Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, No. 1, 1960

1.

It had rained in the canyon during the night. The world had the colored freshness of a butterfly just emerged from the chrysalis stage and trembling in the sun. Actual butterflies danced in flight across free spaces of air or played a game of tag without any rules among the tree branches. At this height there were giant pines among the eucalyptus trees.

I parked my car where I usually parked it, in the shadow of the stone building just inside the gates of the old estate. Just inside the posts, that is — the gates had long since fallen from their rusted hinges. The owner of the country house had died in Europe, and the place had stood empty since the war. It was one reason I came here on the occasional Sunday when I wanted to get away from the Hollywood rat race. Nobody lived within two miles.

Until now, anyway. The window of the gatehouse overlooking the drive had been broken the last time that I’d noticed it. Now it was patched up with a piece of cardboard. Through a hole punched in the middle of the cardboard, bright emptiness watched me — human eye’s bright emptiness.

“Hello,” I said.

A grudging voice answered: “Hello.”

The gatehouse door creaked open, and a white-haired man came out. A smile sat strangely on his ravaged face. He walked mechanically, shuffling in the leaves, as if his body was not at home in the world. He wore faded denims through which his clumsy muscles bulged like animals in a sack. His feet were bare.

I saw when he came up to me that he was a huge old man, a head taller than I was and a foot wider. His smile was not a greeting or any kind of a smile that I could respond to. It was the stretched, blind grimace of a man who lived in a world of his own, a world that didn’t include me.

“Get out of here. I don’t want trouble. I don’t want nobody messing around.”

“No trouble,” I said. “I came up to do a little target shooting. I probably have as much right here as you have.”

His eyes widened. They were as blue and empty as holes in his head through which I could see the sky.

“Nobody has the rights here that I have. I lifted up mine eyes unto the hills and the voice spoke and I found sanctuary. Nobody’s going to force me out of my sanctuary.”

I could feel the short hairs bristling on the back of my neck. Though my instincts didn’t say so, he was probably a harmless nut. I tried to keep my instincts out of my voice.

“I won’t bother you. You don’t bother me. That should be fair enough.”

“You bother me just being here. I can’t stand people. I can’t stand cars. And this is twice in two days you come up harrying me and harassing me.”

“I haven’t been here for a month.”

“You’re an Ananias liar.” His voice whined like a rising wind. He clenched his knobbed fists and shuddered on the verge of violence.

“Calm down, old man,” I said. “There’s room in the world for both of us.”

He looked around at the high green world as if my words had snapped him out of a dream.

“You’re right,” he said in a different voice. “I have been blessed, and I must remember to be joyful. Joyful. Creation belongs to all of us poor creatures.” His smiling teeth were as long and yellow as an old horse’s. His roving glance fell on my car. “And it wasn’t you who come up here last night. It was a different automobile. I remember.”

He turned away, muttering something about washing his socks, and dragged his homy feet back into the gatehouse. I got my targets, pistol, and ammunition out of the trunk, and locked the car up tight. The old man watched me through his peephole, but he didn’t come out again.

Below the road, in the wild canyon, there was an open meadow backed by a sheer bank which was topped by the crumbling wall of the estate. It was my shooting gallery. I slid down the wet grass of the bank and tacked a target to an oak tree, using the butt of my heavy-framed twenty-two as a hammer.

While I was loading it, something caught my eye — something that glinted red, like a ruby among the leaves. I stooped to pick it up and found that it was attached. It was a red-enameled fingernail at the tip of a white hand. The hand was cold and stiff.

I let out a sound that must have been loud in the stillness. A jay bird erupted from a manzanita, sailed up to a high limb of the oak, and yelled down curses at me. A dozen chickadees flew out of the oak and settled in another at the far end of the meadow.

Panting like a dog, I scraped away the dirt and wet leaves that had been loosely piled over the body. It was the body of a girl wearing a midnight-blue sweater and skirt. She was a blonde, about seventeen. The blood that congested her face made her look old and dark. The white rope with which she had been garrotted was sunk almost out of sight in the flesh of her neck. The rope was tied at the nape in what is called a granny’s knot, the kind of knot that any child can tie.

I left her where she lay and climbed back up to the road on trembling knees. The grass showed traces of the track her body had made where someone had dragged it down the bank. I looked for tire marks on the shoulder and in the rutted, impacted gravel of the road. If there had been any, the rain had washed them out.

I trudged up the road to the gatehouse and knocked on the door. It creaked inward under my hand. Inside there was nothing alive but the spiders that had webbed the low black beams. A dustless rectangle in front of the stone fireplace showed where a bedroll had lain. Several blackened tin cans had evidently been used as cooking utensils. Gray embers lay on the cavernous hearth. Suspended above it from a spike in the mantel was a pair of white-cotton work socks. The socks were wet. Their owner had left in a hurry.

It wasn’t my job to hunt him. I drove down the canyon to the highway and along it for a few miles to the outskirts of the nearest town. There a drab green box of a building with a flag in front of it housed the Highway Patrol. Across the highway was a lumberyard, deserted on Sunday.

2.

“Too bad about Ginnie,” the dispatcher said when she had radioed the local sheriff. She was a thirtyish brunette with fine black eyes and dirty fingernails. She had on a plain white blouse, which was full of her. “Do you know Ginnie?”

“My young sister knows her. They go — they went to high school together. It’s an awful thing when it happens to a young person like that. I knew she was missing — I got the report when I came on at eight — but I kept hoping that she was just off cm a lost weekend, like. Now there’s nothing to hope for, is there?” Her eyes were liquid with feeling. “Poor Ginnie. And poor Mr. Green.”

“Her father?”

“That’s right. He was in here with her high-school counselor not more than an hour ago. I hope he doesn’t come back right away. I don’t want to be the one that has to tell him.”

“How long has the girl been missing?”

