Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1953

The Imaginary Blonde by John Ross Macdonald

How do you pin a murder on a woman who doesn’t exist?

It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood. I had followed a man from Fresno to San Diego and lost him in the maze of streets in Old Town. When I picked up his trail again, it was cold. He had crossed the border, and my instructions went no further than the United States.

Halfway home, just above Emerald Bay, I overtook the worst driver in the world. He was driving a black fishtail Cadillac as if he was tacking a sailboat. The heavy car wove back and forth across the freeway, using two of its four lanes, and sometimes three. It was late, and I was in a hurry to get some sleep. I started to pass it on the right, at a time when it was riding the double line. The cadillac drifted towards me like an unguided missile, and forced me off the road in a screeching skid.

I speeded up to pass on the left. Simultaneously, the driver of the Cadillac accelerated. My acceleration couldn’t match his. We raced neck and neck down the middle of the road. I wondered if he was drunk or crazy or afraid of me. Then the freeway ended. I was doing eighty on the wrong side of a two-lane highway, and a truck came over a rise ahead like a blazing double comet. I floorboarded the gas pedal and cut over sharply to the right, threatening the Cadillac’s fenders and its driver’s life. In the approaching headlights, his face was as blank and white as a piece of paper, with charred black holes for eyes. His shoulders were naked.

At the last possible second he slowed enough to let me get by. The truck went off onto the shoulder, honking angrily. I braked gradually, hoping to force the Cadillac to stop. It looped past me in an insane arc, tires skittering, and was sucked away into darkness.

When I finally came to a full stop, I had to pry my fingers off the wheel. My knees were remote and watery. After smoking part of a cigarette, I U-turned and drove very cautiously back to Emerald Bay. I was long past the hot-rod age, and I needed rest.

The first motel I came to, the Siesta, was decorated with a vacancy sign and a neon Mexican sleeping luminously under a sombrero. Envying him, I parked on the gravel apron in front of the motel office. There was a light inside. The glass-paned door was standing open, and I went in. The little room was pleasantly furnished with rattan and chintz. I jangled the bell on the desk a few times. No one appeared, so I sat down to wait and lit a cigarette. An electric clock on the wall said a quarter to one.

I must have dozed for a few minutes. A dream rushed by the threshold of my consciousness, making a gentle noise. Death was in the dream. He drove a black Cadillac loaded with flowers. When I woke up, the cigarette was starting to burn my fingers. A thin man in a gray flannel shirt was standing over me with a doubtful look on his face.

He was big-nosed and small-chinned, and he wasn’t as young as he gave the impression of being. His teeth were bad, the sandy hair was thinning and receding. He was the typical old youth who scrounged and wheedled his living around motor courts and restaurants and hotels, and hung on desperately to the frayed edge of other people’s lives.

“What do you want?” he said. “Who are you? What do you want?” His voice was reedy and changeable like an adolescent’s.

“A room.”

“Is that all you want?”

From where I sat, it sounded like an accusation. I let it pass. “What else is there? Circassian dancing girls? Free popcorn?”

He tried to smile without showing his bad teeth. The smile was a dismal failure, like my joke. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “You woke me up. I never make much sense right after I just wake up.”

“Have a nightmare?”

His vague eyes expanded like blue bubblegum bubbles. “Why did you ask me that?”

“Because I just had one. But skip it. Do you have a vacancy or don’t you?”

“Yessir. Sorry, sir.” He swallowed whatever bitter taste he had in his mouth, and assumed an impersonal, obsequious manner. “You got any luggage, sir?”

“No luggage.”

Moving silently in tennis sneakers like a frail ghost of the boy he once had been, he went behind the counter, and took my name, address, license number, and five dollars. In return, he gave me a key numbered fourteen and told me where to use it. Apparently he despaired of a tip.

Room fourteen was like any other middle-class motel room touched with the California-Spanish mania. Artificially roughened plaster painted adobe color, poinsettia-red curtains, imitation parchment lampshade on a twisted black iron stand. A Rivera reproduction of a sleeping Mexican hung on the wall over the bed. I succumbed to its suggestion right away, and dreamed about Circassian dancing girls.

Along towards morning one of them got frightened, through no fault of mine, and began to scream her little Circassian lungs out. I sat up in bed, making soothing noises, and woke up. It was nearly nine by my wristwatch. The screaming ceased and began again, spoiling the morning like a fire siren outside the window. I pulled on my trousers over the underwear I’d been sleeping in, and went outside.

A young woman was standing on the walk outside the next room. She had a key in one hand and a handful of blood in the other. She wore a wide multi-colored skirt and a low-cut gypsy sort of blouse. The blouse was distended and her mouth was open, and she was yelling her head off. It was a fine dark head, but I hated her for spoiling my morning sleep.

I took her by the shoulders and said, “Stop it.”

The screaming stopped. She looked down sleepily at the blood on her hand. It was as thick as axle grease, and almost as dark in color.

“Where did you get that?”

“I slipped and fell in it. I didn’t see it.”

Dropping the key on the walk, she pulled her skirt to one side with her clean hand. Her legs were bare and brown. Her skirt was stained at the back with the same thick fluid.

“Where? In this room?”

She faltered, “Yes.”

Doors were opening up and down the drive. Half-a-dozen people began to converge on us. A dark-faced man about four-and-a-half feet high came scampering from the direction of the office, his little pointed shoes dancing in the gravel.

“Come inside and show me,” I said to the girl.

“I can’t. I won’t.” Her eyes were very heavy, and surrounded by the bluish pallor of shock.

The little man slid to a stop between us, reached up and gripped the upper part of her arm. “What is the matter, Ella? Are you crazy, disturbing the guests?”

She said, “Blood,” and leaned against me with her eyes closed.

His sharp black glance probed the situation. He turned to the other guests, who had formed a murmurous semicircle around us.

“It is perfectly hokay. Do not be concerned, ladies and gentlemen. My daughter cut herself a little bit. It is perfectly all right.”

Circling her waist with one long hairy arm, he hustled her through the open door and slammed it behind him. I caught it on my foot and followed them in.

The room was a duplicate of mine, including the reproduction over the unmade bed, but everything was reversed as in a mirror image. The girl took a few weak steps by herself and sat on the edge of the bed. Then she noticed the blood spots on the sheets. She stood up quickly. Her mouth opened, rimmed with white teeth.

“Don’t do it,” I said. “We know you have a very fine pair of lungs.”

The little man turned on me. “Who do you think you are?”

“The name is Archer. I have the next room.”

“Get out of this one, please.”

“I don’t think I will.”

He lowered his greased black head as if he was going to butt me. Under his sharkskin jacket, a hunch protruded from his back like a displaced elbow. He seemed to reconsider the butting gambit, and decided in favor of diplomacy:

“You are jumping to conclusions, mister. It is not so serious as it looks. We had a little accident here last night.”

“Sure, your daughter cut herself. She heals remarkably fast.”

“Nothing like that.” He fluttered one long hand. “I said to the people outside the first thing that came to my mind. Actually, it was a little scuffle. One of the guests suffered a nosebleed.”

The girl moved like a sleepwalker to the bathroom door and switched on the light. There was a pool of blood coagulating on the black and white checkerboard linoleum, streaked where she had slipped and fallen in it.

“Some nosebleed,” I said to the little man. “Do you run this joint?”

“I am the proprietor of the Siesta motor hotel, yes. My name is Salanda. The gentleman is susceptible to nosebleed. He told me so himself.”

“Where is he now?”

“He checked out early this morning.”

“In good health?”

“Certainly in good health.”

I looked around the room. Apart from the unmade bed with the brown spots on the sheets, it contained no signs of occupancy. Someone had spilled a pint of blood and vanished.

The little man opened the door wide and invited me with a sweep of his arm to leave. “If you will excuse me, sir, I wish to have this cleaned up as quickly as possible. Ella, will you tell Lorraine to get to work on it right away pronto? Then maybe you better lie down for a little while, eh?”

“I’m all right now, father. Don’t worry about me.”

When I checked out a few minutes later, she was sitting behind the desk in the front office, looking pale but composed. I dropped my key on the desk in front of her.

“Feeling better, Ella?”

“Oh. I didn’t recognize you with all your clothes on.”

“That’s a good line. May I use it?”

She lowered her eyes and blushed. “You’re making fun of me. I know I acted foolishly this morning.”

“I’m not so sure. What do you think happened in thirteen last night?”

“My father told you, didn’t he?”

“He gave me a version, two of them in fact. I doubt that they’re the final shooting script.”

Her hand went to the central hollow in the gypsy blouse. Her arms and shoulders were slender and brown, the tips of her fingers carmine. “Shooting?”

“A cinema term,” I said. “But there might have been a real shooting at that. Don’t you think so?”

Her front teeth pinched her lower lip. She looked like somebody’s pet rabbit. I restrained an impulse to pat her sleek brown head.

“That’s ridiculous. This is a respectable motel. Anyway, father asked me not to discuss it with anybody.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He loves this place, that’s why. He doesn’t want any scandal made out of nothing. If we lost our good reputation here, it would break my father’s heart.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”

She stood up, smoothing her skirt. I saw that she’d changed it. “You leave him alone. He’s a dear little man. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, trying to stir up trouble where there isn’t any.”

I backed away from her righteous indignation: female indignation is always righteous: and went out to my car. The early spring sun was dazzling. Beyond the freeway and the drifted sugary dunes, the bay was Prussian blue. The road cut inland across the base of the peninsula and returned to the sea a few miles north of the town. Here a wide blacktop parking space shelved off to the left of the highway, overlooking the white beach and whiter breakers. Signs at each end of the turnout stated that this was a County Park, No Beach Fires.

The beach and the blacktop expanse above it were deserted except for a single car, which looked very lonely. It was a long black Cadillac nosed into the cable fence at the edge of the beach. I braked and turned off the highway and got out. The man in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac didn’t turn his head as I approached him. His chin was propped on the steering wheel, and he was gazing out across the endless blue sea.

I opened the door and looked into his face. It was paper white. The dark brown eyes were sightless. The body was unclothed except for the thick fur matted on the chest, and a clumsy bandage tied around the waist. The bandage was composed of several blood-stained towels, held in place by a knotted piece of nylon fabric whose nature I didn’t recognize immediately. Examining it more closely, I saw that it was a woman’s slip. The left breast of the garment was embroidered in purple with a heart, containing the name, “Fern,” in slanting script. I wondered who Fern was.

The man who was wearing her purple heart had dark curly hair, heavy black eyebrows, a heavy chin sprouting black beard. He was rough looking in spite of his anemia and the lipstick smudged on his mouth.

There was no registration on the steeringpost, and nothing in the glove-compartment but a half-empty box of shells for a .38 automatic. The ignition was still turned on. So were the dash and headlights, but they were dim. The gas gauge registered empty. Curlyhead must have pulled off the highway soon after he passed me, and driven all the rest of the night in one place.

I untied the slip, which didn’t look as if it would take fingerprints, and went over it for a label. It had one: Gretchen, Palm Springs. It occurred to me that it was Saturday morning and that I’d gone all winter without a weekend in the desert. I retied the slip the way I’d found it, and drove back to the Siesta Motel.

Ella’s welcome was a few degrees colder than absolute zero. “Well!” She glared down her pretty rabbit nose at me. “I thought we were rid of you.”

“So did I. But I just couldn’t tear myself away.”

She gave me a peculiar look, neither hard nor soft, but mixed. Her hand went to her hair, then reached for a registration card. “I suppose if you want to rent a room, I can’t stop you. Only please don’t imagine you’re making an impression on me. You’re not. You leave me cold, mister.”

“Archer,” I said. “Lew Archer. Don’t bother with the card. I came back to use your phone.”

“Aren’t there any other phones?” She pushed the telephone across the desk. “I guess it’s all right, long as it isn’t a toll call.”

“I’m calling the Highway Patrol. Do you know their local number?”

“I don’t remember.” She handed me the telephone directory.

“There’s been an accident,” I said as I dialled.

“A highway accident? Where did it happen?”

“Right here, sister. Right here in room thirteen.”

But I didn’t tell that to the Highway Patrol. I told them I had found a dead man in a car on the parking lot above the county beach. The girl listened with widening eyes and nostrils. Before I finished she rose in a flurry and left the office by the rear door.

She came back with the proprietor. His eyes were black and bright like nailheads in leather, and the scampering dance of his feet was almost frenzied. “What is this?”

“I came across a dead man up the road a piece.”

“So why do you come back here to telephone?” His head was in butting position, his hands outspread and gripping the corners of the desk. “Has it got anything to do with us?”

“He’s wearing a couple of your towels.”

“What?”

“And he was bleeding heavily before he died. I think somebody shot him in the stomach. Maybe you did.”

“You’re loco,” he said, but not very emphatically. “Crazy accusations like that, they will get you into trouble. What is your business?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“You followed him here, is that it? You were going to arrest him, so he shot himself?”

“Wrong on both counts,” I said. “I came here to sleep. And they don’t shoot themselves in the stomach. It’s too uncertain, and slow. No suicide wants to die of peritonitis.”

“So what are you doing now, trying to make scandal for my business?”

“If your business includes trying to cover for murder.”

“He shot himself,” the little man insisted.

“How do you know?”

“Donny. I spoke to him just now.”

“And how does Donny know?”

“The man told him.”

“Is Donny your night keyboy?”

“He was. I think I will fire him, for stupidity. He didn’t even tell me about this mess. I had to find it out for myself. The hard way.”

“Donny means well,” the girl said at his shoulder. “I’m sure he didn’t realize what happened.”

“Who does?” I said. “I want to talk to Donny. But first let’s have a look at the register.”

He took a pile of cards from a drawer and riffled through them. His large hands, hairy-backed, were calm and expert, like animals that lived a serene life of their own, independent of their emotional owner. They dealt me one of the cards across the desk. It was inscribed in block capitals: Richard Rowe, Detroit, Mich.

I said: “There was a woman with him.”

“Impossible.”

“Or he was a transvestite.”

He surveyed me blankly, thinking of something else. “The HP, did you tell them to come here? They know it happened here?”

“Not yet. But they’ll find your towels. He used them for bandage.”

