The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  “I suppose I am.”

  “He’s a detective,” Zinnia said. “She hired him.”

  “What for?”

  He looked from one to the other of us, still holding the shears rigid in his hand.

  “Carl’s out of the asylum. He’s got a gun, and he’s threatening to kill you.”

  His face turned blotchy white. “Is Carl here now?” The words whistled in his throat.

  “She thinks he’s on his way.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “Nothing else. Talk to her yourself.” She went on the offensive suddenly: “You always used to like to talk to her. Didn’t you? Which reminds me you’ve got your nerve accusing me of playing around, after all I’ve got on you.”

  He brushed the quarrel aside with a weary gesture. “You’ve been drinking again, Zinnia. You promised me you wouldn’t drink in the daytime.”

  “Did I?”

  “A dozen times.”

  “This was a special occasion.”

  “Why? Because you think that Carl is going to shoot me? Were you celebrating ahead of time?”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Sure. Sure. I don’t suppose you even called the police.”

  “Naturally I did. Jake Ostervelt’s on his way out.”

  “Well. That’s something, anyway.” He turned to me. “Then we won’t be needing you, will we, Mr. Detective?”

  “I hope not,” I said.

  “I’m telling you we don’t need you.” He huffed and bristled, trying to recapture his anger, without success. His voice was dead: “So you get off my property like I said. This place belongs to me and as long as I’m alive and kicking I don’t need any L.A. sharpie to look out for me or my wife.”

  “All right.” There wasn’t any other answer.

  I went back to my car and drove towards Citrus Junction. A couple of miles from the Heller ranch, I passed a radio car headed in the opposite direction. It had two uniformed men in the front seat, and it was burning the asphalt.

  The windowless packing plants of the lemon growers’ cooperatives were major landmarks on the outskirts of town. The highway became the main street of the business section, which was composed of one new hotel and several old ones, bars and chain stores, a Sears, a giant drugstore whose architect had been inspired by hashish, four new-car agencies, three banks, and a couple of movie houses, one for bracero field-hands.

  It was a slow town, clogged with money, stunned by sun. I made inquiries for Mr. Parish. His office was over the Mexican movie house. The stairs were as dark as a tunnel after the barren brilliance of the street. I groped my way along a second-floor corridor and through a battered door into a waiting room. Its sagging furniture and outdated magazines might have belonged to an old-fashioned dentist with a lower-income practice. An odor of fear and hopelessness hung in the air like a subtle gas.

  An inner door opened. A young man appeared in the doorway. He had soft brown eyes, hardened by spectacles. He wore a threadbare tweed jacket patched with suede at the elbows, and a very cheerful smile. In my mood, an offensively cheerful smile.

  “Dr. Parish?”

  “Not doctor, thanks, though I’m working on my doctorate.” He looked at me with professional solicitude, still smiling. “You’ve been referred to me? May I have your name?”

  “Lew Archer.”

  “Sorry, I don’t recall it. Should I have your file?”

  “I’m not a patient,” I said, “though I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’m a private detective.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He seemed to be disappointed in a flustered, sensitive way. “Won’t you come in?”

  He seated me in a cubbyhole of an office containing two chairs, a desk, a grim green filing cabinet. There were holes in the uncarpeted floor where I guessed a dentist’s chair had once been bolted. Under the floor, a remote passionate voice was declaiming in Spanish. I caught the words for love and death. Amor. Morte.

  “It’s the matinee in the theater downstairs. I hope it doesn’t disturb you.” He sat behind the desk and began to knock out a pipe in a brass ashtray. “Has one of my people got into some kind of trouble?” he said between the pipe-banging and the Spanish.

  “Your people?”

  “My clients. Actually they’re more like a family to me. I think of them as my family, the whole hundred and fifty of them. They make a fairly hectic family group on occasion.” He paused, filling his pipe. “Well, let’s have the bad news. I can see bad news on your face. Is it klepto trouble again?”