“Just since last night. We got the report here about 3 a.m., I think. Apparently she wandered away from a party at Cavern Beach. Down the pike a ways.” She pointed south toward the mouth of the canyon. “What kind of party was it?” “Some of the kids from the Union High School — they took some wienies down and had a fire. The party was part of graduation week. I happen to know about it because my young sister Alice went. I didn’t want her to go, even if it was supervised. That can be a dangerous beach at night. All sorts of bums and scroungers hang out in the caves. Why, one night when I was a kid I saw a naked man down there in the moonlight. He didn’t have a woman with him, either.”

She caught the drift of her words, did a slow blush, and checked her loquacity. I leaned on the plywood counter between us.

“What sort of girl was Ginnie Green?”

“I wouldn’t know. I never really knew her.”

“Your sister does.”

“I don’t let my sister run around with girls like Ginnie Green. Does that answer your question?”

“Not in any detail.”

“It seems to me you ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m naturally interested, since I found her. Also, I happen to be a private detective.”

“Looking for a job?”

“I can always use a job.”

“So can I, and I’ve got one and I don’t intend to lose it.” She softened the words with a smile. “Excuse me; I have work to do.”

She turned to her short-wave and sent out a message to the patrol cars that Virginia Green had been found. Virginia Green’s father heard it as he came in the door. He was a puffy gray-faced man with red-rimmed eyes. Striped pajama bottoms showed below the cuffs of his trousers. His shoes were muddy, and he walked as if he had been walking all night

He supported himself on the edge of the counter, opening and shutting his mouth like a beached fish. Words came out, half strangled by shock.

“I heard you say she was dead, Anita.”

The woman raised her eyes to his. “Yes. I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Green.”

He put his face down on the counter and stayed there like a penitent, perfectly still. I could hear a clock somewhere, snipping off seconds, and in the back of the room the L.A. police signals like muttering voices coming in from another planet. Another planet very much like this one, where violence measured out the hours.

“It’s my fault,” Green said to the bare wood under his face. “I didn’t bring her up properly. I haven’t been a good father.”

The woman watched him with dark and glistening eyes ready to spill. She stretched out an unconscious hand to touch him, pulled her hand back in embarrassment when a second man came into the station. He was a young man with crew-cut brown hair, tanned and fit looking in a Hawaiian shirt. Fit looking except for the glare of sleeplessness in his eyes and the anxious lines around them.

“What is it, Miss Brocco? What’s the word?”

“The word is bad.” She sounded angry. “Somebody murdered Ginnie Green. This man here is a detective and he just found her body up in Trumbull Canyon.”

The young man ran his fingers through his short hair and failed to get a grip on it, or on himself. “My God! That’s terrible!”

“Yes,” the woman said. “You were supposed to be looking after her, weren’t you?”

They glared at each other across the counter. The tips of her breasts pointed at him through her blouse like accusing fingers. The young man lost the glaring match. He turned to me with a wilted look.

“My name is Connor, Franklin Connor, and I’m afraid I’m very much to blame in this. I’m a counselor at the high school, and I was supposed to be looking after the party, as Miss Brocco said.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t realize. I mean, I thought they were all perfectly happy and safe. The boys and girls had pretty well paired off around the fire. Frankly, I felt rather out of place. They aren’t children, you know. They were all seniors, they had cars. So I said good night and walked home along the beach. As a matter of fact, I was hoping for a phone call from my wife.”

“What time did you leave the party?”

“It must have been nearly eleven. The ones who hadn’t paired off had already gone home.”

“Who did Ginnie pair off with?”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid I wasn’t paying too much attention to the kids. It’s graduation week, and I’ve had a lot of problems—”

The father, Green, had been listening with a changing face. In a sudden yammering rage his implosive grief and guilt exploded outward.

“It’s your business to know! By God, I’ll have your job for this. I’ll make it my business to run you out of town.”

Connor hung his head and looked at the stained tile floor. There was a thin spot in his short brown hair, and his scalp gleamed through it like bare white bone. It was turning into a bad day for everybody, and I felt the dull old nagging pull of other people’s trouble, like a toothache you can’t leave alone.

3.

The sheriff arrived, flanked by several deputies and an HP sergeant. He wore a western hat and a rawhide tie and a blue gabardine business suit which together produced a kind of gun-smog effect. His name was Pearsall.

I rode back up the canyon in the right front seat of Pearsall’s black Buick, filling him in on the way. The deputies’ Ford and an HP car followed us, and Green’s new Oldsmobile convertible brought up the rear.

The sheriff said: “The old guy sounds like a looney to me.”

“He’s a loner, anyway.”

“You never can tell about them hoboes. That’s why I give my boys instructions to roust ’em. Well, it looks like an open-and-shut case.”

“Maybe. Let’s keep our minds open anyway, Sheriff.”

“Sure. Sure. But the old guy went on the run. That shows consciousness of guilt. Don’t worry, we’ll hunt him down. I got men that know these hills like you know your wife’s geography.”

“I’m not married.”

“Your girl friend, then.” He gave me a sideways leer that was no gift. “And if we can’t find him on foot, we’ll use the air squadron.”

“You have an air squadron?”

“Volunteer, mostly local ranchers. We’ll get him.” His tires squealed on a curve. “Was the girl raped?”

“I didn’t try to find out. I’m not a doctor. I left her as she was.” The sheriff grunted. “You did the right thing at that.”

Nothing had changed in the high meadow. The girl lay waiting to have her picture taken. It was taken many times, from several angles. All the birds flew away. Her father leaned on a tree and watched them go. Later he was sitting on the ground.

I volunteered to drive him home. It wasn’t pure altruism. I’m incapable of it. I said when I had turned his Oldsmobile:

“Why did you say it was your fault, Mr. Green?”

He wasn’t listening. Below the road four uniformed men were wrestling a heavy covered aluminum stretcher up the steep bank. Green watched them as he had watched the departing birds, until they were out of sight around a curve.

“She was so young,” he said to the back seat.

I waited, and tried again. “Why did you blame yourself for her death?”

He roused himself from his daze. “Did I say that?”

“In the Highway Patrol office you said something of the sort.”

He touched my arm. “I didn’t mean I killed her.”

“I didn’t think you meant that. I’m interested in finding out who did.”

“Are you a cop — a policeman?”

“I have been.”

