Death Is a Lonely Business Read online

  “A bit,” I said, gently.

  “You’d think some guy would like someone as truly dumb as me, but I wear them out. Three hundred nights a year it’s some damn different male goof lying where you’re lying. And that damn foghorn blowing out in the bay, does it get to you? Some nights, even with a jerk of a cluck in bed with me, when that foghorn goes off, I feel so alone and there he is, checking his keys, looking at the door—”

  Her telephone rang. She grabbed it, listened, said, “I’ll be damned.” She waved it at me. “For you.”

  “Impossible,” I said. “No one knows I’m here.”

  I took the phone.

  “What are you doing at her place?” said Constance Rattigan.

  “Nothing. How did you find me?”

  “Someone called. Just a voice. Told me to check on you and hung up.”

  “Oh, my God.” I was turning cold.

  “Get out of there,” said Constance. “I need your help. Your strange friend has come to visit.”

  “My friend?”

  The ocean roared under the Rifle Gallery, shuddering the room and the bed.

  “Down by the shore, two nights in a row. You’ve got to come scare him off—oh, God!”

  “Constance!”

  There was a long silence in which I could hear the surf outside Constance Rattigan’s windows. Then she said, in a strange numb way, “He’s there now.”

  “Don’t let him see you.”

  “The bastard is down on the shoreline, just where he was last night. He just stares up at the house, like he’s waiting for me. The bastard’s naked. What does he think, the old lady is so crazy she’ll run out and jump him? Christ.”

  “Shut the windows, Constance, turn off the lights!”

  “No. He’s backing off. Maybe my voice carries. Maybe he thinks I’m calling the police.”

  “Call them!”

  “Gone.” Constance took a deep breath. “Get over here, kid. Fast.”

  She didn’t hang up. She just let the phone drop and walked off. I could hear her sandals slapping the tiled floor making typewriter sounds.

  I didn’t hang up, either. For some reason I just put the phone down as if it were an umbilical cord between me and Constance Rattigan. As long as I didn’t disconnect, she couldn’t die. I could still hear the night tide moving on her end of the line.

  “Just like all the other men. There you go,” said a voice.

  I turned.

  Annie Oakley sat up in bed, huddled in her sheets like an abandoned manatee.

  “Don’t hang up that telephone,” I said.

  Not until I reach the far end, I thought, and save a life.

  “Dumb,” said Annie Oakley, “that’s why you’re going. Dumb.”

  It took a lot of guts to run the night shore toward Constance Rattigan’s. I imagined some terrible dead man rushing the other way.

  “Jesus!” I gasped. “What happens if I meet him?

  “Gah!” I shrieked.

  “And ran full-tilt into a solid shadow.

  “Thank God, it’s you!” someone yelled.

  “No, Constance,” I said. “Thank God, it’s you.”

  “What’s so damn funny?”

  “This.” I slapped the big bright pillows on all sides of me. “This is the second bed I’ve been in tonight.”

  “Hilarious,” said Constance. “Mind if I bust your nose?”

  “Constance. Peg’s my girl. I was just lonely. You haven’t called in days. Annie asked me for pillow talk, and that’s all it was. I can’t lie. It shows in my face. Look.”

  Constance looked and laughed.

  “Christ, fresh apple pie. Okay, okay.” She sank back. “I scare the hell out of you just now?”

  “You should’ve yelled ahead as you ran.”

  “I was glad to see you, son. Sorry I haven’t phoned. Once I forgot funerals in a few hours. Now, it takes days.”

  She touched a switch. The lights dimmed and the sixteen-millimeter projector flashed on. Two cowboys knocked each other down on the white wall.

  “How can you watch films at a time like this?” I said.

  “To rev me up so I can go out and knock Mr. Naked’s block off if he shows again tomorrow night.”

  “Don’t even joke about it.” I looked out the French windows at the empty shore where only white waves sounded on the edge of night. “Do you think he telephoned you to tell you where I was, with Annie, and then walked up the beach to stand out there?”

