She wilted to her knees and he bumped her in the mouth with his knee, knocking her sprawling on her side. He kicked her in the body three rapid, vicious times, slobber drooling from his slack, red lips. His bloated face was a tar ball in the spill of sign light, his eyes too dull to notice. Somehow his Panama still clung on his eight ball head, whiter than ever, and his red lips were a split, bleeding incision in his black face.
Marie screamed for help. Then she whimpered. Then she begged. “Doan kill me, Black Boy, daddy deah, honey darlin’, daddy-daddy deah. Marie luvs yuh, daddy darlin’. Doan kill me, please, daddy. Doan kill yo’ lil’ honeybunch, Marie …”
The yellow boy, slowly following from the car, paused a moment in indecision as if he would get back in and drive away. But he couldn’t bear seeing Black Boy kick Marie. The growth of emotion was visible in his face before it pushed him forward.
After an instant he realized that that was where he worked as a bellhop, that those white folk would back him up against a strange nigger. He stepped quickly over to Black Boy, spoke in a cultural preëmptory voice: “Stop kicking that woman, you dirty black nigger.”
Black Boy turned his bloated face toward him. His dull eyes explored him, dogged. His voice was flatly telling him: “You keep outta dis, yellow niggah. Dis heah is mah woman an’ Ah doan lak you no way.”
The yellow boy was emboldened by the appearance of two white men in the hotel doorway. He stepped over and slung a weighted blow to Black Boy’s mouth. Black Boy shifted in quick rage, drew a spring-blade barlow chiv and slashed the yellow boy to death before the two white men could run down the stairs. He broke away from their restraining hands, made his way to the alley beside the theater in his shambling, flat-footed run before the police cruiser got there.
He heard Marie’s loud, fear-shrill voice crying: “He pulled a gun on Black Boy, he pulled a gun on Black Boy. Ah saw ’im do it—”
He broke into a laugh, satisfied. She was still his …
Three rapid shots behind him stopped his laugh, shattered his face into black fragments. The cops had begun shooting without calling halt. He knew that they knew he was a “dinge,” and he knew they wanted to kill him, so he stepped into the light behind a Clark’s Restaurant, stopped dead still with upraised hands, not turning around.
The cops took him down to the station and beat his head into an open, bloody wound from his bulging eyes clear around to the base of his skull—“You’d bring your nigger cuttings down on Euclid Avenue, would you, you black—”
They gave him the electric chair for that.
But if it is worrying him, he doesn’t show it during the slow drag of days in death row’s grilled enclosure. He knows that that high yellow gal with the ball-bearing hips is still his, heart, soul and body. All day long, you can hear his loud, crowing voice, kidding the other condemned men, jibing the guards, telling lies. He can tell some tall lies, too—“You know, me ’n Marie wuz in Noo Yawk dat wintah. Ah won leben grands in uh dice game ’n brought her uh sealskin—”
All day long, you can hear his noisy laugh.
Marie comes to see him as often as they let her, brings him fried chicken and hot, red lips; brings him a wide smile and tiny yellow specs in her big, brown, ever-loving eyes. You can hear his assured love-making all over the range, his casual “honeybunch,” his chuckling, contented laugh.
All day long …
It’s at night, when she’s gone and the cells are dark and death row is silent, that you’ll find Black Boy huddled in the corner of his cell, thinking of her, perhaps in some other nigger’s loving arms. Crying softly. Salty tears making glistening streaks down the blending blackness of his face.
PART II
AFTER THE WAR
FIND THE WOMAN
BY ROSS MACDONALD
Beverly Hills
(Originally published in 1946)
I sat in my brand-new office with the odor of paint in my nostrils and waited for something to happen. I had been back on the Boulevard for one day. This was the beginning of the second day. Below the window, flashing in the morning sun, the traffic raced and roared with a noise like battle. It made me nervous. It made me want to move. I was all dressed up in civilian clothes with no place to go and nobody to go with.
