The Chill

by Ross Macdonald

  “Two or three dozen, anyway. It’s better to have too many than too few.”

  “That will run into money.”

  “I know, and so will I.”

  “Are you trying to talk yourself out of a job?”

  “I don’t need the work, and I could use a rest.”

  “To hell with you then.”

  He snatched at the flimsy picture between my fingers. It tore across the middle. We faced each other like enemies, each of us holding a piece of the happy honeymooners.

  Alex burst into tears.

  chapter 2

  I AGREED over lunch to help him find his wife. That and the chicken pot pie calmed him down. He couldn’t remember when he had eaten last, and he ate ravenously.

  We drove out to the Surf House in separate cars. It was on the sea at the good end of town: a pueblo hotel whose Spanish gardens were dotted with hundred-dollar-a-day cottages. The terraces in front of the main building descended in wide green steps to its own marina. Yachts and launches were bobbing at the slips. Further out on the water, beyond the curving promontory that gave Pacific Point its name, white sails leaned against a low gray wall of fog.

  The desk clerk in the Ivy League suit was very polite, but he wasn’t the one who had been on duty on the Sunday I was interested in. That one had been a summer replacement, a college boy who had gone back to school in the East. He himself, he regretted to say, knew nothing about Mrs. Kincaid’s bearded visitor or her departure.

  “I’d like to talk to the hotel photographer. Is he around today?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe he’s out by the swimming pool.”

  We found him, a thin spry man wearing a heavy camera like an albatross around his neck. Among the colored beach clothes and bathing costumes, his dark business suit made him look like an undertaker. He was taking some very candid pictures of a middle-aged woman in a Bikini who didn’t belong in one. Her umbilicus glared at the camera like an eyeless socket.

  When he had done his dreadful work, the photographer turned to Alex with a smile. “Hi. How’s the wife?”

  “I haven’t seen her recently,” Alex said glumly.

  “Weren’t you on your honeymoon a couple of weeks ago? Didn’t I take your picture?”

  Alex didn’t answer him. He was peering around at the pool-side loungers like a ghost trying to remember how it felt to be human. I said:

  “We’d like to get some copies made of that picture you took. Mrs. Kincaid is on the missing list, and I’m a private detective. My name is Archer.”

  “Fargo. Simmy Fargo.” He gave me a quick handshake, and the kind of glance a camera gives you when it records you for posterity. “In what sense on the missing list?”

  “We don’t know. She left here in a taxi on the afternoon of September the second. Kincaid has been looking for her ever since.”

  “That’s tough,” Fargo said. “I suppose you want the prints for circularization. How many do you think you’ll be needing?”

  “Three dozen?”

  He whistled, and slapped himself on his narrow wrinkled forehead. “I’ve got a busy weekend coming up, and it’s already started. This is Friday. I could let you have them by Monday. But I suppose you want them yesterday?”

  “Today will do.”

  “Sorry.” He shrugged loosely, making his camera bob against his chest.

  “It could be important, Fargo. What do you say we settle for a dozen, in two hours?”

  “I’d like to help you. But I’ve got a job.” Slowly, almost against his will, he turned and looked at Alex. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll call the wife in, and you can have your pictures. Only don’t stand me up, the way the other one did.”

  “What other one?” I said.

  “Big guy with a beard. He ordered a print of the same picture and never came back for it. I can let you have that print now if you like.”

  Alex came out of his dark trance. He took hold of Fargo’s arm with both hands and shook it. “You saw him then. Who is he?”

  “I thought maybe you knew him” Fargo disengaged himself and stepped back. “As a matter of fact, I thought I knew him, too. I could have sworn I took his picture once. But I couldn’t quite place the face. I see too many faces.”

  “Did he give you his name?”

  “He must have. I don’t take orders without a name. I’ll see if I can find it for you, eh?”

