The Oxford Book of American Det (85 page)

She knelt before the idol for a long time, and then got to her feet slowly, drying her eyes. She walked up the aisle, stopped at the font, crossed herself, and then walked outside.

We followed her out, catching up with her at the corner. I pulled up on one side of her and Pat on the other.

“Mrs. Dreiser?” I asked.

She stopped walking, “Yes?”

I showed my buzzer. “Police officers,” I said. “We’d like to ask some questions.” She stared at my face for a long time. She drew a trembling breath then, and said, “I killed her. I... Carl was dead, you see. I... I guess that was it. It wasn’t right—his getting killed, I mean. And she was crying.” She nodded blankly. “Yes, that was it. She just cried all the time, not knowing that I was crying inside. You don’t know how I cried inside. Carl... he was all I had. I... I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told her to shut up and when she didn’t I... I...”

“Come on now, ma’m,” I said.

“I brought her to the church.” She nodded, remembering it all now. “She was innocent, you know. So I brought her to the church. Did you find her there?”

“Yes, ma’m,” I said. “That’s where we found her.”

She seemed pleased. A small smile covered her mouth and she said, “I’m glad you found her.”

She told the story again to the lieutenant. Pat and I checked out and on the way to the subway, I asked him, “Do you still want to pull the switch, Pat?” He didn’t answer.

ROSS MACDONALD (1915-1983)

Ross Macdonald was the intellectual of American detective fiction, an honours graduate with a doctorate in literature, and a master of the simile. He might also be called the poet of the dysfunctional family, the abandoned child, and the sins of the father bearing fruit in later generations. His peers gave Macdonald almost every honour the genre has to offer—including the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master award, the Gold Dagger of the British Crime Writers, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Popular Culture Association’s Award for Excellence.

Macdonald was born as Kenneth Millar, an only child, in Los Gatos, California. The family moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. There the father abandoned his wife and child when the latter was three, and the boy spent his formative years living with various relatives. His first story was published when he was a teenage student in Ontario. The same edition of the magazine published a story by another student, Margaret Sturm. The two were married after his graduation from college.

As Kenneth Millar, Macdonald wrote short fiction and four novels, which gained little attention, before inventing Lew Archer in
The Moving Target
in 1949. Since his wife, Margaret Millar, had already established herself as an author, he published The
Moving
Target
under the name John Macdonald. To avoid confusion with the writer John D.

MacDonald, he then wrote as John Ross Macdonald and, beginning in 1956, used only the pen name Ross Macdonald.

Macdonald’s protagonist, Archer, is a private investigator in the line of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. In him, Spade’s hard-edged, cryptic cynicism and Marlowe’s moral romanticism are replaced with a sort of sympathetic applied psychology. Archer finds his solutions to crimes less in the physical evidence of bloodstains, hairs, and footprints than in the damaged lives of the victim’s family.

In many of Macdonald’s books, the violence under investigation is traced back a generation or two to a family abandonment or betrayal. One thinks of Macdonald’s own life and remembers that he once said that the fictional sleuth is the author’s way of dealing with emotional material too hard to handle otherwise. Whatever the driving force behind his work, it opened the gates to more and better psychological detective fiction.

Guilt-Edged Blonde,
a typical Macdonald story, gives us a crime in a dysfunctional family and a look at the skill with language that made the author famous. The man who meets Archer’s plane “wore a stained tan windbreaker, baggy slacks, a hat as squashed and dubious as his face.” More typical of Macdonald’s style, his eyes were “dark and evasive, moving here and there as if to avoid getting hurt. He had been hurt often and badly, I guessed.” Only Chandler could have said it better.

Guilt-Edged Blonde

A man was waiting for me at the gate at the edge of the runway. He didn’t look like the man I expected to meet. He wore a stained tan windbreaker, baggy slacks, a hat as squashed and dubious as his face. He must have been forty years old, to judge by the gray in his hair and the lines around his eyes. His eyes were dark and evasive, moving here and there as if to avoid getting hurt. He had been hurt often and badly, I guessed.

“You Archer?”

I said I was. I offered him my hand. He didn’t know what to do with it. He regarded it suspiciously, as if I was planning to try a Judo hold on him. He kept his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker.

“I’m Harry Nemo.” His voice was a grudging whine. It cost him an effort to give his name away. “My brother told me to come and pick you up. You ready to go?”

“As soon as I get my luggage.”

I collected my overnight bag at the counter in the empty waiting room. The bag was very heavy for its size. It contained, besides a toothbrush and spare linen, two guns and the ammunition for them. A .38 special for sudden work, and a .32 automatic as a spare.

Harry Nemo took me outside to his car. It was a new seven-passenger custom job, as long and black as death. The windshield and side windows were very thick, and they had the yellowish tinge of bulletproof glass.

“Are you expecting to be shot at?”

“Not me.” His smile was dismal. “This is Nick’s car.”

“Why didn’t Nick come himself?”

He looked around the deserted field. The plane I had arrived on was a flashing speck in the sky above the red sun. The only human being in sight was the operator in the control tower. But Nemo leaned towards me in the seat, and spoke in a whisper:

“Nick’s a scared pigeon. He’s scared to leave the house. Ever since this morning.”

“What happened this morning?”

“Didn’t he tell you? You talked to him on the phone.”

“He didn’t say very much. He told me he wanted to hire a bodyguard for six days, until his boat sails. He didn’t tell me why.”

“They’re gunning for him, that’s why. He went to the beach this morning. He has a private beach along the back of his ranch, and he went down there by himself for his morning dip. Somebody took a shot at him from the top of the bluff. Five or six shots.

He was in the water, see, with no gun handy. He told me the slugs were splashing around him like hailstones. He ducked and swam under water out to sea. Lucky for him he’s a good swimmer, or he wouldn’t of got away. It’s no wonder he’s scared. It means they caught up with him, see.”

“Who are ‘they,’ or is that a family secret?”

Nemo turned from the wheel to peer into my face. His breath was sour, his look incredulous. “Christ, don’t you know who Nick is? Didn’t he tell you?”

“He’s a lemon-grower, isn’t he?”

“He is now.”

“What did he used to be?”

The bitter beaten face closed on itself. “I oughtn’t to be flapping at the mouth. He can tell you himself if he wants to.”

Two hundred horses yanked us away from the curb. I rode with my heavy leather bag on my knees. Nemo drove as if driving was the one thing in life he enjoyed, rapt in silent communion with the engine. It whisked us along the highway, then down a gradual incline between geometrically planted lemon groves. The sunset sea glimmered red at the foot of the slope.

Before we reached it, we turned off the blacktop into a private lane which ran like a straight hair-parting between the dark green trees. Straight for half a mile or more to a low house in a clearing.

The house was flat-roofed, made of concrete and fieldstone, with an attached garage.

All of its windows were blinded with heavy draperies. It was surrounded with well-kept shrubbery and lawn, the lawn with a ten-foot wire fence surmounted by barbed wire.

Nemo stopped in front of the closed and padlocked gate, and honked the horn. There was no response. He honked the horn again.

About halfway between the house and the gate, a crawling thing came out of the shrubbery. It was a man, moving very slowly on hands and knees. His head hung down almost to the ground. One side of his head was bright red, as if he had fallen in paint.

He left a jagged red trail in the gravel of the driveway.

Harry Nemo said, “Nick!” He scrambled out of the car. “What happened, Nick?” The crawling man lifted his heavy head and looked at us. Cumbrously, he rose to his feet. He came forward with his legs spraddled and loose, like a huge infant learning to walk. He breathed loudly and horribly, looking at us with a dreadful hopefulness. Then he died on his feet, still walking. I saw the change in his face before it struck the gravel.

Harry Nemo went over the fence like a weary monkey, snagging his slacks on the barbed wire. He knelt beside his brother and turned him over and palmed his chest. He stood up shaking his head.

I had my bag unzipped and my hand on the revolver. I went to the gate. “Open up, Harry.”

Harry was saying, “They got him,” over and over. He crossed himself several times.

“The dirty bastards.”

“Open up,” I said.