Till Millicent Dreen came in.
I had seen her before, on the Strip with various escorts, and knew who she was: publicity director for Tele-Pictures. Mrs. Dreen was over forty and looked it, but there was electricity in her, plugged in to a secret source that time could never wear out. Look how high and tight I carry my body, her movements said. My hair is hennaed but comely, said her coiffure, inviting not to conviction but to suspension of disbelief. Her eyes were green and inconstant like the sea. They said what the hell.
She sat down by my desk and told me that her daughter had disappeared the day before, which was September the seventh.
“I was in Hollywood all day. We keep an apartment here, and there was some work I had to get out fast. Una isn’t working, so I left her at the beach house by herself.”
“Where is it?”
“A few miles above Santa Barbara.”
“That’s a long way to commute.”
“It’s worth it to me. When I can maneuver a weekend away from this town, I like to get really away.”
“Maybe your daughter feels the same, only more so. When did she leave?”
“Sometime yesterday. When I drove home to the beach house last night she was gone.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Hardly. She’s twenty-two and knows what she’s doing. I hope. Anyway, apron strings don’t become me.” She smiled like a cat and moved her scarlet-taloned fingers in her narrow lap. “It was very late and I was—tired. I went to bed. But when I woke up this morning it occurred to me that she might have drowned. I objected to it because she wasn’t a strong swimmer, but she went in for solitary swimming. I think of the most dreadful things when I wake up in the morning.”
“Went in for solitary swimming, Mrs. Dreen?”
“‘Went’ slipped out, didn’t it? I told you I think of dreadful things when I wake up in the morning.”
“If she drowned you should be talking to the police. They can arrange for dragging and such things. All I can give you is my sympathy.”
As if to estimate the value of that commodity, her eyes flickered from my shoulders to my waist and up again to my face. “Frankly, I don’t know about the police. I do know about you, Mr. Archer. You just got out of the army, didn’t you?”
“Last week.” I failed to add that she was my first postwar client.
“And you don’t belong to anybody, I’ve heard. You’ve never been bought. Is that right?”
“Not outright. You can take an option on a piece of me, though. A hundred dollars would do for a starter.”
She nodded briskly. From a bright black bag she gave me five twenties. “Naturally, I’m conscious of publicity angles. My daughter retired a year ago when she married—”
“Twenty-one is a good age to retire.”
“From pictures, maybe you’re right. But she could want to go back if her marriage breaks up. And I have to look out for myself. It isn’t true that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I don’t know why Una went away.”
“Is your daughter Una Sand?”
“Of course. I assumed you knew.” My ignorance of the details of her life seemed to cause her pain. She didn’t have to tell me that she had a feeling for publicity angles.
Though Una Sand meant less to me than Hecuba, I remembered the name and with it a glazed blonde who had had a year or two in the sun, but who’d made a better pin-up than an actress.
“Wasn’t her marriage happy? I mean, isn’t it?”
“You see how easy it is to slip into the past tense?” Mrs. Dreen smiled another fierce and purring smile, and her fingers fluttered in glee before her immobile body. “I suppose her marriage is happy enough. Her Ensign’s quite a personable young man�
�handsome in a masculine way, and passionate she tells me, and naive enough.”
“Naive enough for what?”
“To marry Una. Jack Rossiter was quite a catch in this woman’s town. He was runner-up at Forest Hills the last year he played tennis. And now of course he’s a flier. Una did right well by herself, even if it doesn’t last.”
What do you expect of a war marriage? she seemed to be saying. Permanence? Fidelity? The works?
“As a matter of fact,” she went on, “it was thinking about Jack, more than anything else, that brought me here to you. He’s due back this week, and naturally”—like many unnatural people, she overused that adverb—“he’ll expect her to be waiting for him. It’ll be rather embarrassing for me if he comes home and I can’t tell him where she’s gone, or why, or with whom. You’d really think she’d leave a note.”
