The Chill

Chapter 19

I left the toll road, which bypassed Bridgeton, and drove my rented car through the blocks of housing tracts on the outskirts of the city. I could see the clump of sawed-off skyscrapers in the business district ahead, and off to the left, across the whole south side, the factories. It was Sunday morning, and only one of their stacks was pouring smoke into the deep blue sky.

I stopped for gas at a service station and looked up Earl Hoffman’s address in the telephone directory. When I asked the attendant how to get to Cherry Street, where Hoffman lived, he pointed in the general direction of the factories.

It was a middle-class street of substantial two-story houses which had been touched but not destroyed by the blight that creeps outward from the centers of cities. Hoffman’s house was of grimy white brick like the others, but the front porch had been painted within living memory. An old Chevrolet coupé stood at the curb in front of it.

The doorbell didn’t work. I knocked on the screen door. An old young man with more nose than chin opened the inner door and looked at me through the screen in a sad way.

“Mr. Haggerty?”

“Yes.”

I told him my name and trade and where I was from. “I was with your wife – your ex-wife – shortly before she was killed.”

“It’s a dreadful thing.”

He stood absently in the doorway, forgetting to ask me in. He had a frowzy sleepless look as if he’d been up most of the night. Though there was no gray on his head, white hairs glistened in his day-old beard. His small eyes had the kind of incandescence that goes with conscious suffering.

“May I come in, Mr. Haggerty?”

“I don’t know if it’s such a good idea. Earl’s pretty broken up.

“I thought he and his daughter had been on the outs for a long time.”

“They were. It only makes it harder for him, I think. When you’re angry with someone you love, you always expect at the back of your mind there’ll be a reconciliation some day. But now there will never be anything.”

He was speaking for his father-in-law but also for himself. His empty hands moved aimlessly at his sides. The fingers of his right hand were stained dark yellow by nicotine.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “that Mr. Hoffman isn’t feeling well. I’m afraid I’ll have to talk to him anyway. I didn’t come from California for the ride.”

“No. Obviously not. What is it you have to discuss with him?”

“His daughter’s murder. He may be able to help me understand it.”

“I thought it was already solved.”

“It isn’t.”

“Has the girl student been cleared?”

“She’s in process of being cleared,” I said with deliberate vagueness. “You and I can go into all that later. Right now I’m very eager to talk to Hoffman.”

“If you insist. I only hope you can get some sense out of him.”

I saw what he meant when he took me through the house to “Earl’s den,” as Haggerty called it. It was furnished with a closed roll-top desk, an armchair, a studio couch. Through a haze compounded of whisky fumes and smoke I could see a big old man sprawled in orange pajamas on the couch, his head propped up by bolsters. A strong reading light shone on his stunned face. His eyes seemed out of focus, but he was holding a magazine with an orange cover that almost matched his pajamas. The wall above him was decorated with rifles and shotguns and hand guns.

“When I recall the loss of all my perished years,” he said huskily.

Old cops didn’t talk like that, and Earl Hoffman looked like no exception to the rule. His body was massive, and could have belonged to a professional football player or a wrestler gone to pot. His nose had once been broken. He had a clipped gray head and a mouth like bent iron.

“That’s beautiful poetry, Bert,” the iron mouth said.

“I suppose it is.”

“Who’s your friend, Bert?”

“Mr. Archer, from California.”

“California, eh? That’s where my poor little Helen got knocked off.”

He sobbed, or hiccuped, once. Then he swung himself onto the edge of the couch, letting his bare feet fall heavily to the floor.

“Do you know – did you know my little daughter Helen?”

“I knew her.”

“Isn’t that remarkable.” He rose swaying and clasped my hands in both of his, using me to support him. “Helen was a remarkable girl. I’ve just been reading over one of her poems. Wrote it when she was just a teen-age girl at City College. Here, I’ll show you.”

He made a fairly elaborate search for the orange-covered magazine, which was lying in plain sight on the floor where he had dropped it. The name of it was the Bridgeton Blazer, and it looked like a school production.

Haggerty picked it up and handed it to him: “Please don’t bother with it, Earl. Helen didn’t write it anyway.”

“Didn’t write it? ’Course she wrote it. It’s got her initials on it.” Hoffman flipped through the pages. “See?”

“But she was only translating from Verlaine.”

“Never heard of him.” Hoffman turned to me, thrusting the magazine into my hands. “Here, read this. See what a remarkable gift poor little Helen had.”

I read:

Hoffman looked at me with one of his unfocused eyes. “Isn’t that beautiful poetry, Mr. Arthur?”

