The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  And I was back on the pavement in front of the airport, listening to a woman’s urgent whisper: You’ll have to give me a yes or no. I’ve made up my mind to go by your decision.

  Harvey was looking away across the captive water, fishnetted under elastic strands of light. Under the clear September sun I could see the spikes of gray in his hair, the deep small scars of strain around his mouth.

  “If I could only lay my hands on the woman.” He seemed to be speaking to himself, until he looked at me from the corners of his eyes. “Who do you suppose she is?”

  “How would I know?”

  He leaned across the table confidentially. “Why be so cagey, Archer? I’ve let down my hair.”

  “This particular hair doesn’t belong to me.”

  I regretted the words before I had finished speaking them.

  Harvey said, “When will you see her?”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions again.”

  “If I’m wrong, I’m sorry. If I’m right, give her a message for me. Tell her that Glen—I hate to have to say this, but he’s in jeopardy. If she likes him well enough to—”

  “Please, Rod.” Rhea Harvey seemed genuinely offended. “There’s no need to be coarse.”

  I said, “I’d like to talk to Cave before I do anything. I don’t know that it’s the same woman. Even if it is, he may have reasons of his own for keeping her under wraps.”

  “You can probably have a few minutes with him in the courtroom.” He looked at his wristwatch and pushed his chair back violently. “We better get going. It’s twenty to two now.”

  We went along the side of the pool, back toward the entrance. As we entered the vestibule, a woman was just coming in from the boulevard. She held the heavy plate-glass door for the little flaxen-haired girl who was trailing after her.

  Then she glanced up and saw me. Her dark harlequin glasses flashed in the light reflected from the pool. Her face became disorganized behind the glasses. She turned on her heel and started out, but not before the child had smiled at me and said: “Hello. Are you coming for a ride?” Then she trotted after her mother.

  Harvey looked quizzically at his wife. “What’s the matter with the Kilpatrick woman?”

  “She must be drunk. She didn’t even recognize us.”

  “You know her, Mrs. Harvey?”

  “As well as I care to.” Her eyes took on a set, glazed expression—the look of congealed virtue faced with its opposite. “I haven’t seen Janet Kilpatrick for months. She hasn’t been showing herself in public much since her divorce.”

  Harvey edged closer and gripped my arm. “Would Mrs. Kilpatrick be the woman we were talking about?”

  “Hardly.”

  “They seemed to know you.”

  I improvised. “I met them on the Daylight one day last month, coming down from Frisco. She got plastered, and I guess she didn’t want to recall the occasion.”

  That seemed to satisfy him. But when I excused myself, on the grounds that I thought I’d stay for a swim in the pool, his blue ironic glance informed me that he wasn’t taken in.

  The receptionist had inch-long scarlet fingernails and an air of contemptuous formality. Yes, Mrs. Kilpatrick was a member of the club. No, she wasn’t allowed to give out members’ addresses. She admitted grudgingly that there was a pay telephone in the bar.

  The barroom was deserted except for the bartender, a slim white-coated man with emotional Mediterranean eyes. I found Mrs. Janet Kilpatrick in the telephone directory: her address was 1201 Coast Highway. I called a taxi, and ordered a beer from the bartender.

  He was more communicative than the receptionist. Sure, he knew Glenway Cave. Every bartender in town knew Glenway Cave. The guy was sitting at this very bar the afternoon of the same day he murdered his wife.

  “You think he murdered her?”

  “Everybody else thinks so. They don’t spend all that money on a trial unless they got the goods on them. Anyway, look at the motive he had.”

  “You mean the man she was running around with?”

  “I mean two million bucks.” He had a delayed reaction. “What man is that?”

  “Cave said in court this morning that his wife was going to divorce him and marry somebody else.”

  “He did, eh? You a newspaperman by any chance?”

  “A kind of one.” I subscribed to several newspapers.

