Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

“Slightly.”

“Then you know what I mean. He’s the sort that appeals to women, I never was myself. I told her she was making a fool of herself. He was younger than her, and she was a married woman. I always say a married woman should stick with her first choice. But she went crazy over him, she started blowing all her money on dresses and beauty parlors. Personally I never could see this hair-dyeing stuff. I told her if you’re gray, you’re gray. I was gray myself before I was twenty-five, and Amy took after me.” He patted the top of his head affectionately. “Is Kerry still around in these parts?”

“Permanently.”

“You don’t say.” Wolfe’s face struggled with a confusion of vague memories and vaguer hopes. “Maybe with Fred gone, her and Kerry will be getting together.”

“I doubt it.”

“You never can tell. She was all for ditching Fred and marrying Kerry back in ’45.” He nudged forward confidentially through the litter on the counter. “They were set to run off together when I put the kibosh on it.”

“You put the kibosh on it?”

“Yep.” His large hands came together like independent animals, and clasped. “I didn’t like the idea of any scandal, understand. Her mother and me had enough trouble with her when she was running around before she married Fred. So I did my duty as a father should. I was father and mother both to her by then.” He smiled for the first time, sentimentally. “I dropped a word to the wise, and Fred had it out with her. I guess he did, anyway. I didn’t see any more Kerry Snow around here.”

His smile expanded. Then he realized, too late again, that he had given himself away. His smile became a rictus, teeth clenched like an old dog’s on a last tearing corner of life.

“Maybe I oughtn’t to be talking. Amy goes her way and I go my way. You interested in Amy?”

“Very much.”

“Forget I said it, eh? Whatever you do, don’t tell Amy what I said. She can be a wildcat when she’s mad.”

“I know she can.”

“You’ve seen it happen, eh?”

I didn’t answer. I was watching the street for Helen. She was a long time coming. The afternoon seemed to be stretching out forever, while Wolfe and I traversed the windy barrens of his mind.

“She’ll be along soon,” he said. “Don’t worry. And you can set your mind at rest about Kerry Snow. There never was anything much between he and Amy. He drove down from L.A. a few times to see her and they went out dancing or to the movies, and that’s all there was to it. Ships that pass in the night.”

He was watching me closely now, estimating the extent of my gullibility and the degree of my interest in his daughter. The situation had grown unbearable. I terminated it:

“Mr. Wolfe, I’m sorry I have to tell you this. Amy is wanted for grand theft, and on suspicion of murder.”

“Suspicion of murder? You’re a policeman?”

“There’s a policeman outside. I was Fred’s probation officer.”

“So that’s what happened to Fred,” he said to himself. “She killed him, eh? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.” His face was hard and shiny like polished white stone. “I always knew she’d come to no good end. She was defiant. More than once she threatened me with my life.”

He turned suddenly, and trotted jerkily to the meat-block behind the rear counter. A large knife flashed like a sword in his uplifted hand. “She threatened me with this here knife! Right here in the store! Her own father!”

He looked quite mad for a moment, a caricatured crusader leading an assault on the impregnable past.

“Put the knife down, Mr. Wolfe.” Shock had as many manifestations as there were kinds of people, and I didn’t want him to cut himself.

He dropped it and came trotting back on stiff knees, his eyes glowing like small brown electric bulbs in his perfectly white face:

“You said grand theft. Did she steal something? What did she steal?”

“A package of money.”

“A big package?” His hands outlined a rectangular shape in the air.

“It would be a fair size.”

He ducked with mechanical speed and reached under the counter. Not knowing what to expect, I brought the gun out of my jacket pocket.

He came up with a brown paper parcel, which he pushed away from him across the counter as if it were contaminated. “Is this the package you’re looking for?”

It bore a yellow express-sticker and was addressed to Mrs. Amy Miner, care of Danny’s Neighborhood Market. I broke the string around it and tore it open. Sheaves of fifties tumbled out on the counter-top.

His hands went out to the money. Then he saw my gun and drew back. He wiped his hands on the front of his apron.

“When was this delivered, Mr. Wolfe?”

“This morning. It come by express this morning. I didn’t know what was in it. Honest to God, mister, I didn’t know what was in it. She had no right to send it here. I never broke the law in my life.”

A car door slammed outside. I looked up and saw the Lincoln with Helen at the wheel, and Amy Miner running forward across the sidewalk. She flung the door open. The bell jangled wildly.

“Give me the money,” she said. “It’s my money. I earned that money.”

Her father chattered behind me: “Keep her away. I don’t want anything to do with her.”

Amy had stopped in the doorway, head thrust forward and elbows high, like a running figure caught in stone. The whole weight of her attention leaned on the gun I was holding. Sam Dressen came up behind her quickly and softly. Blue steel handcuffs glinted in his hand. He circled her leaning body with his arms and snapped the handcuffs on.

She cried out, very loudly: “It isn’t fair! It’s my money! Thieves! Dirty robbers!”

Later, she said: “I didn’t do it for money. I only did what I had to do all along.”

Daniel Wolfe had closed his store for the rest of the day and led us back through it into his living-room. Its blinds were drawn, but some light leaked around them onto yellowing curtains, a worn and dusty carpet, a mohair davenport with balding arms, an old cabinet radio. There were photographs of two women on the radio. One was a wooden-framed studio portrait of a smiling girl in leg-of-mutton sleeves and sailor hat, probably Amy’s mother. The other was an enlarged copy of Kerry Snow’s photograph of Amy.

Wolfe peered at them through the dim mote-laden air, then sat down with his back to them. The armchair he chose seemed large for him. Tears glittered in the hollows of his head. There were no tears on Amy’s face. She sat opposite me on the davenport, with Sam and Helen beside her. A line of light from the window fell slanting across the three of them, touching Helen’s head with fire, decorating Sam’s blouse with an honorific yellow sash, gleaming dully on the cuffs on Amy’s wrists. All the time she was speaking, her hands were pulling back and forth, tugging this way and that against the tightened steel rings.

“They didn’t leave me any alternative,” she said. “Kerry found me the end of January. This Art Lemp came along with him. Lemp was the one that tipped Kerry off where I was, and Lemp had this plan for kidnapping Jamie. Kerry said I had to help them. He said I had to do my part in it to pay him back for all those years in prison. He didn’t believe me when I told him that Fred turned him in, that Fred must have followed us to the flat in L.A. that last weekend we had together.

“He wouldn’t listen to reason. He was ready to kill me if I didn’t help them. What could I do? I said that I would go along with their plan. They told me that they would be back the next Saturday for another conference. Lemp called them conferences. All that week my mind was a blank. I couldn’t think. I was scared to death that Fred would find out about Kerry coming back. I had this terrible guilty feeling about Kerry. It wasn’t the kidnapping plan. That didn’t worry me then. I thought it was just a crazy dream they cooked up, that it couldn’t work. – It was Kerry. From the first time I saw Kerry Snow, I knew my life would stand or fall with him. It was more than a guilty feeling I had. I felt surrounded, like the things were coming to pass that I knew were coming, way back in ’45 when Kerry and me went together, the first time.