“You’re not with the locals.”

“No. I happen to be a private detective from Los Angeles. The name is Archer.”

He sat and pondered this information. Below and ahead the summer sea brimmed up in the mouth of the canyon.

“You don’t think the old tramp did her in?” Green said.

“It’s hard to figure out how he could have. He’s a strong-looking old buzzard, but he couldn’t have carried her all the way up from the beach. And she wouldn’t have come along with him of her own accord.” It was a question, in a way.

“I don’t know,” her father said. “Ginnie was a little wild. She’d do a thing because it was wrong, because it was dangerous. She hated to turn down a dare, especially from a man.”

“There were men in her life?”

“She was attractive to men. You saw her, even as she is.” He gulped. “Don’t get me wrong. Ginnie was never a bad girl. She was a little headstrong, and I made mistakes. That’s why I blame myself.”

“What sort of mistakes, Mr. Green?”

“All the usual ones, and some I made up on my own.” His voice was bitter. “Ginnie didn’t have a mother, you see. Her mother left me years ago, and it was as much my fault as hers. I tried to bring her up myself. I didn’t give her proper supervision. I run a restaurant in town, and I don’t get home nights till after midnight. Ginnie was pretty much on her own since she was in grade school. We got along fine when I was there, but I usually wasn’t there.

“The worst mistake I made was letting her work in the restaurant over the weekends. That started about a year ago. She wanted the money for clothes, and I thought the discipline would be good for her. I thought I could keep an eye on her, you know. But it didn’t work out. She grew up too fast, and the night work played hell with her studies. I finally got the word from the school authorities. I fired her a couple of months ago, but I guess it was too late. We haven’t been getting along too well since then. Mr. Connor said she resented my indecision, that I gave her too much responsibility and then took it away again.”

“You’ve talked her over with Connor?”

“More than once, including last night. He was her academic counselor, and he was concerned about her grades. We both were. Ginnie finally pulled through, after all, thanks to him. She was going to graduate. Not that it matters now, of course.” Green was silent for a time. The sea expanded below us like a second blue dawn. I could hear the roar of the highway. Green touched my elbow again, as if he needed human contact.

“I oughtn’t to’ve blown my top at Connor. He’s a decent boy, he means well. He gave my daughter hours of free tuition this last month. And he’s got troubles of his own, like he said.”

“What troubles?”

“I happen to know his wife left him, same as mine. I shouldn’t have borne down so hard on him. I have a lousy temper, always have had.” He hesitated, then blurted out as if he had found a confessor: “I said a terrible thing to Ginnie at supper last night. She always has supper with me at the restaurant. I said if she wasn’t home when I got home last night that I’d wring her neck.”

“And she wasn’t home,” I said. And somebody wrung her neck, I didn’t say.

4.

The light at the highway was red. I glanced at Green. Tear tracks glistened like snail tracks on his face.

“Tell me what happened last night.”

“There isn’t anything much to tell,” he said. “I got to the house about twelve-thirty, and, like you said, she wasn’t home. So I called Al Brocco!s house. He’s my night cook, and I knew his youngest daughter Alice was at the moonlight party on the beach. Alioe was home all right.”

“Did you talk to Alice?”

“She was in bed asleep. Al woke her up, but I didn’t talk to her. She told him she didn’t know where Ginnie was. I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. Finally I got up and called Mr. Connor. That was about one-thirty. I thought I should get in touch with the authorities, but he said no, Ginnie had enough black marks against her already. He came over to the house and we waited for a while and then we went down to Cavern Beach. There was no trace of her. I said it was time to call in the authorities, and he agreed. We went to his beach house, because it was nearer, and called the sheriff’s office from there. We went back to the beach with a couple of flashlights and went through the caves. He stayed with me all night. I give him that.”

“Where are these caves?”

“We’ll pass them in a minute. I’ll show you if you want. But there’s nothing in any of the three of them.” Nothing but shadows and empty beer cans, discarded contraceptives, the odor of rotting kelp. I got sand in my shoes and sweat under my collar. The sun dazzled my eyes when I half-walked, half-crawled, from the last of the caves.

Green was waiting beside a heap of ashes.

“This is where they had the wienie roast,” he said.

I kicked the ashes. A half-burned sausage rolled along the sand. Sand fleas hopped in the sun like fat on a griddle. Green and I faced each other over the dead fire. He looked out to sea. A seal’s face floated like a small black nose cons beyond the breakers. Farther out a water skier slid between unfolding wings of spray.

Away up the beach two people were walking toward us. They were small and lonely and distinct as Chirico figures in the long white distance.

Green squinted against the sun. Red-rimmed or not, his eyes were good. “I believe that’s Mr. Connor. I wonder who the woman is with him.”

They were walking as close as lovers, just above the white margin of the surf. They pulled apart when they noticed us, but they were still holding hands as they approached.

“It’s Mrs. Connor,” Green said in a low voice.

“I thought you said she left him.”

“That’s what he told me last night She took off on him a couple of weeks ago, couldn’t stand a high-school teacher’s hours. She must have changed her mind.”

She looked as though she had a mind to change. She was a hard-faced blonde who walked like a man. A certain amount of style took the curse off her stiff angularity. She had on a madras shirt, mannishly cut, and a pair of black Capri pants that hugged her long, slim legs. She had good legs.

Connor looked at us in complex embarrassment. “I thought it was you from a distance, Mr. Green. I don’t believe you know my wife.”

“I’ve seen her in my place of business.” He explained to the woman: “I run the Highway Restaurant in town.”

“How do you do,” she said aloofly, then added in an entirely different voice: “You’re Virginia’s father, aren’t you? I’m so sorry.”

The words sounded queer. Perhaps it was the surroundings: the ashes on the beach, the entrances to the caves, the sea, and the empty sky which dwarfed us all. Green answered her solemnly.

“Thank you, ma’am. Mr. Connor was a strong right arm to me last night, I can tell you.” He was apologizing. And Connor responded:

“Why don’t you come to our place for a drink? It’s just down the beach. You look as if you could use one, Mr. Green. You, too,” he said to me. “I don’t believe I know your name.”

