Blue City

by Ross Macdonald

  I pulled open the heavy glass door and mumbled: “Excuse me, officer,” to the policeman’s broad back.

  “Pardon me.” He stepped aside out of my way.

  I walked down the stone steps in front of him, using all my self-control to keep from breaking into a run. There was a police car parked at the curb, which contained a man in plain clothes listening to his short-wave radio. There were two more policemen and a group of civilians on the corner in front of the church. I crossed the street in front of the parked car and walked away in the opposite direction from the church. When I reached the corner I refrained from looking back. I turned downtown and started walking faster. Main Street would be a tough gauntlet to run, but the only person I could go to for help lived in the Harvey Apartments, on the other side of the business district. And even she was an off-chance.

  I passed a number of people and none of them paid any attention to me. The life of the city was going on as if Floraine Weather had never died, or never lived. There was a bus parked on the next corner, headed in the direction I wanted to go, and I joined the line of passengers and got on.

  “How much?” I said to the driver.

  “Five cents in the downtown zone. Say, it sure looks as if you’re gonna read a book.”

  “Yeah.”

  I found an unoccupied seat in the back and opened the book in my lap. It was St. Augustine’s City of God, in Latin. At the next stop, which was Main Street, most of the passengers got off and left me feeling kind of naked. I stayed where I was, pretending to be engrossed in Latin I couldn’t read.

  “Hey, bud,” the driver said. “You with the book. It cost you another fare if you want to stay on.”

  “Where do you go from here?”

  “To Farmers’ Square and up Fenton Boulevard. That where you want to go?”

  I got off in a hurry, hugging my book. The policeman on the corner glanced at me curiously, looked away for a moment at the traffic, and looked back at me with renewed interest. I went in at the first open door I came to. It happened to be a barbershop.

  The barber standing beside an empty chair at the back snapped a towel like a lion tamer who has seen a lion. “Shave or haircut, sir?”

  My nerves recoiled at the thought of spending half an hour in a barber’s chair, with a policeman just outside. “I just came in to get some hair tonic. I’ve been troubled by dandruff.”

  “Would you just mind taking your hat off, let me look at your scalp?”

  “Yes, I would. I just want you to sell me a bottle of hair tonic.”

  “Very well, sir. O.K. What kind would you wish?”

  “That kind.” I pointed at a bottle with a purple label.

  “Yes, sir. Virility Violet. Very effective for dandruff, Virility Violet. That will be one dollar, and three cents tax.”

  I set my book down on a table and took out my wallet to pay him. As I did so, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the policeman watching me through the window.

  “Is there a back way out of here?”

  “Yes, sir. Right through there. You sick or something?”

  “Yes,” I said, and left him.

  “Hey, you forgot your tonic! You forgot your book—”

  The door closing behind me cut off his voice, but I could still hear the police whistle in the street.

  chapter 17

  The rat in the maze was getting tired but as the experiment proceeded, the stimuli were becoming more powerful. I ran down a dark corridor, saw daylight under an ill-fitting door, and came out in an alley. Forty or fifty feet from the back door of the barbershop an old delivery truck stood shuddering, with its back doors swinging open. There was nobody in sight just then but there soon would be. I sprinted for the truck and crawled in. Behind the driver’s seat there was a pile of old burlap bags, and I covered myself with them and lay still, breathing the odor of rancid coffee beans.

  In a few seconds I heard somebody come out and, with a straining grunt, lift something heavy onto the back of the truck. Then a door slammed open and several pairs of running feet came down the alley.

  “Did you see a man in a dark-gray coat? He just came out of the back of the barbershop.”

  “Not me, officer,” a boy’s voice said. “I been loading this here truck and I didn’t see nobody.”

  “He must’ve gone the other way,” the barber said. “Out on Randall Street. I thought there was something funny about that character—”

  “Who?” asked the delivery boy.

  “He’s a murderer. He chopped up a woman into little pieces.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Let’s go!” the policeman said. “Maybe we can head him off.”

  Their heavy footsteps went away like a receding doom. The boy ran into the building and left me the action of my heart to listen to. After a while he came out and climbed into the driver’s seat. The idling motor took hold and the truck began to move.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” somebody yelled, and the driver slammed brakes on the truck and my breathing. My hand moved up my thigh, across my hip, and found the gun in my pocket.

  “What you want, Pete?”

  “You goin’ up past Gormlay’s?”

  “Yeah. I can drop you there. Hop in.”

  The door was flung open and the other seat creaked under weight. Two people in the front made it too bad for somebody. Probably me. But at least the truck was moving again, away from the danger zone.

  “That was a pretty slinky little blonde I seen you with last night,” the driver said.

  “Her?” The other boy’s voice was scornful. “I can take her or leave her alone. But she’s crazy about me, and that always helps. I give her a break every now and then.”

  “Any time you don’t need her, you can drop her on my doorstep. I got a use for slinky little blondes.”

  “I thought you was makin’ out with Rose?”

  “Sure, I see her regular. But what I always say, variety, you know, the spice of life. I figure I’m a little young to settle down for keeps. I wanta look ’em over first. Like in business now.”

