Blue City

by Ross Macdonald

  “The Theory of the Leisure Class is a funny book for you to be reading.”

  He smiled his careful, crumpled smile. “Do you really think so? Veblen analyzes some of the illusions of my class very competently, I think. He helps me to be without illusions.”

  “There’s one you’ll never lose. Every man that’s born rich brings it with him out of the nursery and holds on to it for the rest of his life—the illusion of his own superiority.”

  “You had a lot of money when you were a young boy, didn’t you?” he said. “And I haven’t observed that you are afflicted with an inferiority complex.”

  He rang the bell and the maid appeared to show me out.

  “One more thing,” I said. “This Mrs. Weather got all my father’s property. Who’s next in line?”

  “You are, I believe. But Mrs. Weather is both young and, so far as I have heard, healthy.”

  He didn’t offer his hand again. I left him standing with his finger in Veblen, neck-deep in conspicuous consumption.

  chapter 3

  Inspector Ralph Hanson lived in the new east end, in one of the mass-produced houses I had seen when I first came into town. My taxi driver’s flashlight found the number, which I had looked up in the telephone directory, and I asked him to wait again. It wasn’t a big house but it was well kept, surrounded by carefully trimmed shrubbery and a lawn as smooth as a putting green. I climbed the veranda steps and knocked on the door with the ornamental iron knocker.

  A middle-aged woman, whose figure had never recovered from childbearing, opened the door and smiled at me uncertainly. I noticed a tricycle beside the door and a doll carriage in the hall. I asked her if Inspector Hanson was home.

  “Ralph’s in his workshop in the basement. You can just go down there if you want to.”

  “I came here on business,” I said. “Perhaps you’d better call him up.”

  The screeching of a plane on wood, which I had been hearing through the floor, stopped when she called down the stairs: “Ralph! There’s a young man here to see you.”

  Hanson was rolling down his shirt sleeves when he came up, and the hairy backs of his hands were still dusted with little shavings. He was a tall man with a long, sour face and quick, green eyes. He stood in the hallway for a moment brushing off his hands.

  “Oh, Ralph,” his wife said in an indulgent whine. “I asked you to be careful about bringing your dirt up here.”

  “It isn’t dirt,” he said sharply. “It’s good, clean wood.”

  “It’s just as hard to clean up as dirt,” she stated, and disappeared into the back of the house.

  He looked me up and down and assigned me a mental classification that I could guess from his abrupt: “And what can I do for you, sir?”

  I said: “A couple of years ago you investigated the murder of J.D. Weather. Is that correct?”

  “That’s correct. I was in charge of the case.”

  “Do you know who killed him?”

  “No. I came to a dead end. We never caught the murderer.”

  “Does that mean you couldn’t or you didn’t?”

  He looked at me with hostility. His thin lips drew back from his teeth in an involuntary grimace, and I saw they were yellow and long like hound’s teeth. “I don’t like that crack. Just what is your interest in the case?”

  “I’m his son.”

  “Why didn’t you say so, then? Come in and sit down.”

  He waved me ahead of him into the living-room and switched on the ceiling light. It was a small room, too full of overstuffed furniture, with French-type windows on two sides and a fireplace containing a gas heater on the third. He placed me on a mohair chesterfield and sat down in a matching armchair facing me. The room was as homelike as the display window of an installment furniture store, but my host was trying to look more friendly. His long face creased in a smile that might have been mistaken for a look of pain.

  “So you’re John, eh? I remember when you used to tag around with J.D. when you were a kid. I was on a motorcycle then.”

  “You’ve been doing all right,” I said.

  He looked around the room with grim complacence. “Yeah, they promoted me to Inspector last year.”

  “Who did?”

  “The police board. Who do you think?”

  “Not, I take it, for your work on my father’s murder?”

  He leaned forward and spoke rapidly with an almost neurotic excitement: “You’ll get nothing by coming around and throwing that in my teeth. I liked J.D. I worked hard on the case.”

  “Everybody liked J.D., with the possible exception of my mother. And somebody who shot him on the street. And maybe a few other people who covered up for the man that shot him.”

  “I don’t know what kind of stories you’ve been hearing,” Hanson said.

  “I haven’t been hearing a damn thing. That’s the trouble. I don’t even know what happened to him.”

  “You just told me.”

  “I told you what I heard from an old man in a bar. How was he murdered?”

  “You want it in detail?”

  “As much as you can give me.”

  He sat back in his chair and made an arch of his fingers. His story came as pat and clear as rehearsed testimony:

  “He was shot at approximately 6:35 in the evening on April 3, 1944, as he was on his way home from the hotel. The shooting occurred one block north of Main Street on Cleery, near the corner of Cleery and Mack. Two shots were fired, almost simultaneously, according to witnesses. Both shots struck him in the head and pierced his brain, and he died immediately.”

  “Didn’t anybody see the killer?”

  “That’s one of the things that stymied me. Nobody did. It was an ambush killing, well planned ahead of time, and the killer had his getaway prepared. Remember the old Mack Building?”

  “No. Tell me about it.”

