Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

As I watched the two of them, father and daughter, the pattern of the day came into focus. At its center was the muzzle of the Admiral’s gun, the round blue mouth of death.

I said, very carefully, to gain time, “I can guess what Todd said to you this morning. Do you want me to dub in the dialogue?”

He glanced up sharply, and the gun glanced up. There were no more sounds in the garden. If Mary was as quick as I thought, she’d be at a telephone.

“He told you he’d stolen your picture and had a buyer for it. But Hendryx was cautious. Todd needed proof that he had a right to sell it. You gave him the proof. And when Todd completed the transaction, you let him keep the money.”

“Nonsense! Bloody nonsense.” But he was a poor actor, and a worse liar.

“I’ve seen the bill of sale, Admiral. The only question left is why you gave it to Todd.”

His lips moved as if he was going to speak. No words came out.

“And I’ll answer that one, too. Todd knew who killed Hugh Western. So did you. You had to keep him quiet, even if it meant conniving at the theft of your own picture.”

“I connived at nothing.” His voice was losing its strength. His gun was as potent as ever.

“Alice did,” I said. “She helped him to steal it this morning. She passed it out the window to him when Silliman and I were on the mezzanine. Which is one of the things he told you at the beach club, isn’t it?”

“Todd has been feeding you lies. Unless you give me your word that you won’t repeat those lies, not to anyone, I’m going to have to shoot you.”

His hand contracted, squeezing off the automatic’s safety. The tiny noise it made seemed very significant in the silence.

“Todd will soon be feeding worms,” I said. “He’s dead, Admiral.”

“Dead?” His voice had sunk to an old man’s quaver, rustling in his throat.

“Stabbed with an ice pick in his apartment.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. Do you still see any point in trying to shoot me?”

“You’re lying.”

“No. There’s been a second murder.”

He looked down at the girl at his feet. His eyes were bewildered. There was danger in his pain and confusion. I was the source of his pain, and he might strike out blindly at me. I watched the gun in his hand, waiting for a chance to move on it. My arms were rigid, braced against the doorframe.

Mary Western ducked under my left arm and stepped into the room in front of me. She had no weapon, except her courage.

“He’s telling the truth,” she said. “Hilary Todd was stabbed to death today.”

“Put down the gun,” I said. “There’s nothing left to save. You thought you were protecting an unfortunate girl. She’s turned out to be a double murderess.”

He was watching the girl on the floor. “If this is true, Allie, I wash my hands of you.”

No sound came from her. Her face was hidden by her yellow sheaf of hair. The old man groaned. The gun sagged in his hand. I moved, pushing Mary to one side, and took it away from him. He didn’t resist me, but my forehead was suddenly streaming with sweat.

“You were probably next on her list,” I said.

“No.”

The muffled word came from his daughter. She began to get up, rising laboriously from her hands and knees like a hurt fighter. She flung her hair back. Her face had hardly changed. It was as lovely as ever, on the surface, but empty of meaning, like a doll’s plastic face.

“I was next on my list,” she said dully. “I tried to shoot myself when I realized you knew about me. Father stopped me.”

“I didn’t know about you until now.”

“You did. You must have. When you were talking to Father in the garden, you meant me to hear it all – everything you said about Hilary.”

“Did I?”

The Admiral said with a kind of awe: “You killed him, Allie. Why did you want his blood on your hands? Why?” His own hand reached for her, gropingly, and paused in midair. He looked at her as if he had fathered a strange, evil thing.

She bowed her head in silence. I answered for her: “She’d stolen the Chardin for him and met his conditions. But then she saw that he couldn’t get away, or if he did he’d be brought back, and questioned. She couldn’t be sure he’d keep quiet about Hugh. This afternoon she made sure. The second murder comes easier.”

“No!” She shook her blond head violently. “I didn’t murder Hugh. I hit him with something, I didn’t intend to kill him. He struck me first, he struck me, and then I hit him back.”

“With a deadly weapon, a metal fist. You hit at him twice with it. The first blow missed and left its mark on the doorframe. The second blow didn’t miss.”

“But I didn’t mean to kill him. Hilary knew I didn’t mean to kill him.”

“How would he know? Was he there?”

“He was downstairs in his flat. When he heard Hugh fall, he came up. Hugh was still alive. He died in Hilary’s car, when we were starting for the hospital. Hilary said he’d help me to cover up. He took that horrible fist and threw it into the sea.

“I hardly knew what I was doing by that time. Hilary did it all. He put the body in Hugh’s car and drove it up the mountain. I followed in his car and brought him back. On the way back he told me why he was helping me. He needed money. He knew we had no money, but he had a chance to sell the Chardin. I took it for him this morning. I had to. Everything I did, I did because I had to.”

She looked from me to her father. He averted his face from her.

“You didn’t have to smash Hugh’s skull,” I said. “Why did you do that?”

Her doll’s eyes rolled in her head, came back to me, glinting with a cold and deathly coquetry. “If I tell you, will you do one thing for me? One favor? Give me father’s gun for just a second?”

“And let you kill us all?”

“Only myself,” she said. “Just leave one shell in it.”

“Don’t give it to her,” the Admiral said. “She’s done enough to disgrace us.”

“I have no intention of giving it to her. And I don’t have to be told why she killed Hugh. While she was waiting in his studio last night, she found a sketch of his. It was an old sketch, but she didn’t know that. She’d never seen it before, for obvious reasons.”

“What kind of a sketch?”

“A portrait of a nude woman. She tacked it up on the easel and decorated it with a beard. When Hugh came home he saw what she’d done. He didn’t like to have his pictures spoiled, and he probably slapped her face.”

“He hit me with his fist,” Alice said. “I killed him in self-defense.”

“That may be the way you’ve rationalized it. Actually, you killed him out of jealousy.”

She laughed. It was a cruel sound, like vital tissue being ruptured. “Jealousy of her? ”

“The same jealousy that made you ruin the sketch.”

Her eyes widened, but they were blind, looking into herself. “Jealousy? I don’t know. I felt so lonely, all alone in the world. I had nobody to love me, since my mother died.”

“It isn’t true, Alice. You had me.” The Admiral’s tentative hand came out and paused again in the air, as though there were an invisible wall between them.

“I never had you. I hardly saw you. Then Sarah took you. I had no one, no one until Hugh. I thought at last that I had some one to love me, that I could count on–”

Her voice broke off. The Admiral looked everywhere but at his daughter. The room was like a cubicle in hell where lost souls suffered under the silent treatment. The silence was finally broken by the sound of a distant siren. It rose and expanded until its lamentation filled the night.

Alice was crying, with her face uncovered. Mary Western came forward and put her arm around her. “Don’t cry.” Her voice was warm. Her face had a grave beauty.