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¶ Her gaze returned to me, tireder and older after its little slumming excursion around my antechamber. There were olive drab thumbprints under her eyes. Maybe she had been up all night, after all. In any case she looked fifty, in spite of the girlishness and the boyishness. Americans never grew old: they died; and her eyes had the guilty knowledge of it. ¶
My job was a walking job and a driving job, but mainly a sitting and waiting job.
¶ My cigarette tasted like burning grass. I butted it in the lid of a coffee can which had been left in the room as an ashtray and thought of the people who had lain alone or in pairs on the iron [motel] bed and looked at the yellow ceiling. Traces of their dirt remained in the corners, their odors clung to the walls. They had come from all over the country to look at the yellow ceiling, stir in the iron bed, finger the walls and leave their indelible marks. ¶
¶ The air in the hallway was a thin hospital-soup compounded of cooking odors, antiseptic, dimness. A face swam at me through it. It was a big man’s face, too sharp and aggressive. I shifted my feet instinctively, then saw that it was my own face reflected in murky glass, framed in the tarnished curlicues of a wall mirror. ¶
She wore the gray striped uniform of a nurse’s aide, and she was handsome in a plump and violent way. Her black eyes looked at me as if they knew it.
¶ “Do you wish to see the doctor?”
Her eyes color of baked blue enamel. Her beauty canceled the room.
I was wondering how the room had happened to deserve her when she interrupted me: “Did you wish to see the doctor?”
“Yes.”
[...]
She stood with perfect calm under the pressure of my stare, as if it were her natural element. Her beauty wasn’t the kind that depended on movement or feeling. It was plastic and external like a statue’s; even the blue eyes were flat and depthless. Her whole face looked as if it had been frozen with novocaine.
[...] Her tight, lumpy uniform made me restless. Everything about her bothered me. ¶
His little smile had a shamefaced charm, acknowledging that he had taken a running jump at manhood and still, at forty or forty-five, had never quite got his hands on it.
¶ “You’re bloody right.” Self-pity gurgled in his throat like a hemorrhage beyond the reach of irony or cautery. “How did I know she was passing herself for white? That she was going to bleed all over my floor? I got to clean it up.” ¶
¶ We faced each other across the drying moat of blood. He was a rough small-city cop, neither suave nor persuasive, with an ego encysted in scar-tissue. I was tempted to needle him again, to demonstrate to these country cousins how a boy from the big city could be hard in a polished way. But my heart wasn’t in the work. I felt less loyalty to my client than to the dead girl on the floor, and I compromised: ¶
¶ It was the deputy coroner, a plump young medical man bubbling with the excessive cheerfulness of those who handled death as a regular chore. He was accompanied by a white-coated ambulance driver and a black-coated undertaker who strove to outdo him in gaiety.
¶ It was twilight, and the courtyard was almost empty. Around a pole in its center, a group of women stood in the spill of light from a single arc-lamp. They were talking in loud self-righteous tones about murders they had seen or read or heard about or imagined. Their voices sank to an uneasy protesting murmur as Lucy’s cortege went by them. Their eyes, bright-dark in faces splashed with the white by the lamp on the pole, followed the stretcher to the back door of the waiting hearse. The sky was a dingy yellow ceiling. ¶
¶ The Mission Hotel was the most impressive building on Main Street. [...]
The lobby was deep and gloomy, furnished with dark wrinkled-leather chairs. Those near the half-curtained windows at the front were occupied by old men sitting in stiff impromptu positions, as if a flood had lodged them there years ago and then receded forever. On the wall above their heads, an obscure mural depicted U. S. Cavalrymen riding strange horses with human knees in pursuit of still stranger Indians.
The desk-clerk was a mouse-colored little man who was striving against heavy odds to confer distinction on himself and his surroundings. With hair and eyebrow-moustache scrupulously brushed, a cornflower in his buttonhole matching the delicate pin-stripe in his flannels, and at his languid elbow a vase of cornflowers to underline his point, he might have inspired a tone poem by Debussy. He anwered my question in tones of careful elegance, implying that he hadn’t always manned an outpost in the wilderness: ¶
In red Japanese pajamas she looked less like a woman than a sexless imp who had grown old in hell.
[...]
Una was flattering herself again. Even in lounging pajamas, her torso was no more interesting or curvilinear than a brick. I backed into one of the unsittable chairs, and said: “You’re a great admirer of men.” ¶
¶ “[...] Who do you think you are?”
[Lew Archer:] “Merely an ex-cop trying to hustle a living. I sell my services on the open market. It doesn’t mean I have to sell them to anybody.”
