Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

“I’ll write you a letter when I have the time. Surely you remember something of what he said?”

“I remember I didn’t like it. If you want my subjective opinion, it crossed my mind at the time that he was trying to find an angle, a blackmailing angle.”

“To blackmail you?”

“Certainly not.” He laughed, faintly and hollowly. “As near as I can recall, he wanted me, as Helen Johnson’s lawyer, to persuade her to employ him as an investigator. He said he was sure he could discover the identity of Miner’s hit-run victim, and that Mrs. Johnson might be interested.”

“Was she?”

“I didn’t discuss it with her. She had enough on her mind. One thing a lawyer can do is try to protect his clients against unsavory characters.”

I switched off the tape recorder. As its whirring died, an uneasy silence filled the room. “This protection service you give, could it include the use of an icepick, Seifel?”

He jumped in his chair. “Are you insane?”

“I’m asking the questions. Did you follow up the matter and find out that he knew something dangerous about Mrs. Johnson?”

“You are insane,” he said. “I saw the man once, just once. I’ve volunteered my information–”

“Under considerable pressure.”

He pulled at the button-down collar of his shirt. “You’ve got me all wrong. You’ve got Mrs. Johnson all wrong. I tell you, Helen Johnson could no more have any connection with a man like that–” Seifel ran out of words. He stood up, his straightening legs pushing back the chair. “You can go to hell.”

I got up, too. “Relax. You know as well as I do that questions have to be asked, if you want answers.” I felt the faint beginnings of liking for Seifel. When he forgot himself, he had moderately decent instincts. I spoke to them: “If we don’t solve this, Helen stands to lose most.”

He pulled his hand down one side of his face in a weary gesture. “Ask me anything you like. I have nothing to hide. Neither has she. You don’t know Helen Johnson.”

“I have nothing against her.” It was an understatement. “If you suspected attempted blackmail, why did you shake hands with the man? Tell him you’d look him up if you needed his help?”

“Annie’s got you well primed, eh?”

“Leave Ann out of it. Answer the question.”

“You’re a darned unpleasant character to talk to, but I will. It’s a way I have of dealing with people, I don’t say it’s a good way, but it’s sort of a professional necessity with me. When I was a kid, and I hated a guy, I bopped him. Just like that. It got me into a lot of trouble. Nowadays I lean over backwards to be nice to them. The more I hate them, the nicer I treat them. I don’t know why, it’s just the way I operate. I hated that man.”

“Why?”

“He represented pure evil to me.” Seifel was speaking candidly at last, or acting much more expertly. The name of Helen Johnson had acted as a moral catalyst, or a stimulus to greater histrionic effort.

“I have a nose for evil,” he continued. “I saw a lot of it when I was a kid in Chicago in the twenties, and later when I was doing court-martial work for the Navy.”

“We have something in common after all.”

He smiled rather tightly. “I’m willing to bet you’ve never been kidnapped. I was.”

“You were kidnapped?”

“By my own father, when I was three years old. My mother had divorced him, and got custody of me. He came to our apartment one afternoon when my mother was out, and talked the maid into letting him take me for a walk. He was the sort of man who could talk the devil out of hell. He dropped out of sight with me for several days, before the police caught up with him. Of course I don’t remember the incident, or my father either, but Mother’s often told me about it.”

“It wasn’t a kidnapping for ransom?”

“No, of course not. All he wanted was me. The guy got a pretty rough deal when they caught him. Mother’s family had a lot of pull in Illinois, and they had him committed to a mental hospital. She took back her maiden name, and changed my name to hers.” He spoke rapidly, almost lightly, but he was pale with emotion. His tan was like a jaundice over the pallor. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, Cross. I’ve never told it to anyone before.”

“It’s the room,” I said. “It’s heard a thousand confessions. I honestly think it induces them.”

“Or you do,” he said, smiling uneasily. “I wouldn’t want that story to get around town, naturally.”

“It won’t. What was your father’s name?”

“I have no idea. My mother’s suppressed him completely, you understand. It’s as if I had never had a father. All I know about him is that he was a young criminal-lawyer when they were married. Apparently he did something unethical, because he was disbarred. My mother divorced him on account of that, at least that’s the reason she’s always given me.”

“Your mother must have very high ethical standards.”

“She has. You might say my own career has been a reaction against his. Mother always steered me away from criminal law. I never touched it, except of course when I had to, in the Navy.”

“Not all criminal lawyers are shysters.”

“I know that. Clarence Darrow was my great hero when I was in law school. How did we get on all this? I started to explain about my nose for evil. Anyway, I have one. I could smell the odor of hellfire on that fellow in the courtroom.”

I moved around him to the door. “Let’s get over to your office and see if we can find his card.”

“Whatever you say. Tom Swift and his jet-propelled pogo-stick are at your disposal.”

Seifel’s personality leaped back and forth among its multiple poles with the speed and dazzle of an electric arc. He was a hard man to keep track of.

His office contrasted rather spectacularly with mine. We ascended into it in a small private hydraulic elevator whose door was finely lettered in gold with the firm name: Sturtevant and Seifel . Sturtevant, now semiretired, had been the town’s leading estate-lawyer.

The reception room was carpeted with wine-dark broadloom and furnished with chartreuse leather. Reproduced Rouault heads looked out of the paneled walls in tragic resignation. There was nothing Rouault about the secretary at the telephone desk. She had wine-dark eyes and chartreuse hair, as if the room had given birth to her.

“Mrs. Seifel has been trying to get you, Mr. Seifel. Three times.” She gave the words a sardonic intonation.

“What does Mother want now?”

“She says you promised to take her to a party at the beach club. You were to pick her up at four thirty.”

“If she says that, it’s probably true.” There was an undertone of resentment in his voice. “Call her back please, will you, Linda? Tell her I’ll be a little late.”

“She won’t like that.”

He raised his bent arm in a violent, harried movement, and looked at his watch. “Tell her I’ll be fifteen minutes late, no more. I don’t see why she has to start so early.”

“Yes, Mr. Seifel. Can I go then, Mr. Seifel? I have a beauty appointment.”

“ I have a beauty appointment! ” he repeated in savage mimicry.

She stuck out her tongue at his back, caught me watching her, and substituted a feline smile. I followed Seifel into his private office, where the carpet and the leather were dove-gray, the paneling blanched oak. I remarked that law seemed to be paying well these days. He grunted unhappily that he supposed it was.

On the wall behind the black glass-topped desk, a bad oil-painting of a beautiful dark-haired woman in a 1920 cloche hat dominated the room. I guessed that it was Mrs. Seifel keeping an eye on her son. He opened a small bar-cabinet built into a corner and held up a bottle of Scotch: