Death Is a Lonely Business (Crumley Mysteries 1)

1927 NASH. REASONABLE. REAR.

Or

BRASS BED, HARDLY USED. CHEAP. UPSTAIRS.

Walking, one thinks, which side of the bed was used, and how long on both sides, and how long on both sides, and how long never again, twenty, thirty years ago?

Or VIOLINS, GUITARS, MANDOLINS.

And in the window ancient instruments strung not with wire or cat-gut but spiderwebs, and inside an old man crouched over a workbench shaping wood, his head always turned away from the light, his hands moving; someone left over from the year when the gondolas were stranded in backyards to become flower planters.

How long since he had sold a violin or guitar?

Knock at the door, the window. The old man goes on cutting and sandpapering, his face, his shoulders shaking. Is he laughing because you tap and he pretends not to hear?

You pass a window with a final sign.

ROOM WITH A VIEW.

The room looks over the sea. But for ten years no one has ever been up there. The sea might as well not exist.

I turned a final corner and what I was searching for was there.

It hung in the sunbrowned window, its fragile letters drawn in weathered lead pencil, as faint as lemon juice that had burned itself out, self-erased, oh God, some fifty years ago!

canaries for sale.

Yes, someone half a century ago had licked a pencil tip, lettered the cardboard and hung it to age, fixed with flypaper adhesive tape, and gone upstairs to tea in rooms where dust lacquered the banister in gums, choked the lightbulbs so they burned with an Oriental light; where pillows were balls of lint and shadows hung in closets from empty racks.

canaries for sale.

I did not knock. Years before, out of mindless curiosity, I had tried, and, feeling foolish, gone away.

I turned the ancient doorknob. The door glided in. The downstairs was empty. There was no furniture in any of the rooms. I called up through the dusty sunlight.

“Anyone home?”

I thought I heard an attic-whisper:

“… no one.”

Flies lay dead in the windows. A few moths that had died the summer of 1929 dusted their wings on the front screens.

Somewhere far above, where ancient Rapunzel-without-hair was lost in her tower, a single feather fell and touched the air:

“… yes?”

A mouse sighed in the dark rafters:

“… come in.”

I pushed the inner door wider. It gave with a great, grinding shriek. I had a feeling that it had been left unoiled so that anyone entering unannounced would be given away by rusty hinges.

A moth tapped at a dead lightbulb in the upper hall.

“… up here....”

I stepped up to