The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  “Before I go over them in detail, I would like to be assured that you’ll take the case.”

  “I’d like to be assured that your son isn’t guilty.”

  “He isn’t. They have nothing against him but circumstances.”

  “Not many murder cases depend on witnesses, Mrs.—”

  “Norris, Genevieve Norris. My son’s name is Alex, after his father.” The modulation of her voice suggested that Alex senior was dead. “Alex is entering his sophomore year in college,” she added with pride.

  “What does Santana think?”

  “Mr. Santana knows that Alex is innocent. He’d have come to you himself, except that he’s busy trying to have him freed. He thinks the woman may have committed suicide—”

  “It was a woman, then.”

  “She was my boarder. I’ll tell you honestly, Mr. Archer, Alex had grown fond of her. Much too fond. The woman was older than him—than he—and different. A different class of person from Alex. I was going to give her notice when she—died.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Her throat was cut.”

  Mrs. Norris laid a genteel brown hand on her bosom, as if to quiet its surge. A plain gold wedding band was sunk almost out of sight in the flesh of one of her fingers. The hand came up to her lip and dashed away the moisture there. “I found her myself, last midnight. Her terrible breathing woke me. I thought maybe she was sick or—intoxicated. By the time I reached her she was dead on the floor, in her blood. Do you know how I felt, Mr. Archer?” She leaned towards me with the diffident and confiding charm of her race, her eyes deeply shadowed by the brim of her hat: “As if all the things I had dreaded for myself and Alex, when we were going from city to city during the depression, trying to find a living, in Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago. As if they’d suddenly come true, in my own house. When I saw Lucy in her blood.” Her voice broke like a cello string.

  “Who was Lucy?” I asked her after a pause.

  “Lucy Deschamps is her name. She claimed to be a Creole from New Orleans. Alex was taken in, he’s a romantic boy, but I don’t know. She was common.”

  “Weapon?”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “If it might have been suicide, the weapon was there.”

  “Yes, of course. The weapon was there. It was a long native knife. My husband sent it from the Philippines before his ship was sunk. Mr. Norris was a chief petty officer in the Navy.” Her unconscious panic was pushing her off the point, into the security and respectability of her past.

  I brought her back to the point: “And where was Alex?”

  “Sleeping in his room. He has a room of his own. A college student needs a room of his own. When I screamed, he came running in in his pyjamas. He let out a cry and lay down beside her. I couldn’t get him up. When the policemen came, he was bloody from head to foot. He said he was responsible for her death, he was really wild. They took him away.” Bowed forward in her chair like a great black Rachel, she had forgotten her careful speech and her poise. Her shadowed eyes were following the image of her son into the shadows.

  I rose and fetched her a drink from the water-cooler in the corner of the room. “We can drive up to Santa Teresa together,” I said, “if that suits you. I want to hear more about Lucy.”

  She gulped the water and stood up. She was almost as tall as I was, and twice as imposing.

  “Of course. You’re a kind man, Mr. Archer.”

  I took the inland route, over Cahuenga Pass. It wasn’t built for speed, but the sparseness of traffic gave me a chance to listen. As we moved north out of the valley, the heat eased off. The withered September hills were a moving backdrop to the small sad romance of Alex Norris and Lucy.

  She had come to the house in a taxi about a month before, a handsome light brown woman of twenty-five or so, well-dressed and well-spoken. She preferred to stay in a private home, she said, because all but the worst hotels in Santa Teresa were closed to her. Mrs. Norris gave her the spare room, the one in the front of the house with the separate entrance, which she sometimes rented out when she could find a suitable tenant. The rent-money would help with Alex’s tuition.

  Miss Deschamps was a peaceful little soul, or so she seemed. She ate most of her meals with the family, almost never went out, spent most of her evenings quietly in her room with the portable radio she had brought along with her. She seldom spoke about herself, except to let it be understood that she had been a lady’s maid in some very good families. But she made Mrs. Norris nervous. The landlady felt that her boarder was under tension, planning her words and actions in order not to give anything away. She seemed afraid, almost as if she were in hiding from someone or something. It put everyone under a strain.

