Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

“I can’t. I’ve had an incredible day, but I can’t even think about sleep.”

“I have some Nembutals at home.”

“No,” she answered brusquely. “I have pills, too. I prefer not to sleep. I know it’s irrational but I have the feeling that if I keep thinking I’ll be able to think where Jamie is.”

“You love him, don’t you?”

“Everybody does. I love him most. He’s my son.”

“The chances are Miner is holding him somewhere in the desert.” I told her about Lemp’s “timetable,” which I had given to Forest. “Do you know of any place in the desert where Miner would be likely to take him?”

“No. Fred always hated the desert.” She added thoughtfully: “We have a cabin in the desert. He wouldn’t dare to take Jamie to our own house.”

“It’s worth considering. It might have struck them as good tactics, on the least-likely principle. Is there anybody in your desert house?”

“Not now. We closed it last month for the season. It’s too hot in the summer.”

“Where are the keys?”

“Abel kept them in his desk. I’ll get them.”

She left the room, and returned quickly, looking distraught. “They’re gone.”

“Where is this place? Does it have a telephone?”

“Of course.”

She brought me a telephone and gave me a Palmdale number. At three o’clock in the morning, the call went through immediately. Among husky rumors of transcontinental conversations, I heard the rural telephone ring four times, then four more times. The receiver at the other end was lifted.

“Pacific Point calling,” the operator said.

There was a long pause.

“Is anyone there?” the operator said. “Pacific Point is calling. ”

The receiver was replaced. There was a colloquy of operators; then: “I’m sorry, sir, your party does not answer.”

“But there was someone there?”

“I think so, sir. Shall I have them ring again?”

Close to my ear, Helen cried: “Yes! Please! I know he’s there. It couldn’t be anyone else.”

“No, thank you,” I said to the operator, and hung up.

Helen grasped my shoulder with both hands, and shook me: “He’s there! Talk to him. I have to know.”

“No, we might frighten him off. It’s possible we’ve done that already.”

Her emotions were swaying in great surges. She cried with equal passion: “Yes! You’re right. We’ve got to go there, now, immediately.”

“We?”

“I wouldn’t trust anyone else.”

I reached for the telephone. “I’ll notify Forest.”

Her hand closed over mine, slender and strong. “You’ll tell no one. I’m taking no chances, understand. Fred Miner can go Scot free if he gives me Jamie back. He can keep the money–”

“How far is it?”

“About a two-hour drive. We can do it faster if we take the Lincoln.”

“The F.B.I. can do it still faster by plane.”

“I don’t care. I want my boy to be alive when we reach him.” She was obdurate, her mind completely fixed on one final hope. I made no further attempt to argue with her. She was perfectly ready to go alone if she had to.

“Where’s Seifel?” I said. “He might be some use if we run into trouble.”

“He went into the pantry to make himself a drink. He never did come out. Hurry and find him.”

The lights were on in the butler’s pantry, and Seifel had left spoor: a silver pail half-full of melting ice, an icepick floating half-submerged in it, a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish Whiskey standing open, a wet ring whitening on the black oak sideboard. Animal noises reached me from another part of the house.

I found him in a bathroom, dousing his head in a basin of cold water. The fluorescent light thrust a white shaft through an open door across the master bedroom, making a cross-section of the chaos Helen had described. In his last hour Abel Johnson had gone berserk. The bed had been dismantled, its coverings torn, the drapes dragged down from the windows, the windows and mirrors smashed. The angry man had fought himself to a finish, bringing his life down in ruins around his own head.

Seifel raised his dripping face and reached for a towel. “Don’t mind me, I’ve been sick. Feeling much better now. I should never mix my drinks.” He shuddered behind the towel.

Above the square blue bathtub in one corner of the room, an Aubrey Beardsley drawing was recessed in the wall behind glass. It depicted a young woman with a swan neck, serpent eyes, hair like a tropical forest. She was perfectly drawn, debonair and evil.

“On your horse,” I said to Seifel, who was retying his tie. “We’re going for a ride.”

“A ride? Where to?”

“I’ll tell you on the way. Come on. You don’t have to look pretty.”

“One moment. There’s something I wanted to say to you, in private.”

I was prepared for a fist-fight on the spot, under the eyes of Beardsley’s dark-haired lady. But Seifel was truly unpredictable. He said:

“I want to apologize. I’d had too much to drink, and Helen had been rather rough on me. What’s more, you were right. I remember Kerry Snow – the name at least; I never saw the man. I turned him in for desertion in ’46.”

“Without ever seeing him?”

“Right. I told the F.B.I. where to find him.”

“Where did you get the information?”

He hesitated, swallowing shame. “I have to tell someone, I guess. It might as well be you. Helen gave me the man’s address. She asked me to have him apprehended. Just don’t tell her I told you.” He smiled dismally.

His mechanism seemed obvious. Helen had turned him down, and he was retaliating. An urge to hit him rushed up into my head and almost blinded me. It ebbed like a wave, leaving me chilly. Yet I didn’t doubt the truth of what he had said.

I thrust it out of the foreground of my thoughts and went outside, with Seifel at my heels. The wind had risen higher. Above the sighing trees the whole sky seemed to be swaying, threatening to topple.

The black Lincoln that had killed Kerry Snow was purring in the drive. Helen was at the wheel. She moved over to let me take it, and explained to Larry Seifel where we were going.

The big car was clumsy on the hillside. I drove it angrily, punishing the brakes and tires on the hairpin curves. The wind died down as we descended. The road uncoiled in a long curve that joined with a two-lane black-top. This ran ruler-straight to the middle of the inland valley, where it met the north-south highway. I pushed the car to ninety and held it there.

Seifel was in the back seat, hunched forward close to my shoulder, watching the road dart backward through the narrow gantlet of the orange groves. Helen held her shotgun in her lap. No one spoke.

Before we reached Pasadena and the foothills of the mountains, dawn had begun to outline their crags and peaks with an etching-tool. We ascended through fading night into gray day. In the summit of the pass, I switched off the headlights. The sky was a dull green, like stagnant water. Every wrinkle of the cliffs was distinct. Great patches of dirty snow lay at their bases, and along the sides of the road. Their chill edged the wind.

Helen shivered, and drew her leopard-skin coat closer around her shoulders. The gun rolled off her knees and rattled on the floor.

“Be careful with that,” I said sharply.

“I am being careful.” She retrieved it from the floor.

“Keep it out of sight when we get there. I have a gun in my pocket, but I’m not planning to use it if I can help it. This is a situation where violence might backfire.”

She didn’t answer. I glanced at her face, and saw how pale she was. Her eyes, dull and heavy like a reflection of the sky, were gazing far ahead and down across the desert. Its whitish earth, scrawled with winding dirt roads and drifts of brush, stippled with Joshua trees, lay perfectly distinct a mile below. Twenty miles of mountain driving brought us down to it, and into its dust.