Black Money

by Ross Macdonald

  “I’ll reimburse you.”

  “That’s not the point. I hate to disappoint her.”

  “This may be more important.”

  “Not to me it isn’t.” He was speaking to me, but his real complaint was directed toward Ella. I gathered she had used pressure to get him here. “Anyway, as I told Mrs. Strome, I have no pictures of Mr. Martel. I offered to take some, the way I do with any other guest, but he said no. He was pretty emphatic about it.”

  “Unpleasant?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But he certainly didn’t want his picture taken. What is he, a celebrity or something?”

  “Something.”

  My reticence irritated him, and he colored slightly. “The only reason I asked, another person was after me for a picture of him.”

  Ella said: “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I didn’t have a chance to. The woman came to my studio in the Village just before I went home for dinner. When I told her I didn’t have a picture of him, she offered me money to go to his house and take one. I told her I couldn’t do that without Mr. Martel’s permission. At which she got mad and stomped out.”

  “I don’t suppose she gave you her name?”

  “No, but I can describe her. She’s a redhead, tall, with a gorgeous figure. Age about thirty. As a matter of fact, I had a feeling that I’ve seen her before.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here in the club.”

  “I don’t remember any such woman,” Ella said.

  “It was before your time, at least five years ago.” Malkovsky screwed up one side of his face as if he was squinting through a view finder. “I think I took a picture or two of the woman. In fact I’m pretty sure I did.”

  “Would you still have those pictures?” I said.

  “Maybe, but it would be a terrible job to find them. I don’t keep files except for the current year and the year before. All the old stuff is stored away in cartons in the back room.” He looked at his wristwatch, dramatically. “I really have to go now. The wife will kill me if she misses the Bunuel. And the club doesn’t pay me overtime for this kind of a deal.” He tossed a sour look in the direction of Ella, who had gone back to the reception desk.

  “I’ll pay you double time for as long as it takes.”

  “That would be seven dollars an hour. It could take all night.”

  “I know.”

  “And there’s no guarantee that I’ll come up with anything. It may be an entirely different woman. If it’s the same woman, she’s changed the color of her hair. The woman I remember was a blonde.”

  “Blondes turn into redheads all the time. Tell me about the woman you remember.”

  “She was younger then, of course, with the dew still on her. A lovely thing. I remember now, I did take some pictures of her. Her husband wasn’t too crazy about the idea but she wanted it done.”

  “Who was her husband?”

  “An older guy,” he said. “They stayed in one of the cottages for a couple of weeks.”

  “What year were they here?”

  “I couldn’t nail it down—maybe six or seven years ago. But if I find those pictures I can tell you. I generally make a note of the date on the back.”

  By this time Malkovsky was eager to get to work. Before leaving for the Village, he gave me the address and telephone number of his studio. I said I would check with him there in an hour or so.

  I thanked Ella, and went to the parking lot to get my car. An unsteady wind carrying a gritty taste of desert was blowing down from the direction of the mountains. The eucalyptus trees swayed and bowed and waved in the gusts like long-haired madwomen racked by impulse. The night which loomed above the trees and dwarfed them seemed threatening.

  I had been concerned about Harry Hendricks ever since I found his car at the roadside near Martel’s house. Harry had no more earned my concern than the alleged rat which Martel said he had killed. Still I had a foolish yen to see Harry alive.

  The road to the harbor cut across the base of the headland where Fablon had taken his final swim, and back to the ocean. As I drove along the windswept boulevard, my mind was so fixed on Harry that when I saw the Cadillac parked at the curb I thought I was dreaming. I braked and backed and parked directly behind it, and got out. It was Harry’s old Caddie, all right, standing there with a cold engine, empty and innocent, as if it had driven itself down from the foothills. The key was in the ignition. It hadn’t been before.

  I looked around me. It was a lonely place, especially at this time, with a wind blowing. There was no other car in sight, and nothing across the street but rattling palms and the sighing sea.

