Death Is a Lonely Business (17 page)

"Lock your door, Fannie," I said.

"What?" she said. "What?"

Coming back downstairs, I found Henry still waiting in the dark, half-hidden against the wall.

"Henry, for God's sake, what're you doing?"

"Listening," he said.

"For what?"

"This house, this place. Shh. Careful. Now."

His cane came up and pointed like an antenna along the hall.

"There. You hear?"

Far away a wind stirred. Far away a breeze wandered the dark. The beams settled. Someone breathed. A door creaked.

"I don't hear anything."

"That's 'cause you trying. Don't try. Just be. Just listen. Now."

I listened and my spine chilled.

"Someone in this house," whispered Henry. "Don't belong here. I got this sense. I'm no fool. Someone up there, wandering around, up to no good."

"Can't be, Henry."

"Is," he whispered. "A blind man tells you. Stranger underfoot. Henry has the word. You don't hear me, you fall downstairs or...”

Drown in a bathtub, I thought. But what I said was, "You going to stay here all night?"

"Someone's got to stand guard."

A blind man? I thought.

He read my mind. He nodded. "Old Henry, sure. Now run along. It's a big fancy-smelling Duesenberg out front. No taxi. I lied. Who would be picking you up this late, know anyone with a fancy car?"

"No one."

"Get on out. I'll mind Fannie for us. But who'll mind Jimmy now, not even Jim. Not even Sam...”

I started out from one night into another.

"Oh, one last thing."

I paused. Henry said:

"What was the bad news you brought tonight and didn't tell? Not to me. Not to Fannie."

I gasped.

"How did you know?"

I thought of the old woman sinking in the riverbed, silent, in her sheets, out of sight. I thought of Cal, the piano lid slammed on his maple leaf hands.

"Even though," explained Henry with good reason, "you chew spearmint gum, your breath was sour tonight, young sir. Which means you're not digesting your food proper. Which means a bad day for writers come inland with no roots."

"It was a bad day for everyone, Henry."

"I'm still huffing and puffing." Henry stood tall and shook his cane at the darkening halls where the lightbulbs were burning out and the souls were guttering low. "Watchdog Henry. You, now, git!"

I went out the door toward something that not only smelled but looked like a 1928 Duesenberg.

It was Constance Rattigan's limousine. It was as long and bright and beautiful as a Fifth Avenue shop window somehow arrived on the wrong side of L.A.

The back door of the limo was open. The chauffeur was in the front seat, hat crammed down over his eyes, staring straight ahead. He didn't look at me. I tried to get his attention, but the limousine was waiting, its motor humming, and I was wasting time.

I had never been in such a vehicle in my life.

It might be my one and only chance.

I leaped in.

No sooner had I hit the back seat than the limousine swerved in one boa-constrictor glide away from the curb. The back door slammed shut on me and we were up to sixty by the time we reached the end of the block. Tearing up Temple Hill we made something like seventy-five. We managed to make all of the green lights to Vermont where we wheeled over to Wilshire and took it out as far as Westwood for no special reason, maybe because it was scenic.

I sat in the back seat like Robert Armstrong on King Kong's lap, crowing and babbling to myself, knowing where I was going but wondering why I deserved all this.

Then I remembered the nights when I had come up to call on Fannie and met this very same smell of Chanel and leather and Paris nights in the air outside her door. Constance Rattigan had been there only a few minutes before. We had missed colliding by one or two hairs of mink and an exhalation of Grand Marnier.

As we prepared to turn at Westwood we passed a cemetery which was so placed that if you weren't careful, you drove into a parking lot. Or was it that some days, looking for a parking lot, you mistakenly motored between tombstones? A confusion.

Before I could give it great mind, the cemetery and the parking lot were left behind and we were halfway to the sea.

At Venice and Windward we wheeled south along the shore. We passed like a slight rainfall, that quiet and swift, not far from my small apartment. I saw my typewriter window lit with a faint light. I wonder if I am in there, dreaming this? I thought. And we left behind my deserted office telephone booth with Peg two thousand miles away at the end of the silent line. Peg, I thought, if you could see me now!

We swerved in behind the big, bone-white Moorish fort at exactly midnight and the limousine stopped as easily as a wave sinks in sand and the limo door banged and the chauffeur, still quiet after the long, silent glide, streaked into the backside of the fort and did not appear again.

I waited a full minute for something to happen. When it did not, I slid out of the back of the limousine, like a shoplifter, guilty for no reason and wondering whether to escape.

I saw a dark figure upstairs in the house. Lights went on as the chauffeur moved about the Moorish fort on the Venice sands.

I stayed quietly, anyway. I looked at my watch. As the minute hand counted off the last second of the last minute, the front portico lights went on.

I walked up to the open front door and stepped into an empty house. At a distance down a hall I saw a small figure darting about the kitchen making drinks. A small girl in a maid's outfit. She waved at me and ran.

I walked into a living room filled with a menagerie of pillows of every size from Pomeranian to Great Dane. I sat on the biggest one and sank down even as my soul kept sinking in me.

The maid ran in, put down two drinks on a tray, and ran out before I could see her (there was only candlelight in this room). Over her shoulder she threw away "Drink!" in what was or was not a French accent.

It was a cool white wine and a good one and I needed it. My cold was worse. I was sneezing and honking and sneezing all the time.

In the year 2078 they excavated an old tomb or what they thought to be a tomb on the shoreline of California where, it was rumored, queens and kings once ruled, then went away with the tides along the flats. Some were buried with their chariots, it was said. Some with relics of their arrogance and magnificence. Some left behind only images of themselves in strange canisters which, held to the light and spun on a shuttle, talked in tongues and tossed black-and-white shadow-shows on empty tapestry screens.

