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Elmo Crumley and I stepped into the tobacco smells of an eternally attic day.
Crumley stared at the empty space between the old men who leaned like dry wicker chairs against each other.
Crumley moved forward to hold out his hand and show them the dry-caked alphabet confetti.
The old men had had two days now to think about the empty seat between them.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” one of them whispered.
“If a cop,” murmured one of them, blinking at the mulch in his palm, “shows me something like that, it’s gotta come from Willy’s pockets. You want me to come identify Turn?”
The other two old men leaned away from this one who spoke, as if he had said something unclean.
Crumley nodded.
The old man shoved his cane under his trembling hands and hoisted himself up. Crumley tried to help, but the fiery look the old man shot him moved him away.
“Stand aside!”
The old man battered the hardwood floor with his cane, as if punishing it for the bad news, and was out the door.
We followed him out into that mist and fog and rain where God’s light had just failed in Venice, southern California.
We walked into the morgue with a man eighty-two years old, but when we came out he was one hundred and ten, and could no longer use his cane. The fire was gone from his eyes, so he didn’t even beat us off as we tried to help him out to the car and he was mourning over and over, “My God, who gave him that awful haircut? When did that happen?” He babbled because he needed to talk nonsense. “Did you do that to him?” he cried to no one. “Who did that? Who?”
I know, I thought, but didn’t tell, as we got him out of the car and back to sit in his own place on that cold bench where the other old men waited, pretending not to notice our return, their eyes on the ceiling or the floor, waiting until we were gone so they could decide whether to stay away from the stranger their old friend had become or move closer to keep him warm.
Crumley and I were very quiet as we drove back to the as-good-as-empty canaries-for-sale house.
I stood outside the door while Crumley went in to look at the blank walls of the old man’s room and look at the names, the names, the names, William, Willy, Will, Bill. Smith. Smith. Smith, fingernail-scratched there in the plaster, making himself immortal.
When he came out, Crumley stood blinking back into the terribly empty room.
“Christ,” he murmured.
“Did you read the words on the wall?”
“All of them.” Crumley looked around and was dismayed to find himself outside the door staring in. “ ‘He’s standing in the hall.’ Who stood here?” Crumley turned to measure me. “Was it you?”
“You know it wasn’t,” I said, edging back.
“I could arrest you for breaking and entering, I suppose.”
“And you won’t do that,” I said, nervously. “The door, all the doors, have been open for years. Anyone could come in. Someone did.”
Crumley glanced back into the silent room.
“How do I know you didn’t scratch those words on that wall with your own damned fingernail, just to get my hair up and make me believe your cockamamie theory?”
“The writing on the wall is wobbly; an old man’s scribble.”
“You could have thought of that, and imitated an old man’s scrawl.”
“Could have done, but didn’t do. My God, what do you need to convince you?”
“More than gooseflesh on my neck, I’ll tell you that.”
“Then,” I said, my hands back in my pockets again, making fists, the seaweed still hidden but waiting, “the rest is upstairs. Go up. Look. Come down. Tell me what you see.”
