The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  She looked at me frigidly as only a pale blonde can look, and said nothing.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m trying to do a job for Mrs. Dreen. My job is laying skeletons to rest, not teaching them the choreography of the Danse Macabre.”

  “Nicely put,” she said. “Actually there’s no skeleton. Una has played around, in a perfectly casual way I mean, with two or three men in the last year.”

  “Simultaneously, or one at a time?”

  “One at a time. She’s monandrous to that extent. The latest is Terry Neville.”

  “I thought he was married.”

  “In an interlocutory way only. For God’s sake don’t bring my name into it. My husband’s in business in this town.”

  “He seems to be prosperous,” I said, looking more at her than at the house. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Karp. Your name will never pass my lips.”

  “Hideous, isn’t it? The name, I mean. But I couldn’t help falling in love with the guy. I hope you find her. Jack will be terribly disappointed if you don’t.”

  I had begun to turn towards the door, but turned back. “It couldn’t be anything like this, could it? She heard he was coming home, she felt unworthy of him, unable to face him, so she decided to lam out?”

  “Millicent said she didn’t leave a letter. Women don’t go in for all such drama and pathos without leaving a letter. Or at least a marked copy of Tolstoy’s Resurrection.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” Her blue eyes were very bright in the great dim room. “How about this? She didn’t like Jack at all. She went away for the sole purpose of letting him know that. A little sadism, maybe?”

  “But she did like Jack. It’s just that he was away for over a year. Whenever the subject came up in a mixed gathering, she always insisted that he was a wonderful lover.”

  “Like that, eh? Did Mrs. Dreen say you were Una’s best friend?”

  Her eyes were brighter and her thin, pretty mouth twisted in amusement. “Certainly. You should have heard her talk about me.”

  “Maybe I will. Thanks. Goodbye.”

  A telephone call to a screenwriter I knew, the suit for which I had paid a hundred and fifty dollars of separation money in a moment of euphoria, and a false air of assurance got me past the studio guards and as far as the door of Terry Neville’s dressing room. He had a bungalow to himself, which meant that he was as important as the publicity claimed. I didn’t know what I was going to say to him, but I knocked on the door and, when someone said, “Who is it?” showed him.

  Only the blind had not seen Terry Neville. He was over six feet, colorful, shapely, and fragrant like a distant garden of flowers. For a minute he went on reading and smoking in his brocaded armchair, carefully refraining from raising his eyes to look at me. He even turned a page of his book.

  “Who are you?” he said finally. “I don’t know you.”

  “Una Sand—”

  “I don’t know her, either.” Grammatical solecisms had been weeded out of his speech, but nothing had been put in their place. His voice was impersonal and lifeless.

  “Millicent Dreen’s daughter,” I said, humoring him. “Una Rossiter.”

  “Naturally I know Millicent Dreen. But you haven’t said anything. Good day.”

  “Una disappeared yesterday. I thought you might be willing to help me find out why.”

  “You still haven’t said anything.” He got up and took a step towards me, very tall and wide. “What I said was good day.”

  But not tall and wide enough. I’ve always had an idea, probably incorrect, that I could handle any man who wears a scarlet silk bath-robe. He saw that idea on my face and changed his tune: “If you don’t get out of here, my man, I’ll call a guard.”

  “In the meantime I’d straighten out that marcel of yours. I might even be able to make a little trouble for you.” I said that on the assumption that any man with his face and sexual opportunities would be on the brink of trouble most of the time.

  It worked. “What do you mean by saying that?” he said. A sudden pallor made his carefully plucked black eyebrows stand out starkly. “You could get into a very great deal of hot water by standing there talking like that.”

  “What happened to Una?”

  “I don’t know. Get out of here.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  Like one of the clean-cut young men in one of his own movies, he threw a punch at me. I let it go over my shoulder and while he was off balance placed the heel of my hand against his very flat solar plexus and pushed him down into his chair. Then I shut the door and walked fast to the front gate. I’d just as soon have gone on playing tennis with the invisible man.

