Blue City

by Ross Macdonald

  “Are we?” It was a rhetorical question which meant that she didn’t believe in any kind of love. “It’s a pretty story.”

  “We fit, don’t we? Like the two halves of an apple.”

  “And an apple a day keeps the doctor away?”

  “Don’t be so damn cynical. It makes me want to wring your neck.”

  “But that would be suicide, the way you tell it.” She kissed my cheek and broke my embrace. “Let’s go, John. You said you wanted to get there before he does.”

  She brought her car around to the back steps, and I had an uncomfortable ride in the rear compartment—uncomfortable, but safe. When she raised the door, the car was parked in the deserted parking lot behind the Cathay Club. She unlocked the back entrance, let me in, and closed the door behind me. The windowless hall outside Kerch’s office was pitch dark.

  “You’d better go away and leave me here,” I said. “You don’t want to be here when Kerch comes.”

  “When he sees my car, he’ll come in. I can go up to his room.”

  “You’d be safer if you went home.”

  “I’ll be all right upstairs. You take care of yourself.”

  “Worry about Kerch,” I said. “So long. You’ve got a lot of guts.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, I’m scared. But maybe there’s something in that fairy story you told me. It makes me feel good to be around you.”

  “Beat it. There’s a car coming.”

  I saw her shadow for a moment against gray light at the end of the hall. Then the door closed and shut me into darkness again. I took Garland’s automatic out of my pocket and made it ready to fire. The darkness was so thick I could hardly breathe it. But two or three facts were as clear in my head as objects under a searchlight. This was my last chance. If Kerch was alone I could break him down. If there was another man with him, I would have to kill the other man.

  A heavy car crackled across the gravel, paused briefly, and backed to a stop just outside the door. A car door was shut. Slow footsteps came up to the door, and the door opened. I hesitated a second too long, making sure that there was nobody with him, nobody sitting in the car. He saw me and backed outside, slamming the door in my face. He let out a violent cry of “Help!”

  Then I was on him, my hand twisting his collar into the soft flesh of his neck. His pearl-gray hat fell off and rolled in the dirt. He stuck out his thick tongue at me, and his protuberant eyes seemed almost ready to leap from his head like live slugs. A thin current of breath whistled shrilly in his throat.

  I half carried and half dragged him through the door into the hall. There I loosened my hold on his neck and pressed the gun into the roll of fat which girdled his hips. I frisked him, finding no gun.

  “Unlock your office. We have things to talk over.”

  “I have no key,” he said hoarsely.

  “Then I’ll break it down, using your head for a battering ram.” I depressed his head and brought it in sharp contact with the door.

  “I’ll unlock it.” He found the key and did.

  “Turn on the light,” I said. He turned on the light and I closed the door.

  “You’re a frightful fool, Weather,” he began. “You have no chance whatever of getting away with this—”

  I hit his jaw, hard enough to knock him down but not out. “Don’t be urbane. Now, stand up.”

  He sat on the floor with his legs spread, looking up at me blankly.

  “I said stand up! You don’t know how to take orders.” I put my hand inside his collar and jerked him to his feet.

  “This is ridiculous—”

  I hit him between the eyes, a little harder this time. He staggered back halfway across the room and fell on the couch. He lay where he was, with open eyes. Something in the posture of his gross body reminded me of an overfed baby, but there was nothing touching in the similarity.

  “Don’t be urbane, and don’t stall. Stand up again.”

  He lay where he was, awkward and appalled. I took him by the collar and raised him to his feet. He stood swaying. The gauze bandage had come loose from his cheek and the wound was beginning to bleed.

  “What do you want me to do?” he said. “I didn’t kill your father.”

  I hardly heard him. Nothing that he could say meant anything, anyway. In a few hours I had learned to know him as well as if we had been intimate for years. The terrible figure who had cast his shadow across the city melted away in my hands to nothing much. An empty man bundled in layers of flesh—ruled, like an evil child, by cruel appetites and perverse little desires. The great body was loose with fear, sweating freely from every pore.

