The Name is Archer

The Sinister Habit

A MAN in a conservative dark gray suit entered my doorway sideways, carrying a dark gray Homburg in his hand. His face was long and pale. He had black eyes and eyebrows and black nostrils. Across the summit of his high forehead, long black ribbons of hair were brushed demurely. Only his tie had color: it lay on his narrow chest like a slumbering purple passion.

His sharp black glance darted around my office, then back into the corridor. His hairy nostrils sniffed the air as if he suspected escaping gas.

“Is somebody following you?” I said.

“I have no reason to think so.”

I had my coat off and my shirt unbuttoned. It was a hot afternoon at the start of the smog season. My visitor looked at me in a certain way that reminded me of schoolteachers. “Might you be Archer?”

“It’s a reasonable conclusion. Name’s on the door.”

“I can read, thank you.”

“Congratulations, but this is no talent agency.”

He stiffened, clutching his blue chin with a seal-ringed hand, and gave me a long, sad, hostile stare. Then he shrugged awkwardly, as though there was no help for it.

“Come in if you like,” I said. “Close it behind you. Don’t mind me, I get snappy in the heat.”

He shut the door violently, almost hard enough to crack the expensive one-way glass panel. He jumped at the noise it made, and apologized:

“I’m sorry. I’ve been under quite a strain.”

“You’re in trouble?”

“Not I. My sister…” He gave me one of his long looks. I assumed an air of bored discretion garnished with a sprig of innocence.

“Your sister,” I reminded him after a while. “Did she do something, or get something done to her?”

“Both, I’m afraid.” His teeth showed in a tortured little smile which drew down the corners of his mouth. “She and I maintain a school for girls in – in the vicinity of Chicago. I can’t emphasize too much the importance of keeping this matter profoundly secret.”

“You’re doing your part. Sit down, Mr.–”

He took a pinseal wallet out of his inside breast pocket, handling it with a kind of reverence, and produced a card. He hesitated with the card in his hand.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Don’t tell me. Does your name begin with a consonant or a vowel?”

He sat down with great caution, after inspecting the chair for concealed electrodes, and made me the gift of his card. It was engraved: “J. Reginald Harlan, M.A. The Harlan School.”

I read it out loud. He winced.

“All right, Mr. Harlan. Your sister’s in some kind of a jam. You run a girls’ school–”

“She’s headmistress. I’m registrar and bursar.”

“–which makes you vulnerable to scandal. Is it sexual trouble she’s in?”

He crossed his legs, and clasped his sharp knee with both hands. “Now how could you possibly know that?”

“Some of my best friends are sisters. I take it she’s younger than you.”

“A few years my junior, yes, but Maude’s no youngster. She’s a mature woman, at least I’d always supposed that she was mature. It’s her age, her age and position, that make this whole affair so incredible. For a woman of Maude’s social and professional standing, with a hundred virginal minds in her charge, suddenly to go mad over a man! Can you understand such behavior?”

“Yes. I’ve seen enough of it.”

“I can’t.” But a faint, attractive doubt softened his eyes for a moment. Perhaps he was wondering when some long overdue lightning might blast and illuminate him. “I’d always supposed that the teens were the dangerous age. Perhaps after all it’s the thirties.” One hand crawled up his chest like a pallid crab and fondled the purple tie.

“It depends on the person,” I said, “and the circumstances.”

“I suppose so.” He inverted the hat in his lap and gazed down into it. “Now that I come to think of it, Mother’s breakdown occurred when she was in her thirties. I wonder, could Maude be simply reverting to type, impelled by something unstable in her genes?”

“Did Mother have blue genes?”

Harlan smiled his tortured smile. “Indeed she did. You put it very aptly. But we won’t go into the case of Mother. It’s my sister I’m concerned with.”

“What did she do? Elope?”

“Yes, in the most scandalous and disrupting way, with a man she scarcely knew, a dreadful sort of man.”

“Tell me about him.”

He looked down into his hat again, as if its invisible contents fascinated and horrified him. “There’s very little to tell. I don’t even know his name. I saw him only once, last Friday – a week ago tomorrow. He drove up to the school in a battered old car, right in the midst of our Commencement exercises. Maude didn’t even introduce him to me. She introduced him to no one, and if you saw him you would understand why. He was an obvious roughneck, a big hairy brute of a fellow with a red beard, in filthy old slacks and a beret and a turtleneck sweater. She walked up to him in front of all the parents and took his arm and strolled away with him under the elms, completely hypnotized.”

“You mean she never came back?”

“Oh, she came back that night for a time, long enough to pack. I was out myself – I had a number of social duties to perform, Commencement night. When I got in, she was gone. She left me a brief note, and that was all.”

“You have it with you?”

His hand went into his breast pocket and tossed a sheet of folded stationery onto the desk. Its copybook handwriting said:

I pushed the note across the desk to Harlan. “Were you and your sister on good terms?”

“I’d always thought so. We had our little differences over the years, in carrying on Father’s work and interpreting the tradition of the School. But there was a deep mutual respect between Maude and me. You can see it in the note.”

“Yes.” I could see other things there, too. “What’s the suffering she refers to?”

“I have no idea.” He gave a cruel yank to the purple tie.

“We’ve had a good life together, Maude and I, a rich full life of service to girlhood and young womanhood. We’ve been prosperous and happy. To have her turn on me like this – out of a clear sky! Suddenly, after eleven years of devotion, the School meant nothing to her. I meant nothing to her. Father’s memory meant nothing. I tell you, that brute has bewitched her. Her entire system of values has been subverted.”

“Maybe she’s just fallen in love. The older they are when it happens, the harder it hits them. Hell, maybe he’s even lovable.”

Harlan sniffed. “He’s a lewd rascal. I know a lewd rascal when I see one. He’s a womanizer and a drinker and probably worse.”

I glanced at my liquor cabinet. It was closed and innocent-looking. “Aren’t you a little prejudiced?”

“I know whereof I speak. The man’s a ruffian. Maude is a woman of sensibility who requires the gentlest conditions of life. He’ll pulverize her spirit, brutalize her body, waste her money. It’s Mother’s situation all over again, only worse, much worse. Maude is infinitely more vulnerable than Mother ever was.”

“What happened to your mother?”

“She divorced Father and ran away with a man, an art teacher at the School. He led her a merry life, I assure you, until he died of drink.” This seemed to give Harlan a certain satisfaction. “Mother is living in Los Angeles now. I haven’t seen her for nearly thirty years, but Maude came out to visit her during the Easter recess. Against my expressed wishes, I may add.”

“And Maude came back to Los Angeles with her husband?”

“Yes. She wired me yesterday from here. I caught the first possible plane.”

“Let me see the telegram.”

“I don’t have it. It was read to me on the telephone.” He added waspishly: “She might have used a less public means of communicating her disgrace.”

“What did she say?”

“That she was very happy. Turning the knife in the wound, of course.” His face darkened, and through his eyes I caught a glimpse of the red fires banked inside him. “She warned me not to try and follow her, and apologized for taking the money.”

“What money?”

“She wrote a check last Friday before she left, which nearly exhausted our joint checking account. A check for a thousand dollars.”

“But it belonged to her?”

“In the legal sense, not morally. It’s always been understood that I disburse the money.” A doleful whine entered his voice. “The man is clearly after our money, and the deuce of it is, there’s nothing to prevent Maude from drawing on our capital. She might even sell the School!”

“She owns it?”

“I’m afraid she does, legally. Father left her the School. I – my administrative ability was a little slow in developing – a gradual growth, you know. Poor Father didn’t live to see me mature.” He coughed, choking on his own unction. “The buildings alone are worth nearly two hundred thousand. The added value of our prestige is incalculable.”

He paused in a listening attitude, as though he could hear the unholy gurgle of money going down the drain. I put on my coat.

“You want them traced, is that it? To see that the marriage is regular, and make sure that he isn’t a confidence man?”

“I want to see my sister. If I could just talk to her – well, something might be saved. She may have lost her mind. I can’t permit her to wreck her life, and mine, as Mother wrecked Father’s and her own.”

“Where does your mother live in Los Angeles?”

“She has a house in a place called Westwood, I believe. I’ve never been there.”

