The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  “I do not know, Mr. Archer, sincerely I do not know. She went away this afternoon, after the policemen questioned her. They were suspicious, but we managed to soothe their suspicions. They did not know that she had just come home, from another life, and I did not tell them. Mabel wanted to tell them. I silenced her.” His white teeth clicked together.

  “What about Donny?”

  “They took him down to the station for questioning. He told them nothing damaging. Donny can appear very stupid when he wishes. He has the reputation of an idiot, but he is not so dumb. Donny has been with me for many years. He has a deep devotion for my daughter. I got him released tonight.”

  “You should have taken my advice,” I said, “taken the police into your confidence. Nothing would have happened to you. The dead man was a mobster, and what he was doing amounts to kidnaping. Your daughter was a witness against his boss.”

  “She told me that. I am glad that it is true. Ella has not always told me the truth. She has been a hard girl to bring up, without a good mother to set her an example. Where has she been these last six months, Mr. Archer?”

  “Singing in a night club in Palm Springs. Her boss was a racketeer.”

  “A racketeer?” His mouth and nose screwed up, as if he sniffed the odor of corruption.

  “Where she was isn’t important, compared with where she is now. The boss is still after her. He hired me to look for her.”

  Salanda regarded me with fear and dislike, as if the odor originated in me. “You let him hire you?”

  “It was my best chance of getting out of his place alive. I’m not his boy, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You ask me to believe you?”

  “I’m telling you. Ella is in danger. As a matter of fact, we all are.” I didn’t tell him about the second black Cadillac. Gino would be driving it, wandering the night roads with a ready gun in his armpit and revenge corroding his heart.

  “My daughter is aware of the danger,” he said. “She warned me of it.”

  “She must have told you where she was going.”

  “No. But she may be at the beach house. The house where Donny lives. I will come with you.”

  “You stay here. Keep your doors locked. If any strangers show and start prowling the place, call the police.”

  He bolted the door behind me as I went out. Yellow traffic lights cast wan reflections on the asphalt. Streams of cars went by to the north, to the south. To the west, where the sea lay, a great black emptiness opened under the stars. The beach house sat on its white margin, a little over a mile from the motel.

  For the second time that day, I knocked on the warped kitchen door. There was light behind it, shining through the cracks. A shadow obscured the light.

  “Who is it?” Donny said. Fear or some other emotion had filled his mouth with pebbles.

  “You know me, Donny.”

  The door groaned on its hinges. He gestured dumbly for me to come in, his face a white blur. When he turned his head, and the light from the living room caught his face, I saw that grief was the emotion that marked it. His eyes were swollen as if he had been crying. More than ever he resembled a dilapidated boy whose growing pains had never paid off in manhood.

  “Anybody with you?”

  Sounds of movement in the living room answered my question. I brushed him aside and went in. Ella Salanda was bent over an open suitcase on the camp cot. She straightened, her mouth thin, eyes wide and dark. The .38 automatic in her hand gleamed dully under the naked bulb suspended from the ceiling.

  “I’m getting out of here,” she said, “and you’re not going to stop me.”

  “I’m not sure I want to try. Where are you going, Fern?”

  Donny spoke behind me, in his grief-thickened voice: “She’s going away from me. She promised to stay here if I did what she told me. She promised to be my girl—”

  “Shut up, stupid.” Her voice cut like a lash, and Donny gasped as if the lash had been laid across his back.

  “What did she tell you to do, Donny? Tell me just what you did.”

  “When she checked in last night with the fella from Detroit, she made a sign I wasn’t to let on I knew her. Later on she left me a note. She wrote it with a lipstick on a piece of paper towel. I still got it hidden, in the kitchen.”

  “What did she write in the note?”

  He lingered behind me, fearful of the gun in the girl’s hand, more fearful of her anger.

  She said: “Don’t be crazy, Donny. He doesn’t know a thing, not a thing. He can’t do anything to either of us.”

  “I don’t care what happens, to me or anybody else,” the anguished voice said behind me. “You’re running out on me, breaking your promise to me. I always knew it was too good to be true. Now I just don’t care any more.”

  “I care,” she said. “I care what happens to me.” Her eyes shifted to me, above the unwavering gun. “I won’t stay here. I’ll shoot you if I have to.”

  “It shouldn’t be necessary. Put it down, Fern. It’s Bartolomeo’s gun, isn’t it? I found the shells to fit it in his glove compartment.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “I talked to Angel.”

  “Is he here?” Panic whined in her voice.

  “No. I came alone.”

  “You better leave the same way then, while you can go under your own power.”

  “I’m staying. You need protection, whether you know it or not. And I need information. Donny, go in the kitchen and bring me that note.”

  “Don’t do it, Donny. I’m warning you.”

  His sneakered feet made soft indecisive sounds. I advanced on the girl, talking quietly and steadily: “You conspired to kill a man, but you don’t have to be afraid. He had it coming. Tell the whole story to the cops, and my guess is they won’t even book you. Hell, you can even become famous. The government wants you as a witness in a tax case.”

  “What kind of a case?”

  “A tax case against Angel. It’s probably the only kind of rap they can pin on him. You can send him up for the rest of his life like Capone. You’ll be a heroine, Fern.”

  “Don’t call me Fern. I hate that name.” There were sudden tears in her eyes. “I hate everything connected with that name. I hate myself.”

  “You’ll hate yourself more if you don’t put down that gun. Shoot me and it all starts over again. The cops will be on your trail, Angel’s troopers will be gunning for you.”

  Now only the cot was between us, the cot and the unsteady gun facing me above it.

  “This is the turning point,” I said. “You’ve made a lot of bum decisions and almost ruined yourself, playing footsie with the evilest men there are. You can go on the way you have been, getting in deeper until you end up in a refrigerated drawer, or you can come back out of it now, into a decent life.”

  “A decent life? Here? With my father married to Mabel?”

  “I don’t think Mabel will last much longer. Anyway, I’m not Mabel. I’m on your side.”

  I waited. She dropped the gun on the blanket. I scooped it up and turned to Donny:

  “Let me see that note.”

  He disappeared through the kitchen door, head and shoulders drooping on the long stalk of his body.

  “What could I do?” the girl said. “I was caught. It was Bart or me. All the way up from Acapulco I planned how I could get away. He held a gun in my side when we crossed the border; the same way when we stopped for gas or to eat at the drive-ins. I realized he had to be killed. My father’s motel looked like my only chance. So I talked Bart into staying there with me overnight. He had no idea who the place belonged to. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew it had to be something drastic. Once I was back with Angel in the desert, that was the end of me. Even if he didn’t kill me, it meant I’d have to go on living with him. Anything was better than that. So I wrote a note to Donny in the bathroom, and dropped it out the window. He was always crazy about me.”

  Her mouth ha
d grown softer. She looked remarkably young and virginal. The faint blue hollows under her eyes were dewy. “Donny shot Bart with Bart’s own gun. He had more nerve than I had. I lost my nerve when I went back into the room this morning. I didn’t know about the blood in the bathroom. It was the last straw.”

  She was wrong. Something crashed in the kitchen. A cool draft swept the living room. A gun spoke twice, out of sight. Donny fell backwards through the doorway, a piece of brownish paper clutched in his hand. Blood gleamed on his shoulder like a red badge.

  I stepped behind the cot and pulled the girl down to the floor with me. Gino came through the door, his two-colored sports shoe stepping on Donny’s laboring chest. I shot the gun out of his hand. He floundered back against the wall, clutching at his wrist.

  I sighted carefully for my second shot, until the black bar of his eyebrows was steady in the sights of the .38. The hole it made was invisible. Gino fell loosely forward, prone on the floor beside the man he had killed.

  Ella Salanda ran across the room. She knelt, and cradled Donny’s head in her lap. Incredibly, he spoke, in a loud sighing voice:

  “You won’t go away again, Ella? I did what you told me. You promised.”