  “Well, you can tell the world that that’s a lot of baloney. I’ve seen quite a bit of Mrs. Cave around the club. She had her own little circle, see, and you can take it from me she never even looked at other guys. He was always the one with the roving eye. What can you expect, when a young man marries a lady that much older than him?” His faint accent lent flavor to the question. “The very day of the murder he was making a fast play for another dame, right here in front of me.”

  “Who was she?”

  “I wouldn’t want to name names. She was pretty far gone that afternoon, hardly knew what she was doing. And the poor lady’s got enough trouble as it is. Take it from me.”

  I didn’t press him. A minute later a horn tooted in the street.

  A few miles south of the city limits a blacktop lane led down from the highway to Mrs. Kilpatrick’s house. It was a big old-fashioned redwood cottage set among trees and flowers above a bone-white beach. The Cadillac was parked beside the vine-grown veranda, like something in a four-color advertisement. I asked my driver to wait, and knocked on the front door.

  A small rectangular window was set into the door. It slid open, and a green eye gleamed like a flawed emerald through the aperture.

  “You,” she said in a low voice. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  “I have some questions for you, Mrs. Kilpatrick. And maybe a couple of answers. May I come in?”

  She sighed audibly. “If you must.” She unlocked the door and stood back to let me enter. “You will be quiet, won’t you? I’ve just put Janie to bed for her afternoon nap.”

  There was a white silk scarf draped over her right hand, and under the silk a shape which contrasted oddly with her motherly concern—the shape of a small handgun.

  “You’d better put that thing away. You don’t need it, do you?”

  Her hand moved jerkily. The scarf fell from the gun and drifted to the floor. It was a small blue revolver. She looked at it as if it had somehow forced its way into her fist, and put it down on the telephone table.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who was at the door. I’ve been so worried and frightened—”

  “Who did you think it was?”

  “Frank, perhaps, or one of his men. He’s been trying to take Janie away from me. He claims I’m not a fit mother. And maybe I’m not,” she added in the neutral tones of despair. “But Frank is worse.”

  “Frank is your husband?”

  “My ex-husband. I got a divorce last year and the court gave me custody of Janie. Frank has been fighting the custody order ever since. Janie’s grandmother left her a trust fund, you see. That’s all Frank cares about. But I’m her mother.”

  “I think I see what it’s all about,” I said. “Correct me if I’m wrong. Cave spent the night with you—the night he was supposed to have shot his wife. But you don’t want to testify at his trial. It would give your ex-husband legal ammunition to use in the custody fight for Janie.”

  “You’re not wrong.” She lowered her eyes, not so much in shame as in submission to the facts. “We got talking in the bar at the club that afternoon. I hardly knew him, but I—well, I was attracted to him. He asked if he could come and see me that night. I was feeling lonely, very low and lonely. I’d had a good deal to drink. I let him come.”

  “What time did he arrive?”

  “Shortly after eight.”

  “And he stayed all night?”

  “Yes. He couldn’t have killed Ruth Cave. He was with me. You can understand why I’ve been quietly going crazy since they arrested him—sitting at home and biting on my nails and wondering what under heaven
I should do.” Her eyes came up like green searchlights under her fair brow. “What shall I do, Mr. Archer?”

  “Sit tight for a while yet. The trial will last a few more days. And he may be acquitted.”

  “But you don’t think he will be, do you?”

  “It’s hard to say. He didn’t do too well on the stand this morning. On the other hand, the averages are with him, as he seems to realize. Very few innocent men are convicted of murder.”

  “He didn’t mention me on the stand?”

  “He said he was with a woman, no names mentioned. Are you two in love with each other, Mrs. Kilpatrick?”

  “No, nothing like that. I was simply feeling sorry for myself that night. I needed some attention from a man. He was a piece of flotsam and I was a piece of jetsam and we were washed together in the dark. He did get rather—emotional at one point, and said that he would like to marry me. I reminded him that he had a wife.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He said his wife wouldn’t live forever. But I didn’t take him seriously. I haven’t even seen him since that night. No, I’m not in love with him. If I let him die, though, for something I know he didn’t do—I couldn’t go on living with myself.” She added, with a bitter grimace. “It’s hard enough as it is.”

