The Chill

Chapter 26

I walked down the main street to the Pacific Hotel and asked for Mrs. Hoffman. She had just checked out, leaving no forwarding address. The bellhop who handled her bag said she had ridden away in a taxi with another old lady wearing a green coat. I gave him five dollars and my motel address, and told him it would be worth another five to find out where they’d gone.

It was past two o’clock, and my instinct told me this was the crucial day. I felt cut off from what was happening in the private offices of the courthouse, in the shooting gallery and laboratory where the ballistics tests were being conducted, behind the locked door of the nursing home. Time was slipping away, flowing past me like Heraclitus’ river, while I was checking up on the vagaries of old ladies.

I went back to the telephone booths behind the hotel lobby and called Godwin’s office. The doctor was with a patient, and wouldn’t be available until ten minutes to three. I tried Jerry Marks. His secretary told me he was still out.

I made a collect call to the Walters agency in Reno. Arnie answered the phone:

“Nice timing, Lew. I just got the word on your boy.”

“Which one? Bradshaw or Foley?”

“Both of them in a way. You wanted to know why Foley lost his job at the Solitaire Club. The answer is he used his position in the cashier’s cage to find out how much Bradshaw was worth.”

“How did he do that?”

“You know how the clubs check up on their customers when they open an account. They put in a query to the customer’s bank, get an approximate figure on his bank balance, and set a limit to his credit accordingly. ‘Low three’ means a three-figure bank balance on the low side, and maybe a limit of a couple of hundred. A ‘high four’ might be seven or eight thousand, and a ‘low five’ maybe twenty or thirty thousand. Which incidentally is Bradshaw’s bracket.”

“Is he a gambler?”

“He isn’t. That’s the point. He never opened an account at the Solitaire, or anywhere else that I know of, but Foley put in a query on him anyway. The club caught it, did a double check on Foley, and got him out of there fast.”

“It smells like possible blackmail, Arnie.”

“More than possible,” he said. “Foley admits to a bit of a record in that line.”

“What else does he admit?”

“Nothing else yet. He claims he got the information for a friend.”

“Helen Haggerty?”

“Foley isn’t saying. He’s holding back in the hope of making a deal.”

“Go ahead and deal with him. He got hurt worse than I did. I’m willing to drop charges.”

“It may not be necessary, Lew.”

“Deal with him. Assuming blackmail, which I do, the question is what makes Bradshaw blackmailable.”

“Could be his divorce,” Arnie said smoothly. “You were interested in what Bradshaw was doing in Reno between the middle of July and the end of August. The answer is on the court record. He was establishing residence for a divorce from a woman named Letitia O. Macready.”

“Letitia who?”

“Macready.” He spelled it out. “I haven’t been able to get any further information on the woman. According to the lawyer who handled the divorce, Bradshaw didn’t know where she lived. Her last known address was in Boston. The official notice of the proceedings came back from there with a ‘Gone – No Order’ stamp.”

“Is Bradshaw still at Tahoe?”

“He and his new wife checked out this morning. They were on their way back to Pacific Point. That makes him your baby.”

“Baby isn’t quite the word for Bradshaw. I wonder if his mother knows about the first marriage.”

“You could always ask her.”

I decided to try and talk to Bradshaw first. I got my car out of the courthouse lot and drove out to the college. The students on the mall and in the corridors, particularly the girls, wore subdued expressions. The threat of death and judgment had invaded the campus. I felt a little like its representative.

The blonde secretary in the Dean’s outer office looked tense, as if only her will was holding her, and the whole institution, together.

“Dean Bradshaw isn’t in.”

“Not back from the weekend yet?”

“Of course he’s back.” She added in a defensive tone: “Dean Bradshaw was here this morning for over an hour.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. I guess he went home.”

“You sound kind of worried about him.”

She answered me with a machine-gun burst from her typewriter. I retreated, across the hall to Laura Sutherland’s office. Her secretary told me she hadn’t come in today. She’d phoned in the middle of the morning that she was afraid she was coming down with something. I hoped it wasn’t something serious, like death and judgment.

I drove back to Foothill and along it to the Bradshaw house. Wind rustled in the trees. The fog had been completely dissipated, and the afternoon sky was a brilliant aching blue. The mountains rising into it were distinct in every scarred and wrinkled detail.

I was more aware than usual of these things, but I felt cut off from them. I must have had some empathy for Roy Bradshaw and his new wife and was afraid of being hurt in my empathy. I drove past his gate without seeing it and had to turn in the next driveway and come back to the Bradshaw house. I was somewhat relieved to be told by the Spanish woman, Maria, that Bradshaw wasn’t there and hadn’t been all day.

Mrs. Bradshaw called from the stairs in a cracked penetrating voice: “Is that you, Mr. Archer? I want to talk to you.”

She came down the steps in a quilted dressing robe and cloth slippers. The weekend had aged her. She looked very old and haggard.

