Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

He unlocked the front door. The last thing he said before he shut it behind me was:

“I wouldn’t go bothering Walter Hendryx about that story of Sarah’s. She’s not a very trustworthy reporter, and Hendryx isn’t as tolerant of intruders as I am.”

So it was true.

I left my car where it was and crossed to a taxi stand on the opposite corner. There was a yellow cab at the stand, with a brown-faced driver reading a comic book behind the wheel. The comic book had dead women on the cover. The driver detached his hot eyes from its interior, leaned wearily over the back of the seat and opened the door for me. “Where to?”

“A man called Walter Hendryx – know where he lives?”

“Off of Foothill Drive. I been up there before. It’s a two-fifty run, outside the city limits.” His Jersey accent didn’t quite go with his Sicilian features.

“Newark?”

“Trenton.” He showed bad teeth in a good smile. “You want to make something out of it?”

“Nope. Let’s go.”

He spoke to me over his shoulder when we were out of the heavy downtown traffic. “You got your passport?”

“What kind of a place are you taking me to?”

“They don’t like visitors. You got to have a visa to get in, and a writ of habeas corpus to get out. The old man’s scared of burglars or something.”

“Why?”

“He’s got about ten million reasons, the way I hear it. Ten million bucks.” He smacked his lips.

“Where did he get it?”

“You tell me. I’ll drop everything and take off for the same place.”

“You and me both.”

“I heard he’s a big contractor in L.A.,” the driver said. “I drove a reporter up here a couple of months ago, from one of the L.A. papers. He was after an interview with the old guy, something about a tax case.”

“What about a tax case?”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s way over my head, friend, all that tax business. I have enough trouble with my own forms.”

“What happened to the reporter?”

“I drove him right back down. The old man wouldn’t see him. He likes his privacy.”

“I’m beginning to get the idea.”

“You a reporter, too, by any chance?”

“No.”

He was too polite to ask me any more questions.

We left the city limits. The mountains rose ahead, violet and unshadowed in the sun’s lengthening rays. Foothill Drive wound through a canyon, across a high-level bridge, up the side of a hill from which the sea was visible like a low blue cloud on the horizon. We turned off the road through an open gate on which a sign was posted: Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted .

A second gate closed the road at the top of the hill. It was a double gate of wrought iron hung between a stone gatepost and a stone gatehouse. A heavy wire fence stretched out from it on both sides, following the contours of the hills as far as I could see. Hendryx’ estate was about the size of a small European country.

The driver honked his horn. A thick-waisted man in a Panama hat came out of the stone cottage. He squeezed through a narrow postern and waddled up to the cab. “Well?”

“I came to see Mr. Hendryx about a picture.”

He opened the cab door and looked me over, from eyes that were heavily shuttered with old scar tissue. “You ain’t the one that was here this morning.”

I had my first good idea of the day. “You mean the tall fellow with the sideburns?”

“Yeah.”

“I just came from him.”

He rubbed his heavy chin with his knuckles, making a rasping noise. The knuckles were jammed.

“I guess it’s all right,” he said finally. “Give me your name and I’ll phone it down to the house. You can drive down.”

He opened the gate and let us through into a shallow valley. Below, in a maze of shrubbery, a long, low house was flanked by tennis courts and stables. Sunk in the terraced lawn behind the house was an oval pool like a wide green eye staring at the sky. A short man in bathing trunks was sitting in a Thinker pose on the diving board at one end.

He and the pool dropped out of sight as the cab slid down the eucalyptus-lined road. It stopped under a portico at the side of the house. A uniformed maid was waiting at the door.

“This is further than that reporter got,” the driver said in an undertone. “Maybe you got connections?”

“The best people in town.”

“Mr. Archer?” the maid said. “Mr. Hendryx is having his bath. I’ll show you the way.”

I told the driver to wait, and followed her through the house. I saw when I stepped outside that the man on the diving board wasn’t short at all. He only seemed to be short because he was so wide. Muscle bulged out his neck, clustered on his shoulders and chest, encased his arms and legs. He looked like a graduate of Muscle Beach, a subman trying hard to be a superman.

There was another man floating in the water, the blotched brown swell of his stomach breaking the surface like the shellback of a Galapagos tortoise. Thinker stood up, accompanied by his parasitic muscles, and called to him:

“Mr. Hendryx!”

The man in the water rolled over lazily and paddled to the side of the pool. Even his head was tortoise-like, seamed and bald and impervious-looking. He stood up in the waist-deep water and raised his thin brown arms. The other man bent over him. He drew him out of the water and steadied him on his feet, rubbing him with a towel.

“Thank you, Devlin.”

“Yessir.”

Leaning far forward with his arms dangling like those of a withered, hairless ape, Hendryx shuffled towards me. The joints of his knees and ankles were knobbed and stiffened by what looked like arthritis. He peered up at me from his permanent crouch:

“You want to see me?” The voice that came out of his crippled body was surprisingly rich and deep. He wasn’t as old as he looked. “What is it?”

“A painting was stolen last night from the San Marcos gallery: Chardin’s ‘Apple on a Table.’ I’ve heard that you were interested in it.”

“You’ve been misinformed. Good afternoon.” His face closed like a fist.

“You haven’t heard the rest of it.”

Disregarding me, he called to the maid who was waiting at a distance: “Show this man out.”

Devlin came up beside me, strutting like a wrestler, his great curved hands conspicuous.

“The rest of it,” I said, “is that Hugh Western was murdered at the same time. I think you knew him?”

“I knew him, yes. His death is unfortunate. Regrettable. But so far as I know, it has nothing to do with the Chardin and nothing to do with me. Will you go now, or do I have to have you removed?”

He raised his cold eyes to mine. I stared him down, but there wasn’t much satisfaction in that.

“You take murder pretty lightly, Hendryx.”

“Mr. Hendryx to you,” Devlin said in my ear. “Come on now, bud. You heard what Mr. Hendryx said.”

“I don’t take orders from him.”

“I do,” he said with a lopsided grin like a heat-split in a melon. “I take orders from him.” His light small eyes shifted to Hendryx. “You want for me to throw him out?”

Hendryx nodded, backing away. His eyes were heating up, as if the prospect of violence excited him. Devlin’s hand took my wrist. His fingers closed around it and overlapped.

“What is this, Devlin?” I said. “I thought Hugh Western was a pal of yours.”

“Sure thing.”

“I’m trying to find out who killed him. Aren’t you interested? Or did you slap him down yourself?”

“The hell.” Devlin blinked stupidly, trying to hold two questions in his mind at the same time.

Hendryx said from a safe distance: “Don’t talk. Just give him a going-over and toss him out.”

Devlin looked at Hendryx. His grip was like a thick handcuff on my wrist. I jerked his arm up and ducked under it, breaking the hold, and chopped at his nape. The bulging back of his neck was hard as a redwood bole.