Dark Tunnel

by Ross Macdonald

  “Don’t omit Canada. They just came from Canada and may try to go back.”

  “Where in Canada?”

  “Ruth Esch wrote me a letter three days ago from Kirkland Lake, Ontario.”

  “Have you still got it?”

  I felt in my pockets. The letter was gone.

  “No, I must have lost it. Or Peter took it.”

  “You say the Esch woman wrote you a letter. Is she a friend of yours?” He shifted his black eyes from the road for a moment to glance at me.

  “She was. In Germany, years ago. Not any more.”

  I told him what he needed to know about Ruth Esch, including a complete physical description. Like Gordon, I wanted to catch her, but I dreaded meeting her again. There is a story in the Heimskringla about a Norse king who married a witch. She died but her body remained warm and beautiful. The king went mad and kept vigil by her beautiful body in the belief that she was sleeping and would come back to him. After years of vigil, he awoke from his madness and the body was crawling with worms.

  I dreaded meeting her again. But I was going to have to travel a long way before I met her again.

  I said to Gordon, “I heard a news broadcast on your radio. The police are after me for Schneider’s murder.”

  “I told you.”

  “Yes, but not so vividly as the newscaster. Are you going to turn me in?”

  “I have to,” Gordon said. “In any case, it’s the safest place for you.”

  “Because Michigan doesn’t inflict the death penalty? I want to know whether it can be proved that Schneider was a spy, even if you don’t catch the other two.”

  “Maybe it can. He hasn’t been investigated yet.”

  “What have you got on him?”

  “Everything you’ve given us, but that isn’t enough without evidence. Naturally we’ll investigate him thoroughly now. Have you any further leads?”

  “I’ve told you everything I know. At least I think I have.” Something was struggling towards the surface of my unconscious. I could feel it moving but I couldn’t see what it was. Probably a duck-billed platypus, I thought, and tried to relax.

  It was farther to the bootlegger’s by road than it was on foot. We had to follow the side road until it reached the main road and then turn back towards the old house.

  Before we reached the main road we passed a patch of woods on the right side of the road, and I saw something that made me suspicious of my unconscious again. Two men wearing bright plaid blankets around them and colored leaves in their hair came running out of the woods towards the car, yelling and waving their arms.

  Gordon stopped the car and we sat and watched them climb over the fence and jump across the ditch to the road.

  “Can you give us a lift to town?” one of them asked. He stuck his head in the open window on my side and I saw the tear-stains on his face and recognized him.

  I said to Gordon. “These are the two men that left the bootlegger’s when Ruth Esch did.”

  “Get into the back seat,” Gordon said and they climbed in, clutching their blankets around them.

  “I’ve got to get to the police,” the weepy one said. “My car has been stolen.”

  Gordon turned around in his seat and said, “I’m a police agent. Where have you been?”

  “In the woods, sleeping,” said the other babe in the woods. I turned and looked at them. Their eyes were like boiled Brussels sprouts and their faces were sicklied o’er with the pale cast of a hangover.

  “On a camping party, boys?” Gordon said. “I was just going to start looking for you.”

  “Hell, no,” said the man who wept, beyond irony. “Our clothes were stolen. And my car.” His eyes glistened with unshed tears, and I reached for a handkerchief.

  “By a red-headed woman?”

  “How did you know? Say, did you catch her?”

  “Not yet,” Gordon said. He started the car and in a minute we turned into the main road.

  “Well, you better get busy. I want to see that dame put away for a good long time. She asks me for a lift and she looks like a lady and naturally I give her one at that time of morning. But after we drive down the road a piece, she pulls a gun on us and makes us get out of the car and take off our clothes and drives away with the car and the clothes. First time a hitch-hiker ever fooled me and, by Jesus, it’s the last—”

  Gordon cut him off. “Why didn’t you report this theft sooner?”