“I see. Yes. Of course.” He struck himself with a clenched fist on the temple. It made a noise like someone maltreating a pumpkin. “You are a private detective, you say. Now if you informed the police that you were on the trail of a fugitive, a fugitive from justice. He shot himself rather than face arrest. For five hundred dollars?”

“I’m not that private,” I said. “I have some public responsibility. Besides, the cops would do a little checking and catch me out.”

“Not necessarily. He was a fugitive from justice, you know.”

“I hear you telling me.”

“Give me a little time, and I can even present you with his record.”

The girl was leaning back away from her father, her eyes starred with broken illusions. “Daddy,” she said weakly.

He didn’t hear her. All of his bright black attention was fixed on me. “Seven hundred dollars?”

“No sale. The higher you raise it, the guiltier you look. Were you here last night?”

“You are being absurd,” he said. “I spent the entire evening with my wife. We drove up to Los Angeles to attend the ballet.” By way of supporting evidence, he hummed a couple of bars from Tchaikovsky. “We didn’t arrive back here in Emerald Bay until nearly two o’clock.”

“Alibis can be fixed.”

“By criminals, yes,” he said. “I am not a criminal.”

The girl put a hand on his shoulder. He cringed away, his face creased by monkey fury, but his face was hidden from her.

“Daddy,” she said. “Was he murdered, do you think?”

“How do I know?” His voice was wild and high, as if she had touched the spring of his emotion. “I wasn’t here. I only know what Donny told me.”

The girl was examining me with narrowed eyes, as if I was a new kind of animal she had discovered and was trying to think of a use for.

“This gentleman is a detective,” she said, “or claims to be.”

I pulled out my photostat and slapped it down on the desk. The little man picked it up and looked from it to my face. “Will you go to work for me?”

“Doing what, telling little white lies?”

The girl answered for him: “See what you can find out about this — this death. On my word of honor, father had nothing to do with it.”

I made a snap decision, the kind you live to regret. “All right. I’ll take a fifty-dollar advance. Which is a good deal less than five hundred. My first advice to you is to tell the police everything you know. Provided that you’re innocent.”

“You insult me,” he said.

But he flicked a fifty-dollar bill from the cash drawer and pressed it into my hand fervently, like a love token. I had a queasy feeling that I had been conned into taking his money, not much of it but enough. The feeling deepened when he still refused to talk. I had to use all the arts of persuasion even to get Donny’s address out of him.

The key boy lived in a shack on the edge of a desolate stretch of dunes. I guessed that it had once been somebody’s beach house, before sand had drifted like unthawing snow in the angles of the walls and winter storms had broken the tiles and cracked the concrete foundations. Huge chunks of concrete were piled haphazardly on what had been a terrace overlooking the sea.

On one of the tilted slabs, Donny was stretched like a long albino lizard in the sun. The onshore wind carried the sound of my motor to his ears. He sat up blinking, recognized me when I stopped the car, and ran into the house.

I descended flagstone steps and knocked on the warped door. “Open up, Donny.”

“Go away,” he answered huskily. His eye gleamed like a snail through a crack in the wood.

“I’m working for Mr. Salanda. He wants us to have a talk.”

“You can go and take a running jump at yourself, you and Mr. Salanda both.”

“Open it or I’ll break it down.”

I waited for a while. He shot back the bolt. The door creaked reluctantly open. He leaned against the doorpost, searching my face with his eyes, his hairless body shivering from an internal chill. I pushed past him, through a kitchenette that was indescribably filthy, littered with the remnants of old meals, and gaseous with their odors. He followed me silently on bare soles into a larger room whose sprung floorboards undulated under my feet. The picture window had been broken and patched with cardboard. The stone fireplace was choked with garbage. The only furniture was an army cot in one corner where Donny apparently slept.

“Nice homey place you have here. It has that lived-in quality.”

He seemed to take it as a compliment, and I wondered if I was dealing with a moron. “It suits me. I never was much of a one for fancy quarters. I like it here, where I can bear the ocean at night.”

“What else do you hear at night, Donny?”

He missed the point of the question, or pretended to. “All different things. Big trucks going past on the highway. I like to hear those night sounds. Now I guess I can’t go on living here. Mr. Salanda owns it, he lets me live here for nothing. Now he’ll be kicking me out of here, I guess.”

“On account of what happened last night?”

“Uh-huh.” He subsided onto the cot, his doleful head supported by his hands.

I stood over him. “Just what did happen last night, Donny?”

“A bad thing,” he said. “This fella checked in about ten o’clock—”

“The man with the dark curly hair?”

“That’s the one. He checked in about ten, and I gave him room thirteen. Around about midnight I thought I heard a gun go off from there. It took me a little while to get my nerve up, then I went back to see what was going on. This fella came out of the room, without no clothes on. Just some kind of a bandage around his waist. He looked like some kind of a crazy Indian or something. He had a gun in his hand, and he was staggering, and I could see that he was bleeding some. He come right up to me and pushed the gun in my gut and told me to keep my trap shut. He said I wasn’t to tell anybody I saw him, now or later. He said if I opened my mouth about it to anybody, that he would come back and kill me. But now he’s dead, isn’t he?”

“He’s dead.”

I could smell the fear on Donny: there’s an unexplained trace of canine in my chromosomes. The hairs were prickling on the back of my neck, and I wondered if Donny’s fear was of the past or for the future. The pimples stood out in bas-relief against his pale lugubrious face.

“I think he was murdered, Donny. You’re lying, aren’t you?”

“Me lying?” But his reaction was slow and feeble.

“The dead man didn’t check in alone. He had a woman with him.”

“What woman?” he said in elaborate surprise.

“You tell me. Her name was Fern. I think she did the shooting, and you caught her red-handed. The wounded man got out of the room and into his car and away. The woman stayed behind to talk to you. She probably paid you to dispose of his clothes and fake a new registration card for the room. But you both overlooked the blood on the floor of the bathroom. Am I right?”

“You couldn’t be wronger, mister. Are you a cop?”

“A private detective. You’re in deep trouble, Donny. You’d better talk yourself out of it if you can, before the cops start on you.”

“I didn’t do anything.” His voice broke like a boy’s. It went strangely with the glints of grey in his hair.

“Faking the register is a serious rap, even if they don’t hang accessory to murder on you.”

He began to expostulate in formless sentences that ran together. At the same time his hand was moving across the dirty grey blanket. It burrowed under the pillow and came out holding a crumpled card. He tried to stuff it into his mouth and chew it. I tore it away from between his discolored teeth.

It was a registration card from the motel, signed in a boyish scrawl: Mr. and Mrs. Richard Rowe, Detroit, Mich.

Donny was trembling violently. Below his cheap cotton shorts, his bony knees vibrated like tuning forks. “It wasn’t my fault,” he cried. “She held a gun on me.”

“What did you do with the man’s clothes?”

“Nothing. She didn’t even let me into the room. She bundled them up and took them away herself.”

“Where did she go?”

“Down the highway towards town. She walked away on the shoulder of the road and that was the last I saw of her.”

“How much did she pay you, Donny?”

“Nothing, not a cent. I already told you, she held a gun on me.”

“And you were so scared you kept quiet until this morning?”

“That’s right. I was scared. Who wouldn’t be scared?”

