Death Is a Lonely Business Page 5

  All this being true, or imagined, the wise man lives as far inland as possible. The Venice police jurisdiction ends as does the fog at about Lincoln Avenue.

  There, at the very rim of official and bad weather territory, was a garden I had seen only once or twice.

  If there was a house in the garden it was not visible. It was so surrounded by bushes, trees, tropical shrubs, palm fronds, bulrushes, and papyrus that you had to cut your way in with a reaper. There was no sidewalk, only a beaten path. A bungalow was in there, all right, sinking into a chin-high field of uncut grass, but so far away from the street it looked like an elephant foundering in a tar pit, soon to be gone forever. There was no mailbox out front. The mailman must have just tossed the mail in and beat it before something sprang out of the jungle to get him.

  From this green place came the smell of oranges and apricots in season. And what wasn’t orange or apricot was cactus or epiphyllum or night-blooming jasmine. No lawnmower ever sounded here. No scythe ever whispered. No fog ever came. On the boundary of Venice’s damp eternal twilight, the bungalow survived amid lemons that glowed like Christmas tree lights all winter long.

  And on occasion, walking by, you thought you heard okapi rushing and thumping a Serengeti Plain in there, or great sunset clouds of flamingos startled up and wheeling in pure fire.

  And in that place, wise about the weather, and dedicated to the preservation of his eternally sunburned soul, lived a man some forty-four years old, with a balding head and a raspy voice, whose business, when he moved toward the sea and breathed the fog, was bruised customs, broken laws, and the occasional death that could be murder.

  Elmo Crumley.

  And I found him and his house because a series of people had listened to my queries, nodded, and pointed directions.

  Everyone agreed that every late afternoon, the short detective ambled into that green jungle territory and disappeared amid the sounds of hippos rising and flamingos in descent.

  What should I do? I thought. Stand on the edge of his wild country and shout his name?

  But Crumley shouted first.

  “Jesus Christ, is that you?”

  He was coming out of his jungle compound and trekking along the weedpath, just as I arrived at his front gate.

  “It’s me.”

  As the detective trailblazed his own uncut path, I thought I head the sounds I had always imagined as I passed: Thompson’s gazelles on the leap, crossword-puzzle zebras panicked just beyond me, plus a smell of golden pee on the wind—lions.

  “Seems to me,” groused Crumley, “we played this scene yesterday. You come to apologize? You got stuff to say that’s louder and funnier?”

  “If you’d stop moving and listen,” I said.

  “Your voice carries, I’ll say that. Lady I know, three blocks from where you found the body, said because of your yell that night, her cats still haven’t come home. Okay, I’m standing here. And?”

  With every one of his words, my fists had jammed deeper into my sports jacket pockets. Somehow, I couldn’t pull them out. Head ducked, eyes averted, I tried to get my breath.

  Crumley glanced at his wristwatch.

  “There was a man behind me on the train that night,” I cried, suddenly. “He was the one stuffed the old gentleman in the lion cage.”

  “Keep your voice down. How do you know?”

  My fists worked in my pockets squeezing. “I could feel his hands stretched out behind me. I could feel his fingers working, pleading. He wanted me to turn and see him! Don’t all killers want to be found out?”

  “That’s what dime-store psychologists say. Why didn’t you look at him?”

  “You don’t make eye contact with drunks. They come sit and breathe on you.”

  “Right.” Crumley allowed himself a touch of curiosity. He took out a tobacco pouch and paper and started rolling a cigarette, deliberately not looking at me. “And?”

  “You should’ve heard his voice. You’d believe if you’d heard. My God, it was like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, from the bottom of the grave, crying out, remember me! But more than that—see me, know me, arrest me!”

  Crumley lit his cigarette and peered at me through the smoke.

  “His voice aged me ten years in a few seconds,” I said. “I’ve never been so sure of my feelings in my life!”

