The Way Some People Die

Chapter 10

The argument began in my head before I was fully conscious. Had Galley tried to save me, or set me up for Tarantine? In any case, I’d been a pushover. I was ashamed to open my eyes. I lay in my own darkness, face down on something hard, and endured the thudding pain at the base of my skull. The odor of some heavy mantrap perfume invaded my nostrils. After a while I began to wonder where it was coming from.

Something furry or feathery tickled my ear. I lifted one hand to brush it away, and the furry or feathery thing let out a small female yelp. I rolled over and sat up. Through ripples of pain distorting my vision like heat waves, I saw a woman standing above me, dimly silhouetted against the starlight.

“You startled me,” she said. “Thank heavens you’ve come to. Who are you, anyway?”

“Skip the questions, eh?” My head felt like an old tired baseball after batting practice. I braced one hand against the wall beside me, and got to my feet. The woman extended a gloved hand to help me, but I disregarded it. I felt for my gun, which was gone, and my wallet, which wasn’t.

“I only asked you who you were,” she said in a hurt tone. “What happened to you?”

“I was sapped.” I leaned my back against the wall and tried to fix her faintly shimmering outline. After a while it came to rest. She was a large hippy woman in a dark suit. A dead fox crouched on her neck, its feathery tail hanging down.

“Sapped?” she repeated blankly.

“Sandbagged. Hit over the head.” My voice sounded nasty even to me, thin and dry and querulous.

“Goodness gracious, should I call the police?”

“No. Leave them out of it.”

“The hospital, then? Don’t you need some kind of first aid? Was it a robber?”

I felt the swelling at the base of my skull. “Forget it. Just go away and forget it.”

“Whoever you are, you’re not very nice.” She was a spoiled little girl, twenty years later. “I’ve a good mind to go away and leave you to your own devices.”

“I’ll try to bear up under it. Wait a minute, though. How did you get here?” There was no car in the road.

“I was driving past and I saw you lying here and I wasn’t going to come back and then I thought I should. I left my car and walked back. Now I’m sorry I did, so there.”

But she didn’t mean it. Spoiled child or not, there was something I liked about the big dim woman. She had a nice warm prewar middle-western voice. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“That’s all right. I imagine you don’t feel very good, poor man.” She was starting to mother me.

I turned to the door. The screen door was unhooked but the inner door was locked. I wrenched at the knob and got nowhere with it.

“Nobody answers,” she said behind me. “I tried knocking when you were unconscious. Did you lose your key?”

She seemed to think I lived there, and I let her go on thinking it. “I’ll be all right now,” I said. “I can get in the back door. Good night and thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” But she was unwilling to go.

I left her lingering hippily on the porch and went to the back of the house. The Packard was gone from the driveway. There were no lights behind any of the windows. The back door was locked, but it was equipped with a half-length window. I took off one of my shoes and used it to punch a hole in the glass. I was pretty certain that Tarantine had gone. He wouldn’t have left me lying on the threshold if he was still inside.

I turned the inside knob and let myself into the kitchen. Hoping the woman would take it as a signal to go away, I switched on the kitchen light. Monel metal and porcelain and brand-new off-white paint dazzled my eyes. The kitchen had everything: dishwasher, garbage disposal unit, electric range, even a big deep-freezer in the corner by the refrigerator. There was a little food in the refrigerator, milk and butter and ham and a head of lettuce, but nothing at all in the freezer. It looked as if Tarantine hadn’t intended to stay long.

I went through the small dark dinette into the living-room and found a table-lamp, which I turned on. It cast a parchment-yellowed light on a couple of overstuffed chairs and a davenport to match, a white oak radio cabinet, a tan-colored rug of cheap frieze, a small brick fireplace. The room was so similar to a hundred thousand others that it might have been stamped out by a die. There was nothing there to give me a clue to the people who had used it, except for a Daily Racing Form crumpled on one of the chairs. Even the ashtrays were empty.

The bedroom was equally anonymous. It contained twin beds, one of which had been slept in, from the middle-income floor of a department store, a dressing-table, and a chest of drawers with nothing in the drawers. The only trace of Galley was a spilling of suntan powder on the dressing-table. Tarantine had left no trace at all, if you didn’t count the bump on the back of my head.

Going back into the living-room, I heard the tapping on the front door. I went to the door and opened it. “What do you want?”

“Why, nothing. I only wondered, are you quite sure you’re going to be all right here by yourself?”

She was overdoing her Good Samaritan act. I switched on the porch light above her and looked hard into her face. It wasn’t a bad sort of face, though you might have called it moon-shaped. It had a fine mouth, wide and full and generous. The eyes were blue, slightly damaged by recent grief; the lids were puffed. She looked like a soft and easygoing woman who had come up against something hard and unexpected. Her carefully curled red hair was too bright to be natural. The fox was blue and expensive.

“What are you looking at me like that for? Have I got a smut on my nose?”

“I’m trying to figure out why you’re so persistent.”

She could have taken offense, but she decided to smile instead. Her smile, complete with nose wrinkling, was in a nice old-fashioned idiom like her speech. “It isn’t every night I stumble over unconscious men, you know.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll lie down and you can stumble over me again. Then will you go away?”

“I will not.” She stuck out her lower lip in an impressive pout. “I want to talk to you. What’s your name?”

“Archer.”

“Then you don’t really live here. It belongs to a man named Dalling. I made inquiries this afternoon.”

I had forgotten the man with the memorable face. I pushed past her out the door and beyond the circle of light from the porch. The road was bare on the other side of the intersection, and as far as I could see. Dalling had run out long ago.

