The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online

a word. “Doing what you’re doing. You want to contack Galley Lawrence. Go to Palm Springs and contack her. I’ll pay you one grand for her, five for Joey.”
    “Why?”
    “I like them so much. I want to invite them over to look at my television.”
    “Why don’t you go yourself?”
    He paused, then decided to tell me: “It’s out of my territory. I don’t like crossing over out of my territory. Anyway I got you to go for me, isn’t that right?”
    “If you say so.” It was an easy out.
    “That’s the old esprit de corpse,” he said surprisingly. “You bring me Joey and I’ll slip you a quick five G’s.” He showed me a thick pack of bills in a gold clip shaped like a dollar sign.
    “Joey alive or dead?”
    “Alive if you can handle it. Dead, the deal’s still on. What could be fairer?” He turned to Blaney: “You got our friend’s gun here?”
    “Yeah.” Blaney stood up to answer the boss.
    “Okay, give it to him outside.” Dowser turned back to me, smiling with a kind of canine charm: “No hard feelings,old man. Everybody’s got to look out for himself, that’s my philosophy, isn’t that right?”
    “Speaking of looking out for yourself, I usually get a retainer.” I didn’t want Dowser’s money, but I had to ask him for it. The giving and receiving of money, its demand and its refusal, were Dowser’s basic form of communication with other people. That and the threat, the blow, the infliction of fear and pain.
    He grunted, and gave me a hundred-dollar bill. A piece of money takes its feeling from the people that have handled it. This money twisted in my hand like a fat green tomato-worm.

CHAPTER
8 :     
By ten I was in Palm Springs
, making the rounds of the bars. I worked up one side of the main street, a miniature Wilshire with horsy trimmings, and down the other side. Old or young, fat or thin, the bartenders gave me the same cool pitying smile. They looked at me and down at the photograph and back at me again.—Nice little beast, eh, nope I never see her.—What’s the matter bud your wife run out on you?—If she was here last night I’d know it but she wasn’t.—She wouldn’t be your daughter would she? That was the most unkindest cut of all.
    I had spent about six dollars on drinks that I left untouched or anyway unfinished, when I finally got my lead. It was in a little side-street place called the Lariat. A knotty-pine box of a place with longhorns over the bar, seats and stools upholstered with riveted saddle-leather, acolor-retouched photomural of Palm Springs in the days when it was a desert outpost, which weren’t so long ago that I couldn’t remember them. A great deal had been done to fill the Lariat with old western tradition, but it was so contemporary that it barely existed yet. A pair of fugitives from a Los Angeles wolfpack were playing shuffleboard in the rear. The bartender, who was watching the game, came forward when I took a seat at the bar. He was a youngish man in a Hopalong Cassidy shirt and a wide carved cowhide belt.
    I asked for a Scotch and soda. When he brought it, I showed him the photograph and made my little speech. He looked at me and down at the photograph and back at me again, but without the pitying smile. His eyes were large and brown, and they slanted downward from the middle of his face, so that he looked like a cocker spaniel. They had the earnest look of one who sincerely wished to help.
    “Yeah, I know the face,” he said. “She was in here last night. The joint was jumping last night, you wouldn’t believe it. It always slows down on Mondays, after the week-end and all.”
    “What was her name?” It seemed to have come too easily, or maybe too much bar Scotch was making me uneasy.
    “I didn’t catch the name. They weren’t at the bar, they sat down in the back booth there, by the shuffleboard. I just took them their drinks. Daiquiris, they were drinking.”
    “Who was the other half of the they?”
    “Some guy,”