Trouble Follows Me

by Ross Macdonald

  I noticed that a light was burning in the cabin, and rolled over to the edge of the berth and looked down. Eric was sitting in the steel chair in front of the steel desk, his feet wide apart on the steel deck. He hadn’t undressed, and his sloping back looked immobile and infinitely tired, as if he had been sitting there all night.

  But his voice was quite natural when he turned at the sound of my movement. “Go back to sleep, Sam, it’s pretty early. Does this light bother you?”

  “No, but the idea of you sitting there bothers me. Why don’t you hit the sack?”

  “I tried to but I couldn’t sleep.” He stood up and lit a cigarette quickly and steadily. His movements had the febrile vitality of confirmed and accepted insomnia. Watching him I had the feeling that sleep was a daily miracle, the fulfillment of a kind of faith given to idiots, children, and the blissfully drunk. And I knew that I couldn’t sleep any more either.

  “Cuchulain the Hound of Ulster,” I said, “when tired out by wounds and battle, didn’t go and take a rest like ordinary people. He went off some place and exercised to beat the band.”

  “Was it good for him?” Eric said. A smile shone strangely on his pale face.

  “Eventually he went nuts.” I swung my legs over the edge of the berth and jumped down. Eric kicked the other chair in my direction and handed me a cigarette.

  “If you’re concerned about me, you needn’t be,” he said. “I’m too goddamn selfish and practical to go nuts, or even be slightly indiscreet.”

  “It strikes me you’ve achieved indiscretion at least. But if you think I battled my way out of the arms of Morpheus to discuss your personality, you’re wrong. I’d much rather tell you more about Cuchulain. Stevie Smith has a good verse about him—”

  “Don’t digress. I was thinking about what happened to Sue.”

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll talk about Sue Sholto. Then maybe in a couple of days or a couple of weeks we can get around to talking about your wife.”

  “My wife has nothing to do with this,” he said monotonously, like a man repeating an incantation. “I hope to God she never hears of it.”

  “She will, though. You’ll tell her yourself, Eric. You’re the kind of a guy who’ll go to her for comfort, and she’s the kind of a woman who’ll give it to you. That’s why you married her, and that’s why you’ll never leave her.”

  “Won’t I?” He smiled mirthlessly. “If I had known Sue would do what she did—”

  “So you’ve got it all figured out. She killed herself because she couldn’t have you. There may be a good deal of vanity behind your theory, you know. You’ve got a strong feeling of guilt about the affair, and your rationalization of the guilt leads you to the conclusion that Sue killed herself for you. You feel guilty, therefore you are.”

  “I appreciate your intentions. They’re good enough to pave hell with. But you can’t change facts with words.”

  “What facts? You don’t know that Sue committed suicide. She may have been murdered. Halford thinks she was.”

  “Murdered? Who would want to murder Sue?”

  “I don’t know. Detective Cram doesn’t know. Do you?”

  “It’s an incredible idea.” He had nerved himself to live with the idea of her suicide, but the suggestion of murder attacked him from an unexpected quarter, struck him in a new and vulnerable place.

  “Murder is always incredible,” I said. “That’s why it’s a crime and punishable with death. But it happens. Maybe it happened last night.”

  “You’re not taken in by that story about Hector Land, are you? That was evil nonsense. Land’s a queer duck, but sexual crime isn’t in his line at all.”

  “The crime wasn’t sexual. Savo proved that. A queer duck in what way?”

  “I don’t know much about him actually. I intend to find out more. But he’s been insubordinate on one or two occasions, been up for Captain’s Mast and gotten extra duty, and so on. From some things he’s said, I suspect he’s pretty strong on racial feeling. Nothing revolutionary or subversive, I don’t suppose, but he’s not a very soothing influence on the other stewards. I have an idea, too, that he’s one of the leading spirits behind the gambling pools that the black boys have—”

  “Not just the black boys. I haven’t met a Navy man yet that didn’t gamble. Or an Army man, or a Marine.”

