The Three Roads

by Ross Macdonald

  Quarter inch by quarter inch it opened. A single eye blinked through the crack, unfocused. Bret forced his shoulder through the opening.

  “You!” Miles said, straining against the door.

  With his back against the jamb Bret forced the door inward with his hands. Miles stepped back suddenly, and Bret, unbalanced, came headlong into the room. When he looked up, Miles was facing him with his right hand in front of him on a level with his navel, his thumb pressed down on the base of a four-inch knife blade that projected horizontally.

  The shining blade in its center brought the room into focus: the unrelieved ugliness of the stucco walls and the cracked ceiling; the uncarpeted floor worn through to the bare wood by endless traffic between the bathroom and the bed; the chipped metal bed with its frayed cotton bedspread crumpled in the central depression of the mattress; the single lamp on the bedside table wearing its scorched brown paper shade askew. No one came to such a room to live. You came to sleep for a night when nothing better was available; to escape from marriage or convention or police; or to wait. A pair of shoes on the floor and a coat draped over the only chair were the sole signs of occupancy. Miles had come here to wait, and the knife provided the meaning for which he and the room had been waiting.

  Bret put his hand in his pocket and found the butt of the gun. “Drop it!” he said.

  “You got no gun.” His tone was half questioning.

  With his forefinger curled snugly between the trigger and the guard, Bret withdrew his hand from his pocket and answered the question. Miles’ eyes, the balance of power, the focus of the room, shifted to the more potent weapon.

  “That I should get the cross from her!” Miles said. “A dirty double-crossing bitch like that!” His face contorted monkeylike in a strange combination of senility and childishness. “Sure, sure. Now tell me I’m talking about the woman you love.”

  His body was crouched and tense, but the knife, deprived of potency by the gun, hung down in his hand.

  “Drop the knife and close the door.”

  Miles looked down at the knife as if he had forgotten it. He compressed the spring, shut the blade into the handle, and tossed it onto the bed. He went to the door, circling Bret with Bret turning at the center of his circle, and took hold of the knob with his left hand. For an instant his body was quite still.

  “You wouldn’t make it,” Bret said. “Shut the door and come here.”

  When Miles turned from the closed door he was greatly altered by fear. His face was pale and seemed to have lost flesh. His carefully brushed blond hair was growing limp and dark, falling down over his temples like an adolescent’s. His mouth had lost its shape and was feeling for another shape. Bret hadn’t noticed before how wide and dark his nostrils were. A little thing like that could spoil his boyish good looks and give a corny touch even to his terror. A little thing like that was crucial when you were deciding to kill a man.

  “What do you want?” Miles said. His voice was unsteady and high.

  “Come here.”

  Miles moved toward him slowly, as if the gun projected a tangible force against his body.

  “Stand still.” Bret raised the hand that was holding the gun, so that Miles was looking directly into its muzzle. His eyes strained and crossed but could not look away. Suddenly his face was shining, streaming with sweat. Dark patches of wetness appeared on the breast of his shirt and under his arms. His whole body was realizing the fear of death. “No,” he whispered. “Jesus!”

  “How long did you know my wife?”

  “Me?” he babbled. “I didn’t know your wife. What makes you think I knew your wife?”

  “Answer me quickly.”

  “We were friends, that’s all. Just friends. She was a sweet kid. I never did anything to her.” His roving eyes were drawn back to the steady gun. “Oh, no,” he said. “Don’t shoot.” Two deep-curved wrinkles formed at the base of his nose. His teeth chattered between them. “You’re crazy,” he stammered.

  There was a souring smell in the air. There was a sour taste in Bret’s mouth, a sour sickness in his stomach. In the moment of triumph everything had turned sour. He was ashamed of his triumph, ashamed of the quality of his opponent. This chattering, sweating boy had violated his bed and killed his wife, but now he offered no resistance, no challenge. That wet shuddering softness was a sick anticlimax to the danger he had expected.

  But the man had killed and the man had to die. He sighted along the gun. Miles saw the movement of his eyes.

