Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

Paula got rid of Mrs. Swanscutt as smoothly as she could, and backed her roadster down the driveway. At the last moment she ran back into the house to get the small .25 automatic she kept in the drawer beside her jewel case.

It was dark when Paula’s visitor came out of the house, but Bret was able to see in the light from the windows that Paula was not with her. The middle-aged woman got into her coupé and drove away alone. Bret had an impulse to follow her, if only to find out whether he should know her, but he decided not to. There was no reason to suppose that the woman had anything to do with the case or with him, and it was Paula he was following. He had a hunch that sooner or later Harry Milne would come to her or she would go to him.

The taxi driver woke up when the coupé went coughing by them. He stretched and rubbed his eyes. “Jeez! It’s dark already. We going to be here all night?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I go off at eight, bud. It’s past seven now.”

“I want you to stay on if you can. Here’s ten dollars on account.”

“Well, I guess it’ll be okay. But I got to call up the dispatcher.”

“Not now. Wait.”

A minute later, as if to verify his hunch, Paula’s roadster backed down the driveway and stopped beside the front porch. She got out and ran into the house again.

“Drive down to the corner,” he told the driver. “I want you to follow that roadster, but I don’t know which way she’ll turn.”

“Right.”

The taxi started up and rolled slowly past the house. Before they reached the corner the roadster backed out of the driveway and turned toward them. Bret took off his white hat and crouched down in the seat. The roadster, with Paula at the wheel, passed them at accelerating speed and turned at the corner toward the center of Hollywood.

“That’s the one. Don’t lose her.”

“I’ll do what I can,” the driver yelled over his shoulder. “This jalopy is no speed wagon.”

He kept the roadster in sight. It disappeared for a while in a traffic jam at Hollywood and Vine, but Bret caught a tail-end glimpse of it, and they gained on it again when it turned up the boulevard. After a mile or so it stopped at the curb, and Paula got out. They were in time to see her turn up the walk to the two-story stucco building with a red neon sign: “Mexicana Motel.”

“Park up the street ahead of her,” Bret said as he got out. “If she comes out before I do, watch which direction she goes.”

“Okay,” the driver said wearily.

Paula had avoided the door to the front office of the motel and had gone up a flight of open stairs on the left side of the building. As soon as she was out of sight Bret went after her. With his head on a level with the top step he saw her knocking at a door halfway down the balcony. The door opened, and for a moment he saw her profile clear in a shaft of yellow light. She went in, and the door closed.

Moving as silently as he could, Bret walked along the balcony, past a row of closed doors, to the one that had opened and closed. Enough light came into the courtyard to let him read the metal numbers on the door, “106.” There was a narrow window beside the door, but the blind was tightly drawn. Not even a human shadow appeared against the light, though he could hear the murmur of voices. He stood against the wall beside the window and strained his ears. There was a man’s voice yapping excitedly, and a woman’s softer tones. He knelt down and held his ear against the window. Undoubtedly the woman’s voice was Paula’s, but he could not be sure of the man’s.

The woman’s voice rose suddenly, and he heard a few words that made him sure.

“You’ll keep your mouth shut or I’ll kill you.…”

The man let out a mirthless hyena laugh.

Bret stood up and felt for the gun in his pocket. Then someone spoke softly behind him.

“Hold it, friend. We don’t want any trouble around here now.”

Bret whirled on a short egg-shaped man standing in his shirt sleeves behind him with his hands in his pockets. “Who are you?”

“I run this place, is all. And what in hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Be quiet,” Bret whispered tensely. Apart from the danger in the situation he couldn’t bear the idea of having Paula come out and find him here. He moved toward the man in shirt sleeves, who came with him in the direction of the stairs.

“I saw you follow her up here. Your wife?”

“That’s no concern of yours.”

“Oh, yes, it’s some concern of mine. You were all set to make trouble, weren’t you? Trouble is the one thing my business can’t stand.”

They paused at the foot of the stairs, and the little man’s face shone ruddily under the neon. It was a lined and drooping face, with thick black eyebrows that pressed down on the squinting black eyes as if by their own weight, a fleshy nose, heavy lips that stretched insensitively around a dead cigar. The total effect was ugliness and a kind of shrewd honesty.

“I can’t stand here,” Bret said. “She may come out any minute.”

“So what! I thought you wanted to see her.”

“Not her. The man.”

“Come in here.” He led Bret through a door marked “Office” and closed the Venetian blind over the front window. “What’s the deal, Lieutenant? You trying to catch them in flagrante delicto , like they say?”

“No, nothing like that. Who’s registered in 106?”

“That’s the kind of information I only give to the cops–”

“Hell, I’ll go and find out for myself!” He started for the door.

“Just a minute, just a minute. You want me to call the cops? I told you we can’t stand trouble here.”

Bret turned uncertainly at the door. “Who’s in 106?”

“A guy called Miles. Checked in this afternoon. You know him?”

“I know him. Sorry, but I’m going up there.”

The little man had been standing at the window peering out through the blind. “What’s the use?” he said now. “She just came down a minute ago and drove away.”

“God damn you!” Bret flung open the door to the street. Paula’s roadster was gone.

“You said you didn’t want to see her,” the little man said behind him. “I didn’t want you to, either. When you get a threesome with two sexes in it, it spells trouble. Trouble spells cops. Cops spell bad business.”

“Keep out of this. I’m going up to see Miles.”

“Maybe it’d be better if you didn’t. You’re feeling kind of overheated, aren’t you, Lieutenant? I told you we don’t want any trouble.”

“Give it a rest. You’ve got to expect trouble when you rent rooms to criminals.”

“A criminal because he laid your wife on you? Come on now, Lieutenant.”

“This isn’t a divorce case, you fool! This is murder!”

“What’s that!”

Bret slammed the door in his face. The little man sat down at his desk and pulled his cradle phone toward him. He relit his cigar stub and blew several smoke rings. After a brief period of contemplation he crushed out his cigar and, without having used it, pushed the telephone to the back of the desk.

He then took a key case out of his trousers pocket, selected a small steel key, used it to unlock the upper right-hand drawer of the desk, and removed from the drawer a gray steel revolver with full chambers, which he shoved into his right trousers pocket. Then he went quietly upstairs.

When Paula came down the steps from the motel balcony she noticed the yellow cab at the curb. It seemed to her that the driver’s eyes were watching her covertly from its shadowy interior. She kept it in her rear-view mirror as she drove away. The cab stayed where it was until she lost sight of it.