  “Sure I promised. I won’t leave you, Donny. Crazy man. Crazy fool.”

  “You like me better than you used to? Now?”

  “I like you, Donny. You’re the most man there is.”

  She held the poor insignificant head in her hands. He sighed, and his life came out bright-colored at the mouth. It was Donny who went away.

  His hand relaxed, and I read the lipstick note she had written him on a piece of porous tissue:

  “Donny: This man will kill me unless you kill him first. His gun will be in his clothes on the chair beside the bed. Come in and get it at midnight and shoot to kill. Good luck. I’ll stay and be your girl if you do this, just like you always wished. Love. Ella.”

  I looked at the pair on the floor. She was rocking his lifeless head against her breast. Beside them, Gino looked very small and lonely, a dummy leaking darkness from his brow.

  Donny had his wish and I had mine. I wondered what Ella’s was.

  THE SINISTER HABIT

  A man in a conservative dark gray suit entered my doorway sideways, carrying a dark gray Homburg in his hand. His face was long and pale. He had black eyes and eyebrows and black nostrils. Across the summit of his high forehead, long black ribbons of hair were brushed demurely. Only his tie had color: it lay on his narrow chest like a slumbering purple passion.

  His sharp black glance darted around my office, then back into the corridor. His hairy nostrils sniffed the air as if he suspected escaping gas.

  “Is somebody following you?” I said.

  “I have no reason to think so.”

  I had my coat off and my shirt unbuttoned. It was a hot afternoon at the start of the smog season. My visitor looked at me in a certain way that reminded me of schoolteachers. “Might you be Archer?”

  “It’s a reasonable conclusion. Name’s on the door.”

  “I can read, thank you.”

  “Congratulations, but this is no talent agency.”

  He stiffened, clutching his blue chin with a seal-ringed hand, and gave me a long, sad, hostile stare. Then he shrugged awkwardly, as though there was no help for it.

  “Come in if you like,” I said. “Close it behind you. Don’t mind me, I get snappy in the heat.”

  He shut the door violently, almost hard enough to crack the expensive one-way glass panel. He jumped at the noise it made, and apologized.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been under quite a strain.”

  “You’re in trouble?”

  “Not I. My sister…” He gave me one of his long looks. I assumed an air of bored discretion garnished with a sprig of innocence.

  “Your sister,” I reminded him after a while. “Did she do something, or get something done to her?”

  “Both, I’m afraid.” His teeth showed in a tortured little smile which drew down the corners of his mouth. “She and I maintain a school for girls in—in the vicinity of Chicago. I can’t emphasize too much the importance of keeping this matter profoundly secret.”

  “You’re doing your part. Sit down, Mr.—”

  He took a pinseal wallet out of his inside breast pocket, handling it with a kind of reverence, and produced a card. He hesitated with the card in his hand.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Don’t tell me. Does your name begin with a consonant or a vowel?”

  He sat down with great caution, after inspecting the chair for concealed electrodes, and made me the gift of his card. It was engraved: “J. Reginald Harlan, M.A. The Harlan School.”

  I read it out loud. He winced.

  “All right, Mr. Harlan. Your sister’s in some kind of a jam. You run a girls’ school—”

  “She’s headmistress. I’m registrar and bursar.”

  “—which makes you vulnerable to scandal. Is it sexual trouble she’s in?”

  He crossed his legs, and clasped his sharp knee with both hands. “Now how could you possibly know that?”

  “Some of my best friends are sisters. I take it she’s younger than you.”

  “A few years my junior, yes, but Maude’s no youngster. She’s a mature woman, at least I’d always supposed that she was mature. It’s her age, her age and position, that make this whole affair so incredible. For a woman of Maude’s social and professional standing, with a hundred virginal minds in her charge, suddenly to go mad over a man! Can you understand such behavior?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen enough of it.”