“I think we ought to visit her. You haven’t been in touch with her?”

“Certainly not. And I have no wish to see her now.”

“I think you should. If Maude was out here with her at Easter, your mother may know the man. It doesn’t sound as though your sister eloped on the spur of the moment.”

“You may be right,” he said slowly. “It hadn’t occurred to me that she may have met him out here. And then he followed her to Chicago, eh? Of course. It’s the logical hypothesis.”

We had a short talk about money. Harlan endorsed a fifty-dollar traveler’s check to me, and we went downstairs to my car.

It wasn’t far to Westwood, as distances go in Los Angeles. We joined the early evening traffic rushing like lemmings towards the sea and the suburbs. Shielding his eyes with his hand against the sun’s horizontal rays, Harlan told me a little about his mother. Enough for me to know what to expect.

She lived in a frame cottage on a hillside overlooking the distant campus. The front yard was choked with a dozen varieties of cactus, some of which speared as high as the roof. The house needed paint and it hung on the slope a little off balance, like its tenant.

She opened the screen door, blinking against the sun. Her face was gouged and eroded by years and trouble. Black hair, shot with gray, hung in straight limp bangs over her forehead. Large tarnished metal rings depended from her earlobes. Several gold chains hung around her withered neck, and tinkled when she moved. She was dressed in sandals and a brown homespun robe which looked like sacking, cinched in by a rope at the waist.

Her eyes were dusty black and very remote. She didn’t seem to know Harlan. He said in a new voice, a husky questioning whisper:

“Mother?”

She peered at him, and her face organized itself in wrinkles around her brightening eyes. She smiled. Her teeth were tobacco-colored, but her smile was generous. It turned to laughter. Red-stained by the sun, she looked like an old gypsy on a vino jag.

“My God in heaven! You’re Reginald.”

“Yes.” He took off his hat. “I fail to see what you’re laughing about, however.”

“It’s just,” she gasped, “you look so much like your father.”

“Is that so comical? I hope I do. I’ve patterned my life on Father’s, tried to live up to his code. I only wish I could say as much for Maude.”

Her laughter died. “You’ve no right to criticize Maude. She’s worth two of you, and you know it. Maude’s a fine woman.”

“A fine fool!” he said hotly. “Throwing herself away, embezzling money–”

“Watch your language. Maude is my daughter.” The old woman had a certain dignity.

“She’s very much your daughter, apparently. Is she here with you?”

“No, she’s not. I know why you’ve come, of course. I warned Maude you’d try and drag her back to the salt mines.”

“Then you’ve seen her. Where is she?”

“I have no intention of telling you. Maude is well and happy – happy for the first time in her life.”

“You’re going to tell me,” he said between clenched teeth.

He grabbed her pipestem wrist. She batted her eyes in fearful defiance, her seamed lips shrinking back from her long teeth. I took him by the shoulder and the arm and jerked him back on his heels, breaking his grip.

“Take it easy, Harlan. You can’t force information out of people.”

He gave me a look of dull hatred, then transferred it to his mother. She returned it.

“The same old Reginald,” she said, “who used to love pinning beetles to a board. Who is this gentleman, by the way?”

“Mr. Archer.” He added heavily: “A private detective.”

She flung up her hands and grimaced. “Ah, Reggie. You’re outdoing yourself. You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Neither have you, Mother. But you and I are not the point at issue. Please don’t try to divert me. I want to know where Maude and her – her consort are.”

“You won’t find out from me. Aren’t you satisfied with thirty years of Maude’s life? Do you have to have it all?”

“I know what’s best for Maude. I doubt that you do, after the frightful hash you’ve made of your own life.” He looked with contempt at the peeling walls, the patched screen door, the discarded old woman who had taken refuge behind it. “If you’re responsible for this brainstorm of hers–”

He ran out of words. Fury had strung him as taut as a wire. I could practically hear him hum. And I kept my shoulder between him and the door.

“It’s no brainstorm,” she said. “Maude found a man who suited her at last, and she had the good sense to forsake everything for him. Just as I did.” Memory smoothed her face; a surge of romantic feeling sang like a warped record through her voice: “I’m proud of my part in this.”

“You admit it, then?”

“Why shouldn’t I? I brought her and Leonard Lister together last spring, when she was here with me. Leonard’s a splendid man, and they took to each other at once. Maude needed a powerful male personality to break through to her, after all those spinster years–”

“What did you say his name was?”

“Leonard Lister,” I said.

The old woman’s hand had gone to her mouth. She said between yellow fingers: “I didn’t mean to tell you. Now that you’ve got it out of me – you must have heard of Leonard. He’s a brilliant creative artist in the theatre.”

“Have you ever heard of him, Archer?”

“No.”

“Leonard Lister?” the old woman said. “Surely you know his name, if you live in Los Angeles. He’s a well-known director in the experimental theatre. He’s even taught at the University. Leonard has wonderful plans for making poetic film, like Cocteau’s in France.”

“No doubt his plans include Maude’s money,” Harlan said.

“You would think of such a thing. But it’s not true. He loves her for herself.”

“I see. I see. And you’re the honest broker who procured your own daughter for a fortune-hunter. How much is this brilliant fellow going to pay you for your services?”

The sunset had faded out. Deprived of its borrowed color, the old woman’s face behind the screen was drawn and bloodless.

“You know it’s not true, and you mustn’t say such things. Maude has been kind to you. You owe her some tolerance. Why don’t you give up gracefully and go home?”

“Because my sister has been misled. She’s in the hands of fools and knaves. Which are you, Mother?”

“Neither. And Maude is better off than she’s ever been in her life.” But her assurance was failing under his one-track pressure.

“This I desire to see for myself. Where are they?”

“You shan’t find out from me.” She looked at me with an obscure appeal in her eyes.

“Then I’ll find out for myself.”

It wasn’t hard to do. Leonard Lister was in the telephone book. He had an apartment address in Santa Monica, on one of the grid of streets above Lincoln Boulevard. I tried to talk Harlan, an obvious troublemaker, into letting me take it from here. But he was as hot as a cocker with bird scent in his nostrils. I had to let him come, or drop the case. And he’d probably make more trouble by himself.

It was almost dark when we found the place, an old two-story stucco house set back from the street behind a brown patch of lawn. Lister’s apartment was a small studio built over an attached garage. A flight of concrete steps slanted up the outside wall of the garage. There were lights in the house, and behind the blinded windows of the apartment. Under the late twilight stillness, our feet rustled in the dry grass.

“Imagine Maude being reduced to this,” Harlan said. “A woman of exquisite refinement, come to live in a slum with a – a gigolo.”

“Uh-huh. You better let me do the talking. You could get hurt, tossing that language around.”

“No ruffian can intimidate me.”

But he let me go ahead of him up the flight of steps. It was lit by an insect-repellent yellow bulb over the door at the top. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked again. Harlan reached past me and turned the knob. The door was locked.

“Pick the lock,” he said in an urgent whisper. “They’re in there lying low, I’m sure of it. You must have skeleton keys?”

“I also have a license to lose.”

He hammered the door till it vibrated in its frame. His seal-ringed knuckle made little dents in the paint. Soft footsteps approached from the other side. I thrust Harlan back with my arm. He almost lost his balance on the narrow landing.

The door opened. “What goes on?”

The man in the doorway wore a striped cotton bathrobe, and nothing else. His shoulders and bare chest were Herculean, a little bowed and softened by his age. He was in his late forties, perhaps. His red hair was shaggy and streaked with gray. His thick mouth gleamed like a bivalve in the red nest of his beard. His eyes were deepset and dreamy, the kind of eyes that watch the past or the future but seldom look directly at the present.

Over the shoulders which nearly filled the doorframe, I could see into the lighted room. It was cramped and meanly furnished with a studio bed, a few chairs. Books spilled from homemade shelves constructed out of red bricks and unfinished boards. In the cubbyhole kitchenette on the far side, a woman was working. I could see her dark head, her slim back with apron strings tied at the waist, and hear dishes rattling.

I told Lister who I was, but he was looking at the man behind me.

