Росс Макдональд - The Chill

“I’d like to see Chuck Begley.”

He looked vaguely pained, and his voice took on a note of mild complaint. “I had to fire Chuck. I’d send him out with a delivery, and sometimes it’d arrive when it was supposed to, and sometimes it wouldn’t.”

“How long ago did you fire him?”

“Couple of weeks. He only worked for me a couple of weeks. He isn’t cut out for that kind of work. I told him more than once it was beneath his capacity. Chuck Begley is a fairly bright man if he’d straighten up, you know.”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought perhaps you were an acquaintance of his.”

I showed him my photostat.

He blew the smell of peppermint in my face. “Is Begley on the run?”

“He may be. Why?”

“I wondered when he first came in why a man like him would take a part-time delivery job. What’s he wanted for?”

“I wouldn’t know. Can you give me his home address?”

“I think I can at that.” He stroked his veined nose, watching me over his fingers. “Don’t tell Begley I gave you the word. I don’t want him bouncing back on me.”

“I won’t.”

“He spends a lot of time in the home of one of my customers. You might say he’s a non-paying guest of hers. I certainly wouldn’t want to make trouble for her. But then,” he reasoned, “if Begley’s on the run I’m doing her a favor in seeing that he’s picked up. Isn’t that right?”

“I’d say so. Where does she live?”

“On Shearwater Beach, cottage number seventeen. Her name’s Madge Gerhardi. Take the freeway south and you’ll see the Shearwater turnoff about two miles down the line. Only just don’t tell either of them that it was me sent you. Okay?”

“Okay.” I left him with his bottles.

We parked our cars at the top of the access lane, and I persuaded Alex to stay in his, out of sight. Shearwater Beach turned out to be a kind of expensive slum where several dozen cottages stood in a row. The changing blue reflection of the sea glared through the narrow gaps between them. Beyond their peaked rooftops, out over the water, a tern circled on flashing wings, looking for fish.

Number seventeen needed paint, and leaned on its pilings like a man on crutches. I knocked on the scabbed gray door. Slowly, like bodies being dragged, footsteps approached the other side. The bearded man opened it.

He was a man of fifty or so wearing an open-necked black shirt from which his head jutted like weathered stone. The sunlight struck mica glints from his eyes. The fingers with which he was holding the edge of the door were bitten down to the quick. He saw me looking at them and curled them into a fist.

“I’m searching for a missing girl, Mr. Begley.” I had decided on the direct approach. “She may have met with foul play and if she did, you may have been one of the last people who saw her alive.”

He rubbed the side of his face with his clenched knuckles. His face bore marks of old trouble, some of them done by hand: faintly quilted patches around the eyes, a thin scar on his temple divided like a miniature ruler by stitch-marks. Old trouble and the promise of further trouble.

“You must be crazy. I don’t even know any girls.”

“You know me ,” a woman said behind him.

She appeared at his shoulder and leaned on him, waiting for somebody to second the self-administered flattery. She was about Begley’s age, and may have been older. Her body was very assertive in shorts and a halter. Frizzled by repeated dyeings and bleachings, her hair stuck up on her head like a yellow fright wig. Between their deep blue artificial shadows, her eyes were the color of gin.

“I’m very much afraid that you must be mistaken,” she said to me with a cultivated Eastern-seaboard accent which lapsed immediately. “I swear by all that’s holy that Chuck had nothing to do with any girl. He’s been too busy looking after little old me.” She draped a plump white arm across the back of his neck. “Haven’t you, darling?”

Begley was immobilized between the woman and me. I showed him Fargo’s glossy print of the honeymooners.

“You know this girl, don’t you? Her name, her married name, is Dolly Kincaid.”

“I never heard of her in my life.”

“Witnesses tell me different. They say you went to see her at the Surf House three weeks ago this coming Sunday. You saw this picture of her in the paper and ordered a copy of it from the photographer at the Surf House.”

The woman tightened her arm around his neck, more like a wrestling partner than a lover. “Who is she, Chuck?”

“I have no idea.” But he muttered to himself: “So it’s started all over again.”

“What has started all over again?”

She was stealing my lines. “Could I please talk to Mr. Begley alone?”

“He has no secrets from me.” She looked up at him proudly, with a wilted edge of anxiety on her pride. “Have you, darling? We’re going to be married, aren’t we, darling?”

“Could you stop calling me darling? Just for five minutes? Please?”

She backed away from him, ready to cry, her downturned red mouth making a lugubrious clown face.

“Please go inside,” he said. “Let me talk to the man.”

“This is my place. I have a right to know what goes on in my own place.”

“Sure you do, Madge. But I have squatter’s privileges, at least. Go in and drink some coffee.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“No. Of course I’m not.” But there was resignation in his voice. “Beat it, eh, like a good girl?”

His last word seemed to mollify her. Dawdling and turning, she disappeared down the hallway. Begley closed the door and leaned on it.

“Now you call tell me the truth,” I said.

“All right, so I went to see her at the hotel. It was a stupid impulse. It doesn’t make me a murderer.”

“Nobody suggested that, except you.”

“I thought I’d save you the trouble.” He spread out his arms as if for instant crucifixion. “You’re the local law, I gather.”

“I’m working with them,” I said hopefully. “My name is Archer. You haven’t explained why you went to see Mrs. Kincaid. How well did you know her?”

“I didn’t know her at all.” He dropped his outspread arms in emphasis. The sensitive areas around his mouth were hidden by his beard, and I couldn’t tell what he was doing with them. His gray eyes were unrevealing. “I thought I knew her, but I didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought she might be my daughter. There was quite a resemblance to her in the newspaper picture, but not so much in the flesh. The mistake on my part was natural. I haven’t seen my daughter for so long.”

“What’s your daughter’s name?”

He hesitated. “Mary. Mary Begley. We haven’t been in touch for over ten years. I’ve been out of the country, on the other side of the world.” He made it sound as remote as the far side of the moon.

“Your daughter must have been quite young when you left.”

“Yeah. Ten or eleven.”

“And you must have been quite fond of her,” I said, “to order a picture just because it reminded you of her.”

“I was fond of her.”

“Why didn’t you go back for the picture then?”

He went into a long silence. I became aware of something impressive in the man, the untouchable still quality of an aging animal.

“I was afraid that Madge would be jealous,” he said. “I happen to be living on Madge.”

I suspected he was using the bald statement to tell a lie. But it may have come from a deeper source. Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born, and Begley had some of the stigmata of the trouble-prone. He said: