The Galton Case

by Ross Macdonald

  “I haven’t seen him since lunch. Probably he’s out in his car somewhere.”

  “His car?”

  “Aunt Maria bought him a cute little Thunderbird. John’s crazy about it. He’s like a child with a new toy. He told me he’s never had a car of his own before.”

  “I guess he has a lot of things he never had before.”

  “Yes. I’m so happy for him.”

  “You’re a generous woman.”

  “Not really. I’ve a lot to be thankful for. Now that John’s come home, I wouldn’t trade my life for any other. It may sound like a strange thing to say, but life is suddenly just as it was in the old days—before the war, before Tony died. Everything seems to have fallen into harmony.”

  She sounded as if she had transferred her lifelong crush from Tony to John Galton. A dream possessed her face. I wanted to warn her not to bank too heavily on it. Everything could fall into chaos again.

  Mrs. Galton was fussing on the stairs. Cassie went to the door to meet her. The old lady had on a black tailored suit with something white at her throat. Her hair was marcelled in hard gray corrugations which resembled galvanized iron. She extended her bony hand:

  “I’m most pleased to see you. I’ve been wanting to express my personal appreciation to you. You’ve made my house a happier one.”

  “Your check was a very nice expression,” I said.

  “The laborer is worthy of his hire.” Perhaps she sensed that that wasn’t the most tactful way to put it, because she added: “Won’t you stay for tea? My grandson will want to see you. I expect him back for tea. He should be here now.”

  The querulous note was still in her voice. I wondered how much of her happiness was real, how much sheer will to believe that something good could happen to a poor old rich lady. She lowered herself into a chair, exaggerating the difficulty of her movements. Cassie began to look anxious.

  “I think he’s at the country club, Aunt Maria.”

  “With Sheila?”

  “I think so,” Cassie said.

  “Is he still seeing a lot of her?”

  “Just about every day.”

  “We’ll have to put a stop to that. He’s much too young to think of taking an interest in any one girl. Sheila is a dear sweet child, of course, but we can’t have her monopolizing John. I have other plans for him.”

  “What plans,” I said, “if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I’m thinking of sending John to Europe in the fall. He needs broadening, and he’s very much interested in the modern drama. If the interest persists, and deepens, I’ll build him a repertory theater here in Santa Teresa. John has great talent, you know. The Galton distinction comes out in a different form in each generation.”

  As if to demonstrate this proposition, a red Thunderbird convertible careened up the long driveway. A door slammed. John came in. His face was flushed and sullen. He stood inside the doorway and pushed his fists deep in his jacket pockets, his head thrust forward in a peering attitude.

  “Well!” he said. “Here we all are. The three fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Mr. Archer.”

  “That isn’t funny, John,” Cassie said in a voice of warning.

  “I think it’s funny. Very, very funny.”

  He came toward us, weaving slightly, exaggerating the movements of his shoulders. I went to meet him:

  “Hello, John.”

  “Get away from me. I know why you’re here.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you all right.”

  He threw a wild fist in my direction, staggering off balance. I moved in close, turned him with his back to me, took hold of his jacket collar with both hands and pulled it halfway down his arms. He sputtered words at me which smelled like the exhalations from a still. But I could feel the lethal force vibrating through him.

  “Straighten up and quiet down,” I said.

  “I’ll knock your block off.”

  “First you’ll have to load yourself up with something solider than whisky.”

  Mrs. Galton breathed at my shoulder. “Has he been drinking?”

  John answered her himself, in a kind of small-boy defiance: “Yes I have been drinking. And I’ve been thinking. Thinking and drinking. I say it’s a lousy setup.”

  “What?” she said. “What’s happened?”

  “A lot of things have happened. Tell this man to turn me loose.”

  “Let him go,” Mrs. Galton said commandingly.

  “Do you think he’s ready?”

  “Damn you, let me go.”