“Beautiful.”

“I only wisht I understood it. Do you understand it?”

“I think so.”

“Then keep it. Keep it in memory of poor little Helen.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Sure you can. Keep it.” He snatched it out of my hands, rolled it up, and and thrust it into my jacket pocket, breathing whisky in my face.

“Keep it,” Haggerty whispered at my shoulder. “You don’t want to cross him.”

“You heard him. You don’t want to cross me.”

Hoffman grinned loosely at me. He clenched his left fist, examined it for defects, then used it to strike himself on the chest. He walked on spraddled legs to the roll-top desk and opened it. There were botfies and a single smeared tumbler inside. He half-filled the tumbler from a fifth of bourbon and drank most of it down. His son-in-law said something under his breath, but made no move to stop him.

The heavy jolt squeezed sweat out on Hoffman’s face. It seemed to sober him a little. His eyes focused on me.

“Have a drink?”

“All right. I’ll take water and ice in mine, please.” I didn’t normally drink in the morning but this was an abnormal occasion.

“Get some ice and a glass, Bert. Mr. Arthur wants a drink. If you’re too mucky-muck to drink with me, Mr. Arthur isn’t.”

“The name is Archer.”

“Get two glasses,” he said with his foolish grin. “Mr. Archer wants a drink, too. Sit down,” he said to me. “Take the load off your feet. Tell me about poor little Helen.”

We sat on the couch. I filled him in quickly on the circumstances of the murder, including the threat that preceded it, and Helen’s feeling that Bridgeton was catching up with her.

“What did she mean by that?” The lines of the grin were still in his face like clown marks but the grin had become a rictus.

“I’ve come a long way to see if you can help me answer that question.”

“Me? Why come to me? I never knew what went on in her mind, she never let me know. She was too bright for me.” His mood swayed into heavy drunken self-pity. “I sweated and slaved to buy her an education like I never had, but she wouldn’t give her poor old father the time of day.”

“I understand you had a bad quarrel and she left home.”

“She told you, eh?”

I nodded. I had decided to keep Mrs. Hoffman out of it. He was the kind of man who wouldn’t want his wife ahead of him in anything.

“She tell you the names she called me, crook and Nazi, when all I was doing was my bounden duty? You’re a cop, you know how a man feels when your own family undermines you.” He peered at me sideways. “You are a cop, aren’t you?”

“I have been.”

“What do you do for a living now?”

“Private investigation.”

“Who for?”

“A man named Kincaid, nobody you know. I knew your daughter slightly, and I have a personal interest in finding out who killed her. I think the answer may be here in Bridgeton.”

“I don’t see how. She never set foot in this town for twenty years, until last spring. She only came home then to tell her mother she was getting a divorce. From him.” He gestured toward the back of the house, where I could hear ice being chipped.

“Did she do any talking to you?”

“I only saw her the once. She said hello-how-are-you and that was about it. She told her mother that she’d had it with Bert and her mother couldn’t talk her out of it. Bert even followed her out to Reno to try and convince her to come back, but it was no go. He isn’t enough of a man to hold a woman.”

Hoffman finished his drink and set his tumbler down on the floor. He remained slumped forward for about a minute, and I was afraid he was going to get sick or pass out on me. But he came back up to a sitting position and muttered something about wanting to help me.

“Fine. Who was Luke Deloney?”

“Friend of mine. Big man in town back before the war. She told you about him, too, eh?”

“You could tell me more, Lieutenant. I hear you have a memory like an elephant.”

“Did Helen say that?”

“Yes.” The lie didn’t cost me anything, not even a pang of conscience.

“At least she had some respect for her old man, eh?”

“A good deal.”

He breathed with enormous relief. It would pass, as everything passes when a man is drinking seriously to kill awareness. But for the moment he was feeling good. He believed his daughter had conceded a point in their bitter life-long struggle.

“Luke was born in nineteen-oh-three on Spring Street,” he said with great care, “in the twenty-one-hundred block, way out on the south side – two blocks over from where I lived when I was a kid. I knew him in grade school. He was the kind of a kid who saved up his paper-route money to buy a Valentine for everybody in his class. He actually did that. The principal used to take him around to the various rooms to show off his mental arithmetic. He did have a good head on his shoulders, I’ll give him that. He skipped two grades. He was a corner.

“Old man Deloney was a cement finisher, and cement started to come in strong for construction after the World War. Luke bought himself a mixer with money he’d saved and went into business for himself. He did real well in the twenties. At his peak he had over five hundred men working for him all over the state. Even the depression didn’t cramp his style. He was a wheeler and a dealer as well as a builder. The only things going up in those days were public works, so he went out in a big way for the federal and state contracts. He married Senator Osborne’s daughter, and that didn’t do him any harm, either.”

