was there and how it had been planned and steadily built.
I stared and stared again, trying to see what Fannie wanted me to see. Oh, Christ, I thought, what am I looking for? Is the answer one of these? I almost shoved in to hurl all the jams and jellies to the floor. I had to stop my fist, halfway in.
It's not there, or if it is, I can't see it.
I gave a terrible death groan and slammed the door.
The phonograph, with Tosca gone, gave up and quit.
Someone call the police, I thought. Someone?
Constance was out on the balcony again.
Me.
It was all over by three in the morning. The police had come, and everyone had been questioned and names taken and the whole tenement was awake, as if someone had started a fire in the basement, and when I came out the front of the tenement the morgue van was still parked there with the men trying to figure out how to get Fannie out and down the stairs and away. I hoped they wouldn't think of the piano box that Fannie had joked about, in the alley. They never did. But Fannie had to stay in her room until dawn, when they brought a bigger van and a larger carrier.
It was terrible, leaving her up there alone in the night. But the police wouldn't let me stay, and after all, it was a simple case of death from natural causes.
As I went down through the levels of the house, the doors were beginning to close and the lights go out, like those nights at the end of the war when the last conga line, exhausted, drained away into the rooms and down into the streets and there was the lonely walk for me up over Bunker Hill and down to the terminal where I would be taken home in thunders.
I found Constance Rattigan curled up in the back seat of her limousine, lying quietly, staring at nothing. When she heard me open the back door she said,
'Get behind the wheel.'
I climbed up front behind the steering wheel.
'Take me home,' she said quietly.w It took me a full moment of sitting there to say finally, 'I can't.'
'Why not?'
'I don't know how to drive,' I said.
'What?'
'I never learned. There was no reason, anyway.' My tongue moved like lead between my lips. 'Since when can writers afford cars?'
'Jesus.' Constance managed to prop herself up and get out, like someone with a hangover. She got out and came around walking slowly and blindly and waved. 'Get over.'
Somehow she started the car. This time we drove at about ten miles an hour, as if there were a fog so you could only see ten feet ahead.
We made it as far as the Ambassador Hotel. She turned in there and drove up just as the last of a Saturday night party came out with balloons and funny hats. The Coconut Grove was putting out its lights above us. I saw some musicians hurrying away with their instruments.
Everyone knew Constance. We signed in and had a bungalow on the side of the hotel in a few minutes. We had no luggage but no one seemed to mind.
The bellboy who took us through the garden to our place kept looking at Constance as if maybe he should carry her. When we were in the room, Constance said, 'Would a fifty-dollar tip find the key and unlock the gate to let us in the swimming pool around back?'
'It would go a long way toward finding the key,' the bellboy said. 'But a swim, this time of night…?'
'It's my hour,' said Constance.
Five minutes later the lights came on in the pool and I sat there and watched Constance dive in and swim twenty laps, on occasion swimming underwater from one end to the other without coming up for air.
When she came out, ten minutes later, she was gasping and red-faced and I cloaked her in a big towel and held her.
'When do you start crying?' I said, at last.
'Dummy,' she said. 'I just did. If you can't do it in the ocean, a pool's fine. If you don't have a pool, hit the shower. You can scream and yell and sob all you want, and it doesn't bother anyone, the world never hears. Ever think of that?'
'I never thought,' said I, in awe.
At four o'clock in the morning, Constance found me in our bungalow bathroom, standing and staring at the shower. 'Hit it,' she said, gently. 'Go on. Give it a try.' I got in and turned the water on, hard.
At eleven in the morning, we motored through Venice and looked at the canals with a thin layer of green slime on their surface, and passed the half-torn-down pier and looked at some gulls soaring in the fog up there, and no sun yet, and the surf so quiet it was like muffled black drums.
'Screw this,' said Constance. 'Flip a nickel. Heads we go north to Santa Barbara. Tails, south to Tijuana.'
'I don't have a nickel,' I said.'Christ.' Constance grubbed in her purse and took out a quarter and tossed it in the air. 'Tails!'
We were in Laguna by noon, no thanks to the highway patrol that somehow missed us.
We sat out in the open air on a cliff overlooking the beach at Victor Hugo's and had double margaritas.
'You ever see Now, Voyager?'
'Ten times,' I said.
'This is where Bette Davis and Paul Henried sat having a love lunch early in the film. This was the location, back in the early Forties. You're sitting in the very chair where Henried put his behind.'
We were in San Diego by three and outside the bullring in Tijuana just at the hour of four.
'Think you can stand this?' asked Constance.
'I can only try,' I said.
We made it through the third bull and came out into the late-afternoon light and had two more margaritas and a good Mexican dinner before we went north and drove out onto the island and sat in the sunset at the Hotel del Coronado. We didn't say anything, but just watched the sun go down, lighting the old Victorian towers and fresh-painted white sidings of the hotel with pink color.
Along the way home we swam in the surf at Del Mar, wordless and, from time to time, hand in hand.
At midnight we were in front of Crumley's jungle compound.
'Marry me,' said Constance.
'Next time I live,' I said.
'Yeah. Well, that's not bad. Tomorrow.'
When she was gone I walked up the jungle path.
'Where have you been?' said Crumley, in the door.
'Uncle Wiggily says go back three hops,' I said.
'The Skeezix and the Pipsisewah say come in,' said Crumley.
The something cold in my hand was a beer.
'Lord,' he said, 'you look terrible. Come here.'
He gave me a hug. I didn't think a man like Crumley ever hugged anyone, not even a
