Ross MacDonald - Strangers in Town - Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

"Who was Lucy?" I asked her after a pause.

"Lucy Deschamps is her name. She claimed to be a Creole from New Orleans. Alex was taken in, he's a romantic boy, but I don't know. She was common."

"Weapon?"

She looked at me blankly.

"If it might have been suicide, the weapon was there."

"Yes, of course. The weapon was there. It was a long native knife. My husband sent it from the Philippines before his ship was sunk. Mr. Norris was a chief petty officer in the Navy." Her unconscious panic was pushing her off the point, into the security and respectability of her past.

I brought her back to the point: "And where was Alex?"

"Sleeping in his room. He has a room of his own. A college student needs a room of his own. When I screamed, he came running in in his pyjamas. He let out a cry and lay down beside her. I couldn't get him up. When the policemen came, he was blood from head to foot. He said he was responsible for her death, he was really wild. They took him away." Bowed forward in her chair like a great black Rachel, she had forgotten her careful speech and her poise. Her shadowed eyes were following the image of her son into the shadows.

I rose and fetched her a drink from the water-cooler in the corner of the room. "We can drive up to Santa Teresa together," I said, "if that suits you. I want to hear more about Lucy."

She gulped the water and stood up. She was almost as tall as I was, and twice as imposing.

"Of course. You're a kind man, Mr. Archer."

I took the inland route, over Cahuenga Pass. It wasn't built for speed, but the sparseness of traffic gave me a chance to listen. As we moved north out of the valley, the heat eased off. The withered September hills were a moving backdrop to the small sad romance of Alex Norris and Lucy.

She had come to the house in a taxi about a month before, a handsome light brown woman of twenty-five or so, well-dressed and well-spoken. She preferred to stay in a private home, she said, because all but the worst hotels in Santa Teresa were closed to her. Mrs. Norris gave her the spare room, the one in the front of the house with the separate entrance, which she sometimes rented out when she could find a suitable tenant. The rent-money would help with Alex's tuition.

Miss Deschamps was a peaceful little soul, or so she seemed. She ate most of her meals with the family, almost never went out, spent most of her evenings quietly in her room with the portable radio she had brought along with her. She seldom spoke about herself, except to let it be understood that she had been a lady's maid in some very good families. But she made Mrs. Norris nervous. The landlady felt that her boarder was under tension, planning her words and actions in order not to give anything away. She seemed afraid, almost as if she were in hiding from someone or something. It put everyone under a strain.

The strain became severe when Mrs. Norris discovered one day that Lucy was a solitary drinker. It happened quite by accident, as she was cleaning the room during one of Lucy's rare walks. She opened up a bureau drawer to change the paper lining, and found it half full of empty whisky bottles. And then she learned, in conversation with Alex, that Alex had been serving as Lucy's errand-boy, bringing her nightly pints from the liquor store. That she had rewarded Alex by teaching him to dance, alone in her room, to the music of the portable radio. That Lucy, to put it briefly (as Mrs. Norris did), had been transforming her God-fearing household into a dancehall-saloon, her son into God knew what.

This had been on a Monday, three days before. When Mrs. Norris had threatened to evict her tenant, Lucy promised in tears to be good, if only she might stay. Alex announced that if Lucy were forced to leave, he would go with her. Now, in a sense, he had.

"What did he mean by saying that he was responsible?"

"Alex? When?" Mrs. Norris shifted uncomfortably in the seat beside me.

"Last night. You said he told the police that he was responsible for her death."

"Did I say that? You must have misunderstood me." But she wouldn't meet my eyes.

It was just as well, because I almost missed the first Santa Teresa stoplight. I braked the car to a screaming stop, half over the white line. "All right, I misunderstood you. Let me get it straight about the weapon. Had it been lying around the house?"

"Yes."

"In Lucy's room?"

"I don't know where it was, Mr. Archer. It might have been anywhere in the house. It was usually on the mantel in the living room, but Lucy could easily get it if she wanted to do herself an injury."

"Why would she want to?"

The light changed, and I turned right, in the direction of the courthouse.

"Because she was afraid. I told you that."

"But you don't know what of?"

"No."

"Her past is simply a blank? She didn't tell you anything, except that she was a lady's maid from New Orleans?"

"No."

"Or why she came to you?"

"Oh, I know why she came to my house. She was referred. Dr. Benning referred her to me. She went to him as a Patient."

"What was the matter with her?"

"I don't know. She didn't seem ill to me, the way she carried on."

"Maybe I'd better talk to this doctor first. Did you tell the police that he sent Lucy to you?"

She was watching the bright stucco street as if it might narrow at any moment into an arc-lit alley, ambushed at each end. "I didn't tell them anything much." Her voice was glum.

Following her directions, I drove across the railroad tracks which cut through the center of town. The double band of steel was like a social equator dividing Santa Teresa roughly into lighter and darker hemispheres. Dr. Benning's house, which also contained his office, stood in the lower latitudes, a block above the station, two blocks off the main street. It was a grey old three-storied building standing in a block of rundown shops. The faded sign on the wall beside the front door, Samuel Benning, M.D., seemed large, even for California.

A young woman opened the door as I pulled up to the curb. She had straight black hair, trimmed short, and black-rimmed harlequin spectacles that gave her face an Asiatic cast. Though her body looked rather lumpy in an ill-fitting white uniform, I noticed that her waist and ankles were narrow.

"Who's she?" I asked the woman beside me.

"I never saw her before. Must be a new receptionist."

I got out and approached her. "Is Dr. Benning in?"

"He's just going out to lunch." Her spectacles or the blue eyes behind them glittered coldly in the sun.

"It's rather important. A woman has been killed. I understand that she was one of his patients."

"She boarded with me." Mrs. Norris had come up behind me. "Miss Lucy Deschamps."

"Lucy Deschamps?" The chill spread from her eyes across her face, drawing her unpainted mouth into a thin blue line. "I don't recall the name."

"The doctor probably will." I started up the walk that crossed the narrow yard.

As if of its own accord, her body moved to bar my way. She spoke on an indrawn breath: "How was she killed?"

"Cut throat."

"How awful." She turned away, towards the house. Her feet groped for the verandah steps like a blind woman's.

Dr. Benning was in the entrance hall, brushing a felt hat that badly needed brushing. He was a thin, high-shouldered man of indeterminate age. A fringe of reddish hair grew like withering grass around the pink desert expanse of his bald scalp.

"Good morning." His pale eyes shifted from me to the Negro woman. "Why, hello, Mrs. Norris. What's the trouble?"

"Trouble is the right word, doctor. The boarder you sent me last month, she was killed. Alex has been arrested."

"I'm sorry to hear it, naturally. But I didn't send you anyone last month. Did I?"

"That's what I told her," the receptionist put in. "I never heard the name Lucy Deschamps."