Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

I walked toward the western range. Pasadena was on the other side of it. On my side of it, in the middle of the valley, tiny cars raced along a straight road. One of them turned toward me, its headlights swinging up and down on the bumps. I lay down in the sage beside the road.

It was Leonard’s Jaguar, and he was driving it. I caught a glimpse of the face in the seat beside him: a pale, flat oval like a dish on which flat eyes were painted, a pointed chin resting on a spotted bow tie. I’d seen that old-young face before, in the papers after Siegel died, on television during the Kefauver hearings, once or twice at nightclub tables flanked by bodyguards. Carl Stern.

I stayed off the road, cutting at an angle across the high desert toward the highway. The air was turning chilly. In the darkness rising from the earth and spreading across the sky, the evening star hung alone. I was a bit lightheaded, and from time to time I thought that the star was something I had lost, a woman or an ideal or a dream.

Self-pity stalked me, snuffing at my spoor. He was invisible, but I could smell him, a catty smell. Once or twice he fawned on the backs of my legs, and once I kicked at him. The joshua trees waved their arms at me and tittered.

THE FOURTH CAR I thumbed stopped for me. It was a cut-down jalopy with a pair of skis strapped to the top, driven by a college boy on his way back to Westwood. I told him I’d turned my car over on a back road. He was young enough to accept my story without any questions, and decent enough to let me go to sleep in the back seat.

He took me to the ambulance entrance of St. John’s Hospital. A resident surgeon put some stitches in my scalp, gave me quiet hell, and told me to go to bed for a couple of days. I took a taxi home. Traffic was sparse and rapid on the boulevard. I sat back in the seat and watched the lights go by, flashing like thrown knives. There were nights when I hated the city.

My house looked shabby and small. I turned on all the lights. George Wall’s dark suit lay like a crumpled man on the bedroom floor. To hell with him, I thought, and repeated the thought aloud. I took a bath and turned off all the lights and went to bed.

It didn’t do any good. A nightmare world sprang up around the room, a world of changing faces which wouldn’t hold still. Hester’s face was there, refracted through George Wall’s mind. It changed and died and came alive and died again smiling, staring with loveless eyes out of the red darkness. I thrashed around for a while and gave up. Got up and dressed and went out to my garage.

It hit me then, and not until then, that I was minus a car. If the Beverly Hills cops hadn’t hauled it away, my car was parked on Manor Crest Drive, across the street from Hester’s house. I called another taxi and asked to be let off on a corner half a block from the house. My car was where I had left it, with a parking ticket under the windshield-wiper.

I crossed the street for a closer look at the house. There was no car in the drive, no light behind the windows. I climbed the front steps and leaned on the bellpush. Inside, the electric bell chirred like a cricket on an abandoned hearth. The nobody-home sound, the empty-house girl-gone one-note blues.

I tried the door. It was locked. I glanced up and down the street. Lights shone at the intersections and from the quiet houses. The people were all inside. They had given up night walks back in the cold war.

Call me trouble looking for a place to happen. I went around to the side of the house, through a creaking wooden gate into a walled patio. The flagstone paving was uneven under my feet. Crab grass grew rank in the spaces between the stones. I made my way among wrought-iron tables and disemboweled chaises to a pair of French doors set into the wall.

My flashlight beam fell through dirty glass into a lanai full of obscene shadows. They were cast by rubber plants and cacti growing in earthenware pots. I reversed the light and used its butt to punch out one of the panes, drew back a reluctant bolt, and forced the door open.

The house was mostly front, like the buildings on Graff’s sets. Its rear had been given over to ghosts and spiders. Spiders had rigged the lanai’s bamboo furniture and black oak rafters with loops and hammocks and wheels of dusty webbing. I felt like an archaeologist breaking into a tomb.

The door at the end of the lanai was unlocked. I passed through a storeroom full of once-expensive junk: high, unsittable Spanish chairs, a grand piano with grinning yellow keys, brownish oil paintings framed in gilt: through another door, into the central hallway of the house. I crossed to the door of the living-room.

White walls and a half-beamed ceiling rose in front of me, supported by the upward beam from my light. I lowered it to the floor, which was covered with ivory carpeting. White and black sectional furniture, low-slung and cubistic, was grouped in angular patterns around the room. The fireplace was faced with black tile and flanked by a square white leather hassock. On the other side of the fireplace, a faint dark patch showed in the carpet.

I got down on my knees and examined it. It was a wet spot the size of a large dinner plate, of no particular color. Through the odor of detergent, and under the other odors in the room, perfume and cigarette smoke and sweet mixed drinks, I could smell blood. The odor of blood was persistent, no matter how you scrubbed.

Still on my knees, I turned my attention to the raised fireplace. It was equipped with a set of brass fire tools in a rack: brush, shovel, a pair of leather bellows with brass handles. The set was new, and looked as if it had never been used or even touched. Except that the poker was missing.

Beyond the fireplace there was a doorless arch which probably opened into the dining-room. Most of the houses of this style and period had similar floor plans, and I had been in a lot of them. I moved to the arch, intending to go over the rest of the downstairs, then the upstairs.

A motor droned in the street. Light washed the draped front windows and swept past. I went to the end window and looked out through the narrow space between the drape and the window frame. The old black Lincoln was standing in the driveway. Marfeld was at the wheel, his face grotesquely shadowed by the reflection of the headlights. He switched them off and climbed out.

Leroy Frost got out on the far side. I knew him by his hurrying feeble walk. The two men passed, within three or four feet of me, headed for the front door. Frost was carrying a glinting metal rod which he used as a walking-stick.

I went through the archway into the next room. In its center a polished table reflected the wan light filtered through lace-curtained double windows. A tall buffet stood against the wall inside the arch, a chair in the corner behind it. I sat down in the deep shadow, with my flashlight in one hand and my gun in the other.

I heard a key turn in the front door, then Leroy Frost’s voice, jerking with strain: “I’ll take the key. What happened to the other key?”

“Lance give it to the pig.”

“That was a sloppy way to handle it.”

“It was your idea, chief. You told me not to talk to her myself.”

“All right, as long as she got it.” Frost mumbled something indistinguishable. I heard him shuffling in the entrance to the living-room. Suddenly he exploded: “Where is the goddam light? You been in and out of this house, you expect me to grope around in the dark all night?”

The lights went on in the living-room. Footsteps crossed it. Frost said: “You didn’t do a very good job on the rug.”

“I did the best I could in the time. Nobody’s gonna go over it with a fine-tooth comb, anyway.”

“You hope. You better bring that hassock over here, cover it up until it dries. We don’t want her to see it.”