Find a Victim

Chapter 32

I waited for Church with my gun out. He came into the doorway, bright-eyed and haggard under his Stetson. His hand went into the side pocket of his suit coat, which bulged with the shape of a gun.

“I thought that you would be the one,” he said.

“You should have shot me when you had the chance. I wouldn’t try it now, though. Your wife here scored a hundred in silhouette. I used to score ninety-nine in rapid fire.”

“I’m not competing, Archer. I don’t want your blood on my hands.”

“Let me see your hands.”

He held them out in front of him, palms up and empty. He winced when I took the gun out of his pocket. It was a blue steel revolver, a .38-caliber. The butt was suave from use. I twirled the well-oiled cylinder. It was fully loaded.

“Take it,” he said. “It’s the one you want.”

He looked from the gun to the woman. She had backed against the glass door to the patio. Her eyes were terrible green gashes in her still face. They overflowed, and I wondered who her grief was for. Herself?

“You told him, Hilda?”

She nodded dumbly.

He said to me: “You know, then.”

“Yes. Where have you been?”

“Out on the highway. I had a childish kind of idea that I could go away and leave it all behind, start over somewhere else.”

“So here you are.”

“Here I am. I realized that I couldn’t leave myself behind, that I’d have to go on living with myself no matter where I was. A cheerful prospect.” He was trying to be sardonic, to hold a style, but his raw pain showed through. “There’s more to it than that, of course. I couldn’t go away and leave Hilda to face these things alone. I’m guiltier than she is.”

She moaned. Her face was like a statue’s in the rain. “Brandon, let me go outside. Please? I can’t stand to hear you talk like that.”

“You won’t run away?”

“I promise.”

“You won’t hurt yourself?”

“No, Brandon.”

“All right. For a little while.” He turned to me as the glass door slid closed behind her. “She won’t leave the patio, don’t worry. She loves it there, and she hasn’t much time.”

“You still care for her?”

“She’s my child. That’s the hell of it, Archer. I can’t blame her, she’s not responsible. I’m the one who’s responsible. She acted under inner compulsion, hardly knowing what she was doing. I knew damn well what I was doing, right from the beginning. I went ahead and did it anyway. This is the payoff.”

He opened his large hands and looked down into them. “It really came Thursday night, when Kerrigan told me what she had done. He let out a few snide hints when we were at the motor court. I went to his house later, and he threw the whole thing at me. It was the first I knew of it. It was the first I knew that Anne was dead.

“I’m not making excuses for what I did. I don’t believe I would have done it, though, if I’d been thinking straight. He gave me a bad shock. I wasn’t prepared for it. The last I saw of Anne, you see, it was a sunny morning up at the lake, and we were happier than we’d ever been.” Bright droplets pimpled his forehead. He brushed at them impatiently. “God damn it, I’m falling into self-pity. It’s my vice.

“But it was like going through an earthquake that night at Kerrigan’s house. My whole life tilted up and fell on me. My girl was dead. My wife had killed her, and then she’d killed again. Kerrigan didn’t spare me anything, he said whatever he could think of to break my resistance. I didn’t really believe him until I questioned Hilda. But she admitted everything – everything she remembered.

“I couldn’t see any way out that night. I still can’t. I went out to the pass road and did what Kerrigan wanted me to do. You had it right, Archer.” The words came painfully from his grim mouth. “I relieved my men and let the heister go through, out of my county. It’s the thing I’m most ashamed of, out of all the things I have to be ashamed of.”

“He’s back in your county again.”

“I know. It doesn’t alter what I’ve done.”

I was embarrassed by the guns in my fists. I shoved them down into my jacket pockets, out of sight. My judgment of Church had been turned upside down in the last few minutes. He had broken some of the rules. His life had been disordered and passionate. But he was an honest man according to his lights.

“I’d have done the same,” I said.

“You’re not a sworn officer. And aren’t you changing your tune?”

“I was wrong yesterday. I retract what I said. Forget it.”

“I can’t forget the truth. I’ve been running around the countryside for the last forty hours pretending to enforce the law. Actually, I was looking for Anne. Kerrigan wouldn’t tell me where she was, it was another hold he had on me. Well, it’s over now. I suppose Westmore will be asking the grand jury for a formal accusation against me.”

“Not if I can help it. And I’m his main witness.”

He looked at me in surprise. “After what I’ve done?”

“After what you’ve done.”

“You’re an unusual man,” he said slowly.

“Double it. You’re the sort of conscience-stricken bastard who would get satisfaction out of public disgrace and maybe a term in your own jail. Naturally you feel guilty. You are guilty. You made some bad mistakes. The worst one you made was leaving Hilda at large after you knew that she’d committed murder. Kerrigan was no loss to anybody, but it might have been somebody else.”

“I know I shouldn’t have left her that night. Kerrigan forced me to: he made me go out to the pass. I should have taken her to the psychopathic ward. But I couldn’t then. My own mind wasn’t clear. I felt so wrong myself.”

His gaze moved past me to the glass door. Hilda was standing idly in the patio, staring at the white-flowered lemon tree. She seemed lost, as if she had wandered into someone else’s garden by mistake. Church made an inarticulate noise. He took off his hat and threw it at the wall and sat in an iron chair with his head in his hands. I sat down across from him.

When he uncovered his face, his eyes were not so feverishly bright. The lines in his face were deeper. His hands were shaking. He clasped them to hold them still, in a prayerful attitude. In spite of his rumpled business suit, he looked like a ravaged saint stretched on El Greco’s rack.

“Hilda’s going to spend a long time behind walls,” I said. “The place depends on whether or not she’s sane. Is she insane?”

“I don’t know what a jury will say. She’s emotionally disturbed, you can see that for yourself. She’s never been entirely normal since I’ve known her. It’s one of the reasons I married her, I think. Her life at home with Meyer was driving her insane, literally. Some men have a need to be needed. I’m one of them.

“I know now it’s more of a weakness than a strength, not a good basis for a marriage. It worked, though, for nearly ten years. If we could have had children, it might have worked permanently. Or if I hadn’t lost my will.” His eyes were on me, but they didn’t see me. He was deep inside of himself, probing for the truth he had to live by.

“I think will is just another name for desire. In the long run you can’t force yourself to will what you don’t desire. Or stay away from the things you really want.

“I wanted a son,” he said in a deeper voice. “She couldn’t give me one. The son I couldn’t have, all the other things I was missing out of life – they gradually wore me down. Our life together was empty. We tried to fill it with things, a new house, furniture–” he looked around the barren sunlit room “–but there was no fun in it. No love. I didn’t love Hilda any more, and I don’t think she ever loved me. She had too much fear in her heart to be able to love.”

“What was she so afraid of?”

“It started with her father, I think, and then it spread to other things, including me. And herself.” He breathed deeply. “Sometimes it was like a wild animal inside of her looking out through her eyes – an animal I had to keep fed and tamed. So long as I could give her love, the security she needed, she was safe. For nine years I kept her living along like a fairly normal person. Then I failed her. I was the one who failed. I’d overestimated my strength, and taken on too much. And I gave in.”

He struck his long thigh with the edge of his hand. He seemed to be chopping his life into segments.

“I suppose I was attracted to Anne the first time I saw her. I didn’t let myself know it when she was living with us, or for a long time after. She was so young, and I wasn’t going to repeat what her father had done. She was like a daughter to me – a prodigal daughter when she grew up. I was too much of a Puritan to approve of Anne. But she stood for the things I’d been missing: fun and laughter and love without tears. She was so much like Hilda, yet so different – heads and tails of the same coin.

“I started dreaming about her last year, last spring when the hills were turning green. The rutting season.” He was ironizing himself like an old man recalling his hot extinguished youth. But there was a lift in his voice. “I would make elaborate plans to meet her on the street, or think of reasons for Hilda to have her over. Then when she came I was afraid to go near her. She was so lovely.

“I could have stopped it. I could have stopped myself. But I was carried away by – whatever you want to call it, love, or rut, or self-indulgence. I thought I deserved more than I was getting. Well, I got more. We all did.

“In June the three of us went to the ocean for the weekend. I didn’t want to take Anne along – I was fighting it at the time, and I knew I was losing, but Hilda insisted. She had some idea of getting Anne away from Kerrigan, I think. The first night we were there, Hilda had a migraine. Anne and I left her in the motel and went for a walk on the beach. We hadn’t been alone together for years, not since she’d grown up, not in a private place. It happened to us.”

