Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

The phone rang.

Or a voice of cold rain and running night and raw alcohol raving in the storm and mourning terrible events, as the great train shrieked on a curve?

The phone stopped.

With my eyes clenched, my teeth gritted, the covers over my head, turned away against the sweaty pillow. I thought I heard a drifting whisper. I froze.

I kept my breath, I stopped my heart.

For, just now, at that very instant …

Hadn’t I felt something touch and—weigh itself …

On the end of my bed?

A.L. Shrank was not the next victim.

Nor did the canary lady suddenly fly around her room once and expire.

Someone else vanished.

And, not long after dawn, the bright glass eyes across the street from my tired apartment saw the arrival of the evidence.

A truck pulled up outside.

Sleepless and exhausted, I heard it, stirred.

Someone knocked on my coffin door.

I managed to levitate and balloon-drift over to crack the door and peer gum-eyed into the face of a great beefy ox. The face named me, I assented to the name, the ox told me to sign here, I signed something that looked like a D.O.A. slip and watched the delivery man hoof back to his half-truck and wrestle a familiar, bundled object off the back and wheel it along the walk.

“My God,” I said. ‘‘What is it? Who—?”

But the big rolling bundle struck the doorjamb and gave off a musical chord. I slumped, knowing the answer.

“Where do you want it?” said the ox, glancing around Groucho Marx’s overcrowded stateroom. “This as good as any?”

He heaved the wrapped object to one side against the wall, looked around with contempt at my Goodwill sofa, my rugless floor, and my typewriter, and cattle-trotted back out to his truck, leaving the door wide.

Over the way, I saw the ten dozen bright blue, brown, hazel glass eyes watching, even as I ripped away the covering to stare at …

The Smile.

“My God!” I cried. “That’s the piano that I heard playing—”

The “Maple Leaf Rag.”

Wham. The truck door slammed. The truck roared away.

I collapsed on my already collapsed sofa, totally disbelieving that big, vacant, ivory smile.

Crumley, I said in my mind. I felt the lousy haircut too high in back, too short on the sides. My fingers were numb.

Yeah, kid? said Crumley.

I changed my mind. I thought, Crumley, it’s not going to be Shrank or the old bird lady who vanishes.

Gosh, said Crumley, who?