FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, AUGUST 2001
Copyright © 1954, copyright renewed 1982 by John Ross Macdonald
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1954.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Macdonald, John Ross.
Find a victim [by] John Ross Macdonald [pseud.]
New York, Knopf, 1954.
p. cm.
PZ3.M59942 Fi
1381659
CIP
eISBN: 978-0-307-77333-3
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
To Ivan von Auw, Jr.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
A man feared that he might find an assassin;
Another that he might find a victim
One was more wise than the other.
STEPHEN CRANE
CHAPTER 1: He was the ghastliest hitchhiker who ever thumbed me. He rose on his knees in the ditch. His eyes were black holes in his yellow face, his mouth a bright smear of red like a clown’s painted grin. The arm he raised overbalanced him. He fell forward on his face again.
I stamped the brake-pedal and backed a hundred yards to where he lay, a dark-headed man in jeans and a gray workshirt, prone among the jimson. He was as still as death now. But when I squatted down beside him I could hear the sigh and gurgle of his breathing.
Supporting his hip on my knee and his loose head with my arm, I turned him onto his back. The blood at his mouth was breaking in tiny bubbles. The breast of his gray shirt was dark and wet. Unbuttoning it, I saw the round hole among the sodden hairs on his chest, still pumping little bright spurts.
I removed my jacket and tore off my own shirt. Wadding it over the bullet hole, I fixed it in place with my tie. The wounded man stirred and sighed. The eyelids quivered over the dusty-black eyes. He was a young man, and he was dying.
I looked back to the south and then to the north. No cars, no houses, no anything. I had passed one clot of traffic somewhere north of Bakersfield and failed to catch another. It was one of those lulls in time when you can hear your heart ticking your life away, and nothing else. The sun had fallen behind the coastal range, and the valley was filling with twilight. A flight of blackbirds crossed the sky like visible wind, blowing and whiplashing.
I lifted him, his head lolling on my chest, and carried him to the car. He was hard to handle, neither big nor heavy but terribly lax. I got him onto the back seat with his head propped up on my overnight bag so that he wouldn’t smother, and covered him with the car blanket.
He rode six or seven miles in that position. I turned down my rear-view mirror to keep an eye on him. As the twilight faded, his face in the mirror faded almost out.
I passed a sign: CAMP FREMONT, U.S. MARINE CORPS BASE. Cyclone fence sprang up along the highway. Beyond it streets of weathered barracks marched across the valley to the humpbacked horizon. There wasn’t a trace of life. The Quonset hangars of the attached airbase could have been barrows built by a lost race of giants.
Then there were lights at the roadside, a city of lights beyond them. Neons stained the thickening air green and yellow: KERRIGAN’S COURT—DELUXE MOTOR HOTEL. Its lobby and pueblos were brilliantly floodlit. I stopped in front of the lobby and went inside.
It was all blond plywood and green imitation leather furniture. The woman behind the registration desk was also blonde. Her long blue eyes surveyed me, making me conscious of my naked chest. I buttoned my jacket as I crossed the room.
“Can I help you?” she said in a distant way.
“A man in my car needs help, badly. I’ll bring him in while you call a doctor.”
Her eyebrows moved downward, a worried cleft between them. “Is he sick?”
“With lead poisoning. He’s been shot.”
She rose in nervous haste and opened a door behind her. “Don, come here a minute.”
“He needs a doctor now,” I said. “There’s no time to talk it over.”
“Talk what over?” A big man filled the doorway. He was heavy-shouldered in a light gabardine suit, and he moved like an ex-athlete gone to seed. “What in hell is it now? Can’t you handle anything by yourself?”
Her slim hands wrenched at each other. “I won’t permit you to speak to me that way.”
He smiled at her without showing his teeth. Under clipped sandy hair, his face was fiery with alcohol or anger. “I talk the way I want to in my own place.”
“You’re tight, Don.”
“You’ve never seen me tight.”
They were standing close to each other in the space behind the desk, face to face in furious intimacy.
I said: “There’s a man bleeding to death outside. If you won’t let him come in here, at least you can call an ambulance.”
He turned to me, his eyes gray triangles under folded lids. “Bleeding to death? Who is he?”
“I don’t know. Are you going to get some help for him or not?”
“Yes, of course,” the woman said.
She lifted a telephone book out of the desk, found a number, and dialed. The man went out, slamming the door behind him.
“Kerrigan’s Motor Court,” she said, “Mrs. Kerrigan speaking. We have an injured man here.—No. They say he’s been shot.—Yes, it seems to be serious, an emergency.”
She replaced the receiver. “The county hospital is sending an ambulance.” She added in a low voice, hardly more than a whisper: “I’m sorry for what happened. In our family we don’t rise to an emergency. We sink beneath it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me. I’m really sorry.”
