“You’re crazy.”
“Sure. Sure. I don’t suppose you even called the police.”
“Naturally I did. Jake Ostervelt’s on his way out.”
“Well. That’s something, anyway.” He turned to me. “Then we won’t be needing you, will we, Mr. Detective?”
“I hope not,” I said.
“I’m telling you we don’t need you.” He huffed and bristled, trying to recapture his anger, without success. His voice was dead: “So you get off my property like I said. This place belongs to me and as long as I’m alive and kicking I don’t need any L.A. sharpie to look out for me or my wife.”
“All right.” There wasn’t any other answer.
I went back to my car and drove towards Citrus Junction. A couple of miles from the Heller ranch, I passed a radio car headed in the opposite direction. It had two uniformed men in the front seat, and it was burning the asphalt.
The windowless packing plants of the lemon growers’ cooperatives were major landmarks on the outskirts of town. The highway became the main street of the business section, which was composed of one new hotel and several old ones, bars and chain stores, a Sears, a giant drugstore whose architect had been inspired by hashish, four new-car agencies, three banks, and a couple of movie houses, one for bracero field-hands.
It was a slow town, clogged with money, stunned by sun. I made inquiries for Mr. Parish. His office was over the Mexican movie house. The stairs were as dark as a tunnel after the barren brilliance of the street. I groped my way along a second-floor corridor and through a battered door into a waiting room. Its sagging furniture and outdated magazines might have belonged to an old-fashioned dentist with a lower-income practice. An odor of fear and hopelessness hung in the air like a subtle gas.
An inner door opened. A young man appeared in the doorway. He had soft brown eyes, hardened by spectacles. He wore a threadbare tweed jacket patched with suede at the elbows, and a very cheerful smile. In my mood, an offensively cheerful smile.
“Dr. Parish?”
“Not doctor, thanks, though I’m working on my doctorate.” He looked at me with professional solicitude, still smiling. “You’ve been referred to me? May I have your name?”
“Lew Archer.”
“Sorry, I don’t recall it. Should I have your file?”
“I’m not a patient,” I said, “though I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’m a private detective.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He seemed to be disappointed in a flustered, sensitive way. “Won’t you come in?”
He seated me in a cubbyhole of an office containing two chairs, a desk, a grim green filing cabinet. There were holes in the uncarpeted floor where I guessed a dentist’s chair had once been bolted. Under the floor, a remote passionate voice was declaiming in Spanish. I caught the words for love and death. Amor. Morte.
“It’s the matinee in the theater downstairs. I hope it doesn’t disturb you.” He sat behind the desk and began to knock out a pipe in a brass ashtray. “Has one of my people got into some kind of trouble?” he said between the pipe-banging and the Spanish.
“Your people?”
“My clients. Actually they’re more like a family to me. I think of them as my family, the whole hundred and fifty of them. They make a fairly hectic family group on occasion.” He paused, filling his pipe. “Well, let’s have the bad news. I can see bad news on your face. Is it klepto trouble again?”
“That enters into it, probably. He’s carrying a gun, and they didn’t give it to him as a going-away present from Mendocino.”
“Just who are we talking about?”
“Carl Heller. Remember him?”
“I ought to. You don’t mean to tell me they let him out?”
“I mean he escaped. He got to Los Angeles somehow, and turned up at my office this morning. Some friend of his at the institution had given him my name. Some enemy of mine.”
“You saw Carl, then? How is he?” He leaned across the desk in boyish eagerness, tinged with anxiety.
“In bad condition, I’d say. I not only saw him, I also felt him.”
I lifted my chin to show him the bruise on my neck.
Parish clucked with his tongue, irritatingly. “Carl’s violent, eh? Too bad. How was his orientation?”
“If you mean is he off the rails, the answer is yes. I’ve seen paranoia before and he has the symptoms.”
“Delusions of persecution?”
“He’s full of ’em. Everybody’s against him, including the cops. He seems to have delusions of grandeur, too. Claims he’s the rightful heir to a million dollars.”
Parish said softly through smoke: “Maybe he is at that. Oh, he’s paranoid all right, I don’t know how extreme – haven’t seen him for years. He may also be rightful heir to a million dollars.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I never kid about my people.”
“Where would he get a million?”
“He didn’t. That’s the point. I can’t help feeling he was cheated out of it, in a way. His father meant him to have half the estate. Of course Carl wasn’t fit to handle it. Old Heller left the whole thing to his other son Jerry, with the understanding that he would provide for Carl. Then when the accident happened–”
“The old man’s murder, you mean?”
“Accident,” he said sharply. “Murder involves willful intention and knowledge of what you’re doing. If Carl killed his father, he didn’t know what he was doing. He was morally and legally not guilty.”
“By reason of insanity.”
“Of course. As it happened, the case never came to trial, and he was never convicted of anything worse than mental illness. But Jerry, his older brother–”
“I know Jerry. I went out to his ranch to offer him protection. He kicked me off the place. He had a wild idea that I was making advances to his wife. I hate to say this, but it was the other way around.”
“Typical behavior from both of them. He’s terribly jealous, and she gives him plenty of cause.” He smiled with reminiscent grimness. “I was going to say, when I was interrupted, that Jerry took advantage of the tragic situation. As you probably know if you’re a detective, there’s a legal tradition which forbids a murderer to profit from his victim’s death. Jerry shipped Carl off to Mendocino, and kept the whole estate for himself.”
“And the estate is really worth a million dollars?”
“Double that. The old man bought up thousands of acres of lemon land during the depression. The family’s much wealthier than you’d think from the way they live.”
“You said an interesting thing a minute ago, Mr. Parish. You said if Carl killed his father. Is there any doubt that he did?”
“It was never proved. It was simply assumed.”
“I thought he was caught in the act.”
“That was his brother’s statement to the coroner’s jury. I tried to get the sheriff, who is also the coroner – I tried to get him to let me cross-examine Jerry Heller. He wouldn’t permit it. I was new in my job, and that afternoon’s work almost got me fired.”
“You think Jerry was lying.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions. It’s my job, as I see it, to keep people out of Mendocino, unless they’re proven dangerous. If we sent away everyone with a paranoid streak, and locked them up for what amounts to life, the mental hospitals wouldn’t begin to hold them.”
“What about the cemeteries?” I said. “They’d soon be overflowing if we let all the Carl Hellers run around loose.”
“I wonder. Carl was in pretty good shape when they let him out five years ago. Naturally the accident upset him again, threw him back into illness. It made him look very bad. He was tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty of homicidal mania. But I’m not completely convinced that he killed his father. He told me himself that the old man was lying dead when he entered the room. Then Jerry came in and caught him leaning over the bed, trying to untie the rope from his father’s neck.”