Ross MacDonald - Strangers in Town - Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

"Did you get the hat from Lucy?" he said.

"Lucy?" My mouth was numb, and I lisped. "I don't know any Lucy."

"Sure you do." He shattered the glass on the arm of my chair, and held the jagged base up close to my eyes. "You tell me all about it like a nice fella."

"Nix, Gino," the old man said. "I got a better idea as usual."

They conferred in low voices, and the younger man left the room. He returned with a photograph in a silver frame, which he held in front of my face. It was a studio portrait, of the kind intended for use as publicity cheesecake. Against a black velvet background, a young blonde half-reclined in a gossamer sort of robe that was split to show one bent leg. Though she was adequately stacked and pretty in a rather dull, corn-fed way, her best feature was her long pull-taffy hair. The picture was signed in a childish hand: "To my Angel, with love and everything. Fern."

"You know the dame?" Gino demanded. "Ever seen her before?"

I thought I had, and said I hadn't.

"You're sure?" The shard of glass was still in his other hand.

"I see a lot of blondes. How can I be sure?"

"Where did you get the hat, then?"

"I won it in a raffle."

Gino's face thickened, and his eyes almost crossed. Durano stepped in front of him. "Leave him alone, leave him go. There is heat on, remember. We keep our hands clean." He scoured his thin blue hands with each other. They sounded like sticks rubbing together.

Gino backed away, joining the three others who stood in a semi-circle behind Durano. The old man leaned towards me:

"Mr. Detective, I don't know who you work for, I don't care. You took a nice good look at the lady in the picture? You ever see her, come back and visit me. I promise a nicer reception."

I turned my face away from his charnel-house breath.

At midnight I was back in Santa Teresa, knocking on the door of Santana's house. He came to the door in a red velvet smoking-jacket, a volume of the Holmes-Pollock letters open under his arm.

"What under heaven?" he said in Spanish. "Your face, Mr. Archer!"

"I had a little plastic surgery done."

"Come in. Let me get you a drink."

Over the drink, Scotch and water in equal proportions, I told him where I had gone on the trail of the hat, and what had happened there.

"Where is the hat now?"

"Durano kept it. After all, he probably paid for it."

"And what do you make of it all?" Santana hunched his shoulders and spread his hands palms upward on his knees. In his paneled library, surrounded by books, he resembled an old spider at the center of his web.

"There isn't too much to go on, certainly not enough to try and have Durano and his torpedo brought in. That would take powerful medicine."

"I agree."

"What there is adds up to the reasonable alternative you asked for. Fern Dee was Durano's girl friend. She got fed up with him and the desert, as anybody but a gila monster would, and she left him. But that's one of the things the executives of the Syndicate can't permit, this year especially. Their women learn too much about their sources of income, ever to be allowed to run out on them. Besides, Durano is old and ugly and sick. She took her life in her hands when she left him, and she must have known it." I sipped my drink. The whisky burned my lips where they had been cut.

"And Lucy?"

"See how this sounds to you. Lucy was Fern Dee's maid, probably her confidante. She knew where Fern Dee had gone, perhaps she had instructions to follow her when she got the chance, and bring her clothes—"

"To Santa Teresa here."

"Evidently. Fern let her keep some of the clothes, and gave her money to live on quietly. There could have been blackmail involved, but I doubt that."

"Blackmail seems to be indicated," the lawyer said.

"It's doubtful. Gino traced Lucy down, don't forget. He talked to her in her room Tuesday night, and she didn't tell him where Fern was."

"You think that is why she was killed, that this Gino killed her?"

"It's a reasonable alternative," I said. "In any case, your client was an innocent bystander. He stood too near the fire, and got burned."

"We still have the task of proving it. Can we question this Gino in any way? Where is he?"

"In Santa Teresa," I said. "He followed me out of Palm Springs in a Buick. It was a pretty crude tail-job, and I lost him on 99. But he should be in town by now. He'll be looking for me. Durano thinks I can lead him to Fern Dee."

"Can you?"

"I think so."

"Do you have a gun?"

I patted my pocket. "I keep it in the glove compartment of my car."

Santana stood up. "I believe that I had better call the police."

"No," I said. "You want to give them the man along with the story."

"A doctor, at least. Those are nasty cuts on your mouth. They need attention."

"I'm on my way to see a doctor — Dr. Benning."

Santana exploded, dryly, like a puff-ball. "He is a bum physician, Mr. Archer. A charlatan. Only those who can find nothing better go to Benning. Those who have to."

"Girls that get caught, for example?"

"That is the rumor. As a matter of fact, I can confirm the rumor. I have many sorts of clients."

"I'm not proud."

There were lights on both the first and second stories of Dr. Benning's house. I parked at the curb and looked up and down the street. Yellow traffic lights winked on the bare asphalt. The sidewalks were deserted. A few late cars rolled into sight and out of mind. There was no sign of Gino's four-hole Buick sedan.

I pushed the bell-button under the large shabby sign. I heard quiet footsteps in the hallway, and Benning's long face was framed in the dirty glass pane. The light came on over my head. Benning unlocked the door, and opened it cautiously. His pale eyeballs were bloodshot, but not from sleep. He was fully clothed, in the suit I had seen him in that morning.

I got the curious idea that Dr. Benning had been crying.

His speech was slightly thick: "Archer, isn't it? You've been hurt, man."

"That can wait."

I leaned my shoulder against the half-open door, and he stepped back to let me enter. Under the lamp in the hallway, his bald pink pate looked innocent and vulnerable like a baby's. He took his worn felt hat from a brass rack on the wall, and placed it on his head.

"Going somewhere?"

The gesture had been unconscious. He didn't understand me. "No, I'm not going anywhere." His tone implied that he never had, had never even expected to. He moved back against the wall, out of the grim light. Beyond his dwarf shadow a flight of stairs rose into darkness.

"I came across a funny thing this afternoon, Dr. Benning. Your patient Lucy Deschamps — your ex-patient — had a clinical thermometer. Mrs. Norris found it in her bathroom."

"What's funny about that? Most people do, particularly hypochondriacs."

"The funny thing was that it registered a temperature of 107."

"Good lord, man. That's usually fatal in adults. Was she so ill as that? I had no idea." His reaction was phony.

He lifted his hat with his left hand and began to polish the top of his head with his right palm. It was ludicrous. I didn't know whether to laugh at him or weep with him.

"I don't think she was ill at all, or had a temperature. The weather did it."

He blinked at me, still polishing his scalp. Futility and unease surrounded him like an odor. "It's never been that hot in Santa Teresa."

"Lucy came from Palm Springs last August 16. It was that hot in Palm Springs in the middle of August."

"She told me San Francisco," he said feebly.

"Maybe she did. If you talked to her at all. Which I doubt."

"You're calling me a liar?" His body stayed loose against the wall, unstiffened by anger or pride.

Somewhere upstairs, above our heads, there was a scraping sound, a small flurry of movement. Then he stiffened.