Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

I was in the way.

“Goodbye,” I said.

Silence.

I should have stayed, had tea, dinner, breakfast with her. But you can’t protect all of the people in all of the places all of the time, can you?

I waited at the door.

Goodbye.

Did she moan this in her old sleep? I only knew that her breath pushed me away.

Going downstairs I realized I still didn’t know the name of the old man who had drowned in a lion cage with a handful of train ticket confetti uncelebrated in each pocket.

I found his room. But that didn’t help.

His name wouldn’t be there, any more than he was.

Things are good at their beginnings. But how rarely in the history of men and small towns or big cities is the ending good.

Then, things fall apart. Things turn to fat. Things sprawl. The time gets out of joint. The milk sours. By night the wires on the high poles tell evil tales in the dripping mist. The water in the canals goes blind with scum. Flint, struck, gives no spark. Women, touched, give no warmth.

Summer is suddenly over.

Winter snows in your hidden bones.

Then it is time for the wall.

The wall of a little room, that is, where the shudders of the big red trains go by like nightmares turning you on your cold steel bed in the trembled basement of the Not So Royal Lost Canary Apartments, where the numbers have fallen off the front portico, and the street sign at the corner has been twisted north to east so that people, if they ever came to find you, would turn away forever on the wrong boulevard.

But meanwhile there’s mat wall near your bed to be read with your watered eyes or reached out to and never touched, it is too far away and too deep and too empty.

I knew that once I found the old man’s room, I would find that wall.

And I did.

The door, like all the doors in the house, was unlocked, waiting for wind or fog or some pale stranger to step in.

I stepped. I hesitated. Maybe I expected to find the old man’s X-ray imprint spread out there on his empty cot. His place, like the canary lady’s upstairs, looked like late in the day of a garage sale—for a nickel or a dime, everything had been stolen away.

There wasn’t even a toothbrush on the floor, or soap, or a washrag. The old man must have bathed in the sea once a day, brushed his teeth with seaweed each noon, washed his only shirt in the salt tide and lain beside it on the dunes while it dried, if and when the sun came out.

I moved forward like a deep sea diver. When you know someone is dead, his abandoned air holds back every motion you make, even your breathing.

I gasped.

I had guessed wrong.

For there his name was, on the wall. I almost fell, leaning down to squint.

Over and over, his name was repeated, scrabbled on the plaster on the far side of his cot. Over and over, as if fearful of senility or oblivion, terrified at waking some dawn to find himself nameless, over and over he had scratched with a nicotine-stained fingernail.

William. And then Willie. And the Will. And beneath the three. Bill.

And then, again, again, again.

Smith. Smith. Smith. Smith.