“What made you go by there?” I asked.
“While I was shaving an hour ago, I had a hunch, Jesus, like the ones you talk about. I’m still here, waiting for the coroner. You coming by to say I told you so?”
“No, but I’ll be there.”
I hung up.
Back in my apartment, Nothing still hung on the hall door leading to the bathroom. I yanked it off the door, hurled it to the floor, and stepped on it. It seemed only right, since it had gone off during the night to visit the canary lady and come back without telling me, just before dawn.
Christ, I thought, standing numbly on the bathrobe, all the cages are empty now!
Crumley stood on one side of the Lower Nile, the dry riverbed. I stood on the other. One police car and the morgue van were waiting downstairs.
“You’re not going to like this,” said Crumley.
He paused, waiting for me to nod him to pull back the sheet. I said, “Did you call me in the middle of the night?”
Crumley shook his head.
“How long has she been dead?”
“We figure about eleven hours.”
I ran my thoughts back. Four in the morning. When the phone had rung across the street in the night. When Nothing had called to tell me something. If I had run to answer, a cold wind would have blown out of the receiver to tell me this.
I nodded. Crumley pulled back the sheet.
The canaries-for-sale lady was there and not there. Part of her had fled in the dark. What was left was terrible to see.
Her eyes were fixed on some dreadful Nothing, the thing on the top of my hall door, the invisible weight at the end of my bed. The mouth that had once whispered open, saying, come up, come in, welcome, was now gaped in shock, in protest. It wanted something to go away, get out, not stay!
Holding the sheet in his fingers, Crumley glanced at me.
“I guess I owe you an apology.”
“For what?”
It was hard to talk, for she was staring up between us at some terror on the ceiling.
“For guessing right, that was you. For doubting, that was me.”
“It wasn’t hard to guess. That’s my brother, dead. That’s my grandfather and my aunts dead. And my mother and father. All deaths are the same, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.” Crumley let the sheet drift down, a snowfall over the Nile Valley on an autumn day. “But this is just a simple death, kid. Not a murder. That look on her face you can find on all kinds of people when they feel their heart coming out of their chest with an attack.”
I wanted to shout arguments. I bit my tongue. Something seen from the corner of my eye made me turn away and move over to the empty birdcages. It took a few moments for me to see what I was looking at:
“Jesus,” I whispered. “Hirohito. Addis Ababa. They’re gone.”
I turned to stare at Crumley and point.
“Someone’s taken the old newspaper headlines out of the cages. Whoever came up here not only scared her to death, but took the papers. My God, he’s a souvenir collector. I bet he’s got a pocketful of train ticket punchout confetti and Scott Joplin’s peeled-off head, too.”
“Scott Joplin’s what?”
He didn’t want to, but at last Crumley came to look at the bottoms of the cages.
“Find those newspapers and you’ll find him,” I said.
“Easy as pie.” Crumley sighed.
He led me down past the turned-to-the-wall mirrors that had not seen anyone come up during the night and did not see him go. In the downstairs stairwell area was the dusty window with the sign in it. For no reason I could figure, I reached out and pulled the sign away from its flaking Scotch-taped frame. Crumley was watching me.
“Can I have this?” I asked.
“It’ll hurt you, every time you look at it,” said Crumley. “Oh, hell. Keep it.”
I folded it and tucked it in my pocket.
Upstairs, the birdcages sang no songs. The coroner stepped in, full of mid-afternoon beer and whistling.
It had begun to rain. It rained all across Venice as Crumley’s car drove us away from her house, away from my house, away from phones that rang at the wrong hours, away from the gray sea and the empty shore and the remembrance of drowned swimmers. The car windshield was like a great eye, weeping and drying itself, weeping again, as the wiper shuttled and stopped, shuttled and stopped and squeaked to shuttle again. I stared straight ahead.
Inside his jungle bungalow, Crumley looked in my face, guessed at a brandy instead of a beer, gave me that, and nodded at the telephone in his bedroom.
“You got any money to call Mexico City?”
I shook my head.
“Now you have,” said Crumley. “Call. Talk to your girl. Shut the door and talk.”
I grabbed his hand and almost broke every bone in it, gasping. Then I called Mexico.
“Peg!”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, me!”
