The Galton Case

by Ross Macdonald

  “I’m working with the police. Are you sure you don’t know why Culligan came here?”

  “I guess it was just a place like any other. He was a loner and a drifter—I get quite a few of them. He probably covered a lot of territory in his time.” She looked up at the shadows on the ceiling. The light was still now, and the shadows were concentric, spreading out like ripples on a pool. “Listen, mister, who stabbed him?”

  “A young hoodlum.”

  “My boy? Was it my boy that done it? Is that why you come to me?”

  “I think your son is involved.”

  “I knew it.” Her cheeks shuddered. “He took a knife to his father before he was out of high school. He would of killed him, too. Now he really is a murderer.” She pressed her clenched hands deep into her bosom; it swelled around her fists like rising dough. “I didn’t have enough trouble in my life. I had to give birth to a murderer.”

  “I don’t know about that, Mrs. Fredericks. He committed fraud. I doubt that he committed murder.” Even as I said it, I was wondering if he had been within striking distance of Culligan, and if he had an alibi for that day. “Do you have a picture of your son?”

  “I have when he was in high school. He ran away before he graduated.”

  “May I have a look at the picture, Mrs. Fredericks? It’s barely possible we’re talking about two different people.”

  But any hope of this died a quick death. The boy in the snapshot she brought was the same one, six years younger. He stood on a riverbank, his back to the water, smiling with conscious charm into the camera.

  I gave the picture back to Mrs. Fredericks. She held it up to the light and studied it as if she could re-create the past from its single image.

  “Theo was a good-looking boy,” she said wistfully. “He was doing so good in school and all, until he started getting those ideas of his.”

  “What kind of ideas did he have?”

  “Crazy ideas, like he was the son of an English lord, and the gypsies stole him away when he was a baby. When he was just a little tyke, he used to call himself Percival Fitzroy, like in a book. That was always his way—he thought he was too good for his own people. I worried about where all that daydreaming was going to land him.”

  “He’s still dreaming,” I said. “Right now he’s representing himself as the grandson of a wealthy woman in Southern California. Do you know anything about that?”

  “I never hear from him. How would I know about it?”

  “Apparently Culligan put him up to it. I understand he ran away from here with Culligan.”

  “Yeah. The dirty scamp talked him into it, turned him against his own father.”

  “And you say he knifed his father?”

  “That very same day.” Her eyes widened and glazed. “He stabbed him with a butcher knife, gave him an awful wound. Fredericks was on his back for weeks. He’s never got back on his feet entirely. Neither have I, to think my own boy would do a thing like that.”

  “What was the trouble about, Mrs. Fredericks?”

  “Wildness and willfulness,” she said. “He wanted to leave home and make his own way in the world. That Culligan encouraged him. He pretended to have Theo’s welfare at heart and I know what you’re thinking, that Theo did right to run away from home with his old man a bum and the kind of boarders I get. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Look at how Theo turned out.”

  “I have been, Mrs. Fredericks.”

  “I knew he was headed for a bad end,” she said. “He didn’t show natural feelings. He never wrote home once since he left. Where has he been all these years?”

  “Going to college.”

  “To college? He went to college?”

  “Your son’s an ambitious boy.”

  “Oh, he always had an ambition, if that’s what you want to call it. Is that what he learned in college, how to cheat people?”

  “He learned that someplace else.”

  Perhaps in this room, I thought, where Culligan spun his fantasies and laid a long-shot bet on an accidental resemblance to a dead man. The room had Culligan’s taint on it.

  The woman stirred uncomfortably, as if I’d made a subtle accusation:

  “I don’t claim we were good parents to him. He wanted more than we could give him. He always had a dream of himself, like.”

  Her face moved sluggishly, trying to find the shape of truth and feeling. She leaned back on her arms and let her gaze rest on the swollen slopes of her body, great sagging breasts, distended belly from which a son had struggled headfirst into the light. Over her bowed head, insects swung in eccentric orbits around the hanging bulb, tempting hot death.

