Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“I think I know who Mr. Naked on the Shore is.”

“Who?”

She searched down along the surf as if his ghost was still there.

“A son-of-a-bitch from my past with a head like a mean German general,” she said, “and a body like all the boys of summer who ever lived.”

The small motorbike pulled up outside the carousel building with a young man in swimshorts astride, his body bronzed and oiled and beautiful. He was wearing a heavy helmet with a dark visor down over his face to his chin, so I couldn’t see his face. But the body was the most amazing I think I have ever seen. It made me think of a day years before when I had seen a beautiful Apollo walking along the shore with a surf of young boys walking after him, drawn for they knew not what reasons, but they walked in beauty with him, loving but not knowing it was love, never daring to name and trying not to think of this moment later in life. There are beauties like that in the world, and all men and all women and all children are pulled in their wake, and it is all pure and wondrous and clean and there is no residue of guilt, because nothing happened. You just saw and followed and when the time on the shore was over, he went away and you went off, smiling the kind of smile that is such a surprise you put your hand up an hour later and find it still attached.

On a whole beach in an entire summer you only see bodies like that, on some young man, or some young woman, once. Twice, if the gods are snoozing and not jealous.

Here was Apollo, astride the motorbike, gazing through his dark, featureless visor at me.

“You come to see the old man?” The laugh behind the glass was rich and throaty. “Good! Come on.”

He propped the bike and was in and up the stairs ahead of me. Like a gazelle, he took the steps three at a time and vanished into an upstairs room.

I followed, one step at a time, feeling old.

When I got to his room I heard the shower running. A moment later he came out, stripped and glistening with water, the helmet still over his head. He stood in the bathroom door, looking into me as he might into a mirror, and liking what he saw.

“Well,” he said, inside his helmet, “how do you like the most beautiful boy, the young man that I love?”

I blushed furiously.

He laughed and shucked off his helmet.

“My God,” I said, “it really is you!”

“The old man,” said John Wilkes Hopwood. He glanced down at h

is body and smiled. “Or the young. Which of us do you prefer?”

I swallowed hard. I had to force myself to speak quickly, for I wanted to run back down the stairs before he closed and locked me in the room.

“That all depends,” I said, “on which one of you has been standing on the beach, late nights, outside Constance Rattigan’s home.”

With wondrous timing, the calliope downstairs in the rotunda started up, running the carousel. It sounded like a dragon that had swallowed a corps of bagpipers and was now trying to throw them back up, in no particular order to no particular tune.

Like a cat that wants time to consider its next move, old-young Hopwood turned his tanned backside toward me, a signal that was supposed to fascinate.

I shut my eyes to the golden sight.

That gave Hopwood a moment to decide what he wanted to say.

“What makes you think I would bother with an old horse like Constance Rattigan?” he said, as he reached into the bathroom and dragged out a towel which he now used to swab his shoulders and chest.

“You were the great love of her life, she was yours. That was the summer all America loved the lovers, yes?”

He turned to check on how much irony might show in my face to match my voice.

“Have you come here because she sent you, to warn me off?”

“Perhaps.”

“How many pushups can you do, can you do sixty laps of a pool, or bike forty miles in a day without sweating, what weights can you lift, and how many people”—I noticed Tie did not say women—“can you bed in one afternoon?” he asked.

“No, no, no, no, and maybe two,” I said, “to answer all those questions.”