“My God, you sound so strange, so far away.”
“I am far away.”
“You’re alive, thank God.”
“Sure.”
“I had this terrible feeling last night. I couldn’t sleep.”
“What time, Peg, what time?”
“Four o’clock, why?”
“Jesus.”
“Why?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t sleep either. How’s Mexico City?”
“Full of death.”
“God, I thought it was all here.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Lord, it’s good to hear your voice.”
“Say something.”
I said something.
“Say it again!”
“Why are you shouting, Peg?”
“I don’t know. Yes, I do. When are you going to ask me to marry you, damn it!”
“Peg,” I said, in dismay.
“Well, when?”
“On thirty dollars a week, forty when I’m lucky, some weeks nothing, some months not a damn thing?”
“I’ll take a vow of poverty.”
“Sure.”
“I will. I’ll be home in ten days and take both vows.”
“Ten days, ten years.”
“Why do women always have to ask men for their hands?”
“Because we’re cowards and more afraid than you.”
“I’ll protect you.”
“Some conversation this.” I thought of the door last night and the thing hanging on the door and the thing on the end of my bed. “You’d better hurry.”
“Do you remember my face?” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“You do remember it, don’t you, because, God, just an hour ago this terrible, horrible thing happened, I couldn’t remember yours, or the color of your eyes, and I realized what a dumb fool I was not to bring your picture along, and it was all gone. That scares me, to think I could forget. You’ll never forget me, will you?”
I didn’t tell her I had forgotten the color of her eyes just the day before and how that had shaken me for an hour and that it was a kind of death but me not being able to figure who had died first, Peg or me.
“Does my voice help?”
“Yes.”
“Am I there with you? Do you see my eyes?”
“Yes.”
“For God’s sake, first thing you do when you hang up, mail me a picture. I don’t want to be afraid any more…”
“All I have is a lousy twenty-five-cent photo machine picture I…”
“Send it!”
“I should never have come down here and left you alone up there, unprotected.”
“You make me sound like your kid.”
“What else are you?”
“I don’t know. Can love protect people, Peg?”
“It must. If it doesn’t protect you, I’ll never forgive God. Let’s keep talking. As long as we talk, love’s there and you’re okay.”
“I’m okay already. You’ve made me well. I was sick today, Peg. Nothing serious. Something I ate. But I’m right now.”
“I’m moving in with you when I get home, no matter what you say. If we get married, fine. You’ll just have to get used to my working while you finish the Great American Epic, and to hell with it, shut up. Someday, later on, you support me!”
“Are you ordering me around?”
“Sure, because I hate to hang up and I just want this to go on all day and I know it’s costing you a mint. Say some more, the things I want to hear.”
I said some more.
And she was gone, the telephone line humming and me left with a piece of wire cable two thousand miles long and a billion shadow whispers lingering there, heading toward me. I cut them off before they could reach my ear and slide inside my head.
I opened the door and stepped out to find Crumley waiting by the icebox, reaching in for sustenance.
“You look surprised?” He laughed. “Forget you were in my house, you were so busy yakking?”
“Forgot,” I said.
And took anything he handed me, out of the fridge, my nose running, my cold making me miserable.
“Grab some Kleenex, kid,” said Crumley. “Take the whole box.”
“And while you’re at it,” he added, “give me the rest of your list.”
“Our list,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes, wiped his balding head with a nervous hand, and nodded.
“Those who will die next, in order of execution.”
He shut his eyes, heavily burdened.
“Our list,” he said.
I did not immediately tell him about Cal.
“And while you’re at it,” Crumley sipped another beer, “Write down the name of the murderer.”
“It would have to be someone who knows everyone in Venice, California,” I said.
“That could be me,” said Crumley.
“Don’t say that.”
“Why?”
“Because,” I said, “it scares me.”
I made the list.
I made two lists.
And then suddenly discovered myself making three.
The first list was short and full of possible murderers, none of which I believed.
The second was Choose Your Victim, and went on at some length, on who would vanish in short order.
And in the middle of it I realized it had been some while since I trapped all the wandering people of Venice. So I did a page on Cal the barber before he fled out of my mind, and another on Shrank running down the street, and another on all those people on the rollercoaster with me
