Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“And while you’re at it”—Crumley sipped another beer— “write down the name of the murderer.”

“It would have to be someone who knows everyone in Venice, California,” I said.

“That could be me,” said Crumley.

“Don’t say that.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I said, “it scares me.”

I made the list.

I made two lists.

And then suddenly discovered myself making three.

The first list was short and full of possible murderers, none of which I believed.

The second was Choose Your Victim, and went on at some length, on who would vanish in short order.

And in the middle of it I realized it had been some while since I trapped all the wandering people of Venice. So I did a page on Cal the barber before he fled out of my mind, and another on Shrank running down the street, and another on all those people on the rollercoaster with me plummeting into hell, and yet another on the big night steamboat theater crossing the Styx to ram the Isle of the Dead and (unthinkable!) sink Mr. Shapeshade!

I did a final sermon on Miss Birdsong, and a page about the glass eyes, and took all these pages and put them in my Talking Box. That was the box I kept by my typewriter where my ideas lay and spoke to me early mornings to tell me where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. I lay half-asleep, listening, and then got up and went to help them, with my typewriter, to go where they most needed to go to do some special wild thing; so my stories got written. Sometimes it was a dog that needed to dig a graveyard. Sometimes it was a time machine that had to go backward. Sometimes it was a man with green wings who had to fly at night lest he be seen. Sometimes it was me, missing Peg in my tombstone bed.

I took one of the lists back to Crumley.

“How come you didn’t use my typewriter?” said Crumley.

“Yours isn’t used to me yet, and would only get in the way. Mine is way ahead of me, and I run to catch up. Read that.”

Crumley read my list of possible victims.

“Christ,” he murmured, “you got half the Venice Chamber of Commerce, the Lions Club, the flea circus, and the Pier Carnival Owners of America on here.”

He folded it and put it in his pocket.

“Why don’t you throw in some friends from where you once lived in downtown L.A.?”

An ice-frog jumped in my chest.

I thought of the tenement and the dark halls and nice Mrs. Gutierrez and lovely Fannie.

The frog jumped again.

“Don’t say that,” I said.

“Where’s the other list, of murderers? You got the Chamber of Commerce on that, too?”

I shook my head.

“Afraid to show it to me because I’m in the lineup with the rest of them?” asked Crumley.

I took that list out of my pocket, glanced at it, and tore it up.

“Where’s your wastebasket?” I said.

Even as I had been talking, the fog had arrived across the street from Crumley’s. It hesitated, as if searching for me, and then, to verify my paranoid suspicions, sneaked across and blanketed his garden, dousing the Christmas lights in his oranges and lemons and drowning the flowers so they shut their mouths.