“I hear Mrs. Deloney’s still alive.”

“Sure she is. She lives in the house the Senator built in nineteen-oh-one on Glenview Avenue on the north side. Number one-oh-three, I think.” He was straining to live up to his encyclopedic reputation.

I made a mental note of the address. Preceded by clinking, Bert Haggerty came into the room with ice and water and glasses on a tin tray. I cleared a space on the desk and he set the tray down. It had originally belonged to the Bridgeton Inn.

“You took long enough,” Hoffman said offhandedly.

Haggerty stiffened. His eyes seemed to regroup themselves more closely at the sides of his nose.

“Don’t talk to me like that, Earl. I’m not a servant.”

“If you don’t like it you know what you can do.”

“I realize you’re tight, but there’s a limit–”

“Who’s tight? I’m not tight.”

“You’ve been drinking for twenty-four hours.”

“So what? A man has a right to drown his sorrows. But my brain is as clear as a bell. Ask Mr. Arthur here. Mr. Archer.”

Haggerty laughed, mirthlessly, falsetto. It was a very queer sound, and I tried to cover it over with a broad flourish:

“The Lieutenant’s been filling me in on some ancient history. He has a memory like an elephant.”

But Hoffman wasn’t feeling good any more. He rose cumbrously and advanced on Haggerty and me. One of his eyes looked at each of us. I felt like a man in a cage with a sick bear and his keeper.

“What’s funny, Bert? You think my sorrow is funny, is that it? She wouldn’t be dead if you were man enough to keep her at home. Why didn’t you bring her home from Reno with you?”

“You can’t blame me for everything,” Haggerty said a little wildly. “I got along with her better than you did. If she hadn’t had a father-fixation–”

“Don’t give me that, you lousy intellectual. Ineffectual. Ineffectual intellectual. You’re not the only one that can use fourbit words. And stop calling me Earl. We’re not related. We never would have been if I had any say in the matter. We’re not even related and you come into my house spying on my personal habits. What are you, an old woman?”

Haggerty was speechless. He looked at me helplessly.

“I’ll break your neck,” his father-in-law said.

I stepped between them. “Let’s have no violence, Lieutenant. It wouldn’t look good on the blotter.”

“The little pipsqueak accused me. He said I’m drunk. You tell him he’s mistaken. Make him apologize.”

I turned to Haggerty, closing one eye. “Lieutenant Hoffman is sober, Bert. He can carry his liquor. Now you better get out of here before something happens.”

He was glad to. I followed him out into the hall.

“This is the third or fourth time,” he said in a low voice. “I didn’t mean to set him off again.”

“Let him cool for a bit. I’ll sit with him. I’d like to talk to you afterward.”

“I’ll wait outside in my car.”

I went back into the bear cage. Hoffman was sitting on the edge of the couch with his head supported by his hands.

“Everything’s gone to hell in a hand-car,” he said. “That pussy willow of a Bert Haggerty gets under my skin. I dunno what he thinks he’s sucking around for.” His mood changed. “You haven’t deserted me, anyway. Go ahead, make yourself a drink.”

I manufactured a light highball and brought it back to the couch. I didn’t offer Hoffman any. In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.

“You were telling me about Luke Deloney and how he grew.”

He squinted at me. “I don’t know why you’re so interested in Deloney. He’s been dead for twenty-two years. Twenty-two years and three months. He shot himself, but I guess you know that, eh?” A hard intelligence glinted momentarily in his eyes and drew them into focus on my face.

I spoke to the hard intelligence: “Was there anything between Helen and Deloney?”

“No, she wasn’t interested in him. She had a crush on the elevator boy, George. I ought to know, she made me get him the job. I was sort of managing the Deloney Apartments at the time. Luke Deloney and me, we were like that.”

He tried to cross his second finger over his forefinger. It kept slipping. He finally completed the maneuver with the help of his other hand. His fingers were thick and mottled like uncooked breakfast sausages.

“Luke Deloney was a bit of a womanizer,” he said indulgently, “but he didn’t mess around with the daughters of his friends. He never cared for the young stuff, anyway. His wife must of been ten years older than he was. Anyway, he wouldn’t touch my daughter. He knew I’d kill him.”

“Did you?”

“That’s a lousy question, mister. If I didn’t happen to like you I’d knock your block off.”

“No offense.”

“I had nothing against Luke Deloney. He treated me fair and square. Anyway, I told you he shot himself.”

“Suicide?”

“Naw. Why would he commit suicide? He had everything, money and women and a hunting lodge in Wisconsin. He took me up there personally more than once. The shooting was an accident. That’s the way it went into the books and that’s the way it stays.”

“How did it happen, Lieutenant?”

“He was cleaning his .32 automatic. He had a permit to tote it on his person – I helped him get it myself – because he used to carry large sums of money. He took the clip out all right but he must of forgot the shell that was in the chamber. It went off and shot him in the face.”

“Where?”

“Through the right eye.”

“I mean where did the accident occur?”

“In one of the bedrooms in his apartment. He kept the roof apartment in the Deloney building for his private use. More than once I drank with him up there. Prewar Green River, boy.” He slapped my knee, and noticed the full glass in my hand. “Drink up your drink.”

I knocked back about half of it. It wasn’t prewar Green River. “Was Deloney drinking at the time of the shooting?”

“Yeah, I think so. He knew guns. He wouldn’t of made that mistake if he was sober.”

“Was anybody with him in the apartment?”

“No.”

“Can you be sure?”

“I can be sure. I was in charge of the investigation.”

“Did anybody share the apartment with him?”

“Not on a permanent basis, you might say. Luke Deloney had various women on the string. I checked them out, but none of them was within a mile of the place at the time it happened.”

“What kind of women?”

“All the way from floozies to one respectable married woman here in town. Their names didn’t go into the record then and they’re not going to now.”

There was a growl in his voice. I didn’t pursue the subject. Not that I was afraid of Hoffman exactly. I had at least fifteen years on him, and a low alcohol content. But if he went for me I might have to hurt him badly.

“What about Mrs. Deloney?” I said.

“What about her?”

“Where was she when all this was going on?”

“At home, out on Glenview. They were sort of separated. She didn’t believe in divorce.”

“People who don’t believe in divorce sometimes believe in murder.”

Hoffman moved his shoulders belligerently. “You trying to say that I hushed up a murder?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, Lieutenant.”

“You better not. I’m a cop, remember, first last and always.” He raised his fist and rotated it before his eyes like a hypnotic device. “I been a good cop all my life. In my prime I was the best damn cop this burg ever saw. I’ll have a drink on that.” He picked up his tumbler. “Join me?”

I said I would. We were moving obscurely on a collision course. Alcohol might soften the collision, or sink him. I finished my drink and handed him my glass. He filled it to the brim with neat whisky. Then he filled his own. He sat down and stared into the brown liquid as if it was a well where his life had drowned.

“Bottoms up,” he said.

“Take it easy, Lieutenant. You don’t want to kill yourself.” It occurred to me as I said it that maybe he did.

“What are you, another pussy willow? Bottoms up.”

He drained his glass and shuddered. I held mine in my hand. After a while he noticed this.

“You didn’t drink your drink. What you trying to do, pull a fast one on me? Insult my hosh– my hoshpit–?” His lips were too numb to frame the word.

“No insult intended. I didn’t come here for a drinking party, Lieutenant. I’m seriously interested in who killed your daughter. Assuming Deloney was murdered–”

“He wasn’t.”

“Assuming he was, the same person may have killed Helen. In view of everything I’ve heard, from her and other people, I think it’s likely. Don’t you?”

I was trying to get his mind under my control: the sloppy drunken sentimental part, and the drunken violent part, and the hard intelligent part hidden at the core.

“Deloney was an accident,” he said clearly and stubbornly.

“Helen didn’t think so. She claimed it was murder, and that she knew a witness to the murder.”

“She was lying, trying to make me look bad. All she ever wanted to do was make her old man look bad.”

His voice had risen. We sat and listened to its echoes. He dropped his empty glass, which bounced on the rug, and clenched the fist which seemed to be his main instrument of expression. I got ready to block it, but he didn’t throw it at me.

Heavily and repeatedly, he struck himself in the face, on the eyes and cheeks, on the mouth, under the jaw. The blows left dull red welts in his clay-colored flesh. His lower lip split.

Hoffman said through the blood: “I clobbered my poor little daughter. I chased her out of the house. She never came back.”

Large tears the color of pure distilled alcohol or grief rolled from his puffing eyes and down his damaged face. He fell sideways on the couch. He wasn’t dead. His heart was beating strongly. I straightened him out – his legs were as heavy as sandbags – and put a bolster under his head. With blind eyes staring straight up into the light, he began to snore.

I closed the roll-top desk. The key was in it, and I turned it on the liquor and switched off the light and took the key outside with me.