Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“If you’d stop moving and listen,” I said.

“Your voice carries, I’ll say that. Lady I know, three blocks from where you found the body, said because of your yell that night, her cats still haven’t come home. Okay, I’m standing here. And?”

With every one of his words, my fists had jammed deeper into my sports jacket pockets. Somehow, I couldn’t pull them out. Head ducked, eyes averted, I tried to get my breath.

Crumley glanced at his wristwatch.

“There was a man behind me on the train that night,” I cried, suddenly. “He was the one stuffed the old gentleman in the lion cage.”

“Keep your voice down. How do you know?”

My fists worked in my pockets squeezing. “I could feel his hands stretched out behind me. I could feel his fingers working, pleading. He wanted me to turn and see him! Don’t all killers want to be found out?”

“That’s what dime-store psychologists say. Why didn’t you look at him?”

“You don’t make eye contact with drunks. They come sit and breathe on you.”

“Right.” Crumley allowed himself a touch of curiosity. He took out a tobacco pouch and paper and started rolling a cigarette, deliberately not looking at me. “And?”

“You should’ve heard his voice. You’d believe if you’d heard. My God, it was like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, from the bottom of the grave, crying out, remember me! But more than that—see me, know me, arrest me!”

Crumley lit his cigarette and peered at me through the smoke.

“His voice aged me ten years in a few seconds,” I said. “I’ve never been so sure of my feelings in my life!”

“Everybody in the world has feelings.” Crumley examined his cigarette as if he couldn’t decide whether he liked it or not. “Everyone’s grandma writes Wheaties jingles and hums them until you want to kick the barley-malt out of the old crone. Songwriters, poets, amateur detectives, every damn fool thinks he’s all three. You know what you remind me of, son? That mob of idiots that swarmed after Alexander Pope waving their poems, novels, and essays, asking for advice, until Pope ran mad and wrote his ‘Essay on Criticism.’”

“You know Alexander Pope?”

Crumley gave an aggrieved sigh, tossed down his cigarette, stepped on it.

“You think all detectives are gumshoes with glue between their ears? Yeah, Pope, for Christ’s sake. I read him under the sheets late nights so my folks wouldn’t think I was queer. Now, get out of the way.”

“You mean all this is for nothing,” I cried. “You’re not going to try to save the old man?”

I blushed, hearing what I had said.

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” said Crumley, patiently.

He looked off along the street, as if he could see all the way to my apartment and the desk and the typewriter standing there.

“You’ve latched on to a good thing, or you think you have. So you run fevers. You want to get on that big red streetcar and ride back some night and catch that drunk and haul him in, but if you do, he won’t be there, or if he is, not the same guy, or you won’t know him. So right now, you’ve got bloody fingernails from beating your typewriter, and the stuffs coming good, as Hemingway says, and your intuition is growing long antennae that are ever so sensitive. That, and pigs’ knuckles, buys me no sauerkraut!”

He started off around the front of his car in a replay of yesterday’s disaster.

“Oh, no you don’t!” I yelled. “Not again. You know what you are? Jealous!”

Crumley’s head almost came off his shoulders. He whirled.

“I’m what?”

I almost saw his fingers reach for a gun that wasn’t there.

“And, and, and—” I floundered. “You—you’re never going to make it!”

My insolence staggered him. His head swiveled to stare at me over the top of his car.