“Mr. Harlan, isn’t it? This is quite a surprise. I can’t say it’s a pleasant one.” His voice had the ease that great size gives a man. “Now what do you want, Mr. Harlan?”

“You know perfectly well. My sister.”

Lister stepped out, closing the door behind him. It became very cozy with the three of us on the yard-square landing, like the components of fission coming together. Lister’s bare feet were silent on the concrete. His voice was soft:

“Maude is busy. I’m pretty busy myself. I was just going to take a shower. So my advice to you is, go away. And don’t bother coming back. We’re going to be indefinitely busy.”

“Busy spending her money?” Harlan said.

Lister’s teeth flashed in his beard. His voice took on an edge.

“It’s easy to see why Maude won’t speak to you. Now take your detective friend and remove yourself from my doorstep.”

“So the old hag got in touch with you? How much of a percentage are you paying her?”

Lister moved quickly around me. He took Harlan by the front of his coat, lifted him, shook him once, and set him back on his feet.

“Speak of your mother with some respect, you little schnook.”

Harlan leaned on the railing, gripping it firmly like a child daring adults to dislodge him. His face in the yellow light looked sick with humiliation. He said in stubborn malice:

“I want to see my sister. I want to see what you’ve done to her, you bully.”

I said: “Let’s go,” and laid a hand on his arm.

“Are you on his side, too?” He was almost crying.

“A man’s home is his castle, after all. He doesn’t like you, Reginald. Neither does she, apparently.”

“You can say that again,” Lister said. “The little leech has sucked her blood for too long. Now get out of here before you make me mad for real.”

“Come on, Reginald. We’re getting nowhere.”

I detached him from the railing. Below and behind me, a man’s voice was raised. “Trouble up there, Lister?” The voice sounded as if its owner hoped so.

He was a gray-haired man in a Hawaiian print shirt, standing spraddle-legged in the splash of light at the foot of the stairs. It colored his spongy face and made his eyes look colorless.

“No trouble, Dolph. These gentlemen are just leaving.”

Lister stood with his back against the door, a seedy hero in a dirty bathrobe defending his two-bit castle, and watched us go down the stairs. The door closed sharply, and the yellow light went out. Harlan muttered under his breath.

The gray-headed man was waiting for us at the bottom. He whispered through an alcoholic haze: “Cops?”

I didn’t answer. He jerked at my coatsleeve, naggingly:

“What’s lover-man been up to now?”

“You wouldn’t be interested.”

“That’s what you think. You got another think coming. He’s got a woman with him, hasn’t he?”

“None of your business.”

I pulled my coatsleeve free. But he was hard to shake off. He thrust his pudgy face forward into mine.

“What Lister does is my business. I got a right to know if my tenants are living in sin.”

I started to walk away from him and his breath. He followed me across the driveway, bracing his wavering stride with one outstretched hand against the closed garage door. His voice trailed huskily after me:

“What’s the beef about? I got a right to know. I’m a respectable man, see. I don’t run any callhouse for brokendown four-flushers.”

“Wait a minute,” Harlan said. “Are you Lister’s landlord?”

“Sure thing. I never liked the s. o. b., it was the little woman that rented him the apartment. She thought he was class. I saw through him at a glance. Another movie has-been. A never-was.”

He sagged against the stucco wall. Harlan leaned over him like a prosecutor, his face a leaden silhouette in the dim light from a blinded window.

“What else do you know about Lister, my man?”

“I’m going to throw him out on his ear if he don’t watch himself.”

“You mentioned his dealings with women. What about that?”

“I don’t know what goes on up there. But I’m going to find out.”

“Why don’t you go up now? You have the right to, you know, you own the place.”

“By God, I will.”

I went back to Harlan and took his arm. “Let’s get out of here, Reginald. You’ve made enough trouble for one night.”

“I make trouble? Nonsense. My sister’s married to a criminal, a whoremonger.”

The man against the wall wagged his gray head solemnly. “You couldn’t be righter. Is the woman with him your sister?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s married to him?”

“I believe so. But I can’t let her stay with him. I’m going to take her home–”

“Not tonight, Reginald.” I tightened my grip on his arm.

“I have to do something. I have to act.”

He tried to break away from me. His hat fell off, and his meager hair fell down over his ears. He almost screeched:

“How dare you? Take your hands off me.”

A woman’s full-breasted shadow fell on the blind. Her voice issued sharply from the window:

“Jack! Are you still out there?”

The gray-headed man straightened up as if he’d been touched by live current. “Yeah. I’m here.”

“Come inside. You’re drunk, and you’ve been talking nonsense.”

“Who’s going to make me?” He said it under his breath.

She heard him. “I said come in. You’re making a laughing stock of yourself. And tell your friends to go home.”

He turned his back on us and walked uncertainly to the front door. Harlan tried to follow him. I held Harlan. The door slammed. A bolt clicked home.

“Now see what you’ve done,” Harlan said, “with your mishandling and your interference! I was just about to learn something.”

“You never will.”

I released him and went to the car, not caring whether he came along or not. He caught up with me at the curb, wiping his hat with a handkerchief and breathing audibly.

“The least you can do for the money I paid you is drop me at my hotel. The cab fares are scandalous here.”

“All right. Where is it.”

“The Oceano Hotel, in Santa Monica.”

“This is Santa Monica.”

“Really?” He added a moment later: “I’m not surprised. Something guided me to Santa Monica. Maude and I have had a sort of telepathic communication, going back virtually to infancy. Especially when she’s in trouble.”

“I wonder if she is in trouble.”

“With that brute?” He laughed harshly. “Did you observe his conduct to me?”

“It seemed fairly normal under the circumstances.”

“Normal for this Godforsaken place, perhaps. But I’m not going to put up with it. And incidentally, if you intend to do nothing further, I expect a rebate of at least fifty per cent.”

I wanted to ask him who had stolen his rattle when he was a baby. Instead I said: “You’ll get paid in services. I’ll spend tomorrow on Lister. If he’s a wrong number, I’ll find out. If he isn’t–”

“It’s clear that he is. You heard his landlord’s remarks.”

“The guy was drunk. And I wouldn’t go around calling people names without some proof. You almost got your head knocked off.”

“I don’t care what happens to me. It’s Maude I’m anxious about. I have only one sister.”

“You have only one head.”

He sulked the rest of the way. I let him out at the white curb without a word. In the neon kaleidoscope of the ocean front, against the pink backdrop of the hotel, he looked like a displaced shadow from a dark dream. Not my dream, I congratulated myself.

Prematurely.

In the morning I called a friend in the District Attorney’s office. Lister had a record; two drunken driving convictions, a battery complaint reduced to disorderly conduct, nothing worse. He had been a small-time producer before television. His last recorded place of employment was the University.

I made another telephone call, and paid a visit to the University. The spring semester had ended, and Summer School not yet begun, so the campus was bare of students. But most of the faculty were on the job. The acting head of the Speech Department, a man named Schilling, was in his office.

Schilling wasn’t a typical professor. Under the flesh which covered his face with a middle-aging mask, he had the profile of a juvenile lead. He was dressed like an actor in a very sharp gabardine suit and an open-throated sports shirt. The wavy brown hair which undulated back from his widow’s peak was very carefully arranged. I wondered if it was dyed. I said:

“It’s nice of you to give me your time, doctor.”

“Not at all. Sit down, Mr. Archer.” He sat at his desk by the window, where the light could make the most of his features. “When I spoke to you on the telephone, you expressed an interest in one of the members – one of the ex-members of our faculty family.” He enunciated his words with great distinctness, listening to the rich tones of his voice. They seemed to please him.

“Leonard Lister.” I sat down in a straight chair at the end of the paper-strewn desk.

“Exactly what kind of information do you wish? And what use would you put it to? We have our little professional secrets, too, you know, even in this sheltered world of ours.”

“I want to know if he’s honest. That’s the main thing. He seems to have married into a fairly wealthy family. They don’t know much about him.” Which was putting it mildly.

“And they’ve employed you to investigate him?”

“That’s the idea. Certain members of the family think he may be crooked.”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Why did you fire him?”

“We didn’t fire him, exactly. Leonard didn’t have tenure, he was only a Special Lecturer in the Department. And we simply failed to renew his contract at the end of the fall semester.”