  She managed to find some hope in the situation: “At least he didn’t murder anybody, eh?”

  “No.”

  “Who was it that knifed Culligan? You said it was a young hoodlum.”

  “His name is Tommy Lemberg. Tommy and his brother Roy are supposed to be hiding out in Ontario—”

  “Hamburg, did you say?”

  “They may be using that name. Do you know Roy and Tommy?”

  “I hope to tell you. They been renting the downstairs room for the last two weeks. They told me their name was Hamburg. How was I to know they were hiding out?”

  chapter 26

  I WAITED for the Lembergs on the dark porch. They came home after midnight, walking a bit unsteadily down the street. My parked car attracted their attention, and they crossed the street to look it over. I went down the front steps and across the street after them.

  They turned, so close together that they resembled a single amorphous body with two white startled faces. Tommy started toward me, a wide lopsided shape. His arm was still in a white sling under his jacket.

  Roy lifted his head with a kind of hopeless alertness. “Come back here, kid.”

  “The hell. It’s old man trouble himself.” He walked up to me busily, and spat in the dust at my feet.

  “Take it easy, Tommy.” Roy came up behind him. “Talk to him.”

  “Sure I’ll talk to him.” He said to me: “Didn’t you get enough from Mr. Schwartz? You came all this way looking for more?”

  Without giving the matter any advance thought, I set myself on my heels and hit him with all my force on the point of the jaw. He went down and stayed. His brother knelt beside him, making small shocked noises which resolved themselves into words:

  “You had no right to hit him. He wanted to talk to you.”

  “I heard him.”

  “He’s been drinking, and he was scared. He was just putting on a big bluff.”

  “Put away the violin. It doesn’t go with a knifing rap.”

  “Tommy never knifed anybody.”

  “That’s right, he was framed. Culligan framed him by falling down and stabbing himself. Tommy was just an innocent bystander.”

  “I don’t claim he was innocent. Schwartz sent him there to throw his weight around. But nobody figured he was going to run into Culligan, let alone Culligan with a knife and a gun. He got shot taking the gun away from Culligan. Then he knocked Culligan out, and that’s the whole thing as far as Tommy’s concerned.”

  “At which point the Apaches came out of the hills.”

  “I thought maybe you’d be interested in the truth,” Roy said in a shaking voice. “But your thinking is the same as all the others. Once a fellow takes a fall, he’s got no human rights.”

  “Sure, I’m unfair to organized crime.”

  The wisecrack sounded faintly tinny, even to me. Roy made a disgusted sound in his throat. Tommy groaned as if in response. His eyes were still turned up, veined white between half-closed lids. Roy inserted one arm under his brother’s head and lifted it.

  Peering down at the dim face, unconscious and innocent-looking, I had a pang of doubt. I knew my bitterness wasn’t all for Tommy Lemberg. When I hit him I was lashing out at the other boy, too, reacting to a world of treacherous little hustlers that wouldn’t let a man believe in it.

 
I scraped together a nickel’s worth of something, faith or gullibility, and invested it:

  “Lemberg, do you believe this yarn your brother told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you willing to put it to the test?”

  “I don’t understand you.” But his white face slanted up fearfully. “If you’re talking about him going back to California, no. They’d put him in the gas chamber.”

  “Not if his story is true. He could do a lot to back it up by coming back with me voluntarily.”

  “He can’t. He’s been in jail. He has a record.”

  “That record of his means a lot to you, doesn’t it? More than it does to other people, maybe.”

  “I don’t dig you.”

  “Why don’t you dissolve the brother act? Commit yourself where there’s some future. Your wife could do with a piece of you. She’s in a bad way, Lemberg.”

  He didn’t answer me. He held his brother’s head possessively against his shoulder. In the light of the stars they seemed like twins, mirror images of each other. Roy looked at Tommy in a puzzled way, as if he couldn’t tell which was the real man and which was the reflection. Or which was the possessor and which was the possessed.

