Black Money la-13

by Ross Macdonald

  "I'm bucking for the job. The wages are poor but think of the fringe benefits, like getting to know all the best people."

  "You're bucking to get thrown out on your ear."

  His jaw had converted itself into a blunt instrument. His hands were shaking.

  He was big enough to hit, and unpleasant enough, but everything else about the occasion was wrong. Besides, he was in transit from one troubled woman to another, and it gave him a certain license.

  "Take it easy, doctor. We're on the same side."

  "Are we?"

  He looked at me over his cigarette, smoke crawling on his face. Then, as if its burning tip had touched off his outburst, he threw it down on the marble floor and scotched it under his heel. "I don't even know what the game is," he said in a friendlier tone.

  "It's a new kind of game."

  I didn't have the negative of Kitty and Ketchel, so I described it to him. "The man in the picture, the one with the diamond ring, do you know who he'd be?"

  It was an honesty test, but I didn't know whose honesty was being tested, his or his wife's.

  He hedged: "It's difficult to tell from a verbal description. Does he have a name?"

  "It may be Ketchel. I heard he was your patient."

  "Ketchel."

  He stroked his jaw as if to massage it back into human shape. "I believe I did have a patient of that name once."

  "In 1959?"

  "It might have been. It might well have been."

  "Did he stay here?"

  "I believe he did."

  I showed him Kitty's picture.

  He nodded. "That's Mrs. Ketchel. I couldn't be mistaken about her. She came to my office once, before they left, to get instructions about a salt-free diet. I treated her husband for hypertension. His blood pressure was way up, but I managed to bring it down within the normal range."

  "Who is he?"

  Sylvester's face went through the motions of remembering. "A retired man from New York. He told me he got in at the start of the bull market, lucky stiff. He owned a cattle spread somewhere in the Southwest."

  "In California?"

  "I don't remember, at this late date."

  "Nevada?"

  "I doubt it. I'm hardly famous enough to attract out-of-state patients."

  The remark seemed forced.

  "Would Ketchel's address be in the clinic records?"

  "It might, at that. But why are you so interested in Mr. Ketchel?"

  "I don't know yet. I just am."

  I threw him a question from far left field. "Wasn't it just about then that Roy Fablon committed suicide?"

  The question took him by surprise. For a moment his face was trying on attitudes. It settled on a kind of false boredom just behind which his intelligence sat and watched me.

  "Just about when?"

  "The picture of the Ketchels was taken in September 1959. When did Fablon die?"

  "I'm afraid I don't remember exactly."

  "Wasn't he your patient?"

  "I have a number of patients and, frankly, my chronological memory isn't so good. I suppose it was around about that time but if you're suggesting any connection-" "I'm asking, not suggesting."

  "Just what are you asking, again?"

  "Did Ketchel have anything to do with Fablon's suicide?"

  "I have no reason to think so. Anyway, how would I know?"

  "They were both friends of yours. In a sense you may have been the connection between them."

  "I was?"

  But he didn't argue the point. He didn't want to go into it at all.

  "I've heard it suggested that Fablon didn't commit suicide.

  His widow raised the question again tonight. Did she raise it with you?"

  "She did not," he said, without looking at me. "You mean he was drowned by accident?"

  "Or murdered."

  "Don't believe everything you hear. This place is a hotbed of rumors. People don't have enough to do, so they make up rumors about their friends and neighbors."

  "This wasn't exactly a rumor, Dr Sylvester. It was an opinion. A friend of Fablon's told me he wasn't the sort of man to commit suicide. What's your opinion?"

  "I have none."

  "That's strange."

  "I don't think so. Any man is capable of suicide, given sufficient pressure of circumstances."

  "What were the special circumstances of Fablon's suicide?"

  "He was at the end of his rope."

  "Financially, you mean?"

  "And every other way."

