'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 plummeting into hell, and yet another on the big night steamboat theater crossing the Styx to ram the Isle of the Dead and (unthinkable!) sink Mr. Shapeshade!
I did a final sermon on Miss Birdsong, and a page about the glass eyes, and took all these pages and put them in my Talking Box. That was the box I kept by my typewriter where my ideas lay and spoke to me early mornings to tell me where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. I lay half-asleep, listening, and then got up and went to help them, with my typewriter, to go where they most needed to go to do some special wild thing; so my stories got written. Sometimes it was a dog that needed to dig a graveyard. Sometimes it was a time machine that had to go backward. Sometimes it was a man with green wings who had to fly at night lest he be seen. Sometimes it was me, missing Peg in my tombstone bed.
I took one of the lists back to Crumley.
'How come you didn't use my typewriter?' said Crumley.
'Yours isn't used to me yet, and would only get in the way. Mine is way ahead of me, and I run to catch up. Read that.'
Crumley read my list of possible victims.
'Christ,' he murmured, 'you got half the Venice Chamber of Commerce, the Lion's Club, the flea circus, and the Pier Carnival Owners of America on here.'
He folded it and put it in his pocket.
'Why don't you throw in some friends from where you once lived in downtown L.A.?'
An ice-frog jumped in my chest.
I thought of the tenement and the dark halls and nice Mrs. Gutierrez and lovely Fannie.
The frog jumped again.
'Don't say that,' I said.
'Where's the other list, of murderers? You got the Chamber of Commerce on that, too?'
I shook my head.
'Afraid to show it to me because I'm in the lineup with the rest of them?'
asked Crumley.
I took that list out of my pocket, glanced at it, and tore it up.'Where's your wastebasket?' I said.
Even as I had been talking, the fog had arrived across the street from Crumley's. It hesitated, as if searching for me, and then, to verify my paranoid suspicions, sneaked across and blanketed his garden, dousing the Christmas lights in his oranges and lemons and drowning the flowers so they shut their mouths.
'How dare it come here?' I said.
'Everything does,' said Crumley.
'Que? Is this the Crazy?'
'Si, Mrs. Gutierrez!'
'Do I call the office?'
'Si, Mrs. Gutierrez.'
'Fannie is calling outside on her porch!'
'I hear her, Mrs. Gutierrez…'
Far away in the sun inland where there was no fog or mist or rain, and no surf to bring strange visitors in, was the tenement, and Fannie's soprano calling like the Sirens.
'Tell him,' I heard her sing, 'I have a new recording of Mozart's The Magic Flute!'
'She says…'
'Her voice carries, Mrs. Gutierrez. Tell her, thank God, that's a happy one.'
'She wants you to come see, she misses you and hopes you forgive her, she says.'
For what? I tried to remember.
'She says…'
Fannie's voice floated on the warm clear air.
'Tell him to come but don't bring anyone with!'
That knocked the air out of me. The ghosts of old ice creams rose in my blood.
When had I ever done that? I wondered. Who did she think I might bring along, uninvited?
And then I remembered.
The bathrobe hanging on the door late nights. Leave it there. Canaries for sale. Don't fetch the empty cages. The lion cage. Don't roll it through the streets. Lon Chancy. Don't peel him off the silver screen and hide him in your pocket. Don't.
My God, Fannie, I thought, is the fog rolling inland toward you? Will the mist reach your tenement? Will the rain touch on your door?
I shouted so loudly over the phone, Fannie could have heard it, downstairs.
'Tell her, Mrs. Gutierrez, I come alone. Alone. But tell her only maybe I come.
I have no money, not even for train fare. Maybe I come tomorrow…'
'Fannie say, if you come, she give you money.'
'Swell, but meantime, my pockets, empty.'
Just then I saw the postman cross the street and stick an envelope in my mailbox.
'Hold on,' I yelled, and ran.