  Footfalls thudded in the dust behind me. It was Mrs. Fredericks, wearing a bathrobe and carrying a pan of water.

  “Here,” was all she said.

  She handed me the pan and went back into the house. She wanted no part of the trouble in the street. Her house was well supplied with trouble.

  I sprinkled some water on Tommy’s face. He snorted and sat up blinking. “Who hit me?” Then he saw me, and remembered: “You sucker-punched me. You sucker-punched a cripple.”

  He tried to get up. Roy held him down with both hands on his shoulders:

  “You had it coming, you know that. I’ve been talking to Mr. Archer. He’ll listen to what you have to say.”

  “I’m willing to listen to the truth,” I said. “Anything else is a waste of time.”

  With his brother’s help, Tommy got onto his feet. “Go ahead,” Roy prompted him. “Tell him. And no more kid stuff.”

  “The whole truth, remember,” I said, “including the Schwartz angle.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” Tommy was still dazed. “Schwartz was the one hired me in the first place. He sent one of his boys to look me up, promised me a hundred bucks to put a little fear into this certain party.”

  “A little death, you mean?”

  He shook his head violently. “Nothing like that, just a little working over.”

  “What did Schwartz have against Culligan?”

  “Culligan wasn’t the one. He wasn’t supposed to be there, see. He got in the picture by mistake.”

  “I told you that,” Roy said.

  “Be quiet. Let Tommy do the talking.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Tommy said. “It was this beast that I was supposed to put on a little show for. I wasn’t supposed to hurt her, nothing like that, just put the fear of God in her so she’d cough up what she owed Schwartz. It was like a collection agency, y’unnerstan’? Legit.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Alice Sable. They sent me because I knew what she looked like. Last summer in Reno she used to run around with Pete Culligan. But he wasn’t supposed to be there at her house, for God sake. The way they told it to me, she was alone by herself out there all day. When Culligan came marching out, armed up to the teeth, you could of knocked me over with a ’dozer.

  “I moved in on him, very fast, very fast reflexes I got, talking all the time. Got hold of the gun but it went off, the slug plowed up my arm, same time he dropped the gun. I picked it up. By that time he had his knife out. What could I do? He was going to gut me. I slammed him on the noggin with the gun and chilled him. Then I beat it.”

  “Did you see Alice Sable?”

  “Yeah, she came surging out and yelled at me. I was starting the Jag, and I couldn’t hear what she said over the engine. I didn’t stop or turn around. Hell, I didn’t want to rough up no beast, anyway.”

  “Did you pick up Culligan’s knife before you left, and cut him with it?”

  “No sir. What would I do that for? Man, I was hurt. I wanted out.”

  “What was Culligan doing when you left?”

  “Laying there.” He glanced at his brother. “Lying there.”

  “Who coached you to say that?”

  “Nobody did.”

  “That’s true,” Roy said. “It’s just the way he told it to me. You’ve got to believe him.”

  “I’m not the important one. The man he has to convince is Sheriff Trask of Santa Teresa County. And planes are taking off for there all the time.”

  “Aw, no.” Tommy’s gaze swiveled frantically from me to Roy. “They’ll throw the book at me if I go back.”

  “Sooner or later you have to go back. You can come along peaceably now, or you can force extradition proceedings and make the trip in handcuffs and leg-chains. Which way do you want it, hard or easy?”

  For once in his young, life, Tommy Lemberg did something the easy way.

  chapter 27

  I PHONED Sheriff Trask long distance. He agreed to wire me transportation authorization for the Lemberg brothers. I picked it up at Willow Run, and the three of us got aboard an early plane. Trask had an official car waiting to meet the connecting plane when it landed in Santa Teresa.

  Before noon we were in the interrogation room in the Santa Teresa courthouse. Roy and Tommy made statements, which were recorded by a court reporter on steno and tape-machine. Tommy seemed to be awed by the big room with its barred windows, the Sheriff’s quiet power, the weight of the law which both man and building represented. There were no discrepancies in the part of his statement I heard.

