Росс Макдональд - Find a Victim

His raw and broken sentimentality depressed me. The barren little office was stifling hot, and I felt as if I’d been trapped in it for hours.

“Where do you think she is?”

“Search me.”

“You could try your house.”

“Yeah,” he said dubiously.

He picked up the receiver and dialed again. At the other end of the line the telephone chirped like a tired cricket.

“Hilda? Is that you? What the hell are you doing there? – No, hold it. I want to talk to you. And Archer has something to show you. We’ll be right over.”

I followed his Lincoln across town and parked in the drive beside his private junkyard. The house was even uglier by daylight, a peeling yellow face with blinded windows, surrounded by a wild green hair of eucalyptus trees. If Hilda Church had traded her marriage in on this, there was something very wrong with the marriage.

She opened the screen door for us. Meyer looked her up and down and brushed in past her without a word.

“How are you, Mr. Archer?”

“I could be better. I have been worse. And you?”

“I’m perfectly all right. Thank you.” But she looked as though she had spent a bad night. Her green eyes were dusky and vague, and there were bluish patches under them. She smiled with false brightness. “Please come in.”

She led me into the living-room, walking with obvious hesitancy. She reminded me of a small girl moving awkwardly in a body that had outgrown her, threatened by the sharp corners of the world.

I sat on the old davenport across from the fireplace. Its ashes had been cleaned out. The entire room had been swept and dusted and set in order. Meyer didn’t seem to notice. She looked at him reproachfully, wiping her nervous white hands on her apron front.

“I’ve been cleaning the house for you, Father.”

He answered without looking at her: “You don’t have to stay here and do for me. You’ll be better off in the long run if you go home and look after your husband.”

“I’m not going back,” she said sharply. “If you don’t want me here, I’ll go and find a place of my own, like Anne.”

“Anne’s another story. She’s got no permanent ties, and she’s self-supporting.”

“I can support myself, too, if you don’t want me.”

“It isn’t that. If you’re set on staying here, it’s okay by me. Only how’s it going to look to other people?”

“What other people?”

“People in town.” He gestured loosely. “All the people that voted for Brand. It doesn’t make a good appearance, breaking up the family at a time like this.”

“I have no family.”

“You could have if you wanted to, you’re not too old.”

“What do you know about it?” she said in a breaking voice. “I’m not going back and that’s final. It’s my life.”

“It’s his life, too. You’re fouling it up for him.”

“He fouled it for himself. He can do what he wants to with his life. I don’t belong to him, or anybody.”

“You never talked like this before.” Meyer sounded bewildered.

“Brandon never acted like this before.”

“Why, what did he do?”

“I wouldn’t tell you, I’d be ashamed to.” Tears glazed her eyes. “You were always after Anne and me to come home and keep house for you. Now that I’m doing it, you’re not satisfied. You don’t like anything I do.”

“Sure I do, Peaches.”

He tried to touch her shoulder. She drew away. His unpracticed hand hovered in the air for a tremulous instant, then dropped to his side.

I stood up, hoping to break the weary tension that stretched between them. “Mrs. Church, I have something here for you to look at.” I produced the talismanic heel. “Your father thought you might be able to identify it.”

She went to one of the windows and raised the blind. Light poured in over her head and shoulders, electroplating her brown hair. She turned the leather object in her hand.

“Where did you find this?”

“In the mountains near Lake Peridida. Did your sister have a pair of walking shoes that shade of brown?”

“Yes, I think she did. In fact I know she did.” She crossed the room toward me, clumsy with agitation. “Something has happened to Anne. Hasn’t it? Tell me the truth.”

“I wish I knew it. If that’s her heel, she was out in the woods with Kerrigan last Monday, digging a hole in the ground.”

“Digging her own grave, maybe,” Meyer said lugubriously.

“You think she’s dead, Mr. Archer.”

“I don’t mean to frighten you unnecessarily, but it’s a good idea to expect the worst. Then any surprises we get will come as a relief.”

She looked down at the heel clenched in her fist. When she opened her hand, I saw that the nails had made red indentations in her palm. She laid it against her mouth and closed her eyes. I thought for a second she was going to faint. Her body swayed slightly but heavily like a marble statue rocked on its base by an aftershock. But she didn’t fall.

Her eyes opened. “Is that all? Or is there more?”

“I found these in Kerrigan’s cabin at the lake.” I showed her the brown bobby pins that I’d picked out of the bearskin.

“Anne always wore bobby pins like that.”

Meyer peered over her shoulder. “That’s right, she used to scatter them around the house. So she spent the weekend with Kerrigan, eh?”

“I doubt it. But there was a man with her. Do you have any idea who he was?”

Father and daughter looked at each other wordlessly.

“Tony Aquista was up there last Saturday night”

“What was Tony doing at the lake?” Meyer said.

“He could have been the man. They were pretty close at one time, closer than you realize.”

“I don’t believe it.” Hilda’s face was white and rigid. “My sister wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.”

“That’s what you think,” Meyer said. “You never knew what went on in Annie’s head. You convinced yourself that she was a little white saint, but I know damn well what she was. She had hot – she was always a wild one. And she played Tony along the way she played the others until he got too rough for her.”

“It isn’t true.” She turned to me. “You mustn’t listen to Father. Anne was never wild. She was really too innocent for her own good. It never entered her head that she could get involved in – scandal.”

Meyer snorted: “Innocent! She was messing around with them before she was out of pigtails, any size, any color. I caught her in this house, right here in this very room – I whaled the daylights out of her.”

Hilda’s face was pale and shiny, except for the dark crepe patches under her eyes. She said in a measured voice: “You’re a dirty old liar.”

He turned dead white. “So I’m a dirty old liar, am I?”

“Yes, and I’ll tell you why. You liked her too much. You were jealous of the boys, jealous of your own daughter–”

“You’re a crazy woman, talking like that in front of a stranger, blackening your old man.”

His voice strangled in his throat. His hand flew up as if of its own accord and struck her once, sharply, across the face.

“Don’t, Father.”

I stepped between them, facing Meyer. Emotion shook him the way a terrier shakes a rag. It let go of him suddenly. He collapsed on the davenport, limp as a corpse, but breathing audibly through his mouth.

I stood over him. “Meyer, who killed your daughter?”

“I don’t know,” he said in a thin old voice. “You’re not even sure she’s dead.”

“I’m sure enough. Did you kill her yourself?”

“You’re way off the beam. You’re as crazy as she is. I wouldn’t hurt a hair of Annie’s head.”

“You did once. And I wouldn’t throw words like ‘crazy’ around. They can boomerang.”