Black Money la-13

by Ross Macdonald

  Her feeling turned against me. "Why did you bring me here?"

  "It was your idea."

  "But you said that Harry's car-"

  "Apparently it's been stolen."

  She backed away from me, stumbling on her heels, into the ragged black branches of the cypress. All I could see was the pale shape of her face and the glints of her eyes and mouth.

  "There never was any car. What kind of a car was it?"

  "A Cadillac."

  "Now I know you're lying. Where would Harry get a Cadillac?"

  "He probably took it off the lot. It's an old one."

  She didn't seem to be following me. I heard her breath coming more rapidly.

  "There never was any car," she whispered. "You're from Vegas, aren't you? And you brought me here to kill me."

  "That's silly talk, Kitty."

  "Don't you call me Kitty."

  Her voice was taking on more childish cadences. Perhaps her mind was tracking on something that had happened years ago, between the trains rattling her mother's dishes. "You conned me into coming to this place, and now you won't let me go."

  "Go ahead. Go. Go-go."

  She only backed deeper into the cypress, like a nocturnal animal. Her radio was trilling from the darkness. A gust of her perfume reached me, mixed with the smells of diesel oil and wine and fire.

  I saw in a red flash of insight how two people and a set of circumstances might collaborate in an unpredictable murder. Almost, I thought, she wanted to be murdered. She huddled among the shadows, whimpering: "You stay away from me, I'll tell my old man."

  "Get out of there, stupid."

  The scream for which she'd been tuning up came out. I reached for her blindly and got her by the waist and pulled her towards me. She gasped, and swung the radio at my head. It struck me a glancing blow and fell silent, as if the musical side of Kitty's personality had died a violent death.

  I let her go. She ran away gawkily on her high heels, across the multiple tracks, until she was no more than a scrambling shadow, a hurrying sound in the night.

  13

  ERIC MALKOVSKY's STUDIO in the Village was on the direct route to Martel's house. I stopped to see how he was getting on with his search. He had dust on his hands and fingerprints on his forehead, like a human clue.

  "I almost gave up on you," he said.

  "I almost gave up on myself. Did you find any pictures of her?"

  "Five. I may have more."

  He took me in to the back of the shop and laid them out on a table like a poker hand. Four of them were pictures of Kitty, in a plain white bathing suit, taken at the Tennis Club pool. She stood and gazed romantically out to sea. She reclined erotically on a chaise longue. She posed dry on the diving board. Kitty had been a beautiful girl, but all four pictures were spoiled by her awkward staginess.

  The fifth picture was different. Un-posed and fully clothed in a sleeveless summer dress and a wide hat, she sat at a table with a drink at her elbow. A man's hand with a square-cut diamond on it lay on the table beside her arm. The rest of him was cut off, but Kitty seemed to be smiling in his direction. Behind her I could see the patio wall of one of the Tennis Club cottages overgrown with bougainvillea.

  "This is the one she liked."

  Malkovsky showed me the notation on the back: six 4x6 copies @ $5.00 - $30.00 Pd. September 27. 1959.

  "She bought six copies, or her husband did. He was in the picture, too, but he made me crop it."

  Why?"

  "I remember he said something about beauty and the beast. He wasn't that bad looking but he was older, like I told you. And he'd taken some punishment in his time."

  "What was his name?"

  "I don't remember. I suppose I could check it out in the club records."

  "Tonight?"

  "If Mrs. Strome lets me. But it's getting awful late."

  "Don't forget you're on double time."

  He scratched at his hairline, and colored slightly, "Could I see a little of the money please?"

  I looked at my watch. I had hired him roughly two hours ago. "How about fourteen dollars?"

  "Fine. Incidentally," he said with further scratching of his head, "if you want any of these pictures it's only fair that you should pay me for them. Five dollars apiece."

  I gave him a twenty-dollar bill. "I'll take the one she liked. I don't suppose there's any chance you could find the rest of it, the part you cropped off?"

  "I might be able to find the negative."

