The Archer Files

Preface to the Case Notes

After the death of Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) in 1983, his handwritten manuscripts and plot notebooks became part of The Kenneth Millar Papers, held at the University of California, Irvine.

Within those notebooks, Macdonald’s eventual biographer found fragments of several unfinished Lew Archer short stories and novels dating from the early 1950s to the middle 1960s.

It was Macdonald’s habit, over the years, to write the beginnings of possible Archer tales which he might (or might not) then or later continue.

The following eleven items are starting points for Lew Archer adventures that never occurred, cases begun but never finished (at least, not with these particular people and circumstances).

Knowledgeable readers will note that certain pages in some of these recaptured pieces of Lew Archer’s alternate pasts bear oblique resemblance to finished stories and books in the author’s oeuvre.

Some may take special pleasure in making connections between these entries (arranged in estimated chronological order, from 1952 to 1965) and the published works. Detective Lew Archer himself might have enjoyed such a challenge. Author and scholar Ross Macdonald certainly would have.

– Tom Nolan

The 13th Day

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

I picked her up in a bar near Union Station. Or maybe she picked me up. I’ll never know. I was waiting for someone quite different: a man who knew a man who had sold a contaminated mainliner to the hopheaded young brother of a friend of mine. Don’t bother to remember those four people. The boy is dead, and the man who knew the pusher never turned up.

It was one of those incredibly rundown places catering to the incredibly rundown people who live at night in the vacant heart of the city: pushers and pushed, hustlers of various sexes, Pershing Park nature-lovers driven indoors by the rats, fugitives from Alcoholics Anonymous. The bartender was a fat Mitropan named Curly who hid his violent hatred of them all behind thick layers of flesh and a Santa Claus smile. He told me tales of the Vienna woods: Krafft-Ebing would have loved them: while the specked electric clock behind his head moved round from midnight to one and on to one-thirty. Various draggletail blondes assaulted my virtue and registered no sale. I nursed a bottle of beer and then another, fighting off depression. Another hour in the place would have put me permanently on the wagon.

Twenty minutes before closing time, she came in. The bartender saw her first, and his smile slipped, dislodged by sheer surprise. I turned on my stool to see what could surprise him, what impossible human wreck or unheard-of freak. Nothing like that. She was simply a young lady in a midnight blue suit and dark harlequin glasses with dark blue rims. Though she had been well-groomed, her hair and face were slightly disarrayed, as if a storm had struck her a glancing blow. When she took off her glasses, I saw that the storm was inside of her. Her eyes were a turbulent dark blue. I also saw that she was almost beautiful. Hers was a thin nervous long-legged brunette beauty, the kind that has a history. The kind that it is dangerous to touch, unless you want to become a character in history.

I didn’t, but I couldn’t look away from her. There was quality in her clothes, in her face, in the way she held herself and had done her hair. She had no right at all to be there, I thought. Perhaps she read the thought on my face and decided that I was safe. In any case she came towards me and sat on the stool to my left. Her scent was subtle and wry.

She spoke to the bartender in an urgent whisper: “Do you know me?”

He looked her over carefully. “No, ma’am. Should I?”

“With my glasses on?” She replaced the harlequins on her face. They gave her a slant-eyed Eurasian look, or the look of something even more remote. A woman from another planet, maybe, aching to get home. “Now do you remember?”

He wagged his ponderous head. “I’m sorry, lady. This a gag or something?”

“Hardly. I was in here one night about four months ago. Surely you must remember serving me. I had a Dubonnet.”

“We don’t stock Dubonnet even, we got no demand for it.”

“You did four months ago,” she said accusingly.

He spread fat dishwater hands. “Maybe one bottle. I don’t know what this is, lady. I know for a fact I never laid eyes on you. Not in here. You lose something?”

“No.” She took a torn newspaper clipping out of her blue leather pouch and spread it on the bartop. “What about him? Do you remember him?”

It was a two-column photograph from an inside page of the Los Angeles Times. It showed two men walking along a courthouse corridor. One of them was handcuffed to the other. I recognized his face.

“Nor him neither,” the bartender said. He was running out of negatives.

“But you served us!”

“Not me. My brother, maybe. I work nights one week, he works the next. My brother looks like me, a little bit.”

“Where is your brother now?”

“Tijuana, I guess. He’s on vacation. Not that it’s anybody’s business.”

“In Mexico?”

“It always used to be. Unless they moved it in the last couple of weeks.” He smiled blandly at me, asking me to share his enjoyment in the repartee.

I said: “You’re talking to a lady, Curly. Maybe you’re out of practice.”

She turned to me. “Please.” Her smile was brilliant with anxiety. “I’m trying to find something out, from him. When will your brother be back?”

“Next week, I hope. Unless he’s on a bat.”

“A bat?”

“A bender. A binge. I don’t expect him till I see him, see.” The lift of his shoulders said: am I my brother’s keeper? They sagged again, infinitely weary.

“I see.” She refolded the clipping, and tucked it into her pouch.

On her other side, a rumdum far along the lonely road to nightmare cried out in agony for another drink and beat the bar with a shot-glass. She drew away from him. Her shoulder touched mine, and stayed. I could feel her shudder. Looking into her face, I saw that she was crying behind the glasses.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” I said.

“Who are you?”

“Nobody in particular. The name is Archer. If you don’t mind, I’ll call you a cab.”

She sat up straight, drawing her shoulders narrow and forbidding. “I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself, thank you.”

Curly filled the clamorous rumdum’s shot-glass. It was emptied. The night was running down like a rickety machine. I sat and watched the woman crying to herself. Curly said:

“Everybody out. It’s two o’clock, my frolicking little friends, and I got a license to lose.”

Heyday in the Blood

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

The improbable blonde behind the reception desk gave me the electronic eye. She seemed to see the gun in my shoulder holster, the label on the inside breast pocket of my jacket, the pair of lonely tens keeping each other company in my wallet, the place where the laundry had torn my undershirt, even the bent rib where a goon had stamped me back in 1938 on a San Pedro dock. It was a long way, in time and space and social attitude, from the San Pedro docks to the Channel Club.

“Are you a member?” The question was rhetorical.

“Mrs. Casswell asked me to meet her here.”

She underwent a personality change which almost cracked her makeup. “Oh. Excuse me, sir. If you’ll sign the register – I believe Mrs. Casswell is in the bar.”

I signed the piece of foolscap she pushed towards me. She pressed a buzzer which opened the inner door. I stepped through into shimmering blue-green light. It fell from the noon sky and was reflected by the oval pool. A few old people, brown and still as lizards, lay in long chairs along one side of the pool. An Olympic diving tower stood unused at the far end. On the other side, white-coated waiters were setting umbrella tables in preparation for lunch. I could smell ham and chlorine and Roquefort dressing and money.

The bar was dim and cool like a ceremonial grotto. The bartender could have been a surpliced Italian priest performing a ritual. He was pouring a gin and tonic for a dark-headed woman. She wore sunglasses and a sleeveless white linen sundress with a scarlet and white straw belt. I went up to her. She had a beautiful back, with the deep glowing tone of hand-rubbed mahogany.

“Mr. Archer?” she said tentatively.

“Yes.”

She looked at the wafer-thin watch on her brown wrist. “You’re very punctual. No doubt you’re thirsty after your drive. What would you like to drink? Or don’t you drink before lunch?”

“I guess I can handle a beer.”

The bartender poured me a bottle of Löwenbräu. I tried to pay him for it. He informed me in a soft religious voice that money was no good here. Everything had to be signed for.

Mrs. Casswell rose, almost as tall as I in her high heels. “We’ll take our drinks out to the terrace if you don’t mind the sun.” She said over her shoulder to the bartender: “Tell Ferdy to bring us a menu.”

“Yes, Mrs. Casswell.” He made a pass with his hand like a benediction.

We passed through a court with a half-drawn canvas roof. A shaft of sunlight fell on cubist furniture and semi-abstract murals. A couple of men with vein-webbed noses were sitting in a corner over empty glasses, encouraging each other to have another drink. They nodded to Mrs. Casswell and looked at me from a great alcoholic distance. I hadn’t been born with a silver cocktail shaker in my hands.

The flagstone terrace overlooked a golf course. At the bottom of its green slopes lay a dazzling band of sea. Twenty or thirty miles out, a string of brown hunchbacked islands lay on the bright horizon like basking tortoises. The woman looked at the Pacific and its islands as if they belonged to her. I found out later that one of them did.

She arranged herself in a padded metal chaise and made a sign for me to sit near her. “Smoke if you like. I’ve given it up. It’s so morale-building to have given up one of the vices. Of course I’d never have done it without that cancer scare to help me. Sheer terror can be awfully useful, don’t you think?”

She sounded slightly disorganized. Her voice hummed with unspoken feelings like cello overtones. Her gaze swung towards me across the small table holding our drinks like a searchlight occulted by the dark glasses:

“It’s good of you to come like this, without any explanation.”

“I know your name. I read the society pages when there’s nothing better to do. I saw the account of your wedding last year. Who recommended me to you, by the way?”

“Ralph Sandoe. He’s my lawyer. I didn’t tell you anything over the telephone. I don’t trust these long-distance operators. In a matter like this, I hate to trust anyone.”

I waited, sipping my beer and trying to guess her trouble. Her head, dark and small with its Italian cut, had a kind of smooth glaze that seemed impermeable. But she was one of the women who always had trouble. Too handsome and too rich, they wandered from marriage to marriage and continent to continent, searching for something worth finding.

She looked up at the sun as if it was spying on her.

“Well. There’s no point in beating around the bush, is there? I’m worried about Frankie. My son. I have no idea what’s happening to him, but something terrible is. He didn’t come home last night. It isn’t the first time he’s stayed out all night. I found out yesterday that he hasn’t been at school this week. The headmaster talked of expelling him – not that that’s the important thing.”

“How old is your son?”

“Sixteen.” Her white teeth flashed between her lips, unsmiling. “You seem surprised.”

She was very young to have a son that age. Her skin was as smooth as a girl’s, her body sleek and slender. She crossed her ankles under my stare, pointing her toes like a ballet dancer.

“I’m thirty-four,” she said. “Entre nous. I’ll soon be thirty-five. I don’t mind telling my age as long as I look younger than I am. It’s the other way around that hurts.”

She took off her glasses and swung them. Her eyes were blue, and older than the rest of her, a little hard, a little dazed by the unfiltered light or by undiluted experience. She put the glasses on again, turning her profile towards me. The straight nose met the brow without an indentation. It was the profile that Greek sculptors loved, that spread along the Mediterranean to Sicily, to Spain, and crossed the Atlantic when Spain raped Mexico.

“I was married when I was sixteen,” she said, “the year I came out.”

“That was Ben Gunderson.”

“Yes. You know a great deal about me.”

I knew more about Ben Gunderson. I kept it to myself.

“My husband – my first husband was killed last year. You probably know that, too. It was one of those dreadful ordinary accidents. He was cleaning a gun. It was loaded, and it went off. He’d been handling firearms for year, all kinds of guns. Even elephant guns. But he forgot this time. He took the clip out of his automatic, but he forgot to remove the shell in the breech. It killed him.”

Her voice was shaky. I wondered why she was dwelling on Gunderson’s death. She said:

“But all that is irrelevant and immaterial, as Ralph Sandoe would say. Except that it may have been the start of Frankie’s trouble. He was never close to his father, he was always closer to me. But he couldn’t accept Ben’s death. I saw the change in him. I believed he needed a father. I’d never have married Cass if it hadn’t been for Frankie. Certainly not so soon.”

She plucked at the skin on the back of one hand with the red-tipped nails of the other.

“Wait a minute, Mrs. Casswell. You say he’s been gone all night. Do you know where?”

“No. It’s why I called you–”

“Is there any possibility that he’s been kidnapped?”

She gave me a short hot look and looked away. She raised her active hand and stroked her bronze unchanging profile from hairline to mouth. She said through her fingers: “No, I’m sure it’s nothing like that. I wish you hadn’t said it, though.”

“I like to start with the worst and work up.”

“I have no reason to suspect kidnapping, or any kind of foul play. I told you Frankie’s done this before. It’s himself I’m worried about, not other people.” Her voice was cold with pain. “I’m afraid he’s in a bad way, mentally. He’s at the age when schizophrenia strikes so many young people.”

“Maybe he needs a psychiatrist. I’m not one.”

“I know what you are, Mr. Archer. A private detective, with the accent on the private. I have to trust someone, and that’s why you’re here. You can find out where he is and what he’s doing. When I know what I have to deal with, then perhaps it will be time for the psychiatrists. Not that they ever did me any good.”

I thought and didn’t say that she seemed moderately sane for a woman of her age and class. One thing besides her money made me a little nervous, though. Her thought revolved in obsessive circles around herself, returning to the beloved subject like a hawk to a wrist.

“Of course you’ve been in touch with his friends,” I said with some impatience.

“He has no friends, no really close friends, at least not that I know of. It’s one of the things that concern me. There are the boys at school, naturally, but Frankie never fitted into any group too well. I was his only confidante, until this last year or so. He used to tell me everything. Not any more. When he does come home, he keeps himself to himself. He looks at me as if I didn’t exist, literally. When I try to speak to him – to question him – he gets violently angry and rushes out of the house. Or he locks himself in his room and plays music for hours on end. All night, sometimes.”

“Bach or bop?”

“Anything. He plays the same record over and over. Ravel’s Bolero is one. He sits in his room and won’t come down for meals. No wonder he’s losing weight. I’ve gone to his room to try to persuade him – he won’t let me past the door. It’s as if he’s trying to cut himself off entirely. I don’t believe he’s addressed me once in the last two weeks, except to ask for money.”

“He’s spending money?”

“Quite a great deal. I made him an allowance of fifty dollars a week, which is supposed to include the upkeep of his car. But it hasn’t been nearly enough lately. I must have given him an extra three or four hundred in the last month. And he keeps asking for more.”

“Maybe he’s got himself a girl.”

“Maybe he has, but I doubt it. He’s never shown much interest in girls. I almost wish he had. That I could cope with.” Her body stretched and expanded, more or less on its own. “But this isn’t the way a boy behaves when he’s fallen in love. I know what I’m talking about.”

I didn’t doubt it. “Has Mr. Casswell talked to him?”

“Cass has tried. He can’t get through to him, any better than I can. I’m afraid talking is useless. We have to find out where he goes and what he’s doing – do you have any notions, from what I’ve told you?”

I had. I said I hadn’t. I didn’t even want to think about it. “Can I have a look at his room?”

“He keeps it locked when he isn’t there.”

“You must have a master key.”

“Yes, but he changed the lock, six months ago. I know how that sounds,” she said, bowing her head. “As if he’s running completely out of control. And that’s true. I’m afraid, not of Frankie. Just afraid.”

“Is Casswell?”

She pondered her answer. Before it came, there were quick light footsteps on the flagstones behind us. It was a man in morning clothes, carrying a menu. He was small and neat-looking, with crisply waved gray hair. He looked at me with surprise and recognition, but waited for me to speak.

“Ferdy Jerome,” I said.

Mrs. Casswell looked at me suspiciously. “Do you know Ferdy?”

He nodded blandly, to her and then to me. He was a Swiss with a heart of German silver and a politician’s brain. He spoke six languages, including Romantsch, and also understood the uses of silence. I got up to shake hands with him.

“Nice to see you, Ferdy.”

“Thank you, Mr. Archer.” He owned several apartment houses in Los Angeles, and could have bought me out without noticing it. “I haven’t seen you since 1950. March, the first week in March.”

“Correct. Did you get tired of Las Vegas?”

“I wouldn’t say so. But I always have this yearning for the ocean. I’ve been working here for nearly two years.”

“You still are, Ferdy,” Mrs. Casswell drawled. “Give me the menu, please.”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Casswell. I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.” He bent over her solicitously. “And how is Mr. Casswell? And how is Francis?”

She didn’t answer him.

After a lunch which Mrs. Casswell hardly touched, I followed her Lincoln home. Her estate lay along the sea between the club and the city. We entered through iron gates and drove for several hundred yards along a gravel drive. There were polo grounds on one side, which looked disused; on the other a landing strip for light planes, and a bright new metal hangar.

The house belonged to the hashish school of Spanish architecture. Probably early nineteen-twenties and imitation Mizner, which made it the imitation of an imitation which wasn’t worth imitating. It was a ponderous monstrosity with thick walls, meager windows, insane turrets. Somebody with a hidalgo complex had tried to jail a dream of happiness. The prisoner had probably died, or lost its mind.

I watched Mrs. Casswell leave her car and mount the low front steps. Her movements seemed unwilling. She waited for me under the Moorish arch which hung over the front door. She opened the door like a mourner making a duty call at a mausoleum.