  “I can’t.” But a faint, attractive doubt softened his eyes for a moment. Perhaps he was wondering when some long overdue lightning might blast and illuminate him. “I’d always supposed that the teens were the dangerous age. Perhaps after all it’s the thirties.” One hand crawled up his chest like a pallid crab and fondled the purple tie.

  “It depends on the person,” I said, “and the circumstances.”

  “I suppose so.” He inverted the hat in his lap and gazed down into it. “Now that I come to think of it, Mother’s breakdown occurred when she was in her thirties. I wonder, could Maude be simply reverting to type, impelled by something unstable in her genes?”

  “Did Mother have blue genes?”

  Harlan smiled his tortured smile. “Indeed she did. You put it very aptly. But we won’t go into the case of Mother. It’s my sister I’m concerned with.”

  “What did she do? Elope?”

  “Yes, in the most scandalous and disrupting way, with a man she scarcely knew, a dreadful sort of man.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  He looked down into his hat again, as if its invisible contents fascinated and horrified him. “There’s very little to tell. I don’t even know his name. I saw him only once, last Friday—a week ago tomorrow. He drove up to the school in a battered old car, right in the midst of our Commencement exercises. Maude didn’t even introduce him to me. She introduced him to no one, and if you saw him you would understand why. He was an obvious roughneck, a big hairy brute of a fellow with a red beard, in filthy old slacks and a beret and a turtleneck sweater. She walked up to him in front of all the parents and took his arm and strolled away with him under the elms, completely hypnotized.”

  “You mean she never came back?”

  “Oh, she came back that night for a time, long enough to pack. I was out myself—I had a number of social duties to perform, Commencement night. When I got in, she was gone. She left me a brief note, and that was all.”

  “You have it with you?”

  His hand went into his breast pocket and tossed a sheet of folded stationery onto the desk. Its copybook handwriting said:

  “Dear Reginald:

  “I am going to be married. My total despair of making you understand forces me to leave as I am leaving. Do not worry about me, and above all do not try to interfere. If this seems cruel, bear in mind that I am fighting for
life itself. My husband-to-be is a great and warm personality who has suffered in his time as I have suffered. He is waiting outside for me now.

  “Be assured, dear Reginald, that a part of my affection will remain with you and the school. But I shall never return to either.

  “Your sister.”

  I pushed the note across the desk to Harlan. “Were you and your sister on good terms?”

  “I’d always thought so. We had our little differences over the years, in carrying on Father’s work and interpreting the tradition of the School. But there was a deep mutual respect between Maude and me. You can see it in the note.”

  “Yes.” I could see other things there, too. “What’s the suffering she refers to?”

  “I have no idea.” He gave a cruel yank to the purple tie. “We’ve had a good life together, Maude and I, a rich life full of service to girlhood and young womanhood. We’ve been prosperous and happy. To have her turn on me like this—out of a clear sky! Suddenly, after eleven years of devotion, the School meant nothing to her. I meant nothing to her. Father’s memory meant nothing. I tell you, that brute has bewitched her. Her entire system of values has been subverted.”

  “Maybe she’s just fallen in love. The older they are when it happens, the harder it hits them. Hell, maybe he’s even lovable.”

  Harlan sniffed. “He’s a lewd rascal. I know a lewd rascal when I see one. He’s a womanizer and a drinker and probably worse.”

  I glanced at my liquor cabinet. It was closed and innocent-looking. “Aren’t you a little prejudiced?”

  “I know whereof I speak. The man’s a ruffian. Maude is a woman of sensibility who requires the gentlest conditions of life. He’ll pulverize her spirit, brutalize her body, waste her money. It’s Mother’s situation all over again, only worse, much worse. Maude is infinitely more vulnerable than Mother ever was.”

  “What happened to your mother?”

  “She divorced Father and ran away with a man, an art teacher at the School. He led her a merry life, I assure you, until he died of drink.” This seemed to give Harlan a certain satisfaction. “Mother is living in Los Angeles now. I haven’t seen her for nearly thirty years, but Maude came out to visit her during the Easter recesses. Against my expressed wishes, I may add.”