The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  “And Maude came back to Los Angeles with her husband?”

  “Yes. She wired me yesterday from here. I caught the first possible plane.”

  “Let me see the telegram.”

  “I don’t have it. It was read to me on the telephone.” He added waspishly: “She might have used a less public means of communicating her disgrace.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That she was very happy. Turning the knife in the wound, of course.” His face darkened, and through his eyes I caught a glimpse of the red fires banked inside him. “She warned me not to try and follow her, and apologized for taking the money.”

  “What money?”

  “She wrote a check last Friday before she left, which nearly exhausted our joint checking account. A check for a thousand dollars.”

  “But it belonged to her?”

  “In the legal sense, not morally. It’s always been understood that I disburse the money.” A doleful whine entered his voice. “The man is clearly after our money, and the deuce of it is, there’s nothing to prevent Maude from drawing on our capital. She might even sell the School!”

  “She owns it?”

  “I’m afraid she does, legally. Father left her the School. I—my administrative ability was a little slow in developing—a gradual growth, you know. Poor Father didn’t live to see me mature.” He coughed, choking on his own unction. “The buildings alone are worth nearly two hundred thousand. The added value of our prestige is incalculable.”

  He paused in a listening attitude, as though he could hear the unholy gurgle of money going down the drain. I put on my coat.

  “You want them traced, is that it? To see that the marriage is regular, and make sure that he isn’t a confidence man?”

  “I want to see my sister. If I could just talk to her—well, something might be saved. She may have lost her mind. I can’t permit her to wreck her life, and mine, as Mother wrecked Father’s and her own.”

  “Where does your mother live in Los Angeles?” “She has a house in a place called Westwood, I believe. I’ve never been there.”

  “I think we ought to visit her. You haven’t been in touch with her?”

  “Certainly not. And I have no wish to see her now.”

  “I think you should. If Maude was out here with her at Easter, your mother may know the man. It doesn’t sound as though your sister eloped on the spur of the moment.”

  “You may be right,” he said slowly. “It hadn’t occurred to me that she may have met him out here. And then he followed her to Chicago, eh? Of course. It’s the logical hypothesis.”

  —

  We had a short talk about money. Harlan endorsed a fifty-dollar traveler’s check to me, and we went downstairs to my car.

  It wasn’t far to Westwood, as distances go in Los Angeles. We joined the early evening traffic rushing like lemmings towards the sea and the suburbs. Shielding his eyes with his hand against the sun’s horizontal rays, Harlan told me a little about his mother. Enough for me to know what to expect.

  She lived in a frame cottage on a hillside overlooking the distant campus. The front yard was choked with a dozen varieties of cactus, some of which speared as high as the roof. The house needed paint and it hung on the slope a little off balance, like its tenant.

  She opened the screen door, blinking against the sun. Her face was gouged and eroded by years and trouble. Black hair, shot with gray, hung in straight limp bangs over her forehead. Large tarnished metal rings depended from her earlobes. Several gold chains hung around her withered neck, and tinkled when she moved. She was dressed in sandals and a brown homespun robe which looked like sacking, cinched in by a rope at the waist.

  Her eyes were dusty black and very remote. She didn’t seem to know Harlan. He said in a new voice, a husky questioning whisper:

  “Mother?”

  She peered at him, and her face organized itself in wrinkles around her brightening eyes. She smiled. Her teeth were tobacco-colored, but her smile was generous. It turned to laughter. Red-stained by the sun, she looked like an old gypsy on a vino jag.

  “My God in heaven! You’re Reginald.”

  “Yes.” He took off his hat. “I fail to see what you’re laughing about, however.”

  “It’s just,” she gasped, “you look so much like your father.”

  “Is that so comical? I hope I do. I patterned my life on Father’s, tried to live up to his code. I only wish I could say as much for Maude.”

  Her laughter died. “You’ve no right to criticize Maude. She’s worth two of you, and you know it. Maude’s a fine woman.”

  “A fine fool!” he said hotly. “Throwing herself away, embezzling money—”

  “Watch your language. Maude is my daughter.” The old woman had a certain dignity.

  “She’s very much your daughter, apparently. Is she here with you?”

  “No, she’s not. I know why you’ve come, of course. I warned Maude you’d try and drag her back to the salt mines.”

  “Then you’ve seen her. Where is she?”

  “I have no intention of telling you. Maude is well and happy—happy for the first time in her life.”

  “You’re going to tell me,” he said between clenched teeth.

  He grabbed her pipestem wrist. She batted her eyes in fearful defiance, her seamed lips shrinking back from her long teeth. I took him by the shoulder and the arm and jerked him back to his heels, breaking his grip.

  “Take it easy, Harlan. You can’t force information out of people.”

  He gave me a look of dull hatred, then transferred it to his mother. She returned it.

  “The same old Reginald,” she said, “who used to love pinning beetles to a board. Who is this gentleman, by the way?”

  “Mr. Archer.” He added heavily: “A private detective.”

  She flung up her hands and grimaced. “Ah, Reggie. You’re outdoing yourself. You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Neither have you, Mother. But you and I are not the point at issue. Please don’t try to divert me. I want to know where Maude and her—her consort are.”