One of the tombs found and opened was the tomb of a queen and in that vault was not a speck of dust, nor furniture, just pillows in mid-floor and all around, row on row, rising to the ceiling, and stack on stack, reaching to touch that ceiling, canisters labeled with the lives that the queen had lived and none of these lives were true but they seemed true. They were tinned and prisoned dreams. They were containers from which djinns screamed forth or into which princesses fled to hide for eternity from the reality that killed.

And the address of the tomb was 27 Speedway, Ocean Front, Venice, California, in a lost year under sand and water. And the name of the queen with her film in cans from floor to roof was Rattigan.

And I was there now, waiting and thinking:

I hope she's not like the canary lady. I hope she's not a mummy with dust in her eyes.

I stopped hoping.

The second Egyptian queen had arrived. And not with a grand entrance at all, and she wasn't wearing a silver lame evening gown, or even a smart dress and scarf or tailored slacks.

I felt her in the door across the room before she spoke, and what was she? A woman about five feet tall, in a black bathing suit, incredibly suntanned all over her body, and with a face dark as nutmeg and cinnamon. Her hair was cropped and a kind of blonde gray brown and tousled as if, what the hell, she had given it a try with a comb and let it go. The body was neat and firm and quick, and the tendons of her legs had not been cut. She ran quickly, barefoot, across the floor and stood looking down at me with flashing eyes.

"You a good swimmer?"

"Not bad."

"How many laps of my pool could you do?" She nodded to the great emerald lake outside the French doors.

"Twenty."

"I can go forty-five. Any man I know has got to do forty, before he goes to bed with me."

"I just flunked the test," I said.

"Constance Rattigan." She grabbed my hand and pumped it.

"I know," I said.

She stood back and eyed me up and down.

"So you're the one who chews spearmint and likes
Tosca,
" she said.

"You been talking to both Henry the blind man and Florianna?"

"Right! Wait here. If I don't have my night dip, I'll go to sleep on you."

Before I could speak, she plunged out the French doors, skirted the pool, and headed for the ocean. She vanished into the first wave and swam out of sight.

I had a feeling she wouldn't want wine when she came back. I wandered out to the kitchen, which was Dutch, cream white, sky blue, and found a percolator in full perk, and the smell of coffee brewing for the start of a new day. I checked my cheap watch: almost one in the morning. I poured coffee for two and took it out to wait for her on the veranda overlooking the incredibly greeny-blue swimming pool.

"Yes!" was her answer as she ran to shake herself like a dog on the tiles.

She grabbed the coffee and should have burned her mouth drinking it. Between gasps she said, "This
starts
my day."

"What time do you go to bed?"

"Sunrise, sometimes, like the vampires. Noon's not for me."

"How do you get such a tan?"

"Sunlamp in the basement. Why are you staring?"

"Because," I said. "You're so different from the way I thought you would be. I imagined someone like Norma Desmond in that movie that just came out. You see it?"

"Hell, I
lived
it. Half of the film's me, the rest bilge. That dimwit Norma wants a new career. All I want most days is to hole up and not come out. I've had it with his-hand-on-my-knee producers and mattress-spring directors, timid writers, and cowardly scripts. No offense. You a writer?"

"I damn well am."

"You got spunk, kid. Stay away from films. They'll screw you. Where was I? Oh, yeah, I gave most of my fancy gowns to Hollywood Volunteer Sales years ago. I go to maybe one premiere a year, disguised as someone else. Once every eight weeks, if it's some old chum, I have lunch at Sardi's or the Derby, then hole in again. Fannie I see about once a month, usually around this time. She's a night-owl like yours truly."

She finished her coffee and toweled herself off with a huge soft yellow towel that went well with her dark tan. She draped it over her shoulders and gave me another stare. I had time to study this woman who was and wasn't Constance Rattigan, the great empress from my childhood. On screen, twenty feet of gliding, villainous, man-trapping woman, dark haired, ravishing in her slenderness. Here, a sunblasted desert mouse, quick, nimble, ageless, all cinnamon and nutmeg and honey as we stood in the night wind out in front of her mosque by her Mediterranean pool. I looked at that house and thought, no radios, no television, no newspapers. She was quick with her telepathy.

"Right! Only the projector and the films in the parlor. Time only works well in one direction. Back. I control the past. I'll be damned if I know what to do with the present, and to hell with the future. I'm not going to be there, don't want to go there, and would hate you if you made me. It's a perfect life."

I looked at all the lit windows of her house and all the rooms behind the windows and then over at the abandoned limousine to one side of the mosque.

This made her nervous enough that suddenly she was gone and came running back with the white wine. She poured it, and muttered, "What the hell. Drink this. I'll…"

Quite suddenly, as she handed me my glass of wine, I began to laugh. Laugh, hell, I exploded, I guffawed.

"What's the joke?" she asked, half-taking the wine back. "What's funny?"

"You," I roared, "and the chauffeur.
And
the maid. The maid, the chauffeur! And you!"

I pointed at the kitchen, out at the limousine, and back at her.

She knew she was trapped and joined my hilarity, throwing her head back and giving a delicious yell.

"Jesus Christ, kid, you caught on! But, I thought I was good."

"You are!" I cried. "You're terrific. But when you handed me my drink, there was something in your wrist motion. I saw the chauffeur's hands on the steering wheel. I saw the maid's fingers on the serving tray. Constance, I mean Miss Rattigan...”

"Constance."

"You could have carried the masquerade on for days," I said. "It was just the smallest thing about your hands and wrists."