Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“Do you know them?”

“No, but they know me. You can tell by the way they act, the way they look at me.”

His grip was like a tourniquet on my arm. I shook it off, and peered into his eyes. They were shallow and glazed, with no inner light behind them. His mouth was working. His entire body trembled with sincerity.

“I wouldn’t pay any attention to them,” I said. “They’re just a bunch of kids having fun on the beach.”

“That’s what you think.”

“I know it. Pay no attention to them.”

“How can I help it, when they come torturing me?”

“I’m sure they won’t be back.”

“They better not!”

“If they do come back, I wouldn’t throw any more flowerpots. One of those could kill a man, or a boy.”

“Yeah. You’re right.” He hung on the railing like a seasick passenger on a ship, wagging his head slowly from side to side. “I blew my top. I got to learn not to blow my top.”

The boys were far up the beach, some of them on the sand and some in the water. Barr’s flat pale gaze was following them, the way the dead watch the living, if they do.

“You’ve been alone too much, Mr. Barr.”

“Yeah. Tell it to Rosie.”

“I don’t think I will. I won’t be seeing Rosie.”

“I gave you money to find her, didn’t I? You took it, didn’t you?”

“I’m giving it back.” I removed the five bills from my wallet and held them out to him, spread like a poker hand.

“What the hell for? The money is good. You think it’s counterfeit?”

“The money may be good, but the story isn’t. I’m not buying it.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“I’m giving you a chance to change your story.”

“To hell with you. If you don’t like my story you can shove it.” He snatched the money and waved it in my face. “I’ll hire another boy, or run her down myself.”

“Then what?”

“We get married, me and Rosie.”

“You’re sure you’re not planning a funeral instead of a wedding?”

He crumpled the bills and pulled his fist back to his shoulder. He was shaking, and his eyes were almost white. He braced himself with his other hand on the railing.

“I wouldn’t throw that punch, old man. I’ve got at least ten years on you, at least twenty pounds. And your face has already had it.”

I was up on my toes, ready to move in or away. But my words held him, long enough for me to move sideways through the door, across the dim room and out.

“Yellow-bellied coward!” he yelled after me.

A flowerpot smashed on the door as I slammed it shut.

The years since the war hadn’t affected Santa Teresa as much as some other places in California, where people moved on the average every three years. In spite of the housing tracts and the smokeless industries proliferating around it, the older parts of the city had a changeless quality. Settled old families lived in well-kept old houses behind mortised fieldstone walls that had resisted earthquakes, or cypress hedges that had outlived generations of gardeners.

Except for its palm trees and the brown hills rising behind them, Foothill Drive was like an English lane where you could feel the cool shadow of the past. J. Cavendish-Baring was one of the names I read off the rural mailboxes. I noticed the name because J. Cavendish-Baring had a couple of does and a fawn browsing under the oaks in his front yard. Birds were singing, with a faint English accent.

Dwight Maclish, another mailbox announced, and a hundred yards farther on, F. Mark Leverett. I turned up the gravel drive. The house was wide and low, with an overhanging roof and a deep verandah.

A woman in a wide straw hat was kneeling shoulder-deep among the roses with a pair of clippers in her gloved hand. They snicked in the silence when my engine died. I got out and shut the car door. After a while the woman rose to her feet and came towards me, stepping carefully among the bushes. Her body, concealed in a loose blue smock, moved with a kind of heavy certainty, as if she knew that she was beautiful, or had been.

She was. She took off her hat as she came up to me, and fanned herself with it. She was past forty and showed it, but the lines in her face had not destroyed its beauty. Her smiling blue eyes were wide-spaced under level brows. Her heartbreaking heartbroken mouth was as red as any of her roses. Passion or something resembling it had left bittersweet marks at its corners.

“What can I do for you, sir?” If there was a lilt of coquetry in the question, I didn’t think that it was meant for me. It was simply there, a surplus from her youth.

“You’re Mrs. Leverett?”

“Yes. If you’re hoping to catch the doctor, he isn’t home for lunch yet. I am expecting him.”

“It’s you I’d like to speak to.”

“What on earth about?”

I had my story ready: the plain truth, with a little varnish on the rough spots. “I’m in a bit of a dilemma, Mrs. Leverett. A man named Joseph Barr visited here the day before yesterday, he tells me. He didn’t tell me that he made a nuisance of himself, but I suspect he did.”

“ ‘Nuisance’ is putting it mildly. He’s a dreadful man.” A frown puckered her brows. She dropped her clippers in the pocket of her smock and smoothed the frown away with her gloved fingers. “Are you an officer?”

“I have been. I’m in private work at present.” I told her my name. “What did Barr do, exactly?”

“Nothing overt. His very look was enough. I didn’t feel safe in the same room with him. I called my husband and son, and they asked him to leave. He left rather reluctantly, muttering threats.”

“Threats of violence?”

“I don’t believe so. He spoke of buying and selling us, as if that were possible.”

Her gaze went past me and rested as if for comfort on her house, planted securely in its place in the sun. A man in blue clothes was watching us from just inside the doorway. He was very thin and still, and very young.

“I did sense violence in him, though,” she said. “What sort of a person is he?”

“One to look out for.”

Her hand went to her breast. I could see a tiny blue pulse beating in the hollow of her temple. “Is he a wanted man?”

“More of an unwanted one, I’d say. He’s been brushed off and pushed around in his time, and it may have driven him a little off his rocker.”

“You mean that he’s insane?”

“It’s possible.”

“My husband thinks he may be. Dr. Leverett is not a psychiatrist, and of course he only saw him for a minute, but he has had some experience with disturbed patients. He thinks the man is paranoid.”

“Did he say why he thinks so?”

“You can ask him yourself. Fred should be here at any minute.”

She took a tentative step towards the house, then paused and looked me over. She was an open-faced woman, not good at masking what was on her mind: was it safe to ask me into the house, or did my connection with Barr disqualify me? She said:

“Are you a friend of Mr. Barr’s?”

“I’m not his enemy.” He had been my client for a quick quarter of an hour, and I owed him that much. “I met him for the first time this morning. He tried to hire me to find a woman for him.”

She colored slightly, and her open look was confused by something hectic about her eyes. “Rose Breen?”

“That’s correct.”

“You say he tried to hire you. The implication is that he didn’t succeed. Then why are you here?”

“It’s a little hard to explain, even to myself. Barr’s staying in Malibu, and that’s more than halfway here. I decided to come the rest of the way.”

“On your own hook?” Her tone was faintly incredulous.

“Yes. I turned Barr down because I didn’t like his story, and I didn’t like his attitude. He said he’d hire someone else or run Rose down himself, and I believe him. He has a fixed idea, or claims to have, of marrying her after all these years and living happily ever after. She isn’t likely to fall in with the idea. Then there’s bound to be trouble–”