  We followed him into the hotel and through a maze of corridors to his small cluttered windowless office. He phoned his wife, then burrowed into the pile of papers on his desk and came up with a photographer’s envelope. Inside, between two sheets of corrugated paper, was a glossy print of the newly-weds. On the front of the envelope Fargo had written in pencil: “Chuck Begley, Wine Cellar.”

  “I remember now,” he said. “He told me he was working at the Wine Cellar. That’s a liquor store not too far from here. When Begley didn’t claim his picture I called them. They said Begley wasn’t working for them any more.” Fargo looked from me to Alex. “Does the name Begley mean anything to you?”

  We both said that it didn’t. “Can you describe him, Mr. Fargo?”

  “I can describe the part of him that wasn’t covered with seaweed, I mean the beard. His hair is gray, like the beard, and very thick and wavy. Gray eyebrows and gray eyes, an ordinary kind of straight nose, I noticed it was peeling from the sun. He’s not bad-looking for an older man, apart from his teeth, which aren’t good. And he looks as though he’s taken a beating or two in his time. Personally I wouldn’t want to go up against him. He’s a big man, and he looks pretty rough.”

  “How big?”

  “Three or four inches taller than I am. That would make him six feet one or two. He was wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt, and I noticed the muscles in his arms.”

  “How did he talk?”

  “Nothing special. He didn’t have a Harvard accent, and he didn’t say ain’t.”

  “Did he give you any reason for wanting the picture?”

  “He said he had a sentimental interest. He saw it in the paper, and it reminded him of somebody. I remember thinking he must have dashed right over. The paper with the picture in it came out Sunday morning, and he came in around Sunday noon.”

  “He must have gone to see your wife immediately afterward,” I said to Alex. And to Fargo: “How did this particular picture happen to be used by the newspaper?”

  “They picked it out of a batch I sent over. The Press often uses my pictures, as a matter of fact I used to work for them. Why they used this one instead of some of the others I couldn’t say.” He held up the print in the fluorescent light, then handed it to me. “It did turn out well, and Mr. Kincaid and his wife make an attractive couple.”

  “Thanks very much,” Alex said sardonically.

  “I was paying you a compliment, fellow.”

  “Sure you were.”

  I took the print from Fargo and shunted Alex out of the place before it got too small for him. Black grief kept flooding up in him, changing to anger when it reached the air. It wasn’t just grief for a one-day wife, it was also grief for himself. He didn’t seem to know if he was a man or not.

  I couldn’t blame him for his feelings, but they made him no asset to the kind of work I was trying to do. When I found the Wine Cellar, on a motel strip a few blocks inland, I left him outside in his little red sports car.

  The interior of the liquor store was pleasantly cool. I was the only potential customer, and the man behind the counter came out from behind it to greet me.

  “What can I do for you, sir?”

  He wore a plaid waistcoat, and he had the slightly muzzy voice and liquid eyes and dense complexion of a man who drank all day and into the night.

  “I’d like to see Chuck Begley.”

  He looked vaguely pained, and his voice took on a note of mild complaint. “I had to fire Chuck. I’d send him out with a delivery, and sometimes it’d arrive when it was supposed to, and sometimes it wouldn’t.”

/>   “How long ago did you fire him?”

  “Couple of weeks. He only worked for me a couple of weeks. He isn’t cut out for that kind of work. I told him more than once it was beneath his capacity. Chuck Begley is a fairly bright man if he’d straighten up, you know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought perhaps you were an acquaintance of his.”

  I showed him my photostat.

  He blew the smell of peppermint in my face. “Is Begley on the run?”

  “He may be. Why?”

  “I wondered when he first came in why a man like him would take a part-time delivery job. What’s he wanted for?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Can you give me his home address?”

  “I think I can at that.” He stroked his veined nose, watching me over his fingers. “Don’t tell Begley I gave you the word. I don’t want him bouncing back on me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “He spends a lot of time in the home of one of my customers. You might say he’s a non-paying guest of hers. I certainly wouldn’t want to make trouble for her. But then,” he reasoned, “if Begley’s on the run I’m doing her a favor in seeing that he’s picked up. Isn’t that right?”