  The strain became severe when Mrs. Norris discovered one day that Lucy was a solitary drinker. It happened quite by accident, as she was cleaning the room during one of Lucy’s rare walks. She opened up a bureau drawer to change the paper lining, and found it half full of empty whiskey bottles. And then she learned, in conversation with Alex, that Alex had been serving as Lucy’s errand-boy, bringing her nightly pints from the liquor store. That she had rewarded Alex by teaching him to dance, alone in her room, to the music of the portable radio. That Lucy, to put it briefly (as Mrs. Norris did), had been transforming her God-fearing household into a dancehall-saloon, her son into God knew what.

  This had been on a Monday, three days before. When Mrs. Norris had threatened to evict her tenant, Lucy promised in tears to be good, if only she might stay. Alex announced that if Lucy were forced to leave, he would go with her. Now, in a sense, he had.

  “What did he mean by saying that he was responsible?”

  “Alex? When?” Mrs. Norris shifted uncomfortably in the seat beside me.

  “Last night. You said he told the police that he was responsible for her death.”

  “Did I say that? You must have misunderstood me.” But she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  It was just as well, because I almost missed the first Santa Teresa stoplight. I braked the car to a screaming stop, half over the white line. “All right, I misunderstood you. Let me get it straight about the weapon. Had it been lying around the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Lucy’s room?”

  “I don’t know where it was, Mr. Archer. It might have been anywhere in the house. It was usually on the mantel in the living room, but Lucy could easily get it if she wanted to do herself an injury.”

  “Why would she want to?”

  The light changed, and I turned right, in the direction of the courthouse.

  “Because she was afraid. I told you that.”

  “But you don’t know what of?”

  “No.”

  “Her past is simply a blank? She didn’t tell you anything, except that she was a lady’s maid from New Orleans?”

  “No.”

  “Or why she came to you?”

  “Oh, I know why she came to my house. She was referred. Dr. Benning referred her to me. She went to him as a patient.”

  “What was the matter with her?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t seem ill to me, the way she carried on.”

  “Maybe I’d better talk to this doctor first. Did you tell the police that he sent Lucy to you?”

  She was watching the bright stucco street as if it might narrow at any moment into an arc-lit alley, ambushed at each end. “I didn’t tell them anything much.” Her voice was glum.

  Following her directions, I drove across the railroad tracks which cut through the center of town. The double band of steel was like a social equator dividing Santa Teresa roughly into lighter and darker hemispheres. Dr. Benning’s house, which also contained his office, stood in the lower latitudes, a block above the station, two blocks off the main street. It was a gray old three-storied building standing in a block of rundown shops. The faded sign on the wall beside the front door, Samuel Benning, M.D., seemed large, even for California.

  A young woman opened
the door as I pulled up to the curb. She had straight black hair, trimmed short, and black-rimmed harlequin spectacles that gave her face an Asiatic cast. Though her body looked rather lumpy in an ill-fitting white uniform, I noticed that her waist and ankles were narrow.

  “Who’s she?” I asked the woman beside me.

  “I never saw her before. Must be a new receptionist.”

  I got out and approached her. “Is Dr. Benning in?”

  “He’s just going out to lunch.” Her spectacles or the blue eyes behind them glittered coldly in the sun.

  “It’s rather important. A woman has been killed. I understand that she was one of his patients.”

  “She boarded with me.” Mrs. Norris had come up behind me. “Miss Lucy Deschamps.”

  “Lucy Deschamps?” The chill spread from her eyes across her face, drawing her unpainted mouth into a thin blue line. “I don’t recall the name.”

  “The doctor probably will.” I started up the walk that crossed the narrow yard.

  As if of its own accord, her body moved to bar my way. She spoke on an indrawn breath: “How was she killed?”

  “Cut throat.”

  “How awful.” She turned away, towards the house. Her feet groped for the verandah steps like a blind woman’s.

  Dr. Benning was in the entrance hall, brushing a felt hat that badly needed brushing. He was a thin, high-shouldered man of indeterminate age. A fringe of reddish hair grew like withering grass around the pink desert expanse of his bald scalp.

  “Good morning.” His pale eyes shifted from me to the Negro woman. “Why, hello, Mrs. Norris. What’s the trouble?”

  “Trouble is the right word, doctor. The boarder you sent me last month, she was killed. Alex has been arrested.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it, naturally. But I didn’t send you anyone last month. Did I?”

  “That’s what I told her,” the receptionist put in. “I never heard the name Lucy Deschamps.”

  “Just a minute, Miss Tennent. I think I remember now. She probably came here on a Wednesday, when you were off. I may have forgotten to make a note of her visit.” He turned to Mrs. Norris, who blocked the doorway. “Was she that light-brown woman from San Francisco?”

  “I don’t know where she was from. All she said was that you sent her to me. She came to my house in a taxi and I let her move in.” There was a veiled accusation in Mrs. Norris’ tone: no doctor should send a potential murderee to a respectable landlady.

  “You can hardly say I sent her to you. She’d just got off the train, and was looking for a place to stay, and I may have mentioned your place as a possibility. What’s this about Alex being arrested?”

  Mrs. Norris told him. The receptionist stood flat against the wall at his elbow, steadily watching his face.

  The doctor clucked sympathetically. “Too bad. He’s a fine boy. I’ll go down and talk to the D.A. if you like.” He turned to me again: “You a detective?”

  “A private one. I’m working for Mrs. Norris.”

  “Found out anything?”

  “I hoped I would from you. Where the woman came from, what she was doing here, what was the matter with her.”

  “She came here in the middle of the afternoon, said she got off the San Francisco train. Just a minute, I’ll check my records.” He placed his hat on his head, dropping ten years.

  I followed him into the waiting room, where he rummaged in a battered filing cabinet behind the receptionist’s desk. The rest of the furniture was equally dilapidated. There was a worn linoleum rug on the floor.

  He looked up with a deprecatory smile: “I’m sorry, I have so many cash patients, I don’t keep complete records. I do remember this woman though. She had some kind of female trouble, a slight irregularity. She’d blown it up in her head into a malignant disease. I set her mind at rest as well as I could, and gave her a hormone prescription, and that was all there was to it. Typical hypochondriac.”

  “She wasn’t seriously ill, then.”

  “I’d stake my reputation on it.” The room mocked his words, and he grinned sheepishly. His teeth were poor. “Of course it’s possible,” he added slowly, “that she didn’t accept my reassurances, and killed herself out of pure funk. In any case, it’s certainly rough on Jenny.”

  “Mrs. Norris is a friend of yours?”

  “Yes, I’d call her a friend. She’s often nursed patients for me, in their homes. Jenny’s not a trained nurse, but she’s a dependable woman. Used to teach school in Detroit. Her son’s quite brilliant, I hear. Scholarship student. He’s Jenny’s pride and joy.”

  “Evidently. You say the woman came here on a Wednesday.”

  “It must have been”—he consulted the desk-calendar—“Wednesday, August 16, I’d say. Five weeks ago yesterday.”

  “Thanks, Doctor. One other thing. Would you class her as a suicidal type?”

  “I didn’t talk to her for very long, and I’m no psychiatrist. All I can say is that it’s possible. She was prone to phobias, certainly.”

  I left him standing in the unsuccessful room, hatted and ill-at-ease in his own house. Miss Tennent and Mrs. Norris were close together in the hallway, talking in low tones about Lucy’s death. The white-uniformed girl leaned towards the dark woman with an eagerness that almost amounted to sickness. When I brushed past her she shied away.

  Santana was closeted with a Superior Court judge in the judge’s chambers. The District Attorney was holding himself incommunicado in his office. The Deputy D.A. I talked to wouldn’t say a word about the case, except to indicate that Alex was still in jail, for all kinds of excellent reasons. I finally found the Sheriff eating lunch in a lunch-bar across the street from the courthouse.

