The Galton Case

by Ross Macdonald

  “It depends on how soon they catch the killer. They may have him already, in which case they won’t bother with secondary leads. Do you have any idea who it was, Mrs. Matheson?”

  “How could I? I haven’t seen Pete in ten years, I told you.”

  “What happened in Luna Bay?”

  “Change the record, can’t you? If anything happened, which I can’t remember, it was strictly between me and Pete. Nothing to do with anybody else, understand?”

  Her voice and looks were altering under pressure. She seemed to have broken through into a lower stratum of experience and a coarser personality. And she knew it. She pulled her purse toward her and held on to it with both hands. It was a good purse, beautifully cut from genuine lizard. In contrast with it, her hands were rough, their knuckles swollen and cracked by years of work.

  She raised her eyes to mine. I caught the red reflection of fear in their centers. She was afraid of me, and she was afraid to leave me.

  “Mrs. Matheson, Peter Culligan was murdered today—”

  “You expect me to go into mourning?”

  “I expect you to give me any information that might have a bearing on his death.”

  “I already did. You can leave me alone, understand? You’re not getting me mixed up in no murder. Any murder.”

  “Did you ever hear of a man named Anthony Galton?”

  “No.”

  “John Brown?”

  “No.”

  I could see the bitter forces of her will gathering in her face. She exerted them, and got up, and walked away from me and her fear.

  chapter 8

  I WENT back to the telephone booths and looked up the name Chad Bolling in the Bay Area directories. I didn’t expect to find it, after more than twenty years, but I was still running in luck. Bolling had a Telegraph Hill address. I immured myself in one of the booths and called him.

  A woman’s voice answered: “This is the Bolling residence.”

  “Is Mr. Bolling available?”

  “Available for what?” she said abruptly.

  “It has to do with magazine publication of a poem. The name is Archer,” I added, trying to sound like a wealthy editor.

  “I see.” She softened her tone. “I don’t know where Chad is at the moment. And I’m afraid he won’t be home for dinner. I do know he’ll be at The Listening Ear later this evening.”

  “The Listening Ear?”

  “It’s a new night club. Chad’s giving a reading there tonight. If you’re interested in poetry, you owe it to yourself to catch it.”

  “What time does he go on?”

  “I think ten.”

  I rented a car and drove it up Bayshore to the city, where I parked it under Union Square. Above the lighted towers of the hotels, twilight had thickened into darkness. A damp chill had risen from the sea; I could feel it through my clothes. Even the colored lights around the square had a chilly look.

  I bought a pint of whisky to ward off the chill and checked in at the Salisbury, a small side-street hotel where I usually stayed in San Francisco. The desk clerk was new to me. Desk clerks are always moving up or down. This one was old and on his way down; his sallow face drooped in the pull of gravity. He handed me my key reluctantly:

  “No luggage, sir?”

  I showed him my bottle in its paper bag. He didn’t smile.

  “My car was stolen.”

  “That’s too bad.” His eyes were sharp and incredulous behind fussy little pince-nez. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to pay in advance.”

  “All right.” I gave him the five dollars and asked for a receipt.

  The bellhop who took me up in the old open ironwork elevator had been taking me up in the same elevator for nearly twenty years. We shook hands. His was crumpled by arthritis.

  “How are you, Coney?”

  “Fine, Mr. Archer, fine. I’m taking a new pill, phenyl-buta-something. It’s doing wonders for me.”

  He stepped out and did a little soft-shoe step to prove it. He’d once been half of a brother act that played the Orpheum circuit. He danced me down the corridor to the door of my room.

  “What brings you up to the City?” he said when we were inside. To San Franciscans, there’s only one city.

  “I flew up for a little entertainment.”

  “I thought Hollywood was the world’s center of entertainment.”

  “I’m looking for something different,” I said. “Have you heard of a new club called The Listening Ear?”

