He kept going and I ran after, for he was doing the Harry Truman 120-steps-to-the-minute march.
He heard me coming and called over his shoulder, “Tell you what, young Papa Hemingway…”
“You know what I do for a living?”
“Everyone in Venice knows. Every time you got a story in Dime Detective or Flynn’s Detective, the whole town hears you yelling down at the liquor store newsrack, pointing at the magazines.”
“Oh,” I said, the last of the hot air going out of my balloon. Grounded, I stood across the car from Crumley, biting my lower lip.
Crumley saw this and got a look of paternal guilt.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he sighed.
“What?”
“You know the one thing that gripes my gut about amateur detectives?” said Crumley.
“I’m not an amateur detective, I’m a professional writer with big antennae that work!”
“So you’re a grasshopper who knows how to type,” said Crumley, and waited for my wince to die. “But if you’d been around Venice and my office and the morgue as many years as I have, you’d know that every vagrant who wanders by or any drunk who stumbles in is full of theories, evidence, revelations enough to fill a Bible and sink a Baptist Sunday-outing picnic boat.
If we listened to every maundering preacher who fell through the jail doors half the world would be under suspicion, one third under arrest, and the rest fried or hanged. That being so, why should I listen to some young scribe who hasn’t even begun to make his name in literary history,” again my wince, again he waited, “who just because he finds a lion cage full of accidental drowning thinks he has stumbled on Crime and Punishment and feels like Raskolnikov’s son. End of speech. Respond.”
“You know Raskolnikov?” I said, in amaze.
“Almost before you were born. But that doesn’t buy horseflakes. Plead your case.”
“I’m a writer, I know more about feelings than you do.”
“Balls. I’m a detective, I know more about facts than you do. You afraid a fact will confuse you?”
“Tell me this, kiddo. Anything ever happen to you in your life?”
“Anything?”
“Yeah, I mean anything. Big, in between, small. Anything. Like sickness, rape, death, war, revolution, murder.”
“My mother and father died…”
“Peacefully?”
“Yes. But I had an uncle shot in a holdup once…”
“You see him shot?”
“No, but…”
“Well, that don’t count, unless you see. I mean, you ever find anything like men in lion cages ever before?”
“No,” I said at last.
“Well, there you have it. You’re still in shock. You don’t know what life is. I was born and raised in the morgue. This is the first real touch of marble slab you ever had. So why don’t you quiet down and go away.”
He heard his own voice getting much too loud, shook his head, and said, “No, why don’t I quiet down and go away.”
Which he did. He opened the car door, jumped in, and before I could reinflate my balloon, was gone.
Cursing, I slammed into a telephone booth, dropped a dime in the slot, and called across five miles of Los Angeles. When someone picked up at the other end I heard a radio playing “La Raspa,” a door slammed, a toilet flushed, but I could feel the sunlight that I needed, waiting there.
The lady, living in a tenement on the corner of Temple and Figueroa, nervous at the phone she held in her hand, at last cleared her throat and said:
“Que?”
“Mrs. Gutierrez!” I shouted. I stopped, and started over. “Mrs. Gutierrez, this is the Crazy.”
“Oh!” she gasped, and then laughed. “Si, si! You want to talk to Fannie?”
“No, no, just a few yells. Will you yell down, please, Mrs. Gutierrez?”
“I yell.”
I heard her move. I heard the entire ramshackle, rickety tenement lean. Someday, a blackbird would land on the roof and the whole thing would go. I heard a small Chihuahua tap-dance on the linoleum after her, built like a bull bumblebee and barking.
I heard the tenement outer porch door open as Mrs. Gutierrez stepped out onto the third floor and leaned to call down through the sunshine at the second floor.
“Aai, Fannie! Aai! It’s the Crazy.”
I called into my end, “Tell her I need to come visit!”
Mrs. Gutierrez waited. I could hear the second-floor porch creak, as if a vast captain had rolled out onto its plankings to survey the world.
“Aai, Fannie, the Crazy needs to visit!”
A long silence. A voice sprang sweetly through the air above the tenement yard. I could not make out the words.
“Tell her I need Tosca!”
