Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

“You think he took Kerry off on a wild-goose chase and murdered him?”

“So he could move in on me. He was always nuts about me. Nuts is the word. I must of been nuts to let him do it.”

“Why did you?”

“To get back at Kerry, mostly. And I was lonely here by myself, and I didn’t know how I was going to pay the rent. A big help Art was, laying around half-soused most of the time.”

“When did you kick him out?”

“A couple of weeks ago. I found out he pawned my watch, that Kerry gave me for a wedding-present. We had a big blow-up that night, and the bastard beat me. That was the first and last time. I said to him: get out or I call the cops. The evidence is on my back. It still is.”

She stood up and began to remove her dress.

I said: “Keep it on. Have you seen Lemp since then?”

“I’ve heard from him plenty of times. He keeps calling me up, begging me to let him come back, or else I should go and see him. Big offers, he makes. Mink coat, a new car, a trip to Honolulu. I told him I’d sooner go with a Gila monster.”

“Do you know where he’s staying?”

“Down in Long Beach, at some hotel, least he was when he phoned me on Thursday.”

“What hotel?”

“I think it was the Neptune he said. He was crazy for me to come and see him. I told him I wasn’t any masochrist.”

We drove south towards Santa Monica. It was past eleven, and traffic was slackening off. The city whose fires shone in the sky to the south and east was slowing down like a giant Catherine wheel, shooting off fewer sparks. The Santa Monica beach front was deserted, except for a few late couples depending on love or car heaters to keep them warm. There was a hard offshore wind, which made my front wheels weave a little, and flying clouds over the sea.

With her face averted from me, Molly gazed at their gray invasion.

“I hate this country,” she said. “It isn’t human country. I look at that ocean and it drives me cuckoo thinking how wide it is, how deep. It’s ten thousand miles across, Kerry told me. Did you know that?”

“I crossed it during the war.”

“Kerry did, too. His ship was back and forth across it half a dozen times. I was thinking just a minute ago – I must be going cuckoo like I said – I feel like Kerry went away on another long trip across the ocean, too far to ever come back.” She leaned forward with her face against the car window. “It’s dark out there. It must be lonely all by yourself out there.”

She turned her coat collar up around her ears. The top of her head gleamed like a golden egg in a brown nest. When I followed the highway inland, she turned against the back of the seat and watched the sea through the rear window until it disappeared.

“Where did you come from, Molly?”

“I won’t tell you. You’ll try to send me back.”

“I thought you’d want to go back, after the rough time you’ve been having.”

“I never expected the road to be an easy one.” Her voice took on a hard obsessive quality, like a fanatic’s quoting scripture. “The road to stardom is never an easy one, even if a girl is gifted with beauty and talent both. Read the movie magazines if you don’t believe me.”

“You’re pretty enough. Do you have talent, too?”

“I’m beautiful,” she corrected me. “Some very good judges consider me beautiful. I have classical measurements: thirty-five, twenty-three, thirty-five. Those proportions are classical. And I do have talent. I can act. Do you want me to act something? I know some scenes by heart.”

“I wouldn’t be able to watch you while I’m driving. What brought you out here in the first place, a beauty contest?”

“I have won beauty contests, back home. That’s when the judges said about my classical proportions. I won the bathing-suit part of the state finals. But I came out here on my own.”

“Did you run away?”

“I certainly did not. I had my mother’s permission. She gave me the bus-fare, even. My mother is quite wealthy. She owns an extensive chain of beauty parlors.”

“Where?”

“You can stop trying to get it out of me. I’m not telling.”

“Why not, if your mother knows where you are?”

“She doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“She’s dead. She died last winter, in a flood.”

“What about your father?”

“He’s dead, too. The whole family was wiped out in the flood.”

“So you inherited the beauty parlors.”

She paused. “I would of, only the river swept them away. So you see, it isn’t any use trying to send me back. I’m staying here until I get a contract, and I’ll get one, you just watch. I have the beauty and the talent both.”

“How old are you, Molly?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Impossible. If you’d been telling lies for twenty-one years, you’d be better at it.”

She didn’t take offense, but repeated stubbornly: “I’m twenty-one.”

I was tired, and had tried to cover too much ground too quickly. Before she closed up entirely, I changed the subject: “What kind of a ship was Kerry on?”

“Some kind of a carrier, he said. He called it a jeep carrier, he tried to kid me that that meant it carried jeeps, but it was airplanes. He was the ship photographer. That’s where he got his start as a photographer, in the Navy.”

“Do you know the name of the ship?”

“I did. Let me think. It was something with ‘Bay’ in it.”

“ Eureka Bay. ”

“That’s it, Eureka Bay. ”

“Fred Miner served on the same ship. He was an aviation mechanic. Didn’t Kerry ever mention him?”

“You asked me about him before. I told you I never heard of him. What’s so important about this Miner character?”

“His car was the one that ran Kerry down in February.”

“You said it was Art Lemp.”

“That was your idea. But I still think Lemp had something to do with it.”

“I know he did. Art was always jealous of Kerry. He knew me first, and he thought he had a right to me. After we got married–”

“Were you and Kerry really married?”

“Sure we were. I can prove it. Even after that, Art was always sniffing around, trying to get me, trying to talk Kerry into some of his crooked plans. That Art Lemp is a crook. He used to be a cop, and they’re the worst. Lilies that fester smell much worse than stinkweeds, I learned that in high school.”

“And Kerry wasn’t a crook?”

“Kerry was different. He was an artistic personality. That’s why Kerry and me matched up so well. Maybe he did a few things wrong in his life. Who hasn’t?”

“You said he spent time in Portsmouth.”

“Six years of it, but it wasn’t Kerry’s fault. He got taken advantage of.”

“Open up the glove compartment in front of you. There’s a camera in there. I want you to look at it.”

“A camera? Why?” She did as she was told.

I turned the dash lights up. “Have you ever seen that before?”

“Maybe I have. Where did you get it? I think it’s the camera he lost.”

“Was it Kerry’s camera?”

“He had it.”

“What does that mean?”

“I was just going to tell you. He didn’t really mean to steal the cameras. He told me all about it. His ship was in the drydock at San Diego, and he met this red-headed woman at a party–”

“What was her name?”

“He never called her by name, he called her the red-headed woman. He told me she infatuated him. She talked him into going over the hill from his ship, then when she tired of him she turned him over to the F.B.I. He had a couple of cameras with him from the ship that he forgot to take back, so they had him for A.W.O.L. and theft of government property and everything. This camera they didn’t find, though, he stashed it at a friend’s house.”