  “It’s on the corner of Cleery and Mack, with entrances on both streets. J.D. went past it every day about the same time on his way home from his office. The man who shot him must have known that, because he waited for him at a window on the second floor of the Mack Building. The window was about fourteen feet above street level. When J.D. came past, the killer leaned out of the window and shot him from above. At least that’s the way I reconstructed it. It fits in with the path the bullets took.”

  “Whose window was it?”

  “Nobody’s. It was an empty office—used to be a dentist’s office. We found out afterwards that somebody had broken into it. The door had been jimmied, and there were marks in the dust on one of the window ledges where somebody rested his arm.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “No. I told you it was well planned. The killer fired his two shots, put down the window, and beat it through the building and out the other entrance. By that time nearly all the offices were closed and there was hardly anybody in the building, so nobody saw him. Probably he had a car waiting for him at the Mack Street entrance. Anyway, he got clear away.”

  “And that’s all you’ve been able to find out in two years?”

  “One more thing. We recovered the murder weapon and traced it. It was an old Smith and Wesson revolver, and it’s definitely the gun that fired the bullets that killed J.D. We found it in the sewer on Mack Street near the entrance to the Mack Building. Up to a certain point it was easy to trace. The daughter of the original purchaser, a man called Teagarden, sold it to Kaufman the secondhand dealer. Kaufman admitted buying it, but claimed that it was stolen from his store a couple of days before the murder.”

  “You investigated Kaufman?”

  “Naturally. He’s a shady customer all right, some kind of an anarchist or radical. He writes crazy letters to the newspapers. But he didn’t kill your father. He was in his store at the time of the murder, and has two or three people to swear to it. It could be that he sold the gun to somebody and then to cover up he made up this story about a shoplifter. But it sounded to me as if he was telling the truth.”

/>   “I suppose you went into the matter of who stood to profit by J.D.’s death.”

  His long body wriggled uneasily against the cushions of his chair. “I did what I could. Mrs. Weather was the only one who profited directly. She inherited his money and property. But there isn’t any other reason to suspect her. You know that as well as I do.”

  “The hell I do. Just who is this woman?”

  “Don’t you know her? I thought you’d probably be staying with her.”

  “Not if I can help it.” I stood up and walked across the rug to the mantel. “I’ve never seen her, and what I’ve heard about her I don’t like.”

  “Naturally you wouldn’t like her. But she’s a pretty nice kid. She’s got a good deal of class.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “Chicago, I think. Anyway, your father brought her home from Chicago on one of his trips. She was his secretary for a while before he married her. From all I heard, she made him a good wife. The women in the town don’t like her much, but you can expect that. They haven’t got her class.”

  “I’ll have to take a look at all that class. She still lives here?”

  “Yeah, she just stayed on in J.D.’s house. It’s her house now, of course.”

  “Do I know as much about the case now as you do?”

  “I told you the main facts. Maybe I left out some of the details—”

  “Such as who killed my father.”

  He stood up and faced me with bubbling anger in his narrow green eyes. “I told you a straight story. If you don’t like it, you can shove it.”

  “I don’t like it and I’m not going to shove it. I’d like to know if anybody warned you not to find out too much.”

  His lips drew back from his teeth again and his voice rasped: “I did my job and I told you what I knew. Now you can get out of my house.”

  I found his eyes with mine, stared hard, and stared him down. “You’re acting nervous, Inspector Hanson. Tell me what’s making you nervous and I’ll get out.”

  “I’m not afraid of anybody, and if a snotnose like you thinks he can—”

  “You could have the makings of an honest man, Hanson. You like good, clean wood. How do you put up with working on a dirty police force like the one in this town?”

  He took a step towards me and glared in my face. He was a tall man, an inch or two taller than I, but lean and brittle. I could have broken him in two, but he didn’t seem to be worrying about that: “One more crack out of you—”

  “And you’ll swing at me and I’ll have to hurt you and you’ll call your wagon and put me away in jail to rot.”

  “I didn’t say that. But in this town you’re going to talk yourself into trouble.”

  “If I talk myself into it, I’ll fight my way out.”

  “I mean bad trouble,” he said soberly. “Maybe you better drop the whole thing.”

  “The way you did? Are you trying to scare me the way somebody scared you?”

  “Nobody scared me!” he shouted. “Get out!”

  “So you really like this town the way it is. You like being a middling-big frog in a puddle of slime.”

  For a full half-minute he didn’t say a word. His face twitched once or twice and became still. Finally he said: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. When a man’s got a wife and kids and a house to pay for—”

  “You want your kids to grow up in a place where the cops are as crooked as the crooks? You want them to find out that their old man is one of those cops, and getting along pretty nicely in a setup like that? It’s funny you wouldn’t want to clean the place up for your kids.”

  A bitter smile drew the corners of his mouth down. “I told you you didn’t know what you were talking about, Weather. If this town needs cleaning up, your old man had a lot to do with it.”

  “Whatever the hell that means.”

