The Three Roads

by Ross Macdonald

  “I may as well tell you, Mrs. Swanscutt, that Bret has had rather serious psychological difficulties. You couldn’t have been in Los Angeles last May?”

  “No. Why? We were visiting my sister in New Mexico. Do you mean that Bret had a nervous breakdown?”

  “You might call it that—”

  “His father had a nervous breakdown. That was before I met him, while he was still in the seminary. I don’t think he ever recovered from it entirely. He was a very intelligent man, and highly cultivated, but he was always a little—unpredictable.” She raised her voice slightly in sing-song defiance, like someone reciting a creed to a private god. “I’ve never regretted leaving him for an instant.”

  Paula took advantage of the opportunity. “Just what were the circumstances of your leaving him?”

  Mrs. Swanscutt’s blue eyes clouded and looked away. “It’s rather a painful memory,” she faltered. Then her voice regained its power and at the same time became a little phony. “Don’t imagine that I consider that I did wrong. I followed the dictates of my heart, and I have never known a moment’s remorse. I married Frank immediately after the divorce, and our marriage has been an ideally happy one. Our friends will tell you that. We put love ahead of reputation and convention, but a love like ours is more important than anything else, Miss West.”

  I know the feeling, Paula thought, even if your dialogue does need a little toning down (but then you learned to talk before Hemingway was here to teach you). “The last thing I want to seem is critical,” she said carefully. “And I have no desire to cause you pain. It simply happens that Bret has been having trouble with his memory. He’s confused about what happened to you, for one thing. It may be that if you tell me what actually happened it will help to clear up his trouble.” She let out her breath slowly. Trying to get the truth out of an aging romantic was as ticklish as walking on eggs.

  But the carefully chosen words had their effect. The woman looked both guilty and penitent, and she spoke in an honest, uninflated way. “I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt Bret, not for the world. It was terrible for me to have it happen, and I hated to leave him. But he was so young I was convinced that he wouldn’t remember.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Four. He was only a baby. It couldn’t have meant anything to him.”

  “Bret’s doctor would probably disagree. I don’t know whether you’ve read much about psychoanalysis—”

  “Oh yes, I have. I do a great deal of reading.”

  “Then you know how important they think certain childhood events can be. Some of them say that the first year is the most important of all.”

  “I took very good care of him when he was a baby,” Mrs. Swanscutt said irrelevantly.

  “No doubt. But what happened when he was four? He told his doctor that he went into his room and found you dead.”

  “Is that what he said?” There was incredulous horror in the strained blue eyes. For a moment she might almost have believed that she had died then and had been deceiving herself for twenty-five years. Perhaps part of her died then, Paula thought, the part that belonged to her son.

  “Yes, that’s what he said. That delusion may be the origin of his mental troubles. That’s why the truth is so important, do you see?”

  “Is he in the asylum?” It was hard for her to say the word, but she got it out.

  “Yes.” After all, he had been in a mental ward until yesterday. She needed every available tool to pry the truth out of this misty-brained woman.

  “My poor boy!” Mrs. Swanscutt said. “My poor boy!”

  Mrs. Roberts came in with the tea cart, walking firmly as if she had waited long enough and was determined to get it over with.

  “Oh, I’d forgotten about tea,” Paula said, but she was furious. Damn Roberts for blundering in at the crisis of her third degree! And damn the Swanscutt woman for being a woman! She could guess well enough what Bret had found in his mother’s room. But she had to know.

  She said in a low hard voice over the teacups: “I believe you did Bret an injury, Mrs. Swanscutt. The least you can do is tell me what happened so that I can tell his doctor.”

  “I can’t tell you. I can’t.”

  Paula felt a cold fury gathering in her body. Once again she was fighting for Bret’s sanity and her own chance of happiness. The woman could either tell her or get out of her house. “You had a lover,” she stated.

  “Yes.” The admission was almost inaudible. “My present husband. Frank was a graduate student in the college, and he did the heavy work around the house in return for a room. We saw a great deal of each other, and we fell in love. But you can’t possibly understand the circumstances, Miss West.”

  “Why not? I’m in love—with Bret.”

  “After Bret was born my husband never came near me again. Do you understand me? He believed that intercourse was wrong except for the purpose of having children, and the doctor said I couldn’t have any more children. George had his own room, and never once in four years did he come into mine.”

  I haven’t bedded with a man for six years, Paula thought, but she didn’t say it.

  “Frank became my lover. I never thought of it as wicked. I simply didn’t think of George as my husband any longer. He was more than ten years older than I, and he seemed more like a father to me after the first year. He was never ordained, but he was like a priest. Frank was my true husband.”

  “You needn’t make apologies to me,” Paula said. “Most of my friends have been married at least twice. I divorced my first husband in 1940.”

  “You did? For Bret?”

  “No, I didn’t know Bret then. For myself.”

  “I see.”

  The woman was stalling again. Perhaps she needed another jolt. Well, Paula thought, I’m the girl to give it to her. I take them, and I dish them out. “And when did Bret come into this? Or didn’t he matter?”

  “Of course he mattered.” Mrs. Swanscutt said in her wispy, emotional voice. “I loved him too. I never dreamed it would turn out as it did.”