  He went down heavily on his knees. “Oh, God, Mr. Taylor, don’t shoot! I told her I wouldn’t bother her any more. It’s all off, finished. You’ll never see me again.”

  Bret stepped back a pace. “You told who you wouldn’t bother her? Miss West?”

  “Yeah, sure. I promised her.”

  “Were you and she in this together?”

  “Yeah, but I told you it was all off. You don’t have to worry about me any more, Mr. Taylor. I’ll give her back the money, all of it I got left. I’ll do anything you say.”

  For a sick and ugly moment Bret’s hand had squeezed on the trigger, trying to fire the gun. It was what he had come here to do. It was what Miles deserved. But he could not do it. He had never shot an animal in the field, and a man was harder to shoot, if only because he had a greater capacity for fear than any animal. His years in the Pacific had given him an insurmountable backlog of sympathy, of fellowship with fear. As the fever went out of him he realized that he had no right to impose the fear of death on anyone.

  “Get up,” Bret said.

  Miles watched the lowering arm, the gun declining from the level of his head toward the empty floor. He was still on his knees, but his posture seemed less abject.

  “Get up. I’m taking you to the police.”

  “You can’t do that!” Miles yelped. “They got my handprint. It’ll put me in the gas chamber.”

  “You’ll get what you deserve. I told you to get up.”

  “You take me to the cops, and I’ll spill everything. Everything, you understand? You may be crazy, but you’re not that crazy.”

  This is the end of Paula, he thought, of everything we planned for the future—the end of Paula and the end of me. But he could not kill Miles, and he could not let him go free. “Get up,” he said.

  Miles sprang toward him instead, his two hands at Bret’s ankles and his shoulder crashing against Bret’s knees. Bret went down on his back with a thud that knocked out his wind. His hand squeezed the gun in reflex. It fired once, then clattered on the floor somewhere behind his head.

  Miles’s hands were working up his body, pounding his stomach, tearing savagely at his face, closing on his throat. Bret jerked his hips, upward, unseating the man astride him and twisting onto his stomach. The hands returned to his throat from behind. Lowering his head, he brought his knees under him, straight-armed the floor, and rose to his feet. Miles was still behind him with his left arm hooked around his neck, his right fist pounding his kidneys.

  He dropped to his knees again, jerking Miles forward and down with him, and reached up for Miles’s head. He found it and took hold. Miles came over his shoulder, somersaulting in the air, and struck the floor with the full length of his body. But he was quick. Before Bret could pin him he was away and turning at the wall.

  Bret looked for the gun and couldn’t see it. A blow on the side of his face turned him around and sent him staggering to the other side of the room. Miles was after him before he recovered his balance. A heel in the small of his back slammed him against the wall and brought him to his knees with the feeling that his body had been broken in two. The second kick caught him a glancing blow on the nape of the neck. His head crackled and went numb, though he could still feel the raw half of his face that the rough wall had abraded. He twisted on his knees in time to receive the third kick in the stomach.

  Miles closed in on him then, striking rapidly at his face with both fists. They hurt, but they didn’t rock him hard. That was wo
nderful. Miles was fast and tricky, but he couldn’t hit. All he had to do was take the punishment and concentrate on getting to his feet. The trouble was that his legs were hard to handle. And he couldn’t concentrate on them properly with those fists in his face.

  He flung himself up and out, trying to butt with his head. Miles stepped back just far enough and cuffed him to the floor with a rabbit punch. He rolled sideways and felt the iron leg of the bed against his head. Then Miles was behind him again, and the hands were at his throat. Bret caught hold of an individual finger and bent it backward. Miles sighed, and the hands went away.

  Bret rolled onto his face, got his knees under him again, and raised the weight of his body with his legs. Miles caught him on the point of the chin with a long uppercut, almost before his hands had left the floor. He staggered backward, but his legs held him up. The man could not hit. That was wonderful.

