Meet Me at the Morgue

chapter 22

The big car was clumsy on the hillside. I drove it angrily, punishing the brakes and tires on the hairpin curves. The wind died down as we descended. The road uncoiled in a long curve that joined with a two-lane black-top. This ran ruler-straight to the middle of the inland valley, where it met the north-south highway. I pushed the car to ninety and held it there.

Seifel was in the back seat, hunched forward close to my shoulder, watching the road dart backward through the narrow gantlet of the orange groves. Helen held her shotgun in her lap. No one spoke.

Before we reached Pasadena and the foothills of the mountains, dawn had begun to outline their crags and peaks with an etching-tool. We ascended through fading night into gray day. In the summit of the pass, I switched off the headlights. The sky was a dull green, like stagnant water. Every wrinkle of the cliffs was distinct. Great patches of dirty snow lay at their bases, and along the sides of the road. Their chill edged the wind.

Helen shivered, and drew her leopard-skin coat closer around her shoulders. The gun rolled off her knees and rattled on the floor.

“Be careful with that,” I said sharply.

“I am being careful.” She retrieved it from the floor.

“Keep it out of sight when we get there. I have a gun in my pocket, but I’m not planning to use it if I can help it. This is a situation where violence might backfire.”

She didn’t answer. I glanced at her face, and saw how pale she was. Her eyes, dull and heavy like a reflection of the sky, were gazing far ahead and down across the desert. Its whitish earth, scrawled with winding dirt roads and drifts of brush, stippled with Joshua trees, lay perfectly distinct a mile below. Twenty miles of mountain driving brought us down to it, and into its dust.

I slowed for a crossroads ahead.

“We turn left here,” she said. “It’s only another five miles… God, how I despise this place, this unholy, empty place. It was never meant for human beings at all. It’s the abomination of desolation.”

“I understood you came here for winter vacations.”

“We did. Abel always had. I couldn’t deny him his pleasure. He loved it here, it took him back to his deer-hunting days.”

“Fred Miner couldn’t take it, is that right?”

“That’s true, the dry air bothered him. It’s strange he should have chosen this place, under our very noses in a sense, and yet it’s the back of beyond. What was it you said at the house, that he was operating on the least-likely principle?”

“We all should have thought of it before. You’ve read Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter.’ ”

“A long time ago, when I was in school.”

“Was that so terribly long ago?”

“Æons and æons.” She murmured softly and ruefully, to herself: “The purloined boy.” Her hands were gripping the stock and barrel of the shotgun.

Marked by a row of country mailboxes, a side road meandered off to the right. One of the mailboxes was stenciled with the name ABEL JOHNSON. Helen touched my arm: “Turn here.”

I turned. At the top of a rise, she cried: “Look, you can see the cabin.”

I caught a glimpse of the building, a low-roofed stone structure hugging the flat top of a knoll, perhaps a mile away. Straight up from its squat stone chimney, a narrow blue ribbon of smoke was being unreeled onto a transparent green-glass sky. The air was so clear that I could see the light-gray mortar between the moss-dark chimneystones.

We went down into a shallow arroyo, losing sight of the cabin like a ship in the trough of the waves. The road followed the arroyo bed for half a mile, then climbed the other side. At the top of this second rise, the incredible happened.

“I see him,” Helen said. “I see my boy. He’s safe.”

Seifel leaned forward between us across the back of the seat. “Where is he?”

“See him? He’s playing ball. He’s all right, Larry. Look.”

The boy was on a concrete terrace at the front of the cabin, tossing a rubber ball against the door and trying unsuccessfully to catch it. His red head flared like a tiny beacon.

“Hurry,” his mother said beside me. She flung her body forward urgently, as if her movement could increase the speed of the car.

The gun fell across my right foot on the accelerator. I snatched it up and handed it back to Seifel. Helen was oblivious, fixed on the figure of the boy, which appeared and disappeared and appeared again.

At last he saw the Lincoln and recognized it. With a joyful yelp, he dropped his ball and came running out to the road. I braked, but not quickly enough. His mother staggered out of the moving car and fell on her knees in the dust. Then the boy was in her arms.

The door of the cabin opened outward suddenly. Fred Miner came out in his shirtsleeves, an automatic in his hand.

“Mrs. Johnson!” he called on a loud note of surprise. “Is everything okay?”

Almost simultaneously, the shotgun roared from the back seat. One of Miner’s arms moved as if it had been pushed backward by an invisible hand. The automatic clanked on the terrace. Miner ran inside.

I turned on Seifel: “Don’t be a fool. You’ll draw his fire.”

