Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“I’m all right now, Father. Don’t worry about me.”

When I checked out a few minutes later, she was sitting behind the desk in the front office, looking pale but composed. I dropped my key on the desk in front of her.

“Feeling better, Ella?”

“Oh. I didn’t recognize you with all your clothes on.”

“That’s a good line. May I use it?”

She lowered her eyes and blushed. “You’re making fun of me. I know I acted foolishly this morning.”

“I’m not so sure. What do you think happened in thirteen last night?”

“My father told you, didn’t he?”

“He gave me a version, two of them in fact. I doubt that they’re the final shooting script.”

Her hand went to the central hollow in her blouse. Her arms and shoulders were slender and brown, the tips of her fingers carmine. “Shooting?”

“A cinema term,” I said. “But there might have been a real shooting at that. Don’t you think so?”

Her front teeth pinched her lower lip. She looked like somebody’s pet rabbit. I restrained an impulse to pat her sleek brown head.

“That’s ridiculous. This is a respectable motel. Anyway, Father asked me not to discuss it with anybody.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He loves this place, that’s why. He doesn’t want any scandal made out of nothing. If we lost our good reputation here, it would break my father’s heart.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”

She stood up, smoothing her skirt. I saw that she’d changed it. “You leave him alone. He’s a dear little man. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, trying to stir up trouble where there isn’t any.”

I backed away from her righteous indignation – female indignation is always righteous – and went out to my car. The early spring sun was dazzling. Beyond the freeway and the drifted sugary dunes, the bay was Prussian blue. The road cut inland across the base of the peninsula and returned to the sea a few miles north of the town. Here a wide blacktop parking space shelved off to the left of the highway, overlooking the white beach and whiter breakers. Signs at each end of the turnout stated that this was a County Park, No Beach Fires.

The beach and the blacktop expanse above it were deserted except for a single car, which looked very lonely. It was a long black Cadillac nosed into the cable fence at the edge of the beach. I braked and turned off the highway and got out. The man in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac didn’t turn his head as I approached him. His chin was propped on the steering wheel, and he was gazing out across the endless blue sea.

I opened the door and looked into his face. It was paper white. The dark brown eyes were sightless. The body was unclothed except for the thick hair matted on the chest, and a clumsy bandage tied around the waist. The bandage was composed of several blood-stained towels, held in place by a knotted piece of nylon fabric whose nature I didn’t recognize immediately. Examining it more closely, I saw that it was a woman’s slip. The left breast of the garment was embroidered in purple with a heart, containing the name “Fern” in slanting script. I wondered who Fern was.

The man who was wearing her purple heart had dark curly hair, heavy black eyebrows, a heavy chin sprouting black beard. He was rough-looking in spite of his anemia and the lipstick smudged on his mouth.

There was no registration on the steering post, and nothing in the glove compartment but a half-empty box of shells for a .38 automatic. The ignition was still turned on. So were the dash and headlights, but they were dim. The gas gauge registered empty. Curlyhead must have pulled off the highway soon after he passed me, and driven all the rest of the night in one place.

I untied the slip, which didn’t look as if it would take fingerprints, and went over it for a label. It had one: Gretchen, Palm Springs. It occurred to me that it was Saturday morning and that I’d gone all winter without a weekend in the desert. I retied the slip the way I’d found it, and drove back to the Siesta Motel.

Ella’s welcome was a few degrees colder than absolute zero. “Well!” She glared down her pretty rabbit nose at me. “I thought we were rid of you.”

“So did I. But I just couldn’t tear myself away.” She gave me a peculiar look, neither hard nor soft, but mixed. Her hand went to her hair, then reached for a registration card. “I suppose if you want to rent a room, I can’t stop you. Only please don’t imagine you’re making an impression on me. You’re not. You leave me cold, mister.”

“Archer,” I said. “Lew Archer. Don’t bother with the card. I came back to use your phone.”

“Aren’t there any other phones?” She pushed the telephone across the desk. “I guess it’s all right, long as it isn’t a toll call.”

“I’m calling the Highway Patrol. Do you know their local number?”

“I don’t remember.” She handed me the telephone directory.

“There’s been an accident,” I said as I dialed.

“A highway accident? Where did it happen?”

“Right here, sister. Right here in room thirteen.”

But I didn’t tell that to the Highway Patrol. I told them I had found a dead man in a car on the parking lot above the county beach. The girl listened with widening eyes and nostrils. Before I finished she rose in a flurry and left the office by the rear door.

She came back with the proprietor. His eyes were black and bright like nailheads in leather, and the scampering dance of his feet was almost frenzied. “What is this?”

“I came across a dead man up the road a piece.”

“So why do you come back here to telephone?” His head was in butting position, his hands outspread and gripping the corners of the desk. “Has it got anything to do with us?”

“He’s wearing a couple of your towels.”

“What?”

“And he was bleeding heavily before he died. I think somebody shot him in the stomach. Maybe you did.”

“You’re loco,” he said, but not very emphatically. “Crazy accusations like that, they will get you into trouble. What is your business?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“You followed him here, is that it? You were going to arrest him, so he shot himself?”

“Wrong on both accounts,” I said. “I came here to sleep. And they don’t shoot themselves in the stomach. It’s too uncertain, and slow. No suicide wants to die of peritonitis.”

“So what are you doing now, trying to make scandal for my business?”

“If your business includes trying to cover for murder.”

“He shot himself,” the little man insisted.

“How do you know?”

“Donny. I spoke to him just now.”

“And how does Donny know?”

“The man told him.”

“Is Donny your night keyboy?”

“He was. I think I will fire him, for stupidity. He didn’t even tell me about this mess. I had to find it out for myself. The hard way.”

“Donny means well,” the girl said at his shoulder. “I’m sure he didn’t realize what happened.”

“Who does?” I said. “I want to talk to Donny. But first let’s have a look at the register.”

He took a pile of cards from a drawer and riffled through them. His large hands, hairy-backed, were calm and expert, like animals that lived a serene life of their own, independent of their emotional owner. They dealt me one of the cards across the desk. It was inscribed in block capitals: Richard Rowe, Detroit, Mich.

I said: “There was a woman with him.”

“Impossible.”

“Or he was a transvestite.”

He surveyed me blankly, thinking of something else. “The HP, did you tell them to come here? They know it happened here?”