The Chill

by Ross Macdonald

Her hooked fingers raked at his face, leaving three bright parallel tracks. He slapped her. She sat down on the gravel roof. The man picked up the half-empty cola bottle. Its brown contents gushed down his arm as he raised it, advancing on Hoffman.

  Hoffman reached under the back of his coat and took a revolver out of his belt. He fired it over the man’s head. The pigeons flew up from the neighboring rooftop, whirling in great spirals. The man dropped the bottle and stood still with his hands raised. The woman, who had been whimpering, fell silent.

  Hoffman glared at the glaring sky. The pigeons diminished into it. He looked at the revolver in his hand. With my eyes focused on the same object, I stepped out into the sunlight.

  “You need any help with these witnesses, Earl?”

  “Naw, I can handle ’em. Everythin’s under control.” He squinted at me. “What was the name again? Arthur?”

  “Archer.” I walked toward him, pushing my squat shadow ahead of me across the uneven surface of the gravel. “You’ll get some nice publicity out of this, Earl. Solving the Deloney killing singlehanded.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” His eyes were deeply puzzled. He knew I was talking nonsense, as he knew he had been acting nonsense out, but he couldn’t admit it, even to himself. “They hid the body in the basement.”

  “That means we’ll probably have to dig.”

  “Is everybody crazy?” the man said between his upraised arms.

  “Keep quiet, you,” I said. “You better call for reinforcements, Earl. I’ll hold the gun on these characters.”

  He hesitated for a stretching moment. Then he handed me the revolver and went into the penthouse, bumping the doorframe heavily with his shoulder.

  “Who are you?” the man said.

  “I’m his keeper. Relax.”

  “Did he escape from the insane asylum?”

  “Not yet.”

  The man’s eyes were like raisins thumbed deep into dough. He helped his wife to her feet, awkwardly brushing off the seat of her robe. Suddenly she was crying in his arms and he was patting her back with his diamonded hand and saying something emotional in Greek.

  Through the open door I could hear Hoffman talking on the phone: “Six men with shovels an a drill for concrete. Her body’s under the basement floor. Want ’em here in ten minutes or somebody gets reamed!”

  The receiver crashed down, but he went on talking. His voice rose and fell like a wind, taking up scattered fragments of the past and blowing them together in a whirl. “He never touched her. Wouldn’t do that to the daughter of a friend. She was a good girl, too, a clean little daddy’s girl. ’Member when she was a little baby, I used to give her her bath. She was soft as a rabbit. I held her in my arms, she called me da.” His voice broke. “What happened?”

  He was silent. Then he screamed. I heard him fall to the floor with a thud that shook the penthouse. I went inside. He was sitting with his back against the kitchen stove, trying to remove his trousers. He waved me back.

  “Keep away from me. There’s spiders on me.”

  “I don’t see any spiders.”

  “They’re under my clothes. Black widows. The killer’s trying to poison me with spiders.”

  “Who is the killer, Earl?”

  His face worked. “Never found out who put the chill on Deloney. Word came down from the top, close off the case. What can a man—?” Another scream issued from his throat. “My God, there’s hundreds of ’em crawling on me.”

  He tore at his clothes. They were in blue and orange rags when the police arrived, and his old wrestler’s body was naked and writhing on the linoleum.

  The two patrolmen knew Earl Hoffman. I didn’t even have to explain.

  chapter 23

  THE RED SUN sank abruptly when the plane came down into the shadow of the mountains. I had wired my ETA to the Walters agency, and Phyllis was waiting for me at the airport.

  She took my hand and offered me her cheek. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion, a little the worse for sun, and opaque smiling eyes the color of Indian enamel.

  “You look tired, Lew. But you do exist.”

  “Don’t tell me. It makes me feel tireder. You look wonderful.”

  “It gets more difficult as I get older. But then some other things get easier.” She didn’t say what things. We walked toward her car in the sudden evening. “What were you doing in Illinois, anyway? I thought you were working on a case in Pacific Point.”

