The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  “No such luck. But they’ll get him,” she said with female vindictiveness. “The sheriff called out his air squadron, and he sent to Ventura for bloodhounds.”

  “Big deal.”

  She bridled. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t think the old man of the mountain killed her. If he had, he wouldn’t have waited till this morning to go on the lam. He’d have taken off right away.”

  “Then why did he go on the lam at all?” The word sounded strange in her prim mouth.

  “I think he saw me discover the body, and realized he’d be blamed.”

  She considered this, bending the long nail file between her fingers. “If the old tramp didn’t do it, who did?”

  “You may be able to help me answer that question.”

  “Me help you? How?”

  “You know Frank Connor, for one thing.”

  “I know him. I’ve seen him about my sister’s grades a few times.”

  “You don’t seem to like him much.”

  “I don’t like him, I don’t dislike him. He’s just blah to me.”

  “Why? What’s the matter with him?”

  Her tight mouth quivered, and let out words: “I don’t know what’s the matter with him. He can’t keep his hands off of young girls.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I heard it.”

  “From your sister Alice?”

  “Yes. The rumor was going around the school, she said.”

  “Did the rumor involve Ginnie Green?”

  She nodded. Her eyes were as black as fingerprint ink.

  “Is that why Connor’s wife left him?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. I never even laid eyes on Mrs. Connor.”

  “You haven’t been missing much.”

  There was a yell outside, a kind of choked ululation. It sounded as much like an animal as a man. It was Green. When I reached the door, he was climbing out of his convertible with a heavy blue revolver in his hand.

  “I saw the killer,” he cried out exultantly.

  “Where?”

  He waved the revolver toward the lumberyard across the road. “He poked his head up behind that pile of white pine. When he saw me, he ran like a deer. I’m going to get him.”

  “No. Give me the gun.”

  “Why? I got a license to carry it. And use it.”

  He started across the four-lane highway, dodging through the moving patterns of the Sunday traffic as if he were playing Parcheesi on the kitchen table at home. The sounds of brakes and curses split the air. He had scrambled over the locked gate of the yard before I got to it. I went over after him.

  —

  Green disappeared behind a pile of lumber. I turned the corner and saw him running halfway down a long aisle walled with stacked wood and floored with beaten earth. The old man of the mountain was running ahead of him. His white hair blew in the wind of his own movement. A burlap sack bounced on his shoulders like a load of sorrow and shame.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot!” Green cried.

  The old man ran on as if the devil himself were after him. He came to a cyclone fence, discarded his sack, and tried to climb it. He almost got over. Three strands of barbed wire along the top of the fence caught and held him struggling.

  I heard a tearing sound, and then the sound of a shot. The huge old body espaliered on the fence twitched and went limp, fell heavily to the earth. Green stood over him breathing through his teeth.

  I pushed him out of the way. The old man was alive, though there was blood in his mouth. He spat it onto his chin when I lifted his head.

  “You shouldn’t ought to of done it. I come to turn myself in. Then I got ascairt.”

  “Why were you scared?”

  “I watched you uncover the little girl in the leaves. I knew I’d be blamed. I’m one of the chosen. They always blame the chosen. I been in trouble before.”

  “Trouble with girls?” At my shoulder Green was grinning terribly.

  “Trouble with cops.”

  “For killing people?” Green said.

  “For preaching on the street without a license. The voice told me to preach to the tribes of the wicked. And the voice told me this morning to come in and give my testimony.”

  “What voice?”

  “The great voice.” His voice was little and weak. He coughed red.

  “He’s as crazy as a bedbug,” Green said.

  “Shut up.” I turned back to the dying man. “What testimony do you have to give?”

  “About the car I seen. It woke me up in the middle of the night, stopped in the road below my sanctuary.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “I don’t know cars. I think it was one of them foreign cars. It made a noise to wake the dead.”

  “Did you see who was driving it?”

  “No. I didn’t go near. I was ascairt.”

  “What time was this car in the road?”

  “I don’t keep track of time. The moon was down behind the trees.”

  Those were his final words. He looked up at the sky with his sky-colored eyes, straight into the sun. His eyes changed color.

  Green said: “Don’t tell them. If you do, I’ll make a liar out of you. I’m a respected citizen in this town. I got a business to lose. And they’ll believe me ahead of you, mister.”

  “Shut up.”

  He couldn’t. “The old fellow was lying, anyway. You know that. You heard him say yourself that he heard voices. That proves he’s a psycho. He’s a psycho killer. I shot him down like you would a mad dog, and I did right.”

  He waved the revolver.

  “You did wrong, Green, and you know it. Give me that gun before it kills somebody else.”

  He thrust it into my hand suddenly. I unloaded it, breaking my fingernails in the process, and handed it back to him empty. He nudged up against me.

  “Listen, maybe I did do wrong. I had provocation. It doesn’t have to get out. I got a business to lose.”

  He fumbled in his hip pocket and brought out a thick sharkskin wallet. “Here. I can pay you good money. You say that you’re a private eye; you know how to keep your lip buttoned.”

