The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  “Somebody?”

  “Mrs. Turner, to be specific.”

  “Sarah! She’d say anything to get back at him for ditching her.”

  I filed that one away. “Maybe so. The fact is, the Admiral seems to suspect him, too. So much so that he’s keeping the police out of it.”

  “Admiral Turner is a senile fool. If Hugh were here to defend himself—”

  “But that’s the point. He isn’t.”

  “I’ve got to find him.” She turned towards the door.

  “It may not be so easy.”

  She looked back in quick anger, her round chin prominent. “You suspect him, too.”

  “I do not. But a crime’s been committed, remember. Crimes often come in pairs.”

  She turned, her eyes large and very dark. “You do think something has happened to my brother.”

  “I don’t think anything. But if I were certain that he’s all right, I’d be on my way to San Francisco now.”

  “You believe it’s as bad as that,” she said in a whisper. “I’ve got to go to the police.”

  “It’s up to you. You’ll want to keep them out of it, though, if there’s the slightest chance—” I left the sentence unfinished.

  She finished it: “That Hugh is a thief? There isn’t. But I’ll tell you what we’ll do. He may be up at his shack in the mountains. He’s gone off there before without telling anyone. Will you drive up with me?” She laid a light hand on my arm. “I can go myself if you have to get away.”

  “I’m sticking around,” I said. “Can you get time off?”

  “I’m taking it. All they can do is fire me, and there aren’t enough good technicians to go around. Anyway, I put in three hours’ overtime last night. Be with you in two minutes.”

  And she was.

  I put the top of the convertible down. As we drove out of the city the wind blew away her smooth glaze of efficiency, colored her cheeks and loosened her sleek hair.

  “You should do this oftener,” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “Get out in the country and relax.”

  “I’m not exactly relaxed, with my brother accused of theft, and missing into the bargain.”

  “Anyway, you’re not working. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps you work too hard?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that somebody has to work or nothing will get done? You and Hugh are more alike than I thought.”

  “In some ways that’s a compliment. You make it sound like an insult.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, exactly. But Hugh and I are so different. I admit he works hard at his painting, but he’s never tried to make a steady living. Since I left school, I’ve had to look after the bread and butter for both of us. His salary as resident painter keeps him in artist’s supplies, and that’s about all.”

  “I thought he was doing well. His show’s had a big advance buildup in the L.A. papers.”

  “Critics don’t buy pictures,” she said bluntly. “He’s having the show to try to sell some paintings, so he can afford to get married. Hugh has suddenly realized that money is one of the essentials.” She added with some bitterness, “The realization came a little late.”

  “He’s been doing some outside work, though, hasn’t he? Isn’t he a part-time agent or something?”

  “For Hendryx, yes.” She made the name sound like a dirty word. “I’d just as soon he didn’t take any of that man’s money.”

  “Who’s Hendryx?”

  “A man.”

  “I gathered that. What’s the matter with his money?”

  “I really don’t know. I have no idea where it comes from. But he has it.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “No. I don’t like him, and I don’t like the men who work for him. They look like a gang of thugs to me. But Hugh wouldn’t notice that. He’s horribly dense where people are concerned. I don’t mean that Hugh’s done anything wrong,” she added quickly. “He’s bought a few paintings for Hendryx on commission.”

  “I see.” I didn’t like what I saw, but I named it. “The Admiral said something about Hugh trying to buy the Chardin for an unnamed purchaser. Would that be Hendryx?”

  “It could be,” she said.

  “Tell me more about Hendryx.”

  “I don’t know any more. I only met him once. That was enough. I know that he’s an evil old man, and he has a bodyguard who carries him upstairs.”

  “Carries him upstairs?”

  “Yes. He’s crippled. As a matter of fact, he offered me a job.”

  “Carrying him upstairs?”

  “He didn’t specify my duties. He didn’t get that far.” Her voice was so chilly it quick-froze the conversation. “Now could we drop the subject, Mr. Archer?”