  The truck bumped down a curb and turned left into a roaring stream of traffic. Minute by minute it was getting harder for me to lie still. Though I was probably getting enough air through the loosely woven burlap, I had the feeling that I wasn’t. I felt like a Turk in a sack on his last ride to the Bosphorus.

  “What’s it got to do with business? Pleasure is what I call it.”

  “Look at it this way,” the driver said. “I got something to sell, in a way. Does a guy that’s got something to sell let it go to the first bidder? No sir, not the way I do business! It’s the same with a dame. My plan is to look ’em over first and take the best I can get.”

  “You better watch out you don’t knock Rose up, then.”

  “Don’t worry about me. She knows her way around. And if she didn’t, I could always scrape up fifty bucks. Do it the scientific way, is what I always say.”

  “Yeah, science is a great thing. It musta been tough on a girl before they had all this modern science.”

  “I wonder what would make a guy cut a woman up like that,” the driver said.

  “That guy the cops were after? Jeez, I dunno. Mr. Hirschman said he heard over the radio it was for revenge. She was his stepmother or sumpin’, and treated him terrible when he was a kid.”

  “I betchit was sex. Take most of these murders, sex is at the bottom of it. Sex is what makes a man nuts. That’s the chief reason I go out with girls all the time.”

  “Because you’re nuts?”

  “Hell, no! Because I don’t wanna go nuts. I read a book, you gotta have a satisfactory sex life. That’s what it said in the book.”

  “You can let me off at the red light. I don’t get it about sex making a guy nuts. It never made me feel any different one way or the other.”

  “Yeah, but over a period of time,” the boy at the wheel said. “Over a period of time. So long, see you in church.”

  “Not
me you won’t!” The door opened and slammed, and the driver started to sing Don’t Be a Baby, Baby to himself and me.

  The truck went into gear and turned left again. After a couple of minutes the sounds of traffic became intermittent. The truck turned and bumped up a curb, moved over an uneven pavement, and came to a stop in a quiet place. The driver got out, leaving the engine rattling, and opened the doors at the back. The rear springs squeaked and he grunted again as he lifted something heavy off the truck. His footsteps staggered away and a door slammed.

  I threw off the sacks and slid off the back of the truck into another alley. The spectacles were still on my nose, blurring my vision. I tore them off and threw them into an empty carton at the end of a loading platform. Then I went out of the alley the way we had come in, and turned south along the street. It was a street of dirty little bars, four-dollar-permanent parlors, marked-down millinery shops, unappetizing delicatessens—the frayed hem of the business district. In the next block, among the two-bit hotels and store-front tabernacles, I felt even more at home with my sprouting beard and ruined clothes. Nearly everybody I met bore the stamp of poverty on faces strained thin or coarsened by the exigencies of marginal life, and nobody gave me a second glance.

  Some kind of dead reckoning guided me east at the next corner and south again at the one after that. I went down a lane along a high board fence at the rear of a row of tenements, and came out behind the Harvey Apartments. She won’t be home, I told myself, to take the curse off disappointment. If she is, she won’t want you cluttering up her day. In any case, you’ve got no right to run to her with your troubles. She’s got enough of her own.

  But the pride had been scared and beaten out of me. The open air and the bright sunlight frightened me the way a child is frightened of the dark. I felt as naked and desperate as a worm in the middle of a concrete road, nosing blindly for a place to hole up.

  A plain-white card bearing the signature Carla Kaufman was in the number-three mailbox, and I found the corresponding apartment on the ground floor at the rear. I knocked softly on the door and waited. A middle-aged woman in a cotton wrapper opened the door across the hall and picked up a quart of milk.

  “Carla’s never up this early in the morning,” she said. “She works late.”

  “I know.” I kept my face to the door so that she couldn’t get a good view of me. “Thank you.” She closed her door.

  I knocked again, and after an interval, slippered feet whispered inside the apartment and the door opened a crack. Her dark hair was tangled and her blue eyes puffed with sleep. She had on a blue quilted robe over blue pajamas. She looked at me uncertainly for a moment, as if she didn’t recognize me.

  “Remember me?” I said. “The bad penny?”

  She yawned, a wide, childish yawn and rubbed her fists into her eyes.

  “May I come in?”

  “I guess so.” She stepped back and I closed the door behind me. “What is this, anyway?”

  I realized suddenly that she and I were almost complete strangers, that I was bringing nothing but bad trouble to girl I hardly knew, and the realization tied my tongue. “I shouldn’t have come here,” I muttered. Circumstances the night before had made it easy for me to talk to her, but now she had retreated into a private identity.

  “It’s kind of early in the morning for visiting, isn’t it? Christ, I never get to bed before four.”

  “I didn’t come to visit you. The police are after me.”

  “I heard somebody got thrown out of the club last night. Was that you?”

  “It was me, all right, but that isn’t what’s worrying me. Kerch framed me for a murder. He killed Mrs. Weather and hung it on me.”

  “No!” She looked at me incredulously, and her morning pallor grew paler still.

  “Don’t tell me things like that don’t happen. They do when Kerch is around.”

  “Did you get to see Allister, like I told you?”

