Find a Victim

by Ross Macdonald

  I moved up close to her. “Your life isn’t over, it’s only starting.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t console me with rustic philosophy. —No, forgive me for saying that. You’ve been kind to me, right through from the beginning.”

  “It was easy, Katie.”

  “He said I wasn’t a woman. I am a woman, aren’t I?”

  I turned her by the shoulders and held her. She gave me her mouth. She said with her lips against my bandages:

  “I’m sorry you’re hurt, Lew. Please don’t take any more chances.”

  “I won’t. It’s nothing.”

  “Am I a woman, really? Are you—attracted to me?”

  I couldn’t answer her question in words.

  After a time, she said: “I feel like the widow of Ephesus.”

  “I’m full of hard sayings, and you’re loaded with literary allusions. But go ahead. It’s very educational.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Why not?”

  She pulled my head into her carved white shoulder and whispered in my ear: “Did I make you feel like a man, Lew? Did I?”

  “I felt like a man before. I still do.”

  “You’re bragging.”

  “All right, I’m bragging. There’s nobody to hear me except you, and you don’t mind.”

  She laughed. There were footsteps on the veranda, dragging and uneven. The doorbell chimed.

  CHAPTER 23: MacGowan had shaved off his beard. His face was folded neatly like shiny brown paper under a sedate gray hat. He had on a threadbare blue serge suit and a black tie. It had aged him to cut off his beard and put on his Sunday clothes and drive down into the valley.

  “Josephine came to me after all,” he said.

  I stepped outside and shut the door behind me. “Is she at the lake now?”

  “No, she’s on her way again. She’s been roaming around in the desert all day, looking for Bozey. She was pretty petered out. I tried to get her to stay with me, but she wouldn’t stay. All she wanted from me was directions how to get to Traverse.”

  “Traverse?”

  “That’s where Bozey is, apparently. Josephine’s gone to find him.”

  He leaned against the doorframe, exhausted by the effort of speaking out. I put an arm around his shoulders to steady him. His bones were scarecrow thin.

  “Did she tell you this?”

  “She didn’t say he was there; I figured that out for myself. When they were with me in September, he was very much interested in the place—I should of thought of that sooner, when I was talking to you. He asked me quite a few questions about it.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Where it was, and how to get there.”

  “And you told him?”

  “I didn’t see no harm in it at the time. Traverse is over on the other side of Baker, the Nevada side. You turn off the highway at a little hamlet called Yellow Ford, and from there it’s about ten miles up through the mountains to Traverse. It’s real deserted country.”

  “Are the roads passable?”

  “That’s what Bozey wanted to know. He said he would like to try it some time for a camping trip. The road’s passable all right—least it was the last time I was there. Most of it is blasted from solid rock.”

  “Could he take a big truck up?”

  “I don’t see why not. The road was built to carry heavy equipment.”

  “And Jo’s on her way there now?”

  “She must be. She got me to draw her a little map of how to get to the place.”

  “Will you draw one for me?”

  “Nope.” He showed his yellow teeth in a grim smile. “I’m going along with you, son. I’m not as fast on my feet as I once was, but I can still fire a gun if it comes to that.”

  I didn’t try to talk him out of it.

  When I went down to the street after saying good-by to Kate, he had brought a rifle out of the back of his A-model Ford. It was a medium-caliber sporting rifle with a telescope sight. He laid it carefully on the back seat of my car and climbed into the front.

  I pressed the starter. “What decided you to come to me?”

  “I believe you’re a fair-minded man. You talk like one. I’m taking a chance that you’ll act like one.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  I turned south at the boulevard, toward the city limits. It was twilight, and lights were coming on in the houses. The mountains lay like great veiled women against the green east. Some random stars began to nail up the edges of the evening.

  MacGowan’s voice came out of the thickening darkness: “Josephine’s fallen among thieves. I couldn’t sit by and see it happen and do nothin’ about it. You should have seen her today, all sweaty and mussed, with a dirty face and that scared look in her eyes. I hardly knew her.”