  “But you do want to go on living.”

  “Not particularly. I have to because Janie needs me.”

  “Then stay at home and keep your doors locked. It wasn’t smart to go to the club today.”

  “I know. I needed a drink badly. I’m out of liquor, and it was the nearest place. Then I saw you and I panicked.”

  “Stay panicked. Remember if Cave didn’t commit that murder, somebody else did—and framed him for it. Somebody who is still at large. What do you drink, by the way?”

  “Anything. Scotch, mostly.”

  “Can you hold out for a couple of hours?”

  “If I have to.” She smiled, and her smile was charming. “You’re very thoughtful.”

  When I got back to the courtroom, the trial was temporarily stalled. The jury had been sent out, and Harvey and the D.A. were arguing in front of the judge’s bench. Cave was sitting by himself at the far end of the long attorneys’ table. A sheriff’s deputy with a gun on his thigh stood a few feet behind him, between the red-draped windows.

  Assuming a self-important legal look, I marched through the swinging gate into the well of the courtroom and took the empty chair beside Cave. He looked up from the typed transcript he was reading. In spite of his prison pallor he was a good-looking man. He had a boyish look about him and the kind of curly brown hair that women are supposed to love to run their fingers through. But his mouth was tight, his eyes dark and piercing.

  Before I could introduce myself, he said, “You the detective Rod told me about?”

  “Yes. Name is Archer.”

  “You’re wasting your time, Mr. Archer, there’s nothing you can do for me.” His voice was a dull monotone, as if the cross-examination had rolled over his emotions and left them flat.

  “It can’t be that bad, Cave.”

  “I didn’t say it was bad. I’m doing perfectly well, and I know what I’m doing.”

  I held my tongue. It wouldn’t do to tell him that his own lawyer had lost confidence in his case. Harvey’s voice rose sharp and strained above the courtroom mutter, maintaining that certain questions were irrelevant and immaterial.

  Cave leaned towards me and his voice sank lower. “You’ve been in touch with her?”

  “She brought me into the case.”

  “That was a rash thing for her to do, under the circumstances. Or don’t you know the circumstances?”

  “I understand that if she testifies she risks losing her child.”

  “Exactly. Why do you think I haven’t had her called? Go back and tell her that I’m grateful for her concern but I don’t need her help. They can’t convict an innocent man. I didn’t shoot my wife, and I don’t need an alibi to prove it.”

  I looked at him, admiring his composure. The armpits of his gabardine suit were dark with sweat. A fine tremor was running through him.

  “Do you know who did shoot her, Cave?”

  “I have an opinion. We won’t go into it.”

  “Her new man?”

  “We won’t go into it,” he repeated, and buried his aquiline nose in the transcript.

  The judge ordered the bailiff to bring in the jury. Harvey sat down beside me, looking disgruntled, and Cave returned to the witness stand.

  What followed was moral slaughter. The D.A. forced Cave to admit that he hadn’t had gainful employment since his release from the army, that his sole occupations were amateur tennis and amateur acting, and that he had no means of his own. He had been completely dependent on his wife’s money since their marriage in 1946, and had used some of it to take extended trips in the company of other women.

  The prosecutor turned his back on Cave in histrionic disgust. “And you’re the man who dares to impugn the morals of your dead wife, the woman who gave you everything.”

  Harvey objected. The judge instructed the D.A. to rephrase his “question.”

  The D.A. nodded, and turned on Cave. “Did you say this morning that there was another man in Mrs. Cave’s life?”

  “I said it. It was true.”

  “Do you have anything to confirm that story?”

  “No.”

  “Who is this unknown vague figure of a man?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is what Ruth told me.”

  “She isn’t here to deny it, is she? Tell us frankly now, Mr. Cave, didn’t you invent this man? Didn’t you make him up?”

