Meet Me at the Morgue

by Ross Macdonald

  I left Sam Dressen parked out of sight around the corner. A bell tinkled over the door when I went in. The store was small and badly lit, its air soured with the odor of spilled milk which had long since dried and been forgotten. Behind a meat counter at the rear, a man in a dirty-fronted white apron was waiting on a customer, a young woman wearing tight blue jeans and large earrings.

  She asked him for a quarter of a pound of small bologna. He sliced it carefully, weighed it, and wrapped it. His hands were very large, and heavily furred with black hair. The hair on top of his head was thin and gray. His eyebrows were heavy and black. His face looked almost too thin and old to support the eyebrows.

  There was a rack of comic books and confession magazines beside the front counter, and I made a pretense of looking them over. The counter was crowded with things for sale: bottle openers and recaps, packages of beef jerky, humorous postcards, rubber lizards, bubble gum, artificial flies imbedded in plastic ice-cubes, cloves of garlic. On the wall behind the counter hung a display card studded with icepicks. The icepicks had red plastic handles.

  The man in the apron came forward to the cash register to make change. His customer departed with her bologna.

  He leaned forward with one hand on the counter, thrusting one sharp shoulder higher than the other. “You want something?”

  “One of those icepicks, behind you.”

  He turned and plucked one out of the display card. “I better wrap it for you. You wouldn’t want to stick yourself.”

  “I’ll take it as it is.”

  He handed it to me. So far as I could tell, it was identical with the icepick I had found in Lemp’s neck.

  “They haven’t been selling the way the salesman said they were going to sell.” His voice was bitter and monotonous, threaded by a disappointed whine. “You never can trust their say-so. I don’t think I sold four of them in six months. Anything else?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “That’ll be twenty-five cents and one cent tax. Twenty-six cents.”

  I gave him two dimes and six pennies.

  “I can always use the change,” he said.

  “How’s business?”

  “It could be better. It could be worse. I can remember times when it has been worse.” He slammed the drawer of the cash register. “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying business is good. I got the food plans and the supermarkets to contend with. People I carried on the books for years, they walk right by my store now that they got a little cash money in their pockets.” He looked at me with small hot brown eyes. “You on the road?”

  “I’m not trying to sell you anything, Mr.—”

  “Wolfe. Danny Wolfe.”

  “My name is Howard Cross.”

  “You live around here?”

  “I’m from Pacific Point.”

  “You don’t say. I got a married daughter lives in Pacific Point. You know her? Amy Miner? She married a fellow name of Miner.”

  “I know her fairly well.”

  “You don’t say. You should stick around. Amy’s on her way down here now. So you’re a friend of Amy’s.”

  “I know her husband better.”

  “Fred?” He leaned forward across the counter, resting his weight on his forearms. “Say, what happened to Fred? I always thought he was a good steady sort of fellow. When he came courting Amy in the first place, I was in favor of him long before she was. She had uppity ideas: an enlisted man in the Navy wasn’t good enough for her. Way back when she was a little girl, she had them big ideas of hers. I used to call her the Duchess.” He pulled his mind back to the present with an effort. “But it looks like I made a mistake about Fred, after all. He got himself into some pretty bad trouble, I heard. Hit-run driving, wasn’t it?”

  “He killed a man.”

  “So I heard. How did he happen to do that, anyway? When Amy came down to visit here this spring, she wouldn’t say a word about the accident. When I asked her about it, she flew right off the handle.” He scratched the day-old beard on the side of his chin. “I never could get Amy to tell me anything.”

  “Fred was drunk when it happened.”

  “You don’t say. I haven’t seen much of him these last years, but he never went in for drinking when I knew him. Maybe a couple of times he got himself plastered. Mostly it was the other way around. Amy used to gripe about how quiet he was. Course, it was pretty slow for her when he was all those months flat on his back in the hospital.”

  He glanced up suddenly, his eyelids crinkled under the crushing eyebrows. He was aware of something unspoken between us:

  “Say, has Fred had another accident?”