  “Open the safe.”

  “I haven’t got the combination,” he said without conviction. “Rusty has it.”

  I struck his mouth with the back of my hand. Two narrow streams of blood trickled from its corners and beslobbered his chin. Tears formed in his large soft eyes.

  “You can beat me,” he said brokenly. “But I can’t open the safe.”

  I struck his mouth again. The lower lip split like a plum that was rotten ripe. He put his hands over his face and moaned. Then he spread his palms in front of him, frowning miserably at the blood that smeared them. Two tears detached themselves from the inner corners of his eyes and glided down on either side of his nose.

  “I can’t,” he said wildly. “I can’t open it.”

  I struck his mouth again.

  “I can’t,” he sobbed. “Leave me alone.”

  “I’ve been gentle with you, Kerch. But you haven’t cooperated.” I raised the automatic and clicked off the safety. “Now, you’ll open it or I’ll kill you. Hurry.”

  “I told you I can’t,” he whined.

  “I won’t wait any longer.” I brought the gun to shoulder level and aimed it at his head.

  He stared incredulously into the round hole through which death would come, too frightened to move. I saw the realization of death enter his eyes slowly. The realization that there would be no more Kerch, no more money to count and no soft small hands to count it, no more power and no will to power, no means of satisfying perverse desires and no more cruel appetites. No more Kerch.

  He couldn’t face the loss of himself. “Don’t shoot,” he said in a voice as thin as death. “I’ll open it.”

  “Hurry.”

  I stood over him while his fingers cleared the dial. Ten. Twice around clockwise to fourteen. Counterclockwise passing thirty once, stopping on twenty-four. He pulled the heavy door open.

  “Give me the papers that Mrs. Weather wanted.”

  “They don’t matter now,” he said. “She’s dead.”

  I cuffed his left ear with my closed fist. “Don’t argue, give them to me.”

  He opened a drawer in the upper right-hand corner of the safe, but I saw the gun before his hand could close on it, and hammered his knuckles with the muzzle of my gun. He lay down on the floor and rolled gently from side to side, crying to himself.

  “You made a mistake. Get up and try again.” I nudged his head with the toe of my boot. “Hurry.”

  He climbed to his knees and opened the next drawer. It was a filing drawer, containing tabbed cards in alphabetical order. He took a thick envelope from the back of the drawer and handed it to me. The name “Mrs. J.D. Weather” was typed across its face.

  I pushed him out of the way and looked at the tabs in the drawer. The first name was unknown to me. The second name was Allister. The envelope behind it had “Mr. Freeman Allister” typed across its face.

  Kerch was standing in the center of the room, bowed over his hurt hand. I sat behind his desk and set down my gun in front of me.

  “Sit on the couch,” I told him, and he did so.

  Floraine Weather’s envelope contained a marriage certificate, a newspaper clipping, and a notarized document giving her power of attorney, for all business and legal purposes, to one Roger Kerch. The marriage certificate stated that a woman named Floraine Wales had been married to a man named Roger Kerc
h in Portland, Oregon, on the 14th day of May 1931. The headline of the clipping, which was from a Portland newspaper of the same day, was: “Vows Taken by Popular Young Couple.” The story began: “In a charming private ceremony in the Baptist Church today, Miss Floraine Wales, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Wales of Ventura, California, became the bride of Mr. Roger Kerch, son of Mr. and Mrs. Selby Kerch of Trenton, New Jersey. Both the bride and groom have been prominent for several years in local radio circles, the former Miss Wales having been secretary to the general manager, and Mr. Kerch, a well-known news commentator and program director …”

  There was a fairly clear picture of the two of them at the top of the page. Floraine looked young and pretty and virginal in her bridal veil, but she was recognizable. The man beside her, identified as Roger Kerch, did not look like the Kerch I knew. The young man in the morning coat who held her arm was lean and handsome, with romantic dark eyes and a flashing smile.

