Death Is a Lonely Business (29 page)

"How'd you know that?" gasped Crumley.

"I just did, is all. You did the right thing, without knowing. Just like me. I shouted, and he went away from me, too. Oh, God, God."

I told Crumley about my sale to the
Mercury,
my running around town like a fool, my yelling to the sky, and the rain not raining on my three-o'clock-in-the-morning door any more, maybe forever.

Crumley sat down as if I had handed him an anvil.

"We're getting close, Elmo," I said. "We've scared him off, without meaning to. The further away he gets, the more we know about him. Well, maybe, anyway. At least we know he's put off by loud fools and laughing detectives doing maniac things to typewriters at five in the morning. Keep typing, Crumley. Then you'll be safe."

"Horseradish," said Crumley. But he laughed when he said it.

His smile made me brave. I dug in my pockets and brought out the poison-pen letter that had scared Hopwood, plus the warm love-letter on sun-yellow paper that had lured him down the coast in the first place.

Crumley toyed with the bits and pieces and sank halfway back into his old bathrobe of cynicism.

"Each typed on a different typewriter. Neither signed. Hell,
anyone
could have typed both. And if old Hopwood was the sex freak we took him for, he read that one on yellow paper and really believed Rattigan wrote it, hell, he raced up the shore and waited like a good boy for her to come down and grab his behind. But you know and I know, Rattigan never wrote a note like that in her life. She had an ego like a ten-ton truck. She never begged in the big Hollywood houses, on the streets, or on the shore. So what does that leave us with? She swam at strange hours. I'd run along the beach, my workout, and see that, night after night. Anyone, even me, could have snuck in while she was two hundred yards out in the bay playing with the sharks, anyone could have sat in her parlor, used her typewriter and stationery, and snuck back out, mailed this foreplay sex-note to that Hopwood son-of-a-bitch, and waited for the fireworks."

"And?" I said.

"And," said Crumley, "maybe the whole thing backfired. Rattigan, bugged by the flasher, panicked, swam out to escape him, got caught in a riptide. Then Hopwood, on the shore, watching, waiting, turned chicken when she didn't swim back in, and fled. The next day he gets the second note, the real doomsday attack. He knows someone saw him on the beach, and can finger him as Rattigan's so-called killer. So…"

"He's left town already," I said.

"It figures. Which leaves us still ten miles up from Tampico in Cleopatra's barge with no paddles. What in hell do we have to go on?"

"A guy who makes phone calls and steals Scott Joplin's head off Cal the barber's old photo and scares Cal out of town."

"Check."

"A guy who stands in halls and gets an old man drunk and stuffs him in a lion cage and maybe saves some ticket-punch confetti stolen from the old man's pockets."

"Check."

"A guy who scares the old canary lady to death and steals the newspaper headlines from the bottom of her birdcages. And after Fannie stops breathing, the same guy steals her record of
Tosca
as a keepsake. And then he writes letters to old actor Hopwood and frightens him away forever. Probably stole something from Hopwood's apartment, too, but we'll never know. And, if you checked, probably swiped a bottle of champagne from Constance Rattigan's wine racks just before I got there the other night. The guy can't stop himself. He's a real collector…"

Crumley's telephone rang. He picked it up, listened, handed it to me.

"Armpits," said a mellow voice.

"Henry!" Crumley put his ear to the receiver with me.

"Armpits is back, messing around, hour, two hours ago," said Henry, off in that other country, the tenement far across Los Angeles in a rapidly dying past. "Someone got to stop him. Who?"

Henry hung up.

"Armpits." I took Hopwood's springtime cologne out of my pocket and placed it on Crumley's desk.

"Nope," said Crumley. "Whoever that bad ass is in the tenement ain't Hopwood. The old actor always smelled like a bed of marigolds and an acre of stardust. You want me to go sniff around your friend Henry's door?"

"No," I said, "by the time you got there, Mr. Armpits'd be back out here, waiting to snuffle around your door or mine."

"Not if we type and shout, shout and type, you forget that? Hey, what was it you shouted?"

I told Crumley more about my
American Mercury
story sale and the billion dollars that came with it.

"Jesus," said Crumley, "I feel like a pa whose boy has just made it through Harvard. Tell me again, kid. How do you do it? What should I do?"

"Throw up in your typewriter every morning."

"Yeah."

"Clean up every noon."

"Yeah!"

The foghorn out in the bay started blowing, saying over and over in a long gray voice, Constance Rattigan would never come back.

Crumley started typing.

And I drank my beer.

That night, at ten minutes after one, someone came and stood outside my door. Oh, Jesus, I thought, awake. Please. Not again.

There was a fierce bang and a hard bang and then a terrible bang on my door. Someone out there was asking to get in.

God. Coward, I thought. Get it over with. Now, at last . . .

I jumped up to fling the door wide.

"You look great in those lousy torn jockey shorts," said Constance Rattigan.

I grabbed and yelled, "Constance!"

"Who in hell would it be?"

"But…but I went to your funeral."

"So did I. Hell, it's Tom Sawyer time. All those bimbos on the beach and the crappy organ. Shove your ass in your pants. We gotta get out of here. Jump."

Gunning the engine of an old beat-up Ford V-8, Constance made me fast-zip my fly.

Driving south along the sea I kept mourning, "You're alive."

"Hold the funeral and wipe your nose." She laughed at the empty road ahead. "Jesus God, I fooled everyone."

"But why, why?"

"Well, crud, honey, that bastard kept combing the surf line night after night."

"You didn't write, I mean, invite him to…"

"Invite? Jesus, you got no taste."

She braked the car in behind her shut Arabian fort, lit a cigarette, puffed smoke out the window, glared.

