The Way Some People Die

by Ross Macdonald

  “Is it? I wouldn’t know.” Her head was sagging again, under the weight of too much information at once.

  “It would be a nice irony,” I said, “but a little too neat for real life. And it doesn’t begin to cover the second thing that bothers me. Why did Dalling go to the trouble of talking your mother into hiring me? It doesn’t make sense. Unless he was really schizo?”

  “No. I think I know the answer to that one. One possible answer, anyway.”

  “If you can figure it out, I’ll give you a job.”

  “I could use one. The point is that Keith was deathly afraid of Joe. He wanted you to come out there and make trouble, the worse the better. If both of you got killed, that would be perfect. I’d be there in his house, unencumbered, complete with dowry. He wouldn’t even have to carry me across the threshold. Does it make sense? He’d be afraid to hire you personally for a job like that—too many things to go wrong.”

  The waiter set a steak in front of her, and poured beer for me.

  “The job is yours,” I said. “The steak is an advance on your first week’s salary.”

  She paid no attention to the food, or to me. “It didn’t work out the way Keith wanted it to. Joe survived, and so did you. What did happen was, Joe thought that the gang was closing in, and he had to run for it. Maybe that’s all Keith counted on. Anyway, he was there at the dock, or on the boat, when Joe got there. And he did his own dirty work after all.”

  “Very fine,” I said. “But how did he know where Joe was heading? You didn’t tell him?”

  “I didn’t know. He might have followed us down here.”

  “He might have. Or he might have had an accomplice.”

  “Who?” Her eyes burned black.

  “We’ll discuss that later. Eat your steak now, before it gets cold. I’ll be back shortly.” I slid out of my seat.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I want to catch the doctor before he leaves. Guard my beer, will you?”

  “With my life.”

  CHAPTER 33: McCutcheon, assisted by the man in the striped shirt, was sewing up an incision that ran from the base of the dead man’s throat to his lower abdomen. The doctor was wearing rubber gloves, a white coverall, and a hat that gave him an oddly casual appearance. A dead cigar projected from his mouth.

  It didn’t turn in my direction till the sewing job was finished. Then McCutcheon straightened, using his forearm to push the hat back on his head. “Rotten sort of task,” he said. “I shouldn’t kick, I guess. He’s fresher than some.”

  “Exactly how fresh, can you tell?”

  “It’s a hard question, with bodies found in water. Rate of deterioration depends on water temperature and other factors. We happen to know that this laddie’s been in the water between fifty and sixty hours. If I didn’t know that, I’d say he’d been in longer. Decomposition’s rather far advanced for this time of year.” He started to reach for a pocket under the coverall, then remembered his gloved hands: “Light my cigar for me, will you?”

  I gave him a light. “What about cause of death?”

  He dragged deep, regarding me through a cloud of blue smoke. “It isn’t definite yet. I need some work from the pathology lab before I stick my neck out.” He pointed a thumb at a row of jars the undertaker was labeling on the adjacent table. “Stomach contents, blood, lung tissue, neck structures. You a reporter?”

  “Detective. Private, more or less. I’ve been working on this case from the beginning. And I simply want to know if he was drowned.”

  “It’s not impossible,” he said around the cigar. “Some of the indications are consistent with drowning. The lungs are waterlogged, for one thing. The right side of the heart is dilated. Trouble is, those conditions are equally consistent with asphyxia. There are chemical tests we can use on the blood to determine which it is, but I won’t have a report on them before tomorrow.”

  “In your opinion, though, he was drowned or smothered?”

  “I don’t have an opinion until the facts are in.”

  “No signs of violence?”

  “None that I can ascertain. I’ll tell you this: if he was drowned, it was an unusual drowning; he must have died as soon as he hit the water.”

  The mortician glanced up brightly from his jars. “I’ve seen it happen, doctor. Sometimes they die before they strike the water. Shock. Their poor hearts just stop ticking.” He coughed delicately.

  McCucheon ignored him. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get out of here.”

