The Chill

Chapter 16

It was a slow drive up the coast but the fog lifted before I reached the airport, leaving a thickish twilight in the air. I parked my car at the United building. It was exactly six-twenty-five, according to the ticket the girl in the parking lot handed me. I crossed the road to the bright enormous building and found the baggage carrousel, besieged by travelers.

A woman who looked like a dried-up older Helen was standing on the edge of the crowd beside her suitcase. She had on a black dress under a black coat with a ratty fur collar, black hat, and black gloves.

Only her garish red hair was out of keeping with the occasion. Her eyes were swollen, and she seemed dazed, as if a part of her mind was still back in Illinois.

“Mrs. Hoffman?”

“Yes. I’m Mrs. Earl Hoffman.”

“My name is Archer. Your daughter’s department head, Dr. Geisman, asked me to pick you up.”

“That was nice of him,” she said with a poor vague smile. “And nice of you.”

I picked up her suitcase, which was small and light. “Would you like something to eat, or drink? There’s a pretty good restaurant here.”

“Oh no thanks. I had dinner on the plane. Swiss steak. It was a very interesting flight. I never flew in a jet before. But I wasn’t the least bit frightened.”

She didn’t know what she was. She stared around at the bright lights and the people. The muscles of her face were tensing up as if she might be getting ready to cry some more. I got hold of her thin upper arm and hustled her out of there and across the road to my car. We circled the parking lot and got onto the freeway.

“They didn’t have this when I was here before. I’m glad you decided to meet me. I’d get lost,” she said in a lost voice.

“How long is it since you were here before?”

“Nearly twenty years. It was when Hoffman was in the Navy, he was a warrant officer in the Shore Patrol. They assigned him to San Diego and Helen had already run – left home, and I thought I might as well get the benefit of the travel. We lived in San Diego for over a year, and it was very nice.” I could hear her breathing as if she was struggling up to the rim of the present. She said carefully: “Pacific Point is quite near San Diego, isn’t it?”

“About fifty miles.”

“Is that right?” After another pause, she said: “Are you with the college?”

“I happen to be a detective.”

“Isn’t that interesting? My husband is a detective. He’s been on the Bridgeton force for thirty-four years. He’s due to retire next year. We’ve talked about retiring in California but this will probably turn him against it. He pretends not to care, but he cares. I think he cares just as much as I do.” Her voice floated along above the highway noises like a disembodied spirit talking to itself.

“It’s too bad he couldn’t fly out with you today.”

“He could have, if he’d wanted to. He could have taken time off. I think he was afraid he couldn’t face it. And he has his blood pressure to consider.” She hesitated again. “Are you investigating my daughter’s murder?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Geisman said on the phone that you have a suspect, a young girl. What would make a student shoot one of her teachers? I never heard of such a thing.”

“I don’t think she did, Mrs. Hoffman.”

“But Dr. Geisman said it was practically open and shut.” The sorrow in her voice had changed into a kind of vengeful justice.

“That may be.” I had no desire to argue with a potentially valuable witness. “I’m investigating other angles, and you may be able to help me.”

“How is that?”

“Your daughter’s life was threatened. She talked to me about it before she was shot. Somebody called her on the telephone. It was a voice she didn’t recognize, but she said a strange thing about it. She said it sounded like the voice of Bridgeton.”

“Bridgeton? That’s where we live.”

“I know that, Mrs. Hoffman. Helen said it was Bridgeton catching up with her. Do you have any idea what she meant?”

“She always hated Bridgeton. From the time that she was in high school she blamed it for everything that went wrong with her life. She couldn’t wait to get out of Bridgeton.”

“I understand she ran away from home.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” although she almost had. “She only dropped out of sight for the one summer, and she was working all the time. She had a job with a newspaper in Chicago. Then she started in at the University, and she let me know where she was. It was just her father–” She cut this sentence off short. “I used to help her out of my housekeeping money until we went into the Navy.”

“What was the trouble between her and her father?”

“It had to do with his professional work. At least that was what the final big battle was about.”

“When Helen called him a crooked stormtrooper?”

