The Way Some People Die

by Ross Macdonald

  “Afraid of what, Galley? Joe wouldn’t hurt a fly, the way you tell it.”

  “He didn’t kill Keith,” she cried. “I’m certain he didn’t. He had no reason to.”

  “Come off it, you know he had. You won’t admit it, because you’re afraid of getting involved yourself. As if you weren’t up to your neck already.”

  “What reason did he have?”

  “You gave me one reason this afternoon: Joe was blind mad, you said, because Dalling brought me to the hideout in Oasis. You’ve changed your story, now that the thing’s come real.”

  “Keith wasn’t in his apartment. There was no shot. I would have heard the shot.”

  “Nobody else heard it, either, but there was one. You want more motives? Joe must have known that you and Dalling were having an affair. Everybody else did.”

  “You’re a liar!”

  “About what, the fact, or the public knowledge of it?”

  “It isn’t a fact. Keith was a friend, and that’s all. What do you think I am?”

  “A woman who hated her husband. Call the thing platonic if you want to. Joe isn’t the kind to split hairs. You won’t deny that Dalling was crazy about you.”

  “Certainly I deny it. I gave him no encouragement.”

  “He didn’t need encouragement. He was a romantic kid. He would have died for you, and perhaps he did. He brought me into the case, you know.”

  “I thought you said my mother—”

  “Keith persuaded her. He paid a visit to her Sunday night and talked her into hiring me.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “She did. And it’s the truth.”

  “She didn’t know Keith.”

  “She met him Sunday.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “The whole thing was a setup, when I met him in Palm Springs. He wanted me to find him there. Keith was afraid to come to me openly on his own, on account of Joe and Dowser. He felt caught in the middle between them. Still, he had guts enough to take me out there. It must have been hard to do, for a tender personality like Keith. And it really meant something.”

  “Yes, it meant something.” I thought she added under her breath: “Poor fool.” She was quiet then.

  We were on the open highway, headed north toward Long Beach. A strong wind was blowing across it, and I reduced my speed to keep the car from weaving. I caught occasional glimpses of the sea, whitecapped and desolate under a driving sky. The unsteady wind whined in the corners of the cut-banks and fell off in unexpected silences. In one of the silences, under the drive of the motor, I heard Galley crying to herself.

  The lights of Long Beach angered the moving sky ahead of us. The wind rose and fell and rose, and the woman’s crying continued through strata of peace and violence. She moved against me gently and leaned her head on my shoulder. I drove left-handed so as not to disturb her.

  “Did you love him, Galley?”

  “I don’t know, he was sweet to me.” She sighed in the corners of her grief; her breath tickled my neck. “It was too late when I met him. I was married to Joe, and Keith was going to marry another woman. I took him away from her, but it couldn’t work out. He wasn’t quite a man, except when he was loaded. Then he was worse than a man.”

  “He’s finished now.”

  “Everything’s finished,” she said. “Everything’s on its last legs. I wish I had had a blowout when I was driving Joe in from Oasis. There wouldn’t be all these loose ends to gather up and live with, would there?”

  “You didn’t strike me as the kind of a girl who wants an easy out.”

  “There are no easy outs, I guess. I thought I was taking an easy out when I married Joe. I was sick of taking hospital orders, fighting off internes in the linen room, waiting for something good to happen to me. Joe looked like something good for a little while. He wasn’t.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “I told you that, this afternoon. It seems like years ago, doesn’t it?”

  “Tell me again.”

  “There are things I’d rather talk about, but I will if you insist. I was on twenty-four hour duty with Mr. Speed for over two weeks. Joe came to see him nearly every day. He was running the Arena for him.”

  “Who shot Speed?”

  “One of Dowser’s men, Blaney I think. I didn’t dare speak out this afternoon. They might have been listening.”

  “Did Speed tell you that?”

  “No, he never admitted anything about the shooting. When the police questioned him in the hospital, he claimed he shot himself by accident. I suppose he was afraid they’d finish him off if he talked. It was Joe told me, after we were married. I promised him I’d never tell a soul, but I guess my promises to Joe are canceled now. He’s gone away without caring what happens to me.”