  “No. His voice wasn’t right. It’s got to be two different guys. Christ, I can’t figure it, but the one guy, the one with no clothes, he’s got to be some sort of exhibitionist, a flasher, right? Or why doesn’t he just run up in here and ruin the old lady or kill her or both? It’s the other one, me guy on the phone, that gives me the willies.’’

  I know, I thought, I’ve heard his breathing.

  “He sounds like a real monster,” said Constance.

  Yes, I thought. A long way off I heard the big red trolley shriek around an iron curve in the rain, with the voice behind me, chanting the words of a title for Crumley’s book.

  “Constance,” I said, and stopped. I was going to tell her I had seen the stranger on the shore many nights ago.

  “I’ve got some real estate south of here,” said Constance. “I’m going to go check it tomorrow. Call me, late, yes? And meantime, you want to look into something for me?”

  “Anything. Well, almost anything.”

  Constance watched William Farnum knock his brother Dustin down, pick him up, knock him down again.

  “I think I know who Mr. Naked on the Shore is.”

  “Who?”

  She searched down along the surf as if his ghost was still there.

  “A son-of-a-bitch from my past with a head like a mean German general,” she said, “and a body like all the boys of summer who ever lived.”

  The small motorbike pulled up outside the carousel building with a young man in swimshorts astride, his body bronzed and oiled and beautiful. He was wearing a heavy helmet with a dark visor down over his face to his chin, so I couldn’t see his face. But the body was the most amazing I think I have ever seen. It made me think of a day years before when I had seen a beautiful Apollo walking along the shore with a surf of young boys walking after him, drawn for they knew not what reasons, but they walked in beauty with him, loving but not knowing it was love, never daring to name and trying not to think of this moment later in life. There are beauties like that in the world, and all men and all women and all children are pulled in their wake, and it is all pure and wondrous and clean and there is no residue of guilt, because nothing happened. You just saw and followed and when the time on the shore was over, he went away and you went off, smiling the kind of smile that is such a surprise you put your hand up an hour later and find it still attached.

  On a whole beach in an entire summer you only see bodies like that, on some young man, or some young woman, once. Twice, if the gods are snoozing and not jealous.

  Here was Apollo, astride the motorbike, gazing through his dark, featureless visor at me.

  “You come to see the old man?” The laugh behind the glass was rich and throaty. “Good! Come on.”

  He propped the bike and was in and up the stairs ahead of me. Like a gazelle, he took the steps three at a time and vanished into an upstairs room.

  I followed, one step at a time, feeling old.

  When I got to his room I heard the shower running. A moment later he came out, stripped and glistening with water, the helmet still over his head. He stood in the bathroom door, looking into me as he might into a mirror, and liking what he saw.

  “Well,” he said, inside his helmet, “how do you like the most beautiful boy, the young man that I love?”

  I blushed furiously.

  He laughed and shucked off his helmet.

  “My God,” I said, “it really is you!”

  “The old man,” said John Wilkes Hopwood. He glanced down at h
is body and smiled. “Or the young. Which of us do you prefer?”

  I swallowed hard. I had to force myself to speak quickly, for I wanted to run back down the stairs before he closed and locked me in the room.

  “That all depends,” I said, “on which one of you has been standing on the beach, late nights, outside Constance Rattigan’s home.”

  With wondrous timing, the calliope downstairs in the rotunda started up, running the carousel. It sounded like a dragon that had swallowed a corps of bagpipers and was now trying to throw them back up, in no particular order to no particular tune.

  Like a cat that wants time to consider its next move, old-young Hopwood turned his tanned backside toward me, a signal that was supposed to fascinate.

  I shut my eyes to the golden sight.

  That gave Hopwood a moment to decide what he wanted to say.

  “What makes you think I would bother with an old horse like Constance Rattigan?” he said, as he reached into the bathroom and dragged out a towel which he now used to swab his shoulders and chest.

  “You were the great love of her life, she was yours. That was the summer all America loved the lovers, yes?”

  He turned to check on how much irony might show in my face to match my voice.

  “Have you come here because she sent you, to warn me off?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “How many pushups can you do, can you do sixty laps of a pool, or bike forty miles in a day without sweating, what weights can you lift, and how many people”—I noticed Tie did not say women—“can you bed in one afternoon?” he asked.

  “No, no, no, no, and maybe two,” I said, “to answer all those questions.”

  “Then,” said Helmut the Hun, turning to show me Antinous’ magnificent facade, something to match the golden hind, “you are in no position to threaten me, ja?”

  His mouth was a razor slit from which bursts of bright shark teeth hissed and chewed.

  “I will come and go on the beach,” he said.

  With the Gestapo ahead and the summer boys soon after, I thought.

  “I admit nothing. Perhaps I was there some nights.” He nodded up the coast. “Perhaps not.”

  You could have cut your wrists with his smile.

  He hurled the towel at me. I caught it.

  “Get my back for me, will you?”

  I hurled the towel away. It fell and hung over his head, masking his face. The Horrible Hun was, for a moment, gone. Only Sun King Apollo, his rump as bright as the apples of the gods, remained.

  From under the towel his voice said quietly:

  “The interview is over.”

  “Did it ever really begin?” I said.

  I went downstairs as the dragon’s sick calliope music was coming up.

  There were no words at all on the Venice Cinema marquee.

  All the letters were gone.

  I read the emptiness half a dozen times, feeling something roll over and die in my chest.

  I went around trying all the doors, which were locked, and looked into the box office, which was deserted, and glanced at the big poster frames where Barrymore and Chaney and Norma Shearer had smiled just a few nights ago. Now—nothing.

  I backed off and read the emptiness a last time to myself, quietly.

  “How do you like the double bill?” asked a voice from behind me.

  I turned. Mr. Shapeshade was there, beaming. He handed over a big roll of theater posters. I knew what it was. My diplomas from Nosferatu Institute, Graduate School of Quasimodo, Postgraduate in d’Artagnan and Robin Hood.

  “Mr. Shapeshade, you can’t give these to me.”

  “You’re a romantic sap, aren’t you?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Take, take. Farewell, goodbye. But another farewell, goodbye, out beyond. Kummen-sei pier oudt!”

  He left the diplomas in my hands and trotted off.

  I found him at the end of the pier, pointing down and watching my face to see me crumple and seize the pier rail, staring over.

  The rifles were down there, silent for the first time in years. They lay on the sea bottom about fifteen feet under, but the water was clear because the sun was coming out.

  I counted maybe a dozen long, cold, blue metal weapons down there where the fish swam by.

  “Some farewell, huh?” Shapeshade glanced where I was looking. “One by one. One by one. Early this morning. I came running up, yelled, what’re you doing!? What does it look like? she said. And one by one, over and down. They’re closing your place, they’re closing mine this afternoon, so what the hell, she said. And one by one.”

  “She didn’t,” I said, and stopped. I searched the waters under the pier and far out. “She didn’t?”

  “Was she the last one in? No, no. Just stood here a long time, with me, watching the ocean. They won’t be here long, she said. Week from now, gone. A bunch of stupid guys will dive and bring them up, yes? What could I say. Yes.”

  “She leave any word when she went?”

  I could not take my eyes off the long rifles that shone in the flowing tide.

  “Said she was going somewhere to milk cows. But no bulls, she said, no bulls. Milk cows and churn butter, was the last thing I heard.”

  “I hope she will,” I said.

  The rifles suddenly swarmed with fish who seemed to have come to see. But there were no sounds of firing.

  “Their silence,” said Shapeshade, “is nice, eh?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t forget these,” said Shapeshade.

  They had fallen out of my hands. He picked up and handed me my diplomas for all the years of my young life running up and down popcorn aisles in the dark with the Phantom and the Hunchback.

  On the way back, I passed a little boy who stood staring down at the remains of the rollercoaster lying like strewn bones on the shore.

