Росс Макдональд - The Way Some People Die

“He said that, did he, that he’s coming back tomorrow?”

“Something like that. Do you think I should believe him? It would be terrible if this was all a mistake, and I had called the police in, and he really did come back.” She stood facing the door, with a funny look of expectant remorse, as if Henry was there to upbraid her for having disloyal thoughts. “What shall I do, Mr. Archer? It’s taken me a long time to get around to it, but that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“What do you want to do, get Henry back?”

“No, I don’t think so, even if he would come. I don’t trust him any more, I’m afraid of him. It isn’t only his deception of me. I might be able to forgive that if he came back and proved that he loves me by turning over a new leaf. But I can’t help feeling that he’s mixed up in this terrible murder, that that’s why he rushed away so unexpectedly. You see, I don’t know who he is or what he is.” She sat down on the edge of the couch, suddenly and weakly, as if her legs had given way.

“I have a good idea who and what he is. Did the waiter in Santa Barbara call him Speed?”

Her head jerked up: “Speed! That was it. I knew it would come back to me. How did you guess? Do you know him?”

“By reputation,” I said. “His reputation is bad. He didn’t get his abdominal wound in the war. He got it in a gang fight last fall.”

“I knew it,” she cried, and shook her head from side to side so the bright dyed hair swung forward and brushed her cheeks. “I want to go back to Toledo, where people are nice. I always wanted to live in California but now that I’ve seen it, it’s a hellish place. I’ve fallen among thieves, that’s what I’ve done. Thieves and murderers and confidence men. I want to go back to George.”

“It sounds like a very good plan.”

“I can’t though, he’d never forgive me. I’d be a laughing-stock for the rest of my days. What could I tell him about the thirty thousand? It’s nearer forty when you count the car and all the money I’ve spent.” She kneaded her alligator bag with both clenched hands.

“There’s a possibility you can get it back. You have no notion where Henry went, I don’t suppose.”

“He didn’t tell me anything. He just went away. Now I know I’ll never see him again. But if I ever do, I’ll scratch his eyes out.” Her eyes glared from the ambush of her hair. I didn’t know whether to laugh at her or weep with her.

I looked out the window onto the lawn, where spray from a sprinkling system danced in the sun. “No letters? No telephone calls? No telegrams? No visitors?”

There was a long pause while I watched the dancing water.

“He had a person-to-person call from San Francisco yesterday. I answered the phone myself, then he made me go into the bedroom and close the door. Does that mean anything?”

“It may.” I stood up. “I’ll try it anyway. You got no hint of who was calling, no names given?”

“No.”

“But you’re positive it was a San Francisco call.”

“Oh, yes. The operator said so.” She had pushed back her hair from her face and was looking less upset. There was an ice-chip hardness in her eyes I hadn’t noticed before.

“I ought to tell you, Mrs. Fellows–”

“Mrs. Barron,” she said stubbornly. “I was never really married to him.”

“Mrs. Barron, then. You might get better results if you took your story to the police.”

“I can’t. It would be in all the papers. I could never go home at all then. Don’t you see?”

“If I recover your money, or any part of it, I’ll take a percentage, fifteen percent. That would be forty-five hundred out of thirty thousand.”

“All right.”

“Otherwise I’ll charge you for my expenses and nothing else. I usually work for a daily fee, but this case is different.”

“Why is it so different?”

“I have my own reasons for wanting to talk to Henry. And if I find him, I’ll do what I think best. I’m making you no promises.”

It was midnight when I parked my car under Union Square. A wet wind blew across the almost deserted square, blowing fogged breath from the sea on the dark pavements. Flashing neons on all four sides repudiated the night. I turned down a slanting street past a few late couples strolling and lingering on the sidewalk.

The Den ’s orange sign was one of a dozen bar signs on its block. I went down a dirty flight of stairs and looked into the place through a swinging glass door at the bottom. It was a large square room with rounded corners and a ceiling so low you could feel the weight of the city over it. A curved bar arched out from the left-hand wall, making space for a bartender and his array of bottles. The other walls were lined with booths and tables.

In the cleared space in the middle of the room, a tired-looking man in a worn tuxedo was beating the life out of an exhausted grand piano. All the furniture, including the piano, was enameled a garish orange. A sequence of orange-haired nudes romped and languished along the walls under a glaze of grime. I went in.

There were several customers at the bar: a couple well-dressed and young and looking out of place, and a pair of lone-wolfing sailors. A few others, all of them men, were propped like dummies at the tables, waiting for something wonderful to happen, a new life to begin, in more delightful places, under different names. Five or six revelers, all of them women, and hard cases by their looks, were standing around the piano in a chorybantic circle, moving various members in approximate time to the music. One of them, a streaked blonde in a green dress with a drooping hemline, raised what passed for her voice in a banshee sort of singing. The whole thing had the general effect of a wake.

The pianist could have passed for a corpse in any mortuary if he had only stayed still, instead of tossing his fingers in bunches at the suffering keyboard. His batting average in hitting the notes was about .333, which would have been good enough for a Coast League ballplayer. He was white and loaded to the gills, it was hard to tell with what. I sat down at a table near the piano and watched him until he turned his face in my direction. He had the sad bad center-less eyes I expected, wormholes in a withered apple with a dark rotten core.

I ordered a beer from a sulky waitress in an orange apron. When I left her the change from a dollar, she hoisted a long-suffering smile from the depths of despair and offered it to me: “Zizi’s as high as a kite. They ought to make him shut up when he’s so wild, instead of encouraging him.”

“I’d like to buy him a drink.”

“He doesn’t drink.” She corrected herself: “With the customers, I mean.”

“Tell him I want to talk to him when he stops. If he can stop.”

She gave me the twice-over then, and I tried to look as degenerate as hell. Maybe it came easier than I thought. I wanted to drink the beer, but I let it stand on the table, going flat, while Zizi battered his way through half a dozen requests. Moonlight and Roses , the girls wanted. Stardust and Blue Moon and other pieces that brought other times and places into the midnight basement at the bottom of the city. One of the sailors made up his mind and left the bar. Without preliminary, he attached himself to the blonde in the green dress and steered her out, lean-hipped and swaggering. The bartender’s face watched them over the bar like a dead white moon. Happy Days Are Here Again , and Stormy Weather . One of the women tried to sing it and burst loosely into tears. The others comforted her. The pianist struck a plangent discord and gave up. A lone drunk sitting against the wall behind me was talking in a monotone to his absent mother, explaining very reasonably, in great detail, why he was a no-good son-of-a-gun and a disgrace to the family.