  “Everybody in the world has feelings.” Crumley examined his cigarette as if he couldn’t decide whether he liked it or not. “Everyone’s grandma writes Wheaties jingles and hums them until you want to kick the barley-malt out of the old crone. Songwriters, poets, amateur detectives, every damn fool thinks he’s all three. You know what you remind me of, son? That mob of idiots that swarmed after Alexander Pope waving their poems, novels, and essays, asking for advice, until Pope ran mad and wrote his ‘Essay on Criticism.’”

  “You know Alexander Pope?”

  Crumley gave an aggrieved sigh, tossed down his cigarette, stepped on it.

  “You think all detectives are gumshoes with glue between their ears? Yeah, Pope, for Christ’s sake. I read him under the sheets late nights so my folks wouldn’t think I was queer. Now, get out of the way.”

  “You mean all this is for nothing,” I cried. “You’re not going to try to save the old man?”

  I blushed, hearing what I had said.

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” said Crumley, patiently.

  He looked off along the street, as if he could see all the way to my apartment and the desk and the typewriter standing there.

  “You’ve latched on to a good thing, or you think you have. So you run fevers. You want to get on that big red streetcar and ride back some night and catch that drunk and haul him in, but if you do, he won’t be there, or if he is, not the same guy, or you won’t know him. So right now, you’ve got bloody fingernails from beating your typewriter, and the stuffs coming good, as Hemingway says, and your intuition is growing long antennae that are ever so sensitive. That, and pigs’ knuckles, buys me no sauerkraut!”

  He started off around the front of his car in a replay of yesterday’s disaster.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” I yelled. “Not again. You know what you are? Jealous!”

  Crumley’s head almost came off his shoulders. He whirled.

  “I’m what?”

  I almost saw his fingers reach for a gun that wasn’t there.

  “And, and, and—” I floundered. “You—you’re never going to make it!”

  My insolence staggered him. His head swiveled to stare at me over the top of his car.

  “Make what?” he said.

  “Whatever it is you want to do, you—won’t—do—it.”

  I jolted to a full stop, astounded. I couldn’t remember ever having yelled like this at anyone. In school, I had been the prize custard. Every time some teacher slammed her jaws, my crust fell. But now—

  “Unless you learn,” I said, lamely, feeling my face fill up with hot color, “to—ah—listen to your stomach and not your head.”

  “Norman Rockwell’s Philosophical Advice for Wayward Sleuths.” Crumley leaned against his car as if it were the only thing in the world that held him up. A laugh burst from his mouth, which he capped with his palm, and he said, muffled, “Continue.”

  “You don’t want to hear.”

  “Kid, I haven’t had a laugh in days.”

  My mouth gummed itself shut. I closed my eyes.

  “Go on,” said Crumley, with a gentler tone.

  “It’s just,” I said, slowly, “I learned years ago that the harder I thought, the worse my work got. Everyone thinks you have to go around thinking all the time. No, I go around feeling and put it down and feel again and write that down and, at the end of the day, think about it. Thinking comes later.”

  There was a curious light in Crumley’s face. He tilted his head now this way to look at me, and then tilted it the other way, like a monkey in the zoo staring out through the bars and wondering what the hell that beast i
s there outside.

  Then, without a word, or another laugh or smile, he simply slid into the front seat of his car, calmly turned on the ignition, softly pressed the gas, and slowly, slowly drove away.

  About twenty yards down the line, he braked the car, thought for a moment, backed up, and leaned over to look at me and yelled:

  “Jesus H. Christ! Proof! God damn it. Proof.”

  Which made me yank my right hand out of my jacket pocket so fast it almost tore the cloth.

  I held my fist out at last and opened my trembling fingers.

  “There!” I said. “You know what that is? No. Do I know what it is? Yes. Do I know who the old man is? Yes. Do you know his name? No!”

  Crumley put his head down on his crossed arms on the steering wheel. He sighed. “Okay, let’s have it.”

