Murder Most Foul Page 13

“Are you about to explain your plan?” he asked her.

  “I’d rather demonstrate,” she answered. “If I’ve guessed right, we’ll soon know it.”

  While he set up the machine, she took the cord and tied one end around the small knob on top of the music box. Then she put the box on the ground next to the speaker.

  “Ready?” he asked, and she nodded.

  They walked back across the field till the cord was stretched to its full length.

  “This should be a safe distance,” he said. “Now?”

  “Now,” she said.

  She pulled the cord that lifted the top from the powder box while he pushed the button that started the playback. In the clear night air sounded the opening chord of the music box tune. At the same time a familiar girlish voice began, “This is the Red Room—” But neither song nor speech was ever finished.

  A flash of light! An eruption of sound! A mingling in the air of fragments of both box and recorder. Then darkness—silence—a hole in the ground.

  Hugh looked down at her. “You guessed right,” he said dryly. “What put it in your head?”

  “Mainly your mention of my brother. He’s as gadgety as ever. I remembered the last time I visited him he drove up to his garage and leaned out and shouted, ‘Hey! the master’s home!’ and the door rolled open. He has it set with an electrical device that will respond to his voice, no matter what he says, and to no one else’s. So it occurred to me that the music box could be made to operate the same way, with a detonator that would set off the explosive at the sound of the right voice.”

  “And since it was intended as a gift for the First Lady,” Hugh followed up, “it was logical to key it to her tone and accent. The fact that her voice is so distinctive would make the job easier. The way they had it planned, the Premier would give her the box, she'd open it and say ‘Thank you’ or ‘How charming’ or whatever seemed appropriate —and boom!”

  “It was great good luck that she wasn’t here for the presentation.”

  “It was indeed,” Hugh said soberly. “And more than luck that you were on the job tonight. Otherwise it would have meant only a postponement. If the box were still there, it wouldn’t be long before it would hear her voice.”

  “I know,” Selena nodded. “That’s why I had to get it out of the White House, no matter what the risk. She’s bringing the children home tomorrow and she’d be sure to show it to them.” She looked out toward the gaping hole and demolished tape recorder, drew her coat tight in sudden chill. “Children love music boxes.”

  Gone Girl

  Ross Macdonald

  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 eighty 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.

  “A room.”

  “ls that all you want?”

  From where I sat, it sounded like an accusation. I let it pass. “What else is there? Circassian dancing girls? Free popcorn?”

  He tried to smile without showing his bad teeth. The smile was a dismal failure, like my joke. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “You woke me up. I never make much sense right after I just wake up.”

  “Have a nightmare?”

  His vague eyes expanded like blue bubblegum bubbles. “Why did you ask me that?”

  “Because I just had one. But skip it. Do you have a vacancy or don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” He swallowed whatever bitter taste he had in his mouth, and assumed an impersonal obsequious manner. “You got any luggage, sir?”

  “No luggage.”

  Moving silently in tennis sneakers like a frail ghost of the boy he once had been, he went behind the counter, and took my name, address, license number, and five dollars. In return, he gave me a key numbered fourteen and told me where to use it. Apparently he despaired of a tip.

  Room fourteen was like any other middle-class motel room touched with the California-Spanish mania. Artificially roughened plaster painted adobe color, poinsettia-red curtains, imitation parchment lampshade on a twisted black iron stand. A Rivera reproduction of a sleeping Mexican hung on the wall over the bed. I succumbed to its suggestion right away, and dreamed about Circassian dancing girls.

  Along toward morning one of them got frightened, through no fault of mine, and began to scream her little Circassian lungs out. I sat up in bed, making soothing noises, and woke up. It was nearly nine by my wristwatch. The screaming ceased and began again, spoiling the morning like a fire siren outside the window. I pulled on my trousers over the underwear I’d been sleeping in, and went outside.

  A young woman was standing on the walk outside the next room. She had a key in one hand and a handful of blood in the other. She wore a wide multi-colored skirt and a low-cut gypsy sort of blouse. The blouse was distended and her mouth was open, and she was yelling her head off. It was a fine dark head, but I hated her for spoiling my morning sleep.

  I took her by the shoulders and said, “Stop it.”

  The screaming stopped. She looked down sleepily at the blo
od on her hand. It was as thick as axle grease, and almost as dark in color.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I slipped and fell in it. I didn’t see it.”

