Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

He set down the glasses and approached her from behind, looking out through the casement over her broad padded shoulder. She was watching the darkness intently. The walled grounds of the hotel were as quiet and dark as a countryside. The only sound came from a distant bungalow where a radio faintly chided the silence.

With her high heels she was an inch or two taller than he. When they were standing it was hard for him to preserve the patriarchal attitude of his profession. Since he had left his clinic and his professorship and migrated to a strange country, he had found himself dangerously willing at times to slip into a relationship of dependence on such women. He gripped his thick, dark beard with his right hand and thought earnestly of himself as a somewhat priestlike figure, superior to human weaknesses, even his own – a man with weaned affections, as the American Pilgrims said.

Then she turned to him, and he saw the terror in her face.

“What is troubling you, Miss West?”

Her voice was shallow and quick, but her whole body labored to produce it. “I thought I saw somebody outside looking in the window.”

“But who?”

“I don’t know. Nobody I knew. I only saw two eyes, or thought I saw them.”

“It must have been imaginary. The gates of the pueblo are locked at eight, and anyone who comes in must pass the desk. I have never been troubled by window peepers.”

She laughed uncertainly. “Neither have I until lately. But the last few months I’ve thought there’s been someone following me. Even in my own house I don’t feel safe.”

“It’s an unsettling experience even if it is not actual.”

“Have you had that feeling, Doctor? The sense of being followed, being watched by malignant eyes?”

She noticed the full highball glass standing on the coffee table, crossed to it, and drank greedily.

Dr. Klifter looked around the heavily furnished, anonymous room. For two years he had occupied the same bungalow in the walled grounds of this pueblo hotel, but he still considered himself a transient. He had hung no pictures, bought no furniture, planted no seeds in the flower beds. The scented stock and early daffodils bloomed around his house, but they did not seem to bloom for him. He felt that his only rights were squatter’s rights. His trunk was in the closet waiting to be packed. At worst – at very worst – he had traveler’s checks and a volume of Rilke’s poems always in his pockets, and was ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

“Whenever I leave a doorway,” he said, “I look both ways. When I turn a corner I look up and down the street. I know that there is no Gestapo in America, but I have my own Gestapo in my mind. Eventually I hope it may be disbanded. Still my neck is stiff from looking over my shoulder.”

“You seem pretty sure that my fears are imaginary.” The drink had restored some of the color to her cheeks.

“The things you see, the eyes, and the people that follow you, are almost certainly imaginary. The fears themselves are real. We are all pursued by fears from birth to death, from the fear of being born to the fear of dying. There is no one who has not seen those eyes in the night. I mentioned my own peculiarly Jewish fear as an example.”

“You’re very kind,” she said.

“On the contrary, I am very cruel.” He motioned her into a chair and sat down facing her. “But I like to think that mine is the cruelty of a surgeon who amputates in order to save a life. You have been courageous to tell me so much about this murder, and without evasion. Will you tell me one thing more?”

“I will if I can.”

“It has occurred to me – I shall be quite as frank with you as you have been with me – that Mr. Taylor’s amnesia was, and is, the evasive action of a depleted ego in the face of a guilt that it could not bear. You were with him on that night, and you should be able to clear up that possibility for me.”

“Are you asking me whether Bret killed his wife?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t. I know he didn’t, but you don’t have to take my word for it. The police surgeon established that she was killed at about ten thirty, and at that time Bret and I were halfway to Malibu. There was other evidence corroborating the medical testimony. The woman next door heard a scream from the house at that time.”

“Was anyone seen to leave?”

“The woman didn’t look. She thought the scream was a radio sound effect at the time. Nobody else heard or saw anything till Bret and I found her body.”

“The thing is still very vivid to you after nine months.”

“Could it help being? I kept the newspaper clippings on the case too. I have them here if you want them.”

She rummaged in her bag and produced a wad of clippings held together with paper clips. Unfolding the top layer, she spread it out on the coffee table in front of him. “These are the worst in a way, but the Examiner had the most complete coverage.”

The doctor glanced rapidly down the columns of print:

There were dark marks of discoloration on her neck, and the face of the dead girl was suffused with blood, according to Dr. Lambert Sims, Assistant Medical Examiner. Dr. Sims quickly established that the young wife had been strangled to death, and criminally attacked as well, scarcely more than half an hour before the receipt of the telephone call from Mrs. Pangborn.

There was ample evidence that a strange man had been present in the room, and the police theory is that the murderer accompanied his victim to her house. None of the other residents of the quiet residential street saw him arrive, or leave after his bloody business was completed. Mrs. Marguerite Schultz, next-door neighbor of the murdered woman, stated at the inquest that she heard a faint scream from the house of death at approximately 10:30 on the night of the murder. Mrs. Schultz testified that she thought nothing of it at the time, attributing it to a crime radio program, but it helped to corroborate the findings of the medical examiner and fix the time of death.

The most sinister and revealing clue was a series of spots of blood on the porch and sidewalk of the murder bungalow. Dr. Sims has been able to establish that these stains were fresh human blood of a different blood-type from that of any of the known principals in the case. But the man who shed that blood, presumed by the police to be the killer, has not yet been apprehended.

Lieutenant Samuel Warren of the Homicide Squad of the Los Angeles police, who is in charge of the case, attaches great importance, also, to a set of fingerprints, evidently those of a man, which were found in the room of horror. These “prints,” taken from the surface of the bedside table beside the murder bed, indicate, according to Lieutenant Warren, that the killer leaned upon it in the commission of his foul deed. Eventually, Lieutenant Warren believes, the killer will make the inevitable slip and fall into the clutches of the law. When he does, his fingerprints will be waiting in the police files to convict him.

Dr. Klifter laid down the clipping and drew a long breath. “It is rather hideous, is it not?”

“That’s one of the things that reconciles me to Bret’s loss of memory. He doesn’t have to remember these things. He doesn’t even know that his name was in the headlines.”

“You’ve told him nothing?”

“Not I. And fortunately Commander Wright agrees with me. I couldn’t bring myself to show him these.” She made a gesture of repugnance toward the clippings on the table. “You keep them if you wish. I don’t know why I’ve held on to them so long.”

“Thank you. I may have a use for them.”

“What use?”

He answered her indirectly: “I’m not sure that the Commander is right–”