Death is a Lonely Business

“Then why—?”

“Why am I feeling lousy? Because. He’s dead, forever. Christ. And I found him.”

My mind jumped.

On a brighter summer day years back I had rounded a corner to find a man sprawled under a braked car. The driver was leaping from the car to stand over the body. I stepped forward, then stopped.

Something pink lay on the sidewalk near my shoe.

I remembered it from some high school laboratory vat. A lonely bit of brain tissue.

A woman, passing, a stranger, stood for a long time staring at the body under the car. Then she did an impulsive thing she could not have anticipated. She bent slowly to kneel by the body. She patted his shoulder, touched him gently as if to say, oh there, there, there, oh, oh—there.

“Was he—killed?” I heard myself say.

The policeman turned. “What made you say that?”

“How would, I mean, how would he get in that cage—underwater—if someone didn’t—stuff him there?”

The flashlight switched on again and touched over my face like a doctor’s hand, probing for symptoms.

“You the one who phoned the call in?”

“No.” I shivered. “I’m the one who yelled and made all the lights come on.”

“Hey,” someone whispered.

A plainclothes detective, short, balding, kneeled by the body and turned out the coat pockets. From them tumbled wads and clots of what looked like wet snowflakes, papier-mâché.

“What in hell’s that?” someone said.

I know, I thought, but didn’t say.

My hand trembling, I bent near the detective to pick up some of the wet paper mash. He was busy emptying the other pockets of more of the junk. I kept some of it in my palm and, as I rose, shoved it in my pocket, as the detective glanced up.

“You’re soaked,” he said. “Give your name and address to that officer over there and get home. Dry off.”

It was beginning to rain again and I was shivering. I turned, gave the officer my name and address, and hurried away toward my apartment.

I had jogged along for about a block when a car pulled up and the door swung open. The short detective with the balding head blinked out at me.

“Christ, you look awful,” he said.

“Someone else said that to me, just an hour ago.”

“Get in.”

“I only live another block—”

“Get in!”

I climbed in, shuddering, and he drove me the last two blocks to my thirty-dollar-a-month, stale, crackerbox flat. I almost fell, getting out, I was so weak with trembling.

“Crumley,” said the detective. “Elmo Crumley. Call me when you figure out what that paper junk is you stuck in your pocket.”

I started guiltily. My hand went to that pocket. I nodded. “Sure.”

“And stop worrying and looking sick,” said Crumley. “He wasn’t anybody—.” He stopped, ashamed of what he had said, and ducked his head to start over.

“Why do I think he was somebody?” I said. “When I remember who, I’ll call.”

I stood frozen. I was afraid more terrible things were waiting just behind me. When I opened my apartment door, would black canal waters flood out?

“Jump!” and Elmo Crumley slammed his door.

His car was just two dots of red light going away in a fresh downpour that beat my eyelids shut.

I glanced across the street at the gas station phone booth which I used as my office to call editors who never phoned back. I rummaged my pockets for change, thinking, I’ll call Mexico City, wake Peg, reverse the charges, tell her about the cage, the man, and—Christ—scare her to death!

Listen to the detective, I thought.

Jump.

I was shaking so violently now that I couldn’t get the damn key in the lock.

Rain followed me inside.

Inside, waiting for me was …

An empty twenty-by-twenty studio apartment with a body-damaged sofa, a bookcase with fourteen books in it and lots of waiting space, an easy chair bought on the cheap from Goodwill Industries, a Sears, Roebuck unpainted pinewood desk with an unoiled 1934 Underwood Standard typewriter on it, as big as a player piano and as loud as wooden clogs on a carpetless floor.

In the typewriter was an anticipatory sheet of paper. In a wood box on one side was my collected literary output, all in one stack. There were copies of Dime Detective, Detective Tales, and Black Mask, each of which had paid me thirty or forty dollars per story. On the other side was another wooden box, waiting to be filled with manuscript. In it was a single page of a book that refused to begin.

UNTITLED NOVEL.

With my name under that. And the date, July 1, 1949.

Which was three months ago.

I shivered, stripped down, toweled myself off, got into a bathrobe, and came back to stand staring at my desk.

I touched the typewriter, wondering if it was a lost friend or a man or a mean mistress.

Somewhere back a few weeks it had made noises vaguely resembling the Muse. Now, more often than not, I sat at the damned machine as if someone had cut my hands off at the wrists. Three or four times a day I sat here and was victimized by literary heaves. Nothing came. Or if it did, it wound up on the floor in hairballs I swept up every night. I was going through that long desert known as Dry Spell, Arizona.

It had a lot to do with Peg so far away among all those catacomb mummies in Mexico, and my being lonely, and no sun in Venice for the three months, only mist and then fog and then rain and then fog and mist again. I wound myself up in cold cotton batting each midnight, and rolled out all fungus at dawn. My pillow was moist every morning, but I didn’t know what I had dreamed to salt it that way.

I looked out the window at that telephone, which I listened for all day every day, which never rang offering to bank my splendid novel if I could finish it last year.