  Dropping the key on the walk, she pulled her skirt to one side with her clean hand. Her legs were bare and brown. Her skirt was stained at the back with the same thick fluid.

  “Where? In this room?”

  She faltered, “Yes.”

  Doors were opening up and down the drive. Half a dozen people began to converge on us. A dark-faced man about four and a half feet high came scampering from the direction of the office, his little pointed shoes dancing in the gravel.

  “Come inside and show me,” I said to the girl.

  “I can’t. I won’t.” Her eyes were very heavy, and surrounded by the bluish pallor of shock.

  The little man slid to a stop between us, reached up and gripped the upper part of her arm. “What is the matter, Ella? Are you crazy, disturbing the guests?”

  She said, “Blood,” and leaned against me with her eyes closed.

  His sharp glance probed the situation. He turned to the other guests, who had formed a murmuring semicircle around us. “It is perfectly hokay. Do not be concerned, ladies and gentlemen. My daughter cut herself a little bit. It is perfectly all right.”

  Circling her waist with one long arm, he hustled her through the open door and slammed it behind him. I caught it on my foot and followed them in.

  The room was a duplicate of mine, including the reproduction over the unmade bed, but everything was reversed as in a mirror image. The girl took a few weak steps by herself and sat on the edge of the bed. Then she noticed the blood spots on the sheets. She stood up quickly. Her mouth opened, rimmed with white teeth.

  “Don’t do it,” I said. “We know you have a very fine pair of lungs.”

  The little man turned on me. “Who do you think you are?”

  “The name is Archer. I have the next room.”

  “Get out of this one, please.”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  He lowered his greased black head as if he were going to butt me. Under his sharkskin jacket, a hunch protruded from his back like a displaced elbow. He seemed to reconsider the butting gambit, and decided in favor of diplomacy.

  “You are jumping to conclusions, mister. It is not so serious as it looks. We had a little accident here last night.”

  “Sure, your daughter cut herself. She heals remarkably fast.”

  “Nothing like that.” He fluttered one long hand. “I said to the people outside the first thing that came to my mind. Actually, it was a little scuffle. One of the guests suffered a nosebleed.”

  The girl moved like a sleepwalker to the bathroom door and switched on the light. There was a pool of blood coagulating on the black and white checkerboard linoleum, streaked where she had slipped and fallen in it.

  “Some nosebleed,” I said to the little man. “Do you run this joint?”

  “I am the proprietor of the Siesta motor hotel, yes. My name is Salanda. The gentleman is susceptible to nosebleed. He told me so himself.”

  “Where is he now?’’

  “He checked out early this morning.”

  “In good health?”

  “Certainly in good health.”

  I looked around the room. Apart from the unmade bed with the brown spots on the sheets, it contained no signs of occupancy. Someone had spilled a pint of blood and vanished.

  The little man opened the door wide and invited me with a sweep of his arm to leave. “If you will excuse me, sir, I wish to have this cleaned up as quickly as possible. Ella, will you tell Lorraine to get to work on it right away pronto? Then maybe you better lie down for a little while, eh?”

  “I’m all right now, father. Don’t worry about me.”

  When I checked out a few minutes later, she was sitting behind the desk in the front office, looking pale but composed.

  I dropped my key on the desk in front of her. “Feeling better, Ella?”

  “Oh. I didn’t recognize you with all your clothes on.”

  “That’s a good line. May I use it?”

  She lowered her eyes and blushed. “You’re making fun of me. I know I acted foolishly this morning.”

  “I’m not so sure. What do you think happened in thirteen last night?”

  “My father told you, didn’t he?”

  “He gave me a version, two of them, in fact. I doubt that they’re the final shooting script.”

  Her hand went to the central hollow in her blouse. Her arms and shoulders were slender and brown, the tips of her fingers carmine. “Shooting?”

  “A cinema term,” I said. “But there might have been a real shooting at that. Don’t you think so?”

  Her front teeth pinched her lower lip. She looked like somebody’s pet rabbit. I restrained an impulse to pat her sleek brown head.