"All clear?"

"He's never coming back, Constance."

"Good! He looked better every night. When you're one hundred ten years old it's not the man, it's the pants. Besides, I thought I knew who he was."

"You were right."

"So I decided to fix things for good. I stashed groceries in a bungalow south of here, and parked this Ford there. Then I came back."

She jumped out of the old Ford and led me to the back door of her house.

"I turned on all the lights, music, fixed food that night, opened every door and window, and when he showed up, ran down, yelled, beat you to Catalina and dove in. He was so stunned he didn't follow, or he might have, part way, and given up. I swam out two hundred yards and lay easy. I saw him on the shore the next half-hour, waiting for me to come in, then he ran like hell. I had really spooked him. I swam south and surfed in by my old el cheapo bungalow near Playa Del Rey. I had a ham sandwich and champagne on the porch, feeling great. Hid there ever since. Sorry to worry you, kid. You okay? Give me a kiss. But no phys. ed. "

She kissed me and unlocked the door and we walked through to open the beach-front door and let the wind haunt the curtains and sift sand on the tiles.

"Jesus, who the hell lived here?" she wondered. "I'm my own ghost come home. I don't own this any more. You ever feel, back from vacation, all the furniture, books, radio, seem like neglected cats, resentful. They cut you dead. Feel? It's a morgue."

We walked through the rooms. The furniture, white sheeted in the dust and wind, moved restlessly, perturbed.

Constance leaned out the front door and yelled. "Okay, son-of-a-bitch. Gotcha!"

She turned back. "Find some more champagne. Lock up. Place gives me the creeps. Out."

Only the empty shore and the empty house saw us drive away.

“How
about
this?" yelled Constance Rattigan against the wind. She had put the top of her Ford down and we drove in a warm-cold flood of night, our hair blowing.

And we pulled up in a great sluice of sand next to a little bungalow by a half-tumbled wharf and Constance was out shucking clothes down to her bra and pants. The embers of a small fire burned in the front-yard sands. She stoked it with kindling and paper and, when it flared, shoved some forked hotdogs into it and sat knocking my knees like a teenage ape, drinking the champagne, and tousling my hair.

"See that hunk of driftwood there? All that's left of the Diamond Dance Pier, 1918. Charlie Chaplin sat at a table there. D. W. Griffith beyond. Me and Desmond Taylor at the far end. Wally Beery? Well, why go on. Burn your mouth. Eat."

She stopped suddenly and looked north along the sands.

"They won't follow, will they? He or they or them or whatever. They didn't see us, did they? We're safe forever?"

"Forever," I said.

The salt wind stirred the fire. Sparks flew up to shine in Constance Rattigan's green eyes.

I looked away.

"There's just one last thing I have to do."

"What?"

"Tomorrow, around five, go in and clean out Fannie's icebox."

Constance stopped drinking and frowned.

"Why would you want to do that?"

I had to think of something so as not to spoil the champagne night.

"Friend of mine, Streeter Blair, the artist, used to win blue ribbons at the county fair every autumn with his baked bread. After he died they found six loaves of his bread in his home freezer. His wife gave me one. I had it around for a week and ate a slice with real butter once in the morning, once at night. God, it was swell. What a great way to say goodbye to a wonderful man. When I buttered the last slice, he was gone for good. Maybe that's why I want Fannie's jellies and jams. Okay?"

Constance was disquieted.

"Yes," she said at last.

I popped another cork.

"What do we drink to?"

"My nose," I said. "At last, my damn head cold is over. Six boxes of Kleenex later. To my nose."

"Your lovely big nose," she said, and drank.

We slept out on the sand that night, feeling safe two miles south of those funeral flowers touching the shore by the late Constance Rattigan's former Arabian lean-to, and three miles south of an apartment where Cal's piano smile and my battered Underwood waited for me to come save earth from Martians on one page and Mars from earthmen on the next.

In the middle of the night I awoke. The place next to me on the sand was empty, but still warm from where Constance had lain cuddling the poor writer. I got up to hear her thrashing and chortling with seal-bark commotions out in the waves. When she ran in, we finished the champagne and slept until almost noon.

That day was one of those no-excuses-needed-for-living-weather days when you just lie and let the juices flow and drip. But finally I had to say, "I didn't want to ruin last night. God, it was good to find you alive. But the truth is, it's one down, one to go. Mr. Devil-in-the-Flesh on the beach ran away because he thought he had caused you to drown. He never intended anything but skin diving, anyway, and midnight frolics like 1928. What he got was you drowned, it seemed.

"So, he's gone, but there's still the one who sent him."

"Jesus," whispered Constance. Her eyelids flinched like two spiders over her shut eyes. At last she sighed, exhausted, "So it's not over after all?"

I clenched her sand-gritty hand in mine.

After a long silent time of thinking she said, her eyes still shut, "About Fannie's icebox? I never made it back that night five centuries ago, to look in. You looked, saw nothing."

"That's why I've got to go look again. Trouble is, the law has padlocked her apartment."

"You want me to go jimmy the lock?"

"Constance."

"I'll go in, clear the halls, chase out the spooks, you hit 'em with a club, then we both crack the padlock, spoon Fannie's mayonnaise, and at the bottom of the third jar, we find the answer, the solution, if it's still there, if it hasn't spoiled or been taken away…"

A fly buzzed, touched my brow. An old notion stirred.

"Reminds me, that story, years ago in some magazine. Girl fell and froze in a glacier. Two hundred years later, the ice melts and there she is, beautiful, young as the day she was frozen."

"That's no beautiful girl in Fannie's fridge."

"No, it's something terrible."

"And when and if you find and take whatever it is out, do you kill it?"