Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

I left her where she lay and climbed back up to the road on trembling knees. The grass showed traces of the track her body had made where someone had dragged it down the bank. I looked for tire marks on the shoulder and in the rutted, impacted gravel of the road. If there had been any, the rain had washed them out.

I trudged up the road to the gatehouse and knocked on the door. It creaked inward under my hand. Inside there was nothing alive but the spiders that had webbed the low black beams. A dustless rectangle in front of the stone fireplace showed where a bedroll had lain. Several blackened tin cans had evidently been used as cooking utensils. Gray embers lay on the cavernous hearth. Suspended above it from a spike in the mantel was a pair of white cotton work socks. The socks were wet. Their owner had left in a hurry.

It wasn’t my job to hunt him. I drove down the canyon to the highway and along it for a few miles to the outskirts of the nearest town. There a drab green box of a building with a flag in front of it housed the Highway Patrol. Across the highway was a lumberyard, deserted on Sunday.

“Too bad about Ginnie,” the dispatcher said when she had radioed the local sheriff. She was a thirtyish brunette with fine black eyes and dirty fingernails. She had on a plain white blouse, which was full of her.

“Did you know Ginnie?”

“My young sister knows her. They go – they went to high school together. It’s an awful thing when it happens to a young person like that. I knew she was missing – I got the report when I came on at eight – but I kept hoping that she was just off on a lost weekend, like. Now there’s nothing to hope for, is there?” Her eyes were liquid with feeling. “Poor Ginnie. And poor Mr. Green.”

“Her father?”

“That’s right. He was in here with her high school counselor not more than an hour ago. I hope he doesn’t come back right away. I don’t want to be the one that has to tell him.”

“How long has the girl been missing?”

“Just since last night. We got the report here about 3 a.m., I think. Apparently she wandered away from a party at Cavern Beach. Down the pike a ways.” She pointed south toward the mouth of the canyon.

“What kind of a party was it?”

“Some of the kids from the Union High School – they took some wienies down and had a fire. The party was part of graduation week. I happen to know about it because my young sister Alice went. I didn’t want her to go, even if it was supervised. That can be a dangerous beach at night. All sorts of bums and scroungers hang out in the caves. Why, one night when I was a kid I saw a naked man down there in the moonlight. He didn’t have a woman with him either.”

She caught the drift of her words, did a slow blush, and checked her loquacity. I leaned on the plywood counter between us.

“What sort of girl was Ginnie Green?”

“I wouldn’t know. I never really knew her.”

“Your sister does.”

“I don’t let my sister run around with girls like Ginnie Green. Does that answer your question?”

“Not in any detail.”

“It seems to me you ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m naturally interested, since I found her. Also, I happen to be a private detective.”

“Looking for a job?”

“I can always use a job.”

“So can I, and I’ve got one and I don’t intend to lose it.” She softened the words with a smile. “Excuse me; I have work to do.”

She turned to her short-wave and sent out a message to the patrol cars that Virginia Green had been found. Virginia Green’s father heard it as he came in the door. He was a puffy gray-faced man with red-rimmed eyes. Striped pajama bottoms showed below the cuffs of his trousers. His shoes were muddy, and he walked as if he had been walking all night.

He supported himself on the edge of the counter, opening and shutting his mouth like a beached fish. Words came out, half strangled by shock.

“I heard you say she was dead, Anita.”

The woman raised her eyes to his. “Yes. I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Green.”

He put his face down on the counter and stayed there like a penitent, perfectly still. I could hear a clock somewhere, snipping off seconds, and in the back of the room the L.A. police signals like muttering voices coming in from another planet. Another planet very much like this one, where violence measured out the hours.

“It’s my fault,” Green said to the bare wood under his face. “I didn’t bring her up properly. I haven’t been a good father.”

The woman watched him with dark and glistening eyes ready to spill. She stretched out an unconscious hand to touch him, pulled her hand back in embarrassment when a second man came into the station. He was a young man with crewcut brown hair, tanned and fit-looking in a Hawaiian shirt. Fit-looking except for the glare of sleeplessness in his eyes and the anxious lines around them.

“What is it, Miss Brocco? What’s the word?”

“The word is bad.” She sounded angry. “Somebody murdered Ginnie Green. This man here is a detective and he just found her body up in Trumbull Canyon.”

The young man ran his fingers through his short hair and failed to get a grip on it, or on himself. “My God! That’s terrible!”

“Yes,” the woman said. “You were supposed to be looking after her, weren’t you?”

They glared at each other across the counter. The tips of her breasts pointed at him through her blouse like accusing fingers. The young man lost the glaring match. He turned to me with a wilted look.

“My name is Connor, Franklin Connor, and I’m afraid I’m very much to blame in this. I’m a counselor at the high school, and I was supposed to be looking after the party, as Miss Brocco said.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t realize. I mean, I thought they were all perfectly happy and safe. The boys and girls had pretty well paired off around the fire. Frankly, I felt rather out of place. They aren’t children, you know. They were all seniors, they had cars. So I said good night and walked home along the beach. As a matter of fact, I was hoping for a phone call from my wife.”

“What time did you leave the party?”

“It must have been nearly eleven. The ones who hadn’t paired off had already gone home.”

“Who did Ginnie pair off with?”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid I wasn’t paying too much attention to the kids. It’s graduation week, and I’ve had a lot of problems–”

The father, Green, had been listening with a changing face. In a sudden yammering rage his implosive grief and guilt exploded outward.

“It’s your business to know! By God, I’ll have your job for this. I’ll make it my business to run you out of town.”

Connor hung his head and looked at the stained tile floor. There was a thin spot in his short brown hair, and his scalp gleamed through it like bare white bone. It was turning into a bad day for everybody, and I felt the dull old nagging pull of other people’s trouble, like a toothache you can’t leave alone.

The sheriff arrived, flanked by several deputies and an HP sergeant. He wore a western hat and a rawhide tie and a blue gabardine business suit which together produced a kind of gun-smog effect. His name was Pearsall.

I rode back up the canyon in the right front seat of Pearsall’s black Buick, filling him in on the way. The deputies’ Ford and an HP car followed us, and Green’s new Oldsmobile convertible brought up the rear.

The sheriff said: “The old guy sounds like a looney to me.”

“He’s a loner, anyway.”

“You never can tell about them hoboes. That’s why I give my boys instructions to roust ’em. Well, it looks like an open-and-shut case.”