Росс Макдональд - Black Money

She was still on her adolescent high horse. “How dare you? I’m not a prostitute.”

“I don’t mean that kind of hustle. Get a job.”

“I’ve never had to work for a living, thank you.”

“It’s time you did. If you keep dreaming about those vanished millions you’ll dream yourself into Camarillo or Corona.”

“Don’t you dare make threats to me!”

“It isn’t me threatening you. It’s your dreams. If you won’t lift a finger to help yourself, go back to Harry.”

“That feeb? He couldn’t even stay out of hospital.”

“He gave everything he had.”

She was silent. Her face was like a colored picture straining in agony to come to life. Life glittered first in her eyes. A tear made a track down her cheek. I found myself standing beside her comforting her. Then her head was like an artificial dahlia on my shoulder, and I could feel the sorrowful little movements of her body becoming less sorrowful.

The therapist tapped on the door and opened it. She had changed into street clothes. “I’m leaving, Mrs. Ketchel. Mr. Ketchel is safe and snug in his wheelchair.”

She looked at us severely: “But don’t leave him out too long now.”

“I won’t,” Kitty said. “Thank you.”

The woman didn’t move. “I was wondering if you can pay me something on last week, and for staying Monday night. I have bills to meet, too.”

Kitty went to her bedroom and came back with a twenty-dollar bill. She thrust it at the woman. “Will this take care of it for now?”

“I guess it will have to. I don’t begrudge my services, understand, but a woman has a right to honest pay for honest work.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your money. Our dividend checks are slow in arriving this month.”

The woman gave her disbelieving look, and left the house. Kitty was rigid with anger. She rapped her fists together in the air.

“The old bag! She humiliated me.”

“Are there any dividends coming?”

“There’s nothing coming. I’m having to sell my jewels. And I was saving them for a rainy day.”

“It looks like a wet summer.”

“What are you, a rainmaker?”

She moved toward me, humming an old song about what we’d do on a rain-rain-rainy day. Her breast nudged me gently. “I’d do a lot for any man who would help me find Leo’s money.”

She was being deliberately provocative now, but our moment had passed.

“Would you tell me the truth, for instance?”

“What about?”

“Roy Fablon. Did Leo kill him?”

After a long thinking pause, she said: “He didn’t mean to. It was an accident. They had a fight about– something.”

“Something?”

“If you have to know, it was Roy Fablon’s daughter. The older Leo got, the more he went for the young chicks. It was embarrassing. Maybe I shouldn’t have done what I did, but I passed the word to Mrs. Fablon about Leo making a deal for the girl with Fablon.”

“You told Mrs. Fablon?”

“That’s correct. I was acting in self-defense. Also I was doing the girl a favor. Mrs. Fablon straightened her husband out, and he said nix to Leo.”

“I can’t understand why he didn’t say nix in the first place.”

“He owed Leo a lot of money, and that was all the leverage Leo ever needed. Also Fablon pretended not to know what the deal meant. You know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean.”

“Like Leo was a philanthropist or something. He’d sell his sick mother’s blood for ten dollars a pint and take a deposit on the bottle, Leo would. But he was going to send the girl to school in Switzerland, to improve her mind. And Fablon thought that would be great, until his wife got wind of it. Frankly I think that Fablon hated the girl.”

“I thought he was crazy about her.”

“Sometimes there isn’t much difference between the two. Ask me, I’m an expert. Fablon turned against her when she got pregnant by some fellow, apparently, and Fablon would go to any lengths to get her away from him.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. Mrs. Fablon didn’t know, either, or else she didn’t want to tell me. Anyway, Fablon came to the cottage that night and called the whole deal off. Leo and him had a big fight, and Fablon took quite a beating. Leo used to be terrible with his fists, even when he was sick. Fablon stumbled out of the cottage in bad shape. He lost his way in the dark and fell in the pool and drowned.”

“Did you see him?”

“Cervantes did.”

“He must have been lying. According to the chemical evidence, Fablon drowned in salt water. The pool is fresh.”

“Maybe it is now. It was salt in those days. I ought to know. I swam in it every day for two weeks.”

Her voice lingered on the memory. Maybe she was running into rainy days, and having to sell her jewelry. But she had spent two weeks in the Tennis Club sun.

“What did Cervantes have to say about it, Kitty?”

“He found Roy Fablon in the pool, and came and told Leo. It was a bad scene. Leo was committing a felony just by using his fists. When Fablon drowned it was technically murder. Cervantes suggested he could chuck the body in the sea and fake a suicide. He’d been sucking around Leo before, and this was his chance for an in. When we left town the next day or so, we took him along. Instead of sending the Fablon girl to school in Switzerland, Leo sent the Cervantes boy to college in Paris, France.

“I told Leo he was nuts. He said the reason he was a success was because he looked years ahead. He had a use for Cervantes, he said, and he knew he could trust him, after the Fablon business. That was one time he was wrong. As soon as Leo got sick this last time, Cervantes turned on him.”

Her voice deepened. “It’s funny about Leo. Everybody was afraid of him, including me. He was the big shot. But as soon as he got really sick, he was just a nothing man. A flunky like Cervantes could take him for everything he had.”

“At least it was a switch. How did Cervantes get hold of the money?”

“Leo turned it over to him, a piece at a time, over the last three-four years. Cervantes got some kind of a government job, and he could cross the border without being searched. He stashed the money someplace out of the country, maybe Switzerland, in one of those numbered bank accounts they have.”

I didn’t think the money was in Switzerland. There were numbered accounts in Panama, too.

“What are you thinking?”

“I was wondering,” I said, “if Mrs. Fablon was blackmailing Leo for killing her husband.”

“She was. She came to see him in Vegas after the body was found. She told him she protected him at the inquest, and the least he could do was help her out a little. He hated the hell to do it, but I think he sent her payments from then on.”

She paused, and looked at me sharply. “I’ve told you everything I know about the Fablons. Are you going to try to trace that money for me?”

“I’m not saying no. Right now I have another client, and two other murders to work on.”

“There’s no money in that, is there?”

“Money isn’t the only thing in life.”

“That’s what I used to think, until this. What are you, a do-gooder or something?”

“I wouldn’t say so. I’m working at not being a do-badder.”

She gave me a puzzled look. “I don’t get you, Archer. What’s your angle?”

“I like people, and I try to be of some service.”

“And that adds up to a life?”

“It makes life possible, anyway. Try it some time.”

“I did,” she said, “with Harry. But he didn’t have what it takes. I always get stuck with feebs and cripples.” She shrugged. “I better see how Leo is doing.”

He was waiting patiently in the cross-hatched shadow of a latticework screen. His shirt and trousers were loose on his shrunken body. He blinked up at me when we approached him, as if I planned to hit him.