Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

The photograph of Cal and Scott Joplin, covered with a month’s supply of hair, which was not much.

I reached down and picked up the photo.

In the next five or six seconds my whole body turned to ice.

Because Scott Joplin was gone.

Cal was still there, forever young,

smiling, his thin fingers spidering the piano keys.

But the man who stood over him, grinning.

It wasn’t Joplin.

It was another man, black, younger, more sinful looking.

I peered very close.

There were marks of old dry glue where Scott’s head had once been.

Jesus God have mercy on Cal, I thought. None of us ever thought to look close. And, of course, the picture was always under glass and hung rather high on the wall, not easy to reach or take down.

Sometime, a long while ago, Cal had found a picture of Scott Joplin, razor cut around it, and pasted it over this other guy’s face, head on head. He must have forged the signature as well. And all these years we had looked at it and sighed and clucked and said, “Hey, Cal, great! Aren’t you special? Looky there!”

And all those years Cal had looked at it and known what a fraud it was and he was and cut hair so you looked as if you’d been blown dry by a Kansas twister and combed by a maniac wheat harvester run amok.

I turned the photograph over and reached down into the barrel, trying to find Scott Joplin’s decapitated and missing part.

I knew I would not find it.

Someone had taken it.

And whoever had peeled it off the photo had telephoned and sent a message to Cal. You are known! You are naked! You are revealed! I remembered Cal’s phone ringing. And Cal, afraid, refusing to answer.

And coming into his barber shop, what? Two days, three days ago, casually checking the photograph, Cal had been kicked in the gut. With Joplin’s head gone, Cal was gone.

All he could do was Goodwill the barber chair. Salvation Army the tonics, piano me his piano.

I stopped searching. I folded the photograph of Cal without Joplin and went out to watch the landlord broom the hairless tiles.

“Cal,” I said.

The landlord paused his broom.

“Cal didn’t,” I said. “I mean, Cal wouldn’t, I mean, Cal’s still alive?”

“Crud,” said the landlord. “Alive about four hundred miles east of here by now, still owing seven months’ rent.”

Thank God. I won’t have to tell Crumley about this one. Not now, anyway. Going away isn’t murder, or being murdered.

No?

Going east? Isn’t Cal a dead man, driving a car?

I went out the door.

“Boy,” said the landlord. “You look bad coming and going.”