The Chill

Chapter 17

The Pacific Hotel stood on a corner just above the economic equator that divided the main street into a prosperous section and a not so prosperous one. The lobby was almost empty on this Saturday night. Four old men were playing bridge in the light of a standing lamp. The only other human being in sight was Dr. Geisman, if he qualified.

He got up out of a shabby green plastic armchair and shook hands formally with Mrs. Hoffman.

“I see that you’ve arrived safely. How are you?”

“I’m all right, thanks.”

“Your daughter’s unexpected demise came as quite a blow to us.”

“To me, too.”

“In fact I’ve been endeavoring all day to find a replacement for her. I still haven’t succeeded. This is the worst possible time of year to try to recruit teaching personnel.”

“That’s too bad.”

I left them trying to breathe life into their stillborn conversation and went into the bar for a drink. A single customer sat trading sorrows with the fat lugubrious bartender. Her hair was dyed black, with a greenish sheen on it like certain ducks.

I recognized the woman – I could have spotted Mrs. Perrine at a thousand yards – and I started to back out of the room. She turned and saw me.

“Fancy meeting you here.” She made a large gesture which almost upset the empty glass in front of her, and said to the bartender: “This is my friend Mr. Archer. Pour my friend a drink.”

“What’ll you have?”

“Bourbon. I’m paying. What is the lady drinking?”

“Planter’s punch,” she said, “and thanks for the ‘lady.’ Thanks for everything in fact. I’m celebrating, been celebrating all day.”

I wished she hadn’t been. The granite front she had kept up at her trial had eroded, and the inner ruin of her life showed through. While I didn’t know all of Mrs. Perrine’s secrets, I knew the record she had left on the police blotters of twenty cities. She had been innocent of this one particular crime, but she was a hustler who had worked the coasts from Acapulco to Seattle and from Montreal to Key West.

The bartender limped away to make our drinks. I sat on the stool beside her. “You should pick another town to celebrate in.”

“I know. This town is a graveyard. I felt like the last living inhabitant, until you sashayed in.”

“That isn’t what I mean, Mrs. Perrine.”

“Hell, call me Bridget, you’re my pal, you’ve earned the right.”

“Okay, Bridget. The police didn’t like your acquittal, you couldn’t expect them to. They’ll pick you up for any little thing.”

“I haven’t stepped out of line. I have my own money.”

“I’m thinking about what you might do if you go on celebrating. You can’t afford to jaywalk in this town.”

She considered this problem, and her twisting face mimicked the efforts of her mind. “You may be right at that. I been thinking of going to Vegas in the morning. I have a friend in Vegas.”

The bartender brought our drinks. Mrs. Perrine sipped at hers, making a sour face, as if she’d suddenly lost her taste for it. Her gaze strayed to the mirror behind the bar.

“My gosh,” she said, “is that me? I look like the wrath of God.”

“Take a bath and get some sleep.”

“It isn’t so easy to sleep. I get lonely at night.” She ogled me, more or less automatically.

She wasn’t my baby. I finished my drink and put two dollar bills on the bar.

“Good night, Bridget. Take it easy. I have to make a phone call.”

“Sure you do. See you at the Epworth League.”

The bartender limped toward her as I walked out. Mrs. Hoffman and Dr. Geisman were no longer in the lobby. I found the telephone booths in a cul-de-sac behind the main desk and called the Bradshaw house.

Before the phone had rung more than once, the old lady’s voice came quavering over the line. “Roy? Is that you, Roy?”

“This is Archer.”

“I was so hoping it would be Roy. He always telephones by this time. You don’t suppose something has happened to him?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Have you seen the paper?”

“No.”

“There’s an item to the effect that Laura Sutherland went to the Reno conference with him. Roy didn’t tell me that. Do you suppose he’s interested in Laura?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“She’s a lovely young woman, don’t you think?”

I wondered if she’d had some wine at dinner that made her silly. “I have no opinion on the subject, Mrs. Bradshaw. I called to see if you’re willing to follow through on our conversation this afternoon.”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly, not without Roy’s consent. He handles the money in the family, you know. Now I’m going to ask you to cut this short, Mr. Archer. I’m expecting to hear from Roy at any moment.”

She hung up on me. I seemed to be losing my touch with little old ladies. I went into the washroom and looked at my face in the mirror above the row of basins. Someone had written in pencil on the wall: Support Mental Health or I’ll kill you.

A small brown newsboy came into the washroom and caught me grinning at my reflection. I pretended to be examining my teeth. He looked about ten years old, and conducted himself like a miniature adult.

“Read all about the murder,” he suggested.

I bought a local paper from him. The lead story was headlined: “PPC Teacher Shot,” with the subhead: “Mystery Student to be Questioned.” In effect, it tried and convicted Dolly. She had “registered fraudulently, using an alias.” Her friendship with Helen was described as “a strange relationship.” The S and W thirty-eight found in her bed was “the murder weapon.” She had “a dark secret in her past” – the McGee killing – and was “avoiding questioning by the police.”

No other possible suspect was mentioned. The man from Reno didn’t appear in the story.

In lieu of doing something constructive I tore the paper to pieces and dropped the pieces in the trash basket. Then I went back to the telephone booths. Dr. Godwin’s answering service wanted to know if it was an emergency.

“Yes. It has to do with a patient of Dr. Godwin’s.”

“Are you the patient, sir?”

“Yes,” I lied, wondering if this meant I needed help.

The switchboard girl said in a gentler voice: “The last time the doctor called in he was at home.”

She recited his number but I didn’t use it. I wanted to talk to Godwin face to face. I got his address out of the directory and drove across town to his house.

It was one of a number of large houses set on the edge of a mesa which normally overlooked the harbor and the city. Tonight it was islanded by the fog.

Behind the Arizona fieldstone front of the house a tenor and a soprano were singing a heartbreaking duet from La bohème.

The door was answered by a handsome woman wearing a red silk brocade coat and the semi-professional smile that doctors’ wives acquire. She seemed to recognize my name.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Archer. My husband was here until just a few minutes ago. We were actually listening to music for a change. Then a young man called – the husband of one of his patients – and he agreed to meet him at the nursing home.”

“It wasn’t Alex Kincaid who called?”

“I believe it was. Mr. Archer?” She stepped outside, a brilliant and very feminine figure in her red coat. “My husband has spoken of you. I understand you’re working on this criminal case he’s involved with.”

“Yes.”

Her hand touched my arm. “I’m worried about him. He’s taking this thing so seriously. He seems to think that he let the girl down when she was his patient before, and that it makes him responsible for everything that’s happened.” Her fine long eyes looked up at me, asking for reassurance.

“He isn’t,” I said.

“Will you tell him so? He won’t listen to me. There are very few people he will listen to. But he seems to have some respect for you, Mr. Archer.”

“It’s mutual. I doubt that he’d want my opinion on the subject of his responsibility, though. He’s a very powerful and temperamental man, easy to cross.”

“You’re telling me,” she said. “I suppose I had no right to ask you to speak to him. But the way he pours his life away into those patients of his–” Her hand moved from her breast in an outward gesture.

“He seems to thrive on it.”

“I don’t.” She made a wry face. “Physician’s wife, heal thyself, eh?”

“You’re thriving by all appearances,” I said. “That’s a nice coat, by the way.”

“Thank you. Jim bought it for me in Paris last summer.”

I left her smiling less professionally, and went to the nursing home. Alex’s red Porsche was standing at the curb in front of the big plain stucco building. I felt my heartbeat pounding in my ears. Something good could still happen.

A Spanish American nurse’s aide in a blue and white uniform unlocked the door and let me into the front room to wait for Dr. Godwin. Nell and several other bathrobed patients were watching a television drama about a pair of lawyers, father and son. They paid no attention to me. I was only a real-life detective, unemployed at the moment. But not, I hoped, for long.

I sat in an empty chair to one side. The drama was well directed and well played but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. I began to watch the four people who were watching it. Nell the somnambulist, her black hair hanging like tangled sorrows down her back, held cupped in her hands the blue ceramic ashtray she had made. A young man with an untrimmed beard and rebellious eyes looked like a conscientious objector to everything. A thin-haired man, who was trembling with excitement, went on trembling right through the commercial. An old woman had a translucent face through which her life burned like a guttering candle. Step back a little and you could almost imagine that they were three generations of one family, grandmother, parents, and son, at home on a Saturday night.