“That’s tall talk for a peeper. I can buy and sell you twenty times over –”
“Not me. You should have taken my advice and gone to the classifieds. There are bums you can hire for fifteen dollars a day to do anything short of murder. Murder comes higher.” ¶
Her hands were moving over and over each other, trying to warm themselves at the cold fire of the diamonds.
¶ “Just ask her!” He was cut to the quick, which was very near the surface. “Go and ask her.” ¶
¶ It was an early Saturday-night crowd. [...] Women of all ages and all shades. Hard-faced women in hats towed men in business suits. Ranchers hobbling in high-heeled boots leaned on their sun-faded wives.
¶ I went to the bar, which covered the whole left wall of the café. The booths along the opposite wall were full, and the bar was packed with Saturday-night 1 drinkers: soldiers and shrill dark girls who looked too young to be there, hard-faced middle-aged women with permanented hair, old men renewing their youth for the thousandth time, asphalt-eyed whores working for a living on drunken workingmen, a few fugitives from the upper half of town drowning one self to let another self be born. Behind the bar a hefty Greek in an apron dispensed fuel, aphrodisiac, opiate, with a constant melancholy smile. ¶
I guessed that Max had been drinking all day, and had reached the point where anything he said sounded like poetry set to music. ¶
It [her face] might have been handsome in a horsy way before age and ego had stiffened the bony framework and thrust it forward under the skin like concealed artillery.
¶ The situation was too complicated for me to understand or try to deal with. I didn’t know whether the umbilical cord between Mrs. Singleton and her son had stretched and broken and snapped back in her face and knocked her silly. Or whether she knew he was dead and was talking against despair. Whichever it was, she was ready to believe almost anything and suspicious of nearly everybody. Reality had betrayed her. ¶
¶ It was a large L-shaped room decorated with bullfight posters, blue with smoke, pounding with monkeyhouse din. White female shoulders, dinner jackets black, blue, and plaid, swayed and gesticulated three deep at the long bar. The men had the unnaturally healthy, self-assured faces of sportsmen who had never really had to take a chance. Except perhaps on their women. The women’s bodies looked more conscious than their heads. Somewhere behind the walls, an orchestra started a samba rhythm. Some of the shoulders and dinner jackets were lured away from the bar. ¶
¶ “Aren’t you a policeman?”
[Lew Archer:] “More or less. It shows when I’m tired.” ¶
“The total personality is the cause of psychosomatic ills. [...] A strong personality will sometimes convert incipient neurosis into physical symptoms. [...]”
“You are on our side, Mr. Archer?”
“The side of justice when I can find it. When I can’t find it, I’m for the underdog.” ¶
¶ “I believe that you are a righteous man, Mr. Archer.”
I let her believe it. ¶ 2
The pattern I was picking out strand by strand was too complicated to be explained in the language of physical evidence. Brake’s understanding was an evidence box holding the kinds of facts that could be hammered through the skulls of a back-country jury. It wasn’t a back-country case. ¶
¶ He didn’t answer. I had pushed him too fast and too far. Looking down at the locked round impenetrable skull, I understood Brake’s routine 3 and desperate anger after thirty years of trying to fit human truth into the square-cut legal patterns handed down for his use by legislators and judges. And thinking of Brake’s anger, I lost my own. ¶
¶ I took her head in my hands. Her breasts were full and strong between us. Her hands moved on my back.
¶ He answered disconnectedly: “I gave you a helping hand. I lifted you out of the gutter. You owe everything to me.” The shock had sprung a booby-trap of clichés in his head.
“Good gray doctor Good-Samaritan! [...]” ¶
In the frightened attitude her body had assumed, her hips and breasts seemed strangely irrelevant. The rouge-stained mouth in her sallow face was like a wilted red rose stuck in plasticine.
She made an erratic rush for the bed, and covered herself with a sheet. Her mouth fell open. [...] “What do you want?”
[Lew Archer:] “Not you, Florie. Don’t be scared.” ¶
¶ “I did not,” she said, with that peculiar whining intonation which means guilty as charged but I can’t help it if people are always leading me astray. ¶
¶ At the rear of a bus depot below the window, a dusty blue bus was loading passengers: a pregnant Mexican woman herding half-naked brown children, a fieldworker in overalls who might have been the father of the children, an old man with a cane casting a tripod shadow on the asphalt, two young soldiers looking bored with any possible journey through any valley under any sky. The line moved forward slowly like a colored snake drunk with sun. ¶
¶ In my car, Florie relaxed into hangover somnolence. I drove across town to the county hospital. Obscured by the dust and insect splashes on the windshield, wavering in the heat, the streets and buildings were like an image of a city refracted through Florie’s mind. The asphalt was soft as flesh under the wheels.