  “Yeah, but you wouldn’t like it.” He shook his white head. “I hope you didn’t come all the way up here for that.”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “It’s a culture cave. One of these bistros where guys read poems to music. It ain’t your speed at all.”

  “My taste is becoming more elevated.”

  His grin showed all his remaining teeth. “Don’t kid an old man, eh?”

  “Ever hear of Chad Bolling?”

  “Sure. He promotes a lot of publicity for himself.” Coney looked at me anxiously. “You really going in for the poetry kick, Mr. Archer? With music?”

  “I have long yearned for the finer things.”

  Such as a good French dinner at a price I could pay. I took a taxi to the Ritz Poodle Dog, and had a good French dinner. When I finished eating, it was nearly ten o’clock.

  The Listening Ear was full of dark blue light and pale blue music. A combo made up of piano, bass fiddle, trumpet, and drums was playing something advanced. I didn’t have my slide rule with me, but the four musicians seemed to understand each other. From time to time they smiled and nodded like space jockeys passing in the night.

  The man at the piano seemed to be the head technician. He smiled more distantly than the others, and when the melody had been done to death, he took the applause with more exquisite remoteness. Then he bent over his keyboard again like a mad scientist.

  The tight-hipped waitress who brought my whisky-and-water was interchangeable with nightclub girls anywhere. Even her parts looked interchangeable. But the audience was different from other nightclub crowds. Most of them were young people with serious expressions on their faces. A high proportion of the girls had short straight hair through which they ran their fingers from time to time. Many of the boys had longer hair than the girls, but they didn’t run their fingers through it so much. They stroked their beards instead.

  Another tune failed to survive the operation, and then the lights went up. A frail-looking middle-aged man in a dark suit sidled through the blue curtains at the rear of the room. The pianist extended his hand and assisted him onto the bandstand. The audience applauded. The frail-looking man, by way of a bow, allowed his chin to subside on the big black bow tie which blossomed on his shirt front. The applause rose to a crescendo.

  “I give you Mr. Chad Bolling,” the pianist said. “Master of all the arts, singer of songs to be sung, painter of pictures, hepcat, man of letters. Mr. Chad Bolling.”

  The clapping went on for a while. The poet lifted his hand as if in benediction, and there was silence.

  “Thank you, friends,” he said. “With the support of my brilliant young friend Fingers Donahue, I wish to bring to you tonight, if my larynx will permit, my latest poem.” His mouth twisted sideways as if in self-mockery. “It ain’t chopped liver.”

  He paused. The instruments began to murmur behind him. Bolling took a roll of manuscript out of his inside breast pocket and unrolled it under the light.

  “ ‘Death Is Tabu,’ ” he said, and began to chant in a hoarse carrying voice that reminded me of a carnival spieler. He said that at the end of the night he sat in wino alley where the angels drink canned heat, and that he heard a beat. It seemed a girl came to the mouth of the alley and asked him what he was doing in death valley. “ ‘Death is the ultimate crutch,’ she said,” he said. She asked him to come home with her to bed.

  He said that sex was the ultimate crutch, but he turned out to be wrong. It seemed he
heard a gong. She fled like a ghost, and he was lost, at the end of the end of the night.

  While the drummer and the bass fiddler made shock waves on the roof, Bolling raised his voice and began to belt it out. About how he followed her up and down and around and underground, up Russian Hill and Nob Hill and Telegraph Hill and across the Bay Bridge and back by way of the Oakland ferry. So he found the sphinx on Market Street cadging drinks and they got tight and danced on the golden asphalt of delight.

  Eventually she fell upon her bed. “I’m star-transfixed,” she said. He drank the canned hell of her lips, and it went on like that for quite a while, while the music tittered and moaned. She finally succeeded in convincing him that death was the ultimate crutch, whatever that meant. She knew, because it happened she was dead. “Good night, mister,” she said, or he said she said. “Good night, sister,” he said.

