The Way Some People Die

by Ross Macdonald

  “That isn’t her husband. Did he threaten you, or her?”

  “Heavens, no. He simply asked for Galley, very quietly. She came to the door and they talked together for a minute. I didn’t hear what was said. Galley closed the door and stepped outside. Then she came back in and put on her coat and left.”

  “Without a word?”

  “She said good-bye. She said she would be back soon. I tried to get her to eat her breakfast first, but she was in too great a hurry.”

  “Was she frightened?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen my daughter show fear. She is a very courageous girl, Mr. Archer, she always has been. Her father and I tried to teach her to face the world with fortitude.”

  I was standing above her, resting part of my weight on the edge of the refectory table. I noticed that she was looking at me with growing disapproval.

  “Is something the matter?”

  “Please sit down in a chair, Mr. Archer. That table was one of the doctor’s favorite pieces.”

  “Sorry.” I sat down.

  Her past-encumbered mind came back to the present again: “You’ve implied several times that Galley is in danger.”

  “I got the idea from you.”

  “Don’t you believe she will come back soon, as she promised? Has something happened to my girl, Mr. Archer?” One of her fists was steadily pounding one of her bony knees.

  “I don’t know. All you can do is wait and see.”

  “Can’t you do something? I’ll give you anything I have. If only nothing dreadful happens to Galley.”

  “I’ll do what I can. I’m in this case to stay.”

  “You’re a good man.” The fist stopped pounding.

  “Hardly.” She lived in a world where people did this or that because they were good or evil. In my world people acted because they had to. I gave her a little bulletin from my world: “Last night your daughter’s husband knocked me out with a sandbag and left me lying. I make a point of paying back things like that.”

  “Goodness gracious! What kind of a man is Galley married to?”

  “Not a good man.” Perhaps our worlds were the same after all, depending on how you looked at them. The things you had to do in my world made you good or evil in hers. “You’ll probably be hearing from the police some time today.”

  “The police? Is Galley in wrong with the police?” It was the final affront to Dr. Lawrence’s memory and the furniture. Her hands rose to her head and lifted her hair in two gray tangled wings.

  “Not necessarily. They’ll want to ask some questions. Tell them the truth. Tell them I told you to tell them the truth.” I moved to the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I think I know where Galley is. Did she go away in a car?”

  “Yes, a big black car. There was a second man driving.”

  “I’ll bring her back if I can.”

  “Wait a minute.” She followed me down the dim hallway and detained me at the front door. “There’s something I must tell you.”

  “About Galley? If it isn’t you’d better save it.”

  Her roughened hand moved on my sleeve. “Yes, about Galley. I haven’t been entirely candid, Mr. Archer. Now you tell me the police are coming here—”

  “Nothing to worry about. They’ll want to do some checking.”

  “A policeman was here Sunday night,” she said. “He warned me not to divulge the fact to anyone, not even you.

  “How did I come into the conversation? I entered this case on Monday.”

  “Lieutenant Dahl urged me to employ you. He’s a detective in the Vice Squad, he said, a very lovely young man. He said my girl was living with a criminal whom he was shortly going to have to arrest. But he knew that Galley was an innocent good girl, and he didn’t want to involve her if he could help it. So he gave me your name and telephone number. He said that you were honest and discreet, but even so I wasn’t to tell you about his conversation with me.” She bit her lip. “It’s terribly wrong of me to violate his confidence like this.”

  “When did he come here?”

  “Sunday night, after midnight. He got me up out of bed.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was in civilian clothes—an extremely handsome young fellow.”

  “Tall, wavy reddish hair, purple eyes, movie-actor’s profile, radio-actor’s voice?”

  “Do you know Lieutenant Dahl?”

  “Very slightly,” I said. “Our friendship never had a chance to come to its full flower.”

  CHAPTER 14: I went up the looping road in second and stopped at the green iron gate. The sentry was already out of the gatehouse with the shotgun. The sun burned on the oiled and polished barrels.