  He made a violent lunge, and tore loose from the arms of his jacket. He whirled and faced me with his fists up: “Come on and fight. I’m not afraid of you.”

  “This is hardly the time and place.”

  I tossed his jacket to him. He caught and held it, looking down at it stupidly. Cassie stepped between us. She took the jacket and helped him on with it. He submitted almost meekly to her hands.

  “You need some black coffee, John. Let me get you some black coffee.”

  “I don’t want coffee, I’m not drunk.”

  “But you’ve been drinking.” Mrs. Galton’s voice rose almost an octave and stayed there on a querulous monotone: “Your father started drinking young, you mustn’t let it happen all over again. Please, you must promise me.”

  The old lady hung on John’s arm, making anxious noises, while Cassie tried to soothe her. John’s head swung around, his eyes on me:

  “Get that man out of here! He’s spying for Dr. Howell.”

  Mrs. Galton turned on me, the bony structure of her face pushing out through the seamed flesh:

  “I trust my grandson is mistaken about you. I know Dr. Howell is incapable of committing disloyal acts behind my back.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” John said. “He doesn’t want me seeing Sheila. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do to break it up.”

  “I’m asking you, Mr. Archer. Did Dr. Howell hire you?”

  “I’ll have to ask you to take it up with Howell.”

  “It is true, then?”

  “I can’t answer that, Mrs. Galton.”

  “In that case please leave my house. You entered it under false pretenses. If you trespass again, I’ll have you prosecuted. I’ve a good mind to go to the authorities as it is.”

  “No, don’t do that,” John said. “We can handle it, Grandma.”

  He seemed to be sobering rapidly. Cassie chimed in:

  “You mustn’t get so excited about nothing. You know what Dr. Howell—”

  “Don’t mention his name in my presence. To be betrayed by an old and trusted friend—well, that’s what it is to have money. They think they have a right to it simply because it’s there. I see now what August Howell has been up to, insinuating himself and his chit of a daughter into my life. Well, he’s not getting a cent of my money. I’ve seen to that”

  “Please calm down, Aunt Maria.”

  Cassie tried to lead her back to her chair. Mrs. Galton wouldn’t budge. She called hoarsely in my direction:

  “You can go and tell August Howell he’s overreached himself. He won’t get a cent of my money, not a cent. It’s going to my own kith and kin. And tell him to keep that daughter of his from flinging herself at my grandson. I have other plans for him.”

  The breath rustled and moaned in her head. She closed her eyes; her face was like a death mask. She tottered and almost fell. John held her around the shoulders.

  “Get out,” he said to me. “My grandmother is a sick woman. Can’t you see what you’re doing to her?”

  “Somebody’s doing it to her.”

  “Are you going to get out, or do I call the police?”

  “You’d better go,” Cassie said. “Mrs. Galton has a heart condition.”

  Mrs. Galton’s hand went to her heart automatically. Her head fell loosely onto John’s shoulder. He stroked her gray hair. It was a very touching scene.

  I wondered as I went out how many more scenes like th
at the old lady’s heart would stand. The question kept me awake on the night plane to Chicago.

  chapter 24

  I PUT in two days of legwork in Ann Arbor, where I represented myself as a personnel investigator for a firm with overseas contracts. John’s account of his high school and college life checked out in detail. I established one interesting additional detail: He had enrolled in the high school under the name of John Lindsay five-and-a-half years before, on January 9. Peter Culligan had been arrested in Detroit, forty miles away, on January 7 of the same year. Apparently it had taken the boy just two days to find a new protector in Gabriel Lindsay.

  I talked to friends of Lindsay’s, mostly high-school teachers. They remembered John as a likely boy, though he had been, as one of them said: “A tough little egg to start with.” They understood that Lindsay had taken him off the streets.

  Gabriel Lindsay had gone in for helping young people in trouble. He was an older man who had lost a son in the war, and his wife soon after the war. He died himself in the University Hospital in February of the previous year, of pneumonia.

  His doctor remembered John’s constant attendance at his bedside. The copy of his will on file in the Washtenaw County courthouse left two thousand dollars to “my quasi-foster-son, known as John Lindsay, for the furtherance of his education.” There were no other specific bequests in Lindsay’s will; which probably meant it was all the money he had.

  John had graduated from the University in June, as a Speech major, with honors. His counselor in the Dean’s office said that he had been a student without any overt problems; not exactly popular perhaps: he seemed to have no close friends. On the other hand, he had been active in campus theatrical productions, and moderately successful as an actor in his senior year.

  His address at the time of his graduation had been a rooming-house on Catherine Street, over behind the Graduate School. The landlady’s name was Mrs. Haskell. Maybe she could help me.

  Mrs. Haskell lived on the first floor of an old three-story gingerbread mansion. I guessed from the bundles of mail on the table inside the door that the rest of her house was given over to roomers. She led me along the polished parquetry hallway into a half-blinded parlor. It was a cool oasis in the heat of the Michigan July.

  Somewhere over our heads, a typewriter pecked at the silence. The echo of a southern drawl twanged like a mandolin in Mrs. Haskell’s voice:

  “Do sit down and tell me how John is. And how is he doing in his position?” Mrs. Haskell clasped her hands enthusiastically on her flowered print bosom. The curled bangs on her forehead shook like silent bells.

  “He hasn’t started with us yet, Mrs. Haskell. The purpose of my investigation is to clear him for a confidential assignment.”

  “Does that mean the other thing has fallen through?”

  “What other thing is that?”

  ‘The acting thing. You may not know it, but John Lindsay’s a very fine actor. One of the most talented boys I’ve ever had in my house. I never missed an appearance of his at the Lydia Mendelssohn. In Hobson’s Choice last winter, he was rich.”

  “I bet he was. And you say he had acting offers?”

  “I don’t know about offers in the plural, but he had one very good one. Some big producer wanted to give him a personal contract and train him professionally. The last I heard, John had accepted it. But I guess he changed his mind, if he’s going with your firm. Security.”

  “It’s interesting about his acting,” I said. “We like our employees to be well-rounded people. Do you remember the producer’s name?”

  “I’m afraid I never knew it.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  “I don’t know. John was very secretive about his private affairs. He didn’t even leave a forwarding address when he left in June. All I really know about this is what Miss Reichler told me after he left.”

  “Miss Reichler?”

  “His friend. I don’t mean she was his girlfriend exactly. Maybe she thought so, but he didn’t. I warned him not to get mixed up with a rich young lady like her, riding around in her Cadillacs and her convertibles. My boys come and go, but I try to keep them from overstepping themselves. Miss Reichler is several years older than John.” Her lips moved over his name with a kind of maternal greed. The mandolin twang was becoming more pronounced.

  “He sounds like the kind of young man we need. Socially mobile, attractive to the ladies.”

  “Oh, he was always that. I don’t mean he’s girl-crazy. He paid the girls no mind, unless they forced themselves on his attention. Ada Reichler practically beat a path to his door. She used to drive up in her Cadillac every second or third day. Her father’s a big man in Detroit. Auto parts.”

  “Good,” I said. “A high-level business connection.”

  Mrs. Haskell sniffed. “Don’t count too much on that one. Miss Reichler was sore as a boil when John left without even saying good-by. She was really let down. I tried to explain to her that a young man just starting out in the world couldn’t carry any excess baggage. Then she got mad at me, for some god-forsaken reason. She slam-banged into her car and ground those old Cadillac gears to a pulp.”

  “How long did they know each other?”

  “As long as he was with me, at least a year. I guess she had her nice qualities, or he wouldn’t have stuck with her so long. She’s pretty enough, if you like that slinky type.”

  “Do you have her address? I’d like to talk to her.”

  “She might tell you a lot of lies. You know: ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ ”

  “I can discount anything like that.”

