Росс Макдональд: Black Money

The people and events in this novel are all imaginary, and do not refer to any actual people or events.

R. M.

I’d been hearing about the Tennis Club for years, but I’d never been inside of it. Its courts and bungalows, its swimming pool and cabanas and pavilions, were disposed around a cove of the Pacific a few miles south of the Los Angeles County border. Just parking my Ford in the asphalt lot beside the tennis courts made me feel like less of a dropout from the affluent society.

The carefully groomed woman at the front desk of the main building told me that Peter Jamieson was probably in the snack bar. I walked around the end of the fifty-meter pool, which was enclosed on three sides by cabanas. On the fourth side the sea gleamed through a ten-foot wire fence like a blue fish alive in a net. A few dry bathers were lying around as if the yellow eye of the sun had hypnotized them.

When I saw my prospective client, in the sunny courtyard outside the snack bar, I recognized him instinctively. He looked like money about three generations removed from its source. Though he couldn’t have been out of his early twenties, his face was puffy and apologetic, the face of a middle-aged boy. Under his carefully tailored Ivy League suit he wore a layer of fat like easily penetrable armor. He had the kind of soft brown eyes, which are very often short-sighted.

When I approached his table he got up quickly, almost knocking over his double malter. “You must be Mr. Archer.”

I acknowledged that I was.

“I’m glad to see you.”

He let me feel his large amorphous hand. “Let me get you something. The Monday hot lunch is New England boiled dinner.”

“Thanks, I had lunch before I left Los Angeles. A cup of coffee, maybe.”

He went and got it for me. In the creeping fig that covered one wall of the court, a pair of house finches were discussing family matters. The male, which had a splash of red on its front, took off on an errand. My eye followed him across the framed blue sky, then out of the frame.

“It’s a beautiful day,” I said to Peter Jamieson. “Also this coffee is good.”

“Yes, they make good coffee.”

He sipped dolefully at his malted, then said abruptly: “Can you get her back for me?”

“I can’t make your girl come back if she doesn’t want to. I told you that on the phone.”

“I know. I put it wrong. Even assuming she doesn’t come back to me, we can still save her from ruining her life.”

He rested his arms on the table and leaned towards me, trying to imbue me with crusading fervor. “We can’t let her marry this man. And I’m not talking out of jealousy. Even if I can’t have her, I want to protect her.”

“From the other man.”

“I’m serious, Mr. Archer. This man is apparently wanted by the police. He claims to be a Frenchman, a French aristocrat no less, but nobody really knows who he is or where he comes from. He may not even be Caucasian.”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“He’s so dark. And Ginny is so fair. It nauseates me to see her with him.”

“But it doesn’t nauseate her.”

“No. Of course she doesn’t know what I know about him. He’s a wanted man, probably some kind of a criminal.”

“How did you find that out?”

“From a detective. He caught me– I mean, I was watching the house last night, waiting to see if Ginny came home with him.”

“Do you make a practice of watching Martel’s house?”

“Just this last weekend. I didn’t know if they were coming back from the weekend.”

“She went away for the weekend with him?”

He nodded dismally. “Before she left she gave me back my engagement ring. She said she had no further use for it. Or me.”

He fumbled in his watch pocket and produced the ring, as if it was evidence. In a way it was. The diamonds that encrusted the platinum band must have been worth several thousand dollars. Its return meant that Ginny was serious about Martel.

“What did the man say?”

Peter didn’t seem to hear me. He was absorbed in the ring. He turned it slowly so that the diamonds caught and refracted the light from the sky. He winced, as if their cold fire had burned his fingers.

“What did the detective say about Martel?”

“He didn’t actually say anything outright. He asked me what I was doing there sitting in my car, and I told him I was waiting for Martel. He wanted to know where Martel came from, how long he’d been in Montevista, where he got his money–”

“Martel has money?”

“He seems to have. He certainly flings it around. But as I told the man, I don’t know where it came from or where he came from. Then he tried to ask me some questions about Ginny – he must have seen her with Martel. I refused to discuss her, and he let me go.”

“Was he a local detective?”

“I don’t know. He showed me some kind of badge, but I couldn’t see it in the dark. He got in the car beside me all of a sudden and started talking. He was a very fast talker.”

“Describe him. Young or old?”

“In between, around thirty-five or so. He had on some kind of a tweed jacket, and a light gray hat pulled down over his eyes. He was about my size, I think – I’m five-foot-ten – but not so heavy. I really can’t describe his face, but I didn’t like the sound of him. I thought at first he was some kind of crook trying to hold me up.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“If he had, I didn’t see it. When he finished asking me questions, he told me to be on my way. That was when I decided to buy a detective of my own.”

There was a touch of arrogance in the phrase, reminding me that he was in the habit of buying things and people. But the boy was a little different from some other rich people I’d known. He heard himself, and apologized: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“It’s all right, as long as you realize that all you can do is rent me. What kind of a girl is Ginny?”

The question silenced him for a minute. The ring was still on the table, and his brown eyes focused on it until they crossed. I could hear the clatter of pans and conversation from the snack bar, interspersed with the sweeter notes of the finches.

“She’s a beautiful girl,” he said with a dreamy cross-eyed expression, “and really quite innocent. Undeveloped for her age, in spite of her brains. She can’t possibly realize what she’s getting into. I tried to show her the pitfalls, marrying a man with no real information about his background. But she wouldn’t listen. She said she intended to marry him no matter what I said.”

“Did she say why?”

“He reminds her of her father, that was one thing.”

“Is Martel an older man?”

“I don’t know how old he is. He must be thirty at least, maybe older than that.”

“Is money one of the attractions?”

“It can’t be. She could have married me, in fact we were due to be married next month. And I’m not poor.”

He added, with the caution of old money: “We’re not the Rockefellers, but we’re not poor.”

“Good. I charge a hundred dollars a day and expenses.”

“Isn’t that quite a lot?”

“I don’t think so. Actually it’s just enough to get by on. I don’t work all the time, and I have to maintain an office.”

“I see.”

“I’ll take three hundred dollars advance from you.”

I knew from experience that very rich people were the hardest to collect from after the event.

He shied at the amount, but he didn’t object. “I’ll write you a check,” he said, reaching into his inside breast pocket.