Росс Макдональд - Black Money

The girl leaned out of the open door of the Bentley. “Don’t let him hold you up, Francis.”

“I have no intention of that.”

Martel moved suddenly on Harry and plucked the camera out of his hand. He stepped back, dropped it on the asphalt, and ground it under his heel.

Harry was appalled. “You can’t do that!”

“But I have. It’s a fait accompli .”

“I want my money.”

“No money. Pas d’argent. Rien du tout .”

Martel got into the black car and slammed the door. Harry followed him yelling: “You can’t do that to me! That camera doesn’t belong to me! You’ve got to pay for it.”

“Pay him, Francis,” the girl said.

“No. He had his chance.”

Martel made another sudden movement. His fist appeared at the window, with the small round eye of a gun peering over his index finger. “Listen to me my friend. I do not like to be bothered by canaille . If you come this way again or trespass on my privacy in any way, I will kill you.” He clicked his tongue.

Harry backed away from him. He backed to the edge of the driveway, lost his footing, and almost fell. Unimpeded by false shame, he came up like a sprinter and ran for the Cadillac. He got in wheezing and sweating.

“He almost shot me. You’re a witness to that.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t.”

“Arrest him. Go ahead. He can’t get away with that. He’s nothing but a cheap crook. That French act he puts on is as queer as a three-dollar bill.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Not right now. But I’m gonna get that dago . He can’t get away with smashing my camera. It’s a valuable camera, and it wasn’t mine, either.”

His voice was aggrieved: the world had let him down for the thousandth time. “You wouldn’t just sit there if you were a security cop like you say.”

The Bentley rolled out of the driveway into the road. One wheel passed over the broken camera and flattened it. Martel drove away sedately toward town.

“I’ve got to think of something,” Harry said more or less to himself.

He took off his hat as if it limited the sweep and scope of his mind, and held it on his knees like a begging bowl. The printing on the silk lining said that it came from The Haberdashery in Las Vegas. The gold printing on the leather sweatband said L. Spillman . Harry stole his hat, I thought. Or else he was carrying a false driver’s license.

He turned to me as if he had heard my unspoken accusation. With carefully rationed hostility, he said: “You don’t have to feel you have to stick around. You’ve been no help.”

I said I would see him later at the hotel. The prospect didn’t seem to excite him much.

Laurel Drive ran deep between hedges like an English lane. An immense green barricade of pittosporum hid Mrs. Fablon’s garden from the road. On the far side of the garden a woman who at a distance looked like Ginny’s sister was sitting with a man at an umbrella table, eating lunch.

The man had a long jaw, which hardened when I appeared in the driveway. He stood up wiping his mouth with a napkin. He was tall and erect, and his face was handsome in a bony pugnacious way.

“I’ll be shoving off,” I heard him say under his breath.

“Don’t hurry away, I’m not expecting anyone.”

“Neither was I,” he said shortly.

He flung his napkin down on top of his half-eaten salmon mayonnaise. Without speaking again, or looking at me, he walked to a Mercedes parked under an oak, got in, and drove out the other side of the semi-circular driveway. He acted like a man who was anxious for an excuse to get away.

Mrs. Fablon stayed at the table, looking quite composed. “Who on earth are you?”

“My name is Archer. I’m a private detective.”

“Does Dr. Sylvester know you?”

“If he does, I don’t know him. Why?”

“He rushed off in such a hurry when he saw you.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“You needn’t be. The luncheon was no great success. Don’t tell me Audrey Sylvester is having him followed.”

“Possibly. Not by me. Should she have?”

“Certainly not to my doorstep. George Sylvester has been my family doctor for ten years, and the relationship between us is about as highly seasoned as a tongue-depressor.”

She smiled at her own elaborate wit. “Do you follow people, Mr. Archer?”

I looked at her eyes to see if she was kidding. If she was, they didn’t show it. They were pale blue, with a kind of pastel imperviousness. I was interested in her eyes, because I hadn’t seen her daughter’s.

They were innocent eyes, not youthful but innocent, as if they perceived only pre-selected facts. Such eyes went with the carefully dyed blonde hair whipped like cream on her pretty skull, with the impossibly good figure under her too youthful dress, and with the guileless way she let me look at her. But under her serenity she was tense.

“I must be wanted for something,” she said with a half smile. “Am I wanted for something?”

I didn’t reply. I was trying to think of a tactful way to broach the subject of Ginny and Martel.

“I keep asking you questions,” she said, “and you don’t say anything. Is that the way detectives operate?”

“I have my own ways of working.”

“Mysterious ways your wonders to perform? I was beginning to suspect as much. Now tell me what wonders you’re bent on performing.”

“It has to do with your daughter Ginny.”

“I see.”

But her eyes didn’t change. “Sit down if you like.”

She indicated the metal chair across from her. “Is Virginia in some kind of trouble? She never has been.”

“That’s the question I’m trying to answer.”

“Who put you up to it?” she said rather sharply. “It wasn’t George Sylvester?”

“What makes you think it was?”

“The way he ran off just now.”

She was watching me carefully. “But it wasn’t George, was it? He’s quite infatuated with Virginia – all the men are – but he wouldn’t expose himself–” She paused.

“Expose himself?”

She frowned with her meager out-of-place eyebrows. “You’re drawing me out and making me say things I don’t want to.” She caught her breath. “I know, it must have been Peter. Was it?”

“I can’t go into that.”

“If it was Peter, he’s even more helpless than I supposed. It was Peter, wasn’t it? He’s been threatening to hire detectives for some time. Peter is mad with jealousy, but I had no idea he’d go this far.”

“This isn’t very far. He asked me to look into the background of the man she’s planning to marry. I suppose you know Francis Martel.”

“I’ve met him, naturally. He’s a fascinating person.”

“No doubt. But something happened in the last hour, which makes it seem worthwhile to investigate him. I saw it happen, in the road below his house. A man tried to take a picture of him. Martel scared him off with a gun. He threatened to kill him.”

She nodded calmly. “I don’t blame him at all.”

“Does he make a habit of threatening to murder people?”

“It wouldn’t be a murder, it would be self-protection.”

She sounded as if she was quoting somebody else. “There are reasons for what you saw, I’m sure. He doesn’t want his identity to be known.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“I’m pledged to secrecy.”

She touched her red lips with a finger tipped with the same red.

“Who is he,” I said, “the lost Dauphin of France?”

Without trying, I had succeeded in startling her. She stared at me with her mouth open. Then she remembered that it looked better closed, and closed it.