Black money by Ross MacDonald Page A

doorway of the Samoa Room.

    We drove along the boulevard. The rising wind buffeted the car. Out to sea I could make out occasional whitecaps. Faintly phosphorescent, they rose up like ghosts which were quickly swept backward into darkness. The woman peered out along the empty beaches. She turned up the window on the ocean side.

    "Are you okay, Mrs. Hendricks?"

    "I'm okay, but please don't call me that."

    She sounded younger and less sure of herself. "It makes me feel like a phony. Call me Kitty if you like."

    "You're not Mrs. Hendricks?"

    "Legally I am, but we haven't been living together. Harry would have divorced me long ago, only he's a practicing Catholic. And he has this crazy hope that I'll come back to him."

    She leaned forward to peer out of my side. "We've gone a half a mile. Where is his car?"

    I couldn't find it. She began to get nervous. I turned my car and found the hole in the hedge and the fire behind it, which had burned down rapidly to a few breathing coals among the ashes. The three wine-drinkers had blown, leaving their empty jug and the smell of spilled wine.

    Kitty Hendricks called to me: "What are you doing? Is Harry there?"

    "No."

    She came through the hedge. She still had her bag and radio looped over the wrist, and the radio was singing like a semidetached personality. She looked around her, hugging her coat to her body. There was nothing to see but the dying fire, the railroad tracks gleaming dully in the starlight, the trampled unlovely earth.

    "Holy Mother," Kitty said, "It hasn't changed in twenty years."

    "You know this place?"

    "I ought to. I was born about two blocks from here. On the other side of the tracks."

    She added wryly: "Both sides of the tracks are the wrong side if you live close enough to them. The trains used to rattle the dishes in my mother's kitchen."

    She peered across the dark railroad yard. "For all I know my mother is still living there."

    "We could go and see."

    "No! I don't have enough left to put up a front for her, too. I mean, let bygones be bygones."

    She made a unsettled movement toward the cypress hedge, as if the place might betray her into further candor. She could handle the dangers of a hotel room, but not the demands of the wild outer night.

    Her feeling turned against me. "Why did you bring me here?"

    "It was your idea."

    "But you said that Harry's car-"

    "Apparently it's been stolen."

    She backed away from me, stumbling on her heels, into the ragged black branches of the cypress. All I could see was the pale shape of her face and the glints of her eyes and mouth.

    "There never was any car. What kind of a car was it?"

    "A Cadillac."

    "Now I know you're lying. Where would Harry get a Cadillac?"

    "He probably took it off the lot. It's an old one."

    She didn't seem to be following me. I heard her breath coming more rapidly.

    "There never was any car," she whispered. "You're from Vegas, aren't you? And you brought me here to kill me."

    "That's silly talk, Kitty."

    "Don't you call me Kitty."

    Her voice was taking on more childish cadences. Perhaps her mind was tracking on something that had happened years ago, between the trains rattling her mother's dishes. "You conned me into coming to this place, and now you won't let me go."

    "Go ahead. Go. Go-go."

    She only backed deeper into the cypress, like a nocturnal animal. Her radio was trilling from the darkness. A gust of her perfume reached me, mixed with the smells of diesel oil and wine and fire.

    I saw in a red flash of insight how two people and a set of circumstances might collaborate in an unpredictable murder. Almost, I thought, she wanted to be murdered. She huddled among the shadows, whimpering: "You stay away from me, I'll tell my old man."

    "Get out of there, stupid."

    The scream for which she'd been tuning up came out. I reached for her blindly and got her by the waist and pulled her towards me. She gasped, and swung the radio at my head. It struck me a glancing blow