Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

“I could hardly serve as your food-taster, Mr. Drake. Nor am I ubiquitous.”

“You’re ubiquitous enough to suit me. What brought you here tonight?”

“After Hatcher was killed, my suspicions narrowed on Anderson. I did my best to shadow him. When you jumped me at the door of the smoking-compartment last night I think he caught on. He got off the train at Gallup and I followed him, but not fast enough. He took the only available taxi to Albuquerque, and I had to wait for the train to leave. When I got to Albuquerque he had already gone.

“I traced him to the airfield and found that he had chartered a plane to Los Angeles. I took the first commercial flight but when I got to L.A. there was no trace of him there. Like you, I got the idea that he might have come to Santa Barbara to intercept Hatcher’s letter to Miss Eaton. I flew up here at noon and found that he had. He landed at the Santa Barbara airport this morning, and disappeared. Only Miss Eaton has seen him since. The local police informed me of the entry into her house this afternoon. Since then I’ve been watching this house. The local police are watching the roads in and out of town.”

“I didn’t realize I had a bodyguard,” Laura Eaton said. “It feels nice. I don’t know as much about handling a gun as I pretended to.”

“Our organization exists for the protection of the public,” Gordon said sententiously.

“I suppose you know all the circumstances of Bessie Land’s death?” I said.

Laura Eaton leaned forward in her seat and looked at me curiously, but had enough character to hold her tongue.

“I’ve been over the evidence with Hefler,” Gordon said. “As a matter of fact, I examined the cadaver.”

“Do you agree with the police that it was suicide?”

“No, I don’t. Some of those municipal police are textbook-ridden. They’ve learned that hesitation-marks are often associated with suicide, so whenever they see a hesitation-mark they jump to the conclusion that it’s suicide. In this case, a more likely hypothesis is that Bessie Land was murdered while in an alcoholic coma. The tissues of her brain were saturated with alcohol.”

“I saw her a couple of hours before she died. She was terribly drunk then.”

“Exactly. It’s quite likely that the killer hesitated in the act of murder and made a shallow cut in her throat before he could gather enough courage to complete the act. Alcohol is an anaesthetic, and Bessie wouldn’t necessarily be aroused. That’s one way of accounting for the hesitation-mark. Another way, and I consider this more probable, is that it was deliberately inflicted to make the murder look like suicide. That would call for almost surgical coolness, and for some knowledge of medico-legal doctrine. But I think the criminals we’re dealing with are cool enough and intelligent enough. Besides, murder arranged to look like suicide fits in with the previously established pattern.”

“You mean Sue Sholto’s murder?”

“Sue Sholto’s murder?” Laura Eaton said in a shocked whisper.

“There have been three murders,” Gordon said. “Your friend Hatcher was the third.”

Laura Eaton’s face became pale and her body seemed to grow smaller. She put her hands over her face.

“You spoke of criminals,” I said. “In the plural.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that we’re up against an organization–”

“Black Israel?”

“Black Israel is part of the organization, or associated with it. I got a wire when the train stopped in Kansas City. They’ve picked up the Negro who was sitting beside Bessie Land the night she was killed–”

“I knew he had something to do with it.”

“He didn’t kill her,” Gordon said. “He proved that he remained in the Paris Bar and Grill continuously until after 2 A.M., and she was dead long before that. But he is a member of Black Israel. He broke down and confessed.”

“Are the Japs behind it?”

“If they are, he doesn’t know, or won’t admit it. He did admit that Black Israel takes a passive-resistance stand on the war effort. As a matter of fact, his own draft status was not what it should be. That’s the charge we’re holding him on. He’s given us some leads, and we’re rounding up the leaders. Hector Land was a minor leader and a comparatively recent member, he said. And he mentioned a white man who supplied Black Israel with funds for propaganda purposes.”

“Anderson.”

Gordon leaned back and lit a cigarette. “I think so.” There was still tension between us, like an electric arc whose contact points were my sore knuckles and Gordon’s bruised jaw. I said sharply: “If you thought so, why didn’t you arrest him on the train?”

His black eyes gave me a cold superior stare. “For the simple reason that I had no legal evidence against him. You don’t seem to realize how the police must work in a democratic country, Drake. During this war, our Bureau has watched known criminals for as long as two or three years without acting to arrest them. Watched them every minute of every day for years, waiting for something to give them away. In the end, something always does. A slip of the tongue, an error in planning, a chance meeting–”

“It was the chance meeting with Hatcher that gave Anderson away,” I said. “Hatcher said he knew Anderson, or at least implied it.”

“That may be so. Perhaps his letter will give us the clue we need, the reason for his death.”

Laura Eaton said: “Goodness, I could do with a cup of coffee. My head’s amply spinning. What about you gentlemen?”

We said we would, and she started for the kitchen. Before she disappeared Gordon said: “What time is your morning mail delivery?”

“Usually about nine o’clock. Do you think he’ll be back?”

“I don’t know. He’s a tricky customer. He may be too wary to try it again. I’m going to wait and find out.”

“I’m going to wait, too,” I said. “If I may borrow Miss Eaton’s chesterfield and gun for the rest of the night.”

“You may,” she said from the kitchen door. In a minute there was the sound of water rushing from a faucet into a coffee percolator.

We waited in silence for a while. My anger had drained away leaving dregs of shame in my system, and some alarm at my temerity. I felt considerable awe of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And I realized how easily he could have shot me.

My glance fell on an electric record-player beside a lamp in the corner. The albums of records in its cabinet switched my mind to a track that it had been following earlier that day. I said:

“I realize that you have a low opinion of my investigative talents. I realize that you’re somewhat justified, and that the smartest thing I’ve done was to go to the FBI. But I have an idea that I think you should hear.”

“It was partly my fault that we worked at crosspurposes,” he admitted. “But I don’t see how it could have been helped. What’s your idea?”

“It’s nothing better than a hunch. It may be completely screwy. Hefler must have told you that secret information was leaking out of Hawaii to the enemy. At least that’s what I was told.”

“I knew it before Hefler told me. We’ve known about it for a couple of months.”

“But you haven’t been able to put your finger on the leak. Teddy Trask, the magician who put on an act in the club car that first afternoon, told me about a code which he and his partner had developed–”

“I heard him talking about it. I was there.”

“That’s right, you were. The principle of that code could be used by an enemy agent working in a commercial broadcasting station. Sue Sholto, the girl who was hanged–”

“I know about her,” he said impatiently. “How could it be used?”