  “It’s in both places. I found an old prewar murder in Illinois which seems to be closely tied in with the current ones. Don’t ask me how. It would take all night to explain, and we have more important things to do.”

  “You do, anyway. You have a dinner date at eight-thirty with Mrs. Sally Burke. You’re an old friend of mine from Los Angeles, business unspecified. You take it from there.”

  “How did you fix it?”

  “It wasn’t hard. Sally dotes on free dinners and unattached men. She wants to get married again.”

  “But how did you get to know her?”

  “I sort of happened into her at the bar where she hangs out and we got drunk together last night. One of us got drunk, anyway. She did some talking about her brother Judson, who may be the man you want.”

  “He is. Where does he live?”

  “Somewhere on the South Shore. It’s a hard place to find people, as you know. Arnie’s out there looking for him now.”

  “Lead me to the sister.”

  “You sound like a lamb asking to be led to the slaughter. Actually she’s a pretty nice gal,” she said with female solidarity. “Not bright, but she has her heart in the right place. She’s very fond of her brother.”

  “So was Lucrezia Borgia.”

  Phyllis slammed the car door. We drove toward Reno, a city where nothing good had ever happened to me, but I kept hoping.

  Mrs. Sally Burke lived close in on Riley Street, in the upper flat of an old two-story house. Phyllis dropped me off in front of it at eight-twenty-nine, having extracted my promise to come back and spend the night with Arnie and her. Mrs. Burke was waiting in full panoply on the upper landing: tight black sheath with foxes, pearls and earrings, four-inch heels. Her hair was mingled brown and blonde, as if to express the complexity of her personality. Her brown eyes appraised me, as I came up to her level, the way an antebellum plantation owner might look over an able-bodied slave on the auction block.

  She smelled nice, anyway, and she had a pleasant friendly anxious smile. We exchanged greetings and names. I was to call her Sally right away.

  “I’m afraid I can’t ask you in, the place is a mess. I never seem to get anything done on Sunday. You know the old song, ‘Gloomy Sunday’? That is, since my divorce. Phyllis says you’re divorced.”

  “Phyllis is right.”

  “It’s different for a man,” she said with some faint resentment. “But I can see you could use a woman to look after you.”

  She was one of the fastest and least efficient workers I’d ever met. My heart went down toward my boots. She was looking at my boots, and at the clothes I had slept in on the plane. On the other hand I was able-bodied. I had climbed the stairs unaided.

  “Where shall we eat?” she said. “The Riverside is nice.”

  It was nice and expensive. After a couple of drinks I ceased to care about spending Alex’s money. I began to be fascinated, in a way, by Sally Burke’s conversation. Her ex-husband, if I could believe her, was a combination of Dracula, Hitler, and Uriah Heep. He made at least twenty-five thousand a year as a salesman in the Northwest, but more than once she had to attach his salary to collect her measly six hundred a month alimony. She was having a rough time making ends meet, especially now that her little brother had lost his job at the club.

  I ordered her another drink and indicated mild sympathy.

  “Jud’s a good boy,” she said, as if somebody had just denied it. “He played football at Washington State and led the team in rushing. A lot of people in Spokane thought he would have made All-
American if he’d played for a better-known school. But he never got due recognition, he never has. He lost his coaching job out of sheer politics pure and simple. The charges they made were a lot of poppycock, he told me so himself.”

  “What charges?”

  “Nothing. They were a lot of poppycock, I mean it.” She finished her fourth martini and regarded me with simple cunning over the empty glass. “I don’t believe you told me what kind of business that you’re in. Lew?”

  “I don’t believe I did. I run a small agency in Hollywood.”

  “Isn’t that interesting? Jud has always been interested in acting. He hasn’t done any, actually, but he’s said to be a very handsome boy. Jud was down in Hollywood last week.”

  “Looking for an acting job?”

  “Anything,” she said. “He’s a willing worker, but the trouble is he isn’t trained for anything, I mean after he lost his teaching credentials, and then the dance studio folded. Do you think you could get him something to do in Hollywood?”

