Trouble Follows Me

by Ross Macdonald

  “Maybe it has. I can’t speak for the Navy. I can tell you what C.N.O. would say if you took it to them, though. They’d tell you it was fundamentally insecure because, in the first place, you know about it, and in the second place other people do. Me, for instance. Navy codes are originated by naval officers and by a few carefully chosen civilians, and they keep them under their hats.”

  “By God, I never thought of that.” The light of triumph went out of his eyes like small sinking suns. “I’ve been shooting off my mouth all this time. Say, for all I know, maybe they’ve got it. Maybe they’re using it right now, and I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Maybe they are. I wouldn’t know.”

  I left him with whatever vicarious fulfilment he could squeeze out of that. His ideas had suggested a possibility to me which seemed worth investigating. Sue Sholto had worked in a broadcasting station.

  But the moldering body of Sue Sholto and the problem to which her dead face had introduced me were in the Territory of Hawaii, and I was on a train in Arizona. There was a more recent corpse and a more immediate problem to occupy my mind. Why had Hatcher died, assuming that it wasn’t accident? And what, if any, were the relations between Hatcher and Anderson? Though I had no notion of what to do or say when I saw him, I sat in ambush in the club car waiting for Anderson to pass through to the diner, as if the mere sight of his face might suggest the key to the conundrum.

  I waited a long time while the breakfast parade went by. Major Wright walking authoritatively on short legs. Rita Tessinger looking fresh and restless. Her mother with a complacent look of pleasant fatigue. The old lady from Grand Rapids armored in purple flowered silk against the menaces to her comfort which her quick old eyes found in every corner. Finally Mary looking very young and beautiful, and deceptively virginal.

  I told her about the first two and omitted the third.

  “You’re up early this morning,” she said.

  “I slept well last night.”

  “So did I. I dropped off as soon as my head hit the pillow.”

  “And I am the emperor’s white horse and Halsey can ride me any time he wishes. I’ve already eaten breakfast. Shall I wait for you here?”

  “Do.”

  She went away, her hips moving as if in gentle reminiscence. In a grey flannel dress her body had regained its mystery, and the cycle of desire began again in me.

  It was interrupted by the appearance of Miss Green, alone, in a green dress the color of artificial Easter grass and matching green shoes. When she came nearer I could see that she had added jade earrings to her travelling exhibition of jewelry. She looked sick.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Have you seen Mr. Anderson this morning?”

  “Didn’t you know? Mr. Anderson got off the train.”

  “But he told me he was going through to L.A.”

  “Oh, he was. But he made a long-distance call to one of his oil-fields, and they told him he better stay in New Mexico for a couple of days. So last night, or I guess it was early this morning, he got off at Gallup. He told me he was going to Albuquerque.”

  “I wish I’d known. I would have liked to say good-bye to him. You don’t have his California address, do you?”

  “No, he said he moves around so much. He’s got mine, though.” She giggled hoarsely. “Well, I guess I’ll go and see what they got for breakfast. See you later.”

  I felt blocked and yet, to a certain extent, vindicated. Perhaps my questions, which had seemed asinine at the time even to me, had frightened him off the train. If I could get the FBI in Los Angeles to cooperate with me, he could be found and asked those questions again.

  I went back to the Pullman and asked the porter if Anderson had taken his bags with him.

  “No, suh, he told Miss Green to tell me to put them in the baggage car. She said that he’ll be going on to Los Angeles in a couple of days and they’re to be held for him there. Mr. Gordon only had one bag and I guess he took that with him.”

  “Is Gordon gone too?”

  “Yes, suh. It suits me.”

  “Did the two of them leave together?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Drake. All I know is that they both got off at Gallup. Neither of them said a word to me.”

  Three possibilities occurred to me besides the one I had suggested. Gordon was following Anderson. Anderson was following Gordon. Or one had killed the other and bundled his body off the train. Actual melodrama and violence had accustomed my mind to move easily among melodramatic and violent possibilities. The melodrama of the situation deepened when I made inquiries and found out that nobody had seen Gordon or Anderson leave the train.

  Miss Green and Mary came back from the diner together, and I asked Miss Green if Anderson had made arrangements for his luggage in advance.

  “He left me a note. It was under my pillow when I woke up this morning. It was a very nice letter, not just a note.”

  “Are you sure he wrote it?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Who else would write me a note?”

  “Did you know his handwriting?”

  “I don’t know. No, I guess I don’t. But I’m positive he wrote it. He said he was going to Albuquerque and to send his bags on to L.A.”

  “Had he mentioned getting off the train before?”

  “No. I was surprised when I got his note.”

  “Where is it now?” I said.

  “The note? Just a minute.” She went to her compartment and searched it. But she came back empty-handed.

  “It’s gone,” she said. “I can’t understand it. I had it less than an hour ago.”

  The unreal painted flesh of her aging face hid her thoughts from me. I couldn’t tell whether she was lying or not. Everything she said and did was artificial, slightly off the human center-line. The steady trembling of her hands was as if her nervous system had received a delicate and irreparable damage. A corpse returned to life after the tissues had decayed a little would have moved and spoken as she did, and had her taste in clothes.

