Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

“Good morning, Howie. There’s something on your mind.”

“Please don’t be intuitive so early in the day. I find it wearing.”

“You might as well tell me,” she said. “You always get those nasty vertical wrinkles between the eyebrows.”

“Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Burning witches.”

“Come on now, Howie. Tell good gray Doctor Devon.” She was twenty-four.

I sat on the corner of her desk. On the far corner she had set a bowl of multicolored sweet peas that contrasted prettily with the calcimined walls and scuffed office furniture.

“What was Fred Miner after, or wouldn’t he tell you, either?”

“He wanted to see Alex. I told him Alex was away, and he seemed rather worried and disappointed.”

“Did he say why?”

“He mumbled something obscure about wanting to go through channels, and do the right thing for everybody.”

“I think there’s something up his sleeve,” I said. “I met him on the sidewalk just now, and he acted pretty evasive. I couldn’t get him to open up.”

“You won’t be mad if I tell you something, Howie? I think he’s afraid of you.”

“Of me?”

“Quite a few people are. When you put on that grim righteous look. I was scared myself for the first six months or so.”

“I don’t see why.”

“You have a terrible lot of power over these people.”

“I don’t misuse it if I can help it.” The conversation was beginning to irritate me.

“I know you don’t. I wonder if Fred Miner knows it, though. With his Navy experience, he must be aware of what official power can do to him if he makes the slightest slip. After all, he doesn’t know you the way he does Alex. I told him you’d be in soon, but he wouldn’t wait. Probably he came in to ask Alex’s advice about some private problem.”

“He didn’t say anything about going away?”

“Not a word. I’m sure you don’t have to be concerned about him. Alex told me he’s adjusting wonderfully.” Ann’s blue eyes darkened with feeling. “Personally I think he’s a sturdy character. If I killed a man with my car, I swear I’d never be able to drive again.”

“You call it driving, what you do?”

“I’m serious. You mustn’t make fun of me.”

“You mustn’t waste all your fine emotion on a hit-run driver and a married man to boot.”

She colored slightly. “Don’t be ridiculous. My feelings about our clients are quite impersonal. Anyway, he isn’t a hit-run driver, morally speaking. Alex says he didn’t know he’d run over anyone, so it wasn’t his fault.”

“When they’ve been drinking, it’s always their fault. You can pin that in your hat. It’s an axiom.”

Her eyes widened. “Had he been drinking? Alex didn’t tell me that.”

“Alex doesn’t talk about his cases any more than he has to. It’s a good rule to follow.”

She said with a flash of impudence: “You’re very moral-lecturey this morning.” But her curiosity overcame her pique. “How do you know Fred Miner was drinking that night?”

“I read the police report. They gave him an intoximeter test when they arrested him. He was heavily loaded, over two hundred milligrams.”

“Poor man. I didn’t realize he was that way. Perhaps we should run a Rorschach on him. Alcoholics always have deep-seated emotional problems–”

“He isn’t alcoholic. He simply got drunk, as a lot of people do, and killed a man. Don’t waste your sympathy on him, because he’s been lucky. His wife stayed with him. His boss stood by him. If it wasn’t for that, and his war record, Miner would be in jail.”

“Well, I’m glad he isn’t.” She added irrationally: “Even if you’re not.”

She lowered her head and fired a machine-gun burst on the typewriter. Our conversations often ended like that. I liked to think that it was the ancient conflict between heart and head, with me representing head.

The courthouse clock had already struck nine, and I felt its delayed, guilty echo. Closing the door of the inner office rather sharply, I took off my jacket for work and spent the next two hours on the Dictaphone. I was doing a report on a prosperous matron who had been arrested for stealing several dresses from local shops. The dresses were invariably size nine. The lady was size eighteen, and had no children.

Between the paragraphs, my mind kept turning to Fred Miner. Though I wouldn’t admit it to Ann, I felt a certain satisfaction in his case. Three months ago, in early February, it hadn’t looked too promising.

According to the sheriff’s office and the city police, Fred had got himself violently drunk on a Saturday night, had taken one of his employer’s cars without permission, had run a man down in the road near Johnson’s country house, and then driven on into town without stopping. The city police caught him steering in long sweeping arcs along the ocean boulevard, and booked him for drunken driving. The sheriff’s men didn’t find the body in the road until later that night, and then they were unable to identify the victim.

But one of the fog lamps was smashed on the Lincoln that Fred had been driving. Fragments of yellow glass from the fog lamp were scattered at the scene of the accident. One long shard of glass was found imbedded in the dead man’s eye cavity.

The courthouse crowd predicted that Fred would be found guilty on a felony charge and sentenced to two to five years in state prison. Then Abel Johnson came back from his winter house in the desert. He found bail for Fred and put his personal lawyer on the case. The lawyer, a man named Seifel, pleaded him guilty to a reduced charge of involuntary manslaughter and applied for probation.

I assigned Alex Linebarge to do the report on Miner. Alex spent nearly a month going over his record with a fine-tooth comb. He came up with the conclusion that Fred Miner was a solid citizen who had made one grave mistake but wasn’t very likely to make another. Fred was sentenced to one year in the county jail, suspended; he was fined three hundred dollars and put on five years’ probation.

On the whole he had been lucky, as I said. His life had been salvaged, and my department had a stake in it. He’d fallen, been caught before he hit the bottom, and hoisted back to the moral tightrope that everyone has to walk every day.

But a man on probation walks his own high wire without a net. If he falls twice, he falls hard, into prison.

A burst of voices from the outer office broke into my thoughts. I switched off the Dictaphone. One of the voices was Ann’s. She seemed to be trying to quiet another voice, which rose and fell in surges of emotion. One of her juvenile clients, I thought, having a tantrum or a crying spell.

When I thought that it had lasted long enough, I opened the pebbled glass door. A woman who was far from juvenile was slumped in the interview chair beside Ann’s desk. Under a cheap, print house-dress, her body was long and angular. Ann was bent over her with one hand on her gaunt shoulder.

I recognized her when she lifted her face in the light. She seemed to have aged ten years in the three months since I had seen her. There were strands of gray like steel shavings caught in her straight brown hair. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her mouth was distraught.

“What’s the trouble, Mrs. Miner?”

“Terrible trouble.” With difficulty, she controlled the trembling of her lips. “It came down on me out of a blue sky.”

I looked at Ann.

“I don’t quite know what she means,” she said. “It’s something about a kidnapping. Mrs. Miner is afraid her husband is involved in some way.”

“No!” the woman cried. “It isn’t true. Fred couldn’t do a thing like that. He couldn’t, I ought to know. We’ve been married for ten years, and Fred is the kindest man. He loves that boy.”