  I glanced at the frog-faced man who was sitting on the couch sucking his knuckles, and then back at the picture. I could almost feel sorry for him, until I remembered the last time I had seen Floraine. Kerch had changed, but time and disease hadn’t been too cruel to him.

  I opened Freeman Allister’s envelope, and laughed when I saw what it contained.

  “My Dearest, Dearest Francie,” the first letter began:

  In the midst of an impossible situation, both political and domestic, my mind continually returns to you as the tired body of a runner leaps into a cool, sweet stream. How else could I continue to go on in this frightful town, condemned by law to live with the harridan out of hell who calls herself my wife, without the thought of you to support me and sustain me? Ah, to lie again between the clean white streams of your thighs, to rest my weary head upon your breast. This is my dream, waking and sleeping. Come you back from Chicago, my sister, my spouse, for my flesh and spirit are thirsting and hungering for you in a wide wasteland that offers no other comfort but you.…

  The letter was signed: “Your own Freeman.” It was dated March 23, 1944, when Freeman must have been quite a big boy.

  “It didn’t take much to scare Allister, did it?” I said to Kerch. “I suppose Sault stole these from his sister for you.”

  Kerch looked at me, and then at the door. The knob of the door was turning. I picked up the gun and crouched behind the desk.

  “Be careful,” Kerch shouted. “He’s got a gun.”

  “Come out of there,” said a voice I knew. “There are three of us, and we’ll shoot to kill if you don’t come out unarmed, with your hands up.”

  “Let him have it, Moffatt!” another man said. “He’s a killer.”

  A pounding burst from a submachine gun stitched six holes across the door. The invisible bullets crossed the room high above my head like a flight of rapid insects.

  “Stop it!” Kerch yelled. “I’m in here! Kerch!”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Kerch,” Moffatt called. “We’ve got him. Now, you, are you coming out?”

  I threw down my gun and stood up with my hands raised. “I’m coming,” I said. “You can open the door.”

  chapter 19

  The room had a high ceiling and narrow windowless walls covered with burlap painted brown. A green shaded drop-light threw a bleak glare over the lower half of the room and cast the upper half into shadow. Beneath the light there was a tall desk of battered oak with a stool behind it. There was nothing else in the room but a old sour smell—the smell that men emit when they are dirty and afraid.

  The aging police sergent took my tie, my belt, my handkerchief, and my wallet. He didn’t give me a receipt for them.

  “We’ll keep these for you,” he said. “Looks as if we’ll be keepin’ them a long time.”

  I said: “Yeah.”

  The plain-clothes man Moffatt was standing in the hall when we went out.

  “Guess we better put him in one of the new cells, eh?” the sergeant said.

  “Bring him in under the light, Stan. He should be ready to talk.”

  “What do you want me to talk about?” I said. “Who stole my money last night?”

  Moffatt hit me quickly on the side of the head. My arms jerked so that I involuntarily cut my wrists on the handcuffs.

  “You telegraph your punches,” I said. “You should stick to hitting people from behind.”

  He hit me with the edge of his hand on the back of my neck, just below the soft spot which his blackjack had made the night before. A buzzing sickness started in my head and ran erratically through my body, settling in my stomach and my knees.

  “That’s the way you want it, eh?” Moffatt said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s better.” The sickness forced its way up my throat and I vomited on the floor.

  “Better not hit him again,” the sergeant said. “Not if you want him to be able to talk.”

  “Crap!” Moffatt said. “He deserves to be beaten to death. He’s a brutal killer, Stan. All I can say is it’s lucky for Mr. Kerch that Ron heard him call for help. Did you see what he did to poor Mr. Kerch?”

  I said: “You mean, poor Mr. Kerch, the Christ of the Indian road?”

  “Shut up, you. Or I’ll use your face to clean up that mess you made on the floor.”

  “C’mon, Dave,” the sergeant said. “You want to get his confession before Hanson gets back.”

  “Where the hell is Hanson, anyway?”

  “Damned if I know. The Mayor took him off on some wild-goose chase. He’s always getting crazy ideas.”