  "For that I'll pay higher."

  "How much higher?"

  "It depends on what's on it. Twenty dollars anyway."

  I left him rooting enthusiastically among the dusty cartons on his shelves, and drove back into the foothills. This was the direction the wind was coming from. It rushed down the canyons like a hot torrent, and roared in the brush around the Bagshaw house. I had to brace myself against it when I got out of the car.

  The Bentley was gone from the courtyard. I tried the front door of the house. It was locked.

  There was no light in the house, and no response of any kind to my repeated knocking. I went back to the studio in the Village. With a twenty-dollar glint in each eye Malkovsky showed me the negative of the picture of Kitty.

  Beside her sat a man in a striped suit, which was wrinkled by his heavy shoulders and heavy thighs. He was almost bald, but compensating curly hair, white in the negative, sprouting up through his open shirt collar. His black smile had a loose, bland empty cheerfulness, which his narrow white eyes annulled.

  Behind him near the patio wall, and out of focus, was a mustached young man in a busboy's jacket, holding a tray in his hands. He looked vaguely familiar: perhaps he was one of the servants I'd seen around the club.

  "I should have a name for these people," Eric said. "Actually; it's just good luck that I found the negative."

  "We can check them out at the club, as you suggested. Do you remember anything more about the man? Were he and the woman married?"

  "They certainly acted that way. She did, that is. He was in poor health, and she fussed over him quite a bit."

  "What was the matter with him?"

  "I don't know. He couldn't move around much. He spent most of his time in his cottage or in the patio, playing cards."

  "Who did he play with?"

  "Various people. Don't get the idea that I saw much of the guy. The fact is, I avoided him."

  "Why?"

  "He was a rough customer, sick or not. I didn't like the way he talked to me, as if I was some kind of a flunky. I'm a professional man," he asserted.

  I knew how Eric felt. I was a semi-professional man myself. I gave him another twenty dollars, and we drove in separate cars to the club.

  Ella opened up the records room behind the manager's office, and Eric plunged in among the filing cabinets. He had a date to work from: Kitty's pictures had been paid for on September 27, 1959.

  I went back to the pavilion. The music was still going on, but the party had narrowed down to its hard core and shifted its main focus to the bar. It wasn't late, as parties go, but in my absence most of the people had deteriorated, as if a sudden illness had fallen on them: manic-depressive psychosis, or a mild cerebral hemorrhage.

  Only the bartender hadn't changed at all. He made the drinks and served them and stood back from the party, watching it with his quicksilver eyes. I showed him the picture of Kitty, and the negative.

  He held it up to the fluorescent light at the back of the bar. "Yeah, I remember the man and the girl. She came in here with him one night and tried to get tight on B and B - that's all she knew about drinking - and she had a coughing fit. She had about four or five recruits patting her on the back at once and her husband started pushing them around. Me and Mr. Fablon got him calmed down, though."

  "How did Mr. Fablon get into the act?"

  "He was with them."

  "They were friends of his?"

  "I wouldn't want to say that, exactly. He was just with the
m. They drifted in together. Maybe he liked the woman. She was a knockout, I'll give her that."

  "Was Fablon a woman chaser?"

  "You're putting words into my mouth. He liked women. He didn't chase'em. Some of them chased him. But he'd have more sense than mess with that dame. Her husband was bad news."

  "Who is he, Marco?"

  He shrugged. "I never saw him before or since, and I haven't been sitting around waiting to hear from him. He was bad news, a blowtop, a muscle."

  "How did he get in?"

  "He was staying here. Some of our members can't say no when they get asked for a guest card. It would save me a lot of trouble if they could learn to say no."

  He looked around the room with a kind of contemptuous tolerance. "Make you a drink?"

  "No thanks."

  Marco leaned toward me across the bar. "Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but Mrs. Fablon was in here a little while ago."

  "So?"

  "She asked the same question you did, whether I thought her husband committed suicide. She knew him and I were friends, like. I told her no, I didn't think so."

  "What did she say?"

  "She didn't have a chance to say anything. Dr Sylvester came into the bar and took her over. She wasn't looking too good."

  "What do you mean?"

  He moved his head in a quick negative gesture.

  A woman came up and asked for a double scotch. She was behind me, and I didn't recognize her changed voice until she spoke.

  "My husband's been drinking double scotches and I say what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and vice versa."

  "Okay, Mrs. Sylvester, if you say so."

  Marco laid down the photograph and the negative on the bartop and poured her a very meager double scotch. She reached past me with both hands and picked up both the drink and the picture of Kitty. "What's this? I love to look at pictures."

  "That's mine," I said.

  Her whisky-stunned eyes didn't seem to recognize me. "But you don't mind if I look at it?" she said argumentatively. "That's Mrs. Ketchel, isn't it?"

  "Who?"

  "Mrs. Ketchel," she said.

  "A friend of yours?"

  "Hardly."

  She drew herself erect. Her bouffant hair was slipping down her forehead like a wig. "Her husband was one of my husband's patients at one time. A doctor can't pick and choose his patients, you know."

  "I share the problem."

  "Of course," she said. "You're the detective, aren't you? What are you doing with a picture of Mrs. Ketchel?"

  She waved it in my face. For a moment all the people at the bar were looking in our direction. I took the picture out of her hands and put it and the negative back in my pocket.

  "You can trust me with your dark secrets," she said. "I am a doctor's wife."

  I slid off my stool and drew her away from the bar to an empty table. "Where's Dr Sylvester?"

  "He drove Henrietta Fablon home. She's - she was not in a good way. But he'll be back."

  "What's the matter with Mrs. Fablon?"

  "What isn't?" she said lightly. "Marietta's a friend of mine, one of the oldest friends I have in this town, but she's certainly let herself go to pieces lately, physically and morally. I have no objection to people getting plastered - I'm slightly plastered myself, as a matter of fact, Mr. Arch-"

  "Archer."

  She went right on: "But Marietta came here really looped tonight. She walked in, if walking is the word, literally rubber-legged. George had to gather up the pieces and take her home. She's getting to be more and more of a burden to George."

  "In what respect"' "Morally and financially. She hasn't paid her bill, of course, within living memory, and that's all right, I suppose. She's a friend, live and let live. But when it comes to scrounging more money from him, that's too much."

  "Has she been doing that?"

  "Has she? Today she invited him for lunch - I happened to be at the hairdresser's - and made a sudden pitch for five thousand dollars. We don't have that kind of ready money in the bank, which is the only way I know about it - he tried to get my signature on the loan. But I said nix."

  She paused, and her alcohol-angered face grew suddenly quiet with anxiety. I think her mind was playing back what she had said. "I've been telling you my deep dark secrets, haven't I?"

  "It's all right."

  "It isn't all right if you tell George what I said. You won't tell George what I said?"

  She had unloaded her malice but she didn't want to take the responsibility for it.

  "All right," I said.

  "You're nice."

  She reached for my hand on the tabletop and pressed it rather hard. She was more worried now than she was drunk, trying to think of something to make herself feel better. "Do you like dancing, Mr. Arch?"

  "Archer."

  "I love to dance myself."

  Still holding on to my hand she rose and towed me out onto the dance floor. Round and round we went, with her hair slipping down into both our eyes and her breasts bouncing against me like the special organs of her enthusiasm.

  "My first name is Audrey," she confided. "What's your first name, Mr. Arch?"

  "Fallen."

  Her laughter blasted my right ear-drum. When the music stopped I took her back to the table, and went out to the front office. Ella was still at her post, looking rather wan.

  "Are you tired?" I asked her.

  She glanced at herself in the wall mirror facing her desk. "Not so very. It's the music. It gets on my nerves when I'm not allowed to dance to it."

  She passed her hand over her forehead. "I don't know how much longer I can hold this job."

  "How long have you been at it?"

