Meet Me at the Morgue

by Ross Macdonald

  I moved around him to the door. “Let’s get over to your office and see if we can find his card.”

  “Whatever you say. Tom Swift and his jet-propelled pogo-stick are at your disposal.”

  Seifel’s personality leaped back and forth among its multiple poles with the speed and dazzle of an electric arc. He was a hard man to keep track of.

  CHAPTER 12: His office contrasted rather spectacularly with mine. We ascended into it in a small private hydraulic elevator whose door was finely lettered in gold with the firm name: Sturtevant and Seifel. Sturtevant, now semiretired, had been the town’s leading estate-lawyer.

  The reception room was carpeted with wine-dark broadloom and furnished with chartreuse leather. Reproduced Rouault heads looked out of the paneled walls in tragic resignation. There was nothing Rouault about the secretary at the telephone desk. She had wine-dark eyes and chartreuse hair, as if the room had given birth to her.

  “Mrs. Seifel has been trying to get you, Mr. Seifel. Three times.” She gave the words a sardonic intonation.

  “What does Mother want now?”

  “She says you promised to take her to a party at the beach club. You were to pick her up at four thirty.”

  “If she says that, it’s probably true.” There was an undertone of resentment in his voice. “Call her back please, will you, Linda? Tell her I’ll be a little late.”

  “She won’t like that.”

  He raised his bent arm in a violent, harried movement, and looked at his watch. “Tell her I’ll be fifteen minutes late, no more. I don’t see why she has to start so early.”

  “Yes, Mr. Seifel. Can I go then, Mr. Seifel? I have a beauty appointment.”

  “I have a beauty appointment!” he repeated in savage mimicry.

  She stuck out her tongue at his back, caught me watching her, and substituted a feline smile. I followed Seifel into his private office, where the carpet and the leather were dove-gray, the paneling blanched oak. I remarked that law seemed to be paying well these days. He grunted unhappily that he supposed it was.

  On the wall behind the black glass-topped desk, a bad oil-painting of a beautiful dark-haired woman in a 1920 cloche hat dominated the room. I guessed that it was Mrs. Seifel keeping an eye on her son. He opened a small bar-cabinet built into a corner and held up a bottle of Scotch:

  “Join me?”

  “Not just now, thanks.”

  “I think I will.” He added unnecessarily: “Though I very seldom drink in the daytime. Today is a special occasion. A kidnapping in the morning, a cocktail party with Mother in the afternoon. I couldn’t face it without a little assistance. Not that she isn’t a wonderful woman, of course.”

  He half-filled a glass with Scotch, and held it up to the painted face on the wall:

  “Here’s to you, Mother-Wother, in your home in the Sudan. You’re a poor benighted heathen but a first-class fighting man.”

  There was something weirdly pathetic about the scene. Strangely, it was Ann I was sorry for. He tossed the whisky down.

  “Now to find that card, wherever it is. Tom Swift and His X-ray Eye to the Rescue. Sequel to Tom Swift and His Electronic Mother-Wother.”

  He disturbed me. His wit was ranging on the borders of despair, and I regretted the crack I had made about split personality. He went on talking, more or less to himself, about the pleasures of the day and the delightful prospects of the evening, while his hands went through his files.

  He slammed the metal drawer and turned with a card in his hand. “Just as I thought, old man. It was with the Miner papers. Little old Tom Swift has a memory like a steel trap, which is why the world has beaten a path to his door.”

  “Thank him for me.”

  The card was soiled and bent, as if it had been offered and rejected a number of times. It said:

  ACME INVESTIGATIVE AGENCY

  3489 Sunset Boulevard

  Quickest Service, Lowest Rates

  PHONE TU-8-2181

  Seifel said: “I wish I could remember his name. Will this help, do you think?”

  “It should. Mind if I use your phone for a long-distance call?”

  “Any other time, no. Right now I’m in rather a hurry.”

  “It won’t take long.”

  He hovered anxiously around the desk, like a large bird with clipped wings, while I put through a call to the Tucker number. The phone at the other end rang twenty times.

