Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

“Of course not. Jamie must have got it mixed up. She’s on her way to San Diego with Mrs. Miner. I expect her home early this evening, if you’d like to leave a message.”

“Where are they going in San Diego?”

“To Mrs. Miner’s family home. Helen insisted on driving her down. I thought myself that it was a case of leaning over backwards–”

“Do you know the address?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. They wouldn’t be there yet, in any case. They only left a very short time ago.” Her voice, which was pleasantly harsh, took on a roguish lilt. “I think Helen expected you to call, Mr. Cross. In case you did, she left a little message for you. She said there were no hard feelings. And may I say for myself, as Jamie’s grandmother, I’m looking forward–”

“Thank you.” I hung up on her.

Sam, who had his moments, was ready with a San Diego directory. “Do you know her maiden name, Howie?”

“Wolfe. Amy Wolfe.” I spelled it out.

There were a number of Wolfes in the directory. We left their names and numbers in the communications room and took a radio car. The dispatcher reached us by short wave before we passed La Jolla. The one we wanted was Daniel Wolfe, who ran a grocery store in the east end.

Danny’s Neighborhood Market was on a corner in a working-class residential district. The store had been built onto the front of an old two-story frame house, so long ago that it was now old itself. On the front window someone had written smearily in soap: Special – Fresh Ranch Eggs . There was no sign of Helen’s car. Except for a pair of young women wheeling baby carriages half a block away, and an old dog couchant in the road, the street was deserted. The dusty palms that lined it stirred languidly in the late-afternoon breeze.

I left Sam Dressen parked out of sight around the corner. A bell tinkled over the door when I went in. The store was small and badly lit, its air soured with the odor of spilled milk which had long since dried and been forgotten. Behind a meat counter at the rear, a man in a dirty-fronted white apron was waiting on a customer, a young woman wearing tight blue jeans and large earrings.

She asked him for a quarter of a pound of small bologna. He sliced it carefully, weighed it, and wrapped it. His hands were very large, and heavily furred with black hair. The hair on top of his head was thin and gray. His eyebrows were heavy and black. His face looked almost too thin and old to support the eyebrows.

There was a rack of comic books and confession magazines beside the front counter, and I made a pretense of looking them over. The counter was crowded with things for sale: bottle openers and recaps, packages of beef jerky, humorous postcards, rubber lizards, bubble gum, artificial flies imbedded in plastic ice-cubes, cloves of garlic. On the wall behind the counter hung a display card studded with icepicks. The icepicks had red plastic handles.

The man in the apron came forward to the cash register to make change. His customer departed with her bologna.

He leaned forward with one hand on the counter, thrusting one sharp shoulder higher than the other. “You want something?”

“One of those icepicks, behind you.”

He turned and plucked one out of the display card. “I better wrap it for you. You wouldn’t want to stick yourself.”

“I’ll take it as it is.”

He handed it to me. So far as I could tell, it was identical with the icepick I had found in Lemp’s neck.

“They haven’t been selling the way the salesman said they were going to sell.” His voice was bitter and monotonous, threaded by a disappointed whine. “You never can trust their say-so. I don’t think I sold four of them in six months. Anything else?”

“No, thanks.”

“That’ll be twenty-five cents and one cent tax. Twenty-six cents.”

I gave him two dimes and six pennies.

“I can always use the change,” he said.

“How’s business?”

“It could be better. It could be worse. I can remember times when it has been worse.” He slammed the drawer of the cash register. “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying business is good. I got the food plans and the supermarkets to contend with. People I carried on the books for years, they walk right by my store now that they got a little cash money in their pockets.” He looked at me with small hot brown eyes. “You on the road?”

“I’m not trying to sell you anything, Mr.–”

“Wolfe. Danny Wolfe.”

“My name is Howard Cross.”

“You live around here?”

“I’m from Pacific Point.”

“You don’t say. I got a married daughter lives in Pacific Point. You know her? Amy Miner? She married a fellow name of Miner.”

“I know her fairly well.”

“You don’t say. You should stick around. Amy’s on her way down here now. So you’re a friend of Amy’s.”

“I know her husband better.”

“Fred?” He leaned forward across the counter, resting his weight on his forearms. “Say, what happened to Fred? I always thought he was a good steady sort of fellow. When he came courting Amy in the first place, I was in favor of him long before she was. She had uppity ideas: an enlisted man in the Navy wasn’t good enough for her. Way back when she was a little girl, she had them big ideas of hers. I used to call her the Duchess.” He pulled his mind back to the present with an effort. “But it looks like I made a mistake about Fred, after all. He got himself into some pretty bad trouble, I heard. Hit-run driving, wasn’t it?”

“He killed a man.”

“So I heard. How did he happen to do that, anyway? When Amy came down to visit here this spring, she wouldn’t say a word about the accident. When I asked her about it, she flew right off the handle.” He scratched the day-old beard on the side of his chin. “I never could get Amy to tell me anything.”

“Fred was drunk when it happened.”

“You don’t say. I haven’t seen much of him these last years, but he never went in for drinking when I knew him. Maybe a couple of times he got himself plastered. Mostly it was the other way around. Amy used to gripe about how quiet he was. Course, it was pretty slow for her when he was all those months flat on his back in the hospital.”

He glanced up suddenly, his eyelids crinkled under the crushing eyebrows. He was aware of something unspoken between us:

“Say, has Fred had another accident?”

“He was killed yesterday.”

“I knew it!” he said in dry self-congratulation. “I knew there was something wrong when I was talking to Amy on the phone. I felt it in my bones. She didn’t tell me, but I knew it anyway.” Then he sensed his nakedness, and tried to cover it: “It’s a dirty shame, I say, a young man like him. Was he drunk again this time?”

“He was sober this time. When did Amy phone you?”

“A couple of hours ago. She said she was coming home. She didn’t tell me anything else. She’s a secretive girl. She always was a secretive girl. I call it false pride and vanity, if you want my opinion. Amy could never open out to anybody.”

“What about Kerry Snow?”

His eyes and mouth grew narrow. He peered anxiously around the store and out to the street. The street was still empty.

“You know Amy pretty well, eh?”

“Better than most people.”

“Is Kerry still in California? I haven’t seen him in years.”

“When did you see him?”

“Back in ’45, I guess it was. He used to visit Amy, I guess you know that. I wouldn’t want to spread it around unless you already knew it. Amy came home to keep house for me after her mother died and Fred was in the hospital with his back. You know how it is. I couldn’t hardly blame her for stepping out a little, and he was a nice-appearing young fellow. You know Kerry?”