Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

Rollins snarled in frustrated rodent fury: “That’s not what you told me. You promised me a hundred.”

“You’ll get the rest after I see Garth. I told you you can trust me.”

“Trust you?” Rollins laughed hollowly. “You promised me a hundred and slip me a measly forty.”

“Calm down, or I’ll take the forty away from you and hold it in trust for you.” He stood up, casting a wide shadow across Rollins’s side of the booth. “Where can I find Burton Garth?”

“How do I know I’ll ever see you again?” Rollins muttered, half to himself.

“I said be quiet about that. Where is Garth?”

“He runs the Cockalorum over in Glendale. He’s probably there now. You could give me your address, couldn’t you?”

“I have no address,” Bret said on his way out.

Normally he wouldn’t have considered himself able to afford a taxi to Glendale, but money was one of a number of things he no longer cared about. He had between four and five hundred dollars in his pocket, with another couple of thousand in the bank, and he was convinced it was enough to see him through to whatever end he was blindly aiming for. Time was the only currency he was afraid to spend, for he felt that he had very little of that.

He spent the half-hour to Glendale leaning forward in his seat, as if to communicate some of his momentum to the cab. His need to be sure of something, combined with his unwillingness to face days or weeks of waiting and hunting down blind trails, had already half convinced him that Burton Garth was the man who had killed Lorraine.

The Cockalorum was half a block off East Broadway in the center of Glendale, a bar with a shiny new front of black-and-orange plastic. He told the taxi driver to wait.

Yes, Mr. Garth was in, said the soft-voiced young man behind the bar. He was in his office at the back. Just a minute and he’d call him.

“I’d like to talk to him in his office.”

“Just as you say, sir. It’s the last door on the right, the one beside the little girls’ room.”

The door of the office was partly open, and Bret knocked and stepped in. Garth was sitting behind a new steel desk that took up nearly half the floor space of the tiny cubicle. He was a bald-headed man in his forties, with a fleshy chin and neck that emphasized the sharpness of his nose and the smallness of his eyes. His sport coat was expensive and loud, matching the hysterical shrillness of his hand-painted sunset tie. Among drunks, morons, shills, prostitutes, and thieves, he might have passed for a man of distinction, so long as he had plenty of money in his pocket and spent it heavily. Bret hated him on sight, but that didn’t mean anything. The man looked much too cautious and sly to commit a passionate crime.

“And what can I do for you, sir?” Garth said in a husky tenor.

“It’s quite a story.”

“Well, I’m pretty busy just now. If you’ll just tell me what it is you want, Mr.–?”

“My name is Taylor. Lorraine Taylor was my wife.”

“I don’t know the lady. Should I?” His eyes shifted nervously, spoiling the effect of his smile.

Like all obvious bluffers Garth looked like a good subject for bluff. “I think you do,” Bret said. “You were seen on the street with her the night that she was murdered.”

“There must be some mistake.” His voice was loud and firm, but he leaned across the desk and pushed the door shut. Bret felt a wave of mingled claustrophobia and loathing pass through his body. Had he come to the end already, shut up in a windowless cell with an aging tenor in a hand-painted tie?

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Taylor? I can’t imagine what you’re talking about, but I’d like to help you if I can. You say your wife was murdered?” He clicked his tongue irritatingly.

“On the night of May 23 last, at approximately ten thirty. You were seen with her a short time before that. Do you deny it?”

“Of course I deny it.” But he wasn’t so angry and outraged as he should have been. “Look here, Mr. Taylor, just what are you trying to pull? Is this a joke?”

“It’s not the sort of thing I make jokes about. And you don’t seem particularly amused.”

“Naturally I don’t think it’s funny when somebody comes in out of a blue sky and accuses me of being mixed up in a murder.” His face groped for a smile but was frustrated again by his little, frightened eyes. “I don’t even remember what I was doing on May 23.”

“Yes you do. You were in the Golden Sunset Café that night. You asked my wife to let you take her home, and she refused. When she left, you followed her out and offered her a ride in your car.”

“Somebody’s been shooting you a line, Taylor, telling you wild stories about me. Who’s been doing that?”

“You’ll meet them in court,” Bret said with sober emphasis. So far the man had made no slip, not verbally at least, but he was almost certain now that Garth was hiding something. “I want you to come to the police with me and have your fingerprints compared with the fingerprints that were left in my house.”

“Go to hell!” Garth cried, in a voice that was as much a yelp as a bark.

“If you won’t go to them, they can come here.”

The anger that swelled Garth’s face fizzled out like air from a leaking balloon. “Good God, man, you can’t do that! I got a wife and kids. I just started up a legitimate business here. You can’t bring the cops in on me like that for no reason.”

“I had a wife too. Were you with her when she died?”

“No, I wasn’t! Will you for God’s sake sit down and listen to me, Mr. Taylor? You can’t do this to me. I never wished any harm to you or your wife either. Will you sit down and let me tell you why you can’t bring the cops in on this? I made a lot of enemies when I dropped out of the racket, and there’s nothing they’d like better than to see me railroaded to the pen.”

“I’m not interested in your prospects. I’m interested in the truth.”

“The truth is what I’m telling you, Mr. Taylor.” His smooth brown pate was glistening like melting ice.

“You haven’t told me anything yet.”

“I’m an innocent man. You’ve got to see that. I wouldn’t commit a crime like that, Mr. Taylor. I’ve got a daughter of my own almost as old as she was.”

Bret leaned heavily across the desk and looked down into the upturned face. “You said you didn’t know her.”

“I knew her. Sure I knew her. I gave her a lift home that night. That doesn’t make me a murderer, does it, if I gave a girl a lift home? You’re a reasonable man, Mr. Taylor. I wouldn’t be telling you this if I was guilty, would I? I’m as innocent as you are. Why don’t you sit down?”

Bret sat down in the room’s other chair, his knees squeezed uncomfortably against the end of the desk. Garth took a white silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his sweating face. “It’s hot in here,” he said hoarsely.

“I’m getting tired of waiting.”

“Yeah, sure. I’m not trying to stall you, Mr. Taylor.” He began to tell his story immediately, as if Bret had turned a dial. “I had no idea that the young lady was married, you’ve got to remember that. She was just a pretty girl I saw once or twice in the Golden Sunset Café, and I happened to get interested in her, in a perfectly innocent way. I was lonely – my wife and I aren’t too happy together, Mr. Taylor – and she looked as if she was, and I thought it would be nice if we could kind of get together. Companionship is all I had in mind, I’ll swear to that.”

“You’ll be swearing to all of this. Go on.”

“It’s quite true what you said, I was in the Golden Sunset on the night of May 23, and I happened to see her there. Frankly speaking, she was a little the worse for drink, and I became a little alarmed for her. The Golden Sunset is not a first-class restaurant, and some of its customers are unscrupulous, to say the least. Well, to make a long story short, I offered to take her home in my car. Being a married woman – only she didn’t tell me that – she quite naturally refused, and naturally I bowed myself out. It would’ve been better for me if I’d forgotten the whole thing right then and there, but I couldn’t, Mr. Taylor. I was worried about her and kept my eye on her. I told you I have a daughter of my own, going on eighteen. Mrs. Taylor couldn’t have been much older–”