  “Your party does not answer, sir,” the operator said. “Shall I try again in half an hour?”

  “Don’t bother.”

  Seifel accompanied me to the elevator. Just as we reached it, a metal door slid back and a woman emerged. At first glance, it was as if the portrait in Seifel’s office had stepped down out of the frame. The dark aquiline head had remained unchanged for thirty years or more, and the body on which the head was balanced birdlike was as slim as a girl’s.

  At second glance I noticed the leathery patches loose under the jaw, the marks of old knowledge around the painted mouth and in the black, shining eyes. Her ringed hand took hold of Seifel’s sleeve and gave it a violent jerk.

  “What on earth has been keeping you, Lawrence?”

  “I was just coming, Mother. This is Mr. Cross.”

  She disregarded me. Her eyes were on her son, like wet, black leeches. “It’s mean and selfish of you to keep me waiting like this. I didn’t devote my life to you in order to be cast aside whenever you feel the whim.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother.”

  “Indeed you should be sorry. You forced me to take a public bus down here.”

  “You could have taken a taxi.”

  “I can’t afford to pay taxi-fare every day. You never think of my sacrifices, of course, but it has cost me an enormous amount of money to set you up in practice with Mr. Sturtevant.”

  “I realize that.” He looked at me miserably. His body seemed to have shrunk, and taken on an adolescent awkwardness. “Can’t we drop the subject for now, Mother? I’m ready to drive you anywhere you like.”

  She said with icy boredom: “Finish your business, Lawrence. I’m in no hurry. In fact I’ve lost any interest I had in the party. I believe I feel a headache coming on.”

  “Please, Mother, don’t be like that.”

  He fumbled awkwardly, reaching for her hand. She turned away from him in a movement of disdainful coquetry, and walked to the window on high sharp heels. I stepped into the elevator. The last I saw of his face, it looked bruised and shapeless, as if her Cuban heels had been hammering it.

  CHAPTER 13: Sam Dressen, the Sheriff’s identification man, was in his cubicle at the courthouse. Lieutenant Cleat was a more efficient officer, but I was feeling a little soured on Cleat. Sam was biting on a hangnail, and his eyes were heavy with woe. His gray hair had been pulled and worried into spikes and whorls like a last-year’s thistle patch.

  Sighing with the effort, he lifted his eyes to the level of my face. “Hello, Howie. Two will get you twenty you dropped in to tell me what a flop I am. That’s the big fad in law-enforcement agencies all over the country these days—telling Sam Dressen where to turn in. First the Chief lets me have it, then those goldarn federal—”

  “Wait a minute, Sam. You’re talking about the bureau I love. What’s the trouble?”

  “Job trouble. What other kind of trouble is there?”

  “Woman trouble, for instance.”

  “Not at my age, boy. I got one and a half years to go for the County pension, and the whole gang of them want to cut me off from it. Everybody from J. Edgar Hoover down to the Chief are out to get me. You know that, Howie?”

  “I hear you telling me.”

  “The Chief used to be my buddy, but he’s a changed man. Ever since he took that course in F.B.I. School, he’s so goldarn spit-and-polish you wouldn’t recognize him. Know what he said to me today? He said if I don’t brush up on my fingerprinting technique, he said he’d fire me, just like that.” The old man tried to snap his fingers, unsuccessfully
. “Me with eighteen years in the department, going on nineteen. They think I can afford to retire, on the salaries they pay?”

  “What is it, Sam, a kickback on the February deal?”

  He jerked at the hangnail with yellow teeth. “You heard about it, eh?”

  “I heard they couldn’t use the prints you took from that hit-run victim.”

  “That’s right, they flung them back in my face, said they were too faint to classify.”

  “Were they?”

  “I guess so, that’s what they said, they’re the experts.” He looked at me from the corners of his vein-webbed eyes to see if I was with him. “You don’t know the difficulties I was working under, Howie. Rigor mortis, and the stiff had awful faint markings, you could barely see them with the naked eye. All right, so I fluffed it. Everybody fluffs now and then. I’m only human like the rest of us. They didn’t have to write that snooty letter to the Chief. What does it matter who the guy was? He’s dead.”