  The road had begun to rise towards the mountains. Yellow and black Slide Area signs sprang up along the shoulders. By holding the gas pedal nearly to the floor, I kept our speed around fifty.

  “You’ve had quite a busy morning,” Mary said after a while, “meeting the Turners and all.”

  “Social mobility is my stock in trade.”

  “Did you meet Alice, too?”

  I said I had.

  “And what did you think of her?”

  “I shouldn’t say it to another girl, but she’s a lovely one.”

  “Vanity isn’t one of my vices,” Mary said. “She’s beautiful. And she’s really devoted to Hugh.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “I don’t think Alice has ever been in love before. And painting means almost as much to her as it does to him.”

  “He’s a lucky man.” I remembered the disillusioned eyes of the self-portrait, and hoped that his luck was holding.

  The road twisted and climbed through red clay cutbanks and fields of dry chaparral.

  “How long does this go on?” I asked.

  “It’s about another two miles.”

  We zigzagged up the mountainside for ten or twelve minutes more. Finally the road began to level out. I was watching its edge so closely that I didn’t see the cabin until we were almost on top of it. It was a one-story frame building standing in a little hollow at the edge of the high mesa. Attached to one side was an open tarpaulin shelter from which the rear end of a gray coupe protruded. I looked at Mary.

  She nodded. “It’s our car.” Her voice was bright with relief.

  I stopped the convertible in the lane in front of the cabin. As soon as the engine died, the silence began. A single hawk high over our heads swung round and round on his invisible wire. Apart from that, the entire world seemed empty. As we walked down the ill-kept gravel drive, I was startled by the sound of my own footsteps.

  The door was unlocked. The cabin had only one room. It was a bachelor hodgepodge, untouched by the human hand for months at a time. Cooking utensils, paint-stained dungarees and painter’s tools and bedding were scattered on the floor and furniture. There was an open bottle of whiskey, half empty, on the kitchen table in the center of the room. It would have been just another mountain shack if it hadn’t been for the watercolors on the wall, like brilliant little windows, and the one big window which opened on the sky.

  Mary had crossed to the window and was looking out. I moved up to her shoulder. Blue space fell away in front of us all the way down to the sea, and beyond to the curved horizon. San Marcos and its suburbs were spread out like an air map between the sea and the mountains.

  “I wonder where he can be,” she said. “Perhaps he’s gone for a hike. After all, he doesn’t know we’re looking for him.”

  I looked down the mountainside, which fell almost sheer from the window.

  “No,” I said. “He doesn’t.”

  The red clay slope was sown with boulders. Nothing grew there except a few dust-colored mountain bushes. And a foot, wearing a man’s shoe, which projected from a cleft between two rocks.

  I went out without a word. A path led round the cabin to the edge of the slope. Hugh Western was there, att
ached to the solitary foot. He was lying, or hanging head down with his face in the clay, about twenty feet below the edge. One of his legs was doubled under him. The other was caught between the boulders. I climbed around the rocks and bent to look at his head.

  The right temple was smashed. The face was smashed; I raised the rigid body to look at it. He had been dead for hours, but the sharp strong odor of whiskey still hung around him.

  A tiny gravel avalanche rattled past me. Mary was at the top of the slope.

  “Don’t come down here.”

  She paid no attention to the warning. I stayed where I was, crouched over the body, trying to hide the ruined head from her. She leaned over the boulder and looked down, her eyes bright black in her drained face. I moved to one side. She took her brother’s head in her hands.

  “If you pass out,” I said, “I don’t know whether I can carry you up.”

  “I won’t pass out.”

  She lifted the body by the shoulders to look at the face. It was a little unsettling to see how strong she was. Her fingers moved gently over the wounded temple. “This is what killed him. It looks like a blow from a fist.”

  I kneeled down beside her and saw the row of rounded indentations in the skull.

  “He must have fallen,” she said, “and struck his head on the rocks. Nobody could have hit him that hard.”

  “I’m afraid somebody did, though.” Somebody whose fist was hard enough to leave its mark in wood.

  —

  Two long hours later I parked my car in front of the art shop on Rubio Street. Its windows were jammed with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist reproductions, and one very bad original oil of surf as stiff and static as whipped cream. The sign above the windows was lettered in flowing script: Chez Hilary. The cardboard sign on the door was simpler and to the point; it said: Closed.

  The stairs and hallway seemed dark, but it was good to get out of the sun. The sun reminded me of what I had found at high noon on the mesa. It wasn’t the middle of the afternoon yet, but my nerves felt stretched and scratchy, as though it was late at night. My eyes were aching.

  Mary unlocked the door of her apartment, stepped aside to let me pass. She paused at the door of her room to tell me there was whiskey on the sideboard. I offered to make her a drink. No, thanks, she never drank. The door shut behind her. I mixed a whiskey and water and tried to relax in an easy chair. I couldn’t relax. My mind kept playing back the questions and the answers, and the questions that had no answers.

  We had called the sheriff from the nearest fire warden’s post, and led him and his deputies back up the mountain to the body. Photographs were taken, the cabin and its surroundings searched, many questions asked. Mary didn’t mention the lost Chardin. Neither did I.

  Some of the questions were answered after the county coroner arrived. Hugh Western had been dead since some time between eight and ten o’clock the previous night; the coroner couldn’t place the time more definitely before analyzing the stomach contents. The blow on the temple had killed him. The injuries to his face, which had failed to bleed, had probably been inflicted after death. Which meant that he was dead when his body fell or was thrown down the mountainside.

  His clothes had been soaked with whiskey to make it look like a drunken accident. But the murderer had gone too far in covering, and outwitted himself. The whiskey bottle in the cabin showed no fingerprints, not even Western’s. And there were no fingerprints on the steering wheel of his coupe. Bottle and wheel had been wiped clean.

  I stood up when Mary came back into the room. She had brushed her black hair gleaming, and changed to a dress of soft black jersey which fitted her like skin. A thought raced through my mind like a nasty little rodent. I wondered what she would look like with a beard.

  “Can I have another look at the studio? I’m interested in that sketch.”

  She looked at me for a moment, frowning a little dazedly. “Sketch?”

  “The one of the lady with the beard.”

  She crossed the hall ahead of me, walking slowly and carefully as if the floor were unsafe and a rapid movement might plunge her into black chaos. The door of the studio was still unlocked. She held it open for me and pressed the light switch.

  When the fluorescent lights blinked on, I saw that the bearded nude was gone. There was nothing left of her but the four torn corners of the drawing paper thumbtacked to the empty easel. I turned to Mary.

  “Did you take it down?”

  “No. I haven’t been in the studio since this morning.”

  “Somebody’s stolen it then. Is there anything else missing?”

  “I can’t be sure, it’s such a mess in here.” She moved around the room looking at the pictures on the walls and pausing finally by a table in the corner. “There was a bronze cast on this table. It isn’t here now.”

  “What sort of a cast?”

  “The cast of a fist. Hugh made it from the fist of that man—that dreadful man I told you about.”

  “What dreadful man?”

  “I think his name is Devlin. He’s Hendryx’ bodyguard. Hugh’s always been interested in hands, and the man has enormous hands.”

  Her eyes unfocused suddenly. I guessed she was thinking of the same thing I was: the marks on the side of Hugh’s head, which might have been made by a giant fist.

  “Look.” I pointed to the scars on the doorframe. “Could the cast of Devlin’s fist have made these marks?”

  She felt the indentations with trembling fingers. “I think so—I don’t know.” She turned to me with a dark question in her eyes.

  “If that’s what they are,” I said, “it probably means that he was killed in this studio. You should tell the police about it. And I think it’s time they knew about the Chardin.”

