“Why certainly.” Mrs. Ralston looked up at me brightly, and with a movement of her right hand turned her wheelchair in a quarter circle.
I sat down facing her and said, “Last night about a quarter to one Mr. Sablacan and I left your husband at the door of your bungalow and he presumably went to bed. Since he had been drinking he probably fell into a deep alcoholic slumber. An hour or so later he was drowned. This morning I found him in the swimming pool.”
“I know those things,” Mrs. Ralston said. “Is there any point in repeating them to me?”
“This is very painful for my mother,” John Swain said. “I’ll have to ask you to put a stop to it.” He dropped his cigarette on the tiles and ground it angrily under his heel.
“I have reason to believe,” I said, “that Mr. Ralston was not drowned in the swimming pool.”
Mrs. Ralston slumped backward and covered her face with her hands. John Swain stood up and leaned across the table towards me looking as if he would like to bite me.
“This is too much!” he said. “I’ll see Mr. Whittaker about this.” He marched away into the hotel.
“O.K.,” I said to Jane Lennon. “Take her away. I’d just as soon be telling it to the police.”
Mrs. Ralston removed her hands. She looked old, and I felt sorry for her. I felt sorrier for Mr. Ralston.
“The police?” she said.
“Somebody drowned him in the bathtub,” I said. “He was very light.”
Mrs. Ralston picked up a glass ashtray from the table, and threw it at my face. It struck my forehead and made a gash there. While I was dabbing at the blood with a handkerchief, Mrs. Ralston called me many unusual names in a loud voice which attracted the attention of everyone in the patio. Jane Lennon wheeled her away. I was glad to see her go, because Mrs. Ralston’s face had become very old and ugly.
Mr. Whittaker came running out of the hotel with John Swain at his heels.
“What’s all this!” he cried.
“Call the police again,” I said. “Mrs. Ralston seems ready to confess.”
An hour later I was sitting with Al in his room sipping my first beer of the day and wishing away a headache.
“You took a hell of a chance,” Al said.
“No, I didn’t. I made no accusations. All I said was that somebody had drowned him in the bathtub. Mrs. Ralston said the rest.”
“I still think it’s lucky for you she broke down and confessed. You didn’t have any evidence.”
“I had one piece of evidence,” I said. “The whole case hung on it. The water in Mr. Ralston’s lungs was pure city water. He couldn’t have inhaled it in the pool, because the pool water has a good deal of chlorine in it. A bathtub was practically the only alternative.”
“I don’t see how she did it,” Al said.
“Morally, it’s hard to see. Murder always is. Physically, it was feasible enough. He weighed scarcely a hundred pounds. There was nothing the matter with her arms and shoulders, and a wheelchair can be a pretty useful vehicle. She simply wheeled him to the bathtub, held his face under water until he stopped breathing, wheeled him out to the pool, and dumped him in. It must have been difficult, and she stood a chance of being caught at it, but she hadn’t much to lose.”
“And nothing at all to gain. That’s what I don’t get. What good is a million dollars to a dame that’s going to die any day?”
“She wanted to leave it to her son,” I said. “He’d have been cut off from all that money if she had died before her husband. Ever since the doctors told her she was going to die, she must have been waiting for her chance. She probably caught on to the nurse’s trick long ago, and bided her time, waiting to use it. That swimming party last night gave her her opportunity. Mother love is a wonderful thing.”
I thought of another wonderful thing then, and I began to laugh though it wasn’t very funny. In California a murderess can’t inherit her victim’s property. So Johnny Swain is still as far away from a million dollars as the rest of us.
The Bearded Lady
Published in American Magazine, October 1948 [revised for The Name Is Archer, with “Sam Drake” changed to “Lew Archer” (Bantam, 1955)].
The unlatched door swung inward when I knocked. I walked into the studio, which was high and dim as a hayloft. The big north window in the opposite wall was hung with monkscloth draperies that shut out the morning light. I found the switch beside the door and snapped it on. Several fluorescent tubes suspended from the naked rafters flickered and burnt blue-white.
A strange woman faced me under the cruel light. She was only a charcoal sketch on an easel, but she gave me a chill. Her nude body, posed casually on a chair, was slim and round and pleasant to look at. Her face wasn’t pleasant at all. Bushy black eyebrows almost hid her eyes. A walrus moustache bracketed her mouth, and a thick beard fanned down over her torso.
The door creaked behind me. The girl who appeared in the doorway wore a starched white uniform. Her face had a little starch in it, too, though not enough to spoil her good looks entirely. Her black hair was drawn back severely from her forehead.
“May I ask what you’re doing here?”
“You may ask. I’m looking for Mr. Western.”
“Really? Have you tried looking behind the pictures?”
“Does he spend much time there?”
“No, and another thing he doesn’t do – he doesn’t receive visitors in his studio when he isn’t here himself.”
“Sorry. The door was open. I walked in.”
“You can reverse the process.”
“Just a minute. Hugh isn’t sick?”
She glanced down at her white uniform and shook her head.
“Are you a friend of his?” I said.
“I try to be.” She smiled slightly. “It isn’t always easy, with a sib. I’m his sister.”
“Not the one he was always talking about?”
“I’m the only one he has.”
I reached back into my mental grab bag of war souvenirs. “Mary. The name was Mary.”
“It still is Mary. Are you a friend of Hugh’s?”
“I guess I qualify. I used to be.”
“When?” The question was brusque. I got the impression she didn’t approve of Hugh’s friends, or some of them.
“In the Philippines. He was attached to my group as a combat artist. The name is Archer, by the way. Lew Archer.”
“Oh. Of course.”
Her disapproval didn’t extend to me, at least not yet. She gave me her hand. It was cool and firm, and went with her steady gaze. I said:
“Hugh gave me the wrong impression of you. I thought you were still a kid in school.”
“That was four years ago, remember. People grow up in four years. Anyway, some of them do.”
She was a very serious girl for her age. I changed the subject.
“I saw the announcement of his show in the L.A. papers. I’m driving through to San Francisco, and I thought I’d look him up.”
“I know he’ll be glad to see you. I’ll go and wake him. He keeps the most dreadful hours. Sit down, won’t you, Mr. Archer?”
I had been standing with my back to the bearded nude, more or less consciously shielding her from it. When I moved aside and she saw it, she didn’t turn a hair.
“What next?” was all she said.
But I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to Hugh Western’s sense of humor. I looked around the room for something that might explain the ugly sketch.
It was a typical working artist’s studio. The tables and benches were cluttered with things that are used to make pictures: palettes and daubed sheets of glass, sketch pads, scratchboards, bleeding tubes of paint. Pictures in half a dozen mediums and half a dozen stages of completion hung or leaned against the burlap-covered walls. Some of them looked wild and queer to me, but none so wild and queer as the sketch on the easel.