  We stopped in Barstow for sandwiches and coffee, in Baker to check my tires. The air turned colder as night deepened. An hour or so on the far side of Baker, different mountains rose on the horizon. Above them the stars were massed now in white clusters. A few lights gleamed at their feet like bright droppings from the sky.

  They slid along the flat terrain toward us. Suddenly the mountains were almost on top of us, blotting out one side of the sky.

  MacGowan broke a long silence: “That’s Yellow Ford now.”

  It was a general store, a filling station, a few frame houses and tarpaper shacks, a boarded-up real-estate booth surrounded by miles of vacant real estate. A canvas banner on the filling station announced Genuine Rattlesnakes and Other Reptiles on Display: Stop and See the Monsters of the Desert.

  A man in a red plaid shirt came out of the station when I pulled up by the pumps.

  “Ethyl.”

  He started the pump. His face was like a worn saddle ridden by circumstance. “You want to see my snakes while you’re waiting? I got a diamondback close to five feet long.”

  “I’m looking for a different kind of animal.”

  “A Gila? My Gila died.”

  “A man.” I described Bozey.

  There was an extended desert pause. “I haven’t seen him this week,” he said finally.

  “But you have seen him?”

  “If it’s the same young redhead. He came in here for gas a couple of times in the last month, and hung around for a while shooting the breeze.”

  “What was he driving?”

  “Buick coupe.”

  MacGowan nudged me. “It’s him.”

  “Where was he staying?”

  “He didn’t say. Somewhere in the hills.” He waved his arm toward the mountains. “When he first turned up, he bought a sleeping-bag and a camp-stove at the store across the way. Claimed he was prospecting for uranium, but he was no prospector. He couldn’t tell iron ore from copper.”

  He shut off the pump and leaned on the open window. His sun-faded eyes squinted through crinkled holes in his leather face. “He got me a little nervous after a time. I had a funny feeling, last time he was in, that maybe he was fixing to hold me up. He didn’t, though.”

  “When was that?”

  “Along about the middle of last week. Right after that he vamoosed. What was he doing out here, anyway?”

  “Hiding out.”

  “From the draft?”

  “Could be. I heard he went through here early this morning, driving a big semi with an aluminum box. Did you happen to see him?”

  “No. I don’t open till eight.”

  “Maybe you saw a girl this evening. A pretty little brunette in an MG sports car?”

  “Yeah, she went through a couple of hours ago. Didn’t stop.”

  MacGowan leaned across me. “Is the road to Traverse open?”

  “Far as I know. It hasn’t snowed up there yet. Come to think of it, it must be open. A truck went up there today.”

  “An aluminum-painted truck?” I said.

  “A blue truck, big blue van, looked like a furniture van. It went up about four o’clock this afternoon. In daylight yo
u can see part of the road from here.” He added as I paid him for the gas: “If you’re thinking of driving up to Traverse tonight, you better watch the slides. It hasn’t been cleared for a couple of years.”

  I thanked him and drove on.

  MacGowan leaned forward in the seat as if he could will the car to go faster. “Josephine’s there all right.”

  “She’s not the only one.”

  CHAPTER 24: For the first few miles after we left the highway, the road was fairly straight and smooth. Then it began to twist and turn on itself. Its surface was pitted with chuckholes, and I had to take it slow.

  About halfway up the mountain, the wheels of my car plowed through a sand slide below a collapsing cutbank. On the outer side of the road the ground fell away steeply into a canyon. Another slide ahead lay brown and furrowed in the headlights. I stopped the car and got out. MacGowan stayed in the front seat.

  The slope of sand covered more than half the road. There were wide tread-prints in the edge of the sand: the spoor of a big truck. Examining them more closely with my flashlight, I found two sets of tire marks, one partly superimposed on the other. Both were fresh.

