Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“Why don’t you do something to help me?” I cried, like Mr. Hardy.

And Peg as Laurel spluttered back, “Oh, Ollie, I—I mean— it seems—I—”

And there was silence as we breathed our despair, need, and loving grief back and forth, mile on mile and dollar on Peg’s dear dollar.

“You can’t afford this, Stan,” I sighed, at last. “And it’s beginning to hurt where aspirins can’t reach. Stan, dear Stanley, so long.”

“Oil,” she wept. “Dear Ollie—goodbye.”

As I said …

Crumley was wrong.

At exactly one minute after eleven that night, I heard the funeral car pull up in front of my apartment.

I hadn’t been asleep and I knew the sound of Constance Rattigan’s limousine by the gentle hiss of its arrival and then the bumbling under its breath, waiting for me to stir.

I got up, asked no questions of God or anyone, and dressed automatically without seeing what I put on. Something had made me reach for my dark pants, a black shirt, and an old blue blazer. Only the Chinese wear white for the dead.

I held on to the front doorknob for a full minute before I had strength enough to pull the door open and go out. I didn’t climb in the back seat, I climbed up front where Constance was staring straight ahead at the surf rolling white and cold on the shore.

Tears were rolling down her cheeks. She didn’t say anything, but moved the limousine quietly. Soon we were flying steadily down the middle of Venice Boulevard.

I was afraid to ask questions because I feared answers.

About halfway there, Constance said:

“I had this premonition.”

That’s all she said. I knew she hadn’t called anyone. She simply had to go see for herself.

As it turned out, even if she had called someone, it would have been too late.

We rolled up in front of the tenement at eleven-thirty p.m.

We sat there and Constance, still staring ahead, the tears streaking down her cheeks, said:

“God, I feel as though I weigh three-eighty. I can’t move.”

But we had to, at last.

Inside the tenement, halfway up the steps, Constance suddenly fell to her knees, shut her eyes, crossed herself, and gasped, “Oh, please, God, please, please let Fannie be alive.”

I helped her the rest of the way up the stairs, drunk on sadness.

At the top of the stairs in the dark there was a vast in-sucked draft that pulled at us as we arrived. A thousand miles off, at the far end of night, someone had opened and shut the door on the north side of the tenement. Going out for air? Going out to escape? A shadow moved in a shadow. The cannon bang of the door reached us an instant later. Constance rocked on her heels. I grabbed her hand and pulled her along.

We moved through weather that got older and colder and darker as we went. I began to run, making strange noises, incantations, with my mouth, to protect Fannie.

It’s all right, she’ll be there, I thought, making magic prayers, with her phonograph records and Caruso photos and astrology charts and mayonnaise jars and her singing and …

She was there all right.

The door hung open on its hinges.

She was there in the middle of the linoleum in the middle of the room, lying on her back.

“Fannie!” we both shouted at once.