The Way Some People Die (7 page)

I circled the house at a distance. There was no fence,
and the house stood by itself on the bare ground. The doors were closed, including the garage doors at the back, and all the windows were blinded. A bronze-painted Packard roadster shone dimly in the starlight at the rear of the gravel driveway. I passed it close enough to make sure there was no one in it, and circled around to the front of the house again.

The lights were still on behind the two front windows. The blinds fitted too well to let me see past them. Holding the gun in my pocket with the safety off, I mounted the low concrete porch and knocked on the screen door. My knocking wasn’t loud, but it sounded loud to me.

Quick footsteps crossed the room on the other side of the door. The porch light flashed on over my head. Somebody pulled aside the blind in the near window, and I caught the gleam of an eyeball in the opening. The blind fell back into place, and there was a waiting silence. I knocked again.

Someone fumbled the inside knob. The lock clicked. Slowly the door opened to the width of a brass chain that held it secure. I saw a four inch segment of a woman’s face and the muzzle of an automatic gun.

“Go away,” she said.

“I would if I knew how.” The obvious story was the best I could think of. “My car broke down up the road, and I’ve lost my way.”

“Oh.” Her voice relaxed a little, but her gun was steady. “Where are you going?”

“Indio.”

“You’re way off the track.”

“I know that well enough. I hope you’ve got the safety on that automatic.”

“If it bothers you, you can go away,” she said. “As I
suggested.” But something told me, probably my ego, that she was glad to see me. Me or anybody.

“I guess it makes people very inhospitable living all by themselves on the desert like this. Are you a spinster?”

“No. Why?”

“You’re acting like one. I wish you’d call your husband if you can’t help me out. He probably has a road map of this place.”

“Be quiet. You’ll wake him.” It was a natural thing for her to say, but she said it much too vehemently.

I wondered where Tarantine was sleeping, but I wasn’t interested enough to want to disturb him. I kept my voice down. “Why don’t you put up the gun and let me relax? I’m completely harmless to women.”

To my surprise, she lowered the gun. Then, to my greater surprise, she unchained the door and opened it.

“You might as well come in, but please be quiet. I’ll see if I can find a map.”

I couldn’t understand it. It had been some years since my boyish charm had been able to work minor miracles. “Why the sudden reversal? Not that it isn’t pleasant.”

“You don’t look much like a holdup man, I guess.” She unhooked the screen door and held it open for me. “Come in if you like.”

I had my first good chance to look at her face. She was the girl in the picture I was carrying, a few years older, no less striking, I thought. The straight nose, curled lips, round chin, were the same, the boldness enhanced by the short black hair molded to her head. She was wearing a blue skirt and white blouse. The gun hanging low in her left hand completed the costume, and didn’t seem wholly out of place.

As I passed her in the doorway I reached fast for the gun
and twisted it out of her hand. She backed away from me in the confined space until she was flat against the wall of the little hallway. “Give it back to me.”

“After we have a talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. Get out of here.” But all the time she kept her voice quite low.

I dropped her gun in my left-hand pocket, to balance the one in my right. A faint cool breeze from an air-conditioning system was blowing past me. I shut the door behind me, quietly. “Why don’t you go home to your mother, Galley? Joe isn’t going to live long, and neither are you if you stick.”

“Who are you? How do you know my name?” In the half-light from the open door of the living-room her dark eyes shone with an amber gleam.

“The name is Archer. Your mother sent me to find you. She’s been worried about you. With reason.”

“You’re a liar. My mother doesn’t know about Joe. She never sent you here.”

“She gave me your graduation picture, I have it here.”

“You stole it from her.”

“Nonsense. You’re just trying to unknow the error, Galley.”

She recognized the phrase. Slowly she straightened up clear of the wall. In high heels, she was almost as tall as I was. “Please go away. If Mother sent you, tell her I’m all right. Tell her anything.”

“I think you should come along.”

“Be quiet,” she whispered.

From somewhere at the back of the house, I heard a faint dull sound. It could have been a man’s boot drawn softly across the floor.

