Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

My right foot stamped the accelerator. We were on a stretch of highway that lay level and straight as a causeway across the salt flats. Away to our left and behind us, the lights of the airport flared in a giants’ bivouac. A plane rose wobbling through them like a vulture heavy with carrion. Night in these regions had an unredeemed ugliness. I wrestled the steering-wheel while the speedometer turned past eighty, hoping to leave the ugliness behind.

It rode in front of my eyes, a red-haired woman with a naked back.

“Is that your story, or Kerry’s?”

“It’s the honest truth. Kerry always told me the truth.”

“You should try it yourself some time.” I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.

That or the speed frightened her. “I did tell the truth, I’m no liar. Where are we going?”

“To see Art Lemp.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re the one that’s lying. You’re taking me some place, you’re going to send me away.”

My nerves were pulled wire-thin. “Shut up. Be quiet.”

She was suddenly too quiet. I looked away from the speeding gray road and saw her fumbling in the lighted glove-compartment. I kept an automatic at the back of it. It came out in her hand.

Instinctively I pressed the brake, too hard. The car rocked and screeched. Molly said:

“That’s right, stop the car. This is the end of the ride. And you’re the one that’s getting out.” She held the gun two-handed, steadily.

It was a service forty-five, heavy enough to cut me in half. I took my time about stopping the car. I couldn’t remember whether the automatic was actuated.

If it was, a slight pressure on the trigger would end me. If it wasn’t, she couldn’t fire the gun. It took a fairly strong man to ready it for firing.

The car ground to a stop on the cinder shoulder. The shallow ditch was paved with empty cans. A sulfur stench fouled the air. On the rim of the plain, against the cloudy reflection of the city, the oil derricks stood like watchtowers around a prison camp where nothing lived.

I had come to the wrong place, at the wrong time, and done the wrong thing. A law officer who let a prisoner take his gun was worse than a fool. I set the emergency brake, my stomach expecting disaster.

“Don’t bother with that,” she said. “You’re getting out, and leave the keys where they are.”

“I’m staying in.”

“No you’re not. I warn you, I’ll shoot. You’re not sending me back to Minnesota for people to laugh at, or frame me with a camera I never stole. I’ll kill you first.”

Her eyes were a blind and stormy blue.

“The gun isn’t actuated, Molly. It won’t fire.”

She grasped the barrel-jacket and wrestled with it, pressing with all her might. The muzzle turned downward, away from me. I got one hand on it, and then the other.

She scratched the backs of my hands. I twisted the gun away from her, held it out the window and fired into the wasteland. Its recoil, only half-expected, flung my arm up. I set the safety very carefully and dropped the gun in the left-hand pocket of my jacket.

“It was actuated. You might have killed me. Then what would you have done?”

“You got plenty on me now,” she said glumly. “Now you can put me away for a long time.”

“I’m not interested in doing that. I’d like to find a place for you where old men won’t beat you, where young men won’t die on you.” After the shot, I had no anger left in me.

“Is there a place like that?”

Her gaze slipped past me, across the black fields, to the tower-ringed horizon. The odor of burning was still strong on the air.

We drove on into Long Beach.

The Neptune Hotel stood in the limbo of side streets between the neons of the business section and the dark waterfront. Its own sign, ROOM WITH BATH $1.50 , flickered and went out and came to life again like a palsied lust. Flanking the hotel entrance was a bar where a few sailors and their fewer girls sat with midnight faces. The lobby was dimly lit and unpeopled. Its green-washed walls cast a pallor on Molly’s face and turned her blown hair to green gold. She looked around the lobby as if she had been in similar places before.

The night clerk stood up behind his desk He was a dark young man with an advanced haircut, short on top and long around the ears. He wore a luminescent scarlet shirt and illustrated suspenders.

“You want a double?” he said in a cynical tenor.

“No.”

“You take her up to a single, you pay the same as a double.”

“I’m a police officer.”

He ducked, ran his fingers through his short top-hair, and came up smiling. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“You have a man named Arthur Lemp staying here.”

He glanced at the brass-hooked key-rack behind him. “Lemp is out.”

“When did he leave?”

“I couldn’t tell you that. I haven’t seen him tonight, or last night either.”

“When did you see him?”

“Night before last, I guess. One night is like another.” He moved one hand palm-down across the flat surface of his nights.

“Who was he with?”

“I never saw him with nobody. He’s a loner.”

“No friends?”

“Not that I ever saw. He always come by himself. That’s the only time I saw him, when he come in for the night. It was generally pretty late, around this time.”

“Where did he spend his evenings?”

He inverted the eloquent hand. “How would I know? The bars. I’m not his cycloanalyst. But he’s got the flybar look.”

Molly snorted.

“He’s traded it in on the mortuary look,” I said.

The young man touched his mouth, and then the side of his nose. “Dead?”

I nodded.

Molly’s hand gripped my elbow. Her outraged whisper hissed in my ear: “You didn’t tell me he was dead. You been conning me. You brought me down here under false pretenses.”

I shook off her hand, and spoke to the clerk: “Lemp was murdered this morning, out of town. I want a look at his room.”

“You got a warrant?”

“I don’t need a warrant. This is a homicide case. The man is dead.”

Shrugging his thin shoulders, he took a tagged key from the rack and pushed it across the desk:

“I guess you know what you’re doing. It’s three seventeen. Okay if I don’t go up with you? I got no replacement here. You turn left from the elevator. It’s the last one at the back, by the fire escape.”

“Thanks,” I turned to Molly. “You’re coming up with me.”

“I don’t want to come up.”

“I’m not taking a chance on your running around loose and getting into more trouble.”

I took her arm and walked her to the elevator. Its protesting machinery lifted us to the third floor. We went to the left, following a series of small red lights to the end of the corridor. Molly’s footsteps dragged.

There were human sounds behind the walls and doors, sounds of unquiet slumber, alcoholic laughter, furtive love. I was tired enough to feel the weight of lives pressing from both sides on the narrow hallway. For a nightmare instant I felt infinitely tiny, a detached cell threading the veins of a giant, tormented body.

The key turned loosely in the lock and passed us into the room. A light switch inside the door controlled the ceiling fixture. A pair of forty-watt bulbs blinked weakly on an iron-framed single bed, a corner washbasin, a rickety bureau, a few square yards of worn carpet.

Across the half-blinded single window the fire escape slanted up, a black-iron Jacob’s ladder against the roiled light and darkness over the rooftops.

“So this is where he’s been staying,” Molly said contemptuously. “In this dump, and he was talking mink and convertibles on the phone. He always was a dirty lying old skunk.”