“No,” I said. “Maybe a story with a hero who smells of kerosene.”
“Some hero.”
We walked over a killing field of littered days, nights, years, half a century. The papers crunched like cereal underfoot.
“Jericho,” I said.
“Someone bring a trumpet here, and blow a blast?”
“A trumpet blast or a yell. There’s been a lot of yelling lately. At Queen Califia’s, or here, for King Tut.”
“And then there’s the priest. Rattigan,” Crumley said. “Didn’t Constance try to blow his church down? But hell, look, we’re standing on Omaha Beach, Normandy, over Churchill’s war rooms, holding Chamberlain’s damned umbrella. You soaking it up?”
“Wading three feet deep. I wonder how it felt, that last second when old Rattigan drowned in this flood. Franco’s Falangists, Hitler’s youth, Stalin’s Reds, Detroit’s riots, Mayor La Guardia reading the Sunday funnies, what a death!”
“To hell with it. Look.”
The remnant of Clarence Rattigan’s burial cot was sticking up out of a cat litter of STOCK MARKET CRASHES and BANKS CLOSE. I picked up a final discard. Nijinsky danced on the theater page.
“A couple of nuts,” said Crumley. “Nijinsky, and old Rattigan, who saved this review!”
“Touch your eyelids.”
Crumley did so. His fingers came away wet.
“Damn,” he said. “This is a graveyard. Move!”
I grabbed TOKYO SUES FOR PEACE …
And then headed for the sea.
Crumley drove me to my old beach apartment, but it was raining again, and I looked at the ocean threatening to drown us all with a storm that could knock at midnight and bring Constance, dead, and the other Rattigan, also dead, and crush my bed with rain and seaweed. Hell! I yanked Clarence Rattigan’s newspapers off the wall.
Crumley drove me back to my small empty tract house, with no storm on the shore, and stashed vodka by my bed, Crumley’s Elixir, and left the lights on and said he would call later that night to see if my soul was decent, and drove away.
I heard hail on the roof. Someone thumping a coffin lid.
I called Maggie across a continent of rain.
“Do I hear someone crying?” she said.
Chapter Seventeen
The sun was long gone when my phone rang.
“You know what time it is?” said Crumley.
“Ohmigod, it’s night!”
“People dying takes a lot out of you. You done blubbering? I can’t stand hysterical sob sisters, or bastard sons who carry Kleenex.”
“Am I your bastard son?”
“Hit the shower, brush your teeth, and get the Daily News off your porch. I rang your bell, but you were lost. Did Queen Califia tell your fortune? She should have told her own.”
“Is she—?”
“I’m heading back to Bunker Hill at seven-thirty. Be out front with a clean shirt and an umbrella!”