Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll go shake my fists at Elmo Crumley.

In my right fist, a handful of trolley ticket dust.

In my left, a clump of moist seaweed.

But not at the police station!

Jails, like hospitals, sank me to my knees in a faint.

Crumley’s home was somewhere.

Shaking my fists. I’d find it.

For about 150 days a year in Venice, the sun doesn’t show through the mist until noon.

For some sixty days a year the sun doesn’t come out of the fog until it’s ready to go down in the west, around four or five o’clock.

For some forty days it doesn’t come out at all.

The rest of the time, if you’re lucky, the sun rises, as it does for the rest of Los Angeles and California, at five-thirty or six in the morning and stays all day.

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nbsp; It’s the forty- or sixty-day cycles that drip in the soul and make the riflemen clean their guns. Old ladies buy rat poison on the twelfth day of no sun. But on the thirteenth day, when they are about to arsenic their morning tea, the sun rises wondering what everyone is so upset about, and the old ladies feed the rats down by the canal, and lean back to their brandy.

During the forty-day cycles, the foghorn lost somewhere out in the bay sounds over and over again, and never stops, until you feel the people in the local graveyard beginning to stir. Or, late at night, when the foghorn gets going, some variety of amphibious beast rises in your id and swims toward land. It is swimming somewhere yearning, maybe only for sun. All the smart animals have gone south. You are left stranded on a cold dune with an empty typewriter, an abandoned bank account, and a half-warm bed. You expect the submersible beast to rise some night while you sleep. To get rid of him you get up at three a.m. and write a story about him, but don’t send it out to any magazines for years because you are afraid. Not Death, but Rejection in Venice is what Thomas Mann should have written about.

All this being true, or imagined, the wise man lives as far inland as possible. The Venice police jurisdiction ends as does the fog at about Lincoln Avenue.

There, at the very rim of official and bad weather territory, was a garden I had seen only once or twice.

If there was a house in the garden it was not visible. It was so surrounded by bushes, trees, tropical shrubs, palm fronds, bulrushes, and papyrus that you had to cut your way in with a reaper. There was no sidewalk, only a beaten path. A bungalow was in there, all right, sinking into a chin-high field of uncut grass, but so far away from the street it looked like an elephant foundering in a tar pit, soon to be gone forever. There was no mailbox out front. The mailman must have just tossed the mail in and beat it before something sprang out of the jungle to get him.

From this green place came the smell of oranges and apricots in season. And what wasn’t orange or apricot was cactus or epiphyllum or night-blooming jasmine. No lawnmower ever sounded here. No scythe ever whispered. No fog ever came. On the boundary of Venice’s damp eternal twilight, the bungalow survived amid lemons that glowed like Christmas tree lights all winter long.

And on occasion, walking by, you thought you heard okapi rushing and thumping a Serengeti Plain in there, or great sunset clouds of flamingos startled up and wheeling in pure fire.

And in that place, wise about the weather, and dedicated to the preservation of his eternally sunburned soul, lived a man some forty-four years old, with a balding head and a raspy voice, whose business, when he moved toward the sea and breathed the fog, was bruised customs, broken laws, and the occasional death that could be murder.

Elmo Crumley.

And I found him and his house because a series of people had listened to my queries, nodded, and pointed directions.

Everyone agreed that every late afternoon, the short detective ambled into that green jungle territory and disappeared amid the sounds of hippos rising and flamingos in descent.

What should I do? I thought. Stand on the edge of his wild country and shout his name?

But Crumley shouted first.

“Jesus Christ, is that you?”

He was coming out of his jungle compound and trekking along the weedpath, just as I arrived at his front gate.

“It’s me.”

As the detective trailblazed his own uncut path, I thought I head the sounds I had always imagined as I passed: Thompson’s gazelles on the leap, crossword-puzzle zebras panicked just beyond me, plus a smell of golden pee on the wind—lions.

“Seems to me,” groused Crumley, “we played this scene yesterday. You come to apologize? You got stuff to say that’s louder and funnier?”