Росс Макдональд: Trouble Follows Me

We found Eric lying stone cold, but snoring passionately, on a settee in the dining-room. The big Negro steward whom he had called Hector Land was hovering over him as if he thought something should be done but didn’t know what.

“Just leave him for now,” I said. “If he doesn’t come out of it in the next few minutes I’ll take him back to the ship.”

“Yessir. I just wanted to ask him if we could get any more ice. We’re all out of ice.”

“It doesn’t make any difference now, anyway. Have you seen Miss Sholto? The young lady who was with Mr. Swann at supper?”

“No, sir. I haven’t seen her all night. Maybe she’s out in the garden.”

“Shall we try the garden?” Mary said.

We went out the back door and stood on the verandah for a minute, letting our eyes get used to the darkness. I put my hand on her waist but she turned away out of my grasp.

“Don’t be premature,” she said seriously. “I came to this party to drink and dance, not to be made love to.”

“Premature is a good word. There’s a future in it.”

“Is there? You talk ahead of yourself. I like the way you talk, though.”

“Words used to be my business.”

“That’s the trouble. I don’t know whether there’s much connection between what you say and what you are. A lot of servicemen away from home have lost track of themselves. God, am I talking like a Sunday School teacher?”

“Go right ahead. A woman’s softening influence is just what I need.”

“It’s true of all of us, I guess. Not just servicemen. There aren’t many people I know that haven’t lost track of themselves.”

It was queer to be talked at that way by a blonde I was trying to make, but what she said struck home. Ever since I left Detroit I had felt dislocated, and after my ship went down it was worse. Sometimes I felt that all of us were adrift on a starless night, singing in the dark, full of fears and laughing them off with laughter which didn’t fool anyone.

On this side of the house the verandah was roofless. I looked up at the night sky hanging huge over the mountains. The somber clouds on the peaks parted for a moment and let the moon sail through, trailing a single bright star like a target sleeve.

“I think that’s what must have happened to Eric and Sue,” I said. “They thought it didn’t matter, and it turned into very bad medicine for both of them.”

“I wonder if she’ll ever be happy again,” Mary said.

I wasn’t listening. Something against the wall of the house had caught my eye, and I looked up and found Sue Sholto in the moonlight. Her head was cocked birdlike on one side as if she was waiting for the answer to a question, and her tongue protruded roguishly. Under her dangling feet were three yards of empty air. Her whole slight weight was supported by a yellow rope knotted under her ear. Her eyes were larger and blacker than they had been in life.

THE clouds came together again, blotting out the moon, like shadowy giants huddled in a conference of evil. But not before Mary had followed my look and seen what I saw.

“She’s killed herself,” she said in a high unnatural voice. “I was afraid something had happened to her.” She beat her clenched fists together with a dull futile sound. “I should have stayed with her.”

“Do you know what room that is? Nobody could reach her from here.” I gestured upward and my hand flew higher than I intended, out of my control. We looked up again. With the moon gone Sue Sholto was an obscure shadow hanging over us. Only her feet were visible in the light from below, stirring almost imperceptibly with the twist in the hemp. There was a hole in the toe of one of her stockings, and I could see the red polish shining on a toenail.

“I think it’s the ladies’ room, but I can’t be sure. It looks out the back.”

“Stay downstairs with the people,” I said. “I’ll go up.”

I found Lieutenant Savo, the ship’s doctor, on the dance floor. When I told him what I had seen his Vandyke wobbled once and set firmly. He was up the stairs ahead of me.

The ladies’ room was actually three rooms with interconnecting doors: a well-lighted dressing-room with mirrors and a dressing table, a washroom on one side of it, and on the other a dark little room containing nothing more than a few armchairs and a couch. Dr. Savo had attended a girl at a previous party in this room, and he explained that it was used only in case of sickness or alcoholic coma.

I found the light switch and saw that the room had been used for something else. The couch, wide, lumpy and chintz-covered, was jammed against the wall under the sill of the single window. Tied around its bowed walnut legs was the other end of the yellow rope which supported Sue Sholto. We drew her up through the open window and found that she was easy to lift. But in the harsh light cast by the obsolete ceiling chandelier she was not easy to look at. The noose under her ear was clumsily knotted but it had served its purpose. There was nothing left in her face which Eric Swann could have loved.

I went into the next room to get a towel to hide it. Mary was standing in the hall doorway, very pale and tall. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Don’t come in.”

There were footsteps in the hall, and Eric appeared at her shoulder. His flesh was the color of a dead man’s and his eyes were set as if he had forgotten to blink them.

“Something’s happened to Sue,” he said.

Mary moved out of his way and he pushed me aside without knowing it. It would have been a thankless job to fight him for the sake of saving him nightmares. He said to the dead woman: “Darling, you shouldn’t have done it. I’d have done anything.”

Then he lay down on the floor beside her and hid his face in her hair, which flourished on the dusty rug like a black forest. A man’s dry crying is a poor imitation of a woman’s melodious weeping, but it is more terrible in its effect. His retching sobs opened another trapdoor in the bottom cellar of pity and horror. I shut the door on him so Mary wouldn’t see.

“Where did she get the rope?” I asked.

“There’s one in every upstairs room. Look.” She pointed to a hook beside the dressing-room windows where another yellow rope hung in a coil. I had an instinctive desire to take it away and burn it.

“What in God’s name do they leave things like that around for?”

“It’s a fire escape, the only one they have.”

“And I suppose they serve you hemlock with your dinner, just in case you want to take a sip or two between courses in the Socratic manner.”

“Don’t talk so much and for God’s sake don’t try to be funny,” Mary said wearily. “You hardly knew Sue, but I did.” Her neck drooped like a wilting flower’s stalk, and there was nothing I could do for her at all.

A petty officer wearing a black and yellow Shore Patrol armband came into the room with four or five people at his heels. Their faces were blankly eager. I thought of a pack of necrophagous jackals. Mrs. Merriwell was one of them, and the Eurasian manager, tense and stammering, was another.

The SP man, who was young and worried-looking, said: “My name’s Baker, sir. I understand there’s been a very bad accident.”

“Come into the next room. The value of publicity is sometimes over-estimated–”

“Accident nothing,” Mrs. Merriwell bayed. “I don’t believe it was suicide. That awful nigger was up in that very room. I saw him in the hallway coming out.”

“When was this?” Baker said. “And who are you talking about, Madam?”

“That horrible black steward, the one with the crumpled ears. He’d have frightened me out of my wits up here if I didn’t know how to handle niggers. I believe he raped that girl and hanged her to cover up.”