Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

Someone call the police, I thought. Someone?

Constance was out on the balcony again.

Me.

It was all over by three in the morning. The police had come, and everyone had been questioned and names taken and the whole tenement was awake, as if someone had started a fire in the basement, and when I came out the front of the tenement the morgue van was still parked there with the men trying to figure out how to get Fannie out and down the stairs and away. I hoped they wouldn’t think of the piano box that Fannie had joked about, in the alley. They never did. But Fannie had to stay in her room until dawn, when they brought a bigger van and a larger carrier.

It was terrible, leaving her up there alone in the night. But the police wouldn’t let me stay, and after all, it was a simple case of death from natural causes.

As I went down through the levels of the house, the doors were beginning to close and the lights go out, like those nights at the end of the war when the last conga line, exhausted, drained away into the rooms and down into the streets and there was the lonely walk for me up over Bunker Hill and down to the terminal where I would be taken home in thunders.

I found Constance Rattigan curled up in the back seat of her limousine, lying quietly, staring at nothing. When she heard me open the back door she said, “Get behind the wheel.”

I climbed up front behind the steering wheel.

“Take me home,” she said quietly.

It took me a full moment of sitting there to say finally, “I can’t.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know how to drive,” I said.

“What?”

“I never learned. There was no reason, anyway.” My tongue moved like lead between my lips. “Since when can writers afford cars?”

“Jesus.” Constance managed to prop herself up and get out, like someone with a hangover. She got out and came around walking slowly and blindly and waved. “Get over.”

Somehow she started the car. This time we drove at about ten miles an hour, as if there were a fog so you could only see ten feet ahead.

We made it as far as the Ambassador Hotel. She turned in there and drove up just as the last of a Saturday night party came out with balloons and funny hats. The Coconut Grove was putting out its lights above us. I saw some musicians hurrying away with their instruments.

Everyone knew Constance. We signed in and had a bungalow on the side of the hotel in a few minutes. We had no luggage but no one seemed to mind. The bellboy who took us through the garden to our place kept looking at Constance as if maybe he should carry her. When we were in the room, Constance said, “Would a fifty-dollar tip find the key and unlock the gate to let us in the swimming pool around back?”

“It would go a long way toward finding the key,” the bellboy said. “But a swim, this time of night—?”

“It’s my hour,” said Constance.

Five minutes later the lights came on in the pool and I sat there and watched Constance dive in and swim twenty laps, on occasion swimming underwater from one end to the other without coming up for air.

When she came out, ten minutes later, she was gasping and red-faced and I cloaked her in a big towel and held her.

“When do you start crying?” I said, at last.

“Dummy,” she said. “I just did. If you can’t do it in the ocean, a pool’s fine. If you don’t have a pool, hit the shower. You can scream and yell and sob all you want, and it doesn’t bother anyone, the world never hears. Ever think of that?”

“I never thought,” said I, in awe.

At four o’clock in the morning, Constance found me in our bungalow bathroom, standing and staring at the shower.

“Hit it,” she said, gently. “Go on. Give it a try.”

I got in and turned the water on, hard.

At eleven in the morning, we motored through Venice and looked at the canals with a thin layer of green slime on their surface, and passed the half-torn-down pier and looked at some gulls soaring in the fog up there, and no sun yet, and the surf so quiet it was like muffled black drums.

“Screw this,” said Constance. “Flip a nickel. Heads we go north to Santa Barbara. Tails, south to Tijuana.”