  “I’d certainly like to talk to him,” I said truthfully.

  She was tipsy and hopeful, and she wasn’t surprised by my interest in her brother.

  “That can be arranged,” she said. “As a matter of fact he’s at my apartment right now. I could call him and tell him to come over here.”

  “Let’s have dinner first.”

  “I don’t mind paying for Jud’s dinner.” She realized she had made a tactical error, and quickly back-tracked: “But I guess three’s company, eh? I mean two.”

  She talked so much about her brother at dinner that it was almost like having him there. She recited his old football statistics. She told me, with a kind of vicarious enthusiasm, all about his prowess with the ladies. She explained about the brilliant ideas Jud was always hatching. The one I liked best was a plan for a condensed version of the Bible, with all the offensive passages removed, for family reading.

  Sally couldn’t drink. She was coming apart by the time we finished eating. She wanted to pick up her brother and go and hell around in the clubs, but my heart wasn’t in it. I took her home. In the cab she went to sleep on my shoulder. This I didn’t mind.

  I woke her up on Riley Street and got her into the house and up the stairs. She seemed very large and loosely put together, and the foxes kept slipping. I felt as if I’d been nursing drunks all weekend.

  A man in shirtsleeves and form-fitting trousers opened the door of her flat. With Sally leaning on me, I got a quick impression of him: a man of half-qualities who lived in a half-world: he was half-handsome, half-lost, half-spoiled, half-smart, half-dangerous. His pointed Italian shoes were scuffed at the toes.

  “Need any help?” he said to me.

  “Don’t be ridic,” Sally said. “I’m in perfect control. Mr. Archer, meet brother Jud, Judson Foley.”

  “Hello,” he said. “You shouldn’t have let her drink. She’s got a weak head for liquor. Here, I’ll take her.”

  With weary skill he looped her arm over his shoulders, clasped her around the waist, walked her through the front room into a lighted bedroom, laid her out on the Hollywood bed, and turned off the light

  He seemed unpleasantly surprised to find me still in the front room. “Good night, Mr. Archer, or whatever your name is. We’re closing up for the night now.”

  “You’re not very hospitable.”

  “No. My sister is the hospitable one.” He cast a sour glance around the little room, at overflowing ashtrays, clouded glasses, scattered newspapers. “I never saw you before, I’ll never see you again. Why should I be hospitable?”

  “You’re sure you never saw me before? Think hard.”

  His brown eyes studied my face, and then my body. He scratched nervously at the front of his thinning hair. He shook his head.

  “If I ever saw you before I must have been drunk at the time. Did Sally bring you here when I was drunk?”

  “No. Were you drinking last Friday night?”

  “Let’s see, what night was that? I think I was out of town. Yeah. I didn’t get back here until Saturday morning.” He was trying to sound casual and look unconcerned. “It must have been two other guys.”

  “I don’t think so, Jud. I ran into you, or you ran into me, about nine last Friday night in Pacific Point.”

  Panic brightened his face like a flash of lightning. “Who are your?”

  “I chased you down Helen Haggerty’s driveway, remember? You were too fast for me. It took me two days to catch up.”

  He was breathing as if he’d just finished the run. “Are you from the police?”

  “I’m a private detective.”

  He sat down in a Danish chair, gripping the fragile arms so hard I thought they might break. He snickered. It was very close to a sob.

  “This is Bradshaw’s idea, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t answer him. I cleared a chair and sat in it.

  “Bradshaw said he was satisfied with my story. Now he sends you up against me.” His eyes narrowed. “I suppose you were pumping my sister about me.”

  “She doesn’t need much priming.”

  Twisting in the chair, he threw a wicked look in the direction of her bedroom. “I wish she’d keep her mouth shut about my business.”

  “Don’t blame her for what you did yourself.”

  “But the hell of it is I didn’t do anything. I told Bradshaw that, and he believed me, at least he said he did.”

  “Are you talking about Roy Bradshaw?”

  “Who else? He recognized me the other night, or thought he did. I didn’t know who it was I bumped in the dark. I just wanted out of there.”