  "In the last hour or so."

  "You're a good witness. How would you like to join my staff permanently?"

  "It would depend on what I had to witness."

  We smiled at each other, warily. We had both had unsuccessful marriages.

  I retreated into the records room. Malkovsky was bent over the pulled-out drawer of a cabinet, riffling through file cards.

  "I'm making some progress. I hope. As far as I can see there were seven outside guests, individuals and couples, in September of 1959. I've ruled out four of them - people I remember personally, mostly repeaters. That leaves three: the Sandersons, and the de Houvenels, and the Berglunds. But none of the names rings a bell."

  "Try Ketchel."

  "Ketchel!"

  He blinked and smiled. "I believe that's the name. I couldn't find it among the guest cards, though."

  "It could have been taken out."

  "Or lost," he said. "These older files are in a pretty poor shape. But I'm morally certain Ketchel is the name. Where did you pick it up from?"

  "From one of the members."

  I got out the negative. "Can you make me some copies of this?"

  "I don't see why not."

  "How long would it take you?"

  "I guess I could have some by tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow morning at eight?"

  After a moment's hesitation, he said: "I can try."

  I gave him the negative, with a lecture about not losing it, and said goodnight to him at the front door. When he was out of hearing, Ella said dryly: "I hope you're paying him decently. All he makes out of his photography is a bare living. And he has a wife and children."

  "I'm paying him decently. There's no record in the files of the Ketchels being guests here."

  "Mrs. Sylvester could have given you the wrong name."

  "I doubt, it. Eric recognized it. More likely someone took the record out f the files. Are they easily accessible?"

  "I'm afraid they are. People are in and out of the office, and the records room is open a good deal of the time. Is it very important?"

  "It may be. I want to know who sponsored the Ketchels as guests."

  "Mr. Stoll might remember. But he's gone off for the night."

  She directed me to the manager's cottage. It w
as closed and dark. The wind whimpered like a lost dog in the shrubbery.

  I went back to the main entrance of the club. Dr Sylvester still hadn't returned. I looked in at the bar, saw Mrs. Sylvester slouched over a drink, and retreated before she saw me.

  Ella told me more about her second marriage. Her husband Strome was an attorney in the city, an older man, a widower when she married him. She had been his secretary originally, but being his wife was much more demanding, in subtle ways. Her first husband had been too young; her second was too old. An older man was deeply set in his habits, including sexual habits.

  I let the conversation go on. Such desultory continuing conversations were one of my best sources of information. Besides I liked the woman, and I was interested in her marriage.

  The story of it blended with the long rough night we were having. She'd stayed with Strome for six years but in the end she couldn't stick it out. She hadn't even asked for alimony.

  Some people left the party, and Ella said goodnight to them by name. Others were staying on. Our conversation, or Ella's monologue, was punctuated by gusts of music, laughter, wind.

  Dr Sylvester's arrival brought it to a full stop. He pushed through the door with angry force.

  "Is my wife still here?" he asked Ella.

  "I think so, doctor."

  "What kind of shape is she in?"

  "She's still upright," I said.

  He turned a stony eye on me. "Nobody asked you."

  He started off toward the bar, hesitated, and turned back to Ella: "Would you get her for me, Mrs. Strome? I don't feel like facing that mob again tonight."

  "I'll be glad to. How is Mrs. Fablon?"

  "She'll be all right. I got her calmed down. She's upset about her daughter, and it was complicated by barbiturates."

  "She didn't try to take too many?"

  "Nothing like that. She took regular sleeping pills and then decided to come down here to see her friends. Add one drink and the result was predictable."

  He paused, and dropped his professional tone: "Go and get Audrey, will you"" Ella hurried away down the lighted corridor. I leaned on the reception desk and watched Dr Sylvester in the mirror. He lit a cigarette and pretended to forget me, but my presence seemed to make him uncomfortable. He coughed smoke and said: "Look here, what gives you the right to stand there watching me? Are you the new doorman or something?"