The air in the living room was chilly and stale. There was dust on the heavy dark furniture, dirty glasses on the closed top of the grand piano, tarnish on the gilt scrollwork of the picture frames, cobwebs in the angles of the beams. She looked around the giant room as if she was seeing it through my eyes.

“I lost my housekeeping couple. They had some trouble with Frankie. I’ll have to do something about that, too.”

“What did Frankie do?”

“Nothing, really. There was some disagreement. Dohi claimed he threatened him with a knife. He didn’t, of course. It’s perfectly preposterous. These Japs are awful liars.”

“So are these Caucasians. Why did he threaten Dohi with a knife? If he did.”

“He didn’t, I tell you. Frankie’s incapable of anything like that.”

“All right. May I look at his room?”

“I don’t like this,” she said uncertainly. “It’s like breaking faith with him. What do you expect to find there?”

“Some clues to his habits. So far I haven’t much to go on.”

Lady Killer

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

It was nearly half a mile from the gates to the house. The grove of untended oaks which flanked the road gave way to formal gardens. Hedges clipped in old-fashioned topiary shapes divided terraced lawns, brown from lack of water. The house was a stucco monstrosity which looked more like a state institution than a home.

The woman who answered my knock wore a white nylon nurse’s uniform. Its cut was more erotic than professional, plunging low at the neck, nipped in at the waist, flaring out over the hips. She had cool blue eyes, hair like whipped cream, and a figure that justified the formfitting uniform. I told her who I was.

“Come in, Mr. Archer. Mr. Coulson is expecting you.”

“Isn’t he well?”

“Well enough. His gout is kicking up worse than usual. It always does when he’s worried.”

“I understand he’s worried about his son. What’s the boy been up to?”

Her curly red mouth straightened. “You’ll have to take that up with Mr. Coulson.”

I followed her pleasantly switching hips along a tile-floored corridor to a downstairs bedroom. Light flooded it from high windows on the left. A square bed stood against the far wall, so huge that it almost dwarfed its occupant. Not quite. He had been known as Big George Coulson when he was an All-American back before the First World War, and age hadn’t withered him. It had thinned and grayed his hair, though, draped rolls of fat around his middle, and stuck a porous whiskey nose on his face. He was sitting up in bed in white piped black silk pyjamas, his swollen red feet stuck out in front of him. There was a collapsible metal wheelchair just inside the door.

The nurse moved forward with the air of a lion tamer approaching a difficult beast. “Mr. Archer is here to see you,” she said with a soothing lilt in her voice.

“I can see that for myself. I’m crippled, not blind.” His voice was a harsh growl.

Trying to sit up straighter, he winced and groaned. She bent over the bed and lifted his inert mass of flesh. She was strong. He leaned his head against her breast for an instant, breathing hard through the mouth. She didn’t pull away until he moved his head to look at me:

“Sit down, Archer. You want something to eat? Alice was just about to bring me my lunch.”

“I’ve already eaten, thanks.”

“You’re smart, boy. Know what she gives me? Cottage cheese and pineapple and a glass of skim milk.” He grimaced.

She touched his corrugated forehead, casually. “You want to get back on your feet as soon as possible.”

“Don’t worry. They can’t keep a good man down.” He winked at me broadly.

Her hand trailed down his cheek and slapped it lightly. “I’ll get your lunch. Dr. Freestone says if you’re good, you can have a lamb chop for dinner, maybe.”

“And a drink?”

“No drink.”

She left the room. I sat down in a leather armchair beside Coulson’s bed.

He leaned towards me confidentially, and said as if it was a personal word: “I haven’t had a drink for sixty hours.”

“Congratulations. Now about your son.”

“Yeah. My son.” He took a deep breath and blew it out through protruding lips. His big-nosed face was a tragicomic mask. “He hasn’t been home for three nights. I haven’t seen him since Saturday. I don’t want to be overprotective about it – I had some wild times myself when I was in college. But frankly it’s got me down.”

“How old is he?”

“Ron’s nineteen. He’s going into his junior year at Stanford. Ron did pretty well in frosh football, and he’s no baby. But I feel an awful sense of responsibility. I promised his mother when she died that I’d see him safely through college. I’ve had to be father and mother both to my boy.” His red-brown eyes became liquid with sentimentality, which seems to grow with the years on aging athletes. “Now that he’s practically grown up, I can’t let him wreck his life.”

“That’s jumping to conclusions, isn’t it? Has he ever taken off like this before?”

Coulson wagged his massive head against the pillows. “Never. Ron’s been in training all summer – plenty of sleep, exercise, no drinking. Until he took up with this woman.”

“So there’s a woman in it.”

“Hell yes, that’s just the point. If he was off on an ordinary binge with the boys, I wouldn’t worry about him. I could laugh it off. Only you know what can happen when an innocent young fellow takes off for a weekend with a woman. First thing he knows he’s drunk, she drags him off to Vegas for a quickie marriage, and there he is, kaput!”

“That’s one way of looking at marriage.”

“The only way, when a boy has a million dollars of his own. Don’t misunderstand me.” He waved a deprecating hand. Swollen and distorted at the knuckles, it resembled a diseased and knotted vegetable. “I’ve got nothing against marriage. I had a good marriage of my own, and I want the same for Ron, when the time comes.”

“Has he mentioned marriage?”

“Not to me. He said something to Alice before he left on Saturday – he talks to her more than he does to me. She thought he was joking, so she didn’t bring it up until yesterday.”

“What did he say?”

“Something about taking unto himself a wife, and wouldn’t she be surprised. She asked him who the lucky girl was, not taking him seriously.”

“But he didn’t tell her?”

“No. It’s what I want you to find out.” He leaned sideways in the bed, his gargoyle face intent. “Find out who she is, and where they are, and whether he married her. If he did, get me the evidence for an annulment. I don’t care how you get it.” His red-blotched hand worked on the sheet, opening and closing.

“How do you know he’s with a woman at all?”

“He showed Alice this corsage he bought. She said it looked like about thirty dollars’ worth of cymbidiums. Ron wanted to know if she thought it was suitable. She asked him suitable for what, and that’s when he made his remark about getting married.”

“You don’t have any idea where they’ve gone?”

“No. That’s your problem.”

“Do you have a picture I can take along?”

“Ask Alice.” He was tiring, his voice had risen querulously. “Tell Ronnie if you see him, his old man’s on his back and worried sick about him. Tell him his old man needs him, eh?”

“Uh-huh.” But I thought as I left the room that the old man was pretty well provided for.

I met Alice in the corridor, carrying a tray. I waited for her to come out of the room. She came out smoothing her hair and wearing the feline smile that almost any kind of a pass can produce in a certain kind of woman.

“Mr. Coulson says you can give me a picture of Ron.”

“Yes, there’s one in the study.”

She led me to a high-raftered room lined on three sides with books. The fourth side was a bay window which overlooked a lily pond choked with green slime. A pair of time-pocked Greek marbles, one an unsexed man and one a woman, looked at each other remotely from opposite ends of the pool.

“Who reads the books? Mr. Coulson?”

The feline smile widened. “George isn’t the bookish type. I guess Mrs. Coulson used to read ’em.”

“She long dead?”

The nurse shrugged. “About fifteen years. She fell off a polo pony and broke her neck.”

“Too bad. Thinking of taking her place?” She didn’t turn a hair, change color or stop smiling. “It could happen. But don’t get any funny ideas in your head. I like the guy. You’re seeing him when he’s down, but he’s got a lot of stuff for a man his age. He’s full of kicks.”

“How about Ron?”

“Him I like, too. They’re nice boys, both of them.” Her cool gaze rested on me. “You’re all right yourself. Drop around some time when I’m Mrs. George Coulson the Second. I’ll pour you a drink.”

“I’m here now.”

“Sure enough you are. Too bad the liquor’s locked up.” She went briskly to a mahogany desk in one corner, and came back to me with a silver-framed photograph in her hand. “Here’s your picture of Ronnie. Nice-looking boy.”

He was. An ordinary good-looking college boy with wide-spaced eyes and a short crewcut and a straight nose. Perhaps the mouth was a little spoiled and feminine, the eyes a little arrogant. The arrogance was tempered by the marks of a worried frown between the eyes, which the retoucher had missed. I wondered if Ronnie was worried about himself.

I turned to the nurse. “Does he confide in you?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“He showed you some orchids he bought.”

“Yes, he did. They were luscious.”

“Who were they for?”

“I wouldn’t know. Not me.”

“I understand he said he was getting married?”

“In a kidding way. I still think he was kidding.”

“Uh-huh. You must know something about the woman.”

“I suppose she has two eyes, and the other accessories.” The color had left the lower part of her face and centered over the cheekbones.

“You seem to have everything under control, Alice.”

“Thank you, sir, I try.” She placed the knuckles of one hand under her chin and did a mock curtsy.

“You don’t run the house by yourself, though?”

“Right now I do. The Japanese couple are on vacation this month. Not that I do much for the house. I do look after George.”

“Who looks after Ronnie?”

“Ronnie looks after himself.” The spots of color over her cheekbones were vivid. She veiled her eyes, and was silent for a moment, nibbling her lower lip. “If I told you something, would you keep it under your hat? Not let on to George about it, I mean?”

“That’s a promise.”

“Well. I told you a little white lie a minute ago. I do know who she is, at least I’m pretty certain. I introduced her to Ronnie. I had no way of knowing she’d go all out for him.”

“A million dollars is quite an attraction. Who is she?”

“Claire Devon, her name is. She’s Dr. Freestone’s office nurse. Claire and me – Claire and I trained together at Los Angeles General.”

“Nice girl?”

“I always thought so. She never showed much interest in men, but she’s got a good personality. Sort of the reserved type, only with a sense of humor. She’s good for a lot of laughs.”

“How old?”

“About my age. Twenty-three or four – too old for Ronnie. I wouldn’t have brought them together if I’d thought it was going to turn into a thing.” One side of her mouth turned up. “Maybe Claire wants to be a mother to him.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“Just this last month. She came out here to play tennis with me one day – I’m the only one that uses the court – and Ronnie was hanging around and he got interested. Claire’s got gorgeous red hair, and she’s a pretty stunning girl if you like the bony type.” She rotated her body, which belonged to a different type, in the light from the window. “They’ve been seeing each other since.”

“And now you think they’ve eloped?”

“Maybe. It’s hard to believe. I tried to call Claire at her office yesterday, and Dr. Freestone said she didn’t come to work. I called her apartment. No answer.”

“Freestone is Mr. Coulson’s doctor, right?”

“One of them. That’s the trouble. I couldn’t tell him what it was all about. You see, I wouldn’t hurt Claire for anything in the world. She got me this job.”

“And you don’t want to lose the job, you mean?”

“It’s the chance of a lifetime,” she said. “Remember, you promised not to quote me to anybody.”

Dr. Freestone had a cottage in a professional court on the other side of Santa Monica Boulevard. His waiting room was furnished in white leatherette and black masonite, with a sheaf of this week’s magazines on a table. A small aquarium kaleidoscopic with tropical fish divided the public space from the receptionist’s alcove.

A pale woman rose behind the counter, looking at me down her high-bridged nose. He eyes were large and dark, accentuated by eye shadow. She had black hair, clipped very short and curled like karakul. Her jersey dress was black as a widow’s weeds. Under it, her breasts were small and sharp. Her total effect was ugly but interesting.

“What can I do for you, sir?” Her voice was low, with unusual overtones, suggesting that the things she was capable of doing for me were many and varied.

“I’d like to see Dr. Freestone.”

“Sorry, the doctor is busy at the moment. You don’t have an appointment, do you?”

“No, I’m not a patient.”

“What is it you wish to see him about?”

“A private matter.”

The temperature sank, glazing her eyes with a film of ice. “I’m afraid the doctor has a full schedule this afternoon.”

Little Woman

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

It was one of those dusty Valley cities through which big money flowed year after year and, like an underground river, left only a trace of green. The men who controlled the land and the water rights spent their money in other places, in San Francisco and Las Vegas and Los Angeles. I saw their private airfields as I drove up to the city from the south, their Palominos and Black Angus herds, and their vast cotton acreage. I also saw the paintless huts and barracks and trailer camps where the migrant workers lived, in worse conditions than the animals. Animals cost money.

The address I’d been given was an old two-story frame with a mansard roof. Beyond it a housing tract, a hundred stucco cottages which differed only in color from each other, stretched to the western limits of the city. Beyond these, irregular formations of oil derricks struggled across the valley towards the mountains. The mountains surrounded everything like the ruins of an ancient adobe wall which merged with the dust-colored distance.

The lawn in front of the house was unmowed and unwatered. There was alkali dust like dingy frost on the grass, and on the leaves of the trumpet vine which writhed among the wires of the front fence. I pushed open the gate and said hello to a blasé cocker spaniel and knocked on the screen door. Somewhere behind it someone was playing a piano, and playing it well. Tinkling notes rained on the parched air. When I knocked a second time, it stopped.

A short thin blonde woman opened the inner door, and peered at me through the screen. She had once been pretty. Her movements showed that she had not forgotten it. Her hand went to her fading straw-colored hair, which was drawn back almost cruelly from her forehead. Then it went to her mouth and plucked at her dry lower lip. Her head was big for her body, which gave everything she did a childish air.

“Mrs. Wrightson?”

She gave me a queer look, as if I had reminded her of her identity. Her eyes were blue and strained and slightly bulging. There were blue pockets of grief under them and sun-cracks at the corners. “Yes, I’m Mrs. Wrightson.”

“My name is Archer. You wrote me a letter.”

“Oh. Yes. You got here sooner than I expected.” She looked down at her frilly gingham apron, started to take it off, then changed her mind. “I’m afraid I – the house is a mess. But won’t you come in?”

She unhooked the screen, and led me under a deer head into the living room. Old-fashioned sliding double doors cut it off from the rest of the house. Though the windows were heavily blinded against the sun, I could see that the room and everything in it was very neat and clean. The dark red broadloom carpet was immaculate. Even the stones of the fireplace looked as if they had been scrubbed. But the woman ran from one side to the other, picking up a magazine from the davenport, a newspaper from the floor beside it, and placing them precisely on a library table. She came back towards me smoothing down her apron and muttering something inarticulate about living in a pigsty.

“Sit down if you can find a clear space,” she said unsmilingly.

I sat on the bare davenport. She sat beside me hugging her knees and cocked her head at me, birdlike. She seemed hardly bigger than a bird, so light she barely depressed the cushions, and she had the girlish mannerisms which small women never outgrow. Though there was a foot or more of air between us, she gave the impression of leaning on me. I was younger than she was, and had never seen her before, but I had become her daddy and confessor.

She clenched her hands and rapped her knuckles together in quick rhythm. “I’m so relieved you’ve come. It’s been just terrible these last few days, since it happened. I’ve had nobody to talk to about it, nobody. I thought I had friends in this town, but I was wrong. I’ve always stood for the better things, you see.” She glanced at a shelf of Book of the Month selections beside the fireplace, as if to reassure herself. “They can’t forgive me for that. I’ve found out I have no friends, none I can count on. And even Alex – Captain Wrightson hardly ever shows his face in the house. We haven’t exchanged ten words in the last week.”

“Didn’t he give you my name?”

“That’s right, he remembered you from that case in Bella City a few years ago. Lieutenant Gorman is a friend of his, at least he was before this awful thing. I suppose every other officer in the Valley has turned against my husband.”

“Where is he now?”

“Out back in the barn. He has a workshop there, and he’s practically lived there since he was suspended. If I didn’t know he was innocent–” She bit the sentence in half. “I mean, he sits and broods and he won’t see anyone. I’m afraid he’ll lose his mind if he keeps it up. I know he’s drinking.” She added in a whisper: “His father was alcoholic.”

“Unless he’s alcoholic, too, a little drinking won’t hurt him.”

“Oh? Are you a medical man?” Her whole face wrinkled in a hostile smile.

“You know what I am.”

“Yes, and I know how men hang together where drinking is concerned. I know what drinking can do.”

I could feel the hard will underlying her girlish air. “We won’t argue, Mrs. Wrightson. About this letter of yours, did you tell your husband you were writing me?”

“Yes, I did. He didn’t want me to. He said it was a waste of money, and we’re hard up as it is. He said they’re out to get him, and nothing would do any good. We had quite an argument about that letter. I sent it anyway. Alex needs outside help, no matter how much it costs.”

“Fifty a day and expenses.”

“I can pay it, for a few days. We’ve never been able to save out of Alex’s salary, but I have a little savings of my own. I taught music until a few years ago.”

“Piano?”

“Yes.” Her eyes rolled wistfully. “I might have become a concert pianist if I had had the teachers, and the hands. My hands were too small.” She held them up for me to see, tiny but muscular, the knuckles swollen from housework. She said with earnest force: “Thank God Henry inherited his father’s hands. And my talent.”