  The other man spoke, “Well, Johnnie here was awful broken up, and when she took his car he went off in the woods and was sick.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Johnnie said, “I was just sad. My dear wife, and then my dear car—”

  “Yes, he was,” the other man said. “I went to find him and he had passed out. I couldn’t wake him up so I covered him with leaves and let him sleep. I couldn’t leave him in that condition, so I kept guard over him—”

  “You passed out, too,” Johnnie said.

  “Oh, I did not. I—”

  “I’m taking you to the local police,” Gordon said. “They’ll ask you to swear out a warrant for the woman’s arrest.”

  “Nothing I’d like better,” said Johnnie. The tears of things were not affecting him so strongly now, and he seemed to have given up the idea of weeping.

  A minute later I felt like weeping myself.

  Gordon turned down the lane under the trees, and I saw the old barn and the dingy house. The barn looked even worse by day, like a corpse in sunlight. The sight of the house with the paint peeling off was not improved by the black police car which stood in front of it.

  As we drew up behind it, a sharp-nosed man in plain clothes came out of the house and let out a combination of a whoop and a sneer.

  Haggerty came down the porch steps with the speed of a weasel and said to me, “Get out.”

  I got out.

  He said, “Hold out your hands.”

  In the dazed hope that he might be going to give me something to eat, I held out my hands. He snapped handcuffs on my wrists.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE BLANKET BOYS GOGGLED and Johnnie whined, “Say, he was in here just before that woman came in. I bet he’s one of the gang.”

  I said, “Have a good cry about it,” and turned to Haggerty: “If you arrest me, Sergeant, I’m going to sue you for false arrest.”

  Haggerty pushed his face at me as if he intended to stab me with his nose. “Yeah? What do you mean, professor, false arrest?”

  I said, “I didn’t kill Schneider. He was killed by his son and a woman called Ruth Esch. The same woman that stole this man’s car. Take these things off me and go and catch them.” Go and catch a falling star, my mind chattered. Go and catch whooping cough.

  “I know about her,” Haggerty said. “Shiny told me. And maybe you didn’t kill Judd and Schneider. Maybe you did. While I’m finding out, I’m going to book you for larceny, aggravated assault, and obstructing an officer in the performance of his duty.”

  “Obstructing, hell.” The handcuffs saved me from another charge of aggravated assault. They were better than a rope, but they pinched my wrists.

  I turned to Gordon, who had got out of the car. “For Christ’s sake, tell this—detective to take these handcuffs off me.”

  Haggerty burst out, “This isn’t a Federal matter. Damn it—”

  “Better take them off,” Gordon said. “Dr. Branch has had a bad night of it, and he needs medical attention. Less than an hour ago, Peter Schneider tried to murder him by hanging.”

  “I can’t run the risk of letting him get away again,” Haggerty said.

  “Take them off,” Gordon repeated. “You’ll have other chances to display them.”

  Haggerty turned a delicate amethystine color but he produced a key-ring and took the handcuffs off my wrists. Encouraged by Gordon’s support, I said, “What time do they serve breakfast at the jail?”

  Haggerty threatened me with his nose again. “It’ll pay you to be respectful, professor. You’re goi
ng to learn respect for the law.”

  Gordon said, “Has the woman been found?”

  “No,” said Haggerty. “Every main road is being watched. And we have men at the airport and the station.”

  “This man wants to report the theft of his car.” Gordon jerked his thumb at Johnnie, who was still staring at me. “It was evidently taken by Ruth Esch. She also took their clothes.”

  Haggerty motioned to Johnnie to get out of the car and said, “License number and description?”

  “Just a minute, Sergeant,” Gordon said. “I have to get away.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Any sign of Peter Schneider?”

  “He hasn’t been caught. His car was seen by a gas-station attendant on the other side of Arbana, at least it was a green coupe with one man in it.”

  “Headed where?”

  “Direction of the Bomber Plant.”

  “You can take these men into town.”

  “O.K. Especially this one.” Haggerty jabbed a thumb towards me.

  “Treat him kindly, Sergeant,” Gordon said, with just enough condescension to make me want to kick him. “Oh, yes, there’s another thing I wanted to ask you, Haggerty. Did the operator tell you anything that was said on the line into Judd’s office last night?”

