“I can understand why you killed Allie Russo,” I said, “and Nelson Bagley. But why did Tony Lashman have to die?”
“He knew that Nelson Bagley had come here to the house. He tried to get money from me. He wanted a hundred dollars a day for life.”
Her voice was cold and resentful. She had suffered so much that she was immune to anyone else’s suffering. I was growing weary of her, and I asked her to take me to Laurel.
We went to a bedroom at the front of the house. The wall that faced the sea was made of glass, but it was heavily draped against the morning. At one end, a glass door opened onto a railed balcony.
Laurel lay asleep on the bed, a pillow under her dark head and an afghan over her. There was a telephone on the bedside table. Before I used it, I bent over Laurel and touched her warm forehead with my mouth. I could hardly believe that she was alive.
Behind me, the door to the balcony opened and closed. Marian Lennox was climbing awkwardly over the railing.
I moved toward her. “Marian, come back.”
She paid no attention to me. She stepped off into air and fell in silence until the black boulders stopped her. Smoke swirled over her body like the smoke from funeral pyres.
I went back to Laurel. She stirred and half awakened, as if my concern for her had reached down palpably into her sleeping mind. She was alive.
I picked up the phone and started to make the necessary calls.
ROSS MACDONALD
Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.
Books by Ross Macdonald
Blue City
The Dark Tunnel
Trouble Follows Me
The Three Roads
The Moving Target
The Drowning Pool
The Way Some People Die
The Ivory Grin
Meet Me at the Morgue
Find a Victim
The Name is Archer
The Barbarous Coast
The Doomsters
The Galton Case
The Ferguson Affair
The Wycherly Woman
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
The Chill
Black Money
The Far Side of the Dollar
The Goodbye Look
The Underground Man
Sleeping Beauty
The Blue Hammer
BOOKS BY ROSS MACDONALD
THE BARBAROUS COAST
The beautiful, high-diving blonde had Hollywood dreams and stars in her eyes but now she seems to have disappeared without a trace. Hired by her hotheaded husband and her rummy “uncle,” Lew Archer sniffs around Malibu and finds the stink of blackmail, blood money, and murder on every pricey silk shirt. Beset by dirty cops, a bumptious boxer turned silver-screen pretty boy, and a Hollywood mogul with a dark past, Archer discovers the secret of a grisly murder that just won’t stay hidden.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27903-3
THE IVORY GRIN
A hard-faced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry. Archer can tell he’s being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a ramshackle motel in a seedy, rundown small town, but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed number-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who’s mysteriously gone missing.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27899-9
SLEEPING BEAUTY
Lew finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their hands—including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald’s masterful tale of buried memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations between parents and their children.
Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70866-4
THE DOOMSTERS
Hired by Carl Hallman, the desperate-eyed junkie scion of an obscenely wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the suspicious deaths of Hallman’s parents, Senator Hallman and his wife, Alicia. Arriving in the sleepy town of Purissima, Archer discovers that orange groves may be where the Hallmans made their mint but they’ve been investing heavily in political intimidation and police brutality to shore up their rancid riches. However, after years of dastardly double-crossing and low down dirty dealing, the family seems to be on the receiving end of a karmic death blow. With two already dead and another consigned to the nuthouse, Archer races to crack the secret before another Hallman lands on the slab.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27904-0
THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE
In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer’s hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘crazy for men’ and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27898-2
THE GOODBYE LOOK
Lew is hired to investigate a burglary at the mission-style mansion mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disappearing, and the Chalmerses are a family with money and memories to burn. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, a mysterious hobo. Then a stiff turns up in a car on an empty beach. And Nick turns up with a Colt .45.
Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70865-7
THE INSTANT ENEMY
At first glance, it’s an open-and-shut missing persons case: a head-strong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie and Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett, a local millionaire industrialist. Now, Archer is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by Hachett’s coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? And is the daughter simply his nympho sex-kitten companion in crime or really a fragile kid, trying to block out horrific memories of bad acid and an unspeakable sex crime.
Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27905-7
ALSO AVAILABLE:
Black Money, 978-0-679-76810-4
The Blue Hammer, 978-0-679-76810-4
The Chill, 978-0-679-76807-4
The Drowning Pool, 978-0-679-76806-7
The Far Side of the Dollar, 978-0-679-76865-4
Find a Victim, 978-0-375-70867-1
The Galton Case, 978-0-679-76864-7
The Wycherly Woman, 978-0-375-70144-3
The Moving Target, 978-0-375-70146-7
The Underground Man, 978-0-679-76808-1
The Zebra-Striped Hearse, 978-0-375-70145-0
VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
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