  “He was killed yesterday.”

  “I knew it!” he said in dry self-congratulation. “I knew there was something wrong when I was talking to Amy on the phone. I felt it in my bones. She didn’t tell me, but I knew it anyway.” Then he sensed his nakedness, and tried to cover it: “It’s a dirty shame, I say, a young man like him. Was he drunk again this time?”

  “He was sober this time. When did Amy phone you?”

  “A couple of hours ago. She said she was coming home. She didn’t tell me anything else. She’s a secretive girl. She always was a secretive girl. I call it false pride and vanity, if you want my opinion. Amy could never open out to anybody.”

  “What about Kerry Snow?”

  His eyes and mouth grew narrow. He peered anxiously around the store and out to the street. The street was still empty.

  “You know Amy pretty well, eh?”

  “Better than most people.”

  “Is Kerry still in California? I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “When did you see him?”

  “Back in ’45, I guess it was. He used to visit Amy, I guess you know that. I wouldn’t want to spread it around unless you already knew it. Amy came home to keep house for me after her mother died and Fred was in the hospital with his back. You know how it is. I couldn’t hardly blame her for stepping out a little, and he was a nice-appearing young fellow. You know Kerry?”

  “Slightly.”

  “Then you know what I mean. He’s the sort that appeals to women, I never was myself. I told her she was making a fool of herself. He was younger than her, and she was a married woman. I always say a married woman should stick with her first choice. But she went crazy over him, she started blowing all her money on dresses and beauty parlors. Personally I never could see this hair-dyeing stuff. I told her if you’re gray, you’re gray. I was gray myself before I was twenty-five, and Amy took after me.” He patted the top of his head affectionately. “Is Kerry still around in these parts?”

  “Permanently.”

  “You don’t say.” Wolfe’s face struggled with a confusion of vague memories and vaguer hopes. “Maybe with Fred gone, her and Kerry will be getting together.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You never can tell. She was all for ditching Fred and marrying Kerry back in ’45.” He nudged forward confidentially through the litter on the counter. “They were set to run off together when I put the kibosh on it.”

  “You put the kibosh on it?”

  “Yep.” His large hands came together like independent animals, and clasped. “I didn’t like the idea of any scandal, understand. Her mother and me had enough trouble with her when she was running around before she married Fred. So I did my duty as a father should. I was father and mother both to her by then.” He smiled for the first time, sentimentally. “I dropped a word to the wise, and Fred had it out with her. I guess he did, anyway. I didn’t see any more Kerry Snow around here.”

  His smile expanded. Then he realized, too late again, that he had given himself away. His smile became a rictus, teeth clenched like an old dog’s on a last tearing corner of life.

  “Maybe I oughtn’t to be talking. Amy goes her way and I go my way. You interested in Amy?”

  “Very much.”

  “Forget I said it, eh? Whatever you do, don’t tell Amy what I said. She can be a w
ildcat when she’s mad.”

  “I know she can.”

  “You’ve seen it happen, eh?”

  I didn’t answer. I was watching the street for Helen. She was a long time coming. The afternoon seemed to be stretching out forever, while Wolfe and I traversed the windy barrens of his mind.

  “She’ll be along soon,” he said. “Don’t worry. And you can set your mind at rest about Kerry Snow. There never was anything much between he and Amy. He drove down from L.A. a few times to see her and they went out dancing or to the movies, and that’s all there was to it. Ships that pass in the night.”

  He was watching me closely now, estimating the extent of my gullibility and the degree of my interest in his daughter. The situation had grown unbearable. I terminated it:

  “Mr. Wolfe, I’m sorry I have to tell you this. Amy is wanted for grand theft, and on suspicion of murder.”

  “Suspicion of murder? You’re a policeman?”

  “There’s a policeman outside. I was Fred’s probation officer.”

  “So that’s what happened to Fred,” he said to himself. “She killed him, eh? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.” His face was hard and shiny like polished white stone. “I always knew she’d come to no good end. She was defiant. More than once she threatened me with my life.”

