Let's All Kill Constance (Crumley Mysteries 3)

“I’ll soon be silent.”

“You’d be the last name in these pages of the dead?”

“Yep,” said Constance.

I went to turn the heat up and shivered.

“What an awful thing to do.”

“Awful.”

“Telephone books,” I murmured. “Maggie says I cry at them, but it all depends on what telephone books, when.”

“All depends. Now …”

From her purse she pulled out a second small black book.

“Open that.”

I opened it and read, “Constance Rattigan” and her address on the beach, and turned to the first page. It was all As.

“Abrams, Alexander, Alsop, Allen.”

I went on.

“Baldwin, Bradley, Benson, Burton, Buss …”

And felt a coldness take my fingers.

“These are all friends of yours? I know those names.”

“And …?”

“Not all, but most of them, buried out at Forest Lawn. But dug up tonight. A graveyard book,” I said.

“And worse than the one from 1900.”

“Why?”

“I gave this one away years ago. To the Hollywood Helpers. I didn’t have the heart to erase the names. The dead accumulated. A few live ones remained. But I gave the book away. Now it’s back. Found it when I came in tonight from the surf.”

“Jesus, you swim in this weather?”

“Rain or shine. And tonight I came back to find this lying like a tombstone in my yard.”

“No note?”

“By saying nothing, it says everything.”

“Christ.” I took the old directory in one hand, Rattigan’s small names and numbers book in the other.

“Two almost–Books of the Dead,” I said.

“Almost, yes,” said Constance. “Look here, and here, and also here.”

She showed me three names on three pages, each with a red ink circle around it and a crucifix.

“These names?” I said. “Special?”