Росс Макдональд - Black Money

“Cowardy custard,” Kitty said cheerfully. “This is my new boyfriend. He’s going to find the money and take me on a trip around the world. And you want to know what’s going to happen to you, you poor old clown? We’ll put you in a ward in the country hospital. And nobody will ever come to see you.”

I walked out.

I drove back to Los Angeles. Stopped there for dinner during the twilight hour, and finished the trip to Montevista in the dark.

Vera answered the door of the Jamieson house. She was wearing her sunburst kimono, and her black air was loose on her shoulders. It wasn’t that late. The household seemed to be going to pieces in a quiet way.

“He’s out in the guest house,” she said, “with her.”

Vera seemed to resent another woman on the premises.

The guest house was a white frame cottage at the rear of the garden. Light spilled from its half-shuttered windows, reviving the daytime colors of the flower beds around it. Sweet unidentifiable odors drifted in the air.

It seemed like a place for an idyll, instead of the sequel to a tragedy. Life was short and sweet, I thought, sweet and short.

Peter called out: “Who is it?”

I told him, and he opened the door. He had on a bulky gray sweater and an open-collared white shirt, which revealed the flabby thickness of his neck. There was a rather peculiar gleam in his eye. It could have been pure innocent happiness, it could have been euphoria.

I had similar doubts about the girl in the bright chintz room behind him. She sat under a lamp with a book on her knee, perfectly calm and still in a black dress. She nodded to me, and that was all.

“Come in, won’t you?”

“You come out.”

He stepped outside, leaving the door partly open. It was a warm night for May, and windless.

“What is it, Mr. Archer? I hate to leave her.”

“Even for a minute?”

“Even for a minute,” he said with a kind of pride.

“I have some findings to report, about her father’s death. I doubt that she’ll want to hear what I have to say. He wasn’t a suicide. He may have died by accident.”

“I think Ginny will want to hear about it.”

Reluctantly I went in and told my story, slightly bowdlerized. Ginny took it more calmly than Peter. His foot kept thumping to a nervous rhythm. As if an uncontrolled part of him wanted to run away, even from a room with Ginny in it.

I said to her: “I’m sorry to have to dig this up and throw it in your lap. You’ve had quite a lot thrown in your lap recently.”

“It’s all right. It’s over now.”

I hoped it was over. Her serenity bothered me. It was like the lifeless serenity of a statue.

“Do you want me to do anything about Mr. Ketchel?”

Peter waited for her to answer. She lifted her hands a few inches and dropped them on her book. “What would be the point? You say he’s a sick old man, hardly more than a vegetable. It’s like one of the condign punishments in Dante. A big violent man turns into a helpless cripple.” She hesitated. “Were he and my father fighting about me?”

“That was the general idea.”

“I don’t understand,” Peter said.

She turned to him. “Mr. Ketchel made a rough pass at me.”

“And you still don’t want him punished?”

“Why should I? That was years ago. I’m not even the same person,” she added unsmilingly. “Did you know we change completely, chemically speaking, every seven years?” She seemed to take comfort in the thought.

“You’re an angel,” he said. But he didn’t go near her or touch her.

“There’s a further possibility,” I said. “Ketchel-Spillman may not have been responsible for your father’s death after all. Somebody else may have found him wandering around the club grounds in a daze, and deliberately drowned him in the swimming pool.”

“Who would do that?” she said.

“Your late husband himself is the best bet. I’ve got some further information on him by the way. He was a Panamanian who came out of a fairly hard school–”

She interrupted me: “I know that. Professor Tappinger paid me a visit this afternoon. He told me all about Francis. Poor Francis,” she said remotely. “I see now that he wasn’t entirely sane, and neither was I, to be taken in by him. But what conceivable reason could he have for hurting Roy? I didn’t even know him in those days.”

“He may have drowned him to get a hold on Ketchel. Or he may have seen someone else drown him, and convinced Ketchel that it was Ketchel’s fault.”

“You have a horrible imagination, Mr. Archer.”

“So had your late husband.”

“No. You’re mistaken about him. Francis wasn’t like that.”

“You only knew one side of him, I’m afraid. Francis Martel was a made-up character. Did Professor Tappinger tell you his real name was Pedro Domingo, and he was a bastard by-product of the slums of Panama City? That’s all we know about the real man, the real life that forced him into the fantasy life with you.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

She hugged herself as if she could feel a faint chill of reality through her widow’s black. “Please let’s not talk about Francis.”

Peter rose from his chair. “I quite agree. All that is in the past now. And we’ve had enough talk for one night, Mr. Archer.”

He went to the door and opened it. The sweet night air flooded into the room. I sat where I was.

“May I ask you a question in private, Miss Fablon? Are you calling yourself Miss Fablon?”

“I suppose so. I hadn’t thought of it.”

“It won’t be ‘Miss Fablon’ for long.” Peter said with foolish blandness. “One of these fine days it’s going to be ‘Mrs. Jamieson,’ the way it was always meant to be.”

Ginny looked resigned and very tired. “What do you wish to ask me?” she said softly.

“It’s a private question. Tell Peter to go away for a minute.”

“Peter, you heard the man.”

He frowned and went out, leaving the door wide open. I heard him bulling around in the garden.

“Poor old Peter,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without him now. I don’t know just what I’m going to with him, either.”

“Marry him?”

“I don’t seem to have any other choice. That sounds cynical, doesn’t it? I didn’t mean it that way. But nothing seems terribly worthwhile right now.”

“It wouldn’t be fair to marry Peter unless you cared about him.”

“Oh, I care for him, more than anyone. I always have. Francis was just an episode in my life.”

Behind her world-weary pose, I caught a hint of her immaturity. I wondered if she had grown emotionally at all since her father died.

And I thought that Ginny and Kitty, girls from opposite ends of the same town, had quite a lot in common after all. Neither one had quite survived the accident of beauty. It had made them into things, zombies in a dead desert world, as painful to contemplate as meaningless crucifixions.

“You and Peter used to go together, he told me.”

“That’s true. Through most of high school. He wasn’t fat in those days,” she added in an explanatory way.

“Were you lovers?”

Her eyes darkened, the way the ocean darkens under moving clouds. For the first time I seemed to have touched her sense of her own life. She turned away so that I couldn’t look into her eyes.

“I don’t see that it matters.”

That meant yes.

“Did you become pregnant by Peter?”

“If I answer you,” she said with her face averted, “will you promise never to repeat my answer? To anyone, even Peter?”

“All right.”

“Then I can tell you. We were going to have a baby when I was a freshman in college. I didn’t tell Peter. He was so young, and so young for his age. I didn’t want to frighten him. I didn’t tell anyone, except Roy, and eventually Mother. But even them I didn’t tell who the father was. I had no desire to be taken out of school and forced into one of those horrible teenage marriages. Roy was pretty let-down with me, on account of the baby, but he borrowed a thousand dollars and took me to Tijuana. He treated me to the deluxe abortion, complete with doctor and nurse and hygienic atmosphere. But after that he seemed to feel I owed him money.”