Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

I shut my eyes and turned from that lost year. That long ago the feathers had stopped rustling and the warblers had ceased. I stood by the bed and the withered discard there. I heard myself say:

“You ever listen Sunday mornings to the ‘Rocky Mountain Canary-Seed Hour’—?”

“With an organist that played and a studioful of canaries that sang along!” the old woman cried with a delight that rejuvenated her flesh and reared her head. Her eyes flickered like broken glass. “‘When It’s Springtime in the Rockies’!”

“‘Sweet Sue.’ ‘My Blue Heaven,’” I said.

“Oh, weren’t the birds fine!?”

“Fine.” I had been nine then and tried to figure how in hell the birds could follow the music so well. “I once told my mom the birdcages must have been lined with dime-store songsheets.”

“You sound like a sensitive child.” The old woman’s head sank, exhausted, and she shut her eyes. “They don’t make them that way any more.”

They never did, I thought.

“But,” she whispered, “you didn’t really come see me about the canaries—?”

“No,” I admitted. “It’s about that old man who rents from you—”

“He’s dead.”

Before I could speak, she went on, calmly, “I haven’t heard him in the downstairs kitchen since early yesterday. Last night, the silence told me. When you opened the door down there just now, I knew it was someone come to tell me all that’s bad.”

I’m sorry.

“Don’t be. I never saw him save at Christmas. The lady next door takes care of me, comes and rearranges me twice a day, and puts out the food. So he’s gone, is he? Did you know him well? Will there be a funeral? There’s fifty cents there on the bureau. Buy him a little bouquet.”

There was no money on the bureau. There was no bureau. I pretended that there was and pocketed some nonexistent money.

“You just come back in six months,” she whispered. “I’ll be well again. And the canaries will be on sale, and … you keep looking at the door! Must you go?”

“Yes’m,” I said, guiltily. “May I suggest—your front door’s unlocked.”

“Why, what in the world would anyone want with an old thing like me?” She lifted her head a final time.

Her eyes flashed. Her face ached with something beating behind the flesh to pull free.

“No one’ll ever come into this house, up those stairs,” she cried.

Her voice faded like a radio station beyond the hills. She was slowly tuning herself out as her eyelids lowered.

My God, I thought, she wants someone to come up and do her a dreadful favor!

Not me! I thought.

Her eyes sprang wide. Had I said it aloud?

“No,” she said, looking deep into my face. “You’re not him.”

“Who?”

“The one who stands outside my door. Every night.” She sighed. “But he never comes in. Why doesn’t he?”

She stopped like a clock. She still breathed, but she was waiting for me to go away.

I glanced over my shoulder.

The wind moved dust in the doorway like a mist, like someone waiting. The thing, the man, whatever, who came every night and stood in the hall.