She rose suddenly, like a puppet jerked by a wire, and went to the closed double doors. “Henry! Are you in there?”

“Yes, Mother,” a boy’s voice answered in monotone.

The mother’s voice lilted back: “You haven’t finished the Debussy, darling. You’ve only practiced two hours.”

“I’m tired.”

“Nonsense, you can’t be tired. Just keep on playing, and you’ll get your second wind.”

She listened at the door in tense expectancy until the showers of notes began to fall. They seemed to refresh her with an almost sexual pleasure. There was a hint of ballet in her movement back to me.

“My son is a genius, you know.” Her voice was bright.

“I don’t doubt it,” I said under the music. “Now I’d like you to tell me all you can about your husband’s – difficulty. Your letter didn’t go into much detail. I understand he’s a captain of detectives, under suspension for alleged violation of the Health and Safety Code. The Police Commission is going to hold a hearing next week, and if the opposition makes it stick, your husband stands to lose his job and pension rights.”

“Yes,” she said, “after twenty-four years of service. Alex was due to retire next year, and they’re cutting him off without a nickel.”

“What are they charging him with?”

“Selling narcotics, can you imagine? When he’s been fighting the drug traffic with all his heart and soul. He hates it, he’s incapable of going into it himself.”

“It certainly doesn’t sound like a veteran cop. Do they have any evidence on him?”

“I suppose they have. Fabricated evidence. You’ll have to ask Alex about that – he’s the expert – if he’ll talk to you.”

“I’ll try him in a minute. First, who’s the opposition? Who are ‘they’?”

She wagged her head with a doleful up-from-under look. “Practically everybody in town. You don’t make friends trying to enforce the law in a Godforsaken place like this. Alex has made a lot of enemies.”

“Who, for instance?”

“The sheriff, the district attorney. They both work for the clique – the ranchers and oilmen who keep control of the county so their taxes won’t be raised.” Her voice was buzzing with malice, in grotesque counterpoint with the cool clear piano tones. The combination of the woman and the music was getting on my nerves.

“They started the action, did they?”

She nodded. “They’re behind it. The chief was the one who suspended him officially, but he’s only a figurehead. Alex has been running the department for years, if you want the truth. Chief Shouder had nothing against him. It’s the sheriff who wants to get him. Roy Stark.”

“Is this what your husband says?”

“Ask him yourself. You can go out through the house.”

She crossed to the sliding doors with sudden hummingbird speed, and opened them. The music came louder for a moment, then ended in a discord which was no part of Debussy. The boy at the Baldwin piano turned his head, his fingers still spread on the keys. His hands were enormous, too large for his arms, which protruded thin and white from the T-shirt he wore. He was a nice-looking boy, though there was too much hair on his head, too little flesh on his face. A frown knit his eyebrows in a furry black knot across the bridge of his nose:

“Please, Mother. You asked me to practice. Now you’re interrupting as usual.”

“It’s just for a second, darling. Remember your manners, now. Stand up and say hello to the gentleman. This is my son, Mr. Archer.”

He stood up, taller than I was, six foot three or four, and said hello. But he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were on the window where a surf of light was beating. He stood there chewing his short upper lip as though he couldn’t stand the sight of an adult male. I could see why when his mother took his hand and caressed it, tittering nervously: “Henry is only sixteen. Isn’t he tall? Imagine little me giving birth to a great big fellow like Henry.”

He looked down into her upturned smile with a kind of disgusted resignation. If it hadn’t been for his unfinished face and the harsh lines in hers, they almost could have been father and daughter instead of mother and son. She fawned on him like a kitten. He pushed her away, gently:

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother.” His bass was still uncertain. “You’re not a little girl–”

“I’m your little girl,” she said in a falsetto which screeked along my spine. “You’re just embarrassed because you know I’m your girl.”

The boy’s eyes met mine. They were tragic with pain and understanding. I left the room. Mrs. Wrightson’s footsteps pattered after me. Before we were outside, the piano came to life in a plangent chord repeated loudly and violently. The boy began to replay the prelude he had been working on, this time in boogic tempo, with a terrible left hand prowling and growling down in the deep bass.

In the barn, behind the house, a power saw was screeching in sympathy. Mrs. Wrightson knocked on a side door. It was opened by a man in sawdust-sprinkled overalls. For the second time in five minutes, I felt a little short. Wrightson’s thick white hair nearly brushed the top of the doorframe. His eyes were deepset and gray, with a red smoldering in them like the ash of a burning cigar. They looked from me to his wife:

“Who is this, Esther?”

“Mr. Archer.”

“I told you not to send that letter.” He had a freshly cut length of white pine two-by-four in his hand. He smacked it into the palm of his other hand. “Another wasted trip.”

“You need help, Alex.”

He smiled without parting his lips. There was a three or four days’ beard around his mouth. She plucked at her withering throat as if his grizzled silence frightened her. Shifting to the offensive, she leaned towards him and sniffed with flaring nostrils.

“Alex. You’ve been drinking. You shouldn’t use the saw when you’ve been drinking.”

“Shouldn’t I?” He looked up into the sun.

She tugged at his shirtsleeve. “I didn’t mean to nag,” she said contritely. “What are you making, Alex?”

“A coffin,” he said to the sun. “I figured I’d need a custom job.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?” Her voice jangled out of control.

“If you don’t like my jokes, don’t listen. Go away. All the way to the edge of the world and jump off. And take your friend here with you. You don’t fit into my plans, either one of you.”

“Won’t you even talk to him, tell him the facts?”

“Why should I waste my breath? Nobody can do anything about it.” He looked at me. “So beat it, friend.”

He turned back into the workshop. His wife said, “Alex. You won’t – do anything to yourself?”

“Why should I bother?” he said. “It’s being done for me.”

He closed the door with his elbow. The power saw skirled and screeched. Mrs. Wrightson stood with her mouth open and her eyes closed. For an instant I had the illusion that she was making that noise.

The flag on the pole in front of the courthouse hung languid in the still air. It was a two-story concrete building with a flat roof. A columned porch masked its bleak facade. A few old men were lounging against the columns, smoking Bull Durham and spitting over the railing. They looked as if they’d been waiting a long time for something lucky or interesting to happen to them: a jury call or a political sinecure or a free drink.

The corridor had the grimy look and odor of public institutions where nobody lived. I found the sheriff’s office at the rear. The door was standing open, and I could see the big man behind the desk. He wore a black Stetson and a black gabardine shirt, and he was clipping the nails on his pudgy fingers with a pocket clipper. There were pictures of him on the walls, with deer he had killed, fish he had caught, a visiting governor with a man-eating movie smile.

I tapped on the pebbled glass panel. “Sheriff Stark?”

“That’s me.”

He leaned back in the swivel chair which his body overflowed, pushed the Stetson back from his forehead, and went on clipping his nails. I sat down opposite him without being invited. He showed no surprise. His eyes looked blandly out from under folded and overhanging lids. All his features, which were small for his size, were practically submerged in facial blubber.

“What’s the complaint?”

“No complaint. I just drove up from Los Angeles this morning.” I gave him my name, but not my occupation. “I’m a reporter.” I reported my income once a year.

“On one of the L.A. papers?”

“No, I’m a freelance. I specialize in true crime for the magazines.”

“Well. How about that?” He rose cumbrously and offered me his hand and tried to produce a hearty smile. His hand felt like cold Plasticine. His smile was narrow and cruel. “I can tell you right now you came to the right door. Some of my colleagues don’t believe in publicity, but I say it’s the lifeblood of public office. Roy Stark is a servant of the people and my motto is: let the people know.”

“I’ll go along with that.”

He twitched a thumb towards a photograph on the wall. It showed Stark and a hangdog Mexican in a leather arm-restrainer. “I got a real nice writeup on that one there. The Sepulveda case. The guy stabbed his common-law wife with a greased knife in the guts. He’s on the death row in San Quentin now. ‘Crime of Passion,’ they called it. They put that picture in, and a couple of others. I got a copy in the file if you want to look it over. I don’t remember the fellow’s name that wrote it, but he certainly could sling the language.”

“I’m interested in something more recent.”

“Murder? We got a nice juicy murder now.” He sounded like a butcher recommending a cut of meat. “Rigger from Oklahoma shot another Okie at one of these here barn dances. Said he insulted his girl. The killer’s upstairs in the jail if you want to take a look at him. He shot the feller’s face off with a sawed-off shotgun he happened to have in his car. Hell,” Stark added with enthusiasm, “we get plenty of good murders in these parts. The statistics say we have the highest homicide rate in the country. And Roy Stark sees that they pay the penalty. Roy Stark hates lawbreakers, you can tell ’em.”

He struck a heroic pose with his chins and stomach thrust out and his hand on the butt of his gun. It wasn’t very impressive. I guessed that he was a timid man who had hidden his smallness under layers of fat.

“What about this cop in town,” I said, “the one who got suspended for selling drugs?”

A shadow crossed his face. “Wrightson, you mean?”

“Is that the name? If you could give me a story on that, I might be able to use it. It’s a new twist.”

“Yeah,” but his enthusiasm had faded. He said without conviction, as though he was quoting an old political speech: “It’s a terrible thing to have happen, when an officer of the law breaks the public trust like that. I can’t stand a renegade cop myself. It casts a reflection on all of us when it happens.”

He sat down and picked up the clipper from his desk and went back to his nails.

“What was Wrightson peddling?”

“Heroin caps.”

“Where did he get them?”

Stark shrugged his massive shoulders. “He had it. He claims he took it in a raid, and maybe he did at that. He was the narcotics specialist for the city cops. Anyway, it’s not my baby. The Police Commission and the D.A. are handling it. Talk to them if you want. Only I got better stories than that on tap.” He added in a luring tone: “How about the one we had last spring that killed his poor old mother with an axe? Split her head like a cantaloupe. The killer tried to plead insanity, said he was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and President Wilson ordered him to do it, that she was a spy. But he didn’t fool the jury. We got him.” He made his clipper snick in the air. “Valley folks don’t hold with that psychological crap.”

“Who did Wrightson sell it to?” I said.

The sheriff’s eyes lost their blandness. “I wouldn’t know. There’s plenty of addicts in town, in the floating population. But why go into that? There’s nothing interesting in the Wrightson case. No drama, no thrills.”

“I kind of like it, though. And if Wrightson sold heroin to addicts, the Police Commission must have at least one witness.”

“Sure they got a witness.”

“Who?”

“Take it up with them.” He said in an aggrieved tone: “I thought you wanted me to give you a story. I got no part in the Wrightson case.”

“Sorry. I heard you had.”

He leaned across the desk, his belly bulging over its edge. “Where did you hear that?”

“Around town.”

“You just got in, you said. Who you been talking to?”

“People on the street.”

“What people?” He was worried. His voice had risen, become the voice of the frightened little man behind his fatty barricades.

“One of them was a cop,” I said.

“Which one?”

I didn’t answer.

“Was it Cargill, young guy driving a prowl car?”

“It could have been. He was on foot when I talked to him. He didn’t mention his name.”

“Yeah,” the sheriff said to himself. “It was Cargill, all right. The bastard hates my guts.” His eyes were small and bright, half shuttered by drooping lids. “I’ll give you a little piece of friendly advice. Don’t pay no attention to anything Cargill says. He’s a troublemaker in this man’s town, and he was Wrightson’s sidekick. He ain’t gonna last any more than Wrightson did. Hell, he was probably in on this dope racket, if we – I mean if the Commission could get the evidence.”

“The story gets more interesting every minute.”

“You think so? I think you’re wasting your time if you try to write it up.”

“Why?”

He considered the question. “You’re gonna run into difficulty getting information – information you can depend on.”

“What about the public hearing?”

“Sure, there’s gonna be a hearing sometime, maybe in a month or a couple of months. You don’t want to wait for that.”

“I could come back.”

“Naw, save yourself the trouble. Drop in again after lunch and I’ll open the files to you, give you a nice bloody murder. How about it? You cooperate with Roy Stark, Roy Stark cooperates with you.”

I disregarded the implied threat. “Fair enough.”

I drove down the long main street. My tires shuddered on the pitted pavement. Dungareed field hands, high-heeled cowpokes out of a job, swaggered aimlessly through the bright and empty noon, past Chinese restaurants and Mexican movie houses, in and out of liquor stores and bars. I stopped for a red light which flared weakly against the fiercer light from the sky, and saw the City Hall in the side street to my left.

The police department was in the basement. The desk sergeant told me that Cargill was off duty. I’d probably find him, at this time of day, in the bar of the Walter House on the corner of Main.

I walked half a block to the hotel. An old earthquake crack climbed like a ghostly flight of stairs along its white brick side. The lobby was dim and deserted, but the bar at its rear was loud as a monkeyhouse. It was a big square room papered with posters for old rodeos and cattle sales. A semicircular bar arced out from one wall. The booths along the opposite wall were full, and the bar was jammed with eating and drinking men. No women. Most of the customers looked like ranchers and businessmen. There was one uniformed cop sitting alone in a booth and washing a corned beef sandwich down with a glass of beer.

I sat down opposite him. “Do you mind?”

He minded. His face had a sullen Indian look, high-cheekboned, leather-colored from the sun. Black enamel eyes riveted it to its bones. They flicked at me and down at his sandwich. He went on eating.

“Cargill?”

He took another bite, chewed it and swallowed it. “My name’s Cargill.”

I told him mine. “You’re a friend of Alex Wrightson’s, they tell me.”

“Is that what they tell you?” He gulped the last of his beer and started to slide out of the seat. “Excuse me, I got an appointment.”

“Wait a minute, Cargill.”

“What for? I don’t know you.”

“Give me a chance.”

“All right, say your piece.” He was poised on the end of the seat, his shoulder muscles bulging under his blouse. “You from the State Narcotics Bureau?”

“Not me.” I studied his lean hard-bitten face. The fact that the sheriff disliked him was a big point in his favor. I decided to plunge on his honesty: “I’m working for Wrightson.”

“How?”

“Investigating the charges. You can help.”

“How?”

“Tell me what they’ve got on him. He won’t talk to me.”

“That’s funny, you said you’re working for him.”

“Mrs. Wrightson hired me.”

“To work for him, or against him?”

“She’s with him. So am I.”

“I hear you telling me.” His voice was flat and hostile.

I handed him the letter she had sent me, gracefully written on blue notepaper with little colored flowers in the corners. His lips moved as he read. When he had finished, he moved back into the corner of the booth and lit a cigarette and offered me one. I lit one of my own.

“So Esther’s sticking with him after all.”

“A hundred percent,” I said. “Why shouldn’t she?”

“We won’t go into that. Okay.” He took a deep drag and blew it out through his nose in twin plumes. “What do you want to know?”

“Names and dates and places. I can’t do much to break down a case until I know what it is.”

“You think you can break down this one?”

“I can try. Unless he’s guilty.”

“Wrightson isn’t guilty. He was framed, by experts.”

“Who?”

“I’ll tell you the facts. You can figure the rest out yourself.” He looked around, and over the back of the booth. Nobody was paying any attention to us. “About a month ago,” he said, “the sixth of June it was, Alex and me were eating right here in this bar…”

The Strome Tragedy

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

There was a stealthy knock on my bedroom door, not so stealthy that it failed to wake me.

“Who is it?” I said. “Mrs. Jackson?” Her vacuum cleaner had been going all morning, like the sound of distant bombers threatening my dreams.

“Get up. You’ll never catch no early worm snoring your life away. How you expect me to clean your room with you lying there like a dead man?” Her voice trailed off in obscure Cassandra mutterings.

With some mutterings of my own, I got up and put on a bathrobe and opened the door. Mrs. Jackson was a Negro woman of indeterminate age. She had a seamed brown face and gray hair. At the moment most of her hair was tucked up under a purple scarf which was wrapped around her head like a turban. With the flexible hose of the vacuum cleaner draped around her shoulders, she bore a faint clownish resemblance to a carnival performer taming a python.

I was not amused. “I drove down from Sacramento last night. Got held up for three hours by a multiple smashup on the Grapevine. I got in at six o’clock, two hours before you turned up–”

“Was anybody killed?”

“No.”

“That’s a blessing.”

She smiled. My annoyance with Mrs. Jackson could never survive her smile. It was the smile of a woman who loved the sun:

“Poor man, you’ve had a bad night. Put on some clothes and I’ll fix you some lunch. You look as if you could use it.”

By the time I had showered and shaved, my lunch was waiting on the kitchen table: toasted cheese sandwich, tomato soup out of a can. Mrs. Jackson leaned on the sink and watched me eat. She had been born and raised in the South, and never sat down in my presence unless she was asked to.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” I said.

“I’ll do my eating at home, later. Thank you.”

“Sit down and have some coffee, anyway.”