“She’s gone now,” I said. “You can give me a description of her.”

“Yeah.” He made a visible effort to pull his vague thoughts together. One of his eyes was a little off center, lending his face a stunned, amorphous appearance. “She was a big tall dame with blondey hair.”

“Dyed?”

“I guess so, I dunno. She wore it in a braid like, on top of her head. She was kind of fat, built like a lady wrestler, great big watermelons on her. Big legs.”

“How was she dressed?”

“I didn’t hardly notice, I was so scared. I think she had some kind of a purple coat on, with black fur around the neck. Plenty of rings on her fingers and stuff.”

“How old?”

“Pretty old, I’d say. Older than me, and I’m going on thirty-nine.”

“And she did the shooting?”

“I guess so. She told me to say if anybody asked me, I was to say that Mr. Rowe shot himself.”

“You’re very suggestible, aren’t you, Donny? It’s a dangerous way to be, with people pushing each other around the way they do.”

“I didn’t get that, mister. Come again.” He batted his pale blue eyes at me, smiling expectantly.

“Skip it,” I said and left him.

A few hundred yards up the highway I passed an HP car with two uniformed men in the front seat looking grim. Donny was in for it now. I pushed him out of my mind and drove across country to Palm Springs.

Palm Springs is still a one-horse town, but the horse is a Palomino with silver trappings. Most of the girls were Palomino, too. The main street was a cross-section of Hollywood and Vine transported across the desert by some unnatural force and disguised in western costumes which fooled nobody. Not even me.

I found Gretchen’s lingerie shop in an expensive-looking arcade built around an imitation flagstone patio. In the patio’s centre a little fountain gurgled pleasantly, flinging small lariats of spray against the heat. It was late in March, and the season was ending. Most of the shops, including the one I entered, were deserted except for the hired help.

It was a small cool shop, faintly perfumed by a legion of vanished dolls. Stockings and robes and other garments were coiled on the glass counters or hung like brilliant treesnakes on display stands along the narrow walls. A henna-headed woman emerged from rustling recesses at the rear and came tripping towards me on her toes.

“You are looking for a gift, sir?” she cried with a wilted kind of gaiety. Behind her painted mask, she was tired and aging and it was Saturday afternoon and the lucky ones were dunking themselves in kidneyshaped swimming pools behind walls she couldn’t climb.

“Not exactly. In fact, not at all. A peculiar thing happened to me last night. I’d like to tell you about it, but it’s kind of a complicated story.”

She looked me over quizzically and decided that I worked for a living, too. The phony smile faded away. Another smile took its place, which I liked better. “You look as if you had a fairly rough night. And you could do with a shave.”

“I met a girl,” I said. “Actually she was a mature woman, a statuesque blonde to be exact. I picked her up on the beach at Laguna, if you want me to be brutally frank.”

“I couldn’t bear it if you weren’t. What kind of a pitch is this, brother?”

“Wait. You’re spoiling my story. Something clicked when we met, in that sunset light, on the edge of the warm summer sea.”

“It’s always bloody cold when I go in.”

“It wasn’t last night. We swam in the moonlight and had a gay time and all. Then she went away. I didn’t realize until she was gone that I didn’t know her telephone number, or even her last name.”

“Married woman, eh? What do you think I am, a lonely hearts club?” Still, she was interested, though she probably didn’t believe me. “She mentioned me, is that it? What was her first name?”

“Fern.”

“Unusual name. You say she was a big blonde?”

“Magnificently proportioned,” I said. “If I had a classical education I’d call her Junoesque.”

“You’re kidding me, aren’t you?”

“A little.”

“I thought so. Personally I don’t mind a little kidding. What did she say about me?”

“Nothing but good. As a matter of fact, I was complimenting her on her — er — garments.”

“I see.” She was long past blushing. “We had a customer last fall some time, by the name of Fern. Fern Dee. She had some kind of a job at the Joshua Club, I think. But she doesn’t fit the description at all. This one was a brunette, a middle-sized brunette, quite young. I remember the name Fern because she wanted it embroidered on all the things she bought. A corny idea if you ask me, but that was her girlish desire and who am I to argue with girlish desires.”

“Is she still in town?”

“I haven’t seen her lately, not for months. But it couldn’t be the woman you’re looking for. Or could it?”

“How long ago was she in here?”

She pondered. “Early last fall, around the start of the season. She only came in that once, and made a big purchase, stockings and nightwear and underthings. The works. I remember thinking at the time, here was a girlie who suddenly hit the chips but heavily.”

“She might have put on weight since then, and dyed her hair. Strange things can happen to the female form.”

“You’re telling me,” she said. “How old was — your friend?”

“About forty, I’d say, give or take a little.”

“It couldn’t be the same one then. The girl I’m talking about was twenty-five at the outside, and I don’t make mistakes about women’s ages. I’ve seen too many of them in all stages, from Quentin quail to hags, and I certainly do mean hags.”

“I bet you have.”

She studied me with eyes shadowed by mascara and experience. “You a policeman?”

“I have been.”

“You want to tell mother what it’s all about?”

“Another time. Where’s the Joshua Club?”

“It won’t be open yet.”

“I’ll try it anyway.”

She shrugged her thin shoulders and gave me directions. I thanked her.

It occupied a plain-faced one-story building half a block off the main street. The padded leather door swung inward when I pushed it. I passed through a lobby with a retractable roof, which contained a jungle growth of banana trees. The big main room was decorated with tinted desert photomurals. Behind a rattan bar with a fishnet canopy, a white-coated Caribbean type was drying shot-glasses with a dirty towel. His face looked uncommunicative.

On the orchestra dais beyond the piled chairs in the dining area, a young man in shirt-sleeves was playing bop piano. His fingers shadowed the tune, ran circles around it, played leap-frog with it, and. managed never to hit it on the nose. I stood beside him for a while and listened to him work. He looked up finally, still strumming with his left hand in the bass. He had soft-centered eyes and frozen-looking nostrils and a whistling mouth.

“Nice piano,” I said.

“I think so.”

“Fifty-second Street?”

“It’s the street with the beat and I’m not effete.” His left hand struck the same chord three times and dropped away from the keys. “Looking for somebody, friend?”

“Fern Dee. She asked me to drop by some time.”

“Too bad. Another wasted trip. She left here end of last year, the dear. She wasn’t a bad little nightingale but she was no pro, Joe, you know? She had it but she couldn’t project it. When she warbled the evening died, no matter how hard she tried, I don’t wanna be snide.”

“Where did she lam, Sam, or don’t you give a damn?”

He smiled like a corpse in a deft mortician’s hands. “I heard the boss retired her to private life. Took her home to live with him. That is what I heard. But I don’t mix with the big boy socially, so I couldn’t say for sure that she’s impure. Is it anything to you?”

“Something, but she’s over twenty-one.”

“Not more than a couple of years over twenty-one.” His eyes darkened, and his thin mouth twisted sideways angrily. “I hate to see it happen to a pretty little twist like Fern. Not that I yearn—”

I broke in on his nonsense rhymes: “Who’s the big boss you mentioned, the one Fern went to live with?”

“Angel. Who else?”

“What heaven does he inhabit?”