  He turned suddenly, and trotted jerkily to the meat-block behind the rear counter. A large knife flashed like a sword in his uplifted hand. “She threatened me with this here knife! Right here in the store! Her own father!”

  He looked quite mad for a moment, a caricatured crusader leading an assault on the impregnable past.

  “Put the knife down, Mr. Wolfe.” Shock had as many manifestations as there were kinds of people, and I didn’t want him to cut himself.

  He dropped it and came trotting back on stiff knees, his eyes glowing like small brown electric bulbs in his perfectly white face:

  “You said grand theft. Did she steal something? What did she steal?”

  “A package of money.”

  “A big package?” His hands outlined a rectangular shape in the air.

  “It would be a fair size.”

  He ducked with mechanical speed and reached under the counter. Not knowing what to expect, I brought the gun out of my jacket pocket.

  He came up with a brown paper parcel, which he pushed away from him across the counter as if it were contaminated. “Is this the package you’re looking for?”

  It bore a yellow express-sticker and was addressed to Mrs. Amy Miner, care of Danny’s Neighborhood Market. I broke the string around it and tore it open. Sheaves of fifties tumbled out on the counter-top.

  His hands went out to the money. Then he saw my gun and drew back. He wiped his hands on the front of his apron.

  “When was this delivered, Mr. Wolfe?”

  “This morning. It come by express this morning. I didn’t know what was in it. Honest to God, mister, I didn’t know what was in it. She had no right to send it here. I never broke the law in my life.”

  A car door slammed outside. I looked up and saw the Lincoln with Helen at the wheel, and Amy Miner running forward across the sidewalk. She flung the door open. The bell jangled wildly.

  “Give me the money,” she said. “It’s my money. I earned that money.”

  Her father chattered behind me: “Keep her away. I don’t want anything to do with her.”

  Amy had stopped in the doorway, head thrust forward and elbows high, like a running figure caught in stone. The whole weight of her attention leaned on the gun I was holding. Sam Dressen came up behind her quickly and softly. Blue steel handcuffs glinted in his hand. He circled her leaning body with his arms and snapped the handcuffs on.

  She cried out, very loudly: “It isn’t fair! It’s my money! Thieves! Dirty robbers!”

  Later, she said: “I didn’t do it for money. I only did what I had to do all along.”

  Daniel Wolfe had closed his store for the rest of the day and led us back through it into his living-room. Its blinds were drawn, but some light leaked around them onto yellowing curtains, a worn and dusty carpet, a mohair davenport with balding arms, an old cabinet radio. There were photographs of two women on the radio. One was a wooden-framed studio portrait of a smiling girl in leg-of-mutton sleeves and sailor hat, probably Amy’s mother. The other was an enlarged copy of Kerry Snow’s photograph of Amy.

  Wolfe peered at them through the dim mote-laden air, then sat down with his back to them. The armchair he chose seemed large for him. Tears glittered in the hollows of his head. There were no tears on Amy’s face. She sat opposite me on the davenport, with Sam and Helen beside her. A line of light from the window fell slanting across the three of them, touching Helen’s head with fire, decorating Sam’s blouse with an honorific yellow sash, gleaming dully on the cuffs on Amy’s wrists. All the time she was speaking, her hands were pulling back and forth, tugging this way and that against the tightened steel rings.

  “They didn’t leave me any alternative,” she said. “Kerry found me the end of January. This Art Lemp came along with him. Lemp was the one that tipped Kerry off where I was, and Lemp had this plan for kidnapping Jamie. Kerry said I had to help them. He said I had to do my part in it to pay him back for all those years in prison. He didn’t believe me when I told him that Fred turned him in, that Fred must have followed us to the flat in L.A. that last weekend we had together.

