Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“Henry. Is that you?”

“Scare you, did I?” Henry smiled, then remembered why he was there. “I been waiting on you,” he said, lowering his voice, looking around as if he could actually see the shadows.

“Something wrong, Henry?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Things is changing. The old place ain’t the same. People is nervous. Even me.”

I saw his right hand fumble down in the dark to touch and twitch a peppermint-striped cane. I had never seen him carry a cane before. My eye ran down to the tip, which was rounded with what looked to be a good weight of lead. It was not a blind man’s guide. It was a weapon.

“Henry,” I whispered.

And we stood for a moment while I looked him over and saw what had always been there.

Blind Henry.

He had everything memorized. In his pride he had counted and could recall every pace in this block and the next and the next, and how many steps across at this intersection or that. And he could name the streets he strode past, with sovereign certainty, by the butcher or shoeshine or drugstore or poolhall smokes and smells. And even when the shops were shut, he would “see” the kosher pickle scents or the boxed tobaccos, or the locked-away African ivory aromas of the billiard balls in their nests, or the aphrodisiac whiff from the gas station when some tank flooded, and Henry walking, staring straight ahead, no dark glasses, no cane, his mouth counting the beats, to turn in at Al’s Beer and walk steadily and unswervingly through the crowded tables toward an empty piano stool, there to sit and reach up for the beer that was automatically popped in place by Al before his arrival, to play exactly three tunes—including the “Maple Leaf” sadly better than Cal the barber—drink the one beer, and stride out into a night he owned with his paces and counts, heading

home, calling out to unseen voices, naming names, proud of his shuttered genius, only his nose steering the way and his legs firm and muscled from the ten miles of strides per day.

If you tried to help him across the street, which I made the mistake of doing once, he yanked his elbow away and stared at you so angrily that your face burned.

“Don’t touch,” he whispered. “Don’t confuse. You put me off now. Where was I?” He threw some abacus beads in his dark head. He counted cornrows on his skull. “Yeah. Now. Thirty-five across, thirty-seven over.” And on he went alone, leaving you on the curb, his own parade, thirty-five steps across Temple this way, and thirty-seven the other, across Figueroa. An invisible cane tapped cadence for him. He marched, by God, he truly marched.

And it was Henry with No Last Name, Henry the Blind who heard the wind and knew the cracks in the sidewalk and snuffed the dust of the night tenement, who gave the first warnings of things waiting on the stairs or too much midnight leaning heavy on the roof, or a wrong perspiration in the halls.

And here he was now, flattened back against the cracked plaster of the tenement entryway, with full night outside and in the halls. His eyes wobbled and shut, his nostrils flared, he seemed to bend a bit at the knees as if someone had struck him on the head. His cane twitched in his dark fingers. He listened, listened so hard that I turned to stare down the long cavernous hall to the far end of the tenement where the back door stood wide and more night waited.

“What’s wrong, Henry?” I said again.

“Promise you won’t tell Florianna? Fannie takes on fits, you tell her too much wrong stuff. Promise?”

“I won’t give her fits, Henry.”

“Where you been last few days?”

“I had my own troubles, Henry, and I was broke. I could have hitchhiked in, but—well.”

“Lots goes on in just forty-eight hours. Pietro, him and his dogs and birds and geese, you know his cats?”

“What about Pietro?”

“Someone turned him in, called the police. Nuisance, they said. Police come, take all his pets away, take him away. He was able to give some of them to folks. I got his cat up in my room. Mrs. Gutierrez got a new dog. When they led him out, Pietro, he was crying. I never heard a man cry so hard before. It was terrible.”

“Who turned him in, Henry?” I was upset myself. I saw the dogs adoring Pietro, I saw the cats and the geese that lovingly followed and the canaries on his bell-chiming hat and him dancing on street corners through half of my life.

“Who turned him in?”

“Trouble is, no one knows. Cops just come and said, ‘Here!’ and all the pets gone forever and Pietro in jail, a nuisance, or maybe he kicked up a fuss out front there, hit somebody, striking a cop. Nobody knows. But somebody did. That ain’t all—”

“What else?” I said, leaning against the wall.

“Sam.”

“What about him?”

“He’s in the hospital. Booze. Someone gave him two quarts of the hard stuff; damn fool drank it all. What they call it? Acute alcoholism? If he lives tomorrow, it’s God’s will. No one knows who gave him the booze. Then there’s Jimmy, that’s the worst!”

“God,” I whispered. “Let me sit down.” I sat on the edge of the steps leading up to the second floor. “No News or What Killed the Dog.”