The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  “Until now.”

  “Harry isn’t in trouble now.”

  “Not yet. Not officially.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Give me my gun, and put yours down. I can’t talk into iron.”

  She hesitated, a grim and anxious woman under pressure. I wondered what quirk of fate or psychology had married her to a hood, and decided it must have been love. Only love would send a woman across a dark street to face down an unknown gunman. Mrs. Nemo was horsefaced and aging and not pretty, but she had courage.

  She handed me my gun. Its butt was soothing to the palm of my hand. I dropped it into my pocket. A gang of Negro boys at loose ends went by in the street, hooting and whistling purposelessly.

  She leaned towards me, almost as tall as I was. Her voice was a low sibilance forced between her teeth:

  “Harry had nothing to do with his brother’s death. You’re crazy if you think so.”

  “What makes you so sure, Mrs. Nemo?”

  “Harry couldn’t, that’s all. I know Harry, I can read him like a book. Even if he had the guts, which he hasn’t, he wouldn’t dare to think of killing Nick. Nick was his older brother, understand, the successful one in the family.” Her voice rasped contemptuously. “In spite of everything I could do or say, Harry worshiped Nick right up to the end.”

  “Those brotherly feelings sometimes cut two ways. And Harry had a lot to gain.”

  “Not a cent. Nothing.”

  “He’s Nick’s heir, isn’t he?”

  “Not as long as he stays married to me. I wouldn’t let him touch a cent of Nick Nemo’s filthy money. Is that clear?”

  “It’s clear to me. But is it clear to Harry?”

  “I made it clear to him, many times. Anyway, this is ridiculous. Harry wouldn’t lay a finger on that precious brother of his.”

  “Maybe he didn’t do it himself. He could have had it done for him. I know he’s covering for somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “A blonde girl left the house after we arrived. She got away in a cherry-colored convertible. Harry recognized her.”

  “A cherry-colored convertible?”

  “Yes. Does that mean something to you?”

  “No. Nothing in particular. She must have been one of Nick’s girls. He always had girls.”

  “Why would Harry cover for her?”

  “What do you mean, cover for her?”

  “She left a leopardskin coat behind. Harry hid it, and paid me not to tell the police.”

  “Harry did that?”

  “Unless I’m having delusions.”

  “Maybe you are at that. If you think that Harry paid that girl to shoot Nick, or had anything—”

  “I know. Don’t say it. I’m crazy.”

  Mrs. Nemo laid a thin hand on my arm. “Anyway, lay off Harry. Please. I have a hard enough time handling him as it is. He’s worse than my first husband. The first one was a drunk, believe it or not.” She glanced at the lighted cottage across the street, and I saw one half of her bitter smile. “I wonder what makes a woman go for the lame ducks the way I did.”

  “I wouldn’t know, Mrs. Nemo. Okay, I lay off Harry.”

  But I had no intention of laying off Harry. When she went back to her cottage, I walked around three-quarters of the block and took up a new position in the doorway of a dry-cleaning establishment. This time I didn’t smoke. I didn’t even move, except to look at my watch from time to time.

  Around eleven o’clock, the lights went out behind the blinds in the Nemo cottage. Shortly before midnight the front door opened and Harry slipped out. He looked up and down the street and began to walk. He passed within six feet of my dark doorway, hustling along in a kind of furtive shuffle.

  Working very cautiously, at a distance, I tailed him downtown. He disappeared into the lighted cavern of an all-night garage. He came out of the garage a few minutes later, driving a prewar Chevrolet.

  My money also talked to the attendant. I drew a prewar Buick which would still do seventy-five. I proved that it would, as soon as I hit the highway. I reached the entrance to Nick Nemo’s private lane in time to see Harry’s lights approaching the dark ranch house.

  I cut my lights and parked at the roadside a hundred yards below the entrance to the lane, and facing it. The Chevrolet reappeared in a few minutes. Harry was still alone in the front seat. I followed it blind as far as the highway before I risked my lights. Then down the highway to the edge of town.