It was cold enough in the morgue. ¶
¶ She came out shivering, holding the red purse against her breast like an external heart that wouldn’t hold still.
¶ The hallway was dim and chilly. An odor of rotting wood, which I hadn’t noticed before, underlay the other odors. Men with a sense of failure like Benning had a knack of choosing the right environment for failure, or creating it around them. I listened for the sound of the woman in the house.3.2 There was no sound except the drip of a tap somewhere like a slow internal hemorrhage. ¶
¶ “Then why not say so?” Benning spoke with acerbity. He was pulling himself together under the hat.
[...]
[...] Biting at the inside of his long upper lip, the doctor resembled a worried camel chewing a bitter cud. [...]
Benning swallowed several times, his adam’s-apple bobbing like a distorted yo-yo in his throat.
¶ The two men faced each other in silence for a minute. Brake’s silence was heavy, persistent, thick, like a tree-stump’s. Benning’s was tense and alert. He might have been listening to a sound too high for our ears to catch. ¶
¶ He [Benning] was choosing his words very carefully, as if the slightest mishandling might jar out of them a blast of meaning that would destroy him and his house. It struck me that Bess had left him and wasn’t coming back. This was the fact he was concealing from me and Brake, and possibly from himself.3.3 ¶
His [Benning’s] voice was rising like an ill wind, carrying echoes of our previous meeting. ¶
As he [Dr. Benning] unlocked it [the closet door], he gave us a bright bitter smile over his shoulder. [...]
He swung the door open. The sparse [skeleton] head grinned steadfastly, superciliously, from its refuge beyond time.
“[...] Memento mori.” ¶
¶ “Make it fast, then.” Brake seemed to have broken through the thin ice, and contracted a case of cold feet. He moved out through the waiting-room as if to detach his authority from me. ¶
¶ Benning took off his hat and inspected its interior as if for a missing idea.
¶ Brake slung a look from the door which tightened on me like a rope. We left Benning in the hallway, leaning like a flimsy buttress against the rotting 4 wall. He was pressing the marriage certificate to his thin chest as if it was a love token or a poultice or a banknote, or a combination of all three. ¶
¶ “[...] What I don’t see in your story is this idea of a woman changing partners back and forth like a bloody square dance. It don’t happen.”
[Lew Archer:] “Depends on the woman. I’ve known women who kept six men on the string at the same time. Mrs. Benning has been alternating three. I have a witness who says she was Singleton’s mistress for seven years, off and on. She came back to Benning because she needed help –”
Brake brushed the words like mosquitoes away from his head.
¶ It was late afternoon when I drove through Arroyo Beach to the ocean boulevard. The palm-lined sand was strewn with bodies like a desert battlefield. At the horizon sea and sky merged in a blue haze from which the indigo hills of the channel islands rose. Beyond them the sun’s fire raged on the slopes of space. ¶
¶ I turned south into traffic moving bumper to bumper, fender to fender, like an army in retreat. The arthritic trees cast long baroque shadows down the cemetery hill. The shadow of Durano’s house reached halfway across its wilderness of lawn towards the iron fence. I pulled out of the traffic into the entrance to the drive.
[...] After a while a small figure came out of the house. It was Una. She moved impatiently down the drive, chunky and squat 4.2 between the slender coconut palms. ¶
¶ She took me to the room with the picture window at the rear of the house. The sun’s fires had blazed out of control across the whole western sky and were eating at the sea’s edges. Along the shore where the beach curved, a few late swimmers were tossed like matchsticks in a bloody froth of surf. I sat down in a chair against the side wall where I could watch the whole room and its doors and windows. ¶
¶ “Come down to earth,” I said. “You’ll give yourself a migraine. Neither of us wants your dirty money.”
“If my money’s so dirty, what are you sucking around for?”
“Just the truth, sweetheart. You know what happened to Singleton, if anybody does. You’re going to tell me.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You tell the cops. I’ll have them here before dark.” ¶
¶ Lights shone like wit in a dowager behind the windows of the Palladian villa. The green spectrum of its lawns and trees was deepening around it into solid green darkness. I parked under the porte-cochere and yanked at the old-fashioned bell-pull that hung by the side entrance. ¶
¶ Her mouth was pulled thin across her teeth in horror. “There are such dreadful things in the world. Why?”
“There are dreadful things in people’s heads. This one is easier to explain than some. If Charles died in an accident this morning, he couldn’t have died in a shooting two weeks ago.” ¶
¶ [Lew Archer:] “[...] Bess didn’t give her name?”
“No, but she called him Charlie. Not many people did. And she knew my name. Charles told her about me, I guess.” She bit her lip. “When I realized that, I felt sort of let down. It wasn’t simply her calling me by my first name. She condescended to me, as if she knew all about me – how I felt about Charles.”