  “I know, but you have to watch it, or it gets too big. There are a lot of things you have to watch, even if you can’t hope to enforce Navy Regs to the letter. Navy Regs says no gambling on USN ships, which we interpret to mean not too much gambling, and in the proper places at the proper times. I’m going to check up on everything Hector Land has done since he came aboard this ship.”

  There was the slap-slap of slippers in the passage, and a shadow moved across the grey fireproof curtain which hung in the hatchway. Water gurgled in the scuttlebutt outside, and then the curtain was thrust aside to admit a tousled sandy head and a naked tanned shoulder. The head had a square face and small humorous eyes.

  “Hello, Eric,” the head said in a Texas drawl, wiping its wet mouth with the hairy back of a hand. “Get up early to nurse your hangover?”

  “Walked the floor with it all night. You haven’t met Will, have you, Sam? He’s our Communications Officer. Ensign Drake, Lieutenant Wolson.”

  “Glad to know you, Drake. Communications Officer, Chief Censor, Public Relations Officer, general handyman, and convenient scapegoat. And the rest of the wardroom bitches like hell because I don’t stand deck watches in my spare time. I didn’t even get to the party last night—the Captain wanted to get off a message. Now he wants to get off another message, not that it couldn’t wait until we get to Diego—”

  “It’s definite, then, is it?” Eric said. “We’re going to have our availability in San Diego?”

  “It sure looks like it, but you never can tell in the Navy. Don’t spread it around, or a lot of people may be disappointed.”

  “You didn’t miss much last night,” I said to Wolson. “The party started out with a bang but it ended up with a whimper.”

  “I heard about that. It was tough on Eric. What’s the word on that deal? I heard you mention Hector Land before I looked in.”

  “I’ve got to check up on him,” Eric said. “He was seen coming out of the room where—where the thing happened. I was convinced it was suicide, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “You knew the girl, didn’t you?” Curiosity bubbled behind Wolson’s narrow impassive stare.

  “She was a friend,” Eric said coldly.

  On shipboard even more than on shore, you can’t afford to be too interested in the other fellow’s business or you risk making enemies. Wolson changed the subject:

  “While you’re checking up on Land, you might ask him where he gets all the money he’s been sending home. He must have mailed his wife five hundred dollars in the last couple of months—”

  “He did?” Eric stood up. “Have you got a record of that?”

  “Naturally. We log all enclosures in the letters we censor, more to protect ourselves than anything else.”

  “I’d like to see your book. It would take Land at least a year to save five hundred dollars out of his pay.”

  “How about now? I’m going up to the Comm Office as soon as I get dressed.”

  A few minutes later we followed Wolson up three ladders to the Communications Office, where he handed us his clothbound logbook. “You’ll have to pick out the entries yourself,” he said to Eric. “The Captain’s been calling for me again.”

  Wolson hurried off to the Captain’s cabin, and Eric and I sat down with the book. He looked up the entries and I wrote them down in a column on a slip of paper. In twenty minutes we found the record of six enclosures in letters which Hector Land had sent to Mrs. Hector Land in Detroit. The entries, which were dated, extended over the last three months. Each was for approximately one hundred dollars, and the total was six hundred and twenty dollars.

  “He didn’t sav
e that out of his Navy pay,” Eric said. “He’s got another source of income.”

  “Gambling?”

  “Could be. He’d have to have a wonderful run of luck.”

  “He could have won it all at once, in one glorious crapgame, and sent it home in installments to avoid suspicion.”

  “That’s true. The dates correspond with the times we’ve been in port. We’ve been in and out of Pearl regularly for the last three months. We’ve been in for three or four days approximately every two weeks. Of course he had to send it off when we were in port, because you can’t mail letters at sea. I wonder where in hell he got his money.”

  “Where’s Land now?”

  “In his quarters, I suppose. He’s restricted to the ship until the next Captain’s Mast, and then he’ll probably get the brig.”

