Trouble Follows Me

by Ross Macdonald

  “My name is Gordon. I am an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. My special field is subversive activities, that is, catching spies and traitors.”

  “This is Joe Doss, the Captain’s steward,” Eric said. Joe Doss was a small fat man with an almost hairless head and the face of a dusky moon. “This is Albert Feathers, one of the mess-boys who shared a compartment with Land.” Albert Feathers was a lanky mulatto with large liquid eyes, a convulsive Adam’s apple, and hair that was forcibly straight.

  “Hector Land,” Gordon continued, “is suspected of being a spy and a traitor. He was apparently a member of an illegal organization named Black Israel. Did he ever mention it to you?”

  “No, sir. He never mentioned anything like that to me.” Joe Doss disowned Hector Land in the same spirit, almost the same words, that Eric had used in disowning Sue Sholto: “I didn’t know him very well. He worked down in the wardroom and I worked up in the Captain’s galley.”

  “Feathers, you went on liberty with Land more than once,” Eric said.

  “Yes, sir,” Feathers admitted in a dull voice. “But I wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with his lodge.”

  “Did he try to get you to join Black Israel?” Gordon said.

  “Yes, sir. He didn’t call it Black Israel, but that must be what he was talking about. He said it was to make the dark people strong.”

  “By what methods?”

  “He didn’t say. I told him he was just going to get himself into trouble, and when I told him that he just shut up like a clam. He said he’d get me if I said anything to anybody.”

  “You should have told me or your division officer about that,” Eric said. “You might have saved a lot of trouble.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said tonelessly. “I’ll know better next time.”

  “Did Hector Land try to persuade you to spy for him?”

  “Oh, no, sir, nothing like that. He didn’t say anything about me spying. He just told me about the secret society. I just thought it was like an ordinary secret society.” Feathers’ large eyes seemed ready to dissolve in tears. His feet were rooted to the floor but his long body moved restlessly under his blue dungarees.

  “Where did Hector Land get his money?”

  “I don’t know, sir. He got his pay.”

  “I’m not talking about his pay. He had more money than the Navy ever paid him. Where did he get it?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Maybe he got it spying.”

  “Why you making that up, Albert?” Joe Doss said. “You don’t know if he made his money spying.”

  “No, sir. I thought that’s what you meant.”

  “Hector Land made money gambling,” Joe Doss said.

  “Yes, sir,” Feathers echoed. “He made money gambling. He ran a pool. He told me one time that back in Detroit he used to be overlook man for a policy wheel.”

  Gordon turned to Doss, who seemed the more intelligent of the two: “What kind of a pool?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It was some kind of a numbers game.”

  “Did you ever buy a chance in it?”

  “No, sir, I don’t gamble.”

  “We’re not interested in checking up on gambling just now,” Eric said. “If you know anything, let’s have it. You won’t suffer for it. It may do you some good.”

  A flicker of hopefulness passed over Feathers’ sullen brown face. “I know what kind of a pool it was, sir. It was a ship pool. All the dark boys bought chances in it. Not just on the ship. On the beach, too.”

  “What is a ship pool?” Gordon said.

  “Well, all the ships have numbers and if a ship came in with our number we won.”

  Gordon straightened up in his chair as if someone had pressed a trigger in his spine. But his voice was almost casual when he said:

  “I’m not sure I understand. You mean that Hector Land based his numbers game on the goings and comings of naval vessels in Pearl Harbor?”

  “Yes, sir. When we were in Frisco he had the pool, too.”

  “That’s impossible!” Eric said angrily. “Only officers have access to that information.”

  “Where did Land get his information?” Gordon said.

  “We could see the ships, sir,” Feathers said. “Everybody knows what ships are in. And he could always check up on the daily Ships Present list.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Joe Doss, like the Chinaman who wrote on the wall where he had hidden his money that there was no money hidden there.

  “I didn’t say anything about you, Joe,” said Albert Feathers, like the other Chinaman who wrote on the wall after he had stolen the money that he personally was innocent of the theft.

