The Way Some People Die

by Ross Macdonald

  “Who did you pay the money to?”

  “Joe Tarantine. I wouldn’t try to get it back from him if I were you.”

  “Where is he?”

  He lifted his broad shoulders, and dropped them. “I don’t know, and I haven’t any desire to. Joe isn’t one of my bosom pals, exactly.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Two nights ago,” he said, after some reflection.

  “When you bought the heroin from him?”

  “You seem to know my business better than I do.” He leaned toward me, drawing his legs back. I moved the revolver to remind him of it.

  “Put the gun away, please. What did you say your name was?”

  “Archer.” I kept the gun where it was, supported on my knee.

  “How much is Marjorie paying you, Archer?”

  “Enough.”

  “Whatever it is, I could pay you much better. If you’ll give me a little leeway. A little time.” “I don’t think so.”

  “I have two kilos of pure heroin. Do you know how much that’s worth on the present market?”

  “I haven’t been following the quotations. Fill me in.”

  “A clean hundred thousand, if I have the time to make the necessary contacts. A hundred thousand, over and above my debt to the sweet sow.” For the first time, he was showing a little animation. “I’m not even suggesting you double-cross her. All I ask is time. Four days should do it.”

  “While I sit holding a gun on you?”

  “You can put it away.”

  “I think you’re trying to con me the way you conned Marjorie. For all I know, you have the money on you.”

  He compressed the flesh around his eyes, trying to force them into an expression of earnest sincerity. Surrounded by puckered skin, they stayed pale and cold and shallow. “You’re quite mistaken, old man.” I’d wondered where Mosquito got the phrase. “You can take a look at my wallet if you like.” His hand moved toward the inner pocket of his jacket.

  “Keep your hands in sight. What about your suitcases?”

  “Go right ahead and search them. They’re not locked.” Which probably meant there was nothing important in the suitcases.

  He turned his head to look at the expensive luggage, and revealed a different face. Full-face, he looked enough like a gentleman to pass for one in southern California: his face was oval and soft, almost gentle around the mouth, with light hair waving back from a wide sunburned forehead. In profile, his saddle nose and lantern jaw gave him the look of an aging roughneck; the slack skin twisted into diagonal folds under his chin.

  He had fooled me in a way: I hadn’t been able to reach in behind the near-gentlemanly front. My acceptance of the front had even built it up for Speed a little. He was more at ease than he had been, in spite of the gun on my knee.

  I spoke to the ravaged old man behind the front: “You’re on your last legs, Speed. I guess you know that.”

  His head turned back to me, losing ten years. He said nothing, but there was a kind of questioning assent in the eyes.

  “You can’t buy me,” I said. “The way things stand, you can’t angle out of this rap. You’ve made your big try for a comeback, and it’s failed.”

  “What is this leading up to? Or do you simply enjoy hearing yourself make speeches?”

  “I have to take you back with me. There’s the matter of Marjorie’s money, for one thing—”

  “She’ll never get it if you take me back, not a red cent of it.”

  “Then she’ll have the satisfaction of jailing you. She’s in the mood to push it to the limit. Not to mention what the police will do. They’ll have a lot of questions to ask you about this and that, particularly Dalling’s murder.”

  “Dalling’s murder?” His face thinned and turned sallow. “Who is Dalling?” But he knew who Dalling was, and knew I knew he knew.

  “If they ever let you out, Dowser and Blaney will be waiting for you.” I piled it on. “Last time they had no special grudge against you. All they wanted was your territory. This time they’ll cut you to pieces, and you know it. I wouldn’t insure your life for a dime if you paid me a hundred-dollar premium.”

  “You’re one of Dowser’s troopers.” He looked at my gun and couldn’t look away. I raised it so he could see the round hole in the barrel, the peephole into darkness.

  “How about it, Speed? Do you come south with me, or settle with me here?”

  “Settle?” he said, still with his eyes on the gun.

  “I’m going back with you or the heroin, one or the other.”

