Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

“Join me?”

“Not just now, thanks.”

“I think I will.” He added unnecessarily: “Though I very seldom drink in the daytime. Today is a special occasion. A kidnapping in the morning, a cocktail party with Mother in the afternoon. I couldn’t face it without a little assistance. Not that she isn’t a wonderful woman, of course.”

He half-filled a glass with Scotch, and held it up to the painted face on the wall:

“Here’s to you, Mother-Wother, in your home in the Sudan. You’re a poor benighted heathen but a first-class fighting man.”

There was something weirdly pathetic about the scene. Strangely, it was Ann I was sorry for. He tossed the whisky down.

“Now to find that card, wherever it is. Tom Swift and His X-ray Eye to the Rescue. Sequel to Tom Swift and His Electronic Mother-Wother.”

He disturbed me. His wit was ranging on the borders of despair, and I regretted the crack I had made about split personality. He went on talking, more or less to himself, about the pleasures of the day and the delightful prospects of the evening, while his hands went through his files.

He slammed the metal drawer and turned with a card in his hand. “Just as I thought, old man. It was with the Miner papers. Little old Tom Swift has a memory like a steel trap, which is why the world has beaten a path to his door.”

“Thank him for me.”

The card was soiled and bent, as if it had been offered and rejected a number of times. It said:

ACME INVESTIGATIVE AGENCY

3489 Sunset Boulevard

Quickest Service, Lowest Rates

PHONE TU-8-2181

Seifel said: “I wish I could remember his name. Will this help, do you think?”

“It should. Mind if I use your phone for a long-distance call?”

“Any other time, no. Right now I’m in rather a hurry.”

“It won’t take long.”

He hovered anxiously around the desk, like a large bird with clipped wings, while I put through a call to the Tucker number. The phone at the other end rang twenty times.

“Your party does not answer, sir,” the operator said. “Shall I try again in half an hour?”

“Don’t bother.”

Seifel accompanied me to the elevator. Just as we reached it, a metal door slid back and a woman emerged. At first glance, it was as if the portrait in Seifel’s office had stepped down out of the frame. The dark aquiline head had remained unchanged for thirty years or more, and the body on which the head was balanced birdlike was as slim as a girl’s.

At second glance I noticed the leathery patches loose under the jaw, the marks of old knowledge around the painted mouth and in the black, shining eyes. Her ringed hand took hold of Seifel’s sleeve and gave it a violent jerk.

“What on earth has been keeping you, Lawrence?”

“I was just coming, Mother. This is Mr. Cross.”

She disregarded me. Her eyes were on her son, like wet, black leeches. “It’s mean and selfish of you to keep me waiting like this. I didn’t devote my life to you in order to be cast aside whenever you feel the whim.”

“I’m sorry, Mother.”

“Indeed you should be sorry. You forced me to take a public bus down here.”

“You could have taken a taxi.”

“I can’t afford to pay taxi-fare every day. You never think of my sacrifices, of course, but it has cost me an enormous amount of money to set you up in practice with Mr. Sturtevant.”

“I realize that.” He looked at me miserably. His body seemed to have shrunk, and taken on an adolescent awkwardness. “Can’t we drop the subject for now, Mother? I’m ready to drive you anywhere you like.”

She said with icy boredom: “Finish your business, Lawrence. I’m in no hurry. In fact I’ve lost any interest I had in the party. I believe I feel a headache coming on.”

“Please, Mother, don’t be like that.”

He fumbled awkwardly, reaching for her hand. She turned away from him in a movement of disdainful coquetry, and walked to the window on high sharp heels. I stepped into the elevator. The last I saw of his face, it looked bruised and shapeless, as if her Cuban heels had been hammering it.

Sam Dressen, the Sheriff’s identification man, was in his cubicle at the courthouse. Lieutenant Cleat was a more efficient officer, but I was feeling a little soured on Cleat. Sam was biting on a hangnail, and his eyes were heavy with woe. His gray hair had been pulled and worried into spikes and whorls like a last-year’s thistle patch.

Sighing with the effort, he lifted his eyes to the level of my face. “Hello, Howie. Two will get you twenty you dropped in to tell me what a flop I am. That’s the big fad in law-enforcement agencies all over the country these days – telling Sam Dressen where to turn in. First the Chief lets me have it, then those goldarn federal–”

“Wait a minute, Sam. You’re talking about the bureau I love. What’s the trouble?”

“Job trouble. What other kind of trouble is there?”

“Woman trouble, for instance.”

“Not at my age, boy. I got one and a half years to go for the County pension, and the whole gang of them want to cut me off from it. Everybody from J. Edgar Hoover down to the Chief are out to get me. You know that, Howie?”

“I hear you telling me.”

“The Chief used to be my buddy, but he’s a changed man. Ever since he took that course in F.B.I. School, he’s so goldarn spit-and-polish you wouldn’t recognize him. Know what he said to me today? He said if I don’t brush up on my fingerprinting technique, he said he’d fire me, just like that.” The old man tried to snap his fingers, unsuccessfully. “Me with eighteen years in the department, going on nineteen. They think I can afford to retire, on the salaries they pay?”

“What is it, Sam, a kickback on the February deal?”

He jerked at the hangnail with yellow teeth. “You heard about it, eh?”

“I heard they couldn’t use the prints you took from that hit-run victim.”

“That’s right, they flung them back in my face, said they were too faint to classify.”

“Were they?”

“I guess so, that’s what they said, they’re the experts.” He looked at me from the corners of his vein-webbed eyes to see if I was with him. “You don’t know the difficulties I was working under, Howie. Rigor mortis, and the stiff had awful faint markings, you could barely see them with the naked eye. All right, so I fluffed it. Everybody fluffs now and then. I’m only human like the rest of us. They didn’t have to write that snooty letter to the Chief. What does it matter who the guy was? He’s dead.”

“It’s beginning to look as if it might be important, Sam. I’m thinking of asking for an exhumation order.”

“On account of the killing this morning? You think there’s a tie-up?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“Well, don’t expect me to know nothing about it. I just went over to take a look at that new stiff, and the morgue was crawling with federal men. They wouldn’t even let me near it, said they were handling the identification routine themselves. How do you like that, Howie?”

Since Sam had been slipping for a year or more, I liked it fairly well. On the other hand he was an old friend, and a useful one. I made a sympathetic noise in the back of my throat.

He wasn’t consoled. “So the Chief bawls me out all over again. I made him lose face, he said. I said if I had a face like that, I wouldn’t mind losing a piece of it–”

“You said that?”

“Not out loud, I didn’t. Under my breath. I wouldn’t be sitting here now if I said it out loud. I got a pension to protect. But it don’t look as if I’m going to make it.” He sighed like a wind-broken horse. “Well, what is it you want, Howie? You never come over to bat the breeze any more unless you want something.”