Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“Let me grab my beer. Okay. Shoot.”

I reeled off six more names, including, though I didn’t really believe it, Shapeshade’s.

“And maybe,” I finished, and hesitated, “Constance Rattigan.”

“Rattigan!” yelled Crumley. “What the hell you know about Rattigan? She eats tiger’s balls on toast and can whipsaw sharks two Falls out of three. She’d walk out of Hiroshima with her earrings and eyelashes intact. Annie Oakley, now, no to her, too. She’d rifle someone’s butt off before he—no, only way is some night, on her own, she might toss all her guns off the pier and follow after; that’s in her face. As for Shapeshade, don’t make me laugh. He doesn’t even know the real world exists out here with us grotesque normals. They’ll bury him in his Wurlitzer come 1999. Got any more bright ideas?”

I swallowed hard and finally decided to at last tell Crumley about the mysterious disappearance of Cal the barber.

“Mysterious, hell,” said Crumley. “Where you been? The Mad Butcher skedaddled. Piled his tin lizzie with dregs from his shop just the other day, pulled out of the no-parking zone in front of his place, and headed east. Not west, you notice, toward Land’s End, but east. Half the police force saw him make a big U-turn out front the station and didn’t arrest him because he yelled, ‘Autumn leaves, by God, autumn leaves in the Ozarks!’”

I gave a great trembling sigh of relief, glad for Cal’s survival. I said nothing about Scott Joplin’s missing head, which was probably what drove Cal off and away forever. But Crumley was still talking. “You finished with your super-brand-new list of possibl

e deads?”

“Well—” lamely.

“Dip in ocean, then dip in typewriter, says Zen master, makes for full page and happy heart. Listen to the detective advising the genius. The beer is on the ice, so that the pee is in the pot, later. Leave your list at home. So long, Krazy Kat.”

“Offisa Pup,” I said. “Goodbye.”

The forty dozen rifle shots from last night drew me. Their echoes would not stop.

And the sound of more of the pier being pounded and compacted and eaten away drew me, as the sounds of war must draw some.

The rifle shots, the pier, I thought, as I dipped in the ocean and then dipped in my typewriter, like the good kat Offisa Pup wished me to be, I wonder how many men, or was it just one, Annie Oakley killed last night.

I wonder, also, I thought, placing six new pages of incredibly brilliant novel in my Talking Box, what new books of drunken doom A. L. Shrank has toadstool-farmed on his catacomb library shelves?

The Hardy Boys Invite Ptomaine?

Nancy Drew and the Weltschmerz Kid?

The Funeral Directors of America Frolic at Atlantic City?

Don’t go look, I thought. I must, I thought. But don’t laugh when you see the new titles. Shrank might run out and charge you.

Rifle shots, I thought. Dying pier. A. L. Shrank, Sigmund Freud’s Munchkin son. And now, there, up ahead of me biking on the pier:

The Beast.

Or, as I sometimes called him, Erwin Rommel of the Afrika Korps. Or, sometimes, simply:

Caligula. The Killer.

His real name was John Wilkes Hopwood.

I remember reading one of those devastating reviews about him in a small local Hollywood theater some years before:

John Wilkes Hopwood, the matinee assassin, has done it again to another role. Not only has he torn a passion to tatters, he has, madness maddened, stomped on it, ravened it with his teeth, and hurled it across the footlights at unsuspecting club ladies. The damned fools ate it up!

I often saw him riding his bright orange Raleigh eight-speed bike along the ocean walk from Venice to Ocean Park and Santa Monica. He was always dressed in a fine, freshly pressed, brown hound’s-tooth English suit with a dark brown Irish cap pulled over his snow-white curls and shading his General Erwin Rommell or, if you prefer, killer hawk’s Conrad-Veidt-about-to-smother-Joan-Crawford-or-Greer-Garson face. His cheeks were burned to a wonderful polished nutmeg color, and I often wondered if the color stopped at his neckline, for I had never seen him out on the sand, stripped. Forever, he cycled up and down between the ocean towns, at liberty, waiting to be summoned by the German General Staff or the club ladies over at the Hollywood Assistance League, whichever came first. When there was a cycle of war films, he worked constantly, for it was rumored he had a full closet of Afrika Korps uniforms and a burial cape for the occasional vampire film.

As far as I could tell, he had only one casual outfit, that suit. And one pair of shoes, fine English oxblood brogues, highly polished. His bicycle clips, brightly clasping his tweed cuffs, looked to be pure silver from some shop in Beverly Hills. His teeth were always so finely polished, they seemed not his own. His breath, as he pedaled past, was Listerine, just in case he had to take a fast call from Hitler on his way to Playa Del Rey.

I saw him most often motionless, astride his bike, Sunday afternoons, when Muscle Beach filled up with rippling deltoids and masculine laughter. Hopwood would stand upon the Santa Monica pier, like a commander in the last days of the retreat from El Alamein, depressed at all that sand, delighted with all that flesh.

He seemed so apart from all of us, gliding by in his Anglo-Byronic-German daydreams …