Death Is a Lonely Business (31 page)

"Fannie," I said, at last.

"Tell me this, now. When you called that number, some dumb son-of-a-bitch come on, talk, and not come back again ever?"

"Some son-of-a-bitch."

Henry started steering me back toward the open door of his apartment. As if I were the blind one, I let him.

"How they
run
a business like that?" he wondered.

We were at his door. I said, "I guess when you don't give a damn, people throw money at you."

"Yeah, that was always my trouble. I cared too much. So nobody ever threw nothing. Hell, I got plenty cash anyway, uh."

He stopped, for he had heard me suck my breath.

"That," he said, with a quiet nod and smile, "is the sound of someone wants to borrow my life's savings."

"Only if you come with, Henry. To help me find the guy who hurt Fannie."

"Armpits?"

"Armpits."

"This nose is yours. Lead on."

"We need money for a taxicab to save time, Henry."

"I never been in a taxi in my life, why would I take one now?"

"We got to get out to that newspaper before it closes. The sooner we find out what we need to know, the safer it'll be. I don't want to spend one more night worrying about you here in this tenement, or me at the beach."

"Armpits has teeth, huh?"

"You'd better believe it."

"Come on." He circled his room, smiling. "Let's find where a blind man hides his money. All over the place. You want eighty bucks?"

"Hell, no."

"Sixty, forty?"

"Twenty, thirty will do."

"Well, hell then." Henry snorted, stopped, laughed, and yanked a great wad of bills out of his hip pocket. He began to peel the lettuce. "Here's forty."

"It'll take awhile to pay it back."

"If we get whoever pushed Fannie over, you don't owe nothing. Grab the money. Find my cane. Shut the door. C'mon! Let's go find that dumb bunny who answers phones and goes off on vacation."

In the taxicab, Henry beamed around at sources of scent and odor he could not see.

"This is dandy. I never smelled a cab before. This one's new and going fast."

I couldn't resist. "Henry, how'd you save up so much?"

"I don't see 'em, touch 'em, even smell 'em, but I play the horses. Got friends at the track. They listen, and lay on the lettuce. I bet more and lose less than most sighted fools. It mounts up. When it gets too big, I trot along to one of those ugly ladies, so they tell me, in the bungalows out front near the tenement. They say ugly but I don't mind. Blind is blind, and…Well, now. Where
are
we?"

"Here," I said.

We had pulled into an alley behind a building in a rundown block in Hollywood south of the boulevard. Henry snuffed a deep breath. "It ain't Armpits. But it's his first cousin. Watch out."

"I'll be right back."

I got out. Henry stayed in the back seat, his cane in his lap, eyes restfully shut.

"I'll just listen to the meter," he said, "and make sure it don't run fast."

The dusk was long since gone and it was full night as I picked my way along the alley, looking up at a half-lit neon sign on the backstairs of a building, with the great god Janus painted facing two ways above it. Half of one face had flaked off in the rains. The rest would be soon gone.

Even the gods, I thought, are having a bad year.

I dodged upstairs among various young men and women with old faces, hunched like beaten dogs, smoking, begging their pardon, excusing myself, but nobody seemed to mind. I stepped in at the top.

The offices looked as if they hadn't been cleaned since the Civil War. There was paper balled, wadded, tossed over every inch, foot, and yard of the floor. There were hundreds of old newspapers, crumpled and yellowing, in the windows, on the desktops. Three wastebaskets stood empty. Whoever had thrown the paper wads had missed ten thousand times. I waded in through a tide that reached my ankles. I walked on dried cigars, cigarette stubs, and, by the crackling sound of their small thoraxes, cockroaches. I found the abandoned phone under a snow-piled desk, picked it up, listened.

I thought I could hear the traffic going by under Mrs. Gutierrez's window. Crazy. She must have hung up, long ago.

"Thanks for waiting," I said.

"Hey, man, what gives?" said someone.

I hung up and turned.

A tall, skinny man, with a clear drop of water on the end of his thin nose, came wading through the paper tide. He sized me up with nicotine-stained eyes.

"I called about half an hour ago." I nodded at the phone. "I just hung up on me."

He gazed at the phone, scratched his head, and finally got it. He managed a feeble smile and said, "Sheeit."

"Those are my very thoughts."

I had a feeling he was proud of never coming back to the phone; it was better to make up your own news.

"Hey, man," he said, getting another idea to replace the first. He was the sort of thinker who has to move out the furniture before he can bring in the cows. "You, you wouldn't happen to be the fuzz."

"No, just the Goofer Feathers."

"Unh?"

"Remember the Two Black Crows?"

"Huh?"

"Nineteen twenty-six. Two white men in blackface talked about Goofer Feathers. The fuzz. From peaches. Forget it. Did you write this?" I held out the
Janus, Green Envy
page with the terribly sad advertisement at the bottom.

He blinked at it. "Hell, no. It's legit. It was sent in."

"You ever stop to think what you're doing with an ad like that?"

"Hey, man, like we don't read, we just print 'em. It's a free country, right? Lemme see that!" He grabbed the ad and peered at it, moving his lips. "Oh, sure. That one. Funny, huh?"

"You realize someone just might look up that geek and believe in him?"

"Them's the breaks. Hey, look, why don't you fall downstairs outa my life?" He thrust the paper back at me.

"I don't leave without the home phone number of this weirdo."

He blinked at me, stunned, then laughed. "That's Q/T information, like no one knows. You want to write him, sure. We pass mail on. Or he comes, picks it up."

"This is an emergency. Someone's dead. Someone..." I ran out of gas and looked around at the ocean of paper on the floor and, without thinking about it, took out a box of small stick matches.

"Looks like a fire hazard here," I said.

"What fire hazard?"

He glanced around at the year's growth of paper wadding, empty beer cans, dropped paper cups, and old hamburger wrappings. A look of immense pride overcame him. His eyes almost danced when he saw the five-or-six-quart wax milk cartons busy manufacturing penicillin on the window sills, next to some tossed men's jockey shorts that gave the place its real touch of class.

I struck a match to get his attention.

"Hey," he said.

I blew out the first match, to show what a good sport I was, and when he made no further offer of help, lit a second.

"What if I dropped this on the floor?"

He gave the floor a second look around. The paper junk seethed and lapped at his ankles. If I had dropped the match the flames would have reached him in about five seconds.

"You ain't going to drop that," he said.

"No?" I blew it out and lit a third.

"You got the goddamnedest sense of humor, don't you?"

I dropped the match.

He yelled and jumped.

I stepped on the flame before it could spread.

He took a deep breath and let it blast.

"Now you get the hell outa here! You…"

"Wait." I lit a final match and crouched, guarding the flame, close down to a half-ton of wadded rewrites, old calling cards, torn envelopes.

I touched the flame here and there and the paper started burning.

"What in hell you want?"

"Just a phone number. That's all. I still won't have an address, so I can't get at the guy, trace him. But I do, damn it to hell, want that phone, or the whole place burns."

I realized my own voice had gone up about ten decibels, to maniac. Fannie was fighting in my blood. A lot of other dead people were screaming in my breath, wanting out.

"Give it here!" I shouted.

The flames were spreading.

"Shit, man, stomp out the fire, you'll get the goddamn dumb number. Shit, hold on, jump!"

I jumped on the fire, dancing around. Smoke rose and the fire was out by the time Mr. Janus, the editor who faced two ways at once, found the number on his Rolodex.

"Here, goddamn it, here's the crapping number. Vermont four-five-five-five. Got that? Four-five-five-five!"

I struck a final final match until he shoved the Rolodex card under my nose.

"Someone who loved you," it read, and the telephone.

"Okay!" shrieked the editor.

I blew out the match. My shoulders sank with sudden relief.

Fannie, I thought, we'll get him now.

I must have said it out loud, for the editor, his face purple, sprayed me with his saliva.
"What
you going to get?"

"Myself killed," I said, going downstairs.

"I hope so!" I heard him yell.

I opened the door of the taxicab.

"Meter's ticking like crazy," said Henry, in the back seat. "Thank God I'm rich."

"Be right with you."

I beckoned the taxi driver to follow me out to a corner where there was an outdoor phone booth.

I hesitated for a long while, afraid to call the number, afraid someone might really answer.

What, I wondered, do you say to a murderer during suppertime?

I dialed the number.
Someone who loved you, long ago.
Who would answer a dumb ad like that? All of us, on the right night. The voice from the past, making you remember a familiar touch, a warm breath in the ear, a seizure of passion like a strike of lightning. Which of us is not vulnerable, I thought, when it comes to that three-in-the-morning voice. Or when you wake after midnight to find someone crying, and it's you, and tears on the chin and you didn't even know that during the night you had had a bad dream.

Someone who loved you . . .

Where is she now? Where is he? Still alive somewhere? It can't be. Too much time is gone. The one who loves me can't still be in the world somewhere. And yet? Why not, as I was doing, call?

I called three times and went back to sit with Henry in the back seat of the taxi, listening to the meter tick. "Don't worry," he said. "That meter don't bother me. There's plenty of horses waiting and lots of lettuce up ahead. Go dial the number again, child."

The child went to dial.

This time, a long way off in another country, it seemed, a self-appointed funeral director picked up the phone.

"Yes?" said a voice.

At last I gasped, "Who's this?"

"For that matter, who's
this?"
said the guarded voice.

"What took you so long to get to the phone?" I could hear cars going by on the other end.

It was a phone booth in an alley somewhere in the city. Christ, I thought, he does as I do. He's using the nearest pay booth for his office.

"Well, if you're not going to say anything…" said the voice on the other end.

"Wait," I said. I almost know your voice, I thought. Let me hear more. "I saw your ad in
Janus.
Can you help me?"

The voice on the other end relaxed, pleased by my panic. "I can help anyone, anywhere, anytime," he said, easily. "You one of the Lonelies?"

"What?" I cried.

"You one of the…"

Lonelies he had said. And that did it.

I was back at Crumley's, back in time, back on the big train in the cold rain rounding a curve. The voice on the phone was that voice in the night storm half a lifetime ago, saying its say about death and lonely, lonely and death. First the memory of a voice, then the session with Crumley knocking my head, and now this real sound on the phone. There was only one missing piece. I still couldn't put a name on the voice. Close, familiar, I almost had it, but. . . .

"Speak up," I practically shouted.

There was an interval of suspicion on the other end. In that moment I heard the most beautiful sounds of half a lifetime.

The wind blowing at the far end of the line. But more than that: surf rolling in, louder and louder, closer and closer, until I almost felt it roll under my feet.

"Oh, Jesus, I know where you are!" I cried.

"No way," said the phone voice, and broke the connection.

But not soon enough. I stared wildly at the empty phone in my hand and squeezed it in my fist. "Henry!" I yelled.