Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

I admired Ferguson’s old-fashioned chivalry, but his naiveté alarmed me. “Did she tell you who she was?”

“Later. Not right away.”

“Did she seem frightened?”

“Very much so.”

“Crazy?”

“Not at the time. I’m not a doctor, of course. Neither was the man Sloan. According to her, Sloan was a psychopath, which was probably how he picked up his psychiatric jargon. He’d been holding her captive there in the house for more than twenty-four hours.”

“How did he get her there?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Did she know him?”

“No.”

“How did she know he was psycho?”

“By his treatment of her. She – ah – unbuttoned her blouse and showed me the marks on her shoulders and – and – breasts. I was embarrassed and revolted.” He was still embarrassed. “I wanted to call the police, but she wouldn’t allow it. She said that if it got into the papers, it would kill her with the public. That was the expression she used. It was then she told me who she was and that she’d been – mistreated.”

“Raped?”

“Yes. The poor woman got down on her knees and begged me to protect her against that monster. I disliked to see her humble herself to me. I’ve always had a lofty conception of women–”

“Get on with it,” I said.

His face darkened, and his mouth set stubbornly. “I want you to understand my motives. I’ve always had a lofty conception of women, as I said. I lifted her up to her feet and promised her that I would lay down my life, if necessary, to defend her.”

“You swallowed her story whole, then.”

“I believed her implicitly, at the time. I realize now there was a quality of hysteria in her, in the entire situation, and it infected me. Then, too, I’m a passionate man. I hadn’t touched a woman in a long time, and there she was, half naked in my arms.”

“Did you make love to her?”

“I admit that some such thought may have crossed my mind. I repressed it firmly. At that moment I heard the sound of an automobile climbing up the canyon. Almost without conscious thought, I took the rifle down from above the fireplace. It was still fully loaded. When the man knocked on the door, I opened the door to him and showed him the rifle.”

“Same man?”

“Yes. He’d taken off his white smock and put on a topcoat. I didn’t like the look of him at all. I told him I would shoot him unless he went away. He laughed in my face, called me an idiot. He said I’d let myself be taken in by an insane woman, a woman out of touch with reality.

“I didn’t believe him, but I was profoundly uneasy. I could feel the blood pounding at various points in my body; in my groin and head, and in my right forefinger. My finger was on the trigger of the rifle.

“ ‘Put the gun down, you damn fool,’ he said to me. ‘What story has she been telling you?’

“ ‘She said that you’ve been holding her, that she’s an actress named Molly Day.’

“He smiled, showing his teeth. His teeth were bad, and he had a bad breath. It smelled like the odor of corruption. You judge people by little things like that, and by the words they use, sometimes a single word.

“ ‘That bag?’ he said.

“I raised the rifle and shot him through the forehead.”

“Because he called her a bag?”

“That was one reason. He was clearly no doctor. No professional man would speak of one of his patients–”

“Did he have a weapon?”

“I assumed he had. I didn’t look for it.”

“What happened after you shot him? What was the woman’s reaction?”

“That was what troubled me. It’s why I came to you. She insisted I mustn’t on any account go to the police. She said that if I did she would kill herself.

“She picked up the rifle where I’d dropped it, and huddled on the bed with it across her lap. I tried to talk it out of her hands, but she refused to let me come near her. Her wild talk made me suspect that she was beside herself after all. Her very posture was unnerving. She crouched on the bed like a lioness, guarding the blessed telephone.”

“And she’s still there?”

“I left her there. What could I do? I drove down to the highway with the idea of telephoning the police. Then I remembered you, Archer.”

I was sorry he had. It sounded like one of those cases that couldn’t be satisfactorily ended. My client’s medieval moral equipment had already shown signs of breaking down. He belonged in a novel by Walter Scott, not on the front pages of the Los Angeles press.

“Why did you have to shoot him, Colonel?”

“I didn’t have to. That’s the hell of it. I could have handled him – there are few men I can’t handle. But I deliberately shot him. I chose to kill him.”

“Why?”

His fingers pulled at one side of his long equine face. “Evidently I’m a cold-blooded murderer.”

The studio hung like a treehouse on the steep slope of the canyon. It had rained up here during the night. The dirt road was wet. Actual butterflies danced in flight across free spaces of air, or played a game of tag without any rules among the branches.

“Where every prospect pleases,” Ferguson said heavily, “and only man is vile.”

I grunted at him irritably and parked my car at the edge of the narrow road. A jaybird erupted out of a red-berried bush. He sailed up onto the limb of a fir where he swung like a Christmas tree ornament yelling curses. A dozen chickadees flew out of a nearby oak and settled in one further away from the jaybird. Apart from the redwood studio below the road and the big stone house in the distance, there were no traces of human beings, vile or otherwise.

“Where’s the car?”

“What car?”

“Your victim,” I said nastily, “came in a car, you said. Where is it?”

He stood in the road and looked around him blankly. “He left it right here by the driveway. It seems to be gone.”

“What kind of a car was it?”

“A large car, a sedan painted blue or black, rather old and dirty-looking.” A hectic light came into his eyes. “Do you suppose he isn’t really dead?”

He trotted down the steep driveway, with me at his heels. The front door was standing open. He went in with his head thrust forward, stalking stiff-legged. I didn’t try to prevent him from going in. If Goldilocks wanted to shoot somebody, it might as well be him. She was his baby.

Ferguson came back into the doorway. He looked puzzled and relieved. “She’s gone. They’ve both gone.”

I went in past him. The studio was a single big room with a beamed ceiling slanting up at one end to accommodate the north window. Light poured through it onto Navajo rugs, an unmade studio bed, paintings in various media on the walls. I saw where the rifle had hung over the fireplace.

“The rifle gone, too?”

“Yes, by George, it is. Do you suppose she–? No.” He shook his head. “He was a big, heavy man. She couldn’t possibly have lifted him. He must have walked out under his own steam. I couldn’t have hurt him mortally after all.”

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

It was a slow week at the end of June, and I was late in getting to the office. The girl was waiting in the upstairs hallway. I got the impression that she had been waiting for some time. Her posture was rigid, and the drawn look on her face was only partly concealed by her dark glasses. With both hands she was clutching a handsome and expensive-looking lizardskin bag.

She was a handsome and expensive-looking girl. Not Hollywood, though. Her shoes were lizardskin but sensible. Her brown skirt and beige sweater were conservative. So was her makeup. She was very young, perhaps no more than twenty. I regarded her with aesthetic distance and a little regret: