Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

Her voice was low and dry and monotonous, the voice of a vicious boredom. It affected me like a rattlesnake’s buzzing signal. We followed her switching hips into a cavernous living room walled with adobe, roofed with black oak beams. The breeze from a cooling system chilled me, or perhaps it was the blonde. She said:

“What’s your poison, Mr. Archer? I’ve been trying to think of an excuse to have a drink, anyway. I’m Zinnia Heller, by the way, since Milly has forgotten her manners as usual.”

I mislaid mine, deliberately. “I’d go easy on her, Mrs. Heller. She came to warn you–”

She turned to Mildred, her thin plucked eyebrows arching. “To warn me, dear? Aren’t we getting a little melodramatic?”

“Carl has escaped,” the younger woman said. “He hitchhiked to Los Angeles last night and turned up this morning at the office where I work.”

“Escaped from Mendocino?”

“Yes. And he’s violent, Zinnia. He made some wild threats against Jerry.”

“You called the police, I hope.” The blonde’s low buzzing voice had risen at least an octave.

“Not yet. Mr. Archer here is a private detective. Carl attacked him this morning.”

“And you think he’s coming here?”

“I know he is. He’s always believed that Jerry railroaded him.”

“You thought so yourself at one time, if memory serves me.”

“I never did, Zinnia, and you know it. All I ever claimed was that I had a right to some of the money, no matter what Carl did.”

“Well, the law disagreed.” Zinnia went to a bar in the corner of the room, poured herself a stiff brown drink from a cut-glass decanter, and gulped it straight. “Speaking of the law, I’d better call Ostervelt about this. Wasn’t that the idea?”

“Yes. Of course. The Sheriff knows Carl. He won’t hurt him unless he absolutely has to.”

Zinnia picked up a portable telephone and sat down with it in her gleaming satin lap. Her sharp red fingertip hesitated in the dial hole. “You’re sure all this is true, what you’ve been telling me? Carl really did escape? You’re not just trying to throw a scare into me, for old time’s sake?”

I said: “I saw your brother-in-law, Mrs. Heller. He’s disturbed, and he’s got a gun. You’d better tell the Sheriff about the gun. And your husband should be warned.”

“Will do.” She had recovered her composure. She talked to the duty deputy like a brigadier giving orders to a lieutenant colonel. I was once a lieutenant colonel, and I knew.

“Where is your husband?” I said when she put down the phone.

“Somewhere around the place. He putters. Do all men putter, Mr. Archer? Do you putter?”

I let the curve go by. “We ought to find him and tell him about his brother.”

“It shouldn’t be hard to find him. Jerry never goes anywhere. Coming, Milly?”

“I don’t feel very well.” The girl looked badly wilted from the strain. Her dark head drooped on the white stalk of her neck.

“Will you be all right here?” I said.

“Of course I will. I’ll keep a lookout for Carl.”

“He won’t be here for a while, unless he has a car.”

“He may have, though. He may have stolen one. I think he drove away from Dr. Grantland’s.”

“Did you see him?”

“No. But I heard an engine start up just after he ran out.”

“That’s bad.”

“Nothing good ever happens,” Zinnia said. “Not to this precious family, anyway.”

She put on a wide-brimmed Mexican straw hat, and we went out into the sun. It struck me like a slap across the eyes.

She led me around the side of the adobe. “Jerry’s probably in his greenhouse. Flowers, he grows. Cymbidiums. He’s got a green thumb that goes all the way up to his armpit. Well, I suppose everybody’s got to be good at something.”

In the narrow breezeway between the house and the garages, she suddenly turned to face me. Under the white shirt, her breasts were sharp and aggressive. “What are you good at, Mr. Archer?”

“Investigation.”

“What kind of investigation?” Her intent hot face gave the question a double meaning.

I assumed both meanings. “I gather evidence in divorce cases, for example.”

“Do you ever provide that kind of evidence personally?”

“Not when I’m conscious,” I said. “I’m conscious now, in case it doesn’t show.”

“Oh but it does. What a pity. You’re kind of cute in an ugly way, you know.”

“You can have that compliment back if you want it, in spades.”

That didn’t faze her. She said: “Why don’t you come back some time, minus bleeding-heart Milly? I still owe you a drink.”

“I like to buy my own drinks.”

“Oh? Are you loaded? I am.”

“You’re very flattering, Mrs. Heller.” I wouldn’t have touched the body coiled in my path with a forked stick, but it wouldn’t have been tactful to say so. “What about Mr. Heller?”

“What about him? Don’t ask me.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Ask his damn cymbidiums. They know him better than I do.”

“I don’t know the language of the flowers, and we’re wasting time.”

“So what? There’s plenty of time. Time is what hangs heavy on my hands.” She raised her hands, turning them slowly on their slender wrists. “Pretty?”

“I’ve seen prettier.” Her eyes hardened, gleaming like chips of copper ore in the shadow of her hat. “What language do you speak?”

“You wouldn’t know it.”

“Don’t you like women?”

“Women,” I said, “I like. I have my own definition.”

“God damn you.” She leaned towards me, almost falling. I held her up. Her teeth nicked my chin, and her mouth moved like a small hot animal under my ear. Her hat fell off.

I pushed her away, partly because she was another man’s wife and partly because the other man was standing at the rear end of the breezeway, watching us. He had a pair of garden shears in his hand, which gleamed like a double dagger.

I picked up Zinnia’s hat and handed it to her. “Calm yourself, blondie,” I whispered. “Here’s the cymbidium king.”

She whispered back. “Did he see us?”

“Ask the cymbidiums.”

He moved towards us, an older, smaller, heavier version of his brother. His coloring was similar, red hair and pink complexion. It was his eyes that made the difference. They were sane, cynically and wearily sane. I looked down at the shears in his hand. He had a firm grip on them, and they were pointed at the middle of my body.

“Out,” he said. “Get out.”

“You don’t know who I am.”

“I don’t care who you are. If you don’t want to be gelded, get off my property and stay off my property. That includes my wife.”

She was standing flat against the adobe wall, holding the hat in front of her like a flimsy shield. “Take it easy now, Jerry. I got something in my eye. This gentleman was trying to remove it.”

He stood with his short legs planted wide apart, peering at me out of pale eyes. Their whites were yellowish from some internal complaint: bad digestion or bad conscience. “Is that how he got the lipstick on his face?”

“He didn’t get it from me.” But her hand went to her mouth.

“Who did he get it from then?”

“From Milly, probably. They came up here together. She’s in the house now.”

“You’re a liar, Zinnia. You always have been a liar. It’s a wonder you’re not better at it with all that practice.”

“I’m not lying. Milly is in the house.”

He turned to me. “Are you a friend of Milly’s?”

“I suppose I am.”

“He’s a detective,” Zinnia said. “She hired him.”

“What for?”

He looked from one to the other of us, still holding the shears rigid in his hand.