“You had a reason, though, and it wasn’t incompetence?”

“Certainly not incompetence. Leonard knows the theatre. He’s been in it for twenty years, in New York and on the Continent as well as here. And he was quite a figure in the movies at one time. He made a mint while it lasted, and he had a country house and a yacht and even an actress wife, I believe. Then he lost it. This was years ago. I don’t know all that happened to him in the interim, but he was glad to accept my offer of a teaching job.”

“What did he teach?”

“We used him mostly for Extension work, directing plays for various groups and lecturing on the drama. He was well liked by his students.”

“Then what was the matter with him?”

He hesitated. “I suppose I should say the matter was ethical. He’s quite a fellow in his way – I’ve always liked him personally – but he simply didn’t subscribe to the code of the teaching profession. Leonard spent some time in France, you know, in the old expatriate days, and a good deal of the Left Bank rubbed off on him. He drank too much, he liked women too much, he couldn’t face up to the realities of his position. He’s an enormous man – I don’t know whether you know him–”

“I know him.”

“–but he’s not really very grownup. Out of touch, you might say, almost manic at times.”

“Could you be more specific, doctor?”

He looked away from me, out the window, and ran his hand carefully over his hair. “I hate to blacken another man’s reputation. And after all, the name of the University is involved. It’s a very delicate matter.”

“I realize that. I’ll keep it confidential. All this is simply for my own information.”

“Well.” He turned back to me. All he’d needed was a little coaxing. “Leonard had a habit of messing with his women students, with one of them in particular. Rumors got around, as they always do, and I cautioned Leonard. I gave him fair warning. He failed to profit by it, so I kept a close eye on him. This Department is precarious enough without a major scandal on top of everything else. Fortunately, I caught him personally, and kept it quiet.”

Schilling was lighting up with a theatrical glow. Apparently he was reenacting his big moment. “Along towards the end of the fall semester, on an afternoon in December, I saw them go into his office together – it’s just down the hall from mine. You should have seen the look on her face, the cowlike adoration. Well, I secured a master key from the maintenance department and after a suitable interval, I went in. There they were, in flagrante, if you understand me.”

“Was she a young girl?”

“No. It could have been worse. As a matter of fact, she was a married woman. Quite a few of our students are young married women with – ah – theatrical ambitions. But even as it was, the situation was too bad to be allowed to continue. I put an end to it, and Leonard left us. I haven’t seen him since.”

“What happened to the woman?”

“She dropped out of her course. She showed no promise, anyway, and I for one was happy to see her go. You should have heard the names she called me that afternoon, when after all I was only doing my duty. I told Leonard he was playing with dynamite. Why, the woman was a hellcat.” With the forefinger of his left hand, he traced his profile from hairline to chin, and smiled to himself. “I’m afraid that’s all the information I have.”

“One more thing. You said he was honest.”

“Except in that little matter of women, yes.”

“Honest in money matters?”

“So far as I know. Leonard never cared for money. He cares so little for it, in fact, that he’s financially irresponsible. Well, now that he’s married into wealth, I suppose he’ll be settling down. I hope for his sake he can. And I very much hope I haven’t said anything that will damage his standing with the family.”

“Not if he’s dropped the other woman. What was her name, by the way?”

“Dolphine. Stella Dolphine. Quite an unusual name.” He spelled it for me.

I looked it up in Shilling’s telephone directory. There was only one Dolphine listed: a Jack Dolphine who lived at the same address as Leonard Lister.

In full daylight, the stucco house in Santa Monica had an abandoned look. The blinds were drawn on all the windows, upstairs and down. The dying lawn, the unkempt flowerbeds strangling in crab grass, seemed to reflect the lives of people bound and paralyzed by their unhappiness. I noticed, though, that the lawn had recently been hosed, and a few drying puddles lay on the uneven concrete of the driveway.

I climbed the outside stairs to Lister’s apartment. Nobody answered my knock. I turned the knob. The door was locked. I went down and lifted the overhead door of the garage. It was empty.

I pressed the bellpush beside the front door and waited. Shuffling footsteps dragged through the house. The gray-haired man in the Hawaiian shirt opened the door and peered out into the sun. He had had a bad night. His eyes were blurred by alcohol and grief, his mouth was raw and defenseless. The slack flesh of his face hung like melting plasticine on the bones. So did his body. He was a soft-boiled egg without a shell.

He didn’t seem to recognize me.

“Mr. Dolphine?”

“Yeah.” He recognized my voice. “Say, what’s the pitch? You were here last night; you said you were a cop.”

“It was your idea. I’m a private cop. Name’s Archer.”

“Whaddaya know, I was a private cop myself – plant guard at Douglas. But I retired when my investments started to pay off. I own six houses and an apartment court. Maybe you wouldn’t think it to look at me.”

“Good for you. What happened to the tenants in your apartment?”

“Lister, you mean? You tell me. He moved out.”

“For keeps?”

“Damn right for keeps.” He floundered across the doorstep, preceded by his breath, and laid one hand on my shoulder, confidentially. It also helped to hold him up. “I was all set to give him his walking papers, only he saved me the trouble. Packed up his stuff, what there was of it, and left.”

“And the woman went with him? His wife?”

“Yeah, she went along.”

“In his car?”

“That’s correct.”

He gave me a description of the car, a blue Buick sedan, prewar, on its second or third hundred thousand. Dolphine didn’t know the license number. The Listers had left no forwarding address.

“Could I speak to Mrs. Dolphine?”

“What you want with her?” His hand grew heavier on my shoulder. His eyes were narrow and empty between puffed lids.

“She might know where Lister went.”

“You think so?”

“Yes.” I shrugged, dislodging his hand. “I hear she’s a friend of his.”

“You do, eh?”

He fell against me, his upturned face transfigured by sudden rage, and reached for my throat. He was strong, but his reactions were clumsy. I knocked his hands up and away. He staggered back against the doorpost, his arms outstretched in the attitude of crucifixion.

“That was a silly thing to do, Dolphine.”

“I’m sorry.” He was shuddering, as if he had given himself a terrible scare. “I’m not a well man. This excitement–” His hands came together, clutching at the hula girls on his chest. An asthmatic wheeze twanged like a loose guitar string in the back passages of his head. His face was blotched white.

“What excitement?”

“Stella’s left me. She took me for all she could, then dropped me like a hotcake. I’ll give you a piece of advice. Don’t ever marry a younger woman–”

“When did this happen?”

“Last night. She took off with Lister.”

“Both of the women went with him?”

“Yessir. Stella and the other one. Both of them.” A drunken whimsy pulled his face lopsided. “I guess the big red bull thinks he can look after two. He’s welcome. I’ve had enough.”

“Did you see them leave?”

“Not me. I was in bed.”

“How do you know your wife took off with Lister?”

“She told me she was gonna.” He lifted the heavy burden of his shoulders, and dropped it. “What could I do?”

“You must have some idea where they went.”

“Nah, I don’t know and I don’t want to. Let them go. She was no good to me anyway.” The asthma wheezed behind his words, like an unspoken grief. “So I say let her go, it’s a good riddance for me.”

He sat down on the step and covered his face with his hands. His hair was wild and torn, like a handful of gray feathers. I left him.

I drove to the Oceano Hotel and called Harlan on the intramural telephone. He answered immediately, his voice high and nagging.

“Where on earth have you been? I’ve been trying to get you.”

“Checking on Lister,” I said. “He’s decamped with your sister–”

“I know. He telephoned me. My worst forebodings were justified. It’s money he wants, and he’s coming here to try and collect.”

“When?”

“At twelve noon. I’m to meet him in the lobby.”

I looked at the electric clock on the wall of the desk clerk’s alcove: twenty minutes past eleven.

“I’m in the lobby now. Shall I come up?”

“I’ll come down.” He hesitated. “I have a visitor.”

I sat on a red plastic settee near the elevator door. The metal arrow above it turned from one to three and back to one. The door slid open. Harlan’s mother emerged, tinkling and casting vague glances around the lobby. She wore a greenish black cape over her sackcloth dress, which made her look like an old bird of ill omen.