  “Gone where? Surely he gave you a hint.”

  “I only know what I told you,” she said. “I believe he took Mario’s boat.”

  “The Aztec Queen didn’t get very far.”

  “Joe might have been covering his tracks. He could have had another boat waiting at sea for him.”

  “His brother had the same idea.”

  “Mario? Mario would know, better than I. Joe has friends in Ensenada—”

  “I wonder. He may have business connections, but they really belong to Dowser. If Joe’s as sharp as he sounds, he’ll be running in the opposite direction.—Did anybody meet him at the yacht basin?”

  “I didn’t see anyone, no. I heard what you told Mr. Callahan about the man on the beach. It might have been Joe, mightn’t it, in spite of what the girl said?”

  “It might. I think it was somebody else.”

  “Who?”

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  “What do you think happened to Joe?”

  “God knows. He may be in Los Angeles or San Francisco. He may have flown to Cleveland or New York. He may be at the bottom of the sea.”

  “I almost hope he is.”

  “What was he carrying, Galley?”

  “He didn’t tell me, but I can guess that it was heroin. It’s what he deals in.”

  “Does he take it himself?”

  “Not Joe. I’ve seen some of his customers, and that’s when I started to hate him. I didn’t even like his money after that.”

  “He ran out with Dowser’s shipment, is that it?”

  “Evidently. I didn’t dare to ask him.”

  “How much?”

  “I couldn’t even guess.”

  “Where did he keep it?”

  “I don’t know that, either.” Her body turned inward to me, and she sighed. “Please stop talking like a policeman. I really can’t stand it any longer.”

  The traffic was still fairly heavy in the Long Beach area, and I concentrated on my driving. On both sides of the road, the oilfield derricks marched like platoons of iron men across the suburban wilderness. I felt as if I were passing through dream country, trying to remember the dream that went along with the landscape and not being able to. Galley removed her hat and lay heavy and still against me until I stopped the car in front of her mother’s house.

  “Wake up,” I said. “You’re home.”

  CHAPTER 25: It was nearly two o’clock when I reached my section of the city. I lived in a five-room bungalow on a middle-class residential street between Hollywood and Los Angeles. The house and the mortgage on it were mementos of my one and only marriage. Since the divorce I never went home till sleep was overdue. It was overdue now. The last few miles down the night-humming boulevard I drove by muscle memory, half-asleep. My consciousness didn’t take over until I was in my driveway. I saw the garage door white in my headlights, a blank wall at the end of a journey from nowhere to nowhere.

  Leaving the motor idling, I got out of the car to open the garage. Two men walking abreast emerged from the shadows on the porch beside me. I waited in the narrow passage between the house and the open door of the car. They were big young men, dressed in dark suits and
hats. In the half-light reflected from the garage door, their wide shoulders and square faces looked almost identical. A pair of heavenly twins, I guessed, from the Los Angeles police. The thought of Dalling in his blood had followed me all day. Now Dalling was catching up.

  “Archer?” one of them said. “Mr. Lew Archer?”

  “You have me. Hearthstone of the Death Squad, I presume.” I was running short of élan. “Accompanied by Deathstone of the Hearth Squad. Where’s Squadstone of the Death Hearth?”

  “I’m Sergeant Fern,” said First Policeman. “This is Sergeant Tolliver.”

  “Pronounced Taliaferro, no doubt.”

  Second Policeman said: “It’s pretty late to be making corny jokes, isn’t it, Mr. Archer?”

  “Bloody late. Can’t this wait until morning?”

  “Lieutenant Gary said to bring you in whenever you showed. He wants to talk to you now.”

  “About the Dalling killing?”

  The plain-clothes sergeants looked at each other as if I had said something significant. The first one said: “Lieutenant Gary will be glad to explain.”

  “I suppose there’s no way out of it.” I switched off the headlights and slammed the car door shut. “Let’s go.”