“You must be new in these parts—” His eyes swivelled and focused on something over my shoulder. His mouth opened and closed.

A grating tenor said behind me: “Got a question you want answered, bud?”

The pianist went back to the piano as if the ugly tenor had wiped me out, annulled my very existence. I turned to its source. He was standing in a narrow doorway behind the drums, a man in his thirties with thick black curly hair and a heavy jaw blue-shadowed by closely shaven beard. He was almost the living image of the dead man in the Cadillac. The likeness gave me a jolt. The heavy black gun in his hand gave me another.

He came around the drums and approached me, bull-shouldered in a fuzzy tweed jacket, holding the gun in front of him like a dangerous gift. The pianist was doing wry things in quickened tempo with the dead march from Saul. A wit.

The dead man’s almost-double waved his cruel chin and the crueller gun in unison. “Come inside, unless you’re a government man. If you are, I’ll have a look at your credentials.”

“I’m a freelance.”

“Inside then.”

The muzzle of the automatic came into my solar plexus like a pointing iron finger. Obeying its injunction, I made my way between empty music stands and through the narrow door behind the drums. The iron finger, probing my back, directed me down a lightless corridor to a small square office containing a metal desk, a safe, a filing cabinet. It was windowless, lit by fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Under their pitiless glare, the face above the gun looked more than ever like the dead man’s face. I wondered if I had been mistaken about his deadness, or if the desert heat had addled my brain.

“I’m the manager here,” he said, standing so close that I could smell the piney stuff he used on his crisp dark hair. “You got anything to ask about the members of the staff, you ask me.”

“Will I get an answer?”

“Try me, bud.”

“The name is Archer,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”

“Working for who?”

“You wouldn’t be interested.”

“I am, though, very much interested.” The gun hopped forward like a toad into my stomach again, with the weight of his shoulder behind it. “Working for who did you say?”

I swallowed anger and nausea, estimating my chances of knocking the gun to one side and taking him bare-handed. The chances seemed pretty slim. He was heavier than I was, and he held the automatic as if it had grown out of the end of his arm. You’ve seen too many movies, I told myself. I told him: “A motel owner on the coast. A man was shot in one of his rooms last night. I happened to check in there a few minutes later. The old boy hired me to look into the shooting.”

“Who was it got himself ventilated?”

“He could be your brother,” I said. “Do you have a brother?”

He lost his color. The center of his attention shifted from the gun to my face. The gun nodded. I knocked it up and sideways with a hard left uppercut. Its discharge burned the side of my face and drilled a hole in the wall. My right sank into his neck. The gun thumped the cork floor.

He went down but not out, his spread hand scrabbling for the gun, then closing on it. I stamped his wrist. He grunted but wouldn’t let go of it. I threw a rabbit punch at the short hairs on the back of his neck. He took it and came up under it with the gun, shaking his head from side to side like a bull.

“Up with the hands now,” he murmured. He was one of those men whose voices went soft and mild when they were in killing mood. He had the glassy impervious eyes of a killer. “Is Bart dead?”

“Very dead. He was shot in the belly.”

“Who shot him?”

“That’s the question.”

“Who shot him?” he said in a quiet white-faced rage. The single eye of the gun stared emptily at my midriff. “It could happen to you, bud, here and now.”

“A woman was with him. She took a quick powder after it happened.”

“I heard you say a name to Alfie piano-player. Was it Fern?”

“It could have been.”

“What do you mean, it could have been?”

“She was there in the room, apparently. If you can give me a description of her?”

His hard brown eyes looked past me. “I can do better than that. There’s a picture of her on the wall behind you. Take a look at it. Keep those hands up high.”

I shifted my feet and turned uneasily. The wall was blank. I heard him draw a breath and move, and tried to evade his blow. No use. It caught the back of my head. I pitched forward against the blank wall and slid down it into three dimensions of blankness.

The blankness coagulated into colored shapes. The shapes were half human and half beast and they dissolved and re-formed, dancing through the eaves of my mind to dream a mixture of both jive and nightmare music. A dead man with a furred breast climbed out of a hole and doubled and quadrupled. I ran away from them through a twisting tunnel which led to an echo chamber. Under the roaring surge of the nightmare music, a rasping tenor was saying:

“I figure it like this. Vario’s tip was good. Bart found her in Acapulco, and he was bringing her back from there. She conned him into stopping off at this motel for the night. Bart always went for her.”

“I didn’t know that,” a dry old voice put in. “This is very interesting news about Bart and Fern. You should have told me before about this. Then I would not have sent him for her and this would not have happened. Would it, Gino?”

My mind was still partly absent, wandering underground in the echoing caves. I couldn’t recall the voices, or who they were talking about. I had barely sense enough to keep my eyes closed and go on listening. I was lying on my back on a hard surface. The voices were above me.

The tenor said: “You can’t blame Bartolomeo. She’s the one, the dirty treacherous lying little bitch.”

“Calm yourself, Gino. I blame nobody. But more than ever now, we want her back, isn’t that right?”

“I’ll kill her,” he said softly, almost wistfully.

“Perhaps. It may not be necessary now. I dislike promiscuous killing—”

“Since when, Angel?”

“Don’t interrupt, it’s not polite. I learned to put first things first. Now what is the most important thing? Why did we want her back in the first place? I will tell you: to shut her mouth. The government heard she left me, they wanted her to testify about my income. We wanted to find her first and shut her mouth, isn’t that right?”

“I know how to shut her mouth,” the younger man said very quietly.

“First we try a better way, my way. You learn when you’re as old as I am there is a use for everything, and not to be wasteful. Not even wasteful with somebody else’s blood. She shot your brother, right? So now we have something on her, strong enough to keep her mouth shut for good. She’d get off with second degree, with what she’s got, but even that is five to ten in Tehachapi. I think all I need to do is tell her that. First we have to find her, eh?”

“I’ll find her. Bart didn’t have any trouble finding her.”

“With Vario’s tip to help him, no. But I think I’ll keep you here with me, Gino. You’re too hot-blooded, you and your brother both. I want her alive. Then I can talk to her, and then we’ll see.”

“You’re going soft in your old age, Angel.”

“Am I?” There was a light slapping sound, of a blow on flesh. “I have killed many men, for good reasons. So I think you will take that back.”

“I take it back.”

“And call me Mr. Funk. If I am so old, you will treat my grey hairs with respect. Call me Mr. Funk.”

“Mr. Funk.”

“All right, your friend here, does he know where Fern is?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Mr. Funk.”

“Mr. Funk.” Gino’s voice was a whining snarl.

“I think he is coming to. His eyelids fluttered.”

The toe of a shoe prodded my side. Somebody slapped my face a number of times. I opened my eyes and sat up. The back of my head was throbbing like an engine fuelled by pain. Gino rose from a squatting position and stood over me.

“Stand up.”

I rose shakily to my feet. I was in a stone-walled room with a high beamed ceiling, sparsely furnished with stiff old black oak chairs and tables. The room and the furniture seemed to have been built for a race of giants.