“Please.” She was almost whimpering. “You’ve wakened Joe. He’ll kill me if he finds you.”

I opened the door. “Come along with me. Dalling’s waiting in his car.”

“I can’t. I daren’t.” She was breathing quickly, her sharp breasts rising and falling under the blouse.

“Will you be all right?”

“If you go now, please.” She leaned towards me, one hand on my shoulder pressing me backwards.

I reached for the screen door behind me, but it was already open. Galley cried: “Look out!”

The warning came too late. I was a sitting duck for the soft explosion of the sandbag against the back of my head.

CHAPTER
10
:     
The argument began in my head
before I was fully conscious. Had Galley tried to save me, or set me up for Tarantine? In any case, I’d been a pushover. I was ashamed to open my eyes. I lay in my own darkness, face down on something hard, and endured the thudding pain at the base of my skull. The odor of some heavy mantrap perfume invaded my nostrils. After a while I began to wonder where it was coming from.

Something furry or feathery tickled my ear. I lifted one hand to brush it away, and the furry or feathery thing let out a small female yelp. I rolled over and sat up. Through ripples of pain distorting my vision like heat waves, I saw a woman standing above me, dimly silhouetted against the starlight.

“You startled me,” she said. “Thank heaven you’ve come to. Who are you, anyway?”

“Skip the questions, eh?” My head felt like an old tired baseball after batting practice. I braced one hand against the wall beside me, and got to my feet. The woman extended
a gloved hand to help me, but I disregarded it. I felt for my gun, which was gone, and my wallet, which wasn’t.

“I only asked you who you were,” she said in a hurt tone. “What happened to you?”

“I was sapped.” I leaned my back against the wall and tried to fix her faintly shimmering outline. After a while it came to rest. She was a large hippy woman in a dark suit. A dead fox crouched on her neck, its feathery tail hanging down.

“Sapped?” she repeated blankly.

“Sandbagged. Hit over the head.” My voice sounded nasty even to me, thin and dry and querulous.

“Goodness gracious, should I call the police?”

“No. Leave them out of it.”

“The hospital, then? Don’t you need some kind of first aid? Was it a robber?”

I felt the swelling at the base of my skull. “Forget it. Just go away and forget it.”

“Whoever you are, you’re not very nice.” She was a spoiled little girl, twenty years later. “I’ve a good mind to go away and leave you to your own devices.”

“I’ll try to bear up under it. Wait a minute, though. How did you get here?” There was no car in the road.

“I was driving past and I saw you lying here and I wasn’t going to come back and then I thought I should. I left my car and walked back. Now I’m sorry I did, so there.”

But she didn’t mean it. Spoiled child or not, there was something I liked about the big dim woman. She had a nice warm prewar middle-western voice.

“I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“That’s all right. I imagine you don’t feel very good, poor man.” She was starting to mother me.

I turned to the door. The screen door was unhooked but the inner door was locked. I wrenched at the knob and got nowhere with it.

“Nobody answers,” she said behind me. “I tried knocking when you were unconscious. Did you lose your key?”

She seemed to think I lived there, and I let her go on thinking it. “I’ll be all right now,” I said. “I can get in the back door. Good night and thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” But she was unwilling to go.

I left her lingering hippily on the porch and went to the back of the house. The Packard was gone from the driveway. There were no lights behind any of the windows. The back door was locked, but it was equipped with a half-length window. I took off one of my shoes and used it to punch a hole in the glass. I was pretty certain that Tarantine had gone. He wouldn’t have left me lying on the threshold if he was still inside.

I turned the inside knob and let myself into the kitchen. Hoping the woman would take it as a signal to go away, I switched on the kitchen light. Monel metal and porcelain and brand-new off-white paint dazzled my eyes. The kitchen had everything: dishwasher, garbage disposal unit, electric range, even a big deep-freezer in the corner by the refrigerator. There was a little food in the refrigerator, milk and butter and ham and a head of lettuce, but nothing at all in the freezer. It looked as if Tarantine hadn’t intended to stay long.