  “These,” I said, staring at the junk in my palm, “are little A’s and small B’s and tiny C’s. Alphabets, letters, punched out of trolley paper transfers. Because you drive a car, you haven’t seen any of this stuff for years. Because all I do, since I got off my rollerskates, is walk or take trains, I’m up to my armpits in these punchouts!”

  Crumley lifted his head, slowly, not wanting to seem curious or eager.

  I said, “This one old man, down at the trolley station, was always cramming his pockets with these. He’d throw this confetti on folks on New Year’s Eve, or sometimes in July and yell Happy Fourth! When I saw you turn that poor old guy’s pockets inside out I knew it had to be him. Now what do you say?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Shit.” Crumley seemed to be praying to himself, his eyes shut, as mine had been only a minute ago. “God help me. Get in”

  “What?”

  “Get in, God damn it. You’re going to prove what you just said. You think I’m an idiot?”

  “Yes. I mean—no.” I yanked the door open, struggling with my left fist in my left pocket. “I got this other stuff, seaweed, left by my door last night and—”

  “Shut up and handle the map.”

  The car leaped forward.

  I jumped in just in time to enjoy whiplash.

  Elmo Crumley and I stepped into the tobacco smells of an eternally attic day.

  Crumley stared at the empty space between the old men who leaned like dry wicker chairs against each other.

  Crumley moved forward to hold out his hand and show them the dry-caked alphabet confetti.

  The old men had had two days now to think about the empty seat between them.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” one of them whispered.

  “If a cop,” murmured one of them, blinking at the mulch in his palm, “shows me something like that, it’s gotta come from Willy’s pockets. You want me to come identify Turn?”

  The other two old men leaned away from this one who spoke, as if he had said something unclean.

  Crumley nodded.

  The old man shoved his cane under his trembling hands and hoisted himself up. Crumley tried to help, but the fiery look the old man shot him moved him away.

  “Stand aside!”

  The old man battered the hardwood floor with his cane, as if punishing it for the bad news, and was out the door.

  We followed him out into that mist and fog and rain where God’s light had just failed in Venice, southern California.

  We walked into the morgue with a man eighty-two years old, but when we came out he was one hundred and ten, and could no longer use his cane. The fire was gone from his eyes, so he didn’t even beat us off as we tried to help him out to the car and he was mourning over and over, “My God, who gave him that awful haircut? When did that happen?” He babbled because he needed to talk nonsense. “Did you do that to him?” he cried to no one. “Who did that? Who?”

  I know, I thought, but didn’t tell, as we got him out of the car and back to sit in his own place on that cold bench where the other old men waited, pretending not to notice our return, their eyes on the ceiling or the floor, waiting until we were gone so they could decide whether to stay away from the stranger their old friend had become or move closer to keep him warm.

  Crumley and I were very quiet as we drove back to the as-good-as-empty canaries-for-sale house.

  I stood outside the door while Crumley went in to look at the blank walls of the old man’s room and look at the names, the names, the names, William, Willy, Will, Bill. Smith. Smith. Smith, fingernail-scratched there in the plaster, making himself immortal.

  When he came out, Crumley stood blinking back into the terribly empty room.

  “Christ,” he murmured.

  “Did you read the words on the wall?”

  “All of them.” Crumley looked around and was dismayed to find himself outside the door staring in. “ ‘He’s standing in the hall.’ Who stood here?” Crumley turned to measure me. “Was it you?”

  “You know it wasn’t,” I said, edging back.

  “I could arrest you for breaking and entering, I suppose.”

  “And you won’t do that,” I said, nervously. “The door, all the doors, have been open for years. Anyone could come in. Someone did.”

  Crumley glanced back into the silent room.

  “How do I know you didn’t scratch those words on that wall with your own damned fingernail, just to get my hair up and make me believe your cockamamie theory?”

