The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

“Exactly.”

  “And if I don’t agree?”

  “The money goes to the Intelligence Unit of the Internal Revenue Bureau.”

  There was silence for a while, broken by the fire hissing and sputtering in an irritable undertone.

  “Very well,” he said at length. “Give me the money.”

  “Give me the picture.”

  He waded across the heavy rug, moving his feet a few inches at a time, and pressed a corner of one of the bookcases. It swung open like a door. Behind it was the face of a large wall safe. I waited uncomfortably while he twirled the double dials.

  A minute later he shuffled back to me with the picture in his hands. The boy in the blue waistcoat was there in the frame, watching the apple, which looked good enough to eat after more than two hundred years.

  Hendryx’ withered face had settled into a kind of malevolent resignation. “You realize that this is no better than blackmail.”

  “On the contrary, I’m saving you from the consequences of your own poor judgment. You shouldn’t do business with thieves and murderers.”

  “You still insist the picture was stolen?”

  “I think it was. You probably know it was. Will you answer one question?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “When Hilary Todd approached you about buying this picture, did he claim to represent Admiral Turner?”

  “Of course. You have the bill of sale in your hand. It’s signed by the Admiral.”

  “I see that, but I don’t know his signature.”

  “I do. Now, if you have no further questions, may I have my money?”

  He held out his brown hand with the palm upward. I gave him the sheaf of bills.

  “And the bill of sale, if you please.”

  “It wasn’t part of the bargain.”

  “It has to be.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” I handed it to him.

  “Please don’t come back a third time,” he said as he rang for the maid. “I find your visits tiring and annoying.”

  “I won’t come back,” I said. I didn’t need to.

  —

  I parked in the alley beside the art gallery and got out of the car with the Chardin under my arm. There was talk and laughter and the tinny din of cutlery in the restaurant patio beyond the hedge. On the other side of the alley a light was shining behind the barred window of Silliman’s office. I reached up between the bars and tapped on the window. I couldn’t see beyond the closed Venetian blinds.

  Someone opened the casement. It was Alice, her blond head aureoled against the light. “Who is it?” she said in a frightened whisper.

  “Archer.” I had a sudden, rather theatrical impulse. I held up the Chardin and passed it to her edgewise between the bars. She took it from my hands and let out a little yelp of surprise.

  “It was where I thought it would be,” I said.

  Silliman appeared at her shoulder, squeaking, “What is it? What is it?”

  My brain was doing a double take on the action I’d just performed. I had returned the Chardin to the gallery without using the door. It could have been stolen the same way, by Hilary Todd or anyone else who had access to the building. No human being could pass through the bars, but a picture could.

  Silliman’s head came out of the window like a gray mop being shaken. “Where on earth did you find it?”

  I had no story ready, so I said nothing.

  A gentle hand touched my arm and stayed, like a bird alighting. I started, but it was only Mary.

  “I’ve been watching for you,” she said. “The sheriff’s in Hilary’s shop, and he’s raving mad. He said he’s going to put you in jail, as a material witness.”

  “You didn’t tell him about the money?” I said in an undertone.

  “No. Did you really get the picture?”

  “Come inside and see.”

  As we turned the corner of the building, a car left the curb in front of it, and started up the street with a roar. It was Admiral Turner’s black sedan.

  “It looks like Alice driving,” Mary said.

  “She’s gone to tell her father, probably.”

  I made a sudden decision, and headed back to my car.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I want to see the Admiral’s reaction to the news.”

  She followed me to the car. “Take me.”

  “You’d better stay here. I can’t tell what might happen.”

  I tried to shut the door, but she held on to it. “You’re always running off and leaving me to make your explanations.”

  “All right; get in. I don’t have time to argue.”

  I drove straight up the alley and across the parking lot to Rubio Street. There was a uniformed policeman standing at the back door of Hilary’s shop, but he didn’t try to stop us.

  “What did the police have to say about Hilary?” I asked her.

  “Not much. The ice pick had been wiped clean of fingerprints, and they had no idea who did it.”

  I went through a yellow light and left a chorus of indignant honkings at the intersection behind me.

  “You said you didn’t know what would happen when you got there. Do you think the Admiral—” She left the sentence unfinished.

  “I don’t know. I have a feeling I soon will, though.” There were a great many things I could have said. I concentrated on my driving.

  “Is this the street?” I asked her finally.

  “Yes.”

  My tires shrieked on the corner, and again in front of the house. She was out of the car before I was.

  “Stay back,” I told her. “This may be dangerous.”

  She let me go up the walk ahead of her. The black sedan was in the drive with the headlights burning and the left front door hanging open. The front door of the house was closed but there was a light behind it. I went in without knocking.

  Sarah came out of the living room. All day her face had been going to pieces, and now it was old and slack and ugly. Her bright hair was ragged at the edges, and her voice was ragged. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I want to see the Admiral. Where is he?”

  “How should I know? I can’t keep track of any of my men.” She took a step toward me, staggered, and almost fell.

  Mary took hold of her and eased her into a chair. Her head leaned limply against the wall, and her mouth hung open. The lipstick on her mouth was like a rim of cracked dry blood.

