Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“You hate me, too.”

“No. I’m sorry for you, Alice. Sorrier than I am for Hugh.”

The Admiral touched my arm. “Who was the woman in the sketch?” he said in a trembling voice.

I looked into his tired old face and decided that he had suffered enough. “I don’t know.”

But I could see the knowledge in his eyes.

Published in Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries (Crippen & Landru, 2001).

“My son is in grave trouble,” the woman said.

I asked her to sit down, and after a moment’s hesitation she lowered her weight into the chair I placed for her. She was a large Negro woman, clothed rather tightly in a blue linen dress which she had begun to outgrow. Her bosom was rising and falling with excitement, or from the effort of climbing the flight of stairs to my office. She looked no older than forty, but the hair that showed under her blue straw hat was the color of steel wool. Perspiration furred her upper lip.

“About your son?” I sat down behind my desk, the possible kinds of trouble that a Negro boy could get into in Los Angeles running like a newsreel through my head.

“My son has been arrested on suspicion of murder.” She spoke with a schoolteacher’s precision. “The police have had him up all night, questioning him, trying to force a confession out of him.”

“Where is he held? Lincoln Heights?”

“In Santa Teresa. We live there. I just came down on the bus to see if you could help me. There are no private detectives in Santa Teresa.”

“He have a lawyer?”

“Mr. Santana. He recommended you to me, Mr. Archer.”

“I see.” Santana I knew by name and reputation as a leader of minority groups in Southern California. He had come up the long hard way, and remembered every step. “Well, what are the facts?”

“Before I go over them in detail, I would like to be assured that you’ll take the case.”

“I’d like to be assured that your son isn’t guilty.”

“He isn’t. They have nothing against him but circumstances.”

“Not many murder cases depend on witnesses, Mrs.–”

“Norris, Genevieve Norris. My son’s name is Alex, after his father.” The modulation of her voice suggested that Alex senior was dead. “Alex is entering his sophomore year in college,” she added with pride.

“What does Santana think?”

“Mr. Santana knows that Alex is innocent. He’d have come to you himself, except that he’s busy trying to have him freed. He thinks the woman may have committed suicide–”

“It was a woman, then.”

“She was my boarder. I’ll tell you honestly, Mr. Archer, Alex had grown fond of her. Much too fond. The woman was older than him – than he – and different. A different class of person from Alex. I was going to give her notice when she – died.”

“How did she die?”

“Her throat was cut.”

Mrs. Norris laid a genteel brown hand on her bosom, as if to quiet its surge. A plain gold wedding band was sunk almost out of sight in the flesh of one of her fingers. The hand came up to her lip and dashed away the moisture there. “I found her myself, last midnight. Her terrible breathing woke me. I thought maybe she was sick or – intoxicated. By the time I reached her she was dead on the floor, in her blood. Do you know how I felt, Mr. Archer?” She leaned towards me with the diffident and confiding charm of her race, her eyes deeply shadowed by the brim of her hat: “As if all the things I had dreaded for myself and Alex, when we were going from city to city during the depression, trying to find a living, in Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago. As if they’d suddenly come true, in my own house. When I saw Lucy in her blood.” Her voice broke like a cello string.

“Who was Lucy?” I asked her after a pause.

“Lucy Deschamps is her name. She claimed to be a Creole from New Orleans. Alex was taken in, he’s a romantic boy, but I don’t know. She was common.”

“Weapon?”

She looked at me blankly.

“If it might have been suicide, the weapon was there.”

“Yes, of course. The weapon was there. It was a long native knife. My husband sent it from the Philippines before his ship was sunk. Mr. Norris was a chief petty officer in the Navy.” Her unconscious panic was pushing her off the point, into the security and respectability of her past.

I brought her back to the point: “And where was Alex?”

“Sleeping in his room. He has a room of his own. A college student needs a room of his own. When I screamed, he came running in in his pyjamas. He let out a cry and lay down beside her. I couldn’t get him up. When the policemen came, he was bloody from head to foot. He said he was responsible for her death, he was really wild. They took him away.” Bowed forward in her chair like a great black Rachel, she had forgotten her careful speech and her poise. Her shadowed eyes were following the image of her son into the shadows.

I rose and fetched her a drink from the water-cooler in the corner of the room. “We can drive up to Santa Teresa together,” I said, “if that suits you. I want to hear more about Lucy.”

She gulped the water and stood up. She was almost as tall as I was, and twice as imposing.

“Of course. You’re a kind man, Mr. Archer.”

I took the inland route, over Cahuenga Pass. It wasn’t built for speed, but the sparseness of traffic gave me a chance to listen. As we moved north out of the valley, the heat eased off. The withered September hills were a moving backdrop to the small sad romance of Alex Norris and Lucy.

She had come to the house in a taxi about a month before, a handsome light brown woman of twenty-five or so, well-dressed and well-spoken. She preferred to stay in a private home, she said, because all but the worst hotels in Santa Teresa were closed to her. Mrs. Norris gave her the spare room, the one in the front of the house with the separate entrance, which she sometimes rented out when she could find a suitable tenant. The rent-money would help with Alex’s tuition.

Miss Deschamps was a peaceful little soul, or so she seemed. She ate most of her meals with the family, almost never went out, spent most of her evenings quietly in her room with the portable radio she had brought along with her. She seldom spoke about herself, except to let it be understood that she had been a lady’s maid in some very good families. But she made Mrs. Norris nervous. The landlady felt that her boarder was under tension, planning her words and actions in order not to give anything away. She seemed afraid, almost as if she were in hiding from someone or something. It put everyone under a strain.

The strain became severe when Mrs. Norris discovered one day that Lucy was a solitary drinker. It happened quite by accident, as she was cleaning the room during one of Lucy’s rare walks. She opened up a bureau drawer to change the paper lining, and found it half full of empty whiskey bottles. And then she learned, in conversation with Alex, that Alex had been serving as Lucy’s errand-boy, bringing her nightly pints from the liquor store. That she had rewarded Alex by teaching him to dance, alone in her room, to the music of the portable radio. That Lucy, to put it briefly (as Mrs. Norris did), had been transforming her God-fearing household into a dancehall-saloon, her son into God knew what.

This had been on a Monday, three days before. When Mrs. Norris had threatened to evict her tenant, Lucy promised in tears to be good, if only she might stay. Alex announced that if Lucy were forced to leave, he would go with her. Now, in a sense, he had.

“What did he mean by saying that he was responsible?”

“Alex? When?” Mrs. Norris shifted uncomfortably in the seat beside me.