“Archer. Lew Archer.”

He gave me a hard hand. His wife interposed: “I’m sure Mr. Green and his friend won’t want to be bothered with us on a day like this. Besides, it isn’t even noon yet, Frank.”

She was the one who didn’t want to be bothered. We stood around for a minute, exchanging grim, nonsensical comments on the beauty of the day. Then she led Connor back in the direction they had come from. Private Property, her attitude seemed to say: Trespassers will be fresh-frozen.

I drove Green to the Highway Patrol station. He said that he was feeling better, and could make it home from there by himself. He thanked me profusely for being a friend in need to him, as he put it. He followed me to the door of the station, thanking me.

The dispatcher was cleaning her fingernails with an ivory-handled file. She glanced up eagerly.

“Did they catch him yet?”

“I was going to ask you the same question, Miss Brocco.”

“No such luck. But they’ll get him,” she said with female vindictiveness. “The sheriff called out his air squadron, and he sent to Ventura for bloodhounds.”

“Big deal.”

She bridled. “What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t think the old man of the mountain killed her. If he had, he wouldn’t have waited till this morning to go on the lam. He’d have taken off right away.”

“Then why did he go on the lam at all?” The word sounded strange in her prim mouth.

“I think he saw me discover the body, and realized he’d be blamed.” She considered this, bending the long nail file between her fingers. “If the old tramp didn’t do it, who did?”

“You may be able to help me answer that question.”

“Me help you? How?”

“You know Frank Connor, for one thing.”

“I know him. I’ve seen him about my sister’s grades a few times.”

“You don’t seem to like him much.”

“I don’t like him, I don’t dislike him. He’s just blah to me.”

“Why? What’s the matter with him?”

Her tight mouth quivered, and let out words: “I don’t know what’s the matter with him. He can’t keep his hands off of young girls.”

“How do you know that?”

“I heard it.”

“From your sister Alice?”

“Yes. The rumor was going around the school, she said.”

“Did the rumor involve Ginnie Green?”

She nodded. Her eyes were as black as fingerprint ink.

“Is that why Connor’s wife left him?”

“I wouldn’t know about that. I never even laid eyes on Mrs. Connor.”

“You haven’t been missing much.”

There was a yell outside, a kind of choked ululation. It sounded as much like an animal as a man. It was Green. When I reached the door, he was climbing out of his convertible with a heavy blue revolver in his hand.

“I saw the killer,” he cried out exultantly.

“Where?”

He waved the revolver toward the lumberyard across the road. “He poked his head up behind that pile of white pine. When he saw me, he ran like a deer. I’m going to get him.”

“No. Give me the gun.”

“Why? I got a license to carry it. And use it.”

He started across the four-lane highway, dodging through the moving patterns of the Sunday traffic as if he were playing parcheesi on the kitchen table at home. The sounds of brakes and curses split the air. He had scrambled over the locked gate of the yard before I got to it I went over after him.

5.

Green disappeared behind a pile of lumber. I turned the corner and saw him running halfway down a long aisle walled with stacked wood and floored with beaten earth. The old man of the mountain was running ahead of him. His white hair blew in the wind of his own movement. A burlap sack bounced on his shoulders like a load of sorrow and shame.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Green cried.

The old man ran on as if the devil himself were after him. He came to a cyclone fence, discarded his sack, and tried to climb it. He almost got over. Three strands of barbed wire along the top of the fence caught and held him struggling.

I heard a tearing sound, and then the sound of a shot. The huge old body espaliered on the fence twitched and went limp, fell heavily to the earth. Green stood over him breathing through his teeth.

I pushed him out of the way. The old man was alive, though there was blood in his mouth. He spat it onto his chin when I lifted his head.

“You shouldn’t ought to of done it. I come to turn myself in. Then I got ascairt.”

“Why were you scared?”

“I watched you uncover the little girl in the leaves. I knew I’d be blamed. I’m one of the chosen. They always blame the chosen. I been in trouble before.”

“Trouble with girls?” At my shoulder Green was grinning terribly. “Trouble with cops.”

“For killing people?” Green said. “For preaching on the street without a license. The voice told me to preach to the tribes of the wicked. And the voice told me this morning to come in and give my testimony.”

“What voice?”

“The great voice.” His voice was little and weak. He coughed red.

“He’s as crazy as a bedbug,” Green said.

“Shut up.” I turned back to the dying man. “What testimony do you have to give?”

“About the car I seen. It woke me up in the middle of the night, stopped in the road below my sanctuary.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know cars. I think it was one of them foreign cars. It made a noise to wake the dead.”

“Did you see who was driving it?”

“No. I didn’t go near. I was ascairt.”

“What time was this car in the road?”

“I don’t keep track of time. The moon was down behind the trees.” Those were his final words. He looked up at the sky with his sky-colored eyes, straight into the sun. His eyes changed color.

Green said: “Don’t tell them. If you do, I’ll make a liar out of you. I’m a respected citizen in this town. I got a business to lose. And they’ll believe me ahead of you, mister.”

“Shut up.”

He couldn’t. “The old fellow was lying, anyway. You know that. You heard him say yourself that he heard voices. That proves that he’s a psycho. He’s a psycho killer. I shot him down like you would a mad dog, and I did right.”

He waved the revolver.

“You did wrong. Green, and you know it. Give me that gun before it kills somebody else.”

He thrust it into my hand suddenly. I unloaded it, breaking my fingernails in the process, and handed it back to him empty. He nudged up against me.

“Listen, maybe I did do wrong. I had provocation. It doesn’t have to get out. I got a business to lose.”

He fumbled in his hip pocket and brought out a thick sharkskin wallet. “Here. I can pay you good money. You say that you’re a private eye; you know how to keep your lip buttoned.”

I walked away and left him blabbering beside the body of the man he had killed. They were both victims, in a sense, but only one of them had blood on his hands.

Miss Brocco was in the HP parking lot. Her bosom was jumping with excitement.

“I heard a shot.”

“Green shot the old man. Dead. You better send in for the meat wagon and call off your bloody dogs.”

