Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

He thrust it into my hand suddenly. I unloaded it, breaking my fingernails in the process, and handed it back to him empty. He nudged up against me.

“Listen, maybe I did do wrong. I had provocation. It doesn’t have to get out. I got a business to lose.”

He fumbled in his hip pocket and brought out a thick sharkskin wallet. “Here. I can pay you good money. You say that you’re a private eye; you know how to keep your lip buttoned.”

I walked away and left him blabbering beside the body of the man he had killed. They were both victims, in a sense, but only one of them had blood on his hands.

Miss Brocco was in the HP parking lot. Her bosom was jumping with excitement.

“I heard a shot.”

“Green shot the old man. Dead. You better send in for the meat wagon and call off your bloody dogs.”

The words hit her like slaps. She raised her hand to her face, defensively. “Are you mad at me? Why are you mad at me?”

“I’m mad at everybody.”

“You still don’t think he did it.”

“I know damned well he didn’t. I want to talk to your sister.”

“Alice? What for?”

“Information. She was on the beach with Ginnie Green last night. She may be able to tell me something.”

“You leave Alice alone.”

“I’ll treat her gently. Where do you live?”

“I don’t want my little sister dragged into this filthy mess.”

“All I want to know is who Ginnie paired off with.”

“I’ll ask Alice. I’ll tell you.”

“Come on, Miss Brocco, we’re wasting time. I don’t need your permission to talk to your sister, after all. I can get the address out of the phone book if I have to.”

She flared up and then flared down.

“You win. We live on Orlando Street, 224. That’s on the other side of town. You will be nice to Alice, won’t you? She’s bothered enough as it is about Ginnie’s death.”

“She really was a friend of Ginnie’s, then?”

“Yes. I tried to break it up. But you know how kids are – two motherless girls, they stick together. I tried to be like a mother to Alice.”

“What happened to your own mother?”

“Father – I mean, she died.” A greenish pallor invaded her face and turned it to old bronze. “Please. I don’t want to talk about it. I was only a kid when she died.”

She went back to her muttering radios. She was quite a woman, I thought as I drove away. Nubile but unmarried, probably full of untapped Mediterranean passions. If she worked an eight-hour shift and started at eight, she’d be getting off about four.

It wasn’t a large town, and it wasn’t far across it. The highway doubled as its main street. I passed the Union High School. On the green playing field beside it a lot of kids in mortarboards and gowns were rehearsing their graduation exercises. A kind of pall seemed to hang over the field. Perhaps it was in my mind.

Farther along the street I passed Green’s Highway Restaurant. A dozen cars stood in its parking space. A couple of white-uniformed waitresses were scooting around behind the plate-glass windows.

Orlando Street was a lower-middle-class residential street bisected by the highway. Jacaranda trees bloomed like low small purple clouds among its stucco and frame cottages. Fallen purple petals carpeted the narrow lawn in front of the Brocco house.

A thin, dark man, wiry under his T-shirt, was washing a small red Fiat in the driveway beside the front porch. He must have been over fifty, but his long hair was as black as an Indian’s. His Sicilian nose was humped in the middle by an old break.

“Mr. Brocco?”

“That’s me.”

“Is your daughter Alice home?”

“She’s home.”

“I’d like to speak to her.”

He turned off his hose, pointing its dripping nozzle at me like a gun.

“You’re a little old for her, ain’t you?”

“I’m a detective investigating the death of Ginnie Green.”

“Alice don’t know nothing about that.”

“I’ve just been talking to your older daughter at the Highway Patrol office. She thinks Alice may know something.”

He shifted on his feet. “Well, if Anita says it’s all right.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” a girl said from the front door. “Anita just called me on the telephone. Come in, Mister – Archer, isn’t it?”

“Archer.”

She opened the screen door for me. It opened directly into a small square living room containing worn green baize furniture and a television set which the girl switched off. She was a handsome, serious-looking girl, a younger version of her sister with ten years and ten pounds subtracted and a ponytail added. She sat down gravely on the edge of a chair, waving her hand at the chesterfield. Her movements were languid. There were blue depressions under her eyes. Her face was sallow.

“What kind of questions do you want to ask me? My sister didn’t say.”

“Who was Ginnie with last night?”

“Nobody. I mean, she was with me. She didn’t make out with any of the boys.” She glanced from me to the blind television set, as if she felt caught between. “It said on the television that she was with a man, that there was medical evidence to prove it. But I didn’t see her with no man. Any man.”

“Did Ginnie go with men?”

She shook her head. Her ponytail switched and hung limp. She was close to tears.

“You told Anita she did.”

“I did not!”

“Your sister wouldn’t lie. You passed on a rumor to her – a high school rumor that Ginnie had had something to do with one man in particular.”

The girl was watching my face in fascination. Her eyes were like a bird’s, bright and shallow and fearful.

“Was the rumor true?”

She shrugged her thin shoulders. “How would I know?”

“You were good friends with Ginnie.”

“Yes. I was.” Her voice broke on the past tense. “She was a real nice kid, even if she was kind of boy crazy.”

“She was boy crazy, but she didn’t make out with any of the boys last night.”

“Not while I was there.”

“Did she make out with Mr. Connor?”

“No. He wasn’t there. He went away. He said he was going home. He lives up the beach.”

“What did Ginnie do?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t notice.”

“You said she was with you. Was she with you all evening?”

“Yes.” Her face was agonized. “I mean no.”

“Did Ginnie go away, too?”

She nodded.

“In the same direction Mr. Connor took? The direction of his house?”

Her head moved almost imperceptibly downward.

“What time was that, Alice?”

“About eleven o’clock, I guess.”

“And Ginnie never came back from Mr. Connor’s house?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know for certain that she went there.”

“But Ginnie and Mr. Connor were good friends?”

“I guess so.”

“How good? Like a boyfriend and a girlfriend?”

She sat mute, her birdlike stare unblinking.

“Tell me, Alice.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of Mr. Connor?”

“No. Not him.”

“Has someone threatened you – told you not to talk?”

Her head moved in another barely perceptible nod.

“Who threatened you, Alice? You’d better tell me for your own protection. Whoever did threaten you is probably a murderer.”

She burst into frantic tears. Brocco came to the door.

“What goes on in here?”

“Your daughter is upset. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, and I know who upset her. You better get out of here or you’ll be sorrier.”

He opened the screen door and held it open, his head poised like a dark and broken ax. I went out past him. He spat after me. The Broccos were a very emotional family.