Find a Victim

Chapter 31

Hilda Church opened the front door and looked out shyly. In her quilted cotton housedress she might have been any pretty suburban chatelaine interrupted at her morning work. But there was a tight glazed look around her eyes and mouth. Her eyes were translucent and strange, a clear pale green like deep ocean water.

“Is your husband home, Mrs. Church?”

“No. I’m afraid he isn’t.”

“I’ll wait.”

“But I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have things to discuss with you.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t feel like talking to anyone. Not this morning.”

She tried to close the door. I held it open.

“You better let me come in.”

“No. Please. Brandon will be angry if he comes home and finds you.” She leaned her weight on the door. One side of her breast bulged around its edge. “Please let me close it. And go away. I’ll tell Brandon you called.”

“I’m coming in, Mrs. Church.”

I set my shoulder, against the door and forced it open. She retreated to the doorway of the living-room and stood in it, her arms stiff at her sides, her fingers working at the ends of them. She looked sideways at me, with a kind of fearful coquetry. The cord in the side of her neck was strung taut like a thin rope.

I moved toward her. She retreated farther, into the living-room. She walked with a queer cumbersomeness, as if her body was lagging far behind her thought. Stopping beside a bleached mahogany coffee table, she leaned over and moved a white clay ashtray a fraction of an inch, into the table’s mathematical center.

The ashtray, the table, the rug, everything in the room was clean. The white and black-iron furniture was bleakly new, and geometrically placed around the room. Through sliding glass doors I could see out into a white-walled patio blazing like an open furnace with flowers. A circular brick planter overflowed with masses of purple lobelia, in the middle of which a dwarf lemon tree held its wax blossoms up to the sun.

“What do you want with me?” she whispered.

The light reflected from the patio wall fell stark across her half-averted face. She looked so much like the dead woman in that instant that I couldn’t believe in her reality. Death had aged Anne Meyer and made them almost twins. Time jarred to a stop and reversed itself. The helpless pity I had felt for Anne went through me like a drug. Now I pitied the unreal woman who was standing with her head bowed over her immaculate coffee table.

She had acted beyond her power to imagine what she had done. I had to drive the truth home to her, give her back reality, and regain it for myself. I’d rather have shot her through the head.

“You killed your sister with your father’s gun. Do you want to talk about it now, Mrs. Church?”

She looked up at me. Through her tide-green eyes I could see the thoughts shifting across her mind like the shadows of unknown creatures. She said: “I loved my sister. I didn’t mean, I didn’t intend–”

“But you did.”

“It was an accident. The gun did. The gun went off in my hand. Anne looked at me. She didn’t say a word. She fell on the floor.”

“Why did you shoot her if you loved her?”

“It was Anne’s fault. She oughtn’t to have gone with him. I know how you men are, you’re like animals, you can’t help yourselves. The woman can help it, though. She shouldn’t have let him. She shouldn’t have led him on.

“I’ve done a great deal of thinking about it,” she said. “I’ve done nothing but think about it since it happened. I haven’t even taken time to sleep. I’ve spent the whole week thinking and cleaning house. I cleaned this house and then I cleaned Father’s house and then I came back here and cleaned this house again. I can’t seem to get it clean, but I did decide one thing, that it was Anne’s fault. You can’t blame Fath– you can’t blame Brandon for it, he’s a man.”

“I don’t understand how it happened, Mrs. Church. Do you remember?”

“Not very well. I’ve been thinking so much. My mind has been working so quickly, I haven’t had time to remember.”

“Did it happen on Sunday?”

“Sunday morning, early, at the lake. I went there to talk to Anne. All I intended to do was talk to her. She was always so thoughtless, she didn’t realize what she’d done to me. She needed someone to bring her to her senses. I couldn’t let it go on the way it had. I had to do something.”

“You knew about it then?”

“I’d known for months. I saw how Brand looked at her, and how she acted. He’d be sitting in his chair and she’d walk close to him so her skirt would brush his knee. And then they started to go on weekend trips. Last Saturday they did it again. Brand said that he had a meeting in Los Angeles. I called the hotel and he wasn’t in Los Angeles. He was with Anne. I knew that, I didn’t know where.

“Then Tony Aquista came here Saturday night. It was very late, past midnight. He got me out of bed. I wasn’t asleep, though. I was thinking already, even before it happened. When he came to the door and told me, I could see everything all at once, my whole life in a single instant – the city and the mountains and the two of them in the cabin with each other, and me by myself, all by myself down here.”

She raised her hands to her breasts and gripped them cruelly.

“Go on,” I said. “What did Aquista tell you?”

“He said that he followed her to Lake Perdida and saw her with Brand. He said that they were on the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace. The fire was burning and they had no clothes on. He said that she was laughing and calling out his name.

“Tony was drunk, and he hated Brand, but he was telling the truth. I knew he was telling the truth. I sat all night after he left, trying to think what to do. The night went by like no time at all. And then the church bells started ringing for early Mass. They came as a sign to me, they sounded like my own wedding bells, and all the way driving up to the lake they kept on ringing. All the time I was talking to Anne, they were ringing in my ears. I had to shout so I could hear myself. They didn’t stop until the gun went off.”

She shuddered, as if she could feel its fiery orgasm penetrating her own flesh.

“Where was your husband when it happened?”

“He wasn’t there. He left before I got there.”