The words hit her like slaps. She raised her hand to her face, defensively. “Are you mad at me? Why are you mad at me?”

“I’m mad at everybody.”

“You still don’t think he did it.”

“I know damned well he didn’t. I want to talk to your sister.”

“Alice? What for?”

“Information. She was on the beach with Ginnie Green last night. She may be able to tell me something.”

“You leave Alice alone.”

“I’ll treat her gently. Where do you live?”

“I don’t want my little sister dragged into this filthy mess.”

“All I want to know is who Ginnie paired off with.”

“I’ll ask Alice. I’ll tell you.”

“Come on, Miss Brocco, we’re wasting time. I don’t need your permission to talk to your sister, after all. I can get the address out of the phone book if I have to.”

She flared up and then flared down.

“You win. We live on Orlando Street, 224. That’s on the other side of town. You will be nice to Alice, won’t you? She’s bothered enough as it is about Ginnie’s death.”

“She really was a friend of Ginnie’s, then?”

“Yes. I tried to break it up. But you know how kids are — two motherless girls, they stick together. I tried to be like a mother to Alice.”

“What happened to your own mother?”

“Father— I mean, she died.” A greenish pallor invaded her face and turned it to old bronze. “Please. I don’t want to talk about it. I was only a kid when she died.”

She went back to her muttering radios. She was quite a woman, I thought as I drove away. Nubile but unmarried, probably full of untapped Mediterranean passions. If she worked an eight-hour shift and started at eight, she’d be getting off about four.

It wasn’t a large town, and it wasn’t far across it. The highway doubled as its main street. I passed the Union High School. On the green playing field beside it a lot of kids in mortarboards and gowns were rehearsing their graduation exercises. A kind of pall seemed to hang over the field. Perhaps it was in my mind.

Farther along the street I passed Green’s Highway Restaurant. A dozen cars stood in its parking space. A couple of white-uniformed waitresses were scooting around behind the plate-glass windows.

Orlando Street was a lower-middle-class residential street bisected by the highway. Jacaranda trees bloomed like low small purple clouds among its stucco and frame cottages. Fallen purple petals carpeted the narrow lawn in front of the Brocco house.

A thin, dark man, wiry under his T-shirt, was washing a small red Fiat in the driveway beside the front porch. He must have been over fifty, but his long hair was as black as an Indian’s. His Sicilian nose was humped in the middle by an old break.

“Mr. Brocco?”

“That’s me.”

“Is your daughter Alice home?”

“She’s home.”

“I’d like to speak to her.”

He turned off his hose, pointing its dripping nozzle at me like a gun.

“You’re a little old for her, ain’t you?”

“I’m a detective investigating the death of Ginnie Green.”

“Alice don’t know nothing about that.”

“I’ve just been talking to your older daughter at the Highway Patrol office. She thinks Alice may know something.”

He shifted on his feet. “Well, if Anita says it’s all right.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” a girl said from the front door. “Anita just called me on the telephone. Come in, Mister— Archer, isn’t it?”

“Archer.”

6.

She opened the screen door for me. It opened directly into a small square living room containing worn green frieze furniture and a television set which the girl switched off. She was a handsome, serious-looking girl, a younger version of her sister with ten years and ten pounds subtracted and a pony tail added. She sat down gravely on the edge of a chair, waving her hand at the chesterfield. Her movements were languid. There were blue depressions under her eyes. Her face was sallow.

“What kind of questions do you want to ask me? My sister didn’t say.”

“Who was Ginnie with last night?”

“Nobody. I mean, she was with me. She didn’t make out with any of the boys.” She glanced from me to the blind television set, as if she felt caught between. “It said on the television that she was with a man, that there was medical evidence to prove it. But I didn’t see her with no man. Any man.”

“Did Ginnie go with men?”

She shook her head. Her pony tail switched and hung limp. She was close to tears.

“You told Anita she did.”

“I did not!”

“Your sister wouldn’t lie. You passed on a rumor to her — a high-school rumor that Ginnie had had something to do with one man in particular.”

The girl was watching my face in fascination. Her eyes were like a bird’s eyes, bright and shallow and fearful.

“Was the rumor true?”

She shrugged her thin shoulders. “How would I know?”

“You were good friends with Ginnie.”

“Yes. I was.” Her voice broke on the past tense. “She was a real nice kid, even if she was kind of boy crazy.”

“She was boy crazy, but she didn’t make out with any of the boys last night.”

“Not while I was there.”

“Did she make out with Mr. Connor?”

“No. He wasn’t there. He went away. He said he was going home. He lives up the beach.”

“What did Ginnie do?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t notice.”

“You said she was with you. Was she with you all evening?”

“Yes.” Her face was agonized. “I mean no.”

“Did Ginnie go away, too?”

She nodded.

“In the same direction Mr. Connor took? The direction of his house?”

Her head moved almost imperceptibly downward.

“What time was that, Alice?”

“About eleven o’clock, I guess.”

“And Ginnie never came back from Mr. Connor’s house?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know for certain that she went there.”

“But Ginnie and Mr. Connor were good friends?”

“I guess so.”

“How good? Like a boy friend and a girl friend?”

She sat mute, her birdlike stare unblinking.

“Tell me, Alice.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of Mr. Connor?”

“No. Not him.”

“Has someone threatened you — told you not to talk?”

Her head moved in another barely perceptible nod.

“Who threatened you, Alice? You’d better tell me for your own protection. Whoever did threaten you is probably a murderer.”

She burst into frantic tears. Brocco came to the door.

“What goes on in here?”

“Your daughter is upset. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, and I know who upset her. You better get out of here or you’ll be sorrier.”

He opened the screen door and held it open, his head poised like a dark and broken ax. I went out past him. He spat after me. The Broccos were a very emotional family.

I started back toward Connor’s beach house on the south side of town but ran into a diversion on the way. Green’s car was parked in the lot beside his restaurant. I went in.

The place smelled of grease. It was almost full of late Sunday lunchers seated in booths and at the U-shaped breakfast bar in the middle. Green himself was sitting on a stool behind the cash register counting money. He was counting it as if his life and his nope of heaven depended on the colored paper in his hands.

