The Way Some People Die

Chapter 9

My car was parked six blocks away, where I had begun my rounds. Dalling’s was waiting at the curb. If I had been asked to guess what kind of car he had, I would have said a red or yellow convertible, Chrysler or Buick or De Soto. It was a yellow Buick with red leather seats.

As we drove out of town, slowing down occasionally for a stop sign, I asked him what he did. He had been and done a number of things, he said, chorus boy in musicals before he grew too big, photographic model for advertising agencies, car and yacht salesman, navigator on a PBY during the war. He was proud of that. After the war he had married a rich wife, but it hadn’t lasted. More recently he had been a radio actor but that hadn’t lasted either because he drank too much. Dalling was frank almost to the point of fruitiness. Starting with the assumption that no man could like him in any case, he said, he figured he might just as well be himself. He had nothing to lose.

When we got on the highway he accelerated to eighty or so and concentrated on his driving, which interrupted our onesided conversation. After a while I asked him where we were going. “At this rate we’ll be in Mexico before long.”

He chuckled. Surely I’d heard that chuckle on the radio. People didn’t chuckle in real life. “It’s just a few miles from here,” he said. “A place they call Oasis. I suppose it’s not exactly a place yet, but it will be. This country is filling up. Don’t you love it?"

I watched the dim arid tundra sweeping by, dotted with cactus and gray sage like the ghosts of vegetation. “It looks like a sea floor. I like a sea floor with water over it, it’s more interesting.”

“It’s funny you should say that. The Gulf of California reached almost to here at one time.”

We turned right off the highway and followed an asphalt road across the lightless desert. A dozen miles to our right the town lights sparkled, a handful of white and colored stones thrown down carelessly. A few lights gleamed ahead of us, lost and little in the great nocturnal spaces. Dalling said they were the lights of Oasis.

We entered a maze of gravel roads crisscrossing like city streets, but practically uninhabited. A handful of houses scattered here and there, street-lights at most of the corners, that was Oasis. It reminded me of an army camp I had seen at a staging point in the far west Pacific, after its division had left for bloodier pastures.

“What is this, a ghost town?” I asked him.

“It almost looks like one, doesn’t it? Actually it’s the opposite of a ghost town, a town waiting to be born. It’s a fairly new development, you see. I got in at the beginning, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds.” But he didn’t sound too happy about his real estate investment.

He took a series of turns on tires that screeched and skittered in the gravel. I kept my sense of direction straight by watching the high escarpment that blotted out the horizon to the southeast. On the far edge of the skeleton town he slowed to a crawl.

“That’s my house up ahead.”

There was only one house ahead, a white frame shoebox with projecting eaves, lengthened by the garage appended to the rear. As we passed it I saw light in the front windows, leaking faintly around the edges of closed Venetian blinds.

“I thought we were going to stop and pay a visit.” The Buick had kept on rolling, on to the next intersection and beyond. He finally brought it to a stop at the side of the road.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said uneasily. “Tarantine knows me, and he doesn’t know you. Wouldn’t it be more strategic if you went in alone? I’ll stand by, of course. I’ll keep the car here with the motor running.” His voice, trying to be charming, was pretty dreary.

If Dalling had a normal amount of physical courage, he must have used it up on me when he first came into the Lariat. I pitied him a little. “Whatever you say, Dalling.”

The pity, or the contempt that went with it, must have showed: “After all,” and the deep manly overtones had departed, “you’ve been hired to find Galley Lawrence, haven’t you? I’m doing what I can to help you, man. And if Joseph Tarantine knows I’ve given him away, you know what will happen to me.”

He made sense, in a way. If I had an equal amount of sense of a similar kind, I might have stayed in the car and gone to work on Dalling. Two would get you twenty there was a soft spot in his story to go with the soft spot in his spine. The one thing real and certain was his fear. It hung around him like a damp contagion.

It was Dalling’s fear, or my reaction against it, that made me foolhardy. That and the whisky I had drunk in line of business. Without its fading glow in my insides I might have reacted in a different way. I might even have saved a life or two if I’d gone to work on Dalling.

But I contented myself with a smiling threat: “Don’t stand me up or you won’t be pretty any more. Or popular.”

The invisible hooks worked on his mouth. “Don’t worry.” He switched off his headlights. “I really appreciate this, your attitude, I mean–” He gave it up and settled down for a wait.

There were more stars over Oasis than I’d seen since I left that island in the Pacific. The unbuilt street was still and peaceful as the desert was supposed to be. But I felt a hot prickling at the nape of my neck as I approached the stucco house. I transferred my gun from shoulder holster to pocket, and leaned my moral weight on it.