  “Yes?”

  “He must have been frightened by a dream—he sometimes had nightmares, though he hadn’t had one for a long time. Anyway, he woke up in the middle of the night and came to my room. Frank was with me. We were—in bed together. Bret came in very quietly and turned on the ceiling light—that was the first we knew of his being there. When he saw us he carried on something terrible. He set up a terrible howling and rushed at me with his fists. He bruised my breast quite badly.”

  I’m glad, said Paula to herself.

  “George heard the disturbance and came running up the stairs. He caught Frank before he could get back to his room, and they fought in the hall. It was frightful. George knocked Frank down—he was quite a powerful man. I tried to take Bret in my arms and quiet him, but he hit and scratched at me like a wild animal. Then he ran back to the nursery, and that was the last I saw of him. George went downstairs and locked himself in his study. Frank and I left town that night and went to Cincinnati, where his people lived. Several years after that I received a legal notice that George had divorced me on grounds of desertion. Frank and I got married and came west, and I never heard from George again. Perhaps he did tell Bret that I was dead. I don’t know.”

  Paula respected Mrs. Swanscutt’s honesty, but it was not enough to keep her from hating the woman. She had harmed Bret, and that damned her forever in Paula’s eyes. Still, she spoke as kindly as she could. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Swanscutt. Will you have some more tea?”

  “No, thank you. But I do think I’ll have one of these sandwiches. I’m quite famished.” Her voice broke then, and she placed her hand lightly on Paula’s arm. “I know you love Bret. You speak of him as if you loved him. Do you think I’m evil, an evil mother?”

  “I think you were unlucky, I’m sorry for you. Bret was unlucky too—and George. He’s dead, by the way.”

  The hall telephone rang, and Paula was there before Mrs. Roberts
could come out of the kitchen. “Hello?”

  “Is that you, Miss West?”

  “Yes.” She shut the door to the living-room with her foot.

  “You know who’s talking. I want to see you personally—now. Your boy friend has been sticking his nose in once too often, and I don’t like it. Not a little bit.”

  “I warned you to leave town. You said you would.”

  “Maybe I did, but I’m not going, understand? I’m sticking around to see what gives. I think you’ve been giving me the cross, and I don’t like it.”

  “Think what you like. I haven’t.”

  “Maybe you haven’t and maybe you have. Anyway, I want to see you. Do I get to?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’ll come. Are you at home?”

  “Nix! Taylor drops in too much. I’m in the Mexicana Motel, room 106. Know where that is?”

  “On Hollywood Boulevard?”

  “Correct. I’ll be waiting. And if you bring anybody with you you’ll be making an ugly mistake—but ugly.” He hung up.

  Paula got rid of Mrs. Swanscutt as smoothly as she could, and backed her roadster down the driveway. At the last moment she ran back into the house to get the small .25 automatic she kept in the drawer beside her jewel case.

  chapter 19

  It was dark when Paula’s visitor came out of the house, but Bret was able to see in the light from the windows that Paula was not with her. The middle-aged woman got into her coupé and drove away alone. Bret had an impulse to follow her, if only to find out whether he should know her, but he decided not to. There was no reason to suppose that the woman had anything to do with the case or with him, and it was Paula he was following. He had a hunch that sooner or later Harry Milne would come to her or she would go to him.

  The taxi driver woke up when the coupé went coughing by them. He stretched and rubbed his eyes. “Jeez! It’s dark already. We going to be here all night?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “I go off at eight, bud. It’s past seven now.”

  “I want you to stay on if you can. Here’s ten dollars on account.”

  “Well, I guess it’ll be okay. But I got to call up the dispatcher.”

  “Not now. Wait.”

  A minute later, as if to verify his hunch, Paula’s roadster backed down the driveway and stopped beside the front porch. She got out and ran into the house again.

  “Drive down to the corner,” he told the driver. “I want you to follow that roadster, but I don’t know which way she’ll turn.”

  “Right.”

  The taxi started up and rolled slowly past the house. Before they reached the corner the roadster backed out of the driveway and turned toward them. Bret took off his white hat and crouched down in the seat. The roadster, with Paula at the wheel, passed them at accelerating speed and turned at the corner toward the center of Hollywood.

  “That’s the one. Don’t lose her.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” the driver yelled over his shoulder. “This jalopy is no speed wagon.”

  He kept the roadster in sight. It disappeared for a while in a traffic jam at Hollywood and Vine, but Bret caught a tail-end glimpse of it, and they gained on it again when it turned up the boulevard. After a mile or so it stopped at the curb, and Paula got out. They were in time to see her turn up the walk to the two-story stucco building with a red neon sign: “Mexicana Motel.”

  “Park up the street ahead of her,” Bret said as he got out. “If she comes out before I do, watch which direction she goes.”

  “Okay,” the driver said wearily.

  Paula had avoided the door to the front office of the motel and had gone up a flight of open stairs on the left side of the building. As soon as she was out of sight Bret went after her. With his head on a level with the top step he saw her knocking at a door halfway down the balcony. The door opened, and for a moment he saw her profile clear in a shaft of yellow light. She went in, and the door closed.

