Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  “Christopher—I need help . . .”

  Her voice brought me bolt upright in the chair. “Marilynn—what is it?”

  “Stanley . . . He’s dead . . . Two shots; two bullets . . . Can you come—right away?”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said lamely. “What happened?”

  “Please—can you just come up? Now I need you, darling . . .”

  She sounded forlorn, waiflike—an urchin begging for solace. I flung the van up the Pacific Coast Highway toward Topanga Canyon, cursing the clots of traffic that slowed me. I was filled with alarm and fear. Not for Stanley but for Marilynn: the implications of what she’d said were enough to put the coppery taste of fear on my tongue.

  Going up the corkscrew road I heard a police siren somewhere ahead of me. I went caroming past the turnoff to Tom Todhunter’s place and a moment later was slithering through the sharp bend where the lookout point gave me a glimpse of the hacienda. I could see the three-car garage from there—the doors open as they always were, all three cars parked abreast in the stalls. There were no vehicles parked in the driveway.

  As I sped away from the viewpoint I heard a crack of sound that could have been a gunshot; it was half obscured by the wailing sirens up-canyon and I couldn’t be sure.

  The police would get there ahead of me. Still, she must have telephoned me quite some time before she’d called them; they’d be from the Malibu sheriff s station and I’d had farther to come. If it hadn’t been for the evening traffic I’d have been there ahead of them.

  When I made the turn onto the gravel driveway I was hoping she’d have the sense to say nothing at all: nothing except, “I want to see my lawyer.” I wondered if she had one. Surely with all Stanley’s shady dealings and high-powered contacts she must know a good lawyer . . .

  The two black-and-white sheriff s cars were parked just behind Tom Todhunter’s distinctive old Packard. I left the van in the driveway, not bothering to move it out of anyone’s way, and went at a run up to the house. I didn’t ring the bell; the door was half open and I just walked inside. I could hear voices just along the corridor and went that way to the open door of Orcutt’s study.

  I heard an unfamiliar male voice: “There’s three empties in the cylinder here. I only see two wounds. Anybody see a bullet hole in the furniture or anyplace?”

  As I arrived at the door I heard Tom Todhunter say, “It could have gone out that window there.”

  They all were in that room: three men in deputy uniforms; one official-looking man with iron-grey hair in a khaki-colored suit and tie; Marilynn slumped in a chair looking faint; Tom Todhunter on his feet with his back flat against the bookcase, looking down at Stanley Orcutt—at least I assumed it was Orcutt. The dead man was lying on the floor with his back to me and there were two darkening stains on the back of his shirt. The smell in the room was acrid and not pleasant. I noticed the window beyond the desk was wide open; a bit of a breeze tickled my face.

  One of the cops discovered me in the doorway and went rigid. “Who’s this—who’s this?”

  It made Marilynn look up. She said: “Oh, thank God.” I went toward her as she rose to her feet; I embraced her.

  The one in plainclothes with the steel-colored hair said, “What’s your name?”

  “Christopher Ainsworth,” I answered. “What’s yours?”

  “McKittrick.” Then he added, with emphasis, “Sergeant McKittrick.” He had a pencil in his hand. From it a revolver dangled by its trigger guard. He turned to one of the uniformed cops and said, “Bag this,” and the cop produced a folded transparent plastic bag from his pocket. McKittrick dropped the revolver into it and the cop sealed the bag shut with a twist-tie and wrote something on its tag.

  Old Tom Todhunter said to me, “You see that, boy? Even dead he’s still ugly.” He looked down at the dead man again.

  During all this Marilynn clung to me, squeezing me with great violence as if by pressing herself close enough she could draw strength directly from me. She was breathing very fast. Weeping now; drawing in great sucking gasps. I held her in a tender grip and stroked her hair: “Okay, all right, take it easy now, just try to relax, it’s okay, you’ll be all right, go ahead and let it out”—talking to her as you’d talk to a skittish animal, just letting the words flow, trying to make the voice soothing.

