“Do you know him?”
“Nope. Do you?”
“Never saw him before,” I said, with truth.
“How about you phoning the police, Mac? I’m pooped. And unless I make a catch, I don’t eat today. There’s no pay in fishing for corpses.”
“In a minute.”
I went through the dead man’s pockets. There was a set of car keys in his jacket pocket, and an alligator wallet on his hip. It contained no money, but the driver’s license was decipherable: Owen Dewar, Mesa Court, Las Vegas. I put the wallet back, and let go of the body. The head rolled sideways. I saw the small hole in his neck, washed clean by the sea.
“Holy Mother!” the diver said. “He was shot.”
—
I got back to the Falk house around midmorning. The sun had burned off the clouds, and the day was turning hot. By daylight the long, treeless street of identical houses looked cheap and rundown. It was part of the miles of suburban slums that the war had scattered all over Southern California.
Gretchen was sprinkling the brown front lawn with a desultory hose. She looked too big for the pocket-handkerchief yard. The sunsuit that barely covered her various bulges made her look even bigger. She turned off the water when I got out of my car.
“What gives? You’ve got trouble on your face if I ever saw trouble.”
“Dewar is dead. Murdered. A skin-diver found him in the sea off La Jolla.”
She took it calmly. “That’s not such bad news, is it? He had it coming. Who killed him?”
“I told you a gunman from Nevada was on his trail. Maybe he caught him. Anyway, Dewar was shot and bled to death from a neck wound. Then he was dumped in the ocean. I had to lay the whole thing on the line for the police, since there’s murder in it.”
“You told them what happened to Ethel?”
“I had to. They’re at the rest home talking to her now.”
“What about Ethel’s money? Was the money on him?”
“Not a trace of it. And he didn’t live to spend it. The police pathologist thinks he’s been dead for a week. Whoever got Dewar got the money at the same time.”
“Will she ever get it back, do you think?”
“If we can catch the murderer, and he still has it with him. That’s a big if. Where’s Clare, by the way? With her sister?”
“Clare went back to L.A.”
“What for?”
“Don’t ask me.” She shrugged her rosy shoulders. “She got Jake to drive her down to the station before he went to work. I wasn’t up. She didn’t even tell me she was going.” Gretchen seemed peeved.
“Did she get a telegram, or a phone call?”
“Nothing. All I know is what Jake told me. She talked him into lending her ten bucks. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it was all the ready cash we had, until payday. Oh well, I guess we’ll get it back, if Ethel recovers her money.”
“You’ll get it back,” I said. “Clare seems to be a straight kid.”
“That’s what I always used to think. When they lived here, before Ethel met Illman and got into the chips, Clare was just about the nicest kid on the block. In spite of all the trouble in her family.”
“What trouble was that?”
“Her father shot himself. Didn’t you know? They said it was an accident, but the people on the street—we knew different. Mr. Larrabee was never the same after his wife left him. He spent his time brooding, drinking and brooding. Clare reminded me of him, the way she behaved last night after you left. She wouldn’t talk to me or look at me. She shut herself up in her room and acted real cold. If you want the honest truth, I don’t like her using my home as if it was a motel and Jake was a taxi-service. The least she could of done was say goodbye to me.”
“It sounds as if she had something on her mind.”
All the way back to Los Angeles, I wondered what it was. It took me a little over two hours to drive from San Diego to West Hollywood. The black Lincoln with the searchlight and the Nevada license plates was standing at the curb below the redwood house. The front door of the house was standing open.
I transferred my automatic from the suitcase to my jacket pocket, making sure that it was ready to fire. I climbed the terraced lawn beside the driveway. My feet made no sound in the grass. When I reached the porch, I heard voices from inside. One was the gunman’s hoarse and deathly monotone:
“I’m taking it, sister. It belongs to me.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Sure, but not about this. The money is mine.”
“It’s my sister’s money. What right have you got to it?”
“This. Dewar stole it from me. He ran a poker game for me in Vegas, a high-stakes game in various hotels around town. He was a good dealer, and I trusted him with the house take. I let it pile up for a week, that was my mistake. I should’ve kept a closer watch on him. He ran out on me with twenty-five grand or more. That’s the money you’re holding, lady.”
“I don’t believe it. You can’t prove that story. It’s fantastic.”
“I don’t have to prove it. Gelt talks, but iron talks louder. So hand it over, eh?”
“I’ll die first.”
“Maybe you will at that.”
I edged along the wall to the open door. Clare was standing flat against the opposite wall of the hallway. She was clutching a sheaf of bills to her breast. The gunman’s broad flannel back was to me, and he was advancing on her.
“Stay away from me, you.” Her cry was thin and desperate. She was trying to merge with the wall, pressed by an orgastic terror.
“I don’t like taking candy from a baby,” he said in a very reasonable tone. “Only I’m going to have that money back.”
“You can’t have it. It’s Ethel’s. It’s all she has.”
“——you, lady. You and your sister both.”
He raised his armed right hand and slapped the side of her face with the gun barrel, lightly. Fingering the welt it left, she said in a kind of despairing stupor:
“You’re the one that hurt Ethel, aren’t you? Now you’re hurting me. You like hurting people, don’t you?”
