The Three Roads by Ross MacDonald

Author:Ross MacDonald [MacDonald, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307740748
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-10T21:00:00+00:00

Oh well, Taylor would be back, he could count on that. Taylor was the kind of guy that would have to come back to give him back his suit. He wasn’t like that himself, praise God, but he’d met the type once or twice before in his life: the type that was so honest it hurt.

chapter 13

It was after ten when Bret reached the Golden Sunset Café. The place was deserted except for a few early barflies. It was chilly and desolate in the morning, like a fever patient who began each day with a low temperature and rose to a peak of delirium in the hot evening. The long room was like an image of his own hangover, run-down and almost empty, containing like a corrupt memory the odors of rancid grease and stale whisky spillings.

Fortunately neither of the bartenders who had witnessed the fight was on duty this morning. He had never seen the man behind the bar, a young man with thin round features like an emaciated infant’s, wearing pockets of gray flesh, puckered like chicken-skin, under his indeterminate pale eyes. Rollins?

An excitement that gave him no strength took hold of the lower half of his body and shook him visibly. He sat down in the booth nearest to the door and reasoned with himself. He couldn’t expect Rollins to be able to tell him anything. The police had questioned him long ago and found out merely that Lorraine had left by herself that night. Even if Rollins knew something more he had no reason to suppose that he could get it out of him. Still, the excitement would not stay down. It rose to his head and made him dizzy, so that Rollins’s face, if it was Rollins, wavered behind the bar and the stagnant air in the room buzzed like an electric bell.

“What’ll you have?” A waitress with a dark pitted face had come out of the kitchen at the back and was standing calmly over him like an attendant.

He recalled that he hadn’t eaten since noon of the previous day. “Fried eggs with toast?”

“Yeah. We got some bacon today if you want it.”

“Good. And bring me a quart of milk right away.” His dehydrated palate still regretted the bottle of milk he had left unopened, as a sign of his independence, on Harry Milne’s kitchen table.

“A quart of milk?” The waitress raised one heavy black eyebrow. “You want it spiked with anything?”

“No, thanks. I’m a milk addict.”

She stood and watched him drink it as if that were one for the book. Then she watched him eat his bacon and eggs.

“You were hungry,” she said. They never tipped you in the morning, anyway—the jerks that came to this joint had to be boiled before you could peel a nickel off their palms—so you might as well act natural.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m a food addict too.”

She laughed even if he didn’t, and what do you know, he gave her a buck and told her to keep the change.

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