“Where did you get the gun? From your father?”

“It was Father’s revolver. But he didn’t give it to me. Anne did.”

“Your sister gave it to you?”

“Yes.” She nodded her fine small head, birdlike. “She must have. I know she had it. And then it was in my hand.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. Honestly. I can’t remember.” Her face went completely blank. “I try to think back and it’s just a blur with Anne’s face in it, and the sound of the bells. Everything moves so fast, and I’m so slow. The gun went off and I was terrified, there by myself with her body. I thought for a minute that it was me, lying dead on the floor. I ran away.”

“But you went back?”

“Yes. I did. On Monday. I wanted to – to give Anne decent burial. I believed if I could bury her I wouldn’t have to be thinking constantly of her lying there.”

“Was Kerrigan there at the lodge? Or did he walk in on you and find you with her body?”

“Yes, he came when I was there. I was trying to drag – to carry her out to her car. Mr. Kerrigan offered to help me. He said he couldn’t afford to leave her there, that he’d be suspected of shooting her himself. He drove me to a place where I could bury her, in the woods. Then that awful old man came spying on us.” Anger darkened her eyes, fleeting and meaningless as a child’s anger. “It was the old man’s fault that I couldn’t give my sister decent burial. He made me fall and hurt my knee.”

“And lose your heel?”

“Yes. How did you know? Anne and I wear the same size and style of shoe, and Mr. Kerrigan said if I changed shoes with her, no one would ever know the difference. I left her shoes at her apartment when we went to destroy the evidence.”

“What evidence?”

“Mr. Kerrigan didn’t tell me. He just said that there was evidence against me in Anne’s apartment.”

“More likely evidence against him. Your sister was blackmailing him.”

“No, you must be mistaken.” Her tone was both defensive and superior. “Anne was incapable of anything like that. She was thoughtless, but she wasn’t consciously evil. She didn’t mean to be bad.”

“Nobody ever does, Mrs. Church. It creeps up on people.”

“No. You don’t understand. Mr. Kerrigan was helping me. He said it wasn’t fair that I should have to suffer for Anne – for Anne’s mistake. She was in the trunk of her car, and he offered to drive it out and leave it where it wouldn’t be found, not for a long time.”

“And what did he want from you, in return for all his help? Another accident?”

“I don’t remember.” But her look was evasive.

“I’ll remember for you,” I said. “Kerrigan told you to be out on the highway Thursday afternoon along toward evening. You were to stop Aquista’s truck and get him out of it somehow. You went to your father’s house, partly to get an alibi started, and partly to borrow his old Chewy. Why did it have to be your father’s car?”

“Mr. Kerrigan said that Tony would be certain to recognize it.”

“He thought of everything, didn’t he? Nearly everything. But he didn’t know that you had a reason to kill Aquista. Or did he?”

“What reason? I don’t understand.”

“Aquista could figure out, if he hadn’t already, that you had murdered your sister.”

“Please don’t use that word.” She looked up wildly, as if I had released something fearful and blind in the room, a bat that might dive and cling to her hair. “You mustn’t use that word.”

“It’s the correct word, Mrs. Church. For all three shootings. You murdered Aquista in order to silence him. You pushed him into the ditch and drove back to your father’s house to complete your alibi. That left one witness against you – Kerrigan.”

“You make it sound so evil,” she said, “so planned. It wasn’t that way at all. When Tony got into the car, I told him the first thing that came into my head: that Father had had an accident. I didn’t intend to shoot Tony. But he saw the gun on the seat and it made him suspicious. He made a grab for it. I had to pick it up before he got it, I didn’t trust him. Then I couldn’t drive and watch him and hold the gun all at the same time. He grabbed for it again.”

“And it went off again?”

“Yes. He slumped down in the seat and began to breathe queerly.” Her shoulders sagged in unconscious mimicry, and her breath rustled in her throat. “I couldn’t stand the sound of him, the sight of the blood. So I put him out of the car.” She thrust her arms out violently, against thin air.

“The gun went off once more ” I said. “Do you remember the third time? In Kerrigan’s office?”

“Yes. I remember.” Her voice was firmer, her look more definite. It seemed to have strengthened her, in some secret way, to re-enact her murders and confess. “The others were accidents – I know you don’t believe me. But I killed Mr. Kerrigan because I had to. He had told Brand about the others. Everything I had to prevent him from telling other people. Brand locked me in that night, but then he had to go out again. I broke a window and went to the motor court. Mr. Kerrigan was in his office, and I walked in and shot him. I hated to do it, after all the help he gave me. But I had to.”

I looked into the shadowed depths of her eyes, unable to tell if the irony was intended. She was as stern and unsmiling as a judge with his black cap on.

“Three killings with three shots is quite a record. Where did you learn to shoot so well?”

“Father taught me, and Brandon used to take me out on the range. I sometimes scored a hundred in silhouette.”

“Where is the gun you used?”

“Brandon has it. He found it where I hid it. I’m glad he found it.”

I looked at her questioningly.

“I don’t want anything more to happen,” she said. “I hate killing and violence. I always have. I couldn’t even bury a dead cat when I was a girl, or take a mouse out of a trap. While I had the gun, I had no peace.”

“Neither did anyone else.”

She didn’t hear me. Her face had the look I had seen on it Thursday night, both frightened and expectant. A car stopped in the drive.