Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

I pulled it out and read by the icebox light, Janus, the Green Envy Weekly.

I left the box door wide and staggered over to put Fannie’s old chair upright and collapse in it, to wait for my heart to slow.

I turned the green-tinted newspaper pages. On the back were obits and personals. I ran my eye down, found nothing, ran it down again, and saw—

A small box, circled faintly with red ink.

And this was what he had searched for, to take away forever.

How could I know? Here were the words:

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL THESE YEARS? MY HEART CRIES OUT, DOES YOURS? WHY DON’T YOU WRITE OR CALL? I CAN BE HAPPY IF ONLY YOU’D REMEMBER ME AS I REMEMBER YOU. WE HAD SO MUCH AND LOST IT ALL. NOW, BEFORE I’TS TOO LATE TO REMEMBER, FIND YOUR WAY BACK.

CALL!

And it was signed:

SOMEONE WHO LOVED YOU, LONG AGO.

And in the margin were these words, scrawled by someone:

SOMEONE WHO LOVED YOU, WITH A FULL HEART, LONG AGO.

Jesus at midnight, Mary in the morn.

I read it six times in disbelief.

I let the paper fall, walked on it, stood in the icebox draft to cool off. Then I went back to read the damn message for a seventh time.

What a piece of work it was, what a beaut, what a come-on, what a baited trap. What a Rorschach test, what a piece of palmistry, what a numbers game that anyone could sum and win with. Men, women, old, young, dark, light, tall, thin. Listen, look! This means YOU.

It applied to anyone who had ever loved and lost, meaning every single soul in the whole damned city, state, and universe.

Who, reading it, would not be tempted to lift a phone, dial, wait, and whisper at last, late at night:

Here I am. Please—come find me.

I stood in the middle of the linoleum floor of Fannie’s apartment and tried to imagine her here, the ship’s deck creaking underfoot as her weight shifted this way and that, as Tosca lamented from the phonograph, and the icebox door stood wide with its enshrined condiments, her eyes moving, her heart beating, like a hummingbird trapped in a vast aviary.

Christ. The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse had to be the editor of a paper like this.

I checked all the other advertisements. The telephone number was the same in each. You had to call one number to get referrals to all the ads. And that phone number belonged to the publishers of, damn them to hell forever, Janus, the Green Envy Weekly.

Fannie had never in her life bought a paper like this. Someone had given it to her or … I stopped and glanced at the door.

No!

Someone had left it for her to find with the red ink circling this one ad, so she would be sure to see.

SOMEONE WHO LOVED YOU, WITH A FULL HEART, LONG AGO.

“Fannie!” I cried in dismay. “Oh, you damn, damn fool.”

I waded through broken shards of La Bohème and Butterfly, then remembered and stumbled back to slam the icebox door.

Things were no better on the third floor.

Henry’s door was wide open. I had never seen it open before. Henry Believed in shut doors. He didn’t want anyone having a sighted advantage on him. But now …