He looked up, smiling loosely and vaguely. “Yes, sir?” Then he recognized me. His face went through a quick series of transformations and settled for a kind of boozy shame. “I know I shouldn’t be here working on a day like this. But it keeps my mind off my troubles. Besides, they steal you blind if you don’t watch ’em. And I’ll be needing the money.”

“What for, Mr. Green?”

“The trial.” He spoke the word as if it gave him a bitter satisfaction.

“Whose trial?”

“Mine. I told the sheriff what the old guy said. And what I did. I know what I did. I shot him down like a dog, and I had no right to. I was crazy with my sorrow, you might say.”

He was less crazy now. The shame in his eyes was clearing. But the sorrow was still there in their depths like stone at the bottom of a well.

“I’m glad you told the truth, Mr. Green.”

“So am I. It doesn’t help him, and it doesn’t bring Ginnie back. But at least I can live with myself.”

“Speaking of Ginnie,” I said. “Was she seeing quite a lot of Frank Connor?”

“Yeah. I guess you could say so. He came over to help her with her studies quite a few times. At the house, and at the library. He didn’t charge me any tuition, either.”

“That was nice of him. Was Ginnie fond of Connor?”

“Sure she was. She thought very highly of Mr. Connor.”

“Was she in love with him?”

“In love? Hell, I never thought of anything like that. Why?”

“Did she have dates with Connor?”

“Not to my knowledge,” he said. “If she did, she must have done it behind my back.” His eyes narrowed to two red swollen slits. “You think Frank Connor had something to do with her death?”

“It’s a possibility. Don’t go into a sweat now. You know where that gets you.”

“Don’t worry. But what about this Connor? Did you get something on him? I thought he was acting queer last night.”

“Queer in what way?”

“Well, he was pretty tight when he came to the house. I gave him a stiff snort, and that straightened him out for a while. But later on, down on the beach, he got almost hysterical. He was running around like a rooster with his head chopped off.”

“Is he a heavy drinker?”

“I wouldn’t know. I never saw him drink before last night at my house.” Green narrowed his eyes. “But he tossed down a triple bourbon like it was water. And remember this morning, he offered us a drink on the beach. A drink in the morning, that isn’t the usual thing, especially for a high-school teacher.”

“I noticed that.”

“What else have you been noticing?”

“We won’t go into it now,” I said. “I don’t want to ruin a man unless and until I’m sure he’s got it coming.”

He sat on his stool with his head down. Thought moved murkily under his knitted brows. His glance fell on the money in his hands. He was counting tens.

“Listen, Mr. Archer. You’re working on this case on your own, aren’t you? For free?”

“So far.”

“So go to work for me. Nail Connor for me, and I’ll pay you whatever you ask.”

“Not so fast,” I said. “We don’t know that Connor is guilty. There are other possibilities.”

“Such as?”

“If I tell you, can I trust you not to go on a shooting spree?”

“Don’t worry,” he repeated. “I’ve had that.”

“Where’s your revolver?”

“I turned it in to Sheriff Pearsall. He asked for it.”

We were interrupted by a family group getting up from one of the booths. They gave Green their money and their sympathy. When they were out of hearing, I said: “You mentioned that your daughter worked here in the restaurant for a while. Was Al Brocco working here at the same time?”

“Yeah. He’s been my night cook for six-seven years. Al is a darned good cook. He trained as a chef on the Italian line.” His slow mind, punchy with grief, did a double-take. “You wouldn’t be saying that he messed around with Ginnie?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Shucks, Al is old enough to be her father. He’s all wrapped up in his own girls, Anita in particular. He worships the ground she walks on. She’s the mainspring of that family.”

“How did he get on with Ginnie?”

“Very well. They kidded back and forth. She was the only one who could ever make him smile. Al is a sad man, you know. He had a tragedy in his life.”

“His wife’s death?”

“It was worse than that,” Green said. “Al Brocco killed his wife with his own hand. He caught her with another man and put a knife in her.”

“And he’s walking around loose?”

“The other man was a Mex,” Green said in an explanatory way. “A wetback. He couldn’t even talk the English language. The town hardly blamed Al, the jury gave him manslaughter. But when he got out of the pen, the people at the Pink Flamingo wouldn’t give him his old job back — he used to be chef there. So I took him on. I felt sorry for his girls, I guess, and Al’s been a good worker. A man doesn’t do a thing like that twice, you know.”

He did another slow mental double-take. His mouth hung open. I could see the gold in its corners. “Let’s hope not.”

“Listen here,” he said. “You go to work for me, eh? You nail the guy, whoever he is. I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you now. How much do you want?” I took a hundred dollars of his money and left him trying to comfort himself with the rest of it. The smell of grease stayed in my nostrils.

7.

Connor’s house clung to the edge of a low bluff about halfway between the HP station and the mouth of the canyon where the thing had begun: a semi-cantilevered redwood cottage with a closed double garage fronting the highway. From the grape stake-fenced patio in the angle between the garage and the front door a flight of wooden steps climbed to the flat roof, which was railed as a sun deck. A second set of steps descended the fifteen or twenty feet to the beach.

I tripped on a pair of garden shears crossing the patio to the garage window. I peered into the interior twilight. Two things inside interested me: a dismasted flattie sitting on a trailer, and a car. The sailboat interested me because its cordage resembled the white rope that had strangled Ginnie. The car interested me because it was an imported model, a low-slung Triumph two-seater.

I was planning to have a closer look at it when a woman’s voice screeked overhead like a gull’s:

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Mrs. Connor was leaning over the railing on the roof. Her hair was in curlers. She looked like a blond Gorgon. I smiled up at her, the way that Greek whose name I don’t remember must have smiled.

“Your husband invited me for a drink, remember? I don’t know whether he gave me a rain check or not.”

“He did not! Go away! My husband is sleeping!”

“Shh. You’ll wake him up. You’ll wake up the people in Forest Lawn.”

