“I know Brand Church too well. He drove a truck for the old man one summer when he was in college. I knew him way back before that, even, when his father ran a barbershop downtown. Brand was all right in those days, he was a damn good football-player in high school. Only going to college changed him. He came back to town with a lot of big ideas.”
“What kind of big ideas?”
“Psychology, he called it. Everybody was crazy except him. Hell, he even tried to pull it on me, said that I was accident-prone or something. He as much as told me I ought to get my head examined. Me.” An old anger reddened his scalp, blotchily. “Maybe he can put it over on the rest of the town. I don’t buy it. The old man don’t like him much, either, but he’s stuck with him for a son-in-law.”
“How many daughters has Meyer got?”
“Just the two. Church married the older one, Hilda. She was helping around the office that same summer, and she went for him. I never could figure out why. The old man raised a hell of a stink about it.”
“Where does the old man live?”
He gave me directions, and nudged me confidentially with his shoulder. “Don’t tell him what I said, eh? I like a guy that can roll his own, and I talk too much sometimes.”
I thanked him for his information and told him I could hold it.
Chapter 6
Meyer lived in a big frame house that stood against a eucalyptus grove at the rear of a vacant lot. The lot wasn’t entirely vacant. Eight or nine car bodies, T-models, A-models, an old Reo truck, and a pickup lay among its weeds in various stages of disintegration.
I left my car in the driveway and crossed the rank lawn, circling a concrete fishpond whose stagnant smell competed with the uric odor of the eucalyptus trees. The old-fashioned deep veranda was shadowy and cluttered with garden tools and tangled hose. Its boards creaked under my feet.
A sharper sound split the silence, twice, three times. I tried the front door. It was locked. Three more shots cracked out, from somewhere deep inside the house, probably the basement. Between them I heard the tap-tap of approaching footsteps. A woman’s voice said through the door: “Is that you, Brand?”
I didn’t answer. A light went on over my head and she pulled the heavy door open. “Oh. I’m sorry. I was expecting my husband.”
She was a tall woman, still young, with a fine head of chestnut hair. Her body leaning awkwardly in the doorway was heavy-breasted and very female, almost too female for comfort.
“Mrs. Church?”
“Yes. Have we met somewhere?”
Her malachite-green eyes searched my face, but they were only half-focused. They seemed to be looking through me or beyond me for something in the outside darkness, someone she feared or loved.
“I’ve met your husband,” I said. “What’s all the shooting about?”
“It’s only Father. When something upsets him, he likes to go down in the basement and shoot at a target.”
“I don’t have to ask you what upset him. In fact, I want to talk to him about the truck he lost.” I told her my name and occupation. “May I come in?”
“If you like. I warn you, the house is a mess. I have my own house to look after, and I can’t do much for Father’s. I’ve tried to get him to have a woman in, but he won’t have a woman in the house.”
She opened the door wider and stood to one side. Stepping in past her, I gave her a close look. If she had known how to groom herself, she could have been beautiful. But her thick hair was chopped off in girlish bangs, which made her face seem wide. Her dress was too young and it hung badly on her, parodying her figure.
She backed away from my gaze like a shy child, turned quickly, and went to a door at the end of the hallway. She called down a lighted stairway: “Father, there’s someone to see you.”
A rough bass answered: “Who is it?” – punctuated by a single shot.
“He says that he’s a detective.”
“Tell him to wait.”
Five more shots sounded under the floor. I felt their vibration through the soles of my shoes. The woman’s body registered each one. When they had ceased she still lingered in the upslanting light from the basement stairway, as if the shots had been an overture to music I couldn’t hear. A strange wild music that rang in her head and echoed along her nerves and held her rapt.
Heavy feet mounted the stairs. She backed away from the man who appeared in the light. There was something strange in her eyes, hatred or fear or the last of the silent I music. He looked at her with a kind of puzzled contempt.
“Yeah, I know, Hilda. You don’t like the sound of gunfire. You can always stuff cotton in your ears.”
“I didn’t say anything, Father. This is Mr. Archer.”
He faced me under a deerhead, a big old wreck of a man who had started to shrink in his skin. His shoulders were bowed and his chest caving under a wrinkled horse-hide jacket. White glinted in the reddish stubble on his cheeks and chin, and his eyes were rimmed with red. They smoldered in his head like the last vestiges of inextinguishable and ruinous passions.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Archer?” His grooved, stubborn mouth denied his willingness to do anything for anybody.
I told him I had stumbled into the case and wanted to stay in it. I didn’t tell him why. I didn’t know exactly why, though Kate Kerrigan had something to do with it. And perhaps the dark boy’s death had become a symbol of the senseless violence I had seen and heard about in the valley towns. Here was my chance to get to the bottom of it.
“You mean you want me to hire you?” Meyer said.
“I’m giving you the opportunity.”
“Some opportunity. My daughter’s husband – he’s the sheriff – is out on the roads right now with thirty deputies. And don’t think I’m not paying them, in taxes. What have you got to sell that they can’t give me?”
“Full-time attention to the case, my brains, and my guts.”
“You think you’re pretty hot, eh?”
“I have a reputation down south. Not a very pleasant one, but a good one in my line ”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” He looked down at his grained hands, flexing the big-jointed fingers. I could smell the smokeless powder on them. “I work for my money, boy. I don’t lay none of it on the line unless I see value received, first. What do I stand to gain? The truck’s insured, so’s the payload.”
“What about your standing with the shippers? These things are hard on business.”
“You’re telling me.” He thrust his gray head forward. “Who you been talking to? Has Kerrigan been griping?”
“Where does he come in?”
“It’s Kerrigan’s whisky they lifted.”
“You mean he owns the payload?”
“In a way. It was billed to him from the distributors. But unless he gets delivery, I’m the one that has to take the loss.”
“You said it was insured.”
“Ninety per cent insured. I didn’t have full coverage. The other ten comes out of my pocket.” He grimaced painfully, as if he was describing a surgical operation that he faced, a moneyectomy. “Seven thousand dollars more or less.”
“I’ll work for ten per cent of the ten per cent. Seven hundred if I get the load back.”
“And if you don’t?”
“One hundred for expenses. Paid now.”
He stood in front of me, shifting his weight from one leg to the other. His voice was like a wood rasp rubbing constantly on a single theme. “That’s a lot of money. How do I know you’ll do anything to earn it?”
“Because I’m telling you. Take it or leave it.”
He smiled for the first time, foxily. “I hear you telling me. Okay, I’ll make you a deal. Come in and sit down.”
His living-room was the kind of room you find in back-country ranch-houses where old men hold the last frontier against women and civilization and hygiene. The carpets and furniture were glazed with dirt. Months of wood ashes clogged the fireplace and sifted onto the floor. The double-barreled shotgun over the mantel was the only clean and cared-for object in the room.