  “For what?”

  “He admitted himself that he went into that room to steal whiskey. Even if that’s the only thing he did, he’s in for it and he knows it.”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll get anything out of him this morning,” I said. “Last night scared him stiff. But I think we should have a talk with him.”

  “I think so too.”

  We found Land in the wardroom helping another steward to set the tables for breakfast. He avoided looking at us and went on working as if we weren’t there. He worked quickly and intently as if he would willingly devote his whole life and all his faculties to the safe and homely task of unfolding tablecloths and arranging knives and forks and spoons.

  When Eric called, “Land!” he straightened up and said, “Yessir,” still without looking at us. In the bright iron room his scarred black face and huge torso looked incongruous and lost, like a forest tree torn from its roots by a storm or a flood and lodged in an alien and fatal place.

  “Come here and sit down,” Eric said. “I want to talk to you for a minute.”

  He moved toward us quickly, and, after we had seated ourselves, sat down on the edge of a chair. “Yessir?”

  “You’ve been sending a good deal of money home lately.”

  “Not so much, sir. Just what I manage to save. My wife needs the money, sir.”

  “No doubt she does. But that doesn’t explain where you’ve been getting it.”

  “I saved it, sir. I hardly spend any money on myself at all. I send her all my pay, sir.”

  “Where did you get six hundred and seventy dollars in the last three months? If you stall, I’ll know you’re lying.”

  Land’s jaws moved convulsively, in labor with an answer, but no words came. Finally he said: “I made it, sir. I just made it.”

  “How?”

  “I made it gambling. I’m powerfully lucky with the dice, and I made that money gambling.”

  “Who with?”

  “Just with the boys. Anybody that wanted to play.”

  “Men from this ship?”

  “Yessir. Well, no, sir. Some of them was I guess. I don’t remember.”

  “Think about it, and remember, Land. Because I’m going to check up on your story, and if you’re lying it’s going to be too bad for you. You’re in a pretty bad position as it is, and this gambling deal isn’t going to help.”

  “Yessir,” Land said, the muscles of his face tense with repressed fear. “I made the money gambling. That’s the truth, and that’s why I’m telling you. I’m a lucky man at craps—”

  “That’s what you said. Go out in the galley and see if there’s any chow for us. It’s nearly time for breakfast.”

  Land rose as if a spring had been released under him, and almost ran into the galley.

  “Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

  “How should I know?” Eric said a little snappily. “A black never tells the truth to a white if he can think of anything better. He’s got too much to lose.”

  A loudspeaker on the bulkhead began to rasp: “Lieutenant Swann please lay down to the quarterdeck for a telephone call. Telephone call on the quarterdeck for—”

  “It’s probably the police,” Eric said wearily. “What was that detective’s name?”

  “Cram.”

  It was Detective Cram calling from Honolulu. He wanted to get formal statements from Eric and me, concerning the circumstances of Sue Sholto’s death and my discovery of the body.

  “He wants to talk to you,” Eric said when he had told me this.

  I took the receiver and said, “Drake speaking.”

  “This is Cram. Can you come over to police headquarters this morning? I want to get your story straight.”

  “Yes, but I have to report in at the Transport Office first. I may have to leave on pretty short notice.”

  “Yeah, I know. We’re going to have the inquest this afternoon. You’ll have to be there, also Lieutenant Swann.”

  “We’ll be there. Are there any new developments?”

  “No, but the coroner has his doubts about it being a suicide. The trouble is, we’ve got no lead. Anybody could have done it, including the deceased. The whole thing’s wide open, and I don’t know how we’re going to get it closed. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we’ll talk about it when you come over to my office. Nine o’clock suit you?”

  “Right.”

  We talked about it for nearly two hours behind the Venetian blinds in Cram’s office, and got nowhere. Sue Sholto could have been killed by Land, by Eric, by me, by Gene Halford, by Mary Thompson, by Mrs. Merriwell, by Dr. Savo, by any one of a hundred people. No one who was at the party could account for his actions continuously, and there wasn’t even any reason for limiting the field of suspects to those who had attended the party. Honolulu House had been wide open to anyone all evening.