I circled the house at a distance. There was no fence, and the house stood by itself on the bare ground. The doors were closed, including the garage doors at the back, and all the windows were blinded. A bronze-painted Packard roadster shone dimly in the starlight at the rear of the gravel driveway. I passed it close enough to make sure there was no one in it, and circled around to the front of the house again.

The lights were still on behind the two front windows. The blinds fitted too well to let me see past them. Holding the gun in my pocket with the safety off, I mounted the low concrete porch and knocked on the screen door. My knocking wasn’t loud, but it sounded loud to me.

Quick footsteps crossed the room on the other side of the door. The porch light flashed on over my head. Somebody pulled aside the blind in the near window, and I caught the gleam of an eyeball in the opening. The blind fell back into place, and there was a waiting silence. I knocked again.

Someone fumbled the inside knob.

The lock clicked. Slowly the door opened to the width of a brass chain that held it secure. I saw a four inch segment of a woman’s face and the muzzle of an automatic gun.

“Go away,” she said.

“I would if I knew how.” The obvious story was the best I could think of. “My car broke down up the road, and I’ve lost my way.”

“Oh.” Her voice relaxed a little, but her gun was steady. “Where are you going?”

“Indio.”

“You’re way off the track.”

“I know that well enough. I hope you’ve got the safety on that automatic.”

“If it bothers you, you can go away,” she said. “As I suggested.” But something told me, probably my ego, that she was glad to see me. Me or anybody.

“I guess it makes people very inhospitable living all by themselves on the desert like this. Are you a spinster?”

“No. Why?”

“You’re acting like one. I wish you’d call your husband if you can’t help me out. He probably has a road map of this place.”

“Be quiet. You’ll wake him.” It was a natural thing for her to say, but she said it much too vehemently.

I wondered where Tarantine was sleeping, but I wasn’t interested enough to want to disturb him. I kept my voice down. “Why don’t you put up the gun and let me relax? I’m completely harmless to women.”

To my surprise, she lowered the gun. Then, to my greater surprise, she unchained the door and opened it.

“You might as well come in, but please be quiet. I’ll see if I can find a map.”

I couldn’t understand it. It had been some years since my boyish charm had been able to work minor miracles. “Why the sudden reversal? Not that it isn’t pleasant.”

“You don’t look much like a holdup man, I guess.” She unhooked the screen door and held it open for me. “Come in if you like.”

I had my first good chance to look at her face. She was the girl in the picture I was carrying, a few years older, no less striking, I thought. The straight nose, curled lips, round chin, were the same, the boldness enhanced by the short black hair molded to her head. She was wearing a blue skirt and white blouse. The gun hanging low in her left hand completed the costume, and didn’t seem wholly out of place.

As I passed her in the doorway I reached fast for the gun and twisted it out of her hand. She backed away from me in the confined space until she was flat against the wall of the little hallway. “Give it back to me.”

“After we have a talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. Get out of here.” But all the time she kept her voice quite low.

I dropped her gun in my left-hand pocket, to balance the one in my right. A faint cool breeze from an air-conditioning system was blowing past me. I shut the door behind me, quietly.

“Why don’t you go home to your mother, Galley? Joe isn’t going to live long, and neither are you if you stick.”

“Who are you? How do you know my name?” In the half-light from the open door of the living-room her dark eyes shone with an amber gleam.

“The name is Archer. Your mother sent me to find you. She’s been worried about you. With reason.”

“You’re a liar. My mother doesn’t know about Joe. She never sent you here.”

“She gave me your graduation picture, I have it here.”

“You stole it from her.”

“Nonsense. You’re just trying to unknow the error, Galley.”

She recognized the phrase. Slowly she straightened up clear of the wall. In high heels, she was almost as tall as I was. “Please go away. If mother sent you, tell her I’m all right. Tell her anything.”

“I think you should come along.”

“Be quiet,” she whispered.

From somewhere at the back of the house, I heard a faint dull sound. It could have been a man’s boot drawn softly across the floor.

“Please.” She was almost whimpering. “You’ve wakened Joe. He’ll kill me if he finds you.”

I opened the door. “Come along with me. Dalling’s waiting in his car.”

“I can’t. I daren’t.” She was breathing quickly, her sharp breasts rising and falling under the blouse.

“Will you be all right?”

“If you go now, please.” She leaned towards me, one hand on my shoulder pressing me backwards.

I reached for the screen door behind me, but it was already open. Galley cried: “Look out!”

The warning came too late. I was a sitting duck for the soft explosion of the sandbag against the back of my head.