Her face slanted forward across the desk. Her pale smooth hair was drawn back severely from it, as if to emphasize its stark beauty.
“Isn’t there anything else I can do?” she said on a rising note. “Call the police?”
“The hospital will. They’re required to by law. Thanks for your trouble, Mrs. Kerrigan.”
She followed me to the door, a troubled woman who had missed her chance to react like a human being and couldn’t let it go. “This must be a terrible thing for you. Is he a friend of yours?”
“He’s nothing to me. I found him on the highway.”
She touched my arm, as if to establish contact with reality, and quickly withdrew her hand, as if the contact frightened h
er. Her eyes were focused on my chest. I looked down at the drying smear where the bloody face had rested.
“Are you hurt, too? Can I do anything for you?”
“Not a thing,” I said, and went outside.
Kerrigan was leaning in at the open back door of my car. He straightened sharply when he heard my feet in the gravel.
“Is he still breathing?”
“Yeah, he’s breathing.” The alcoholic blood had drained out of his face, leaving it blotched. “I don’t think we ought to move him, but we’ll take him inside if you say so.”
“He might dirty your carpet.”
“There’s no need to get unpleasant, fellow. You heard me offer to take him in.”
“Forget it.”
He moved up closer to me, his eyes opaque and stony gray in the floodlights. “Where did you find him?”
“A couple of miles south of the Marine Base, in the ditch.”
“How did you happen to bring him here, to my doorstep? If I may ask.”
“You may ask. This was the first place I came to. Next time I’ll keep going.”
“I don’t mean that. I merely wondered if it was a coincidence.”
“Why? Do you know him?”
“Yeah. He drives a truck for the Meyer line in town. Name’s Tony Aquista.”
“You know him well?”
“I wouldn’t say that. In my line of business I have a speaking acquaintance with most of the jerks in Las Cruces. But I don’t hobnob with Mexican truck-drivers.”
“Good for you. Any idea who shot him?”
“That’s kind of a silly question.”
“You could still answer it.”
“What gives you the right to ask questions, fellow?”
“Go on calling me fellow. It sends me.”
“You didn’t mention your name.”
“That’s right. I didn’t.”
“Maybe I ought to ask you a question or two,” he said. “You didn’t happen to shoot him yourself by any chance?”
“You’re very acute. Naturally I shot him. This is my getaway.”
“I was merely asking. I couldn’t help noticing the blood on you.”
He smiled with soft malice. His changeable mouth, both sensitive and brutal, tempted my fist the way a magnet tempts iron. He was big enough, and not too old, but he was a little ripe. I put my fist in my pocket and walked around to the other side of the car.
I switched on the dome light. Tony Aquista was still blowing his sad small bubbles. His eyes were completely closed now. He was blind and deaf with the effort to hold onto life. The ambulance sighed in the road.
I followed it on its return trip through the highway suburbs, past motels and cabins and trailer parks where soldiers and salesmen and tourists and migrant workers passed temporary nights with temporary bedmates. At a six-lane wye where two main roads converged, the ambulance turned off the highway to the left.
I missed the green arrow and had to wait. The hospital was visible in the distance, a long white box of a building pierced with lights. Nearer the highway, the lighted screen of an outdoor theater, on which two men were beating each other to the rhythm of passionate music, rose against the night like a giant dream of violence.
I found the ambulance entrance at the rear of the hospital. Its red electric sign spelled out EMERGENCY and cast a hellish glow on the oil-stained concrete driveway. Before I went in, I took a clean shirt out of my bag and put it on.
In the receiving-room half a dozen white-coated people were grouped around the table where Tony Aquista lay. Now even his lips were yellow. An inverted bottle of blood was dripping into a tube that was strapped to his arm.
A young doctor, resident or intern, leaned over the closed face and pressed his thumbs down into the eyes. Aquista didn’t stir. The room seemed to be holding its breath. I moved to the doctors side. He glanced at me sharply.
“Are you a patient?”
“A witness. I found this man.”
He shook his head from side to side. “You should have found him sooner.” He turned to one of the nurses: “Don’t waste any more blood on him.”
She closed off the rubber tube and disconnected the half-empty bottle. The hospital smell, the odor of dissolution, was keen in my nostrils.
“Is he going, doctor?”
“He’s gone. No pulse, no respiration. He must have been bleeding for some time, probably didn’t have a pint left in his system.”
“Bullet wound?”
“Unquestionably, I’d say. These lung wounds are murder.”
I looked down at Tony Aquista’s face. It had changed from flesh to wax, and the teeth were grinning.
“Murder is the word.”
I must have said it loudly or strangely. The doctor gave me a compunctious look.
“This man a buddy of yours?”
“No. I just don’t like to see it happen to anybody. Have you called the police?”
