The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  There was nothing amusing about Ferguson now. His long homely face had sunk on its bones. Under their heavy black brows, his eyes looked stunned. And he was shivering. It was a misty dawn in February, but it was hardly cold enough to make a Canadian shiver.

  “Come in,” I said. “I’ll make some coffee and you can tell me about it.”

  He sidled through the door, tentatively, as if he thought I might change my mind and kick him out into the cold again. For a man of his rank and background, he seemed very uncertain of himself. His feet dragged as if he’d been hamstrung.

  “What happened, Colonel?”

  “I killed a man. I shot him.”

  “Why?”

  “I hardly know. I’d never seen the man before.” He turned to face me and the growing light. His small eyes glared with pain. “I’ve killed a man, and wrecked my own life, without any clear reason.”

  He wept dry-eyed, gasping and shuddering, then covered his ugly face with ten hooked fingers. Partly to spare his pride, I carried my clothes into the kitchen, dressed there, and made coffee. I took him a mug of it, heavily spiked with Bushmills. He was standing at the glass door, stiff and calm-faced. His eyes were on the breaking line of the surf.

  I handed him his coffee. “Compliments of the management.” But neither of us succeeded in cracking a smile.

  He took the cup and held it without a tremor. His face was like granite. His voice was like granite speaking:

  “I made you an ugly scene there. I have to apologize. I had no idea I had such weakness in me.”

  “People do, you know. You look as though you’ve had a rough night.”

  “I have had rougher, but I’ve never before killed a man, in civilian life. It came as rather a shock to me, that I was capable of it.”

  “Do you want to go into it now?”

  “I must.” He sipped from his mug, still standing up, and watching me over the rim. “I do owe it to myself to say one thing at the start. I did have a reason for killing him. It seemed adequate at the time. He was threatening a woman—threatening to maltreat her.”

  “What woman?”

  “An actress, Molly Day. At least she claimed that that was her name. It’s rather an unlikely name.”

  “She’s an unlikely woman.”

  “Have you heard of her?”

  “Everybody in the United States has heard of her.”

  “I’m not a filmgoer.”

  “So I gather. How did you get mixed up with Molly Day?”

  Ferguson sat down and told me.

  He’d had trouble going to sleep the night before. After he’d turned out the light in the studio, he’d noticed a light on the far side of the canyon. It shouldn’t have been there, because his friends the Trumbulls owned the entire canyon, and so far as he knew they were still in Europe.

  He explained about the Trumbulls. He’d met them in London through their son George, the painter. Ferguson himself was an art collector in a small way. When he’d completed his recent tour as attaché at Canada House, George and his parents had insisted that he spend at least part of his leave at their place in California. If he didn’t want the trouble of opening up the big house, he was welcome to use George’s studio on the other side of the canyon.

  Having taken up the Trumbulls’ suggestion, Ferguson naturally felt an obligation to see that their house had not been invaded by vandals. The possibility wouldn’t let him sleep. He got up and pulled back the drapes over the window. The light he’d seen, or thought he’d seen, was no longer visible. The Trumbull house was a black bulk diminished by distance, half hidden by trees, unbroken by any light.

  It had probably been a trick of the eye, or a flash of moonlight reflected from a window. There was a moon in the sky, enlarged and blurred by clouds. Its light fell on the trees that filled the deep canyon, and lent their leaves a silvery aspen appearance. Ferguson was struck by the beauty and peace of the night. It was so still that the gurgle of the creek came up from a quarter of a mile below, as clearly as though it was lapping at the cantilevers of the studio.

  George Trumbull had left a deer rifle hanging above the studio fireplace, and Ferguson had noticed that it had a telescopic sight. When he trained it on the Trumbull house, he saw the light again, a thin spillage of brightness from a blinded window on the second-floor level. The brightness was white and steady: at least the place wasn’t burning. But somebody was in it who had no right to be there.

  Carefully drawing the drapes again, so as not to alarm the housebreakers, Ferguson turned on the light and looked up the emergency number of the county police. Then he changed his mind. Perhaps the Trumbulls had come back unexpectedly by plane. His own jet flight from London had whisked him to Los Angeles in what seemed no time at all. If the Trumbulls had come home, they wouldn’t thank him for inviting the authorities to their homecoming.

  He dialed their number instead of the police number. A man answered immediately, as if he had been waiting with his hand on the receiver:

  “Hello.”

  “May I speak to Mr. Trumbull?”

  “Sorry, but there’s no such person here.”

  “Are you the Trumbull caretaker?”

  “Hardly. I don’t know the Trumbulls, whoever they are. I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

  The man’s voice was persuasive, and cultivated, as American voices went. Ferguson hung up, checked the number in the telephone directory, and called it again. The same voice answered, as quickly and more sharply:

  “Yes?”

  “There seems to be something out of kilter,” Ferguson said. “I keep calling the Trumbulls’ number and getting you.”

  “So you do. Would you mind stopping, please? I’m expecting a call.”

  There was a whining note of impatience in the man’s voice. It irked Ferguson, for some reason. He said brusquely:

  “Who am I talking to?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question.”

