Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

I reached for him. He backed away, his face sallow and pinched. “Keep your hands off me. And drag your butt off my property. I’m warning you, I got a loaded shotgun in the house.”

He went as far as the door, and turned to watch us. George was on his hands and knees now. I got one of his arms draped over my shoulders and heaved him tip to his feet. He walked like a man trying to balance himself on a spring mattress.

When I turned for a last look at the house, Leonard was on the doorstep, combing his hair.

I DROVE down the long grade to Beverley Hills slowly, because I was feeling accident-prone. There were days when you could put your finger on the point of stress and everything fell into rational patterns around you. And there were the other days. George bothered me. He sat hunched over with his head in his hands, groaning from time to time. He had a fine instinct, even better than mine, for pushing his face in at the wrong door and getting it bloodied. He needed a keeper: I seemed to be elected.

I took him to my own doctor, a G.P. named Wolfson who had his office on Santa Monica Boulevard. Wolfson laid him out on a padded metal table in a cubicle, went over his face and skull with thick, deft fingers, flashed a small light in his eyes, and performed other rituals.

“How did it happen?”

“He fell down and hit his head on a flagstone walk.”

“Who pushed him? You?”

“A mutual friend. We won’t go into that. Is he all right?”

“Might be a slight concussion. You ever hurt your head before?”

“Playing football, I have,” George said.

“Hurt it bad?”

“I suppose so. I’ve blacked out a couple of times.”

“I don’t like it,” Wolfson said to me. “You ought to take him to the hospital. He should spend a couple of days in bed, at least.”

“No!” George sat up, forcing the doctor backward. His eyes rolled heavily in their swollen sockets. “A couple of days is all I’ve got. I have to see her.”

Wolfson raised his eyebrows. “See who?”

“His wife. She left him.”

“So what? It happens every day. It happened to you. He’s still got to go to bed.”

George swung his legs off the table and stood up shakily. His face was the color of newly poured cement. “I refuse to go to the hospital.”

“You’re making a serious decision,” Wolfson said coldly. He was a fat doctor who loved only medicine and music.

“I can put him to bed at my house. Will that do?”

Wolfson looked at me dubiously. “Could you keep him down?”

“I think so.”

“Very well,” George stated solemnly, “I accept the compromise.”

Wolfson shrugged. “If that’s the best we can do. I’ll give him a shot to relax him, and I’ll want to see him later.”

“You know where I live,” I said.

In a two-bedroom stucco cottage on a fifty-foot lot off Olympic. For a while the second bedroom hadn’t been used. Then for a while it had been. When it was vacated finally, I sold the bed to a secondhand-furniture dealer and converted the room into a study. Which for some reason I hated to use.

I put George in my bed. My cleaning woman had been there that morning, and the sheets were fresh. Hanging his torn clothes on a chair, I asked myself what I thought I was doing and why. I looked across the hall at the door of the bedless bedroom where nobody slept any more. An onion taste of grief rose at the back of my throat. It seemed very important to me that George should get together with his wife and take her away from Los Angeles. And live happily ever after.

His head rolled on the pillow. He was part way out by now, under the influence of paraldehyde and Leonard’s sedative fists: “Listen to me, Archer. You’re a good friend to me.”

“Am I?”

“The only friend I have within two thousand miles. You’ve got to find her for me.”

“I did find her. What good did it do?”

“I know, I shouldn’t have come tearing down to the house like that. I frightened her. I always do the wrong thing. Christ, I wouldn’t hurt a hair of her head. You’ve got to tell her that for me. Promise you will.”

“All right. Now go to sleep.”

But there was something else he had to say: “At least she’s alive, isn’t she?”

“If she’s a corpse, she’s a lively one.”

“Who are these people she’s mixed up with? Who was the little twerp in the pajamas?”

“Boy named Torres. He used to be a boxer, if that’s any comfort to you.”

“Is he the one who threatened her?”

“Apparently.”

George raised himself on his elbows. “I’ve heard that name Torres. Hester used to have a friend named Gabrielle Torres.”

“She told you about Gabrielle, did she?”

“Yes. She told me that night she confessed her sins to me.” His gaze moved dully around the room and settled in a corner, fixed on something invisible. His dry lips moved, trying to name the thing he saw: “Her friend was shot and killed, in the spring of last year. Hester left California right after.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. She seemed to blame herself for the other girl’s death. And she was afraid of being called as a witness, if the case ever came to trial.”

“It never did.”

He was silent, his eyes on the thing in the empty corner. “What else did she tell you, George?”

“About the men she’d slept with, from the time that she was hardly in her teens.”

“That Hester had slept with?”

“Yes. It bothered me more than the other, even. I don’t know what that makes me.”

Human , I thought.

George closed his eyes. I turned the venetian blinds down and went into the other room to telephone. The call was to CHP headquarters, where a friend of mine named Mercero worked as a dispatcher. Fortunately he was on the daytime shift. No, he wasn’t busy but he could be any minute, accidents always came in pairs and triples to foul him up. He’d try to give me a quick report on the Jaguar’s license number.

I sat beside the telephone and lit a cigarette and tried to have a brilliant intuition, like all the detectives in books and some in real life. The only one that occurred to me was that the Jaguar belonged to Lance Leonard and would simply lead me around in a circle.

Cigarette smoke rumbling in my stomach reminded me that I was hungry. I went out to the kitchen and made myself a ham-and-cheese sandwich on rye and opened a bottle of beer. My cleaning woman had left a note on the kitchen table:

Dear Mr. Archer,

Arrived nine left twelve noon, I need the money for today will drive by and pick it up this aft, please leave $3.75 in mailbox if your out.

Yours truly, Beatrice M. Jackson.

p.s. – There is mouse dirt in the cooler, you buy a trap Ill set it out, mouse dirt is not sanitary.

Yours truly, Beatrice M. Jackson.

I sealed four dollars in an envelope, wrote her name across the face, and took it out to the front porch. A pair of house wrens chitchatting under the eaves made several snide references to me. The mailbox was full of mail: four early bills, two requests for money from charitable organizations, a multigraphed letter from my Congressman which stated that he was alert to the threat, a brochure describing a book on the Secrets of Connubial Bliss marked down to $2.98 and sold only to doctors, clergymen, social-service workers, and other interested parties; and a New Year’s card from a girl who had passed out on me at a pre-Christmas party. This was signed “Mona” and carried a lyric message:

True friendship is a happy thing

Which makes both men and angels sing.

As the year begins, and another ends,

Resolved: that we shall still be friends.