I turned my face away from his charnel-house breath.
At midnight I was back in Santa Teresa, knocking on the door of Santana’s house. He came to the door in a red velvet smoking-jacket, a volume of the Holmes-Pollock letters open under his arm.
“What under heaven?” he said in Spanish. “Your face, Mr. Archer!”
“I had a little plastic surgery done.”
“Come in. Let me get you a drink.”
Over the drink, Scotch and water in equal proportions, I told him where I had gone on the trail of the hat, and what had happened there.
“Where is the hat now?”
“Durano kept it. After all, he probably paid for it.”
“And what do you make of it all?” Santana hunched his shoulders and spread his hands palms upward on his knees. In his paneled library, surrounded by books, he resembled an old spider at the center of his web.
“There isn’t too much to go on, certainly not enough to try and have Durano and his torpedo brought in. That would take powerful medicine.”
“I agree.”
“What there is adds up to the reasonable alternative you asked for. Fern Dee was Durano’s girl friend. She got fed up with him and the desert, as anybody but a gila monster would, and she left him. But that’s one of the things the executives of the Syndicate can’t permit, this year especially. Their women learn too much about their sources of income, ever to be allowed to run out on them. Besides, Durano is old and ugly and sick. She took her life in her hands when she left him, and she must have known it.” I sipped my drink. The whiskey burned my lips where they had been cut.
“And Lucy?”
“See how this sounds to you. Lucy was Fern Dee’s maid, probably her confidante. She knew where Fern Dee had gone, perhaps she had instructions to follow her when she got the chance, and bring her clothes—”
“To Santa Teresa here.”
“Evidently. Fern let her keep some of the clothes, and gave her money to live on quietly. There could have been blackmail involved, but I doubt that.”
“Blackmail seems to be indicated,” the lawyer said.
“It’s doubtful. Gino traced Lucy down, don’t forget. He talked to her in her room Tuesday night, and she didn’t tell him where Fern was.”
“You think that is why she was killed, that this Gino killed her?”
“It’s a reasonable alternative,” I said. “In any case, your client was an innocent bystander. He stood too near the fire, and got burned.”
“We still have the task of proving it. Can we question this Gino in any way? Where is he?”
“In Santa Teresa,” I said. “He followed me out of Palm Springs in a Buick. It was a pretty crude tail-job, and I lost him on 99. But he should be in town by now. He’ll be looking for me. Durano thinks I can lead him to Fern Dee.”
“Can you?”
“I think so.”
“Do you have a gun?”
I patted my pocket. “I keep it in the glove compartment of my car.”
Santana stood up. “I believe that I had better call the police.”
“No,” I said. “You want to give them the man along with the story.”
“A doctor, at least. Those are nasty cuts on your mouth. They need attention.”
“I’m on my way to see a doctor—Dr. Benning.”
Santana exploded, dryly, like a puff-ball. “He is a bum physician, Mr. Archer. A charlatan. Only those who can find nothing better go to Benning. Those who have to.”
“Girls that get caught, for example?”
“That is the rumor. As a matter of fact, I can confirm the rumor. I have many sorts of clients.”
“I’m not proud.”
There were lights on both the first and second stories of Dr. Benning’s house. I parked at the curb and looked up and down the street. Yellow traffic lights winked on the bare asphalt. The sidewalks were deserted. A few late cars rolled into sight and out of mind. There was no sign of Gino’s four-hole Buick sedan.
I pushed the bell-button under the large shabby sign. I heard quiet footsteps in the hallway, and Benning’s long face was framed in the dirty glass pane. The light came on over my head. Benning unlocked the door, and opened it cautiously. His pale eyeballs were bloodshot, but not from sleep. He was fully clothed, in the suit I had seen him in that morning.
I got the curious idea that Dr. Benning had been crying.
His speech was slightly thick: “Archer, isn’t it? You’ve been hurt, man.”
“That can wait.”
