Gino died in the County Hospital two days later, without having had a visitor. His automobile was charged with concealment of weapons, found guilty, and impounded for official use by the Sheriff’s staff. Fern Dee, or whatever her name was, was released the following Monday. She disappeared. At the end of the month, Santana sent me a check for eighty dollars. One day’s pay and expenses.
Gone Girl
Published as “The Imaginary Blonde,” in Manhunt, February 1953.
A Note to the Reader
Sequential presentation for the first time of “Strangers in Town” and “Gone Girl” underscores certain similarities between these stories.
“Strangers in Town” was written in 1950 for submission in that year’s Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine contest, then withdrawn by Ross Macdonald to be used as a framework for a novel: The Ivory Grin (published in 1952). The author later incorporated other elements of the unpublished “Strangers in Town,” including some verbatim sentences, into the short story “Gone Girl” (printed in 1953).
Comparison of the stories shows the different uses to which Macdonald might put similar material – the inventive variations he was able to play on a given theme: one of the hallmarks of his fiction.
– Tom Nolan
It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood. I had followed a man from Fresno to San Diego and lost him in the maze of streets in Old Town. When I picked up his trail again, it was cold. He had crossed the border, and my instructions went no further than the United States.
Halfway home, just above Emerald Bay, I overtook the worst driver in the world. He was driving a black fishtail Cadillac as if he were tacking a sailboat. The heavy car wove back and forth across the freeway, using two of its four lanes, and sometimes three. It was late, and I was in a hurry to get some sleep. I started to pass it on the right, at a time when it was riding the double line. The Cadillac drifted towards me like an unguided missile, and forced me off the road in a screeching skid.
I speeded up to pass on the left. Simultaneously, the driver of the Cadillac accelerated. My acceleration couldn’t match his. We raced neck and neck down the middle of the road. I wondered if he was drunk or crazy or afraid of me. Then the freeway ended. I was doing eighty on the wrong side of a two-lane highway, and a truck came over a rise ahead like a blazing double comet. I floorboarded the gas pedal and cut over sharply to the right, threatening the Cadillac’s fenders and its driver’s life. In the approaching headlights, his face was as blank and white as a piece of paper, with charred black holes for eyes. His shoulders were naked.
At the last possible second he slowed enough to let me get by. The truck went off onto the shoulder, honking angrily. I braked gradually, hoping to force the Cadillac to stop. It looped past me in an insane arc, tires skittering, and was sucked away into darkness.
When I finally came to a full stop, I had to pry my fingers off the wheel. My knees were remote and watery. After smoking part of a cigarette, I U-turned and drove very cautiously back to Emerald Bay. I was long past the hot-rod age, and I needed rest.
The first motel I came to, the Siesta, was decorated with a vacancy sign and a neon Mexican sleeping luminously under a sombrero. Envying him, I parked on the gravel apron in front of the motel office. There was a light inside. The glass-paned door was standing open, and I went in. The little room was pleasantly furnished with rattan and chintz. I jangled the bell on the desk a few times. No one appeared, so I sat down to wait and lit a cigarette. An electric clock on the wall said a quarter to one.
I must have dozed for a few minutes. A dream rushed by the threshold of my consciousness, making a gentle noise. Death was in the dream. He drove a black Cadillac loaded with flowers. When I woke up, the cigarette was starting to burn my fingers. A thin man in a gray flannel shirt was standing over me with a doubtful look on his face.
He was big-nosed and small-chinned, and he wasn’t as young as he gave the impression of being. His teeth were bad, the sandy hair was thinning and receding. He was the typical old youth who scrounged and wheedled his living around motor courts and restaurants and hotels, and hung on desperately to the frayed edge of other people’s lives.
“What do you want?” he said. “Who are you? What do you want?” His voice was reedy and changeable like an adolescent’s.
“A room.”
“Is that all you want?”
From where I sat, it sounded like an accusation. I let it pass. “What else is there? Circassian dancing girls? Free pop-corn?”
He tried to smile without showing his bad teeth. The smile was a dismal failure, like my joke. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “You woke me up. I never make much sense right after I just wake up.”
“Have a nightmare?”
His vague eyes expanded like blue bubblegum bubbles. “Why did you ask me that?”
“Because I just had one. But skip it. Do you have a vacancy or don’t you?”
“Yessir. Sorry, sir.” He swallowed whatever bitter taste he had in his mouth, and assumed an impersonal obsequious manner. “You got any luggage, sir?”
“No luggage.”
Moving silently in tennis sneakers like a frail ghost of the boy he had once been, he went behind the counter, and took my name, address, license number, and five dollars. In return, he gave me a key numbered fourteen and told me where to use it. Apparently he despaired of a tip.
Room fourteen was like any other middle-class motel room touched with the California-Spanish mania. Artificially roughened plaster painted adobe color, poinsettia-red curtains, imitation parchment lampshade on a twisted black iron stand. A Rivera reproduction of a sleeping Mexican hung on the wall over the bed. I succumbed to its suggestion right away, and dreamed about Circassian dancing girls.
Along towards morning one of them got frightened, through no fault of mine, and began to scream her little Circassian lungs out. I sat up in bed, making soothing noises, and woke up. It was nearly nine by my wristwatch. The screaming ceased and began again, spoiling the morning like a fire siren outside the window. I pulled on my trousers over the underwear I’d been sleeping in, and went outside.
A young woman was standing on the walk outside the next room. She had a key in one hand and a handful of blood in the other. She wore a wide multicolored skirt and a low-cut gypsy sort of blouse. The blouse was distended and her mouth was open, and she was yelling her head off. It was a fine dark head, but I hated her for spoiling my morning sleep.
I took her by the shoulders and said, “Stop it.”
The screaming stopped. She looked down sleepily at the blood on her hand. It was as thick as axle grease, and almost as dark in color.
“Where did you get that?”
“I slipped and fell in it. I didn’t see it.”
Dropping the key on the walk, she pulled her skirt to one side with her clean hand. Her legs were bare and brown. Her skirt was stained at the back with the same thick fluid.
“Where? In this room?”
She faltered, “Yes.”
Doors were opening up and down the drive. Half a dozen people began to converge on us. A dark-faced man about four and a half feet high came scampering from the direction of the office, his little pointed shoes dancing in the gravel.
“Come inside and show me,” I said to the girl.