She turned in the seat to look at me. “Helen told you that, eh? Are you – were you her boy friend or something like that?”

“We were friends.” I found that I could say it with some conviction. We had spent a single angry hour together but her death had turned a light on it which hurt my eyes.

She leaned closer to study my face. “What else did she tell you?”

“There was murder involved in her quarrel with her father.”

“That’s a lie. I don’t mean Helen was lying, but she was mistaken. The Deloney shooting was an accident pure and simple. If Helen thought she knew more about it than her father, she was dead wrong.”

“Dead” and “wrong” were heavy words to lay on the dead. Her black-gloved hand flew up to her mouth. She rode for a while in hunched and fearful silence, a thin dry cricket of a woman who had lost her chirp.

“Tell me about the Deloney shooting, Mrs. Hoffman.”

“I don’t see the point of doing that. I never talk about my husband’s cases. He doesn’t like me to.”

“But he isn’t here.”

“In a way he is. We’ve been together so long. Anyway it’s all past history.”

“History is always connected with the present. That case may have something to do with Helen’s death.”

“How could that be? It was twenty years ago, longer than that, and it didn’t amount to anything at the time. The only reason it made an impression on Helen was that it happened in our apartment building. Mr. Deloney was cleaning a gun, and it went off and shot him, and that was the whole story.”

“Are you sure?”

“Hoffman said so, and Hoffman doesn’t lie.” It sounded like an incantation which she had used before.

“What made Helen think he was lying?”

“Imagination pure and simple. She said she talked to a witness who saw somebody shoot Mr. Deloney, but I say she dreamed it. No witness ever turned up, and Hoffman said there couldn’t have been a witness. Mr. Deloney was alone in the apartment when it happened. He tried to clean a loaded gun and shot himself in the face. Helen must have dreamed the other. She had a bit of a crush on Mr. Deloney. He was a good-looking man, and you know how young girls are.”

“How old was she?”

“Nineteen. That was the summer she left home.”

It was full dark now. Away off to the right the lights of Long Beach, where I had spent my own uneasy youth, were reflected like a dying red fire from the overcast.

“Who was Mr. Deloney?”

“Luke Deloney,” she said. “He was a very successful contractor in Bridgeton and throughout the state. He owned our apartment building and other buildings in town. Mrs. Deloney still owns them. They’re worth a lot more than they were then, and even then he was close to a millionaire.”

“Deloney has a surviving widow?”

“Yes, but don’t go jumping to conclusions. She was miles away, in their main house, when it happened. Sure there was a lot of talk in town, but she was as innocent as a newborn babe. She came from a very good family. She was one of the famous Osborne sisters in Bridgeton.”

“What were they famous for?”

“Their father was the U. S. Senator. I remember when I was in grade school, back before the World War One, they used to ride to hounds in red coats. But they were always very democratic.”

“Good for them.” I brought her back to the Deloney case. “You say Deloney was shot in the building where you had your own apartment?”

“Yes. We were in an apartment on the ground floor. We got it dirt cheap because we used to collect the rent for Mr. Deloney. He kept the roof apartment for himself. He used it for a kind of private office, and a place to throw parties for visiting firemen and so on. A lot of big men from the state house were friends of his. We used to see them coming and going,” she said in a privileged way.

“And he shot himself in this penthouse apartment?”

“The gun shot him,” she corrected me. “It was an accident.”

“What sort of a man was Deloney?”

“He was a self-made man, I guess you’d say. He came from the same section of town Hoffman and I did, which is how we got the job collecting rent for him, and that helped, in the depression. The depression didn’t faze Luke Deloney. He borrowed the money to start his own contracting business and came up fast on his own initiative, and married Senator Osborne’s oldest daughter. There’s no telling where he might have got to. He was only a young man of forty when he died.”

“Helen was interested in him, you say?”

“Not seriously, I don’t mean that. I doubt if they ever said two words to each other. But you know how young girls are, dreaming about older men. He was the most successful man around, and Helen was always very ambitious. It’s funny, she blamed her father for being a failure, which he isn’t. But when she finally got around to marrying she had to pick Bert Haggerty, and he’s a failure if there ever was one.”

