Let's All Kill Constance (Crumley Mysteries 3)

I was out front with a clean shirt and an umbrella at seven twenty-nine. When I got in, Crumley grabbed my chin and scanned my face.

“Hey, no stormy weather!”

And we roared to Bunker Hill.

Passing Callahan and Ortega seemed different suddenly.

There were no police cars or morgue wagons.

“You know a scotch ale called Old Peculiar?” said Crumley as we pulled up to the curb. “Look at the nonevent outside Queen Califia’s.”

I also looked at the newspaper in my lap. Califia wasn’t a headliner. She was buried near the obits.

“ ‘Renowned psychic, famed in silent films, dies in fall. Alma Crown, a.k.a. Queen Califia, was found on the steps of her Bunker Hill residence. Neighbors reported hearing her peacock cry. Searching, Califia fell. Her book The Chemist

ry of Palmistry was a 1939 bestseller. Her ashes are to be strewn in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, where, some said, she was born.’ ”

“Garbage,” said Crumley.

We saw someone on the front porch of the Queen’s house and walked up. It was a young woman in her twenties, with long dark hair and Gypsy coloring, wringing her hands, moaning, and letting tears fall, pointing her face toward the front door.

“Awful,” she mourned. “Oh, awful, awful.”

I opened the front door and stared in.

“No, my God, no.”

Crumley came to look in at the desolation.

For the house was completely empty. All the pictures, crystal balls, tarot cards, lamps, books, records, furniture had vanished. Some mysterious van and transfer company had lugged it all away.

I walked into the small kitchen, pulled open drawers. Empty, vacuumed clean. Pantry: no spices, canned fruit. The cupboard was bare, so her poor dog had none.

In her bedroom the closet was crammed with hangers but no tent-size dressing gowns, stockings, shoes.

Crumley and I went out to stare at the young Gypsy woman’s face. “I saw it all!” she cried, pointing in all directions. “They stole everything! They’re all poor. Excuses! Poor! Across the street, when the police left, they knocked me down, old women, men, kids, yelling, laughing, ran in and out, carrying chairs, drapes, pictures, books. Grab this, grab that! A fiesta! One hour and it was empty. They went to that house over there! My God, the laughs. Look, my hands, the blood! You want Califia’s junk? Go knock on doors! You gonna go?”

Crumley and I sat down on either side of her. Crumley took her left hand. I took her right.

“Sonsabitches,” she gasped. “Sonsabitches.”

“That’s about it,” said Crumley. “You can go home. There’s nothing to guard. Nothing inside.”

“She is inside. They took her body, but she’s still there. I’ll wait until she says go.”

We both looked over her shoulder at the screen door and some unseen massive ghost.

“How will you know when she says go?”

The Gypsy wiped her eyes. “I’ll know.”

“Where are you going?” said Crumley.

Because I was on the walk heading across the street. At the opposite house I knocked.

Silence. I knocked again.

I peered through a side window. I could see shapes of furniture in midfloor, where there should be no furniture, and too many lamps, and rolled carpets.