Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“There’s one coincidence that bothers me. How did you happen to take your dog to his school?”

“I happened to see his sign, and Fernando Rambeau isn’t a common name. I couldn’t resist going there. I had to know what had happened to George. I think perhaps Fernando came to California for the same reason.”

“Now you both know,” I said.

After the death of Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) in 1983, his handwritten manuscripts and plot notebooks became part of The Kenneth Millar Papers, held at the University of California, Irvine.

Within those notebooks, Macdonald’s eventual biographer found fragments of several unfinished Lew Archer short stories and novels dating from the early 1950s to the middle 1960s.

It was Macdonald’s habit, over the years, to write the beginnings of possible Archer tales which he might (or might not) then or later continue.

The following eleven items are starting points for Lew Archer adventures that never occurred, cases begun but never finished (at least, not with these particular people and circumstances).

Knowledgeable readers will note that certain pages in some of these recaptured pieces of Lew Archer’s alternate pasts bear oblique resemblance to finished stories and books in the author’s oeuvre.

Some may take special pleasure in making connections between these entries (arranged in estimated chronological order, from 1952 to 1965) and the published works. Detective Lew Archer himself might have enjoyed such a challenge. Author and scholar Ross Macdonald certainly would have.

– Tom Nolan

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

I picked her up in a bar near Union Station. Or maybe she picked me up. I’ll never know. I was waiting for someone quite different: a man who knew a man who had sold a contaminated mainliner to the hopheaded young brother of a friend of mine. Don’t bother to remember those four people. The boy is dead, and the man who knew the pusher never turned up.

It was one of those incredibly rundown places catering to the incredibly rundown people who live at night in the vacant heart of the city: pushers and pushed, hustlers of various sexes, Pershing Park nature-lovers driven indoors by the rats, fugitives from Alcoholics Anonymous. The bartender was a fat Mitropan named Curly who hid his violent hatred of them all behind thick layers of flesh and a Santa Claus smile. He told me tales of the Vienna woods: Krafft-Ebing would have loved them: while the specked electric clock behind his head moved round from midnight to one and on to one-thirty. Various draggletail blondes assaulted my virtue and registered no sale. I nursed a bottle of beer and then another, fighting off depression. Another hour in the place would have put me permanently on the wagon.

Twenty minutes before closing time, she came in. The bartender saw her first, and his smile slipped, dislodged by sheer surprise. I turned on my stool to see what could surprise him, what impossible human wreck or unheard-of freak. Nothing like that. She was simply a young lady in a midnight blue suit and dark harlequin glasses with dark blue rims. Though she had been well-groomed, her hair and face were slightly disarrayed, as if a storm had struck her a glancing blow. When she took off her glasses, I saw that the storm was inside of her. Her eyes were a turbulent dark blue. I also saw that she was almost beautiful. Hers was a thin nervous long-legged brunette beauty, the kind that has a history. The kind that it is dangerous to touch, unless you want to become a character in history.

I didn’t, but I couldn’t look away from her. There was quality in her clothes, in her face, in the way she held herself and had done her hair. She had no right at all to be there, I thought. Perhaps she read the thought on my face and decided that I was safe. In any case she came towards me and sat on the stool to my left. Her scent was subtle and wry.

She spoke to the bartender in an urgent whisper: “Do you know me?”

He looked her over carefully. “No, ma’am. Should I?”

“With my glasses on?” She replaced the harlequins on her face. They gave her a slant-eyed Eurasian look, or the look of something even more remote. A woman from another planet, maybe, aching to get home. “Now do you remember?”

He wagged his ponderous head. “I’m sorry, lady. This a gag or something?”

“Hardly. I was in here one night about four months ago. Surely you must remember serving me. I had a Dubonnet.”

“We don’t stock Dubonnet even, we got no demand for it.”

“You did four months ago,” she said accusingly.

He spread fat dishwater hands. “Maybe one bottle. I don’t know what this is, lady. I know for a fact I never laid eyes on you. Not in here. You lose something?”

“No.” She took a torn newspaper clipping out of her blue leather pouch and spread it on the bartop. “What about him? Do you remember him?”

It was a two-column photograph from an inside page of the Los Angeles Times . It showed two men walking along a courthouse corridor. One of them was handcuffed to the other. I recognized his face.

“Nor him neither,” the bartender said. He was running out of negatives.

“But you served us!”

“Not me. My brother, maybe. I work nights one week, he works the next. My brother looks like me, a little bit.”

“Where is your brother now?”

“Tijuana, I guess. He’s on vacation. Not that it’s anybody’s business.”

“In Mexico?”

“It always used to be. Unless they moved it in the last couple of weeks.” He smiled blandly at me, asking me to share his enjoyment in the repartee.

I said: “You’re talking to a lady, Curly. Maybe you’re out of practice.”

She turned to me. “Please.” Her smile was brilliant with anxiety. “I’m trying to find something out, from him. When will your brother be back?”

“Next week, I hope. Unless he’s on a bat.”

“A bat?”

“A bender. A binge. I don’t expect him till I see him, see.” The lift of his shoulders said: am I my brother’s keeper? They sagged again, infinitely weary.

“I see.” She refolded the clipping, and tucked it into her pouch.

On her other side, a rumdum far along the lonely road to nightmare cried out in agony for another drink and beat the bar with a shot-glass. She drew away from him. Her shoulder touched mine, and stayed. I could feel her shudder. Looking into her face, I saw that she was crying behind the glasses.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” I said.

“Who are you?”

“Nobody in particular. The name is Archer. If you don’t mind, I’ll call you a cab.”

She sat up straight, drawing her shoulders narrow and forbidding. “I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself, thank you.”

Curly filled the clamorous rumdum’s shot-glass. It was emptied. The night was running down like a rickety machine. I sat and watched the woman crying to herself. Curly said:

“Everybody out. It’s two o’clock, my frolicking little friends, and I got a license to lose.”

Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).

The improbable blonde behind the reception desk gave me the electronic eye. She seemed to see the gun in my shoulder holster, the label on the inside breast pocket of my jacket, the pair of lonely tens keeping each other company in my wallet, the place where the laundry had torn my undershirt, even the bent rib where a goon had stamped me back in 1938 on a San Pedro dock. It was a long way, in time and space and social attitude, from the San Pedro docks to the Channel Club.