He found a key ring in the dead man’s pocket and opened the padlocked gate. Our dragging footsteps crunched the gravel. I looked down at the specks of gravel in Nicky Nemo’s eyes, the bullet hole in the temple.

“Who got him, Harry?”

“I dunno. Fats Jordan, or Artie Castola, or Faronese. It must have been one of them.”

“The Purple Gang.”

“You called it. Nicky was their treasurer back in the thirties. He was the one that didn’t get into the papers. He handled the payoff, see. When the heat went on and the gang got busted up, he had some money in a safe deposit box. He was the only one that got away.”

“How much money?”

“Nicky never told me. All I know, he come out here before the war and bought a thousand acres of lemon land. It took them fifteen years to catch up with him. He always knew they were gonna, though. He knew it.”

“Artie Castola got off the Rock last spring.”

“You’re telling me. That’s when Nicky bought himself the bulletproof car and put up the fence.”

“Are they gunning for you?”

He looked around at the darkening groves and the sky. The sky was streaked with running red, as if the sun had died a violent death.

“I dunno,” he answered nervously. “They got no reason to. I’m as clean as soap. I never been in the rackets. Not since I was young, anyway. The wife made me go straight, see?”

I said: “We better get into the house and call the police.” The front door was standing a few inches ajar. I could see at the edge that it was sheathed with quarter-inch steel plate. Harry put my thoughts into words.

“Why in hell would he go outside? He was safe as houses as long as he stayed inside.”

“Did he live alone?”

“More or less alone.”

“What does that mean?”

He pretended not to hear me, but I got some kind of an answer. Looking through the doorless arch into the living room, I saw a leopardskin coat folded across the back of the chesterfield. There were red-tipped cigarette butts mingled with cigar butts in the ash trays.

“Nicky was married?”

“Not exactly.”

“You know the woman?”

“Naw.” But he was lying.

Somewhere behind the thick walls of the house, there was a creak of springs, a crashing bump, the broken roar of a cold engine, grinding of tires in gravel. I got to the door in time to see a cerise convertible hurtling down the driveway. The top was down, and a yellow-haired girl was small and intent at the wheel. She swerved around Nick’s body and got through the gate somehow, with her tires screaming. I aimed at the right rear tire, and missed. Harry came up behind me. He pushed my gun-arm down before I could fire again. The convertible disappeared in the direction of the highway.

“Let her go,” he said.

“Who is she?”

He thought about it, his slow brain clicking almost audibly. “I dunno. Some pig that Nicky picked up some place. Her name is Flossie or Florrie or something. She didn’t shoot him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You know her pretty well, do you?”

“The hell I do. I don’t mess with Nicky’s dames.” He tried to work up a rage to go with the strong words, but he didn’t have the makings. The best he could produce was petulance: “Listen, mister, why should you hang around? The guy that hired you is dead.”

“I haven’t been paid, for one thing.”

“I’ll fix that.”

He trotted across the lawn to the body and came back with an alligator billfold. It was thick with money.

“How much?”

“A hundred will do it.”

He handed me a hundred-dollar bill. “Now how about you amscray, bud, before the law gets here?”

“I need transportation.”

“Take Nicky’s car. He won’t be using it. You can park it at the airport and leave the key with the agent.”

“I can, eh?”

“Sure. I’m telling you you can.”

“Aren’t you getting a little free with your brother’s property?”

“It’s my property now, bud.” A bright thought struck him, disorganising his face.

“Incidentally, how would you like to get off my land?”

“I’m staying, Harry. I like this place. I always say it’s people that make a place.” The gun was still my hand. He looked down at it.

“Get on the telephone, Harry. Call the police.”

“Who do you think you are, ordering me around? I took my last order from anybody, see?” He glanced over his shoulder at the dark and shapeless object on the gravel, and spat venomously.

“I’m a citizen, working for Nicky. Not for you.”

He changed his tune very suddenly “How much to go to work for me?”

“Depends on the line of work.”

He manipulated the alligator wallet. “Here’s another hundred. If you got to hang around, keep the lip buttoned down about the dame, eh? Is it a deal?” I didn’t answer, but I took the money. I put it in a separate pocket by itself. Harry telephoned the county sheriff.