Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

He let it out in a sigh. “No, Mr. Archer. I don’t want any private detective work done on the case. I don’t want you or anyone else raking over the mess I’ve made of my life.”

“It’s been thoroughly raked over in the newspapers.”

“That’s the point. I’ve had enough.”

He looked at me bleakly, his head between his hands. He was still a young man, but his hair was gray. His very skin was gray, and hung slack on his face. The long trial after months of waiting had carved him down to the bone.

The third man in the interview room spoke. He was Alexander Stillman, Garvin’s defense lawyer. And Garvin’s personal friend as well, I gathered:

“I know you’re tired, Larry. But you can’t give up.”

“Why not? I do. I have.”

“But surely not in the ultimate sense. You want to go on living.”

“I wouldn’t have taken the sleeping pills if I’d wanted to go on living. I see nothing to live for now.”

“There’s Sylvia,” Stillman said.

“She’ll be better off without me.”

“That’s not true, Larry, and you know it. Sylvia loves you deeply and passionately.”

“Leave it on the cob where it belongs,” Garvin said harshly. “Are you trying to break my heart?”

“I’m trying to save your life.” Stillman’s bulldog face was fierce with intensity. “Even if you don’t value it, there’s more than one man’s life involved in this. There’s principle involved. I’m not going to let a man who isn’t guilty go to the gas chamber.”

“I must be guilty. Twelve good men and true found me guilty.”

“Eight of the twelve were women, Larry. The jury was carried away by the idea of a high school teacher mur – doing what you were alleged to have done. The whole town was carried away. I did everything within the realm of possibility to obtain a change of venue–”

Garvin’s sharp voice cut in on the lawyer’s orotund one: “I know all this. You don’t have to rehash it.”

Lawyer and client glared at each other across the steel table. They were sick and tired of each other. The trial had been like a long illness which they had shared. Which threatened to end in the death of one of them.

I said to Stillman: “Could I possibly talk to Mr. Garvin alone?”

“I have nothing to say to you, Mr. Archer. And I’m expecting a visit from my wife.”

“She isn’t here yet,” Stillman said. He got up heavily and tapped on the battleship-gray door. A guard in deputy’s suntans let him out.

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

It was a dead-end street in Malibu. The blue emptiness of the sea glared through the narrow gap between the houses. The one I was looking for needed paint, and leaned on its pilings like a man on crutches.

Nothing happened when I pressed the bell-push. I knocked on the door. Slowly, like twin bodies being dragged, footsteps approached the other side of it.

“Yes?” a man’s voice said. “Who is it?”

“Archer. You called me yesterday.”

“So I did.” He opened the door and leaned through the opening. “I call you yesterday, you keep me waiting all night. What kind of a way is that to do business? I been sitting here biting on the nail.”

He meant it literally. The fingers holding the edge of the door were bitten down to the quick. He saw me looking at them and curled them into a fist, more defensive than aggressive. He was a man of fifty-five or so wearing an open-necked white shirt from which his head jutted like a weathered statue. The sunlight struck metallic glints from his gray-white eyes.

“I been waiting twenty years. You had to keep me waiting one more day, didn’t you?” His voice was a groan modulating into a low yell: “What have you got to say for yourself?”

Goodbye was the first thing I thought of. I thought again. Another ten years and a face like his, aggressive and defensive, might be peering at me out of the bathroom mirror. Men got old. I said with all the tact I could muster:

“I had a job to wind up, Mr. Barr. I explained that to you on the telephone. I’m sorry if you misunderstood me. I was working until two this morning.”

“Yeah. I get impatient. I get impatient.”

He looked up at the high sun as if he hated it. Without another word he turned and padded into the house. He left the door open, presumably for me, and I followed him in.

The room was lofty and raftered. Spiders had been busy in the angles of the rafters, webbing and blurring them. The rattan furniture was coming apart at the joints. One of the pieces, a cushioned settee, was supported at one corner by a stack of girlie magazines; at least the top one was a Playboy . The Navajo rugs around the floor had been trampled into brown rags.

The redeeming feature of the room was the double glass door that opened onto a balcony and the sky, where white gulls circled. Barr stood with his back to them. His bare feet were horny and knobbed.

“One-seventy a month I pay for this dump, in the off -season. Two months in advance, and the landlord won’t even fix the furniture. He says when he fixes the furniture he raises the rent. The rent goes up to five hundred on the first of June, anyway.” He glared at me as if I’d come to collect it. “The country has changed, I tell you.”

“Have you been out of the country?”

“Yeah. A long time out.” He thought about the long time, his heavy chin sinking towards his chest. Iron-gray tendrils of hair grew out of his open collar. “But I didn’t bring you out here to talk about me.”

I waited.

“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll tell you what the pitch is.”

Avoiding the broken settee, I sat on a straight chair in a corner. He spoke rapidly, like an embarrassed amateur making a prepared speech:

“There was this girl, beautiful girl named Rose, auburn-haired. I fell for her, hard. That was a long time ago, but I still dream about her. I wanted to marry her at the time, but it was no go then. I had woman trouble on my hands, other kinds of trouble. I went into the army – the war was on at the time – and after the war was over I didn’t come back to this country. I wanted to make it big and come back in style.

“I made it big, in case you’re wondering.” With the air of a conjurer, he flourished a roll of fifties in my direction. The outside bill was a fifty, anyway. “I have a nice little chrome mine in New Caledonia. I can give Rosie everything she needs. And I’m not old,” he added with harsh wistfulness. “There’s still time.”

I waited. A spider descended from one of the rafters, swinging into the sunlight. The sound of the surf was like a giant systole and diastole slowing down time. A jet went over, very high, leaving a shrieking track.

Barr started. “Goddamn, I hate those things. A shock wave woke me up this morning, I thought it was the Russians.”

He shook his fist at the ceiling. The spider climbed up his rope. Another jet went over.

Barr sneered. “They can take ’em and they can shove ’em. A man comes looking for a little peace.” He took a twisted cigar out of a box and rammed it into his face as if he needed something to keep his lips still. His brown teeth started to chew it.

“You were telling me about Rose,” I reminded him. “You want me to look for her? Is that the problem?”

“That’s it. I want to see her in the flesh. See if she’s still got her looks, see if she’s married. If she isn’t, I’ll make her a proposish – a proposal, I mean. It’s why I came back to this country. It’s why I’m here. I love the girl, see. I can’t go on living without her.”

It wasn’t very convincing. Middle-aged romanticism seldom is, except to the one who’s bitten by the bug. He had been bitten by something. His eyes were hot, malarial with passion.