Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“Nice piano,” I said.

“I think so.”

“Fifty-second Street?”

“It’s the street with the beat and I’m not effete.” His left hand struck the same chord three times and dropped away from the keys. “Looking for somebody, friend?”

“Fern Dee. She asked me to drop by some time.”

“Too bad. Another wasted trip. She left here end of last year, the dear. She wasn’t a bad little nightingale but she was no pro, Joe, you know? She had it but she couldn’t project it. When she warbled the evening died, no matter how hard she tried, I don’t wanna be snide.”

“Where did she lam, Sam, or don’t you give a damn?”

He smiled like a corpse in a deft mortician’s hands. “I heard the boss retired her to private life. Took her home to live with him. That is what I heard. But I don’t mix with the big boy socially, so I couldn’t say for sure that she’s impure. Is it anything to you?”

“Something, but she’s over twenty-one.”

“Not more than a couple of years over twenty-one.” His eyes darkened, and his thin mouth twisted sideways angrily. “I hate to see it happen to a pretty little twist like Fern. Not that I yearn–”

I broke in on his nonsense rhymes: “Who’s the big boss you mentioned, the one Fern went to live with?”

“Angel. Who else?”

“What heaven does he inhabit?”

“You must be new in these parts–” His eyes swiveled and focused on something over my shoulder. His mouth opened and closed.

A grating tenor said behind me: “Got a question you want answered, bud?”

The pianist went back to the piano as if the ugly tenor had wiped me out, annulled my very existence. I turned to its source. He was standing in a narrow doorway behind the drums, a man in his thirties with thick black curly hair and a heavy jaw blue-shadowed by closely shaven beard. He was almost the living image of the dead man in the Cadillac. The likeness gave me a jolt. The heavy black gun in his hand gave me another.

He came around the drums and approached me, bull-shouldered in a fuzzy tweed jacket, holding the gun in front of him like a dangerous gift. The pianist was doing wry things in quickened tempo with the dead march from Saul . A wit.

The dead man’s almost-double waved his cruel chin and the crueler gun in unison. “Come inside, unless you’re a government man. If you are, I’ll have a look at your credentials.”

“I’m a freelance.”

“Inside then.”

The muzzle of the automatic came into my solar plexus like a pointing finger. Obeying its injunction, I made my way between empty music stands and through the narrow door behind the drums. The iron finger, probing my back, directed me down a lightless corridor to a small square office containing a metal desk, a safe, a filing cabinet. It was windowless, lit by fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Under their pitiless glare, the face above the gun looked more than ever like the dead man’s face. I wondered if I had been mistaken about his deadness, or if the desert heat had addled my brain.

“I’m the manager here,” he said, standing so close that I could smell the piney stuff he used on his crisp dark hair. “You got anything to ask about the members of the staff, you ask me.”

“Will I get an answer?”

“Try me, bud.”

“The name is Archer,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”

“Working for who?”

“You wouldn’t be interested.”

“I am, though, very much interested.” The gun hopped forward like a toad into my stomach again, with the weight of his shoulder behind it. “Working for who, did you say?”

I swallowed anger and nausea, estimating my chances of knocking the gun to one side and taking him barehanded. The chances seemed pretty slim. He was heavier than I was, and he held the automatic as if it had grown out of the end of his arm. You’ve seen too many movies, I told myself. I told him: “A motel owner on the coast. A man was shot in one of his rooms last night. I happened to check in there a few minutes later. The old boy hired me to look into the shooting.”

“Who was it got himself ventilated?”

“He could be your brother,” I said. “Do you have a brother?”

He lost his color. The center of his attention shifted from the gun to my face. The gun nodded. I knocked it up and sideways with a hard left uppercut. Its discharge burned the side of my face and drilled a hole in the wall. My right sank into his neck. The gun thumped the cork floor.

He went down but not out, his spread hand scrabbling for the gun, then closing on it. I kicked his wrist. He grunted but wouldn’t let go of it. I threw a punch at the short hairs on the back of his neck. He took it and came up under it with the gun, shaking his head from side to side.

“Up with the hands now,” he murmured. He was one of those men whose voices go soft and mild when they are in a killing mood. He had the glassy impervious eyes of a killer. “Is Bart dead? My brother?”

“Very dead. He was shot in the belly.”

“Who shot him?”

“That’s the question.”

“Who shot him?” he said in a quiet white-faced rage. The single eye of the gun stared emptily at my midriff. “It could happen to you, bud, here and now.”

“A woman was with him. She took a quick powder after it happened.”

“I heard you say a name to Alfie, the piano-player. Was it Fern?”

“It could have been.”

“What do you mean, it could have been?”

“She was there in the room, apparently. If you can give me a description of her?”

His hard brown eyes looked past me. “I can do better than that. There’s a picture of her on the wall behind you. Take a look at it. Keep those hands up high.”

I shifted my feet and turned uneasily. The wall was blank. I heard him draw a breath and move, and tried to evade his blow. No use. It caught the back of my head. I pitched forward against the blank wall and slid down it into three dimensions of blankness.

The blankness coagulated into colored shapes. The shapes were half human and half beast and they dissolved and re-formed. A dead man with a hairy breast climbed out of a hole and doubled and quadrupled. I ran away from them through a twisting tunnel which led to an echo chamber. Under the roaring surge of the nightmare music, a rasping tenor was saying:

“I figure it like this. Vario’s tip was good. Bart found her in Acapulco, and he was bringing her back from there. She conned him into stopping off at this motel for the night. Bart always went for her.”

“I didn’t know that,” a dry old voice put in. “This is very interesting news about Bart and Fern. You should have told me before about this. Then I would not have sent him for her and this would not have happened. Would it, Gino?”

My mind was still partly absent, wandering underground in the echoing caves. I couldn’t recall the voices, or who they were talking about. I had barely sense enough to keep my eyes closed and go on listening. I was lying on my back on a hard surface. The voices were above me.

The tenor said: “You can’t blame Bartolemeo. She’s the one, the dirty treacherous lying little bitch.”

“Calm yourself, Gino. I blame nobody. But more than ever now, we want her back, isn’t that right?”

“I’ll kill her,” he said softly, almost wistfully.

“Perhaps. It may not be necessary now. I dislike promiscuous killing–”

“Since when, Angel?”

“Don’t interrupt, it’s not polite. I learned to put first things first. Now what is the most important thing? Why did we want her back in the first place? I will tell you: to shut her mouth. The government heard she left me, they wanted her to testify about my income. We wanted to find her first and shut her mouth, isn’t that right?”