The Doomsters

24

MISS PARISH and the sheriff were standing in uncomfortable relation to each other. I guessed they’d had an argument. She looked official and rather imposing in a plain blue coat and hat. Ostervelt’s face was shadowed by his wide hat brim, but I got the impression that he was feeling subdued. If there had been an argument, he’d lost.

“What are you doing here?” He spoke without force, like an old actor who has lost faith in his part.

“I’ve been holding Mrs. Hallman’s hand. Hello, Miss Parish.”

“Hello.” Her smile was warm. “How is Mrs. Hallman?”

“Yeah,” Ostervelt said. “How is she? She sounded kind of upset on the telephone. Did something happen?”

“Mrs. Hallman doesn’t want to see you unless it’s necessary.”

“Hell, I’m just interested in her personal safety.” He looked sideways at Miss Parish and added for her benefit, in an injured-innocent tone: “What’s Mildred got against me?”

I stepped outside and shut the door behind me. “Are you sure you want an answer?”

I couldn’t keep the heat out of my voice. In reflex, Ostervelt put his hand on his gun-butt.

“Good heavens!” Miss Parish said with a forced little laugh. “Haven’t we got enough trouble, gentlemen?”

“I want to know what he means by that. He’s been needling me all day. I don’t have to take that stuff from any keyhole cop.” Ostervelt sounded almost querulous. “Not in my own county I don’t.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Archer.” She stepped between us, turning her back on me and her full maternal charm on Ostervelt. “Why don’t you wait for me in the car, Sheriff? I’ll talk to Mrs. Hallman if she’ll let me. It’s obvious that her husband hasn’t been here. That’s all you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but–” He glared at me over her shoulder. “I didn’t like that crack.”

“You weren’t intended to. Make something out of it.”

The situation was boiling up again. Miss Parish poured cool words on it: “I didn’t hear any crack. Both you men are under a strain. It’s no excuse for acting like boys with a chip on your shoulder.” She touched Ostervelt’s shoulder, and let her hand linger there. “You will go and wait in the car, won’t you? I’ll only be a few minutes.”

With a kind of caressing firmness, she turned Ostervelt around and gave him a gentle push toward the street. He took it, and he went. She gave me a bright, warm look.

“How did you get him eating out of your hand?”

“Oh, that’s my little secret. Actually, something came up.”

“What came up?”

She smiled. “I did. Dr. Brockley couldn’t make it; he had an important meeting. So he sent me instead. I asked him to.”

“To check up on Ostervelt?”

“I have no official right to do anything like that.” The door of the Mercury slammed in the street. “We’d better go inside, don’t you think? He’ll know we’re talking about him.”

“Let him.”

“You men. Sometimes I feel as though the whole world were a mental hospital. It’s certainly a safe enough assumption to act on.”

After the day I’d put in, I wasn’t inclined to argue.

I opened the door and held it for her. She faced me in the lighted hallway.

“I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“I got involved.”

“I understand you have your car back.”

“Yes.” But she wasn’t interested in my car. “If you’re asking the question I think you are, I’m working for your friend Carl. I don’t believe he killed his brother, or anybody else.”

“Really?” Her bosom rose under her coat. She unbuttoned the coat to give it the room it needed. “I just got finished telling Sheriff Ostervelt the same thing.”

“Did he buy it?”

“I’m afraid not. The circumstances are very much against Carl, aren’t they? I did manage to cool the old man off a bit.”

“How did you manage that?”

“It’s official business. Confidential.”

“Having to do with Carl?”

“Indirectly. The man he escaped with, Tom Rica. I really can’t give you any more information, Mr. Archer.”

“Let me guess. If I’m right, I know it already. If I’m wrong, there’s no harm done. Ostervelt got Rica off with a state-hospital commitment when under the law he should have been sent to the pen.”

Miss Parish didn’t say I was wrong. She didn’t say anything.

I ushered her into the front room. Her dark awareness took it in at a glance, staying on the empty bottle on top of the piano. There was a family photograph beside it, in a tarnished silver frame, and a broken pink conch shell.

Miss Parish picked up the bottle and sniffed it and set it down with a rap. She looked suspiciously toward the door. Her bold profile and mannish hat reminded me of a female operative in a spy movie.

