“You’re very acute. Naturally I shot him. This is my getaway.”
“I was merely asking. I couldn’t help noticing the blood on you.”
He smiled with soft malice. His changeable mouth, both sensitive and brutal, tempted my fist the way a magnet tempts iron. He was big enough, and not too old, but he was a little ripe. I put my fist in my pocket and walked around to the other side of the car.
I switched on the dome light. Tony Aquista was still blowing his sad small bubbles. His eyes were completely closed now. He was blind and deaf with the effort to hold onto life. The ambulance sighed in the road.
I followed it on its return trip through the highway sub-orbs, past motels and cabins and trailer parks where soldiers and salesmen and tourists and migrant workers passed temporary nights with temporary bedmates. At a six-lane way where two main roads converged, the ambulance turned off the highway to the left.
I missed the green arrow and had to wait. The hospital was visible in the distance, a long white box of a building pierced with lights. Nearer the highway, the lighted screen of an outdoor theater, on which two men were beating each other to the rhythm of passionate music, rose against the night like a giant dream of violence.
I found the ambulance entrance at the rear of the hospital. Its red electric sign spelled out Emergency and cast a hellish glow on the oil-stained concrete driveway. Before I went in, I took a clean shirt out of my bag and put it on.
In the receiving-room half a dozen white-coated people were grouped around the table where Tony Aquista lay. Now even his lips were yellow. An inverted bottle of blood was dripping into a tube that was strapped to his arm.
A young doctor, resident or intern, leaned over the closed face and pressed his thumbs down into the eyes.
Aquista didn’t stir. The room seemed to be holding its breath. I moved to the doctor’s side. He glanced at me sharply.
“Are you a patient?”
“A witness. I found this man.”
He shook his head from side to side. “You should have found him sooner.” He turned to one of the nurses: “Don’t waste any more blood on him.”
She closed off the rubber tube and disconnected the half-empty bottle. The hospital smell, the odor of dissolution, was keen in my nostrils.
“Is he going, doctor?”
“He’s gone. No pulse, no respiration. He must have been bleeding for some time, probably didn’t have a pint left in his system.”
“Bullet wound?”
“Unquestionably, I’d say. These lung wounds are murder.”
I looked down at Tony Aquista’s face. It had changed from flesh to wax, and the teeth were grinning.
“Murder is the word.”
I must have said it loudly or strangely. The doctor gave me a compunctious look.
“This man a buddy of yours?”
“No. I just don’t like to see it happen to anybody. Have you called the police?”
“The sheriff’s office. It happened in the county, didn’t it?”
“That’s where they ditched him, anyway.”
He moved to the door, saying over his shoulder: “The sheriff will want you to stick around, I expect.”
I didn’t tell him that waiting in sterile rooms for policemen was my calling. I waited for this one on a metal camp-chair outside the receiving-room. The business of the hospital went on around me. Nurses came and went, clearing the room for the next emergency case. Tony Aquista, featureless under a sheet, was trundled away to the morgue at the end of the corridor.
Part of my mind went with him into the cold darkness. It’s like that sometimes when a younger man dies. I felt as if a part of me had turned to wax under the white lights.
From somewhere in the murmurous bowels of the building an infant’s cry rose sharp. I wondered if it was a newborn baby equalizing the population of Las Cruces.
Chapter 2
A tall man in a gray business suit opened the door of the morgue. His dazzling off-white Stetson just missed the top of the doorframe as he came out. He smacked the concrete wall with the flat of his hand and said to the uniformed deputy behind him: “God damn it, what happened to Tony?”
The deputy shrugged. “Woman trouble, maybe. You know Tony, chief.”
“Yes. I know Tony.”
The sheriff’s striding shadow lengthened toward me. The face under the hatbrim was long and lean like his body, and burned by the valley sun. Though he was young for his job, about my age, I could see the scars of old pain branching out from the corners of his eyes and bracketing his mouth. His eyes were deepset and dark like the windows of a haunted house.
“You’re the one who brought him in?”
“I’m the one.”
“You’re not a Las Cruces man, are you?”
“Los Angeles.”
“I see.” He nodded as if I had made a damaging admission. “Let’s have your name and home address.”
I gave him my name, Lew Archer, and my business address on Sunset Boulevard. The deputy wrote them down. The sheriff dragged a second chair up to mine and sat facing me.
“I’m Sheriff Church. This is Danelaw, my identification officer. And what’s your occupation, Mr. Archer, besides acting as a good Samaritan?” If Church was trying to be genial, he wasn’t succeeding.
“I’m a licensed private detective.”
“Well. This is quite a coincidence. Or is it? What were you doing out on the highway?”
“Driving. I’m on my way to Sacramento.”
“Not tonight,” he said brusquely. “It doesn’t pay to be a good Samaritan nowadays. I’m afraid you’re going to have to put up with a certain amount of red tape. We’ll need you for the inquest, for one thing.”
“I realize that.”
“I’ll hurry it if I can – tomorrow or the next day. Let’s see, this is Thursday. Can you stay over till Saturday?”
“If I have to.”
“Good. Now how did you happen to pick him up?”
“He was lying in the ditch a couple of miles south of the Marine Base. He managed to get up onto his knees and wave at me.”
“He was still conscious then? Did he say anything?”
“He lost consciousness before I got to him. I didn’t like to move him, but there was no way to telephone, no one to send for help. I put him in the back seat of my car and phoned for an ambulance from the first place I came to.”
“Where was that?”
“Kerrigan’s motor court. Kerrigan had quite a reaction to the thing. It seems he knew Aquista, and didn’t want any part of him, dead or alive. His wife called the ambulance for me.”
“What was Mrs. Kerrigan doing there?”
“Holding down the desk, apparently.”
“Wasn’t Kerrigan’s manager around? Miss Meyer?”
“If she was, I didn’t see her. Does it matter?”
“No.” The sheriffs voice had risen. He brought it under control. “It’s the first time I ever heard of Kate Kerrigan going to work in the place.”
Danelaw looked up from his notebook. “She’s been out there all week.”
Church looked at him as if he had more questions, but he swallowed them. His knobbed throat moved visibly.
I said: “Kerrigan was a little under the weather. Which may account for his manners. He asked me if I shot the man myself.”
A tight smile pincered the sheriff’s mouth. “What did you say to that?”
“No. I never saw the man before. I thought I’d get that on the record, in case he babbles some more.”
“Not a bad idea, under the circumstances. Now if you’ll show me the way to the spot where you found him.”
We stood up at the same time. His bony hand closed on my shoulder and urged me toward the exit. I couldn’t tell whether it was a gesture of encouragement or command. In any case, I jerked my shoulder free.