  They took me into a dark room and made me sit down on a backless chair. Moffatt turned on a bright light which shone directly into my eyes. I closed them, but found I couldn’t do without that contact with the physical world. My mind was a blank wilderness, swept by a rattling wind of pain. I lost my balance and almost fell off the chair.

  A fist came out of the darkness and cuffed me upright. “Open your eyes,” Moffatt said. “Don’t try playing possum.”

  I looked up at his shadowed face, then down his body at his dark wool tie, his solid vest front with the thin watch chain glittering across it, his thick legs planted apart in a bold, firm pose. He had an odor of sweat, cigars, bay rum, and after-shaving powder. I couldn’t think of a word heavy enough to throw at him, so I said nothing.

  “We know you killed Mrs. Weather,” he said. “We know why. You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble if you give us a statement.”

  “I like trouble.”

  The four fingers of his right hand ploughed down my face from forehead to chin. I snapped at his hand, but he drew it back too quickly.

  “What big teeth you got, Grandmother,” he said. “You got too many teeth for good looks. Stan, give me the knuckles.”

  The sergeant handed him a piece of molded brass, which he slipped over his fingers. Then his armed fist invaded my mouth. I felt a sharp piece of bone on my tongue and spat it out between numb lips.

  “You better not hit him again, Dave,” the sergeant said. “Judge Simeon don’t like it when they’re all marked up.”

  “Don’t worry, Stan. He was resisting an officer, wasn’t he? He tried to escape, didn’t he?”

  He drew back his dully shining fist. “You want to dictate a statement while you still got the use of your mouth?”

  I leaned back and kicked him in the groin. He grunted and bent double, clutching at himself. “I’ll kill him,” he said between gritting teeth. “The bastard ruptured me.”

  The sergeant’s truncheon swung in a quarter circle to my forehead, and a whirlpool of shattered light sucked me down a drain and underground. Later, someone exhumed my consciousness—someone who said in a blurred voice:

  “I hope I ruptured you properly. Then you’ll be the last of the Moffatts.”

  Someone kicked a man who was lying on a floor. Pity for the man on the floor coursed through my body as real as pain. I’m learning some fine humanitarian lessons, I thought, but somebody should put a stop to this.

 
“Somebody should put a stop to this,” the man on the floor said. My tongue moved awkwardly in my mouth and scratched itself on a broken tooth.

  “So you’d resist an officer of the law in the performance of his duty,” some clown said.

  The man on the floor tried to get up but his stomach was weak and the handcuffs interfered with the use of his hands. I thought it would be nice if another whirlpool would take me down another drain, and immediately a whirlpool began to turn in my head. I lay back and waited for the blackout.

  “Get up, get up,” I said to the man on the floor. “You’ve got to get up and fight.”

  I opened my eyes and looked steadily at the leg of a table beside my head. Gradually it took on solidity, became realer than the whirlpool, realer than pain. From its reality I deduced the reality of my own body lying on the floor. My pity changed to anger and my head cleared.

  I managed to sit up then, but a man standing over me planted his foot on my chest and flung me backwards. My very real head grazed the indubitable leg of the table. I rolled my head aside and lay quietly, fighting off self-pity. The repetition of physical violence, I told myself, is beginning to bore me. But boredom was another thing I had to fight.

  A door opened and a ceiling light was switched on.

  “What goes on here?” somebody said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “He tried to escape,” Moffatt said. “He kicked me in the balls.”

  “You’re not on duty, are you, Moffatt?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Go home, then, before I lose my temper.” I recognized the bitter, twanging voice of Inspector Hanson.

  Moffatt went out and Hanson bent over me and looked into my face. “The bastard fixed you, didn’t he!” He stepped behind me and helped me to my feet. I would have fallen again if he hadn’t held me.

  “Bring that chair over here, Sergeant,” he said. “Then you can get out.”

  I sat down in the chair and he leaned against the table facing me. “I warned you last night, Weather. I told you you were heading into bad trouble.”

  “I’m doing all right,” I said. “There’s nothing the matter with me a good dentist can’t fix.”