Росс Макдональд - Blue City

“Listen to me for a change. You identify yourself with a cause, and all that means is that your ambition acquires a flavor of sanctity. You can convince yourself that you’re working for a higher purpose, a purpose so high that it places you above the law. You kill a man, but you’re not a murderer. You’re a political assassin killing in the interests of good government with you at the head of it.”

“You’ve got him pat,” the woman said. “When he does it, he thinks it doesn’t stink.”

“Do I have to sit here and listen to her recriminations?”

“Tie a can to it, Mr. Allister-Pallister. You can’t go to bed with a woman without pretending that you’re kneeling at the altar in a bloody church.”

His body jerked towards her. “You’d throw filth on every dream I ever had.”

“Filth!” she spat. “ You filth!” The gun moved slightly in her hand, and for a moment the room stopped breathing and became as silent as eternity.

“Maybe you’d better go out in the kitchen again,” I said. “We’ve got things to talk about.”

“I got a right to be here, haven’t I? It’s my house.”

“Go out in the kitchen. And you’d better give me that gun.”

“No you don’t. I’m hanging on to this.” She got up slowly and walked out of the room with a contemptuous weaving of her hips.

“That’s what you get for trying to kill people,” I said. “She doesn’t like you any more.”

He turned and watched her through the doorway, as she sat down in a kitchen chair and laid the gun on the table in front of her. When he spoke again, it was in a hushed and altered voice. “It seems impossible,” he said, “that I should try to kill anyone. And I’ve killed three. It isn’t any use, is it?”

“Murder?”

“Murder, or anything. I’m finished. I was finished four years ago, if I’d only known it. I should have killed myself then, and been done with it.”

“What happened four years ago?”

He looked up and tried to smile, but his face wouldn’t function properly. “I can’t even be sure of that. You wouldn’t understand if I tried to tell you. I suppose it was the war.”

“We’ve all been in a war.”

“I wasn’t. I didn’t get in, and that’s the point. I tried for a commission after Pearl Harbor, but I couldn’t pass the medical. They classified me as a psychoneurotic. Then my wife cut me off.”

“Skip it.”

“But it’s important. She has weird ideas of heredity, and she said she wouldn’t take the risk of bearing me any children. We’d only been married two years – I married late – and I loved my wife.”

“But you don’t any more?”

“I don’t love anyone,” the empty voice said. “Least of all, myself. You’d never believe what I used to be, Weather. I was a good man according to my lights. I believed in truth and justice, and I fought for those things, by God!” But the words came out with an unreal accent, like fragments of a language he had almost forgotten. “For ten years I fought for them, and then it all broke down. I discovered that I didn’t like people any more. Nineteen forty-two was the year they squelched my report, too. I was Assistant D.A., and the D.A. assigned me to investigate the police department here. I and my staff spent eight months on the job and turned in fifteen hundred pages, documenting the abuses and blueprinting the reforms that were needed. Only three men ever saw that report. The D.A., Sanford, and your father. It seemed to me that I was always on the losing side, and I was sick of it. Ten years I had worked for other people, for the public good, and got nowhere. I decided to work for other things – for myself. I decided to become the governor of this state.

“I resigned from the D.A.’s office and ran for the council in 1943. I had a reputation for honesty, and they were afraid of me. They voted unborn babies against me, unnaturalized citizens, two generations of graveyards. They threatened and beat my ward workers, and punched holes in the gasoline tanks of their cars. Your father laughed in my face when I met him after the election. He told me I could never be elected dogcatcher in this town. But he was afraid of me.”

“He had reason to be,” I said. It was strange to be sitting here talking with the man who killed my father, and stranger still to feel no strong emotion one way or the other. They were simply two men, a cheerful cynic and a solemn cynic, each of them partly good and partly evil, and the more dangerous one had killed the other.

“Not then,” Allister protested. “Not in the way you mean. I had no idea of killing him then. I was simply a political threat to him. There are good people in this city, Weather, and they supported me. I was never stronger than the day after the election, when they saw how badly I had lost, and the lengths to which the machine had gone to beat me. The next year the clean government faction drafted me to run for Mayor against Sanford’s and your father’s candidate. He was a nonentity, but he had the machine behind him, and it was a close campaign. I had a better than even chance of winning, I think, until they got hold of my relation with – her.” He twitched his head towards the kitchen. “I made a terrible mistake when I became involved with her.”

“Blackmail?”

“Not exactly that – political blackmail. Your father got hold of some of my letters to her.” He had lowered his voice so that she wouldn’t hear him. “I think her brother stole them, or she may have sold them herself. Anyway, your father was going to publish them, and that would have ended my political life. Don’t you see?”

“I see,” I answered flatly. “So you ended his instead.”

“I’m not trying to justify myself. I’m trying to explain how it happened. It wasn’t just the letters. It was the cumulative effect of years of frustration, and they were the last straw. Whenever I moved, he blocked my path. With those letters he was going to shame me before the whole city, the whole state. I couldn’t face it.”

“You postponed it for a while. Now you have to face something worse, something really final. What happened to the letters after you shot him?”

He glanced at the table. “Those are the letters. I don’t know how Kerch got them.”

“I think I do,” I said, thinking of Floraine Weather. “You thought you built a trap for J.D., but you were really building one for yourself.”

“I realized that the night I killed him. It’s been pressed on me every day since then–”

“Yeah. But let’s get down to details. You’re a good shot, so you probably have your own gun. But you were careful not to use it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“All right. I’ll talk. You got hold of a gun that couldn’t be connected with you, an old Smith and Wesson revolver, which Joe Sault had picked up in a secondhand store. His sister got you another gun last night, didn’t she? It took me a long time to see the connection, but it finally clicked. Once you had the gun, there was the problem of place and time. You studied J.D.’s habits, and found out that he passed the Mack Building every night about the same time. You didn’t know that a couple of Kerch’s gunmen were making a study of him, too. You laid an ambush for him by breaking into an empty office in the Mack Building. You opened a window above the sidewalk where he always passed, and waited with your gun ready. At that point your plan went wild and the trap for him turned into a trap for both of you.”

“Yes,” was all he said. His words had run out.

“Kerch’s man Garland saw you at the window. Maybe he thought you were somebody my father had hired to gun for him and Rusty Jahnke. Whatever he thought, he came after you. He beat it around the corner to the Mack Street entrance and entered the building to catch you from behind. You must have killed my father before he got to you. Rusty Jahnke, who was driving for him, was still within earshot when the shots were fired. Garland caught you in the office with a smoking gun.”