A homicidal maniac, or reasonable facsimile of one, had taken me in my own office. That would be a pretty story for the papers, good advertising for a private detective. Clients would be lining up six deep at my door. I sat and looked at the telephone, trying to decide whether to throw it out the window permanently.
There were footsteps in the outer office, too rapid and light for a man’s. As I crossed the room, they paused outside my door. I pulled it open. A woman in a dark suit stumbled in, attached to the knob. Her jet black ducktail bob was slightly disarrayed. She was breathless.
“Are you Mr. Archer?”
I looked her over and decided that there was no harm in admitting it.
She swayed towards me, wafting in springtime odors from the young slopes of her body. “I’m so glad you’re all right, that I got here first.”
“First before what?”
“Before Carl. He came to Dr. Grantland’s office—where I work—and said that he was on his way to see you. He demanded money to pay you with. I went back to get the doctor, to see if he could reason with him. As soon as my back was turned, Carl rifled the petty cash drawer in the desk.”
“Who is Carl?”
“My husband. Please forgive me, I’m not making much sense, am I?” Her dark blue glance slid over my shoulder and rested on the jagged hole in the window. “Has Carl been here already?”
“Something was. A man on a cyclone.”
“A big young man in working clothes? With short blond hair?”
I nodded.
“And he was violent.” It wasn’t a question. It was a leaden statement of despair.
“He started to choke me to death, but he changed his mind. Flighty. Did you say he’s your husband?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not wearing a wedding ring.”
“I know I’m not. But we’re still man and wife, in the legal sense. Of course I could have had an automatic divorce, after the trouble.” She slumped against the doorframe. Her dark enormous eyes and her carmine mouth provided the only color in her face. “I knew it. I knew he was lying. They’d never let him go in his condition. He must have escaped. It’s what I’ve been afraid of.” A few sobs racked her. She swallowed them, and straightened.
“Come in and sit down. You need a drink.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Not even water?”
I brought her a paper cupful from the cooler and stood over her chair while she drained it.
“Where did Carl escape from?”
“He’s been in the Security Hospital in Mendocino for nearly five years.” She crumpled the cup in her hands, and twisted it. “It’s a state institution for the criminally insane, in case you don’t know.”
“I do know. Is he that bad?”
“As bad as possible,” she said to the twisted cup. “Carl killed his father, you see. He was never tried for the murder, he was so obviously—unbalanced. All the psychiatrists agreed, for once. The judge was a friend of the family, and had him committed without a public trial.”
“Where did all this happen?”
“In the Valley, in Citrus Junction. It was a tragic thing for all of us. It happened on Thanksgiving Day, five years ago. Carl was home from Camarillo, and we were having a sort of family reunion.”
“Was he a mental patient at the time?”
“He had been, but he was out on leave of absence. We all thought he was on his way to being cured. It was almost a happy day, our first for a long time—until it happened. We should never have left him alone with his father for a minute. I still don’t think he meant to kill the old man. He simply went into one of his terrible rages, and when he came out of it old Mr. Heller was dead. Choked to death.” Her heavy eyes came up to my face. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You have no part in my troubles. Nobody could possibly want a part of them.”
It was a hot bright morning, but the draft from the broken window was cold on the back of my neck. “What brought him to me, I wonder?”
“One of the men he knew in—the institution. Someone you’d helped. He told me that this morning. Carl believes that he’s an innocent man, you see. He thinks he’s perfectly well, that everyone’s been persecuting him unjustly. It’s typical of paranoia, according to Dr. Grantland.”
“Dr. Grantland is your employer?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know Carl?”
“Of course. He treated him for a while before—it happened. Dr. Grantland is a psychiatrist.”
“Does he think Carl is dangerous?”
“I’m afraid so. The only one that doesn’t is Mr. Parish, and he’s not a real psychiatrist.”
“What is he?”
