Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“The story gets more interesting every minute.”

“You think so? I think you’re wasting your time if you try to write it up.”

“Why?”

He considered the question. “You’re gonna run into difficulty getting information – information you can depend on.”

“What about the public hearing?”

“Sure, there’s gonna be a hearing sometime, maybe in a month or a couple of months. You don’t want to wait for that.”

“I could come back.”

“Naw, save yourself the trouble. Drop in again after lunch and I’ll open the files to you, give you a nice bloody murder. How about it? You cooperate with Roy Stark, Roy Stark cooperates with you.”

I disregarded the implied threat. “Fair enough.”

I drove down the long main street. My tires shuddered on the pitted pavement. Dungareed field hands, high-heeled cowpokes out of a job, swaggered aimlessly through the bright and empty noon, past Chinese restaurants and Mexican movie houses, in and out of liquor stores and bars. I stopped for a red light which flared weakly against the fiercer light from the sky, and saw the City Hall in the side street to my left.

The police department was in the basement. The desk sergeant told me that Cargill was off duty. I’d probably find him, at this time of day, in the bar of the Walter House on the corner of Main.

I walked half a block to the hotel. An old earthquake crack climbed like a ghostly flight of stairs along its white brick side. The lobby was dim and deserted, but the bar at its rear was loud as a monkeyhouse. It was a big square room papered with posters for old rodeos and cattle sales. A semicircular bar arced out from one wall. The booths along the opposite wall were full, and the bar was jammed with eating and drinking men. No women. Most of the customers looked like ranchers and businessmen. There was one uniformed cop sitting alone in a booth and washing a corned beef sandwich down with a glass of beer.

I sat down opposite him. “Do you mind?”

He minded. His face had a sullen Indian look, high-cheekboned, leather-colored from the sun. Black enamel eyes riveted it to its bones. They flicked at me and down at his sandwich. He went on eating.

“Cargill?”

He took another bite, chewed it and swallowed it. “My name’s Cargill.”

I told him mine. “You’re a friend of Alex Wrightson’s, they tell me.”

“Is that what they tell you?” He gulped the last of his beer and started to slide out of the seat. “Excuse me, I got an appointment.”

“Wait a minute, Cargill.”

“What for? I don’t know you.”

“Give me a chance.”

“All right, say your piece.” He was poised on the end of the seat, his shoulder muscles bulging under his blouse. “You from the State Narcotics Bureau?”

“Not me.” I studied his lean hard-bitten face. The fact that the sheriff disliked him was a big point in his favor. I decided to plunge on his honesty: “I’m working for Wrightson.”

“How?”

“Investigating the charges. You can help.”

“How?”

“Tell me what they’ve got on him. He won’t talk to me.”

“That’s funny, you said you’re working for him.”

“Mrs. Wrightson hired me.”

“To work for him, or against him?”

“She’s with him. So am I.”

“I hear you telling me.” His voice was flat and hostile.

I handed him the letter she had sent me, gracefully written on blue notepaper with little colored flowers in the corners. His lips moved as he read. When he had finished, he moved back into the corner of the booth and lit a cigarette and offered me one. I lit one of my own.

“So Esther’s sticking with him after all.”

“A hundred percent,” I said. “Why shouldn’t she?”

“We won’t go into that. Okay.” He took a deep drag and blew it out through his nose in twin plumes. “What do you want to know?”

“Names and dates and places. I can’t do much to break down a case until I know what it is.”

“You think you can break down this one?”

“I can try. Unless he’s guilty.”

“Wrightson isn’t guilty. He was framed, by experts.”

“Who?”

“I’ll tell you the facts. You can figure the rest out yourself.” He looked around, and over the back of the booth. Nobody was paying any attention to us. “About a month ago,” he said, “the sixth of June it was, Alex and me were eating right here in this bar…”

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

There was a stealthy knock on my bedroom door, not so stealthy that it failed to wake me.

“Who is it?” I said. “Mrs. Jackson?” Her vacuum cleaner had been going all morning, like the sound of distant bombers threatening my dreams.

“Get up. You’ll never catch no early worm snoring your life away. How you expect me to clean your room with you lying there like a dead man?” Her voice trailed off in obscure Cassandra mutterings.

With some mutterings of my own, I got up and put on a bathrobe and opened the door. Mrs. Jackson was a Negro woman of indeterminate age. She had a seamed brown face and gray hair. At the moment most of her hair was tucked up under a purple scarf which was wrapped around her head like a turban. With the flexible hose of the vacuum cleaner draped around her shoulders, she bore a faint clownish resemblance to a carnival performer taming a python.

I was not amused. “I drove down from Sacramento last night. Got held up for three hours by a multiple smashup on the Grapevine. I got in at six o’clock, two hours before you turned up–”

“Was anybody killed?”

“No.”

“That’s a blessing.”

She smiled. My annoyance with Mrs. Jackson could never survive her smile. It was the smile of a woman who loved the sun:

“Poor man, you’ve had a bad night. Put on some clothes and I’ll fix you some lunch. You look as if you could use it.”

By the time I had showered and shaved, my lunch was waiting on the kitchen table: toasted cheese sandwich, tomato soup out of a can. Mrs. Jackson leaned on the sink and watched me eat. She had been born and raised in the South, and never sat down in my presence unless she was asked to.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” I said.

“I’ll do my eating at home, later. Thank you.”

“Sit down and have some coffee, anyway.”

“Doctor says I shouldn’t drink coffee. It gives me palpitations of the heart. My sister bought me a jar of that kind where they grind the caffeine out. It don’t taste the same, but I’d rather put up with the taste than the palpitations. You’ve heard me speak of my younger sister?”

“No. I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“Ruby,” she said. “She’s staying with me for a few weeks till she and her fiancé settle their affairs. Mr. Wilson’s a fine young fellow, works for a bottling company in Compton. A churchgoer, too – goes to my church, which is how my sister met him. Ruby sings contralto in the choir. It pleasures my heart, after all her tribulations, to see Ruby getting herself settled. That first man of hers was no bargain. He made her a lot of big promises and then he left her flat, with the payments on the car and everything. I had to make the payments on the car myself.”

I’d begun to wonder where the talk was leading. Mrs. Jackson was one of those garrulous talkers who never said anything without a reason. Possibly she needed money. In all the years she’d been my cleaning woman, she’d never asked me for an extra cent. Being loaded at the moment, I said:

“If an advance on your pay would help–?”

She pushed the thought away with an awkward sweep of her arm. “I thank you very kindly, Mr. Archer, but I don’t need your money – long as I have the strength in my back to make an honest living, which I have been vouchsafed. Ruby and me have our problems, Lord knows, but money ain’t the problem. And once she can get herself married, there won’t be any problem.”