  “No luck, I take it?” Mrs. Dreen said when she opened the door of her apartment to me.

  “I’ve got nothing to go on. If you really want to find your daughter you’d better go to Missing Persons. They’ve got the organization and the connections.”

  “I suppose Jack will be going to them. He’s home already.”

  “I thought he was coming tomorrow.”

  “That telegram was sent yesterday. It was delayed somehow. His ship got in yesterday afternoon.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “At the beach house by now, I guess. He flew down from Alameda in a Navy plane and called me from Santa Barbara.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “What could I tell him? That Una was gone. He’s frantic. He thinks she may have drowned.” It was late afternoon, and in spite of the whiskey which she was absorbing steadily, like an alcohol lamp, Mrs. Dreen’s fires were burning low. Her hands and eyes were limp, and her voice was weary.

  “Well,” I said, “I might as well go back to Santa Barbara. I talked to Hilda Karp but she couldn’t help me. Are you coming along?”

  “Not again. I have to go to the studio tomorrow. Anyway, I don’t want to see Jack just now. I’ll stay here.”

  The sun was low over the sea, gold-leafing the water and bloodying the sky, when I got through Santa Barbara and back onto the coast highway. Not thinking it would do any good but by way of doing something or other to earn my keep, I stopped at the filling station where the road turned off to Mrs. Dreen’s beach house.

  “Fill her up,” I said to the woman attendant. I needed gas anyway.

  “I’ve got some friends who live around here,” I said when she held out her hand for her money. “Do you know where Mrs. Dreen lives?”

  She looked at me from behind disapproving spectacles. “You should know. You were down there with her today, weren’t you?”

  I covered my confusion by handing her a five and telling her: “Keep the change.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. All I want you to do is tell me who was there yesterday. You see all. Tell a little.”

  “Who are you?”

  I showed her my card.

  “Oh.” Her lips moved unconsciously, computing the size of the tip. “There was a guy in a green convert, I think it was a Chrysler. He went down around noon and drove out again around four, I guess it was, like a bat out of hell.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear. You’re wonderful. What did he look like?”

  “Sort of dark and pretty good-looking. It’s kind of hard to describe. Like the guy that took the part of the pilot in that picture last week—you know—only not so good-looking.”

  “Terry Neville.”

  “That’s right, only not so good-looking. I’ve seen him go down there plenty of times.”

  “I don’t know who that would be,” I said, “but thanks anyway. There wasn’t anybody with him, was there?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  I went down the road to the beach house like a bat into hell. The sun, huge and angry red, was horizontal now, half-eclipsed by the sea and almost perceptibly sinking. It spread a red glow over the shore like a soft and creeping fire. After a long time, I thought, the cliffs would crumble, the sea would dry up, the whole earth w
ould burn out. There’d be nothing left but bone-white cratered ashes like the moon.

  When I rounded the bluff and came within sight of the beach I saw a man coming out of the sea. In the creeping fire which the sun shed he, too, seemed to be burning. The diving mask over his face made him look strange and inhuman. He walked out of the water as if he had never set foot on land before.

  I walked towards him. “Mr. Rossiter?”

  “Yes.” He raised the glass mask from his face and with it the illusion of strangeness lifted. He was just a handsome young man, well-set-up, tanned, and worried-looking.

  “My name is Archer.”

  He held out his hand, which was wet, after wiping it on his bathing trunks, which were also wet. “Oh, yes, Mr. Archer. My mother-in-law mentioned you over the phone.”

  “Are you enjoying your swim?”

  “I am looking for the body of my wife.” It sounded as if he meant it. I looked at him more closely. He was big and husky, but he was just a kid, twenty-two or -three at most. Out of school into the air, I thought. Probably met Una Sand at a party, fell hard for all that glamour, married her the week before he shipped out, and had dreamed bright dreams ever since. I remembered the brash telegram he had sent, as if life was like the people in slick magazine advertisements.