I heard a tearing noise in the patio. I got up and went to the door. Hilda was down on her knees, ripping at the crabgrass that grew in long strands around the edge of the brick planter.

“That was my crime,” Church said to my back, insistently. “I took away my love from Hilda and gave it to her sister. Anne fell in love with me, too. It got so that we had to be together, any way we could, anywhere. I’d go away for a night with Anne, and Hilda would be waiting for me when I came home with that wounded-animal look in her eyes. She never said a word about Anne, never asked me a question. She was withdrawing herself again, the way she was when I married her. And I let it happen. I think I must have wanted it to happen. There were times when I willed her to lose her mind completely, so that I’d be free to live with Anne, to marry her and have children.” His voice broke. “I got my wish, in a way.”

“Has she ever been hospitalized?”

“Once, in the first year of our marriage. She tried to commit suicide. They held her for observation at the county hospital for ten days. She was going to have a baby, and the doctors blamed it on her pregnancy. She told me she didn’t want to bring a child into this world. The same night she took an overdose of sleeping-pills. I got her to a stomach pump in time.

“I could have had her committed then. The doctors left it up to me. I decided to keep her at home. I believed I could give her a better life at home. And she was carrying my child.”

“What happened to the child?”

“She lost it anyway. Her mental condition improved after that.”

“Has she been having psychiatric treatment?”

“Some, off and on. Supportive treatment.”

“Well, it’s a fair background for a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity plea. Did she plan to kill Anne ahead of time, do you know?”

“I know it wasn’t premeditated. It was done on the spur of the moment. I can prove it, if they’ll take my word for it. She didn’t have the gun when she went up there.”

“So she told me. I didn’t know if she was telling the truth.”

“She was. She must have taken it from Anne, or found it in the cabin. I saw it on the bureau Saturday night, and I warned Anne about leaving a loaded gun lying around. But she wouldn’t let me unload it. She wanted it for protection.”

“Against Hilda?”

“That I doubt. She was never afraid of Hilda.”

“She should have been. According to Hilda, Anne gave her the gun. Does that make any sense to you?”

“She told me that, too. But Anne wouldn’t do that.”

“I wonder. She knew that Hilda had attempted suicide.” I moved to the door. Hilda was on her knees among the flowers, but she was no longer weeding. She was tearing up the trailing lobelia in great colored handfuls and flinging them behind her. The planter looked half-scalped.

Church brushed past me and stepped down into the patio. “Hilda! What are you doing?”

She rose on her knees and glanced up at us over her shoulder. Her face was flushed and wet. “I don’t like these. They’re not pretty any more.” She saw the shocked look on his face and cringed away from it. “Is it all right, Father, I mean Brandon?”

He answered after a breathing pause: “It’s all right, Hilda. Do what you want to with the flowers. They’re yours.”

“I’d like to ask you a question,” I said. “About Anne.”

She got to her feet, pushing her hair back with a soiled hand. “But I told you about Anne. It was an accident. I had the gun in my hand and it went off and she looked at me. She looked at me and fell over on the floor.”

“How did the gun get into your hand?”

“Anne gave it to me,” she said. “I told you that”

“Why did she give it to you? Did she say anything? Do you remember?”

“I remember something. It doesn’t seem right.”

“What was said, Mrs. Church? Try hard to remember.”

“She laughed at me. I said if she didn’t leave Father alone that I would kill myself.”

“Leave your father alone?”

“No.” Her eyes were puzzled. “Brandon. Leave Brandon alone. She laughed and went into the bedroom and got the revolver and handed it to me. ‘Go ahead and kill yourself,’ she said. ‘Here’s your chance, the gun is loaded. Kill yourself,’ she said.” She paused, in a listening attitude. “But I didn’t. I killed her.”

Church groaned behind me. I turned. He looked like a man who had barely survived a long illness. A hummingbird whizzed over his head like an iridescent bullet. He watched it out of sight, peering into the blue depths of the sky.

His wife was back among the flowers, ripping the last of them out of the moist earth. When the police car arrived, the planter was denuded and she had begun to strip the thorny lemon tree. Church washed and bandaged her bleeding hands before they took her away.

The End