  “They must be here.”

  The single shot that we heard then was an exclamation point at the end of my sentence. It came from somewhere back of the house, muffled by walls and distance.

  I went through into the garden. There were lights in the gardener’s cottage, and a man’s shadow moved across the window. I ran up the path to the cottage’s open door, and froze there.

  Admiral Turner was facing me with a gun in his hand. It was a heavy-caliber automatic, the kind the Navy issued. From its round, questioning mouth a wisp of blue smoke trailed. Alice lay face down on the carpeted floor between us.

  I looked into the mouth of the gun, into Turner’s granite face. “You killed her.”

  But Alice was the one who answered. “Go away.” The words came out in a rush of sobbing that racked her prostrate body.

  “This is a private matter, Archer.” The gun stirred slightly in the Admiral’s hand. I could feel its pressure across the width of the room. “Do as she says.”

  “I heard a shot. Murder is a public matter.”

  “There has been no murder, as you can see.”

  “You don’t remember well.”

  “I have nothing to do with that,” he said. “I was cleaning my gun, and forgot that it was loaded.”

  “So Alice lay down and cried? You’ll have to do better than that, Admiral.”

  “Her nerves are shaken. But I assure you that mine are not.” He took three slow steps towards me, and paused by the girl on the floor. The gun was very steady in his hand. “Now go, or I’ll have
to use this.”

  The pressure of the gun was increasing. I put my hands on the doorframe and held myself still. “You seem to be sure it’s loaded now,” I said.

  Between my words I heard the faint, harsh whispering of shifting gravel on the garden path behind me. I spoke up loudly, to drown out the sound.

  “You had nothing to do with the murder, you say. Then why did Todd come to the beach club this morning? Why did you change your story about the Chardin?”

  He looked down at his daughter as if she could answer the questions. She made no sound, but her shoulders were shaking with inner sobbing.

  As I watched the two of them, father and daughter, the pattern of the day came into focus. At its center was the muzzle of the Admiral’s gun, the round blue mouth of death.

  I said, very carefully, to gain time, “I can guess what Todd said to you this morning. Do you want me to dub in the dialogue?”

  He glanced up sharply, and the gun glanced up. There were no more sounds in the garden. If Mary was as quick as I thought, she’d be at a telephone.

  “He told you he’d stolen your picture and had a buyer for it. But Hendryx was cautious. Todd needed proof that he had a right to sell it. You gave him the proof. And when Todd completed the transaction, you let him keep the money.”

  “Nonsense! Bloody nonsense.” But he was a poor actor, and a worse liar.

  “I’ve seen the bill of sale, Admiral. The only question left is why you gave it to Todd.”

  His lips moved as if he was going to speak. No words came out.

  “And I’ll answer that one, too. Todd knew who killed Hugh Western. So did you. You had to keep him quiet, even if it meant conniving at the theft of your own picture.”

  “I connived at nothing.” His voice was losing its strength. His gun was as potent as ever.

  “Alice did,” I said. “She helped him to steal it this morning. She passed it out the window to him when Silliman and I were on the mezzanine. Which is one of the things he told you at the beach club, isn’t it?”

  “Todd has been feeding you lies. Unless you give me your word that you won’t repeat those lies, not to anyone, I’m going to have to shoot you.”

  His hand contracted, squeezing off the automatic’s safety. The tiny noise it made seemed very significant in the silence.

  “Todd will soon be feeding worms,” I said. “He’s dead, Admiral.”

  “Dead?” His voice had sunk to an old man’s quaver, rustling in his throat.

  “Stabbed with an ice pick in his apartment.”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon. Do you still see any point in trying to shoot me?”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No. There’s been a second murder.”

  He looked down at the girl at his feet. His eyes were bewildered. There was danger in his pain and confusion. I was the source of his pain, and he might strike out blindly at me. I watched the gun in his hand, waiting for a chance to move on it. My arms were rigid, braced against the doorframe.

  Mary Western ducked under my left arm and stepped into the room in front of me. She had no weapon, except her courage.

  “He’s telling the truth,” she said. “Hilary Todd was stabbed to death today.”

  “Put down the gun,” I said. “There’s nothing left to save. You thought you were protecting an unfortunate girl. She’s turned out to be a double murderess.”

  He was watching the girl on the floor. “If this is true, Allie, I wash my hands of you.”

  No sound came from her. Her face was hidden by her yellow sheaf of hair. The old man groaned. The gun sagged in his hand. I moved, pushing Mary to one side, and took it away from him. He didn’t resist me, but my forehead was suddenly streaming with sweat.

  “You were probably next on her list,” I said.

  “No.”

  The muffled word came from his daughter. She began to get up, rising laboriously from her hands and knees like a hurt fighter. She flung her hair back. Her face had hardly changed. It was as lovely as ever, on the surface, but empty of meaning, like a doll’s plastic face.

  “I was next on my list,” she said dully. “I tried to shoot myself when I realized you knew about me. Father stopped me.”

  “I didn’t know about you until now.”

  “You did. You must have. When you were talking to Father in the garden, you meant me to hear it all—everything you said about Hilary.”

  “Did I?”