I went through the small dark dinette into the living-room and found a table-lamp, which I turned on. It cast a parchment-yellowed light on a couple of overstuffed chairs and a davenport to match, a white oak radio cabinet, a tan-colored rug of cheap frieze, a small brick fireplace. The room was so similar to a hundred thousand others that it might have been stamped out by a die. There was nothing
there to give me a clue to the people who had used it, except for a
Daily Racing Form
crumpled on one of the chairs. Even the ashtrays were empty.

The bedroom was equally anonymous. It contained twin beds, one of which had been slept in, from the middle-income floor of a department store, a dressing-table, and a chest of drawers with nothing in the drawers. The only trace of Galley was a spilling of suntan powder on the dressing-table. Tarantine had left no trace at all, if you didn’t count the bump on the back of my head.

Going back into the living-room, I heard a tapping on the front door. I went to the door and opened it. “What do you want?”

“Why, nothing. I only wondered, are you quite sure you’re going to be all right here by yourself?”

She was overdoing her Good Samaritan act. I switched on the porch light above her and looked hard into her face. It wasn’t a bad sort of face, though you might have called it moon-shaped. It had a fine mouth, wide and full and generous. The eyes were blue, slightly damaged by recent grief; the lids were puffed. She looked like a soft and easygoing woman who had come up against something hard and unexpected. Her carefully curled red hair was too bright to be natural. The fox was blue and expensive.

“What are you looking at me like that for? Have I got a smut on my nose?”

“I’m trying to figure out why you’re so persistent.”

She could have taken offense, but she decided to smile instead. Her smile, complete with nose wrinkling, was in a nice old-fashioned idiom like her speech. “It isn’t every night I stumble over unconscious men, you know.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll lie down and you can stumble over me again. Then will you go away?”

“I will not.” She stuck out her lower lip in an impressive pout. “I want to talk to you. What’s your name?”

“Archer.”

“Then you don’t really live here. It belongs to a man named Dalling. I made inquiries this afternoon.”

I had forgotten the man with the memorable face. I pushed past her out the door and beyond the circle of light from the porch. The road was bare on the other side of the intersection, and as far as I could see. Dalling had run out long ago.

She followed me like an embarrassing bulky shadow. “You didn’t answer my question.” Her voice was sibilant with suspicion.

“Dalling’s my landlord,” I said.

“What’s his first name?” Her cross-questioning technique reminded me of a grade-school teacher conducting a spelling bee.

“Keith.”

“I guess you really do live here, Mr. Archer. Excuse me.”

While we were standing there on the unseeded lawn, lighting up the sky with our repartee, a pair of headlights swept up out of nowhere and slid along the road in our direction. The car passed us without stopping or even slackening speed, but my overworked glands spurted adrenalin. If Tarantine came back to inquire after my health, I didn’t want to be available.

“You better go home,” I said. “Where do you live?”

“I’m staying at the Oasis Inn, with my husband.”

“Can I get transportation to Palm Springs?”

“There’s a taxi stand at the Inn. I’ll be glad to drive you over.”

“Good. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

I went through the house turning off the lights, closed
the doors, and rejoined her in the road. Her car, a new Cadillac, was parked on the shoulder a couple of hundred yards from the house. She had to use a key to open it. Another thing that puzzled me was the fact that the Cadillac was turned towards the house.

“Let me get this straight,” I said as she started the engine. “You were driving past the house when you saw me lying on the porch. So you backed up two hundred yards in the dark, locked your car, and then went back to investigate. Is that what you did?”

She sat behind the wheel letting the motor idle. Her answer when it came was another question, off at another tangent: “Do you know my husband, Mr. Archer?”

The question took me by surprise. “Your husband?”

“Henry Fellows. Colonel Henry Fellows.”

“I don’t know him.”

She fed gas to the motor, and the heavy car moved on the crackling gravel. “I really don’t know him myself very well. We were married only recently.” She added after a moment’s pause: “As a matter of fact, we’re on our honeymoon.”

“Why don’t you go home and get acquainted with him? No time like the present.”

“He wasn’t at the Inn when I left. I came out looking for him. Are you sure you don’t know him, Mr. Archer?”