“A guy who stands in halls and gets an old man drunk and stuffs him in a lion cage and maybe saves some ticket-punch confetti stolen from the old man’s pockets.”
“Check.”
“A guy who scares the old canary lady to death and steals the newspaper headlines from the bottom of her birdcages. And after Fannie stops breathing, the name guy steals her record of Tosca as a keepsake. And then he writes letters to old actor Hopwood and frightens him away forever. Probably stole something from Hopwood’s apartment, too, but we’ll never know. And, if you checked, probably swiped a bottle of champagne from Constance Rattigan’s wine racks just before I got there the other night. The guy can’t stop himself. He’s a real collector—”
Crumley’s telephone rang. He picked it up, listened, handed it to me.
“Armpits,” said a mellow voice.
“Henry!” Crumley put his ear to the receiver with me.
“Armpits is back, messing around, hour, two hours ago,” said Henry, off in that other country, the tenement far across Los Angeles in a rapidly dying past. “Someone got to stop him. Who?”
Henry hung up.
“Armpits.” I took Hopwood’s springtime cologne out of my pocket and placed it on Crumley’s desk.
“Nope,” said Crumley. “Whoever that bad ass is in the tenement ain’t Hopwood. The old actor always smelled like a bed of marigolds and an acre of Stardust. You want me to go sniff around your friend Henry’s door?”
“No,” I said, “by the time you got there, Mr. Armpits’d be back out here, waiting to snuffle around your door or mine.”
“Not if we type and shout, shout and type, you forget that? Hey, what was it you shouted?”
I told Crumley more about my American Mercury story sale and the billion dollars that came with it.
“Jesus,” said Crumley, “I feel like a pa whose boy has just made it through Harvard. Tell me again, kid. How do you do it? What should I do?”
“Throw up in your typewriter every morning.”
“Yeah.”
“Clean up every noon.”
“Yeah!”
The foghorn out in the bay started blowing, saying over and over in a long gray voice, Constance Rattigan would never come back.
Crumley started typing.
And I drank my beer.
That night, at ten minutes after one, someone came and stood outside my door.
Oh, Jesus, I thought, awake. Please. Not again.
There was a fierce bang and a hard bang and then a terrible bang on my door. Someone out there was asking to get in.
God. Coward, I thought. Get it over with. Now, at last …
I jumped up to fling the door wide.
“You look great in those lousy torn jockey shorts,” said Constance Rattigan.
I grabbed and yelled, “Constance!”
“Who in hell would it be?”
“But—but I went to your funeral.”