Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“With a friend.”

The courtroom began to buzz again.

“What friend?” Harvey barked. He suddenly sounded like a prosecutor cross-examining a hostile witness.

Cave moved his mouth to speak, and hesitated. He licked his dry lips. “I prefer not to say.”

“Why do you prefer not to say?”

“Because it was a woman. I don’t want to involve her in this mess.”

Harvey swung away from the witness abruptly and looked up at the judge. The judge admonished the jury not to discuss the case with anyone, and adjourned the trial until two o’clock.

I watched the jurors file out. Not one of them looked at Glenway Cave. They had seen enough of him.

Harvey was the last man to leave the well of the courtroom. I waited for him at the little swinging gate which divided it from the spectators’ section. He finished packing his briefcase and came towards me, carrying the case as if it was weighted.

“Mr. Harvey, can you give me a minute?”

He started to brush me off with a weary gesture, then recognized my face. “Lew Archer? What brings you here?”

“It’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“This case?”

I nodded. “Are you going to get him off?”

“Naturally I am. He’s innocent.” But his voice echoed hollowly in the empty room and he regarded me doubtfully. “You wouldn’t be snooping around for the prosecution?”

“Not this time. The person who hired me believes that Cave is innocent. Just as you do.”

“A woman?”

“You’re jumping to conclusions, aren’t you?”

“When the sex isn’t indicated, it’s usually a woman. Who is she, Archer?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Come on now.” His square pink hand rested on my arm. “You don’t accept anonymous clients any more than I do.”

“This one is an exception. All I know about her is that she’s anxious to see Cave get off.”

“So are we all.” His bland smile tightened. “Look, we can’t talk here. Walk over to the office with me. I’ll have a couple of sandwiches sent up.”

He shifted his hand to my elbow and propelled me towards the door. The dark-eyed woman with the artificial violets at her waist was waiting in the corridor. Her opaque gaze passed over me and rested possessively on Harvey.

“Surprise.” Her voice was low and throaty to match her boyish look. “You’re taking me to lunch.”

“I’m pretty busy, Rhea. And I thought you were going to stay home today.”

“I tried to. Honestly. But my mind kept wandering off to the courthouse, so I finally up and followed it.” She moved towards him with a queer awkwardness, as if she was embarrassingly conscious of her body, and his. “Aren’t you glad to see me, darling?”

“Of course I’m glad to see you,” he said, his tone denying the words.

“Then take me to lunch.” Her white-gloved hand stroked his lapel. “I made a reservation at the club. It will do you good to get out in the air.”

“I told you I’m busy, Rhea. Mr. Archer and I have something to discuss.”

“Bring Mr. Archer along. I won’t get in the way. I promise.” She turned to me with a flashing white smile. “Since my husband seems to have forgotten his manners, I’m Rhea Harvey.”

She offered me her hand, and Harvey told her who I was. Shrugging his shoulders resignedly, he led the way outside to his bronze convertible. We turned towards the sea, which glimmered at the foot of the town like a fallen piece of sky.

“How do you think it’s going, Rod?” she said.

“I suppose it could have been worse. He could have got up in front of the judge and jury and confessed.”

“Did it strike you as that bad?”

“I’m afraid it was pretty bad.” Harvey leaned forward over the wheel in order to look around his wife at me. “Were you in on the debacle, Archer?”

“Part of it. He’s either very honest or very stupid.”

Harvey snorted. “Glen’s not stupid. The trouble is, he simply doesn’t care. He pays no attention to my advice. I had to stand there and ask the questions, and I didn’t know what crazy answers he was going to come up with. He seems to take a masochistic pleasure in wrecking his own chances.”

“It could be his conscience working on him,” I said.

His steely blue glance raked my face and returned to the road. “It could be, but it isn’t. And I’m not speaking simply as his attorney. I’ve known Glen Cave for a long time. We were roommates in college. Hell, I introduced him to his wife.”

“That doesn’t make him incapable of murder.”

“Sure, any man is capable of murder. That’s not my point. My point is that Glen is a sharp customer. If he had decided to kill Ruth for her money, he wouldn’t do it that way. He wouldn’t use his own gun. In fact, I doubt very much that he’d use a gun at all. Glen isn’t that obvious.”

“Unless it was a passional crime. Jealousy can make a man lose his sophistication.”

“Not Glen. He wasn’t in love with Ruth – never has been. He’s got about as much sexual passion as a flea.” His voice was edged with contempt. “Anyway, this tale of his about another man is probably malarkey.”

“Are you sure, Rod?”

He turned on his wife almost savagely. “No, I’m not sure. I’m not sure about anything. Glen isn’t confiding in me, and I don’t see how I can defend him if he goes on this way. I wish to God he hadn’t forced me into this. He knows as well as I do that trial work isn’t my forte. I advised him to get an attorney experienced in this sort of thing, and he wouldn’t listen. He said if I wouldn’t take on his case that he’d defend himself. And he flunked out of law school in his second year. What could I do?”

He stamped the accelerator, cutting in and out of the noon traffic on the ocean boulevard. Palm trees fled by like thin old wild-haired madmen racing along the edge of the quicksilver sea.

The beach club stood at the end of the boulevard, a white U-shaped building whose glass doors opened “For Members and Guests Only.” Its inner court contained a swimming pool and an alfresco dining space dotted with umbrella tables. Breeze-swept and sluiced with sunlight, it was the antithesis of the dim courtroom where Cave’s fate would be decided. But the shadow of the courtroom fell across our luncheon and leached the color and flavor from the food.

Harvey pushed away his salmon salad, which he had barely disturbed, and gulped a second Martini. He called the waiter to order a third. His wife inhibited him with a barely perceptible shake of her head. The waiter slid away.

“This woman,” I said, “the woman he spent the night with. Who is she?”

“Glen told me hardly anything more than he told the court.” Harvey paused, half gagged by a lawyer’s instinctive reluctance to give away information, then forced himself to go on. “It seems he went straight from home to her house on the night of the shooting. He spent the night with her, from about eight-thirty until the following morning. Or so he claims.”

“Haven’t you checked his story?”

“How? He refused to say anything that might enable me to find her or identify her. It’s just another example of the obstacles he’s put in my way, trying to defend him.”

“Is this woman so important to his defense?”

“Crucial. Ruth was shot sometime around midnight. The p.m. established that through the stomach contents. And at the time, if he’s telling the truth, Glen was with a witness. Yet he won’t let me try to locate her, or have her subpoenaed. It took me hours of hammering at him to get him to testify about her at all, and I’m not sure that wasn’t a mistake. That miserable jury–” His voice trailed off. He was back in court fighting his uphill battle against the prejudices of a small elderly city.