Read Online The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald - Free Book Online Page B

later.”
    “You know where I live,” I said.
    In a two-bedroom stucco cottage on a fifty-foot lot off Olympic. For a while the second bedroom hadn’t been used. Then for a while it had been. When it was vacated finally, I sold the bed to a secondhand-furniture dealer and converted the room into a study. Which for some reason I hated to use.
    I put George in my bed. My cleaning woman had beenthere that morning, and the sheets were fresh. Hanging his torn clothes on a chair, I asked myself what I thought I was doing and why. I looked across the hall at the door of the bedless bedroom where nobody slept any more. An onion taste of grief rose at the back of my throat. It seemed very important to me that George should get together with his wife and take her away from Los Angeles. And live happily ever after.
    His head rolled on the pillow. He was part way out by now, under the influence of paraldehyde and Leonard’s sedative fists:
    “Listen to me, Archer. You’re a good friend to me.”
    “Am I?”
    “The only friend I have within two thousand miles. You’ve got to find her for me.”
    “I did find her. What good did it do?”
    “I know, I shouldn’t have come tearing down to the house like that. I frightened her. I always do the wrong thing. Christ, I wouldn’t hurt a hair of her head. You’ve got to tell her that for me. Promise you will.”
    “All right. Now go to sleep.”
    But there was something else he had to say: “At least she’s alive, isn’t she?”
    “If she’s a corpse, she’s a lively one.”
    “Who are these people she’s mixed up with? Who was the little twerp in the pajamas?”
    “Boy named Torres. He used to be a boxer, if that’s any comfort to you.”
    “Is he the one who threatened her?”
    “Apparently.”
    George raised himself on his elbows. “I’ve heard that name Torres. Hester used to have a friend named Gabrielle Torres.”
    “She told you about Gabrielle, did she?”
    “Yes. She told me that night she—confessed her sins to me.” His gaze moved dully around the room and settled in a corner, fixed on something invisible. His dry lips moved, trying to name the thing he saw:
    “Her friend was shot and killed, in the spring of last year. Hester left California right after.”
    “Why would she do that?”
    “I don’t know. She seemed to blame herself for the other girl’s death. And she was afraid of being called as a witness, if the case ever came to trial.”
    “It never did.”
    He was silent, his eyes on the thing in the empty corner.
    “What else did she tell you, George?”
    “About the men she’d slept with, from the time that she was hardly in her teens.”
    “That Hester had slept with?”
    “Yes. It bothered me more than the other, even. I don’t know what that makes me.”
    Human, I thought.
    George closed his eyes. I turned the venetian blinds down and went into the other room to telephone. The call was to CHP headquarters, where a friend of mine named Mercero worked as a dispatcher. Fortunately he was on the daytime shift. No, he wasn’t busy but he could be any minute, accidents always came in pairs and triples to foul him up. He’d try to give me a quick report on the Jaguar’s license number.
    I sat beside the telephone and lit a cigarette and tried to have a brilliant intuition, like all the detectives in books and some in real life. The only one that occurred to me was that the Jaguar belonged to Lance Leonard and would simply lead me around in a circle.
    Cigarette smoke rumbling in my stomach reminded me that I was hungry. I went out to the kitchen and made myselfa ham-and-cheese sandwich on rye and opened a bottle of beer. My cleaning woman had left a note on the kitchen table:
    Dear Mr. Archer, Arrived nine left twelve noon, I need the money for today will drive by and pick it up this aft, please leave $3.75 in mailbox if your out. Yours truly, Beatrice M. Jackson.
    P.S .—There is mouse dirt in the cooler, you buy a trap Ill set it out,