  “To Dowser?”

  “You’re a good guesser. If Danny gets his shipment back, he won’t care so much about you.”

  He said, with an effort: “I’ll split with you. We can clear a hundred thousand between us. Fifty thousand for you. I have a contact in the east, he’s flying out tomorrow.” The effort left him breathless.

  “You can’t buy me,” I repeated. “Hand it over.”

  “If I do, what happens to me?”

  “It’s up to you. Climb into your car and drive as fast as you can as far as you can. Or walk due west until you hit the ocean and keep on walking.”

  He raised his eyes to mine. His face was old and sick. “I should have shot you when I had the chance.”

  “You should have, but you didn’t. You’re washed up, as I said.”

  “Yes,” he said to himself. “I am washed up.” His voice was almost cheerful, in a wry thin way. I got the impression that he had never really expected to succeed, and was taking a bitter satisfaction from his own foresight.

  “You’re wasting my time. Where is it?”

  “I’ll give you a straight answer to that if you’ll give me a straight answer to this. Who tipped my hand to you? I don’t expect to do anything about it. I’d simply like to know.”

  “Nobody did.”

  “Nobody?”

  “I put together a couple of hunches and a lot of leg-work, and worked it out for myself. You won’t believe that, naturally.”

  “Oh, I believe it. Anyway, what difference does it make?” He shook his head fretfully, bored by the answer to his own question. “The lousy stuff is in a tobacco can in the kitchen cupboard.”

  I found it there.

  CHAPTER 29: I had made up my mind about Ruth before I got back to the Grandview Hotel. I knew if I didn’t go back for her I wouldn’t be able to forget her. A teen-aged girl with heroin in her veins was the stuff bad dreams were made of.

  The lobby was dark and deserted except where the night clerk sat behind his desk with a science-fiction magazine propped in front of him. He descended from inter-galactic space to give me a quick once-over. Neither of us spoke. I went up in the elevator and down the red-lit corridor again to 307.

  The girl was sleeping as I had left her, on her side, her knees bent double and her long thighs clasped to her breast. She stirred and sighed when I closed the door and crossed the room to look at her. The short gold hair fallen across her face moved in and out with her breathing. I pushed it back and tucked it behind her ear. She raised her free arm as if to protect her head from attack, but she slept on. She was sunk deep in sleep, maybe beyond my reach.

  I filled the bathroom glass with cold water again, straightened her out on the bed, and poured the water over her face. He eyelids fluttered open, and she swore.

  “Rise and shine, Ruth.”

  “Go away, you’re rocking my dreamboat.” She flipped over onto her stomach, and buried her wet face in the soaking pillow.

  I flipped her back. “Hey, kid! You’ve got to get up.”

  “No. Please,” she whined, her eyes tight shut again.

  I refilled the glass and brought it back from the bathroom. “More water?”

  “No!” She sat up, calling me names.

  “Get dressed. You’re coming with me. You don’t want to stay with Mosquito, do you?”

  Her head lolled on her neck, to one side and then the other. “No. He’s nasty
.” She spoke with childish earnestness, casting an orphaned look around the barren walls. “Where is Mosquito?”

  “He’s on his way. You’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Yes.” She repeated after me like a lesson she had learned: “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  I gathered up her clothes from the bathroom floor and tossed them to her: sweater and skirt, shoes and stockings. But she was still far gone, unequal to the task of putting them on. I had to strip off the pajamas and dress her. Her entire body was cold to the touch. It was like dressing a doll.

  Her polo coat was hanging on the bathroom door. I wrapped it around her and pulled her to her feet. She couldn’t stand alone, or didn’t choose to. Ruth had flown back to her island, leaving her vacant body for me to deal with. In one way and another I got her to the elevator and propped her in a corner while I ran it down to the lobby. I pushed back the metal door and lifted her in my arms. She was light enough.

  The night clerk looked up as I passed the desk. He didn’t say a word. No doubt he had seen more remarkable couples step out of that elevator.