  “I’d say so. Where does she live?”

  “On Shearwater Beach, cottage number seventeen. Her name’s Madge Gerhardi. Take the freeway south and you’ll see the Shearwater turnoff about two miles down the line. Only just don’t tell either of them that it was me sent you. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I left him with his bottles.

  chapter 3

  WE PARKED OUR CARS at the top of the access lane, and I persuaded Alex to stay in his, out of sight. Shearwater Beach turned out to be a kind of expensive slum where several dozen cottages stood in a row. The changing blue reflection of the sea glared through the narrow gaps between them. Beyond their peaked rooftops, out over the water, a tern circled on flashing wings, looking for fish.

  Number seventeen needed paint, and leaned on its pilings like a man on crutches. I knocked on the scabbed gray door. Slowly, like bodies being dragged, footsteps approached the other side. The bearded man opened it.

  He was a man of fifty or so wearing an open-necked black shirt from which his head jutted like weathered stone. The sunlight struck mica glints from his eyes. The fingers with which he was holding the edge of the door were bitten down to the quick. He saw me looking at them and curled them into a fist.

  “I’m searching for a missing girl, Mr. Begley.” I had decided on the direct approach. “She may have met with foul play and if she did, you may have been one of the last people who saw her alive.”

  He rubbed the side of his face with his clenched knuckles. His face bore marks of old trouble, some of them done by hand: faintly quilted patches around the eyes, a thin scar on his temple divided like a minature ruler by stitch-marks. Old trouble and the promise of further trouble.

  “You must be crazy. I don’t even know any girls.”

  “You know me,” a woman said behind him.

  She appeared at his shoulder and leaned on him, waiting for somebody to second the self-administered flattery. She was about Begley’s age, and may have been older. Her body was very assertive in shorts and a halter. Frizzled by repeated dyeings and bleachings, her hair stuck up on her head like a yellow fright wig. Between their deep blue artificial shadows, her eyes were the color of gin.

  “I’m very much afraid that you must be mistaken,” she said to me with a cultivated Eastern-seaboard accent which lapsed immediately. “I swear by all that’s holy that Chuck had nothing to do with any girl. He’s been too busy looking after little old me.” She draped a plump white arm across the back of his neck. “Haven’t you, darling?”

  Begley was immobilized between the woman and me. I showed him Fargo’s glossy print of the honeymooners.

  “You know this girl, don’t you? Her name, her married name, is Dolly Kincaid.”

  “I never heard of her in my life.”

  “Witnesses tell me different. They say you went to see her at the Surf House three weeks ago this coming Sunday. You saw this picture of her in the paper and ordered a copy of it from the photographer at the Surf House.”

  The woman tightened her arm around his neck, more like a wrestling partner than a lover. “Who is she, Chuck?”

  “I have no idea.” But he muttered to himself: “So it’s started all over again.”

  “What has started all over again?”

  She was stealing my lines. “Could I please talk to Mr. Begley alone?”

  “He has no secrets from me.” She looked up at him proudly, with a wilted edge of anxiety on her pride. “Have you, darling? We’re going to be married, aren’t we, darling?”

  “Could you stop calling me darling? Just for five minutes? Please?”

  She backed away from him, ready to cry, her downturned red mouth making a lugubrious clown face.

  “Please go inside,” he said. “Let me talk to the man.”

  “This is my place. I have a right to know what goes on in my own place.”

  “Sure you do, Madge. But I have squatter’s privileges, at least. Go in and drink some coffee.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “No. Of course I’m not.” But there was resignation in his voice. “Beat it, eh, like a good girl?”

  His last word seemed to mollify her. Dawdling and turning, she disappeared down the hallway. Begley closed the door and leaned on it.

