Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“You going to stay and watch?” said Mr. Shapeshade, gently.

“I don’t think I could stand it,” I said. “I saw a film once where they shot an elephant right on screen. The way it fell down and over, collapsed, hurt me terribly. It was like watching someone bomb St. Peter’s dome. I wanted to kill the hunters. No, thanks.”

A flagman, anyway, was waving us off.

Shapeshade and I walked back through the fog. He took my elbow, like a good middle-European uncle advising his favorite nephew.

“Tonight. No explosions. No destructions. Only joy. Fun. Great old times. My theater. Maybe tonight is our last cinema night. Maybe tomorrow. Free. Gratis. Nice boy, be there.”

He hugged me and plowed off through the fog like a great dark tugboat.

On my way past A. L. Shrank’s I saw that his door was still wide open. But I didn’t step in.

I wanted to run, call collect on my gas station telephone, but I feared that two thousand miles of silence would whisper back at me of deaths in sunlit streets, red meats hung in carnecería windows, and a loneliness so vast it was like an open wound.

My hair grayed. It grew an inch.

Cal! I thought. Dear, dreadful barber—here I come.

Cal’s barber shop in Venice was situated right across the street from the city half and next door to a bail bond shop where flies hung like dead trapeze artists from flypaper coils that had been left in the windows for ten years, and where men and women from the jail across the way went in like shadows and came out like uninhabited clothes. And next door to that was a little ma-and-pa grocery, but they were gone and their son sat on his pants in the window all day and sold maybe a can of soup and took horse-race telephone bets.

The barber shop, though it had a few flies in the window that had been dead no more than ten days, at least got a washdown once a month from Cal, who ran the place with well-oiled shears and unoiled elbows and spearmint gossip in his all-pink mouth. He acted like he was running a bee farm and afraid it would get out of hand as he wrestled the big, silver, bumbling insect around your ears until it suddenly froze, bit, and held on to your hair until Cal cursed and yanked back as if he were pulling teeth.

Which was why, along with economics, I had my hair cut only twice a year by Cal.

Twice yearly, also, because of all the barbers in the world, Cal talked, sprayed, gummed, cudgeled, advised, and droned more than most, which boggles the mind. Name a subject, he knew it all, top, side, and bottom, and in the middle of explaining dumb Einstein’s theory would stop, shut one eye, cock his head, and ask the Great Question with No Safe Answer.

“Hey, did I ever tell you about me and old Scott Joplin? Why, old Scott and me, by God and by Jesus, listen. That day in 1915 when he taught me how to play the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ Let me tell you.”

There was this picture of Scott Joplin on the wall, signed in ink a few centuries ago and fading like the canary lady’s message. In that photo you could see a very young Cal, seated on a piano stool, and bent over him, Joplin, his big black hands covering those of the happy boy.

There was that joyous kid, forever on the wall, captured on film, hunched over to seize the piano keys, ready to leap on life, the world, the universe, eat it all. The look on that boy’s face was such that it cracked my heart every time I saw it. So I didn’t look at it often. It hurt enough to see Cal looking at it, gathering his spit to ask the age-old Great Question, and, with no begs or requests, dash for the piano to maple leaf that rag.

Cal.

Cal looked like a cowpuncher who now rode barber chairs. Think of Texas cowhands, lean, weatherbeaten, permanently dyed by sun, sleeping in their Stetsons, glued on for life, taking showers in the damn hats. That was Cal, circling the enemy, the customer, weapon in hand, eating the hair, chopping the sideburns, listening to the shears, admiring the Bumblebee Electric’s harmonics, talking, talking, as I imagined him cowhand-naked dancing around my chair. Stetson jampack-nested above his ears, crave-itching to leap to that piano and rak

e its smile.

Sometimes I’d pretend I didn’t see him throwing those mad stares, shuttling his love glances at the waiting black and white, white and black keys. But finally I’d heave a great masochistic sigh and cry, “Okay, Cal. Git.”

Cal got.

Galvanized, he shot across the room, in a cowboy shamble, two of him, one in the mirror faster and brighter than the real one, yanking the piano lid up to show all that yellow dentistry just aching to have its music pulled.

“Listen to this, son. You ever hear anything, ever, ever in life, ever hear anything like—this?”

“No, Cal,” I said, waiting in the chair with my head half-ruined. “No,” I said, honestly, “I never did.”

“My God,” cried the old man coming out of the morgue a final time inside my head, “who gave him that awful haircut?”

I saw the guilty party standing in the window of his barber shop, gazing out at the fog, looking like one of those people in empty rooms or cafes or on street corners in paintings by Hopper.

Cal.

I had to force myself to pull open the front door and step in, gingerly, looking down.

There were curlicues of brown, black, and gray hair all over the place.