Free The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald Page B

Starr Hammond. The envelope had been postmarked early in March.
    I found her name again in the small red leather address-book that was the last of the items from Dalling’s breast pocket. There were a great many names in the book, nine out of ten of them female, and a great many telephone numbers. The only addresses and telephone numbers that interested me deeply were the ones on the last page: Mrs.Samuel Lawrence’s and my own. I tore out that last page, and put the book and the bills and the letters back where I had got them.
    Dalling had no more use for Malibu telephone numbers or hundred-dollar loans. He’d keep no more whisky vigils in the Murphy bed, with desperation and a dying bottle for bedmates. No one would ever send him another book of poems with love written small and neat on the flyleaf.
    There were two men starting their cars in the parking lot, but they didn’t pay any special attention to me. I got into my car and switched on the engine. The yellow Buick stood there waiting to be repossessed.

CHAPTER
12 :     
I called Jane Starr Hammond’s
number from a short-order restaurant on the boulevard. If I reached her before the body was discovered and the police visited her, I might learn something that I otherwise wouldn’t. A maid with a Negro lilt in her voice answered the phone immediately. Miss Hammond had already left for the studio; she would be in her office there the rest of the morning. I went back to my seat at the counter and contemplated the ham and eggs I had ordered. The yolk of one of the eggs had leaked out onto the plate like a miniature pool of yellow blood. I had black coffee for breakfast.
    Parking spaces in downtown Hollywood were as scarce as the cardinal virtues. I found a place on Cahuenga and walked back to the studio, which occupied the third and fourth floors of a stone-faced building on Sunset. When I asked for Miss Hammond’s office, the blue-uniformed elevator attendant let me off on the third floor and pointeddown the corridor. Her name was on the translucent glass pane of a door, with PRIVATE printed underneath. I knocked lightly and waited, undergoing a rare attack of embarrassment. It passed.
    “Come in,” a cool voice answered, “it isn’t locked.”
    I stepped into a light and airy office and closed the door behind me. Its opposite wall was a giant studio window. A young woman sat with her back to the light, working at a bleached mahogany desk. She was as crisp and exact as the daffodils in the square white bowl at her elbow. She was shiny and trim in a navy blue faille suit and a flat blue sailor hat, too trim and shiny. She looked as if she was made of rustless alloys, synthetic rubber and dyes, powered by a chrome-plated engine clicking away inside her porcelain chest. She wore a fresh gardenia on her lapel.
    She looked up from the typescript she was penciling, and caught me regarding the hat. “Pay no attention to the flying saucer.” She showed her small even teeth in a practiced smile. “I have to interview a ladybird this morning. As a matter of fact, I thought you might be she.”
    “I’m usually compared to insects like the cockroach.”
    “I mean when you knocked. Don’t you know what a ladybird is? A ladybird is a bird who thinks she’s a lady. The hat helps me to dominate, you know? This particular ladybird has slain wild elephants with a wild elephant gun, so she’ll take some dominating. Now tell me you’re her husband.” She smiled expertly again. If her nose had been a trifle less sharp, her eyes a few degrees warmer, she would have been a very pretty woman. I couldn’t imagine her writing the inscription in the
Sonnets from the Portuguese
.
    I said: “My name is Archer. You
are
Miss Hammond?”
    “You surprise and distress me, Mr. Archer. My fair pan was on the cover of
Radio Mirror
last month.” I wonderedif she worked this hard selling herself all day every day.
    “What can I do for you?” she said. “I only have a