  “Yeah, but he fell down on me. He’s got a better front and a high-class line of talk, but he’s as bad as the rest.”

  “No, he’s not,” she said flatly. “He’s a good man.”

  “He may be kind to his mother, I wouldn’t know. I came to you because you were the only one I could think of.”

  She was frightened, but she did her best to hide it from me. “I’m glad you came to me. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, you know that? But I don’t know what to do.” She emitted a little snort that was halfway between a laugh and a sob.

  “Just let me stay here for a while. I wouldn’t last long on the streets. There’s nobody else lives with you?”

  “No. I told you I lived by myself. Take off your coat and hat, Johnny. Make yourself at home.”

  “You’re a good girl. I suppose you know you’re taking a big risk?”

  “Yeah, and so early in the morning, too,” she said in her ironic monotone. “I ought to murder you myself for waking me up so early in the morning.”

  “Don’t use that word, ‘murder.’ Use any other word instead.”

  “What’s the matter, you got the jitters, Johnny?” Her vivacity was a little forced but it was better than none.

  “I won’t try to tell you about it,” I said as I struggled out of the tight coat I had stolen. “If I didn’t have the jitters, there’d be something the matter with my head.”

  She hung my coat and hat in a closet which opened off the tiny hall, and led me into the living-room.

  “Better pull down the blinds,” I said, but she was already on her way to the windows.

  She switched on a floor lamp by an armchair. “Sit down. You look as if you’ve been up all night.”

  “I have.”

  “Go to sleep if you want to. I have only the one bed, but you can have it.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. But thanks for being so damn nice.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t get sentimental! You had any breakfast yet?”

  “No, I’m not hungry.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. Just give me three minutes to slip into some clothes, and I’ll make you breakfast.”

  She went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. I sat and thought of nothing, but a little spring of good feeling had begun to bubble up inside me. She was a good girl with a nice solid core. I felt like an alley cat that has been taken in out of the cold and given warm milk, except that an alley cat is never tempted to shed tears of gratitude. She was right. I was getting sentimental. And as sometimes happens for no good reason when you’re beaten down and exhausted, a node of heat had formed in my loins and was branching through my body. I caught myself waiting second by second for the bedroom door to open again. “What’s the matter, Weather,” I asked myself, “you got no shame?”

  She came out looking brisk, with her hair pinned up and an apron over her dress. Her only concession to my sex was a trace of lipstick on her mouth. But the stiff cotton front of the high-collared dress curved breathtakingly over her bosom and fell away into a tight-belted waist I could have put my hands around.

  “I like you in that dress,” I said lamely.

  “No kidding?” She looked at me and smiled. “You’re not talking as if you had the jitters now.”

  “You cured ’em.” I stood up and moved toward her.

  She moved away with a dancer’s bodily tact. “What you need is food, my boy. You better stay out of the kitchen. Somebody might see you from the back porch.”

  She let the door swing to and left me alone again. I heard the rattle of a pan on the stove, grease sizzling, eggs being broken.

  “You want ’em sunny side up?” she called.

  “Easy over,” I called back.

  While water ran into a coffee percolator and the eggs sputtered in hot grease, I looked around the room. There wasn’t much to look at: a chesterfield and matching armchair, a coffee table, a portable record player on a stand with a pile of records beside it, a magazine rack containing a Mademoiselle, a couple of copies of Life, and a cheap
reprint of a historical romance; but as it was, the room was crowded. There were no pictures on the wall, and no photograph anywhere. Either she hadn’t lived there long, or she hadn’t intended to stay. Even a migratory bird left more permanent traces than she had in her living-room.

  She came through the swinging door with a wooden tray in one hand, a pot of coffee in the other. She set down the tray on the coffee table beside me, and I saw that it contained a plate of four fried eggs and a pile of toast.

  “This looks wonderful,” I said. “Aren’t you going to eat, too?”

  “Not this early. I’ll have some coffee, though. You want your coffee black?”

  “Very black.”

  I stabbed an egg and discovered that I was hungry after all.

  She half-sat on the arm of the other chair with one slender knee swinging loose, and watched me over the rim of her coffee cup.

  “You want some more?” she said after a while. “I only made four on account of you not being hungry.”

  “I was wrong.” I finished the toast with my coffee. “But I’m not hungry any more. I almost feel good, in fact.”

  “I feel pretty good, too. God knows why.”

  “Don’t you ever get lonely?” I don’t know why I said it. Perhaps it was the homelessness of the room, or her attitude on the chair arm, perched like a bird waiting for a signal to take flight.

  “I don’t think so,” she said after a pause. “I never thought about it much. Maybe I’m a kind of hermit. I get awfully tired of all the people at the club, having to talk to them, and everything.”

  “Anybody would, but I didn’t exactly mean that. I mean when you come home, and probably make your own supper, and eat by yourself.”

  “I often eat with Sonia down the hall. And sometimes with Francie Sontag. She’s right upstairs. I go out a lot to eat, too. It’s no fun cooking for yourself. You know, I got a hell of a bang out of making breakfast for you. I’d hate to think I was the homemaker type.” She let herself fall back into the chair in a movement that was deliberately hoydenish, but with such unconscious grace that it looked right.