Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“You know the one thing that gripes my gut about amateur detectives?” said Crumley.

“I’m not an amateur detective, I’m a professional writer with big antennae that work!”

“So you’re a grasshopper who knows how to type,” said Crumley, and waited for my wince to die. “But if you’d been around Venice and my office and the morgue as many years as I have, you’d know that every vagrant who wanders by or any drunk who stumbles in is full of theories, evidence, revelations enough to fill a Bible and sink a Baptist Sunday-outing picnic boat. If we listened to every maundering preacher who fell through the jail doors half the world would be under suspicion, one third under arrest, and the rest fried or hanged. That being so, why should I listen to some young scribe who hasn’t even begun to make his name in literary history”—again my wince, again he waited—“who just because he finds a lion cage full of accidental drowning thinks he has stumbled on Crime and Punishment and feels like Raskolnikov’s son. End of speech. Respond.”

“You know Raskolnikov?” I said, in amaze.

“Almost before you were born. But that doesn’t buy horseflakes. Plead your case.”

“I’m a writer, I know more about feelings than you do.”

“Balls. I’m a detective, I know more about facts than you do. You afraid a fact will confuse you?”

“I—”

“Tell me this, kiddo. Anything ever happen to you in your life?”

“Anything?”

“Yeah, I mean anything. Big, in between, small. Anything. Like sickness, rape, death, war, revolution, murder.”

“My mother and father died—”

“Peacefully?”

“Yes. But I had an uncle shot in a holdup once—”

“You see him shot?”

“No, but—”

“Well, that don’t count, unless you see. I mean, you ever find anything like men in lion cages ever before?”

“No,” I said at last.

“Well, there you have it. You’re still in shock. You don’t know what life is. I was born and raised in the morgue. This is the first real touch of marble slab you ever had. So why don’t you quiet down and go away.”

He heard his own voice getting much too loud, shook his head, and said, “No, why don’t I quiet down and go away.”

Which he did. He opened the car door, jumped in, and before I could reinflate my balloon, was gone.

Cursing, I slammed into a telephone booth, dropped a dime in the slot, and called across five miles of Los Angeles. When someone picked up at the other end I heard a radio playing “La Raspa,” a door slammed, a toilet flushed, but I could feel the sunlight that I needed, waiting there.

The lady, living in a tenement on the corner of Temple and Figueroa, nervous at the phone she held in her hand, at last cleared her throat and said:

“Qu

é?”

“Mrs. Gutierrez!” I shouted. I stopped, and started over. “Mrs. Gutierrez, this is the Crazy.”

“Oh!” she gasped, and then laughed. “Sí, sí! You want to talk to Fannie?”

“No, no, just a few yells. Will you yell down, please, Mrs. Gutierrez?”

“I yell.”

I heard her move. I heard the entire ramshackle, rickety tenement lean. Someday, a blackbird would land on the roof and the whole thing would go. I heard a small Chihuahua tap-dance on the linoleum after her, built like a bull bumblebee and barking.