Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

“Our film Crossed Sabers was the smash of 1926 across America. Our affair made headlines that summer. I was the greatest love of her life.”

“Were you—” I started to say. Were you the one, I thought, and not the director who drowned himself, who cut her hamstrings with your sword, so she couldn’t walk for a year?

But then, last night, I hadn’t really had a chance to look for the scars. And the way Constance ran, it was all lies told a hundred years back.

“You should go see A. L. Shrank, a concerned man, pure Zen, all wise,” he said, climbing back on his bike. “How so? He told me to give you these.”

He took from his other pocket a handful of candy wrappers, twelve of them, neatly paperclipped together, mostly Clark, Crunch, and Power House. Things I had mindlessly strewn in the beach winds and someone had picked up.

“He knows all about you,” said Mad Otto of Bavaria, and laughed with the soundtrack off.

I took the candy wrappers shamefacedly, and felt the extra ten pounds sag around my middle as I held these flags of defeat.

“Visit me,” he said. “Come ride the carousel. Come see if innocent boy David is truly married to old evil Caligula, eh?”

And he biked away, a tweed suit under a tweed hat, smiling and looking only ahead.

I walked back to A. L. Shrank’s melancholy museum and squinted through the dusty window.

There was a toppling stack of bright orange, lemon, chocolate-brown candy wrappers filed on a small table near the sunken sofa.

Those can’t all be mine, I thought.

They are, I thought. I’m plump. But then—he’s nuts.

I went to find ice cream.

“Crumley?”

“I thought my name was Offisa Pup.”

“I think I’ve got a

line on the murderer himself!”

There was a long ocean silence while the policeman put down the phone, tore his hair, and picked the phone up again.

“John Wilkes Hopwood,” I said.

“You forget,” said the police lieutenant, “there have been no murders yet. Only suspicions and possibilities. There’s a thing called a courtroom and another thing called proof. No proof, no case, and they throw you out on your butt so fast you’re stopped up for weeks!”

“You ever seen John Wilkes Hopwood with his clothes off?” I asked.

“That did it.”

Offisa Pup hung up on me.

It was raining when I came out of the both.

Almost immediately the telephone rang as if knowing I was there. I snatched at it and for some reason yelled, “Peg!”

But there was only a sound of rain, and soft breathing, miles away.

I won’t ever answer this phone again, I thought.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” I yelled. “Come get me, you bastard.”

I hung up.