She saw me and came forward, taking long skinny-legged strides in her flat sandals.

“Good morning, Mrs. Harlan.”

“My name is not Harlan,” she said severely. But she neglected to tell me what it was. “Are you following me, young man? I warn you–”

“You don’t have to. I came to see your son. I guess you did, too.”

“Yes, my son.” A black mood clawed her face downward. From its furrows her eyes glittered like wet black stones. “You look like a decent man. I know something of spiritual auras. It’s my study, my life work. And I’ll tell you, Mr. Whatsis, since you’re involved with Reginald, my son has an evil aura. He was a cold-hearted boy and he’s grown into a cold-hearted man. He won’t even help his own sister in her extremity.”

“Extremity?”

“Yes, she’s in very serious trouble. She wouldn’t tell me what it was. But I know my daughter–”

“When did you see her?”

“I haven’t seen her. She telephoned me last night, and she was desperate for money. Of course she knows I have none, I’ve been living off her bounty for ten years. She wanted me to intercede with Reginald. As I have done.” Her mouth closed like a pouch with a drawstring.

“He won’t open the family coffers?”

She shook her head, dislodging tears from the corners of her eyes. The arrow over the elevator door had turned to three and back again to one. Harlan stepped out. His mother gave him a sidelong glance and started away. She flapped across the lobby and out into the street, a bird of ill omen who had seen a more ominous bird.

Harlan came up to me with a tentative smile and an outstretched hand. His handshake was dead.

“I didn’t mean to be unpleasant last night. We Harlans are rather emotional.”

“Forget it, I’m not proud.”

He glanced at the sunlit door through which his mother had vanished. “Has she been filling you with fantasies? I ought to warn you, she’s not entirely sane.”

“Uh-huh. She told me that Maude needs money.”

“Lister does, at any rate.”

“How much money?”

“Five thousand dollars. He says he’s bringing Maude’s check for that amount. I’m to expedite payment by telephoning our bank in Chicago. It amounts to his asking me to cash the check.”

“Did you talk to your sister at all?”

“No. It’s one of the things that alarm me. Just one of them. He had a long involved explanation, to the effect that she’s not well enough to leave the house, and there’s no telephone where they’re staying.”

“He didn’t say where that was?”

“Absolutely not. He was most evasive. I tell you he means her no good, if she’s still alive–”

“Don’t jump to conclusions. The most important thing is to find out where she is. So handle him carefully. Accept what he says.”

“You don’t mean I should cash the check?” He spoke with great feeling, five thousand dollars’ worth of it.

“It’s your sister’s money, isn’t it? Maybe she does need it. She told your mother she did.”

“So Mother claims. But the old fool would lie for her. I suspect they’re in cahoots.”

“That I doubt.”

Harlan paid no attention. “How could Maude need the money? She took a thousand dollars with her last week.”

“Maybe they stopped off at Vegas.”

“Nonsense. Maude detests the very idea of gambling. She’s quite a frugal person, like myself. She couldn’t spend a thousand dollars in a week, unless the man is bleeding her.”

“Sure she could, on her honeymoon. This whole thing may not be as bad as you think. I’ve made some inquiries, and Lister has a fair reputation.” I decided that was stretching it, and added: “At least he isn’t totally bad.”

“Neither was Landru,” Harlan said darkly.

“We’ll see.” It was ten to twelve by the electric clock. “Don’t accuse him of anything. But tell him he’ll have to come back for the cash. I’ll wait outside and tail him when he comes out. You sit tight. I’ll get in touch with you when I find out where they’re holed up.”

He nodded several times.

“And for God’s sake, take it easy with him, Harlan. I don’t believe that he’s a commercial killer. But he could turn out to be a passional one.”

Lister had the virtue of punctuality, at least. At one minute to twelve, an old Buick sedan appeared from the direction of downtown Santa Monica. It pulled up at the curb a hundred feet short of the hotel entrance. Lister got out and locked his car. His beret and dark glasses gave him the look of a decadent Viking.

I was parked across the wide boulevard, facing in the wrong direction. As soon as Lister had entered the hotel, I U-turned and found a parking space a few cars behind the Buick. I got out for a closer look at it.

Its blue paint was faded and almost hidden by road grime. The fenders were crumpled. I peered through the dusty glass at the luggage on the back seat: a woman’s airplane set with the monogram MH, a man’s scuffed leather bag covered with European hotel labels and steamship stickers, a canvas haversack stuffed with oblong shapes which were probably books. A long object wrapped in brown paper leaned across the luggage. It had the shape of a spade.

I looked around. There were too many people on the street for me to do a windwing job.

Back in my own car, I made a note of the license number and waited. The blue glare from the sea, relayed by the chrome of passing cars, bothered my eyes. I put on a pair of sunglasses. A few minutes later, Lister appeared on the sidewalk, swaggering towards me. He had taken off his dark glasses, and his blue eyes seemed to be popping from white lids. He looked elated. I remembered what Schilling had said about his manic side, and wished I could see the lower part of his face, where danger often shows. Perhaps the beard had a purpose.

Lister got into the Buick and headed north. I trailed him through heavy noon traffic at a variable distance. He drove with artistic abandon, burning rubber at the Sunset stoplight. Six or eight miles north of it he turned off the highway, tires screeching again. I braked hard and took the turn onto gravel

The gravel road slanted steeply up a hillside. The Buick disappeared over the rim. I ate my way through its dust to the top and saw it a quarter-mile ahead, going fast. The road wound down into a small closed valley where a few ranch houses stood in cultivated fields. A tractor clung like a slow orange beetle to the far hillside. The air between was so still that the Buick’s dust hung like a colloid over the road. I ate another couple of miles of it, by way of lunch.

Beyond the third and last ranch house, a County sign announced: This is not a through road. A rusty mailbox sagged on a post beside it. I caught a glimpse of the faded stenciling on the mailbox. “Leonard Lister,” I thought it said.

The Buick was far ahead by now, spinning into the defile between two bluffs at the inner end of the valley. It spun out of sight. The road got worse, became a single dirt track rutted and eroded by the rains of many springs. At its narrowest point an old landslide almost blocked it.

I was so taken up with the road that I almost passed the house before I noticed it. It stood far back, at the end of a eucalyptus-shadowed lane. I saw the Buick, standing empty, through the trees; and I kept on going. When I was out of sight of the house I turned my car and left it with the doors locked.

I climbed through yellow mustard and purple lupine to a point from which I could look down on the house. It was a ruin. Its cracked stucco walls leaned crazily. Part of the tile roof had caved in. I guessed that it had been abandoned when water undermined its foundations. Rank geraniums rioted in the front yard, and wild oats stood fender-high around the Buick.

In the back yard, close against the wall of the house, a broad-backed man was digging a hole. The bright iron of his spade flashed now and then in the sun. I moved down the slope towards him. The hole was about six feet long by two feet wide. Lister’s head, when he paused to rest, cast a jut-jawed shadow at the foot of the stucco wall.

I sat down with the yellow mustard up to my eyes, and watched him work. After a while he took his shirt off. His heavy white shoulders were peppered with reddish freckles. The metal of his spade was losing its brightness. In an hour the hole was approximately four feet deep. Lister’s red hair was dark with sweat, and his arms were running with it. He stuck the spade into the pile of adobe he had dug, and went into the house.

I started down the hillside. A hen pheasant whirred up from under my feet. In the glazed stillness, its wings made a noise like a jato take-off. I watched the house but there was no response, no face at the broken windows. I stepped over the sagging wire fence and crossed the back yard.

The door hung open on what had been a back kitchen. Its floor was littered with broken plaster which crunched under my feet. Through the bare ribs of the ceiling daylight gleamed. The silence was finely stitched with a tiny tumult of insects. I thought I could hear the murmur of voices somewhere; then the sound of heavy footsteps moved towards me through the house.

I had my revolver ready. Lister came through the inner doorway, carrying a burlap bundle upright in his arms. His head was craned awkwardly sideways, watching his feet, and he failed to see me until I spoke.

“Hold it, gravedigger.”