  “That enters into it, probably. He’s carrying a gun, and they didn’t give it to him as a going-away present from Mendocino.”

  “Just who are we talking about?”

  “Carl Heller. Remember him?”

  “I ought to. You don’t mean to tell me they let him out?”

  “I mean he escaped. He got to Los Angeles somehow, and turned up at my office this morning. Some friend of his at the institution had given him my name. Some enemy of mine.”

  “You saw Carl, then? How is he?” He leaned across the desk in boyish eagerness, tinged with anxiety.

  “In bad condition, I’d say. I not only saw him, I also felt him.”

  I lifted my chin to show him the bruise on my neck.

  Parish clucked with his tongue, irritatingly. “Carl’s violent, eh? Too bad. How was his orientation?”

  “If you mean is he off the rails, the answer is yes. I’ve seen paranoia before and he has the symptoms.”

  “Delusions of persecution?”

  “He’s full of ’em. Everybody’s against him, including the cops. He seems to have delusions of grandeur, too. Claims he’s the rightful heir to a million dollars.”

  Parish said softly through smoke: “Maybe he is at that. Oh, he’s paranoid all right, I don’t know how extreme—haven’t seen him for years. He may also be rightful heir to a million dollars.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I never kid about my people.”

  “Where would he get a million?”

  “He didn’t. That’s the point. I can’t help feeling he was cheated out of it, in a way. His father meant him to have half the estate. Of course Carl wasn’t fit to handle it. Old Heller left the whole thing to his other son Jerry, with the understanding that he would provide for Carl. Then when the accident happened—”

  “The old man’s murder, you mean?”

  “Accident,” he said sharply. “Murder involves willful intention and knowledge of what you’re doing. If Carl killed his father, he didn’t know what he was doing. He was morally and legally not guilty.”

  “By reason of insanity.”

  “Of course. As it happened, the case never came to trial, and he was never convicted of anything worse than mental illness. But Jerry, his older brother—”

  “I know Jerry. I went out to his ranch to offer him protection. He kicked me off the place. He had a wild idea that I was making advances to his wife. I hate to say this, but it was the other way around.”

  “Typical behavior from both of them. He’s terribly jealous, and she gives him plenty of cause.” He smiled with reminiscent grimness. “I was going to say, when I was interrupted, that Jerry took advantage of the tragic situation. As you probably know if you’re a detective, there’s a legal tradition which forbids a murderer to profit from his victim’s death. Jerry shipped Carl off to Mendocino, and kept the whole estate for himself.”

  “And the estate is really worth a million dollars?”

  “Double that. The old man bought up thousands of acres of lemon land during the depression. The family’s much wealthier than you’d think from the way they live.”

  “You said an interesting thing a minute ago, Mr. Parish. You said if Carl killed his father. Is there any doubt that he did?”

  “It was never proved. It was simply assumed.”

  “I thought he was caught in the act.”

  “That was his brother’s statement to the coroner’s jury. I tried to
get the sheriff, who is also the coroner—I tried to get him to let me cross-examine Jerry Heller. He wouldn’t permit it. I was new in my job, and that afternoon’s work almost got me fired.”

  “You think Jerry was lying.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions. It’s my job, as I see it, to keep people out of Mendocino, unless they’re proven dangerous. If we sent away everyone with a paranoid streak, and locked them up for what amounts to life, the mental hospitals wouldn’t begin to hold them.”

  “What about the cemeteries?” I said. “They’d soon be overflowing if we let all the Carl Hellers run around loose.”

  “I wonder. Carl was in pretty good shape when they let him out five years ago. Naturally the accident upset him again, threw him back into illness. It made him look very bad. He was tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty of homicidal mania. But I’m not completely convinced that he killed his father. He told me himself that the old man was lying dead when he entered the room. Then Jerry came in and caught him leaning over the bed, trying to untie the rope from his father’s neck.”

  “Did Jerry frame him, in your opinion?”

