Meet Me at the Morgue

chapter 21

I drove up to the summit of the ridge. The night was still and silent, balanced on its dead center. The city’s web of lights lay behind me like a tangled net hauled phosphorescent from the sea and flung up along the slopes. Beyond, the sea itself was a gray emptiness lit between the moving clouds by a few small hurrying stars.

In the hedged tunnel of road where Kerry Snow had met his death, the darkness beyond my headlights was so solid that day was unimaginable. Murder was imaginable, though. I could see the three of them: the faceless victim fallen in the road, the blind-drunk murderer driving on over him, and Arthur Lemp watching from the darkness, planning to fashion a second crime from the leavings of the first.

I shifted into second and let the motor’s inertia hold the car on the descending curves. My own excitement had long since settled down into a stubborn anger. If the boy was alive, I was determined to find him. If the boy was dead, his death would have to be paid for.

My headlights swept the gatehouse where Miner had lived, where Miner would live no longer. In the drive ahead, long brown leaves from the eucalyptus trees formed desolate hieroglyphics on the stones. The trees themselves stood overhead like tremulous giants, shaking in fear of the wind and the shifting sky.

There was a car in the turnaround, and lights from the main house spilled down into the ravine. The car was a new Buick convertible, which I associated with Larry Seifel.

Seifel answered the door. His eyes looked sleepy, and a little out of focus. Passing him in the doorway, I caught a whiff of his breath, pungent with alcohol. He stopped me in the glass-bricked entrance hall and spoke for the first time, in a whisper:

“You know what’s happened, don’t you?”

“A lot of things have happened.”

His hand grew heavier on my arm. “I mean the old man. He died tonight – last night.”

“Forest just told me. Are they going to have an autopsy?”

“I don’t see why they should. The doctor assured Helen it was the coronary, nothing else.”

“That must have been a great comfort to her.”

His mouth opened, unevenly. “Does that have some hidden meaning?”

“The things that have been happening have,” I said. “I’m trying to find it. Now here’s a possibility that should be interesting to the legal mind. A man is seriously ill. It’s known that excessive excitement is likely to kill him. A highly exciting event is made to occur; a kidnapping, to be exact. The man dies, and the question is: Is it murder?”

“Are you asking me for my opinion? I’d say its arguable. There have been comparable cases where murder has been proved–”

“I’m asking you for your evidence. Forest tells me you turned in Kerry Snow for desertion in 1946. I don’t believe you could have done that to a man and not remember it.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“I’m suggesting that the memory is a voluntary faculty, to a great extent. It can be turned off and on. You should get to work on yours.”

“I’ve taken enough from you today. Who do you think you are?”

“Diogenes. I have a Diogenes complex. What’s yours?”

“Œdipus,” Helen Johnson said from the inner doorway. “Larry’s as Œdipal as all get out. We were just discussing it before you arrived. Abel was Larry’s father-image, he says. Now that his father-image is kaput, Larry has an irresistible urge to possesss the father-image’s wife-image. That is, me. Isn’t that what you said, Larry?”

“You’re a fast worker, Seifel.”

“Go to hell.” His mouth twisted sideways. His hand on my arm jerked me around towards him. His right fist rose rapidly towards my face.

I parried the uppercut with my left forearm, stepped in close and locked his arms in a bear-hug. “When are you going to grow up? A punch in the nose never helped any situation.”

I knew Seifel’s type, had been dealing with it most of my adult life: the anxious ego walling itself in behind an adipose tissue of bluff and vanity.

“Turn my arms loose. I’ll show you who’s grown up, I’ll knock your block off.” He struggled to free himself, tears of anger rising in his eyes. Humiliation in front of a woman was hard for him to bear. No doubt he had had enough of it from his mother.

Helen Johnson came forward and put a hand on his shoulder: “Calm down now, Larry. If you don’t I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

He became perfectly still at her touch, though the tension stayed in his muscles. I released him. He turned to her in a trembling rage:

“You didn’t hear what he said.”

“What didn’t I hear?” She was very calm, perhaps too calm. Her beauty had grown colder with the night, colder and darker. There were lines in her brow, smudges of doubt in her eyes, distinct blue semicircles under them.

“He virtually accused you of murdering your husband. He definitely accused me of withholding information.”

“Well?” she said to me with a slight unchanging smile.