  “You can’t punch,” Bret tried to say. He discovered that his mouth was too numb to be used for speaking. He put his left fist in front of it, cocked his right, and moved in on Miles on his badly disciplined legs.

  Miles waited for him, watching his feet. Bret feinted with his left awkwardly. Miles countered and came off balance. Bret’s right struck him heavily in the neck just below the ear. Miles backed away, stubbed his heel on the wall, moved sideways along it. Bret followed him.

  “You’re finished,” Bret said. “I’m going to spoil your face for good.” He had to speak elaborately, like an elocutionist, in order to form the words.

  Miles was no longer watching Bret’s feet. He had noticed his own left hand. Its second finger projected rigidly, bent back at a right angle with the back of his hand. He whimpered.

  Bret hit him between the eyes with all his force. He felt the bones move in his right hand, grinding against each other like stones in a bag. Miles was sliding down the wall inch by inch, his face turned sideways and his eyes fixed.

  Bret walked to the bed and lay across it. The cold metal of the knife handle came in contact with his face. He pushed it onto the floor with a weary gesture. All his remaining energy was going into an effort not to be sick. The sickness was pressing upward from his stomach into his throat.

  There was a slight movement on the floor behind him, the rustle of cloth against wood. Slowly he raised himself and turned. Miles was squatting in the corner with the gun. The flow of time stopped suddenly, like a river frozen in an instant by incredible cold. For the duration of the endless moment Bret looked into the muzzle, the dark, round mouth from which, like a roaring word of command imposing silence, death would come. All the traffic of his mind passed through that narrow hole, the rat hole through which his life, like a rodent fleeing from a collapsing building, was going to leave his body. Yet he was too tired to be afraid, and too certain that the end had come, to try to change it. He had found what he was looking for, and he had hoped for nothing more than this. Then the moment ended. Another moment began, and he was still alive.

  Someone knocked on the door with an object heavier than a fist.

  Bret said: “Come in,” without turning his head. He was dizzy with the effort of continuing to live, but all his muscles had tensed for action.

  “Stay out of here,” Miles yelled. “I’ll shoot.”

  “Stand back from the door,” a man’s voice bellowed. “We got a Tommy gun.”

  “So you brought the law, you bastard!” Miles was snarling. “I warned you.” He fired at Bret.

  A fraction of a second ahead of the bullet, Bret rolled off the bed onto the floor.

  A loud stuttering sounded from the balcony, and a series of irregularly spaced holes made an inverted V in the middle of the door. Miles fired at the door. Bret rolled to the wall and lay still.

  “Drop your gun and come out with your hands on your head,” the voice commanded. “This is your last chance.”

  Miles fired again from the corner and started for the door of the bathroom. The rapid fire of the submachine gun began again, and a row of holes marched across the door and the opposite wall. Miles fell to his knees in a little cloud of plaster dust and crawled the rest of the way to the bathroom door. At the threshold he fell on his face and stopped moving. Bright arterial blood spouted from his mouth.

  “You got him,” Bret called. “You can come in.”

  The door was flung open. For a moment it was quite empty, framing the quiet night. Then a uniformed policeman stepped in, carrying his Tommy gun in the crook of his arm. Behind him came the little man who ran the motel, and another armed policeman.

  Bret sat up with his back against the wall.

  “What’s your name?” the first policeman said.

  “Taylor.”

  “And him?”

  “His name is Miles.”

  “You mean it was.”

  Bret got to his feet and looked across the room. He had enough strength left to feel sorry for the dead man, enough strength to regret the loss of all the human blood that had run out on the floor. The rising sickness took him unawares. It doubled him over the bed, flooding his throat and mouth and nasal passages with bitterness.

  His enemy was dead. He had accomplished what he set out to do, but the only taste it left in his mouth was bitterness. His mind was as sick and turbulent as his body. His closed eyes looked down into a seething darkness that extended to the bottom of the night. Even there he found unreality, a shifting unreality that tugged at the foundations of his mind, and the reflection of a face he was afraid to recognize because it was so much like his own.