  In the middle of the motel and drive-in district he turned off onto a side road and in under a neon sign which spelled out TRAILER COURT across the darkness. The trailers stood along the bank of a dry creek. The Chevrolet stopped in front of one of them, which had a light in the window. Harry got out with a spotted bundle under his arm. He knocked on the door of the trailer.

  I U-turned at the next corner and put in more waiting time. The Chevrolet rolled out under the neon sign and turned towards the highway. I let it go.

  Leaving my car, I walked along the creek bank to the lighted trailer. The windows were curtained. The cerise convertible was parked on its far side. I tapped on the aluminum door.

  “Harry?” a girl’s voice said. “Is that you, Harry?”

  I muttered something indistinguishable. The door opened, and the yellow-haired girl looked out. She was very young, but her round blue eyes were heavy and sick with hangover, or remorse. She had on a nylon slip, nothing else.

  “What is this?”

  She tried to shut the door. I held it open.

  “Get away from here. Leave me alone. I’ll scream.”

  “All right. Scream.”

  She opened her mouth. No sound came out. She closed her mouth again. It was small and fleshy and defiant. “Who are you? Law?”

  “Close enough. I’m coming in.”

  “Come in then, damn you. I got nothing to hide.”

  “I can see that.”

  I brushed in past her. There were dead Martinis on her breath. The little room was a jumble of feminine clothes, silk and cashmere and tweed and gossamer nylon, some of them flung on the floor, others hung up to dry. The leopardskin coat lay on the bunk bed, staring with innumerable bold eyes. She picked it up and covered her shoulders with it. Unconsciously, her nervous hands began to pick the wood chips out of the fur. I said:

  “Harry did you a favor, didn’t he?”

  “Maybe he did.”

  “Have you been doing any favors for Harry?”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as knocking off his brother.”

  “You’re way off the beam, mister. I was very fond of Uncle Nick.”

  “Why run out on the killing then?”

  “I panicked,” she said. “It would happen to any girl. I was asleep when he got it, see, passed out if you want the truth. I heard the gun go off. It woke me up, but it took me quite a while to bring myself to and sober up enough to put my clothes on. By the time I made it to the bedroom window, Harry was back, with some guy.” She peered into my face. “Were you the guy?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought so. I thought you were the law at the time. I saw Nick lying there in the driveway, all bloody, and I put two and two together and got trouble. Bad trouble for me, unless I got out. So I got out. It wasn’t nice to do, after what Nick meant to me, but it was the only sensible thing. I got my career to think of.”

  “What career is that?”

  “Modeling. Acting. Uncle Nick was gonna send me to school.”

  “Unless you talk, you’ll finish your education at Corona. Who shot Nick?”

  A thin edge of terror entered her voice. “I don’t know, I tell you. I was passed out in the bedroom. I didn’t see nothing.”

  “Why did Harry bring you your coat?”

  “He didn’t want me to get involved. He’s my father, after all.”

  “Harry Nemo is your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that. What’s your name?�
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  “Jeannine. Jeannine Larue.”

  “Why isn’t your name Nemo if Harry is your father? Why do you call him Harry?”

  “He’s my stepfather, I mean.”

  “Sure,” I said. “And Nick was really your uncle, and you were having a family reunion with him.”

  “He wasn’t any blood relation to me. I always called him uncle, though.”

  “If Harry’s your father, why don’t you live with him?”

  “I used to. Honest. This is the truth I’m telling you. I had to get out on account of the old lady. The old lady hates my guts. She’s a real creep, a square. She can’t stand for a girl to have any fun. Just because my old man was a rummy—”

  “What’s your idea of fun, Jeannine?”

  She shook her feathercut hair at me. It exhaled a heavy perfume which was worth its weight in blood. She bared one pearly shoulder and smiled an artificial hustler’s smile. “What’s yours? Maybe we can get together.”