  “It means that this town got its first real taste of corruption when J.D. moved in his slot machines thirty years ago. First, he bought himself into the police force so they wouldn’t throw his slot machines out of town. Then, he bought himself into the municipal government so they wouldn’t clean up the police force. And don’t call me a liar, because I know what I’m talking about. I’ve had my cut.”

  I didn’t want to believe it, but it sounded like the truth. It gave my stomach a queer twist. Except where women were concerned, I had always thought my father was the straightest man in the Middle West.

  chapter 4

  Taxis were costing me more than I could afford, but I was in a hurry and the evening was slipping away. The driver took me straight down Main Street into the heart of town. The night streets were crowded with noisy couples, young girls in twos and threes looking for a pickup, boys and young men in threes and fours marching abreast and wearing bright ties like banners. Spring ran in the gutters like a swift, foul stream, and the people in the streets moved and regrouped in a slow, enormous Bacchic dance. We turned at the Palace Hotel and went up Cleery Street into the north side of town.

  All the windows were dark on the second floor of the Mack Building, and there was no bronze plaque on the sidewalk where J.D. Weather had died.

  Even his house looked the same, though it was smaller than I remembered. Nothing had changed, except that I couldn’t walk in without knocking, and nobody there would be glad to see me. When I went up the front steps I had the feeling that I was about to do something I had often done before. I rang the bell and waited. The feeling went away before the door opened, and left me half-angry and half-embarrassed.

  The porch light came on over my head, and the door opened on a chain. Through the opening I could see a four-inch section of a woman: carefully lacquered, upswept auburn hair, dark eyes in a pale face, a white neck rising from a low, plain neckline.

  “Mrs. Weather?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to talk to you. I think you must be my stepmother.”

  She made a noise in her throat, a little chuckling gasp. “Are you John Weather?”

  “Yes. May I come in?”

  “Of course. Please do.” She unhooked the chain and stepped back to open the door. “I shouldn’t have kept you standing outside. But I’m alone in the house tonight, and you never know about night callers. This is the maid’s night off.”

  “I know how you feel,” I said, but I wasn’t thinking of her. The old hall tree was gone, and the moose head was missing from over the door. The floor had been refinished, and there was a new pastel rug on it. Ivory enamel made the staircase look unreal. Everything was too pale and neat.

  “You used to live in this house, didn’t you?” she said.

  “I was just thinking of that. It’s different.”

  “I hope you approve of the changes.” Her tone was a subtle blend of arrogance and feminine cajolery.

  Her voice interested me. It was a good voice, low, rich, and complex, with a more frankly female quality than perfect ladies allow themselves. I looked into her face and said: “There have been too many changes to generalize about, haven’t there? Not that my opinion matters one way or the other.”

  She turned on her heel and walked to the door of the living-room. “Won’t you come in and sit down and have a drink? We must have things to talk about.”

  I said: “Thank you,” and followed her. If her breasts and her hips were her own, her figure was very handsome. Even if they weren’t, she had her legs, and the way she moved her body. In her dark silk dress she moved with the free, shining fullness and flow of a seal in water.

  The face she leaned towards me, as we sat down facing each other, was in contrast to her body. It had a bloodless kind of beauty, emphasized by her scarlet mouth, but it was thin and worried-looking. Her wide, dark eyes seemed to have drawn out and to hold all the life and energy of her face. Her bright hair stood above her pale face and neck like a curled red flower on a stalk that the sun had missed.

  She smiled nervously under my stare. “Do you think you’ve got my Bert
illon measurements by now?”

  “Excuse me. I’m naturally interested in my father’s last wife.”

  “That’s not a very chivalrous thing to say.”

  “My chivalry is my weakest point.”

  “That’s true of your whole generation, isn’t it? Or maybe you’ve been reading Hemingway or something.”

  “Don’t start talking down like a stepmother. You haven’t got much of a drop on me where age is concerned.”

  Her laugh came strangely out of her unmoving face. “Maybe I was wrong about your chivalry. But don’t kid yourself. I belong to the lost generation. Which reminds me, I promised you a drink.”

  I said: “Who’s been reading Hemingway now?” and looked around the room while she went to the bar in the corner. The bar had been J.D.’s idea, but the rest of the room had been remade. Thick, bright curtains at the windows, low, square-cut furniture placed in complicated geometric patterns on a desert expanse of polished floor, chaste walls and soft indirect lighting, which made the ceiling seem high and airy. The only old-fashioned survival was the pair of sliding doors which closed off the dining room. It was a beautiful room but it lacked life. Time and change had tiptoed away and left it breathless and still. I wondered if the rich, widowed body of the woman who had invented the room spent lonely nights.

  She gave me a bourbon with a little soda and a lot of ice. Then she raised her glass and said: “Here’s to chivalry.” Her hands were white and well kept, but there was a little gathering and puckering of the flesh at the wrist. Perhaps I had been wrong about her age, but it couldn’t be more than thirty-five.

  “Here’s to women that aren’t dependent on it.”

  She looked at me for a moment and said slowly: “You’re rather a nice boy.”

  “You’re not exactly a typical stepmother. Or did I read too much Grimm in my formative years?”

  “I doubt it. What are your plans, John?”