  “What makes you think she drowned?”

  “She wouldn’t go away like this. She knew I was coming home this week. I cabled her from Pearl.”

  “Maybe she never got the cable.”

  After a pause he said: “Excuse me.” He turned towards the waves which were breaking almost at his feet. The sun had disappeared, and the sea was turning gray and cold-looking, an anti-human element.

  “Wait a minute. If she’s in there, which I doubt, you should call the police. This is no way to look for her.”

  “If I don’t find her before dark, I’ll call them then,” he said. “But if she’s here, I want to find her myself.” I could never have guessed his reason for that, but when I found it out it made sense. So far as anything in the situation made sense.

  He walked a few steps into the surf, which was heavier now that the tide was coming in, plunged forward, and swam slowly towards the raft with his masked face under the water. His arms and legs beat the rhythm of the crawl as if his muscles took pleasure in it, but his face was downcast, searching the darkening sea floor. He swam in widening circles about the raft, raising his head about twice a minute for air.

  He had completed several circles and I was beginning to feel that he wasn’t really looking for anything, but expressing his sorrow, dancing a futile ritualistic water dance, when suddenly he took air and dived. For what seemed a long time but was probably about twenty seconds, the surface of the sea was empty except for the white raft. Then the masked head broke water, and Rossiter began to swim towards shore. He swam a laborious side stroke, with both arms submerged. It was twilight now, and I couldn’t see him very well, but I could see that he was swimming very slowly. When he came nearer I saw a swirl of yellow hair.

  He stood up, tore off his mask, and threw it away into the sea. He looked at me angrily, one arm holding the body of his wife against him. The white body half-floating in the shifting water was nude, a strange bright glistening catch from the sea floor.

  “Go away,” he said in a choked voice.

  I went to get a blanket out of the car, and brought it to him where he laid her out on the beach. He huddled over her as if to protect her body from my gaze. He covered her and stroked her wet hair back from her face. Her face was not pretty. He covered that, too.

  I said: “You’ll have to call the police now.”

  After a time he answered: “I guess you’re right. Will you help me carry her into the house?”

  I helped him. Then I called the police in Santa Barbara, and told them that a woman had been drowned and where to find her. I left Jack Rossiter shivering in his wet trunks beside her blanketed body, and drove back to Hollywood for the second time.

  Millicent Dreen was in her apartment in the Park-Wilshire. In the afternoon there had been a nearly full decanter of Scotch on her buffet. At ten o’clock it was on the coffee table beside her chair, and nearly empty. Her face and body had sagged. I wondered if every day she aged so many years, and every morning re-created herself through the power of her will.

  She said: “I thought you were going back to Santa Barbara. I was just going to go to bed.”

  “I did go. Didn’t Jack phone you?”

  “No.” She looked at me, and her green eyes were suddenly very much alive, almost fluorescent. “You found her?” she said.

  “Jack found her in the sea. She was drowned.”

  “I was afraid of that.” But there was something like relief in her voice. As if worse things might have happened. As if at least she had lost no weapons and gained no foes in the daily battle to hold position in the world’s most competitive city.

  “You hired me to find her,” I said. “She’s found, though I had nothing to do with finding her—and that’s that. Unless you want me to find out who drowned her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. Perhaps it wasn’t an accident. Or perhaps somebody stood by and watched her drown.”

  I had given her plenty of reason to be angry with me before, but for the first time that day she was angry. “I gave you a hundred dollars for doing nothing. Isn’t that enough for you? Are you trying to drum up extra business?”

  “I did one thing. I found out that Una wasn’t by herself yesterday.”

  “Who was with her?” She stood up and walked quickly back and forth across the rug. As she walked her body was remolding itself into the forms of youth and vigor. She re-created herself before my eyes.

  “The invisible man,” I said. “My tennis partner.”