  “Yeah, but it didn’t make any sense.”

  “I’ll decide that,” Gordon said sharply. “What was it?”

  “Don’t get your shirt-tail in a knot. I was just trying to remember the exact words. I think it was: ‘Get up, old man, get up. You can’t stay there all day.’ Something like that.”

  “I see. Perhaps I’d better talk to her myself. What was her name?”

  “Hilda Kramm, I think,” Haggerty said. “They can tell you at the U exchange.”

  “No doubt they can,” Gordon barked. “But it’s your duty as an officer to keep accurate records. In a murder case, they are precisely a matter of life and death.”

  “Murder! My God, are you going off the deep end—”

  Gordon delivered a look that shut Haggerty off in mid-sentence, and slid behind the wheel of his car.

  Three separate things were jostling in my mind, which the terror and exhaustion of the night had already pulled apart at the seams. One was the intense pleasure of hearing Haggerty rated for incompetence by a professional superior. One was a wild guess about the meaning of Alec’s telephone conversation. I thought of Poe’s Valdemar, and the Wizard King who could hypnotize people at a distance. Could Alec have been hypnotized and commanded over the telephone to get up on the windowsill and jump to his death? The idea seemed fantastic, but I had a friend in the psychology department who had shown me what hypnotism could do.

  The third was the duck-billed platypus who was still swimming around in my unconscious, very near the surface. As Gordon’s car started to move, he came up for air and my conscious mind got hold of him. His name was Rudolf Fisher.

  “Gordon!” I yelled. “Wait a minute!”

  He braked the car and leaned his head out of the window. “What is it, Branch?”

  “A possible lead on Schneider. Alec Judd suspected a man named Rudolf Fisher of being Dr. Schneider’s contact man with the Detroit ring. Your Detroit office has investigated Fisher and they should be able to tell you where to find him. Rudolf Fisher—I think he’s a naturalized German.”

  “Right. I’ll look into it.” He waved his hand and threw out the clutch. The whine of his engine mounted like a small siren as he went up the lane.

  Haggerty climbed the stairs to the porch and yelled through the open door, “Hey, Joe! Let’s go!”

  A policeman in uniform emerged from the house and Haggerty said, “Stay away from that tart if you don’t want syph. Her last customer didn’t have any nose.”

  “You should give him some of yours,” I said under my breath so he wouldn’t hear me. “A nose-transfusion.”

  Haggerty put me in the front seat beside the policeman and got into the back seat with the Indian braves. As we drove away, I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck.

  I said over my shoulder, “If you won’t tell me when breakfast is served, will you tell me whether there are any beds in the jail?”

  Haggerty said, “There are. But don’t be so cocky, professor. They’re not comfortable.”

  The policeman behind the wheel said, “Want me to shut him up, Sarge?”

  “Don’t touch me, officer,” I said, “until you have a Wassermann test.”

  “Leave him alone,” Haggerty said. “He nearly got hanged. And I think he’s nuts. He talks nuts.”

  “My sleep was strangely troubled last night,” I said. “Mind if I snooze?”

  Haggerty began to question Johnnie about his car and paid no attention to me. I rested my head against the back of the seat and went to sleep. I was sitting in a dentist’s chair with my head back saying, “It’s the tooth in my throat that troubles me, doctor.” He reached into my throat with a pair of gilded tongs which he drew from his beard, and when he pulled them out they were spattered with blood. Then I saw that he had green eyes and long hair like a woman, made of twisted hemp. He curtsied to me and I saw the hole in the top of his head and the announcer said, “Arbana station.”

  “I said wake up, Branch,” Haggerty said. “We’re at the station.”

  I opened my eyes and blinked and got out of the car, balancing my head on top of a stiff neck. Haggerty took me by the arm.

  He said to the driver, “Better take these guys home to get some clothes on,” and the police car moved away.