  “You mean the way you got together with Nick?”

  “You’re prettier than him.”

  “I’m also smarter, I hope. Is Harry really your stepfather?”

  “Ask him if you don’t believe me. Ask him. He lives in a place on Tule Street—I don’t remember the number.”

  “I know where he lives.”

  But Harry wasn’t at home. I knocked on the door of the frame cottage and got no answer. I turned the knob and found that the door was unlocked. There was a light behind it. The other cottages in the court were dark. It was long past midnight, and the street was deserted. I went into the cottage, preceded by my gun.

  A ceiling bulb glared down on sparse and threadbare furniture, a time-eaten rug. Besides the living room, the house contained a cubbyhole of a bedroom and a closet kitchenette. Everything in the poverty-stricken place was pathetically clean. There were moral mottoes on the walls, and one picture. It was a photograph of a tow-headed girl in a teen-age party dress. Jeannine, before she learned that a pretty face and a sleek body could buy her the things she wanted. The things she thought she wanted.

  For some reason, I felt sick. I went outside. Somewhere out of sight, an old car-engine muttered. Its muttering grew on the night. Harry Nemo’s rented Chevrolet turned the corner under the streetlight. Its front wheels were weaving. One of the wheels climbed the curb in front of the cottage. The Chevrolet came to a halt at a drunken angle.

  I crossed the sidewalk and opened the car door. Harry was at the wheel, clinging to it desperately as if he needed it to hold him up. His chest was bloody. His mouth was bright with blood. He spoke through it thickly:

  “She got me.”

  “Who got you, Harry? Jeannine?”

  “No. Not her. She was the reason for it, though. We had it coming.”

  Those were his final words. I caught his body as it fell sideways out of the seat. I laid it out on the sidewalk and left it for the cop on the beat to find.

  I drove across town to the trailer court. Jeannine’s trailer still had light in it, filtered through the curtains over the windows. I pushed the door open.

  The girl was packing a suitcase on the bunk bed. She looked at me over her shoulder, and froze. Her blond head was cocked like a frightened bird’s, hypnotized by my gun.

  “Where are you off to, kid?”

  “Out of this town. I’m getting out.”

  “You have some talking to do first.”

  She straightened up. “I told you all I know. You didn’t believe me. What’s the matter, didn’t you get to see Harry?”

  “I saw him. Harry’s dead. Your whole family is dying like flies.”

  She half-turned and sat down limply on the disordered bed. “Dead? You think I did it?”

  “I think you know who did. Harry said before he died that you were the reason for it all.”

  “Me the reason for it?” Her eyes widened in false naivete, but there was thought behind them, quick and desperate thought. “You mean that Harry got killed on account of me?”

  “Harry and Nick both. It was a woman who shot them.”

  “God,” she said. The desperate thought behind her eyes crystallized into knowledge. Which I shared.

  The aching silence was broken by a big diesel rolling by on the highway. She said above its roar:

  “That crazy old bat. So she killed Nick.”

  “You’re talking about your mother. Mrs. Nemo.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see her shoot him?”

  “No. I was blotto like I told you. But I saw her out there this week, keeping an eye on the house. She’s always watched me like a hawk.”

  “Is that why you were getting out of town? Because you knew she killed Nick?”

  “Maybe it was. I don’t know. I wouldn’t let myself think about it.”

  Her blue gaze shifted from my face to something behind me. I turned. Mrs. Nemo was in the doorway. She was hugging the straw bag to her thin chest.

  Her right hand dove into the bag. I shot her in the right arm. She leaned against the doorframe and held her dangling arm with her left hand. Her face was granite in whose crevices her eyes were like live things caught.

  The gun she dropped was a cheap .32 revolver, its nickel plating worn and corroded. I spun the cylinder. One shot had been fired from it.

  “This accounts for Harry,” I said. “You didn’t shoot Nick with this gun, not at that distance.”

