Ross MacDonald - Strangers in Town - Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

"The police?" she said.

"Somebody drowned him in the bathtub," I said. "He was very light."

Mrs. Ralston picked up a glass ashtray from the table, and threw it at my face. It struck my forehead and made a gash there. While I was dabbing at the blood with a handkerchief, Mrs. Ralston called me many unusual names in a loud voice which attracted the attention of everyone in the patio. Jane Lennon wheeled her away. I was glad to see her go, because Mrs. Ralston's face had become very old and ugly.

Mr. Whittaker came running out of the hotel with John Swain at his heels.

"What's all this!" he cried.

"Call the police again," I said. "Mrs. Ralston seems ready to confess."

An hour later I was sitting with Al in his room sipping my first beer of the day and wishing away a headache.

"You took a hell of a chance," Al said.

"No, I didn't. I made no accusations. All I said was that somebody had drowned him in the bathtub. Mrs. Ralston said the rest."

"I still think it's lucky for you she broke down and confessed. You didn't have any evidence."

"I had one piece of evidence," I said. "The whole case hung on it. The water in Mr. Ralston's lungs was pure city water. He couldn't have inhaled it in the pool, because the pool water has a good deal of chlorine in it. A bathtub was practically the only alternative."

"I don't see how she did it," Al said.

"Morally, it's hard to see. Murder always is. Physically, it was feasible enough. He weighed scarcely a hundred pounds. There was nothing the matter with her arms and shoulders, and a wheelchair can be a pretty useful vehicle. She simply wheeled him to the bathtub, held his face under water until he stopped breathing, wheeled him out to the pool, and dumped him in. It must have been difficult, and she stood a chance of being caught at it, but she hadn't much to lose."

"And nothing at all to gain. That's what I don't get. What good is a million dollars to a dame that's going to die any day?"

"She wanted to leave it to her son," I said. "He'd have been cut off from all that money if she had died before her husband. Ever since the doctors told her she was going to die, she must have been waiting for her chance. She probably caught on to the nurse's trick long ago, and bided her time, waiting to use it. That swimming party last night gave her her opportunity. Mother love is a wonderful thing."

I thought of another wonderful thing then, and I began to laugh though it wasn't very funny. In California a murderess can't inherit her victim's property. So Johnny Swain is still as far away from a million dollars as the rest of us.

Like all Ross Macdonald's fiction, this tale was inspired by, or incorporated details from, Ken Millar's life. One event that sparked "Strangers in Town" was a February 1950 dinner party at the Palm Springs home of movie-studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, to which the Millars were taken by Bennett Cerf (Margaret's publisher), who was staying in the nearby desert resort of La Quinta. When a medical thermometer packed in a suitcase for this trip was found reading 107°, a clue was born.

And maybe Darryl Zanuck — who made a show of having himself publicly shaved in the presence of his guests — plays a cameo role in "Strangers," cast against type as the gangster Durano, dwarfed by his baronial house and with "two days' beard on his chin, like motheaten grey plush."

Other characters receive a share of Millar's own experience, as the author finds common emotional cause with citizens superficially unlike him. Archer's African-American client, like Ken Millar, is an ex-schoolteacher. Like Millar — who grew up poor and got to college only by dint of his father's $2,000 in life insurance — the Hispanic lawyer Santana "had come up the long hard way, and remembered every step." The religious motto on the wall in Mrs. Norris’s house is straight out of Kenneth Millar's childhood.

The vignette of a teenager or young man being taught to dance by an older girl (as Lucy teaches Alex) occurs so often in Millar manuscripts and notebooks, it surely must have figured importantly in the author's past.

Another object purloined from Millar's history is the bolo knife sent from the Philippines by Alex's chief petty officer father. It's a duplicate of the souvenir Lt. j.g. Ken Millar sought in those islands in January of 1946, when he wrote his daughter Linda from the U.S.S. Shipley Bay: "I've been trying to find a good bolo knife to hang over our mantel."{" 'I've been trying to find a good bolo knife' ": Kenneth to Linda Millar, January 8, 1946, The Kenneth Millar Papers, Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.} The next day he reported to his wife: "I went ashore… I bought a bolo knife to hang on the wall… for $1.50…"{" 'I went ashore' ": Kenneth to Margaret Millar, January 9, 1946, The Kenneth Millar Papers, Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.}

The "Mickey" whom Durano has been sent to neutralize would be West Coast operator Mickey Cohen. The syndicate's caution "this year especially" is due to the Kefauver hearings on organized crime.

L.A. columnist's legman Morris Cramm appeared in the 1950 Archer novel The Drowning Pool. Reviewer Anthony Boucher found him delightful and urged Millar to use him again. Macdonald obliged.

"My son is in grave trouble," the woman said.

I asked her to sit down, and after a moment's hesitation she lowered her weight into the chair I placed for her. She was a large Negro woman, clothed rather tightly in a blue linen dress which she had begun to outgrow. Her bosom was rising and falling with excitement, or from the effort of climbing the flight of stairs to my office. She looked no older than forty, but the hair that showed under her blue straw hat was the color of steel wool. Perspiration furred her upper lip.

"About your son?" I sat down behind my desk, the possible kinds of trouble that a Negro boy could get into in Los Angeles running like a newsreel through my head.

"My son has been arrested on suspicion of murder." She spoke with a schoolteacher's precision. "The police have had him up all night, questioning him, trying to force a confession out of him."

"Where is he held? Lincoln Heights?"

"In Santa Teresa. We live there. I just came down on the bus to see if you could help me. There are no private detectives in Santa Teresa."

"He have a lawyer?"

"Mr. Santana. He recommended you to me, Mr. Archer."

"I see." Santana I knew by name and reputation as a leader of minority groups in Southern California. He had come up the long hard way, and remembered every step. "Well, what are the facts?"

"Before I go over them in detail, I would like to be assured that you'll take the case."

"I'd like to be assured that your son isn't guilty."

"He isn't. They have nothing against him but circumstances."

"Not many murder cases depend on witnesses, Mrs.—"

"Norris, Genevieve Norris. My son's name is Alex, after his father." The modulation of her voice suggested that Alex senior was dead. "Alex is entering his sophomore year in college," she added with pride.

"What does Santana think?"

"Mr. Santana knows that Alex is innocent. He'd have come to you himself, except that he's busy trying to have him freed. He thinks the woman may have committed suicide—"

"It was a woman, then."

"She was my boarder. I'll tell you honestly, Mr. Archer, Alex had grown fond of her. Much too fond. The woman was older than him — than he — and different. A different class of person from Alex. I was going to give her notice when she — died."

"How did she die?"

"Her throat was cut."

Mrs. Norris laid a genteel brown hand on her bosom, as if to quiet its surge. A plain gold wedding band was sunk almost out of sight in the flesh of one of her fingers. The hand came up to her lip and dashed away the moisture there. "I found her myself, last midnight. Her terrible breathing woke me. I thought maybe she was sick or — intoxicated. By the time I reached her she was dead on the floor, in her blood. Do you know how I felt, Mr. Archer?" She leaned towards me with the diffident and confiding charm of her race, her eyes deeply shadowed by the brim of her hat: "As if all the things I had dreaded for myself and Alex, when we were going from city to city during the depression, trying to find a living, in Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago. As if they'd suddenly come true, in my own house. When I saw Lucy in her blood." Her voice broke like a cello string.