“Mr. Parish is a psychiatric social worker, in Citrus Junction. He stood up for Carl when they sent him away, but it didn’t do any good.” She rose, and fumbled at the clasp of her cheap imitation-leather saddlebag. “I’ll be glad to pay you for the window. I’m sorry about this—about poor Carl.”
“Poor everybody,” I said.
She gave me a bewildered look. “What do you mean, poor everybody?”
“Your husband is carrying a gun.”
Her mouth opened. When it finally closed, it was a thin red line. Her eyes focused like a blue spotlight on my face. “How do you know?”
“He was kind enough to show it to me. It looked like a Smith & Wesson .32 revolver.”
“Did he threaten you with it?”
“It wasn’t a water-pistol, and we weren’t playing cowboys and Indians. Does he know how to handle a gun?”
“Carl was a rifleman in the infantry.” Her eyes were darkly luminous like clouds containing lightning. She held out a five-dollar bill to me. “Will this cover the window? It’s all the cash I have with me. I have to go.”
“Forget the window. We should call the police.”
“No.” The word broke like a dry sob from her lips. “I can’t turn the police on him. You know what they’ll do if they catch him and he resists. They’ll shoot him down like a dog. I’ve got to go myself and warn Jerry that he’s out.”
“Jerry?”
“Jerry Heller, Carl’s brother in Citrus Junction. He blames Jerry for everything that’s happened to him. I’ve got to get to Jerry before he does.”
“I’ll go along.”
She looked at me dubiously. “I couldn’t afford to pay you very much.”
“I don’t put a dollar-sign on people’s lives. Let’s go.”
We left her battered Chevrolet in the parking lot of my building, and took my car. Driving out Ventura into the Valley, she told me her name, Mildred Heller, and something about her background.
She had been very young, just out of Hollywood High, when Carl Heller entered her life. It was 1943, and he was a new young private in the Army. They met at a church canteen. She was susceptible, and he was strong and masculine and handsome in a rather strange way of his own. They fell in love and got married, with her parents’ reluctant consent, a week before he was shipped out to the Marianes. When she saw him again in 1945, he was in the disturbed ward of a veterans’ hospital.
They picked up the pieces together as well as they could. After his discharge, they went to live on his family’s lemon ranch. The years of waiting had been hard, but the next few years were harder. Carl and his family didn’t get along. His father was crippled with arthritis, and tried to run the ranch from his wheelchair. Carl’s older brother Jerry actually ran it. Carl wouldn’t take orders from either of them. And then there was Jerry’s wife, who regarded the younger couple as interlopers.
Carl loafed around the house for two years, alternately brooding and raging. Finally he became impossible to live with, and his father had him committed to the state hospital. A year later Carl came home, ate a Thanksgiving dinner, and strangled his father with the rope from the old man’s bathrobe. Now Mildred was afraid it was Jerry’s turn.
I shifted my eyes from the road to look at her. Huddled in the corner of t
he seat, she seemed thinner and smaller and older than she had.
“Aren’t you afraid of what he’ll do to you?”
“No,” she said, “I’m not. He’s never tried to hurt me, never laid a hand on me. Sometimes I’ve almost wished he would, and put an end to it. What does my life amount to, after all? I can’t even have a child. What have I got to lose?”
“You’re a loyal girl, to stick to him.”
“Am I? My people don’t believe in divorce.”
“And you don’t either?”
“I don’t believe in anything any more. Good or bad.”
She turned her face away, and we drove in silence for another hour. The spring color of the hills was like Paris green. Gradually the hills slipped back into hazy distance. The highway ran smooth and straight across the citrus flatlands. Geometrically planted lemon trees stretched out like deep green corduroy around us. At her direction, I left the highway and turned up a county road.
A weather-warped sign, Jeremiah Heller Lemons, marked the entrance to a private lane. It led us through nearly a mile of lemon groves spotted with yellowing fruit. At its end a tile-roofed ranch house sprawled in the sun. When I switched off my engine, the silence was almost absolute.