She was talking much more freely, but her loquacity tended to fly off in all directions. It was natural enough. Her daughter’s murder had dropped a depth charge into her life.

“Assume there is a connection,” I said, “between Helen’s death and the Deloney shooting – do you have any notion what it could be?”

“No, she must have been imagining things. She was always a great one for that.”

“But she said she knew a witness who saw Deloney shot by someone else?”

“She was talking foolishness.”

“Why?”

“You mean why would she say such things to her father? To get under his skin. There was always bad blood between them, from the time that Hoffman first raised his hand to her. Once they got arguing, there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t say.”

“Did she name the witness?”

“How could she? There was no such person. Her father challenged her to mention a name. She admitted that she couldn’t, that she was just talking.”

“She admitted it?”

“She had to. Hoffman made her. But she never took back the hard words she spoke to him.”

“Is it possible that Helen herself was the witness?”

“That’s crazy and you know it. How could she be a witness to something that never happened?” But there was a shrill edge on her certitude.

“Deloney’s dead, remember. So is she. It tends to confirm the things she told her friends before she died.”

“About Bridgeton, you mean?”

“Yes.”

She lapsed into silence again. Below the harbor cities we entered the fog zone. I was afraid of running into a pileup and I slowed down. Mrs. Hoffman kept looking back as if she could feel Bridgeton catching up.

“I hope Hoffman isn’t drinking,” she said after a while. “It isn’t good for his blood pressure. I’ll blame myself if anything happens to him.”

“One of you had to come out here.”

“I suppose so. Anyway Bert is with him and whatever else he may be Bert is no drunk.”

“Helen’s ex-husband is staying with her father?”

“Yes. He came over from Maple Park this morning and drove me to the airport. Bert’s a good boy. I shouldn’t call him a boy, he’s a grown man in his forties, but he always seems younger than he is.”

“Does he teach at Maple Park?”

“That’s right, only he hasn’t got his degree. He’s been working on it for years. He teaches journalism and English, and he helps put out the school paper. He used to be a newspaperman, that was how Helen met him.”

“When she was nineteen?”

“You have a good memory. You and Hoffman would get along. Hoffman’s middle name is memory. There was a time before we got our wartime expansion when he knew every building in Bridgeton. Every factory, every warehouse, every residence. Pick any house on any street and he could tell you who built it and who owned it. He could tell you who lived there and who used to live there and how many children they had and how much income and anything else you wanted to know about them. I’m not exaggerating, ask any of his fellow officers. They used to predict great things for him, but he never made it higher than Lieutenant.”

I wondered why the great things hadn’t materialized. She gave me a kind of answer, which I suspected was more of a legend than a fact:

“Helen got her memory from him. They were more alike than either of them admitted. And they were crazy about each other, under all the trouble there was between them. It broke his heart when Helen left home and never wrote. He never asked about her, either, but he did a lot of brooding. He was never the same man again.”

“Did she marry Bert Haggerty right away?”

“No, she kept him dangling for five or six years. He was away in the army part of that time. Bert did well in the war – a lot of men did well in the war that never did so well before or since – and he was full of confidence for a while. He was going to write a book, start his own newspaper, take her to Europe on their honeymoon. They did get to Europe, on the G. I. Bill – I gave them part of the money to make the trip – but that was all that ever came of his plans. He never could settle down to any one thing, and when he finally did it was too late. Last spring they came to the parting of the ways. I didn’t like it, but I can hardly blame her. She always did better than he did, from the time that they were married. And one thing I’ll say for Helen, she always had class.”

“I agree.”

“But maybe she should have stuck with Bert. Who knows? Maybe this wouldn’t have happened. I sometimes think that any man is better than no man at all.”

Later, as we were entering Pacific Point, she said: “Why couldn’t Helen marry an upstanding husband? It’s funny. She had brains and looks and class, but she never could attract an upstanding man.”

I could feel her eyes on my profile, trying to chart the lost continent of her daughter’s life.