  Over her head I could see Tom Todhunter’s cracked-leather face. He was gazing at us—at me or at Marilynn, I couldn’t tell which—and he looked preternaturally sad: compassion and concern flowed from his eyes. Then he turned to McKittrick and held his gnarled hands out, wrists together. “You got handcuffs or something?”

  McKittrick said, “I guess we won’t need them.”

  “You think I couldn’t make a run for it? You think I’m too old?”

  I didn’t understand. “What’s going on? What are you talking about?”

  Marilynn blurted out a sobbing cry. She turned in the circle of my arms and tried to focus through her tears. In a half strangled voice she said: “For God’s sake, don’t let him—”

  “Never mind!” old Tom roared. “I’ll confess any damn time I please. I’ve done us all a favor here. This world’s better off without that ugly man and his ugly condominiums. I ain’t sorry. I’d do it again.”

  She struggled to break free of my grasp. “Tom—you can’t—”

  “Honey love,” the old man said, “I can and I did. Now just hush up and let your young man take care of you there. There’s nothing you can do now. Nothing that happens now is going to change the way things are—this man can’t get any deader.” He prodded the corpse with his toe; it prompted one of the cops to grip his arm and pull him away; and Tom said in a dust-dry voice, “Sorry—I didn’t mean to disturb the evidence.”

  Then he turned to Marilynn. “I expect you stand to inherit from him. You’re not going to go ahead building those ugly things, are you? You won’t ugly up this landscape—I know you won’t. That’s what counts. The view.”

  By then I had it figured out and when Marilynn opened her mouth to speak another objection, I squeezed her arms very hard. It was surreptitious and the cops couldn’t possibly notice it, but she felt it all right and she didn’t speak again.

  After a while they took Tom away.

  I parked the van in front of the archway and walked in below his initials, carried my gear into the house and started to work. He took a long swallow of bourbon and grunted with pleasure. “First rubdown in nearly two weeks. Only things I’ve been missing—rubdowns and good whisky. Hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have minded staying in jail. Nice comfortable private cell and the food’s not too bad. But now you’re here I’m glad they made bail for me. By the way—I didn’t get your bill for last month.”

  “It’s on the house.”

  “Come on. I may be under indictment but I’m not broke.”

  I said, “We owe you more than anybody can ever pay.”

  “Well, somebody had to stop him before he ruined this whole countryside.”

  “That’s not what I mean. And you know it.”

  “She told you, did she?”

  “No. I figured it out for myself. I haven’t said a word to her.”

  “Nor she to you? I wonder how long she can keep it bottled up.” Then he twisted his head to squint up at me. “How’d you figure it out?”

  “I came up the road just behind the police. When I looked across the canyon there weren’t any cars parked in Orcutt’s driveway. And I heard a gunshot. I could hear it; the police couldn’t—not with those sirens right above their heads. A few minutes later I came up the driveway and your Packard was parked there, in front of the police cars. You got there just a couple minutes ahead of the cops. You took the gun away from her and you fired a shot out the window—so that they’d find powder burns on your hand. How’d you know about it? Did she telephone you?”

  “No. I heard the two shots—you know how sound carries in these hills. I went out by the pool to have a look around and I sa
w her come running out of the house over there and then run back inside. Too far to see much but I could tell she was distraught all right. Put that together with the noise of the shots I’d heard—I guessed something was wrong. I decided to go over and see if I could help. But the Packard wouldn’t start up right away and I had to hook up the quick-charger on the battery for fifteen, twenty minutes. Then I heard the sirens coming up from the bottom and I knew I’d need to hurry.”

  I said, “You gave her back her life.”

  “Well, she’s a sweet thing. She was going to tell you about it but I told her to hold off—I thought you might take it better coming from me. Look, he goaded her into it, he provoked it, he drove her to it the same way the picador drives the bull to it in the ring. Mr. Stanley Orcutt might as well have pulled the trigger himself. He’d found out about you. He was going to have you—punished. That’s how he put it. He flaunted that in front of her. He was going to run you out of business and then he made some talk about breaking your hands real good so you’d never massage anybody again. And of course naturally she was never to see you again. So forth, etcetera, so on.”