The man behind Gino was small and old and weary. He might have been an unsuccessful grocer or a superannuated barkeep who had come to California for his health. Clearly his health was poor. Even in the stifling heat he looked pale and chilly, as if he had caught chronic death from one of his victims. He moved closer to me, his legs shuffling feebly in wrinkled blue trousers that bagged at the knees. His shrunken torso was swathed in a heavy blue turtleneck sweater. He had two days’ beard on his chin, like moth-eaten grey plush.

“Gino informs me that you are investigating a shooting.” His accent was Middle-European and very faint, as if he had forgotten his origins. “Where did this happen, exactly?”

“I don’t think I’ll tell you that. You can read it in the papers tomorrow night if you are interested.”

“I am not prepared to wait. I am impatient. Do you know where Fern is?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I did.”

“But you know where she was last night.”

“I couldn’t be sure.”

“Tell me anyway to the best of your knowledge.”

“I don’t think I will.”

“He doesn’t think he will,” the old man said to Gino.

“I think you better let me out of here. Kidnaping is a tough rap. You don’t want to die in the pen.”

He smiled at me, with a tolerance more terrible than anger. His eyes were like thin stab-wounds filled with watery blood. Shuffling unhurriedly to the head of the mahogany table behind him, he pressed a spot in the rug with the toe of one felt slipper. Two men in blue serge suits entered the room and stepped towards me briskly. They belonged to the race of giants it had been built for.

Gino moved behind me and reached to pin my arms. I pivoted, landed one short punch, and took a very hard counter below the belt. Something behind me slammed my kidneys with the heft of a trailer truck bumper. I turned on weakening legs and caught a chin with my elbow. Gino’s fist, or one of the beams from the ceiling, landed on my neck. My head rang like a gong. Under its clangor, Angel was saying pleasantly:

“Where was Fern last night?”

I didn’t say.

The men in blue serge held me upright by the arms while Gino used my head as a punching bag. I rolled with his lefts and rights as well as I could but his timing improved and mine deteriorated. His face wavered and receded. At intervals Angel inquired politely if I was willing to assist him now. I asked myself confusedly in the hail of fists what I was holding out for or who I was protecting. Probably I was holding out for myself. It seemed important to me not to give in to violence. But my identity was dissolving and receding like the face in front of me.

I concentrated on hating Gino’s face. That kept it clear and steady for a while: a stupid square-jawed face barred by a single black brow, two close-set brown eyes staring glassily. His fists continued to rock me like an air-hammer.

Finally Angel placed a clawed hand on his shoulder, and nodded to my handlers. They deposited me in a chair. It swung on an invisible wire from the ceiling in great circles. It swung out wide over the desert, across a bleak horizon, into darkness.

I came to cursing. Gino was standing over me again. There was an empty water-glass in his hand, and my face was dripping. Angel spoke up beside him, with a trace of irritation in his voice:

“You stand up good under punishment. Why go to all the trouble, though? I want a little information, that is all. My friend, my little girlfriend, ran away. I’m impatient to get her back.”

“You’re going about it the wrong way.”

Gino leaned close, and laughed harshly. He shattered the glass on the arm of my chair, held the jagged base up to my eyes. Fear ran through me, cold and light in my veins. My eyes were my connection with everything. Blindness would be the end of me. I closed my eyes, shutting out the cruel edges of the broken thing in his hand.

“Nix, Gino,” the old man said. “I have a better idea as usual. There is heat on, remember.”

They retreated to the far side of the table and conferred there in low voices. The young man left the room. The old man came back to me. His storm troopers stood one on each side of me, looking down at him in ignorant awe.

“What is your name, young fellow?”

I told him. My mouth was puffed and lisping, tongue tangled in ropes of blood.

“I like a young fellow who can take it, Mr. Archer. You say that you’re a detective. You find people for a living, is that right?”

“I have a client,” I said.

“Now you have another. Whoever he is, I can buy and sell him, believe me. Fifty times over.” His thin blue hands scoured each other. They made a sound like two dry sticks rubbing together on a dead tree.

“Narcotics?” I said. “Are you the wheel in the heroin racket? I’ve heard of you.”

His watery eyes veiled themselves like a bird’s. “Now don’t ask foolish questions, or I will lose my respect for you entirely.”

“That would break my heart.”

“Then comfort yourself with this.” He brought an old-fashioned purse out of his hip pocket, abstracted a crumpled bill and smoothed it out on my knee. It was a five-hundred-dollar bill.

“This girl of mine you are going to find for me, she is young and foolish. I am old and foolish, to have trusted her. No matter. Find her for me and bring her back and I will give you another bill like this one. Take it.”

“Take it,” one of my guards repeated. “Mr. Funk said for you to take it.”

I took it. “You’re wasting your money. I don’t even know what she looks like. I don’t know anything about her.”

“Gino is bringing a picture. He came across her last fall at a recording studio in Hollywood where Alfie had a date. He gave her an audition and took her on at the club, more for her looks than for the talent she had. As a singer she flopped. But she is a pretty little thing, about five foot four, nice figure, dark brown hair, big hazel eyes. I found a use for her.” Lechery flickered briefly in his eyes and went out.

“You find a use for everything.”

“That is good economics. I often think if I wasn’t what I am, I would make a good economist. Nothing would go to waste.” He paused, and dragged his dying old mind back to the subject: “She was here for a couple of months, then she ran out on me, silly girl. I heard last week that she was in Acapulco, and the federal Grand Jury was going to subpoena her. I have tax troubles, Mr. Archer, all my life I have tax troubles. Unfortunately I let Fern help with my books a little bit. She could do me great harm. So I sent Bart to Mexico to bring her back. But I meant no harm to her. I still intend her no harm, even now. A little talk, a little realistic discussion with Fern, that is all that will be necessary. So even the shooting of my good friend Bart serves its purpose. Where did it happen, by the way?”

The question flicked out like a hook on the end of a long line.

“In San Diego,” I said, “at a place near the airport: the Mission Motel.”

He smiled paternally. “Now you are showing good sense.”

Gino came back with a silver-framed photograph in his hand. He handed it to Angel, who passed it on to me. It was a studio portrait, of the kind intended for publicity cheesecake. On a black velvet divan, against an artificial night sky, a young woman reclined in a gossamer robe that was split to show one bent leg. Shadows accentuated the lines of her body and the fine bones in her face. Under the heavy makeup which widened the mouth and darkened the half-closed eyes, I recognized Ella Salanda. The picture was signed in white, in the lower right-handed corner: “To my Angel, with all my love, Fern.”

A sickness assailed me, worse than the sickness induced by Gino’s fists. Angel breathed into my face: “Fern Dee is a stage name. Her real name I never learned. She told me one time that if her family knew where she was they would die of shame.” He chuckled drily. “She will not want them to know that she killed a man.”

I drew away from his charnel-house breath. My guards escorted me out. Gino started to follow, but Angel called him back.

“Don’t wait to hear from me,” the old man said after me. “I expect to hear from you.”

The building stood on a rise in the open desert. It was huge and turreted, like somebody’s idea of a castle in Spain. The last rays of the sun washed its walls in purple light and cast long shadows across its barren acreage. It was surrounded by a ten-foot hurricane fence topped with three strands of barbed wire.

