Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“No, damn it, now just pull up at the next corner and let me the damn hell out!”

“For a bashful boy from northern Illinois, you got some language, Mr. Hemingway.”

“Well, hell, Miss Rattigan!”

That did it. I saw her shoulders slump a little. She was losing me, if she wasn’t careful, and knew it.

“Constance,” she suggested, quieter.

“Constance,” I said. “It’s not my fault people drown in bathtubs and drink too much or fall downstairs or get taken away by the police. Why didn’t you come inside just now? You’re Fannie’s old, old friend.”

“I was afraid that seeing you and me together would overload and the top of her head fly off and we would never be able to get it back on.”

She let the limousine go from a rather hysterical seventy down to a nervous sixty or sixty-two. But she had her claws on the wheel as if it were my shoulders and she was shaking me. I said, “You’d better get her out of there, once and for all. She won’t sleep for a week now and that might loll her, just exhaustion. You can’t feed a soul on mayonnaise forever.”

Constance slowed the limo to fifty-five.

“She give you a rough time?”

“Only called me Death’s Friend, like you. I seem to be everyone’s goat, handing out bubonic fleas. Whatever is in the tenement is there all right, but I’m not the carrier. On top of which, Fannie has done something stupid.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, she won’t tell me. She’s put out with herself. Maybe you can worm it out of her. I got a terrible feeling Fannie brought all this on herself.”

“How?”

The limousine slowed to forty. Constance was watching me in the rearview mirror. I licked my lips.

“I can only guess. Something in her icebox, she said. If anything happened to her, she said, look in the icebox. God, how stupid! Maybe you can go back, later tonight on your own and look in the damn icebox and figure out how and why and what it is that Fannie has invited into the tenement that is scaring the hell out of her.”

“Jesus at midnight,” murmured Constance, shutting her eyes. “Mary at dawn.”

“Constance!” I yelled.

For we had just gone through a red light, blind.

Luckily, God was there, and paved the way.

She parked in front of my apartment and she got out while I unlocked the door and she stuck her head in.

“So this is where all the genius happens, huh?”

“A little piece of Mars on earth.”

“Is that Cal’s piano there? I heard about the music critics who tried to burn it once. Then there were the customers who mobbed the shop one day, yelling and showing their funny hair.”

“Cal’s all right,” I said.

“Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

“He tried.”

“Just on one side of you. Remind me, next time you’re over, my dad did some barbering, too. Taught me. Why are we standing here in the doorway? Afraid the neighbors will talk if you— hell. There you go again. No matter what I say, it seems to be the truth. You’re the genuine article, aren’t you? I haven’t seen a bashful man since I turned twelve.”

She stuck her head further in.

“God, all the junk. Don’t you ever pick up? What’s this, reading ten books at a time, half of them comics? Is that a Buck Rogers disintegrator there by your typewriter? Did you send away box tops?”