  “You won’t find out from me. Aren’t you satisfied with thirty years of Maude’s life? Do you have to have it all?”

  “I know what’s best for Maude. I doubt that you do, after the frightful hash you’ve made of your own life.” He looked with contempt at the peeling walls, the patched screen door, the discarded old woman who had taken refuge behind it. “If you’re responsible for this brainstorm of hers—”

  He ran out of words. Fury had strung him as taut as a wire. I could practically hear him hum. And I kept my shoulder between him and the door.

  “It’s no brainstorm,” she said. “Maude found a man who suited her at last, and she had the good sense to forsake everything for him. Just as I did.” Memory smoothed her face; a surge of romantic feeling sang like a warped record through her voice: “I’m proud of my part in this.”

  “You admit it, then?”

  “Why shouldn’t I? I brought her and Leonard Lister together last spring, when she was here with me. Leonard’s a splendid man, and they took to each other at once. Maude needed a powerful male personality to break through to her, after all those spinster years—”

  “What did you say his name was?”

  “Leonard Lister,” I said.

  The old woman’s hand had gone to her mouth. She said between yellow fingers: “I didn’t mean to tell you. Now that you’ve got it out of me—you must have heard of Leonard. He’s a brilliant creative artist in the theatre.”

  “Have you ever heard of him, Archer?”

  “No.”

  “Leonard Lister?” the old woman said. “Surely you know his name, if you live in Los Angeles. He’s a well-known director in the experimental theatre. He’s even taught at the University. Leonard has wonderful plans for making poetic films, like Cocteau’s in France.”

  “No doubt his plans include Maude’s money,” Harlan said.

  “
You would think of such a thing. But it’s not true. He loves her for herself.”

  “I see. I see. And you’re the honest broker who procured your own daughter for a fortune-hunter. How much is this brilliant fellow going to pay you for your services?”

  The sunset had faded out. Deprived of its borrowed color, the old woman’s face behind the screen was drawn and bloodless.

  “You know it’s not true, and you mustn’t say such things. Maude has been kind to you. You owe her some tolerance. Why don’t you give up gracefully and go home?”

  “Because my sister has been misled. She’s in the hands of fools and knaves. Which are you, Mother?”

  “Neither. And Maude is better off than she’s ever been in her life.” But her assurance was failing under his one-track pressure.

  “This I desire to see for myself. Where are they?”

  “You shan’t find out from me.” She looked at me with an obscure appeal in her eyes.

  “Then I’ll find out for myself.”

  It wasn’t hard to do. Leonard Lister was in the telephone book. He had an apartment address in Santa Monica, on one of the grid of streets above Lincoln Boulevard. I tried to talk Harlan, an obvious troublemaker, into letting me take it from here. But he was as hot as a cocker with bird scent in his nostrils. I had to let him come, or drop the case. And he’d probably make more trouble by himself.

  It was almost dark when we found the place, an old two-story stucco house set back from the street behind a brown patch of lawn. Lister’s apartment was a small studio built over an attached garage. A flight of concrete steps slanted up the outside wall of the garage. There were lights in the house, and behind the blinded windows of the apartment. Under the late twilight stillness, our feet rustled in the dry grass.

  “Imagine Maude being reduced to this,” Harlan said. “A woman of exquisite refinement, come to live in a slum with a—a gigolo.”

  “Uh-huh. You better let me do the talking. You could get hurt, tossing that language around.”

  “No ruffian can intimidate me.”

  But he let me go ahead of him up the flight of steps. It was lit by an insect-repellent yellow bulb over the door at the top. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked again. Harlan reached past me and turned the knob. The door was locked.

  “Pick the lock,” he said in an urgent whisper. “They’re in there lying low, I’m sure of it. You must have skeleton keys?”

  “I also have a license to lose.”

  He hammered the door till it vibrated in its frame. His seal-ringed knuckle made little dents in the paint. Soft footsteps approached from the other side. I thrust Harlan back with my arm. He almost lost his balance on the narrow landing.

  The door opened. “What goes on?”

  The man in the doorway wore a striped cotton bathrobe, and nothing else. His shoulders and bare chest were Herculean, a little bowed and softened by his age. He was in his late forties, perhaps. His red hair was shaggy and streaked with gray. His thick mouth gleamed like a bivalve in the red nest of his beard. His eyes were deepset and dreamy, the kind of eyes that watch the past or the future but seldom look directly at the present.

  Over the shoulders which nearly filled the doorframe, I could see into the lighted room. It was cramped and neatly furnished with a studio bed, a few chairs. Books spilled from homemade shelves constructed out of red bricks and unfinished boards. In the cubbyhole kitchenette on the far side, a woman was working. I could see her dark head, her slim back with apron strings tied at the waist, and hear dishes rattling.

  I told Lister who I was, but he was looking at the man behind me.

  “Mr. Harlan, isn’t it? This is quite a surprise. I can’t say it’s a pleasant one.” His voice had the ease that great size gives a man. “Now what do you want, Mr. Harlan?”

  “You know perfectly well. My sister.”