I leaned my shoulder against the half-open door, and he stepped back to let me enter. Under the lamp in the hallway, his bald pink pate looked innocent and vulnerable like a baby’s. He took his worn felt hat from a brass rack on the wall, and placed it on his head.
“Going somewhere?”
The gesture had been unconscious. He didn’t understand me. “No, I’m not going anywhere.” His tone implied that he never had, had never even expected to. He moved back against the wall, out of the grim light. Beyond his dwarf shadow a flight of stairs rose into darkness.
“I came across a funny thing this afternoon, Dr. Benning. Your patient Lucy Deschamps—your ex-patient—had a clinical thermometer. Mrs. Norris found it in her bathroom.”
“What’s funny about that? Most people do, particularly hypochondriacs.”
“The funny thing was that it registered a temperature of 107.”
“Good lord, man. That’s usually fatal in adults. Was she so ill as that? I had no idea.” His reaction was phony.
He lifted his hat with his left hand and began to polish the top of his head with his right palm. It was ludicrous. I didn’t know whether to laugh at him or weep with him.
“I don’t think she was ill at all, or had a temperature. The weather did it.”
He blinked at me, still polishing his scalp. Futility and unease surrounded him like an odor. “It’s never been that hot in Santa Teresa.”
“Lucy came from Palm Springs last August 16. It was that hot in Palm Springs in the middle of August.”
“She told me San Francisco,” he said feebly.
“Maybe she did. If you talked to her at all. Which I doubt.”
“You’re calling me a liar?” His body stayed loose against the wall, unstiffened by anger or pride.
Somewhere upstairs, above our heads, there was a scraping sound, a small flurry of movement. Then he stiffened.
“You are a liar,” I said. “You said that Lucy was a hypochondriac, that fear might have motivated her suicide. But she hadn’t taken her temperature in a month. A hypochondriac takes it every day.”
“I may have misjudged her. I probably did. People make mistakes.”
“No. She didn’t even come here to see you. She came to see your receptionist. You lied this morning to cover up for Miss Tennent.”
“I had to—” He broke off sharply, jammed the hat on his head, huddled long and thin against the wall.
“I want to speak to Miss Tennent. Is she upstairs?”
“No. I don’t know where she is. She’s gone away.”
“I’ll have a look, if you don’t mind.”
“No!” He moved sideways to the foot of the stairs. His actions had lost all sense of style or timing. Something had beaten the last vestiges of pride out of his body.
“Even if you do mind.”
I pushed him to one side and went up. A dingy hallway lined with doors ran the length of the second story. A yellow tape of light showed under one of the doors. I opened it quietly.
The woman who had called herself Miss Tennent was packing a suitcase on an unmade bed on the far side of the room. She was leaning over the bed with her narrow back to me, the short black hair falling about her face.
She spoke without turning:
“You needn’t come crawling back, Sam. I’m taking off, and you know it. Make it a clean break.”
I said nothing. She turned sideways, still not looking at me, and picked up a bottle of bla
ck liquid that might have been hair dye. Wrapping it in a black brassiere, she pushed it into the suitcase.
She went on talking in a toneless voice, the words dropping cold and heavy from her hidden mouth. “Lucy and I were like sisters, you know that? All these years, since the South Side, she was my one true friend. So you killed her, Sam. All right. Lucy’s finished. So are we. Anything you did for me when I needed doing for, you canceled it out. Just take it like a man, that’s all I’m asking. Nobody’s turning you in.”
Behind and below me, Benning was laboring up the stairs. I had pushed him pretty hard. His breathing was audible, to the woman as well as me.
“Sam?” she cried on a rising note, and whirled in a dancer’s movement.
I moved towards her. She reached backwards into the suitcase for something. I took her by the wrists. Her body was made of whalebone covered with plush. It was hard to subdue.
“Easy, Fern,” I said. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”
Downstairs, in the front of the house, the doorbell rang. The woman started. We stood together by the half-packed suitcase, the unmade bed, breathing hard into each other’s faces.
