Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“Wouldn’t want them to think I was born that way,” Berker said moodily. “I stuck it in a little hole in the corn cutter, and whish! I’d of been more careful if I’d knew how hard it was to get a job with a finger missing. I don’t suppose you got any job worries though. That fiancée of yours looks pretty well heeled if I ever saw one–”

“Be quiet, Joe,” his wife said sharply. “Where’s your manners?”

“You want a slug of vino ?” Berker asked, by way of remembering his manners. “I got a half-gallon jug, and it’s only half killed.”

“No, thanks. Did you say Paula was here?”

“Yeah, a couple of hours ago,” Mrs. Berker said. “She was looking for you. She was even talking about putting an ad in the papers, but I told her it wasn’t anything to get so worked up about. Joe here used to drop out of sight for a month at a time when he was your age, and then he’d turn up like a bad penny as dapper as you please.”

“Do you have a phone?” He resented Paula’s persistent interference, but if she was worried about him he’d have to get in touch with her.

Berker grinned sheepishly. “We got a phone, only it’s disconnected. We don’t know nobody in this burg anyhow, so it don’t make no difference. Why in hell we ever drove across the country to come and live in a burg where I don’t know nobody and can’t even get a job–”

“You be quiet,” his wife snapped. “If you got no job, you know whose fault it is, and you wouldn’t want your eldest daughter lying dead with nobody to tend her grave. Besides, Ellie’s making some real nice friends in the store, which is more than you can say for the trash she knew in that trailer camp. Ellie’s our other daughter,” she explained parenthetically to Bret. “You’d like her. If we was still in Michigan, you know as well as I do, Joe Berker, Ellie wouldn’t of stayed with us any more than Lorraine.”

“Good riddance, then.”

“That’s a fine way to talk. You want the lieutenant to think we ain’t good parents to our children? Where would we be now if it wasn’t for Ellie? Answer me that.”

“Go to hell!” He went in and slammed the door behind him. His diminishing voice complained as he retreated: “I made better money in my life than any snip of a girl–”

“Don’t pay no attention to him,” the woman said. “He hasn’t been the same since Lorraine – and then they closed down the plant. He’s worried about Ellie, thinks she’s getting fast ideas from the girls at the five-and-ten. He was worried about Lorraine the same way after she ran away to Hollywood. I told him a girl as pretty and bright as Lorraine was sure to land on her feet and maybe even make a success in pictures, but he always said she’d be ruined. It certainly turned the tables on him when she sent us the letter as cool as you please that she was married to a full lieutenant in the Navy. I hope you’ll get a chance to meet Ellie some day soon. I don’t think she’s quite as pretty as Lorraine, but a lot of people do. She’s a blonde, taking after Joe’s mother, and her hair is naturally wavy. She never had a permanent in her life.”

Bret’s sympathy had receded in spite of his efforts, and left his original stony contempt. “I have to be going,” he said brusquely. Wasn’t one of your daughters enough for me? Keep your Ellie with the naturally wavy hair, and keep the house and the furniture and the memories in it.

“Goodness gracious,” she said, “why don’t you sit down and relax for a bit? Don’t let Joe put you off like that; he don’t mean anything. We haven’t even had a real visit yet, and I know you want to see Lorraine’s pictures. She was the cutest kid you ever saw when she was little. Did she ever tell you she had red hair when she was a toddler? I got a lock of it in the trunk.”

On the point of departure he was struck by the full realization that these were the steps where Garth had been attacked, that was the door from which the murderer had come. Perhaps Lorraine had known the man for years, perhaps her mother knew him. Mrs. Berker was standing at the door holding it open, waiting uncertainly for some encouragement from him to fetch her mementos of Lorraine. Gradually her arm relaxed and let the door swing shut.

“I’m looking for a man Lorraine knew. He may have had something to do with her murder.”

“Now who would that be?” The whimpering question ended in a high-pitched sob, and a devil-mark grimace slid over her face and curled its sagging lines. “It was a terrible thing – a terrible thing to happen to my little girl.” The word “murder” had swept away her defenses, leaving nothing, no childhood snapshots or locks of hair, between her and the fact. She stood blinking like someone staring into a blinding light.

“I don’t know his name. I haven’t even a good description of him.”

“Somebody in Michigan? She had a lot of friends in Michigan, but most of the fellows she knew at Dearborn High were real nice boys. They wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

“Did she know a big man with light hair? He probably had some money, he wore good clothes. About my size, I think, and he liked fighting. It’s possible his hair wasn’t blond.”

“It couldn’t be Sammy Luger? He was a big blond boy she went out with, and he had good clothes. Only I heard when we left Michigan he was still in the army. He was a sergeant in Berlin.”

“Then it couldn’t be Sammy Luger, could it?” He instantly regretted the savage irony of his tone and softened it. “Do you know of anyone else who fits the description?”

“She knew lots of big men, but she never ran around with the brawling kind. She was with a nice high-class crowd at Dearborn High. When she was in her junior year they elected her the most popular girl in the class. I guess it went to her head, sort of. She was doing real good in her studies but she quit before she finished up the year. She should have stayed with her ma and pa,” she lamented, “and then this wouldn’t of happened. It wasn’t anybody she knew that did it. It was one of these Los Angeles sex maniacs, a Mexican or a nigger. They’ll do anything to get a white girl. Many’s the time I’ve thought it’d been better for her if she’d grew up as ugly as a witch.”

Her sobs became more frequent, the rhythmic peaks of sound in a ululation that included fragments of sentences in its pattern: “… a good girl … nobody she knew … kill the dirty animals … killed my girl.”

Bret opened the door with his left hand and with his right arm around her heaving shoulders, propelled her into the house. The front door opened directly into the living-room. Berker was on his back, emitting strangulated snores, on the beaten chesterfield at the far end of the room. Beside him on the newspaper-covered floor a green glass jug stood open. The patches of floor that were visible between the dirty newspapers had lost their hardwood finish and were acquiring a patina of grease and grime. There were several teacups full of cigarette butts on the cracked glass tray of the coffee table, but most of the ashes and butts of recent months were piled in the disused fireplace, from which they had gradually spread like volcanic ash across the room. There was a tangle of peach-colored woman’s underwear on the radio, and in the opposite corner a lint-covered mop was leaning. The armchair beside the door, ripped as if by a butcher knife, was spilling its cotton guts into its lap.

Mrs. Berker sat down heavily. Her sobbing continued, unconsciously synchronized with her husband’s snores.

“I’m sorry,” Bret said to her bowed head, “for everything.”

He ran through the door and away from the house.