Characters in Umney’s Last Case

… to call an ambulance when that nutty dame, Agnes Stemwood, first tore my phone out of the wall and then swallowed what she swore was drain-cleaner. The “drain-cleaner” turned out to be nothing but crystals of raw sugar, and the office Vern broke into turned out to be a high-class …

… where I’d said goodbye to the silver-haired, violet-eyed Ardis McGill. I’d spent the rest of that lost night walking in a rare Los Angeles fog which might have only been behind my eyes . . . and trickling down my cheeks, by the time the sun came up. Blondie’s closed?

Do yourself a favor and grow up. Yours truely, Arlene Cain P.S.: I’m going back to my mother’s in Idaho. Do not try to get in touch with me. I held the note a moment or two longer, looking at it unbelievingly, then dropped it.

… Mavis had once sat, and Ardis McGill, and Big Tom Hatfield. Even Vernon Klein had sat there once, when he got those pictures of his daughter wearing nothing but an opium grin and her birthday suit. Sitting there with the same patch of California sun slanting across his features—features I …

… a compulsion, and not even the sight of Bill Tuggle, the rummy CPA from the third floor, going inside could quite dispel it. But seeing is believing, they say, and when I got to 2221, I saw no chain, no sign, and no soap on the glass. It was just …

Big ones, as if someone had hit him with two large-caliber shotgun rounds. “Blondie’s is gone, I toldja!” he screamed. “My mom says he upped and ran away with that redhead floozy he hired last month! You should be so lucky, you ugly prick!”

Nor had I heard Buster, and that was maybe even odder. Buster, the Demmicks’ Welsh Corgi, has a high-pitched bark that goes through your head like slivers of glass, and he uses it as much as he can. Also, he’s the jealous type.

I’m givin Miss America a finger-frig and Chick there’s puttin rouge on Betty Grable’s nippy-nips.” I’d had enough. Enough of them, enough of everything. I reached out, grabbed the quiz-kid under the armpit, and used my fingertips to engage a particularly nasty nerve that hides up there.

… I walked down toward the frosted-glass door marked CLYDE UMNEY PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, restraining a renewed urge to see if I could drop-kick a can of Dutch Boy Oyster White through the window at the end of the hall and out onto the fire-escape. I was actually reaching for my doorknob …

… “In March of 1992, on the anniversary of Daniel’s death. Over two years ago now.” A single tear tracked down his wrinkled, prematurely aged cheek, and I had an idea that he had gotten old in one hell of a hurry. It was sort of awful, realizing I had been …

… so long ago, shooting a coked-up fashion-plate named Dunninger who had killed three hopheads in the aftermath of a Hollywood dope party. It was also the place where I’d said goodbye to the silver-haired, violet-eyed Ardis McGill. I’d spent the rest of that lost night walking in a rare Los …

No more parties, no more jitterbugging at Al Arif, no more frothy upper-class murder cases in Palm Desert or Beverly Glen. They were cooling off now, drawing flies, growing pale under their fashionable poolside tans. George and Gloria Demmick, who had died inside this man’s machine.

… bed—the way the police are going to find Gloria Demmick later today, Clyde—I had finished one hundred and ninety pages of manuscript. I was up to the part where you fish Mavis’s brother out of Lake Tahoe. I came home from the funeral three days later, fired up the word-processor, …

The boss is Hap Corrigan. If you want to know who hired the cump’ny, you’ll have to ask h—” “It was the owner,” the other painter said quietly. “The owner of this building. A guy named Samuel Landry.”

If Peoria hadn’t shown up on Harris Brunner’s houseboat when he did, I’d still be trying to swim with my feet cemented into a kerosene drum, somewhere off Malibu. To say I owe him a lot is an understatement.

… have to press shirts for that damned old Lee Ho anymore, and I ain’t going to have to sell papers on the corner anymore, shiverin when it rains in the winter and havin to suck up to those nutty old bags who work down at Bilder’s. I can quit actin …

… didn’t see how bad it was getting with Linda.” I didn’t know, couldn’t know . . . but I did. “She killed herself.” He nodded. “In March of 1992, on the anniversary of Daniel’s death. Over two years ago now.” A single tear tracked down his wrinkled, prematurely aged cheek, …

… particular investigation (Peoria Smith, not Harris Brunner and Mavis Weld), I even found out the kid’s real name, although wild horses wouldn’t have dragged it out of me. Peoria’s father took a permanent coffee-break out a ninth-floor office window on Black Friday, his mother’s the only white frail working in …

Okay, here goes: When I looked toward the door, I saw a very chastened, very downcast Peoria Smith standing there. “I guess I treated you pretty bad the last time I saw you, Mr. Umney,” he said. “I came to say I’m sorry.”

“Landry. Samuel D. Landry. At your service.” V. An Interview with God. Even as rattled as I was, it only took me two or three seconds to place the name, probably because I’d heard it such a short time ago.

It’s real! My Uncle Fred went down and picked up the cash yest’y afternoon. He brought it back in the saddlebag of his Vinnie! I smelled it! Hell, I rolled in it! It was spread all over my mom’s bed! Richest feeling I ever had, let me tell you—forty-froggin-thousand smackers!”

Bill was standing next to Vernon Klein, world’s oldest elevator operator, in Car 2. In his frayed red suit and ancient pillbox hat, Vernon looks like a cross between the Philip Morris bellboy and a rhesus monkey which has fallen into an industrial steam-cleaning machine.

… Landry’s agent, a guy from New York named Verrill. He wants to know when I’m going to start a new book. Soon, I tell him. Soon. Mostly I stay in. I have no urge to explore the world Landry pushed me into when he pushed me out of my own; …