“If I turn you loose, will you promise not to shoot me?”
“I promise nothing.”
I lifted her from behind and carried her into the hallway. Below, the front door opened.
“Dr. Benning?” It was Gino’s voice.
“Don’t let him in,” I shouted.
Benning never heard me. A submachine gun pounded like an air-hammer at the shaky walls of his house.
The woman had ceased struggling in my arms. She was stiff with terror. I swung her behind me, took my revolver out, steadied my gun arm on the newel post. Gino came to the foot of the stairs with the Thompson in his hands. I shot him carefully through the face. Then I went to the telephone.
When I returned to the hallway, Benning was lying near the open door, his head in the woman’s lap. His hat was on its side beside him, in a growing pool of blood. When he spoke, the words made bubbling sounds in his throat:
“You won’t leave me, Fern? You promised you’d never leave me. I did it for you, everything for you.”
“I won’t leave you. Crazy fool. Crazy man.”
She cradled the naked, vulnerable head in her hands. He sighed, and his life came out bright-colored at the mouth. It was Dr. Benning who departed.
Sitting against the wall with the dead man in her arms, she talked to me, in the same cold heavy voice:
“I’m a swell picker, aren’t I? Durano, and now Sam Benning. I heard about Sam from a girl friend in the Springs, when I was two months gone. I could stand a trick baby, but not Durano’s. Did you ever see Durano?”
“I’ve seen him.” I sat on the bottom step and offered her a cigarette, which she refused.
“I stomached Angel for two years and a half. I owed him about that long. He took me out of a strip joint in Gary and gave me everything. Everything I wanted. But a baby was too much. I took a runout powder, and came up here to Sam. He didn’t know me from Eve, but he took care of me. Even when he found out who I was, and who Durano was, he let me stay. He wanted me to stay. He was crazy about me, crazy in more ways than one. But he had guts.” She looked down at the blind face clasped to her breast: “You weren’t afraid, were you, Sammy? Not for a while, anyway.”
Her gaze, blue and remote, swung back to me: “He started to lose his grip when Lucy came. She was my maid, sort of, I brought her out of Gary along with me. Hell, she was my best friend. Too bad Sammy never got that straight. Lucy came up last month and brought my things, all she could get away with. Then she was afraid to go back. I didn’t want her to, either. Durano would squeeze it out of her where I was. So Sam found her a place to stay up here. I knew it couldn’t last after Lucy came. A month was the best we could hope for. Durano’s men found Lucy then. She didn’t cover her traces the way I did. Gino went to see her Tuesday night. She had to play along. What could she do? She said she needed forty-eight hours to finger me, that I was hiding out in the mountains and only came to town once a week for groceries.
“They left a watch on her. It took her most of yesterday to throw them off and get over here without giving me away. I wasn’t even here when she arrived. But Sam was. She spilled the thing to him, and he got the fantods and decided that Lucy had to be silenced. He knew that if she talked to Gino, that was the end of us. Sam was afraid for his life, but mostly I guess he didn’t want to lose me. So he sneaked over there in the middle of the night and cut her throat for her. Today after you came I asked him if he did it and he admitted it. You had good reason to be afraid, didn’t you, Sammy?” A dark and cynical tenderness growled in her voice. “Stop me if I’m breaking your heart, Archer or whatever your name is.”
Somewhere outside in the night a siren screamed, very loud, as if the noise could make up for its tardiness.
“They’ll be holding you for material witness,” I said. “At least.”
She shrugged, and the dead face moved against her. “I couldn’t care less. Where would I want to go that I haven’t been? Anyway, Angel can’t get at me in the clink.”
She was still in the same position when the city police walked in. She looked up at them coldly.
They held me, too, until Santana established that I had shot Gino in self-defense. I was in the Sheriff’s office when Alex Norris was released. His mother was there with Santana, waiting to greet him. It was bright morning by then.