  “Please. I didn’t say that. Carl may have killed him. Or Jerry may have believed that he did, sincerely. A million dollars can be a powerful motive for believing something. Myself, I’ve never known Carl to be really dangerous.”

  “He was this morning.”

  “Perhaps. After five years behind the walls. I’d like to see him for myself.”

  “You’re a braver man than I am.”

  “I know him better than you. I like Carl.”

  “Evidently. But if he didn’t kill his father, who did?”

  “There were other people in the house. The servants had no reason to love old Heller. Neither had Jerry or Zinnia, for that matter. Sheriff Ostervelt was there, too, eating Thanksgiving dinner with the family. He’s Heller’s brother-in-law, and the old man owned him lock, stock and barrel.” He caught himself up short, and his brown eyes veiled themselves behind the spectacles. “For heaven’s sake, don’t quote me to anyone. I’m a public employee, you know, and the Heller family has political pull.”

  “All this is off the record then?”

  “I’m afraid it has to be, though I’d dearly like to do something for Carl and Mildred.”

  “The best thing we can do for him is find him before he hurts somebody.”

  “Yes. Of course. I agree.”

  The telephone on his desk rang jarringly. He picked it up and identified himself. I watched his brown eyes grow round and glassy.

  “This is dreadful,” he said. “Dreadful.” He bit his lip. “Yes, I’ll come right out. It happens that Mr. Archer is here with me. Of course, Sheriff. I’ll bring him along.”

  He set the receiver down, fumblingly, and ran his fingers through his thinning hair.

  “Somebody else has been killed,” I said.

  “Yes. Jerry Heller. Shot in his greenhouse. They have the gun.”

  I murdered scores of insects on the ten-mile stretch of road between the town and the ranch. Parish sat beside me, watching the speedometer and gripping the door-handle. “This is dreadful, dreadful,” he kept repeating.

  We found Jerry Heller lying peacefully in the center aisle of his greenhouse. Cymbidium sprays in most of the colors of the rainbow, and some others, made a fine funeral display. The light fell muted through the transparent roof onto his dead face. A round red hole in his forehead made him appear three-eyed.

  A big man in a wide-brimmed hat got up from a bench in one of the side aisles. He had a pitted nose and little uneasy eyes. His belly moved ahead of him down the aisle.

  “Looks like your boy has gone and done it again,” he said to Parish.

  “It appears so, Sheriff.” Parish was still upset, his voice high and wavering. But he stuck to his guns: “This time I hope you’ll conduct a decent investigation, anyway.”

  “Investigation, hell. We know who killed Jerry. We know the motive. We got the weapon, even. It was stuck down in the dirt under one of these plants.” He stepped over the body, heavily, and pointed at a ragged hole in the peat-moss. “All we got to do now is find him. You know his habits, don’t you?”

  “I knew Carl five years ago.”

  “He hasn’t changed much, has he? Where do you think he is?”

  “I haven’t any idea.” Parish looked up into the filtered light. “Hiding on the ranch?”

  “It’s possible. I’m having a posse formed. I want you to go along with them. You can talk to him better than I can. He may have another gun, and we don’t want any more killings.”

  “I’ll be glad to,” Parish said.

  “Go and report to Deputy Santee, then. He’s in the house telephoning.” Parish went through an inner door which led through a covered passageway into the house. Before he closed it behind him, I caught a glimpse of Zinnia standing in the shadows of the passageway.

  The sheriff turned a fish eye on me. “You Archer?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “I’m Ostervelt, the sheriff of this county. Remember that and we’ll get along just fine. Mrs. Heller, Mildred that is, tells me you saw him this morning.”

  “He came to my office to try and hire me.”

  “What for?”

  “Apparently he thought that he’d been framed—”

  “He wasn’t,” Ostervelt said. “If you need any proof, look down at what’s in front of you.”

  “I have.”

  “A nice piece of work, isn’t it? Why in God’s name didn’t you grab him this morning and hold on to him?”

