The Galton Case by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

is putting it mildly. He’s dead.”
    “I realize that,” he said rather shrilly.
    “Did he seem nervous lately? Afraid of anything?”
    “If he was, I never noticed. He didn’t talk about himself.”
    “Did he have any visitors, before this last one?”
    “Never. At least, not to my knowledge. He was a solitary person.”
    “Could he have been using your place and his job here as a sort of hide-out?”
    “I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”
    An engine started up in front of the house. Sable rose and moved to the glass wall, parting the drapes. I looked out over his shoulder. A black panel truck rolled away from the house and started down the hill.
    “Come to think of it,” Sable said, “he certainly kept out of sight. He wouldn’t chauffeur for me, said he’d had bad luck with cars. But he may have wanted to avoid going to town. He never went to town.”
    “He’s on his way there now,” I said. “How many people knew he was out here?”
    “Just my wife and I. And you, of course. I can’t think offhand of anyone else.”
    “Have you had visitors from out of town?”
    “Not in the last few months. Alice has been having her ups and downs. It’s one reason I took Peter on out here. We’d lost our housekeeper, and I didn’t like to leave Alice by herself all day.”
    “How is Mrs. Sable now?”
    “Not so good, I’m afraid.”
    “Did she see it happen?”
    “I don’t believe so. But she heard the sounds of thestruggle, and saw the car drive away. That was when she phoned me. When I got here, she was sitting on the doorstep in a half daze. I don’t know what it will do to her emotional state.”
    “Any chance of my talking to her?”
    “Not now, please. I’ve already spoken to Dr. Howell, and he told me to give her sedation. The Sheriff has agreed not to question her for the present. There’s a limit to what the human mind can endure.”
    Sable might have been talking about himself. His shoulders drooped as he turned from the window. In the harsh sunlight his face was a grainy white, and puffy like boiled rice. In murder cases, there are usually more victims than one.
    Sable must have read the look on my face. “This is an unsettling thing to me, too. It can’t conceivably relate to Alice and me. And yet it does, very deeply. Peter was a member of the household. I believe he was quite devoted to us, and he died in our front yard. That really brings it home.”
    “What?”
    “Timor mortis,”
he said. “The fear of death.”
    “You say Culligan was a member of your household. I take it he slept in.”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “I’d like to have a look at his room.”
    He took me across the court and through a utility room to a back bedroom. The room was furnished with a single bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, and a reading-lamp.
    “I’ll just look in on Alice,” Sable said, and left me.
    I went through Peter Culligan’s meager effects. The closet contained a pair of Levis, a couple of workshirts, boots, and a cheap blue suit which had been bought at a San Francisco department store. There was a Tanforan pari-mutuel stub in the outside breast pocket of the suit coat. A dirty comb and a safety razor lay on top of the chest of drawers. Thedrawers were practically empty: a couple of white shirts, a greasy blue tie, a T-shirt and a pair of floral shorts, socks and handkerchiefs, and a cardboard box containing a hundred shells for a .38-caliber automatic. Not quite a hundred: the box wasn’t full. No gun.
    Culligan’s suitcase was under the bed. It was a limp old canvas affair, held together with straps, which looked as if it had been kicked around every bus station between Seattle and San Diego. I unstrapped it. The lock was broken, and it fell open. Its contents emitted a whiff of tobacco, sea water, sweat, and the subtler indescribable odor of masculine loneliness.
    It contained a gray flannel shirt, a rough blue turtle-neck sweater, and other heavier work clothes. A broad-bladed