  Miss Green returned to her love-story magazines, and quickly became absorbed in a Spicy Romances. I went back to our compartment and sat down beside Mary.

  “Miss Green wants to know if there’s anything the matter,” I said in a low voice. “If you ask me, there’s something the matter with her.”

  “What do you mean? She’s a type you see all over. An ignorant woman who got hold of money somewhere, and doesn’t know how to use it on herself.”

  “Yeah, but how did she get her money?” I looked over my shoulder at Miss Green. Her fading prurient eyes were fastened on the pages of her pulp magazine. “There’s something about her I don’t like, something reptilian.”

  “Maybe she won it in a lottery,” Mary said with a laugh. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Sam. She’s a pathetic old hag. I think I know women, and that’s all I can see in her.”

  “She was pretty friendly with Anderson, too. I was beginning to feel there was something queer about him and now he’s dropped out of sight. Too many people have been dropping through trap-doors. Gordon’s gone, too.”

  “Gordon?”

  “The man that was spying on you the other night in the club car. He left the train last night.”

  “Is that sinister? For all you know, he may have had a perfectly respectable reason—”

  “Maybe he had. But I’m not taking it for granted. He acted fishy.”

  “Everything’s looking fishy to you, Sam. Aren’t you letting the whole thing get you down?”

  “You’re damn right I am. Can’t you see we’re both in this thing up to our necks? You or I may be the next to drop through the trap-door. I almost did.”

  “I know you did.” She leaned towards me and put a firm white hand on my knee. “Then why do you insist on sticking your neck out?”

  “There’s trouble in the air, and I believe in meeting trouble halfway. I want something to get hold of.”

  “But what if there isn’t anythin
g to get hold of?”

  “A minute ago you said I was sticking my neck out. Now there’s nothing to get hold of, and all this is my imagination. But I suppose I can’t expect a woman to be logical.”

  “Maybe I’m not logical. I follow my feelings. And my feeling is that you should try to forget about this business.”

  I couldn’t forget it, and I knew that she couldn’t either, but I dropped the subject. My nerves were stretched and waiting, but there was nothing to do. I did my best to enjoy the long peaceful day.

  We read and talked, intimate desultory talk. The train dragged itself across Arizona, spanned the Colorado gorge, spiralled up into the last great wall of mountains, slid down through blue-white light into the California coastal plain and the green season.

  At ten-thirty that night the train stopped for the last time in the Los Angeles station, and we left it together. Climbing up the long sloping tunnel from the train, I had more than the usual feeling of strangeness on coming into an unfamiliar city. It was like climbing out of a tight little hell into an unpredictable chaos. Even my own intentions were unpredictable, but at the last minute I made up my mind.

  “I’m going to Santa Barbara,” I told Mary at the baggage counter.

  “But you said you were coming to San Diego with me!” There was an angry flush in her cheeks. Her proprietary tone made me angry, too.

  “I’m not,” I said bluntly. “I may see you in Diego tomorrow night.”

  “What on earth are you going to Santa Barbara for?”

  “I’m going to look up Laura Eaton. The girl Hatcher wrote the letter to.”

  She put her hand on my arm and drew me aside from the crowd at the checking desk. “Please don’t go, Sam. Stay in Los Angeles with me tonight.”

  “You’re not jealous of a girl I’ve never seen?”

  “I’m not jealous of anybody. I just don’t want you to go to Santa Barbara. I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “What might happen to you. You mustn’t go running around the country looking for trouble.”

  “I don’t have to look for it. It found me long ago: I want to know what’s in that letter, and I have to go to Santa Barbara to find out.”

  “And if I don’t like I can lump it!” she said flatly.

  She took her hand away from my arm. I felt very much alone.

  PART IV

  THE END OF THE RIDE

  11

  I LEFT her at the taxi-stand. She didn’t say good-bye. I checked my bag through to San Diego, and took a northbound train. The hundred-mile journey in a coach was not pleasant. I was sick of trains anyway, and conflicting feelings were churning inside me. I hated to leave Mary standing, but unfinished events were tugging at me. I couldn’t relax until I had done something, and the only feasible action I could think of was a visit to Laura Eaton, whoever she might be.

  Between one and two in the morning I got off at the Santa Barbara station. The town had the salt smell of a seaport, but it was as dark and deserted as any prairie village in the middle of the night. I found a telephone book in a station booth and looked up Laura Eaton. There was a William Eaton at 2124 Bath Street.

  I walked up the empty main street and finally captured a nocturnal taxi-driver dozing at the wheel. He took me out Bath Street. It was a quiet residential street of one-story stucco and frame houses nestling bone-white among palms and oleanders and flowering yews. To the right the mountains seemed to rise straight up behind them against the dim moonlit sky.

  The mountains and the moonlight, the tropical trees and houses, the warm sea-laden wind which came in through the open windows of the cab reminded me of Oahu. I had a moment of false recognition as if I were riding to see the already seen, to find the already found: Sue Sholto hanging like a grotesque vine against a briefly moonlit wall. I had an intuition that I was completing an obscure and fearful cycle, but I had no sense of what the fulfilment would be.

