Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

I turned to Mrs. Connor. She was standing in the doorway with her legs apart. Her body was almost black against the daylight. Her eyes were hooded by the scarf on her head.

“What time did you get home, Mrs. Connor?”

“About ten o’clock this morning. I took a bus as soon as my husband called. But I’m in no position to give him an alibi.”

“An alibi wasn’t what I had in mind. I suggest another possibility, that you came home twice. You came home unexpectedly last night, saw the girl in the house with your husband, waited in the dark till the girl came out, waited with a piece of rope in your hands – a piece of rope you’d cut from your husband’s boat in the hope of getting him punished for what he’d done to you. But the picture doesn’t fit the frame, Mrs. Connor. A sailor like your husband wouldn’t cut a piece of line from his own boat. And even in the heat of murder he wouldn’t tie a granny’s knot. His fingers would automatically tie a reef knot. That isn’t true of a woman’s fingers.”

She held herself upright with one long, rigid arm against the doorframe.

“I wouldn’t do anything like that. I wouldn’t do that to Frank.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t in daylight, Mrs. Connor. Things have different shapes at midnight.”

“And hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Is that what you’re thinking? You’re wrong. I wasn’t here last night. I was in bed in my father’s house in Long Beach. I didn’t even know about that girl and Frank.”

“Then why did you leave him?”

“He was in love with another woman. He wanted to divorce me and marry her. But he was afraid – afraid that it would affect his position in town. He told me on the phone this morning that it was all over with the other woman. So I agreed to come back to him.” Her arm dropped to her side.

“He said that it was all over with Ginnie?”

Possibilities were racing through my mind. There was the possibility that Connor had been playing reverse English, deliberately and clumsily framing himself in order to be cleared. But that was out of far left field.

“Not Ginnie,” his wife said. “The other woman was Anita Brocco. He met her last spring in the course of work and fell in love – what he calls love. My husband is a foolish, fickle man.”

“Please, Stella. I said it was all over between me and Anita, and it is.”

She turned on him in quiet savagery. “What does it matter now? If it isn’t one girl it’s another. Any kind of female flesh will do to poultice your sick little ego.”

Her cruelty struck inward and hurt her. She stretched out her hand toward him. Suddenly her eyes were blind with tears.

“Any flesh but mine, Frank,” she said brokenly.

Connor paid no attention to his wife.

He said to me in a hushed voice:

“My God, I never thought, I noticed her car last night when I was walking home along the beach.”

“Whose car?”

“Anita’s red Fiat. It was parked at the viewpoint a few hundred yards from here.” He gestured vaguely toward town. “Later, when Ginnie was with me, I thought I heard someone in the garage. But I was too drunk to make a search.” His eyes burned into mine. “You say a woman tied that knot?”

“All we can do is ask her.”

We started toward my car together. His wife called after him:

“Don’t go, Frank. Let him handle it.”

He hesitated, a weak man caught between opposing forces.

“I need you,” she said. “We need each other.”

I pushed him in her direction.

It was nearly four when I got to the HP station. The patrol cars had gathered like homing pigeons for the change in shift. Their uniformed drivers were talking and laughing inside.

Anita Brocco wasn’t among them. A male dispatcher, a fat-faced man with pimples, had taken her place behind the counter.

“Where’s Miss Brocco?” I asked.

“In the ladies’ room. Her father is coming to pick her up any minute.”

She came out wearing lipstick and a light beige coat. Her face turned beige when she saw my face. She came toward me in slow motion, leaned with both hands flat on the counter. Her lipstick looked like fresh blood on a corpse.

“You’re a handsome woman, Anita. Too bad about you.”

“Too bad.” It was half a statement and half a question. She looked down at her hands.

“Your fingernails are clean now. They were dirty this morning. You were digging in the dirt last night, weren’t you?”

“No.”

“You were, though. You saw them together and you couldn’t stand it. You waited in ambush with a rope, and put it around her neck. Around your own neck, too.”

She touched her neck. The talk and laughter had subsided around us. I could hear the tick of the clock again, and the muttering signals coming in from inner space.

“What did you use to cut the rope with, Anita? The garden shears?”

Her red mouth groped for words and found them. “I was crazy about him. She took him away. It was all over before it started. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted him to suffer.”

“He’s suffering. He’s going to suffer more.”

“He deserves to. He was the only man–” She shrugged in a twisted way and looked down at her breast. “I didn’t want to kill her, but when I saw them together – I saw them through the window. I saw her take off her clothes and put them on. Then I thought of the night my father – when he – when there was all the blood in Mother’s bed. I had to wash it out of the sheets.”

The men around me were murmuring. One of them, a sergeant, raised his voice.

“Did you kill Ginnie Green?”

“Yes.”

“Are you ready to make a statement?” I said.

“Yes. I’ll talk to Sheriff Pearsall. I don’t want to talk here, in front of my friends.” She looked around doubtfully.

“I’ll take you downtown.”

“Wait a minute.” She glanced once more at her empty hands. “I left my purse in the – in the back room. I’ll go and get it.”

She crossed the office like a zombie, opened a plain door, closed it behind her. She didn’t come out. After a while we broke the lock and went in after her.

Her body was cramped on the narrow floor. The ivory-handled nail file lay by her right hand. There were bloody holes in her white blouse and in the white breast under it. One of them had gone as deep as her heart.

Later Al Brocco drove up in her red Fiat and came into the station.

“I’m a little late,” he said to the room in general. “Anita wanted me to give her car a good cleaning. Where is she, anyway?”

The sergeant cleared his throat to answer Brocco.

All us poor creatures, as the old man of the mountain had said that morning.

Published in Argosy , April 1965.

The day after her dog disappeared, Fay Hooper called me early. Her normal voice was like waltzing violins, but this morning the violins were out of tune. She sounded as though she’d been crying.

“Otto’s gone.” Otto was her one-year-old German shepherd. “He jumped the fence yesterday afternoon and ran away. Or else he was kidnapped – dognapped, I suppose is the right word to use.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You know Otto, Mr. Archer – how loyal he was. He wouldn’t deliberately stay away from me overnight, not under his own power. There must be thieves involved.” She caught her breath. “I realize searching for stolen dogs isn’t your métier. But you are a detective, and I thought, since we knew each other…” She allowed her voice to suggest, ever so chastely, that we might get to know each other better.

I liked the woman, I liked the dog, I liked the breed. I was taking my own German shepherd pup to obedience school, which is where I met Fay Hooper. Otto and she were the handsomest and most expensive members of the class.