  Trask motioned me out before Tommy was finished. I followed him down the corridor to his office. He took off his coat and opened the neck of his shirt. Blotches of sweat spread from his armpits. He filled a paper cup with water from a cooler, drained the cup, and crushed it in his fist.

  “If we buy this,” he said at last, “it puts us back at the beginning. You buy it, don’t you, Archer?”

  “I’ve taken an option on it. Naturally I think it should be investigated. But that can wait. Have you questioned Theo Fredericks about the Culligan killing?”

  “No.”

  “Is Fredericks doing any talking at all?”

  “Not to me he isn’t.”

  “But you picked him up last night?”

  Trask’s face had a raw red look. I thought at first that he was on the verge of a heart attack. Then I realized that he was painfully embarrassed. He turned his back on me, walked over to the wall, and stood looking at a photograph of himself shaking hands with the Governor.

  “Somebody tipped him off,” he said. “He flew the coop five minutes before I got there.” He turned to face me: “The worst part of it is, he took Sheila Howell with him.”

  “By force?”

  “You kidding? She was probably the one who tipped him off. I made the mistake of phoning Dr. Howell before I moved on the little rat. In any case, she went along with him willingly—walked out of her father’s house and drove away with him in the middle of the night. Howell’s been on my back ever since.”

  “Howell’s very fond of his daughter.”

  “Yeah, I know how he feels, I have a daughter of my own. I was afraid for a while that he was going to take off after her with a shotgun, and I mean literally. Howell’s a trap-shooter, one of the best in the county. But I got him calmed down. He’s in the communications room, waiting to hear some word of them.”

  “They’re traveling by car?”

  “The one Mrs. Galton bought for him.”

  “A red Thunderbird should be easy to spot.”

  “You’d think so. But they’ve been gone over eight hours without a trace. They may be in Mexico by now. Or they may be cuddled up in an L.A. motel under one of his aliases.” Trask scowled at the image. “Why do so many nice young
girls go for the dangerous ones?”

  The question didn’t expect an answer, and that was just as well. I hadn’t any.

  Trask sat down heavily behind his desk. “Just how dangerous is he? When we talked on the telephone last night, you mentioned a knifing he did before he left Canada.”

  “He stabbed his father. Apparently he meant to kill him. The old man is no saint, either. In fact, the Fredericks’ boardinghouse is a regular thieves’ kitchen. Peter Culligan was staying there at the time of the knifing. The boy ran away with him.”

  Trask took up a pencil and broke it in half, abstractedly, dropping the pieces on his blotter. “How do we know the Fredericks boy didn’t murder Culligan? He had a motive: Culligan was in a position to call his bluff and tell the world who he really was. And M.O. figures, with his knifing record.”

  “We’ve been thinking the same thing, Sheriff. There’s even a strong likelihood that Culligan was his partner in the conspiracy. That would give him a powerful motive to silence Culligan. We’ve been assuming that Fredericks was in Luna Bay that day. But has his alibi ever been checked?”

  “There’s no time like the present.”

  Trask picked up his phone and asked the switchboard to put through a call to the San Mateo County sheriff’s office in Redwood City.

  “I can think of one other possibility,” I said. “Alice Sable was involved with Culligan last year in Reno, and maybe since. Remember how she reacted to his death. We put it down to nervous shock, but it could have been something worse.”

  “You’re not suggesting that she killed him?”

  “As a hypothesis.”

  Trask shook his head impatiently. “Even putting it hypothetically, it’s pretty hard to swallow about a lady like her.”

  “What kind of a lady is she? Do you know her?”

  “I’ve met her, that’s about all. But hell, Gordon Sable’s one of the top lawyers in the city.”

  The politician latent in every elected official was rising to the surface and blurring Trask’s hard, clear attitudes. I said: