Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

I looked away.

“There’s just one last thing I have to do.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow, around five, go in and clean out Fannie’s icebox.”

Constance stopped drinking and frowned.

“Why would you want to do that?”

I had to think of something so as not to spoil the champagne night.

“Friend of mine, Streeter Blair, the artist, used to win blue ribbons at the county fair every autumn with his baked bread. After he died they found six loaves of his bread in his home freezer. His wife gave me one. I had it around for a week and ate a slice with real butter once in the morning, once at night. God, it was swell. What a great way to say goodbye to a wonderful man. When I buttered the last slice, he was gone for good. Maybe that’s why I want Fannie’s jellies and jams. Okay?”

Constance was disquieted.

“Yes,” she said at last.

I popped another cork.

“What do we drink to?”

“My nose,” I said. “At last, my damn head cold is over. Six boxes of Kleenex later. To my nose.”

“Your lovely big nose,” she said, and drank.

We slept out on the sand that night, feeling safe two miles south of those funeral flowers touching the shore by the late Constance Rattigan’s former Arabian lean-to, and three miles south of an apartment where Cal’s piano smile and my battered Underwood waited for me to come save earth from Martians on one page and Mars from earthmen on the next.

In the middle of the night I awoke. The place next to me on the sand was empty, but still warm from where Constance had lain cuddling the poor writer. I got up to hear her thrashing and chortling with seal-bark commotions out in the waves. When she ran in, we finished the champagne and slept until almost noon.

That day was one of those no-excuses-needed-for-living-weather days when you just lie and let the juices flow and drip. But finally I had to say, “I didn’t want to ruin last night. God, it was good to find you alive. But the truth is, it’s one down, one to go. Mr. Devil-in-the-Flesh on the beach ran away because he thought he had caused you to drown. He never intended anything but skin diving, anyway, and midnight frolics like 1928. What he got was you drowned, it seemed.

“So, he’s gone, but there’s still the one who sent him.”

“Jesus,” whispered Constance. Her eyelids flinched like two spiders over her shut eyes. At last she sighed, exhausted, “So it’s not over after all?”

I clenched her sand-gritty hand in mine.

After a long silent time of thinking she said, her eyes still shut, “About Fannie’s icebox? I never made it back that night five centuries ago, to look in. You looked, saw nothing.”

“That’s why I’ve got to go look again. Trouble is, the law has padlocked her apartment.”

“You want me to go jimmy the lock?”

“Constance.”

“I’ll go in, clear the halls, chase out the spooks, you hit ’em with a club, then we both crack the padlock, spoon Fannie’s mayonnaise, and at the bottom of the third jar, we find the answer, the solution, if it’s still there, if it hasn’t spoiled or been taken away—”

A fly buzzed, touched my brow. An old notion stirred.

“Reminds me, that story, years ago in some magazine. Girl fell and froze in a glacier. Two hundred years later, the ice melts and there she is, beautiful, young as the day she was frozen.”

“That’s no beautiful girl in Fannie’s fridge.”

“No, it’s something terrible.”

“And when and if you find and take whatever it is out—do you kill it?”