  “How’s the hunting?” I asked him.

  He had a bulldog face whose only expression was a frozen ferocity intended to scare off trespassers. “You better beat it. This is private property.”

  “Dowser is expecting me. I’m Archer.”

  “You stay in your car and I’ll check.” He retired to the gatehouse, from which a telephone wire ran to the main building. When he came out he opened the gate for me. “You can park over here by the fence.”

  He moved up close to me as I got out of the car. I stood still and let his hands run down me. They paused at my empty holster. “Where’s the gun?”

  “I ditched it.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Trouble.”

  Blaney met me at the front door, still wearing the wide black hat. “I didn’t expect you back.”

  I took a long look at the mushroom-colored face, the ground glass eyes. They told me nothing. If Blaney had shot Dalling he’d done it without a second thought.

  “I can’t resist your charming hospitality,” I said. “Where’s the boss?”

  “Eating lunch in the patio. You’re to come on out, he says.”

  Dowser was sitting alone at a wrought-iron table by the swimming pool, a crabmeat salad with mayonnaise in front of him. His short hair was wet, and he was wrapped to the chin in a white terrycloth robe. With his bulging eyes and munching jaws he looked like an overgrown gopher masquerading as a man.

  He went on eating for a while, to remind me of his importance in the world. He ate pieces of crabmeat and lettuce with his fingers, and then he licked his fingers. Blaney stood and watched him like an envious ghost. I looked around at the oval pool still stirred and winking with the memory of Dowser’s bathe, the spectrum of flowers that fringed the patio, all the fine things that Dowser had pushed and cheated and killed for. And I wondered what I could do to take them away from Dowser.

  He pushed the demolished salad away and lit a cigarette. “You can go in, Blaney.” The thin man vanished from my side.

  “Did you get my special delivery?”

  “Come again. Sit down if you want to.”

  I took a chair across the table from him. “I flushed the girl for you. Tarantine was too quick for me, or I’d have brought him in too.”

  “You flushed her! We had to find her ourselves. Some dame called in this morning that she was at her old lady’s. That wasn’t you on the phone, was it, doing a female impersonation?”

  “I don’t have the figure for it,” I said, looking him up and down.

  “So where do you come in?”

  “I brought her from Palm Springs for you. You said it was worth a thousand.”

  “The way I understand it, she came by herself. I pay for value received.”

  “You’ve got her, haven’t you? You wouldn’t have her if I hadn’t sent her home to mother. I talked her into it.”

  “That’s not her story.”

  “What is her story?”

  “She isn’t talking much.” He looked uncomfortable, and changed the subject: “Did you see Tarantine?”

  “I didn’t see him. He sapped me from behind. The girl tried to stop it, I think. There’s a possibility she isn’t in this with him. Whatever this is.”

  He laughed h
is unenjoyable laugh. “You’d like to know, huh?”

  “When I get beaten over the head, I’m interested in the reason.”

  “I’ll tell you the reason. Tarantine has something of mine, you maybe guessed it, huh? I’m going to get it back. The girl says she don’t know nothing about it.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “That doesn’t matter. He won’t be toting it around with him. When I get him, then I get it afterwards.”

  “Junk,” I said under my breath. If he heard me he paid no attention.

  “You working for me, Archer?”

  “Not for love.”

  “I offered you five grand for Tarantine. I’ll raise it five.”

  “You offered me one for Galley. You’re full of offers.” I was watching his face closely, to see how far I could go in that direction.

  “Be reasonable,” he said. “You brought her in, I’d of slipped you the cash just like an expressman at the door. You didn’t bring her. Blaney had to go and get her himself. I can’t afford to throw money away on good will. My expenses are a friggin’ crime these days. I got a payroll that would break your heart and now the lawyers tell me I got to pay back income-tax to clear myself with the feds.” His voice was throbbing with the injustice of it all. “Not to mention the politicians,” he added. “The God-damn politicians bleed me white.”

