“O.K., but let’s keep it quiet. Harold can be a bit difficult, especially when he’s disturbed during his nap or when my father’s name comes up.”
She led the way in through the back door. The kitchen was large, pine, and modern with shining steel and a double sink. The refrigerator in the corner made self-satisfied gurgling sounds, and we sat at a kitchen table made of redwood. My milk could wait. I’d drink it on the way back to L.A. Through the side window on the opposite side of the house I could see a big blue car, probably a Packard.
Delores Ressner was tight and edgy as she turned the coffeepot on and sat. She scratched at a bothersome cuticle and bit her lower lip before looking up at me.
“What do you do?” I said. “Besides swimming.”
She shrugged. “Some acting. Nothing much. A few small parts at Twentieth Century-Fox. I was in
“Have you heard from your father in the last four days?”
She looked down at a knot in the wooden table. Behind us the coffeepot bubbled.
Somewhere deeper in the house the floor creaked. It wasn’t the creak of weather and sundown, but the creak of a human moving.
“He needs help,” she said. “Not the kind of help Dr. Winning gives, imprisoning him. My stepfather, if you want the simple truth, pays to keep my father locked up and out of the way. My mother goes along with it because she can’t bear the idea of facing my father again. It wasn’t easy for her.”
“Or you either,” I said.
Her eyes were a little moist.
“I think I hear Grayson getting up,” I said.
She touched her cheek nervously and stood.
“Let’s have coffee. He can find us here.”
“Your father,” I repeated, turning toward her. “You’ve heard from him. I don’t want to hurt him. I just want to keep him from hurting you and your mother, other people, maybe even himself.”
“Maybe even you?” she said, turning to me from the stove with the coffeepot in her hand.
“Maybe. And maybe I’m doing it for my fee and for a friend. But maybe or no maybes, your old man will be a lot better off if I find him before he gets in more trouble. Delores, believe me, he is in trouble, but not in it so far that he can’t be eased out of it with some help from you and me.”
It was warm in the kitchen, but Delores pulled her robe across her chest with her free hand and shivered as she stepped forward to pour me a cup and one for herself. Then she sat down again, placing the pot on a wooden trivet. She was working herself up to say something, and I wanted to give her room.
I poured a few spoons of sugar in my cup, put my open palm over the cup to feel the moist warmth, and took a sip.
“He’s here,” she said softly, so softly that I didn’t hear it the first time, or maybe I didn’t believe what I heard.
“What?” I said, leaning forward.
“Here. He’s here in the other room. In the living room. We were waiting for my mother to come back to decide what we’d do. Harold’s not sick or napping. He and my father are trying to work things out, see what …”
I got up slowly, very slowly.
“I think I’ll just go in and join the conversation,” I said gently. “No trouble. Why don’t you just sit there and finish your coffee. I’ll introduce myself to Grayson. Your father and I have already met, I believe.”
She nodded in resigned agreement, her shoulders slumping down as if she had done a day of hard labor.
I walked to the doorway leading into the house from the kitchen and considered taking off my shoes to keep from making noise, but every time I have removed my shoes on a case things have got worse instead of better. I moved on. There were no voices ahead of me, but something was creaking. The hallway I found myself in carried on the lacquered dark wood motif. A print on the wall showed the driving of the golden spike. Leland Stanford glared down on me and the future of the West. To my right I found the living room, but no one was in it. There were two sofas, both oversize and masculine brown, a grand piano, and a rocking chair. The rug was an Indian design with a pattern in the center that looked to me like a snarling demon.
Across the hall opposite the living room were three doors, all closed. Still no voices. I tried the first door. It opened and showed me a bedroom, bright and orange, a woman’s room, probably Delores’s. There was a faint pleasant odor of scented soap or perfume.
The next door was partly open. I stepped in. It was a much larger bedroom than Delores’s. In one corner stood a desk. In another a dresser and twin beds beyond which was a view of the town through a big floor-to- ceiling window. The beds were made up with brown Indian spreads. I could see the design clearly on one bed. The other was obscured by the body of the man on top of it.
The man was gray-haired, around sixty, wearing a heavy blue flannel robe and a long knife in his chest. His arms were spread out and his eyes were wide and surprised. Something creaked from the hall, and I grabbed for a portable radio on the dresser. I swung around, ready to clip Jeffrey Ressner with the white Philco, and stopped just short of clobbering Delores, whose mouth went open in fear.
“Back up,” I said, putting my free hand out and placing the radio back on the dresser.
“Where is …” she began and saw the body on the bed. I put out both hands to catch her if she fell, but kept my eyes on the doorway. Ressner was almost certainly still in the house.
“God,” she whispered.
“That’s Grayson?” I whispered, pushing her gently out of the room.
Her eyes were still fixed on the body, but she nodded her confirmation. When I had her around the corner into the living room, her eyes met mine and her head shook a dumb no no no no of disbelief.
“Get on the phone and call the local police,” I said very quietly. “Can you do that?”
She didn’t answer but kept scanning my face for understanding.
“Can you do that? I’m going to find your father and keep him from any other trouble. Now make that call. O.K.?”
She agreed with her eyes and looked around the familiar room, wondering where the phone was.
“He’s dead?”
“Dead,” I agreed and went for the front door. I was after my.38. Maybe I’d also grab the bronze Alcatraz and my bag of groceries. Ressner was not my run-of-the-dice killer. If he was the same guy I’d tangled with at Mae West’s and it looked as if he were, I wasn’t sure what it would take to stop him.
Before I could get to my car, the sound of an engine firing up came from behind me. The dark Packard parked at the side of the house came to life and kicked dust and sand as it shot in front of me. I didn’t see the driver clearly, but his shape was about what I remembered and expected of Ressner.
I ran around the side of my Buick, climbed in, closed the door, and took off. Ressner took the road I’d come on, the only road, and he really hit the floorboard. He came close to running down an old couple holding floppy hats on with one hand and drinking murky Poodle piss with the other.
At the main road, he turned toward Palmdale on two wheels and took off, wobbling. On the open road, my old Buick couldn’t keep up with the Packard, not even close, but I dogged him. If I could stay within a mile or two, he wouldn’t be able to stop, and if he hit civilization, driving that fast he’d pick up a surly cop or two. By now Delores, if she had found the phone, had called what passed for police in Plaza Del Lago. I had no idea of what they might do, but I didn’t count on their moving quickly. I dogged on, shoving my.38 in my jacket pocket, where it knocked against my hip until I had to take it out and put it on the seat next to me. Ressner was still in sight, going seventy or eighty down the road. My.38 flew up in the air when I hit a rock or a prairie rat and almost took my right eye. I grabbed the gun in midair and put it in my grocery bag.
We were in sight of Dot’s Dixie Gas Station when my Buick died a terrible death. It chugged, gurgled, and belched something that sounded like “The hell with it.” Metal dropped out of the front of the car and skidded with the undercarriage shooting sparks into the dusk. I lost control. The carton of milk flew out of the bag to see what was happening and exploded against the front windshield, spraying me and ending any chance I had of coming to a reasonable halt. The car barreled off the road and hit something solid.
I flew into the backseat and agreed with the car. We had been through a lot together. The hell with it. I shut