  “Sorry. But would you call it murder?”

  “That depends on a lot of things. Frankly, there’s something a little peculiar about the tissues. If it weren’t a patent impossibility, I’d say he might have frozen to death. Anyway, I’m making a couple of microscopic sections. So there you have three alternatives. See what you can make of them.” He turned back to the table where Tarantine lay.

  I drove to the sheriff’s office and found Callahan. He was huddled over a typewriter that looked too small for his hands, filling out an official form of some kind. He looked pleased when I walked in, providing him with an excuse to leave off typing.

  “How was George’s?”

  “Fine. I left Mrs. Tarantine there.”

  “Did her brother-in-law find you all right?”

  “Mario? I didn’t see him.”

  “He left here a few minutes ago. He wanted to invite her for overnight—you wouldn’t think a dame with her class would want to stay with them guineas, though. Hell, I wanted to hold him in a cell but the Chief says no. We need the Italian vote in the election. Matter of fact, the Chief is one himself, shut my big mouth.”

  “If the vote depends on Mario, you’ll probably lose it. I’ve just been talking to McCutcheon.”

  “What did he say?”

  “A lot of things. Which boil down to three possibilities: drowning, suffocation, freezing.”

  “Freezing?”

  “That’s what he said. He also said that it was impossible, but I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me if Mario’s boat had a freezer.”

  “I doubt it. The big commercial boats have. You don’t see them on a sport boat that size. There’s an ice plant down near the dock, though. Maybe we better take a look at it.”

  “Later. Right now I want to see Mario.”

  I was frustrated. When we reached George’s Café, the booth I had occupied was empty.

  The old Greek waiter hustled across the room. “I’m sorry, sir, I poured out your beer after the lady left. I thought—”

  “When did she leave?”

  “Five minutes, ten minutes, hard to tell. When her friend came in—”

  “The man with the bandaged head?”

  “That’s him. He sat down with her for a minute, then they got up and left.” He twisted his head towards Callahan. “Is something the matter, sheriff?”

  “Huh. Did he threaten her? Show any kind of a weapon?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that.” The old man’s face had turned a dull white, like bread dough. “I see any trouble, I call you on the telephone, you know that. They just walked out like anybody else.”

  “No argument?”

  “Maybe they argued a little. How can I tell? I was busy.”

  I drew Callahan to one side.

  “Did she have her car?”

  He nodded. “They’re probably in it, eh?”

  “It looks to me like a general alarm, with road-blocks. The quicker the better.”

  But the alarm and the road-blocks were too late. I waited in the sheriff’s office for an hour, and nobody was brought in. By ten o’clock I was ready to try a long shot in the dark.

  CHAPTER 34: For two hours I drove down the white rushing tunnel carved by my headlights in the solid night. At the end of the run the unbuilt town lay dark around me, its corners desolate under the sparse streetlights. When I stepped out of my car the night shot up like a tree and branched wide into blossoming masses of stars. Under their far cold lights I fel
t weak and little. If a fruit fly lived for one day instead of two, it hardly seemed to matter. Except to another fruit fly.

  There was light behind the Venetian blinds of the house that Dalling built, the kind of warm and homey light a lonely man might envy as he passed the house. The same light that murderers worked in when they killed their wives or husbands or lovers or best friends. The house was as quiet as a burial vault.

  The light was in the living-room. I mounted the low veranda and looked in between the slats of the blind. Galley lay prone on the tan rug, one arm supporting her head, the other outstretched. The visible side of her face was smeared darkly with something that looked like blood. Her visible eye was closed. There was a heavy automatic gun in her outstretched hand. The too-late feeling that had driven me across the desert went to my knees and loosened them.

  The front door was standing open and I went in, letting the screen door close itself behind me. From the hall I heard her breathing and sighing in slow alternation. She sounded like a runner who has run a fast race and fallen and broken his heart.