Palm Springs was a clutter of white stones in the distance, diamonded by an occasional light. The dull red sun was balanced like a glowing cigar-butt on the rim of the hills above the town. A man with a bulky shoulder harness under his brown suede windbreaker drove me towards it. The sun fell out of sight, and darkness gathered like an impalpable ash on the desert, like a column of blue-grey smoke towering into the sky.

The sky was blue-black and swarming with stars when I got back to Emerald Bay. A black Cadillac followed me out of Palm Springs. I lost it in the winding streets of Pasadena. So far as I could see, I had lost it for good.

The neon Mexican lay peaceful under the stars. A smaller sign at his feet asserted that there was No Vacancy. The lights in the long low stucco buildings behind him shone brightly. The office door was open behind a screen, throwing a barred rectangle of light on the gravel. I stepped into it, and froze.

Behind the registration desk in the office, a woman was avidly reading a magazine. Her shoulders and bosom were massive. Her hair was blonde, piled on her head in coroneted braids. There were rings on her fingers, a triple strand of cultured pearls around her thick white throat. She was the woman Donny had described to me.

I pulled the screen door open and said rudely: “Who are you?”

She glanced up, twisting her mouth in a sour grimace. “Well! I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”

“Sorry. I thought I’d seen you before somewhere.”

“Well, you haven’t.” She looked me over coldly. “What happened to your face, anyway?”

“I had a little plastic surgery done. By an amateur surgeon.”

She clucked disapprovingly. “If you’re looking for a room, we’re full up for the night. I don’t believe I’d rent you a room even if we weren’t. Look at your clothes.”

“Uh-huh. Where’s Mr. Salanda?”

“Is it any business of yours?”

“He wants to see me. I’m doing a job for him.”

“What kind of a job?”

I mimicked her: “Is it any business of yours?” I was irritated. Under her mounds of flesh she had a personality as thin and hard and abrasive as a rasp.

“Watch who you’re getting flip with, sonny boy.” She rose, and her shadow loomed immense across the back door of the room. The magazine fell closed on the desk: it was Teen-age Confessions. “I am Mrs. Salanda. Are you a handyman?”

“A sort of one,” I said. “I’m a garbage collector in the moral field. You look as if you could use me.”

The crack went over her head. “Well, you’re wrong. And I don’t think my husband hired you, either. This is a respectable motel.”

“Uh-huh. Are you Ella’s mother?”

“I should say not. That little snip is no daughter of mine.”

“Her stepmother?”

“Mind your own business. You better get out of here. The police are keeping a close watch on this place tonight, if you’re planning any tricks.”

“Where’s Ella now?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. She’s probably gallivanting off around the countryside. It’s all she’s good for. One day at home in the last six months, that’s a fine record for a young unmarried girl.” Her face was thick and bloated with anger against her stepdaughter. She went on talking blindly, as if she had forgotten me entirely: “I told her father he was an old fool to take her back. How does he know what she’s been up to? I say let the ungrateful filly go and fend for herself.”

“Is that what you say, Mabel?” Salanda had softly opened the door behind her. He came forward into the room, doubly dwarfed by her blonde magnitude. “I say if it wasn’t for you, my dear, Ella wouldn’t have been driven away from home in the first place.”

She turned on him in a blubbering rage. He drew himself up tall and reached to snap his fingers under her nose. “Go back into the house. You are a disgrace to women, a disgrace to motherhood.”

“I’m not her mother, thank God.”

“Thank God,” he echoed, shaking his fist at her. She retreated like a schooner under full sail, menaced by a gunboat. The door closed on her. Salanda turned to me:

“I’m sorry, Mr. Archer. I have difficulties with my wife, I am ashamed to say it. I was an imbecile to marry again. I gained a senseless hulk of flesh, and lost my daughter. Old imbecile!” he denounced himself, wagging his great head sadly. “I married in hot blood. Sexual passion has always been my downfall. It runs in my family, this insane hunger for blondeness and stupidity and size.” He spread his arms in a wide and futile embrace on emptiness.

“Forget it.”

“If I could.” He came closer to examine my face. “You are injured, Mr. Archer. Your mouth is damaged. There is blood on your chin.”

“I was in a slight brawl.”

“On my account?”

“On my own. But I think it’s time you levelled with me.”

“Levelled with you?”

“Told me the truth. You knew who was shot last night, and who shot him, and why.”

He touched my arm, with a quick, tentative grace. “I have only one daughter, Mr. Archer, only the one child. It was my duty to defend her, as best as I could.”

“Defend her from what?”

“From shame, from the police, from prison.” He flung one arm out, indicating the whole range of human disaster. “I am a man of honor, Mr. Archer. But private honor stands higher with me than public honor. The man was abducting my daughter. She brought him here in the hope of being rescued. Her last hope.”

“I think that’s true. You should have told me this before.”

“I was alarmed, upset. I feared your intentions. Any minute the police were due to arrive.”

“But you had a right to shoot him. It wasn’t even a crime. The crime was his.”

“I didn’t know that then. The truth came out to me gradually. I feared that Ella was involved with him.” His flat black gaze sought my face and rested on it. “However, I did not shoot him, Mr. Archer. I was not even here at the time. I told you that this morning, and you may take my word for it.”

“Was Mrs. Salanda here?”

“No sir, she was not. Why should you ask me that?”

“Donny described the woman who checked in with the dead man. The description fits your wife.”

“Donny was lying. I told him to give a false description of the woman. Apparently he was unequal to the task of inventing one.”

“Can you prove that she was with you?”

“Certainly I can. We had reserved seats at the theatre. Those who sat around us can testify that the seats were not empty. Mrs. Salanda and I, we are not an inconspicuous couple.” He smiled wryly.

“Ella killed him then.”

He neither assented, nor denied it. “I was hoping that you were on my side, my side and Ella’s. Am I wrong?”

“I’ll have to talk to her, before I know myself. Where is she?”

“I do not know, Mr. Archer, sincerely I do not know. She went away this afternoon, after the policemen questioned her. They were suspicious, but we managed to soothe their suspicions. They did not know that she had just come home, from another life, and I did not tell them. Mabel wanted to tell them. I silenced her.” His white teeth clicked together.

“What about Donny?”

“They took him down to the station for questioning. He told them nothing damaging. Donny can appear very stupid when he wishes. He has the reputation of an idiot, but he is not so dumb. Donny has been with me for many years. He has a deep devotion for my daughter. I got him released tonight.”

“You should have taken my advice,” I said, “taken the police into your confidence. Nothing would have happened to you. The dead man was a mobster, and what he was doing amounts to kidnaping. Your daughter was a witness against his boss.”

“She told me that. I am glad that it is true. Ella has not always told me the truth. She has been a hard girl to bring up, without a good mother to set her an example. Where has she been these last six months, Mr. Archer?”

“Singing in a night club in Palm Springs. Her boss was a racketeer.”

“A racketeer?” His mouth and nose screwed up, as if he sniffed the odor of corruption.

“Where she was isn’t important, compared with where she is now. The boss is still after her. He hired me to look for her.”

Salanda regarded me with fear and dislike, as if the odor originated in me. “You let him hire you?”

“It was my best chance of getting out of his place alive. I’m not his boy, if that’s what you mean.”

“You ask me to believe you?”