  Lister stepped out, closing the door behind him. It became very cozy with the three of us on the yard-square landing, like the components of fission coming together. Lister’s bare feet were silent on the concrete. His voice was soft:

  “Maude is busy. I’m pretty busy myself. I was just going to take a shower. So my advice to you is, go away. And don’t bother coming back. We’re going to be indefinitely busy.”

  “Busy spending her money?” Harlan said.

  Lister’s teeth flashed in his beard. His voice took on an edge.

  “It’s easy to see why Maude won’t speak to you. Now take your detective friend and remove yourself from my doorstep.”

  “So the old hag got in touch with you? How much of a percentage are you paying her?”

  Lister moved quickly around me. He took Harlan by the front of his coat, lifted him, shook him once, and set him back on his feet.

  “Speak of your mother with some respect, you little schnook.”

  Harlan leaned on the railing, gripping it firmly like a child daring adults to dislodge him. His face in the yellow light looked sick with humiliation. He said in stubborn malice:

  “I want to see my sister. I want to see what you’ve done to her, you bully.”

  I said: “Let’s go,” and laid a hand on his arm.

  “Are you on his side, too?” He was almost crying.

  “A man’s home is his castle, after all. He doesn’t like you, Reginald. Neither does she, apparently.”

  “You can say that again,” Lister said. “The little leech has sucked her blood for too long. Now get out of here before you make me mad for real.”

  “Come on, Reginald. We’re getting nowhere.”

  I detached him from the railing. Below and behind me, a man’s voice was raised. “Trouble up there, Lister?” The voice sounded as if its owner hoped so.

  He was a gray-haired man in a Hawaiian print shirt, standing spraddle-legged in the splash of light at the foot of the stairs. It colored his spongy face and made his eyes look colorless.

  “No trouble, Dolph. These gentleman are just leaving.”

  Lister stood with his back against the door, a seedy hero in a dirty bathrobe defending his two-bit castle, and watched us go down the stairs. The door closed sharply, and the yellow light went out. Harlan muttered under his breath.

  The gray-headed man was waiting for us at the bottom. He whispered through an alcoholic haze:

  “Cops?”

  I didn’t answer. He jerked at my coatsleeve, naggingly:

  “What’s lover-man been up to now?”

  “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “That’s what you think. You got another think coming. He’s got a woman with him, hasn’t he?”

  “None of your business.”

  I pulled my coatsleeve free. But he was hard to shake off. He thrust his pudgy face forward into mine.

  “What Lister does is my business. I got a right to know if my tenants are living in sin.”

  I started to walk away from him and his breath. He followed me across the driveway, bracing his wavering stride with one outstretched hand against the closed garage door. His voice trailed huskily after me:

  “What’s the beef about? I got a right to know. I’m a respectable man, see. I don’t run any callhouse for broken-down fourflushers.”

  “Wait a minute,” Harlan said. “Are you Lister’s landlord?”

  “Sure thing. I never liked the s.o.b., it was the little woman that rented him the apartment. She thought he was class. I saw through him at a glance. Another movie has-been. A never-was.”

  He sagged against the stucco wall. Harlan leaned over him like a prosecutor, his face a leaden silhouette in the dim light from a blinded window.

  “What else do you know about Lister, my man?”

  “I’m going to throw him out on his ear if he don’t watch himself.”

  “You mentioned his dealings with women. What about that?”

  “I don’t know what goes on up there. But I’m going to find out.”

  “Why don’t you go up now? You have the right to, you know, yo
u own the place.”

  “By God, I will.”

  I went back to Harlan and took his arm. “Let’s get out of here, Reginald. You’ve made enough trouble for one night.”

  “I make trouble? Nonsense. My sister’s married to a criminal, a whoremonger.”

  The man against the wall wagged his gray head solemnly. “You couldn’t be righter. Is the woman with him your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s married to him?”

  “I believe so. But I can’t let her stay with him. I’m going to take her home—”

  “Not tonight, Reginald.” I tightened my grip on his arm.

  “I have to do something. I have to act.”

  He tried to break away from me. His hat fell off, and his meager hair fell down over his ears. He almost screeched:

  “How dare you? Take your hands off me.”

  A woman’s full-breasted shadow fell on the blind. Her voice issued sharply from the window:

  “Jack! Are you still out there?”

  The gray-headed man straightened up as if he’d been touched by live current. “Yeah. I’m here.”

  “Come inside. You’re drunk, and you’ve been talking nonsense.”

  “Who’s going to make me?” He said it under his breath.

  She heard him. “I said come in. You’re making a laughing-stock of yourself. And tell your friends to go home.”

  He turned his back on us and walked uncertainly to the front door.

  Harlan tried to follow him. I held Harlan. The door slammed. A bolt clicked home.

  “Now see what you’ve done,” Harlan said, “with your mishandling and your interference! I was just about to learn something.”

  “You never will.”

  I released him and went to the car, not caring whether he came along or not. He caught up with me at the curb, wiping his hat with a handkerchief and breathing audibly.

  “The least you can do for the money I paid you is drop me at my hotel. The cab fares are scandalous here.”

  “All right. Where is it?”

  “The Oceano Hotel, in Santa Monica.”

  “This is Santa Monica.”