Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

He ran ahead to his workroom and pointed dramatically at his desk where a pile of manuscript, half an inch high, lay filled with words.

“Why, you old s.o.b.,” I said, and whistled.

“That’s me! S. O. B. Crumley. Crumley, S. O. B. Boy howdy.”

He ripped a page out of the typewriter.

“Wanta read?”

“I don’t have to.” I laughed. “It’s good, right?”

“Git outa the way.” He laughed back. “The dam has broke.”

I sat down, snorting with happiness at the sun in his face. “When did all this happen?”

“Two nights ago, midnight, one, two, I dunno. I was just lying here with my teeth in my mouth, staring at the ceiling, not reading a book, not listening to any radio, not drinking beer, and the wind blew outside, and the trees shook, and all of a sudden the damn ideas seethed like maggots on a hotplate. And I just got the hell up and walked over and sat down and next thing I know I’m typing and typing like hell and can’t stop, and by dawn there’s a big mountain, or molehill, of stuff and I’m laughing and crying all the time. Lookit that. And come six in the morning I go to bed and just lie there looking at all this paper and I laugh and laugh and I’m as happy as if I just had a brand-new love affair with the greatest lady in the world.”

“You had,” I said, softly.

“Funny thing is,” said Crumley, “what started it. Maybe the wind outside the house. Somebody leaving seaweed calling cards on the porch? But did the old detective rush out, firing guns, yelling ‘Freeze!’ Hell, no. No yells, no shots. Just me banging my typewriter, making lots of noise like on New Year’s or Halloween. And you know what happened next? Guess?”

My body was cold. A whole population of frosted bumps had come up on my neck.

“The wind went away,” I said. “The footsteps outside your house stopped.”

“What?” said Crumley, amazed.

“And there’s been no seaweed ever again. And he, whoever he was, has not come back since.”

“How’d you know that?” gasped Crumley.

“I just did, is all. You did the right thing, without knowing Just like me. I shouted, and he went away from me, too. Oh God, God.”

I told Crumley about my sale to the Mercury, my running around town like a fool, my yelling to the sky, and the rain not raining on my three-o’clock-in-the-morning door any more, maybe forever.

Crumley sat down as if I had handed him an anvil.

“We’re getting close, Elmo,” I said. “We’ve scared him off, without meaning to. The further away he gets, the more we know about him. Well, maybe, anyway. At least we know he’s put off by loud fools and laughing detectives doing maniac things to typewriters at five in the morning. Keep typing, Crumley. Then you’ll be safe.”

“Horseradish,” said Crumley. But he laughed when he said it.

His smile made me brave. I dug in my pockets and brought out the poison-pen letter that had scared Hopwood, plus the warm love-letter on sun-yellow paper that had lured him down the coast in the first place.

Crumley toyed with the bits and pieces and sank halfway back into his old bathrobe of cynicism.

“Each typed on a different typewriter. Neither signed. Hell, anyone could have typed both. And if old Hopwood was the sex freak we took him for, he read that one on yellow paper and really believed Rattigan wrote it, hell, he raced up the shore and waited like a good boy for her to come down and grab his behind. But you know and I know, Rattigan never wrote a note like that in her life. She had an ego like a ten-ton truck. She never begged in the big Hollywood houses, on the streets, or on the shore. So what does that leave us with? She swam at strange hours. I’d run along the beach, my workout, and see that, night after night. Anyone, even me, could have snuck in while she was two hundred yards out in the bay playing with the sharks, anyone could have sat in her parlor, used her typewriter and stationery, and snuck back out, mailed this foreplay sex-note to that Hop-wood son-of-a-bitch, and waited for the fireworks.”

“And?” I said.

“And,” said Crumley, “maybe the whole thing backfired. Rattigan, bugged by the flasher, panicked, swam out to escape him, got caught in a riptide. Then Hopwood, on the shore, watching, waiting, turned chicken when she didn’t swim back in, and fled. The next day he gets the second note, the real doomsday attack. He knows someone saw him on the beach, and can finger him as Rattigan’s so-called killer. So—”

“He’s left town already,” I said.

“It figures. Which leaves us still ten miles up from Tampico in Cleopatra’s barge with no paddles. What in hell do we have to go on?”

“A guy who makes phone calls and steals Scott Joplin’s head off Cal the barber’s old photo and scares Cal out of town.”

“Check.”