  Ferguson gave his name, prefixed by his rank. The voice at the other end of the line became more genial:

  “I’m afraid I can’t explain the mixup, Colonel. What number are you calling, anyway?”

  “23799.”

  “This is 23788,” the man said. “Evidently your dialing system is faulty. If I were you, I’d report it to the telephone company in the morning.”

  Ferguson said that he would, apologized shortly, and hung up for the second time. He crawled into bed. Sleep was more remote than ever. He’d forgotten to close the drapes. The moon had broken free from the clouds and leered down through the window at him. Like a platinum blonde street-walker with acne, he said. His nerves were getting snappish. The sound of the creek burbled up out of the darkness, irritating as tea-party voices.

  Then a dog howled at the moon. He sat up in bed. The sound was repeated, once, and he realized that no canine throat had emitted it. It had been a human cry, the cry of a woman, raised twice across the canyon. Its tiny repeated echoes sounded like laughter, and merged with the inane chuckling of the creek.

  There were shells for the deer rifle in a box under one of the window seats. His absent host had told Ferguson where to find them, in case he wanted to try some target shooting. He loaded the rifle and carried it to the window. Crossed by the hairlines of the sight, the light was still burning on the second floor of the Trumbull house. He estimated the distance at a thousand yards. It would be interesting to discover if he could shoot out the window at that distance, and what the effect would be. While he was toying with this cheerful thought, the light went out.

  Ferguson was obscurely alarmed by his casual readiness to fire the rifle. He had a queer feeling that Southern California was dream country, in which the normal standards of civilized behavior did not apply. To guard against the consequences of this irresponsible feeling, he deliberately put the rifle back where it belonged above the fireplace. He felt capable of handling any situation that might come up, without the use of firearms. He pulled on his clothes and w
ent out to his rental car.

  The Trumbulls and their son, by mutual agreement, had left uncleared the deep wooded gorge between the studio and the main house. Ferguson had no inclination for a midnight scramble through undergrowth. In order to reach the main house by car, he had discovered several days before, he had to drive four or five miles down the canyon to the point where the private road debouched on Cabrillo Highway above Malibu. A mile north of this point, a second private road began its climb up the other side of the canyon to the main house.

  The entrance to this second road was barred by a heavy wire gate, which was padlocked. Ferguson had a key to the padlock on the ring of keys which the Trumbulls’ agent had given him. But when Ferguson got out of his car to use it, he discovered that the padlock had been changed. A heavy new brass lock glinted in the light of his torch.

  He could have climbed over the gate, but that would have meant a five-mile walk uphill. Being in a hurry, he broke the new padlock with a tire iron and drove through the gate, leaving it open. He drove up the winding road without headlights: that acned blonde, the moon, was of some use after all. When it made a deep black shadow under a roadside oak, he parked his car, and covered the last few hundred yards on foot.

  From the road, the house was completely dark and silent. Something about its architecture reminded Ferguson of a medieval castle, the dark tower to which (he said obscurely) Childe Roland came. The row of eucalyptus trees along the driveway stood like bearded seneschals swaying mystically in the silver air.

  One of his feet slipped on the driveway and he swayed not so mystically, almost falling on his rump. He switched on his flashlight to see what had caused him to slip. An irregular dark pool as big as his hand glistened on the concrete. He touched it and smelled his finger: oil drippings where a car had stood, not very long ago.

  He doused his light and walked on to the house, keeping in the shadows of the trees. Their sharp medicinal odor reminded him of hospitals; that, or the moisture in the air, started a wound aching where he had taken shrapnel in the back. It started up an old excitement, too, which Ferguson hadn’t felt since the year they cleared the Low Countries.

  Leaning against the trunk of the last tree in the row, he listened to the house for a while, and watched it. It was built of stone, and the castellated twin towers at the end of each wing somehow added to its deserted air. Drifts of leaves, fallen branches and twisted strips of eucalyptus bark littered the overgrown lawn.

  Yet it had the wrong sound for an empty house; or rather, not sound enough. The house and its surroundings seemed to be holding their breath. No wild life stirred or murmured, nearer than the occasional frogs croaking down in the creek-bed. The house stood in a vacuum of sound, ringed by the silence which human beings impose on nature. It was almost, he said, as if the natural world had heard the repeated cry that he had heard, and been struck dumb by it.

  As he was thinking this, Ferguson heard another crying, quiet and broken, somewhere inside the house; then the sound of a door being closed. He ran across the cluttered lawn and hammered the front door with its lion’s-head knocker.

  Silence answered him, the absolute silence he had learned to distrust. He knocked again, with all his force. As he did so, Ferguson told me, he had an odd objective vision of himself. He saw himself from above and behind as the moon might have seen him if she had eyes: a dark little figure casting a frantic shadow on a moonlit door. Like the traveller in de la Mare’s poem, which he had read in the Fifth Form at Upper Canada College.

  “Where?” I said.

  “Upper Canada College. The school I attended in Toronto when I was a youngster. I was a wild—”

  I cut him short: “Could we skip the biographical details, and the literary touches? Another time they’d be interesting. Right now I need the facts, Colonel.”

