Find a Victim by Ross MacDonald

twisted iron rods, a red mohair divan piled with cheap magazines, a rug whose color and design had been trampled into indistinguishable grime. The only decoration on the yellow plaster walls was a last year’s cheesecake calendar. A bored hand had given the blonde girl in the picture a mustache and goatee, and hair on her chest.
    She came up to me like an eager child who had been promised a gift. “What did Donny send me?”
    “This.” I closed the door behind me and gave her the packet wrapped in butcher’s paper.
    Her fingers tore it open, scattering the brown cigarettes on the rug. She went down on her knees to retrieve them, snatching at them as if they were live worms that might wriggle away from her. She stood up with four in her hand and one in her mouth.
    I flicked my lighter and lit it for her. I told myself that it was necessary, that she had the habit anyway, that police departments paid off informers with dope every day in the year. But I couldn’t shake off my feeling as I watched her that I had bought a small piece of her future.
    She sucked on the brown weed like a starved baby on an empty bottle. Six of her deep shuddering drags ate half of it away. She looked at what was left with growing, brightening eyes, and dragged again. Her smoky mouth wreatheditself in changing smiles. In no time at all the butt was burning her fingers.
    Pressing it out in an ashtray, she put it away in an empty cigarette-case, along with the four whole reefers. She did a few dance-steps around the room, stumbling a little in her pomponed mules. Then she sat down on the red divan with her fists clenched tightly between her legs. Her eyes were huge and terribly alive, but they were turned inward, lost in the blossoming jungle of her thoughts. Her smile kept changing: girlish and silly, queenly and triumphant, whorish, feline, evil and old, and gay again and girlish.
    I sat beside her. “How are you feeling, Jo?”
    “I feel wonderful.” Her voice came from far inside her head, barely moving her lips. “Jesus, I needed that. Thank Donny for me.”
    “I will if I see him. Isn’t he leaving town?”
    “That’s right, I almost forgot, we’re going away.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “Guatemala.” She said it like an incantation. “We’re going to build a new life together. A beautiful new life together, with no more trouble in it, no more nastiness, no more jerks. Just him and me.”
    “What are you going to live on?”
    “Ways and means,” she said dreamily. “Donny has ways and means.”
    “I hope you make it.”
    “Why shouldn’t we make it?” She gave me a black scowl. The drug had exaggerated all of her emotions, fear and hostility as well as hope.
    “They’re looking in his direction.”
    She sat up straight, pierced by anxiety. “Who? The cops?”
    I nodded.
    She leaned on me and took hold of my arm with bothhands and shook it. “What’s the matter, isn’t the protection working?”
    “It takes pretty solid protection to cover murder.”
    Her lips curled, baring her teeth. Her eyes blazed black in mine. “Did you say murder?”
    “You heard me. A friend of yours was shot.”
    “What friend? I got no friends around this town.”
    “Doesn’t Tony Aquista rate?”
    Without shifting her eyes from my face, she edged away from me, crawling on hands and buttocks into the far corner of the divan. She said from her teeth:
    “Aquista? Should I know the name? How many A’s in Aquista?”
    “Don’t try to kid me, Jo. He was one of your followers. You brought him home here Sunday night.”
    “Who told you that? It’s a lie.” But she looked around the room as if it had betrayed her. Her voice was croupy with fear: “Did they kill Tony?”
    “You ought to know. You set him up for the kill.”
    “No,” she said. “It isn’t true. I wouldn’t touch a thing like that. I’m clean.”
    Her gaze had returned from the interior of her dream. She wasn’t as far out of focus as I’d thought.