Alex had very little to say to his mother. He wanted to know where Lucy’s body was. When Santana told him, he set out for the morgue by himself. I felt sorry for Mrs. Norris, but there was nothing I could do for her. Her son had stood too close to the fire and been burned. Chicago, the northern cities, had caught up with both of them.
Gino died in the County Hospital two days later, without having had a visitor. His automobile was charged with concealment of weapons, found guilty, and impounded for official use by the Sheriff’s staff. Fern Dee, or whatever her name was, was released the following Monday. She disappeared. At the end of the month, Santana sent me a check for eighty dollars. One day’s pay and expenses.
GONE GIRL
A Note to the Reader
Sequential presentation for the first time of “Strangers in Town” and “Gone Girl” underscores certain similarities between these stories.
“Strangers in Town” was written in 1950 for submission in that year’s Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine contest, then withdrawn by Ross Macdonald to be used as a framework for a novel: The Ivory Grin (published in 1952). The author later incorporated other elements of the unpublished “Strangers in Town,” including some verbatim sentences, into the short story “Gone Girl” (printed in 1953).
Comparison of the stories shows the different uses to which Macdonald might put similar material—the inventive variations he was able to play on a given theme: one of the hallmarks of his fiction.
—Tom Nolan
It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood. I had followed a man from Fresno to San Diego and lost him in the maze of streets in Old Town. When I picked up his trail again, it was cold. He had crossed the border, and my instructions went no further than the United States.
Halfway home, just above Emerald Bay, I overtook the worst driver in the world. He was driving a black fishtail Cadillac as if he were tacking a sailboat. The heavy car wove back and forth across the freeway, using two of its four lanes, and sometimes three. It was late, and I was in a hurry to get some sleep. I started to pass it on the right, at a time when it was riding the double line. The Cadillac drifted towards me like an unguided missile, and forced me off the road in a screeching skid.
I speeded up to pass on the left. Simultaneously, the driver of the Cadillac accelerated. My acceleration couldn’t match his. We raced neck and neck down the middle of the road. I wondered if he was drunk or crazy or afraid of me. Then the freeway ended. I was doing e
ighty on the wrong side of a two-lane highway, and a truck came over a rise ahead like a blazing double comet. I floorboarded the gas pedal and cut over sharply to the right, threatening the Cadillac’s fenders and its driver’s life. In the approaching headlights, his face was as blank and white as a piece of paper, with charred black holes for eyes. His shoulders were naked.
At the last possible second he slowed enough to let me get by. The truck went off onto the shoulder, honking angrily. I braked gradually, hoping to force the Cadillac to stop. It looped past me in an insane arc, tires skittering, and was sucked away into darkness.
When I finally came to a full stop, I had to pry my fingers off the wheel. My knees were remote and watery. After smoking part of a cigarette, I U-turned and drove very cautiously back to Emerald Bay. I was long past the hot-rod age, and I needed rest.
The first motel I came to, the Siesta, was decorated with a vacancy sign and a neon Mexican sleeping luminously under a sombrero. Envying him, I parked on the gravel apron in front of the motel office. There was a light inside. The glass-paned door was standing open, and I went in. The little room was pleasantly furnished with rattan and chintz. I jangled the bell on the desk a few times. No one appeared, so I sat down to wait and lit a cigarette. An electric clock on the wall said a quarter to one.
I must have dozed for a few minutes. A dream rushed by the threshold of my consciousness, making a gentle noise. Death was in the dream. He drove a black Cadillac loaded with flowers. When I woke up, the cigarette was starting to burn my fingers. A thin man in a gray flannel shirt was standing over me with a doubtful look on his face.
He was big-nosed and small-chinned, and he wasn’t as young as he gave the impression of being. His teeth were bad, the sandy hair was thinning and receding. He was the typical old youth who scrounged and wheedled his living around motor courts and restaurants and hotels, and hung on desperately to the frayed edge of other people’s lives.
“What do you want?” he said. “Who are you? What do you want?” His voice was reedy and changeable like an adolescent’s.
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