Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

So it wasn’t over after all. Well, it was what she deserved for going back on herself. In the end you got what you deserved.

“Do the police know?”

“I’m the only one that knows.”

She gathered all her courage together in her throat and said: “I have something to tell you, Bret.”

“I know you have.”

He sat motionless, watching her. She looked directly into his eyes and was unable to assess their meaning. They were bright and steady and hard, unsoftened by love or any kind of hope.

“Miles was blackmailing me,” she said with difficulty. “At first he threatened to go to the police. When I realized that he wouldn’t dare, and told him so, he said he would go to you, and I couldn’t let him do that. I’ve been paying him regularly for months. Tonight I saw it was no use. It had to stop. I went to him and told him I was finished. He tried to bluff me, and I did some threatening myself. I frightened him. It was easier than I expected it to be.”

“He must have been frightened to do what he did. He tried to shoot it out with the police. But they had a machine gun.”

“Were you with them?”

“I was with him in the motel. He tried to shoot me before they killed him. In spite of that I felt sorry for him when he died.”

“You needn’t have. He wasn’t worth it.”

“You did your best to protect him from me.”

“I was afraid that you would kill him.”

“Are you sorry he’s dead?”

“I’m glad he’s dead. But I’m gladder still that you didn’t kill him.”

“I tried to. I aimed the gun at his head and couldn’t pull the trigger. I didn’t know why I couldn’t. Perhaps I felt I didn’t have the right. I didn’t have the right, did I, Paula?”

She started visibly at the challenge in his question. She looked into his face again and understood the meaning of his eyes.

“You remember?” she whispered faintly.

“I think I have a pretty clear idea.”

The scene that flickered at the back of his mind was dimmer and more confused than his firm voice admitted. It was shadowy dark like an underexposed film, and all but erased by other pictures superimposed upon it. He saw himself in the scene, small and foreshortened and faceless like an unknown actor whose movements have been recorded by an overhead camera. The faceless man in blues, dwarfed by the high May night, went up the walk and into the white bungalow. Another man, half out of his clothes, ran across the unlighted living-room, through the kitchen, and out of the house. Lorraine was in the bedroom trying to cover her body. Darkness covered her body.

He knew what he had done, but he had no memory of the act. He drew his knowledge of it from the emotions that still poured along his nerves and stained his blood with their acid juices. Outraged self-righteousness and its hot and dangerous anger, the savage wish to inflict pain on the source of pain, the hopeless desire, which lay like an eyeless worm at the core of murder, to end an impossible situation by violence. The very violence that stretched it out forever.

Paula watched his eyes turn inward and lose their sight, fogged once more by the obscurity at the center of his life. He looked as if he had forgotten her completely, and it frightened her. Complete indifference, nothingness, was the one enemy she had no idea how to fight. Any kind of talking was better than this long blind silence, even the kind of talking she had to do. She invented the desperate hope that if she could join him there, link hands with him in his darkness, they might emerge together on the other side.

“You asked me to tell you,” she said.

“Yes?” He spoke almost absently, like a man just coming awake.

“I wasn’t with you when you found Lorraine.”

“I know. I remember.”

“Lorraine wasn’t dead when you found her.”

It was terribly hard to say. She could feel the sweat gathering in drops between her breasts and trickling down to her waist, leaving a cold trail. It was terribly hard, and why was it up to her? How did she come to inherit a job like this? But that was too easy to answer. She’d asked for it. Everything she’d done, she’d done because she wanted to. It was her baby, and she knew it.

She felt giddy and light when he took it away from her.

“I know I killed her. You needn’t temper the wind to me. But I don’t understand what happened. You must have known I killed her.”

“Yes,” she heard her voice replying from some corner of the room.

“And that was what Milne knew, that was why you were paying him?”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have put yourself in his hands.”

Her sense of herself came back from a great distance, and her voice came with it. “I did what I thought I had to do. After that it was too late to change anything. I had to go through with it.”

“I don’t understand why. Tell me what happened.” The part of his face she could see was rigidly controlled, and his firmness gave her courage to go on.

“I wasn’t there. I came when you telephoned. I only know what you told me over the phone and what Miles said afterwards. You told me that you were in dreadful trouble, that you’d found Lorraine with a man, and killed her. When I got to your house you were unconscious in the bedroom. Lorraine’s body was on the bed.”

“But you said you spoke to Miles. I thought he ran away.”

“He did. They saw you coming up the walk, and Lorraine knew you. Miles came to see me the next day. He’d read about me in the papers, and realized that I had some money and that I’d lied to the police. I’ve been paying him ever since.”

“I had to drag you into it, didn’t I?” His voice cracked and became raw with emotion. “I wasn’t content to make a filthy mess of my own life. I had to drag you into it.”

“You made me glad,” she said. “You called on me to help you when you were at the end of the rope, and it made me glad.”

Before the love and courage that shone from her tired face, he felt a terrible humility. Not the false and transient humility of wounded pride, but the humility a man who has lost and regretted his virtue feels in the presence of virtue.

“I’m not fit to live in the same world with you, Paula. This afternoon I even suspected that you and Miles were partners in some way.”

“I know you did. It’s no wonder you were suspicious of me. I lied to you, I lied to everyone. When the police came I told them the story that you and I had been for a drive, and that we were together when you found Lorraine’s body. Once I’d told that lie I couldn’t change my story or they’d have thought we conspired to murder. It’s strange, isn’t it? They never doubted my word.”

“No one should ever doubt your word.”

“That’s the hell of having an honest face,” she said. “If I’d been challenged I’d have had to tell the truth. Nobody challenged me. I know now I should have told them the truth anyway. Considering the circumstances, you might have been acquitted or given a short manslaughter sentence. But I waited until it was too late. Then I found out that you didn’t know yourself what you had done. I was afraid of what the truth might do to you. But I was wrong about that too. I did the wrong thing from start to finish.”

“No.”

He was so deeply moved that he couldn’t say anything more. Shame washed over him like waves of dirty water that left him foul and breathless. He was sick to death of himself, the self-deluded fool, proud and intolerant and hard of heart, who had projected his own guilt outward like a shadow that darkened everything it touched. Phrases from his childhood came back to him like fragments of a language he had almost forgotten, or was just beginning to learn. The mote that is in your brother’s eye … the beam that is in your own. Judge not lest ye be judged.