“Doctor says I shouldn’t drink coffee. It gives me palpitations of the heart. My sister bought me a jar of that kind where they grind the caffeine out. It don’t taste the same, but I’d rather put up with the taste than the palpitations. You’ve heard me speak of my younger sister?”

“No. I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“Ruby,” she said. “She’s staying with me for a few weeks till she and her fiancé settle their affairs. Mr. Wilson’s a fine young fellow, works for a bottling company in Compton. A churchgoer, too – goes to my church, which is how my sister met him. Ruby sings contralto in the choir. It pleasures my heart, after all her tribulations, to see Ruby getting herself settled. That first man of hers was no bargain. He made her a lot of big promises and then he left her flat, with the payments on the car and everything. I had to make the payments on the car myself.”

I’d begun to wonder where the talk was leading. Mrs. Jackson was one of those garrulous talkers who never said anything without a reason. Possibly she needed money. In all the years she’d been my cleaning woman, she’d never asked me for an extra cent. Being loaded at the moment, I said:

“If an advance on your pay would help–?”

She pushed the thought away with an awkward sweep of her arm. “I thank you very kindly, Mr. Archer, but I don’t need your money – long as I have the strength in my back to make an honest living, which I have been vouchsafed. Ruby and me have our problems, Lord knows, but money ain’t the problem. And once she can get herself married, there won’t be any problem.”

“Is your sister in trouble?”

“I didn’t say that. Ruby’s a good girl. She’ll make Mr. Wilson a fine wife, once they’re legally married.”

“Are they illegally married?”

“Not yet. She wanted to go ahead and risk it. I wouldn’t let her. I told her it would be doing injustice to Mr. Wilson. He don’t know about the other one. But it would be a terrible thing if he turned up on Ruby’s wedding day: preacher says, does any man know a reason why this couple can’t be united in holy matrimony? And Horace Dickson marches up the aisle and says for all to hear: Ruby Dickson is my lawful wife. I come to claim my bride, after all these years.”

“She’s still married to her first husband,” I said.

Mrs. Jackson looked at me with affectionate pride, the way a fisherman looks at a fish who has accomplished the feat of taking his bait:

“Yes, she’s still married to him. And the worst of it is she don’t know where he is.”

“How long is it since she’s seen him?”

“Two years, close to three. She hasn’t heard from him in all that time.”

“She could divorce him on grounds of desertion.”

“Divorces take time. And Mr. Wilson, he don’t want to wait. Mr. Wilson is concupiscent, like it says in the Good Book. He’s anxious to get a family started.”

“Your sister will have to tell him the truth. They can arrange a divorce.”

“But Ruby’s afraid to do that. She’s afraid that Mr. Wilson wouldn’t marry a divorced woman. Mr. Wilson is very strict in his conscience. He goes to Bible college, nights.”

“I don’t see how I can help.”

“Ruby thinks you can. Did you enjoy your lunch, Mr. Archer? Here, let me hot up your coffee for you.”

She filled my cup from the percolator. I said: “I fear the Greeks even while bearing gifts.”

“They never bothered me. I knew some very nice Greek people in Pacific Palisades, used to clean for them, but it got too far to drive. I never did like driving in all that traffic. I know just how you feel about that highway accident you went through last night. Now that Ruby’s quit her job to get married, she’s been doing my driving for me. She drove me over here this morning.”

The themes of her monologue were coming together like the themes of a complex piece of music. I was alarmed. This unlikely siren was luring me onto the rocks of her family affairs. I said grimly:

“Is Ruby in this house now?”

“Heavens, no.” But her titter was embarrassed.

“I want an honest answer, Mrs. Jackson. Have you got your sister secreted in my house? Waiting to pounce? Is that why you hauled me out of bed and fed me up like a lamb for the slaughter?”

“I wouldn’t do a thing like that, Mr. Archer. Besides, it isn’t good for a man to sleep his youth away–”

“Youth is the wrong word. I’m forty years old.”

“You certainly don’t look it,” she said with a straight face. “I’m the oldest in my family, but I don’t tell my age. Ruby, now, is the youngest of the flock. She’s only thirty-four, with many happy years to look forward to. If she can just get this trouble straightened out.”

“She’s going to have to straighten it out for herself. I’m not a lawyer.”

“No, but you’re a detective. You know how to find people.”

“Say I found this Horace Dickson. What good would that do? He’d probably want to move right in–”

“He wouldn’t if he’s dead,” Mrs. Jackson said calmly. “Ruby thinks that Horace Dickson probably is dead.”

“Does she have any reason for thinking so? Or is it wish fulfillment?”

She dimmed the bright intelligence of her eyes. “I don’t understand all you say, Mr. Archer. You should talk to Ruby, now. She’s got the education, I put her all the way through high school. You’d enjoy talking to Ruby.”

“Is she waiting outside?”

“No. I’m expecting her, though. She said she’d pick me up at twelve o’clock.”

She glanced up at the brass clock on the wall. My eyes followed her glance. It was two minutes to twelve. Like the closing chord of Mrs. Jackson’s music, the sound of a car engine slowing down reached my ears from the front of the house.

“Ruby’s always on time,” she said serenely. “Now while you’re talking to Ruby I’ll clean your room for you. It surely needs it.”

I opened the front door and watched Ruby come up the walk. She belonged to a different generation from her sister, not only in age. She was smartly and conservatively dressed, in a sharkskin suit and a hat. Conscious respectability controlled the natural movements of her body and stiffened her back.

When she stepped up on the porch in her high heels, her eyes were on a level with mine.

“Mrs. Dickson?”

She hesitated. Her soft dark glance slid over my face and past me into the house, where the vacuum cleaner was whining.

“Your sister’s spoken to me about you. Won’t you come in?”

In the living room, she sat tensely on the edge of the chair I indicated, clutching her blue leather purse in her lap:

“It’s kind of you to talk to me. I have to thank you–”

I sat down facing her. “Don’t thank me, I haven’t done anything. I understand your husband is missing, Mrs. Dickson?”

“Yes. If you don’t mind, I don’t use my married name. I’m known as Ruby Smith, professionally. After Horace took off from me, I just let the name carry over into my private life.”

“What’s your profession?”

“Beauty operator. I’m not working right now, but I have some money saved up.” She opened and closed her hands on her purse, as if it contained her savings. “I can afford to pay–”

“We can go into that later. Tell me something about your husband: what sort of a person he is, the circumstances of his leaving, and so on.”

“A fly-by-night.” She took a long breath, like an inaudible sigh, and her voice deepened. “Horace was a natural born fly-by-night. He was a good mechanic, but he wouldn’t settle for that. He wanted to be an entertainer, a star. He was always looking for something he didn’t have. Far fields were always greener. That was the basic trouble between him and me – him and I.”

“You had trouble in your marriage?”

“More trouble than marriage,” she said bitterly. “I went into it with high hopes. I thought he was a young man with a future. I wanted a decent home where I could bring up children. And I was willing to work for it, willing and able. But Horace had different ideas.”

“What did he want?”

“I never could figure that out. Maybe if I could of figured him out – only he was so much smarter. Horace was so smart that it made him stupid.” She paused, and touched her mouth, as if she distrusted what it was going to say. “Horace wanted to be a white man. He thought that that would solve his problems for him. I told him it would only make more problems, and what about me?”

Unconsciously, her manicured fingertips moved from the corner of her mouth to her high bronze cheekbone. Her whole palm flattened out against her cheek:

“I didn’t mean to say that. It was on my mind and it came out.”

“I take it he’s light enough to pass.”

“Yes. I know he is.”

“Do you think he’s passing now, and that’s why you haven’t heard from him?”

“I think he tried it, and got himself into trouble.”

“You must have a reason for thinking so.”

“I got – I have plenty of reasons. He could never say no to trouble. He was always sticking his neck out for the chopper. And he stuck it out once too often, that’s my opinion. He tried to stand too tall, and they cut him down.”

“This isn’t Mississippi.”

“No. It’s California. Maybe you think nothing happens in California. There are sections in this very town where a colored person can’t take a walk without they pick him up.”

“Did Horace often get picked up?”

“Not for anything bad. He used to talk to people, and get involved, like in bars. In some of his moods, nobody could look at him, he’d snap right back. Then there would be a fight, and even when he didn’t start it, it was too bad for him.”

“You mean he got beaten?”

“No. That was the trouble. He did some fighting in the Navy, and after that he had some professional fights. That was before I married him, I made him give it up. But he had no right to go picking fights with civilians. It kept him in and out of jail, and once a man starts the habit of going to jail, I–” Her voice broke, into a lower register: “I couldn’t keep him steady. He turned himself into a hater. A hater and a dreamer, with his dancing act and his crazy names. Lorenzo Granada. Big man.”

“He had an alias?”

The anger withdrew from her eyes, leaving them cautious. “Not like you think, I don’t mean that. He got this job out Ventura Boulevard at this dancing academy. Spanish type. He could pass for a Spanish type. He got this job under this Spanish name, I guess it’s Spanish. And he was ashamed to tell me about it, I guess. He knew what I thought about a man who wouldn’t stick with his own–”

“You were telling me about his job, Miss Smith.”

“Yes. He had this job, but he didn’t let on to me. He acted like he was planning to ditch me. I got scared, and jealous. He’d come home late at night with the smell of women on him. So one night I took it on myself to follow him out to the place on Ventura. He walked in bold as you please. I watched him through the window, dancing with them.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? Walk in and tell the people who he was, and that I was his wife? I drove on home and went to bed. When Horace got in, I told him what I thought. That he was a crazy fool crossing over, taking the risk of his life. He said that he was glad I found out. He didn’t want to hurt me, but this was it. He was starting his big new career, and I didn’t fit in with his plans. So goodbye Ruby. He packed up his suitcase, and walked out, and I never saw him again.”

“What sort of career was he planning?”

“He didn’t say, but it was easy to guess. He had this dancing-instructor job, and dancing was what was on his mind for years. He couldn’t sing, he couldn’t act, he couldn’t play an instrument. But he had to be somebody. So he was going to be a great tap dancer.” She added with a wry small smile: “He couldn’t dance, either, not by professional standards.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t planning to try something else?”

“Go back to grinding valves? He was too big to work with his hands. He wanted more than there was.”

“How far was he willing to go for it?”

“I’m not sure I understand you, Mr. Archer.”

“Don’t be offended if I spell it out. He was working under an alias. You said yourself that he was a hater and a dreamer. He’d been in and out of jail.”

“For assault. He wasn’t a criminal. I wouldn’t marry no – any criminal.”

“How long were you married to him?”

“Ten years, off and on.”

“People can change in ten years. Are you sure he wasn’t planning some criminal activity when he left you?”

“I’m sure he wasn’t.” But her eyes were guarded.

“You suggested yourself that Horace was in trouble.”

“Yes.” She nodded soberly. “I think–” She touched her mouth again, in distrust. The sound of the vacuum cleaner had stopped, and she seemed afraid to speak out into naked silence.

“You think he’s dead, Miss Smith? Your sister said something along that line.”

“Yes. I think he’s dead and buried, long ago. I’ve thought it ever since that picture came out in the newspaper.”

“A picture of Horace?”

“I’m certain it was him, yes. And it said underneath: ‘Have you seen this man?’ ”

“When did the picture come out?”

“Three years ago, almost. A few weeks after he left me. It said if anybody saw him, they should contact the police.”

“Did you?”

“No. Why should I? I didn’t see him.”

“That’s right,” her sister said from the doorway. “You didn’t see him. And you don’t know that it was Horace in the picture. It was just a picture, not a snap. You shouldn’t waste Mr. Archer’s time with it.”

“It said the man’s name was Larry Granada. That was the name Horace used.”

“It don’t prove nothing,” Mrs. Jackson said lightly. “Must be lots of Larry Granadas or whatever their name is.”

“You know it was Horace,” Ruby Smith said. “And that he’s dead and missing. You thought so at the time.”

“Maybe you thought so. I thought so. I don’t say all I know.” Mrs. Jackson’s voice went into a sibylline muttering, about the desirability of letting sleeping dogs lie.

I stood up, looking from one woman to the other. “Let them lie. It suits me.”

Mrs. Jackson looked relieved. She’d come this far, and lost her courage. But Ruby Smith shook her head determinedly, angrily. She wanted a home, and children, and a husband who was willing to give them to her.

“Don’t listen to her.”

She opened her purse. I thought she was going to press money on me, but it was a small bundle of newspaper clippings. Collecting them, I gathered this information:

Stolen Woman

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

The sound of breathing woke me. I opened my eyes and saw the first pale light filtering through the matchstick blinds. I closed my eyes and deliberately rolled over with my face to the wall, telling myself that it was just the sea. I’d been in the beach house for less than a week, and I wasn’t used to the constant sound of it.

But this was a different sound, quicker and somehow more urgent. Under it and behind it, I could hear the longer lapses of the surf. Somebody was breathing at me through the french door. I sat up in bed and made out his shadowy outline through the blind. His trench coat and snap-brim hat were vaguely familiar.

I got out of bed and opened the glass door:

“Colonel Ferguson?”

“I hesitated to wake you. I’ve been standing here in the corner for some time, trying to decide…” He let the sentence trail off.

“Decide to do what?”

“Ask your advice. It hardly seems fair to ask you to share my burden. But I’m very badly in need of advice from someone. I know hardly anyone in California, and you mentioned the other day that you had had some experience in crim – in these matters.”

“Criminal matters?”

His head dropped like a tired horse’s. “I’m afraid that is the case.”

I looked him over, putting together the few things I knew about him. I’d met him on the beach two days before. I think I spoke to him because he looked out of place. In fact, he looked totally lost, too civilized for the landscape and at the same time too provincial. He told me that he was a Canadian army officer visiting California for the first time, a colonel with the Canadian division of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. I asked him in for a drink, because it seemed the pukka thing to do. Over Scotch on the rocks, he became quite interesting, in a solemn way. He told a story well.

There was nothing amusing about Ferguson now. His long homely face had sunk on its bones. Under their heavy black brows, his eyes looked stunned. And he was shivering. It was a misty dawn in February, but it was hardly cold enough to make a Canadian shiver.

“Come in,” I said. “I’ll make some coffee and you can tell me about it.”

He sidled through the door, tentatively, as if he thought I might change my mind and kick him out into the cold again. For a man of his rank and background, he seemed very uncertain of himself. His feet dragged as if he’d been hamstrung.

“What happened, Colonel?”

“I killed a man. I shot him.”

“Why?”

“I hardly know. I’d never seen the man before.” He turned to face me and the growing light. His small eyes glared with pain. “I’ve killed a man, and wrecked my own life, without any clear reason.”

He wept dry-eyed, gasping and shuddering, then covered his ugly face with ten hooked fingers. Partly to spare his pride, I carried my clothes into the kitchen, dressed there, and made coffee. I took him a mug of it, heavily spiked with Bushmills. He was standing at the glass door, stiff and calm-faced. His eyes were on the breaking line of the surf.

I handed him his coffee. “Compliments of the management.” But neither of us succeeded in cracking a smile.

He took the cup and held it without a tremor. His face was like granite. His voice was like granite speaking:

“I made you an ugly scene there. I have to apologize. I had no idea I had such weakness in me.”

“People do, you know. You look as though you’ve had a rough night.”

“I have had rougher, but I’ve never before killed a man, in civilian life. It came as rather a shock to me, that I was capable of it.”

“Do you want to go into it now?”

“I must.” He sipped from his mug, still standing up, and watching me over the rim. “I do owe it to myself to say one thing at the start. I did have a reason for killing him. It seemed adequate at the time. He was threatening a woman – threatening to maltreat her.”

“What woman?”

“An actress, Molly Day. At least she claimed that that was her name. It’s rather an unlikely name.”

“She’s an unlikely woman.”

“Have you heard of her?”

“Everybody in the United States has heard of her.”

“I’m not a filmgoer.”

“So I gather. How did you get mixed up with Molly Day?”

Ferguson sat down and told me.

He’d had trouble going to sleep the night before. After he’d turned out the light in the studio, he’d noticed a light on the far side of the canyon. It shouldn’t have been there, because his friends the Trumbulls owned the entire canyon, and so far as he knew they were still in Europe.

He explained about the Trumbulls. He’d met them in London through their son George, the painter. Ferguson himself was an art collector in a small way. When he’d completed his recent tour as attaché at Canada House, George and his parents had insisted that he spend at least part of his leave at their place in California. If he didn’t want the trouble of opening up the big house, he was welcome to use George’s studio on the other side of the canyon.

Having taken up the Trumbulls’ suggestion, Ferguson naturally felt an obligation to see that their house had not been invaded by vandals. The possibility wouldn’t let him sleep. He got up and pulled back the drapes over the window. The light he’d seen, or thought he’d seen, was no longer visible. The Trumbull house was a black bulk diminished by distance, half hidden by trees, unbroken by any light.

