Росс Макдональд - Find a Victim

“They were registered as man and wife. Mr. and Mrs. John Brown.” A wry smile twitched at one corner of his mouth. “A highly appropriate alias, in view of what happened to the original John Brown.”

“When did they leave L. A.?”

“Six weeks ago, September the 3rd. He robbed the bank in Portland on August 15. From September the 3rd till yesterday he dropped out of sight completely.”

“Not quite,” I said.

He gave me a keen look. “Go on, if you know something more. I’ve taken you into my confidence.”

“Do you know where Lake Perdida is, Mr. Westmore?”

“I should, I have a cottage there. Why?”

“It’s one of the focal points of the case. Bozey and the Summer girl hid out there for several days in early September. And Anne Meyer was last seen at the lake–”

“How does she enter the picture?”

“She’s in the middle of it. I don’t know what efforts are being made to trace her. If it hasn’t been done, I suggest an APB.”

“The sheriff issued one on her last night. We’ve had no response so far.”

“I think you should center your search on Lake Perdida.”

“You must lave reasons.”

“Yes.” I gave him the heel, and the keys to the cabin, and went through my story again.

He listened impatiently, tapping his desk with a restless hand, as if he could feel the seconds slipping away from under his fingers. “MacGowan may be lying. Doesn’t his story strike you as fantastic?”

“It’s as wild as life. If he was making it up, he’d think of something more credible. Besides, I saw the hole.”

“He could have dug it himself. And he has reason to lie, if he’s the Summer girl’s grandfather.”

“MacGowan didn’t even know the girl was in trouble when he told me about the gravediggers.”

“He seems to have convinced you, at least.”

“Question him yourself.”

“I intend to. In the meantime, I want you to talk for the record.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

He flicked his intercom switch and asked for a court reporter. A genteel white-haired man lugged his stenotype into the room and set it up by the desk. While his racing fingers took my story down, Westmore roved the office.

The sheriff played a purely conventional role in my account. If Westmore had been a different man, I might have spoken out. But Westmore was very smooth, and I distrusted his smoothness. He had more power than the sheriff, but I couldn’t be sure how he would use his power.

Halfway through my recital, he was called out of the room.

He came back bright-eyed and nervous with excitement. After the stenotypist left, he told me why: “I’ve been talking to the intelligence unit from Internal Revenue. I turned over Kerrigan’s books to them this morning. There hasn’t been time for a complete analysis, but they’re certain now that he was cheating the government.”

“Income-tax evasion?”

“Yes, going back several years. He made quite a lot of money out of his bar in the late forties, money that he didn’t report as income.”

“Where did the money go?”

He shrugged his narrow pin-striped shoulders. “Las Vegas, Tanforan, Caliente – much more exciting than paying income tax. The year after he bought the Golden Slipper, he started keeping two sets of books. Apparently he did it with Anne Meyer’s connivance. She was his secretary and bookkeeper at that time. The government has been trying for several months to get some concrete evidence against them. They tell me they were planning to call both Kerrigan and the Meyer woman before the grand jury.”

“No wonder he tried to get out.”

Westmore nodded solemnily. “Donald Kerrigan was at the end of his rope, financially and morally and every other way. Even his marriage was breaking up. I spoke just now to Kate Kerrigan on the telephone. He’s luckier than she is, in a sense. He’s out of it.”

“Isn’t she?”

“Not if the government presses its case. She signed Ms Joint tax returns, of course without knowing that he had falsified them. But they could probably take everything she has left.”

I thought of Kate Kerrigan, still tangled in the consequences of a wrong choice made seven years ago. “Isn’t that pretty rough on her?”

“It won’t happen if I can help it. Kate’s a much sinned-against woman, and she’s been a saint about it, an absolute saint.”

I didn’t argue, though saint wasn’t quite the word. “I like her, too.”

“I’m glad to hear you say so. She asked after you, by the way. She wants to see you when you’re finished here.”

“Is she at home?”

“At home, yes. One thing I didn’t tell her, and I wouldn’t want it passed on to her, or anyone else.” He looked at me a little dubiously.

“It’ll stop with me.”

“Well, it ties in with your idea that the Meyer woman is central to this case. According to Kerrigan’s canceled checks, he’s been paying her a thousand dollars a month for the past year.”

“That’s a big salary for a motel manager.”

“More than he ever drew from the business himself.”

“Blackmail?”

“It seems to be the logical hypothesis. Hush-money of some sort, probably connected with his income-tax shenanigans. Whatever it was, it gave him a powerful motive for murdering her. Does that fit in with your ideas?”

“I’ll go along with it, at least for the present.”

Westmore moved to the window and stood there for a while with his back to me. When he turned, his spectacles glared in the slanting light.

“Let’s assume that Kerrigan killed Anne Meyer on Monday, and disposed of her body somehow. He knew that it would be found sooner or later, and he’d be the obvious suspect. No doubt he also knew that the Revenue Bureau was getting ready to descend on his fat neck. So he decided to get out, with as much money as he could scrape together.”

“And the Summer girl.”

“The girl, of course. She’s the catalytic agent in the reaction. She brought her two men together, Bozey and Kerrigan, and they worked out a plan to highjack a load of liquor. Bozey had twenty thousand dollars that he couldn’t spend. Kerrigan had the connections that made it possible for him to order the load and set it up for Bozey. He even arranged a temporary drop at the airbase. For these various services Bozey paid him in stolen money.”

“Which Kerrigan wouldn’t have been able to spend either.”

“Obviously Kerrigan didn’t know that. They conned him. Bozey was using the girl as sucker-bait.” The underworld jargon sounded queer in Westmore’s Ivy League accent.

“Maybe,” I said, “but she made it real for herself. She was in love with Kerrigan.”

His eyebrows rose. “How do you know that?”

“From the way she talked. Also, I saw them together.”

“Isn’t that rather subjective evidence?”

“You can’t ignore it, though. People are human. That includes the girls in Corona, and the girls who are on their way there.”

“We won’t argue.” His face had stiffened into an official mask. He was a bureaucrat, no matter how reluctant “She’s accessory to murder in any case. We know that Bozey shot Aquista.”

“Do we know it for certain?”

“I’m convinced he shot both Aquista and Kerrigan. The bullets that killed them came from the same gun. Look at Bozey’s record. It’s pure chance that he hadn’t killed before. He was ready to kill for that load of whisky. It was better than money to him, better than the kind of money he had. There are still states in this Union where good bootleg liquor is a valuable commodity.”

“New Mexico is one. The reservation Indians pay high for it.”

“I’m not forgetting it. We’re watching all the highways out of the state. When he tries to drive that truck across the border, we’ll take him. And we’ll have our case wrapped up.”