“Mr. Seifel is exaggerating. Forest, the F.B.I. man, referred to your husband’s death as indirect murder. I asked Mr. Seifel for a lawyer’s opinion: whether or not the kidnappers are legally responsible for your husband’s death.”

“Where did I come in?”

“You didn’t, until now.”

“Is that why you came out here at this hour – to ask Larry for a legal opinion?”

“There are several things I’d like to go into.”

“Let’s stick to the subject of Abel’s death. I’ve been thinking about it all evening – all night. I think I had better tell you the truth about it. There’s something about the truth–”

Seifel moved slightly, placing one dinner-jacketed shoulder in front of one of her shoulders. “Don’t say another word, Helen. You’re foolish to commit yourself on anything when you’re in an emotional state.”

She didn’t look at him. “As I was saying, in my emotional way, the truth has a saving grace. It’s something to hold on to when you’re falling through space – you know? – even when it’s bitter. Besides, I feel I owe it to myself, in my capacity as non-grief-stricken widow.”

Her brittleness was disquieting. I said: “Can we go in and sit down?”

“Of course. Forgive me. You must be exhausted. Mr. Forest gave me some idea of what you were trying to do. I can’t tell you how grateful–”

“For nothing,” I said. “Until you get Jamie back, it adds up to nothing.”

“No, I don’t agree.” There were sudden tears in her eyes. “But do come in.”

She seated me on a sectional divan that curved around the fireplace in a corner of the living-room. Eucalyptus logs were burning low in the grate, giving off a faintly medicinal odor. The indirect lights were dim along the walls, and night pressed heavily on the great window.

“What will you drink, Mr. Cross? Larry will be glad to make you a drink, won’t you, Larry?”

“Of course,” he answered in a low, disgruntled tone.

“You’re very kind, but I’m afraid I can’t. It might knock me out at this late stage.”

“Have one yourself then, Larry,” she said. “You know where the liquor is.”

He wandered out. She sat above me, on the square back of the divan:

“I used to like Larry. Lately he’s been getting on my nerves. Tonight was the last straw. He had the infernal gall to propose to me. He thought that now was the time for us to run away together and live happily ever after. Can you imagine, under these circumstances?”

“Yes. I can imagine.”

“I was on the point of ordering him out of the house.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was afraid to be left alone.”

“No friends or relatives?”

“None that I’ve wanted to be with. I wired my mother in New York and she’ll probably fly out tomorrow or the next day.” She lowered her voice. “Larry’s been quite a disappointment to me. I thought I could trust him to be tactful at least.”

“He’s been drinking since afternoon. It’s one way to lose one’s inhibitions.”

“The problem is to have inhibitions, isn’t it? So many people don’t have any at all any more. They do as they please, and more often than not it pleases them to ruin their own lives.” Her head, half bowed over me, was like a brooding queen’s. “What sort of a man are you, Mr. Cross?”

“You don’t expect an honest answer.”

“Yes.”

“I’m a slightly displaced person, I think. Nothing quite suits me, or rather I don’t quite suit.”

“Is that why you’ve never married?”

I leaned forward and struck the dying logs with a poker. A swarm of sparks rose like angry hornets and trailed up the chimney. I stood up facing her across the divan.

“You and Ann Devon have been talking about me.”

“Why not?”

“Did you talk about Larry Seifel?”

“Naturally. She’s very much in love with him, and I think Larry’s fond of her if he’ll admit it to himself. But you’re evading my question.”

“You asked for an honest answer. I had none. The question never came up. I suppose the answer to it is something like this: It’s part of my displacement. I feel more strongly for other people than I do for myself. For one thing, my parents had a bad marriage. It seems to me I spent a lot of my time when I was a kid trying to head off quarrels, or dampen down quarrels that had already started. Then I started college in the depths of the Depression. I majored in sociology. I wanted to help people. Helpfulness was like a religion with a lot of us in those days. It’s only in the last few years, since the war, that I’ve started to see around it. I see that helping other people can be an evasion of oneself, and the source of a good deal of smug self-satisfaction. But it takes the emotions a long time to catch up. I’m emotionally rather backward.”

“Do you honestly believe that?” Her eyes were dark and glowing.

I didn’t answer because I had no answer. Nobody knows himself, until later. I shrugged my shoulders. “I understand what you mean about helpfulness. Every good nurse has a broad streak of it. I’ve always prided myself on it. Isn’t it a virtue?”

“Most human qualities are, when they’re not in excess.”