  Still she wouldn’t speak the name. She was like the priestess of a cult whose tongue was forbidden to pronounce a secret word. But she said quickly and harshly: “If my daughter was killed I want to know who did it. I don’t care who it was. But if you’re giving me a line and if you make trouble for me and nothing comes of it, I’ll have you kicked out of Southern California. I could do that.”

  Her eyes flashed, her breath came fast, and her sharp breast rose and fell with many of the appearances of genuine feeling. I liked her very much at that moment. So I went away, and instead of making trouble for her I made trouble for myself.

  I found a booth in a drugstore on Wilshire and confirmed what I knew, that Terry Neville would have an unlisted number. I called a girl I knew who fed gossip to a movie columnist, and found out that Neville lived in Beverly Hills but spent most of his evenings around town. At this time of night he was usually at Ronald’s or Chasen’s, a little later at Ciro’s. I went to Ronald’s because it was nearer, and Terry Neville was there.

  He was sitting in a booth for two in the long, low, smoke-filled room, eating smoked salmon and drinking stout. Across from him there was a sharp-faced terrier-like man who looked like his business manager and was drinking milk. Some Hollywood actors spend a lot of time with their managers, because they have a common interest.

  I avoided the headwaiter and stepped up to Neville’s table. He saw me and stood up, saying: “I warned you this afternoon. If you don’t get out of here I’ll call the police.”

  I said quietly: “I sort of am the police. Una is dead.” He didn’t answer and I went on: “This isn’t a good place to talk. If you’ll step outside for a minute I’d like to mention a couple of facts to you.”

  “You say you’re a policeman,” the sharp-faced man snapped, but quietly. “Where’s your identification? Don’t pay any attention to him, Terry.”

  Terry didn’t say anything. I said: “I’m a private detective. I’m investigating the death of Una Rossiter. Shall we step outside, gentlemen?”

  “We’ll go out to the car,” Terry Neville said tonelessly. “Come on, Ed,” he added to the terrier-like man.

  The car was not a green Ch
rysler convertible, but a black Packard limousine equipped with a uniformed chauffeur. When we entered the parking lot he got out of the car and opened the door. He was big and battered-looking.

  I said: “I don’t think I’ll get in. I listen better standing up. I always stand up at concerts and confessions.”

  “You’re not going to listen to anything,” Ed said.

  The parking lot was deserted and far back from the street, and I forgot to keep my eye on the chauffeur. He rabbit-punched me and a gush of pain surged into my head. He rabbit-punched me again and my eyes rattled in their sockets and my body became invertebrate. Two men moving in a maze of lights took hold of my upper arms and lifted me into the car. Unconsciousness was a big black limousine with a swiftly purring motor and the blinds down.

  Though it leaves the neck sore for days, the effect of a rabbit punch on the centers of consciousness is sudden and brief. In two or three minutes I came out of it, to the sound of Ed’s voice saying:

  “We don’t like hurting people and we aren’t going to hurt you. But you’ve got to learn to understand, whatever your name is—”

  “Sacher-Masoch,” I said.

  “A bright boy,” said Ed. “But a bright boy can be too bright for his own good. You’ve got to learn to understand that you can’t go around annoying people, especially very important people like Mr. Neville here.”

  Terry Neville was sitting in the far corner of the back seat, looking worried. Ed was between us. The car was in motion, and I could see lights moving beyond the chauffeur’s shoulders hunched over the wheel. The blinds were down over the back windows.

  “Mr. Neville should keep out of my cases,” I said. “At the moment you’d better let me out of this car or I’ll have you arrested for kidnaping.”

  Ed laughed, but not cheerfully. “You don’t seem to realize what’s happening to you. You’re on your way to the police station, where Mr. Neville and I are going to charge you with attempted blackmail.”

  “Mr. Neville is a very brave little man,” I said. “Inasmuch as he was seen leaving Una Sand’s house shortly after she was killed. He was seen leaving in a great hurry and a green convertible.”