Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

I never thought to see him parking his Raleigh bike outside A. L. Shrank’s tarot-card-large-belfry-with-plenty-of-bats-open-at-all-hours shed.

But park he did, and hesitated outside the door.

Don’t go in! I thought. No one goes in A. L. Shrank’s unless it’s for poison Medici rings and tombstone phone numbers.

Erwin Rommel didn’t mind.

Neither did the Beast, or Caligula.

Shrank beckoned.

All three obeyed.

By the time I got there, the door was shut. On it, for the first time, though it had probably yellowed there for years, was a list, typed with a faded ribbon, of all the folks who had passed through his portals to be psyched back to health.

H. B. WARNER, WARNER OLAND, WARNER BAXTER, CONRAD NAGEL, VILMA BANKY, ROD LA ROCQUE, BESSIE LOVE, JAMES GLEASON …

It read like the Actors Directory for 1929.

But Constance Rattigan was there.

I didn’t believe that.

And John Wilkes Hopwood.

I knew I had to believe that.

For, as I glanced through the dusty window, where a shade was half-drawn against prying eyes, I saw that someone was indeed on that couch from which stuffing sprang in mad abandon from the burst seams. And the man lying on the couch was the man in the brown tweed suit, eyes shut, doing lines, no doubt from a revised and improved last act of Hamlet.

Jesus in the lilies, as Crumley had said. Christ fresh to the cross!

At that moment, intent upon reciting his rosary innards. Hop-wood’s eyes flew open with actor’s intuition.

His eyes rolled, then his head flicked swiftly to one side. He stared at the window and saw me.

As did A. L. Shrank, seated nearby, turned away, pad and pencil in hand.

I stood back, cursed quietly, and walked quickly away.

In total embarrassment, I walked all the way to the end of the ruined pier, bought six Nestlé’s Crunch bars and two Clark Bars and two Power Houses to devour on the way. Whenever I am very happy or very sad or very embarrassed, I cram my mouth with sweets and Utter the breezeway with discards.

It was there at the end of the pier in the golden light of late afternoon that Caligula Rommel caught up with me. The destruction workers were gone. The air was silent.

I heard his bicycle hum and glide just behind me. He didn’t speak at first. He just arrived on foot, the bright silver bike clips around his trim ankles, the Raleigh held in his firm grasp like an insect woman. He stood at the one place on the pier where I had seen him, like a statue of Richard Wagner, watching one of his great choruses come in tides along the shore.

There were still half a dozen young men playing volleyball below. The thump of the ball and the rifleshots of their laughs were somehow killing the day. Beyond, two weight-lifting finalists were lifting their own worlds into the sky, in hopes of convincing eight or nine young women nearby that a fate worse than death wasn’t so bad after all, and could be had upstairs in the hotdog apartments just across the sand.

John Wilkes Hopwood surveyed the scene and did not look at me. He was making me sweat and wait, daring me to leave. I had, after all, crossed an invisible sill of his life, half an hour ago. Now, I must pay.

“Are you following me?” I said at last, and immediately felt a fool.

Hopwood laughed that famous last-act maniac laugh of his.

“Dear boy, you’re much too young. You’re the sort I throw back in the sea.”

God, I thought, what do I say now?

Hopwood cricked his head stiffly back behind him, pointing his eagle’s profile toward the Santa Monica pier a mile north from here, along the coast.