  Eric turned on Joe Doss. “Have you been messing with the Captain’s Ships Present list?”

  “No, sir, I don’t ever mess with anything on the Captain’s desk.” Drops of sweat came out on his high black forehead like globules of rendered fat. He swivelled a swift revengeful look at Albert Feathers.

  “I want these men to make a deposition,” Gordon said to Eric. “This evidence is of first-rate importance.”

  “You’re damned right it is. I’ll have to take the matter up with the Captain, but there’ll be no difficulty there.” He looked at Doss. “There’s another matter I’ll take up with the Captain at the same time. Doss, you’re coming with me to see the Master-at Arms.”

  Doss followed him out on hopeless legs. Feathers stood where he was, apparently occupied with intimations of disaster.

  “You may go, Feathers,” Gordon said. “I’ll want to get in touch with you in the morning. If you’ve told a straight story and continue to tell one you have nothing to fear.” The faint trace of ham in his nature added with dramatic effectiveness: “The United States Government will appreciate your assistance.”

  “Don’t talk this around,” I said before Feathers left the room.

  Gordon turned to me with a tense smile. “By God, this case is breaking. Now to give the Mexican police a shot in the arm. We’ve got to get our hands on Land.”

  “Land had a smooth way of gathering information. I wonder if he thought that up himself. He didn’t strike me as particularly bright.”

  “I doubt it. There are real brains behind this business, Drake. With the possible exception of the Schneider case, this is the trickiest business I’ve worked on in this war. Schneider had the brains, but he was a piker compared with this outfit. This is nothing less than a conspiracy to give the Japs the whole outline of our naval movements in the Pacific.”

  I said not without complacence: “I’ve suspected it for a hell of a long time.”

  “The pattern is beginning to emerge,” Gordon said. “As I see it it’s something like this. Hector Land collected information which he passed on to another agent in Honolulu. It’s unlikely that he was the only one supplying information, but he’s the only one we know about so far. The second agent—”

  “Sue Sholto?”

  “Perhaps. We haven’t enough evidence to say certainly yet. The second agent sifted the information, encoded the significant items, and broadcast them via the marked records to be picked up by Nip submarines lying off the Islands. The information was then re-encoded and relayed to Tokyo, or it may have been taken to Wake Island for rebroadcast.”

  “But where does Anderson come in?”

  “Probably on the administrative end. He coordinated the whole thing from the mainland. There doesn’t seem much doubt that he used Black Israel to recruit, or develop, potential spies. I’d guess from what Hefler told me about Land’s background, that the race riot made him ripe for subversion, and then Black Israel sucked him in. Black Israel also made its contribution to psychological warfare, by stirring up interracial strife in an arsenal city like Detroit. The web has more than one strand, and it looks to me as if Anderson sat in the center of it.”

  “You think he’s the head of the organization, then?”

  “I can’t say. We’ve got so pitifully little to go on so far. I admit he didn’t
strike me as particularly big, or particularly dangerous. But I gave up spot judgments long ago.”

  Eric returned with a guarantee that Doss would be available when he was wanted. Gordon began to ask him questions about Land’s disappearance. I told them I had a date, and went ashore. The Officer of the Deck gave me a jeep to the main gate of the Repair Base, and I took a taxi from there. It was barely nine, and I had plenty of time to get to the hotel by ten.

  On the way I decided to stop at the Santa Fe station for my bag. Eric had lent me the use of his razor, but I needed a change of linen. The taxi let me out at the side entrance of the station, and I asked the driver to wait.

  The baggage room was crowded with sailors retrieving their sea-bags and foot-lockers, a few drunks there for the company, a few civilians in clothes that looked a little frivolous and a little pathetic among all the lean blues. The clothes of a woman at the counter caught my eye particularly. She was wearing a tall felt hat trimmed with long iridescent feathers, gold pendant earrings, and two silver foxes which curled amorously around her neck but stared with cold button eyes.