  Cave’s forehead was shining with sweat. He took a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped his forehead, then his mouth. Above the white fabric masking his lower face, he looked past the D.A. and across the well of the courtroom. There was silence for a long minute.

  Then Cave said mildly, “No, I didn’t invent him.”

  “Does this man exist outside your fertile brain?”

  “He does.”

  “Where? In what guise? Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Cave said on a rising note. “If you want to know, why don’t you try and find out? You have plenty of detectives at your disposal.”

  “Detectives can’t find a man who doesn’t exist. Or a woman either, Mr. Cave.”

  The D.A. caught the angry eye of the judge, who adjourned the trial until the following morning. I bought a fifth of scotch at a downtown liquor store, caught a taxi at the railroad station, and rode south out of town to Mrs. Kilpatrick’s house.

  When I knocked on the door of the redwood cottage, someone fumbled the inside knob. I pushed the door open. The flaxen-haired child looked up at me, her face streaked with half-dried tears.

  “Mummy won’t wake up.”

  I saw the red smudge on her knee, and ran in past her. Janet Kilpatrick was prone on the floor of the hallway, her bright hair dragging in a pool of blood. I lifted her head and saw the hole in her temple. It had stopped bleeding.

  Her little blue revolver lay on the floor near her lax hand. One shot had been fired from the cylinder.

  The child touched my back. “Is Mummy sick?”

  “Yes, Janie. She’s sick.”

  “Get the doctor,” she said with pathetic wisdom.

  “Wasn’t he here?”

  “I don’t know. I was taking my nap.”

  “Was anybody here, Janie?”

  “Somebody was here. Mummy was talking to somebody. Then there was a big bang and I came downstairs and Mummy wouldn’t wake up.”

  “Was it a man?”

  She shook her head.

  “A woman, Janie?”

  The same mute shake of her head. I took her by the hand and led her outside to the cab. The dazzling postcard scene outside made death seem unreal. I asked the driver to tell the child a story, any story so long as it was cheerful. Then I went back into the grim hallway a
nd used the telephone.

  I called the sheriff’s office first. My second call was to Frank Kilpatrick in Pasadena. A manservant summoned him to the telephone. I told him who I was and where I was and who was lying dead on the floor behind me.

  “How dreadful!” He had an Ivy League accent, somewhat withered by the coastal sun. “Do you suppose that Janet took her own life? She’s often threatened to.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t suppose she took her own life. Your wife was murdered.”

  “What a tragic thing!”

  “Why take it so hard, Kilpatrick? You’ve got the two things you wanted—your daughter, and you’re rid of your wife.”

  It was a cruel thing to say, but I was feeling cruel. I made my third call in person, after the sheriff’s men had finished with me.

  The sun had fallen into the sea by then. The western side of the sky was scrawled with a childish finger-painting of colored cirrus clouds. Twilight flowed like iron-stained water between the downtown buildings. There were lights on the second floor of the California-Spanish building where Harvey had his offices.

  Harvey answered my knock. He was in shirtsleeves and his tie was awry. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand. His breath was sour in my nostrils.

  “What is it, Archer?”

  “You tell me, lover-boy.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “You were the one Ruth Cave wanted to marry. You were going to divorce your respective mates and build a new life together—with her money.”

  He stepped backward into the office, a big disordered man who looked queerly out of place among the white-leather and black-iron furniture, against the limed-oak paneling. I followed him in. An automatic door closer shushed behind me.

  “What in hell is this? Ruth and I were good friends and I handled her business for her—that’s all there was to it.”

  “Don’t try to kid me, Harvey. I’m not your wife, and I’m not your judge…I went to see Janet Kilpatrick a couple of hours ago.”

  “Whatever she said, it’s a lie.”

  “She didn’t say a word, Harvey. I found her dead.”

  His eyes grew small and metallic, like nailheads in the putty of his face. “Dead? What happened to her?”