She put her hand to her mouth. From the expression on her face she seemed to be biting her hand. She disappeared for a moment, and then came down the steps with a multicolored silk scarf over her curlers. The rest of her was sheathed in a white satin bathing suit. Against it her flesh looked like brown wood.

“You get out of here,” she said. “Or I shall call the police.”

“Fine. Call them. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“Are you implying that we have?”

“We’ll see. Why did you leave your husband?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“I’m making it my business, Mrs. Connor. I’m a detective investigating the murder of Ginnie Green. Did you leave Frank on account of Ginnie Green?”

“No. No! I wasn’t even aware—” Her hand went to her mouth again. She chewed on it some more.

“You weren’t aware that Frank was having an affair with Ginnie Green?”

“He wasn’t.”

“So you say. Others say different.”

“What others? Anita Brocco? You can’t believe anything that woman says. Why, her own father is a murderer, everybody in town knows that.”

“Your own husband may be another, Mrs. Connor. You might as well come clean with me.”

“But I have nothing to tell you.”

“You can tell me why you left him.”

“That is a private matter, between Frank and me. It has nothing to do with anybody but us.” She was calming down, setting her moral forces in a stubborn, defensive posture.

“There’s usually only the one reason.”

“I had my reasons. I said they were none of your business. I chose for reasons of my own to spend a month with my parents in Long Beach.”

“When did you come back?”

“This morning.”

“Why this morning?”

“Frank called me. He said he needed me.” She touched her thin breast absently, pathetically, as if perhaps she hadn’t been much needed in the past.

“Needed you for what?”

“As his wife,” she said. “He said there might be tr—” Her hand went to her mouth again. She said around it: “Trouble.”

“Did he name the kind of trouble?”

“No.”

“What time did he call you?”

“Very early, around seven o’clock.”

“That was more than an hour before I found Ginnie’s body.”

“He knew she was missing. He spent the whole night looking for her.”

“Why would he do that, Mrs. Connor?”

“She was his student. He was fond of her. Besides, he was more or less responsible for her.”

“Responsible for her death?”

“How dare you say a thing like that?”

“If he dared to do it, I can dare to say it.”

“He didn’t!” she cried. “Frank is a good man. He may have his faults, but he wouldn’t kill anyone. I know him.”

“What are his faults?”

“We won’t discuss them.”

“Then may I have a look in your garage?”

“What for? What are you looking for?”

“I’ll know when I find it.” I turned toward the garage door.

“You mustn’t go in there,” she said intensely. “Not without Frank’s permission.”

“Wake him up and we’ll get his permission.”

“I will not. He got no sleep last night.”

“Then I’ll just have a look without his permission.”

“I’ll kill you if you go in there.” She picked up the garden shears and brandished them at me — a sick-looking lioness defending her overgrown cub. The cub himself opened the front door of the cottage. He slouched in the doorway groggily, naked except for white shorts. “What goes on, Stella?”

“This man has been making the most horrible accusations.”

His blurred glance wavered between us and focused on her. “What did he say?”

“I won’t repeat it.”

“I will, Mr. Connor. I think you were Ginnie Green’s lover, if that’s the word. I think she followed you to this house last night, around midnight. I think she left it with a rope around her neck.”

Connor’s head jerked. He started to make a move in my direction. Something inhibited it, like an invisible leash. His body slanted toward me, static, all the muscles taut. It resembled an anatomy specimen with the skin off. Even his face seemed mostly bone and teeth.

I hoped he’d swing on me and let me hit him. He didn’t. Stella Connor dropped the garden shears. They made a noise like the dull clank of doom.

“Aren’t you going to deny it, Frank?”

“I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t. I admit that we — that we were together last night, Ginnie and I.”

“Ginnie and I?” the woman repeated incredulously.

His head hung down. “I’m sorry, Stella. I didn’t want to hurt you more than I have already. But it has to come out. I took up with the girl after you left. I was lonely and feeling sorry for myself. Ginnie kept hanging around. One night I drank too much and let it happen. It happened more than once. I was so flattered that a pretty young girl—”

“You fool!” she said in a deep, harsh voice.

“Yes, I’m a moral fool. That’s no surprise to you, is it?”

“I thought you respected your pupils, at least. You mean to say you brought her into our own house, into our own bed?”

“You’d left. It wasn’t ours any more. Besides, she came of her own accord. She wanted to come. She loved me.”

She said with grinding contempt: “You poor, groveling ninny. And to think you had the gall to ask me to come back here, to make you look respectable.”

I cut in between them. “Was she here last night, Connor?”

“She was here. I didn’t invite her. I wanted her to come, but I dreaded it, too. I knew that I was taking an awful chance. I drank quite a bit to numb my conscience—”

“What conscience?” Stella Connor said.

“I have a conscience,” he said without looking at her. “You don’t know the hell I’ve been going through. After she came, after it happened last night, I drank myself unconscious.”

“Do you mean after you killed her?” I said.

“I didn’t kill her. When I passed out, she was perfectly all right. She was sitting up drinking a cup of instant coffee. The next thing I knew, hours later, her father was on the telephone, and she was gone.”

“Are you trying to pull the old blackout alibi? You’ll have to do better than that.”

“I can’t. It’s the truth.”

“Let me into your garage.”

He seemed almost glad to be given an order, a chance for some activity. The garage wasn’t locked. He raised the overhead door and let the daylight into the interior. It smelled of paint. There were empty cans of marine paint on a bench beside the sailboat. Its hull gleamed virgin white.

“I painted my flattie last week,” he said inconsequentially.

“You do a lot of sailing?”

“I used to. Not much lately.”

“No,” his wife said from the doorway. “Frank changed his hobby to women. Wine and women.”

“Lay off, eh?” His voice was pleading.

She looked at him from a great and stony distance.

8.

I walked around the boat, examining the cordage. The starboard jib line had been sheared off short. Comparing it with the port line, I found that the missing piece was approximately a yard long. That was the length of the piece of white rope that I was interested in.

“Hey!” Connor grabbed the end of the cut line. He fingered it as if it was a wound in his own flesh. “Who’s been messing with my lines? Did you cut it, Stella?”