  “What a mess!” the first policeman said.

  “I was afraid they were going to make a mess,” said the little man.

  chapter 22

  The house was locked and dark when Paula reached home, but she felt no fear of going in alone. Having conquered the terrors of her mind and made her decision, she was immune to fear. Still, there were little things that continued to bother her. She was ashamed of having left the house without telling Mrs. Roberts that she wouldn’t be back for dinner. In fact she was even hungry. She turned on the lights in the front hallway and went through to the kitchen. Mrs. Roberts had written her a note in bold black capitals and left it on a chair in the center of the kitchen floor:

  Regret you did not see fit to eat dinner. Roast is in refrig. wrapped in wax paper.

  S. Roberts.

  She found the roast and made herself a sandwich. She wasn’t jittery any more. She felt quite mistress of herself in a spinsterly way; a little cold and dead, but that was to be expected. She had elected a permanent spinsterhood, and it was no laughing matter. The thing she had chosen tasted very much like despair. It was as tasteless as unbuttered bread. Still, there was a certain satisfaction in getting your teeth into a solid chunk of despair.

  She might have known from the beginning that it wouldn’t be a laughing matter. He hadn’t been merry in La Jolla; probably he had never been merry. His first kiss had been fierce and blocked, no gaiety in it. Even in love he was a man who moved with a weighty fatality, as if he meant everything he did and meant it forever. It was hard to believe that such a man could be so mixed up inside, still nursing a wound he had received when he was a baby. It was harder still to believe that mere words, even truthful words, could straighten him out and heal his wound.

  Watch it, West, she said to herself as she munched her grief-stricken sandwich. You’ve made up your mind to go through with it and you’re going to go through with it. No rationalizing, please. No more thinking at all. You haven’t the brains for it, girl. And on the other hand you mustn’t let your feelings be your guide. They made you what you are today. Just do what the doctor said.

  She turned off the kitchen lights and went to her sitting-room in the front part of the house. There she settled down to wait for Bret. She had no reason to feel sure that he would come, but she had that feeling. She had only to put in so much time, and then he’d have to come. While the hands of her watch crept round past ten thirty and then eleven, she put in tim
e.

  Waiting was the one thing above all others that she couldn’t stand, and she’d had so much of it lately. There were the months of waiting for him to come back after his ship went out from San Diego. More months of hopeless waiting after he married Lorraine. The worst months of all, suspended between mortal terror and boundless hope, while he was in the hospital in San Diego. She was still waiting, though the thing she had waited for had shriveled up and blown away. There was no more suspense, no more heights or depths. Her mind swung only in a little arc between the hope that he would come soon and the wish that he would not come for a long time. Even waiting was less painful than the end of the waiting was going to be.

  She tried some music on the record player, but it stirred up her emotions, and she didn’t want that. Emotion made the whole thing so real. She switched it off and listened to the silence in the house: the ringing deafness, the sound of time moving slowly through silence. You could hear it advancing step by step with your heartbeats, drumming you through the virgin country of despair.

  One thing about despair: it didn’t make you cry. You cried at its first onset, when you didn’t really believe it. You cried afterwards perhaps, when you felt like starting to live again and found out that you couldn’t. In the dead center of despair you couldn’t cry if you had to. And that was a good thing, for crying puffed up the eyes.

  The hands of her watch crept round to eleven thirty while she listened to the silence. She turned out the lamp beside her chair and watched the darkness too. Darkness and silence suited her quite well, but she’d trade them in for oblivion any day. You couldn’t work, love, and suffer for years without feeling a letdown when it was all off at the last minute. Without, in fact, wishing you were dead. There was some slight consolation in knowing that time was grinding away, and you were on the assembly line, and the finished product was oblivion.

  When she heard the car come into the street she knew that it was Bret. She’d have been quite as certain if it hadn’t been. She ran to the front door and flung it open. When she turned on the porch light her heart jumped. It was a police car at the curb. Bret climbed out slowly and stiffly, as if his body had aged years in a few hours.