Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“We got to get out to that newspaper before it closes. The sooner we find out what we need to know, the safer it’ll be. I don’t want to spend one more night worrying about you here in this tenement, or me at the beach.”

“Armpits has teeth, huh?”

“You’d better believe it.”

“Come on.” He circled his room, smiling, “Let’s find where a blind man hides his money. All over the place. You want eighty bucks?”

“Hell, no.”

“Sixty, forty?”

“Twenty, thirty will do.”

“Well, hell then.” Henry snorted, stopped, laughed, and yanked a great wad of bills out of his hip pocket. He began to peel the lettuce. “Here’s forty.”

“It’ll take awhile to pay it back.”

“If we get whoever pushed Fannie over, you don’t owe nothing. Grab the money. Find my cane. Shut the door. C’mon! Let’s go find that dumb bunny who answers phones and goes off on vacation.”

In the taxicab, Henry beamed around at sources of scent and odor he could not see.

“This is dandy. I never smelled a cab before. This one’s new and going fast.”

I couldn’t resist. “Henry, how’d you save up so much?”

“I don’t see ’em, touch ’em, even smell ’em, but I play the horses. Got friends at the track. They listen, and lay on the lettuce. I bet more and lose less than most sighted fools. It mounts up. When it gets too big, I trot along to one of those ugly ladies, so they tell me, in the bungalows out front near the tenement. They say ugly but I don’t mind. Blind is blind, and— Well, now. Where are we?”

“Here,” I said.

We had pulled into an alley behind a building in a run-down block in Hollywood south of the boulevard. Henry snuffed a deep breath. “It ain’t Armpits. But it’s his first cousin. Watch out.”

“I’ll be right back.”

I got out. Henry stayed in the back seat, his cane in his lap, eyes restfully shut.

“I’ll just listen to the meter,” he said, “and make sure it don’t run fast.”

The dusk was long since gone and it was full night as I picked my way along the alley, looking up at a half-lit neon sign on the backstairs of a building, with the great god Janus painted facing two ways above it. Half of one face had flaked on in the rains. The rest would be soon gone.

Even the gods, I thought, are having a bad year.

I dodged upstairs among various young men and women with old faces, hunched like beaten dogs, smoking, begging their pardon, excusing myself, but nobody seemed to mind. I stepped in at the top.

The offices looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned since the Civil War. There was paper balled, wadded, tossed over every inch, foot, and yard of the floor. There were hundreds of old newspapers, crumpled and yellowing, in the windows, on the desktops. Three wastebaskets stood empty. Whoever had thrown the paper wads had missed ten thousand times. I waded in through a tide that reached my ankles. I walked on dried cigars, cigarette stubs, and, by the crackling sound of their small thoraxes, cockroaches. I found the abandoned phone under a snow-piled desk, picked it up, listened.

I thought I could hear the traffic going by under Mrs. Gutierrez’s window. Crazy. She must have hung up, long ago.

“Thanks for waiting,” I said.

“Hey, man, what gives?” said someone.

I hung up and turned.

A tall, skinny man, with a clear drop of water on the end of his thin nose, came wading through the paper tide. He sized me up with nicotine-stained eyes.

“I called about half an hour ago.” I nodded at the phone. “I just hung up on me.”

He gazed at the phone, scratched his head, and finally got it. He managed a feeble smile and said, “Shee-it.”