“Where’s the little wife?” she whispered.

“Upstairs, changing her clothes.”

“Is she a drinker?”

“Never touches the stuff. Her mother drinks for both of them.”

“I see.”

Miss Parish leaned forward to examine the photograph. I looked at it over her shoulder. A smiling man in shirtsleeves and wide suspenders stood under a palm tree with a strikingly pretty woman. The woman held a long-dressed child on her arm. The picture had been amateurishly tinted by hand. The tree was green, the woman’s bobbed hair was red, the flowers in her dress were red. All the colors were fading.

“Is this the mother-in-law?”

“Apparently.”

“Where is she now?”

“Dreamland. She passed out.”

“Alcoholic?”

“Mrs. Gley is working at it.”

“What about the father?”

“He dropped away long ago. He may be dead.”

“I’m surprised,” Miss Parish murmured. “I understood Carl came from quite a wealthy – quite a good background.”

“Wealthy, anyway. His wife doesn’t.”

“So I gather.” Miss Parish looked around the mortuary room where the past refused to live or die. “It helps to fill in the picture.”

“What picture?” Her patronizing attitude irked me.

“My understanding of Carl and his problems. The type of family a sick man marries into can be very significant. A person who feels socially inadequate, as sick people do, will often lower himself in the social scale, deliberately declass himself.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions too fast. You should take a look at his own family.”

“Carl’s told me a great deal about them. You know, when a person breaks down, he doesn’t do it all by himself. It’s something that happens to whole families. The terrible thing is when one member cracks up, the rest so often make a scapegoat out of him. They think they can solve their own problems by rejecting the sick one – locking him up and forgetting him.”

“That applies to the Hallmans,” I said. “It doesn’t apply to Carl’s wife. I think her mother would like to see him put away for good, but she doesn’t count for much.”

“I know, I mustn’t let myself be unfair to the wife. She seems to be quite a decent little creature. I have to admit she stayed with it when the going was rough. She came to see Carl every week, never missed a Sunday. Which is more than you can say for a lot of them.” Miss Parish cocked her head, as if she could hear a playback of herself. She flushed slowly. “Good heavens, listen to me. It’s such a temptation to identify with the patients and blame the relatives for everything. It’s one of our worst occupational hazards.”

She sat down on the piano stool and took out a cigarette, which I lit for her. Twin lights burned deep in her eyes. I could sense her emotions burning behind her professional front, like walled atomic fires. They didn’t burn for me, though.

Just to have something burning for me, I lit a cigarette of my own. Miss Parish jumped at the snap of the lighter; she had nerves, too. She turned on the stool to look up at me: “I know I identify with my patients. Especially Carl. I can’t help it.”

“Isn’t that doing it the hard way? If I went through the wringer every time one of my clients does–” I lost interest in the sentence, and let it drop. I had my own identification with the hunted man.

“I don’t care about myself.” Miss Parish crushed out her cigarette rather savagely, and moved to the doorway. “Carl is in serious jeopardy, isn’t he?”

“It could be worse.”

“It may be worse than you think. I talked to several people at the courthouse. They’re raking up those other deaths in his family. He did a lot of talking, you know, at the time he was committed. Completely irrational talking. You don’t take what a disturbed person says at its face value. But a lot of men in law enforcement don’t understand that.”

“Did the sheriff tell you about Carl’s alleged confession?”

“He hinted around about it. I’m afraid he gives it a lot of weight. As if it proved anything.”

“You sound as if you’ve heard it all before.”

“Of course I have. When Carl was admitted six months ago he had himself convinced that he was the criminal of the century. He accused himself of killing both his parents.”

“His mother, too?”

“I think his guilt-feelings originated with her suicide. She drowned herself several years ago.”

“I knew that. But I don’t understand why he’d blame himself.”

“It’s a typical reaction in depressed patients to blame themselves for everything bad that happens. Particularly the death of people they love. Carl was devoted to his mother, deeply dependent on her. At the same time he was trying to break away and have a life of his own. She probably killed herself for reasons that had no connection with Carl. But he saw her death as a direct result of his disloyalty to her, what he thought of as disloyalty. He felt as though his efforts to cut the umbilical cord had actually killed her. From there it was only a step to thinking that he was a murderer.”