  The counter was lined three deep but I moved towards it. A sailor said without looking at me: “Hey, quit your shoving!”—then turned and added, “Sir.”

  The woman with the foxes looked around and caught my eye. She gave no sign of recognition, and quickly looked away again. But not before I had recognized the rouged and raddled face of Miss Green.

  I said, “Miss Green,” but she didn’t look around. I pushed slowly towards her but before I reached her she left the counter. The sailors made way for her and she was at the door before I could work my way out of the crowd.

  I caught her on the sidewalk and took her arm. “Miss Green, I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Let me go, I don’t know you.” I looked closely into her face in the light of a streetlamp, and saw that her eyes were empty and hot. But it was not the evil look in her eyes which went through my brain like a knife and quivered there. It was the odor of ether on her breath.

  13

  SHE tore her arm from my grasp and ran laboriously on high heels to a long black sedan which was parked ahead of my taxi. A man in the front seat who seemed to be wearing a chauffeur’s cap opened the door for her. She climbed in, the door slammed behind her, the black car jumped forward with the long rising whoop of a powerful engine, and Miss Green was out of my life again. But not forever.

  I jumped into my taxi and told the driver to follow that car.

  “I will if I can,” he said as he shifted gears. “That’s a Cadillac.”

  When we turned the corner the black car was out of sight. We took a chance on the next corner and saw it a block ahead at Broadway, held up by a red light.

  “Slow up,” I said to the driver. “I don’t want them to know they’re being followed.”

  “Say, what is this? Are you in Naval Intelligence?”

  “I’m working on a case with the FBI.”

  “No kiddin’? Wait till I tell the boys.”

  “There won’t be anything to tell them if you lose sight of that car.”

  “Brother, I’ll run this crate down to an oil spot before I lose ’em.”

  Before we reached the intersection the light changed. As the black car leapt away I caught a glimpse of an old evil face at the rear window. I took off my hat and held it in my hands and crouched low in my seat. There was heavy traffic in downtown San Diego that night, and maneuverability was more important than speed. My driver took his cab through impossible openings which closed a foot from the rear fenders. He aimed nonchalantly into traffic snarls which opened up like the Red Sea just before we piled up in them. We curved and skidded across the southern half of San Diego, past the all-night movies, the seedy restaurants and mushroom hamburger stands, the penny arcades, the liquor stores and warehouses, the storefront churches and four-bit flophouses, past the fish factories and the junk yards. Out of San Diego and through National City we kept the black car in sight.

  On the other side of National City it accelerated. Its taillight went away from us like a small red comet and was swallowed up by the night. Simultaneously I became aware that I was on the last lap of my long ride from Detroit to Tia Juana.

  The driver drove hard for a few minutes, his motor vibrating like a donkey engine. I bounced around in the back seat as the cab climbed and descended the looping coastal hills. At Palm City he slowed down and said over his shoulder:

  “I tore the guts out of this baby, but she’s out of her class trying to catch a Cadillac. God damn it.”

  “This is the road to Tia Juana, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it looks like they’re going to Tia Juana.”

  “Will you take me there?”

  “You’re the boss. I’ll have to charge you special fare.”

  “This is what I’ve been saving my money for.”

  He accelerated to a steady fifty and drove for another ten minutes in silence. We topped a rise and saw the lights of Tia Juana below us. A few minutes later we stopped at the border.

  “Did a black Cadillac sedan go through here a few minutes ago?” the cab-driver asked the border guard who looked at my I.D. card. Under the road lights I got my first good look at the driver’s face: fat and forty, pug-nosed, with black Irish eyes. According to the license which was pinned up in front of me, his name was Halloran.

  “Yeah. The big time. Uniformed chauffeur and all.”

  “You don’t know who she was?”

  “Nope. She’s been through here before but I don’t know her. Why? They cut in on you?”

  “No. I just thought I seen her before.”