  Laura Eaton at least wore no rope around her neck. She greeted me at her door, which opened six inches on a chain, with a .38 revolver in her hand.

  I said: “It looks as if they got here before I did.”

  “Put up your hands,” she said in a voice which might have been pleasant under other circumstances. When I had done so, she unhooked the chain. “Now step inside while I call the police. If you make a false move I’ll shoot you in the stomach.”

  She was a tall woman in her late twenties. Her tawny hair was down her back, matching the tan wool bathrobe which she wore. Holding her .38 steadily in her right hand she patted my pockets and armpits. She seemed surprised to find no gun, and looked at me for a moment without speaking.

  “You’re Laura Eaton, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “My name is Sam Drake. My friends call me Sam and always pull a gun on me when I knock on their door. It’s a game we play.”

  “My house was entered today. I don’t propose to have it entered again.”

  “But I’ve already entered it. Look. Now call the police.”

  She looked at me uncertainly. “Who are you anyway? Are you really in the Navy?”

  “Do you know a man called Hatcher?”

  “Rodney Hatcher?”

  “I don’t know his first name. He comes from Kansas City.”

  “That’s Rodney.”

  “He died the night before last.”

  “He died! Is that why you’ve come, to tell me?” She had forgotten her gun. I lowered my hands.

  “That’s one reason. Point your gun away from my stomach, will you? It makes my stomach feel funny.”

  She clicked the safety and dropped the gun on the chesterfield, where it fell with a soft thump that was soothing to my nerves. “Why did you come at this time of night?” she said.

  “I just got here. I came as soon as I could.”

  “Did Rodney send you? Tell me, what happened to Rodney?”

  “He didn’t exactly send me. He wrote you a letter just before he died. I thought it might have some bearing on his death. I came to you to find out.”

  “I haven’t had a letter from him for weeks. Not since he wrote me from Europe that he was coming home for reassignment. How did he die? Was he wounded?”

  “Were you and he very close?”

  “We were good friends. I’ve known him off and on for years. We went to school together in Kansas City. You needn’t pull any punches, if that’s what you mean.”

  I told her briefly what had happened to Rodney Hatcher, not omitting my suspicions of Anderson and Gordon.

  A few tears made shining tracks down her face, combining at the point of her chin to form a clinging drop of brine. She sat down on the edge of a chair and half turned away from me to use a handkerchief. “Poor Rodney,” she said in a deep soft voice. “It was a beastly way to die.”

  “It was painless. You just go out like a light. I know from experience.”

  “It was beastly for him.” She looked at me with fire and ice in her eyes. Her body was proud. I thought that Hatcher was lucky to have such a mourner. “He should have died in action. He should have died fighting.”

  “Who broke into your house today?” I said after a pause. “There may be a connection between that and Rodney’s death.”

  “Do you think so? Do you think perhaps he was looking for Rodney’s letter?”

  “It seems very likely to me. Did you see what he looked like?”

  “I didn’t see him very well. I’ll tell you what happened. This afternoon I ran over to Eva Raine’s for an hour or so—she’s a friend of mine who lives down the street.”

  “Had your afternoon mail come yet?”

  “No, it came when I was gone. I started home about three. When I was about half a block from home I saw this man come down off my verandah. I didn’t know then that he’d been in the house. I thought it was someone who had come to see me or father, so naturally I called to him and waved. He took one look at me over his shoulder and headed in the other d
irection, walking as fast as he could go.

  “When I got home I found that the lock on my front door had been forced. The writing-desk had been ransacked and the bureaus and cupboards had been searched. I called the police and they said they’d hunt for him, but I haven’t heard from them since. As a matter of fact, nothing was missing. I left my purse in the house in plain sight, and nothing in it was taken.”

  “You say your afternoon mail was there when you got home?”

  “It was on the floor, right there.” She pointed to the front door, which opened directly on the living-room where we were sitting. I turned my head and noticed that the door had a letter-slot in it. I also noticed that she had left it ajar.

  “From the fact that he searched the house it looks as if Rodney’s letter didn’t come in that mail,” I said. “It should be here tomorrow morning. It was mailed two days ago.”

  “If that man comes back I’ll shoot him.” Her full defiant lips pushed out, and her wide eyes became tigerish.

  “I believe you will. Did you get any idea at all of what he looked like?”

  “He was tall. He looked quite broad. The very first moment I thought it was father, but then I realized that father couldn’t have gotten back from Phoenix so soon.”

  “Did he have black hair?”

  “I’m not sure—” In the midst of her sentence she suddenly became quite still. Even her mouth was immobilized half open.

  “It wasn’t I, Mr. Drake, if that’s what you’re implying,” a man’s voice said from the direction of the door. I turned to see Gordon step quietly into the room with a contemptuously calm look in his black eyes.

  I got up without haste and walked towards him. When I was near enough I dropped my right hand to the level of my knee and brought it up in an uppercut to the point of his long jaw. It was a sucker-punch, but he carried a gun. He went down with his back against the door, which slammed shut. Almost before he hit the floor there was a gun in his hand and I was looking into its round empty eye. The gun’s eye followed me as he rose to his feet.