  He didn't have to explain what he meant. Towed by Ella, his wife hove into view. She had slipped another mental disc and was in a further stage of drunkenness. Her mouth was set in grooves of dull belligerence. Her eyes were fixed.

  "I know where you've been. You've been in bed with her, haven't you?"

  "You're talking nonsense."

  He fended her off with his hands. "There's nothing between me and Marietta. There never has been, Aud-"

  "Except five thousand dollars worth of something."

  "It was supposed to be a loan. I still don't know why you wouldn't co-operate."

  "Because we'd never get it back, any more than the other money you've thrown away. It's my money just as much as yours remember. I worked for seven years so that you could get your degree. And what did I ever get out of it? The money comes in and the money goes out but I never see any of it."

  "You get your share."

  "Marietta gets more than her share."

  "That's nonsense. Do you want her to go under?"

  He looked from me to Ella. Throughout the interchange with his wife, he had been talking to all three of us. Now that his wife was thoroughly discredited, he said: "Don't you think you better come home? You've made enough of a spectacle of yourself for one night."

  He reached for her arm. She backed away from him grimacing, trying to recover the feel of her anger. But she was entering a fourth, lugubrious stage.

  Still backing away, she bumped into the mirror. She turned around and looked at herself in it. From where I stood I could see her reflected face, swollen with drink and malice, surmounted by a loosened sheaf of hair, with a little trickle of terror in the eyes.

  "I'm getting old and heavy," she said. "I can't even afford to take a week in residence at the health farm. But you can afford to gamble our money away."

  "I haven't gambled in seven years, and you know it."

  Roughly he put his arm around her, and walked her out. She was tangle-footed, like a heavyweight fighter at the end of a bad round.

  14

  THERE WERE LIGHTS In the Jamieson house as I passed, and a single light in Marietta Fablon's. It was after midnight, a poor time for visiting. I went to see Marietta anyway. Her husband's drowned body seemed to be floating just below the surface of the night.

  She took a long time to answer my knock. When she did, she opened a Judas window set in the door, and peered at me through the grille. She said above the sound of the wind: "What do you want?"

  "My name is Archer-"

  She cut in on me sharply: "I remember you. What do you want?"

  "A chance to talk seriously with you."

  "I couldn't possibly talk tonight. Come back in the morning."

  "I think we should talk now. You're worried about Ginny. So am I"

  "Who said I was worried?"

  "Dr Sylvester."

  "What else did he say about me?"

  "I could tell you better inside."

  "Very well. This is rather Pyramus and Thisbe, isn't it?"

  It was a gallant effort to recover her style. I saw when she let me in to the lighted hallway that she was having a bad night. The barbiturates were still playing tricks with her eyes. Her body, un-corseted under a pink quilted robe, seemed to have slumped down on its fine bones. She had a pink silk cap on her head, and under it her face seemed thinner and older.

  "Don't look at me please, I'm not lookable tonight."

  She took me into her sit
ting room. Though she only turned on one lamp I could see that everything in the room, the print-covered chairs and settee and the gay rug and the drapes, was faintly shabby. The only new thing in the room was the pink telephone.

  I started to sit on one of the fragile chairs. She made me sit on another, and took a third herself, by the telephone.

  "Why did you suddenly get concerned about Ginny?" I said.

  "She came home tonight. He was with her. I'm close to my daughter - at least I used to be - and I could sense that she didn't want to go with him. But she was going anyway."

  "Why?"

  "I don't understand it."

  Her hands fluttered in her lap, like birds, and one of them pecked at the other. "She seems afraid to go, and afraid not to go with him."

  "Go where?"

  "They wouldn't say. Ginny promised to get in touch with me eventually."

  "What was his attitude?"

  "Martel? He was very formal and distant. Aggressively polite. He regretted disturbing me at the late hour, but they'd made a sudden decision to leave."

  She paused, and turned her narrow probing face toward me. "Do you really think the French government is after him?"

  "Somebody is."

  "But you don't know who."