It was tempting doctrine, that Carl’s guilt was compounded of words and fantasies, the stuff of childhood nightmares. It promised to solve so many problems that I was suspicious of it.

“Would a theory like that stand up in court?”

“It isn’t theory, it’s fact. Whether or not it was accepted as fact would depend on the human element: the judge, the jury, the quality of the expert witnesses. But there’s no reason why it should ever come to court.” Her eyes were watchful, ready to be angry with me.

“I’d still like to get my hands on firm evidence that he didn’t do these crimes, that somebody else did. It’s the only certain way to prove that his confession was a phony.”

“But it definitely was. We know his mother was a suicide. His father died of natural causes, or possibly by accident. The story Carl told about that was pure fantasy, right out of the textbook.”

“I haven’t read the textbook.”

“He said that he broke into his father’s bathroom when the old man was in the tub, knocked him unconscious, and held him under water until he was dead.”

“Do you know for a fact that it didn’t happen that way?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do. I have the word of the best possible witness, Carl himself. He knows now that he had no direct connection with his father’s death. He told me that several weeks ago. He’s developed remarkable insight into his guilt-feelings, and his reasons for confessing something he didn’t do. He knows now that he wanted to punish himself for his father-killing fantasies. Every boy has the Oedipus fantasies, but they seldom come out so strongly, except in psychotic breakthrough.

“Carl had a breakthrough the morning he and his brother found their father in the bathtub. The night before, he’d had a serious argument with his father. Carl was very angry, murderously angry. When his father actually did die, he felt like a murderer. The guilt of his mother’s death came up from the unconscious and reinforced this new guilt. His mind invented a story to explain his terrible guilt-feelings, and somehow deal with them.”

“Carl told you all this?” It sounded very complicated and tenuous.

“We worked it out together,” she said softly and gravely. “I don’t mean to take credit to myself. Dr. Brockley directed the therapy. Carl simply happened to do his talking-out to me.”

Her face was warm and bright again, with the pride a woman can take in being a woman, exerting peaceful power. It was hard to hold on to my skepticism, which seemed almost like an insult to her calm assurance.

“How can you tell the difference between true confessions and fantasies?”

“That’s where training and experience come in. You get a feeling for unreality. It’s partly in the tone, and partly in the content. Often you can tell by the very enormity of the fantasy, the patient’s complete insistence on his guilt. You wouldn’t believe the crimes I’ve had confessed to me. I’ve talked to a Jack the Ripper, a man who claimed he shot Lincoln, several who killed Christ himself. All these people feel they’ve done evil – we all do in some degree – and unconsciously they want to punish themselves for the worst possible crimes. As the patient gets better, and he can face his actual problems, the need for punishment and the guilty fantasies disappear together. Carl’s faded out that way.”

“And you never make a mistake about these fantasies?”

“I don’t claim that. There’s no mistake about Carl’s. He got over them, and that’s proof positive that they were illusory.”

“I hope he got over them. This morning when I talked to him, he was still hung up on his father’s death. In fact, he wanted to hire me to prove that somebody else murdered his father. I guess that’s some improvement over thinking he did it himself.”

Miss Parish shook her head. She brushed past me and moved to the window, stood there with her thumbnail between her teeth. Her shadow on the blind was like an enlarged image of a worried child. I sensed the doubts and fears that had kept her single and turned her love toward the sick.

“He’s had a setback,” she said bitterly. “He should never have left the hospital so soon. He wasn’t ready to face these dreadful things.”

I laid my hand on one of her bowed shoulders. “Don’t let it get you down. He’s depending on people like you to help him out of it.” Whether or not he’s guilty, the words ran on unspoken in my head.

I looked out past the edge of the blind. The Mercury was still in the street. I could hear the squawk of its radio faintly through the glass.

“I’d do anything for Carl,” Miss Parish said close to my ear. “I suppose that’s no secret to you.”

I didn’t answer her. I was reluctant to encourage her intimacy. Miss Parish alternated between being too personal and too official. And Mildred was a long time coming down.

I went to the piano and picked out a one-finger tune. I quit when I recognized it: “Sentimental Journey.” I took the conch shell and set it to my ear. Its susurrus sounded less like the sea than the labored breathing of a tiring runner. No doubt I heard what I was listening for.