  He gave me a dark angry look, then dropped his eyes to the coffee mug in his hands. All the time he spoke, he’d been staring down and into it, twisting and turning it, like a crystal ball that told him the past but kept the future hidden.

  “These are facts about me,” he said. “Since you’re good enough to listen to me, I want you to understand how I came to do what I did. I was a wild boy at school, lonely and romantic, a dreamer and a chance-taker. In that moment of revelation at the door, I realized that I hadn’t changed. At the age of forty-five, I was still trying to act like a knight-errant, rescuing the damsel from the blessed tower.

  “And I said to myself that I had been too much alone. I had made a mistake in coming to California. A trick of light, an animal cry or two, a wrong number on the telephone, had peopled my mind with figures of melodrama. My midnight enterprise was quixotic, absurd. I turned from the door, ready to forget the whole thing.

  “Then a voice I recognized spoke through the door.

  “ ‘Is that you, Larry?’ it said.

  “ ‘No,’ I said. My excitement made me rash. I told him that I was Colonel Ferguson, and that he’d better open up, whoever in hell he was, or I’d kick the bloody door down on top of him. He answered in an unctuous tone that that was hardly necessary, and opened up. He was a big fellow dressed in white, like a baker or a chef. He turned out to be a doctor, or so he claimed—a Dr. Sloan. According to his story, he’d leased the house from the Trumbulls’ agent and was planning to use it as a nursing home. As a matter of fact he had a patient with him, a disturbed patient. She was particularly disturbed on account of the full moon. He hoped the noise she’d been making hadn’t alarmed me.”

  “Did you see this patient?”

  “Not then. The doctor stepped outside and closed the door behind him. But I could hear her on the other side of it. She was cursing him, in the most unfeminine language, and calling to me for help. I wanted to help her, of course, then and there. But the situation didn’t seem reasonable. The doctor persuaded me that the woman was off her rocker. His story was certainly plausible. There seemed no alternative but to accept it, and apologize, and went my way back to the studio.”

  “He talked like a doctor, did he?”

  “I’d say so, yes. He used a number of technical terms that weren’t familiar to me.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was a big chap, as I said, thickly built, perhaps my age or older. He had quite an impressive face, dark eyes and a high forehead.” The last word, for some reason, made Ferguson wince and sigh. “But there’s no need to describe him. You can see him for yourself.”

  “Where?”

  “In the studio. He’s the man I killed. I shot him with George’s rifle.”

  “Is anybody with him?”

  “Yes. I left the woman, Molly.”

  “We’d better get up there. You can tell me the rest on the way.”

  —

  We left his rented car on the shoulder of the highway and drove up the coast in mine. Apart from a few trucks, there was no traffic. He explained how he had got on a first-name basis, in no time at all, with Hollywood’s most incendiary blonde. Call it an explanation, anyway.

  He’d gone back to bed, but not to sleep, and lay there trying to make some sense of the night’s events. It turned out they weren’t over. He heard a scrambling and plunging in the undergrowth below the studio, and went outside with his flashlight. “It was the woman,” he said. “She’d got away from the house somehow and crossed the canyon on foot. She’d had to wade the creek, and her slacks were soaked to the waist. Her shirt, even her face and hair, were streaked with mud where she’d fallen. In spite of this, and the rather wild look in her eye, she was extraordinarily good-looking.

  “I put my arm around her and helped her up the bank. My heart beat foolishly high. Frankly, I’m susceptible to women. Perhaps she sensed this. She turned to me as I shut the door of the studio and laid her poor soiled head on my shoulder.

  “ ‘You won’t let him take me back?’ she said. ‘You’ll look after me, won’t you?’

  “Under the circumstances, I couldn’t very well refuse. No
matter who or what she was, she was a woman in distress.”

  I admired Ferguson’s old-fashioned chivalry, but his naiveté alarmed me. “Did she tell you who she was?”

  “Later. Not right away.”

  “Did she seem frightened?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Crazy?”

  “Not at the time. I’m not a doctor, of course. Neither was the man Sloan. According to her, Sloan was a psychopath, which was probably how he picked up his psychiatric jargon. He’d been holding her captive there in the house for more than twenty-four hours.”

  “How did he get her there?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Did she know him?”

  “No.”

  “How did she know he was psycho?”

  “By his treatment of her. She—ah—unbuttoned her blouse and showed me the marks on her shoulders and—and—breasts. I was embarrassed and revolted.” He was still embarrassed. “I wanted to call the police, but she wouldn’t allow it. She said that if it got into the papers, it would kill her with the public. That was the expression she used. It was then she told me who she was and that she’d been—mistreated.”

  “Raped?”

  “Yes. The poor woman got down on her knees and begged me to protect her against that monster. I disliked to see her humble herself to me. I’ve always had a lofty conception of women—”

  “Get on with it,” I said.

  His face darkened, and his mouth set stubbornly. “I want you to understand my motives. I’ve always had a lofty conception of women, as I said. I lifted her up to her feet and promised her that I would lay down my life, if necessary, to defend her.”

  “You swallowed her story whole, then.”