Dr. Godwin appeared in the inner doorway and crooked his finger at me. I followed him down the hallway through a thickening hospital odor, into a small cramped office. He switched on a lamp over the desk and sat behind it. I took the only other chair.

“Is Alex Kincaid with his wife?”

“Yes. He called me at home and seemed very eager to see her, though he hasn’t been around all day. He also wanted to talk to me.”

“Did he say anything about running out on her?”

“No.”

“I hope he’s changed his mind.” I told Godwin about my meeting with Kincaid senior, and Alex’s departure with his father.

“You can’t entirely blame him for falling by the wayside momentarily. He’s young, and under great strain.” Godwin’s changeable eyes lit up. “The important thing, for him as well as Dolly, is that he decided to come back.”

“How is she?”

“Calmer, I think. She didn’t want to talk tonight, at least not to me.”

“Will you let me have a try at her?”

“No.”

“I almost regret bringing you into this case, doctor.”

“I’ve been told that before, and less politely,” he said with a stubborn smile. “But once I’m in I’m in, and I’ll continue to do as I think best.”

“I’m sure you will. Did you see the evening paper?”

“I saw it.”

“Does Dolly know what’s going on outside? About the gun, for instance?”

“No.”

“Don’t you think she should be told?”

He spread out his hands on the scarred desk-top. “I’m trying to simplify her problems, not add to them. She had so many pressures on her last night, from both the past and the present, that she was on the verge of a psychotic breakthrough. We don’t want that to happen.”

“Will you be able to protect her from police questioning?”

“Not indefinitely. The best possible protection would be a solution to this case absolving her.”

“I’m working on it. I talked to her Aunt Alice this morning, and looked over the scene of the McGee killing. I became pretty well convinced that even if McGee did kill his wife, which I doubt, Dolly couldn’t have identified him as he left the house. In other words her testimony at his trial was cooked.”

“Alice Jenks convinced you of this?”

“The physical layout did. Miss Jenks did her best to convince me of the opposite, that McGee was guilty. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the main motive power behind the case against him.”

“He was guilty.”

“So you’ve said. I wish you’d go into your reasons for believing that.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. It has to do with the confidences of a patient.”

“Constance McGee?”

“Mrs. McGee wasn’t formally a patient. But you can’t treat a child without treating the parents.”

“And she confided in you?”

“Naturally, to some extent. For the most part we talked about her family problems.” Godwin was feeling his way carefully. His face was bland. Under the lamp his bald head gleamed like a metal dome in moonlight.

“Her sister Alice made an interesting slip. She said there was no other man in Constance’s life. I didn’t ask her. Alice volunteered the information.”

“Interesting.”

“I thought so. Was Constance in love with another man at the time she was shot?”

Godwin nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Who was he?”

“I have no intention of telling you. He’s suffered enough.” A shadow of the suffering passed across his own face. “I’ve told you this much because I want you to understand that McGee had a motive, and was certainly guilty.”

“I think he was framed, just as Dolly is being framed.”

“We agree on the latter point. Why can’t we settle for that?”

“Because there have been three killings, and they’re connected. They’re connected subjectively, as you would say, in Dolly’s mind. I believe they’re objectively connected, too. They may all have been done by the same person.”

Godwin didn’t ask me who. It was just as well. I was talking over my head, and I had no suspect.

“What third killing are you referring to?”

“The death of Luke Deloney, a man I never heard of until tonight. I met Helen Haggerty’s mother at the L.A. airport and had a talk with her on the way down here. According to her, Deloney shot himself by accident while cleaning a gun. But Helen claimed he was murdered and said she knew a witness. The witness may have been herself. At any rate she quarreled with her father on the issue – he seems to have been the detective in charge of the case – and ran away from home. All this was over twenty years ago.”

“You seriously think it’s connected with the present case?”

“Helen thought so. Her death makes her an authority on the subject.”

“What do you propose to do about it?”

“I’d like to fly to Illinois tonight and talk to Helen’s father. But I can’t afford to do it on my own hook.”

“You could phone him.”

“I could. My sense of the situation is that it would do more harm than good. He may be a tough nut to crack.”

Godwin said after a minute’s thought: “I might consider backing you.”

“You’re a generous man.”

“A curious one,” he said. “Remember I’ve been living with this case for over ten years. I’d give a good deal to see it ended.”

“Let me talk to Alex first, and ask him how he feels about laying out more money.”

