Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

Miss Green returned to her love-story magazines, and quickly became absorbed in a Spicy Romances. I went back to our compartment and sat down beside Mary.

“Miss Green wants to know if there’s anything the matter,” I said in a low voice. “If you ask me, there’s something the matter with her.”

“What do you mean? She’s a type you see all over. An ignorant woman who got hold of money somewhere, and doesn’t know how to use it on herself.”

“Yeah, but how did she get her money?” I looked over my shoulder at Miss Green. Her fading prurient eyes were fastened on the pages of her pulp magazine. “There’s something about her I don’t like, something reptilian.”

“Maybe she won it in a lottery,” Mary said with a laugh. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Sam. She’s a pathetic old hag. I think I know women, and that’s all I can see in her.”

“She was pretty friendly with Anderson, too. I was beginning to feel there was something queer about him and now he’s dropped out of sight. Too many people have been dropping through trap-doors. Gordon’s gone, too.”

“Gordon?”

“The man that was spying on you the other night in the club car. He left the train last night.”

“Is that sinister? For all you know, he may have had a perfectly respectable reason–”

“Maybe he had. But I’m not taking it for granted. He acted fishy.”

“Everything’s looking fishy to you, Sam. Aren’t you letting the whole thing get you down?”

“You’re damn right I am. Can’t you see we’re both in this thing up to our necks? You or I may be the next to drop through the trap-door. I almost did.”

“I know you did.” She leaned towards me and put a firm white hand on my knee. “Then why do you insist on sticking your neck out?”

“There’s trouble in the air, and I believe in meeting trouble halfway. I want something to get hold of.”

“But what if there isn’t anything to get hold of?”

“A minute ago you said I was sticking my neck out. Now there’s nothing to get hold of, and all this is my imagination. But I suppose I can’t expect a woman to be logical.”

“Maybe I’m not logical. I follow my feelings. And my feeling is that you should try to forget about this business.”

I couldn’t forget it, and I knew that she couldn’t either, but I dropped the subject. My nerves were stretched and waiting, but there was nothing to do. I did my best to enjoy the long peaceful day.

We read and talked, intimate desultory talk. The train dragged itself across Arizona, spanned the Colorado gorge, spiralled up into the last great wall of mountains, slid down through blue-white light into the California coastal plain and the green season.

At ten-thirty that night the train stopped for the last time in the Los Angeles station, and we left it together. Climbing up the long sloping tunnel from the train, I had more than the usual feeling of strangeness on coming into an unfamiliar city. It was like climbing out of a tight little hell into an unpredictable chaos. Even my own intentions were unpredictable, but at the last minute I made up my mind.

“I’m going to Santa Barbara,” I told Mary at the baggage counter.

“But you said you were coming to San Diego with me!” There was an angry flush in her cheeks. Her proprietary tone made me angry, too.

“I’m not,” I said bluntly. “I may see you in Diego tomorrow night.”

“What on earth are you going to Santa Barbara for?”

“I’m going to look up Laura Eaton. The girl Hatcher wrote the letter to.”

She put her hand on my arm and drew me aside from the crowd at the checking desk. “Please don’t go, Sam. Stay in Los Angeles with me tonight.”

“You’re not jealous of a girl I’ve never seen?”

“I’m not jealous of anybody. I just don’t want you to go to Santa Barbara. I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“What might happen to you. You mustn’t go running around the country looking for trouble.”

“I don’t have to look for it. It found me long ago: I want to know what’s in that letter, and I have to go to Santa Barbara to find out.”

“And if I don’t like I can lump it!” she said flatly.

She took her hand away from my arm. I felt very much alone.

I LEFT her at the taxi-stand. She didn’t say good-bye. I checked my bag through to San Diego, and took a northbound train. The hundred-mile journey in a coach was not pleasant. I was sick of trains anyway, and conflicting feelings were churning inside me. I hated to leave Mary standing, but unfinished events were tugging at me. I couldn’t relax until I had done something, and the only feasible action I could think of was a visit to Laura Eaton, whoever she might be.

Between one and two in the morning I got off at the Santa Barbara station. The town had the salt smell of a seaport, but it was as dark and deserted as any prairie village in the middle of the night. I found a telephone book in a station booth and looked up Laura Eaton. There was a William Eaton at 2124 Bath Street.

I walked up the empty main street and finally captured a nocturnal taxi-driver dozing at the wheel. He took me out Bath Street. It was a quiet residential street of one-story stucco and frame houses nestling bone-white among palms and oleanders and flowering yews. To the right the mountains seemed to rise straight up behind them against the dim moonlit sky.

The mountains and the moonlight, the tropical trees and houses, the warm sea-laden wind which came in through the open windows of the cab reminded me of Oahu. I had a moment of false recognition as if I were riding to see the already seen, to find the already found: Sue Sholto hanging like a grotesque vine against a briefly moonlit wall. I had an intuition that I was completing an obscure and fearful cycle, but I had no sense of what the fulfilment would be.

Laura Eaton at least wore no rope around her neck. She greeted me at her door, which opened six inches on a chain, with a .38 revolver in her hand.

I said: “It looks as if they got here before I did.”

“Put up your hands,” she said in a voice which might have been pleasant under other circumstances. When I had done so, she unhooked the chain. “Now step inside while I call the police. If you make a false move I’ll shoot you in the stomach.”

She was a tall woman in her late twenties. Her tawny hair was down her back, matching the tan wool bathrobe which she wore. Holding her .38 steadily in her right hand she patted my pockets and armpits. She seemed surprised to find no gun, and looked at me for a moment without speaking.

“You’re Laura Eaton, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“My name is Sam Drake. My friends call me Sam and always pull a gun on me when I knock on their door. It’s a game we play.”

“My house was entered today. I don’t propose to have it entered again.”

“But I’ve already entered it. Look. Now call the police.”

She looked at me uncertainly. “Who are you anyway? Are you really in the Navy?”

“Do you know a man called Hatcher?”

“Rodney Hatcher?”

“I don’t know his first name. He comes from Kansas City.”

“That’s Rodney.”

“He died the night before last.”

“He died! Is that why you’ve come, to tell me?” She had forgotten her gun. I lowered my hands.

“That’s one reason. Point your gun away from my stomach, will you? It makes my stomach feel funny.”

She clicked the safety and dropped the gun on the chesterfield, where it fell with a soft thump that was soothing to my nerves. “Why did you come at this time of night?” she said.