  “Now you call tell me the truth,” I said.

  “All right, so I went to see her at the hotel. It was a stupid impulse. It doesn’t make me a murderer.”

  “Nobody suggested that, except you.”

  “I thought I’d save you the trouble.” He spread out his arms as if for instant crucifixion. “You’re the local law, I gather.”

  “I’m working with them,” I said hopefully. “My name is Archer. You haven’t explained why you went to see Mrs. Kincaid. How well did you know her?”

  “I didn’t know her at all.” He dropped his outspread arms in emphasis. The sensitive areas around his mouth were hidden by his beard, and I couldn’t tell what he was doing with them. His gray eyes were unrevealing. “I thought I knew her, but I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought she might be my daughter. There was quite a resemblance to her in the newspaper picture, but not so much in the flesh. The mistake on my part was natural. I haven’t seen my daughter for so long.”

  “What’s your daughter’s name?”

  He hesitated. “Mary. Mary Begley. We haven’t been in touch for over ten years. I’ve been out of the country, on the other side of the world.” He made it sound as remote as the far side of the moon.

  “Your daughter must have been quite young when you left.”

  “Yeah. Ten or eleven.”

  “And you must have been quite fond of her,” I said, “to order a picture just because it reminded you of her.”

  “I was fond of her.”

  “Why didn’t you go back for the picture then?”

  He went into a long silence. I became aware of something impressive in the man, the untouchable still quality of an aging animal.

  “I was afraid that Madge would be jealous,” he said. “I happen to be living on Madge.”

  I suspected he was using the bald statement to tell a lie. But it may have come from a deeper source. Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born, and Begley had some of the stigmata of the trouble-prone. He said:

  “What do you think happened to Mrs. Kincaid?” His question was cold and formal, disclaiming all interest in the answer to it.

  “I was hoping you’d have some ideas on the subject. She’s been missing for nearly three weeks. I don’t like it. It’s true that girls are always disappearing, but not on their honeymoons —not when they love their husbands.”

  “She loves hers, does she?”

  “He thinks so. How was
she feeling when you saw her? Was she depressed?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. She was surprised to see me.”

  “Because she hadn’t seen you for so long?”

  He sneered at me hairily. “Don’t bother trying to trap me, I told you she wasn’t my daughter. She didn’t know me from Adam.”

  “What did you find to talk about with her?”

  “We didn’t talk.” He paused. “Maybe I asked her a few questions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Who her father was. Who her mother was. Where she came from. She said she came from Los Angeles. Her maiden name was Dolly something—I forget the name. Her parents were both dead. That’s about all.”

  “It took you quite a while to get that much out of her.”

  “I was only there five or ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”

  “The desk clerk said an hour.”

  “He made a mistake.”

  “Or maybe you did, Mr. Begley. Time passes very rapidly sometimes.”

  He clutched at this dubious excuse. “Maybe I did stay longer than I realized. I remember now, she wanted me to stay and meet her husband.” His eyes held steady, but they had taken on a faint lying sheen. “He didn’t come and didn’t come, so I left.”

  “Did you suggest seeing her again?”

  “No. She wasn’t that interested in my story.”

  “You told her your story?”

  “I told her about my daughter, naturally, just like I told you.”

  “I don’t understand it. You say you were out of the country for ten years. Where?”

  “In New Caledonia, mostly. I worked for a chrome mine there. They shut it down last spring and shipped us home.”

  “And now you’re looking for your daughter?”

  “I’d certainly like to put my hands on her.”

  “So she can be a bridesmaid at your wedding?” I wanted to see how sharp a needle he would take.

  He took this one without a word.

  “What happened to your wife?”

  “She died.” His eyes were no longer steady. “Look, do we have to go into all this? It’s bad enough losing your loved ones without having it raked up and pushed in your face.” I couldn’t tell if his self-pity was false: self-pity always is to some extent.