Meet Me at the Morgue by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

him.”
    “When was this?”
    “This morning. I was sweeping the veranda. The sandblows from the beach.” Her hands moved laterally, imitating the sand. “This big old man went by in the street, walking very queeckly.”
    She began to walk, very queeckly, in a small circle of which I was the hub. Her expert mimicry included a sore-footed limp. It ended with a dancer’s heel-and-toe.
    “Can you remember what time this morning?”
    Her carmine mouth was weighted with thought. “Eleven o’clock? Five minutes after? Ten minutes? It was soon after eleven. I opened the office at eleven.”
    “Did you notice, was he carrying anything?”
    She considered the question, her finger twiddling a lower lip. “I am not sure. Perhaps a coat? I hardly looked at him.”
    “You didn’t see where he went?”
    “That way, in the direction of the Harbormaster’s office.” She pointed northward, parallel with the shoreline.
    “And he was hurrying?”
    “Ah, yes, very queeckly!”
    She began to demonstrate the limping hustle again. I raised my hand in a traffic officer’s gesture. She smiled and desisted. I touched the lifted hand to the brim of my hat and started out. She called after me:
    “Say hello to Miss Devon!”
    The lift I had got from Secundina, the lift I always got when fear took a setback, faded rapidly on the pavement. There was nothing in the direction she had indicated but a dollar doss over a fried-fish place. F RIED F ISH . R OOMS O NE D OLLAR . T RY O UR S MOKED F ISH S PECIAL . J UMBO S HRIMP . The greasy counterman who doubled as room-clerk had never seen my man. His close mouth wouldn’t have opened if he had.
    The Harbormaster’s Quonset and jetty lay in the corner of the cove where the Point curved out from the shore. The blank-walled bath-house in front of it was loud as amonkeyhouse with teen-age whistles and hoots and ululations. Beyond it, across the base of the landspit, deep-sea breakers pounded a steep shore. The desolate beach, eaten at the edge by dangerous currents, was closed to swimmers. It pullulated with gulls. They rose like an inverted snowstorm, and veered seaward.
    The asphalt road across the base of the point was sand-blown and salt-pitted and led nowhere. The dancing pavilion it had served had been smashed by a winter storm some years ago. Nothing remained of the pavilion but crumbling concrete bulkheads and a large, weathered billboard: D INE AND D ANCE TO THE M USIC OF THE W AVES .
    A few cars were parked along the edge of the road, nosed into the sand-drifts on its seaward side. There were a couple of empty jalopies, a family eating picnic-lunch in their station wagon, an old truck piled with black and brown fishing-nets. A black and brown mongrel with a Doberman head barked violently from the rear of the truck as I passed, wagging his tail in self-congratulation.
    “Be a hero,” I told him. His bark made the whole truck shake. The gulls coming in from sea flew out again, blown between blue layers of sea and sky.
    Another car was parked near the truck, almost hidden behind the Dine and Dance billboard. The tracks it had made in the sand were blowing over but still visible. It was a prewar Chrysler sedan, painted blue, with a Los Angeles license number. I looked in through the open rear window. A new black suitcase lay open on the back seat, empty.
    A man reclined on the front seat half covered by a brown topcoat. His head was jammed into the corner between the right-hand door and the back of the seat, his legs twisted under the steering wheel. When I opened the door a brown toupee detached itself from his skull anddraped itself across the toe of my shoe. From the side of his neck the red plastic handle of an icepick stood out like a terrible carbuncle.
    The registration card had been ripped from its holder on the steering-post. The car keys hung from the ignition, but no identification was attached to them. I went through the pockets of the dead man’s mohair jacket and chocolate