Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

Among the half-dozen other cars, one in particular interested me. It was a fairly new Plymouth two-door with Purissima Record lettered across the door. I walked over for a closer look.

A molded prewar Ford with a shackled rear end and too much engine came off the highway on banshee tires and pulled up beside the Plymouth. The two boys in the front seat looked me over with bold and planless eyes and forgot about me. I was a pedestrian, earth-borne. While they were waiting for a carhop, they occupied themselves with combing and rearranging their elaborate hair-structures. This process took a long time, and continued after one of the waitresses came up to the side of their car. She was a little blonde, pert-breasted in her tight uniform.

“Drive much?” she said to the boys. “I saw you come into the lot. You want to kill it before it multiplies.”

“A lecture,” the boy at the wheel said.

The other boy leaned toward her. “It said on the radio Gwen saw the killer.”

“That’s right, she’s talking to the reporter now.”

“Did he pull a gun on her?”

“Nothing like that. She didn’t even know he was the killer.”

“What did he do?” the driver said. He sounded very eager, as if he was seeking some remarkable example to emulate.

“Nothing. He was poking around in the garbage pails. When he saw her, he took off. Listen, kids, I’m busy. What’ll it be?”

“You got a big George, George?” the driver asked his passenger.

“Yeah, I’m loaded. We’ll have the usual, barbecued baby and double martinis. On second thought, make it a couple of cokes.”

“Sure, kids, have yourselves a blast.” She came around the Plymouth to me. “What can I do for you, sir?”

I realized I was hungry. “Bring me a hamburger, please.”

“Deluxe, Stackburger, or Monarch? Monarchburger is the seventy-five-center. It’s bigger, and you get free potatoes with it.”

“Free potatoes sounds good.”

“You can eat it inside if you want.”

“Is Gwen inside? I want to talk to her.”

“I wondered if you were plainclothes. Gwen’s out behind with Gene Slovekin from the paper. He wanted to take her picture.”

She indicated an open gate in the grapestake fence that surrounded the rear of the lot. There were several forty-gallon cans beside the gate. I looked into the nearest one. It was half full of a greasy tangle of food and other waste. Carl Hallman was hard-pressed.

On the other side of the gate, a footpath led along the bank of the creek. The dry bed of the creek was lined with concrete here, and narrowed down to a culvert which ran under the highway. This was high enough for a man to walk upright through it.

Slovekin and the carhop were coming back along the path toward me. She was thirtyish and plump; her body looked like a ripe tomato in her red uniform. Slovekin was carrying a camera with a flashbulb attachment. His tie was twisted, and he walked as if he was tired. I waited for them beside the gate.

“Hello, Slovekin.”

“Hello, Archer. This is a mad scramble.”

The carhop turned to him. “If you’re finished with me, Mr. Slovekin, I got to get back to work. The manager’ll be docking me, and I got a kid in school.”

“I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions,” I said.

“Gee, I dunno about that.”

“I’ll fill you in,” Slovekin said, “if it doesn’t take too long. Thanks, Gwen.”

“You’re more than welcome. Remember you promised I could have a print. I haven’t had my picture taken since God made little green apples.”

She touched the side of her face, delicately, hopefully, and hustled into the building on undulating hips. Slovekin deposited the camera in the back seat of his press car. We got into the front.

“Did she see Hallman enter the culvert?”

“Not actually,” Slovekin said. “She made no attempt to follow him. She thought he was just a bum from the jungle on the other side of the tracks. Gwen didn’t catch onto who he was until the police got here and asked some questions. They came up the creekbed from the beach, incidentally, so he couldn’t have gone that way.”

“What was his condition?”

“Gwen’s observations aren’t worth much. She’s a nice girl, but not very bright. Now that she knows who he is, he was seven feet tall with horns and illuminated revolving eyeballs.” Slovekin moved restlessly, turning the key in the ignition. “That’s about all there is here. Can I drop you anywhere? I’m supposed to cover the movements of the sheriff’s posse.” His intonation satirized the phrase.

“Wear your bulletproof vest. Turning seventy hunters loose in a town is asking for double trouble.”

“I agree. So does Spaulding, my editor. But we report the news, we don’t make it. You got any for me, by any chance?”

“Can I talk off the record?”

“I’d rather have it on. It’s getting late, and I don’t mean late at night. We’ve never had a lynching in Purissima, but it could happen here. There’s something about insanity, it frightens people, makes them irrational, too. Their worst aggressions start popping out.”

“You sound like an expert in mob psychology,” I said.

“I sort of am. It runs in the family. My father was an Austrian Jew. He got out of Vienna one jump ahead of the storm troopers. I also inherited a prejudice in favor of the underdog. So if you know something that will let Hallman off the hook, you better spill it. I can have it on the radio in ten minutes.”

“He didn’t do it.”

“Do you know he didn’t for certain?”

“Not quite. I’d stake my reputation on it, but I have to do better than that. Hallman’s being used as a patsy, and a lot of planning went into it.”

“Who’s behind it?”

“There’s more than one possibility. I can’t give you any names.”

“Not even off the record?”

“What would be the use? I haven’t got enough to prove a case. I don’t have access to the physical evidence, and I can’t depend on the official interpretation of it.”

“You mean it’s been manipulated?”

“Psychologically speaking, anyway. There may have been some actual tampering. I don’t know for sure that the gun that was found in the greenhouse fired the slugs in Jerry Hallman.”

“The sheriff’s men think so.”

“Have they run ballistics tests?”

“Apparently. The fact that it was his mother’s gun has generated a lot of heat downtown. They’re going into ancient history. The rumor’s running around that Hallman killed his mother, too, and possibly his father, and the family money got him off and hushed it up.” He gave me a quick, sharp look. “Could there be anything in that?”

“You sound as if you’re buying it yourself.”

“I wouldn’t say that, but I know some things it could jibe with. I went to see the Senator last spring, just a few days before he died.” He paused to organize his thoughts, and went on more slowly. “I had dug up certain facts about a certain county official whose re-election was coming up in May. Spaulding thought the Senator ought to know these facts, because he’d been supporting this certain official for a good many years. So had the paper, as a matter of fact. The paper generally went along with Senator Hallman’s ideas on county government. Spaulding didn’t want to change that policy without checking with Senator Hallman. He was a big minority stockholder in the paper, and you might say the local elder statesman.”

“If you’re trying to say he was county boss and Ostervelt was one of his boys, why beat around the bush?”

“It wasn’t quite that simple, but that’s the general picture. All right, so you know.” Slovekin was young and full of desire, and his tone became competitive: “What you don’t know is the nature of my facts. I won’t go into detail, but I was in a position to prove that Ostervelt had been taking regular payoff money from houses of prostitution. I showed Senator Hallman my affidavits. He was an old man, and he was shocked. I was afraid for a while that he might have a heart attack then and there. When he calmed down, he said he needed time to think about the problem, perhaps talk it over with Ostervelt himself. I was to come back in a week. Unfortunately, he died before the week was up.”