  “Five hundred, then,” I said. “We’ll split the difference.”

  “Five hundred dollars for nothing?” But he was just haggling now, trying to convert a bargain to a steal.

  “Last night it was a thousand. Only last night you didn’t have the girl.”

  “The girl is no good to me. If she knows where Joe Tarantine is, she isn’t telling.”

  “Let me talk to her?” Which was the point I had been aiming at from the beginning.

  “She’ll talk for me. It takes a little time.” He stood up, tightening the sash around his flabby waist. There was something womanish about the gesture, though the muscles bulged like angry veins in his sleeves.

  On his feet he looked smaller. His legs were proportionately shorter than his body. I stayed in my chair. Dowser would be more likely to do what I wanted him to do if he could look down at the top of my head. There were two-inch heels on the sandals that clasped his feet.

  “A little time,” I repeated. “Isn’t that what Tarantine needs to get lost in Mexico? Or wherever he’s gone.”

  “I can extradite him,” he said with his canine grin. “All I need to know is where he is.”

  “And if she doesn’t know?”

  “She knows. She’ll remember. A man don’t leave behind a piece like her. Not Joey. He loves his flesh.”

  “Speaking of flesh, what have you been doing to the girl?”

  “Nothing much.” He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Blaney pushed her around a little bit. I guess now I got my strength up I’ll push her around a little bit myself.” He punched himself in the abdomen, not very hard.

  “I wish you’d let me talk to her,” I said.

  “Why all the eager interest, baby?”

  “Tarantine sapped me.”

  “He didn’t sap you in the moneybags, baby. That’s where you get the real agony.”

  “No doubt. But here’s my idea. The girl has a notion I might be on her side.” If Galley had that notion, she was right. “If you muss my hair and shove me in alongside her, it should convince her. I suppose you’ve got her locked in some dungeon?”

  “You want to stool for me, is that the pitch?”

  “Call it that. When do I get my five hundred?”

  He dug deep into the pocket of his robe, slipped a bill from the gold money-clip and tossed it on the table. “There’s your money.”

  I rose and picked it up against my will, telling myself it was justified under the circumstances. Taking his money was the only way I knew to make Dowser trust me. I folded the bill and tucked it into my watch pocket, separate from my other money, promising myself that at the earliest opportunity I’d bet it on the horses.

  “It might be a good idea,” he said. “You have a talk with the girl before we rough her up too much. I kind of like her looks the way she is. Maybe you do too, huh?” The bulging eyes shone with a lewd cunning.

  “She’s a lovely piece,” I said.

  “Well, don’t start getting any ideas. I’ll put you in where she is, see, and all you do is talk to her. Along the lines we discussed. I got a mike in there, and a one-way window. I put the one-way window in for the politicians. They come to visit me sometimes, see. I take my own sex straight.”

  So does a coyote, I thought, and did not say.

  CHAPTER 15: After the sunswept patio, the room was very dim behind three-quarters-drawn drapes. A thin partition of light fell through it from the uncovered strip of window, dividing it into two unequal sections. The section to my right held a dressing-table and a long chair upholstered in dark red satin. I saw myself in the mirror above the dressing-table. I looked disheveled enough without even trying. The heavy door slammed shut and a key turned in the lock.

  In the section to my left there were more chairs, a wide bed with a red silk padded head, a portable cellarette beside the bed in lieu of a bedside table. Galley Tarantine crouched on the bed like a living piece of the dimness and the stillness. Only the amber discs of her eyes showed life. Then the point of her tongue made a slow circuit of her lips at the pace of a second hand:

  “This is an unexpected pleasure. I didn’t know I was going to have a cellmate. The right sex, too.” There was some irony there. Her voice, low and intense, was well adapted to it.

  “You’re very observant.” I went to the window and found that it was a casement, but bolted top and bottom on the outside.