The house was an old adobe which must have stood for several generations. Each new generation had added a wing of its own. A station wagon and a dusty jeep were parked on the gravel in front of the garages.
The silence was broken by a screen door’s percussion. Mildred jumped in her seat. She was strung as taut as a fiddlestring.
A striking blonde came out on the verandah and stood with her arms folded over her breasts, watching us as we got out of the car. She wore black satin slacks, a white silk shirt, and green enamel earrings in the middle of the day. Her eyes were the color and texture of the earrings.
“Why Mildred. What brings you here? Long time no see. I thought you had a job in Los Angeles, darling. Or did you lose that one, too?”
“I took the day off.”
“Well, that’s nice, isn’t it? Who’s the boyfriend?”
“Mr. Archer isn’t my boyfriend.”
“No? Don’t tell me you’re still burning a vestal candle for Carl. Isn’t that one pretty much of a forlorn hope?”
“Please, Zinnia. Don’t.” Mildred moved slowly up the verandah steps, as if she had to force herself to approach the blonde woman or enter the area of the house. “I came to tell you about Carl.”
“How fascinating. Let’s get out of this bloody sun, then, shall we? It plays hell with my complexion.”
Her voice was low and dry and monotonous, the voice of a vicious boredom. It affected me like a rattlesnake’s buzzing signal. We followed her switching hips into a cavernous living room walled with adobe, roofed with black oak beams. The breeze from a cooling system chilled me, or perhaps it was the blonde. She said:
“What’s your poison, Mr. Archer? I’ve been trying to think of an excuse to have a drink, anyway. I’m Zinnia Heller, by the way, since Milly has forgotten her manners as usual.”
I mislaid mine, deliberately. “I’d go easy on her, Mrs. Heller. She came to warn you—”
She turned to Mildred, her thin plucked eyebrows arching. “To warn me, dear? Aren’t we getting a little melodramatic?”
“Carl has escaped,” the younger woman said. “He hitchhiked to Los Angeles last night and turned up this morning at the office where I work.”
“Escaped from Mendocino?”
“Yes. And he’s violent, Zinnia. He made some wild threats against Jerry.”
“You called the police, I hope.” The blonde’s low buzzing voice had risen at least an octave.
“Not yet. Mr. Archer here is a private detective. Carl attacked him this morning.”
“And you think he’s coming here?”
“I know he is. He’s always believed that Jerry railroaded him.”
“You thought so yourself at one time, if memory serves me.”
“I never did, Zinnia, and you know it. All I ever claimed was that I had a right to some of the money, no matter what Carl did.”
“Well, the law disagreed.” Zinnia went to a bar in the corner of the room, poured herself a stiff brown drink from a cut-glass decanter, and gulped it straight. “Speaking of the law, I’d better call Ostervelt about this. Wasn’t that the idea?”
“Yes. Of course. The Sheriff knows Carl. He won’t hurt him unless he absolutely has to.”
Zinnia picked up a portable telephone and sat down with it in her gleaming satin lap. Her sharp red fingertip hesitated in the dial hole. “You’re sure all this is true, what you’ve been telling me? Carl really did escape? You’re not just trying to throw a scare into me, for old time’s sake?”
I said: “I saw your brother-in-law, Mrs. Heller. He’s disturbed, and he’s got a gun. You’d better tell the Sheriff about the gun. And your husband should be warned.”
“Will do.” She had recovered her composure. She talked to the duty deputy like a brigadier giving orders to a lieutenant colonel. I was once a lieutenant colonel, and I knew.
“Where is your husband?” I said when she put down the phone.
“Somewhere around the place. He putters. Do all men putter, Mr. Archer? Do you putter?”
I let the curve go by. “We ought to find him and tell him about his brother.”
“It shouldn’t be hard to find him. Jerry never goes anywhere. Coming, Milly?”