“I can’t keep up with you,” I said. “A minute ago Una was in the clutches of the cruel crawling foam. Now she’s taken off with a romantic stranger.”
“I consider possibilities, is all. When I was Una’s age, married to Dreen, I had quite a time settling down. I still do.”
Our gazes, mine as impassive as hers I hoped, met, struck no spark, and disengaged. The female spider who eats her mate held no attraction for me.
“I’m getting to know you pretty well,” I said with the necessary smile, “but not the missing girl. Who’s she been knocking around with?”
“I don’t think we need to go into that. She doesn’t confide in me, in any case.”
“Whatever you say. Shall we look at the scene of the crime?”
“There isn’t any crime.”
“The scene of the accident, then, or the departure. Maybe the beach house will give me something to go on.”
She glanced at the wafer-thin watch on her brown wrist. Its diamonds glittered coldly. “Do I have to drive all the way back?”
“If you can spare the time, it might help. We’ll take my car.”
She rose decisively but gracefully, as though she had practiced the movement in front of a mirror. An expert bitch, I thought as I followed her high slim shoulders and tight-sheathed hips down the stairs to the bright street. I felt a little sorry for the army of men who had warmed themselves, or been burned, at that secret electricity. And I wondered if her daughter Una was like her.
When I did get to see Una, the current had been cut off; I learned about it only by the marks it left. It left marks.
We drove down Sunset to the sea and north on 101 Alternate. All the way to Santa Barbara, she read a typescript whose manila cover was marked: Temporary—This script is not final and is given to you for advance information only. It occurred to me that the warning might apply to Mrs. Dreen’s own story.
As we left the Santa Barbara city limits, she tossed the script over her shoulder into the backseat. “It really smells. It’s going to be a smash.”
A few miles north of the city, a dirt road branched off to the left beside a filling station. It wound for a mile or more through broken country to her private beach. The beach house was set well back from the sea at the convergence of brown bluffs which huddled over it like scarred shoulders. To reach it we had to drive along the beach for a quarter of a mile, detouring to the very edge of the sea around the southern bluff.
The blue-white dazzle of sun, sand, and surf was like an arcfurnace. But I felt some breeze from the water when we got out of the car. A few languid clouds moved inland over our heads. A little high plane was gamboling among them like a terrier in a henyard.
“You have privacy,” I said to Mrs. Dreen.
She stretched, and touched her varnished hair with her fingers. “One tires of the goldfish role. When I lie out there in the afternoons I—forget I have a name.” She pointed to the middle of the cove beyond the breakers, where a white raft moved gently in the swells. “I simply take off my clothes and revert to protoplasm. All my clothes.”
I looked up at the plane whose pilot was doodling in the sky. It dropped, turning like an early falling leaf, swooped like a hawk, climbed like an aspiration.
She said with a laugh: “If they come too low I cover my face, of course.”
We had been moving away from the house towards the water. Nothing could have looked more innocent than the quiet cove held in the curve of the white beach like a benign blue eye in a tranquil brow. Then its colors shifted as a cloud passed over the sun. Cruel green and violent purple ran in the blue. I felt the old primitive terror and fascination. Mrs. Dreen shared the feeling and put it into words:
“It’s got queer moods. I hate it sometimes as much as I love it.” For an instant she looked old and uncertain. “I hope she isn’t in there.”
The tide had turned and was coming in, all the way from Hawaii and beyond, all the way from the shattered islands where bodies lay unburied in the burnt-out caves. The waves came up towards us, fumbling and gnawing at the beach like an immense soft mouth.
“Are there bad currents here, or anything like that?”
“No. It’s deep, though. It must be twenty feet under the raft. I could never bottom it.”
“I’d like to look at her room,” I said. “It might tell us where she went, and even with whom. You’d know what clothes were missing?”
She laughed a little apologetically as she opened the door. “I used to dress my daughter, naturally. Not any more. Besides, more than half her things must be in the Hollywood apartment. I’ll try to help you, though.”