  The stubborn fact that always stymied us, the blind alley where each new idea led, was that no one had any apparent reason for killing Sue. Eric and Mary were the only ones with whom Sue had had any personal relations, so far as we knew, and neither of them seemed an eligible suspect. I was not surprised that the upshot of the inquest, like the conclusion of our morning’s talk, was the verdict that Sue Sholto had died by her own hand.

  During the inquest, which was repetitious, dull, and obscure, I watched Mary. She was the only object in the bare, sweltering room on which the eyes could rest without effort. She showed the effects of her friend’s death, of course; in the luminous pallor of her skin, the mournful directness of her gaze, the intense stillness of her hands when she gave her testimony. Once or twice her voice broke when she described Sue’s usual gaiety, contrasting with her sudden and unaccountable depression the night before.

  “Yet I didn’t think it was a suicidal depression,” Mary said in answer to the Coroner’s question. “Sue was deeply emotional, passionate, but she never gave way to anything like—such black despair.” Her eyes grew dark with horror of the image that her imagination saw: a lithe body twisted and limp, a bright face become sodden and blue, a discontent with life so great that it preferred nothing. Mary had difficulty in speaking, and the Coroner excused her from the witness stand.

  When the inquest was over Mary was the first to leave the room, walking quickly and blindly to the door. But when I made my way to the hall she was there waiting for me.

  “I hoped I’d have a chance to talk to you before you left,” she said.

  “I was going to call you if we didn’t. I go out tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? That’s very soon.”

  “Not too soon for me. Hawaii’s going to have a funny taste for me from now on.”

  “For me too. I’m beginning to feel that nothing good can happen here. There’s something ominous and antihuman about those mountains, and the clouds, and the bright green sea, and a climate that’s too good all the time.”

  “Something good can happen here.” I was impressed by her feelings but unwilling to be carried away by them. “If you’ll have dinner with me.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not very cheerful company. But I’d like to.”

  “I think we shou
ld try to forget the whole business for a while. What do you say to driving up to the north shore for a swim? I can get a jeep from the Transportation Center.”

  “I’d have to go home and change, and get my swimming-suit.”

  When I picked her up she had changed to white linen, and a bandana for her hair. Then we drove across the island. It was warmer inland, but the wind blew freshly in the open sides of the jeep and whipped the color into her cheeks. The air was suffused with light, the tender green of the young pineapple shoots was like a whispered promise in the fields, the palmtrunks rose straight towards the sun like a high song. But here and there along the road, more frequently as we went higher, there were ribs and boulders of volcanic rock, as if hell had thrust a shoulder through the earth.

  By tacit agreement we avoided talking of Sue’s death. In fact we did very little talking at all, saving our breath for swimming and running. There was no reef to break the surf, and it came into the white beach high and strong, as hard to ride and as exciting as a mettlesome horse. Mary was like a porpoise in the waves. She forgot her earlier depression, and lived in her senses like a young animal.

  When we were tired out we lay in the clean coarse sand, and she slept while I watched her. I watched her smooth shoulders, her honey-colored hair curled in the nape of her neck, her round arms, her long brown thighs, the delicate decline and fullness of her back and buttocks. I didn’t touch her or speak to her, but I memorized her body.

  Only after night fell was there a recurrence of her unhappy mood. We were walking on the beach below the inn where we had eaten dinner. The evening breeze was beginning to blow in from the disappearing sea. The half-visible breakers, approaching and receding, kept up a muttering which rose and fell like a sad native chant.

  “I’m cold,” Mary said. She shivered slightly against my arm. “And I’m afraid.”

  “What you need is another drink. Or maybe two.”

  “Ten would do the trick, I guess. But that would only postpone it until tomorrow.”