“But how could – how could a desire to help someone else be wrong?”

“You have to judge things by their consequences.”

I looked around for Seifel, and saw that he was nowhere in sight. I decided to strike boldly: “I don’t know why you married Abel Johnson. If you married him for any reason but love, you shouldn’t have.”

“What right have you to say that?”

“None. But it hasn’t worked out.”

The flickering fire cast her shadow high up the wall. It wavered there like a woman clothed in black flames.

“I loved him,” she said, “in a way. Naturally I knew he was rich, and I’d worked hard all my life, but that isn’t why I married him.”

“What way?”

“You’re being cruel,” she said with her face averted.

“Events are being cruel. I want to see them end.”

“I pitied Abel. He begged me to be his wife, to look after him. He was lonely, and afraid of dying. And he wanted a son so badly… You were right, though. I admit it. It didn’t work out.”

“Why not?”

“He was so much older. I was a strain on him. He tried so hard to keep up. Even Jamie was hard on him. Abel was like a grandfather to the child. He loved him, but he couldn’t stand him under his feet all day. That’s one reason I let Jamie spend so much time with Fred Miner. It was my worst mistake. I made so many mistakes.”

She wrung her hands. They were so dry that I could hear their friction.

“Your husband made mistakes, too. You mustn’t blame yourself entirely.”

She gave me a startled look. “Yes, I was going to tell you. I find I haven’t the heart. But perhaps you know?”

“I’ve talked with a man named Bourke, who runs a detective agency in Hollywood.”

Her hands went to her bosom, and she sighed. Like a frozen flame, dark fire converted into substance, her hair curved over her forehead. It seemed to me that, guilty or not, she was a magnificent woman.

“I was faithful to Abel,” she said. “It’s strange that I should be telling you this. I’ve never discussed it with anyone, I don’t expect I ever will again. I was genuinely innocent. Perhaps I was indiscreet in letting Larry take me places. I didn’t know until today that Abel was suspicious of me, at least to that extent. Of course I knew he was jealous.”

“Any man would be.”

“Any old man, perhaps. You see, I haven’t much pity for him now. It seeped out of me gradually. The last drop of it went today, when he told me what he had done. To put a spy on me!” she said. “When all I’ve thought about in the last six years was looking after him.”

“He told you that he had?”

“Yes, he did. When I came home from the mortuary, I described the dead man to him. I thought he might have seen him at the station. Abel recognized the description, but not from the station. It was a private detective he’d put on my trail some time last fall.”

She rose and went to the window, her shadow looming across the wall like a dark fate, the one who did the cutting:

“He realized what he had done. It was Abel himself who brought that dead man into our lives in the first place. He made that false move against me, and everything else followed from it.” She paused. “Did you really accuse me of murdering Abel, as Larry said?”

“Larry was jumping to conclusions. I admit the possibility occurred to me.”

“Well, I didn’t. Abel killed himself. He couldn’t live with the thought of what he had done. He told me that some time before he died.”

“He committed suicide?”

“I don’t like to call it by that name. He didn’t shoot himself, or take poison. It wasn’t necessary, in his condition. Abel got up out of bed and destroyed the furniture in his room. He broke it up, piece by piece, with his hands. I tried to stop him, but it was no use. He threatened to kill me if I set foot in there. He died of the effort, and the anger with himself. When things were quiet, and I dared to go in, I found him in the wreckage.”

“Why don’t you try for some rest now, Helen? You’ve had a terrible day.”

“I can’t. I’ve had an incredible day, but I can’t even think about sleep.”

“I have some Nembutals at home.”

“No,” she answered brusquely. “I have pills, too. I prefer not to sleep. I know it’s irrational but I have the feeling that if I keep thinking I’ll be able to think where Jamie is.”

“You love him, don’t you?”

“Everybody does. I love him most. He’s my son.”

“The chances are Miner is holding him somewhere in the desert.” I told her about Lemp’s “timetable,” which I had given to Forest. “Do you know of any place in the desert where Miner would be likely to take him?”

“No. Fred always hated the desert.” She added thoughtfully: “We have a cabin in the desert. He wouldn’t dare to take Jamie to our own house.”

“It’s worth considering. It might have struck them as good tactics, on the least-likely principle. Is there anybody in your desert house?”

“Not now. We closed it last month for the season. It’s too hot in the summer.”

“Where are the keys?”

“Abel kept them in his desk. I’ll get them.”

