Meet Me at the Morgue

by Ross Macdonald

  “Lieutenant Cleat has the right,” I said. “Your husband’s under suspicion. They’ll let you go as soon as he’s cleared.”

  “If,” Cleat said.

  She batted her eyes like a scared filly, and ran for the door and the sunlight. The man who was coming in caught her around the waist, immobilized her flailing arms and passed her to the police guard. The guard pushed her towards the black car that was waiting in the drive. Her angular shadow merged with the shadow of the car.

  The young man in the doorway was florid and stocky. His silhouette was almost square in a double-breasted business suit.

  “I’m Forest, Special Agent,” he said briskly, and shook hands with efficient heartiness. “Our technicians are coming down in the mobile unit, should be here very soon. I understand there’s a ransom note?”

  I quoted it, almost verbatim. It kept repeating itself in the back of my mind, like a song that was too ugly to forget.

  Forest’s quick brown eyes steadied and sobered. “Nasty piece of work, eh? Who’s in charge of the case here?”

  “Lieutenant Cleat is. The corpus was found in the city. But the boy lives in the county. If Miner snatched him, the crime originated in sheriff’s territory.”

  “You with the sheriff’s department?”

  “I’m a probation officer.” I explained who Miner was, and my connection with the case.

  Forest turned to Cleat. “Call the sheriff, will you please, Lieutenant?” He added in a rather doctrinaire tone: “Cooperation with local agencies is our first principle.”

  Cleat glanced involuntarily at the body on the table. It had been all his until now. “Okay.” He removed his cigar, threw it on the concrete floor, ground it to shreds with his heel, and left the room. A bleat of organ music came through the inner door before he closed it.

  Forest went to the body. His practiced hands dove in and out of the pockets. “Ugly customer, eh?”

  “Handsome is as handsome does. I searched him when I found him. Nothing useful, except a pocket comb with his initials, A.G.L. The murderer didn’t want him identified too soon.”

  “He was stabbed, wasn’t he? Where’s the weapon?”

  “It was done with an icepick. They’re testing it for prints now. I don’t think they’re going to find any.”

  “Icepicked, eh? And hijacked. It could be a big-time mob at work. Fifty thousand is a lot of hay. The parents wealthy?”

  “The father has half a million or so, according to the rumors.”

  “Like to talk to him.”

  “He’s at home, ill. The mother’s probably in my office now. It isn’t far.”

  “She have the ransom letter?”

  “I think she left it at home.”

  “We want to get to work on that. They’re bringing our file along for comparison. Modus operandi is primary in a kidnap case. It’s like a compulsion neurosis repeating itself. Not that it often gets a chance to repeat.”

  He shot his cuff with a peculiarly mechanical movement, and looked at his watch. I half expected him to suggest we synchronize our watches.

  “Twenty past three,” he said. “Let’s get going. You can give me a rundown on the way and I’ll check back here later.”

  We cut across the courthouse grounds. A trusty was mowing the lawn with a power mower. The cut grass smelled fresh and sweet, and after the pavement the springy turf was pleasant underfoot.

  I talked and Forest listened. He listened well. I had the impression that my words were being recorded on rolls of permanent tape whizzing round in his skull.

  CHAPTER 9: When we reached the County Annex, Ann was locking the door of the office. I introduced her to Forest.

  “Has Mrs. Johnson gone home?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I promised to drive out after her. Helen shouldn’t be alone, and she doesn’t seem to have any friends or relatives available.”

  “You’re a dutiful girl.”

  She flinched at the compliment, and bit her lower lip. “I have nothing better to do.”

  “I wonder, might I hitch a ride with you, Miss Devon?” Forest spoke very politely. Ann was pretty. “I’m not familiar with the local topography.”

  “Of course.” She turned to me in a sudden flurry of impulse: “Howie, I have to talk to you, privately.”

  “Right now?”

  “Please, if you have the time.”

  Forest put in swiftly: “That’s all right. I’d like to look over your probation report on Miner.”