  “That’s ridiculous. This is a respectable motel. Anyway, father asked me not to discuss it with anybody.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He loves this place, that’s why. He doesn’t want any scandal made out of nothing. If we lost our good reputation here, it would break my father’s heart.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”

  She stood up, smoothing her skirt. I saw that she’d changed it. “You leave him alone. He’s a dear little man. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, trying to stir up trouble where there isn’t any.”

  I backed away from her righteous indignation—female indignation is always righteous—and went out to my car. The early spring sun was dazzling. Beyond the freeway and the drifted sugary dunes, the bay was Prussian blue. The road cut inland across the base of the peninsula and returned to the sea a few miles north of the town. Here a wide blacktop parking space shelved off to the left of the highway, overlook ing the white beach and whiter breakers. Signs at each end of the turnout stated that this was a County Park, No Beach Fires.

  The beach and the blacktop expanse above it were deserted except for a single car, which looked very lonely. It was a long black Cadillac nosed into the cable fence at the edge of the beach. I braked and turned off the highway and got out. The man in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac didn’t turn his head as I approached him. His chin was propped on the steering wheel, and he was gazing out across the endless blue sea.

  I opened the door and looked into his face. It was paper white. The dark brown eyes were sightless. The body was unclothed except for the thick hair matted on the chest, and a clumsy bandage tied around the waist. The bandage was composed of several blood-stained towels, held in place by a knotted piece of nylon fabric whose nature I didn’t recognize immediately. Examining it more closely, I saw that it was a woman’s slip. The left breast of the garment was embroidered in purple with a heart, containing the name, “Fern,” in slanting script. I wondered who Fern was.

  The man who was wearing her purple heart had dark curly hair, heavy black eyebrows, a heavy chin sprouting black beard. He was rough-looking in spite of his anemia and the lipstick smudged on his mouth.

  There was no registration on the steering post, and nothing in the glove compartment but a half-empty box of shells for a .38 automatic. The ignition was still turned on. So were the dash and headlights, but they were dim. The gas gauge registered empty. Curlyhead must have pulled off the highway soon after he passed me, and driven all the rest of the night in one place.

  I untied the slip, which didn’t look as if it would take fingerprints, and went over it for a label. It had one: Gretchen, Palm Springs. It occurred to me that it was Saturday morning, and that I’d gone all winter without a weekend in the desert. I retied the slip the way I’d found it, and drove back to the Siesta Motel.

  Ella’s welcome was a few degrees colder than absolute zero. “Well!” She glared down her pretty rabbit nose at me. “I thought we were rid of you.”

  “So did I. But I just couldn’t tear myself away.”

>   She gave me a peculiar look, neither hard nor soft. but mixed. Her hand went to her hair, then reached for a registration card. “I suppose if you want to rent a room, I can’t stop you. Only please don’t imagine you’re making an impression on me. You’re not. You leave me cold, mister.”

  “Archer,” I said. “Lew Archer. Don’t bother with the card. I came back to use your phone.”

  “Aren’t there any other phones?” She pushed the telephone across the desk. “I guess it’s all right, long as it isn’t a toll call.”

  “I’m calling the Highway Patrol. Do you know their local number?”

  “I don’t remember.” She handed me the telephone directory.

  “There’s been an accident,” I said as I dialed.

  “A highway accident? Where did it happen?”

  “Right here, sister. Right here in room thirteen.”

  But I didn’t tell that to the Highway Patrol. I told them I had found a dead man in a car on the parking lot above the county beach. The girl listened with widening eyes and nostrils. Before I finished, she rose in a flurry and left the office by the rear door.

  She came back with the proprietor. His eyes were black and bright, like nailheads in leather, and the scampering dance of his feet was almost frenzied. “What is this?”

  “I came across a dead man up the road a piece.”

  “So why do you come back here to telephone?” His head was in butting position, his hands outspread and gripping the corners of the desk. “Has it got anything to do with us?”

  “He’s wearing a couple of your towels.”

  “What?”

  “And he was bleeding heavily before he died. I think somebody shot him in the stomach. Maybe you did.”

  “You’re loco,” he said, but not very emphatically. “Crazy accusations like that, they will get you into trouble. What is your business?”

  “I’m a private detective.”

  “You followed him here, is that it? You were going to arrest him, so he shot himself?”

  “Wrong on both accounts,” I said. “I came here to sleep. And they don’t shoot themselves in the stomach. It’s too uncertain, and slow. No suicide wants to die of peritonitis.”