  I stood up with my heart knocking on my ribs. Somewhere on the black heights above me a little whining sound fretted the silence. I didn’t move. The sound grew in my ears. It was a car engine coming down the mountain.

  Light flashed against the sky, defining a rocky buttress up ahead. I went back to my car and switched off the lights. There was no time to move it. I took out my gun and crouched behind the open front door. MacGowan reached for his rifle.

  Headlights swung their long beams out over the canyon, swung back onto the road, and blazed in my eyes. The little sports car leaped around the curve. Its horn hooted. Then its brakes took hold. It swerved and skidded broadside into the sand and almost turned over. Flung out sideways over the low door, its driver fell face down in the road and lay still.

  “It’s Josephine,” MacGowan said.

  I ran to her and flashed my light on her face. Twin worms of blood crawled down her upper lip. Her eyes were fixed with shock, but she was conscious.

  She tried to sit up and failed. I supported her with one arm. Her flesh was very soft, hung on an armature so frail that she seemed boneless.

  “I’m hurt,” she snuffled. “They hurt me way inside.”

  I wiped her bloody lip and saw then that her dress was ripped to the waist. Her body was marked with bruises that weren’t accounted for by the fall she had taken.

  MacGowan climbed out of my car and toiled up the road toward us.

  I said to the girl, with a hardness I didn’t feel: “All you hustlers get hurt sooner or later. It’s fair enough when you make a living hurting other people.”

  “I never hurt nobody in my life.”

  “What about Tony Aquista?”

  “I didn’t know about Tony. Honest, mister.”

  “What about Kerrigan?”

  “Don was dead when I got there. I didn’t shoot him.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know. Neither does Bozey. I was supposed to meet him. We were going away together, him and me.”

  She was coming out of shock. Her eyes were beginning to move and regain their luster. A single tear left a bright track on her face.

  I made a stab in the dark: “What happened to the money that Bozey gave Kerrigan?”

  She didn’t answer. But her head moved on my arm, involuntarily, and she glanced at the sports car from the corners of her eyes.

  MacGowan said behind me: “Josie, are you all right?”

  “Sure. I’m swell. Everything’s great.” Her pointed tongue moved over her upper lip. “Grandpa?”

  I left her with him and searched the two-seater. There was a package under the boot in the space behind the driver’s seat, an oblong package wrapped in newspaper and tied with dirty string. I tore it open. It was full of money, fifties and hundreds and five hundreds, all new bills. The newspaper it was wrapped in was a Portland Oregonian, dated last August. I rolled it up again and put it in the locked steel evidence case in the trunk of my car. Money and marijuana, the stuff that dreams are made of.

  Jo was on her feet now, held in MacGowan’s arms. She was mewing like a kitten, a draggled kitten in a stormy world:

  “They made a circle around me. They broke open one of the cases and got drunk and took turns at me. Over and over and over.” Her voice skipped up the octaves of despair.

  His face was granite against her tangled hair. “I’ll kill them, lass. How many of them are there?”

  “Three of them. They came from Albuquerque to pick up the whisky. I should have stayed with you, Grandpa.”

  He frowned in puzzled grief. “Didn’t your husband try to stop them?”

  “Bozey isn’t my husband. He would have stopped them if he could, I guess. But they took his gun before that, and beat him up.”

  I touched her shuddering back. “Are they still up there, Jo?”

  “Yeah, they were loading the truck when I sneaked out. They’ve got the other truck stashed in the old fire station.”

  “Show me the place.”

  “I don’t want to go back there.”

  “You don’t want to stay here by yourself, either.”

  She looked at my car, then up and down the road as if its shadowed length was the years of her life, past and future. Without a word she climbed into the front seat.

  I steered through the narrow space between the sports car and the drop into the canyon. MacGowan nursed his rifle on his knees. Jo sat between us, staring at nothing.

  “Did you kill Kerrigan for the money?” I said.

  “No. No. I went out there to meet him, and found him in his blood.” Her voice was a hopeless monotone.