  The audience waited to make sure that Bolling was finished, then burst into a surge of clapping, interspersed with bravos and ole’s. Bolling stood with pursed lips and absorbed it like a little boy sucking soda pop through a straw. While the lower part of his face seemed to be enjoying itself, his eyes were puzzled. His mouth stretched in a clownish grin:

  “Thanks, cats. I’m glad you dig me. Now dig this.”

  He read a poem about the seven blind staggers of the soul, and one about the beardless wonders on the psycho wards who were going to be the gurus of the new truth. At this point I switched off my hearing aid, and waited for it to be over. It took a long time. After the reading there were books to be autographed, questions to be answered, drinks to be drunk.

  It was nearly midnight when Bolling left a tableful of admirers and made for the door. I got up to follow him. A large girl with a very hungry face cut in in front of me. She attached herself to Bolling’s arm and began to talk into his ear, bending over because she was taller than he was.

  He shook his head. “Sorry, kiddie, I’m a married man. Also I’m old enough to be your father.”

  “What are years?” she said. “A woman’s wisdom is ageless.”

  “Let’s see you prove it, honey.”

  He shook her loose. Tragically clutching the front of her baggy black sweater, she said: “I’m not pretty, am I?”

  “You’re beautiful, honey. The Greek navy could use you for launching ships. Take it up with them, why don’t you?”

  He reached up and patted her on the head and went out. I caught up with him on the sidewalk as he was hailing a taxi.

  “Mr. Bolling, do you have a minute?”

  “It depends on what you want.”

  “I want to buy you a drink, ask you a few questions.”

  “I’ve had a drink. Several, in fact. It’s late. I’m beat. Write me a letter, why don’t you?”

  “I can’t write.”

  He brightened a little. “You mean to tell me you’re not an unrecognized literary genius? I thought everybody was.”

  “I’m a detective. I’m looking for a man. You may have known him at one time.”

  His taxi had turned in the street and pulled into the curb. He signaled the driver to wait:

  “What’s his name?”

  “John Brown.”

  “Oh sure, I knew him well at Harper’s Ferry. I’m older than I look.” His empty clowning continued automatically while he sized me up.

  “In 1936 you printed a poem of his in a magazine called Chisel.”

  “I’m sorry you brought that up. What a lousy name for a magazine. No wonder it folded.”

  “The name of the poem was ‘Luna.’ ”

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember it. A lot of words have flowed under the bridge. I did know a John Brown back in the thirties. Whatever happened to John?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Okay, buy me a drink. But not at the Ear, eh? I get tired of the shaves and the shave-nots.”

  Bolling dismissed his taxi. We walked about sixty feet to the next bar. A pair of old girls on the two front stools flapped their eyelashes at us as we went in. There was nobody else in the place but a comatose bartender. He roused himself long enough to pour us a couple of drinks.

  We sat down in one of the booths, and I showed Bolling my pictures of Tony Galton. “Do you recognize him?”

  “I think so. We corresponded for a while, but I only met him once or twice. Twice. He called on us when we were living in Sausalito. And then one Sunday when I was driving down the coast by Luna Bay, I returned the visit.”

  “Were they living at Luna Bay?”

  “A few miles this side of it, in an old place on the ocean. I had the very devil of a time finding it, in spite of the directions Brown had given me. I remember now, he asked me not to tell anyone else where he was living. I was the only one who knew. I don’t know why he singled me out, except that he was keen to have me visit his home, and see his son. He may have had some sort of father feeling about me, though I wasn’t much older than he was.”

  “He had a son?”

  “Yes, they had a baby. He’d just been born, and he wasn’t much bigger than my thumb. Little John was the apple of his father’s eye. They were quite a touching little family.”

  Bolling’s voice was gentle. Away from the crowd and the music he showed a different personality. Like other performers, he had a public face and a private one. Each of them was slightly phony, but the private face suited him better.

  “You met the wife, did you?”