“I winged him,” he said excitedly.

The boy disengaged himself from the leopard-skin arms. “Why are they shooting at Fred, Mummy? Did he do something wrong?”

“It’s only a game, Jamie.”

I swung the door wide. “Get into the car, both of you. We’re all getting out of here.”

But Miner had anticipated us. There was a rapid burst of explosions. The bronze Jaguar shot out of the carport beside the cabin. The top was down, and I could see Miner’s face intent over the wheel. The sports car crossed the road in front of us in a flurry of dust, skidded into a turn at the foot of the slope, and turned back to the road a hundred yards behind us. Before I could get the Lincoln turned and straightened out, the Jaguar was a mile or more away, an invisible comet with a winding tail of dust.

I turned to the boy. “Is anybody else out here?”

“No, sir. Just me and Fred.”

“Did he treat you all right?”

He looked puzzled.

“He didn’t hurt you, Jamie?” his mother said.

“Fred wouldn’t hurt me. Fred and me are shipmates.”

I said to Seifel: “You stay here with Helen and the boy. Call the police, et cetera.”

“Let me go after him.” His face was shining with a kind of buck fever.

“No.”

Helen climbed out of the car with the boy in her arms, struggling, and Seifel followed them. I followed Miner’s dust.

It was still very early, and there were no other cars. The trail of dust hung in the still air over the road like a curling white worm. It led south across the arid valley, back towards the wall of mountains. Their snow-capped peaks were dazzling now in the full sun.

Twice I caught sight of the Jaguar bouncing over the top of a rise like a low-slung brown rabbit. It was far ahead, and increasing its lead. Since the Lincoln did better than ninety in the straightaways, Miner’s car must have been doing well over a hundred. It struck me wryly that he was breaking the conditions of his probation.

I caught sight of it for the third time when it reached the southern rim of the valley, by now a tiny bronze beetle blowing a small derisive spume of dust. It raced below the leaning basalt slabs that buttressed the base of the mountain. Then it was lost in the trees on the shaggy mountainside.

Four minutes and five miles later I was at the foot of the basalt cliffs. Beyond them the road turned sharply and steeply upward. For a screeching, sliding instant the big car threatened to roll. I stamped the gas pedal to the floorboard, braking with my left foot. The rear wheels churned the gravel of the shoulder and pushed back onto the road. Miner’s dust was there ahead, obscuring the road and talcuming my windshield.

The desert flora gave way to scrub oaks and these in turn to larger trees, great pines and spruce. The road grew narrower and more treacherous, doubling and redoubling on itself. Far up ahead a patch of snow glittered like a medal on the mountain’s shoulder. The road curved round the end of an oval lake that mirrored trees and sky. The higher it went the narrower it grew. I began to hope that Miner, with all his speed, was in a dead end.

Then I saw a gleam of chrome through the trees, and heard him coming. There were no side roads above the lake. The single road we were on was just wide enough for two cars to pass each other. On my left the bank sloped up at an angle of forty-five or fifty degrees. On the other side the shoulder fell off sharply into a ravine where a mountain brook rushed downward from the snowbeds.

The Jaguar appeared around a curve, headed directly for me. Miner had come to the end of the road and turned back. I braked and jerked the steering-wheel to the right, skidding to a stop broadside across the road. He didn’t slacken speed. If anything, he accelerated. I flung myself backward across the width of the car and fumbled for the door button. But there was no impact.

The Jaguar swerved sharply to my left and climbed the bank. For a moment it looked as if the maneuver might work. Miner was poised above me, forty feet off the road, like a pilot in an open cockpit. Then one of his tires went out with a gunshot report. The Jaguar left the slope, turned turtle in the air, hung there for a long instant with Miner suspended head-down from the steering-wheel, and fell back to earth. Over and over it rolled, down into the road behind me.

Miner was flung out halfway down the slope. He was sitting up when I reached him, coughing bright blood and holding his chest together with one arm. His other arm hung loose, its sleeve soaked with blood. His brow was deeply ridged as if by a giant nutcracker.

His eyes saw me. “Mess. I could of held it with two good arms. Teach me to break the speed laws.”

“Why did you do it, Fred?”

“She told me to.” His voice was guttural, his breath beginning to bubble. “I know I broke my conditions. But it’s pretty rough when you fire on a guy for that.”

“It wasn’t for that.”

“What then? I was only protecting the boy. I brought him out here for his own protection.”

“Who told you to do that?”

“Mrs. Johnson. She’s the boss.”

Then his eyes lost their light, and he toppled. I caught him under the arms. His body was heavier than lead.