“I don’t feel very well.” The girl looked badly wilted from the strain. Her dark head drooped on the white stalk of her neck.
“Will you be all right here?” I said.
“Of course I will. I’ll keep a lookout for Carl.”
“He won’t be here for a while, unless he has a car.”
“He may have, though. He may have stolen one. I think he drove away from Dr. Grantland’s.”
“Did you see him?”
“No. But I heard an engine start up just after he ran out.”
“That’s bad.”
“Nothing good ever happens,” Zinnia said. “Not to this precious family, anyway.”
She put on a wide-brimmed Mexican straw hat, and we went out into the sun. It struck me like a slap across the eyes.
She led me around the side of the adobe. “Jerry’s probably in his greenhouse. Flowers, he grows. Cymbidiums. He’s got a green thumb that goes all the way up to his armpit. Well, I suppose everybody’s got to be good at something.”
In the narrow breezeway between the house and the garages, she suddenly turned to face me. Under the white shirt, her breasts were sharp and aggressive. “What are you good at, Mr. Archer?”
“Investigation.”
“What kind of investigation?” Her intent hot face gave the question a double meaning.
I assumed both meanings. “I gather evidence in divorce cases, for example.”
“Do you ever provide that kind of evidence personally?”
“Not when I’m conscious,” I said. “I’m conscious now, in case it doesn’t show.”
“Oh but it does. What a pity. You’re kind of cute in an ugly way, you know.”
“You can have that compliment back if you want it, in spades.”
That didn’t faze her. She said: “Why don’t you come back some time, minus bleeding-heart Milly? I still owe you a drink.”
“I like to buy my own drinks.”
“Oh? Are you loaded? I am.”
“You’re very flattering, Mrs. Heller.” I wouldn’t have touched the body coiled in my path with a forked stick, but it wouldn’t have been tactful to say so. “What about Mr. Heller?”
“What about him? Don’t ask me.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Ask his damn cymbidiums. They know him better than I do.”
“I don’t know the language of the flowers, and we’re wasting time.”
“So what? There’s plenty of time. Time is what hangs heavy on my hands.” She raised her hands, turning them slowly on their slender wrists. “Pretty?”
“I’ve seen prettier.” Her eyes hardened, gleaming like chips of copper ore in the shadow of her hat. “What language do you speak?”
“You wouldn’t know it.”
“Don’t you like women?”
“Women,” I said, “I like. I have my own definition.”
“God damn you.” She leaned towards me, almost falling. I held her up. Her teeth nicked my chin, and her mouth moved like a small hot animal under my ear. Her hat fell off.
I pushed her away, partly because she was another man’s wife and partly because the other man was standing at the rear end of the breezeway, watching us. He had a pair of garden shears in his hand, which gleamed like a double dagger.
I picked up Zinnia’s hat and handed it to her. “Calm yourself, blondie,” I whispered. “Here’s the cymbidium king.”
She whispered back. “Did he see us?”
“Ask the cymbidiums.”
He moved towards us, an older, smaller, heavier version of his brother. His coloring was similar, red hair and pink complexion. It was his eyes that made the difference. They were sane, cynically and wearily sane. I looked down at the shears in his hand. He had a firm grip on them, and they were pointed at the middle of my body.
“Out,” he said. “Get out.”
“You don’t know who I am.”
“I don’t care who you are. If you don’t want to be gelded, get off my property and stay off my property. That includes my wife.”
She was standing flat against the adobe wall, holding the hat in front of her like a flimsy shield. “Take it easy now, Jerry. I got something in my eye. This gentleman was trying to remove it.”
He stood with his short legs planted wide apart, peering at me out of pale eyes. Their whites were yellowish from some internal complaint: bad digestion or bad conscience. “Is that how he got the lipstick on his face?”
“He didn’t get it from me.” But her hand went to her mouth.
“Who did he get it from then?”
“From Milly, probably. They came up here together. She’s in the house now.”
The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator Page 36