  I said, “Your check-up last week—”

  “Well, they found cancer. I guess it’s metastasized. I won’t be alive to go to trial.” The side of his face that I could see was smiling. “I kind of like happy endings,” he said.

  Hector Gomez

  Provides

  by John Lutz

  John Lutz has written so many good novels and short stories that he gets taken for granted. Yes, he’s won the Edgar; yes, one, perhaps two major movies have been made from his books (I say “perhaps” because at press time he’s got a deal pending); and yes, he’s generally regarded as one of the genre’s best stylists. Now it’s up to you to make him a household name. He deserves it.

  First published in 1985.

  Here, a hundred and fifty feet high on the ancient stone Tower of Saint Marcos, Hector Gomez felt free. The wind whipped about his lithe body, threatening to snatch him and hurl him out into high, cool space above the sea. A pelican flew past, lower than Hector, and gazed obliquely at him between wingbeats then soared in an ascending arc toward the sun. Below Hector the waves rolled in and became graceful ribbons of white surf, then boiling white water, against the rocks.

  To Hector’s right was the Avenue Del Mar, where three turista buses were parked in a line at the side of the road. Along the top of the stone wall above the sea, Mexican vendors had their glittering handmade wares displayed on blankets for sale to the Americans.

  Directly below Hector was a tiny, semi-isolated portion of the sea. Saint Marcos Cove. The swells roared into the miniature cove regularly and smashed in white foam over jagged rock along the shore. The sides of the cove, less than a hundred feet apart, were also lined with sharp rock. Only in its center, for brief moments, was the water relatively calm.

  Three times a day, Hector Gomez dived from atop the Tower of Saint Marcos into the center of the tiny cove. He had to time each dive perfectly with an oncoming swell, hitting the water just as the wave rolled into the cove. Otherwise the water in the cove was only about four feet deep, and the bottom was lined with hard pebbles rolled smooth by the waves. It was indeed a matter of delicate timing, Hector’s dive. And a matter of courage. Everyone, tourist and native alike, knew that the dive was extremely dangerous.

  And Hector knew the danger. With the detachment and freedom he felt before each dive came the accompanying price of fear.

  Below him the turistas were all out of the buses, staring up at him, pointing, focusing their cameras. Sunlight glinted off Mexican silver spread along the sea wall, off the windows of the buses and off upturned camera lenses.

  Hector’s feeling of freedom passed. It was time for business; he had Maria and their two children to feed and shelter. And the bus driver-guides below had by now finished telling the turistas the manufactured legend of Spanish gold hidden somewhere at the bottom of the cove. Perhaps someday the brave diver would emerge with a handful of doubloons and no longer have to risk his life; the prospect, said the guides, was what compelled him to face death daily, even though the gold was cursed.

  Hector let the first two swells roll into the cove and break; they were too small and the water in the cove wouldn’t be deep enough for the dive.

  The third wave appeared large enough. Fear tried to crawl up Hector’s throat again as he raised his right arm in a signal to the turista that he was about to dive, that they should ready their cameras. Now there was no turning back and still living a man’s life with self-respect.

  When the glittering emerald swell was at just the right point, almost ready to roll into the cove, Hector swallowed his near-panic, flexed his knees, and hurled himself off the tower.

  The freedom again. The fear. He had to leap far enough out to clear the outcropping of cliff below. Had to keep his back tightly arched before going into the vertical position, or he might flip over too far backward and land wrong, on his back, breaking himself on the water even before he struck the cove’s bottom. Yet if he didn’t straighten his body in time, there was the cliff.

  He timed it, uno, dos, tres . . . and he aimed his outstretched arms forward and down and brought his feet up, legs strained straight and rigid. He willed his body out away from the cliff, clenching his teeth so hard that a sharp pain shot through his jaws.

  The tops of his tucked-in toes brushed the outcropping of rock seventy feet above the water, and he knew it would be a good dive.