  Ann brought it out of the files and followed me into my office, closing the door. She stood with her hands behind her, looking down at the worn cork floor-covering between us:

  “I’m afraid you’re going to think a good deal less of me, after today.”

  “That little business with Seifel? Not a bit of it. It’s even a hopeful sign. I was beginning to be afraid that all your feelings were for other people.”

  “I’m really a jealous vixen under the skin. That’s not what I wanted to say, though.”

  “Strangely enough, I didn’t think it was.”

  “I’m in love with him,” she said.

  “I didn’t even know that you and Seifel were friends.”

  “We’re not, exactly. I don’t approve of him. He doesn’t take me seriously at all. He baits me for being a bluestocking. But ever since he came to the office that day—”

  “What day?”

  “It was in February, when he was working up the Miner case. He came in to ask some questions. You were up in the north end of the county, and Alex was out. We got to talking, and he asked me to have lunch with him. I’ve been seeing him ever since.”

  “It’s no crime. Why the secrecy?”

  “He doesn’t want his mother to know. As a matter of fact, I didn’t want you to know.”

  “Both of your reasons sound peculiar to me.”

  “Do they? I guess I’m a little ashamed of myself, Howie. He’s not my type. Sometimes I think I hate him. All he’s interested in is money and social success. He’s a money-hungry egotist. How could I fall in love with a man like that? Yet I can’t get him out of my head. I dream about him at night. What’s happened to me, Howie?”

  “First love, maybe. You’re having a late adolescence. Better late than never.”

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “Is that so terrible? I admit I’m surprised, but I’m not exactly shocked. It’s time he got married, anyway, and you, too.”

  “You don’t think he’d marry me? No. He’ll wait for Mr. Johnson to die, and marry her.” Her voice had sunk to a melodramatic whisper.

  “You’re making him out worse than he is. There’s nothing the matter with Seifel a good woman couldn’t fix. He’s simply spoiled. I’ll bet a nickel his mother has spoiled him all his life.”

  “She has. I’ve seen them together. He’s just like a big cat, purring when she strokes him. Oh, I despise that man!”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  She turned away and wiped her brimming eyes. Her voice came muffled through Kleenex: “Howie, there’s something else. I’m sorry. This wasn’t what I meant to talk about at all. You sort of drew it out of me.”

  “Call me Torquemada.”

  “No, don’t joke now. This is serious. It may be important. I ought to have told you right away. I couldn’t make myself. I don’t know what’s becoming of me, morally—”

  “Buck up,” I said loudly and firmly. “You have something to tell me. I’m here.”

  “I’ve seen the dead man before, Howie.”

  “Where?”

  “With Larry Seifel. I was afraid to tell you.”

  “Go on. When was this, lately?”

  “It was in February, the day Fred Miner was tried. I met Larry at the door of the courtroom—we were going to have lunch together. He and this man were in the empty courtroom, talking.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I wouldn’t have spoken if I weren’t. I couldn’t forget that face, those reddish eyes. A
nd the bald head. He wasn’t wearing a toupee that day.”

  “What were they talking about?”

  “I didn’t listen. They came to the door together. Larry shook hands with him, and said something about getting in touch with him in Los Angeles if he ever needed his help.”

  “If Larry ever needed his help?”

  “Yes. What are you going to do about it, Howie?”

  “Get a positive identification from Seifel, naturally. If he’s willing to make one.”

  She took hold of my arm with both hands, looking up at my face through tears. “Please don’t tell him I told you.”

  “Are you so crazy about him?”

  “It’s terrible. I feel lonely all the time I’m not seeing him.”

  “Even if he’s mixed up in this business?”

  She pressed her face against my shoulder. “He is mixed up in it, I know he is. I realized it as soon as I saw that man in the back of the mortuary. It doesn’t seem to change my feeling.”

  The fine tremor of her nerves passed through her hands to my arm. Her hair had disarrayed itself. I smoothed it with my free hand.

  “You’re my good right arm, Ann. I don’t want you going to pieces.”

  “I’m not.” She straightened up, refastening bobby pins, regrouping her forces.