  “It’s beginning to look as if it might be important, Sam. I’m thinking of asking for an exhumation order.”

  “On account of the killing this morning? You think there’s a tie-up?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “Well, don’t expect me to know nothing about it. I just went over to take a look at that new stiff, and the morgue was crawling with federal men. They wouldn’t even let me near it, said they were handling the identification routine themselves. How do you like that, Howie?”

  Since Sam had been slipping for a year or more, I liked it fairly well. On the other hand he was an old friend, and a useful one. I made a sympathetic noise in the back of my throat.

  He wasn’t consoled. “So the Chief bawls me out all over again. I made him lose face, he said. I said if I had a face like that, I wouldn’t mind losing a piece of it—”

  “You said that?”

  “Not out loud, I didn’t. Under my breath. I wouldn’t be sitting here now if I said it out loud. I got a pension to protect. But it don’t look as if I’m going to make it.” He sighed like a wind-broken horse. “Well, what is it you want, Howie? You never come over to bat the breeze any more unless you want something.”

  “I have something for you.” I took the bent business-card out of my wallet and laid it on the desk under his melancholy nose. “This belonged to the man in the mortuary. He gave it to Larry Seifel in February.” I described the circumstances briefly. “Show it to the Sheriff. It should do his face some good. Tell him to get a statement from Seifel. You know Seifel?”

  “Sure I know him. He’s another,” he said obscurely. “There’s two kinds of young twerps. He’s the kind with no respect for their elders, he’d push an older man right out of the picture to make room for himself. You’re the other kind, Howie,” he added as an afterthought.

  “Did you have trouble with Seifel?”

  “No trouble, he can’t make trouble for me. But he was in last week, fretting about that body in the Miner case. I’m sorry I ever heard of the Miner case.”

  “You’re going to hear more, I’m afraid. What did he want?”

  “Information. I told him I didn’t have any new information. He seemed to think I should have. Shucks, I got more to think about than that one case. That armed-robbery gang we nabbed on Tuesday, there’s inquiries on ’em from six states, fourteen police departments. I’m over my ears in paperwork.” He grabbed a wad of papers from his in-basket and slammed it down in front of him.

  “Forget about them for now. Just what information do you have, Sam?”

  “Nothing new. I followed down a lead this week. It turned out to be a dead end. It was the last decent lead I had—the cleaner’s mark on the suit the guy was wearing.”

  “No maker’s label?”

  “The maker’s label had been removed. Know why? The suit was stolen. I found out that much.”

  “Go on.”

  “This cleaner’s is in Westwood. It’s a new business, just started last year, and independent, so it wasn’t so easy to trace. Missing Persons didn’t even have it on file. Anyway, I finally got a chance to go up to L.A. on Wednesday—I had some stuff to deliver to Ray Pinker. The cleaner’s gave me the name and address of the people the suit was stolen from. I didn’t know at the time the suit was stolen, though. I thought I was getting somewhere.”

  I was getting impatient. The afternoon was fading towards its close, and I was wasting what was left of it. “What did you find out, Sam? You interviewed the people it was stolen from?”

  “I tried to. They weren’t home. I talked to the maid on the telephone from the cleaner’s. I described the suit. She said it was stolen, along with a lot of other loot, about four months ago. So apparently the guy was a burglar. Anyway, it explains what he was doing out on Ridgecrest Road that night, probably casing a joint he was going to rob. When Miner run him down, he did somebody a big favor.”

  “Give me the name and address.”

  “What name and address? I just got finished telling you it was a dead end.”

  “The people the suit was stolen from. I’m going to Westwood and talk to them.”

  “What’s the use? They never caught the burglar.”

  “Any lead is better than none. Let’s have it, Sam.”

  “Sure, if you want to go to all that trouble.” He rummaged in an overflowing drawer, and came up with a cleaner’s invoice blank on which he had written in pencil:

  J. Thomas Richards

  8 Juncal Place

  Westwood.