“Tosca!” Mrs. Gutierrez yelled down into the yard.
A long silence.
The whole tenement leaned again, the other way, like the earth turning in its noon slumbers.
The strains of the first act of Tosca moved up around Mrs. Gutierrez. She spoke.
“Fannie says…”
“I hear the music, Mrs. Gutierrez. That means ‘Yes’!”
I hung up. At the same instant, a hundred thousand tons of salt water fell on the shore, a few yards away, with exquisite timing. I nodded at God’s precision.
Making sure I had twenty cents in my pocket, I ran for the next train.
She was immense.
Her real name was Cora Smith, but she called herself Fannie Florianna, and no one ever called her otherwise. And I had known her, years ago, when I lived in the tenement, and stayed in touch with her after I moved out to the sea.
Fannie was so huge that she never slept lying down. Day and night she sat in a large-sized captain’s chair fixed to the deck of her tenement apartment, with bruise marks and dents in the linoleum which her great weight had riveted there.
She moved as little as possible, her breath churning in her lungs and throat as she sailed toward the door, and squeezed out to cross the hall to the narrow water-closet confines where she feared she might be ignominiously trapped one day. “My God,” she often said, “wouldn’t it be awful if we had to get the fire department to pry me out of there.”
And then back to her chair and her radio and her phonograph and, only a beckon away, a refrigerator filled with ice cream and butter and mayonnaise and all the wrong foods in the wrong amounts. She was always eating and always listening. Next to the refrigerator were bookshelves with no books, only thousands of recordings of Caruso and Galli-Curci and Swarthout and the rest. When the last songs were sung and the last record hissed to a stop at midnight, Fannie sank into herself, like an elephant shot with darkness.
Her great bones settled in her vast flesh. Her round face was a moon watching over the vast territorial imperatives of her body. Propped up with pillows, her breath escaped and sucked back, escaped again, fearful of the avalanche that might happen if somehow she lay back too far, and her weight smothered her, her flesh engulfed and crushed her lungs, and put out her voice and light forever. She never spoke of it, but once when someone asked why there was no bed in her room, her eyes burned with a fearful light, and beds were never mentioned again. Fat, as Murderer, was always with her. She slept in her mountain, afraid, and woke in the morning glad for one more night gone, having made it through.
A piano box waited in the alley below the tenement.
“Mine,” said Fannie. “The day I die, bring the piano box up, tuck me in, hoist me down. Mine. Oh, and while you’re at it, there’s a dear soul, hand me that mayonnaise jar and that big spoon.”
I stood at the front door of the tenement, listening. Her voice flowed down through the halls. It started out as pure as a stream of fresh mountain water and cascaded through the second to the first and then along the hall. I could almost drink her singing, it was that clear.
Fannie.
As I climbed up the first-floor steps she trilled a few lines from La Traviata. As I moved on the second flight, pausing, eyes shut, to listen, Madame Butterfly sang welcome to the bright ship in the harbor and the lieutenant in his whites.
It was the voice of a slender Japanese maiden on a hill on a spring afternoon. There was a picture of that maid, aged seventeen, on a table near the window leading out onto the second-floor tenement porch. The girl weighed 120 pounds at most, but that was a long time ago. It was her voice that pulled me up through the old stairwell, a promise of brightness to come.
I knew that when I got to the door, the singing would stop.
“Fannie,” I’d say. “I heard someone singing up here just now.”
“Did you?”
“Something from Butterfly.”
“How strange. I wonder who it could have been?”
We had played that game for years, talked music, discussed symphony / ballet / opera, listened to it on radios, played it on her old Edison crank-up phono, but never, never once in three thousand days, had Fannie ever sung when I was in the room with her.
But today was different.
As I reached the second floor her singing stopped. But she must have been thinking, planning. Maybe she had glanced out and seen the way I walked along the street. Maybe she read my skeleton through my flesh. Maybe my voice, calling far across town on the phone (impossible) had brought the sadness of the night and the rain with it. Anyway, a mighty intuition heaved itself aware in Fannie Florianna’s summer bulk. She was ready with surprises.
I stood at her door, listening.
Creaks as
