Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“But, if you should ever decide to follow me”—he smiled— “that is where I live. Above the carousel, above the horses.”

I turned. Far off on that other still vibrant pier was the carousel that had been turning and grinding out its calliope music since I was a kid. Above the big horse race were the Carousel Apartments, a grand eyrie for retired German generals, failed actors, or driven romantics. I had heard that great poets who published small lived there. Novelists of many wits and no reviews lived there. Well-hung artists with unhung paintings lived there. Courtesans of famous film stars who were now prostitutes for spaghetti salesmen lived there. Old English matrons who had once thrived in B

righton and missed the Rocks lived there with stacks of antimacassars and stuffed Pekingese.

Now it seemed that Bismarck, Thomas Mann, Conrad Veidt, Admiral Doenitz, Erwin Rommel, and Mad Otto of Bavaria lived there.

I looked at that magnificent eagle profile. Hopwood stiffened with pride at my glance. He scowled at the golden sands and said, quietly, “You think I am crazy, allowing myself the tender mercies of one A. L. Shrank?”

“Well—”

“He is a very insightful man, very holistic, very special. And as you know, we actors are the world’s most unsettled people. The future is always uncertain, the phone should ring but never does. We have much time on our hands. So it is either numerology or the tarot cards or astrology or the Eastern meditation up under the great tree at Ojai with Krishnamurti, have you been? Fine! Or Reverend Violet Greener at her Agabeg Temple on Crenshaw? Norvell the futurist? Aimee Semple McPherson, were you ever saved? I was. She laid on the hands, then I laid her. Holy Rollers? The ecstasy. Or the Hall Johnson Choir down in the First Baptist Church Sunday nights. Dark angels. Such glory. Or it is the all-night bridge or the start-at-noon, play-till-dusk bingo with all the ladies with heliotrope hair. Actors go everywhere. If we knew a good eviscerator we would attend. Caesar’s Gut-Readers, Inc. I could make a mint scalpeling doves and fishing out the innards like card-pips where the future lies stinking at noon. I try it all to fill the time. That’s what all actors are, time fillers. Ninety percent of our lives, stage-waits. Meanwhile, we lie down with A. L. Shrank to get it up at Muscle Beach.”

He had never taken his gaze from the pliant rubber Greek gods who frolicked below, washed by equal parts of salt wind and lust.

“Have you ever wondered,” he said at last, a faint line of sweat on his upper lip, a faint brim of perspiration along the hairline under his cap, “about vampires who do not appear in mirrors? Well, now, see those glorious young men down there? They appear in all mirrors; but no one else does. Only the minted gods show. And when they stare at themselves, do they ever see anyone else, the girls that they ride like seahorses? I have no such faith. So now”—he went back to his starter subject—“do you understand why you saw me with the wee dark mole A. L. Shrank?”

“I wait for phone calls, myself,” I said. “Anything’s better than that!”

“You actually understand.” He stared at me with eyes that burned the clothes off my body.

I nodded.

“Come visit me sometime.” He nodded at the faraway Carousel Apartments where the calliope groaned and lamented over something vaguely resembling “Beautiful Ohio.” “I’ll tell you about Iris Tree, Sir Beerbohm Tree’s daughter, who used to live in those apartments, the half-sister of Carol Reed, the British director. Aldous Huxley sometimes drops up, you might see him.”

He saw my head jerk at that and knew I was on the hook.

“You like to meet Huxley? Well, behave yourself’—he caressed the words—“and you just might.”

I was filled with an inexpressible and insufferable need that I had to force myself to repress. Huxley was a madness in my life, a terrible hunger. I longed to be that bright, that witty, that toweringly supreme. To think, I might meet him.

“Come visit.” Hopwood’s hand had crept to his coat pocket. “And I will introduce you to the young man I love best in all the world.”

I forced myself to glance away, as I had often glanced off from something Crumley or Constance Rattigan said.

“Well, well,” murmured John Wilkes Hopwood, his Germanic mouth curling with delight, “the young man is embarrassed. It’s not what you think. Look! No, stare.”

He held out a crumpled glossy photograph. I tried to take it but he held it gripped firmly, his thumb placed over the head of the person in the photo.

The rest, sticking out from under the thumb, was the most beautiful body of a young man I had ever seen in my life.

It reminded me of photos I had once seen of the statue of Antinous, the lover of Hadrian, in the lobby of the Vatican Museum. It reminded me of the boy David. It reminded me of a thousand young men’s bodies wrestling up and down the beach from my childhood to here, sunburned and mindless, wildly happy without true joy. A thousand summers were compacted down into this one single photograph, as John Wilkes Hopwood held it with his thumb hiding the face to protect it from revelations.

“Isn’t it the single most incredible body in the history of the world?” It was a proclamation.

“And it’s mine, all mine. Mine to have and hold,” he said. “No, no, don’t flinch. Here.”

He took his thumb off the face of the incredibly lovely young man.

And the face of the old hawk, the ancient German warrior, the African tank general appeared.

“My God,” I said. “It’s you.”

“Me,” said John Wilkes Hopwood.

And threw his head back with that merciless grin that flashed sabers and promised steel. He laughed silently, in honor of the old days, before films talked.

“It is I, rather,” he said.