It had probably been a trick of the eye, or a flash of moonlight reflected from a window. There was a moon in the sky, enlarged and blurred by clouds. Its light fell on the trees that filled the deep canyon, and lent their leaves a silvery aspen appearance. Ferguson was struck by the beauty and peace of the night. It was so still that the gurgle of the creek came up from a quarter of a mile below, as clearly as though it was lapping at the cantilevers of the studio.

George Trumbull had left a deer rifle hanging above the studio fireplace, and Ferguson had noticed that it had a telescopic sight. When he trained it on the Trumbull house, he saw the light again, a thin spillage of brightness from a blinded window on the second-floor level. The brightness was white and steady: at least the place wasn’t burning. But somebody was in it who had no right to be there.

Carefully drawing the drapes again, so as not to alarm the housebreakers, Ferguson turned on the light and looked up the emergency number of the county police. Then he changed his mind. Perhaps the Trumbulls had come back unexpectedly by plane. His own jet flight from London had whisked him to Los Angeles in what seemed no time at all. If the Trumbulls had come home, they wouldn’t thank him for inviting the authorities to their homecoming.

He dialed their number instead of the police number. A man answered immediately, as if he had been waiting with his hand on the receiver:

“Hello.”

“May I speak to Mr. Trumbull?”

“Sorry, but there’s no such person here.”

“Are you the Trumbull caretaker?”

“Hardly. I don’t know the Trumbulls, whoever they are. I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

The man’s voice was persuasive, and cultivated, as American voices went. Ferguson hung up, checked the number in the telephone directory, and called it again. The same voice answered, as quickly and more sharply:

“Yes?”

“There seems to be something out of kilter,” Ferguson said. “I keep calling the Trumbulls’ number and getting you.”

“So you do. Would you mind stopping, please? I’m expecting a call.”

There was a whining note of impatience in the man’s voice. It irked Ferguson, for some reason. He said brusquely:

“Who am I talking to?”

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

Ferguson gave his name, prefixed by his rank. The voice at the other end of the line became more genial:

“I’m afraid I can’t explain the mixup, Colonel. What number are you calling, anyway?”

“23799.”

“This is 23788,” the man said. “Evidently your dialing system is faulty. If I were you, I’d report it to the telephone company in the morning.”

Ferguson said that he would, apologized shortly, and hung up for the second time. He crawled into bed. Sleep was more remote than ever. He’d forgotten to close the drapes. The moon had broken free from the clouds and leered down through the window at him. Like a platinum blonde street-walker with acne, he said. His nerves were getting snappish. The sound of the creek burbled up out of the darkness, irritating as tea-party voices.

Then a dog howled at the moon. He sat up in bed. The sound was repeated, once, and he realized that no canine throat had emitted it. It had been a human cry, the cry of a woman, raised twice across the canyon. Its tiny repeated echoes sounded like laughter, and merged with the inane chuckling of the creek.

There were shells for the deer rifle in a box under one of the window seats. His absent host had told Ferguson where to find them, in case he wanted to try some target shooting. He loaded the rifle and carried it to the window. Crossed by the hairlines of the sight, the light was still burning on the second floor of the Trumbull house. He estimated the distance at a thousand yards. It would be interesting to discover if he could shoot out the window at that distance, and what the effect would be. While he was toying with this cheerful thought, the light went out.

Ferguson was obscurely alarmed by his casual readiness to fire the rifle. He had a queer feeling that Southern California was dream country, in which the normal standards of civilized behavior did not apply. To guard against the consequences of this irresponsible feeling, he deliberately put the rifle back where it belonged above the fireplace. He felt capable of handling any situation that might come up, without the use of firearms. He pulled on his clothes and went out to his rental car.

The Trumbulls and their son, by mutual agreement, had left uncleared the deep wooded gorge between the studio and the main house. Ferguson had no inclination for a midnight scramble through undergrowth. In order to reach the main house by car, he had discovered several days before, he had to drive four or five miles down the canyon to the point where the private road debouched on Cabrillo Highway above Malibu. A mile north of this point, a second private road began its climb up the other side of the canyon to the main house.

The entrance to this second road was barred by a heavy wire gate, which was padlocked. Ferguson had a key to the padlock on the ring of keys which the Trumbulls’ agent had given him. But when Ferguson got out of his car to use it, he discovered that the padlock had been changed. A heavy new brass lock glinted in the light of his torch.

He could have climbed over the gate, but that would have meant a five-mile walk uphill. Being in a hurry, he broke the new padlock with a tire iron and drove through the gate, leaving it open. He drove up the winding road without headlights: that acned blonde, the moon, was of some use after all. When it made a deep black shadow under a roadside oak, he parked his car, and covered the last few hundred yards on foot.

From the road, the house was completely dark and silent. Something about its architecture reminded Ferguson of a medieval castle, the dark tower to which (he said obscurely) Childe Roland came. The row of eucalyptus trees along the driveway stood like bearded seneschals swaying mystically in the silver air.

One of his feet slipped on the driveway and he swayed not so mystically, almost falling on his rump. He switched on his flashlight to see what had caused him to slip. An irregular dark pool as big as his hand glistened on the concrete. He touched it and smelled his finger: oil drippings where a car had stood, not very long ago.

He doused his light and walked on to the house, keeping in the shadows of the trees. Their sharp medicinal odor reminded him of hospitals; that, or the moisture in the air, started a wound aching where he had taken shrapnel in the back. It started up an old excitement, too, which Ferguson hadn’t felt since the year they cleared the Low Countries.

Leaning against the trunk of the last tree in the row, he listened to the house for a while, and watched it. It was built of stone, and the castellated twin towers at the end of each wing somehow added to its deserted air. Drifts of leaves, fallen branches and twisted strips of eucalyptus bark littered the overgrown lawn.

Yet it had the wrong sound for an empty house; or rather, not sound enough. The house and its surroundings seemed to be holding their breath. No wild life stirred or murmured, nearer than the occasional frogs croaking down in the creek-bed. The house stood in a vacuum of sound, ringed by the silence which human beings impose on nature. It was almost, he said, as if the natural world had heard the repeated cry that he had heard, and been struck dumb by it.

As he was thinking this, Ferguson heard another crying, quiet and broken, somewhere inside the house; then the sound of a door being closed. He ran across the cluttered lawn and hammered the front door with its lion’s-head knocker.

Silence answered him, the absolute silence he had learned to distrust. He knocked again, with all his force. As he did so, Ferguson told me, he had an odd objective vision of himself. He saw himself from above and behind as the moon might have seen him if she had eyes: a dark little figure casting a frantic shadow on a moonlit door. Like the traveller in de la Mare’s poem, which he had read in the Fifth Form at Upper Canada College.

“Where?” I said.

“Upper Canada College. The school I attended in Toronto when I was a youngster. I was a wild–”

I cut him short: “Could we skip the biographical details, and the literary touches? Another time they’d be interesting. Right now I need the facts, Colonel.”

He gave me a dark angry look, then dropped his eyes to the coffee mug in his hands. All the time he spoke, he’d been staring down and into it, twisting and turning it, like a crystal ball that told him the past but kept the future hidden.

“These are facts about me,” he said. “Since you’re good enough to listen to me, I want you to understand how I came to do what I did. I was a wild boy at school, lonely and romantic, a dreamer and a chance-taker. In that moment of revelation at the door, I realized that I hadn’t changed. At the age of forty-five, I was still trying to act like a knight-errant, rescuing the damsel from the blessed tower.

“And I said to myself that I had been too much alone. I had made a mistake in coming to California. A trick of light, an animal cry or two, a wrong number on the telephone, had peopled my mind with figures of melodrama. My midnight enterprise was quixotic, absurd. I turned from the door, ready to forget the whole thing.

“Then a voice I recognized spoke through the door.

“ ‘Is that you, Larry?’ it said.

“ ‘No,’ I said. My excitement made me rash. I told him that I was Colonel Ferguson, and that he’d better open up, whoever in hell he was, or I’d kick the bloody door down on top of him. He answered in an unctuous tone that that was hardly necessary, and opened up. He was a big fellow dressed in white, like a baker or a chef. He turned out to be a doctor, or so he claimed – a Dr. Sloan. According to his story, he’d leased the house from the Trumbulls’ agent and was planning to use it as a nursing home. As a matter of fact he had a patient with him, a disturbed patient. She was particularly disturbed on account of the full moon. He hoped the noise she’d been making hadn’t alarmed me.”

“Did you see this patient?”

“Not then. The doctor stepped outside and closed the door behind him. But I could hear her on the other side of it. She was cursing him, in the most unfeminine language, and calling to me for help. I wanted to help her, of course, then and there. But the situation didn’t seem reasonable. The doctor persuaded me that the woman was off her rocker. His story was certainly plausible. There seemed no alternative but to accept it, and apologize, and went my way back to the studio.”

“He talked like a doctor, did he?”

“I’d say so, yes. He used a number of technical terms that weren’t familiar to me.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was a big chap, as I said, thickly built, perhaps my age or older. He had quite an impressive face, dark eyes and a high forehead.” The last word, for some reason, made Ferguson wince and sigh. “But there’s no need to describe him. You can see him for yourself.”

“Where?”

“In the studio. He’s the man I killed. I shot him with George’s rifle.”

“Is anybody with him?”

“Yes. I left the woman, Molly.”

“We’d better get up there. You can tell me the rest on the way.”

We left his rented car on the shoulder of the highway and drove up the coast in mine. Apart from a few trucks, there was no traffic. He explained how he had got on a first-name basis, in no time at all, with Hollywood’s most incendiary blonde. Call it an explanation, anyway.

He’d gone back to bed, but not to sleep, and lay there trying to make some sense of the night’s events. It turned out they weren’t over. He heard a scrambling and plunging in the undergrowth below the studio, and went outside with his flashlight. “It was the woman,” he said. “She’d got away from the house somehow and crossed the canyon on foot. She’d had to wade the creek, and her slacks were soaked to the waist. Her shirt, even her face and hair, were streaked with mud where she’d fallen. In spite of this, and the rather wild look in her eye, she was extraordinarily good-looking.

“I put my arm around her and helped her up the bank. My heart beat foolishly high. Frankly, I’m susceptible to women. Perhaps she sensed this. She turned to me as I shut the door of the studio and laid her poor soiled head on my shoulder.

“ ‘You won’t let him take me back?’ she said. ‘You’ll look after me, won’t you?’

“Under the circumstances, I couldn’t very well refuse. No matter who or what she was, she was a woman in distress.”

I admired Ferguson’s old-fashioned chivalry, but his naiveté alarmed me. “Did she tell you who she was?”

“Later. Not right away.”

“Did she seem frightened?”

“Very much so.”

“Crazy?”

“Not at the time. I’m not a doctor, of course. Neither was the man Sloan. According to her, Sloan was a psychopath, which was probably how he picked up his psychiatric jargon. He’d been holding her captive there in the house for more than twenty-four hours.”

“How did he get her there?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Did she know him?”

“No.”

“How did she know he was psycho?”

“By his treatment of her. She – ah – unbuttoned her blouse and showed me the marks on her shoulders and – and – breasts. I was embarrassed and revolted.” He was still embarrassed. “I wanted to call the police, but she wouldn’t allow it. She said that if it got into the papers, it would kill her with the public. That was the expression she used. It was then she told me who she was and that she’d been – mistreated.”

“Raped?”

“Yes. The poor woman got down on her knees and begged me to protect her against that monster. I disliked to see her humble herself to me. I’ve always had a lofty conception of women–”

“Get on with it,” I said.

His face darkened, and his mouth set stubbornly. “I want you to understand my motives. I’ve always had a lofty conception of women, as I said. I lifted her up to her feet and promised her that I would lay down my life, if necessary, to defend her.”

“You swallowed her story whole, then.”

“I believed her implicitly, at the time. I realize now there was a quality of hysteria in her, in the entire situation, and it infected me. Then, too, I’m a passionate man. I hadn’t touched a woman in a long time, and there she was, half naked in my arms.”

“Did you make love to her?”

“I admit that some such thought may have crossed my mind. I repressed it firmly. At that moment I heard the sound of an automobile climbing up the canyon. Almost without conscious thought, I took the rifle down from above the fireplace. It was still fully loaded. When the man knocked on the door, I opened the door to him and showed him the rifle.”

“Same man?”

“Yes. He’d taken off his white smock and put on a topcoat. I didn’t like the look of him at all. I told him I would shoot him unless he went away. He laughed in my face, called me an idiot. He said I’d let myself be taken in by an insane woman, a woman out of touch with reality.

“I didn’t believe him, but I was profoundly uneasy. I could feel the blood pounding at various points in my body; in my groin and head, and in my right forefinger. My finger was on the trigger of the rifle.

“ ‘Put the gun down, you damn fool,’ he said to me. ‘What story has she been telling you?’

“ ‘She said that you’ve been holding her, that she’s an actress named Molly Day.’

“He smiled, showing his teeth. His teeth were bad, and he had a bad breath. It smelled like the odor of corruption. You judge people by little things like that, and by the words they use, sometimes a single word.

“ ‘That bag?’ he said.

“I raised the rifle and shot him through the forehead.”

“Because he called her a bag?”

“That was one reason. He was clearly no doctor. No professional man would speak of one of his patients–”

“Did he have a weapon?”

“I assumed he had. I didn’t look for it.”

“What happened after you shot him? What was the woman’s reaction?”

“That was what troubled me. It’s why I came to you. She insisted I mustn’t on any account go to the police. She said that if I did she would kill herself.

“She picked up the rifle where I’d dropped it, and huddled on the bed with it across her lap. I tried to talk it out of her hands, but she refused to let me come near her. Her wild talk made me suspect that she was beside herself after all. Her very posture was unnerving. She crouched on the bed like a lioness, guarding the blessed telephone.”

“And she’s still there?”

“I left her there. What could I do? I drove down to the highway with the idea of telephoning the police. Then I remembered you, Archer.”

I was sorry he had. It sounded like one of those cases that couldn’t be satisfactorily ended. My client’s medieval moral equipment had already shown signs of breaking down. He belonged in a novel by Walter Scott, not on the front pages of the Los Angeles press.

“Why did you have to shoot him, Colonel?”

“I didn’t have to. That’s the hell of it. I could have handled him – there are few men I can’t handle. But I deliberately shot him. I chose to kill him.”

“Why?”

His fingers pulled at one side of his long equine face. “Evidently I’m a cold-blooded murderer.”

The studio hung like a treehouse on the steep slope of the canyon. It had rained up here during the night. The dirt road was wet. Actual butterflies danced in flight across free spaces of air, or played a game of tag without any rules among the branches.

“Where every prospect pleases,” Ferguson said heavily, “and only man is vile.”

I grunted at him irritably and parked my car at the edge of the narrow road. A jaybird erupted out of a red-berried bush. He sailed up onto the limb of a fir where he swung like a Christmas tree ornament yelling curses. A dozen chickadees flew out of a nearby oak and settled in one further away from the jaybird. Apart from the redwood studio below the road and the big stone house in the distance, there were no traces of human beings, vile or otherwise.

“Where’s the car?”

“What car?”

“Your victim,” I said nastily, “came in a car, you said. Where is it?”

He stood in the road and looked around him blankly. “He left it right here by the driveway. It seems to be gone.”

“What kind of a car was it?”

“A large car, a sedan painted blue or black, rather old and dirty-looking.” A hectic light came into his eyes. “Do you suppose he isn’t really dead?”

He trotted down the steep driveway, with me at his heels. The front door was standing open. He went in with his head thrust forward, stalking stiff-legged. I didn’t try to prevent him from going in. If Goldilocks wanted to shoot somebody, it might as well be him. She was his baby.

Ferguson came back into the doorway. He looked puzzled and relieved. “She’s gone. They’ve both gone.”

I went in past him. The studio was a single big room with a beamed ceiling slanting up at one end to accommodate the north window. Light poured through it onto Navajo rugs, an unmade studio bed, paintings in various media on the walls. I saw where the rifle had hung over the fireplace.

“The rifle gone, too?”

“Yes, by George, it is. Do you suppose she–? No.” He shook his head. “He was a big, heavy man. She couldn’t possibly have lifted him. He must have walked out under his own steam. I couldn’t have hurt him mortally after all.”

Death Mask

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

It was a slow week at the end of June, and I was late in getting to the office. The girl was waiting in the upstairs hallway. I got the impression that she had been waiting for some time. Her posture was rigid, and the drawn look on her face was only partly concealed by her dark glasses. With both hands she was clutching a handsome and expensive-looking lizardskin bag.