  “What’s that dinosaur doing lying there dead on the beach?” he said.

  I had thought of it first. I resented this boy who saw the collapsed rollercoaster as I saw it: a beast dead in the tides.

  No! I wanted to yell at him.

  But aloud I said, gently, “Oh, Lord, son, I wish I knew.”

  I turned and staggered away, carrying an armload of invisible rifles down the pier.

  I had two dreams that night.

  In the first, A. L. Shrank’s Sigmund Freud Schopenhauer tarot card shop was knocked to flinders by the great hungry steam-shovel, so off in the tide floated the Marquis de Sade and Thomas De Quincey, and Mark Twain’s sick daughters and Sartre on a truly bad day, drowning in the dark waters over the shine of the shooting gallery rifles.

  The second dream was a newsreel I had seen of the Russian royal family, lined up by their graves, and shot so that they jerked and jumped like a silent film projection, knocked, blown away, end over end, like popped corks, into the pit. It made you gasp with horrid laughter. Inhuman. Hilarious. Bam!

  There went Sam, Jimmy, Pietro, canary lady, Fannie, Cal, old lion-cage man, Constance, Shrank, Crumley, Peg, and me!

  Bam!

  I slammed awake, sweating ice.

  The telephone, across the street in the gas station, was ringing.

  It stopped.

  I held my breath.

  It rang again once, and stopped.

  I waited.

  It rang again, once, and stopped.

  Oh, God, I thought—Peg wouldn’t do that. Crumley wouldn’t do that. Ring once and stop?

  The phone rang again, once. Then, silence.

  It’s him. Mr. Lonely Death. Calling to tell me things I don’t want to know.

  I sat up, the hairs on my body fuzzed as if Cal had run his Bumblebee Electric barber shears down my neck to strike a nerve.

  I dressed and ran out to the shoreline. I took a deep breath, then stared south.

  Far away down the coast, all of the windows in Constance Rattigan’s Moorish fort were brightly lit.

  Constance, I thought. Fannie won’t like this.


  Fannie?

  And then I really ran.

  I came in from the surf, like Death himself.

  Every light in Constance’s place was burning, and every door stood wide open, as if she had opened them all to let nature and the world and night and the wind in to clean her place while she was gone.

  And she was gone.

  I knew without even going in her place, because there was a long line of her footprints coming down to the tideline where I stopped and looked to see where they went in the water, but never came out.

  I wasn’t surprised. I was surprised that I wasn’t surprised. I walked up to her wide-open front door and didn’t call, or almost called for her chauffeur and laughed to think I might have been so foolish, and went in without touching anything. The phonograph was playing in the Arabian parlor. Dance music by Ray Noble, from London, in 1934, some Noël Coward tunes. I let the music play. The projector was on, mindlessly whirling its reel, the film done, the white light of the bulb staring at the blank front wall. I didn’t think to turn it off. A bottle of Moët et Chandon stood iced and waiting, as if she had gone down to the sea expecting to bring some golden god of the deep back with her.

  Cheeses were laid out on a plate on a pillow, along with a shaker of martinis, getting watery. The Duesenberg was in the garage and the footprints still lay in the sand, going only one way. I telephoned Crumley, and congratulated myself on not crying just yet, feeling numb.

  “Crumley?” I said into the telephone.

  “Crumley. Crum,” I said.

  “Child of the night,” he said. “You bet on another wrong horse again?”

  I told him where I was.

  “I can’t walk very well.” I sat down suddenly, clenching the phone. “Come get me.”

  Crumley met me on the shore.

  We stood looking up at that Arabian fort all brightly lit like a festive tent in the middle of a desert of sand. The door opening out on the shore was still wide and the music was playing inside, a stack of records that seemed never to want to stop dropping. It was “Lilac Time,” then it was “Diane,” then it was “Ain’t She Sweet?” followed by “Hear My Song of the Nile” and then “Pagan Love Song.” I expected Ramon Novarro to show up at any moment, run in, and come out wild haired and mad of eye, rushing down to the shore.