Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“Yeah, that’s right. It was about–”

Bret interrupted him: “Let the doctor remember for himself.”

The doctor looked from one to the other through thick spectacles that made his brown eyes seem frog-like and suspicious. “You haven’t been having trouble with your eye, Mr.–?”

“Garth. Burton Garth. No trouble at all, doc. My own doctor, that’s Clark over in Glendale, came to look at it a couple of times, and he took out the stitches–”

The doctor cut him short. “If there’s nothing more, Mr. Garf, I have patients waiting.”

“There is something more,” Bret said. “A crime was committed at a certain time last May 23. Garth claims he was in your office at that time.”

The doctor took off his glasses and revealed his little, tired, old eyes. “You from the police?”

“I’m investigating the matter privately. If you can check the time Garth was here?”

“Don’t you remember when I came here, doc? You couldn’t forget that. I had blood all over my shirt.”

“I remember you all right. I was just going to bed. Let me see, it must have been around ten o’clock at night.”

“Would you swear to it?” Bret said.

“I believe I would. Yes, I would. It was about ten o’clock.”

“And the date?”

The doctor turned up the palms of his thick hands in a helpless gesture. “I hardly ever know what day of the week it is. But you can check my records.” He raised his voice and called: “Miss Davis.”

A young nurse came in by the rear door. “Yes, doctor?”

“Remember the night I called you back to help with this gentleman’s eye? Mr. Garth, is it?”

“Do you remember what time the doctor called you?” Bret asked her.

She turned up her eyes to the ceiling and stood still for a long moment. “Yeah,” she said at length. “It was a little after ten, maybe ten after. I paid special attention to the time because it was so late.”

“Check the date in the files, Miss Davis. These gentlemen will be in the waiting-room.” The doctor waved away their thanks and pressed a buzzer under the desk.

A few minutes later Miss Davis brought them a filing card that fixed May 23 as the date of Mr. Garth’s visit.

“Well, that’s that,” Garth said as they left the house. With the pressure of fear removed, his personality was already beginning to expand obnoxiously. “Maybe next time you won’t be in so much of a hurry to accuse innocent parties.”

“You’re lucky,” Bret said grimly. He was angered and humiliated by the fact that this corpulent little rat had picked up his wife on the street, even though it appeared that Garth had done no more than that. Garth was the kind of civilian that all servicemen hated, the man who stayed behind and made his pile out of the war; too old or sick to fight, but not too old or sick to pursue women and cuckold their absent husbands. But in this case Garth himself had been a victim. Bret’s mind shifted to the vague man who had knocked Garth down the steps.

“Can you tell me anything more about this man? Did she call him a name or anything like that?”

Garth turned and faced him beside the waiting taxi. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I told you as much as I know. He was big and good looking and he had on pretty snappy clothes. Sport clothes, I guess you’d call them. I think he had light-colored hair, but it’s hard to tell at night. Look here, Mr. Taylor, I got to get back to my business.”

“Go ahead. I know where to find you if I want you.”

Over his shoulder Garth gave him a last worried look. Then his tweedy, fat body was swallowed up by the taxi and trundled away. Bret stood on the curb for a moment to get his bearings, and then turned back on foot in the direction of Caesar Street.

A middle-aged woman was sitting on the porch of the white bungalow, looking very much as if she belonged there. He looked at the number again to make sure that it was his. 1233 Caesar Street; he’d addressed too many letters there to be mistaken. But the house evoked no image or sense of place. Even his knowledge that Lorraine had been murdered here and that he had found her body, while it hung upon his mind like a clock weight and had motivated all his actions during the past day and night, seemed wholly external to him, as unassimilable as the strange woman on the porch of his empty house.

He turned up the walk, and she rose to meet him, a heavy woman with a tired face framed by short, graying hair. An ill-fitting blue flowered cotton dress was wrinkled over her body, which time and gravity had conspired to ruin.

“Hello,” she said. “If you’re selling, there’s nothing I want to buy, unless it’s nylons, that is.” She looked down at her thick, naked legs. “Haven’t had no stockings for six months, that’s how my legs got so chapped, I always did have a delicate skin.”

“I’m not selling anything. My name’s Taylor–”

“You don’t say!” Her slack face tightened in pleased surprise. “Don’t tell me you’re Lieutenant Taylor?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I declare! I thought you was–” She dropped the end of the sentence like a hot potato and raised her voice to a shout. “Pa, come and see who’s here. We got a visitor, you’d never guess.” She winked at Bret and whispered hoarsely: “Don’t tell him who you are. Let him guess. He’ll be surprised.” She added to herself, or to the world in general: “Lord knows he needed something to sober him up!”

“I’m a little surprised myself,” Bret said stiffly. “I thought my house was empty.”

“You mean to say Miss West didn’t tell you? I knew she didn’t want to bother you when you was sick, but now you’re all better again, it’s funny she didn’t tell you. She was here a little while ago too. Anyway, if you ask me for my opinion, and I don’t care if you knew about it or not, it was real nice of you to let us stay here like this.”

“Not at all.” It was grotesque and incredible, but he was beginning to suspect that this woman was Lorraine’s mother. Lorraine had told him in San Francisco that her family was in Michigan, but she had evaded detailed questions about them. He’d guessed that she was ashamed of them, and he hadn’t inquired too closely into the story of her father’s being one of Henry Ford’s right-hand men and he could get her a very good secretarial job any day, only she’d rather make her own way in life and have her freedom.

The woman let her tongue run on with the unselfconsciousness of the poor, the people who have nothing to lose. “I hope you’re not thinking about moving in here yourself right away? Pa hasn’t found a job yet, and the way he’s been hitting the bottle since Lorraine passed away, the good Lord knows when he’s ever going to – Pa!” she cried again. “You gone to sleep in there?”

A man’s voice grumbled and whined inside the house, and two feet stamped heavily on the floor.

“He was asleep,” she said. “I never saw a man that could sleep as much as Joe Berker. He was on the graveyard shift the last year at Willow Run, and it got him in the habit of sleeping in the daytime. Now he sleeps at night besides. I told him more than once he ought to get himself examined for sleeping sickness, but I was only kidding. It’s probably just that wine he drinks all the time. He calls it vino since we came out here. You’d think he was a dago or something–”

Her voice ran down like an unwound phonograph when she perceived that Bret was no longer listening. The name “Berker” had confirmed his guess that this woman was his mother-in-law, and the knowledge filled him with an ugly sorrow. So this was the family he had married into; this gross and aging hag was the substitute he had acquired for the beautiful dead mother of his childhood. Then he became aware of the woman’s worried eyes watching his stony face. The awareness was like a dash of cold water. Snap out of it, you fool! He told himself. Byronic melancholy was the opium of the intellectuals and the last refuge of little minds. Snap out of it and act like a man!