Meet Me at the Morgue by Ross Macdonald

Author:Ross Macdonald [Macdonald, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-74075-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17: I made a left turn on to Sunset and joined the westward flight of automobiles. I passed a few cars, came up behind a fast Cadillac and let it pace me on the unbanked curves. The depression that had blanketed me all day, ever since I learned the boy was stolen, was lifting at the corners. The boy was as lost as ever, but at least I was doing something about it, moving in a long, descending curve towards the heart of the evil.

A straight length of road coincided with a gap in the eastbound traffic. I passed the Cadillac, and held the accelerated speed. Approaching headlights rushed up out of the night like terrible eyes and passed with a grunt and a sigh. I slid down the final slope to the coast highway and turned right when the light changed.

Tall eroded cutbanks rose on the inland side. I drove slowly in the left-hand lane, watching the other side. A miscellaneous line of buildings, multicolored and many-shaped, clung to the rim of the road above the beach. Most of them were beach houses on twelve- or fifteen-foot lots, or one-story rental apartments. There were a few shops selling redwood souvenirs, genuine oil-paintings, handwoven textiles, ceramics: Bohemia on its last legs, driven back to the ultimate seacoast. The heavy gray ocean yawned below.

I saw what I was looking for, a storefront wearing a “Photographer” sign, and slowed to a crawl. A truck horn blasted the rear of my car. I made a hasty left-turn signal and skidded through a break in the southbound traffic. There was no place to park except the shoulder of the highway, close up against the narrow display window.

The window and the shop behind it were dark. In the light from passing cars, I could see the sample pictures through the smeared plate-glass. They were signed, in a large and flowing hand: “Kerry.” The names, the lives, the deaths were drawing together towards an intersection.

At the rear of the shop, which wasn’t ten feet deep, a hollow rectangle of light outlined a door. I knocked on the glass front-door. The hollow rectangle filled with sudden light. A young woman entered it, pausing with one hand on the knob. She called across the width of the shop, in a voice that sounded tinny through the glass:

“Art? Is that you, Art?”

I shouted back: “I have a message from him.”

She stepped forward through the doorway, her giant shadow plunging ahead of her, her tiny heel-taps following. Her face came close up to the glass, a white blur with black holes for eyes and a black mouth, framed in an aureole of lighted yellow hair. I was aware of the skull behind the flesh.

The black mouth trembled: “If he wants to come back, tell him it’s no use.”

“I came to tell you that.”

“I wouldn’t touch Art Lemp with a ten-foot pole, not after what he did.” She caught her breath: “You came to tell me what?”

“Let me in, Molly. We have things to talk about.

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