Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“You believe in hypnotism? Mind regression?”

“You’re already regressed—”

“Please.” I gathered my spit. “I’m going nuts. Regress me. Shove me back!”

“Holy Moses.” Crumley was on his feet, emptying the coffee and grabbing beer out of the icebox. “Outside the nut farm, where do you want to be sent?”

“I’ve met the murderer, Crumley. Now I want to meet him again. I tried to ignore him because he was drunk. He was behind me on that last big red train to the sea that night I found the old man dead in the lion cage.”

“No proof.”

“Something he said was proof, but I’ve forgotten. If you could ticket me back, let me ride that train again in the storm, and listen for his voice, then I’d know who it is and the killings would stop. Don’t you want them to?”

“Sure, and after I talk you back with a hypnotic dog act and you bark the results, I go arrest the killer, hmm? Come along now, bad man, my friend the writer heard your voice in a hypnotic séance and that’s more than proof. Here are the handcuffs. Snap ’em on!”

“The hell with you.” I stood up and jarred my coffee cup down. “I’ll hypnotize myself. That’s what it’s all about, anyway, isn’t it? Autosuggestion? It’s always me that puts me under?”

“You’re not trained, you don’t know how. Sit down, for Christ’s sake. I’ll help you find a good hypnotist. Hey!” Crumley laughed somewhat crazily. “What about A. L. Shrank, hypnotist?”

“God.” I shuddered. “Don’t even joke. He’d sink me down with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and I’d never surface again. You got to do it, Elmo.”

“I got to get you out and me to bed.”

He led me gently to the door.

He insisted on driving me home. On the way, looking straight ahead at the dark future, he said, “Don’t worry, kid. Nothing more is going to happen.”

Crumley was wrong.

But not immediately, of course.

I awoke at six in the morning because I thought I heard three dozen rifle shots again.

But it was only the annihilators at the pier, the workmen dentists, yanking the big teeth. Why, I thought, do destroyers start so early to destroy. And those rifle shots? Probably just their laughter.

I showered and ran out just in time to meet a fogbank rolling in from Japan.

The old men from the trolley station were on the beach ahead of me. It was the first time I had seen them since the day their friend Mr. Smith who wrote his name on his bedroom wall had vanished.

I watched them watching the pier die, and I could feel the timbers fall inside their bodies. The only motion they made was a kind of chewing of their gums, as if they might spit tobacco. Their hands hung down at their sides, twitching. With the pier gone, I knew, they knew, it was only a matter of time before the asphalt machines droned along and tarred over the railroad tracks and someone nailed shut the ticket office and broomed away the last of the confetti. If I had been them, I would have headed for Arizona or some bright place that afternoon. But I wasn’t them. I was just me, half a century younger and with no rust on my knuckles and no bones cracking every time the big pliers out there gave a yank and made an emptiness.

I went and stood between two of the old men, wanting to say something that counted.

But all I did was let out a big sigh.

It was a language they understood.

Hearing it, they waited a long while.

And then, they nodded.

“Well, here’s another fine mess you got me in!”

My voice, on its way to Mexico City, was Oliver Hardy’s voice.

“Ollie,” cried Peg, using Stan Laurel’s voice. “Fly down here. Save me from the mummies of Guanajuato!”

Stan and Ollie. Ollie and Stan. From the start we had called ours the Laurel and Hardy Romance, because we had grown up madly in love with the team, and did a fair job of imitating their voices.