  “No.” She was looking down at her dripping hand. “I used my old police gun on Nick Nemo. After I killed him, I threw the gun into the sea. I didn’t know I’d have further use for a gun. I bought that little suicide gun tonight.”

  “To use on Harry?”

  “To use on you. I thought you were on to me. I didn’t know until you told me that Harry knew about Nick and Jeannine.”

  “Jeannine is your daughter by your first husband?”

  “My only daughter.” She said to the girl: “I did it for you, Jeannine. I’ve seen too much—the awful things that can happen.”

  The girl didn’t answer. I said:

  “I can understand why you shot Nick. But why did Harry have to die?”

  “Nick paid him,” she said. “Nick paid him for Jeannine. I found Harry in a bar an hour ago, and he admitted it. I hope I killed him.”

  “You killed him, Mrs. Nemo. What brought you here? Was Jeannine the third on your list?”

  “No. No. She’s my own girl. I came to tell her what I did for her. I wanted her to know.”

  She looked at the girl on the bed. Her eyes were terrible with pain and love. The girl said in a stunned voice:

  “Mother. You’re hurt. I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s go, Mrs. Nemo,” I said.

  WILD GOOSE CHASE

  The plane turned in towards the shoreline and began to lose altitude. Mountains detached themselves from the blue distance. Then there was a city between the sea and the mountains, a little city made of sugar cubes. The cubes increased in size. Cars crawled like colored beetles between the buildings, and matchstick figures hustled jerkily along the white morning pavements. A few minutes later I was one of them.

  The woman who had telephoned me was waiting at the airport, as she had promised. She climbed out of her Cadillac when I appeared at the entrance to the waiting room, and took a few tentative steps towards me. In spite of her height and her blondeness, the dark harlequin glasses she wore gave her an oddly Oriental look.

  “You must be Mr. Archer.”

  I said I was, and waited for her to complete the exchange of names—she hadn’t given me her name on the telephone. All she had given me, in fact, was an urgent request to catch the first plane north, and assurances that I would be paid for my time.

  She sensed what I was waiting for. “I’m sorry to be so mysterious. I really can’t afford to tell you my name. I’m taking quite a risk in coming here at all.”

  I looked her over carefully, trying to decide whether this was another wild goose chase. Although she was well-groo
med in a sharkskin suit, her hair and face were slightly disarranged, as if a storm had struck a glancing blow. She took off her glasses to wipe them. I could see that the storm was inside of her, roiling the blue-green color of her eyes.

  “What’s the problem?” I said.

  She stood wavering between me and her car, beaten by surges of sound from the airfield where my plane was about to take off again. Behind her, in the Cadillac’s front seat, a little girl with the coloring of a Dresden doll was sitting as still as one. The woman glanced at the child and moved farther away from the car:

  “I don’t want Janie to hear. She’s only three and a half but she understands a great deal.” She took a deep gasping breath, like a swimmer about to dive. “There’s a man on trial for murder here. They claim he murdered his wife.”

  “Glenway Cave?”

  Her whole body moved with surprise. “You know him?”

  “No, I’ve been following the trial in the papers.”

  “Then you know he’s testifying today. He’s probably on the witness stand right now.” Her voice was somber, as if she could see the courtroom in her mind’s eye.

  “Is Mr. Cave a friend of yours?”

  She bit her lip. “Let’s say that I’m an interested observer.”

  “And you don’t believe he’s guilty.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “By implication. You said they claim he murdered his wife.”

  “You have an alert ear, haven’t you? Anyway, what I believe doesn’t matter. It’s what the jury believes. Do you think they’ll acquit him?”

  “It’s hard to form an opinion without attending the trial. But the average jury has a prejudice against the idea of blowing off your wife’s head with a twelve-gauge shotgun. I’d say he stands a good chance of going to the gas chamber.”

  “The gas chamber.” Her nostrils dilated, and she paled, as if she had caught a whiff of the fatal stuff. “Do you seriously think there’s any danger of that?”