  “He wouldn’t listen to reason. He was ready to kill me if I didn’t help them. What could I do? I said that I would go along with their plan. They told me that they would be back the next Saturday for another conference. Lemp called them conferences. All that week my mind was a blank. I couldn’t think. I was scared to death that Fred would find out about Kerry coming back. I had this terrible guilty feeling about Kerry. It wasn’t the kidnapping plan. That didn’t worry me then. I thought it was just a crazy dream they cooked up, that it couldn’t work.—It was Kerry. From the first time I saw Kerry Snow, I knew my life would stand or fall with him. It was more than a guilty feeling I had. I felt surrounded, like the things were coming to pass that I knew were coming, way back in ’45 when Kerry and me went together, the first time.

  “I got Fred drunk that Saturday night. It was his first time in two years, but Fred was always a pushover for liquor. I bought him a bottle myself and fed him a few triples after supper so he wouldn’t know what was going on. Then I took the Lincoln and went to meet them at the time they said. It was ten o’clock they said.

  “I didn’t have any plan to kill Kerry. I wasn’t thinking. I just felt surrounded. It happened like automatically when I saw them standing there in the road beside their car, two little men there standing in my lights. Lemp saw me coming and got away. He rolled away under their car. But I knew I hit Kerry. I felt the bumps, double bumps. I didn’t care. I loved him so much, but he didn’t love me any more.

  “I drove up on the ridge away from the city and parked for a while. I tried to think. There was a moon that night. I remember how it looked, shining on the water. It was pretty on the water. I sat there watching it for a while. All I could think was: ‘I killed Kerry tonight, and I’m as cool and calm as moon on the water.’ That is the way I felt.

  “When I went back, their car was gone. I said to myself: ‘I frightened you off, Art Lemp. I’m a better man than you are, Art Lemp.’ Kerry was lying on the side of the road. He looked dead. He didn’t look like Kerry. He looked like a picture of a dead man all black and white in the moonlight. I didn’t stop. I didn’t want to go near him. That way I could kid myself that he was never alive.

  “Fred was fighting blind drunk when I got home. His bottle was gone. He wanted another bottle. I told him he was too far gone to drive, but he wouldn’t listen. He was blind drunk and deaf drunk. They picked him up that way in town—I don’t know how he ever got as far as town. What could I do? I let him take the blame for what I did to Kerry Snow.

  “What else could I do?” she asked us, grinding her bony wrist
s against the handcuffs. “If I confessed that I was the one, they’d know I did it out of malice and forethought. They’d dig it out all about Kerry and me, how he went over the hill so he could stay with me, and all those days we had in the flat together, and how Fred’s jealousy sent him up to the pen. I couldn’t tell them. I couldn’t tell Fred, either. He could never hold anything back, he always went by the rules. He’d broadcast it to the world.

  “Fred never did find out that it was Kerry, and he never did find out that I was the one. I thought for a while, when he got his probation and all, that things would turn out for us yet. Then Art Lemp came back one night. He was scared of me now, I could tell by the way he acted, only he wasn’t scared enough. He thought he was smarter than me, that he could outsmart me and out-talk me. I let him think that.

  “Lemp told me how lucky I was. He told me he did me a favor, by taking all the stuff out of Kerry’s clothes so the body couldn’t be identified. Now it was my turn to do him a favor, he said. He was full of his plan to take Jamie, still burning up with that plan. He said he was a mastermind, that he could operate by remote control and never get caught.—I was the one that was caught. I had to do what he said, I had to tell him what the Johnsons did at all different times of the day, and spy on Mr. Johnson’s savings-book to see how much cash there was. But that last week I worked out a plan of my own.

  “He wasn’t even going to pay me!” she cried in a surge of anger. “Not a red cent was he going to pay me! A man so cheap, didn’t he deserve to die?”

  “He deserved to die,” I said.

  My agreement seemed to calm her. She went on: “And I was the one who had to do his dirty work for him. The hardest part was Saturday morning. I had to lie to Fred and make him believe me. I told him Mrs. Johnson sent him a message, that she was sick in bed and sent him a message through me. She was worried, I told him, because somebody threatened to kidnap Jamie. He was to take Jamie off to the desert house where he would be safe from the kidnappers over the weekend.