His head came up, eyes wide and blue in the red sweat-streaked face. His reaction was incredibly quick and strong. Without losing a step he came forward, thrusting his bundle out at arm’s length into my face. I fired as I went down backwards with the burlap thing on top of me. I pushed it off. It was heavy and stiff, like refrigerated meat. One of Lister’s heels stamped down on my gun hand, the other came into my face. The daylight in the ceiling glimmered redly and died.

When my eyes blinked open, sunlight stabbed into them from the open door. One of my arms was numb, pinned under the thing in the burlap shroud. I disengaged myself from its embrace and sat up against the wall. The rumor of insects sounded in my head like small-arms fire between the heavy artillery of my pulse. I sat poised for a while between consciousness and unconsciousness. Then my vision cleared. I dabbed at my swollen face with my usable hand.

My revolver lay on the floor. I picked it up and spun the cylinder: its chambers had been emptied. Still sitting, I dragged the burlap bundle towards me and untied the twine that held its wrapping in place. Peeling the burlap down with a shaky hand, I saw a lock of black wavy hair stiff with blood.

I got up and unwrapped the body completely. It was the body of a woman who had been beautiful. Its beauty was marred by a depressed contusion which cut slantwise like a groove across the left temple. Bending close, I could also see a pair of purplish ovals on the front of the throat. Thumbprints. Her skin shone like ivory in the light from the doorway. I covered her with the burlap. Then I noticed that my wallet was lying open on the floor. Nothing seemed to be missing from it, but the photostat of my license was halfway out of its holder.

I went through the house. It was a strange place for a honeymoon, even for a honeymoon that ended in murder. There were no lights, and no furniture, with the exception of some patio furniture – canvas chairs and a redwood chaise with a ruptured pad – in what had been the living room. This room had a fairly weatherproof ceiling, and was clearly the one that Lister and his wife had occupied. There were traces of a recent fire in the fireplace: burned fragments of eucalyptus bark and a few scraps of scorched cloth. The ashes were not quite cold.

I crossed the room to the wooden chaise, noticing the marks of a woman’s heels in the dust on the floor. In the dust beside the chaise someone had written three words in long sloping script: Ora pro nobis. The meaning of the phrase came back to me across twenty years or more. Ora pro nobis. Pray for us. Now and in the hour of our death…

For a minute I felt as insubstantial as a ghost. The dead woman and the living words were realer than I was. The actual world was a house with its roof falling in, dissolved so thin you could see the sunlight through it.

When I heard the car noise outside, I didn’t believe my ears. I went to the front door, which stood open. A new tan Studebaker was toiling up the overgrown lane under the eucalyptus trees. It stopped where the Buick had been, and Harlan got out.

I stood back behind the door and watched him through the crack. He approached cautiously, his black glance shifting from one side to the other. When his foot was on the lintel, I showed myself and the empty gun in my hand. He froze in midstride, with a rigor that matched the dead woman’s.

“For heaven’s sake, put that gun down. You gave me a dreadful start.”

“Before I put it down, I want to know how you got here. Have you been talking to Lister?”

“I saw him at noon, you know that. He told me about this place he used to own. I didn’t get out on the street in time to intercept you. Now put the gun away, there’s a good fellow. What on earth happened to your face?”

“That can wait. I don’t understand yet why you’re here.”

“Wasn’t that the plan, that I should join you here? I rented a car and got here as soon as I could. It took me a long time to find this place. And no wonder. Are they inside?”

“One of them is.”

“My sister?” His hand grasped my arm. The long white fingers were stronger than they looked, and they were hard to shake off.

“You tell me.”

I took him through the house to the back kitchen. Pulling back the burlap that covered the damaged head, I watched Harlan’s face. It didn’t change. Not a muscle moved. Either Harlan was as cold as the cadaver, or deliberately suppressing his emotion.

“I’ve never seen this woman before.”

“She’s not your sister? Take a good long look.” I uncovered the body.

Harlan averted his eyes, his cheeks flushing purple. But his look came creeping sideways back to the body.

“This is your sister, isn’t it, Mr. Harlan?”

I had to repeat the question to make him hear. He shook his head. “I never saw her before.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t seriously think I’d refuse to identify my own flesh and blood?”

“If there was money in it.”

He didn’t hear me. He was fascinated by the uncovered body. I replaced the burlap and told him what had happened, cutting it short when I saw he wasn’t interested.

I took him to the front room and showed him the writing in the dust.

“Is that your sister’s handwriting?”

“I couldn’t possibly tell.”

“Look closely.”

Harlan squatted, leaning one arm on the chaise. “It’s not her writing.”

“Did she know Latin?”

“Of course. She taught it. I’m surprised that you do.”

“I don’t, but my mother was Catholic.”

“I see.” Rising awkwardly, he stumbled forward on one knee, obliterating the writing.

“Damn you, Harlan!” I said. “You’re acting as if you murdered her yourself.”

“Don’t be absurd.” He smiled his thin white-edged smile. “You’re morally certain that’s Maude in the back room, aren’t you?”

“I’m morally certain you were lying. You were too careful not to recognize her.”

“Well.” He dusted his knee with his hands. “I suppose I had better tell you the truth, since you know it anyway. You’re perfectly right, it’s my sister. She wasn’t murdered, however.”

The sense of unreality returned to the room. I sat down on the chaise, which complained like an animal under my weight

“It’s a tragic story,” Harlan said slowly. “I was rather hoping not to have to tell it. Maude died last night by accident. After I left the studio, she quarreled with Lister over his refusal to admit me. She became quite irrational, in fact. Lister tried to quiet her, but she got away from him and flung herself bodily down those outside steps. The fall killed her.”

“Is that Lister’s version?”

“It’s the simple truth. He came to my hotel room a short while ago, and told me what had happened. The man was in terrible earnest. I know genuine anguish when I see it, and I can tell when a man is telling the truth.”

“You’re better than I am, then. I think he’s playing you for a sucker.”

“What?”

“I caught him practically red-handed, trying to bury the body. Now he’s lying out of it the best way he can. It strikes me as very peculiar that you swallowed it.”

Harlan’s black eyes probed my face. “I assure you his story is the truth. He told me about everything, you see, including the matter of – burial. Put yourself in his place. When Maude killed herself – was killed – last night, Lister saw immediately that suspicion would fall on him, especially my suspicion. He’s had some trouble with the police, he told me. Inevitably in his panic he acted like a guilty man. He thought of this deserted place, and brought the body here to dispose of it. His action was rash and even illegal, but I think understandable under the circumstances.”

“You’re very tolerant all of a sudden. What about the five grand he’s been trying to con you for?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“The check for five thousand, has it slipped your mind?”

“We’ll forget about it,” he said impassively. “It’s my affair, strictly between him and me.”

I was beginning to get hold of the situation, if not the motives behind it. Somehow or other Lister had persuaded Harlan to cover for him. I said with all the irony I could muster:

“So we’ll bury the body and forget about it.”

“Precisely my idea. Not we, however. You. I can’t afford to become involved in any illegality whatsoever.”

“What makes you think I can?”

He brought a leatherette folder out of his coat pocket and opened it to show me the travelers’ checks inside. There were ten hundreds. “One thousand dollars,” he said, “seems to me an adequate sexton’s fee. Enough to assure forgetfulness as well.”

His look was very knowing, but his passion for money was making him idiotic. He was like a tone-deaf man who couldn’t believe that other people heard music and even liked it. But I didn’t argue. I let him sign the checks and listened to his instructions. Bury her and forget her.

“I sincerely hate to do this to Maude,” he said before he left. “It goes against my grain to leave my sister in an unmarked grave, but I have to consider the greatest good of the greatest number. It would ruin the School if this matter got into the newspapers. I can’t let mere fraternal piety interfere with the welfare of the School.”

Naturally I didn’t bury the body. I left it where it lay and followed Harlan back to Santa Monica. I caught the Studebaker before it reached the city, but I let it stay ahead of me.

He parked on Wilshire Boulevard and went into an air travel agency. Before I could find a parking space, he was out again and climbing into his car. I made a note of the agency’s name, and followed the Studebaker back to the Oceano Hotel. Harlan left it at the white curb for the garageman. There were shells in my dashboard compartment, and I reloaded my revolver.

