Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

“How about a little drink?”

“No thanks. My husband doesn’t like it when he comes home and I have liquor on my breath.”

“You can’t smell vodka,” Laurel said.

“He can. He’s got a nose like a beagle. Good night now.”

“Take care.”

A door closed. Laurel began to hum an old song about whistling in the dark. She must have been moving around her apartment, because her voice faded and returned.

I started to turn the knob of the library door. Ruth Marburg said:

“Who is that out there?”

I had to go in, smiling. Mrs. Marburg was sitting beside the telephone. There was no revolver in sight.

Hackett was sitting at the table where the tape recorder stood. His battered smile looked as ghastly from the outside as mine felt from the inside. He switched off Laurel’s singing.

“Mrs. Hackett told me where to find you. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

Hackett started to tell me that I wasn’t, but Mrs. Marburg’s voice overbore his: “As a matter of fact you are interrupting something. My son and I are playing some old family tapes.”

“Go right ahead.”

“You wouldn’t be interested. They’re very nostalgic, but just to members of the family.” Her voice sharpened: “Do you want something?”

“I came to give you my final report.”

“This is a bad time. Come back tomorrow, eh?”

“I’d like to hear what he has to say.” Hackett looked uneasily at his mother. “As long as we’re paying him so much we might as well get the benefit of it.”

“I’d rather hear what Laurel has to say.”

Mrs. Marburg flapped her false eyelashes at me. “Laurel? Who on earth is Laurel?”

“Jasper’s wife. You’ve just been listening to her. Let’s all listen.”

Mrs. Marburg leaned toward me urgently. “Close the door behind you. I want to talk to you.”

I closed the door and leaned on it, watching them. Mrs. Marburg rose heavily, using her arms as well as her legs. Hackett reached for the tape recorder.

“Leave it alone.”

His hand hovered over the controls, and then withdrew. Mrs. Marburg walked toward me.

“So you’ve dug up a little dirt and you think you can raise the ante. You couldn’t be more wrong. If you don’t watch yourself you’ll be in jail before morning.”

“Somebody will.”

She thrust her face close to mine. “My son and I buy up people like you two for a nickel. That check I gave you is postdated. Are you too stupid to know what that means?”

“It means you didn’t trust me to stay bought. Nobody’s staying bought these days.” I got out Keith Sebastian’s check and showed it to her. “Sebastian gave me this.”

She snatched at the check. I held it out of her reach and put it away. “Don’t be grabby, Etta.”

Her whole face scowled under its mask of paint. “You mustn’t call me that name. My name is Ruth.”

She went to her chair. Instead of sitting down she opened the drawer of the telephone table. I reached her before she got the revolver out and ready to fire, and tore it out of her hands.

I backed away from her and turned to Hackett. He was on his feet, moving on me. I didn’t have to fire the gun. He started to walk backwards, rather tentatively, toward the table where he’d been sitting.

“Get away from the table, Hackett. I want you on the other side of the room, near your mother.”

He crossed in front of her and leaned against all of Dickens, then sat on a three-stepped stool in the corner, like a dunce. Mrs. Marburg stood resistant, but eventually sank back into her chair.

I took her son’s place on the chair by the tape recorder, and switched it on. Fleischer’s recording apparatus must have been noise-activated: there were no long breaks or lacunae in the sound. Laurel’s singing was followed by the small noise of Laurel making herself a drink, then by the larger noise of her making another drink.

She sang a song of her own invention, with the refrain of “Davy, Davy, Davy.”

The door of her apartment opened and closed, and Davy himself was in the room. “Hi, Laurel.”

“Call me Mother.”

“It doesn’t sound right. Hey, you don’t have to kiss me.”

“I have a right to. Haven’t I treated you like a mother?”

“Lately, you have. Sometimes I wonder why.”

“Because I am your mother. I’d cut off my right hand to prove it.”

“Or your head?”

She cried out, “Ahl” as if he had hurt her physically. “It isn’t very nice of you to talk like that. I didn’t have anything to do with killing your father.”

“But you know who did kill him.”

“I told you the other night, it was the young man – the beatnik with the beard.”

“They didn’t have beatniks in those days.” Davy’s voice was flat and incredulous.

“Whatever you want to call him – he was the one.”

“Who was he?”

After some hesitation she said: “I don’t know.”

“Then why did you cover up for him?”

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. You told Fleischer and the law that the dead man wasn’t my father. But you told me he was. Either you lied to them or you’re lying to me. Which is it?”

Laurel said in a small voice: “You mustn’t be so hard on me. I didn’t lie either time. The man the train ran over–”

Mrs. Marburg groaned, so loudly that I missed the end of Laurel’s sentence. I switched the recorder off as Mrs. Marburg started to speak:

“Do I have to sit here all night and listen to this soap opera?”

“It’s a family tape,” I said. “Very nostalgic. Your grandson and his mother are talking about what happened to your son. Don’t you want to know what happened to him?”

“That’s nonsense! I only have the one son.”

She turned to Hackett in his corner and showed her teeth in what was probably meant to be a maternal smile. He moved uneasily under it. Finally he spoke, for the second time, very carefully:

“There’s not much use pretending, Mother. He can find out about Jasper quite easily. I think he already has. I also think it’s time I made a clean breast of it.”

“Don’t be a fool!”

“A clean breast of what?” I said.

“The fact that I killed my half-brother, Jasper Blevins. If you’ll give me a chance to explain what happened, I think you’ll take a different view of the matter. Certainly no jury would convict me.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” his mother said. “I say you’re making a big mistake if you trust this s.o.b.”

“I have to trust someone,” he said. “And this man saved my life. I don’t agree with you, by the way, that we should stop payment on his check. He earned the money.”

I cut in: “You were going to tell me how you killed Jasper.”

He took a deep breath. “Let me start with why I killed him. Jasper murdered my father. My father and I had been very close, though I hadn’t seen him for a long time. I was living in London, studying economics in preparation for taking over the business eventually. But Dad was a man in his prime, and I didn’t expect him to die for many years. When I got the word that he’d been murdered, it just about pushed me over the edge. I was still very young, in my early twenties. When I flew home I was determined to track down my father’s murderer.”

Hackett was talking like a book, which made it hard to believe him. “How did you track him down?”

“It turned out to be quite easy. I found out Jasper had quarreled with Dad.”

“Who told you?”

He looked at his mother. She pushed air away with the flat of her hand. “Leave me out of this. If you take my advice, you’ll shut up here and now.”

“What are you afraid of, Mrs. Marburg?”