Росс Макдональд - Blue City

“I haven’t asked anybody for anything in years.”

“Quite. But your attitude strikes me as unnecessarily aggressive–”

“This is a rough town, Mr. Sanford. You know that – it’s your town. Two years ago my father was killed in it. What happened to the investigation of his death?”

“I told you that the crime has remained unsolved. He was shot on the street and his assailant was never apprehended.”

“Is the case still open, or was it dropped?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. Why you should assume that I had anything to do with the investigation–”

“An important case wouldn’t be dropped without your tacit approval.”

We had finished our highballs. He put his glass down on the table with a slightly peremptory rap. “You have a curious conception of the function of a wealthy man in a modern democratic municipality. We are all under the law, Mr. Weather. We must all try to get along with our neighbors.”

“J.D. used to try to, but one of his neighbors shot him on the street. Who handled the case?”

“Inspector Hanson, I believe. Ralph Hanson.” He stood up, picked up his book, and put on his reading glasses. Now he looked more than ever like an exquisite old scholar who had abandoned the pleasures of the world.

“ The Theory of the Leisure Class is a funny book for you to be reading.”

He smiled his careful, crumpled smile. “Do you really think so? Veblen analyzes some of the illusions of my class very competently, I think. He helps me to be without illusions.”

“There’s one you’ll never lose. Every man that’s born rich brings it with him out of the nursery and holds on to it for the rest of his life – the illusion of his own superiority.”

“You had a lot of money when you were a young boy, didn’t you?” he said. “And I haven’t observed that you are afflicted with an inferiority complex.”

He rang the bell and the maid appeared to show me out.

“One more thing,” I said. “This Mrs. Weather got all my father’s property. Who’s next in line?”

“You are, I believe. But Mrs. Weather is both young and, so far as I have heard, healthy.”

He didn’t offer his hand again. I left him standing with his finger in Veblen, neck-deep in conspicuous consumption.

Inspector Ralph Hanson lived in the new east end, in one of the mass-produced houses I had seen when I first came into town. My taxi driver’s flashlight found the number, which I had looked up in the telephone directory, and I asked him to wait again. It wasn’t a big house but it was well kept, surrounded by carefully trimmed shrubbery and a lawn as smooth as a putting green. I climbed the veranda steps and knocked on the door with the ornamental iron knocker.

A middle-aged woman, whose figure had never recovered from childbearing, opened the door and smiled at me uncertainly. I noticed a tricycle beside the door and a doll carriage in the hall. I asked her if Inspector Hanson was home.

“Ralph’s in his workshop in the basement. You can just go down there if you want to.”

“I came here on business,” I said. “Perhaps you’d better call him up.”

The screeching of a plane on wood, which I had been hearing through the floor, stopped when she called down the stairs: “Ralph! There’s a young man here to see you.”

Hanson was rolling down his shirt sleeves when he came up, and the hairy backs of his hands were still dusted with little shavings. He was a tall man with a long, sour face and quick, green eyes. He stood in the hallway for a moment brushing off his hands.

“Oh, Ralph,” his wife said in an indulgent whine. “I asked you to be careful about bringing your dirt up here.”

“It isn’t dirt,” he said sharply. “It’s good, clean wood.”

“It’s just as hard to clean up as dirt,” she stated, and disappeared into the back of the house.

He looked me up and down and assigned me a mental classification that I could guess from his abrupt: “And what can I do for you, sir?”

I said: “A couple of years ago you investigated the murder of J.D. Weather. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct. I was in charge of the case.”

“Do you know who killed him?”

“No. I came to a dead end. We never caught the murderer.”

“Does that mean you couldn’t or you didn’t?”

He looked at me with hostility. His thin lips drew back from his teeth in an involuntary grimace, and I saw they were yellow and long like hound’s teeth. “I don’t like that crack. Just what is your interest in the case?”

“I’m his son.”

“Why didn’t you say so, then? Come in and sit down.”

He waved me ahead of him into the living-room and switched on the ceiling light. It was a small room, too full of overstuffed furniture, with French-type windows on two sides and a fireplace containing a gas heater on the third. He placed me on a mohair chesterfield and sat down in a matching armchair facing me. The room was as homelike as the display window of an installment furniture store, but my host was trying to look more friendly. His long face creased in a smile that might have been mistaken for a look of pain.

“So you’re John, eh? I remember when you used to tag around with J.D. when you were a kid. I was on a motorcycle then.”

“You’ve been doing all right,” I said.

He looked around the room with grim complacence. “Yeah, they promoted me to Inspector last year.”

“Who did?”

“The police board. Who do you think?”

“Not, I take it, for your work on my father’s murder?”

He leaned forward and spoke rapidly with an almost neurotic excitement: “You’ll get nothing by coming around and throwing that in my teeth. I liked J.D. I worked hard on the case.”

“Everybody liked J.D., with the possible exception of my mother. And somebody who shot him on the street. And maybe a few other people who covered up for the man that shot him.”

“I don’t know what kind of stories you’ve been hearing,” Hanson said.

“I haven’t been hearing a damn thing. That’s the trouble. I don’t even know what happened to him.”

“You just told me.”

“I told you what I heard from an old man in a bar. How was he murdered?”

“You want it in detail?”

“As much as you can give me.”

He sat back in his chair and made an arch of his fingers. His story came as pat and clear as rehearsed testimony:

“He was shot at approximately 6:35 in the evening on April 3, 1944, as he was on his way home from the hotel. The shooting occurred one block north of Main Street on Cleery, near the corner of Cleery and Mack. Two shots were fired, almost simultaneously, according to witnesses. Both shots struck him in the head and pierced his brain, and he died immediately.”

“Didn’t anybody see the killer?”

“That’s one of the things that stymied me. Nobody did. It was an ambush killing, well planned ahead of time, and the killer had his getaway prepared. Remember the old Mack Building?”

“No. Tell me about it.”

“It’s on the corner of Cleery and Mack, with entrances on both streets. J.D. went past it every day about the same time on his way home from his office. The man who shot him must have known that, because he waited for him at a window on the second floor of the Mack Building. The window was about fourteen feet above street level. When J.D. came past, the killer leaned out of the window and shot him from above. At least that’s the way I reconstructed it. It fits in with the path the bullets took.”

“Whose window was it?”

“Nobody’s. It was an empty office – used to be a dentist’s office. We found out afterwards that somebody had broken into it. The door had been jimmied, and there were marks in the dust on one of the window ledges where somebody rested his arm.”