Godwin inclined his head and remained bowing as he stood up. He wasn’t bowing to me. It was more of a general and habitual bow, as if he could feel the weight of the stars and was asking their permission to take part of the weight on human shoulders.

“I’ll get him out of there. He’s stayed long enough.”

Godwin disappeared down the hallway. A few minutes later Alex came back alone. He walked like a man in a tunnel underground, but his face was more serene than I’d ever seen it.

He paused in the doorway. “Dr. Godwin said you were here.”

“I’m surprised to see you.”

Hurt and embarrassment flickered across the upper part of his face. He brushed at it impatiently with his fingers. Then he stepped into the office, shutting the door behind him and leaning on it.

“I made a fool of myself today. I tried to chicken out.”

“It takes guts to admit it.”

“Don’t gloss it over,” he said sharply. “I was really lousy. It’s funny, when Dad gets upset it has a peculiar effect on me. It’s like sympathetic vibrations: he goes to pieces, I go to pieces. Not that I’m blaming him.”

“I’m blaming him.”

“Please don’t. You have no right to.” His eyebrows knitted. “The company’s talking about bringing in computers to handle most of the work in the office. Dad’s afraid he can’t adjust, and I guess it makes him afraid of things in general.”

“You’ve been doing some thinking.”

“I had to. You started me off with what you said about annulling myself. I felt that way when I went home with Dad – as though I wasn’t a man any more.” He pushed himself clear of the door and balanced himself on his feet, his arms swinging slightly at his sides. “It’s really amazing, you know? You really can make a decision inside yourself. You can decide to be one thing or the other.”

The only trouble was that you had to make the decision every hour on the hour. But he would have to find that out for himself.

“How is your wife?” I said.

“She actually seemed glad to see me. Have you talked to her?”

“Dr. Godwin wouldn’t let me.”

“He wouldn’t let me, either, till I promised not to ask her any questions. I didn’t, but the subject of the revolver came up. She’d heard two of the aides talking about some newspaper story–”

“It’s in the local paper. What did she have to say about the gun?”

“It isn’t hers. Somebody must have hidden it under her mattress. She asked me to describe it, and she said it sounded like her Aunt Alice’s revolver. Her aunt used to keep it on her bedside table at night. Dolly was sort of fascinated by it when she was a little girl.” He breathed deeply. “Apparently she saw her aunt threaten her father with it. I didn’t want her to go into all that stuff but I couldn’t prevent her. She calmed down again after a while.”

“At least she’s stopped blaming herself for Helen Haggerty’s death.”

“She hasn’t, though. She still says it was her fault. Everything’s her fault.”

“In what way?”

“She didn’t go into it. I didn’t want her to.”

“You mean Dr. Godwin didn’t want you to.”

“That’s right. He’s calling the shots. I guess he knows more about her than I ever will.”

“I take it you’re going on with your marriage?” I said.

“We have to. I realized that today. People can’t walk out on each other when they’re in this kind of trouble. I think maybe Dolly realizes it, too. She didn’t turn her back on me or anything.”

“What else did you talk about?”

“Nothing important. The other patients, mostly. There’s one old lady with a broken hip who doesn’t want to stay in bed. Dolly’s been sort of looking after her.” It seemed important to him. “She can’t be so very sick herself.” It was an implied question.

“You’ll have to take that up with the doctor.”

“He isn’t saying much. He wants to give her some psychological tests tomorrow. I told him to go ahead.”

“Do I have your go-ahead, too?”

“Naturally. I was hoping you’d take that for granted. I want you to do everything you can to settle this thing. I’ll give you a written contract–”

“That won’t be necessary. But it’s going to cost you money.”

“How much money?”

“A couple of thousand, maybe a good deal more.”

I told him about the Reno end of the case, which Arnie and Phyllis Walters were handling, and about the Bridgeton situation which I wanted to explore. I also advised him to talk to Jerry Marks first thing in the morning.

“Will Mr. Marks be available on a Sunday?”

“Yes. I’ve already set him up for you. Of course you’re going to have to give him a retainer.”

“I have some savings bonds,” he said thoughtfully, “and I can borrow on my insurance policy. Meantime I can sell the car. It’s paid for, and I’ve been offered two five for it. I was getting pretty tired of sports car rallies and all that jazz. It’s kid stuff.”