Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

Mrs. Gutierrez had been standing there a long while, I was sure, a plate of hot tacos in her hands, always the diplomat, waiting.

“I’ll call you tomorrow, Fannie,” I said.

“Of course you will, and Fannie will be alive!”

I wonder, I thought, if I shut my eyes and pretend to be blind …

Can I find Henry’s room?

I tapped on Henry’s door.

“Who that?” Henry said, locked away.

“Who dat say who dat?” I said.

“Who dat say who dat say who dat?” he said, and had to laugh. Then he remembered he was in pain. “It’s you.”

“Henry, let me in.”

“I’m okay, just fell downstairs is all, just almost got destroyed is all, just let me rest here with the door locked, I’ll be out tomorrow, you’re a good boy to worry.”

“What happened, Henry?” I asked the locked door.

Henry came closer. I felt he was leaning against it, like someone talking through a confessional lattice.

“He tripped me.”

A rabbit ran around in my chest and turned into a big rat that kept right on running.

“Who, Henry?”

“Him. Son-of-a-bitch tripped me.”

“Did he say anything, you sure he was there?”

“How do I know the upstairs hall light is on? Me? I feel. Heat. The hall was terrible warm where he was. And he was breathing, of course. I heard him sucking away at the air and blowing out nice and gentle where he hid. He didn’t say nothing as I went by, but I heard his heart, too, wham, wham, or maybe it was mine. I figured to sneak by so he can’t see me, blind man figures that if he’s in the dark, why not everyone else. And next thing you know—bam! I’m at the bottom of the stairs and don’t know how I got there. I started yelling for Jimmy and Sam and Pietro, then I said damn fool to myself, they’re gone and you, too, if you don’t ask for someone else. I started naming names, top speed, doors popped all around the house, and while they was popping, he popped out. Sounded almost barefoot out the door. Smelled his breath.”

I swallowed and leaned on the door. “What was it like?”

“Let me think and tell. Henry’s going to bed now. I’m sure glad I’m blind. Hate to have seen myself going down stairs like a bag of laundry. Night.”

“Goodnight, Henry,” I said.

And turned just as the big steamboat of a tenement house rounded a bend of river wind in the dark. I felt I was back at the surf in Mr. Shapeshade’s movie house at one in the morning, with the tide glutting and shaking the timbers under the seats, and the big silver-and-black images gliding on the screen. The whole tenement shivered. The cinema was one thing. The trouble with this big old twilight place was the shadows had come off the screen and waited by stairwells and hid in bathrooms and unscrewed lightbulbs some nights so everyone groped, blind as Henry, to find their way out.

I did just that. At the top of the stairs, I froze. I heard breath churning the air ahead of me. But it was only the echo of my own sucks and swallows hitting the wall and bouncing back to feel at my face.

For Christ’s sake, I thought, don’t trip yourself, going down.

The chauffeur-driven 1928 Duesenberg limousine was waiting for me when I came out of Fannie’s. When the door slammed, we were off and halfway to Venice when the chauffeur up front took off his cap and let his hair down and became …

Rattigan the Interrogator.

“Well?” she said coldly. “Is she or isn’t she upset?”

“She is damn well upset but I didn’t upset her.”

“No?”