Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

I turned the pages, saw the names. There were little red crosses by fifty percent of the names on each page.

“That personal phone book is thirty-five years old. So half the people in it have been gone quite a while, and I don’t have the guts to finally erase or yank out the names. It would be like a final death. So I guess I’m the same sort of custard you are, son.”

She took the book of the dead back from me.

I felt a cold wind from the window and heard the beach sand stir as if a great and invisible beast had put a huge paw down on it.

“I didn’t spook Fannie,” I said, at last. “I’m not Typhoid Mary. I don’t carry the disease. If it’s anywhere tonight, or here, it’s on its own. My stomach’s been ruined for days. People are dying or running away, and there’s no connection, and I can’t prove anything. I’m around or near when it happens and I feel guilty I can’t see, know, tell, stop it. I have this god-awful feeling it’ll go on more days than I can bear. Everyone I look at, now, I think, I wonder if he or she is next, and know that if I wait long enough, of course, everyone goes. They just seem to be going faster this week. That’s all I’m going to say. Now I’ll shut up.”

She came and kissed the ends of her fingers and put the fingertips on my mouth. “I won’t rile you again. For a custard, you snap back. What now, another drink? Want to run films? Midnight dip in my pool? Mercy sex with your film mother? None of the above?”

I ducked my head so as to avoid her mocking and fiery gaze.

“Films. I’d like to see Constance Rattigan in Lace Curtains. Last time I saw it, I was five.”

“You sure know how to make old folks feel great. Lace Curtains. Stand back while I load the projector. My pa worked a Kansas City cinema when I was a girl, taught me to run the machines. Still can. I don’t need anyone in this house!”

“Yes, you do. Me. To watch the film.”

“Damn.” She leaped across the pillows and started fiddling with the projector in the back of the parlor. She yanked a can of film on a nearby shelf and deftly began to thread it through the machine. “You’re right. I’ll watch your face watching me.”

While she was busy, humming and adjusting, I turned and stepped out on the low porch above the sands. My eye traveled along from the south, roving the shore, past the front of Constance Rattigan’s property, and on north until …

Down by the tideline, I saw something.

There was a man standing there, motionless, or something that looked like a man. And how long he had been there, and whether he had just come in from the surf, I couldn’t say. I couldn’t see if he was wet. He looked naked.

I gasped and glanced quickly inside. Constance Rattigan, whistling between her teeth, was still dickering away at the projector.

A wave fell like a gunshot. I flicked my gaze back. The man was still there, hands at his side, head up, legs apart, almost defiant.

Go away! I wanted to yell. What are you doing here? We’ve done nothing.

Are you sure? was my next thought.

No one deserves to be killed.

No?

A final wave came in behind the shape there on the shore. It broke up into a series of cracked mirrors that fell and seemed to envelop the man. He was erased. When the wave pulled back out he was gone, perhaps running away north along the sands.

Back past the Bon cage in the canal, past the canary lady’s empty windows, back past my apartment with its winding-sheet bed.

“Ready?” Constance Rattigan called from inside.

Not really, I thought.

Inside, Constance said, “Come see the old lady made young.”

“You’re not old,” I said.

“No, by God.” She ran around turning off lights and fluffing pillows in the middle of the room. “This health nut’s writing a book, out next year. Underwater gymnastics. Sex at low tide. What bicarbs to take after you eat the local football coach. What—my God. You’re blushing again. What do you know about girls?”

“Not much.”

“How many you had?”

“Not many.”