Росс Макдональд: The Instant Enemy

Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.

THERE WAS LIGHT early morning traffic on Sepulveda. As I drove over the low pass, the sun came up glaring behind the blue crags on the far side of the valley. For a minute or two, before regular day set in, everything looked fresh and new and awesome as creation.

I left the freeway at Canoga Park and stopped at a drive-in for a ninety-nine-cent breakfast. Then I went on up to the Sebastians’ place in Woodland Hills.

Keith Sebastian had given me detailed instructions on how to find his house. It was an angular contemporary house cantilevered out over a slope. The slope ran steeply down to the edge of a golf course, green from the first of the winter rains.

Keith Sebastian came out of the house in shirt sleeves. He was a handsome man of forty or so, with thick curly brown hair frosted at the sides. He hadn’t shaved yet, and his growth of beard looked like fibrous dirt that his lower face had been rubbed in.

“It’s good of you to come right out,” he said when I had introduced myself. “I realize it’s an ungodly hour–”

“You didn’t pick it, and I don’t mind. I gather she hasn’t come home yet.”

“No, she hasn’t. Since I called you I’ve found out something else is missing. My shotgun, and a box of shells.”

“You think your daughter took them?”

“I’m afraid she must have. The gun cabinet wasn’t broken, and nobody else knew where the key to it was. Except my wife, of course.”

Mrs. Sebastian had appeared as if on cue at the open front door. She was thin and dark and rather beautiful in a haggard sort of way, and she was wearing fresh lipstick and a fresh yellow linen dress.

“Come in,” she said to both of us. “It’s cold out.”

She made a shivery self-hugging gesture which didn’t end when it should have. She went on shivering.

“This is Mr. Lew Archer,” Sebastian was saying. “The private detective I called.” He spoke as if he was presenting me to her as a kind of peace offering.

She answered him impatiently: “I guessed that. Come in, I’ve made some coffee.”

I sat between them at the kitchen counter and drank the bitter brew from a thin cup. The place seemed very clean and very empty. The light pouring in through the window had a cruel clarity.

“Can Alexandria fire a shotgun?” I asked them.

“Anybody can,” Sebastian said glumly. “All you have to do is pull the trigger.”

His wife cut in. “Actually Sandy’s a fair shot. The Hacketts took her quail hunting earlier this year. Much against my wishes, I might add.”

“You might and did,” Sebastian said. “I’m sure the experience was good for her.”

“She hated it. She said so in her diary. She hates to kill things.”

“She’ll get over it. And I know it gave pleasure to Mr. and Mrs. Hackett.”

“Here we go again.”

But before they did, I said: “Who in hell are Mr. and Mrs. Hackett?”

Sebastian gave me a self-revealing look, partly offended, partly patronizing.

“Mr. Stephen Hackett is my boss. That is, he controls the holding company that controls the savings and loan company I work for. He owns quite a few other things, too.”

“Including you,” his wife said. “But not my daughter.”

“That’s unfair, Bernice. I never said–”

“It’s what you do that counts.”

I got up and walked around to the other side of the counter and stood facing them. They both looked a little startled and ashamed.

“All this is very interesting,” I said. “But I didn’t get out of bed at five o’clock in the morning to referee a family argument. Let’s concentrate on your daughter Sandy. How old is she, Mrs. Sebastian?”

“Seventeen. She’s in her senior year.”

“Doing well?”

“She was until the last few months. Then her grades started slipping, quite badly.”

“Why?”

She looked down into her coffee cup. “I don’t really know why.” She sounded evasive, unwilling even to give herself an answer.

“Of course you know why,” her husband said. “All this has happened since she took up with that wild man. Davy what’s-his-name.”

“He isn’t a man. He’s a nineteen-year-old boy and we handled the whole thing abominably.”

“What whole thing, Mrs. Sebastian?”

She held out her arms as if she was trying to encompass the situation, then dropped them in despair. “The business of the boy. We mishandled it.”

“She means I did, as usual,” Sebastian said. “But I only did what I had to do. Sandy was starting to run wild. Skipping school to have afternoon dates with this fellow. Spending her nights on the Strip and God knows where else. Last night I went out and hunted them down–”

His wife interrupted him. “It wasn’t last night. It was the night before last.”

“Whenever it was.” His voice seemed to be weakening under the steady cold force of her disapproval. It shifted gears, to a kind of chanting shout. “I hunted them down in a weird joint in West Hollywood. They were sitting there in public with their arms around each other. I told him if he didn’t stay away from my daughter I’d take my shotgun and blow his bloody head off.”

“My husband watches a good deal of television,” Mrs. Sebastian said dryly.

“Make fun of me if you want to, Bernice. Somebody had to do what I did. My daughter was running wild with a criminal. I brought her home and locked her in her room. What else could a man do?”

His wife was silent for once. She moved her fine dark head slowly from side to side.

I said: “Do you know the young man is a criminal?”

“He served time in the county jail for auto theft.”

“Joy riding,” she said.

“Call it what you like. It wasn’t a first offense, either.”

“How do you know?”

“Bernice read it in her diary.”

“I’d like to see this famous diary.”

“No,” Mrs. Sebastian said. “It was bad enough for me to have read it. I shouldn’t have.” She took a deep breath. “We haven’t been very good parents, I’m afraid. I’m just as much to blame as my husband is, in subtler ways. But you don’t want to go into that.”

“Not now.” I was weary of the war of the generations, the charges and countercharges, the escalations and negotiations, the endless talk across the bargaining table. “How long has your daughter been gone?”

Sebastian looked at his wrist watch. “Nearly twenty-three hours. I let her out of her room yesterday morning. She seemed to have calmed down–”

“She was furious,” her mother said. “But I never thought when she started out for school that she had no intention of going there. We didn’t really catch on until about six o’clock last night when she didn’t come home for dinner. Then I got in touch with her homeroom teacher and found out she’d been playing hooky all day. By that time it was dark already.”

She looked at the window as if it was still dark, now and forever. I followed her glance. Two people were striding along the fairway, a man and a woman, both white-haired, as if they’d grown old in the quest for their small white ball.