“The sheriff’s office. It happened in the county, didn’t it?”
“That’s where they ditched him, anyway.”
He moved to the door, saying over his shoulder: “The sheriff will want you to stick around, I expect.”
I didn’t tell him that waiting in sterile rooms for policemen was my calling. I waited for this one on a metal camp-chair outside the receiving-room. The business of the hospital went on around me. Nurses came and went, clearing the room for the next emergency case. Tony Aquista, featureless under a sheet, was trundled away to the morgue at the end of the corridor.
Part of my mind went with him into the cold darkness. It’s like that sometimes when a younger man dies. I felt as if a part of me had turned to wax under the white lights.
From somewhere in the murmurous bowels of the building an infant’s cry rose sharp. I wondered if it was a newborn baby equalizing the population of Las Cruces.
CHAPTER 2: A tall man in a gray business suit opened the door of the morgue. His dazzling off-white Stetson just missed the top of the doorframe as he came out. He smacked the concrete wall with the flat of his hand and said to the uniformed deputy behind him:
“God damn it, what happened to Tony?”
The deputy shrugged. “Woman trouble, maybe. You know Tony, chief.”
“Yes. I know Tony.”
The sheriff’s striding shadow lengthened toward me. The face under the hatbrim was long and lean like his body, and burned by the valley sun. Though he was young for his job, about my age, I could see the scars of old pain branching out from the corners of his eyes and bracketing his mouth. His eyes were deepset and dark like the windows of a haunted house.
“You’re the one who brought him in?”
“I’m the one.”
“You’re not a Las Cruces man, are you?”
“Los Angeles.”
“I see.” He nodded as if I had made a damaging admission. “Let’s have your name and home address.”
I gave him my name, Lew Archer, and my business address on Sunset Boulevard. The deputy wrote them down. The sheriff dragged a second chair up to mine and sat facing me.
“I’m Sheriff Church. This is Danelaw, my identification officer. And what’s your occupation, Mr. Archer, besides acting as a good Samaritan?” If Church was trying to be genial, he wasn’t succeeding.
“I’m a licensed private detective.”
“Well. This is quite a coincidence. Or is it? What were you doing out on the highway?”
“Driving. I’m on my way to Sacramento.”
“Not tonight,” he said brusquely. “It doesn’t pay to be a good Samaritan nowadays. I’m afraid you’re going to have to put up with a certain amount of red tape. We’ll need you for the inquest, for one thing.”
“I realize that.”
“I’ll hurry it if I can—tomorrow or the next day. Let’s see, this is Thursday. Can you stay over till Saturday?”
“If I have to.”
“Good. Now how did you happen to pick him up?”
“He was
lying in the ditch a couple of miles south of the Marine Base. He managed to get up onto his knees and wave at me.”
“He was still conscious then? Did he say anything?”
“He lost consciousness before I got to him. I didn’t like to move him, but there was no way to telephone, no one to send for help. I put him in the back seat of my car and phoned for an ambulance from the first place I came to.”
“Where was that?”
“Kerrigan’s motor court. Kerrigan had quite a reaction to the thing. It seems he knew Aquista, and didn’t want any part of him, dead or alive. His wife called the ambulance for me.”
“What was Mrs. Kerrigan doing there?”
“Holding down the desk, apparently.”
“Wasn’t Kerrigan’s manager around? Miss Meyer?”
“If she was, I didn’t see her. Does it matter?”
“No.” The sheriff’s voice had risen. He brought it under control. “It’s the first time I ever heard of Kate Kerrigan going to work in the place.”
Danelaw looked up from his notebook. “She’s been out there all week.”
Church looked at him as if he had more questions, but he swallowed them. His knobbed throat moved visibly.
I said: “Kerrigan was a little under the weather. Which may account for his manners. He asked me if I shot the man myself.”
A tight smile pincered the sheriff’s mouth. “What did you say to that?”
“No. I never saw the man before. I thought I’d get that on the record, in case he babbles some more.”
“Not a bad idea, under the circumstances. Now if you’ll show me the way to the spot where you found him.”
We stood up at the same time. His bony hand closed on my shoulder and urged me toward the exit. I couldn’t tell whether it was a gesture of encouragement or command. In any case, I jerked my shoulder free.
His car was a new black Mercury special with undercover plates and no official markings. It followed me south out of town, the way I had come. The twilight lull in the traffic was over. It was full night now. Headlights after headlights stabbed up through the valley from the south, flashed in my eyes and away. From the north we were overtaken by a second official car.
We passed through the deserted camp and I began to watch the roadside. Spotlight beams from the cars behind me dragged in the ditch like broken oars of light. After two false stops I found the place. It was marked by a dribble of drying blood on the gravel shoulder. The bent jimson weeds below the shoulder still held the impression of a spreadeagled body.
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