  She gave me a look of passive resistance. Then she gave in. “Yes, I’ll have to tell them. They’ll find out soon enough, anyway. But I’m surer now than ever that Hugh didn’t take it.”

  “What does the picture look like? If we could find it, we might find the killer attached to it.”

  “You think so? Well, it’s a picture of a little boy looking at an apple. Wait a minute: Hilary has a copy. It was painted by one of the students at the college, and it isn’t very expert. It’ll give you an idea, though, if you want to go down to his shop and look at it.”

  “The shop is closed.”

  “He may be there anyway. He has a little apartment at the back.”

  I started for the hall, but turned before I got there. “Just who is Hilary Todd?”

  “I don’t know where he’s from originally. He was stationed here during the war, and simply stayed on. His parents had money at one time, and he studied painting and ballet in Paris, or so he claims.”

  “Art seems to be the main industry in San Marcos.”

  “You’ve just been meeting the wrong people.”

  I went down the outside stairs to the parking lot, wondering what that implied about her brother. Todd’s convertible stood near the mouth of the alley. I knocked on the back door of the art shop. There was no answer, but behind the Venetian-blinded door I heard a murmur of voices, a growling and a twittering. Todd had a woman with him. I knocked again.

  After more delay the door was partly opened. Todd looked out through the crack. He was wiping his mouth with a red-stained handkerchief. The stains were too bright to be blood. Above the handkerchief his eyes were very bright and narrow, like slivers of polished agate.

  “Good afternoon.”

  I moved forward as though I fully expected to be let in. He opened the door reluctantly under the nudging pressure of my shoulder, and backed into a narrow passage between two wallboard partitions.

  “What can I do for you, Mr.—? I don’t believe I know your name.”

  Before I could answer, a woman’s voice said clearly, “It’s Mr. Archer, isn’t it?”

  Sarah Turner appeared in the doorway behind him, carrying a highball glass and looking freshly groomed. Her red hair was unr
uffled, her red mouth gleaming as if she had just finished painting it.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Turner.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Archer.” She leaned in the doorway, almost too much at ease. “Do you know Hilary, Mr. Archer? You should. Everybody should. Hilary’s simply loaded and dripping with charm, aren’t you, dear?” Her mouth curled in a thin smile.

  Todd looked at her with hatred, then turned to me without changing his look. “Did you wish to speak to me?”

  “I did. You have a copy of Admiral Turner’s Chardin.”

  “A copy, yes.”

  “Can I have a look at it?” “What on earth for?”

  “I want to be able to identify the original. It’s probably connected with the murder.”

  I watched them both as I said the word. Neither showed surprise.

  “We heard about it on the radio,” the woman said. “It must have been dreadful for you.”

  “Dreadful,” Todd echoed her, injecting synthetic sympathy into his dark eyes.

  “Worse for Western,” I said, “and for whoever did it. Do you still think he stole the picture, Mrs. Turner?”

  Todd glanced at her sharply. She was embarrassed, as I’d intended her to be. She dunked her embarrassment in her highball glass, swallowing deeply from it and leaving a red half-moon on its rim.

  “I never thought he stole it,” her wet mouth lied. “I merely suggested the possibility.”

  “I see. Didn’t you say something about Western trying to buy the picture from your husband? That he was acting as agent for somebody else?”

  “I wasn’t the one who said that. I didn’t know it.”

  “The Admiral said it then. It would be interesting to know who the other man was. He wanted the Chardin, and it looks to me as if Hugh Western died because somebody wanted the Chardin.”

  Todd had been listening hard and saying nothing. “I don’t see any necessary connection,” he said now. “But if you’ll come in and sit down I’ll show you my copy.”

  “You wouldn’t know who it was that Western was acting for?”

  He spread his palms outward in a Continental gesture. “How would I know?”

  “You’re in the picture business.”

  “I was in the picture business.” He turned abruptly and left the room.