  On the inland side a tall cypress hedge shielded the boulevard from a view of the railroad tracks and the hobo jungles. Through a hole in the hedge I could see the dark shapes of men crouched around a bonfire which flared and veered.

  I went through the hole and approached them. There were three of them drinking dark red wine out of a half-gallon jug which was nearly empty. Their faces all turned toward me in the firelight: the seamed and gap-toothed face of an aging white man; the flat stubborn planes of a young Negro’s head; a boy with Indian features and an Indian’s stolid apathetic eyes. He wore nothing above the waist but an open black vest.

  The Negro got up with five or six feet of two-by-four in his hands. He staggered toward me on the uneven ground.

  “Amscray, ’bo. This a private party.”

  “You can answer a civil question. I’m looking for a friend of mine.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about no friends of yours.” Big and drunk, he leaned on his two-by-four like a warrior on his spear. His tripod shadow wavered on the hedge.

  “That’s his car there,” I said quickly. “The Cadillac. He’s a medium-sized man in a checkered jacket. Have you seen him?”

  “Naw.”

  “Just a minute.” The white man rose unsteadily. “Maybe I seen him, maybe not. What’s it worth to you?”

  He came up close to me so that I could smell his fiery breath and look deep into the glaring hollows of his eyes. They had a feverish brainwashed wino emptiness. He was so far gone that he would never come back.

  “It isn’t worth anything to me, old-timer. You’re trying to promote the price of another jug.”

  “I seen him, honest I seen him. Little man in a checkered jacket. He gave me four bits, I thanked him very kindly. You don’t forget a citizen like that.” The breath whistled through the gaps in his teeth.

  “Let’s see the four bits.”

  He searched elaborately through his jeans. “I must have lost it.”

  I turned away. He followed me all the way to the car. His gnarled fists drummed on the window.

  “Have a heart, for Christ’s sake. Gimme four bits. I told you about your friend.”

  “No money for wine,” I said.

  “It’s for food. I’m starving. I came down here to pick oranges and they fired me, said I couldn’t do the work.”

  “They’ll feed you at the Salvation Army.”

  He puckered up his mouth and spat on the window. His saliva ran down the glass between him and me. I started the motor.

  “Get away, you might get hurt.”

  “I’m hurt already,” he said with his life in his voice.

  He staggered back to the hedge, disappearing suddenly through the hole like a man swallowed up by darkness.

  chapter 12

  THE BREAKWATER HOTEL was only a few blocks from the place where Harry’s Cadillac was parked. It was possible, though hardly likely, that he’d left it there, for reasons of his own, and gone the rest of the way on foot.

  The lobby of the hotel was the mouth of a tourist trap which had lost its bite. There were scuff-marks on the furniture, dust on the philodendrons. The bellhop wore an old blue uniform which looked as if he had fought through the Civil War in it.

  There was no one at the desk, but the register was lying open on it. I found Harry Hendricks’s name on the pre
vious page. He had room 27. I looked at the half-wall of pigeonholes behind the desk, and couldn’t see any key in 27.

  “Is Mr. Hendricks in?” I asked the bellhop.

  He stroked the growth of beard on his chin. It looked like moth-eaten gray plush, but it rasped like sandpaper. “I wouldn’t know about that. They come and go. I’m not paid to keep track.”

  “Where’s the manager?”

  “In there.”

  He jerked a thumb toward a curtained doorway with an electric sign above it: Samoa Room. The name meant that it would have bamboo furniture and a fishnet ceiling: it had: and would serve rum drinks containing canned pineapple juice and floating fruit.

  Three rather wilted-looking sharpies were rolling dice on the bar. The fat bartender watched them over his belly. A tired-looking hostess offered me the temporary use of her smile. I told her that I wanted to ask the manager a question.

  “Mr. Smythe is the assistant manager. Mr. Smythe!”

