Росс Макдональд - The Way Some People Die

“I took it away from him when he tried to knife me.”

Dowser grinned. “Sure, it was self-defense. You laid him out in the road and ran over him in self-defense. Don’t get me wrong, he got what was coming to him, and you did me a favor when you did it. But I’m in business, baby, you got to realize that.”

“Selling old knives?” I said.

“Maybe you’re not so dumb. You catch on pretty fast.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Pass the lettuce, huh?”

Blaney and Sullivan showed their guns. I stood up, raising my hands. This was the moment I had been living over and over for the past half-hour. Now that it was happening, it seemed hackneyed.

“You dirty double-crossers,” I said from the script I had written in my head.

“Come on now, don’t be like that. You sold me something valuable of mine, I sell you something valuable of yours. It’s just that I’m smarter than you are.” He said it with deep sincerity. “I’ll mail you the knife some time, if you’re sweet about things. Make trouble, though, and I’ll deliver it in person.” He dropped it hack in his pocket, and reached around me. My wallet was lighter when he replaced it on my hip.

“Double-crossing dip,” I counterfeited anger, but I was inwardly relieved. If Dowser hadn’t dreamed up something to pin on me, he might have thought it necessary to kill me. It was the chance I had to face from the beginning.

Dowser’s pleasure was more obvious than mine. His face was shining with it.

“Where would Mosquito get thirty grand? The sprout was strictly smalltime for my money. Or maybe that was just part of the spiel. Maybe he used the knife on Joe, huh, and didn’t need thirty grand?”

“That would be nice,” I said.

“You still around?” He pantomimed surprise, and his gun-men smiled dutifully over their guns. “You can go now. Remember, you go quiet and stay sweet. I’m holding on to the knife for you.”

Blaney and Sullivan escorted me to the car. In order to keep their minds occupied, I swore continuously without repeating myself. The guns were missing from the glove compartment. The guard at the gate held his shotgun on me until I was out of sight. Dowser was careful.

A quarter mile south of the private road, two black sedans, unmarked, were parked on the left side of the highway. Peter Colton was beside the driver of the lead car. The other eleven men were strangers to me.

I U-turned illegally under the eyes of twelve policemen, local and Federal, and stopped by the lead car.

“He has the can,” I told Colton, “probably in his safe. Do you want me to go in with you?”

“Dangerous and unnecessary,” he snapped. “By the way, they found Tarantine’s body. He was drowned all right.”

I wanted to ask him questions, but the black cars started to roll. Two cars coming from the other direction joined them at the entrances to the private road. All four turned up toward the hilltop where Dowser lived, not forever.

The Pacific Point morgue was in the rear of the mortuary two blocks from the courthouse. I avoided the front entrance – white pseudo-Colonial columns lit by a pink neon sign – and went up the driveway at the side. It curved around the back, past the closed doors of the garage, and led me to the rear door. Callahan was smoking a cigarette just outside the door, his big hat brushing the edge of the brown canvas canopy. A pungent odor drifted through the open door and disinfected the twilight.

He showed me the palm of his hand in salutation. “Well, we found your man. He’s not much good to anybody, in his condition.”

“Drowned?”

“Sure looks like it. Doc McCutcheon’s coming over to do an autopsy on him soon as he can. Right now he’s delivering a baby. So we don’t lose any population after all.” A smile cracked his weathered face as dry heat cracks the earth. “Want to take a look at the corpus?”

“I might as well. Where did you find him?”

“On the beach, down south of Sanctuary. There’s a southerly current along here, about a mile an hour. The wind blew the boat in fast, but Tarantine was floating low in the water and the current drifted him further south before the tide brought him in. That’s how I figure it.” His butt pinwheeled into the gathering darkness, and he turned toward the door.

I followed him into a low deep room walled with bare concrete blocks. Five or six wheeled tables with old-fashioned marble tops stood against the walls. All but one were empty. Callahan switched on a green-shaded lamp that hung above the occupied table. A pair of men’s feet, one of them shoeless, protruded from under the white cotton cover. Callahan pulled the cover off with a sweeping showman’s gesture.

Joe Tarantine had been roughly used by the sea. It was hard to believe that the battered, swollen face had once been handsome, as people said. There was white sand in the curled black hair and white sand on the eyeballs. I peered into the gaping mouth. It was packed with wet brown sand.

“No foam,” I said to Callahan. “Are you sure he drowned?”

“You can’t go by that. And those marks on his face and head are probably posthumous. The stiffs all get ’em when the surf rolls ’em in on the rocks.”

“You have a lot of them?”

“One or two a month along here. Drownings, suicides. This is a plain ordinary drowning in my book.”

“In spite of what the girl said, about the man swimming ashore?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that if I was you. Even if the girl was telling the truth, which I doubt – some of these biddies will say anything to get their picture in the paper – even if she was, it was probably one of these midnight bathers or something. We have a lot of nuts in this town.”

I leaned closer to the dead man to examine his clothing. He had on worn blue Levi’s and a work-shirt, still dark with sea-stain and smelling of the sea. There was sand in the pockets and nothing else.

I glanced at Callahan. “You’re certain this is Tarantine?”

“Him or his brother. I knew the guy.”

“Did he usually wear dungarees? I understood he was a flashy dresser.”

“Nobody wears good clothes on a boat.”

“I suppose not. Speaking of his brother, where is his brother?”

“Mario should be on his way now. Him and the old lady were out all afternoon; we finally got in touch with them. They’re coming in for a formal identification.”

“What about Mrs. Tarantine? The wife?”

“She’s coming, too. We notified her soon as we found the body. Seems to be taking her time about it, doesn’t she?”

“I’ll stick around, if you don’t mind.”

“It’s all right with me,” he said, “if you like the scenery. It suits me better outside.” Raising his arm in an exaggerated movement, he squeezed his veined nose between thumb and forefinger.

The dead man lay under the light, battered and befouled and awesome. Callahan turned the switch and we went outside.

Leaning against the wall with a cigarette, I told him about Dalling’s early morning swim and Dalling’s early morning death. I didn’t expect the information to do him any good. I was talking against the stillness that circled outward from the dead man as sound waves spread from their source. The late green twilight faded from the sky as I talked, and darkness rolled in a slow surge over the rooftops. All I could see of Callahan was his dark hulk like a buttress against the wall, and the orange eye of the cigarette glowing periodically under his hatbrim.

A pair of bright headlights swept into the driveway and froze in the massive stillness.

“Bet that’s the patrol car,” he said, and moved to the corner of the building.

Over his shoulder, I saw Mario step out of the sheriffs car. He came into the glare of the headlights, towing his mother like a captive balloon. I stepped hack into the shadow to let them pass, and followed them to the door. Callahan switched on the lamp above the dead man’s face. Mario stood looking down, his mother leaning heavily on his shoulder. The bruise marks on his face were turning yellowish and greenish. Other men had been as rough on him as the sea had been on his brother. He might have been thinking that, from the look in his eyes. They were mocking and grim.