  "Not yet. I want to try a name on you, Mrs. Fablon. Ketchel."

  I spelled it. Her queer eyes widened. Her hands clenched knuckle to knuckle.

  "Who gave you that name?"

  "No one person. The name came up. I take it it's familiar to you."

  "My husband knew a man named Ketchel," she said. "He was a gambler."

  She leaned toward me. "Did Dr Sylvester give you that name?"

  "No, but I understand that Ketchel was one of Dr Sylvester's patients."

  "Yes. He was. He was more than that."

  I waited for her to explain what she meant. Finally I said: "Was Ketchel the gambler who took your husband's money?"

  "Yes, he was. He took everything we had left, and wanted more. When Roy couldn't pay him " She paused, as if she sensed that melodrama didn't go with her style.

  "We won't discuss it any more, Mr. Archer. I'm not at my best tonight. I should never have agreed to talk to you, under these conditions."

  "What was the date of your husband's suicide?"

  She rose, swaying a little, and moved towards me. I could smell her fatigue.

  "You've really been digging into our lives, haven't you? The date, if you must know, was September 29, 1959."

  Two days after Malkovsky was paid for his pictures. The coincidence underlined my feeling that Fablon's death was part of the present case.

  Mrs. Fablon peered up at me. "That date seems to mean a great deal to you."

  "It suggests some possibilities. It must mean a great deal more to you."

  "It was the end of my life."

  She took an unsteady step backwards and sat down again, as if she were falling back into the past, helplessly but not unwillingly. "Everything since has been going through the motions. It's a strange thing. Roy and I fought like animals throughout our marriage. But we loved each other. At least I was in love with him, no matter what he did."

  "What did he do?"

  "Everything a man can think of. Most of it cost money. My money." She hesitated. "I'm not a money-oriented person, really. That was one of the troubles. In every marriage there should be one partner who cares about money more than other things. Neither of us cared. In the eighteen years of our marriage we went through nearly a million dollars. Please notice the first person plural pronoun. I share the blame. I didn't learn to care about money until it was too late."

  She stirred, and jerked her shoulders as if the thought of money was a palpable weight on them. "You said the date of my husband's death suggested possibilities. What do you mean?"

  "I'm wondering if he really killed himself."

  "Of course he did."

  The statement sounded perfunctory, empty of feeling.

  "Did he leave a suicide note?"

  "He didn't have to. He announced his intention to me and Ginny a day or two before. God knows what it's done to my daughter's emotional life. I encouraged this Martel business because he was the only real man she's shown any interest in. If I've made a dreadful mistake-"

  She dropped the end of the sentence, and returned to her first subject. Her mind was running in swift repetitious circles like a squirrel in a cage. "Can you imagine a man saying such a thing to his wife and his seventeen-year-old daughter? And then doing it? He was angry with me, of course, for running out of money. He didn't believe it could happen. There had always been another bequest coming in from some relative, or another house or piece of land we could sell. But we were down to a rented house and there were no more relatives to die. Roy died instead, by his own hand."

  She kept insisting on this, almost as if she was trying to convince me, or persuade herself. I suspected that she was a little out of control, and I had no desire to ask her any more questions. But she went on answering unspoken questions, painfully and obsessively, as if the past had stirred and was talking through her in its sleep: "That doesn't cover the situation, of course. There are always secret motivations in life - urges and revenges and desires that people don't admit even to themselves. I discovered the real source of my husband's death, quite by accident, just the other day. I'm planning to give up this house and I've been going through my things, sorting and throwing away. I came across a batch of old papers in Roy's desk, and among them was a letter to Roy from - a woman. It absolutely astonished me. It had never occurred to me that, in addition to all his other failings as a husband and father, Roy had been unfaithful. But the letter went into explicit detail on that point."

  "May I see it?"

  "No. You may not. It was humiliating enough for me to read it by myself."

  "Who wrote it?"

  "Audrey Sylvester. She didn't sign it but I happen to know her handwriting."

