Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“So did I. Hell, it’s Tom Sawyer time. All those bimbos on the beach and the crappy organ. Shove your ass in your pants. We gotta get out of here. Jump.”

Gunning the engine of an old beat-up Ford V-8, Constance made me fast-zip my fly.

Driving south along the sea I kept mourning. “You’re alive.”

“Hold the funeral and wipe your nose.” She laughed at the empty road ahead. “Jesus God, I fooled everyone.”

“But why, why?”

“‘Well, crud, honey, that bastard kept combing the surf line night after night.”

“You didn’t write, I mean, invite him to—”

“Invite? Jesus, you got no taste.”

She braked the car in behind her shut Arabian fort, lit a cigarette, puffed smoke out the window, glared.

“All clear?”

“He’s never coming back, Constance.”

“Good! He looked better every night. When you’re one hundred ten years old it’s not the man, it’s the pants. Besides, I thought I knew who he was.”

“You were right.”

“So I decided to fix things for good. I stashed groceries in a bungalow south of here, and parked this Ford there. Then I came back.”

She jumped out of the old Ford and led me to the back door of her house.

“I turned on all the lights, music, fixed food that night, opened every door and window, and when he showed up, ran down, yelled, beat you to Catalina! And dove in. He was so stunned he didn’t follow, or he might have, part way, and given up. I swam out two hundred yards and lay easy. I saw him on the shore the next half-hour, waiting for me to come in, then he ran like hell. I had really spooked him. I swam south and surfed in by my old el cheapo bungalow near Playa Del Rey. I had a ham sandwich and champagne on the porch, feeling great. Hid there ever since. Sorry to worry you, kid. You okay? Give me a kiss. But no phys. ed.”

She kissed me and unlocked the door and we walked through to open the beach-front door and let the wind haunt the curtains and sift sand on the tiles.

“Jesus, who the hell lived here?” she wondered. “I’m my own ghost come home. I don’t own this any more. You ever feel, back from vacation, all the furniture, books, radio, seem like neglected cats, resentful. They cut you dead. Feel? It’s a morgue.”

We walked through the rooms. The furniture, white sheeted in the dust and wind, moved restlessly, perturbed.

Constance leaned out the front door and yelled. “Okay, son-of-a-bitch. Gotcha!”

She turned back. “Find some more champagne. Lock up. Place gives me the creeps. Out.”

Only the empty shore and the empty house saw us drive away.

“How about this?” yelled Constance Rattigan against the wind. She had put the top of her Ford down and we drove in a warm-cold flood of night, our hair blowing.

And we pulled up in a great sluice of sand next to a little bungalow by a half-tumbled wharf and Constance was out shucking clothes down to her bra and pants. The embers of a small fire burned in the front-yard sands. She stoked it with kindling and paper and, When it flared, shoved some forked hot-dogs into it and sat knocking my knees like a teenage ape, drinking the champagne, and tousling my hair.

“See that hunk of driftwood there? All that’s left of the Diamond Dance Pier, 1918. Charlie Chaplin sat at a table there. D. W. Griffith beyond. Me and Desmond Taylor at the far end. Wally Beery? Well, why go on. Burn your mouth. Eat.”

She stopped suddenly and looked north along the sands.

“They won’t follow, will they? He or they or them or whatever. They didn’t see us, did they? We’re safe forever?”

“Forever,” I said.

The salt wind stirred the fire. Sparks flew up to shine in Constance Rattigan’s green eyes.