A young man, an intern at UCLA Medical Center, is heading
out of Los Angeles on his way to his niece’s wedding in Phoenix. He has signed out for the long weekend and he
is eagerly anticipating some time with his family, which will include (though
he doesn’t know this yet) his niece’s college roommate, an eligible young woman
from a prominent Washington, DC, family, who will be at the wedding also. Driving his mother’s late-model Cadillac,
with his suitcase, medical bag, and his father’s golf clubs in the trunk, he is
fifteen miles out of Indio and in the middle of nowhere when he spots a teenage
girl by the side of the road. She’s a
bit disheveled and is carrying a small canvas travel bag and a white plastic handbag
and nothing else; she looks to him like the girls his younger sisters refer to
as “cheap.” He pulls over and rolls down
his window. She is sullen and somewhat
evasive in answering questions, and she happens to be going to Phoenix also. Hugh feels that he can’t just leave her here,
in the desert, where who knows who she might encounter, so he offers a ride; he
decides, however, that he will drop her off at the next town, where she can
catch the bus.
What could possibly go wrong, right?
This is the set-up of Dorothy Hughes’ The Expendable Man,
and the answer is, of course, plenty. It
is not a big reveal to say that the girl’s motives seem dubious and she proves
hard to be rid of, being dropped off and then showing up again, including
showing up at Hugh’s Phoenix motel room, where he refuses to speak to her. It is not even a big reveal to say that the
morning after she shows up at his motel room her body is found in a canal on
the outskirts of Phoenix, and the autopsy reveals her to have been pregnant—and
aborted. Nor is it a big reveal—indeed,
it is only logical to assume—that the suspicion of the local police falls on
Hugh, the last person—and conveniently, a physician—known to have seen her
alive. It will be up to Hugh to prove his innocence
despite the damning circumstances.