  Sheriff Kerrigan was a big middle-aged man in a rumpled business suit. He was reasonable, as elected police officials often tended to be. My connection with Santana, and Santana’s influence on the Mexican and Negro vote, were no disadvantage at all. He took me to see the body at the morgue.

  This occupied the rear of a fly-specked mortuary a short walk from the courthouse. The dead woman lay on a marble-topped table under a sheet. The Sheriff removed the sheet, and switched on a naked light. I looked down into wide blank eyes. Lucy’s skin was shriveled and jaundiced from loss of blood, which had wasted through a gaping slash in her neck. Her orange silk pyjamas were heavily stained. I noticed before I looked away that the silk was real. She had red mules on her feet.

  “Not pretty,” Kerrigan said. “I don’t like it any better than you do.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “I’ll be frank with you,” he answered heavily. “I haven’t the slightest idea. The city identification officer is stumped—”

  “No kidding, Sheriff.”

  “Absolutely not. There’s nothing in her room to give us a lead. Repeat, nothing. No laundry marks, no social security card, no labels on the clothes that tell us anything, nothing written down. It’s possible she couldn’t write, I don’t know. All we know is she’s dead.”

  “Autopsy?”

  “Not yet. The cause of death is obvious, so there’s no hurry. Snickersnee.” He drew a finger under his own soft jowls.

  “With the Norrises’ bolo knife?”

  “Sure looks like it. The knife was there on the floor, covered with blood.”

  “How would it get into her room, assuming that Alex Norris didn’t take it there?”

  “He did, though. He admits it.”

  “You have a confession?”

  “Hell, no. He claims she asked him for it day before yesterday. According to him, she saw him using it to split some kindling, and she said she’d like to have it in her room. He took it to her when he was finished cutting wood. He says.”

  “Any reason given?”

  “She wanted it to protect herself, he says. Santana thinks she was contemplating suicide, but that’s what Santana would think, or say he thinks.”

  “What do fingerprints say, or is that a secret?”

&nb
sp; He lit a cigar without offering me one: I voted in Los Angeles. “It’s no secret. Both hers and his are on it. Mostly hers.”

  “That’s consistent with suicide.”

  “It’s also consistent with murder. Suicides don’t cut themselves that deep, unless they’re completely nutty, and she wasn’t. Besides, there are no hesitation marks. And the boy admits they quarreled. The D.A. wants him arraigned.” He sounded faintly regretful.

  “You don’t think he did it, though.”

  “I’ll let a jury form my opinion for me. The evidence warrants arraignment, you can see that. Somebody killed her, and the Norris kid was the one that quarreled with her.” He switched off the light, and his cigar winked at me like a red eye.

  “What about?”

  “He won’t say. He admits that they quarreled yesterday, that’s all.”

  “Is that what he meant when he said he was responsible?”

  “You figure it out.” He covered Lucy with the sheet again, and we went outside.

  I drove to Mrs. Norris’s address. The street was on the precarious edge of the slums, in but not quite of the unofficial ghetto. A street of small well-kept houses standing among neat pocket-handkerchief lawns and flowery borders. Mrs. Norris’s white clapboard bungalow was one of the best in its block. There was a postwar Cadillac at the curb in front of it, being admired by a group of Negro children. I parked behind the Cadillac.

  Its owner was inside with Mrs. Norris. He was a slight, sallow Mexican in his fifties, with a dry laconic voice and effusive manners. He embraced me with one arm and shook my hand with the other. “Glad to see you, Mr. Archer. Glad you could make it.” His breath, which was not unpleasant, smelt of spices. A mummy might look and smell and sound as Santana did, if it started to breathe again in a sudden onrush of enthusiasm.

  I drew away, and sat in the armchair Mrs. Norris indicated. “What’s the word on your client?”

  “They still habent the corpus. I just passed a bad hour arguing with Judge Bronson. He won’t issue a writ. They’re going to arraign Alex in Justice Court.” He took out a gold cigarette holder, caught Mrs. Norris’s look of disapproval, and put it away again, gracefully.

  “Can they make it stick?”