Free The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald Page A

The jagged dried splash on the wall still smelled of bourbon, and the floor was littered with brown shards of glass which crunched under my feet.
    The living-room was dim behind closed Venetian blinds. I jerked the cord to let the morning in, and looked around me. A scarred prewar radio-phonograph stood by the window, with piles of records on the floor beside it. There was a shallow fireplace in the inside wall, containing a cold gas heater unnecessarily protected by a brass fire-screen. On the wall above the fireplace Van Gogh’s much reproduced sunflowers burned in a bamboo frame. The mantel held some old copies of
Daily Variety
and
Hollywood Reporter
, and a few books: cheap reprints of Thorne Smith, Erskine Caldwell, the poems of Joseph Moncure March, and
The Lost Weekend
. There was one handsome book, a copy of
Sonnets from the Portuguese
bound in green tooled leather. Its flyleaf was inscribed: “If thou must love me, let it befor naught except for love’s sake only.—Jane.” Jane wrote a precise small hand.
    The most conspicuous piece of furniture was a Murphy bed standing on its hind legs in a doorway across the room. I had to push it aside before I could get through the door. I did this with my elbow, instead of my fingerprint surfaces. I suppose I smelled the blood before I was conscious of it.
    There was a great deal of blood in the little hallway on the other side of the door. It covered the floor from wall to wall, a dark pool filming over now and beginning to cake at the edges. Dalling lay in the middle of it, prone on his back and finished. His waxen profile caught the light that shone through the bathroom door. At first glance I couldn’t make out the hole through which the blood had wasted. Leaning over, I saw the puncture in the far slope of his neck and the powder burns on his collar. He was dressed as I had seen him in Palm Springs, and he made a handsome corpse. Any mortician would have been proud of Dalling.
    A sheaf of envelopes and folded papers lay on the un-breathing chest halfway out of the jacket’s inside pocket. Hugging the door frame with one crooked elbow, I leaned further out over the red pool and got them. It wasn’t legal, but on the other hand paper seldom took usable fingerprints.
    I went back to the window with the papers, and read through them quickly. A Third Street auto agency intended to repossess the Buick if Dalling didn’t pay overdue installments of one hundred and sixty-five dollars and fifty cents. A note on the letterhead of a talent agency, signed by one of its partners, stated that things were tough all over in show biz, if that was any comfort, but TV might make a few more jobs in the fall. An overdraft notice from adowntown bank hinted at a threat of legal proceedings. A Beverly Hills tailor was turning over his account to a collection agency.
    I returned to the door of the hallway and took a second look for a gun. There was none in sight, and it wasn’t likely that Dalling had fallen on it in his position. Somebody else had done him the final favor.
    There was only one personal letter, written on an interoffice memo form from a Hollywood radio station. It was handwritten in neat small calligraphy, and signed Jane:
    Dear Keith, It may be difficult for you to believe, under the circumstances, that I was glad to hear from you, but, even under the circumstances, I truly was. I shall always be glad to hear from you, whatever the reason. I don’t think, however, that it would be good for either of us to try to renew our relationship, as you suggest. What’s past is past, though I think of you often and bear you no ill feeling. I do hope, Keith, that you are taking better care of yourself now. I enclose my personal check for one hundred dollars, and trust it will tide you over your current embarrassment
.
    Yours sincerely
,    
Jane
            
    Jane’s full name was written above the station call-letters that were printed on the envelope. It was Jane