She was a handsome and expensive-looking girl. Not Hollywood, though. Her shoes were lizardskin but sensible. Her brown skirt and beige sweater were conservative. So was her makeup. She was very young, perhaps no more than twenty. I regarded her with aesthetic distance and a little regret:

“Are you waiting for me?”

“If you’re Mr. Archer.” Her voice was soft and tentative.

“I am. Come in, Miss–”

“Maclish,” she said. “Sandra Maclish.”

I unlocked the door. She moved across the waiting room with a kind of furtive charm, as if she wanted to be there and not there at the same time. I decided on the spur of the moment to buy a new carpet and have the old green furniture redone in tasteful colors. Like brown and beige.

I took her into the inner office and yanked up the venetian blind. Light poured in, reflected from the stucco buildings across the boulevard.

“It’s a beautiful morning,” I said.

She looked at the morning with something approaching dismay. “Is it? I hadn’t noticed.”

“If the light bothers your eyes, I can close the blind again.”

“Oh, my eyes are all right. Thank you. I’m wearing these glasses because I didn’t want to be seen coming here.”

“They’re not a very effective disguise. In fact, they might tend to call attention to you. You’re not the type that generally wears dark glasses.”

“Yes I am. I wear them all the time on the beach. But I’ll take them off if you like.”

She did so. Handsome wasn’t the word for Miss Maclish. Her eyes were shadowed green lights. In a year or two, when she had gained assurance, or whatever it is that distinguishes women from girls, the word would be beautiful.

She put the glasses in her bag and sat in the chair I placed for her, facing away from the window. I pulled my swivel chair around to the other side of the desk.

“Are you being followed, Miss Maclish?”

This startled her. “No. At least, I hope not. Though I wouldn’t put it past Father. He doesn’t approve of my interesting myself in – well, what I’m interested in.”

“And what is that?”

“I can’t tell you. I can’t tell anyone.”

Her voice was small and thin. She swallowed, and her throat shimmered. The shadow across her eyes seemed to be cast by an image in the air in front of her. She looked up at the image as if it had a head and eyes of its own. Then she averted her face.

“I mean,” she said after a while, “I don’t understand it myself. So how can I explain it to you?”

“Are you in trouble?”

“A friend of mine is.”

“Trouble with the law?”

“It hasn’t come to that, yet. In a way, it’s worse than that. But please don’t ask me to talk about it. I can’t give away other people’s confidences.”

“You’re doing a fine job of not giving anything away.”

She lit up with a little flare of anger, suppressed it, and produced a small wan smile. “I know. I haven’t been making too much sense, up to now, have I? And I had my whole speech so carefully planned.”

“How old are you, Miss Maclish?”

“Twenty-one. Is it important?”

“It probably is to you.”

She lifted her chin. “I’m old enough to employ a detective on my own responsibility.”

“Sure you are. I don’t have age limits. Some of my favorite clients have been babes-in-arms. One of them wasn’t even born yet.”

“You’re joking.”

“It’s a free country. But what I said is true. I once represented an unborn child whose father was killed in a hunting accident.”

“All this is very interesting, but we’re not getting anywhere.”

“I agree. Why don’t you give me the speech that you had so carefully planned?”

“I can’t. It wouldn’t sound right. I mean, you’re different from what I expected. And so am I. It’s always happening to me.”

I didn’t ask her what she meant by that. I waited for her to continue. It took some time, but I didn’t mind. I was content to sit across the desk from her while the passing seconds stitched together a kind of silent intimacy. Her voice threaded through it:

“A man I know, a lawyer in Lamarina, told me that you were one of the best detectives in California. Does that mean you’re frightfully expensive?”

“I charge a hundred dollars a day.”

“I see. When you find out things about people – if you do, I mean – do you keep them to yourself?”

“I try to protect my clients. It isn’t always possible, where there’s crime involved. Is there crime involved?”

“I don’t know,” she said soberly. “I want you to try and find out for me. Just for me, nobody else. Then I’ll know what to do.”

For a while she had seemed very young. She seemed much older. Her face had a bony look that reminded me of the tragic skeleton we all contained. The skull beneath the skin.

“You say you’ve talked to a lawyer in Lamarina. What was his advice?”

“I didn’t ask Mr. Griffin for his advice. I asked him for the name of a good detective. I haven’t talked to anybody about it.”

“Not even me.”

“I know. I’ve been wasting your time, holding back like this. It’s simply that it could be so important, to quite a number of people. Especially me.”

“Is it a matter of life and death?” I offered helpfully.

“Maybe. That was part of the speech. I do know it’s a matter of someone’s sanity.”

“Yours?”

She closed her eyes. Deprived of their light, her face was like a death mask. “No, not mine.” She opened them and turned them full on my face. “You say you protect your clients, Mr. Archer?”

“I try to.”

“What about other people? Say your client had someone dear to her, or him. Would you protect him or her? I mean, if you stumbled over something very unpleasant?”

“It would depend on the circumstances. I don’t have a lawyer’s right of silence where clients are concerned. Even a lawyer’s right is severely restricted. We all have to live with the law, you know.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything illegal.”

“What are you asking me to do? It’s about time we got to that, don’t you think?”

“Yes. I just want your word that you won’t go running to people with what I tell you, or what you find out on your own.”

“You have my word on that. I’m the closest-mouthed man you ever met. And you’re the closest-mouthed girl I ever met. Tell me one thing. Has there been a crime?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you suspect one?”

“Yes.”

“Murder?”

“I wouldn’t call it that. No, it wouldn’t be murder.” She twisted her mouth. “It’s a terrible word, isn’t it?”

“A terrible fact. Now who is involved in this non-murder?”

She looked at me as if she hated me. The unobtrusive lipstick on her mouth came out bright red against her pallor. She fumbled at the catch of her bag, produced the dark glasses, put them on. I was afraid that she was going to leave.

I didn’t want her to. I wanted her to stay and share her trouble with me. Call it romanticism – the late romanticism that boils up sometimes in middle age and spills a kind of luster on certain faces. But my impulse was more paternal than anything else. It stayed that way.

“I have a suggestion, Miss Maclish. If you want better security, you can employ me through your lawyer friend in Lamarina. Then anything I find out, anything I’m told, has the same legal status as information confided to a lawyer. What did you say his name was? Griffith?”

“Griffin. But I can’t do that. He’d have to know all about it if I did that. Sooner or later he’d go to Father with it. Mr. Griffin is one of Father’s attorneys.”

Change of Venue

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

I got into the Garvin case late, when it was just about all over but the gas chamber. Garvin was due to be shipped to San Quentin in the morning. He seemed already to be holding his breath.

He let it out in a sigh. “No, Mr. Archer. I don’t want any private detective work done on the case. I don’t want you or anyone else raking over the mess I’ve made of my life.”

“It’s been thoroughly raked over in the newspapers.”

“That’s the point. I’ve had enough.”

He looked at me bleakly, his head between his hands. He was still a young man, but his hair was gray. His very skin was gray, and hung slack on his face. The long trial after months of waiting had carved him down to the bone.

The third man in the interview room spoke. He was Alexander Stillman, Garvin’s defense lawyer. And Garvin’s personal friend as well, I gathered:

“I know you’re tired, Larry. But you can’t give up.”

“Why not? I do. I have.”

“But surely not in the ultimate sense. You want to go on living.”

“I wouldn’t have taken the sleeping pills if I’d wanted to go on living. I see nothing to live for now.”

“There’s Sylvia,” Stillman said.

“She’ll be better off without me.”

“That’s not true, Larry, and you know it. Sylvia loves you deeply and passionately.”

“Leave it on the cob where it belongs,” Garvin said harshly. “Are you trying to break my heart?”

“I’m trying to save your life.” Stillman’s bulldog face was fierce with intensity. “Even if you don’t value it, there’s more than one man’s life involved in this. There’s principle involved. I’m not going to let a man who isn’t guilty go to the gas chamber.”

“I must be guilty. Twelve good men and true found me guilty.”

“Eight of the twelve were women, Larry. The jury was carried away by the idea of a high school teacher mur – doing what you were alleged to have done. The whole town was carried away. I did everything within the realm of possibility to obtain a change of venue–”

Garvin’s sharp voice cut in on the lawyer’s orotund one: “I know all this. You don’t have to rehash it.”

Lawyer and client glared at each other across the steel table. They were sick and tired of each other. The trial had been like a long illness which they had shared. Which threatened to end in the death of one of them.

I said to Stillman: “Could I possibly talk to Mr. Garvin alone?”

“I have nothing to say to you, Mr. Archer. And I’m expecting a visit from my wife.”

“She isn’t here yet,” Stillman said. He got up heavily and tapped on the battleship-gray door. A guard in deputy’s suntans let him out.

Do Your Own Time

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

It was a dead-end street in Malibu. The blue emptiness of the sea glared through the narrow gap between the houses. The one I was looking for needed paint, and leaned on its pilings like a man on crutches.

Nothing happened when I pressed the bell-push. I knocked on the door. Slowly, like twin bodies being dragged, footsteps approached the other side of it.

“Yes?” a man’s voice said. “Who is it?”

“Archer. You called me yesterday.”

“So I did.” He opened the door and leaned through the opening. “I call you yesterday, you keep me waiting all night. What kind of a way is that to do business? I been sitting here biting on the nail.”

He meant it literally. The fingers holding the edge of the door were bitten down to the quick. He saw me looking at them and curled them into a fist, more defensive than aggressive. He was a man of fifty-five or so wearing an open-necked white shirt from which his head jutted like a weathered statue. The sunlight struck metallic glints from his gray-white eyes.

“I been waiting twenty years. You had to keep me waiting one more day, didn’t you?” His voice was a groan modulating into a low yell: “What have you got to say for yourself?”

Goodbye was the first thing I thought of. I thought again. Another ten years and a face like his, aggressive and defensive, might be peering at me out of the bathroom mirror. Men got old. I said with all the tact I could muster:

“I had a job to wind up, Mr. Barr. I explained that to you on the telephone. I’m sorry if you misunderstood me. I was working until two this morning.”

“Yeah. I get impatient. I get impatient.”

He looked up at the high sun as if he hated it. Without another word he turned and padded into the house. He left the door open, presumably for me, and I followed him in.

The room was lofty and raftered. Spiders had been busy in the angles of the rafters, webbing and blurring them. The rattan furniture was coming apart at the joints. One of the pieces, a cushioned settee, was supported at one corner by a stack of girlie magazines; at least the top one was a Playboy. The Navajo rugs around the floor had been trampled into brown rags.

The redeeming feature of the room was the double glass door that opened onto a balcony and the sky, where white gulls circled. Barr stood with his back to them. His bare feet were horny and knobbed.

“One-seventy a month I pay for this dump, in the off-season. Two months in advance, and the landlord won’t even fix the furniture. He says when he fixes the furniture he raises the rent. The rent goes up to five hundred on the first of June, anyway.” He glared at me as if I’d come to collect it. “The country has changed, I tell you.”

“Have you been out of the country?”

“Yeah. A long time out.” He thought about the long time, his heavy chin sinking towards his chest. Iron-gray tendrils of hair grew out of his open collar. “But I didn’t bring you out here to talk about me.”

I waited.

“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll tell you what the pitch is.”

Avoiding the broken settee, I sat on a straight chair in a corner. He spoke rapidly, like an embarrassed amateur making a prepared speech:

“There was this girl, beautiful girl named Rose, auburn-haired. I fell for her, hard. That was a long time ago, but I still dream about her. I wanted to marry her at the time, but it was no go then. I had woman trouble on my hands, other kinds of trouble. I went into the army – the war was on at the time – and after the war was over I didn’t come back to this country. I wanted to make it big and come back in style.

“I made it big, in case you’re wondering.” With the air of a conjurer, he flourished a roll of fifties in my direction. The outside bill was a fifty, anyway. “I have a nice little chrome mine in New Caledonia. I can give Rosie everything she needs. And I’m not old,” he added with harsh wistfulness. “There’s still time.”

I waited. A spider descended from one of the rafters, swinging into the sunlight. The sound of the surf was like a giant systole and diastole slowing down time. A jet went over, very high, leaving a shrieking track.

Barr started. “Goddamn, I hate those things. A shock wave woke me up this morning, I thought it was the Russians.”

He shook his fist at the ceiling. The spider climbed up his rope. Another jet went over.

Barr sneered. “They can take ’em and they can shove ’em. A man comes looking for a little peace.” He took a twisted cigar out of a box and rammed it into his face as if he needed something to keep his lips still. His brown teeth started to chew it.

“You were telling me about Rose,” I reminded him. “You want me to look for her? Is that the problem?”

“That’s it. I want to see her in the flesh. See if she’s still got her looks, see if she’s married. If she isn’t, I’ll make her a proposish – a proposal, I mean. It’s why I came back to this country. It’s why I’m here. I love the girl, see. I can’t go on living without her.”

It wasn’t very convincing. Middle-aged romanticism seldom is, except to the one who’s bitten by the bug. He had been bitten by something. His eyes were hot, malarial with passion.

“If you haven’t seen her for twenty years, she won’t be a girl any more.”

“Fifteen,” he corrected me. “It’s fifteen years since I had word of her. She was only twenty-one or -two at the time. She still isn’t old, no more than thirty-seven. She’s still got twenty good years in her. So have I.” He spat out flakes of tobacco onto the floor, and pointed the frayed end of his cigar at me. “I come from a long-lived family.”

“Good for you. What’s her full name?”

“Rose Breen, unless she’s married. If she’s married and raising a family, I guess it’s all off. But I got to find out.”

“Where was she when you heard of her fifteen years ago?”

“Up the pike a piece from here, in a town called Santa Teresa. You know it?”

“I know it. What was her address?”

“I don’t have that. All I can give you is the name of the people she worked for. She was a kind of a baby-sitter, or nurse. They hired her to look after their little boy. He isn’t so little now.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“Yeah, I went up there day before yesterday on the bus. He gave me a bad time. They all did. They’re very la-di-da.” In a flash of savage satire, he minced on his misshapen feet, making effeminate gestures with his hands. “All I wanted to ask them was where Rose went, but they didn’t even let me get to first base. Something about me that puts people off, I dunno. Maybe I lived too long in a – on an island. People don’t like me.”

He looked at me as if he hoped I’d deny it. I didn’t like him. There was an odor about him, and it wasn’t the odor of sanctity. It was whiskey and fear and cigars and appalling loneliness. And sickness or evil – they have the same smell – as penetrating as chlorine in my nostrils.

The word goodbye rose like a gorge at the back of my tongue. I swallowed it. He interested me.

“You haven’t told me the name of the family Rose worked for.”

“It was Chantry. It isn’t any more. She lost her husband or something and married a second time – a doctor named Leverett. They’re still living in the Chantry house on Foothill, though, 265 Foothill Drive. That’s the rich end of town.”

“I know.”

He didn’t hear me. He was off on a private kick: “When I realize my finances, I got a good mind to buy in there, spang in the middle of the Foothill district. They think they can brush me off? I’ll show ’em. Naw.” His voice dropped, and he shook his head. “It’s too rich for my blood, I guess.”

I prompted him: “You say they gave you a bad time.”

“They froze me out. The lady – Mrs. Leverett – she acted like I was trying to insult her when I brought up the name of Rose Breen. But then she said she never heard of her. I told her I knew damn well she did, I had it on good authority. Then she admitted she knew her, fifteen years ago. I asked her where Rosie went, and she called in her husband and son to throw me out. I could have handled them.” His fists clenched and unclenched. He looked down into his palms, crossed by curved black lines of ineradicable grime. “But what was the use? I didn’t want trouble. All I wanted was Rosie. And I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar the Leverett dame knows where Rosie is.”

“What makes you think so?”

“The way that she reacted to the name. The way they all reacted. You’d think I was asking them for the keys to their safe.”

“Why wouldn’t they tell you, if they knew?”

“Because I wanted them to,” he said with a sour grin. “People never give me what I want. I have to take it, always have had. So I take it.”

He laughed. It sounded like machinery. He tramped around the room swaggering, swinging his shoulders, jostling shadows.

The money test isn’t a particularly keen one, but it was one I had available. If he had made it big, as he said, he wasn’t spending any of it on front.

“There’s a Spanish proverb: ‘Take what you want, then pay for it.’ Under my credit system, you pay for it first.”

“How much?”

“A hundred a day. Two-fifty in advance.”

“What happens if you don’t find her?”

“That’s your tough luck, Mr. Barr. I sell my services, period. You understand a job like this could take me a day, or it could run into weeks.”

“Yeah.”

“Also, she could be dead.”

“Rosie dead? She better not be.” It was a queer smiling threat: I’ll kill you if you’re dead. “You trying to talk yourself out of work?”

“No. I simply want you to understand the conditions.”

“I understand ’em all right.” Better than you do, said his gap-toothed leer. “I understand ’em fine, and mainly you want two-fifty. How do I know you won’t walk out of here with my money and never come back?”

From most other men it would have been an insult. From him it was a natural thing to hear. Barr was living on the ragged edge, holding on with bitten fingernails while hope and suspicion took turns at his liver.

“That’s a chance you have to take. I’m taking a chance on you, too.”

“How’s that?”

“I have an idea there’s more to Rose Breen’s story than you’ve let on. Do you want to tell me the rest of it? It might save time and trouble.”

“There is no rest of it. All I want is for you to locate her, see. When you do find her, I don’t want you talking to her or telling her anything. Just pass the word to me, and I’ll make my own pitch. You got that?”

“Yes.” But I didn’t say that that was what I would do.

He hoisted his roll out of his hip pocket and turned his back on me, crouching over the money like a dog over a red bone. I could smell burning, and it triggered a fantasy: Barr was a dead man who had climbed up out of hell to look for Rose, drag her back down with him into the fire. I was his little helper.

I didn’t like the role. But I took his money, five fifties, and put it away in my wallet. He sniffed:

“Do you smell something burning?”

“It smells like woodsmoke.”

“Damn them!”

He opened one of the glass doors and stepped out onto the balcony. Wisps of smoke were rising past it, yellowish gray against the blue sky. Leaning over the railing, I could see half a dozen boys huddled around a small fire. Most of them were bare-backed; one or two were wearing black rubber shirts. Their surfboards lay around them on the sand.

“Get out of here!” Barr cried. “This is private property.”

The boys looked up in unison. “It isn’t, below the mean high tide line,” one of them said. “We’re below the tide line.”

“Don’t you talk back to me. Scram! Beat it! I pay rent for this place. I don’t pay it so a gang of beach bums can set fire to the property.”

“It’s perfectly safe,” their spokesman said.

“Safe? You must be crazy!”

“Somebody is,” one of the boys muttered. He made the ancient gesture, rotating forefinger pointed at his temple.

Barr picked up a red clay flowerpot containing a dead plant and threw it down at him. It chunked harmlessly into the sand, but the boys began to disperse. Picking up their long boards and carrying them on their heads, they marched off along the beach. The one who had spoken first lingered behind to kick sand on the fire. He didn’t look up again, but Barr stood watching him until he had gone.

He had seemed very large for a minute, larger than he was. Like a rubber figure losing air, he dwindled till he seemed smaller than he was.

“This is the second day in a row,” he said. “They’re trying to make me blow my top. They’re deliberately out to get me.”

“That I doubt.”

“Oh yes.” He grasped my arm. “If it wasn’t planned, they wouldn’t torment me like this. They hate me, see.”

“Do you know them?”

“No, but they know me. You can tell by the way they act, the way they look at me.”

His grip was like a tourniquet on my arm. I shook it off, and peered into his eyes. They were shallow and glazed, with no inner light behind them. His mouth was working. His entire body trembled with sincerity.

“I wouldn’t pay any attention to them,” I said. “They’re just a bunch of kids having fun on the beach.”

“That’s what you think.”

“I know it. Pay no attention to them.”

“How can I help it, when they come torturing me?”

“I’m sure they won’t be back.”

“They better not!”

“If they do come back, I wouldn’t throw any more flowerpots. One of those could kill a man, or a boy.”

“Yeah. You’re right.” He hung on the railing like a seasick passenger on a ship, wagging his head slowly from side to side. “I blew my top. I got to learn not to blow my top.”

The boys were far up the beach, some of them on the sand and some in the water. Barr’s flat pale gaze was following them, the way the dead watch the living, if they do.

“You’ve been alone too much, Mr. Barr.”

“Yeah. Tell it to Rosie.”

“I don’t think I will. I won’t be seeing Rosie.”

“I gave you money to find her, didn’t I? You took it, didn’t you?”

“I’m giving it back.” I removed the five bills from my wallet and held them out to him, spread like a poker hand.

“What the hell for? The money is good. You think it’s counterfeit?”

“The money may be good, but the story isn’t. I’m not buying it.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“I’m giving you a chance to change your story.”

“To hell with you. If you don’t like my story you can shove it.” He snatched the money and waved it in my face. “I’ll hire another boy, or run her down myself.”

“Then what?”

“We get married, me and Rosie.”

“You’re sure you’re not planning a funeral instead of a wedding?”

He crumpled the bills and pulled his fist back to his shoulder. He was shaking, and his eyes were almost white. He braced himself with his other hand on the railing.

“I wouldn’t throw that punch, old man. I’ve got at least ten years on you, at least twenty pounds. And your face has already had it.”

I was up on my toes, ready to move in or away. But my words held him, long enough for me to move sideways through the door, across the dim room and out.

“Yellow-bellied coward!” he yelled after me.

A flowerpot smashed on the door as I slammed it shut.

The years since the war hadn’t affected Santa Teresa as much as some other places in California, where people moved on the average every three years. In spite of the housing tracts and the smokeless industries proliferating around it, the older parts of the city had a changeless quality. Settled old families lived in well-kept old houses behind mortised fieldstone walls that had resisted earthquakes, or cypress hedges that had outlived generations of gardeners.

Except for its palm trees and the brown hills rising behind them, Foothill Drive was like an English lane where you could feel the cool shadow of the past. J. Cavendish-Baring was one of the names I read off the rural mailboxes. I noticed the name because J. Cavendish-Baring had a couple of does and a fawn browsing under the oaks in his front yard. Birds were singing, with a faint English accent.

Dwight Maclish, another mailbox announced, and a hundred yards farther on, F. Mark Leverett. I turned up the gravel drive. The house was wide and low, with an overhanging roof and a deep verandah.

A woman in a wide straw hat was kneeling shoulder-deep among the roses with a pair of clippers in her gloved hand. They snicked in the silence when my engine died. I got out and shut the car door. After a while the woman rose to her feet and came towards me, stepping carefully among the bushes. Her body, concealed in a loose blue smock, moved with a kind of heavy certainty, as if she knew that she was beautiful, or had been.

She was. She took off her hat as she came up to me, and fanned herself with it. She was past forty and showed it, but the lines in her face had not destroyed its beauty. Her smiling blue eyes were wide-spaced under level brows. Her heartbreaking heartbroken mouth was as red as any of her roses. Passion or something resembling it had left bittersweet marks at its corners.

“What can I do for you, sir?” If there was a lilt of coquetry in the question, I didn’t think that it was meant for me. It was simply there, a surplus from her youth.

“You’re Mrs. Leverett?”

“Yes. If you’re hoping to catch the doctor, he isn’t home for lunch yet. I am expecting him.”

“It’s you I’d like to speak to.”

“What on earth about?”

I had my story ready: the plain truth, with a little varnish on the rough spots. “I’m in a bit of a dilemma, Mrs. Leverett. A man named Joseph Barr visited here the day before yesterday, he tells me. He didn’t tell me that he made a nuisance of himself, but I suspect he did.”

“ ‘Nuisance’ is putting it mildly. He’s a dreadful man.” A frown puckered her brows. She dropped her clippers in the pocket of her smock and smoothed the frown away with her gloved fingers. “Are you an officer?”

“I have been. I’m in private work at present.” I told her my name. “What did Barr do, exactly?”

“Nothing overt. His very look was enough. I didn’t feel safe in the same room with him. I called my husband and son, and they asked him to leave. He left rather reluctantly, muttering threats.”

“Threats of violence?”

“I don’t believe so. He spoke of buying and selling us, as if that were possible.”

Her gaze went past me and rested as if for comfort on her house, planted securely in its place in the sun. A man in blue clothes was watching us from just inside the doorway. He was very thin and still, and very young.

“I did sense violence in him, though,” she said. “What sort of a person is he?”

“One to look out for.”

Her hand went to her breast. I could see a tiny blue pulse beating in the hollow of her temple. “Is he a wanted man?”

“More of an unwanted one, I’d say. He’s been brushed off and pushed around in his time, and it may have driven him a little off his rocker.”

“You mean that he’s insane?”

“It’s possible.”

“My husband thinks he may be. Dr. Leverett is not a psychiatrist, and of course he only saw him for a minute, but he has had some experience with disturbed patients. He thinks the man is paranoid.”

“Did he say why he thinks so?”

“You can ask him yourself. Fred should be here at any minute.”

She took a tentative step towards the house, then paused and looked me over. She was an open-faced woman, not good at masking what was on her mind: was it safe to ask me into the house, or did my connection with Barr disqualify me? She said:

“Are you a friend of Mr. Barr’s?”

“I’m not his enemy.” He had been my client for a quick quarter of an hour, and I owed him that much. “I met him for the first time this morning. He tried to hire me to find a woman for him.”

She colored slightly, and her open look was confused by something hectic about her eyes. “Rose Breen?”

“That’s correct.”

“You say he tried to hire you. The implication is that he didn’t succeed. Then why are you here?”

“It’s a little hard to explain, even to myself. Barr’s staying in Malibu, and that’s more than halfway here. I decided to come the rest of the way.”

“On your own hook?” Her tone was faintly incredulous.

“Yes. I turned Barr down because I didn’t like his story, and I didn’t like his attitude. He said he’d hire someone else or run Rose down himself, and I believe him. He has a fixed idea, or claims to have, of marrying her after all these years and living happily ever after. She isn’t likely to fall in with the idea. Then there’s bound to be trouble–”

“That isn’t what he told me,” the woman cut in. “He said that he was her uncle by marriage, that he’d made some money and wanted to help her with it.”

“Now I know he’s a liar. He was probably lying to both of us. When his first story didn’t work on you, he changed it for me.”

She touched my arm. She wasn’t a small woman, but she had a hummingbird touch, light and vibrating and brief. “What do you suppose he really wants with her?”

“Nothing good, in my opinion. Rose would know.”

It was a question. She seemed embarrassed by it, and she let the embarrassment narrow into suspicion. “I fail to understand your interest in all this, or why you’ve come to me. What do you hope to gain?”

“Nothing. I like to sleep nights. That means that in the daytime I have to follow through–”

She cut me short: “On whose account are you here?”

“My own. And Rose Breen’s.”

“Do you know her?” she said sharply.

“I never heard of her until this morning. But I thought if she’s available I’d like to talk to her.”

“On what subject?”

“Joseph Barr. I thought I’d made that clear. He’s dangerous – dangerous to anyone and especially to a woman that he’s been dreaming about for fifteen years or so. He may be an escaped mental patient or convict–”

“And you may be a very imaginative man.”

“I try to be. The things that happen in the world can be pretty fantastic, and I try to stay attuned.”

She was not amused. The confusion in her eyes was affecting the rest of her face. Her beauty was loosening, coming apart like an overblown flower. I asked her the direct question:

“Mrs. Leverett, is Rose still working for you?”

“She certainly is not. Rose Breen was only with me a total of two or three months. She left fifteen years ago under circumstances that I don’t care to dwell on.”

“Circumstances?”

“I was ill at the time, and she left me without notice.” Her look was almost malevolent. The people in Foothill Drive took their servant problems very seriously. Such things happened to the emotionally unemployed.

“Is Rose still living in Santa Teresa?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

“Who would?”

“I can’t think of anyone. Not anyone.” She put on her wide hat and tied it under her chin as if it might help to hold her face together. “Now if you’ll excuse me, there are some instructions I must give the cook.”

“Do you mind if I wait for your husband?”

“I see no point in it.”

“But do you mind?”

“Wait for him if you like.”

She left me standing and walked towards the house. Her heavy grace was heavier and less graceful. She went in. I got back into the car, wondering what had happened to the conversation. We’d been getting along fairly well, I’d thought, then suddenly we weren’t communicating. I hoped I wasn’t losing my fine interrogatory touch.

I had another chance to test it, right away. The young man in blue came out of the house and down the drive. In worn and faded Levi’s and sneakers, he looked like the assistant gardener, or somebody playing the role of assistant gardener. He walked like a zombie, scuffing his feet in the gravel as if he had poor contact with reality. His intense dark gaze seemed to be fixed on another world than this one, not necessarily a better world.

The pressures of this one had stretched the brown skin over the lumpy bones of his face. His hair was short and stood up.

I saw when he reached the side of the car that he was very tall, taller than I was by an inch or two, and about half as wide.

“You’ve upset Mother,” he said tightly.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“She’s very upset. She went into her room without even speaking.”

“She upsets easily.”

He considered this proposition. “Mother has had enough trouble. I don’t want her bothered.”

“I have no intention of bothering her.”

“What are you doing camping in the driveway?”

“I want to talk to your father.”

“Leverett is not my father. Leverett is my stepfather.” He leaned over to peer in at my face. His eyes were burning black. “Is that clear?”

“Leverett is your stepfather.”

“My cruel stepfather from the Siberian steppes. He’s helping me up the stepladder of success, step by step.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“A non-joke. You can un-laugh if you like.”

I un-laughed. He grinned mirthlessly in at me. “What do you want to talk to him about?”

“Rose Breen. If you’re Peter Leverett–”

“Chantry. Peter Chantry. Is that clear?”

“You’re Peter Chantry. I understand a girl named Rose Breen looked after you for a while when you were a small boy. You may not remember her.”

“I do, though. I remember her very well. Rose treated me very well. She used to do a lot of clowning around. She taught me to swim in the pool. She even got me started reading, mirabile dictu.” The memory softened his eyes. They needed softening. He almost smiled.

“Mirabile what?”

“Mirabile dictu. It’s a Latin phrase. Rose and I had a wonderful time together – the best time that I ever had in my life. I’ve been thinking about her a lot these last couple of days. I sat up most of last night thinking about her.” He added confidentially: “I do my best thinking at night.”

He appeared to be about twenty, but he acted younger. Still I had the impression that he was playing a role – assistant gardener, village idiot, family fool – behind which his intelligence lay in ambush. I’d run into similar fronts in other young people who felt displaced at home.

“Maybe I better come back around midnight or something. We’ll synchronize our watches.”

“Mine is already synchronized,” he said, deadpan. “What’s your name?”

“Lew Archer. I’m a private detective. Is that clear?”

He looked at me in boyish confusion. Then he decided to laugh. Or un-laugh. “I’m sorry, but I don’t like to be mistaken for Leverett’s son.”

“Where did you pick up the is-that-clear bit? Television?”

“Leverett. He used to say it all the time. I started saying it back to needle him. It must have crept up on me. Things do.”

“Tell me more about Rose. Sit in the car if you like.”

“No thanks.” But he leaned his arm on the door. “Why is everybody suddenly so interested in Rose? A man was here the other day – it’s what got me started thinking about her. I’d hate to think of that Barr person catching up with Rose. He isn’t really her uncle, is he?”

“He’s not her uncle. I don’t know who he is.”

“What does he want with her?”

“She’s the one to ask. Do you have any idea where she is, Peter?”

“How would I know?” His face had gone blank and stupid. “She may be dead, for all I know.”

“But you don’t think she is.”

“I don’t want to think she is.”

“How did the idea come up?”

“Everybody I care about dies or goes away.” He kicked the earth, spraying the car-door with gravel.

“When did you last see her?”

“I was about five. She took off without even saying goodbye. I felt very badly about it. I cried. That was about the last time I ever cried. You see, she treated me like a mother. My own mother never did. Rose took me to her place and we used to pretend that I was her little boy.” His voice cracked with self-pity.

“Didn’t she live in?”

“She did at first. After Father came home from the war she moved into her own place, down the road. I suppose there wasn’t room for her in the house. But you’d think there would be, wouldn’t you?” He looked at the house. “It’s a big house, and there was – there were only Mother and I for a long time after that.”

“What about your father?”

He turned on me. “What about him?”

“You said that he was home from the war.”

“He didn’t stay,” the boy said. “He went away again around the same time Rose did. Maybe it was the same time. I don’t remember exactly.” He winced, as if the razor edge of memory was hurting him.

“He went back to the war?”

“The war was over, I know that much. It was over long before he ever came home in the first place.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t he tell you? Or didn’t your mother tell you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.” His sneaker toe was digging a hole in the gravel. “I wish you wouldn’t ask questions about my father. It’s painful to me. I hardly remember him. Besides, his run-out has nothing to do with Rose Breen.”

I wondered. Maybe he was wondering too. He raised his eyes from his little excavation. They were bleak and blind in the sunlight. They winced away from mine like an animal’s.

The sound of a heavy car was approaching in the road.

“That’s Leverett now,” he said. “You’d better move your car. Leverett doesn’t like people to get in his way.”

I started to move the car to the side of the driveway. A mass of chrome and color hove up in my rearview mirror and honked at me. I got out, leaving the motor running. So did the other driver.