  I was halfway across the room toward the prostrate girl when she became aware of me. She rose on her knees and elbows, her breasts sharp-pointed at the floor, the blunt gun in her right hand pointed at me. Behind the tangled black hair that hung down over her face, her eyes gleamed like an animal’s. I froze.

  She straightened gradually, rocking back on her heels and rising to her feet; stood swaying a little with her legs apart, both hands holding the gun up. She tossed her hair back. Her eyes were wide and fixed.

  “What happened to you?”

  She answered me in a small tired voice: “I don’t know. I must have passed out for a while.”

  “Give me the gun.” I took a step toward her. Another step would put me within kicking distance, but my feet stuck to the floor.

  “Stand back. Back to where you were.” Her voice had changed. It cracked like an animal trainer’s whip. And her hands were steady as stone.

  The soles of my feet came unstuck and slid away from her. Her eyes were blank and ominous, like the gun’s round eye.

  “Where’s Mario?”

  She shrugged impatiently. “How should I know?”

  “You left the café together.”

  Her mouth twisted. “God, I despise you, Archer! You’re a dirty little sees-all hears-all tells-all monkey, aren’t you? What difference does it make to you what people do?”

  “I like to pretend I’m God. But I don’t really fool myself. It takes a murderer to believe it about himself. Personally, I’m just another fruit fly. If I don’t care what happens to fruit flies, what is there to care about? And if I don’t care, who will? It makes no difference to the stars.” My talk was postponing the gun’s roaring period, but I couldn’t talk it out of her hands and out the window.

  “You’re talking nonsense, chattering like a monkey.” Her foot felt for the armchair behind her, and she sat down carefully, cradling the gun on her knee. “If you must talk, we’ll talk seriously. You sit down, too.”

  I squatted uncomfortably on a leatherette hassock by the fireplace. Yellow light fell like an ugly truth from the bulbs in the ceiling fixture. Galley was bleeding from a wide cut on one cheekbone.

  I said: “There’s blood on your face.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Blood on your hands, too.”

  “Not yours. Not yet.” She smiled her bitter smile. “I want to explain to you why I killed Keith Dalling. Then we’ll decide what to do.”

  “You have the gun.”

  “I know. I’m going to keep it. I didn’t have the gun when I shot Keith. I had to fight him for it.”

  “I see. Self-defense. Neat. Only, can you get away with it?”

  “I’m telling you the truth,” she said.

  “It’s the first time if you are.”

  “Yes, the first time.” She spoke rapidly and low. “When I drove Joe to the Point Tuesday morning, I saw Keith’s car at the docks. He knew Joe would turn up there: I told him myself. I didn’t realize what Keith was planning. I went back to Los Angeles, to Keith’s apartment, and waited for him there. When he came home I asked him what he had done, and he confessed to me. He’d fought with Joe on the boat and pushed him into the ocean. He thought the way was clear now for us to marry. I couldn’t conceal what I thought of him, I didn’t try. He was a murderer, and I told him so. Then he pulled a gun on me, the gun he’d taken from Joe, your gun, as you guessed he did. I pretended to be convinced—I had to save my life—and I made up to him and got the gun away from him. I shot him. I had to. Then I panicked and ran out and threw the gun in the drain, and when the police questioned me I lied about everything. I was afraid. I knew that Joe was dead, and it made no difference to him if I blamed Keith’s death on him. I know now I made a mistake. I should have called the police when it happened, and told them the truth.”

  Her breast rose and fell irregularly. Like any pretty woman with mussed hair, blood on her face, she had a waiflike appeal, which the steady gun destroyed. I thought of Speed, and saw how easy it was to wilt in a gun’s shadow. Though I had faced them before, single and multiple, each time was a fresh new experience. And a single gun in the hands of a woman like Galley was the most dangerous weapon. Only the female sex was human in her eyes, and she was its only really important member.

  “What truth?” I said. “You’ve changed your story so often I doubt if you know what really happened.”

  “Don’t you believe me?” Her face seemed to narrow and lengthen. I had never seen her look ugly before. An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

  “I believe you partly. No doubt you shot Dalling. The circumstances sound a bit artificial.”

  The blood from her cut cheek wriggled like a black worm at the corner of her mouth. “The police will believe me, if you’re not there to deny it. I can turn Gary round my little finger.” It was a forlorn boast.

  “You’re losing your looks,” I said. “Murders take it out of a woman. You pay so much for them that they’re never the bargain they seem to be.” I had heard a noise from the back of the house, and was talking to cover it. It sounded like a drunk man floundering in the dark.

  She glanced at the gun in her hands and back to my face, imagining the flight of the bullet. I saw her knuckles tense around the butt.

  And I leaned forward a little without rising, shifting my weight to the balls of my feet, still talking: “If you shoot me, I’ll get to you before I die, I promise. You’ll have no looks left, even if you survive. Even if you survive, the police will finish the job. You’re vulnerable as hell.” The back door creaked. “Vulnerable as hell,” I repeated loudly. “Two murders, or three, already, and more coming up. You can’t kill everybody. We’re too many for one crazy girl with a gun.”

  The floundering footsteps moved on the kitchen floor. She heard them. Her eyes shifted from me to the door on her right, came back to me before I could stir. She stepped sideways out of the chair, retreating with her back to the window, so that her gun commanded my side of the room and the kitchen doorway.

  Mario came into the doorway and leaned there for an instant with one raised hand gripping the frame. His chin had been smashed by something heavier than a fist. Blood coursed down his neck into the black hair that curled over his open shirt-collar. There was death in his face. I wasn’t sure he could see until he advanced on Galley. His smashed mouth blew a bubble in which the room hung upside down, tiny and blood-colored.

  She yelped once like a dog and fired point-blank. The slug spun Mario on his heels and flung him bodily against the wall. He pushed himself away from the wall with his hands and turned to face her. She fired again, the black gun jumping like a toad. Still her white hands held it firm, and her white devoted face was watching us both.

  Mario doubled forward and sank to his knees. The indestructible man crawled toward the woman, leaking blood like black oil on the rug. Her third shot drilled the bandaged top of his head, and
finished Mario. Still she was not content. Standing over him, she pumped three bullets into his back as fast as she could fire.

  I counted them, and when the gun was empty I took it away from her. She didn’t resist.

  CHAPTER 35: When I set the telephone down, she was sitting in the chair I had pushed her into, her closed eyelids tremorless as carved ivory, her passionate mouth closed and still. From where I stood on the other side of the room, she seemed tiny and strange like a figurine, or an actress sitting on a distant stage. Mario lay face down between us.

  A shudder ran through her body and her eyes came open. “I’m glad I didn’t kill you, Archer. I didn’t want to kill you, honestly.” Her voice had the inhuman quality of an echo.

  “That was nice of you.” I stepped over the prone body and sat down facing her. “You didn’t want to kill Mario, either. Like Dalling, you killed him in self-defense.” I sounded strange to myself. The fear of death had made a cold lump in my throat which I was still trying to swallow.

  “You’re a witness to that. He attacked me with a deadly weapon.” She glanced at the metal knuckles on the dead man’s fist, and touched her cheek. “He struck me with it.”

  “When?”

  “In the garage a few minutes ago.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “He came into George’s Café and forced me to leave with him. I had no gun. He’d got the idea that I knew where his brother had left the money. I knew there was a gun out here, in the garage where Joe had hidden it. I told Mario the money was here, and he made me drive him out.” Her voice was clear and steady, though the words came out with difficulty. “He was almost crazy, threatening to kill me, with that awful thing on his hand. I got hold of Joe’s gun and shot him with it, once. I thought he was dead. I managed to get into the house before I fainted.” She sighed. With the emotional versatility of a good actress, she was slipping back into the brave-little-woman role that had taken me in before, and wouldn’t again.

  “You might get by with a self-defense plea if you’d only killed one man. Two in a week is too many. Three is mass murder.”