  “Certainly. She was sitting on the front porch when I got there, nursing the baby. She had lovely white breasts, and she didn’t in the least mind exposing them. It made quite a picture, there on the bluff above the sea. I tried to get a poem out of her, but it didn’t come off. I never really got to know her.”

  “What sort of a girl was she?”

  “Very attractive, I’d say, in the visual sense. She didn’t have too much to say for herself. As a matter of fact, she massacred the English language. I suppose she had the fascination of ignorance for Brown. I’ve seen other young writers and artists fall for girls like that. I’ve been guilty of it myself, when I was in my pre-Freudian period.” He added wryly: “That means before I got analyzed.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “Mrs. Brown’s name?” He shook his head. “Sorry. In the poem I botched I called her Stella Maris, star of the sea. But that doesn’t help you, does it?”

  “Can you tell me when you were there? It must have been toward the end of the year 1936.”

  “Yes. It was around Christmas, just before Christmas—I took along some bauble for the child. Young Brown was very pleased that I did.” Bolling pulled at his chin, lengthening his face. “It’s queer I never heard from him after that.”

  “Did you ever try to get in touch with him?”

  “No, I didn’t. He may have felt I’d brushed him off. Perhaps I did, without intending to. The woods were full of young writers; it was hard to keep track of them all. I was doing valid work in those days, and a lot of them came to me. Frankly, I’ve hardly thought of Brown from that day to this. Is he still living on the coast?”

  “I don’t know. What was he doing in Luna Bay, did he tell you?”

  “He was trying to write a novel. He didn’t seem to have a job, and I can’t imagine what they were living on. They couldn’t have been completely destitute, either. They had a nurse to look after the mother and child.”

  “A nurse?”

  “I suppose she was what you’d call a practical nurse. One of those young women who take charge,” he added vaguely.

  “Do you recall anything about her?”

  “She had remarkable eyes, I remember. Sharp black eyes which kept watching me. I don’t think she approved of the literary life.”

  “Did you talk to her at all?”

  “I may have. I have a distinct impression of her, that she was the only sensible person in the house. Brown and his wife seemed to be living in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.”

  “How do you mean
?”

  “They were out of touch with the ordinary run of life. I don’t mean that as a criticism. I’ve been out of touch enough in my own life, God knows. I still am.” He gave me his clown grin. “You can’t make a Hamlet without breaking egos. But let’s not talk about me.”

  “Getting back to the nurse, do you think you can remember her name?”

  “I know perfectly well I can’t.”

  “Would you recognize it if I said it?”

  “That I doubt. But try me.”

  “Marian Culligan,” I said. “C-u-l-l-i-g-a-n.”

  “It rings no bell with me. Sorry.”

  Bolling finished his drink and looked around the bar as if he expected something to happen. I guessed that most of the things that can happen to a man had already happened to him. He changed expressions like rubber masks, but between the masks I could see dismay in his face.

  “We might as well have another drink,” he said. “This one will be on me. I’m loaded. I just made a hundred smackers at the Ear.” Even his commercialism sounded phony.

  While I lit a fire under the bartender, Bolling studied the photographs I’d left on the table:

  “That’s John all right. A nice boy, and perhaps a talented one, but out of this world. All the way out of this world. Where did he get the money for horses and tennis?”

  “From his family. They’re heavily loaded.”

  “Good Lord, don’t tell me he’s the missing heir. Is that why you’re making a search for him?”

  “That’s why.”

  “They waited long enough.”

  “You can say that again. Can you tell me how to get to the house the Browns were living in when you visited them?”

  “I’m afraid not. I might be able to show you, though.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning if you like.”

  “That’s good of you.”

  “Not at all. I liked John Brown. Besides, I haven’t been to Luna Bay for years. Eons. Maybe I’ll rediscover my lost youth.”

  “Maybe.” But I didn’t think it likely.

  Neither did he.