  The patrol car was waiting around the corner. Lieutenant Gary was waiting in his Homicide Division cubicle.

  It was a small square room dismally equipped with gray-painted steel furniture: a filing-cabinet, a desk with a squawkbox and In and Out baskets piled with reports, a water-cooler in a corner. A street map of the city nearly covered one wall. The single window opened on the windowless side of an adjacent building. A ceiling fixture filled the room with bright and ugly light.

  Gary stood up behind his desk. He was a man in his forties with prematurely white hair. It stuck up all over his head in thistly spikes, as if his fingers had been busy at it. Gary had the shoulders of a football guard, but there was nothing beef-trust about his face. He had quarterback’s eyes, alert and shifting, a thin inquiring nose, a mobile mouth.

  “Lew Archer, eh?” he said, not unpleasantly. His shirt was open and his tie hung askew. He tugged at it halfheartedly and forgot it. “Okay, Fern, thanks.”

  The sergeant who had escorted me into the station closed the glass door behind him. Gary sat down at his desk and studied me. There was a green cloth board on the wall beside him, with several pictures of wanted men, full-face and profile, pinned to it. I had a fellow-feeling with the black-and-white smudged faces.

  “You’ll always remember me, Lieutenant.”

  “I do remember you. I’ve been checking your record, as a matter of fact. A pretty good record, as records go, in your job, in this town. I can’t say you’ve ever co-operated very freely, but you’ve never tried to cheat us, and that’s something. Also, I’ve talked to Colton on the D.A.’s staff about you. He’s in your corner, one hundred percent.”

  “I served under him in Intelligence during the war. What are you working up to, lieutenant? You didn’t haul me in at two in the morning to compliment me on my record.”

  “No. I mention the record because if it wasn’t for that you’d be under arrest.”

  It took me a little while to swallow that. He watched me, his nervous mouth chewing on itself.

  I decided to come up smiling. “As it is I’m paying you a social call. Charming occasion, isn’t it?”

  His eyes narrowed and brightened. They were like rifle slits in his walled face, with blue steel glinting behind them. “The warrant’s drawn,” he said softly. “If I decided to execute it, you wouldn’t think it was funny.”

  “What’s it for? Spitting on the sidewalk?”

  I got no rise out of him. He answered me with a question: “What have you been doing with yourself all day?”

  “Eating. Working. Drinking. Having laughs.”

  He answered his own question: “Looking for Joe Tarantine. Tell me why.”

  “I have a client.”

  “Name him.”

  “My memory for names is very lousy.”

  He shifted in his chair, his blue gaze circling the room as if he wanted out. “I have several questions to ask you, Archer. I hope this isn’t going to be typical of your answers.”

  “You seem to know the answers.”

  “Hell, let’s get down to cases. Soft-pedal the repartee.”

  “I’m afraid when you wave a warrant at me it brings out the comedian.”

  “Forget the warrant. It wasn’t my idea.” Against all the odds, he sounded like a fair man. “Sit down and tell me why in God’s name you should start running errands for Dowser at this late date.”

  “What have you got against Dowser?” I sat in the one straight chair in front of the desk. “Dowser’s a solid citizen. He’s got a swimming pool and a private bar to prove it. He entertains politicians in his charming ranch-type home on an exclusive hilltop. He even supports a butler and a blonde.”

  “I don’t get it, Archer.” He sounded disappointed. “You’re working for him?”

  “Why not? He must be on good terms with the law or he wouldn’t be running loose. I wonder how many cops he has on his payroll. I’m just an ex-cop with a living to hustle.”

  His eyes shut tight. For an instant the long gray face looked dead. “Don’t tell me about Dowser’s payoff. I know. I also know why you left the Long Beach force. You wouldn’t take Sam Schneider’s monthly cut, and he forced you out.”

  “Colton’s been talking too much,” I said. “If you know all about Dowser, go out and bring him in and put him in Alcatraz where he belongs. Don’t take out your official frustrations on me.”