  I walked away and left him blabbering beside the body of the man he had killed. They were both victims, in a sense, but only one of them had blood on his hands.

  Miss Brocco was in the HP parking lot. Her bosom was jumping with excitement.

  “I heard a shot.”

  “Green shot the old man. Dead. You better send in for the meat wagon and call off your bloody dogs.”

  The words hit her like slaps. She raised her hand to her face, defensively. “Are you mad at me? Why are you mad at me?”

  “I’m mad at everybody.”

  “You still don’t think he did it.”

  “I know damned well he didn’t. I want to talk to your sister.”

  “Alice? What for?”

  “Information. She was on the beach with Ginnie Green last night. She may be able to tell me something.”

  “You leave Alice alone.”

  “I’ll treat her gently. Where do you live?”

  “I don’t want my little sister dragged into this filthy mess.”

  “All I want to know is who Ginnie paired off with.”

  “I’ll ask Alice. I’ll tell you.”

  “Come on, Miss Brocco, we’re wasting time. I don’t need your permission to talk to your sister, after all. I can get the address out of the phone book if I have to.”

  She flared up and then flared down.

  “You win. We live on Orlando Street, 224. That’s on the other side of town. You will be nice to Alice, won’t you? She’s bothered enough as it is about Ginnie’s death.”

  “She really was a friend of Ginnie’s, then?”

  “Yes. I tried to break it up. But you know how kids are—two motherless girls, they stick together. I tried to be like a mother to Alice.”

  “What happened to your own mother?”

&nbs
p; “Father—I mean, she died.” A greenish pallor invaded her face and turned it to old bronze. “Please. I don’t want to talk about it. I was only a kid when she died.”

  She went back to her muttering radios. She was quite a woman, I thought as I drove away. Nubile but unmarried, probably full of untapped Mediterranean passions. If she worked an eight-hour shift and started at eight, she’d be getting off about four.

  It wasn’t a large town, and it wasn’t far across it. The highway doubled as its main street. I passed the Union High School. On the green playing field beside it a lot of kids in mortarboards and gowns were rehearsing their graduation exercises. A kind of pall seemed to hang over the field. Perhaps it was in my mind.

  Farther along the street I passed Green’s Highway Restaurant. A dozen cars stood in its parking space. A couple of white-uniformed waitresses were scooting around behind the plate-glass windows.

  Orlando Street was a lower-middle-class residential street bisected by the highway. Jacaranda trees bloomed like low small purple clouds among its stucco and frame cottages. Fallen purple petals carpeted the narrow lawn in front of the Brocco house.

  A thin, dark man, wiry under his T-shirt, was washing a small red Fiat in the driveway beside the front porch. He must have been over fifty, but his long hair was as black as an Indian’s. His Sicilian nose was humped in the middle by an old break.

  “Mr. Brocco?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Is your daughter Alice home?”

  “She’s home.”

  “I’d like to speak to her.”

  He turned off his hose, pointing its dripping nozzle at me like a gun.

  “You’re a little old for her, ain’t you?”

  “I’m a detective investigating the death of Ginnie Green.”

  “Alice don’t know nothing about that.”

  “I’ve just been talking to your older daughter at the Highway Patrol office. She thinks Alice may know something.”

  He shifted on his feet. “Well, if Anita says it’s all right.”

  “It’s okay, Dad,” a girl said from the front door. “Anita just called me on the telephone. Come in, Mister—Archer, isn’t it?”

  “Archer.”

  —

  She opened the screen door for me. It opened directly into a small square living room containing worn green baize furniture and a television set which the girl switched off. She was a handsome, serious-looking girl, a younger version of her sister with ten years and ten pounds subtracted and a ponytail added. She sat down gravely on the edge of a chair, waving her hand at the chesterfield. Her movements were languid. There were blue depressions under her eyes. Her face was sallow.

  “What kind of questions do you want to ask me? My sister didn’t say.”

  “Who was Ginnie with last night?”

  “Nobody. I mean, she was with me. She didn’t make out with any of the boys.” She glanced from me to the blind television set, as if she felt caught between. “It said on the television that she was with a man, that there was medical evidence to prove it. But I didn’t see her with no man. Any man.”

  “Did Ginnie go with men?”

  She shook her head. Her ponytail switched and hung limp. She was close to tears.

  “You told Anita she did.”

  “I did not!”

  “Your sister wouldn’t lie. You passed on a rumor to her—a high school rumor that Ginnie had had something to do with one man in particular.”

  The girl was watching my face in fascination. Her eyes were like a bird’s, bright and shallow and fearful.

  “Was the rumor true?”

  She shrugged her thin shoulders. “How would I know?”

  “You were good friends with Ginnie.”

  “Yes. I was.” Her voice broke on the past tense. “She was a real nice kid, even if she was kind of boy crazy.”

  “She was boy crazy, but she didn’t make out with any of the boys last night.”

  “Not while I was there.”

  “Did she make out with Mr. Connor?”

  “No. He wasn’t there. He went away. He said he was going home. He lives up the beach.”

  “What did Ginnie do?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t notice.”

  “You said she was with you. Was she with you all evening?”