  “Some pan,” the guard said as Halloran pushed in the clutch. “She looked like she just crawled out of the woodwork and was just about ready to crawl back in.”

  At the first corner in Tia Juana a barefoot boy with a flapping shirttail waved a pasteboard box and cried: “Gum! Chiclets!”

  “Wait a minute,” I said to Halloran.

  “You come down here to buy gum?” he said cynically. But he stopped the car. The hungry-eyed Mexican boy boarded the car like a buccaneer. “Chiclets—two for a nickel!” he cried.

  I held a fifty-cent piece in the light between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. “Did you see a big black Cadillac sedan go past here a little while ago?”

  “Yes, señor.”

  “Where did it go?”

  He pointed to the right, up the hill to the center of the town.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Yes, señor. That way.”

  “Do you know who was in it?”

  “No, señor. American lady.”

  His eyes were on the coin with an intent and ageless gaze. His thin sallow face could have been anywhere between ten and sixteen. I dropped the coin in his box and he jumped from the running-board and ran away in the dust, his shoulderblades flapping through his shirt like vestigial wings.

  We went up the little hill in the direction he had pointed, past weather-warped clapboard dwellings, tamale stands, the one-story establishments of cheapjack lawyers whose signs advertised quick and easy divorces. We stopped at a gas station at the top of the street, and I asked the Mexican attendant if he had seen my friend in the black Cadillac.

  “Señora Toulouse?” he said, and widened his mouth with a leer which separated the hairs of his thin black moustache. “I think she has gone home. She is your friend?”

  “I met her on the train. She asked me to come and see her in Tia Juana. But I don’t know where she lives.”

  “You don’t know where she lives? Then you do not know Tia Juana.” He leered once more, as if there were curiously amusing secrets unknown to those who did not know Tia Juana.

  “That’s right, I don’t.”

  He turned to Halloran: “You know where the girls are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Señora Toulouse has the biggest house in the street. You will see it. It is built of stone.”

&nbs
p; I gave him a dollar, which he folded and tucked into his waistband. He stood back and leered us amiably out of sight.

  “What the hell is this, anyway?” Halloran said.

  We had turned into a noisy street which slanted down between brilliantly lighted houses into final darkness. There was a steady male traffic on the footpaths, and on the lighted porches girls like assorted fruit on display. Between the two, the men in the street and the waiting girls in the houses, there was a low tension which exploded continuously in wisecracks, obscene repartee, and invitations.

  We stopped at the first corner and a lean dark youth in a white open-necked shirt appeared from nowhere. He said: “You want something very, very nice?”

  “I’m looking for Señora Toulouse.”

  “Señora Toulouse phooey,” he said ardently. “They are old stuff and also they supercharge. You come with me. I show you something.” He opened the back door of the cab, leaned forward with his hand on my knee, and whispered: “Virgin!”

  I gave him a dollar and said: “Where is Señora Toulouse?”

  “Si, señor,” he said courteously. “It is there. The big house in the middle of the block.” He leaned forward again: “Will you tell her Raoul sent you? Raoul?”

  I almost closed the door on his narrow, hopeful face. We moved down the road and parked across the street from the big house. It was an imposing mansion of grey stone, not indigenous to the country but squarebuilt like old Ohio farmhouses. It had three stories, all of which were lit, but blinds were drawn over every window. The front door was shut and there were no girls on the porch, but there was the sound of music from inside.

  “I’m going in,” I said. “If I don’t come out in half an hour go to the police.”

  “No use going to the police. You know what this is, don’t you? These cathouses are protected by the local cops, that’s why they’re here.”

  “Go to the police at the border. Then drive back to Diego and go to Mary Thompson at the Grant, got that? Tell her—wait a minute, I’ll write a note.”

  I tore a page out of my address-book, wrote a note to Mary telling her to get in touch with Gordon, addressed it and gave it to Halloran. “This is if I don’t come out in half-an-hour. It’s ten now.”