She left the room, and returned quickly, looking distraught. “They’re gone.”

“Where is this place? Does it have a telephone?”

“Of course.”

She brought me a telephone and gave me a Palmdale number. At three o’clock in the morning, the call went through immediately. Among husky rumors of transcontinental conversations, I heard the rural telephone ring four times, then four more times. The receiver at the other end was lifted.

“Pacific Point calling,” the operator said.

There was a long pause.

“Is anyone there?” the operator said. “Pacific Point is calling.”

The receiver was replaced. There was a colloquy of operators; then: “I’m sorry, sir, your party does not answer.”

“But there was someone there?”

“I think so, sir. Shall I have them ring again?”

Close to my ear, Helen cried: “Yes! Please! I know he’s there. It couldn’t be anyone else.”

“No, thank you,” I said to the operator, and hung up.

Helen grasped my shoulder with both hands, and shook me: “He’s there! Talk to him. I have to know.”

“No, we might frighten him off. It’s possible we’ve done that already.”

Her emotions were swaying in great surges. She cried with equal passion: “Yes! You’re right. We’ve got to go there, now, immediately.”

“We?”

“I wouldn’t trust anyone else.”

I reached for the telephone. “I’ll notify Forest.”

Her hand closed over mine, slender and strong. “You’ll tell no one. I’m taking no chances, understand. Fred Miner can go Scot free if he gives me Jamie back. He can keep the money–”

“How far is it?”

“About a two-hour drive. We can do it faster if we take the Lincoln.”

“The F.B.I. can do it still faster by plane.”

“I don’t care. I want my boy to be alive when we reach him.” She was obdurate, her mind completely fixed on one final hope. I made no further attempt to argue with her. She was perfectly ready to go alone if she had to.

“Where’s Seifel?” I said. “He might be some use if we run into trouble.”

“He went into the pantry to make himself a drink. He never did come out. Hurry and find him.”

The lights were on in the butler’s pantry, and Seifel had left spoor: a silver pail half-full of melting ice, an icepick floating half-submerged in it, a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish Whiskey standing open, a wet ring whitening on the black oak sideboard. Animal noises reached me from another part of the house.

I found him in a bathroom, dousing his head in a basin of cold water. The fluorescent light thrust a white shaft through an open door across the master bedroom, making a cross-section of the chaos Helen had described. In his last hour Abel Johnson had gone berserk. The bed had been dismantled, its coverings torn, the drapes dragged down from the windows, the windows and mirrors smashed. The angry man had fought himself to a finish, bringing his life down in ruins around his own head.

Seifel raised his dripping face and reached for a towel. “Don’t mind me, I’ve been sick. Feeling much better now. I should never mix my drinks.” He shuddered behind the towel.

Above the square blue bathtub in one corner of the room, an Aubrey Beardsley drawing was recessed in the wall behind glass. It depicted a young woman with a swan neck, serpent eyes, hair like a tropical forest. She was perfectly drawn, debonair and evil.

“On your horse,” I said to Seifel, who was retying his tie. “We’re going for a ride.”

“A ride? Where to?”

“I’ll tell you on the way. Come on. You don’t have to look pretty.”

“One moment. There’s something I wanted to say to you, in private.”

I was prepared for a fist-fight on the spot, under the eyes of Beardsley’s dark-haired lady. But Seifel was truly unpredictable. He said:

“I want to apologize. I’d had too much to drink, and Helen had been rather rough on me. What’s more, you were right. I remember Kerry Snow – the name at least; I never saw the man. I turned him in for desertion in ’46.”

“Without ever seeing him?”

“Right. I told the F.B.I. where to find him.”

“Where did you get the information?”

He hesitated, swallowing shame. “I have to tell someone, I guess. It might as well be you. Helen gave me the man’s address. She asked me to have him apprehended. Just don’t tell her I told you.” He smiled dismally.

His mechanism seemed obvious. Helen had turned him down, and he was retaliating. An urge to hit him rushed up into my head and almost blinded me. It ebbed like a wave, leaving me chilly. Yet I didn’t doubt the truth of what he had said.

I thrust it out of the foreground of my thoughts and went outside, with Seifel at my heels. The wind had risen higher. Above the sighing trees the whole sky seemed to be swaying, threatening to topple.

The black Lincoln that had killed Kerry Snow was purring in the drive. Helen was at the wheel. She moved over to let me take it, and explained to Larry Seifel where we were going.