“Listen to reason, lady. It ain’t just the money, it’s a matter of business. I let it happen once, it’ll happen again. I can’t afford to let anybody get away with nothing. I got a reputation to live up to.”
I said from the doorway: “Is that why you killed Dewar?”
He let out an animal sound, and whirled in my direction. I shot before he did, twice. The first slug rocked him back on his heels. His bullet went wild, plowed the ceiling. My second slug took him off balance and slammed him against the wall. His blood spattered Clare and the money in her hands. She screamed once, very loudly.
The man from Las Vegas dropped his gun. It clattered on the parquetry. His hands clasped his perforated chest, trying to hold the blood in. He slid down the wall slowly, his face a mask of smiling pain, and sat with a bump on the floor. He blew red bubbles and said:
“You got me wrong. I didn’t kill Dewar. I didn’t know he was dead. The money belongs to me. You made a big mistake, punk.”
“So did you.”
He went on smiling, as if in fierce appreciation of the joke. Then his red grin changed to a rictus, and he slumped sideways.
Clare looked from him to me, her eyes wide and dark with the sight of death. “I don’t know how to thank you. He was going to kill me.”
“I doubt that. He was just combining a little pleasure with business.”
“But he shot at you.”
“It’s just as well he did. It leaves no doubt that it was self-defense.”
“Is it true what you said? That Dewar’s dead? He killed him?”
“You tell me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got the money that Dewar took from your sister. Where did you get it?”
“It was here, right in this house. I found it in the kitchen.”
“That’s kind of hard to swallow, Clare.”
“Show me where.”
“You’re not being very nice to me. And I’m not feeling well.”
“Neither is Dewar. You didn’t shoot him yourself, by any chance?”
“How could I? I was in Berkeley when it happened. I wish I was back there now.”
“You know when it happened, do you?”
“No.” She bit her lip. “I don’t mean that. I mean I was in Berkeley all along. You’re a witness, you were with me on the train coming down.”
“Trains run both ways.”
She regarded me with loathing. “You’re not nice at all. To think that yesterday I thought you were nice.”
“You’re wasting time, Clare. I have to call the police. But first I want to see where you found the money. Or where you say you did.”
“In the kitchen. You’ve got to believe me. It took me a long time to get here from the station on the bus. I’d only just found it when he walked in on me.”
“I’ll believe the physical evidence, if any.”
To my surprise, the physical evidence was there. A red-enameled flour canister was standing open on the board beside the kitchen sink. There were fingerprints on the flour, and a floury piece of oilskin wrapping in the sink.
“He hid the money under the flour,” Clare said. “I guess he thought it would be safer here than if he carried it around with him.”
It wasn’t a likely story. On the other hand, the criminal mind is capable of strange things. Whose criminal mind, I wondered: Clare’s, or Owen Dewar’s, or somebody else’s? I said:
“Where did you get the bright idea of coming back here and looking for it?”
“Ethel suggested it last night, just before I left her. She told me this was his favorite hiding place while she was living with him. She discovered it by accident one day.”
“Hiding place for what?”
“Some kind of drug he took. He was a drug addict. Do you still think I’m lying?”
“Somebody is. But I suppose I’ve got to take your word, until I get something better. What are you going to do with the money?”
“Ethel said if I found it, that I was to go down and put it in the bank.”
“There’s no time for that now. You better let me hold it for you. I have a safe in my office.”
“No. You don’t trust me. Why should I trust you?”
“Because you can trust me, and you know it. If the cops impound it, you’ll have to prove ownership to get it back.”
She was too spent to argue. She let me take it out of her hands. I riffled through the bills and got a rough idea of their sum. There was easily twenty-five thousand there. I gave her a receipt for that amount, and put the sheaf of bills in my inside pocket.
It was after dark when the cops got through with me. By that time I was equipped to do a comparative study on the San Diego and Los Angeles P.D.’s. With the help of a friend in the D.A.’s office, Clare’s eyewitness account, and the bullet in the ceiling, I got away from them without being booked. The dead man’s record also helped. He had been widely suspected of shooting Bugsy Siegel, and had fallen heir to some of Siegel’s holdings. His name was Jack Fidelis. R.I.P.
I drove out Sunset to my office. The Strip was lighting up for business again. The stars looked down on its neon conflagration like hard bright knowing eyes. I pulled the Venetian blinds and locked the doors and counted the money: $26,380. I wrapped it up in brown paper, sealed it with wax and tucked it away in the safe. I would have preferred to tear it in little pieces and flush the green confetti down the drain. Two men had died for it. I wasn’t eager to become the third.
I had a steak in the restaurant at International Airport, and hopped a shuttle plane to Las Vegas. There I spent a rough night in various gambling joints, watching the suckers blow their vacation money, pinching my own pennies, and talking to some of the guys and girls that raked the money in. The rest of Illman’s two hundred dollars bought me the facts I needed.