  My car was parked at the yellow curb in front of the hotel. I unlocked the door and deposited her on the seat with her head propped in the corner against a baseball cushion. She stayed in that position for the next six hours, though she had a tendency to slide toward the floor. Every hour or so, I had to stop the car in order to lift her back into her corner. Most of the rest of the time I kept the speedometer needle between seventy-five and eighty. She slept like the dead while I drove from foggy night to dawn and through the long bright morning, heading south.

  She woke up finally when I braked for the stoplight at the Santa Barbara wye. The light changed suddenly, taking me by surprise, and I had to burn rubber. Ruth was flung from her seat. I held her back from the windshield with my right arm. She opened her eyes then, and looked around and wondered where she was.

  “Santa Barbara.” The light changed back to green, and I shifted gears.

  She stretched and sat up straight, staring at the combed green lemon groves and the blue mountains in the near distance. “Where are we going?” she asked me, her voice still thickened by sleep.

  “To see a friend of mine.”

  “In San Francisco?”

  “Not in San Francisco.”

  “That’s good.” She yawned and stretched some more. “I don’t really want to go there after all. I had an awful dream about San Francisco. An awful little man with bushy hair took me up to his room and made me do terrible things. I don’t exactly remember what they were, though. God, I feel lousy. Was I on a jag last night?”

  “A kind of one. Go to sleep again if you want to. Or how about something to eat?”

  “I don’t know if I can scarf anything, but maybe I better try. God knows how long since I have.”

  We were approaching the freeway, and there was a truck-stop restaurant ahead. I pulled into the service station beside it and helped her out of the car. We were a sorry couple. She still moved like a sleepwalker, and her pallor was ghastly under the noon sun. I had three hundred and forty brand-new miles on my gauge, and I felt as if I had walked them. I needed food, sleep, shave, and shower. Most of all I needed a talk with or even a look at somebody who was happy, prosperous, and virtuous, or any one of the three.

  A steak and a pint of coffee did a lot for me. The girl nibbled half-heartedly at a piece of toast that she dipped in the yolk of one of her eggs. Heroin was her food and drink and sleep. It was going to be her death if she stayed with the kick to the end. The idea bothered me.

  I said that to her, in slightly different words, when we were back in the car: “I’ve known weed- and opium-smokers, coke-sniffers, hemp-chewers, laudanum drinkers, plain and fancy drunks. Guys and girls who lived on canned heat and rubbing alcohol. There are even people in the world who can’t leave arsenic alone, and other people who would sell themselves into slavery for a long cool drink of ether. But your habit is the worst habit there is.”

  “A lecture,” she said, with adolescent boredom. I might have been a high-school teacher objecting to bubble-gum. “What do you know about my habits, Mr. Drag?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a private detective. I told you that before, but you’ve forgotten it.”

  “Yeah, I suppose I did. Was I in San Francisco last night? I think I remember, I rode up there on a bus.”

  “You were there. I don’t know how you got there.”

  “What happened to my shoulder? I noticed in the rest room, it looks like somebody bit me.”

  “You were bitten by a mosquito.”

  I turned from the road to look at her, and our eyes met for a moment. Hers were uncomprehending.

  “That isn’t funny,” she said icily.

  I was angry and amused at the same time. “Hell, I didn’t bite you.” But not angry enough to remind her unnecessarily of the night she had forgotten. Even to me, Mosquito seemed unreal, the figment of a red-lit dream.

  I glanced at the girl’s face, and saw that she was remembering: the shadow of the memory shaded her eyes. “It’s true,” she said, “what you said about the habit. It’s terrible. I started out trying it for kicks, with Ronnie. The first few times he gave it to me free. Now it’s the only thing that makes me feel good. In between, I feel awful. How do you think I feel now?”

  “Half dead, the way you look.”

  “Completely dead, and I don’t even care. I don’t even care.”

