Trouble Follows Me

by Ross Macdonald

  “Put down your gun,” Hector said softly to Anderson. “I want to talk to you.”

  His large body slanted towards Anderson in a slight movement which was as terrible as the slight movement of a stone statue.

  Anderson said: “Stay where you are or I’ll fire.” The automatic shifted in his hand, and I saw his fingers tighten on the trigger.

  All this time Land had been holding my shoulder, which ached in his grip. In the same moment he let go of me and moved swiftly towards Anderson in a crouching leap. The gun fired six times before it was knocked away. I jumped to the ground and searched for it in the dust, but couldn’t find it. When I looked up Anderson was standing on the porch white and shaken. Land was stretched out at his feet. I rushed Anderson and hit him with my left because my right was injured.

  He kicked at my groin but only grazed my thigh. I closed with him and hit him with my left. I felt his nose break under my fist. He turned to run and I caught him from behind by shoulder and crotch and threw him over the railing of the verandah. He fell heavily in the dust, lay still for a moment, and began to get up.

  I went after him and waited over him till he got up. Then I hit him with my left. One of his teeth showed through his upper lip. He saw that I aimed to kill him and closed with me groping for a headlock. He caught my head in a thick arm and for a minute I teetered on his hip. I set all the strength I had left against his weight, which was greater than mine. Finally I slipped my head free. I put my knee in his back and dragged him backwards with my arm around his throat. He fell heavily with me on top of him.

  When he got up I hit him again with my left. The lower half of his face was bright with blood. Now a flap came loose over his eye and hung down showing the white bone. I hit him again with my left and he went down moaning. I pulled him to his feet and hit him again with my left. He kicked at me but lost his balance and fell on his back. I helped him to his feet and hit him again. My fist caught him in the center of the throat and broke his larynx. I heard it snap. When he fell down I let him lie. I was very happy.

  Hector Land came down off the verandah then. He walked slowly and the blood ran down one side of his face from a bullet track across his temple. But when he pushed me out of the way I staggered my own length and fell in the dust.

  I lay there and watched him kick Anderson to death. Anderson’s head became shapeless and muddy. There was nothing I could do and nothing I wanted to do. I was afraid of Hector Land and I wanted to see Anderson die. When I had seen him die I crawled around the corner of the house and sat in the shadow nursing my broken left hand.

  14

  AFTER a long time, during which my body was stiffened and chilled by the mountain air, I moved from my seat in the shadowed dust and looked cautiously around the corner of the house. Anderson lay where he had fallen, his face in the moonlight half-returned to indistinguishable earth. There was no trace of Hector Land except the destruction which I had begun and he had ended.

  I left my hiding place and crawled in the dust below the verandah, clawing through it square foot by square foot, searching for the gun which Anderson had dropped. Not even the war had been able to convince me, but I was convinced now, that a gun was more precious than anything else. In a world of violence and terror a gun was the staff of life. My nerves were so shaken that I should not have been astonished if the mountains had spoken and threatened me, or if armed men had sprung up out of the ground. I sifted the dust for the gun as a prospector sifts gold-bearing sand, but I couldn’t find it.

  Then came the one remaining thing which had power to astonish me, and the mental horror was added to the physical horror. Far off among the mountains I heard the hum of an automobile engine like a drone of insects, which grew louder as the car climbed the road towards the valley. I could see the beam from its headlights, first like a small faint dawn working its way across the brow of the pass into the valley, then like a white flare of torches flung intermittently against the night. Before the car itself came into sight I went back to my lair and squatted down to watch. With my whole body weak and sore, and without a gun, I felt helpless and declassed, without rights or hopes in a world which struck unpredictably against anyone who did not have a weapon and the will to use it.

  The car bounded casually over the last ridge as if it were on a familiar track. When it began to descend into the valley I saw that it was a light roadster with the top down. When it reached the bottom of the hill and stopped, I saw that a woman was driving. When she stepped out of the car I saw that it was Mary Thompson.

  “Mary!” I shouted, and ran towards her on knees which were almost unhinged by relief and reaction from shock and fear. She walked quickly towards me. Her hair, ashy in the moonlight, was blown by the wind.

  She said, “Sam! What’s happened?”

  I pointed to the body in the dust.

  “Who is that?”

  “It’s Anderson. Lorenz Jensen.”

  Her mouth opened to scream and the tendons of her neck came out like fingers in bas-relief. She made no sound.

  “Don’t look,” I said, and put out my hand to her shoulder to turn her away. But when she turned to me she had a small revolver in her hand. A wave of nausea swept through the middle of my body. It was almost more than I could bear to stand in a line of fire again, and to be invaded by the thoughts which sprang up full-fledged in my mind after long repression.

  “How did you get here?” I said.

  She put the hand which held the gun in the pocket of her coat. “I drove here to find you. I got your message from the taxi driver.”

  “How did you know where to come?”

  “The police raided Miss Green’s house. She told them where you were.”

  I was so grateful for her explanation that I almost wept For a moment of terrible stillness, during which the mountains had seemed as unreal as cardboard and the moon a silver coin pasted to a low hollow ceiling, I had imagined that she was another enemy. The sky expanded again into infinite pure space and the mountains resumed their solidity.

  Then the whole fabric collapsed, with a grinding like bone being crushed in my head. “Why didn’t the police come?” I said.

  While she was still hesitating on the point of speech, I struck at her. She stepped back out of my way and brought the gun out of its pocket. “Raise your hands. Walk ahead of me slowly into the house. Where’s Hector Land?”

  “He ran away,” I said. “He killed Anderson and ran away.”

  “Land killed Anderson?”

  “I told him Anderson murdered Bessie. But you killed her, didn’t you?”

  A sudden Gestalt which must have been preparing in my unconscious for a long time, held down by the will to believe in Mary Thompson, illuminated the past month in bitter colors. “That was why you had a headache and had to go back to the hotel. So that you could catch Bessie Land when she came home from the bar, and quiet her for good.”

  Her face groped for an attitude. It is terrible to see a human face empty of meaning. Her face was still beautiful, but I saw for the first time its essential lack of humanity. It was like a silver face cast on a screen, sustained in beauty by the desire of the onlooker who wishes away its unreality.

  “Turn around and walk into the house as I told you. I want to talk to you, Sam.”

  I had thought that I knew her intimately, but for the first time I saw into her mind. She could pull the trigger easily because she could not imagine the consequences of killing, because to her human bodies were organic matter to be disposed of when it became inconvenient. She could betray her country because she had no country to betray. She could kill me easily because lovers were easy to find. I did as I was told.

  The front door of the ranchhouse opened directly on the living room, a wide low room, heavily furnished with thick black furniture. There was a cavernous stone fireplace at one end, and before it a refectory table flanked by chairs with carved backs. The room was dimly lit by a kerosene lamp on one end of the table. Facing the fireplace, at
the other end of the room, was a door which opened on darkness.

  “Sit down there,” she said, pointing the revolver towards a chair at the end of the table.

  I sat down and she sat facing me, with her back to the dead fireplace. I began to plan to overturn the table on her.

  “Keep your hands on the table,” she said. “If you don’t I’ll have to shoot you.”

  That repeated threat was beginning to lose its terror for me, but I put my hands on the table. My left hand was swollen and blue and almost rigid. My right hand was crusted with blood where the rope had torn the flesh.

  “You’re having a bad time of it, aren’t you?” she said.

  I felt free from fear and extraordinarily light, but I was beginning to lose my interest in things. I saw everything clearly, without conscious emotion, with the wan objectivity of a cynicism which is reached at the bottom of despair.

  I told her the truth: “This is the worst time now.”

  “Look, Sam. I gave Sue Sholto her chance but she wouldn’t take it. She’d been suspicious of me for a long time, ever since she caught me marking the records one day in the record-library. When she heard about the leak of information that night at Honolulu House, she finally caught on. But I gave her a chance. I didn’t want to kill her. I went to her in the women’s room where she was lying down, I even offered her money to keep quiet. She said she wouldn’t keep quiet. So I had to kill her. Hector Land almost caught me at it when he came up to the powder room to talk to me.”

  “You must be strong.”

  “Yes, I’m strong for a woman. But I don’t want to kill you, Sam. I don’t have to kill you if you’ll keep quiet.”

  It struck me suddenly that Mary was a strange name for her to have. Mary was an innocent and feminine name, the name of virgins and mothers. Then I thought of Bloody Mary.

  I said: “Did you ever hear of Bloody Mary?”

  Her eyes were very pale, almost white. My mind was working at top speed in a vacuum, quick to find allusions which would do me no good. I thought of Scott Fitzgerald’s description of a woman who had “white crook’s eyes.”

  “You don’t seem to realize, Sam,” she said in a flat tone. “I have to kill you now if you don’t agree to keep quiet. This is your only chance.”

  I told myself that I would play for time. I was too tired to face death just then. “What’s your offer?”

  “Life. That’s the main thing.”

  “Go on.”

  “You know that we can get along. Now that Jensen’s dead we can marry.” She saw no irony in her distaste for bigamy. “It’s best that way, I’ve found.”

  “Was he your husband? No wonder you tried to steal Hatcher’s letter.”

  “The last few years he was. It cuts down on the passport problem and a lot of other things.”

  “I told him he was a pimp,” I said. “I didn’t know how right I was. He let you bed with me so I wouldn’t catch him sneaking off the train at Gallup. Didn’t he?”

  “He couldn’t have stopped me,” she said with a perverse pride. “I wanted you. I still do, if you don’t make me kill you.”

  “What would we do together? Make love?”

  “You needn’t be cynical about it. I know how you feel about me. I could have you now.”

  “One of the dangers of getting out of touch with normal human values is this.” I forgot that I was playing for time. “You make ghastly mistakes. Like murder. Like that one.”

  Her lips parted, her teeth showed, her eyelids crinkled, but the movements of her face did not convey the intent of a smile. All I could see there was the terrible blank naïveté of evil. “Maybe not right this minute. You look pretty tired.”

  I said: “What would my other duties be?”

  She said: “The Baroness is dead. She committed suicide before the police got to her. Jensen is dead. Toulouse is in jail, but she doesn’t count. She doesn’t know the business, she doesn’t even know where this ranch is. She’s nothing but a graduate of a Paris bordello, a woman we paid for the use of her house. We could make a lot of money, Sam.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve got the brains and the contacts. You’re in the Navy, and you used to be a newspaper man. If you could get yourself transferred to Public Relations. There’s a thing in New Mexico that Jensen has been working on. You may have heard of the Manhattan Project. We need an inside man, someone in the services, and we haven’t been able to get one. You told me you wanted to make money, Sam. We could make more money than you’ve ever dreamed of.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred thousand dollars in six months.” Her eyes glittered like glass, and I saw what her central emotion was. She loved money so passionately that she couldn’t imagine how cold her numbers left me.

  My emotions were coming to life again, forming a new configuration directed against her. I said in cold fury:

  “I’d rather go into business with a hyena and make love to a corpse.”

  Her mouth fell open as if my sentiments surprised and offended her. “Don’t you understand, Sam? I have to kill you if you won’t cooperate. I have to kill you now. And I don’t want to. Why do you think I took the job of watching you? Why do you think I didn’t kill you in Detroit? I could have killed you there. I could have killed you in Honolulu. After his own attempt failed, Jensen wanted me to kill you on the train but I didn’t want to. Even when you started figuring out our code I didn’t want to. I thought perhaps we could get along.”

  I said nothing. I watched her face. I saw that like all true criminals she was abnormal. Part of her sensibility was missing and part of her mind was blank. She could not see herself as evil or depraved. Her ego stood between her and the rest of the world like a distorting lens.