It was good to step out of the vibrating brightness of the beach into shadowy stillness behind Venetian blinds. “I noticed that you unlocked the door,” I said. “It’s a big house with a lot of furniture in it. No servants?”
“I occasionally have to knuckle under to producers. But I won’t to my employees. They’ll be easier to get along with soon, now that the plane plants are shutting down.”
We went to Una’s room, which was light and airy in both atmosphere and furnishings. But it showed the lack of servants. Stockings, shoes, underwear, dresses, bathing suits, lipstick-smeared tissue littered the chairs and the floor. The bed was unmade. The framed photograph on the night table was obscured by two empty glasses which smelt of highball, and flanked by overflowing ashtrays.
I moved the glasses and looked at the young man with the wings on his chest. Naive, handsome, passionate were words which suited the strong, blunt nose, the full lips and square jaw, the wide proud eyes. For Mrs. Dreen he would have made a single healthy meal, and I wondered again if her daughter was a carnivore. At least the photograph of Jack Rossiter was the only sign of a man in her room. The two glasses could easily have been from separate nights. Or separate weeks, to judge by the condition of the room. Not that it wasn’t an attractive room. It was like a pretty girl in disarray. But disarray.
We examined the room, the closets, the bathroom, and found nothing of importance, either positive or negative. When we had waded through the brilliant and muddled wardrobe which Una had shed, I turned to Mrs. Dreen.
“I guess I’ll have to go back to Hollywood. It would help me if you’d come along. It would help me more if you’d tell me who your daughter knew. Or rather who she liked—I suppose she knew everybody. Remember you suggested yourself that there’s a man in this.”
“I take it you haven’t found anything?”
“One thing I’m pretty sure of. She didn’t intentionally go away for long. Her toilet articles and pills are still in her bathroom. She’s got quite a collection of pills.”
“Yes, Una’s always been a hypochondriac. Also she left Jack’s picture. She only had the one, because she liked it best.”
“That isn’t so conclusive,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’d know whether there’s a bathing suit missing?”
“I really couldn’t say, she had so many. She was at her best in them.”
“Still was?”
“I guess so, as a working hypothesis. Unless you can find me evidence to the contrary.”
“You
didn’t like your daughter much, did you?”
“No. I didn’t like her father. And she was prettier than I.”
“But not so intelligent?”
“Not as bitchy, you mean? She was bitchy enough. But I’m still worried about Jack. He loved her. Even if I didn’t.”
The telephone in the hall took the cue and began to ring. “This is Millicent Dreen,” she said into it. “Yes, you may read it to me.” A pause. “‘Kill the fatted calf, ice the champagne, turn down the sheets and break out the black silk nightie. Am coming home tomorrow.’ Is that right?”
Then she said, “Hold it a minute. I wish to send an answer. To Ensign Jack Rossiter, USS Guam, CVE 173, Naval Air Station, Alameda—is that Ensign Rossiter’s correct address? The text is: ‘Dear Jack join me at the Hollywood apartment there is no one at the beach house. Millicent.’ Repeat it, please…. Right. Thank you.”
She turned from the phone and collapsed in the nearest chair, not forgetting to arrange her legs symmetrically.
“So Jack is coming home tomorrow?” I said. “All I had before was no evidence. Now I have no evidence and until tomorrow.”
She leaned forward to look at me. “I’ve been wondering how far I can trust you.”
“Not so far. But I’m not a blackmailer. I’m not a mind reader, either, and it’s sort of hard to play tennis with the invisible man.”
“The invisible man has nothing to do with this. I called him when Una didn’t come home. Just before I came to your office.”
“All right,” I said. “You’re the one that wants to find Una. You’ll get around to telling me. In the meantime, who else did you call?”
“Hilda Karp, Una’s best friend—her only female friend.”
“Where can I get hold of her?”
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