  Mr. Smythe was the sharpest-looking of the sharpies. He tore himself away from the dice for a moment. If they were his dice, they were probably gaffed. His true-blue All-American look was warped like peeling veneer around the edges.

  “You wish accommodations, sir?”

  “Later, perhaps. I wanted to ask you if Mr. Hendricks is in.”

  “Not unless he came in in the last few minutes. His wife is waiting in his room for him.”

  “I didn’t know he was married.”

  “He’s married all right. Very married. I’d give up the joys of bachelorhood myself if I could latch onto a dish like that.” His hands made an hourglass figure in the smoky air.

  “Maybe she can tell me where he is.”

  “She doesn’t know. She asked me. I haven’t seen him since this afternoon. Is he in some kind of a jam?”

  “Could be.”

  “You a cop?”

  “An investigator,” I answered vaguely. “What makes you think that Hendricks is in trouble?”

  “He asked me where he could buy a cheap hand gun.”

  “Today?”

  “This aft, like I said. I told him to try the pawnshops. Did I do wrong? He didn’t shoot somebody?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “That’s good.” But he was subtly disappointed. “If you want to talk to Mrs. Hendricks, there’s a room phone beside the desk.”

  I thanked him, and he returned to the joys of bachelorhood. I didn’t bother with the room phone, or with the elevator. I found the fire stairs at the back of the lobby and went up the redlit stairwell to the second floor.

  Room 27 was at the end of the hall. I listened at the door. There was faint music behind it, a country blues. I knocked. The music was shut off abruptly.

  “Who is it?” a woman said.

  “Harry.”

  “It’s about time!”

  She unlatched the door and pulled it open. I walked in on her and took the doorknob out of her hand and swung the door shut behind me, in case the screaming expression on her face changed into sudden noise.

  It didn’t. The fixed lopsided rigor of her face didn’t change. Her right fist rose of its own accord to the level of her eyes. She looked at me around it.

  “Take it easy, Mrs. Hendricks. I won’t hurt you.”

  “I hear you telling me.” But she relaxed enough to unclench her fist and use it to smoothe her red hair. Her lopsided mouth straightened itself. “Who are you?”

  “A friend of Harry’s. I said I’d look him up here.”

  She didn’t believe me. She looked like a woman who had stopped believing almost everything except the numbers on bills, the price tags on clothes and people. She was dressed with style, in a brown loose kind of half-sleeved something which showed her figure without overemphasizing it. Her forearms and legs were beautifully made and deeply tanned.

  But her face was made up as if she had begun to doubt her looks, or wished to hide them. From under eyelids greener than her eyes, through eyelashes that groped like furred antennae in the air, she peered at me distrustfully.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Then get out of my room.” But she didn’t really expect me to. If she had any expectations left, they had to do with possible disasters.

  “It isn’t your room. It’s Harry’s. He said he’d meet me.”

  She looked around the room, at the worn carpet, the faded flowers in the wallpaper, the bedside lamp with its scorched paper shade, as if she was considering her relationship to it. Externally she didn’t belong here at all. She had the kind of style that could be bought, but not suddenly, at Bullocks and I. Magnin’s; the brown pouch on the bed with its gold tassels looked like Paris. But she belonged internally to the room, the way a prisoner belongs to his cell. She had done time in rooms like this, and it was setting in again.

  “It’s my room too,” she said. To prove it, and to cheer things up a little, she went to the bedside table and turned up her portable radio. The country blues hadn’t ended yet. It had been a long two minutes.

  “What—?” Her voice screeked on the word. She was still so full of tension that she was hardly breathing. She tried to swallow the tension; I watched the marvelous mechanism of her throat. “What kind of business do you have with Harry?” she finally managed to say.

  “We were going to compare notes on Francis Martel.”

  She flapped her eyelashes. “Who?”

  “Martel. The man you want a picture of.”

  “You must be thinking of two other people.”

