Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines—and the malicious will still write letters that loll.

I saw a small bottle of cologne near the phone and took it, remembering blind Henry and his memory and his nose.

Downstairs the carousel still turned in silence, the horses still leaped over invisible barriers toward finish lines that never arrived.

I glanced at the drunken ticketman in his coffin booth, shivered, and, to absolutely no music whatsoever, got the hell out of there.

The miracle came just after lunch.

A special-delivery letter arrived from the American Mercury offering to buy a short story if I wouldn’t mind their sending a check for three hundred dollars.

“Mind?” I shrieked. “Mind! Good grief, they must be nuts!”

I stuck my head out into the empty street and yelled at the houses, the sky, and the shore.

“I just sold to the American Mercury! Three hundred bucks! I’m rich!”

I lurched over to shove the Mercury letter under the bright glass eyes in the small shop window.

“Look!” I cried. “How about that? See.

“Rich,” I muttered and gasped as I ran to the liquor store to flap the letter in the owner’s face. “Look.” I waved it around in the Venice train ticket office. “Hey!” I jolted to a halt. For I discovered I had jumped into the bank thinking I had the actual check with me and was about to deposit the damn letter.

“Rich—.” I blushed and backed off.

At my apartment, I suddenly remembered the nightmare.

That dire beast rising to seize and eat me.

Idiot! Fool! You shouted good rice when it should have been bad.

That night for the first night in a long while, the small rainstorm did not drench my doormat. There was no visitor, no seaweed on my sidewalk at dawn.

Somehow my truth, my blundering yells, had scared it away.

Curiouser, I thought, and curiouser.

There was no body and so no funeral the next day, just a memorial service for Constance Rattigan that seemed to have been organized by a rat pack of autograph and film-photo fans, so there was a mob of milling extras stomping the sand out front of Constance Rattigan’s Arabian fort on the shore.

I stood a long way off from the stampede and watched some aging lifeguards sweat a portable organ across the sands to where someone had forgotten the stool so the lady who played it badly played it standing up, beads of salt on her brow, bobbing her head to conduct the lugubrious choir as the gulls flew down to investigate a scene without food so they flew away, and a fake minister barked and yipped like a poodle and the sandpipers rushed away, frightened, as the sandcrabs dug deeper to hide, and I gritted my teeth halfway between outrage and demon laughter as one by one the various grotesques, come down off the night screen at Mr. Shapeshade’s or out from under the midnight piers, staggered down to the surf and hurled withered flower garlands at the tide.

Damn it, Constance, I thought, swim in now. Stop this damn freakshow. But my magic thinking failed. The only thing that came in was the wreaths, upchucked by a tide that didn’t want them. A few people tried to throw them back again, but the damn things simply returned, and it began to rain. There was a frantic search for newspapers to protect their heads, and the lifeguards grunted the damn organ back across the sand, and I was left alone in the rain with a newspaper draped over my skull and the headlines upside down over my eyes.

FAMED SILENT STAR VANISHES.

I went down to kick the floral wreaths into the surf. This time, they stayed. Stripped down to my swimsuit, I grabbed an armload of flowers and swam out as far as I could before I let go.

Coming back, I almost drowned when my feet caught, tangled in one of the wreaths.

“Crumley,” I whispered.

And did not know if his name on my lips was a curse or a prayer.

Crumley opened his door. His face was bright and shining, but not with beer. Something else had happened.

“Hey!” cried the detective. “Where you been? I been callin

g and calling you. Christ, come see what the old man’s got.”