  “Go home and take a rest. Forget about Mrs. Johnson. She’s made of strong stuff, and doing perfectly well.”

  “So am I.” She managed to smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll put on my public look. Actually, I’m better off with somebody else to think about.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “Of course I do. I think she’s a marvelous woman.” Ann had already put on her public look. “Don’t you?”

  Helen Johnson’s face was suddenly in my mind. I realized that she was a beautiful woman. Her beauty wasn’t dazzling. It was simply there, something definite and solid that had never entirely left my mind from the moment I met her.

  “Don’t you?” Ann repeated with her Mona Lisa smile.

  I refused to answer on the grounds that my reply might tend to incriminate me. “Beat it now, Ann. Forest is waiting for you.”

  “If I’m your good right arm, you won’t tell Larry, will you?”

  “Not unless I have to. But he’ll know.”

  “I can’t help that, can I?”

  CHAPTER 10: Forest was sitting in Ann’s chair with the typed report in his hand. He turned it face down on the desk and stood up:

  “This man’s record is excellent, at least on the surface. You’re sure it’s complete? No missing years or anything like that?”

  “Linebarge does a thorough job,” I said. “He used to be a cop, and he has to convince himself every time.”

  “He’s convinced me. If this is the full story, unretouched, I can’t see Miner in the role of kidnapper. A man doesn’t often build up a solid record for twenty or thirty years, then turn around and commit a major crime. Of course there are exceptions: embezzlement, passional murder. But kidnapping for profit takes preparation. It doesn’t come naturally to a normal man. Well, Miss Devon? Are we ready?”

  “Ready,” she answered with her best public smile.

  “One thing occurred to me,” he said from the doorway. “This hit-and-run he pleaded guilty to—is there any possibility it wasn’t an accident? Murder by automobile is getting pretty common in these parts. Who was the victim?”

  “Not identified, so far as I know.”

  “The courthouse people call him Mr. Nobody,” Ann put in.

  “Two of them, eh? This case has its puzzling aspects, all right.” Forest held the door for Ann and closed it sharply behind him.

  I sat down in the chair he had been warming, and phoned Larry Seifel’s office. A secretarial voice told me with sweet impatience that he was busy.

  “Tell him it’s Howard Cross, and I’m also busy.”

  “Very well, Mr. Goss.”

  His voice sounded higher and thinner over the wire. “Who is it speaking, please?”

  “Cross. I’m in my office. I want to see you right away.”

  “Can’t you come over here? I’m swamped with work, drawing up one of these complicated trusts. I lost the whole morning, you know.”

  I cut him short: “I’ll expect you in twenty minutes, or less. On the way—do you know Watkins’s Mortuary?”

  “It’s a block up from the courthouse, isn’t it?”

  “Right. Cleat’s got a corpse there, in the back room. I want you to look at it before you come here. Tell Cleat I sent you.”

  “A corpse? Somebody I know?”

  “You should be able to answer that question when you see him.” I hung up.

  Turning the Miner report over, I began to glance through it idly, and then to read it in earnest. I hadn’t seen it since Linebarge submitted it for my approval the week before the hearing, and there were going to be questions about Fred Miner.

  I skipped through the “Family Background” section, which reminded me that Frederick Andrew Miner had been born on an Ohio farm in 1916. His mother died two years after his birth and her place in his life was taken by his elder sister, Ella. Their father was a strict man, a member of the Mennonite sect whose motto was: “The Devil finds things for idle hands to do.” The boy’s hands were seldom idle. He worked full time on the farm in the spring and summer. In the winter he attended country school, and later a Union High School, where he specialized in “practical mechanics.”

  According to the records of the High School [the report went on] Miner was a serious, plodding student with a good citizenship standing and great mechanical aptitude. He was, however, forced to leave school without being graduated, at the age of sixteen, and take a full-time job in a local garage. This shift was necessitated to a great extent by economic pressures. For a period of several years, while he was still in his teens, the boy was the mainstay of the family, his garage work providing the only regular cash-income the Miner family had. This was supplemented to some extent by Miner’s winnings as a stock-car racing-driver at various local meets and county fairs.