  The Admiral said with a kind of awe: “You killed him, Allie. Why did you want his blood on your hands? Why?” His own hand reached for her, gropingly, and paused in midair. He looked at her as if he had fathered a strange, evil thing.

  She bowed her head in silence. I answered for her: “She’d stolen the Chardin for him and met his conditions. But then she saw that he couldn’t get away, or if he did he’d be brought back, and questioned. She couldn’t be sure he’d keep quiet about Hugh. This afternoon she made sure. The second murder comes easier.”

  “No!” She shook her blond head violently. “I didn’t murder Hugh. I hit him with something, I didn’t intend to kill him. He struck me first, he struck me, and then I hit him back.”

  “With a deadly weapon, a metal fist. You hit at him twice with it. The first blow missed and left its mark on the doorframe. The second blow didn’t miss.”

  “But I didn’t mean to kill him. Hilary knew I didn’t mean to kill him.”

  “How would he know? Was he there?”

  “He was downstairs in his flat. When he heard Hugh fall, he came up. Hugh was still alive. He died in Hilary’s car, when we were starting for the hospital. Hilary said he’d help me to cover up. He took that horrible fist and threw it into the sea.

  “I hardly knew what I was doing by that time. Hilary did it all. He put the body in Hugh’s car and drove it up the mountain. I followed in his car and brought him back. On the way back he told me why he was helping me. He needed money. He knew we had no money, but he had a chance to sell the Chardin. I took it for him this morning. I had to. Everything I did, I did because I had to.”

  She looked from me to her father. He averted his face from her.

  “You didn’t have to smash Hugh’s skull,” I said. “Why did you do that?”

  Her doll’s eyes rolled in her head, came back to me, glinting with a cold and deathly coquetry. “If I tell you, will you do one thing for me? One favor? Give me father’s gun for just a second?”

  “And let you kill us all?”

  “Only myself,” she said. “Just leave one shell in it.”

  “Don’t give it to her,” the Admiral said. “She’s done enough to disgrace us.”

  “I have no intention of giving it to her. And I don’t have to be told why she killed Hugh. While she was waiting in his studio last night, she found a sketch of his. It was an old sketch, but she didn’t know that. She’d never seen it before, for obvious reasons.”

  “What kind of a sketch?”

  “A portrait of a nude woman. She tacked it up on the easel and decorated it with a beard. When Hugh came home he saw what she’d done. He didn’t like to have his pictures spoiled, and he probably slapped her face.”

  “He hit me with his fist,” Alice said. “I killed him in self-defense.”

  “That may be the way you’ve rationalized it. Actually, you killed him out of jealousy.”

  She laughed. It was a cruel sound, like vital tissue being ruptured. “Jealousy of her?”

  “The same jealousy that made you ruin the sketch.”

  Her eyes widened, but they were blind, looking into herself. “Jealousy? I don’t know. I felt so lonely, all alone in the world. I had nobody to love me, since my mother died.”

  “It isn’t true, Alice. You had me.” The Admiral’s tentative hand came out and paused again in the air, as though there were an invisible wall between them.

  “I never had you. I hardly saw you. Then Sarah took you. I had no one, no one until Hugh. I thought at last
that I had some one to love me, that I could count on—”

  Her voice broke off. The Admiral looked everywhere but at his daughter. The room was like a cubicle in hell where lost souls suffered under the silent treatment. The silence was finally broken by the sound of a distant siren. It rose and expanded until its lamentation filled the night.

  Alice was crying, with her face uncovered. Mary Western came forward and put her arm around her. “Don’t cry.” Her voice was warm. Her face had a grave beauty.

  “You hate me, too.”

  “No. I’m sorry for you, Alice. Sorrier than I am for Hugh.”

  The Admiral touched my arm. “Who was the woman in the sketch?” he said in a trembling voice.

  I looked into his tired old face and decided that he had suffered enough. “I don’t know.”

  But I could see the knowledge in his eyes.

  STRANGERS IN TOWN

  “My son is in grave trouble,” the woman said.

  I asked her to sit down, and after a moment’s hesitation she lowered her weight into the chair I placed for her. She was a large Negro woman, clothed rather tightly in a blue linen dress which she had begun to outgrow. Her bosom was rising and falling with excitement, or from the effort of climbing the flight of stairs to my office. She looked no older than forty, but the hair that showed under her blue straw hat was the color of steel wool. Perspiration furred her upper lip.

  “About your son?” I sat down behind my desk, the possible kinds of trouble that a Negro boy could get into in Los Angeles running like a newsreel through my head.

  “My son has been arrested on suspicion of murder.” She spoke with a schoolteacher’s precision. “The police have had him up all night, questioning him, trying to force a confession out of him.”

  “Where is he held? Lincoln Heights?”

  “In Santa Teresa. We live there. I just came down on the bus to see if you could help me. There are no private detectives in Santa Teresa.”

  “He have a lawyer?”

  “Mr. Santana. He recommended you to me, Mr. Archer.”

  “I see.” Santana I knew by name and reputation as a leader of minority groups in Southern California. He had come up the long hard way, and remembered every step. “Well, what are the facts?”