Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“How dare it come here?” I said.

“Everything does,” said Crumley.

“Qué? Is this the Crazy?”

“Sí, Mrs. Gutierrez.”

“Do I call the office?”

“Sí Mrs. Gutierrez.”

“Fannie is calling outside on her porch!”

“I hear her, Mrs. Gutierrez—”

Far away in the sun inland where there was no fog or mist or rain, and no surf to bring strange visitors in, was the tenement, and Fannie’s soprano calling like the Sirens.

“Tell him,” I heard her sing, “I have a new recording of Mozart’s The Magic Flute!”

“She says—”

“Her voice carries, Mrs. Gutierrez. Tell her, thank God, that’s a happy one.”

“She wants you to come see, she misses you and hopes you forgive her, she says.”

For what? I tried to remember.

“She says—”

Fannie’s voice floated on the warm clear air.

“Tell him to come but don’t bring anyone with!”

That knocked the air out of me. The ghosts of old ice creams rose in my blood. When had I ever done that? I wondered. Who did she think I might bring along, uninvited?

And then I remembered.

The bathrobe hanging on the door late nights. Leave it there. Canaries for sale. Don’t fetch the empty cages. The lion cage. Don’t roll it through the streets. Lon Chaney. Don’t peel him off the silver screen and hide him in your pocket. Don’t.

My God, Fannie, I thought, is the fog rolling inland toward you? Will the mist reach your tenement? Will the rain touch on your door?

I shouted so loudly over the phone, Fannie could have heard it, downstairs.

“Tell her, Mrs. Gutierrez, I come alone. Alone. But tell her only maybe I come. I have no money, not even for train fare. Maybe I come tomorrow—”

“Fannie say, if you come, she give you money.”

“Swell, but meantime, my pockets, empty.”

Just then I saw the postman cross the street and stick an envelope in my mailbox.

“Hold on,” I yelled, and ran.

The letter was from New York with a check for thirty dollars in it for a story I had just sold to Bizarre Tales, about a man who feared the wind

that followed him around the world from the Himalayas and now shook his house late at night, hungry for his soul.

I ran back to the telephone and shouted, “If I make it to the bank—tonight I will come!”