  It was just eight by the electric clock in the hallway of the police station. Lieutenant Gross was going off duty but he stayed to help question me. They took me into a bare back room and asked questions for nearly an hour while a policeman took shorthand notes.

  I could have refused to talk or demanded a lawyer, but I was too tired to bother. I answered all their questions and told them everything I knew.

  When they had finished, Cross said to Haggerty, “I’m going to put this man in the hospital, Sergeant. Under guard. He looks as if he needs a doctor.”

  “I need a cook,” I said. “And an oculist. I don’t think my neck needs setting.”

  “They’ll feed you at the hospital,” Cross said.

  They did. Coddled eggs and toast that retained its shape no matter how you bent it. Before that I had to take a bath and the nurse wondered how the patient got so filthy and I said I didn’t know, I’d have to ask him, but I thought he was preparing to write an article on barnyard imagery in Shakespeare.

  After that they x-rayed my neck and an oculist put drops in my eyes. He took my broken glasses to have the lenses re-ground, and left me alone with a policeman. Policemen had begun to bore me, and I wriggled my toes between the sweet, clean sheets, turned over and went to sleep. Those whom the gods wish to go to sleep, they first make sleepy.

  I was awakened for lunch, which began with a bowl of chicken broth and ended with cornstarch pudding. “You must keep your strength up,” the nurse said, and I didn’t laugh because my laughing apparatus had congealed. Also, because they’d probably put me in jail if they found out that I wasn’t an invalid.

  While I was still inflicting cornstarch on my palate, an orderly brought me my mended glasses. I polished them on a corner of the sheet and put them on and looked around. They let me see things more clearly but the new lenses didn’t filter out the policeman. He was still there sitting inside the door, moving his jaws scissorwise like a camel. “Have you got a cigarette?” I asked.

  “Not me, professor.” He exhibited a wad of tobacco between his teeth. Then he moved to the window to spit.

  I noticed that the window was the same as those in McKinley Hall: the heavy steel-sashed lower pane swung outward from the top, supported by steel arms at the sides. I remembered that the hospital was a university building, built at the same time as McKinley, by the same contractor. I also noticed that my room was on the ground floor of the hospital, and that the window
was only a few feet above the lawn of an inner courtyard.

  I said to the policeman, “Would you get me a pack of cigarettes? The booth is just down the corridor, I think.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “My orders are to stay here.”

  “You don’t think I’m going to run away in a nightshirt that barely covers my navel, do you?”

  “A guy ran away from this hospital once without anything on at all,” the policeman said. “He was coocoo.”

  “Listen, I haven’t had a smoke for twenty-four hours. I’ll give you two dollars for twenty cigarettes.”

  “Where’s the money?”

  “At the station. What’s your name? I won’t forget you.”

  “Stevenson,” he said. “Robert Louis Stevenson.”

  “You’re looking better, R.L.S.,” I said. “Will you do it?”

  “Well, I hate to see a guy suffer. What brand?”

  “They’re milder,” I said. “My throat needs kindness.”

  He spat out of the window again and sauntered out of the room.

  The window had given me an idea. I got out of bed and opened the lower section wide, so that the pane was horizontal, with two-foot spaces below it and above it. Across the courtyard in another wing of the hospital, a window-cleaner was cleaning the upper pane of another window like mine. He had opened the lower pane wide and was sitting on it as he worked. When I saw the window-cleaner, my idea became a momentary obsession.

  I climbed onto the sill and sat on the pane like the window-cleaner, with my feet on the sill. I raised my feet and swiveled on the cold, smooth glass, keeping my weight on the inner end of the pane. When my feet were pointing outwards, I leaned back and slid forward until my legs were hanging over the outer edge and my shoulders rested on the steel sash at the inner edge.

  I felt like somebody’s sweetie laid out on a table in St. James Infirmary, and I wondered what an unconscious man would do if he came to in that position.

  There was a bellow from the room behind me, “Hey!” and I sat up startled. The window partly closed under my weight and I tobogganed into air. But it was a drop of only four or five feet and I landed on all fours in the grass without hurting myself.