The lobby of the hotel was deserted except for the desk clerk and a pair of old ladies playing canasta. I found a telephone booth at the rear, and called the travel agency. A carefully preserved British accent said:

“Sanders’ travel agency, Mr. Sanders speaking.”

“This is J. Reginald Harlan,” I said fussily. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“Indeed it does, Mr. Harlan. I trust your reservations are satisfactory?”

“I’m not entirely sure about that. You see, I’m eager to get there as soon as I can.”

“I absolutely assure you, Mr. Harlan, I’ve put you on the earliest available flight. Ten o’clock from International Airport.” A trace of impatience threaded through the genteel tones.

“When do I get there?”

“I thought I’d made that clear. It’s written on your envelope.”

“I seem to have misplaced the envelope.”

“You’re scheduled to arrive tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, Chicago time. All right?”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all.”

I called the hotel switchboard and asked for Harlan.

“Who is speaking, please?” the operator yodeled.

“Lister. Leonard Lister.”

“One moment, Mr. Lister, I’ll ring Mr. Harlan’s room. He’s expecting you.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll just go up. What was the number again?”

“Three-fourteen, sir.”

I took the elevator to the third floor. The elevator boy noticed my face, opened his mouth to comment, caught my eye, and shut his mouth without speaking. Harlan’s room was at the front of the hotel, in a good location. I knocked.

“Is that you, Leonard?”

“Uh-huh.”

Harlan opened the door, and I crowded through. He raised his fists together in front of his chest, like a woman. Looking at me as if he hated me, he said:

“Come in, Mr. Archer.”

“I’m in.”

“Sit down then. I’m afraid I wasn’t expecting to see you again. So soon,” he added. “There hasn’t been any trouble?”

“No trouble. Just the same routine murder.”

“But it was an accident–”

“Maybe the fall downstairs was an accident. I don’t think that fall killed her. There are thumbprints on her throat.”

“But this is all news to me. Do sit down, Mr. Archer, won’t you?”

“I’ll stand. In the second place, your sister wrote a prayer in the dust in that house. She was alive when Lister took her there. In the third place, you just bought tickets to Chicago, and you’re expecting another visit from Lister. Aren’t you getting pretty cozy with him?”

“He’s my brother-in-law, after all.” His voice was bland.

“And you’re very fond of him, eh?”

“Leonard has his points.”

He sat down in an armchair by the window. Past his narrow cormorant skull I could see the sky and the sea, wide and candid, flecked with the white purity of sails. I spent too much of my time trying to question liars in rented rooms.

“I think he’s your partner in crime. You both stand to gain by your sister’s death. From what I’ve seen of the two of you, you’re capable of murdering for gain.”

“You’ve changed your mind about Lister, eh?”

“Not as much as you have.”

Harlan made his hands flop in the air. “My dear good fellow, you couldn’t possibly be further wrong. Even apart from the money I’ve paid you, I do earnestly hope for your sake that you won’t act on your ridiculous theory. In the first place,” he mimicked me, “if I were in league with Lister, I wouldn’t have sought your help yesterday, would I?”

“You must have had a reason. I don’t see it, though.”

“I came to you in all sincerity. But now I know more about the situation. I tell you in all sincerity that if Lister had killed my sister I’d hunt him down to the ends of the earth. You don’t know me.”

“What about the plane tickets?”

“You’ve made a mistake. I bought no tickets, and if I had it’s no concern of yours. Look here.” He showed me the return half of a round-trip ticket between Los Angeles and Chicago. “You see, I’m flying home to Chicago tomorrow, by myself.”

“Mission accomplished?”

“Deuce take you!” They were the strongest words I’d heard him use. He rose and came towards me. “Get out of my room now. I’m sick of the sight of you.”

“I’m staying.”

“I’ll call the house detective.”

“Hell, call the police.”

He went to the room telephone and lifted the receiver. I stood and watched his bluff fade into nothing. He put the receiver down. I sat in the armchair he had vacated, and he went into the bathroom. I heard him in there retching. He had meant it literally when he said I made him sick.

The phone rang after a while, and I answered it. A woman’s voice said: “Reggie? I’m calling from a drugstore. May we come to your room? Leonard thinks it would be safer.”

“Naturally,” I said in a higher voice than my own.

“Did you get the tickets?”

“Absolutely.”

The bathroom door had opened. Harlan flung himself on my back. I hung up carefully before I turned on him. He fought with his nails and his teeth. I had to quiet him the hard way, with my left fist. I dragged him into the bathroom and shut the door on him.

Then I sat on the bed and looked at the telephone. Lister had a woman with him, and she knew Harlan. She knew Harlan well enough to call him Reggie, and Reggie had bought plane tickets for her and Lister. With a wrench that shook me down to my heels, the entire case turned over in my head and lodged at a crazy angle. Over its tilted edge, I saw Dolphine’s moon-dead face, and the faceless face of the woman who had left him.

I found his name again in the directory. His telephone rang six times, and then his voice came dimly over the wires:

“Jack Dolphine speaking.”

I said bluntly, to keep him from hanging up: “Mrs. Dolphine has left you, I understand.”

“What’s that? Who is this?”

“The private cop you talked to this morning, about the Lister case. It’s turned into a murder case.”

“Murder? How does Stella come into it?”

“That’s the question, Mr. Dolphine. Is she there?”

There was a long silence, ending in a “No,” that was almost as soft as silence.

“When did she leave?”

“I told you. Last night. Anyway she was gone when I got up this morning.” Self-pity or some other emotion rose audibly in his throat. “This murder, you don’t mean Stella?” The emotion choked him.

“Pull yourself together. Did your wife really leave with Lister?”

“Far as I know. Did he kill her? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything. I have a corpse on my hands. You should be able to identify it.”

“You put the arm on Lister?” He sounded very eager.

“Not yet. I’m going to shortly.”

“Don’t let him go, whatever you do. He’s a dangerous man. He killed her, I know he killed her.”

He was choking up again. I said sharply:

“How do you know?”

“He threatened to. I heard them talking before he went east, a couple of weeks ago. They were quarreling back and forth in his studio, yelling at each other like wild animals. She wanted to marry him, divorce me and go off with him. He said he was going to marry another woman, a woman he really loved. She said she wouldn’t let him. And he told her if she interfered, he’d strangle her with his hands.”

“Will you swear to that?”

“I’ll swear to it. It’s the truth.” His voice dropped. “Did he strangle her?”

“A woman’s dead. I don’t know who she is, until I get her identified. I’m in Santa Monica, at the Oceano Hotel. Can you come here now?”

“I guess so. I know where it is. Is Stella there?”

There was a flurry of footsteps in the hall.

“Maybe she soon will be. Make it as quick as you can, and come right up. I’m in room three-fourteen.”

Somebody knocked on the hall door. I hung up, took my revolver out, and carried it to the door, which I swung wide. Lister was surprised to see me. His eyes bulged in their white rings. His right hand started a movement, which the woman beside him interrupted. She wrapped both arms around his arm, and hung her weight on him:

“Please, Leonard, no more violence. I couldn’t bear any more violence.”

But there had been violence, and she had borne it. Its marks were on her face. One of her eyes had been blackened, one cheek was ridged diagonally with deep scratches. Otherwise she was a handsome woman of thirty or so, tall and slender-hipped in a tailored suit. A new-looking hat sat smartly on her dark head. But her single usable eye was glaring in desperation:

“Are you a policeman?”

Lister’s free hand covered her mouth. “Be quiet now. Don’t say a word. I’ll do the talking.”

They stumbled into the room in a kind of lockstep. I shut the door with my heel. The woman sat on the bed. The marks on her face were vivid against her pallor. Lister stood in front of her.

“Where’s Harlan?”

“I’ll ask the questions. You’ll answer them.”

“Who do you think you are?”

He took a threatening step. I leveled my revolver at his stomach.

“The one with the gun. It’s loaded. I’ll use it if I have to.”

The woman spoke behind him. “Listen to me, Leonard. It isn’t any use. Violence only breeds further violence. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

“Don’t worry, there won’t be any trouble. I know how to deal with these Hollywood dollar-chasers.” He turned to me, a white sneer flashing in his beard. “It is money you’re after, isn’t it?”