  “Why the runout, then?”

  “Because they’d think I killed him. Just like you do. But I wouldn’t hurt Don Kerrigan. I adored him.”

  MacGowan spat into the wind.

  I said: “You took the money from him.”

  “So I took the money. I had a right. Don was dead, he had no use for it. It was lying there on the office floor and I picked it up and took a car and went to look for Bozey. All I wanted was out.”

  “And twenty thousand dollars. Did Bozey tell you to get the money and join him?”

  “No, nothing like that. I thought I was going away with Don. I didn’t even know where Bozey was for sure.”

  “That’s true. I told you that,” MacGowan said.

  She lifted her face to look at me. “Why don’t you let me go? I didn’t do anything wrong, except for taking the money. And it was just lying there.” Her voice brightened. “Keep it yourself, why don’t you? Nobody will know. Grandpa won’t tell.”

  MacGowan let out a sound that might have been a sob, or a snort of repugnance.

  I said: “The money isn’t any good. Didn’t you know that?”

  “Come again.”

  “The money was hot, so hot that Bozey couldn’t spend it. He took it from a bank in Portland, and they had a list of the bills. Nobody could spend it, anywhere. Or is this old stuff to you?”

  “I don’t believe you. Bozey wouldn’t do that.”

  “He did, though. He was conning Kerrigan. The money was Confederate.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said hotly.

  “Am I? Think about it, Jo. Would Bozey risk twenty grand on a deal like this if the twenty grand was any good to him? Nobody would.”

  She sat still for a while. I could feel her beside me, and almost sense the workings of her small dark mind. Her violated personality was closing up again, hard and tight and defensive as a fist.

  “If that’s straight, I’m glad they beat him. He had it coming. I’m glad they cheated him out of his payoff.”

  We climbed toward the ridge, which rose solid black against the star-punctured sky. I nursed the laboring engine along in second, swinging from one side of the road to the other to avoid the holes and slides.

 
“Jo?”

  “I’m still here. I haven’t gone any place.”

  “You said last night that you were elected to flag down Aquista’s truck, then something changed the plan. What was it?”

  “Don didn’t want me to take the risk,” she said with a certain pride. “That was the main thing, anyway.”

  “What were the other things?”

  “He did a favor for a friend of his. Then this friend of his did a favor for him.”

  “By stopping the truck and shooting Aquista?”

  “Stopping the truck was all. Don didn’t figure on any shooting. This friend of his crossed him up.”

  “Who was it, Jo?”

  “Don didn’t mention names. He said the less I knew, the better. He wanted me to be in the clear if the blueprint didn’t work out.”

  “Was it Church? The sheriff?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Meyer?”

  Still no answer.

  “What was the favor Don did for his friend?”

  “Take it up with Bozey, why don’t you? He was in on it. Bozey went out in the desert with Don, Monday night.”

  “What were they doing out in the desert?”

  “It’s a long story. You wouldn’t be interested.”

  MacGowan clucked like a hen. “Don’t hold back now, honey. You ought to make a clean breast of everything.”

  “Make a clean breast, he says.” Her laugh teetered on the shrill edge of hysteria. “I had nothing to do with it. I’m clean. All I know is what they told me.”

  “Who?”

  “Tony, and then Don.”

  “What did Tony tell you Sunday night?”

  “Don said I should keep quiet about it. Only I guess it doesn’t matter any more, now that he’s dead. What does? Tony followed Anne Meyer up to Lake Perdida on Saturday. She was in Don’s cabin with some guy, and Tony was window-peeping. This doesn’t make much sense. Nothing that Tony did ever made much sense. He only had about forty-eight cards in the deck.”

  “What did he see?”

  “The usual, I guess. Beautiful music.”

  “Who was the man with her?”

  “He didn’t say. I think he was scared to tell me. The whole thing threw him, see. He was stuck on Anne Meyer, and when he looked in and her lying dead on the floor—”