Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“She left me, yes. After all I’d done for her.”

“Not for her. For you. You’ve killed two men and a woman because they threatened your security. You’d have killed Bess if she hadn’t got out fast. She didn’t tell me that, but I think she knew it. She was the one you wanted to kill from the start, if you hadn’t been afraid.”

He shuddered, covering his eyes with his spread fingers. “Why are you torturing me?”

“I want a confession.”

It took him several minutes to bring himself under control. When he lowered his hands, his face had smoothed and thinned. His eyes seemed smaller and darker. No animal was using them.

He got up awkwardly from the pile of wood and took a halting step towards me: “I’ll give you a confession, Mr. Archer. If you’ll let me have access to my drug cabinet, for just a moment?”

“No.”

“It will save time and trouble, for all of us.”

“It’s too easy. I’ve promised myself one satisfaction out of this case. To see you go in and Alex Norris come out.”

“You’re a hard man.”

“I hope so. It’s the soft ones, the self-pity boys like you, that give me bad dreams.” I had had enough of that basement, cluttered with broken objects, wet and hot and squalid with broken desires. “Let’s go, Benning.”

Outside, the flawed white moon was higher among the stars. Benning looked up at them as if the night had really become a cave of shadows, the moon a clouded port and the stars peepholes into a terrible brightness: “I do feel grief for her. I loved her. There was nothing I wouldn’t do.”

He started down the veranda steps, his short black shadow dragging and jerking at his heels.