  “See that you do. John’s a fine young man, and your people will be lucky if he decides to go with them. Her father’s name is Ben, I think, Ben Reichler. They live over in the section by the river.”

  I drove on winding roads through a semi-wooded area. Eventually I found the Reichlers’ mailbox. Their driveway ran between rows of maples to a low brick house with a sweeping roof. It looked small from a distance, and massive when I got up close to it. I began to understand how John could have made the leap from Mrs. Gorgello’s boardinghouse to the Galton house. He’d been training for it.

  A man in overalls with a spraygun in his hands climbed up the granite steps of a sunken garden.

  “The folks aren’t home,” he said. “They’re never home in July”

  “Where can I find them?”

  “If it’s business, Mr. Reichler’s in his office in the Reichler Building three-four days a week.”

  “Miss Ada Reichler’s the one I want.”

  “Far as I know, she’s in Kingsville with her mother. Kingsville, Canada. They have a place up there. You a friend of Miss Ada’s?”

  “Friend of a friend,” I said.

  It was early evening when I drove into Kingsville. The heat hadn’t let up, and my shirt was sticking to my back. The lake lay below the town like a blue haze in which white sails hung upright by their tips.

  The Reichlers’ summer place was on the lakeshore. Green terraces descended from the house to a private dock and boathouse. The house itself was a big old lodge whose brown shingled sides were shaggy with ivy. The Reichlers weren’t camping out, though. The maid who answered the door wore a fresh starched uniform, complete with cap. She told me that Mrs. Reichler was resting and Miss Ada was out in one of the boats. She was expected back at any time, if I cared to wait.

  I waited on the dock, which was plastered with No Trespassing signs. A faint breeze had begun to stir, and the sailboats were leaning shoreward. Mild little land-locked waves lapped at the pilings. A motorboat went by like a bird shaking out wings of white water. Its wash rocked the dock. The boat turned and came in, slowing down. A girl with dark hair and dark glasses was at the wheel. She pointed a finger at her brown chest, and cocked her head questioningly.

  “You want me?”

  I nodded, and she brought the boat in. I caught the line she threw and helped her onto the dock. Her body wa
s lean and supple in black Capris and a halter. Her face, when she took off her glasses, was lean and intense.

  “Who are you?”

  I had already decided to discard my role. “My name is Archer. Im a private detective from California.”

  “You came all this way to see me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Because you knew John Lindsay.”

  Her face opened up, ready for anything, wonderful or otherwise.

  “John sent you here?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  I didn’t answer her. She jerked at my arm like a child wanting attention.

  “Tell me, is John in trouble? Don’t be afraid, I can take it.”

  “I don’t know whether he is or not, Miss Reichler. What makes you jump to the conclusion that he is?”

  “Nothing, I don’t mean that.” Her speech was staccato. “You said that you’re a detective. Doesn’t that indicate trouble?”

  “Say he is in trouble. What then?”

  “I’d want to help him, naturally. Why are we talking in riddles?”

  I liked her rapid, definite personality, and guessed that honesty went along with it:

  “I don’t like riddles any more than you do. I’ll make a bargain with you, Miss Reichler. I’ll tell you my end of the story if you’ll tell me yours.”

  “What is this, true confession hour?”

  “I’m serious, and I’m willing to do my talking first. If you’re interested in John’s situation—”

  “Situation is a nice neutral word.”

  “That’s why I used it. Is it a bargain?”

  “All right.” She gave me her hand on it, as a man would have. “I warn you in advance, though, I won’t tell you anything against him. I don’t know anything against him, except that he treated me—well, I was asking for it.” She lifted her high thin shoulders, shrugging off the past. “We can talk in the garden, if you like.”

  We climbed the terraces to a walled garden in the shadow of the house. It was crowded with the colors and odors of flowers. She placed me in a canvas chair facing hers. I told her where John was and what he was doing.