  “It isn’t much use,” she said. “Even if you smashed it, the place is too well guarded to get away from. Dowser plays with gunmen the way other spoiled little boys play with lead soldiers. He thinks he’s Napoleon Bonaparte and he probably suffers from the same anatomical deficiency. I wouldn’t know myself. I wouldn’t let him touch me with a ten-foot pole.” She spoke quietly but clearly, apparently taking pleasure in the sound of her own voice, though it had growling overtones. I hoped that Dowser was hearing all of this, and wondered where the mike was.

  Perhaps in the cellarette. I turned from the window to look at it, and the light fell on my face. The woman sat up higher on her heels and let out a little gasp of recognition. “You’re Archer! How did you get here?”

  “It all goes back about thirty-seven years ago.” She was too bright for a Lochinvar approach. “A few months before I was born, my mother was frightened by a tall dark stranger with a sandbag. It had a queer effect on my infant brain. Whenever anybody hits me with a sandbag, I fall down and get up angry.”

  “You touch me deeply,” she said. “How did you know it was a sandbag?”

  “I’ve been sandbagged before.” I sat down on the foot of the bed and fingered the back of my head. The swelling there was as sore as a boil.

  “I’m sorry. I tried to stop it, but Joe was too fast. He sneaked out the back of the house and around to the porch in his stocking feet. You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you.” She shuffled towards me on her knees, her hips rotating with a clumsy kind of grace. “Let me look at it.”

  I bent my head. Her fingers moved cool and gentle on the swelling. “It doesn’t look too bad. I don’t think there’s any concussion, not much anyway.” Her fingers slid down the nape of my neck.

  I looked up into the narrow face poised over me. The full red lips were parted and the black eyes dreamed downward heavily. Her hair was uncombed. She had sleepless hollows under her eyes, a dark bruise on her temple. She still was the fieriest thing I’d seen up close for years.

  “Thanks, nurse.”

  “Don’t mention it.” The dark hawk face came down and kissed my mouth. For an instant her breast came hard against my shoulder, then she withdrew to the other end of the bed.

  It mad
e the blood run round in my veins too fast. But she was calm and cool, as if it were a thing she did for all her patients.

  “What did Joe do after that?” I said.

  “You haven’t told me how you got here.—Have you a comb?”

  I tossed her my pocket comb. Her hair crackled and ran smooth like black water through her hands. I looked around the room for Dowser’s one-way window. There was a double band of black glass along the edges of the panel heater near the door.

  “You wouldn’t be one of Dowser’s lead soldiers, would you?” She was still combing her hair, her bosom rising and falling with the movement of her arms.

  “That bum? I wouldn’t be here if I was. I told you your mother hired me.”

  “Ah yes, you’re Mother’s helper. Did you see her?”

  “No more than an hour ago. Stop combing your hair, it disturbs me.”

  A white grin lit her face. “Poor mans, did I excite hims?”

  “That was the idea, wasn’t it?”

  “Was it?” The tossed comb would have hit me in the face if I hadn’t palmed it. “What did Mother say?”

  “She said she’d give whatever she has if I could bring you back.”

  “Really?” For the first time she sounded and looked dead serious. “Did she mean it?”

  “She meant it all right. I said I’d do what I can.”

  “So you came up here and got yourself locked up. It took you less than an hour. You move fast, Archer.”

  I assumed an angry tone which turned out to be half real: “If I had my gun, it wouldn’t have happened. Your husband took my gun last night.”

  “He took mine, too,” she said.

  “Where did he go?”

  “You’ll never catch him now.”

  “You know where he is, then?”

  “I can guess. He didn’t tell me anything himself. He never did.”

  “Don’t kid me.”

  “I wouldn’t if I could,” she said. “It’s true. When I went to Las Vegas with him—we were married at Gretna Green—I thought he was a wrestling promoter. I knew he worked as a pinball machine collector before that, but that seemed fairly innocent. He didn’t tell me different.”