Росс Макдональд - The Way Some People Die

The patrol car was waiting around the corner. Lieutenant Gary was waiting in his Homicide Division cubicle.

It was a small square room dismally equipped with gray-painted steel furniture: a filing-cabinet, a desk with a squawk-box and In and Out baskets piled with reports, a water-cooler in a corner. A street map of the city nearly covered one wall. The single window opened on the windowless side of an adjacent building. A ceiling fixture filled the room with bright and ugly light.

Gary stood up behind his desk. He was a man in his forties with prematurely white hair. It stuck up all over his head in thistly spikes, as if his fingers had been busy at it. Gary had the shoulders of a football guard, but there was nothing beef-trust about his face. He had quarterback’s eyes, alert and shifting, a thin inquiring nose, a mobile mouth.

“Lew Archer, eh?” he said, not unpleasantly. His shirt was open and his tie hung askew. He tugged at it halfheartedly and forgot it. “Okay, Fern, thanks.”

The sergeant who had escorted me into the station closed the glass door behind him. Gary sat down at his desk and studied me. There was a green cloth board on the wall beside him, with several pictures of wanted men, full-face and profile, pinned to it. I had a fellow-feeling with the black-and-white smudged faces.

“You’ll always remember me, Lieutenant.”

“I do remember you. I’ve been checking your record, as a matter of fact. A pretty good record, as records go, in your job, in this town. I can’t say you’ve ever co-operated very freely, but you’ve never tried to cheat us, and that’s something. Also, I’ve talked to Colton on the D. A.’s staff about you. He’s in your corner, one hundred percent.”

“I served under him in Intelligence during the war. What are you working up to, Lieutenant? You didn’t haul me in at two in the morning to compliment me on my record.”

“No. I mention the record because if it wasn’t for that you’d be under arrest.”

It took me a little while to swallow that. He watched me, his nervous mouth chewing on itself.

I decided to come up smiling. “As it is I’m paying you a social call. Charming occasion, isn’t it?”

His eyes narrowed and brightened. They were like rifle slits in his walled lace, with blue and steel glinting behind them. “The warrant’s drawn,” he said softly. “If I decided to execute it, you wouldn’t think it was funny.”

“What’s it for? Spitting on the sidewalk?”

I got no rise out of him. He answered me with a question: “What have you been doing with yourself all day?”

“Eating. Working. Drinking. Having laughs.”

He answered his own question: “Looking for Joe Tarantine. Tell me why.”

“I have a client.”

“Name him.”

“My memory for names is very lousy.”

He shifted in his chair, his blue gaze circling the room as if he wanted out. “I have several questions to ask you, Archer. I hope this isn’t going to be typical of your answers.”

“You seem to know the answers.”

“Hell, let’s get down to cases. Soft-pedal the repartee.”

“I’m afraid when you wave a warrant at me it brings out the comedian.”

“Forget the warrant. It wasn’t my idea.” Against all the odds, he sounded like a fair man. “Sit down and tell me why in God’s name you should start running errands for Dowser at this late date.”

“What have you got against Dowser?” I sat in the one straight chair in front of the desk. “Dowser’s a solid citizen. He’s got a swimming pool and a private bar to prove it. He entertains politicians in his charming ranch-type home on an exclusive hilltop. He even supports a butler and a blonde.”

“I don’t get it, Archer.” He sounded disappointed. “You’re working for him?”

“Why not? He must be on good terms with the law or he wouldn’t be running loose. I wonder how many cops he has on his payroll. I’m just an ex-cop with a living to hustle.”

His eyes shut tight. For an instant the long gray face looked dead. “Don’t tell me about Dowser’s payoff. I know. I also know why you left the Long Beach force. You wouldn’t take Sam Schneider’s monthly cut, and he forced you out.”

“Colton’s been talking too much,” I said. “If you know all about Dowser, go out and bring him in and put him in Alcatraz where he belongs. Don’t take out your official frustrations on me.”

“He isn’t my department.” Gary was masticating his lip again. “The boys knock off his peddlers two and three a month, but that’s as far as it goes. Tarantine’s one of his right-hand men, you know that?”

“He was. Not any more.”

“Where is Tarantine now?”

“Nobody knows.”

“We found his fingerprints in Dalling’s apartment.” He changed the subject suddenly: “What were you doing in Dalling’s apartment this morning?”

I let it go by, trying not to show that he had startled me.

He went on: “A driver for Western Dairy gave us your description this afternoon. He also described your car. You or your twin went to the Casa Loma the back way some time around eight o’clock this morning.” He sat back and waited for me to have a reaction.

I had a number of them. This meant that his questions about Dowser were by-play. He’d told me to forget the warrant, but he remembered it.

There was nothing in being cagey. “At eight o’clock Dalling had been dead for hours. The autopsist will tell you that, if he hasn’t already.”

“You admit you were there? You admit that Dalling was dead.”

“I was there. He was dead.”

“You didn’t report it to us. We had to wait until the blood soaked through the floor and made a spot on the ceiling of the apartment underneath and somebody finally got around to noticing it. That wasn’t smart of you, Archer, it wasn’t co-operative, it wasn’t even legal. It’s the kind of thing that makes for license trouble.” He leaned forward across the desk, his eyes jumping like blue Bunsen flames, and tossed me a change-of-pace: “Of course license trouble is the least of your worries.”

“Go on.”

“You rushed straight from the Casa Loma to interview a couple of witnesses, Severn and the Hammond woman. God knows what you thought you were trying to do. The kindest interpretation is that you suddenly remembered you were an aging boy-wonder and decided to cut us out entirely and run a murder investigation as a one-man show. Have you been seeing a lot of movies lately? Reading The Rover Boys at Hollywood and Vine ?”

“Maybe I have. What’s the unkindest interpretation?”

“It’s possible you were covering up for yourself.” He dropped it very casually. “We found the gun, you see. A member of my detail picked it out of a storm drain on the street behind the Casa Loma parking lot.”

Gary opened the drawer in front of him and set a squat black .38 automatic on the desk. “Recognize it?”

I recognized it. It was my own gun.

“You should,” he said. “It’s registered to you. Our ballistics man just completed some firing tests with this gun a couple of hours ago. It’s his opinion, based on examination with a comparison microscope, that this gun fired the slug that was dug out of Dalling’s cortex. It severed the jugular vein and imbedded itself in the cortex. Dalling bled to death. How do you like that, Archer?”

“Not very much. Go on. You haven’t warned me that anything I say may be used against me yet.”

“I’ll give it to you now. Have you got anything to say?”

“I’m very smart,” I said, “and very devious. I saw Dalling for the first time last night and decided that he was too pretty to live, a fit subject for the perfect crime. So I committed it. I shot him with a gun that could easily be identified as mine and carefully deposited it in the nearest drain, where any cop would be sure to look for it. Four or five hours later I returned to the scene of the crime, as murderers must, in order to admire my handiwork. Also to let a milkman spot me for you. I wanted to make things difficult for myself–”