“I never go near your blessed boat,” she said.

“I can tell you where the rest of that line is, Connor. A line of similar length and color and thickness was wrapped around Ginnie Green’s neck when I found her.”

“Surely you don’t believe I put it there?”

I tried to, but I couldn’t. Small-boat sailors don’t cut their jib lines, even when they’re contemplating murder. And while Connor was clearly no genius, he was smart enough to have known that the line could easily be traced to him. Perhaps someone else had been equally smart.

I turned to Mrs. Connor. She was standing in the doorway with her legs apart. Her body was almost black against the daylight. Her eyes were hooded by the scarf on her head.

“What time did you get home, Mrs. Connor?”

“About ten o’clock this morning. I took a bus as soon as my husband called. But I’m in no position to give him an alibi.”

“An alibi wasn’t what I had in mind. I suggest another possibility, that you came home twice. You came home unexpectedly last night, saw the girl in the house with your husband, waited in the dark till the girl came out, waited with a piece of rope in your hands — a piece of rope you’d cut from your husband’s boat in the hope of getting him punished for what he’d done to you. But the picture doesn’t fit the frame, Mrs. Connor. A sailor like your husband wouldn’t cut a piece of line from his own boat. And even in the heat of murder he wouldn’t tie a granny’s knot. His fingers would automatically tie a reef knot. That isn’t true of a woman’s fingers.”

She held herself upright with one long, rigid arm against the doorframe.

“I wouldn’t do anything like that. I wouldn’t do that to Frank.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t in daylight, Mrs. Connor. Things have different shapes at midnight.”

“And hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Is that what you’re thinking? You’re wrong. I wasn’t here last night. I was in bed in my father’s house in Long Beach. I didn’t even know about that girl and Frank.”

“Then why did you leave him?”

“He was in love with another woman. He wanted to divorce me and marry her. But he was afraid — afraid that it would affect his position in town. He told me on the phone this morning that it was all over with the other woman. So I agreed to come back to him.” Her arm dropped to her side.

“He said that it was all over with Ginnie?”

Possibilities were racing through my mind. There was the possibility that Connor had been playing reverse English, deliberately and clumsily framing himself in order to be cleared. But that was out of far left field.

“Not Ginnie,” his wife said. “The other woman was Anita Brocco. He met her last spring in the course of work and fell in love — what he calls in love. My husband is a foolish, fickle man.”

“Please, Stella. I said it was all over between me and Anita, and it is.” She turned on him in quiet savagery. “What does it matter now? If it isn’t one girl it’s another. Any kind of female flesh will do to poultice your sick little ego.”

Her cruelty struck inward and hurt her. She stretched out her hand toward him. Suddenly her eyes were blind with tears.

“Any flesh but mine, Frank,” she said brokenly.

Connor paid no attention to his wife.

He said to me in a hushed voice: “My God, I never thought. I noticed her car last night when I was walking home along the beach.”

“Whose car?”

“Anita’s red Fiat. It was parked at the viewpoint a few hundred yards from here.” He gestured vaguely toward town. “Later, when Ginnie was with me, I thought I heard someone in the garage. But I was too drunk to make a search.” His eyes burned into mine. “You say a woman tied that knot?”

“All we can do is ask her.”

We started toward my car together. His wife called after him:

“Don’t go, Frank. Let him handle it.”

He hesitated, a weak man caught between opposing forces.

“I need you,” she said. “We need each other.”

I pushed him in her direction.

9.

It was nearly four when I got to the HP station. The patrol cars had gathered like homing pigeons for the change in shift. Their uniformed drivers were talking and laughing inside.

Anita Brocco wasn’t among them. A male dispatcher, a fat-faced man with pimples, had taken her place behind the counter.

“Where’s Miss Brocco?” I asked.

“In the ladies’ room. Her father is coming to pick her up any minute.” She came out wearing lipstick and a light beige coat. Her face turned beige when she saw my face.

She came toward me in slow motion, leaned with both hands flat on the counter. Her lipstick looked like fresh blood on a corpse.

“You’re a handsome woman, Anita. Too bad about you.”

“Too bad.” It was half a statement and half a question. She looked down at her hands.

“Your fingernails are clean now. They were dirty this morning. You were digging in the dirt in the dark last night, weren’t you?”

“No.”

“You were, though. You saw them together and you couldn’t stand it. You waited in ambush with a rope, and put it around her neck. Around your own neck, too.”

She touched her neck. The talk and laughter had subsided around us. I could hear the tick of the clock again, and the muttering signals coming in from inner space.

“What did you use to cut the rope with, Anita? The garden shears?”

Her red mouth groped for words and found them. “I was crazy about him. She took him away. It was all over before it started. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted him to suffer.”

“He’s suffering. He’s going to suffer more.”

“He deserves to. He was the only man—” She shrugged in a twisted way and looked down at her breast. “I didn’t want to kill her, but when I saw them together — I saw them through the window. I saw her take off her clothes and put them on. Then I thought of the night my father — when he — when there was all the blood in Mother’s bed. I had to wash it out of the sheets.”

The men around me were murmuring. One of them, a sergeant, raised his voice.

“Did you kill Ginnie Green?”

“Yes.”

“Are you ready to make a statement?” I said.

“Yes. I’ll talk to Sheriff Pearsall. I don’t want to talk here, in front of my friends.” She looked around doubtfully.

“I’ll take you downtown.”

“Wait a minute.” She glanced once more at her empty hands. “I left my purse in the — in the back room. I’ll go and get it.”

She crossed the office like a zombie, opened a plain door, closed it behind her. She didn’t come out. After a while we broke the lock and went in after her.

Her body was cramped on the narrow floor. The ivory-handled nail file lay by her right hand. There were bloody holes in her white blouse and in the white breast under it. One of them had gone as deep as her heart.

Later Al Brocco drove up in her red Fiat and came into the station.

“I’m a little late,” he said to the room in general. “Anita wanted me to give her car a good cleaning. Where is she, anyway?”

The sergeant cleared his throat to answer Brocco.

All us poor creatures, as the old man of the mountain had said that morning.