Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“I said I think it’s him, but I can’t swear to it. There’s no use dragging me into court, because I won’t swear to anything.”

“Forget about the law, can’t you? That man slugged you and killed my wife. Didn’t he?”

“It’s him all right,” Garth said reluctantly. “Only remember what I said if you drag me into court. I co-operated with you to the best of my ability–”

“Give it a rest. And lend me your gun.”

“What you want a gun for? You better call the cops and let them handle it. Give me a chance to pull out of here, and call the cops.”

“I didn’t ask you for advice. I asked for your gun.”

“You can’t have it. It’s a damn good gun, and I need it in my office.”

“You can buy another.”

“It’s not registered. It cost me fifty bucks. Give me one reason why I should hand you fifty bucks.”

“Here.” They had reached the corner in front of the drugstore. Bret stopped him and held out a fifty-dollar bill.

“It’s not registered, I told you. It’s not so easy to replace.”

“All the better for both of us.”

Garth took the money and looked at it. Then he swung past Bret in a half circle as calculated and neat as a veronica. Bret felt the sudden weight of metal in the pocket of his blouse, and almost as tangibly he felt a new respect for Garth. The little man had unsuspected talents.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, boy. You try to use that rod and you’ll burn your fingers for sure.”

“I don’t expect to use it. I want it for moral support.”

“Moral support for what? I still say call the cops. Give me five minutes to get out–”

“Maybe you’re right. I will.”

“Uh?”

Garth left him without a backward look or a good-bye and scurried across the road to his parked car. Bret stood on the corner, smiling grimly, until Garth’s yellow convertible had nosed out into the stream of traffic and merged with it. Then he went back to the apartment building he and Garth had just left. For reasons there was no time to examine, he had no intention of calling the police.

For the third time in an hour he knocked on the door. This time there was no answer. An entire minute ticked off in individual seconds while he listened and waited. He knocked again more loudly and was answered by another thirty seconds of silence. He knocked so hard that the thin panels reverberated under his knuckles like a drum. Once more he waited very briefly, and then his patience ended. Stepping back across the hallway, he ran against the door and burst it open with his shoulder.

The living-room contained nothing but the afternoon sunlight sluiced through the tilted slats of the Venetian blinds. He closed the door behind him and looked around the room. A row of nude photographs on the wall to his right: “To my old friend Larry …” “For Larry, who has what it takes …” A heavy armchair crouched in the corner beside a cabinet radio-phonograph and a table covered with piles of scrambled records. He looked behind the chair, behind the chesterfield, and went through the rest of the apartment: the kitchen, remarkably neat and clean; the windowless little bathroom, where he had been sick the night before; the bedroom with its two unmade beds, and nothing under them but rolls of fluffy dust; the closet full of clothes hanging in quiet ranks, with no man behind them. He had made one visit too many, and Milne had taken the hint.

Standing in the empty bedroom with Milne’s possessions all around him, in his nostrils the piny odor of some sort of masculine scent, he was overwhelmed by his nearness to the man who had killed Lorraine. He had spoken to him, been touched by him, slept in his room with him all night, even worn his clothes. He had been in intimate contact with a murderer and had seen in him nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing worse than cheapness and vulgarity, qualities that had seemed harmless enough in a person who was helping him out. The cheapness had been moral bankruptcy, and the vulgarity had been viciousness. He had accepted help from the hands that strangled Lorraine, and felt contaminated as this room had been contaminated by Milne’s use.

There was a photograph of Milne, very sleek and athletic in a sport shirt, in a leather frame on the dresser. He stared at the smiling face in cold anger and confusion, unable to understand why Milne had brought him home in the first place. Certainly humanitarianism wasn’t the reason. It was possible, as anything now seemed possible, that Milne had intended to kill him and had changed his mind. The intricacies of the brain that hid behind that smooth face and vain smile were completely mysterious to him.

Now was the time to call the police if he was ever going to call them. A runaway man could disappear in Los Angeles County for weeks or months, or forever. No one man, searching alone, could begin to cover the hotels and motels and apartments, the rooming houses, flophouses, call houses, where Milne might hole up. A perversion of chance had led him to Milne once, but he hadn’t the slightest hope that it would happen again. It was a job for the police, and even they might fail at it.

He started for the telephone in the living-room, wryly aware of the dramatic fitness of calling the police from the fugitive’s own apartment. Before he got to the telephone he realized that, drama or no drama, he couldn’t go through with it. He didn’t owe obedience to Paula, but he owed her some kind of loyalty. Her role in the case was too doubtful to permit him to bring in the police.

His mind balked when he tried to define that role, and understand her relation to the dead woman and to Harry Milne. He had always thought she was honest almost more honest than it was natural for a woman to be. Perhaps that was simply one of the illusions of love. The pain and doubt of the past day had eaten away some of his love for her, and he had come to feel that he knew her less. He could no longer follow the thoughts that moved behind her candid eyes. He knew that she had been disingenuous, if not deceitful, in urging him to think of the future, forget Lorraine, and drop the case. But the Medusa fact that stood between him and the telephone was worse than simple deceit. She and Harry Milne had met before. Because Paula had suppressed the truth, whatever it was, it followed that she was obscurely leagued with the murderer. He was afraid that if he looked further into that twisted fact and saw all its implications, it would turn him to stone.

He used the telephone to call a taxi, and went downstairs to wait for it at the curb. When the taxi arrived he gave the driver Paula’s address. As they crossed to Wilshire in a rapid chaos of traffic his mind went on working, half against his will. Paula was involved with Milne, perhaps in something connected with the murder; by suppressing her connection with Milne, she had been protecting him; in spite of her efforts Milne had been forced to run; there was a chance that he’d run to Paula for further protection.

They turned into her street, a typical Hollywood residential block of houses too elaborate and big for their lots, sentried along each curb by rows of palms like giant old men with ragged beards and their withered hair in their eyes. He saw Paula’s car in her driveway, and told the taxi driver to stop before they reached her house.

“2245 is on up the street,” the driver said.

“I know. Just stay here and I’ll pay you for the time.”

They parked across the street and a hundred yards short of Paula’s house, and settled down to wait. The driver stretched out diagonally in his seat with the exaggerated abandon of a man relaxing on the job. Bret leaned forward tensely with his elbows on his knees and watched the house.

After what seemed hours he looked at his watch. Ten minutes to six. No one had appeared on the glassed veranda or at any of the windows. No cars had come or gone. The declining sun made deep shadows between the houses, and the heat dropped out of the air as the shadows of the palm trees lengthened. The wide, low house where Paula lived seemed stable and peaceful in the amber light, washed clean and mellow by the gentle passage of time. A spray of water from the sprinkling system caught the horizontal rays and made a transient rainbow among the shrubbery on her lawn. Then the windows on the west side of the house burned ardently with borrowed light for the last few minutes before the sun went down. When the light withdrew, the windows were blank and dull like eyes that have lost their vision.