Trouble Follows Me

by Ross Macdonald

  “Postpone what?”

  “The way I feel. I feel awfully bleak and desolate, and frightened. I hate this island, Sam. I have a feeling that something terrible will happen if I stay here.”

  “Something terrible has happened, but not to you. It’s a selfish way to look at it, but I’ve seen men die, and the pity and terror are always alleviated by the fact that it isn’t one’s self. The war develops scar tissue in everyone’s sensibilities.”

  “Surely the war has nothing to do with this. Has it?”

  “I was explaining my point of view. But I don’t know. Remember what Gene Halford said about enemy agents in these islands? It was about then that Sue’s mood changed, and soon after that she—she died. It’s barely possible, isn’t it, that there’s a connection?”

  “Don’t say that, please. You’re frightening me more.” We were standing facing each other now, all by ourselves in a remote corner of the dim and deserted beach. I moved closer to look into her face. Her eyes were dark as the night sky, and her mouth was an anguished dark-red gash, tremulous and pitiable.

  “Why are you afraid?” I said. “I don’t get it. Unless you had the same idea.”

  “What idea?”

  “The idea that Sue’s death was connected with the war. Did you?”

  “No, not exactly. But we worked in the same place, and did the same things. If she was killed, whoever, or whatever, killed her may try to kill me too. I know I must sound childish, but I’m afraid.”

  “That’s what you said before, but I don’t see any reason for it. Unless you know more about it than I do?”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t. That’s what makes it so terrible. The whole thing has no reason to it.”

  “All right, if you’re afraid, why don’t you leave the island? Go back to your folks in the States. Oahu gets some people down, and you seem to be one of them.”

  “I am going,” she said softly and firmly. “I couldn’t go on in the station without Sue, anyway. I resigned this morning.”

  “It’ll be a blow to the station to lose both of you at once.”

  “Do you think I’m a welcher?”

  “Hell,” I said. “People have to work out their own lives. If Oahu frightens you, obviously you have to leave it.”

  Far down the shore to our left as we turned seaward there was the chatter and crash of guns. Mary moved against me and I put my arm around her shoulders, feeling the tiny vibration of the nerves throughout her body.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “They have anti-aircraft practice out here nearly every night.”

  The tracers were rising into the sky like luminous juggler’s balls in gentle and terrific flight. The tempo of the guns increased, rising in a raucous crescendo. The long white gaze of searchlights began to scan the empty blackness, crossing and intertwining like desperate searching fingers.

  Mary turned inwards to me as my other arm went around her waist. “Kiss me,” she said.

  We stood interlocked, dizzy and warm, under the zebra-striped sky, until the sound of the guns and the beating of our hearts were a single clamor.

  PART II

  DETROIT

  4

  FIVE thousand miles and two weeks later I met Mary again. It was not a coincidence. We had known each other for only a little more than twenty-four hours, but neither of us was willing to let it end there. Before we parted that night in Hawaii, we exchanged Stateside addresses and telephone numbers.

  I had kept on my bachelor apartment in Detroit by subletting it to a friend. When I got home I moved in with him. During my first week in Detroit not much happened to me externally but a good deal happened inside. I went to visit my old girl-friend Sandra, and found that she had flown the coop. She was in Florida with her very new husband, a very new flier stationed at Pensacola. The thought of Mary cushioned the blow, and I was surprised at how little I cared.

  I was content to lead a bachelor life with my subtenant, a reporter on a morning paper named Joe Scott. I did a good deal of sitting around catching up on my reading and my drinking. The drinking was mostly beer and in the evenings, because I had nothing to escape from and was where I wanted to be. I went to a few shows and one or two parties, where I found myself mostly among acquaintances, not friends. Nearly all my friends were in the services, or in Washington, or in the OWI overseas. Still, it was good to be home for twenty days. Before the week was up I had begun to wonder how I could ever bring myself to go back out to the Pacific. I felt half like a civilian again, and even when I was bored it was good to be bored by something different from sea and sun and bogies on the radar screen.

  With the war, Sue Sholto’s death receded like a nightmare in the morning. More vivid and frequent in my memory was Mary’s long brown body in the sand, the freshness of her mouth, the way she held me on the last night. The bad business came back and hit me hardest the day before Mary telephoned. I went to Ann Arbor to make a duty call on Eric Swann’s wife.

  I had put it off for a week and couldn’t very well put it off any longer. I was embarrassed for Eric’s sake, though I had no objective reason to be. The story of Sue’s death had gone no further than the local Hawaiian press. Eric had been mentioned only in passing, as a member of the party who had testified at the inquest. Still I felt embarrassment, which deepened in the face of the woman’s love and loyalty to her husband.

  Helen Swann was a big pale blonde, vaguely warm and vaguely nervous, the antithesis of Sue Sholto. She was the hausfrau type, but childless, so that all her love was lavished on her husband.

  “You saw Eric, didn’t you?” she said in an eager flutter, when she had perfunctorily praised my tan and the lucky stars which had brought me back. “He wrote me about it. Tell me, is he well?”

  “He seemed very well when I saw him in Pearl,” I lied. “In tip-top form.”

  “I’m so glad. You know, he always tells me in his letters how well he’s feeling, but I can’t entirely believe him. It’s so nice to have confirmation. You see, even if he were sick he wouldn’t tell me, he wouldn’t want to worry me, the poor dear.”

  “You’ll be able to see for yourself,” I said, wondering how deep her loving eyes would see. “His ship’s coming back to the States.”

  “I know,” she said, her soft mouth wreathed in a girlish smile which struck a pang through me. “He’s coming home tomorrow. Look.”

  With the air of a magician solving the riddle of time and space, she picked up a yellow telegram from the table and gave it to me to read:

  SAFE BACK IN STATES ARRIVING HOME FOR SHORT LEAVE WEDNESDAY THE EIGHTEENTH EVER SO MUCH LOVE ERIC.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said. “I don’t care how short the time is if only I can see him again. And he’s coming tomorrow.”

  “That’s swell,” but my enthusiasm rang a little uncertainly in my ears. I doubted Eric’s ability to shift with perfect ease from a dead mistress to a living wife. On the other hand, Helen Swann’s tremulous and brooding love needed very little to feed on. Which was why, I thought, her husband had been unfaithful to her.

  I stayed long enough to satisfy propriety if not all her eager questions, and promised to have dinner with them during Eric’s leave. Then I went back to Detroit to read a book and forget about women.

  The next morning Mary Thompson telephoned from Cleveland. As soon as I heard her low rich voice I knew what had been keeping me dull and somnolent all week. It was suppressed expectation, suppressed by the fear that I’d never hear from her again.

  “You made it fast,” I said. “I’m damn glad.”

  “Fast for a civilian. I’m damn glad too. How long have you been home?”

  “A week.”

  “Having a good time?”

  “In a quiet way. I suddenly realized when I heard your voice that I’ve been waiting very hard to hear from you.”

  “That’s nice. If you mean it. You’re sure you’re not really put out to hear from me, and just carrying it off like a gentleman?”

&nb
sp; “You know different. My feeling for you is not precisely gentlemanly. When can I see you?”

  “Well, I’m coming back to Detroit today. Not to see you: it’s about a job.”

  “Back to Detroit? You mean you were here and didn’t call me?”

  “I was just passing through from Chicago. I had to come here to see the folks. Not that any explanation is called for. Avoid that proprietary tone.” Her voice was mocking, but a little steel grated in it. “How’s the girlfriend?”

  “Married off, thank God. In which case will you meet me for dinner at the Book-Cadillac at eight?”

  “I’d love to. See you.” She hung up.

  A couple of hours later I had another telephone call, and I began to feel as if it were Pearl Harbor old home week. This time it was Eric, calling from the airport.

  “I’m glad I could get in touch with you,” he said when we had exchanged greetings. “Something new has been added.”

  “In connection with—it?”

  “Not exactly. Perhaps. Hector Land has disappeared.”

  “I thought he was in the brig.”

  “He was for ten days. Then we let him out, but he was restricted to the ship. The night we got into Diego he got away somehow, and hasn’t been seen since.”

  “I don’t see how he got out of the Yard.”

  “We weren’t in the Yard yet. We docked at North Island when we came in. I figure he must have slipped over the side and swum around to one of the unrestricted beaches, maybe at Coronado. He may have drowned himself, for that matter. Anyway he’s gone.”

  “His being A.W.O.L. doesn’t prove very much, does it?”

  “Not much. But I’m still interested in checking up on him. That’s the main reason I called you. His wife lives in Detroit.”

  “I know. Somewhere in Paradise Valley.”

  “I can’t take the time now—Helen will be waiting for me—but I thought I’d come into town tonight and look up Mrs. Land. Are you free?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I have a dinner engagement.”

  “Could we get together afterwards?”

  For a moment I thought of asking him to leave me out of it, let me forget it even if he couldn’t. But I said: “Look, it’s Mary Thompson I’m having dinner with—she just got back to the States. Why don’t you bring Helen and make it a foursome? We’ll make a night of it and if we get the chance we’ll look up Mrs. Land.”

  As soon as I made the suggestion I regretted it. There are more entertaining projects for a mixed group than looking in Paradise Valley for a Negro woman you have never seen. Apart from that, I anticipated a certain amount of strain in a meeting between Eric’s wife and Sue’s friend. But Eric took me up on it and the engagement was made for eight.

  The party fitted together better than I expected. Helen was so delighted to be with Eric again that nothing could have fazed her, and Eric flourished in the atmosphere of devotion which she generated. Mary, who I remembered had understood Eric from the beginning, was content to let well enough alone. She made no mention of Sue, nor even any subtly feminine insinuation, and the two women were soon on their way to becoming friends.

  Mary had changed noticeably since I had seen her. On Oahu her whole nature had seemed open, like a rose in a sudden hailstorm, to the shock and pain of events. She had been shaken by the vibration of horror which had passed through Honolulu House, and I had felt helpless to comfort her, though I did my best. Now she seemed no longer vulnerable. Her nature had closed upon itself and become poised and self-contained again. Perhaps it was no more than the healthful effects of putting the island and its associations behind her, of taking a sea-voyage, of coming home again. But she seemed a different woman.

  The difference was emphasized by the Martinis and highballs we had before and after dinner. When Eric and I proposed our expedition, Mary took it up with sophomore enthusiasm:

  “I think it should be fun. A manhunt through the wilds of Detroit. A womanhunt, at least.”

  “Hardly that,” Eric said drily. “I’ve got her address. 214 Chestnut Street.”

  Helen was a bit put out: “I thought you were on leave, Eric. You’ve only got five days and one day’s gone already.”

  He looked a little sheepish but said: “This won’t take half an hour. After that we’ll hit the night-spots.”

  Mary and I shared the back seat of Eric’s carefully preserved sedan, and I lost interest in where we were going. She let me kiss her, but her mouth was not tremulous and yielding as it had been the one other time. She kissed me firmly back.

  Before I wanted to see it I saw the number 214 in rusty metal nailed above the door of a dark building. It stood among other buildings like it, huge multicellular mansions which had once housed a single family in rather stuffy luxury, and now housed twenty or more. Hemmed in by economic pressure and social injustice, the Negroes swarmed in the rotting hives which they had neither built nor chosen, three, five, or seven to a room. The old houses were eaten away by interior decay, the plumbing dissolved and went away in the sewers, the floors and walls were unpainted and unpapered, the roofs were sagging and porous, the heating systems were left unused or taken out to be sold as scrap metal; and the landlords made no repairs, because they were not needed to rent the buildings. Yet from the outside, especially when snow and bleak weather kept the tenants huddled inside around their stoves, the houses looked as they had always looked. Their façades were ornate and imposing, like a pompous matron with a social disease.

  Mary wanted to go in with us, for the adventure, she said, but Helen was glad enough to stay outside of the gloomy building.

  “This isn’t a very good section,” Eric said, apparently regretting the impulse which had made him bring his wife here. “Keep the doors locked, and if anybody tries to bother you just drive around the block.”

  We left them bundled up in their furs in the front seat, and knocked on the door of the silent house. A glass window set high in the huge carved door was painted over and shone whitely like an eye blinded by cataract. We knocked again, and when nobody answered opened the door and entered the dark hallway. The hall was deserted, but it was odorous and murmurous, alive with the memories and promises of human life: cooking and eating, copulation and birth, quarrels and music and violence.

  The first door to the right showed a crack of light. I knocked on it and the crack widened.

  “Who you want?” said the half-face, leathery and wrinkled and crowned with a grey poll, which appeared in the lighted crack.

  “Does Mrs. Hector Land live here?”

  “Bessie Land live down the hall,” the old man said impatiently. “Third to the left.” He shut the door.

  We stepped carefully among perambulators and empty milkbottles and found the door. I lit my lighter and found a card nailed to the door with a thumbtack. It bore two autographs: Mrs. Bessie Land, Mrs. Kate Morgan.

  I knocked on the door and a woman shouted brusquely: “Go away, I’m busy.”

  There were sounds from inside the room which indicated the nature of the business.

  “I don’t like this,” Eric said suddenly. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I said: “Did you expect Mrs. Land to receive you in her drawing-room with her best tiara on?”

  I knocked again and the sounds ceased. A young Negro woman came to the door holding a cotton wrapper across her breast. She kicked without malice at a white mongrel puppy which bounded out of the darkness and nipped at her slippers.

  “Mrs. Hector Land?” I said.

  “Bessie ain’t here. She ain’t in business any more anyway. If you wait a few minutes, maybe I—?”

  She raised her right hand to stroke back her hair and made her right breast rise under the wrapper.

  “We came to see Mrs. Land,” Eric said hastily. “On business. That is, not—” He blushed and subsided.

  “Suits me,” the black girl said, and smiled without warmth. “I’m tired tonight. Bessie’s over at the Paris Bar and Grill. Around the
corner to your left.”

  We found Helen and Mary shivering in the car in spite of heater and furs, and drove around the corner to the left. A gap-toothed neon in red and orange flickered on the dirty snow like a dying fire, proclaiming the Paris Bar and Grill.

  “Better come in and have a drink,” I said to Mary. “It’s cold out here.”

  “Are you quite sure it’s safe?” Helen said. “It looks like an all-Negro place.”

  “So what?” I said. “This is a democracy, isn’t it? They drink the same liquor we do, and it makes them drunk just like us.”

  “Come on,” Mary said, and we all went in. There was a lunch-counter along the left wall, along the right a row of booths with tall thin partitions between them, and a bar at the back. At the right end of the bar there was a boogie-woogie piano with a black boogie-woogie pianist playing it. The big room was loud with the intricate rustle and jangle of boogie-woogie, thick with smoke, and crowded with people. But there wasn’t much talking, and there was no laughter. I realized with a jolt that everyone in the room was conscious of our presence. I was embarrassed by the power of my skin to stop a roomful of conversations. Our progress down the room was a little like running a moral gauntlet.

  All the booths were full but there was room at the bar for us. We sat down and asked the bartender for four bourbons and the whereabouts of Mrs. Hector Land.

  “Right beside you,” he said to me with a smile. I looked at the woman beside me. She was black but comely, like the girl in Song of Songs: well-made, with strong delicate lines in her face and long narrow eyes. But her eyes weren’t very well focussed and her mouth was gloomy and slack. There was a little glass of brownish fluid in front of her.

  “Mrs. Land?” I said.

  “Yes.” I smelt wormwood on her breath.

  “I’m Ensign Drake. This is Lieutenant Swann, who would like to ask you a question or two.”

  “Questions about what?” she said drowsily. Her eyes swung in her head slowly as if by their own weight.

  “About your husband.”