I flew back to Los Angeles in the morning, picked up my car and headed for San Diego. I was tired enough to sleep standing up, like a horse. But something heavier than sleep or tiredness sat on the back of my neck and pressed the gas pedal down to the floorboards. It was the thought of Clare.
Clare was with her sister in the Mission Rest Home. She was waiting outside the closed door of Ethel’s room when Mrs. Lestina took me down the hall. She looked as if she had passed a rougher night than mine. Her grooming was careless, hair uncombed, mouth unpainted. The welt from Fidelis’ gun had turned blue and spread to one puffed eye. And I thought how very little it took to break a young girl down into a tramp, if she was vulnerable, or twist her into something worse than a tramp.
“Did you bring it with you?” she said as soon as Mrs. Lestina was out of earshot. “Ethel’s angry with me for turning it over to you.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Give it to me. Please.” Her hand clawed at my sleeve. “Isn’t that what you came for, to give it back to me?”
“It’s in the safe in my office in Los Angeles. That is, if you’re talking about the money.”
“What else would I be talking about? You’ll simply have to go back there and get it. Ethel can’t leave here without it. She needs it to pay her bill.”
“Is Ethel planning to go someplace?”
“I persuaded her to come back to Berkeley with me. She’ll have better care in the hospital there, and I know of a good plastic surgeon—”
“It’ll take more than that to put Ethel together again.”
“What do you mean?”
“You should be able to guess. You’re not a stupid girl, or are you? Has she got you fooled the way she had me fooled?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I don’t like it. Every time I see you, you seem to get nastier.”
“This is a nasty business. It’s rubbing off on all of us, isn’t it, kid?”
She looked at me vaguely through a fog of doubt. “Don’t you dare call me kid. I thought you were a real friend for a while, but you don’t even like me. You’ve said some dreadful things. You probably think you can scare me into letting you keep our money. Well, you can’t.”
“That’s my problem,” I said. “What to do with the money.”
“You’ll give it back to Ethel and me, that’s what you’ll do. There are laws to deal with people like you—”
“And people like Ethel. I want to talk to her.”
“I won’t let you. My sister’s suffered enough already.”
She spread her arms across the width of the door. I was tempted to go away and send her the money and forget the whole thing. But the need to finish it pushed me, imperative as a gun at my back.
I lifted her by the waist and tried to set her aside. Her entire body was rigid and jerking galvanically. Her hands slid under my arms and around my neck and held on. Her head rolled on my shoulder and was still. Suddenly, like delayed rain after lightning, her tears came. I stood and held her vibrating body, trying to quench the dangerous heat that was rising in my veins, and wondering what in hell I was going to do.
“Ethel did it for me,” she sobbed. “She wanted me to have a good start in life.”
“Some start she’s giving you. Did she tell you that?”
“She didn’t have to. I knew. I tried to pretend to myself, but I knew. When she told me where to look for the money last night—the night before last.”
“You knew Ethel took it from Dewar and hid it in her house?”
“Yes. The thought went through my mind, and I couldn’t get rid of it. Ethel’s always taken terrible chances, and money means so much to her. Not for herself. For me.”
“She wasn’t thinking of you when she gambled away the money she got from Illman.
She went through it in a week.”
“Is that what happened to it?”
“That’s it. I flew to Las Vegas last night and talked to some of the people that got her money, dealers and stickmen. They remembered her. She had a bad case of gambling fever that week. It didn’t leave her until the money was gone. Then maybe she thought of you.”
“Poor Ethel. I’ve seen her before when she had a gambling streak.”
“Poor Dewar,” I said.
The door beside us creaked open. The muzzle of a blue revolver looked out. Above it, Ethel’s eyes glared red from her bandaged face.
“Come in here, both of you.”
Clare stretched out her hands towards her sister. “No, Ethel. Darling, you mustn’t. Give me that gun.”
“I have a use for it. I know what I’m doing.”
She backed away, supporting herself on the doorknob.
I said to Clare: “We better do as she says. She won’t hurt you.”
“Nor you unless you make me. Don’t reach for your gun, and don’t try anything funny. You know what happened to Dewar.”
“Not as well as you do.”
“Don’t waste any tears on that one. Save them for yourself. Now get in here.” The gun wagged peremptorily.
I edged past her with Clare at my back. Ethel shut the door and moved to the bed, her eyes never leaving mine. She sat on its edge, and supported the elbow of her gun arm on her knee, hunched far over like an aged wreck of a woman.
It was strange to see the fine naked legs dangling below her hospital gown, the red polish flaking off her toenails. Her voice was low and resonant.
“I don’t like to do this. But how am I going to make you see it my way if I don’t? I want Clare to see it, too. It was self-defense, understand. I didn’t intend to kill him. I never expected to see him again. Fidelis was after him, and it was only a matter of time until he caught up with Owen. Owen knew that. He told me himself he wouldn’t live out the year. He was so sure of it he was paralyzed. He got so he wouldn’t even go out of the house.
“Somebody had to make a move, and I decided it might as well be me. Why should I sit and wait for Fidelis to come and take the money back and blow Owen’s head off for him? It was really my money, anyway, mine and Clare’s.”
The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator Page 30