  When the Depression lifted somewhat, Miner was enabled to borrow enough money, with his father’s backing, to open a small filling-station of his own. This prospered, and by 1940, when he enlisted in the armed services, Miner was the proprietor of a filling-station and an attached “service” garage.

  His initial desire, Miner states, was to become a fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy. Being unable to meet the educational requirements, he elected instead to become a ground crewman in the Naval air service. After a period of boot training at Norfolk, Va., he served at various Naval air bases on the West Coast, and rose, through diligent work and regular study, to the rating of Aviation Motor Machinist’s Mate, First Class. While stationed at the Naval Air Station, San Diego, Miner met and married Amy Wolfe, daughter of a small businessman in San Diego, on Sept. 18, 1942. Their marriage, although childless, has been marked by steady and devoted companionship.

  In the summer of 1943, Miner was ordered to Bremerton, Wash., to join the crew of the Eureka Bay, an escort carrier then in the final stages of construction. Mrs. Miner followed her husband to Bremerton, and remained near him during the training and shakedown period. It was during this period, she states, that Miner “took his first drink,” and discovered that he was unable to “hold his liquor.” This fact is confirmed by Dr. Levinson, who describes Miner in his attached report as “a potential alcoholic, that is, a man who is psychologically and/or physiologically abnormally susceptible to the intoxicant and depressant effects of alcohol.”

  Miner’s first drinking episode, he frankly admits, was responsible for the only black mark on his Naval record. Failing to return aboard ship at the assigned time after a weekend pass, he was reduced to the rating of Aviation Motor Machinist’s mate, Second Class. Within a year, however, Miner had recovered his First Class rating, and before his Naval career ended, he achieved the rating of Chief Aviation Motor Machinist.

 
; Miner’s contribution to his country’s defense, a factor to which the community attaches some weight when the kind and degree of a man’s punishment for a crime is in the balance, is sufficiently attested to by the attached letters from Captain Angus Drew, C.O. of the Eureka Bay, 1944–1945; Commander Julius Heckendorf, Executive Officer; and Lieutenant Elmer Morton, First Lieutenant and Damage Control Officer. “His diligence and devotion to duty,” Comdr. Heckendorf writes, “were remarkable even in a branch of the service where such qualities are a normal expectation. His work was an inspiration to the men under him, and a source of satisfaction to his superiors.” During Miner’s service aboard the Eureka Bay, the vessel participated in the Iwo Jima, Luzon, and Okinawa invasions.

  Towards the conclusion of the Okinawa campaign, Miner’s Naval career was terminated in what Lieutenant Morton calls “a burst of glory.” The Eureka Bay was struck by a Japanese “suicide” plane, which tore a hole in the flight deck and plunged through to the hangar deck. In the confusion that followed, Miner assumed responsibility for fighting the ensuing fire on the hangar deck, and the crew that he rallied was successful in bringing the blaze under control. Unfortunately, a bomb exploded in the wreckage of the “Kamikaze” throwing Miner against a bulkhead and fracturing his skull and spine. Flown to Guam and ultimately to the Naval Hospital in San Diego, Miner spent the greater part of the next year in a hospital bed. He was released from the service on a fifty-per-cent-disability pension in March 1946.

  Immediately upon his release, Miner was offered a position as chauffeur with Mr. Abel Johnson, at that time the head of a San Diego real estate firm. He has been employed by Mr. Johnson since that time and has, to quote his employers words, “served us loyally and efficiently.” Mr. Johnson is willing, if the Court sees fit to grant probation, to continue Miner in his present position and to assume reasonable responsibility for his future good behavior (See memo. #8). Dr. Levinson is of opinion that: “Miner in particular, and the community in general, need have nothing to worry about if he will eschew alcoholic beverages in any and all forms. Apart from his potential alcoholism, a condition which is by no means rare among wounded war veterans in general and men who have lost their mothers at an early age in particular, Miner presents a sound psychological configuration.”