  “Why?”

  He lifted his heavy shoulders and sat with them lifted, head down between them. “I didn’t want trouble with the law.”

  “What were you doing at Helen’s?”

  “She asked me to come. Hell, I went there as a good Samaritan. She called me at the motel in Santa Monica and practically begged me to come and spend the night. It wasn’t my beautiful blue eyes. She was frightened, she wanted company.”

  “What time did she call you?”

  “Around seven or seven-thirty. I was just coming in from getting something to eat.” He dropped his shoulders. “Listen, you know all this, you got it from Bradshaw, didn’t you? What are you trying to do, trap me into a mistake?”

  “It’s an idea. What sort of a mistake did you have in mind?”

  He shook his head, and went on shaking it as he spoke. “I didn’t have anything particular in mind. I mean, I can’t afford to make any mistakes.”

  “You already made the big one, when you ran.”

  “I know. I panicked.” He shook his head some more. “There she was with a bullet hole in her skull and there I was a natural setup for a patsy. I heard you fellows coming, and I panicked. You’ve got to believe me.”

  They always said that. “Why do I have to believe you?”

  “Because I’m telling the truth. I’m innocent as a little child.”

  “That’s pretty innocent.”

  “I didn’t mean in general, I meant in this particular situation. I went a long way out of my way to give Helen a helping hand. It doesn’t make sense I’d go there to knock her off. I liked the girl. She and I had a lot in common.”

  I didn’t know if this was a compliment to either of them. Bert Haggerty had described his ex-wife as corrupt. The man in front of me was a dubious character. Behind the mask of his good looks he seemed dilapidated, as if he’d painfully bumped down several steps in the social scale. In spite of this, I half-believed his story. I would never more than half-believe anything he said.

  “What did you and Helen have in common?”

  He gave me a quick sharp up-from-under look. This wasn’t the usual line of questioning. He thought about his answer. “Sports. Dancing. Fun and games. We had some real fun times, I mean it. I almost died when I found her the other night.”

  “How did you happen to meet her?”

  “Yo
u know all this,” he said impatiently. “You’re working for Bradshaw, aren’t you?”

  “Put it this way: Bradshaw and I are on the same side.” I wanted to know why Roy Bradshaw loomed so large in Foley’s mind, but other questions had priority. “Now why don’t you humor me and tell me how you knew Helen?”

  “It’s simple enough.” He jabbed his thumb downward like a decadent emperor decreeing death. “She rented the downstairs apartment when she was putting in her six weeks this summer. She and my sister hit it off, and eventually I got into the act. The three of us used to go places together.”

  “In Sally’s car?”

  “I had my own car then—sixty-two Galaxie five hundred,” he said earnestly. “This was back in August before I lost my job and couldn’t keep up with the payments.”

  “How did you happen to lose your job?”

  “That wouldn’t interest you. It had nothing to do with Helen Haggerty, nothing whatever.”

  His overinsistence on the point made me suspicious. “What were you working at?”

  “I said you wouldn’t be interested.”

  “I can easily find out where you were working. You might as well tell me.”

  He said with his eyes down: “I was in the cashier’s cage at the Solitaire in Stateline. I guess I made one mistake too many.” He looked at his strong square fumbling hands.

  “So you were looking for work in Los Angeles?”

  “Correcto.” He seemed relieved to get away from the subject of his job and why he lost it. “I didn’t make a connection, but I’ve got to get out of this place.”

  “Why?”

  He scratched his hair. “I can’t go on living on my sister. It cuts me, being on the ding. I’m going down to L.A. again and have another look around.”

  “Let’s get back to the first time. You say Helen called you at your motel Friday night. How did she know you were there?”

  “I already called her earlier in the week.”

  “What for?”

  “The usual. I mean, I thought we could get together, have some fun.” He kept talking about having fun but he looked as if he hadn’t had any for years. “Helen already had a date that night, Wednesday night. As a matter of fact she had a date with Bradshaw. They were going to some concert. She said she’d call me back another time. Which she did, Friday night.”