  “Better warn them you’re coming,” Sam said. “It’s a long way to drive for nothing, and they’re gallivanters.”

  “I’ll do that. There’s one more thing.”

  “Aren’t we even yet?” He bared his teeth in a shrewd smile. “Want me to throw in the shirt off my back?”

  I pretended not to notice the needle. The old man had been having a hard day. “The Sheriff will sit up and beg when you show him that card. You’ll give it to him right away?”

  “As soon as I get the heck rid of you, Howie.”

  “That won’t be hard. All I want is the pictures you took of Miner’s victim.”

  “They’re not supposed to go out of here, you know that.”

  “I promise to bring them back.”

  “You think you can establish identification?”

  “I’m going to try. If I do, you get first crack at it.”

  “I’ll take your word on that, Howie. I don’t think you can do it, though, unless you got a tip I don’t know about.” His wrinkled smile was like an old scar that still hurt sometimes. There was a time when Sam had hoped to be sheriff.

  “Set your mind at rest. I haven’t. Let’s have the pictures, Sam.”

  He unlocked a green metal cabinet against the wall, and pawed the dark shelves. A shaft of sunlight, almost horizontal, thrust through the tall barred window behind his desk. In the faint and broken sunlight, his searching profile was dark and poignant. It was like an old stone face roughed and eroded by too many rainy seasons.

  “Don’t worry, Sam,” I said in a low voice that he could choose not to hear. “You’ll make your pension.”

  He found the folder he was looking for, and opened it on the desk. I had my first look at the face of the first anonymous man. He had probably been younger and better-looking than the second, the one in the mortuary, but that was before Miner’s car had smashed his features. They were badly damaged: jaw dislocated, nose flattened, cheeks and brow abraded, one eye gone. The one good identifying feature was the light wavy hair growing low and thick on the cut forehead.

  “The impact bust the fog lamp,” Sam was saying. “Both the wheels passed over him. Caved his chest in, cracked his skull like a pecan, drove the glass into his face.”

  “Blond hair?”

  “That’s right. Gray-blue eyes. Five nine, about one sixty, twenty-nine or thirty. The way I reconstruct him, he was a nice-looking boy.”

  “Special characteristics?”

 
“Just this.” He turned over to a closeup of an arm, captioned “Left Forearm.” It was tattooed with a hula girl wearing a lei, and the word Aloha. “I figure he was in the Navy, probably. Too bad he didn’t have his serial number tattooed on him.”

  He closed the manila folder and tied it with tape. It took him quite a long time, because his hands were shaking.

  “Feeling all right, Sam?”

  “I’m all right. It’s just these bodies get me down, lately even the pictures get me down. I know darn well I fluffed this print job last February. It was terrible, Howie. I couldn’t hardly bring myself to handle him. It’s a rough experience for an old guy like me to see any young fellow cut off. It makes you think dark thoughts, boy, it does me anyway.” His large bony hand clutched my arm and held on desperately. “Am I losing my grip, Howie?’

  “We’re all afraid of death,” I said. “It’s normal to be afraid.”

  “Don’t say that word, Howie. I can’t stand to hear that word. I seen so many of them. I only realized the last couple of years that any day now it’s going to be me.”

  “Morbid thoughts,” I said cheerfully as I went out. But they trailed my car like black crepe all the way to Los Angeles. I drove as if death were behind me on a motorcycle.

  CHAPTER 14: The Acme Investigative Agency had second-floor offices in a narrow, stucco building above a loan company. I found a parking place across the street and made my way through the evening flow of traffic. The cars were fleeing wildly across the twilight, as if there had been simultaneous disasters at both ends of the boulevard. Lights were being lit like tiny watchfires all along the hills.

  I walked up to the second floor and found, as I expected, that the Acme offices were locked and silent. There was a telephone booth which smelled of stale cigar-smoke in the corridor. A skylight above it filtered a dusty gray light. I used the phone to call the J. Thomas Richards home in Westwood. The maid informed me that Mr. and Mrs. Richards were still out on the golf course. Would I try the Bel Air clubhouse? Yes, they were expected home for dinner.