Ross MacDonald - Strangers in Town - Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

Carl loafed around the house for two years, alternately brooding and raging. Finally he became impossible to live with, and his father had him committed to the state hospital. A year later Carl came home, ate a Thanksgiving dinner, and strangled his father with the rope from the old man's bathrobe. Now Mildred was afraid it was Jerry's turn.

I shifted my eyes from the road to look at her. Huddled in the corner of the seat, she seemed thinner and smaller and older than she had.

"Aren't you afraid of what he'll do to you?"

"No," she said, "I'm not. He's never tried to hurt me, never laid a hand on me. Sometimes I've almost wished he would, and put an end to it. What does my life amount to, after all? I can't even have a child. What have I got to lose?"

"You're a loyal girl, to stick to him."

"Am I? My people don't believe in divorce."

"And you don't either?"

"I don't believe in anything any more. Good or bad."

She turned her face away, and we drove in silence for another hour. The spring color of the hills was like Paris green. Gradually the hills slipped back into hazy distance. The highway ran smooth and straight across the citrus flatlands. Geometrically planted lemon trees stretched out like deep green corduroy around us. At her direction, I left the highway and turned up a county road.

A weatherwarped sign, Jeremiah Heller Lemons , marked the entrance to a private lane. It led us through nearly a mile of lemon groves spotted with yellowing fruit. At its end a tile-roofed ranch house sprawled in the sun. When I switched off my engine, the silence was almost absolute.

The house was an old adobe which must have stood for several generations. Each new generation had added a wing of its own. A station wagon and a dusty jeep were parked on the gravel in front of the garages.

The silence was broken by a screen door's percussion. Mildred jumped in her seat. She was strung as taut as a fiddlestring.

A striking blonde came out on the verandah and stood with her arms folded over her breasts, watching us as we got out of the car. She wore black satin slacks, a white silk shirt, and green enamel earrings in the middle of the day. Her eyes were the color and texture of the earrings.

"Why Mildred. What brings you here? Long time no see. I thought you had a job in Los Angeles, darling. Or did you lose that one, too?"

"I took the day off."

"Well, that's nice, isn't it? Who's the boyfriend?"

"Mr. Archer isn't my boyfriend."

"No? Don't tell me you're still burning a vestal candle for Carl. Isn't that one pretty much of a forlorn hope?"

"Please, Zinnia. Don't." Mildred moved slowly up the verandah steps, as if she had to force herself to approach the blonde woman or enter the area of the house. "I came to tell you about Carl."

"How fascinating. Let's get out of this bloody sun, then, shall we? It plays hell with my complexion."

Her voice was low and dry and monotonous, the voice of a vicious boredom. It affected me like a rattlesnake's buzzing signal. We followed her switching hips into a cavernous living room walled with adobe, roofed with black oak beams. The breeze from a cooling system chilled me, or perhaps it was the blonde. She said:

"What's your poison, Mr. Archer? I've been trying to think of an excuse to have a drink, anyway. I'm Zinnia Heller, by the way, since Milly has forgotten her manners as usual."

I mislaid mine, deliberately. "I'd go easy on her, Mrs. Heller. She came to warn you—"

She turned to Mildred, her thin plucked eyebrows arching. "To warn me, dear? Aren't we getting a little melodramatic?"

"Carl has escaped," the younger woman said. "He hitchhiked to Los Angeles last night and turned up this morning at the office where I work."

"Escaped from Mendocino?"

"Yes. And he's violent, Zinnia. He made some wild threats against Jerry."

"You called the police, I hope." The blonde's low buzzing voice had risen at least an octave.

"Not yet. Mr. Archer here is a private detective. Carl attacked him this morning."

"And you think he's coming here?"

"I know he is. He's always believed that Jerry railroaded him."

"You thought so yourself at one time, if memory serves me."

"I never did, Zinnia, and you know it. All I ever claimed was that I had a right to some of the money, no matter what Carl did."

"Well, the law disagreed." Zinnia went to a bar in the corner of the room, poured herself a stiff brown drink from a cut-glass decanter, and gulped it straight. "Speaking of the law, I'd better call Ostervelt about this. Wasn't that the idea?"

"Yes. Of course. The Sheriff knows Carl. He won't hurt him unless he absolutely has to."

Zinnia picked up a portable telephone and sat down with it in her gleaming satin lap. Her sharp red fingertip hesitated in the dial hole. "You're sure all this is true, what you've been telling me? Carl really did escape? You're not just trying to throw a scare into me, for old time's sake?"

I said: "I saw your brother-in-law, Mrs. Heller. He's disturbed, and he's got a gun. You'd better tell the Sheriff about the gun. And your husband should be warned."

"Will do." She had recovered her composure. She talked to the duty deputy like a brigadier giving orders to a lieutenant colonel. I was once a lieutenant colonel, and I knew.

"Where is your husband?" I said when she put down the phone.

"Somewhere around the place. He putters. Do all men putter, Mr. Archer? Do you putter?"

I let the curve go by. "We ought to find him and tell him about his brother."

"It shouldn't be hard to find him. Jerry never goes anywhere. Coming, Milly?"

"I don't feel very well." The girl looked badly wilted from the strain. Her dark head drooped on the white stalk of her neck.

"Will you be all right here?" I said.

"Of course I will. I'll keep a lookout for Carl."

"He won't be here for a while, unless he has a car."

"He may have, though. He may have stolen one. I think he drove away from Dr. Grantland's."

"Did you see him?"

"No. But I heard an engine start up just after he ran out."

"That's bad."

"Nothing good ever happens," Zinnia said. "Not to this precious family, anyway."

She put on a wide-brimmed Mexican straw hat, and we went out into the sun. It struck me like a slap across the eyes.

She led me around the side of the adobe. "Jerry's probably in his greenhouse. Flowers, he grows. Cymbidiums. He's got a green thumb that goes all the way up to his armpit. Well, I suppose everybody's got to be good at something."

In the narrow breezeway between the house and the garages, she suddenly turned to face me. Under the white shirt, her breasts were sharp and aggressive. "What are you good at, Mr. Archer?"

"Investigation."

"What kind of investigation?" Her intent hot face gave the question a double meaning.

I assumed both meanings. "I gather evidence in divorce cases, for example."

"Do you ever provide that kind of evidence personally?"

"Not when I'm conscious," I said. "I'm conscious now, in case it doesn't show."

"Oh but it does. What a pity. You're kind of cute in an ugly way, you know."

"You can have that compliment back if you want it, in spades."

That didn't faze her. She said: "Why don't you come back some time, minus bleeding-heart Milly? I still owe you a drink."

"I like to buy my own drinks."

"Oh? Are you loaded? I am."

"You're very flattering, Mrs. Heller." I wouldn't have touched the body coiled in my path with a forked stick, but it wouldn't have been tactful to say so. "What about Mr. Heller?"

"What about him? Don't ask me." She shrugged her shoulders. "Ask his damn cymbidiums. They know him better than I do."

"I don't know the language of the flowers, and we're wasting time."