  “He isn’t my department.” Gary was masticating his lip again. “The boys knock off his peddlers two and three a month, but that’s as far as it goes. Tarantine’s one of his right-hand men, you know that?”

  “He was. Not any more.”

  “Where is Tarantine now?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “We found his fingerprints in Dalling’s apartment.” He changed the subject suddenly: “What were you doing in Dalling’s apartment this morning?”

  I let it go by, trying not to show that he had startled me.

  He went on: “A driver for Western Dairy gave us your description this afternoon. He also described your car. You or your twin went in the Casa Loma the back way some time around eight o’clock this morning.” He sat back and waited for me to have a reaction.

  I had a number of them. This meant that his questions about Dowser were by-play. He’d told me to forget the warrant, but he remembered it.

  There was nothing in being cagey. “At eight o’clock Dalling had been dead for hours. The autopsist will tell you that, if he hasn’t already.”

  “You admit you were there? You admit that Dalling was dead.”

  “I was there. He was dead.”

  “You didn’t report it to us. We had to wait until the blood soaked through the floor and made a spot on the ceiling of the apartment underneath and somebody finally got around to noticing it. That wasn’t smart of you, Archer, it wasn’t co-operative, it wasn’t even legal. It’s the kind of thing that makes for license trouble.” He leaned forward across the desk, his eyes jumping like blue Bunsen flames, and tossed me a change-of-pace: “Of course license trouble is the least of your worries.”

  “Go on.”

  “You rushed straight from the Casa Loma to interview a couple of witnesses, Severn and the Hammond woman. God knows what you thought you were trying to do. The kindest interpretation is that you suddenly remembered you were an aging boy-wonder and decided to cut us out entirely and run a murder investigation as a one-man show. Have you been seeing a lot of movies lately? Reading The Rover Boys at Hollywood and Vine?”

  “Maybe I have. What’s the unkindest interpretation?”

  “It’s possible you were covering up for yourself.” He dropped it very casually. “We found the gun, you see. A member of my detail picked it out of a storm drain on the street behind the Casa
Loma parking lot.”

  Gary opened the drawer in front of him and set a squat black .38 automatic on the desk. “Recognize it?”

  I recognized it. It was my own gun.

  “You should,” he said. “It’s registered to you. Our ballistics man just completed some firing tests with this gun a couple of hours ago. It’s his opinion, based on examination with a comparison microscope, that this gun fired the slug that was dug out of Dalling’s cortex. It severed the jugular vein and imbedded itself in the cortex. Dalling bled to death. How do you like that, Archer?”

  “Not very much. Go on. You haven’t warned me that anything I say may be used against me yet.”

  “I’ll give it to you now. Have you got anything to say?”

  “I’m very smart,” I said, “and very devious. I saw Dalling for the first time last night and decided that he was too pretty to live, a fit subject for the perfect crime. So I committed it. I shot him with a gun that could easily be identified as mine and carefully deposited it in the nearest drain, where any cop would be sure to look for it. Four or five hours later I returned to the scene of the crime, as murderers must, in order to admire my handiwork. Also to let a milkman spot me for you. I wanted to make things difficult for myself—”

  “You have.” Gary was using his gentle voice once more. “This isn’t very funny. It doesn’t make me laugh.”

  “It isn’t funny. It has some funny elements, though—”

  He cut me off again: “You’ve acted like a damn fool, and you know it. I could probably get an indictment and possibly make it stick—”

  “The hell you could. I was just going to tell you the funniest thing of all. I shot Dalling at a range of one hundred and twenty miles. Pretty good for a .38 automatic that normally can’t hit a barn door at fifty paces.”

  “Failing a murder indictment,” he went on imperturbably, “I could be very nasty about your failure to report discovery of the corpse. It happens I don’t want to be nasty. Colton doesn’t want me to be nasty, and I value his judgment. But you’re going to force me to be nasty if you go on talking like a damn fool on top of acting like one.” He chewed his upper lip. “Now what was that about an alibi?”