“You’d feel better if you knew all about her.”
“Do you?”
“Nobody does. She’s crowded several lives into her first twenty-five years.” 5
“Is that all she is, twenty-five? I imagined she was much older, older than Charles.”
“Bess grew up early and fast. She was married in her teens to a man twice her age. He brought her out here during the war. She met Charles here in 1943.”
“So long ago,” she said desolately. Her loss of Charles was final, and retroactive. “Long before I knew him.” ¶
¶ “I don’t – I can’t understand – Charles’s taking up with such a woman.” 6
“She’s a fine-looking wench.7 And she was safely married to a man who wouldn’t divorce her.” 8
“But he’s such an idealist. His standards are so high. Nothing was ever good enough for Charles.”
“It’s possible he was out of touch with his own standards. I never met Charles, but he sounds flawed to me – a man trying all his life to get hold of something real and not succeeding.” I didn’t know for sure whether my candor came from concern for the living girl or jealousy of the dead man. “That bullet in the guts was probably the realest thing that ever happened to him.”
Her hazel eyes were troubled, but transparent as water in a well. “You mustn’t speak of him in that way.”
“Speak no ill of the dead?”
“You don’t know that he is dead.” She cupped her left breast gravely in her right hand. “I feel, here, that he is alive.”
“I interviewed a witness today who saw him shot.”
“How can I feel so strongly that he is alive?”
“He may be,” I said without conviction. “My evidence isn’t conclusive.”
“Yet you won’t let me have my hope. I think you wish him dead.”
I touched the back of her hand, which still lay over her breast. “I never saw a girl with more goodness. I’d hate to see you waste it all on the memory of a guy who never gave a thought to anybody but himself.”
“He wasn’t like that!” She was flushed and radiant with anger. “He was beautiful.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m tired. I shouldn’t try to mastermind other people’s lives. It never works out.” I sat down in the bowlegged chair and let the thoughts in my head string off in whirling darkness.
Her touch on my shoulder straightened me up. She looked down at me with a smile of wise innocence:
“Don’t be sorry, and don’t be angry with me. I wasn’t exactly nice.”
Nice was her middle name, but I kept that to myself. I looked at my wristwatch:
“It’s nearly seven now. [...]”
A changing light thrown up from the Boulevard silhouetted the girl 9 against the window.
“Look at the lights all up the sides of the hills,” she said. “I’ve never seen this city [Los Angeles] at night. It’s so new and aspiring.”
“New anyway.”
I stood behind her watching the cars run by in the road.
But in the lighted room I saw that she [Bess] was losing what she had had.10 Her past was coming out on her face like latent handwriting. [...] Dissolution was working in her rapidly like a fatal disease she had caught from her husband that day.11 ¶
¶ “I’ll tell you what’s really strange,” she [Bess] added after an interval: “The people you love are never the ones that love you.12 The people that love you, the way Sam loved me, they’re the ones you can’t love. Sam was a good man when I first knew him. But he was too crazy about me. I couldn’t love him, ever, and he was too smart to fool. It ruined him.13 ¶ [...]”
Bess was listening to it, the flesh haggard on the bones of her face like wet clay drooping on an armature. ¶
¶ I shot to kill. Una died on her feet, of a smudged hole in the temple, and thumped the floor.
¶ The starred sky arched like a crystal roof over the town. The valley floor was like the floor of a cave, the mountains blunt stalagmites against its glimmering walls. Once I got off the highway, the streets of Bella City were deserted. Its midnight buildings, leached of color by the alkali moonlight, stood like gray shadows on their own black shadows. ¶
It [Benning’s face] was crumpled and streaked like a discarded charcoal-sketch of itself. ¶
The closet was empty. He [Dr. Benning] shut the door and leaned against it. His long-toothed melancholy grin mimicked the grin of the absent skull. ¶ 14
¶ In the far corner, behind a rough board partition, an old cast-iron furnace was breathing like a bull. I used my toe to open the fire door, and saw what lay in the heart of the fire: a skull licked by flames in a phoenix nest of bones. ¶
¶ “You’re a hard man.”
“I hope so. It’s the soft ones, the self-pity boys like you, that give me bad dreams.” I had had enough of that basement, cluttered with broken objects, wet and hot and squalid with broken desires. “Let’s go, Benning.” ¶
¶ Outside, the flawed white moon was higher among the stars. Benning looked up at them as if the night had really become a cave of shadows, the moon a clouded port and the stars peepholes into a terrible brightness:
“I do feel grief for her. There was nothing I wouldn’t do.”
He started down the veranda steps, his short black shadow dragging and jerking at his heels. ¶
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