  “Yes.” Her face was agonized. “I mean no.”

  “Did Ginnie go away, too?”

  She nodded.

  “In the same direction Mr. Connor took? The direction of his house?”

  Her head moved almost imperceptibly downward.

  “What time was that, Alice?”

  “About eleven o’clock, I guess.”

  “And Ginnie never came back from Mr. Connor’s house?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know for certain that she went there.”

  “But Ginnie and Mr. Connor were good friends?”

  “I guess so.”

  “How good? Like a boyfriend and a girlfriend?”

  She sat mute, her birdlike stare unblinking.

  “Tell me, Alice.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid of Mr. Connor?”

  “No. Not him.”

  “Has someone threatened you—told you not to talk?”

  Her head moved in another barely perceptible nod.

  “Who threatened you, Alice? You’d better tell me for your own protection. Whoever did threaten you is probably a murderer.”

  She burst into frantic tears. Brocco came to the door.

  “What goes on in here?”

  “Your daughter is upset. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, and I know who upset her. You better get out of here or you’ll be sorrier.”

  He opened the screen door and held it open, his head poised like a dark and broken ax. I went out past him. He spat after me. The Broccos were a very emotional family.

  I started back toward Connor’s beach house on the south side of town but ran into a diversion on the way. Green’s car was parked in the lot beside his restaurant. I went in.

  The place smelled of grease. It was almost full of late Sunday lunchers seated in booths and at the U-shaped breakfast bar in the middle. Green himself was sitting on a stool behind the cash register counting money. He was counting it as if his life and his hope of heaven depended on the colored paper in his hands.

  He looked up, smiling loosely and vaguely. “Yes, sir?” Then he recognized me. His face went through a quick series of transformations and settled for a kind of boozy shame. “I know I shouldn’t be here working on a day like this. But it keeps my mind off my troubles. Besides, they steal you blind if you don’t watch ’em. And I’ll be needing the money.”

  “What for, Mr. Green?”

  “The trial.” He spoke the word as if it gave him a bitter satisfaction.

  “Whose trial?”

  “Mine. I told the sheriff what the old guy said. And what I did. I know what I did. I shot him down like a dog, and I had no right to. I was crazy with my sorrow, you might say.”

  He was less crazy now. The shame in his eyes was clearing. But the sorrow was still there in their depths, like stone at the bottom of a well.

  “I’m glad you told the truth, Mr. Green.”

  “So am I. It doesn’t help him, and it doesn’t bring Ginnie back. But at least I can live with myself.”

  “Speaking of Ginnie,” I said. “Was she seeing quite a lot of Frank Connor?”

  “Yeah. I guess you could say so. He came over to help her with her studies quite a few times. At the house, and at the library. He didn’t charge me any tuition, either.”

  “That was nice of him. Was Ginnie fond of Connor?”

  “Sure she was. She thought very highly of Mr. Connor.”

  “Was she in love with him?”

  “In love? Hell, I never thought of anything like that. Why?”

  “Did she have dates with Connor?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “If she did, she
must have done it behind my back.” His eyes narrowed to two red swollen slits. “You think Frank Connor had something to do with her death?”

  “It’s a possibility. Don’t go into a sweat now. You know where that gets you.”

  “Don’t worry. But what about this Connor? Did you get something on him? I thought he was acting queer last night.”

  “Queer in what way?”

  “Well, he was pretty tight when he came to the house. I gave him a stiff snort, and that straightened him out for a while. But later on, down on the beach, he got almost hysterical. He was running around like a rooster with his head chopped off.”

  “Is he a heavy drinker?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I never saw him drink before last night at my house.” Green narrowed his eyes. “But he tossed down a triple bourbon like it was water. And remember this morning, he offered us a drink on the beach. A drink in the morning, that isn’t the usual thing, especially for a high school teacher.”

  “I noticed that.”

  “What else have you been noticing?”

  “We won’t go into it now,” I said. “I don’t want to ruin a man unless and until I’m sure he’s got it coming.”

  He sat on his stool with his head down. Thought moved murkily under his knitted brows. His glance fell on the money in his hands. He was counting tens.

  “Listen, Mr. Archer. You’re working on this case on your own, aren’t you? For free?”

  “So far.”

  “So go to work for me. Nail Connor for me, and I’ll pay you whatever you ask.”

  “Not so fast,” I said. “We don’t know that Connor is guilty. There are other possibilities.”

  “Such as?”

  “If I tell you, can I trust you not to go on a shooting spree?”

  “Don’t worry,” he repeated. “I’ve had that.”

  “Where’s your revolver?”

  “I turned it in to Sheriff Pearsall. He asked for it.”

  We were interrupted by a family group getting up from one of the booths. They gave Green their money and their sympathy. When they were out of hearing, I said:

  “You mentioned that your daughter worked here in the restaurant for a while. Was Al Brocco working here at the same time?”

  “Yeah. He’s been my night cook for six-seven years. Al is a darned good cook. He trained as a chef on the Italian line.” His slow mind, punchy with grief, did a double take. “You wouldn’t be saying that he messed around with Ginnie?”