“I’m telling you. Ella is in danger. As a matter of fact, we all are.” I didn’t tell him about the second black Cadillac. Gino would be driving it, wandering the night roads with a ready gun in his armpit and revenge corroding his heart.

“My daughter is aware of the danger,” he said. “She warned me of it.”

“She must have told you where she was going.”

“No. But she may be at the beach house. The house where Donny lives. I will come with you.”

“You stay here. Keep your doors locked. If any strangers show and start prowling the place, call the police.”

He bolted the door behind me as I went out. Yellow traffic lights cast wan reflections on the asphalt. Streams of cars went by to the north, to the south. To the west, where the sea lay, a great black emptiness opened under the stars. The beach house sat on its white margin, a little over a mile from the motel.

For the second time that day, I knocked on the warped kitchen door. There was light behind it, shining through the cracks. A shadow obscured the light.

“Who is it?” Donny said. Fear or some other emotion had filled his mouth with pebbles.

“You know me, Donny.”

The door groaned on its hinges. He gestured dumbly to me to come in, his face a white blur. When he turned his head, and the light from the living room caught his face, I saw that grief was the emotion that marked it. His eyes were swollen as if he had been crying. More than ever he resembled a dilapidated boy whose growing pains had never paid off in manhood.

“Anybody with you?”

Sounds of movement in the living room answered my question. I brushed him aside and went in. Ella Salanda was bent over an open suitcase on the camp cot. She straightened, her mouth thin, eyes wide and dark. The .38 automatic in her hand gleamed dully under the naked bulb suspended from the ceiling.

“I’m getting out of here,” she said, “and you’re not going to stop me.”

“I’m not sure I want to try. Where are you going, Fern?”

Donny spoke behind me, in his grief-thickened voice: “She’s going away from me. She promised to stay here if I did what she told me. She promised to be my girl—”

“Shut up, stupid.” Her voice cut like a lash, and Donny gasped as if the lash had been laid across his back.

“What did she tell you to do, Donny? Tell me just what you did.”

“When she checked in last night with the fella from Detroit. She made a sign I wasn’t to let on I knew her. Later on she left me a note. She wrote it with a lipstick on a piece of paper towel. I still got it hidden, in the kitchen.”

“What did she write in the note?”

He lingered behind me, fearful of the gun in the girl’s hand, more fearful of her anger.

She said: “Don’t be crazy, Donny. He doesn’t know a thing, not a thing. He can’t do anything to either of us.”

“I don’t care what happens, to me or anybody else,” the anguished voice said behind me. “You’re running out on me, breaking your promise to me. I always knew it was too good to be true. Now I just don’t care any more.”

“I care,” she said. “I care what happens to me.” Her hazel eyes shifted to me, above the unwavering gun. “I won’t stay here. I’ll shoot you if I have to.”

“It shouldn’t be necessary. Put it down, Fern. It’s Bartolomeo’s gun, isn’t it? I found the shells to fit it in his glove compartment.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I talked to Angel.”

“Is he here?” Panic whined in her voice.

“No. I came alone.”

“You better leave the same way then, while you can go under your own power.”

“I’m staying. You need protection, whether you know it or not. And I need information. Donny, go in the kitchen and bring me that note.”

“Don’t do it, Donny. I’m warning you.”

His sneakered feet made soft indecisive sounds. I advanced on the girl, talking quietly and steadily: “You conspired to kill a man, but you don’t have to be afraid. He had it coming. Tell the whole story to the cops, and my guess is they won’t even book you. Hell, you can even become famous. The government wants you as a witness in a tax case.”

“What kind of a case?”

“A tax case against Angel. It’s probably the only kind of rap they can pin on him. You can send him up for the rest of his life like Capone. You’ll be a heroine, Fern.”

“Don’t call me Fern. I hate that name.” There were sudden tears in her eyes. “I hate everything connected with that name. I hate myself.”

“You’ll hate yourself more if you don’t put down that gun. Shoot me and it all starts over again. The cops will be on your trail, Angel’s troopers will be gunning for you.”

Now only the cot was between us, the cot and the unsteady gun facing me above it.

“This is the turning-point,” I said. “You’ve made a lot of bum decisions and almost ruined yourself, playing footsie with the evillest men there are. You can go on the way you have been, getting in deeper until you end up in a refrigerated drawer, or you can come back out of it now, into a decent life.”

“A decent life? Here? With my father married to Mabel?”

“I don’t think Mabel will last much longer. Anyway, I’m not Mabel. I’m on your side.”

Ella made a decision. I could tell a mile away what she was going to do. She dropped the gun on the blanket. I scooped it up and turned to Donny:

“Let me see that note.”

He disappeared through the kitchen door, head and shoulders drooping on the long stalk of his body.

“What could I do?” the girl said. “I was caught. It was Bart or me. All the way up from Acapulco I planned how I could get away. He held a gun in my side when we crossed the border, the same way when we stopped for gas or to eat at the drive-ins. I realized he had to be killed. My father’s motel looked like my only chance. So I talked Bart into staying there with me overnight. He had no idea who the place belonged to. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew it had to be something drastic. Once I was back with Angel in the desert, that was the end of me. Even if he didn’t kill me, it meant I’d have to go on living with him. Anything was better than that. So I wrote a note to Donny in the bathroom, and dropped it out the window. He was always crazy about me.”

Her mouth had grown softer. She looked remarkably young and virginal. The faint blue hollows under her eyes were dewy. “Donny shot Bart with Bart’s own gun. He had more nerve than I had. I lost my nerve when I went back into the room this morning. I didn’t know about the blood in the bathroom. It was the last straw.”

She was wrong. Something crashed in the kitchen. A cool draft swept the living room. A gun spoke twice, out of sight. Donny fell backwards through the doorway, a piece of brownish paper clutched in his hand. Blood gleamed on his shoulder like a red badge.

I stepped behind the cot and pulled the girl down to the floor with me. Gino came through the door, his two-colored sports shoe stepping on Donny’s laboring chest. I shot the gun out of his hand. He floundered back against the wall, clutching at his wrist.

I sighted carefully for my second shot, until the black bar of his eyebrows was steady in the sights of the .38. The hole it made was invisible. Gino fell loosely forward, prone on the floor beside the man he had killed.

Ella Salanda ran across the room. She knelt, and cradled Donny’s head in her lap. Incredibly, he spoke, in a loud sighing voice:

“You won’t go away again, Ella? I did what you told me. You promised.”

“Sure I promised. I won’t leave you, Donny. Crazy man. Crazy fool.”

“You like me better than you used to? Now?”

“I like you, Donny. You’re the most man there is.”

She held the poor insignificant head in her hands. He sighed, and his life came out bright-colored at the mouth. It was Donny who went away.

His hand relaxed, and I read the lipstick note she had written him on a piece of porous tissue:

“Donny: This man will kill me unless you kill him first. His gun will be in his clothes on the chair beside the bed. Come in and get it at midnight and shoot to kill. Good luck. I’ll stay and be your girl if you do this, just like you always wished. Love. Ella.”

I looked at the pair on the floor. She was rocking his lifeless head against her breast. Beside them, Gino looked very small and lonely, a dummy leaking darkness from his brow.

Donny had his wish and I had mine. I wondered what Ella’s was.