Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

“Albert Blevins,” he said, “has lived in the Bowman Hotel for about a year. It’s a pensioners’ hotel, one of the better ones in the Mission District.”

“Just how old is he?”

“Maybe sixty. I don’t know for sure. You didn’t give me much time, Lew.”

“There isn’t much time.”

I told him why. Willie was a money player, and his eyes shone like anthracite coal when he heard about Hackett’s wealth. A chunk of it would buy him a new young blonde to break his heart with again.

Willie wanted another Gibson and some lunch, but I steered him to an elevator and out to the parking lot. He backed his Jaguar out of its slot and headed up Bayshore to the city. The aching blue water and the endless mud flats gave me the pang of remembered younger days.

Willie broke into my thoughts. “What’s Albert Blevins got to do with the Hackett snatch?”

“I don’t know, but there has to be some connection. A woman named Laurel Smith who died last night – homicide victim – used to call herself Laurel Blevins. Fleischer knew her in Rodeo City fifteen years ago. Around the same time, and the same locality, an unidentified man was decapitated by a train. Apparently he was Davy Spanner’s father. Deputy Fleischer handled the case, and put it in the books as accidental death.”

“And you say it wasn’t?”

“I’m suspending judgment. There’s still another connection. Spanner was Laurel Smith’s tenant and employee, and I suspect they were closer than that, maybe very close.”

“Did he kill her?”

“I don’t think so. The point is that the people and the places are starting to repeat.” I told Willie about the midnight scene at the railroad crossing. “If we can get Fleischer and Blevins to talk, we may be able to shut the case down in a hurry. Particularly Fleischer. For the past month he’s been bugging Laurel’s apartment in Pacific Palisades.”

“You think he killed her?”

“He may have. Or he may know who did.”

Willie concentrated on the traffic as we entered the city. He left his car in an underground garage on Geary Street. I walked up to his office with him to see if the tail on Fleischer had called in. He had. Fleischer had left Blevins at the Bowman Hotel, and at the time of the call was inside the shop of the Acme Photocopy Service. This was Fleischer’s second visit to the Acme Photocopy Service. He had stopped there on his way to the Bowman Hotel.

I did the same. The Acme Service was a one-man business conducted in a narrow store on Market Street. A thin man with a cough labored over a copying machine. For five quick dollars he told me what Fleischer had had copied. On his first visit it was the front page of an old newspaper, on his second an even older birth certificate.

“Whose birth certificate?”

“I don’t know. Just a minute. Somebody called Jasper, that was the first name, I think.”

I waited, but nothing else came. “What was in the newspaper?”

“I didn’t read it. If I read everything I copy, I’d go blind.”

“You say it was old. How old?”

“I didn’t look at the date, but the paper had turned pretty yellow. I had to handle it carefully.” He coughed, and lit a cigarette in reflex. “That’s all I can tell you, mister. What’s it all about?”

I took that question to the Bowman Hotel. It was a grimy white brick building whose four rows of evenly spaced front windows had a view of the railroad yards. Some of the windows had wooden boxes nailed to their outside sills in lieu of refrigerators.

The lobby was full of old men. I wondered where all the old women were.

One of the old men told me that Albert Blevins’s room was on the second floor at the end of the hall. I went up and knocked on the door.

A husky voice said: “Who is it?”

“My name is Archer. I’d like to talk to you, Mr. Blevins.”

“What about?”

“Same thing as the other fellow.”

A key turned in the lock. Albert Blevins opened the door a few inches. He wasn’t terribly old, but his body was warped by use and his seamed face was set in the cast of permanent stubborn failure. His clear blue eyes had the oddly innocent look of a man who had never been completely broken in to human society. You used to see such men in the small towns, in the desert, on the road. Now they collected in the hollow cores of the cities.

“Will you pay me same as the other fellow?” he said.

“How much?”

“The other fellow gave me fifty dollars. Ask him yourself if you don’t believe me.” A horrible suspicion ravaged his face. “Say, you’re not from Welfare?”

“No.”

“Thank Jehosophat for that. You get a lucky windfall, they take it off your Welfare and that wipes out your luck.”

“They shouldn’t do that.”

My agreement pleased Blevins. He opened the door wider and beckoned me into the room. It was a ten-foot cube containing a chair, a table, and a bed. The iron fire escape slanted across the single window like a cancellation mark.

There was a faint sour odor of time in the room. So far as I could tell, it came from the leatherette suitcase which lay open across the bed. Some of its contents were on the table, as if Blevins had been sorting through his memories and laying them out for sale.

I could recognize some of the things on sight: a broad-bladed fisherman’s knife to which a few old fish scales were clinging like dry tears, a marriage certificate with deep fold-marks cutting across it, a bundle of letters tied together with a brown shoestring, some rifle bullets and a silver dollar in a net sack, a small miner’s pick, a couple of ancient pipes, an ineffectual-looking rabbit’s foot, some clean folded underwear and socks, a glass ball that filled itself with a miniature snowstorm when you shook it, a peacock feather watching us with its eye, and an eagle’s claw.

I sat at the table and picked up the marriage certificate. It was signed by a civil registrar, and stated that Albert D. Blevins had married Henrietta R. Krug in San Francisco on March 3, 1927. Henrietta was seventeen at the time; Albert was twenty; which made him just over sixty now.

“You want to buy my marriage paper?”

“I might.”

“The other fellow gave me fifty for the birth certificate. I’ll let this one go for twenty-five.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s of no great value to me. Marrying her was the big mistake of my life. I never should of married any woman. She told me that herself a hundred times, after we got hitched. But what’s a man to do when a girl comes to him and tells him he got her pregnant?” He spread his hands out incompletely on his faded denim knees. His painfully uncurling fingers reminded me of starfish torn from their moorings.

“I shouldn’t complain,” he said. “Her parents treated us right. They gave us their farm and moved into town. It wasn’t Mr. Krug’s fault that we had three straight years of drought and I couldn’t afford to bring in water and feed and the cattle died. I don’t even blame Etta for leaving me, not any more. It was a miserable life on that dry farm. All we had between us was going to bed together, and that dried up before the baby was born. I delivered him myself, and I guess it hurt her pretty bad. Etta never let me come near her again.”

He was talking like a man who hadn’t had a chance to reveal himself for years, if ever. He rose and paced the room, four steps each way.

“It made me mean,” he said, “living with a pretty girl and not being able to touch her. I treated her mean, and I treated the boy even worse. I used to beat the living bejesus out of him. I blamed him, see, for cutting off my nooky by being born. Sometimes I beat him until the blood would flow. Etta would try to stop me, and then I’d beat her, too.”