He was a middle-aged man in a dark gray suit that matched his dark gray hair. Either he had a good tailor, or he was very fit under his clothes. His face was brown with suntan that hadn’t come out of a bottle, and not bad-looking, except for a prissy little mouth under a prissy moustache. His eyes were keen and glacial.

“Don’t block the driveway, please,” he said precisely.

“I was just unblocking it. There’s room for you to get by.”

The Count of Montevista

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

I went through my mail in search of hopeful omens. One interesting-looking envelope came from Spain and had pictures of General Franco and the Santa Maria on the stamps. It was addressed to Señor Lew Archer at my Sunset Boulevard address. Inside it said: “Cordiales Saludos: This comes to you from faroff Spain to call your attention to our new Fiesta line of custom furniture with its authentically Spanish motif…”

There was a bill from The Bottle Shelf.

Its size astonished me. Combined with the weekend I had just put in, at Palm Springs, it made me determined to quit drinking almost any day now. I was planning my anti-drinking campaign, with emphasis on how to spend all the money I would save on liquor, when the telephone on my desk rang.

It was Eric Griffin of the Beverly Hills law firm Griffin and Shelhovbian. I had done a little work for him in the past. He wanted to know if I was free to undertake a small job. I was.

“I have a young man with me in my office now. He’s the son of an old acquaintance of mine, and he seems to feel that he needs the services of a detective.” Griffin sounded as if he had his doubts about the need. “Apparently his girl has thrown him over in favor of some sort of foreigner. He seems to think that the man may be crooked or even dangerous.”

Behind Griffin’s voice I heard a younger man say: “He is dangerous.”

“I’ll let him talk to you himself,” Eric said.

“Not on the phone. Shall I come over there?”

“No, I’ll send him over to you. His name is Peter Jamieson Three,” he said with a faintly sardonic intonation. “Treat him gently.”

“Is he fragile?”

“Not exactly. I knew his father at Princeton.” His voice was full of unspoken information. “The family lives in Montevista. Peter will handle the financial arrangements himself, since he’s not really my client.”

The young man arrived in about twenty-five minutes. He was puffing from the climb to my second-floor office. He couldn’t have been out of his early twenties but his face was fattish and rather apologetic, the face of a middle-aging boy. His body was encased in a layer of fat like football padding which made his Ivy League suit too tight for him. He looked like money about three generations removed from its source.

“I’m Peter Jamieson.” He let me feel his large amorphous hand.

“Yes. Sit down. Mr. Griffin told me you were coming.”

“I heard him. Mr. Griffin thinks I’m making a fuss about nothing. I’m not, though.” He peered around at the mug shots on the walls. He had the kind of soft brown eyes which are very often shortsighted.

“I can’t make your girl come back to you if she doesn’t want to. Griffin will tell you the same thing.”

“He already has,” the young man said rather wistfully. “But even if she doesn’t come back, to me, we can save her from making a terrible mistake.”

100 Pesos

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

It started out to be one of those germ-free cases, untouched by the human hand. The firm of lawyers who called me in, Trotter, Griffin and Wake, had the kind of reputation young men dream about aspiringly when they’re sitting up late studying for their bar exams. Their exquisitely hushed offices surrounded a garden court in Beverly Hills.

The lovely young thing in the front office looked at me with aesthetic distance. “Yes?”

“Mr. Archer to see Mr. Griffin.”

“Mr. Griffin is free now.”

He was a lean man in summer gray, with a white crewcut and a wintry smile. The tan against which his teeth flashed hadn’t come out of a bottle. He shook my hand vigorously but briefly, offered me a mottled greenish cigar which I refused, closed the box without taking one himself, waved me into a padded leather chair, leaned back in his own chair and clapped his hands, once.

Nothing happened, except that I jumped a little.

“We’ll get right down to business,” Griffin said. “That suits me and I’m sure it suits you. You’re a busy man, I’m given to understand.”

“By whom?”

“Mr. Colton of the D.A.’s office has recommended you highly, among others. He gave me to understand that you’re among the more intelligent and persistent members of your – ah – profession.”

“That was nice of him.”

“Yes. As you may know, we specialize in corporation law and don’t have much occasion to use detectives. I’m – ah – negotiating with you simply as a favor to a colleague.”

“That’s nice of you.”

He gave me a stainless-steel look. “Yes. Well. It appears that there is this certain person in La Mesa who needs looking into. You know La Mesa?”

“Not like the back of my hand, but I’ve been there. Who’s the certain person?”

“He calls himself Smith. Presumably Smith is not his real name. He’s a man who came to town – to La Mesa, that is – several days ago. Apparently he’s been stirring up a certain amount of trouble, of a rather indeterminate nature.”

“And I’m supposed to run him out of town?”

“Nothing like that,” he said sharply. “Your assignment is to find out who he actually is, where he came from, what he’s doing in La Mesa. Get to know him, if you can. Get him talking. We want a full report on his background, his identity, his intentions.”

“Where can I find him?”

“He’s probably staying at some waterfront motel. It shouldn’t be too hard to pick him up – I can give you a fairly good description of the man.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“No. This is at second hand, but I can assure you of its accuracy.” He shuffled the papers on his desk and picked out a sheet of typewriter paper scribbled over in pencil. “Smith is a man who appears to be in his middle fifties. His hair has streaks of gray in it. It was originally black. His skin is quite dark – whether for – ah – racial reasons or simply because he’s been out in the sun a lot, I can’t say. Brown eyes, almost black – his eyes are said to be his most notable feature. Also, he has a rather large nose with a hump in it – evidently broken at some time. This and his general manner give him the appearance of a rather rough-looking customer, and a fairly exotic specimen, you might say.”

“Foreign?”

“That isn’t clear. He seems to speak English without any accent.”

“Who has he been speaking English to?”

Griffin compressed his lips. “I’m afraid I’m not authorized to name our client, if that is what you mean. In point of fact, the client in question isn’t properly ours. I’m acting in this matter for a colleague in La Mesa.”

“Another lawyer?”

“That is correct.”

“What’s his name?”

“I’m not authorized to give it to you. It was thought best not to.”

“I like to know who I’m working for. And why.”

“Naturally.” Griffin smiled his wintry smile. “Certainly we’re implying no lack of confidence in you, or we’d never have asked you to take a hand in this. But there are circumstances in the present case – family and – ah – psychological considerations – which impose a certain amount of security on us. I’m asking you to go along with it, and I give you my personal assurance that you’re dealing with the highest type of people.”

“In the best of all possible worlds?”

Griffin sat behind his desk, watching me with a no-comment expression. Trying to get information out of a Los Angeles lawyer was like opening a can of sardines without a key. I said:

“This Smith doesn’t sound like any bargain. What’s he been doing to these high-type people, to make them want to investigate him?”

“We look to you for an answer to that, Mr. Archer.”

“You mean they don’t know what he’s been doing to them?”

“His intentions are obscure, shall we say. Everything about the man is obscure. If you can throw some light on him and his motives, you’ll be well paid for your trouble.”

“It will cost your client a hundred dollars a day, whether or not I come up with anything.”

“I anticipated that, and I’m prepared to give you a five-hundred-dollar advance now. Will you take the case?”

I didn’t want the case. I didn’t like Griffin. I resented the secrecy with which he was trying to handle it and me. But he had stirred my curiosity. And I could use the money.

“I’ll take it.”

He handed me a check which he had already made out against his firm’s account, and watched me put it away. With a glint of something in his eye that might have been ownership. I didn’t like it.

“Is Smith blackmailing your high-type people?” I said.

Griffin’s eyebrows went up till his forehead resembled brown corduroy. “I have no reason to think so. You must understand, our knowledge of him is minimal. We’re looking to you, Mr. Archer, to maximize it.”

“Okay, let’s get back to Smith’s description. Brown-black eyes, largish broken nose, swarthy complexion, gray streaks in black hair. How big is he?”

I took out my notebook while Griffin consulted his scribbled sheet. “About six feet. His back is slightly stooped, possibly from doing manual work. He’s broad-shouldered, but not too heavy.”

I wrote this down. “How does he dress?”

“In an ordinary dark business suit. It looks new, but it doesn’t fit him too well. He wears a white shirt and a dark tie. No hat. At least he wasn’t wearing one at the time that he was observed.”

“Where and when was this?”

“I don’t know. In fact, you’ve pretty well exhausted my information.”

“You’re not giving me much to go on, Mr. Griffin. There must be a hundred thousand people in La Mesa–”

“But only a few dozen named Smith.”

“Does he have a first name?”

“Presumably, but I don’t know it. The chances are, as I said, that he’s living in a waterfront hotel or motel. You shouldn’t have too much trouble finding him. After that – I believe you understand your instructions.”

“Yes.”

“If and when you uncover anything significant, report to me. Our answering service can put you in touch with me at any hour.”

Griffin rose in a gesture of dismissal.

I got to La Mesa in time for lunch, which I ate in a waterfront café. It was late June, and the place was crowded with women in slacks and men in shorts, displaying sunburned knees. From my table by the window, I could see the yacht harbor. Small sailboats were moving out through the channel with that slow grace that only sailboats have. It was a bright day, and the wind was freshening.

Just for fun, I tried Smith’s description on the waitress who brought my Crab Louie. She shook her hennaed head at me:

“I’m sorry. Even if I did see him – I see so many people.”

She limped away.

I had no better luck in the motels. They stretched for half a mile along the waterfront boulevard: expensive stucco layouts with green swimming pools and greener lawns, shaded by palm trees rattling in the wind. They were happy places for happy people who wanted to live for a little while in a postcard paradise. Some of the people were named Smith, and that took time. None of them was the Smith I was looking for.

Four hours later, four hours of legwork and tonguework which got me nothing, I had worked my way to the end of motel row. Like white birds coming home to roost, the sails were turning back towards the harbor, heeling as they tacked into the channel.

I turned back towards the main street, remembering a small hotel I had missed. It stood on a corner a block away from the boulevard. It was a three-story building with a front of dirty white bricks and an old electric sign which mumbled through its missing bulbs that this was the MADISON HOTEL. The lobby was narrow and dank. There was nobody at the desk. Two old men, facing each other across a card table that had been set up by the front window, were playing checkers as if their lives depended on the outcome. One of them had two kings; the other had three.

I asked the lucky one where the desk clerk was.

“I’m taking care of the desk right now,” he said without looking up. “You want a room?”

“I may at that. Is there a Mr. Smith staying here?”

He raised his head. His eyes were time-washed and shrewd. “What you want with him?”

“I ran into him, he said you might have a room. Most of the motels are full.”

“We got plenty of rooms. Mind if I finish the game, mister, and then I’ll fix you up?”

He moved one of his kings, hastily, as if he had lost interest in the game. The other old man took it. My old man took his opponent’s two kings and got up grinning like a dog.

He disappeared through a door at the back and emerged behind the desk, wearing a green eyeshade. “I can give you a room with a private bath if you want to go to five.”

“We’ll talk about that in a minute. I want to be sure that it’s the same Mr. Smith. Is he a dark man with a broken nose?”

“Uh-huh. He’s the only Smith we got.”

“Is he in his room?”

He glanced at the keyboard behind him. “Not right now. I think he went out for a walk. You want a room or don’t you?”

“Yes. Please. With bath.”

I registered under my own name, gave him a ten-dollar bill and told him to keep the change.

His jaw dropped, displacing his false teeth slightly. He looked as if he was going to eat the money. “What’s this for?”

“For not telling Mr. Smith that I was asking about him. Pass the word to your friend.”

“Cop?”

I improved on this: “Undercover agent.”

“Did Mr. Smith do something?”

“I don’t know. He may be an innocent victim of the conspiracy. I’ve been assigned to keep an eye on him. I’m telling you this much because you’re obviously a man of experience and you have an honest face.”

“You can trust me,” he said. “Is it the dope traffic? We’ve had a lot of it seeping into town these last few years.”

“Could be. My name is Archer, by the way.”

“Gimpel. Jack Gimpel.” He offered me an arthritic hand. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Archer. I hope there won’t be any trouble, though.”

“I’m here to head off trouble.”

That turned out to be one of my emptier boasts.

We Went on from There

Published in The Archer Files (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2015).

The original handwritten manuscript of the 1965 Ross Macdonald novel The Far Side of the Dollar ended with a brief final chapter chapter featuring an exchange between protagonist Lew Archer and another of the book’s characters.

Before having his manuscript typed, the author decided not to include that ultimate scene. Above it, he wrote to his typist: “I think leave off this chapter. Yes, disregard it, please.”

29

“She had a dreadful life,” Susanna said, “and a dreadful end. I would have given her access to her sleeping pills.”

“You can say that because you didn’t have the responsibility. I helped a man to die once, in similar circumstances. It still wakes me up in the middle of the night.”

She studied me across the table. She herself had a slightly convalescent look, and she was wearing a gardenia. It was Saturday night; we were about to have dinner in one of the medium-priced places on Restaurant Row; I had just ordered martinis.

“You’re a curious combination,” she said. “Very hard, and quite soft.”

“Most men are. So are most women.”

“It certainly applies to Elaine Hillman. You know, I can almost sympathize with her. Or empathize. He did almost the same thing to me as he did to her – getting me to take care of Carol, without any hint that he was the father of the child she was carrying. He may even have recruited me for that purpose,” she said, making herself wince.

“I don’t think he’s as cold an operator as that.”

“Don’t you?”

“How do you feel about him, Susanna?”

“I have no feeling whatever about him,” she said with feeling. “I’m much more interested in what’s going to happen to the boy. How can he possibly survive such trouble?”

“He’ll survive. He has some choices now. His father is willing to send him away to prep school. Or he may even spend the next year with his grandfather Rob Brown. I introduced them to each other yesterday, and they seemed to get along. He even has a nice girl waiting for him.”

Susanna gave me a bright opaque look, as if she could think of another male with similar advantages. “Stella is a nice girl. I’m sorry I couldn’t or didn’t stay with her the other morning. I felt–” She fumbled with a spoon in some embarrassment.

“You felt Ralph Hillman’s needs were overriding.”

“No. I simply felt he had a right–”

“The droit du seigneur?”

“You’re being unpleasant,” she said. “And I was so looking forward to seeing you.”

“I’m trying to get certain things out of the way. Then we can go on from there.”

“Can we?”

“We can try. You haven’t told me what you and Ralph Hillman talked about at breakfast. Did he know his wife had killed those people?”

“Maybe he did. He didn’t say anything about it.”

“If he knew, it would explain his asking you to marry him, as well as something he did Thursday night. He suddenly told me about his fling with Carol, and the fact that Tom was his son. I think he was feeding me evidence of Elaine’s guilt. He wanted her to be found out, even if it meant that he was found out, too.”

“And then he was going to marry me and live happily ever after.” She looked quite pale and haunted for a moment.

The bar girl brought our martinis, and we went on from there.

Trial

Published in The Archer Files (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2015).

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

I parked my car where I usually parked it, in the driveway of the Trumbull estate, just inside the gates. The posts, rather the gates had rusted and fallen from their hinges. Trumbull had died in Europe, and his country house stood empty since the war. It was one reason I visited the canyon: nobody lived there.

Until now, at least. The window of the stone gatehouse which overlooked the driveway had been broken the last time I’d seen it. Now it was patched with cardboard. Through a hole punched in the middle of the cardboard, bright emptiness watched me. A human eye’s bright emptiness.

“Hello.”

My voice was loud in the stillness. A jaybird erupted from a red-berried bush, sailed up to the limb of a tree and yelled back curses at me. A dozen chickadees flew out of the oak and settled in another, more remote. The door of the gatehouse creaked, and a man came out.

He wore faded jeans, a brown horsehide jacket, and a smile. He walked mechanically, as if his body was not at home in the world. The very sound of his feet on the gravel was harsh and clumsy. Perhaps he was used to pavements.

“Hello,” I said again.

He came right up to me without answering. I saw that his smile was not a greeting, or any kind of a smile that you could respond to. It was the stretched blind grimace of a man who hated the sun. His bright and empty eyes looked at me as if he hated me because I was under the sun.

But all he said was: “Bud, you can’t park here. This driveway is in use.”

“Who’s using it?”

He shrugged awkwardly. One of his hands was in his jacket pocket. His other arm hung stiff as a board at his side:

“I got no instructions to answer questions. The question is, what you think you’re doing here? This is private property, all the way down to the highway. You’re trespassing.”

“I know that. I knew the Trumbulls at one time. Miss Trumbull sold the property?”

“Looks like it, don’t it?”

“To you?”

“Not to me. Listen, bud, you admit you’re trespassing. Why don’t you beat it now?”

I was on the point of complying. I had no right there, though over the years I’d established what I thought of as squatter’s rights. But he said one word too many:

“Beat it before I get rough.”

The hair on the back of my neck hadn’t bristled since the war. I could feel it rise like iron filings magnetized by his smile.

Winnipeg, 1929