Dream Town

Chapter 10

The first thing Archer did was find a bathroom on the main floor off the foyer, where he threw up everything he’d eaten and drunk on New Year’s Eve. The White Russian felt particularly egregious coming back up his throat, like his own painfully private Cold War. After that he snagged a washcloth, filled it with some cubes from the refrigerator, and laid it over the bloody bump on his head. He’d had concussions before, and he knew he was suffering from one now.

He sat on the bottom step and stared dully at the dead man. The guy was in his fifties, with thinning, gray hair and a florid face that was turning paler by the minute. He was around five-ten and about two hundred pounds. The bullet wound on his face was blackened, with the skin crusted up like furrows of dirt in a tilled field.

That told Archer that whoever had shot him had been close to the guy. He was dressed in a gray two-piece that looked off the rack and was baggy and off-kilter in all the places a cheap suit always was. His tie was red and too short. It barely reached the top of his now-slack belly.

Archer looked at his face more closely. There were bruises on his cheeks and jaw and one on his neck. His nose looked puffy and swollen. He checked the dead man’s pockets. The suit was courtesy of Sears, Roebuck and Company, the label said. If this was the Ford man, Archer could match the name from the car. Only the fellow had no ID and no wallet. And no car keys. And there was no business card or other clue that would solve the whole thing in short order. So someone had rolled him and taken everything that could tell who he was.

Except the damn car. So is this Cedric Bender?

That would make sense. The car was outside and the dead guy was inside. But Archer needed to be sure. He glanced down at the corpse again. Archer had no idea how the man had lived his life, but that life was now over. It was a callous and sad send-off, however you looked at it.

Archer put the ice back on his head and took another minute to think what to do. He decided to search the rest of the house to make sure that Lamb wasn’t lying somewhere with a hole added to her head as well.

He didn’t find Lamb’s or any other body. He saw walls and beamed ceilings that were all painted white. The fireplace surround in the front room was etched with musical notes, and film awards were aligned on the mantel. Hanging on one wall was a cuckoo clock. There was a white china cabinet and a built-in buffet.

The kitchen had all the latest appliances and gadgets, marble countertops, an island with bar stools around it, a large refrigerator with practically nothing in it, and an electric stovetop. There was a library filled with books that actually looked read, and a door that led to an outdoor shower enclosed by a wooden wall. A small dining room had a rectangular Craftsman-style table with six chairs. This was no doubt where the Marses and Greens had eaten during their visit. Aside from that there were comfortable couches, chairs, rugs, a portable bar outfitted in chrome, some paintings, interesting light fixtures, and lots of windows both large and small.

Other than that, the only things in the house were a dead body, and a very much alive PI nursing a cracked head and a bruised ego for letting someone so easily sandbag him.

He went back up to Lamb’s office and looked through the Wheeldex again. His fingers plucked out two cards that seemed promising because, unlike all the others, they each had a large X written in under the name.

When in doubt, X marks the spot. That must be in some PI mail order course somewhere.

He wrote the information down and put the cards back. He liked to play fair with the cops, even if they didn’t always play fair with him.

He went out the way he had come, wiping his prints off along the way. His sense of fair play had its limits, thus Archer wasn’t about to leave behind any evidence that might earn him a trip to San Quentin to sniff a bunch of cyanide gas as the concluding frame of his personal horror flick.

He got back to his car and drove off, winding his way down after winding his way up. He stopped at a call box on the highway and reported a dead body at Eleanor Lamb’s house, giving the address. He didn’t provide his name, rank, or PI license number despite the dispatcher’s demanding all personal info from him except his ring size. It might come back to bite him, but so would willingly sticking his neck out.

He didn’t want to meet the deputy sheriffs on the drive east. At this hour of the morning, in a car that stood out, that would only get him pulled over with difficult questions to follow. So he drove past the Sea Lion and the Albatross and headed west. When he was far enough away from Las Flores and reached a part of Malibu that was far less developed, he pulled over to the beach side and parked behind some scrub bushes, just in case the cops decided to look for whoever had called them, or killed the guy in the house.

He got out, took off his shoes and socks, and put them on the car seat, then rolled up his pants and walked along the beach. It was low tide, and the coolness of the sand worked its way up to his injured head. He found a dry place to sit down and watched the ocean recede south toward San Diego and Tijuana. During the summers a surfing crowd had started invading the beaches here. He’d watched the surfers serenade the bathing suit ladies with their tales of derring-do, often strumming a ukulele while doing so. He’d seen more than one fresh-faced, wide-eyed young woman taken in by this glib crap, which usually ended with a face slap and/or a paternity suit.

He looked out to the water and saw a white light. It might be from the cargo ship he had seen earlier, but then again probably not. Enough time had passed for it to be well out of sight by now. And this light was far closer. The ship was probably making for port along the coast.

Malibu was a slender appendage sticking out from the torso of California. He was on a part of Malibu sand that also had sharp, vertical bluffs as a backstop. At high tide some of the old caves would fill up with water. People would occasionally find gold doubloons from Spanish vessels that had gone down in the notorious storms that made this section of the coast a mariner’s nightmare back in the day.

In the distance a few minutes later, he heard the LA County Sheriff’s radio patrol cars come flying along the coast road, the pitch of their sirens wound so high they could probably be heard high up in the canyons. He was too far away to see them from here, but he could imagine their flashing lights being like stark embers in the darkness. He listened to their cacophony until the canyon swallowed them all whole, just like the whale had Jonah. Only then did he rise on shaky legs and start to walk to his car.

The next moment he dropped to the sand. He had happened to glance back out toward the water and his gaze had held on that same light out there. It had changed course and was coming closer by the second. He could hear its motor revved high over the crash of the waves. He knelt there, his heart hammering, as the now-revealed boat swept over the line of breakers. It quickly beached and the men swarmed off. Archer lay flat on the sand and continued to watch as one of the men splayed a flashlight beam around the area. The light passed just over the sharp brim of Archer’s hat and then swung back.

Under the moonlight he saw the other men begin to unload large crates from the boat. It had to be illegal what they were doing. Honest businesses did not do their work well before dawn on a deserted beach on the first day of the new year.

He edged back on the beach as the men carrying the boxes headed to the dry sand.

Some words came to him over the sounds of the breakers. Spanish, then English.

Archer began to inch backward in a crabwalk because the men’s path was taking them dangerously close to where he was. He managed to reach a spot that seemed far enough away to commence a hastier retreat. He turned, half rose, and hoofed it, his bare feet struggling in the loose sand and his injured head pounding beyond all reckoning.

He had looked back to make sure no one had seen him when he suddenly slammed into something hard. He and the other man went down in a tangle of arms and legs. Archer couldn’t see the fellow’s face because of the darkness and the extreme thrashing the two were engaged in, with their bodies rolling around violently. He had to keep shutting his eyes because their movements were causing the sand to fly all over them. Archer felt a hand reach for his throat and grip there. He pushed the palm of his hand into the man’s face, levering the neck back enough to where the man gasped and let go his grip.

The next instant Archer saw the glint of a knife and the blade came at his throat. Before it plunged into him he grabbed the man’s wrist and luckily found his strength superior to his opponent’s, so he could keep the knife at bay. He smelled the garlic and tobacco breath and felt the foul spit on his face as they writhed and tussled in the sand, each trying to gain control of the weapon.

Then, needing to end this before the other men on the beach saw what was happening, Archer closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and rammed the crown of his head into the left side of the man’s jaw. The man cried out and he dropped the knife. Archer next clocked him with a stunner of a right cross, and the man fell limp to the sand, with his face turned away. Archer got to his feet, fought the blinding pain in his head, and ran for it.

The sand got more densely packed the farther he went. Archer picked up speed, but his strides were still wobbly and clumsy. He heard the report of a gun and felt a round crack past him and embed itself in the wood of a fence set up to stop erosion. It couldn’t have been the guy he’d fought, it had to be the men from the boat, which meant they had spotted him.

He redoubled his efforts, running flat-out, his breaths coming in bursts and his heart beating so fast he wasn’t sure what would give out first, his lungs or his ticker.

More shots came, and with them he heard feet running hard behind him and the cries of the men to whom those feet and gunfire belonged. As he approached the road, from the corner of his eye he thought he saw what looked like a truck parked about a hundred yards away on the edge of the sand. He reached his car where it was hidden behind the scrub bushes, slid into the front seat, turned the key, and slammed down the starter button. The French beast roared to life. He wheeled the Delahaye around, pointed it to the coast road, and pushed his bare foot down hard on the accelerator.

He hit the asphalt, and in the straightaway he wound the car up to a hundred. He zipped around the first curve as the car banked around the wall of a canyon and he was out of the sight line and range of the guns. He drove fast for another mile and then, conscious that more cops might be on the way to the murder scene, he slowed down and drove the rest of the way back to Callahan’s place at a sedate pace. He reached it just about the time the milkman dropped off three fresh bottles on her front porch. Archer pressed his face against the steering wheel and thanked God and everyone else he could think of for sparing him tonight.