Death Is a Lonely Business (28 page)

Constance Rattigan's footprints blew away off the sand in the dawn wind. And Mr. Shapeshade came along the shore, looking back over his shoulder, cans of film under his arms. Far off there, at this very moment, his movie house was being trashed by huge steel-toothed monsters that had risen, summoned by real estate speculators, out of the sea.

When Shapeshade saw me and Crumley standing on Constance Rattigan's front porch, he blinked at our faces and then at the sand and then at the ocean. We didn't have to tell him anything, our faces were that pale.

"She'll be back," he said again and again, "she'll be back. Constance wouldn't go away. My God, who would I run films with, who? She'll be back, sure!" His eyes spilled over.

We left him in charge of the empty fort and drove back toward my place. On the way, Detective Lieutenant Crumley, in a burst of invective, using harsh epithets like cow-chappatis, Bull Durham, bushwah, and watch-out-you'll-step-in-it, refused my offer to go ride on that damn carousel questioning Field Marshal Erwin Rommel or his pretty pal, dressed up in rose petals, Nijinsky.

"In one or two days, maybe. If that goony old woman doesn't swim back from Catalina, sure.
Then
I start asking questions. But now? I will not shovel horse-flops to find the horse."

"Are you angry with me?" I asked.

"Angry, angry, why would I be angry? Angry? Christ, you drive me out of my skull. But angry? Here's a buck, go buy ten rides on that calliope racetrack."

He dropped me, running, at my door, and roared off.

Inside, I looked at Cal's old piano. The sheet had fallen off the big white ivory teeth.

"Don't laugh," I said.

Three things happened that afternoon. Two were fine. One was terrible.

A letter arrived from Mexico. In it was a photo of Peg. She had colored her eyes with a blend of brown and green ink, to help me remember what they looked like.

Then there was a postcard from Cal, postmarked Gila Bend.

"Son," it said, "you keeping my piano tuned? I'm torturing folks part-time in the local beer joint. This town is full of bald men. Me being here, they don't know how lucky they are. Cut the sheriffs hair yesterday. He gave me twenty-four hours to leave town. Will gas up for Sedalia tomorrow. Be happy. Yours, Cal."

I turned the card over. There was a photo of a gila monster with black and white patterns on its back. Cal had drawn a bad portrait of himself seated there as if the creature were a musical instrument and him playing only the dark keys.

I laughed and walked north toward the Santa Monica pier, wondering what I might say to that odd man who lived a double life above the moaning carousel.

"Field Marshal Rommel," I shouted, "how and why did you set out to kill Constance Rattigan?"

But no one was there to hear.

The carousel ran in silence.

The calliope was turned on, but the music was at the end of its roll and the slots flapped around and around.

The carousel owner was not dead in his ticket booth, only dead drunk. He was awake, but seemed not to hear the silence or know that the horses were galloping to the slap of the Swiss cheese roll in the mouth of the big machine.

I surveyed it all with disquiet and was about to trudge upstairs when I noticed a fine-blowing litter on the floor of the circling horse race.

I waited for the carousel to turn twice more, then grabbed a brass pole and hopped on, moving drunkenly among the poles.

Pieces of torn paper blew in the wind made by the horses jumping up and down and the passage of the carousel itself, going nowhere.

I found a thumbtack on the circular floor under the ripped paper. Someone had perhaps tacked the message to the forelock of one of the wooden horses. Someone had found it, read it, torn it, run away.

John Wilkes Hopwood.

I spent a good three minutes picking up the pieces, feeling as hopeless as the carousel's journey, then hopped off and tried piecing it together. It took another fifteen minutes of finding a terrible word here, an awful word there, and a damning word further on, but finally there was a death and a doom. Anyone reading this, anyone, that is, with the wrong old skeleton hung inside his young bright flesh, might wither at these strikes to the groin.

I could not put it all together. There were missing pieces. But the essence was that the reader was an old man, ugly man. Truly ugly. He made love to that body because with that face, who would want him? Nobody for years. It recalled how the studios threw him out in 1929, attacked the fake Kraut voice and broken wrists and strange boyfriends and old sick women. "In bars late at night they say your name and laugh at you when you go away full of cheap gin. And now you have caused death. I saw you on the beach last night when she swam out and did not come back. People will say murder. Goodnight, sweet prince."

That was it. A dreadful weapon, posted and found.

I gathered the pieces and went upstairs, about ninety years older than I had been a few days before.

The door to Hopwood's room whispered open under my hand.

There were clothes all over the place, on the floor and by several suitcases, as if he had tried to pack, panicked, and gone off traveling light.

I looked out the apartment window. Down on the pier, his bike was still padlocked against a lamppost. But his motorbike was gone. Proving nothing. He might have driven, rather than walked, into the sea.

Christ, I thought, what if he catches up with Annie Oakley, and then the two of them catch up with Cal?

I dumped a small wastebasket out on a flimsy desk by his bed and found some torn bits of fine bright yellow Beverly Hills-type stationery with C.R. for Constance Rattigan along the top. There was typewriting on the paper:

MIDNIGHTS. WAIT. SIX NIGHTS RUNNING ON THE SHORELINE. MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, LIKE OLD TIMES. And the typed initials C.R.

The typeface looked like the machine I had seen open on a desk in her Arabian parlor.

I touched the fragments, thinking, had Constance written Hopwood? No. She would have told me. Someone else must have sent this to Hopwood, a week ago. And he had jogged up the shore like a stallion to wait in the surf for Constance to come laughing down. Had he gotten tired of waiting and dragged her in the water and drowned her? No, no. He must have seen her dive in and never come out. Scared, he ran home, to find what? The last note, the one with the terrible words and awful degradations that shot him below the belt. So he had two reasons to leave town: fright and the insults.