She followed me like an embarrassing bulky shadow. “You didn’t answer my question.” Her voice was sibilant with suspicion.

“Dalling’s my landlord,” I said.

“What’s his first name?” Her cross-questioning technique reminded me of a grade-school teacher conducting a spelling bee.

“Keith.”

“I guess you really do live here, Mr. Archer. Excuse me.”

While we were standing there on the unseeded lawn, lighting up the sky with our repartee, a pair of headlights swept up out of nowhere and slid along the road in our direction. The car passed us without stopping or even slackening speed, but my overworked gland spurted adrenalin. If Tarantine came back to inquire after my health, I didn’t want to be available.

“You better go home,” I said. “Where do you live?”

“I’m staying at the Oasis Inn, with my husband.”

“Can I get transportation to Palm Springs?”

“There’s a taxi stand at the Inn. I’ll be glad to drive you over.”

“Good. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

I went through the house turning off the lights, closed the doors, and rejoined her in the road. Her car, a new Cadillac, was parked on the shoulder a couple of hundred yards from the house. She had to use a key to open it. Another thing that puzzled me was that the fact that the Cadillac was turned towards the house.

“Let me get this straight,” I said as she started the engine. “You were driving past the house when you saw me lying on the porch. So you backed up two hundred yards in the dark, locked your car, and then went back to investigate. Is that what you did?”

She sat behind the wheel letting the motor idle. Her answer when it came was another question, off at another tangent: “Do you know my husband, Mr. Archer?”

The question took me by surprise. “Your husband?”

“Henry Fellows. Colonel Henry Fellows.”

“I don’t know him.”

She fed gas to the motor, and the heavy car moved on the crackling gravel. “I really don’t know him myself very well. We were married only recently.” She added after a moment’s pause: “As a matter of fact, we’re on our honeymoon.”

“Why don’t you go home and get acquainted with him? No time like the present.”

“He wasn’t at the Inn when I left. I came out looking for him. Are you sure you don’t know him, Mr. Archer?”

“I know several thousand people, several dozen colonels. I don’t know a Henry Fellows.”

“Then it couldn’t have been Henry who struck you and knocked you unconscious?”

I felt out of touch with reality, wherever it was. The big car rolling across the star-blanched desert might have been a spaceship just landed on the moon. “Where did you get that idea?”

“I just wondered.”

“Did you see him?”

“No, I didn’t.” She sounded uncomfortable. “It was a silly idea. I shouldn’t have put it into words.”

“What does he look like?”

She answered reluctantly, then warmed to her work: “He’s a large man, in his forties – a great tall powerful creature. I need a big man to set me off, you know. Henry’s quite distinguished looking with his nice brown wavy hair, and the gray at his temples.” A sharper note entered her voice: “He’s very attractive to women.”

I tried to dredge up an image of the man who had knocked me out, but nothing came. I had had no time to turn and look at him. Perhaps I had seen his shadow on the veranda floor. I couldn’t even be sure of that.

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Henry,” I said. “You don’t have any reason to think it was?”

“No. I shouldn’t have said it.”

“How do you spell the last name?” She spelled it out for me. “I’m Marjorie Fellows. But if he thinks he can carry on like this, even before our honeymoon is over – I shan’t be Marjorie Fellows for long!” Her mind was helplessly hung up between love for Henry and resentment of him. New tears glittered like rhinestones on her lashes. I felt sorry for the big soft woman, driving her car along unpeopled streets in early-morning darkness – a poor sort of way to pass a honeymoon. She seemed out of place on the California desert.

“Where did you meet Colonel Fellows?”

“In Reno.” But she had remembered her pride, and it stiffened her voice: “I don’t care to discuss it. Please forget what I said.”

At the next corner, she jerked the steering-wheel viciously, cutting the wheels so the tires ground in the stones. There was a little settlement of lights ahead, which became a scattering of buildings behind an adobe wall. A score of cars were parked with their noses to the wall, a single taxi at the end of the line. A blue neon sign, OASIS INN, hung over the entrance of the largest building, which fronted on the road.

She turned her car into an empty space between two others, switched off the engine and headlights. We got out together.

As we walked down the line of cars towards the entrance, a man emerged from the shadows under the stucco portico. He strode towards us, literally shouting: “Marjorie! Where have you been?”

She stood still, frightened stiff, unable to answer him. He stepped up close to her, tall and wide and angry. “Where have you been?”

I said: “Fortunately for me, your wife decided to go for a midnight drive. I was lost in the desert, my car broke down, and she gave me a lift to civilization.” This was civilization. And I was back on the little-boy-lost routine again.

“What made you do that, Marjorie?” One of his hands closed over one of her arms. The flesh bulged out on either side of it, and she winced.

I thought of hitting him. He was big enough to make it worth while, a powerful-looking heavyweight with a nose like a battering ram. It would give me a good deal of satisfaction, but on the other hand it wouldn’t help Marjorie. Henry would have the rest of their life together to take it out on her, and he looked like the man to do just that.

“Why shouldn’t I go for a ride by myself?” She jerked her arm free. “What do you care? You go away and neglect me all the time.”

“Now, darling, that’s not fair. You had me worried sick when you didn’t come home.”

“Were you really worried, Henry?”

“You know I was. I can’t have my sweet girl wandering around in the desert at all hours of the night.” His pale eyes glared in my direction, as if I had kidnapped his bride.

Marjorie was doing fine, it seemed. I thanked her and said good night. She fluttered a hand at me, then tucked it possessively under the big man’s arm.