Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“And now he’s dead,” Cal added.

“Dead!” I almost shouted.

“Somebody found him in a lion cage submerged under the canal waters. Dead.”

“Somebody,” I said. But didn’t add, me!

“I figure the old man never had any champagne before or it was a long time back, got loaded, fell in. Cal, he said, the works. It just goes to show you, right? Could be me or you in that canal, just as likely, and now, hot damn and old breakfasts, he’s alone forever. Don’t it make you think? Hey, now, son. You don’t look too well. I talk too much, right?”

“Did he say who was going to pick him up and how and when and why?” I said.

“Nothing fancy, far as I could tell. Someone coming on the big Venice Short Line train, pick him up, take him right down to Myron’s Ballroom door. You ever get on the train Saturday nights around one? Old ladies and old gents piling out of Myron’s in their mothball furs and green tuxedos, smelling of Ben-Hur perfume and nickel panatelas, glad they didn’t break a leg on the dance floor, bald heads sweating, mascara running, and the fox furs starting to spoil? I went once, and looked around and got out. I figured the streetcar might stop at Rose Lawn Cemetery, on the way to the sea, and half those folks get out. No, thanks. I talk too much, don’t I? Just tell me if I do—

“Anyways,” he went on at last, “he’s dead and gone, and the awful thing is he’ll be lying in the grave the next one thousand years remembering who in hell gave him his last awful haircut, and the answer is me.

“So it’s been one of them weeks. People with bad haircuts disappear, wind up drowned, and at long fast I know damn well my hands are no good for nothing, and—”

“You don’t know who it was picked the old man up and took him to that dance?”

“Who knows? Who cares? Old man said whoever it was told him to meet him down front of the Venice Cinema at seven, see part of a show, have a dinner at Modesti’s, the last cafe on the pier still open, boy howdy, and head downtown to the ballroom. For a fast waltz with a ninety-nine-year-old Rose Queen, what a night, hey? Then home to bed, forever! Rut why would you want to know all this, son? You—”

The telephone rang.

Cal looked at it, his face drai

ning of color.

The telephone rang three times.

“Aren’t you going to answer it, Cal?” I said.

Cal looked at it the same way I looked at my gas station office phone, and two thousand miles of silence and heavy breathing along the way. He shook his head.

“Why would I answer a phone when there’s nothing but bad news on it?” he said.

“Some days, you feel that way,” I said.

I pulled the apron from around my neck, slowly, and got up.

Automatically, Cal’s hand went palm out for my cash. When he saw his hand there, he cursed and dropped his hand, turned and banged the cash register.

Up jumped NO SALE.

I looked at myself in the mirror and almost barked like a seal at what I saw.

“It’s a great haircut, Cal,” I said.

“Git outa here.”

On the way out, I put my hand up to touch where the picture of Scott Joplin used to hang, playing great stuff with fingers like two bunches of big black bananas.

If Cal saw this, he didn’t say.

I slipped on some old hair, going out.

I walked until I found sunshine and Crumley’s buried-in-deep-grass bungalow.

I stood outside.