  “Come on now, Mrs. Hendricks. I’ve just been talking to the photographer Malkovsky. You wanted him to take a picture of Martel. Your husband risked his neck trying to get one this morning.”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “How do you know so much about me?”

  “That’s all I know about you, unfortunately. Tell me more.”

  Laboriously, with hands that jerked a little, she got a gold cigarette case out of her brown pouch, opened it, took out a cigarette and put it between her lips. I lit it for her. She sat on the bed and leaned back on her arm, blowing smoke hard at the ceiling as if to conceal its dinginess.

  “Don’t stand over me like that. You look as though you’re going to jump down my throat.”

  “I was admiring your throat.” I pulled up the only chair in the room and sat on it.

  “Swingin’.” Her voice was sardonic. She covered her neck with the collar of her fingers, and studied me. “I can’t figure you out, unless you’re trying to soften me up with the sweet-and-sour treatment. Which will get you nowhere.”

  “Are you really Harry’s wife?”

  “Yes. I am.” She sounded a little surprised herself. “I’d show you my marriage license but I don’t seem to have it with me at the moment.”

  “How can he afford you?”

  “He can’t. We haven’t been working at it lately. But we’re still friends.” She added with a kind of rough nostalgia: “Harry wasn’t always on the skids. He used to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys.”

  “And you weren’t always in the chips.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody had to tell me.” Your voice told me, doll, and the way you have to keep using your body in little conspicuous ways as if you were treading water. The way you looked at the room told me, and the way the room looked back.

  “Are you from Vegas?” she said.

  “People are supposed to smile when they say that.”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m from Hollywood.”

  “What do you do for a living, Hollywood? If anything.”

  “Private investigations.”

  “And you’re doing a job on me?”

  Her look was fearful again. At the same time she signaled for the ashtray from the bedside table and butted her cigarette in it while I held it. She shifted her position, leaning heavily sideways with half-deliber
ate clumsiness to show how helpless her fine big body was. It needed no help from me, though: it was perfectly at home on a hotel bed.

  “You’ve got things twisted around,” I said. “I was hired to do a job on Martel.”

  “Who by?” She corrected herself: “By whom?”

  “A local man. His identity doesn’t matter. Martel stole his girl.”

  “It figures. He’s a thief.”

  “What did he steal from you, Mrs. Hendricks?”

  “That’s a good question. The real question, though, is whether he’s the guy I think he is. Have you seen him?”

  “Several times.”

  “Describe him for me, will you? We may be able to get together on this.”

  “He’s a medium-sized man, about five foot nine, not heavy, but compactly built, and quick in his movements. Age about thirty. He has black hair, jet black, growing fairly low on his forehead. He wears it combed straight back. His complexion is dark, almost Indian dark. He has a long nose with noticeably flaring nostrils. He speaks with a French accent, uses a lot of French, and claims to be a French political refugee.”

  She had been listening and nodding in confirmation, but my last sentence confused her. “What was that?”

  “He says he’s a Frenchman who can’t live in France because he doesn’t get along with de Gaulle.”

  “Oh.” But she still didn’t understand.

  “De Gaulle is the President of France.”

  “I know that, stupid. You think I don’t listen to the news?” She glanced at the radio, which was playing rock.

  “Do you mind if I turn that thing off?” I said.

  “You can turn it down a little, but leave it on. I hate the sound of the wind.”

  I turned the music not too far down. Based on such minor co-operations an intimacy was growing between us, as if the room had provided us with built-in roles. But it was a chancy intimacy, whose rhythm was an alternating current of fear and doubt. She asked me sensible questions and seemed to believe my answers. But her eyes weren’t certain that I wouldn’t kill her.

  “Do you know who he is?” I said.

  “I think so, and he isn’t any Frenchman.”

  “What is he?”

  “I’ll tell you,” she said crisply, as if she had decided on her story. “I happen to be the confidential secretary to a very important businessman in the Southland. This man who calls himself Martel wormed his way into my employer’s good graces and wound up as his executive assistant.”