  My anger had died down into a kind of sick repulsion, but steady fear of the gun made my mind unnaturally active. I knew I had come to the end but I kept on talking. Talking had saved my life once. I did not see how it could save me again, but I went on talking, buying my life minute by minute with words. Perhaps the vigilance of the gun would relax, and I’d have a chance to move.

  “How did you get into this kind of thing?” I said. There was a whine of insincerity in my voice which I couldn’t repress.

  “I hate the life.” But she went on as if she had been waiting eagerly for such a question, as if perhaps she had not had a chance to explain herself for years: “But I’ve always been in it, and it buys me the things I want. I started lifting things in stores when I was eleven. There was a woman that pretended to be my mother when we went shopping. She was Jensen’s mistress then.”

  “I thought your parents were in Cleveland.”

  “My mother died in Cleveland when I was a baby. My father took me to Chicago when I was seven, and died two years later. I’ve been on my own ever since. Jensen got rid of the other woman when I was fourteen, and then we started to work into the real money. I’d pick up men on the Chicago streets and take them to our apartment. Jensen would come in and pretend to be my father. I was underage. They paid. But the last one was a detective. Jensen went to the penitentiary and I went to reform school. When he got out he helped me to escape, but we were on the rocks and the police were after him for breaking parole. We went west and travelled steerage from Seattle to Manila. From there we went to Shanghai. We made some good contacts in Shanghai. Since then we’ve been in the money.”

  “Money is very important to you, isn’t it?”

  “It’s very important to everybody, don’t let them kid you. Maybe it’s a little more important to me. For two years I slept in a box of excelsior behind a furnace in a cellar. I ate what people left on their plates in restaurants. Now I eat the best that money can buy.”

  “Human flesh is a rich diet,” I said, “but it makes you deathly sick in the end.”

  I had found words that reached her. As if I had pressed a button her face became convulsive. “I didn’t want to kill them,” she chanted in a high voice which rose to a scream. “
I didn’t want to kill Sue Sholto! I didn’t want to kill Bessie Land! But she knew about Jensen and Black Israel, and she was getting ready to talk. I had to. It was hard for me. I did have a migraine that night.”

  A blob of saliva dripped over her lower lip onto her chin. I tried to imagine myself ever kissing that wild mouth. She wiped the moisture away with the back of her left hand. Her right hand held the gun pointed steadily at my heart.

  I knew that she was ready to kill me, and I had to act now. I tensed my muscles to overturn the table.

  Before I moved Hector Land spoke behind me, from the other end of the room. His voice boomed under the low ceiling: “It was you that killed Bessie.”

  Mary’s eyes shifted from my face. I heard three heavy footsteps drag across the floor behind me. I watched her gun. The muscles moved in her slender wrist and it was deflected from my heart.

  There was an explosion behind me, and her gun fell to the table. With one hand clenched on the edge of the table she held herself upright. The other hand was at her breast. A little blood leaked between her fingers and sparkled on them like rubies.

  She said: “My breast is a nasty mess. You liked it for a little while, didn’t you, Sam? You thought my breasts were beautiful.”

  She was about to say more, but she coughed, and her voice bubbled in her throat. Bright streams of blood spilled from the corners of her mouth, and for a moment I had the illusion that she was grinning a shining red grin which stretched from side to side of her face.

  “It’s just as well this way,” she said thickly. “I didn’t want to kill you.”

  Her eyes were black with pain and stared at me so intently that I didn’t know she was dead till her body went loose. Her fair head, her mouth and breast, her fine weaving hips, her evil brain perched like an obscene bird on the edge of madness, fell to the floor like a sack. A sack of food for worms.

  I picked up her gun from the table and turned to face Hector Land. He squeezed the gun in his hand three times rapidly, so hard that the muscles in his forearm writhed like a black snake. No fire came out of the muzzle.