I glanced at the telephone and sighed. No use calling Crumley. No corpus delicti. Just torn paper which I shoved in my jacket pockets. They felt like moth-wings, fragile but poisonous.

Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines, and the malicious will still write letters that kill.

I saw a small bottle of cologne near the phone and took it, remembering blind Henry and his memory and his nose.

Downstairs the carousel still turned in silence, the horses still leaped over invisible barriers toward finish lines that never arrived.

I glanced at the drunken ticketman in his coffin booth, shivered, and, to absolutely no music whatsoever, got the hell out of there.

The miracle came just after lunch.

A special-delivery letter arrived from the
American Mercury
offering to buy a short story if I wouldn't mind their sending a check for three hundred dollars.

"Mind?" I shrieked. "Mind! Good grief, they must be
nuts!"

I stuck my head out into the empty street and yelled at the houses, the sky, and the shore.

"I just sold to
the American Mercury
!
Three hundred bucks! I'm
rich!"

I lurched over to shove the
Mercury
letter under the bright glass eyes in the small shop window.

"Look!" I cried. "How about that?
See.

"Rich," I muttered and gasped as I ran to the liquor store to flap the letter in the owner's face. "Look." I waved it around in the Venice train ticket office. "Hey!" I jolted to a halt. For I discovered I had jumped into the bank thinking I had the actual check with me and was about to deposit the damn letter.

"Rich…" I blushed and backed off.

At my apartment, I suddenly remembered the nightmare.

That dire beast rising to seize and eat me.

Idiot! Fool! You shouted
good
rice when it should have been
bad.

That night for the first night in a long while, the small rainstorm did not drench my doormat. There was no visitor, no seaweed on my sidewalk at dawn.

Somehow my truth, my blundering yells, had scared it away.

Curiouser, I thought, and curiouser.

There was nobody and so no funeral the next day, just a memorial service for Constance Rattigan that seemed to have been organized by a rat pack of autograph and film-photo fans, so there was a mob of milling extras stomping the sand out front of Constance Rattigan's Arabian fort on the shore.

I stood a long way off from the stampede and watched "some aging lifeguards sweat a portable organ across the sands to where someone had forgotten the stool so the lady who played it badly played it standing up, beads of salt on her brow, bobbing her head to conduct the lugubrious choir as the gulls flew down to investigate a scene without food so they flew away, and a fake minister barked and yipped like a poodle and the sandpipers rushed away, frightened, as the sandcrabs dug deeper to hide, and I gritted my teeth halfway between outrage and demon laughter as one by one the various grotesques, come down off the night screen at Mr. Shapeshade's or out from under the midnight piers, staggered down to the surf and hurled withered flower garlands at the tide.

Damn it, Constance, I thought, swim in
now.
Stop this damn freakshow. But my magic thinking failed. The only thing that came in was the wreaths, upchucked by a tide that didn't want them. A few people tried to throw them back again, but the damn things simply returned, and it began to rain. There was a frantic search for newspapers to protect their heads, and the lifeguards grunted the damn organ back across the sand, and I was left alone in the rain with a newspaper draped over my skull and the headlines upside down over my eyes.

FAMED SILENT STAR VANISHES.

I went down to kick the floral wreaths into the surf. This time, they stayed. Stripped down to my swimsuit, I grabbed an armload of flowers and swam out as far as I could before I let go.

Coming back, I almost drowned when my feet caught, tangled in one of the wreaths.

"Crumley," I whispered.

And did not know if his name on my lips was a curse or a prayer.

Crumley opened his door. His face was bright and shining, but not with beer. Something else had happened.

"Hey!" cried the detective. "Where you been? I been calling and calling you. Christ, come see what the old man's got."

He ran ahead to his workroom and pointed dramatically at his desk where a pile of manuscript, half an inch high, lay filled with words.

"Why, you old s.o.b.," I said, and whistled.

"That's me! S. O. B. Crumley. Crumley, S. O. B. Boy howdy."

He ripped a page out of the typewriter.

"Wanta read?"

"I don't have to." I laughed. "It's good, right?"

"Git outa the way." He laughed back. "The dam has broke."

I sat down, snorting with happiness at the sun in his face. "When did all this happen?"

"Two nights ago, midnight, one, two, I dunno. I was just lying here with my teeth in my mouth, staring at the ceiling, not reading a book, not listening to any radio, not drinking beer, and the wind blew outside, and the trees shook, and all of a sudden the damn ideas seethed like maggots on a hotplate. And I just got the hell up and walked over and sat down and next thing I know I’m
typing and typing like hell and can't stop, and by dawn there's a big mountain, or molehill, of stuff and I'm laughing and crying all the time. Lookit
that.
And come six in the morning I go to bed and just lie there looking at all this paper and I laugh and laugh and I'm as happy as if I just had a brand-new love affair with the greatest lady in the world."

"You had," I said, softly.

"Funny thing is," said Crumley, "what started it. Maybe the wind outside the house. Somebody leaving seaweed calling cards on the porch? But did the old detective rush out, firing guns, yelling 'Freeze!' Hell, no. No yells, no shots. Just me banging my typewriter, making lots of noise like on New Year's or Halloween. And you know what happened next? Guess?"

My body was cold. A whole population of frosted bumps had come up on my neck.

"The wind went away," I said. "The footsteps outside your house stopped."

"What?" said Crumley, amazed.

"And there's been no seaweed ever again. And he, whoever he was, has not come back since."