  After a while she dropped off to sleep again. She slept through the heavy truck-traffic on 101 Alternate and the even heavier traffic on the boulevard. It took Main Street to wake her finally.

  I found a parking place near the Hall of Justice. It was nearly two o’clock, a good time to catch Peter Colton in his office. She came along quietly enough, still walking as if the sidewalk were foam rubber, until she saw the building. Then she jerked to a stop:

  “You’re going to turn me in!”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, but I was lying. A couple of sidewalk loungers were drifting toward us, prepared to witness anything we cared to do. “Come along with me now, or I’ll bite your other shoulder.”

  She glared at me, but she came, on stiff unwilling legs. Our short black shadows stumped up the steps together.

  Colton was in his office, a big jut-nosed man in his fifties, full of quiet energy. When I opened the door, his head was bowed over papers on his desk, and he stayed in that position for a measurable time. His light brown hair, cut en brosse, gave him a bearish look that went with his disposition. I pushed the girl ahead of me into the room, and shut the door rather sharply. She moved sideways along the wall, away from me.

  Colton looked up with calculated effect, his powerful nose pointed accusingly at me. “Well. The prodigal son. You look terrible.”

  “That comes of living on the husks that the swine did eat.”

  “A Biblical scholar yet, and I wasn’t even certain you could read.” Before I could answer, he aimed his face at the girl, who was trembling against the wall: “Who’s this, the prodigal daughter?”

  “This is Ruth,” I said. “What’s your last name, Ruth?”

  She stammered: “I won’t tell you.”

  Colton regarded her with cold blue interest. “What’s the girl been taking?”

  “Heroin.”

  “It’s a lie,” she said woodenly.

  Colton shrugged his shoulders. “You’re in the wrong department, aren’t you? I’m busy. Why bring her to me?”

  “Busy on the Dalling case?”

  “You’ve got nerve, Lew, even to bring up the name. Lucky for you the Tarantine woman backed up your story about the gun. The Assistant D.A. wanted to clap you in one of the nice new cells till I talked him out of it. Stick around and waste my time and I’ll talk him right back into it. And it won’t be hard to do. We’ve had a lot of trouble with private operators the last couple of years.”

  “Yeah,”
I said. “Like when I took Dwight Troy for you.”

  “Don’t brag, I know you’re hot. Now why don’t you take all that Fahrenheit and peddle it someplace else? You can’t polish apples with us by bringing in a little old junkie. They’re two for a nickel. I could round up fifty any time between here and Union Station.” Colton was angry. He had kept me out of a cell, but he hadn’t forgiven me for what I had done to the law.

  The girl looked at me sideways, smiling slightly. It gave her pleasure to see me taking it. She sat down in a straight-backed chair against the wall and crossed her legs.

  “Go ahead and ride me,” I said. “It’s the old Army play, when somebody’s riding you.”

  “Nobody’s riding me. I’ll tell you frankly, though, this Hammond woman has been ugly to deal with. And all day yesterday she was after us to release the body to her. Why in God’s name did you have to go and stir up Jane Starr Hammond?”

  “It seemed like a promising lead at the time. I’m not infallible.”

  “Don’t act as if you thought you were, then. Next time the wolves can have you.” He rose and moved to the window, his back to the room.

  “All right,” I said. “I apologize. Now if your wounded feelings have had enough of a therapeutic workout, let’s get back to business.”

  He growled something unintelligible.

  “You haven’t found Tarantine, have you?”

  That brought him back from the window. “We have not.” He added with heavy irony: “No doubt he gave you his forwarding address.”

  “I think I know where to look for him. In the sea.”

  “You’re a little late. The Sheriff’s Aero Squadron in Pacific Point has been working on that for two days. The Coast Guard’s carrying on dragging operations.”

  “Any trace of his companion?”

  “None. They’re not even sure he had a companion. The only witness they have won’t swear there were two in the skiff. It was just an impression he had.”

  “Ruth is a witness. She saw him swim ashore.”

  “I heard something about that.” He turned on the girl: “Where have you been?”