  "Was it still in its envelope?"

  "Yes, and the postmark was clean. It was postmarked June 30, 1959, three months before Roy died. After seven years I understood why George Sylvester introduced Ketchel to Roy and stood by smiling while Ketchel cheated Roy out of thirty thousand dollars which he didn't have."

  She struck herself with her fist on her quilted thigh: "He may even have planned it all. He was Roy's doctor. He may have sensed that Roy was close to suicide, and conspired with Ketchel to push him over the edge."

  "Isn't that stretching it a bit, Mrs. Fablon?"

  "You don't know George Sylvester. He's a ruthless man. And you don't know Mr. Ketchel. I met him once at the club."

  "I'd like to meet him myself. You don't know where he is, do you?"

  "No, I do not. Ketchel left Montevista a day or so after Roy disappeared - long before his body was found."

  "Are you implying he knew your husband was dead?"

  She bit her mouth, as if to punish it for saying too much. From her eyes I got the swift impression that my guess was accurate, and she knew it, but for some obscure reason she was covering it up.

  "Did Ketchel murder your husband?"

  "No," she said, "I don't suggest that. But he and George Sylvester were responsible for Roy's death."

  In the midst of her old grief and rage, she looked at me cautiously. I had the strange feeling that she was sitting apart from herself, playing on her own emotions the way another woman might play on an organ, but leaving one end of the keyboard wholly untouched. "It's indiscreet of me to tell you all this. I'll ask you not to pass it on to anyone, including - especially including - Peter and his father."

  I was weary of her elaborate reconstructions and evasions. I said bluntly: "I won't pass your story on, and I'll tell you why, Mrs. Fablon. I don't entirely believe it. I don't think you believe it yourself."

  She rose shakily. "How dare you speak to me in that way?"

  "Because I'm really concerned about your daughter's safety. Aren't you?"

  "You know I
am. I'm terribly concerned."

  "Then why won't you tell me the truth as you see it? Was your husband murdered?"

  "I don't know. I don't know anything any more. I had a real earthquake shock tonight. The ground was jerked right out from under me. It still isn't holding still."

  "What happened?"

  "Nothing happened. Something was said."

  "By your daughter?"

  "If I told you any more," she said, "I'd be telling you too much. I'm going to have to get more information before I speak out."

  "Getting information is my business."

  "I appreciate the offer, but I have to handle this my own way."

  Another of her silences began, she sat perfectly still with her opposing fists pressed fiercely against each other, her eyes absorbing light.

  Under the sound of the wind I heard a noise like rats chewing in the wall. I didn't connect it right away with Marietta Fablon. Then I realized that she was grinding her teeth.

  It was time I left her in peace. I got my car out from under her groaning oak tree and drove next door to the Jamieson house. The lights were still on there.

  15

  PETER'S FATHER ANSWERED the door. He had on pajamas and a bathrobe, and he looked even more transparent and withdrawn than he had in the morning.

  "Come in, Mr. Archer, won't you? My housekeeper has gone to bed but I can offer you a drink. I was rather hoping you'd drop by, I have some information for you."

  Talking as if it was the middle of the day, he led me along the hall to his library. His movements were uncertain but he managed to steer himself through the door and into his chair.

  There was a drink beside it. Jamieson seemed to be one of those drinkers who held themselves at a certain level of sobriety all day and all night.

  "I'll let you make your own drink. My hands are a little unsteady."

  He raised his hands and examined their tremor with clinical interest. "I should be in bed, I suppose, but I've almost lost the ability to sleep. These night watches are the hardest. The image of my poor dead wife comes back most vividly. I feel my loss like a vast yawning emptiness, in me as well as the external universe. I forgot whether I've shown you a picture of my dead wife?"

  Reluctantly I admitted that he hadn't. I had no desire to sit up all night with Jamieson and his irrigated memories. The drink I poured for myself from his fresh bottle was a careful ounce.