Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

She seated me on a sectional divan that curved around the fireplace in a corner of the living-room. Eucalyptus logs were burning low in the grate, giving off a faintly medicinal odor. The indirect lights were dim along the walls, and night pressed heavily on the great window.

“What will you drink, Mr. Cross? Larry will be glad to make you a drink, won’t you, Larry?”

“Of course,” he answered in a low, disgruntled tone.

“You’re very kind, but I’m afraid I can’t. It might knock me out at this late stage.”

“Have one yourself then, Larry,” she said. “You know where the liquor is.”

He wandered out. She sat above me, on the square back of the divan:

“I used to like Larry. Lately he’s been getting on my nerves. Tonight was the last straw. He had the infernal gall to propose to me. He thought that now was the time for us to run away together and live happily ever after. Can you imagine, under these circumstances?”

“Yes. I can imagine.”

“I was on the point of ordering him out of the house.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was afraid to be left alone.”

“No friends or relatives?”

“None that I’ve wanted to be with. I wired my mother in New York and she’ll probably fly out tomorrow or the next day.” She lowered her voice. “Larry’s been quite a disappointment to me. I thought I could trust him to be tactful at least.”

“He’s been drinking since afternoon. It’s one way to lose one’s inhibitions.”

“The problem is to have inhibitions, isn’t it? So many people don’t have any at all any more. They do as they please, and more often than not it pleases them to ruin their own lives.” Her head, half bowed over me, was like a brooding queen’s. “What sort of a man are you, Mr. Cross?”

“You don’t expect an honest answer.”

“Yes.”

“I’m a slightly displaced person, I think. Nothing quite suits me, or rather I don’t quite suit.”

“Is that why you’ve never married?”

I leaned forward and struck the dying logs with a poker. A swarm of sparks rose like angry hornets and trailed up the chimney. I stood up facing her across the divan.

“You and Ann Devon have been talking about me.”

“Why not?”

“Did you talk about Larry Seifel?”

“Naturally. She’s very much in love with him, and I think Larry’s fond of her if he’ll admit it to himself. But you’re evading my question.”

“You asked for an honest answer. I had none. The question never came up. I suppose the answer to it is something like this: It’s part of my displacement. I feel more strongly for other people than I do for myself. For one thing, my parents had a bad marriage. It seems to me I spent a lot of my time when I was a kid trying to head off quarrels, or dampen down quarrels that had already started. Then I started college in the depths of the Depression. I majored in sociology. I wanted to help people. Helpfulness was like a religion with a lot of us in those days. It’s only in the last few years, since the war, that I’ve started to see around it. I see that helping other people can be an evasion of oneself, and the source of a good deal of smug self-satisfaction. But it takes the emotions a long time to catch up. I’m emotionally rather backward.”

“Do you honestly believe that?” Her eyes were dark and glowing.

I didn’t answer because I had no answer. Nobody knows himself, until later. I shrugged my shoulders. “I understand what you mean about helpfulness. Every good nurse has a broad streak of it. I’ve always prided myself on it. Isn’t it a virtue?”

“Most human qualities are, when they’re not in excess.”

“But how could – how could a desire to help someone else be wrong?”

“You have to judge things by their consequences.”

I looked around for Seifel, and saw that he was nowhere in sight. I decided to strike boldly: “I don’t know why you married Abel Johnson. If you married him for any reason but love, you shouldn’t have.”

“What right have you to say that?”

“None. But it hasn’t worked out.”

The flickering fire cast her shadow high up the wall. It wavered there like a woman clothed in black flames.

“I loved him,” she said, “in a way. Naturally I knew he was rich, and I’d worked hard all my life, but that isn’t why I married him.”

“What way?”

“You’re being cruel,” she said with her face averted.

“Events are being cruel. I want to see them end.”

“I pitied Abel. He begged me to be his wife, to look after him. He was lonely, and afraid of dying. And he wanted a son so badly… You were right, though. I admit it. It didn’t work out.”

“Why not?”

“He was so much older. I was a strain on him. He tried so hard to keep up. Even Jamie was hard on him. Abel was like a grandfather to the child. He loved him, but he couldn’t stand him under his feet all day. That’s one reason I let Jamie spend so much time with Fred Miner. It was my worst mistake. I made so many mistakes.”

She wrung her hands. They were so dry that I could hear their friction.

“Your husband made mistakes, too. You mustn’t blame yourself entirely.”

She gave me a startled look. “Yes, I was going to tell you. I find I haven’t the heart. But perhaps you know?”

“I’ve talked with a man named Bourke, who runs a detective agency in Hollywood.”

Her hands went to her bosom, and she sighed. Like a frozen flame, dark fire converted into substance, her hair curved over her forehead. It seemed to me that, guilty or not, she was a magnificent woman.

“I was faithful to Abel,” she said. “It’s strange that I should be telling you this. I’ve never discussed it with anyone, I don’t expect I ever will again. I was genuinely innocent. Perhaps I was indiscreet in letting Larry take me places. I didn’t know until today that Abel was suspicious of me, at least to that extent. Of course I knew he was jealous.”

“Any man would be.”

“Any old man, perhaps. You see, I haven’t much pity for him now. It seeped out of me gradually. The last drop of it went today, when he told me what he had done. To put a spy on me!” she said. “When all I’ve thought about in the last six years was looking after him.”

“He told you that he had?”

“Yes, he did. When I came home from the mortuary, I described the dead man to him. I thought he might have seen him at the station. Abel recognized the description, but not from the station. It was a private detective he’d put on my trail some time last fall.”

She rose and went to the window, her shadow looming across the wall like a dark fate, the one who did the cutting:

“He realized what he had done. It was Abel himself who brought that dead man into our lives in the first place. He made that false move against me, and everything else followed from it.” She paused. “Did you really accuse me of murdering Abel, as Larry said?”

“Larry was jumping to conclusions. I admit the possibility occurred to me.”

“Well, I didn’t. Abel killed himself. He couldn’t live with the thought of what he had done. He told me that some time before he died.”

“He committed suicide?”

“I don’t like to call it by that name. He didn’t shoot himself, or take poison. It wasn’t necessary, in his condition. Abel got up out of bed and destroyed the furniture in his room. He broke it up, piece by piece, with his hands. I tried to stop him, but it was no use. He threatened to kill me if I set foot in there. He died of the effort, and the anger with himself. When things were quiet, and I dared to go in, I found him in the wreckage.”

“Why don’t you try for some rest now, Helen? You’ve had a terrible day.”