  “I tried to. He got the drop on me.”

  “He wouldn’t of got it on me. I’m older and fatter than you, but he wouldn’t of got it on me.” By way of illustration, he flung his suitcoat back and reached for his hip. A service forty-five hopped up in his hand. He thrust it back in its holster, smiling sleepily with rubbery lips. “You saw his gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you identify it?”

  “I should be able to.”

  “Wait here, then. I’ll go get it.”

  He went outside. As soon as the sound of his footsteps had receded, Zinnia Heller came out of the passageway. Her face was carved from chalk, but her pull-taffy hair was lacquered smooth and trim, with not a curl out of place. She stopped about ten feet short of the body, as if she’d come up against an invisible barrier. The long black butt of a target pistol protruded from the waistband of her slacks.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  I moved towards her, sidestepping her defunct mate. “You’re really loaded now.”

  “You mustn’t talk like that.” Genuine anguish, or something very like it, pulled downwards at her mouth. “Okay, so we weren’t a perfect married couple. That doesn’t make me glad the poor guy got killed.”

  “Two million dollars should.”

  “Who have you been talking to?”

  “The flowers,” I said. “The flowers and the birds.”

  She took hold of my coatsleeve. “Listen. I wanted to ask you a favor. Don’t tell them that we quarreled before he died.”

  “Why? Did you shoot him?”

  “Don’t be crazy.”

  “I’m not. Everybody else seems to be. But I’m not.”

  “It just wouldn’t look right,” she said. “It might make them suspicious. Ostervelt has a down on me, anyway. He was married to the old man’s sister, and he always thought he should have a piece of the property. We did enough for him already, canceling his debts.”

  “You canceled his debts?”

  “Jerry did, after the old man died.”

  “Why would Jerry do that?”

  “He did it out of pure generosity, not that it’s any of your business. You make me sick with your suspicions. You’re suspicious of everybody.”

  “Including you,” I said.

  “You are crazy. And I was a fool to try and talk to yo
u.”

  “Talk some more. How did this happen?”

  “I wasn’t present, is that clear? I didn’t even hear the shot.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Taking a shower, if you want to know.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “Examine me. I’m clean.” Her green eyes flashed with never-say-die eroticism.

  I backed away. “Where was the sheriff?”

  “Searching the stables. He thought maybe Carl was there. Carl used to spend a lot of time in the stables.”

  “Has he been seen at all?”

  “Not to my knowledge. If I do see him, you’ll know it. So will he.” She patted the target pistol stuck in her waistband.

  Returning footsteps crackled in the gravel. She smoothed her face and tried to look like a widow. She went on looking like exactly what she was: a hard blonde beauty in her fading thirties, fighting the world with two weapons, sex and money. Both of her weapons had turned in her hands and scarred her.

  The sheriff entered the greenish gloom, with Mildred trailing reluctantly at his heels. She was pale and anxious-eyed. When I approached her, she looked down at the packed earth floor of the greenhouse. Her mouth trembled into speech:

  “It wasn’t any use after all. Why did you go away?”

  “I was forced to. Your brother-in-law ordered me off the ranch. He must have been shot within a few minutes after that.”

  “Did Carl really do it, do you think?”

  “That’s the idea the sheriff is trying to sell. I haven’t taken an option on it yet.”

  She raised her eyes from the brown earth, and managed a small grateful smile. Sheriff Ostervelt tapped my shoulder. “Here. I want to show you.”

  He had a black enameled evidence case in his hands. He carried it as if it was full of jewels. Setting it down on a bench, he unlocked it and opened it, with the air of a magician. It contained a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson nickel-plated revolver—the gun that Carl had flourished in my office.

  “Don’t touch it,” Ostervelt said. “I can’t see any prints with the naked eye, but I’m going to have it tested for latent ones. Is this the gun that Heller pulled on you?”

  “That one or its twin.”

  “You’re sure about that? You know guns?”