“That’s what Harlan thought. He paid me a thousand dollars to bury a dead woman and forget her. I’m turning his checks over to the police.”

“I hear you telling me.”

“You’ll see me do it, Lister. I’m turning you over to them at the same time.”

“Unless I pay you, eh? How much?”

The woman sighed. “Dearest. These shifts and stratagems – can’t you see how squalid, how squalid and miserable they are? We’ve tried your way and it’s failed, wretchedly. It’s time to try my way.”

“We can’t, Maude. And we haven’t failed.” He sat on the bed and put one arm around her narrow shoulders. “Just let me talk to him, I’ve dealt with his kind before. He’s only a private detective. Your brother hired him yesterday.”

“Where is my brother now?” she asked me. “Is he all right?”

“In there. He’s a little battered.”

I indicated the bathroom door with my gun. For some reason it was embarrassing to hold a naked weapon in front of her. I pushed it down into my waistband, leaving my jacket open in case I needed it quickly.

“You’re Maude Harlan.”

“I was. I am Mrs. Leonard Lister. This is my husband.” She looked up into my face. I caught a glimpse of the thing between them. It flared like sudden lightning in blue darkness.

“The dead one is Stella Dolphine.”

“Is that her first name? It’s strange to have killed a woman without even knowing her name.”

“No.” The word was torn painfully from Lister’s throat. “My wife doesn’t know what she’s saying, she’s had a bad time.”

“It’s over now, Leonard. I’m afraid I’m not very adequate in the role of criminal.” She gave him a bright smile, distorted by her wounds, and me the sad vestige of it. “Leonard wasn’t there. He was taking a shower when the woman – when Mrs. Dolphine came to our door. I killed her.”

“Why?”

“It was my fault,” Lister said, “all of it, from the beginning. I had no right to marry Maude, to drag her down into the life I live. I was crazy to bring her back to that apartment.”

“Why did you?”

His white-ringed eyes rolled around, straining for a look at himself. “I don’t know, really. Stella thought she owned me. I had to prove that she didn’t.” His eyes steadied. “I’m a disastrous fool.”

“Be still.” Her fingers touched his hairy mouth. The back of her hand was scratched. “It was an ill fate. I scarcely know how it happened. It simply happened. She asked me who I was, and I told her I was Leonard’s wife. She said that she was his wife in the eyes of heaven. She tried to force her way into the apartment. I asked her to leave. She told me that I was the one who ought to leave, that I should go home with my brother. When I refused, she attacked me. She pulled me by the hair onto the outside landing. I must have pushed her away somehow. She fell backwards down the steps, all the way to the bottom. I heard her skull strike the concrete.” Her small hand went to her own mouth, as if to hold it still. “I think I fainted then.”

“Yes,” Lister said. “Maude was unconscious on the landing when I came out of the shower. I carried her inside. It took me some time to bring her to and find out what had happened. I put her to bed and went down to see to Stella. She was dead, at the foot of the steps. Dead.” His voice cracked.

“You were in love with her, Leonard,” his wife said.

“Not after I met you.”

“She was beautiful.” There was a questioning sadness in her voice.

“She isn’t any more,” I said. “She’s dead, and you’ve been carrying her body around the countryside. What sense was there in that?”

“No sense.” Behind his hairy mask, Lister had the shamefaced look of a delinquent boy. “I panicked. Maude wanted to call the police right away. But I’ve had one or two little scrapes with them, in the past. And I knew what Dolphine would do if he found Stella dead at my door. He hates me.” The naïve blue eyes were bewildered by the beginnings of insight. “I don’t blame him.”

“What would he do?”

“Cry murder, and pin it on me.”

“I don’t see how. The way your wife described it, it’s a clear case of manslaughter, probably justifiable.”

“Is it? I wouldn’t know. I felt so guilty about Stella, I wasn’t thinking too well. I simply wanted to hide her and get Maude out of the country, away from the mess I’d made.”

“That’s what the five thousand was for?”

“Yes.”

“You were going by way of Chicago?”

“The plan was changed. Maude’s brother advised me to take her back to Chicago instead. After you tracked us down, I came here to him and made a clean breast of everything. He said leaving the country was an admission of guilt, in case the matter ever came to trial.”

“It will.”

“Does it really need to?” He leaned towards me, the bed squealing under his shifting weight. “If you have any humanity, you’ll let us go to Chicago. My wife is a gentlewoman. I don’t know if that means anything to you.”

“Does it to you?”

He dropped his eyes. “Yes. She can’t go through a Los Angeles trial, with the dirt they’ll dig up about me and throw in her face.”

I said: “I have some humanity, not enough to go round. Right now Stella Dolphine is using most of it.”

“You said yourself it was justifiable manslaughter.”

“The way your wife tells it, it is.”

“Don’t you believe me?” She sounded astonished.

“As far as your story goes, I believe you. But you don’t know all the facts. There are thumbprints on Stella Dolphine’s throat. I’ve seen prints like them on the throats of other women who were strangled.”

“No,” she whispered. “I swear it. I only pushed her.”

I looked at the delicate hands that were twisting in her lap. “You couldn’t have made those marks. You pushed her down the stairs and knocked her out and set her up for somebody else. Somebody else found her unconscious and throttled her. Lister?”

His head sank like an exhausted bull’s. He didn’t look at his wife.

“Stella Dolphine made trouble for you, and she was in a position to make more trouble. You decided to put an end to it by finishing her off. Is that the way it happened?”

“The sinister habit,” he said. “The sinister habit of asking questions, as Cocteau calls it. You’ve got a bad case of it, Archer.”

“Liars bring it out in me.”

“All right,” he said to the floor. “If I admit it, and take the blame, will you let Maude go free, back to Chicago with her brother?”

She pressed her face against his bowed shoulder and said: “No. You didn’t do it, Leonard. You’re only trying to protect me.”

“Did you?”

She shook her head slowly against his body. He turned and held her. I looked past them out the window to the darkening sea. They were fairly decent people, as people go, harried by the future and the past but holding together on the sharp ridge of the instant. And I was tormenting them. The case turned over behind my eyes again, a many-headed monster struggling to be born out of my mind.

Harlan opened the bathroom door and came out shakily. His nose was bleeding. He looked at me with hatred, at the lovers with desolation. Unnoticed by them, he stood like a wallflower against the doorframe.

“I should never have come here,” he said bitterly.

I turned to them. “This has gone far enough.”

They were blind and deaf, alone together on the sharp ridge, held flesh to flesh. A door creaked. I thought it was Harlan closing the bathroom door, and I looked in the wrong direction. Dolphine was in the room before I saw him. A heavy service revolver wavered in his hand. He advanced on Lister and his wife.

“You killed her, you devils.”

Lister tried to get up from the bed. The woman held him. Her back was to the gun.

The gun spoke once, very loudly, its echoes rumbling like delayed thunder. Harlan had crossed to the center of the room, perhaps with some idea of defending his sister. He took the slug in the body. It stopped him like a wall. He fell. I fired across him.

Dolphine dropped his revolver. He spread his hands across his stomach and backed against the wall, where he sat down. He was wheezing. Water ran from his eyes and nose. His face worked, trying to realize his grief and failing. Blood began to run between his fingers. I stood over him.

“How do you know they killed her?”

“I saw them. I saw it all.”

“You were in bed.”

“No, I was in the garage. They threw her down the steps, and came down after and choked her. Lister did. I saw him.”

“You didn’t call the police.”

“No. I–” His mouth groped for words. “I’m a sick man. I was too sick to call them. Upset. I couldn’t talk.”

“You’re sicker now, but you’re going to have to talk. It wasn’t Lister, was it? It was you.”

He choked, and began to cough blood. Great pumping sobs forced red words out of his mouth.

“She got what she deserved. I thought when I told her he’d married the other one, that she would come back to my bed. But she wouldn’t look at me. All she could think about was getting him back. When I was the one that loved her.”

“I can see that.”

“I did. I loved her.”

He lifted his red-laced hands in front of his eyes and began to scream. He rolled sideways with his face to the wall, screaming. He died that night.

Harlan was dead already. He should never have come there.