  Barely had he realized this when his fists broke the rushing surface of the wave rolling into the cove. There was a crash of water that he heard only for an instant. He arched his back again, flattening out quickly beneath the surface to slow his descent. Still he struck bottom hard, scraping his chest and thighs even though he pushed away from the smooth pebbles with his palms. His breath rushed out from between his lips in a graceful swirl of pearl-like bubbles, his blood pulsed in his ears, and he forced himself to stay calm as he rose to the surface.

  The turistas were applauding. Even in the sun’s heat, Hector felt the warm glow of their appreciation; they had been entertained. The Americans didn’t know that this part of his act, reaching shore without being smashed against the rocks, was almost as dangerous as the dive.

  Hector stroked cautiously toward where the surf broke over the rocks, watching warily behind him for the next wave to come crashing in through the mouth of the cove. When it came, he prudently ducked beneath it and let it roll over him, feeling its force pass him by, rather than let it carry him tumbling out of control toward the jagged rocks. As the wave receded and the water again became momentarily calm, he raised his head and stroked again for shore.

  He had to deal with three waves this way before he finally was safe on the rocks. Smiling, he climbed up to the road and walked wet and triumphant among the turistas, gratefully accepting their compliments, pesos, and the admiring glances of the young women. The turistas voiced appreciation of his great courage. He smiled and told them he hoped they had gotten good photographs to take home from their Mexican vacations.

  When the turistas had left, Vicente Escobar, one of the silver vendors, walked over to Hector and stood with him watching the exhaust-darkened square backs of the departing buses. A few of the turistaswaved from open windows, then quickly closed the glass to conserve air conditioning.

  “You’re going to kill yourself,” Vicente Escobar said. “Why do you continue to dive?” Even as he asked, he knew it was a question for which there was a universal answer.

  “I do it for this,” Hector said, holding up the fistful of pesos he had collected for his dive. He had in his hand over eleven hundred pesos. Almost seven American dollars.

  At the end of the day, Hector changed from his low-cut black trunks into worn jeans and a sleeveless red tee-shirt. Then, with his day’s profits locked in a steel box in the car’s trunk, he climbed into his ten-year-old gray Plymouth and drove south twenty miles to the village of Barbilla,
where he lived with Maria, their five-year-old son Eugenio, and their six-year-old daughter Ramona.

  The Gomezes’ lifestyle was much like everyone else’s in Barbilla. Their home was small, simple, with a dirt floor, and a sheet metal roof held down by nails driven through bottle caps whose cork linings kept out the seasonal rains. In the Gomez home was running water, and a bathroom. Because Hector dived rather than eke out a living as a fisherman, the Gomezes were only occasionally hungry.

  Maria Gomez watched her husband walk up the path to their home. To her right, where the land overlooked the ocean, she knew that the American Martin still stood before his canvas and easel, painting another of his seascapes. She had gone up the trail to the rocks and talked to the American again today. Why not? She was lonely, with Hector always gone. To be alone with two small children was enough to drive any twenty-five-year-old woman loco, especially a woman as energetic and pretty as Maria. Probably, she thought, lowering her hands to wipe grease from tortillas onto her print skirt, Hector wouldn’t object to her talking with the American Martin. But it would be just as well if Hector never found out. He had a man’s foolish pride.

  Eugenio saw Hector and ran out to embrace his father. Young Ramona followed. Hector hugged his children to him, smiling whitely, his lean muscles dancing and cording as he lifted a child in each arm.

  “It was a profitable day,” he said, as he lowered the children and bent to kiss Maria. “Almost four thousand pesos.” He was beaming proudly, this man who risked death to provide for his family, so she smiled at him. “Soon we might have enough saved to move away from here, into Mazatlan.”

  Into a house almost like this only larger, Maria thought, though she said, “Supper is almost ready.”

  He walked past her. She could feel the weariness emanating from his body. Herself weary, she followed him into the house and tended to the rice and shrimp on the propane gas stove. If Hector moved them to Mazatlan Maria might have an electric stove; she’d heard they were better. But she wanted more than that, really. She wanted her meals cooked for her like the rich in the cities. She wanted not just better clothes, but fine clothes. For herself. For her children. For the foolishly daring Hector.