  Moving as silently as he could, Bret walked along the balcony, past a row of closed doors, to the one that had opened and closed. Enough light came into the courtyard to let him read the metal numbers on the door, “106.” There was a narrow window beside the door, but the blind was tightly drawn. Not even a human shadow appeared against the light, though he could hear the murmur of voices. He stood against the wall beside the window and strained his ears. There was a man’s voice yapping excitedly, and a woman’s softer tones. He knelt down and held his ear against the window. Undoubtedly the woman’s voice was Paula’s, but he could not be sure of the man’s.

  The woman’s voice rose suddenly, and he heard a few words that made him sure.

  “You’ll keep your mouth shut or I’ll kill you.…”

  The man let out a mirthless hyena laugh.

  Bret stood up and felt for the gun in his pocket. Then someone spoke softly behind him.

  “Hold it, friend. We don’t want any trouble around here now.”

  Bret whirled on a short egg-shaped man standing in his shirt sleeves behind him with his hands in his pockets. “Who are you?”

  “I run this place, is all. And what in hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Be quiet,” Bret whispered tensely. Apart from the danger in the situation he couldn’t bear the idea of having Paula come out and find him here. He moved toward the man in shirt sleeves, who came with him in the direction of the stairs.

  “I saw you follow her up here. Your wife?”

  “That’s no concern of yours.”

  “Oh, yes, it’s some concern of mine. You were all set to make trouble, weren’t you? Trouble is the one thing my business can’t stand.”

  They paused at the foot of the stairs, and the little man’s face shone ruddily under the neon. It was a lined and drooping face, with thick black eyebrows that pressed down on the squinting black eyes as if by their own weight, a fleshy nose, heavy lips that stretched insensitively around a dead cigar. The total effect was ugliness and a kind of shrewd honesty.

  “I can’t stand here,” Bret said. “She may come out any minute.”

  “So what! I thought you wanted to see her.”

  “Not her. The man.”

  “Come in here.” He led Bret through a door marked “Office” and closed the Venetian blind over the front window. “What’s the deal, Lieutenant? You trying to catch them in flagrante delicto, like they say?”

  “No, nothing like that. Who’s registered in 106?”

  “That’s the kind of information I only give to the cops—”

  “Hell, I’ll go and find out for myself!” He started for the door.

  “Just a minute, just a minute. You want me to call the cops? I told you we can’t stand trouble here.”

  Bret turned uncertainly at the door. “Who’s in 106?”

  “A guy called Miles. Checked in this afternoon. You know him?”

  “I know him. Sorry, but I’m going up there.”

  The little man had been standing at the window peering out through the blind. “What’s the use?” he said now. “She just came down a minute ago and drove away.”

  “God damn you!” Bret flung open the door to the street. Paula’s roadster was gone.

  “You said you didn’t want to see her,” the little man said behind him. “I didn’t want you to, either. When you get a threesome with two sexes in it, it spells trouble. Trouble spells cops. Cops spell bad business.”

  “Keep out of this. I’m going up to see Miles.”

  “Maybe it’d be better if you didn’t. You’re feeling kind of overheated, aren’t you, Lieutenant? I told you we don’t want any trouble.”

  “Give it a rest. You’ve got to expect trouble when you rent rooms to criminals.”

  “A criminal because he laid your wife on you? Come on now, Lieutenant.”

  “This isn’t a divorce case, you fool! This is murder!”

  “What’s that!”

  Bret slammed the door in his face. The little man sat down at his d
esk and pulled his cradle phone toward him. He relit his cigar stub and blew several smoke rings. After a brief period of contemplation he crushed out his cigar and, without having used it, pushed the telephone to the back of the desk.

  He then took a key case out of his trousers pocket, selected a small steel key, used it to unlock the upper right-hand drawer of the desk, and removed from the drawer a gray steel revolver with full chambers, which he shoved into his right trousers pocket. Then he went quietly upstairs.

  chapter 20

  When Paula came down the steps from the motel balcony she noticed the yellow cab at the curb. It seemed to her that the driver’s eyes were watching her covertly from its shadowy interior. She kept it in her rear-view mirror as she drove away. The cab stayed where it was until she lost sight of it.

  Evidently her nerves were playing her tricks again. If they were, it was no wonder. The strain of facing Miles and saying what she’d said had put her in a state beyond fear. She felt hollow and light, like a blown eggshell. She had poured out all her strength in sustaining that final stand, but it had worked.

  Her only regret was that she hadn’t stood up to him months before. The money didn’t matter to her, but the last few months had eaten away her moral fiber, and it was wearing awfully thin. She moved her hands and feet and drove by the little sparks of life that hung on flickering in her nerve ends. She felt too weak to face the rest of the night alone, and she turned down Wilshire in the direction of Dr. Klifter’s hotel.

  She phoned him from the desk, and he came to the gate of the pueblo to meet her, a quiet-walking little man in bright, informal clothes, with the air of a wizard in disguise.

  “It is a pleasure to see you again, Miss West.”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “Then walk into my parlor. Come.” His English was remarkably pure, she thought absently, but his attempts to make gay little remarks gave him away.