Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

Two were fine. One was terrible.

A letter arrived from Mexico. In it was a photo of Peg. She had colored her eyes with a blend of brown and green ink, to help me remember what they looked like.

Then there was a postcard from Cal, postmarked Gila Bend.

“Son,” it said, “you keep my piano tuned? I’m torturing folks part-time in the local beer joint. This town is full of bald men. Me being here, they don’t know how lucky they are. Cut the sheriffs hair yesterday. He gave me twenty-four hours to leave town. Will gas up for Sedalia tomorrow. Be happy. Yours, Cal.”

I turned the card over. There was a photo of a gila monster with black and white patterns on its back. Cal had drawn a bad portrait of himself seated there as if the creature were a musical instrument and him playing only the dark keys.

I laughed and walked north toward the Santa Monica pier, wondering what I might say to that odd man who lived a double life above the moaning carousel.

“Field Marshall Rommel,” I shouted, ?

?how and why did you set out to kill Constance Rattigan?”

But no one was there to hear.

The carousel ran in silence.

The calliope was turned on, but the music was at the end of its roll and the slots flapped around and around.

The carousel owner was not dead in his ticket booth, only dead drunk. He was awake, but seemed not to hear the silence or know that the horses were galloping to the slap of the Swiss cheese roll in the mouth of the big machine.

I surveyed it all with disquiet and was about to trudge upstairs when I noticed a fine-blowing litter on the floor of the circling horse race.

I waited for the carousel to turn twice more, then grabbed a brass pole and hopped on, moving drunkenly among the poles.

Pieces of torn paper blew in the wind made by the horses jumping up and down and the passage of the carousel itself, going nowhere.

I found a thumbtack on the circular floor under the ripped paper. Someone had perhaps tacked the message to the forelock of one of the wooden horses. Someone had found it, read it, torn it, run away.

John Wilkes Hopwood.

I spent a good three minutes picking up the pieces, feeling as hopeless as the carousel’s journey, then hopped off and tried piecing it together. It took another fifteen minutes of finding a terrible word here, an awful word there, and a damning word further on, but finally there was a death and a doom. Anyone reading this, anyone, that is, with the wrong old skeleton hung inside his young bright flesh, might wither at these strikes to the groin.

I could not put it all together. There were missing pieces. But the essence was that the reader was an old man, ugly man. Truly ugly. He made love to that body because with that face, who would want him? Nobody for years. It recalled how the studios threw him out in 1929, attacked the fake Kraut voice and broken wrists and strange boyfriends and old sick women. “In bars late at night they say your name and laugh at you when you go away full of cheap gin. And now you have caused death. I saw you on the beach last night when she swam out and did not come back. People will say murder. Goodnight, sweet prince.”

That was it. A dreadful weapon, posted and found.

I gathered the pieces and went upstairs, about ninety years older than I had been a few days before.

The door to Hopwood’s room whispered open under my hand.

There were clothes all over the place, on the floor and by several suitcases, as if he had tried to pack, panicked, and gone off traveling light.

I looked out the apartment window. Down on the pier, his bike was still padlocked against a lamppost. But his motorbike was gone. Proving nothing. He might have driven, rather than walked, into the sea.

Christ, I thought, what if he catches up with Annie Oakley, and then the two of them catch up with Cal?

I dumped a small wastebasket out on a flimsy desk by his bed and found some torn bits of fine bright yellow Beverly Hills-type stationery with C.R. for Constance Rattigan along the top. There was typewriting on the paper:

MIDNIGHTS. WATT. SIX NIGHTS RUNNING ON THE SHORELINE. MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, LIKE OLD TIMES. And the typed initials C.R.

The typeface looked like the machine I had seen open on a desk in her Arabian parlor.

I touched the fragments, thinking, had Constance written Hopwood? No. She would have told me. Someone else must have sent this to Hopwood, a week ago. And he had jogged up the shore like a stallion to wait in the surf for Constance to come laughing down. Had he gotten tired of waiting and dragged her in the water and drowned her? No, no. He must have seen her dive in and never come out. Scared, he ran home, to find what? The last note, the one with the terrible words and awful degradations that shot him below the belt. So he had two reasons to leave town: fright and the insults.

I glanced at the telephone and sighed. No use calling Crumley. No corpus delicti. Just torn paper which I shoved in my jacket pockets. They felt like moth-wings, fragile but poisonous.