Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

Crumley tilted his head to give me one of those monkey looks, then sighed and went up, like an old shoe salesman carrying an anvil in each hand.

At the top of the stairs he stood like Lord Carnarvon outside Tutankhamen’s waiting tomb, for a long moment. Then he went in. I thought I heard toe ghosts of old birds rustling and peering. I thought I heard a mummy whisper, rising from river dusts. But that was the old Muse in me, anxious for startlements.

What I heard was Crumley pacing the milkweed silt on the old woman’s floor, which muffled his tread. A birdcage gave a metallic bell sound; he had touched it. Then what I heard was him bending over to lend an ear to a wind of time that moved from a dry and aching mouth.

And what I heard finally was the sound of the name on the wall whispered once, twice, three times, as if the old canary woman were reading the Egyptian hieroglyphs, symbol by symbol.

When Crumley came back down he was carrying the anvils in his stomach, and his face was tired.

“I’m getting out of this business,” he said.

I waited.

“Hirohito ascends throne.” He quoted the old newsprint he had just seen at the bottom of the cage.

“Addis Ababa?” I said.

“Was it really that long ago?”

“Now you’ve seen it all,” I said. “What’s your conclusion?”

“What conclusion should I have?”

“Didn’t you read it in her face? Didn’t you see?”

“What?”

“She’s next.”

“What?”

“It’s all there, in her eyes. She knows about the man who stands in the hall. He’s been up to her room, also, but hasn’t gone in. She’s simply waiting, and praying for him. I’m cold all over, and can’t get warm.”

“Just because you were right about the trolley ticket punchout junk, and found his place and I.D.’d the man, doesn’t make you Tarot Card Champ of the Week. You’re cold all over? I’m cold all over. Your hunch and my chill buys no dog food for a dead dog.”

“If you don’t post a guard here, she’ll be dead in two days.”

“If we posted guards over everybody who’s goi

ng to be dead in two days, we’d have no more police. You want me to go tell the captain what to do with his men? He’d throw me downstairs and throw my badge after me. Look, she’s nobody. I hate to say that. But that’s the way the law runs. If she were somebody, maybe we’d post—”

“I’ll do it myself, then.”

“Think what you just said. You got to eat sometime, or sleep. You can’t be here and you know it. The first time you run for a hotdog is when he, him, who, whomever, if he exists, will come in, make her sneeze, and she’s gone. There was never any man here. It was only an old hairball blowing by in the night. The old guy heard it first. Mrs. Canary hears it now.”

Crumley stared up the long, dark stairs toward the place of no birdsong, no springtime in the Rockies, no bad organist playing for his tiny yellow friends in some lost year.

“Give me time to think, kid,” he said.

“And let you be an accessory to murder?”

“There you go again!” Crumley yanked the door so it screamed on its hinges. “How come I spend half my time almost liking you and the rest being mad as hell?”

“Do I do that to you?” I said.

But he was gone.

Crumley did not call for twenty-four hours.