  “The writing on the wall is wobbly; an old man’s scribble.”

  “You could have thought of that, and imitated an old man’s scrawl.”

  “Could have done, but didn’t do. My God, what do you need to convince you?”

  “More than gooseflesh on my neck, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Then,” I said, my hands back in my pockets again, making fists, the seaweed still hidden but waiting, “the rest is upstairs. Go up. Look. Come down. Tell me what you see.”

  Crumley tilted his head to give me one of those monkey looks, then sighed and went up, like an old shoe salesman carrying an anvil in each hand.

  At the top of the stairs he stood like Lord Carnarvon outside Tutankhamen’s waiting tomb, for a long moment. Then he went in. I thought I heard toe ghosts of old birds rustling and peering. I thought I heard a mummy whisper, rising from river dusts. But that was the old Muse in me, anxious for startlements.

  What I heard was Crumley pacing the milkweed silt on the old woman’s floor, which muffled his tread. A birdcage gave a metallic bell sound; he had touched it. Then what I heard was him bending over to lend an ear to a wind of time that moved from a dry and aching mouth.

  And what I heard finally was the sound of the name on the wall whispered once, twice, three times, as if the old canary woman were reading the Egyptian hieroglyphs, symbol by symbol.

  When Crumley came back down he was carrying the anvils in his stomach, and his face was tired.

  “I’m getting out of this business,” he said.

  I waited.

  “Hirohito ascends throne.” He quoted the old newsprint he had just seen at the bottom of the cage.

  “Addis Ababa?” I said.

  “Was it really that long ago?”

  “Now you’ve seen it all,” I said. “What’s your conclusion?”

  “What conclusion should I have?”

  “Didn’t you read it in her face? Didn’t you see?”

  “What?”

  “She’s next.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all there, in her eyes. She knows about the man who stands in the hall. He’s been up to her room, also, but hasn’t gone in. She’s simply waiting, and praying for him. I’m cold all over, and can’t get warm.”

  “Just because you were right about the trolley ticket punchout junk, and found his place and I.D.’d the man, doesn’t make you Tarot Card Champ of the Week. You’re cold all over? I’m cold all over. Your hunch and my chill buys no dog food for a dead dog.”

  “If you don’t post a guard here, she’ll be dead in two days.”

  “If we posted guards over everybody who’s goi
ng to be dead in two days, we’d have no more police. You want me to go tell the captain what to do with his men? He’d throw me downstairs and throw my badge after me. Look, she’s nobody. I hate to say that. But that’s the way the law runs. If she were somebody, maybe we’d post—”

  “I’ll do it myself, then.”

  “Think what you just said. You got to eat sometime, or sleep. You can’t be here and you know it. The first time you run for a hotdog is when he, him, who, whomever, if he exists, will come in, make her sneeze, and she’s gone. There was never any man here. It was only an old hairball blowing by in the night. The old guy heard it first. Mrs. Canary hears it now.”

  Crumley stared up the long, dark stairs toward the place of no birdsong, no springtime in the Rockies, no bad organist playing for his tiny yellow friends in some lost year.

  “Give me time to think, kid,” he said.

  “And let you be an accessory to murder?”

  “There you go again!” Crumley yanked the door so it screamed on its hinges. “How come I spend half my time almost liking you and the rest being mad as hell?”

  “Do I do that to you?” I said.

  But he was gone.

  Crumley did not call for twenty-four hours.

  Grinding my teeth into a fine powder, I primed my Underwood and steamrollered Crumley into the platen.

  “Speak!” I typed.

  “How come,” Crumley responded, typing from somewhere inside my amazing machine, “I spend half my time almost liking you and the rest being mad as hell?”

  Then the machine typed, “I’ll telephone you on the day the old canary lady dies.”

  It’s obvious that years back I had pasted two gummed labels on my Underwood. One read: OFFICIAL OUIJA BOARD. The other, in large letters: DON’T THINK.