The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald Page A

lead soldiers. He thinks he’s Napoleon Bonaparte and he probably suffers from the same anatomical deficiency. I wouldn’t know myself. I wouldn’t let him touch me with a ten-foot pole.” She spoke quietly but clearly, apparently taking pleasure in the sound of her own voice, though it had growling overtones. I hoped that Dowser was hearing all of this, and wondered where the mike was.
    Perhaps in the cellarette. I turned from the window to look at it, and the light fell on my face. The woman sat up higher on her heels and let out a little gasp of recognition. “You’re Archer! How did you get here?”
    “It all goes back about thirty-seven years ago.” She was too bright for a Lochinvar approach. “A few months before I was born, my mother was frightened by a tall dark stranger with a sandbag. It had a queer effect on my infant brain. Whenever anybody hits me with a sandbag, I fall down and get up angry.”
    “You touch me deeply,” she said. “How did you know it was a sandbag?”
    “I’ve been sandbagged before.” I sat down on the foot ofthe bed and fingered the back of my head. The swelling there was as sore as a boil.
    “I’m sorry. I tried to stop it, but Joe was too fast. He sneaked out the back of the house and around to the porch in his stocking feet. You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you.” She shuffled towards me on her knees, her hips rotating with a clumsy kind of grace. “Let me look at it.”
    I bent my head. Her fingers moved cool and gentle on the swelling. “It doesn’t look too bad. I don’t think there’s any concussion, not much anyway.” Her fingers slid down the nape of my neck.
    I looked up into the narrow face poised over me. The full red lips were parted and the black eyes dreamed downward heavily. Her hair was uncombed. She had sleepless hollows under her eyes, a dark bruise on her temple. She still was the fieriest thing I’d seen up close for years.
    “Thanks, nurse.”
    “Don’t mention it.” The dark hawk face came down and kissed my mouth. For an instant her breast came hard against my shoulder, then she withdrew to the other end of the bed.
    It made the blood run round in my veins too fast. But she was calm and cool, as if it were a thing she did for all her patients.
    “What did Joe do after that?” I said.
    “You haven’t told me how you got here.—Have you a comb?”
    I tossed her my pocket comb. Her hair crackled and ran smooth like black water through her hands. I looked around the room for Dowser’s one-way window. There was a double band of black glass along the edges of the panel heater near the door.
    “You wouldn’t be one of Dowser’s lead soldiers, wouldyou?” She was still combing her hair, her bosom rising and falling with the movement of her arms.
    “That bum? I wouldn’t be here if I was. I told you your mother hired me.”
    “Ah yes, you’re Mother’s helper. Did you see her?”
    “No more than an hour ago. Stop combing your hair, it disturbs me.”
    A white grin lit her face. “Poor mans, did I excite hims?”
    “That was the idea, wasn’t it?”
    “Was it?” The tossed comb would have hit me in the face if I hadn’t palmed it. “What did Mother say?”
    “She said she’d give whatever she has if I could bring you back.”
    “Really?” For the first time she sounded and looked dead serious. “Did she mean it?”
    “She meant it all right. I said I’d do what I can.”
    “So you came up here and got yourself locked up. It took you less than an hour. You move fast, Archer.”
    I assumed an angry tone which turned out to be half real: “If I had my gun, it wouldn’t have happened. Your husband took my gun last night.”
    “He took mine, too,” she said.
    “Where did he go?”
    “You’ll never catch him now.”
    “You know where he is, then?”
    “I can guess. He didn’t tell me anything himself. He never did.”
    “Don’t kid me.”
    “I wouldn’t if I could,” she said. “It’s true. When I went to Las