Росс Макдональд - The Way Some People Die

I counted them, and when the gun was empty I took it away from her. She didn’t resist.

When I set the telephone down, she was sitting in the chair I had pushed her into, her closed eyelids tremorless as carved ivory, her passionate mouth closed and still. From where I stood on the other side of the room, she seemed tiny and strange like a figurine, or an actress sitting on a distant stage. Mario lay face down between us.

A shudder ran thrugh her body and her eyes came open. “I’m glad I didn’t kill you, Archer. I didn’t want to kill you, honestly.” Her voice had the inhuman quality of an echo.

“That was nice of you.” I stepped over the prone body and sat down facing her. “You didn’t want to kill Mario, either. Like Dalling, you killed him in self-defense.” I sounded strange to myself. The fear of death had made a cold lump in my throat which I was still trying to swallow.

“You’re a witness to that. He attacked me with a deadly weapon.” She glanced at the metal knuckles on the dead man’s fist, and touched her cheek. “He struck me with it.”

“When?”

“In the garage a few minutes ago.”

“How did you get there?”

“He came into George’s Cafe and forced me to leave with him. I had no gun. He’d got the idea that I knew where his brother had left the money. I knew there was a gun out here, in the garage where Joe had hidden it. I told Mario the money was here, and he made me drive him out.” Her voice was clear and steady, though the words came out with difficulty. “He was almost crazy, threatening to kill me, with that awful thing on his hand. I got hold of Joe’s gun and shot him with it, once. I thought he was dead. I managed to get into the house before I fainted.” She sighed. With the emotional versatility of a good actress, she was slipping back into the brave-little-woman role that had taken me in before, and wouldn’t again.

“You might get by with a self-defense plea if you’d only killed one man. Two in a week is too many. Three is mass murder.”

“Three?”

“Dalling and Mario and Joe.”

“I didn’t kill Joe. How could I? I can’t even swim.”

“You’re a good liar, Galley. You have the art of mixing fact with fantasy, and it’s kept you going for a week. But you’ve run out of lies now.”

“I didn’t kill him,” she repeated. Her body was stiff in the chair, her hands clenched tight on the arms. “Why should I kill my own husband?”

“Spare me the little-wife routine. It worked for a while, I admit. You had me and the cops convinced that you were shielding Joe. Now it turns my stomach. You had plenty of reasons to kill him, including thirty thousand dollars. It must have looked like a lot of money after years of nurse’s work on nurse’s pay. You probably married Joe with the sole intention of killing him as soon as he was loaded.”

“What kind of a woman do you think I am?” Her face had lost its impassivity and was groping for an expression that might move me.

I touched the dead man with the toe of my shoe. “I just saw you pump six .45 slugs into a man who was dying on his feet. Does that answer your question?”

“I had to. I was terrified.”

“Yeah. You have the delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake, and you react like one. You killed Mario because he figured out that you murdered his brother. Joe probably warned him about you.”

“You’d have a hard time proving that.” Her eyes were like black charred holes in her white mask.

“I don’t have to. Wait until the police lab men have a look at the deep-freeze unit in your kitchen.”

“How–?” Her mouth closed tight, an instant too late. She had confirmed my guess.

“Go on. How did I know that you kept Joe in cold storage for three days?”

“I’m not talking.”

“I didn’t know it until now. Not for certain. It clears up a lot of things.”

“You’re talking nonsense again. Do I have to listen to you?”

“Until the sheriffs car gets here from Palm Springs, yes. There’s a lot of truth to be told, after all the lies, and if you won’t tell it I will. It might give you a little insight into yourself.”

“What do you think you are, a psychoanalyst?”

“Thank God I’m not yours. I wouldn’t want to have to explain what made you do what you did. Unless you were in love with Herman Speed?”

She laughed. “That old stallion? Don’t be a silly boy. He was my patient.”

“You used him then. You got the low-down on Joe’s dope-smuggling from him. I take it he was glad enough to spoil the game for the man who fingered him and stole his business. Perhaps Speed was using you, at that. After talking to both of you, I imagine it was his idea in the first place. He was the brains–”

“Speed?” I had touched a nerve. So it had been her idea.

“Anyway, you went to San Francisco with him when he got out of the hospital. You sent your mother a Christmas card from there, and that was your first mistake – mixing sentiment with business. After you’d worked out the plan, you let your mother sweat out the next two months without hearing from you, because you intended to use her. You came back to Pacific Point and married Joe: no doubt he’d asked you before and was waiting for your answer. Speed went to Reno to try and raise the necessary money. Unfortunately he succeeded. Which brings us down to last Friday night–”

“You,” she said, “not us. You lost me long ago. You’re all by yourself.”

“Maybe some of the details are wrong or missing: they’ll be straightened out in court. I don’t know, for example, what you put in Joe’s food or drink Friday night when he came home from his last boat-trip. Chloral hydrate, or something that leaves no trace? You know more about things like that than I do.”

“I thought you were omniscient.”

“Hardly. I don’t know whether Dalling pushed in on your project, or was invited. Or was it a combination of both? In any case, you needed the use of this house of his, and you needed help. Speed was busy holding up his end of a phony honeymoon. Dalling was the best you could get in the clutch. When Joe went to sleep, Dalling helped you carry him out through his apartment and down the back way to the car. At this end, you hoisted him into the freezer and let him smother. So far it had been simple. Joe was dead, and you had the heroin. Speed had the money and the contacts. But your biggest problem still faced you. You knew if Dowser caught on to you, you wouldn’t live to enjoy your money. Perhaps you heard what his gorillas did to Mario Friday night, just on the off chance that he knew something about it. You had to clear yourself with Dowser. That’s where I came in, and that’s where you made your big mistake.”

“Anything with you in it is a mistake. I only hope you repeat this fable in public, to the police. I’ll put you out of business.” But she couldn’t muster enough conviction to support her words. They sounded desperately thin.

“I’ll be in business when you’re in Tehachapi, or in the gas chamber. You thought you could call me in to take a fall, then turn me off like a tap, or kiss me off with a little casual sex. It was a tricky idea, a little too tricky to work. You and your radio actor persuaded your mother to hire me to look for you: you probably wrote the script. Then you arranged for me to find you and be convinced that Joe was alive and kicking. Dalling sneaked up on the porch behind me and sandbagged me. You even faked a warning that came too late, to demonstrate good faith. You removed my gun and filed it for future reference. I don’t know whether you were already planning to kill your partner. You must have seen that he was going to pieces. But you kept him alive as long as possible, because you still needed his help.