Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

“That doesn’t make me responsible.”

“You are, though. You can’t profit from murder without taking part of the blame.”

“I didn’t know he killed Laurel,” she said with some force.

“You knew he killed Mark Hackett. Didn’t you?”

“I found out about it.”

“But you didn’t turn him in.”

“He was my son,” she said.

“Stephen was your son, too. But your maternal instincts didn’t work for him. You conspired with Jasper to kill Stephen and put Jasper in his place.”

She gave me a shocked look, as if the truth of what they had done was just occurring to her, fifteen years too late. “How could I possibly do a thing like that?”

The sentence was meant to be a denial, but it was also a question; which I answered. “You were headed for the rocks. Mark Hackett knew about your affair with Sidney Marburg. He was going to divorce you and cut you off financially. Simply killing Mark wouldn’t help you very much. The bulk of his estate was going to Stephen. So Stephen had to go.

“Nobody in California knew Stephen. He’d been out of the country for several years, and at the time he left for Europe you were all living in Texas. But your lover Sid had sharp eyes, and you didn’t want to have to knock him off, so you sent him to Mexico for the transition period. Sid caught one glimpse of Stephen wearing a beard when Stephen flew in from England.

“You shunted Stephen off to the ranch where Jasper was waiting for him. Jasper had more than money to gain from Stephen’s death. His brother’s identity was a perfect mask for the murderer of Mark Hackett. He killed Stephen and shaved his beard off.” I looked past Mrs. Marburg to her son. “You were a barber at one time, weren’t you, Jasper?”

He looked back at me with eyes as empty as a skull’s. I said to him: “You left Laurel behind to con the local law and came down here and took your brother’s place. It couldn’t have been too hard, with your mother vouching for you. I imagine the hardest part was learning to forge your brother’s signature. But then you were a bit of an artist, too. You were a bit of just about everything. But you found your real métier as a killer and conman.”

The man in the corner spat at me and missed. His role as a rich and lucky man had ended. The room with its books and pictures no longer belonged to him. He was Albert Blevins’s son, alone in blank space.

“For fourteen or fifteen years,” I said, “nothing much happened to threaten your success. You lived quietly in seclusion, developed a taste for good pictures, visited Europe. You even got up nerve enough to make a bigamous marriage.

“No doubt you were paying off Laurel all those years. You owed her a lot, really, for keeping Jack Fleischer off your trail. Unfortunately she got lonely with nothing but a little money to keep her company. And she had some pangs of conscience about the boy she’d abandoned.

“In the end she made a move toward the boy. It was enough to tip Jack Fleischer off. I’m sure he’d been suspicious of both of you from the start. His retirement freed him to act. He put Laurel’s apartment under surveillance, and started to dig into the whole background.

“We know from the tape what happened after that. Fleischer called you. You silenced Laurel. Later you got your chance to silence Fleischer. Do you want to talk about that?”

Hackett made no response of any kind. He was leaning forward with his hands on his knees. I went on:

“It isn’t hard to imagine what happened. Davy believed he had found his father, that his life was just beginning. He laid the shotgun down and untied you. You made a grab for the gun and got hold of it. But Davy got away.

“Jack Fleischer was older and not so quick. Or maybe he was paralyzed by the sudden confrontation. Did he recognize you, Jasper, and know in the moment before he died who shot him? We know, anyway. You killed Fleischer and threw the gun in the creek. Then you collapsed on the creek bank and waited to be rescued.”

“You can’t prove any of this,” Mrs. Marburg said.

Her son was doubtful. He slid off the stool and tried to rush me, clumsy and almost reluctant, trotting in slow motion toward his own revolver in my hand.

I had time to decide where to shoot him. If I had liked the man I might have shot to kill. I shot him in the right leg.

He fell at his mother’s feet, clutching his knee and moaning. She didn’t reach out to touch him or comfort him. She sat looking down at him in the way I imagine the damned look down, with pity and terror only for themselves, into lower circles than their own.

The sound of the shot brought Aubrey into the house. He arrested both of them and took them in on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder.

Later I made my way through the crowds of night-blooming young people on the Strip and climbed the stairs to my office. The basket of cold chicken, washed down with a slug of whisky, tasted better than I expected it to.

I had a second slug to fortify my nerves. Then I got Mrs. Marburg’s check out of the safe. I tore it into small pieces and tossed the yellow confetti out the window. It drifted down on the short hairs and the long hairs, the potheads and the acid heads, draft dodgers and dollar chasers, swingers and walking wounded, idiot saints, hard cases, foolish virgins.

The End