“My son hasn’t been home for three days,” she complained, “and he hasn’t telephoned once. What do you suppose has happened to him?”

“I’d like to discuss that question with you, in private.”

Maria, who had been listening with her entire body, went off in a hip-swinging dudgeon. Mrs. Bradshaw took me to a room I hadn’t been in before, a small sitting room opening on a patio at the side of the house. Its furnishings were informal and old-fashioned, and they reminded me slightly of the room where I had interviewed Mrs. Deloney.

This room was dominated by an oil painting over the fireplace. It was a full-length portrait, almost life-size, of a handsome gentleman wearing sweeping white mustaches and a cutaway. His black eyes followed me across the room to the armchair which Mrs. Bradshaw indicated. She sat in an upholstered platform rocker with her slippered feet on a small petit point hassock.

“I’ve been a selfish old woman,” she said unexpectedly. “I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve decided to pay your expenses after all. I don’t like what they’re doing to that girl.”

“You probably know more about it than I do.”

“Probably. I have some good friends in this city.” She didn’t elaborate.

“I appreciate the offer,” I said, “but my expenses are being taken care of. Dolly’s husband came back.”

“Really? I’m so glad.” She tried to warm herself at the thought, and failed. “I’m deeply concerned about Roy.”

“So am I, Mrs. Bradshaw.” I decided to tell her what I knew, or part of it. She was bound to find out soon about his marriage, his marriages. “You don’t have to worry about his physical safety. I saw him last night in Reno, and he was in good shape. He checked in at the college today.”

“His secretary lied to me then. I don’t know what they’re trying to do to me out there, or what my son is up to. What was he really doing in Reno?”

“Attending a conference, as he said. He also went there to look into a suspect in Helen Haggerty’s murder.”

“He must have been very fond of her, after all, to go to such lengths.”

“He was involved with Miss Haggerty. I don’t think the involvement was romantic.”

“What was it then?”

“Financial. I think he was paying her money, and incidentally he got her a job at the college, through Laura Sutherland. To put it bluntly, the Haggerty woman was blackmailing your son. She may have called it something different herself. But she used a crooked friend in Reno to check on his bank balance before she ever came here. This was the same man Roy went to Reno to talk to.”

Mrs. Bradshaw didn’t throw a fit, as I was afraid she might. She said in a grave tone: “Are these facts, Mr. Archer, or are you exercising your imagination?”

“I wish I were. I’m not.”

“But how could Roy be blackmailed? He’s led a blameless life, a dedicated life. I’m his mother. I ought to know.”

“That may be. But the standard varies for different people. A rising college administrator has to be lily-white. An unfortunate marriage, for instance, would queer his chances for that university presidency you were telling me about.”

“An unfortunate marriage? But Roy has never been married.”

“I’m afraid he has,” I said. “Does the name Letitia Macready mean anything to you?”

“It does not.”

She was lying. The name drew a net of lines across her face, reduced her eyes to bright black points and her mouth to a purse with a drawstring. She knew the name and hated it, I thought; perhaps she was even afraid of Letitia Macready.

“The name ought to mean something to you, Mrs. Bradshaw. The Macready woman was your daughter-in-law.”

“You must be insane. My son has never married.”

She spoke with such force and assurance that I had a moment of doubt. It wasn’t likely that Arnie had made a mistake – he seldom did – but it was possible that there were two Roy Bradshaws. No, Arnie had talked to Bradshaw’s lawyer in Reno, and must have made a positive identification.

“You have to get married,” I said, “before you can get a divorce. Roy got a Reno divorce a few weeks ago. He was in Nevada establishing residence for it from the middle of July till the end of August.”

“Now I know you’re insane. He was in Europe all that time, and I can prove it.” She got up, on creaking reluctant limbs, and went to the eighteenth-century secretary against one wall. She came back toward me with a sheaf of letters and postcards in her shaking hands. “He sent me these. You can see for yourself that he was in Europe.”

I looked over the postcards. There were about fifteen of them, arranged in order: the Tower of London (postmarked London, July 18), the Bodleian Library (Oxford, July 21), York Cathedral (York, July 25), Edinburgh Castle (Edinburgh, July 29), The Giant’s Causeway (Londonderry, August 3), The Abbey Theatre (Dublin, August 6), Land’s End (St. Ives, August 8), The Arc de Triomphe (Paris, August 12), and so on through Switzerland and Italy and Germany. I read the card from Munich (a view of the English Gardens, postmarked August 25):

I turned to Mrs. Bradshaw. “Is this your son’s handwriting?”

“Yes. It’s unmistakable. I know he wrote those cards, and these letters, too.”

She brandished several letters under my nose. I looked at the postmarks: London, July 19; Dublin, August 7; Geneva, August 15; Rome, August 20; Berlin, August 27; Amsterdam, August 30. I started to read the last one (“Dear Moms: Just a hasty note, which may arrive after I do, to tell you how I loved your letter about the blackbirds…”) but Mrs. Bradshaw snatched it out of my hand.

“Please don’t read the letters. My son and I are very close, and he wouldn’t like me to show our correspondence to a stranger.” She gathered all the letters and cards and locked them up in the secretary. “I believe I’ve proved my point, that Roy couldn’t have been in Nevada when you say he was.”

For all her assurance, her voice was questioning. I said:

“Did you write letters to him while he was away?”

“I did. That is to say, I dictated them to Miss What’s-hername, except for once or twice when my arthritis allowed me to write. I had a nurse-companion during the summer. Miss Wadley, her name was. She was one of these completely young women–”

I cut in: “Did you write a letter about the blackbirds?”

“Yes. We had an invasion of them last month. It was more of a fanciful little tale than a letter, having to do with blackbirds baked in a pie.”

“Where did you send the blackbird letter?”

“Where? I think to Rome, to American Express in Rome. Roy gave me an itinerary before he left here.”

“He was supposed to be in Rome on August 20. The blackbird letter was answered from Amsterdam on August 30.”

“You have an impressive memory, Mr. Archer, but I fail to see what you’re getting at.”

“Just this. There was a lapse of at least ten days between the receiving and the answering of that letter – time enough for an accomplice to pick it up in Rome, airmail it to Roy in Reno, get his airmail reply in Amsterdam, and remail it to you here.”

“I don’t believe it.” But she half-believed it. “Why would he go to such lengths to deceive his mother?”

“Because he was ashamed of what he was actually doing – divorcing the Macready woman in Reno – and he didn’t want you, or anyone else, to know about it. Has he been to Europe before?”

“Of course. I took him there soon after the war, when he was in graduate school at Harvard.”

“And did you visit many of these same places?”

“Yes. We did. Not Germany, but most of the others.”

“Then it wouldn’t have been hard for him to fake the letters. As for the postcards, his accomplice must have bought them in Europe and mailed them to him.”

“I dislike your use of the word ‘accomplice’ in connection with my son. There is, after all, nothing criminal about this – this deception. It’s a purely personal matter.”

“I hope so, Mrs. Bradshaw.”

She must have known what I meant. Her face went through the motions of swallowing pain. She turned her back on me and went to the window. Several white-eyed blackbirds were walking around on the tiles of the patio. I don’t suppose she saw them. One of her hands combed roughly at her hair, over and over, until it stuck up like molting thistles. When she turned around at last, her eyes were half-closed, and her face seemed tormented by the light.

“I’m going to ask you to keep all this in confidence, Mr. Archer.”

Roy Bradshaw had used very similar language last night, about his marriage to Laura.

“I can try,” I said.

“Please do. It would be tragic if Roy’s career were to be ruined by a youthful indiscretion. That’s all it was, you know – a youthful indiscretion. It would never have happened if his father had lived to give him a father’s guidance.” She gestured toward the portrait over the fireplace.

“By ‘it’ you mean the Macready woman?”

“Yes.”

“You know her then?”

“I know her.”

As if the admission had exhausted her, she collapsed in the platform rocker, leaning her head on the high cushioned back. Her loose throat seemed very vulnerable.

“Miss Macready came to see me once,” she said. “It was before we left Boston, during the war. She wanted money.”

“Blackmail money?”

“That’s what it amounted to. She asked me to finance a Nevada divorce for her. She’d picked Roy up on Scollay Square and tricked the boy into marrying her. She was in a position to wreck his future. I gave her two thousand dollars. Apparently she spent it on herself and never bothered getting a divorce.” She sighed. “Poor Roy.”

“Did he know that you knew about her?”

“I never told him. I thought I had ended the threat by paying her money. I wanted it over with and forgotten, with no recriminations between my son and me. But apparently she’s been haunting him all these years.”

“Haunting him in the flesh?”

“Who knows? I thought I understood my son, and all the details of his life. It turns out that I don’t.”

“What sort of a woman is she?”

“I saw her only once, when she came to my house in Belmont. I formed a most unfavorable impression. She claimed to be an actress, unemployed, but she dressed and talked like a member of an older profession than that.” Her voice rasped with irony. “I suppose I have to admit that the redheaded hussy was handsome, in a crude way. But she was utterly unsuitable for Roy, and of course she knew it. He was an innocent lad, hardly out of his teens. She was obviously an experienced woman.”

“How old was she?”

“Much older than Roy, thirty at least.”

“So she’d be pushing fifty now.”

“At least,” she said.

“Have you ever seen her in California?”

She shook her head so hard that her face went loose and wobbly.

“Has Roy?”

“He’s never mentioned her to me. We’ve lived together on the assumption that the Macready woman never existed. And I beg you not to tell him what I’ve told you. It would destroy all confidence between us.”

“There may be more important considerations, Mrs. Bradshaw.”

“What could be more important?”

“His neck.”

She sat with her thick ankles crossed, more stunned than impassive. Her broad sexless body made her resemble a dilapidated Buddha. She said in a hushed voice:

“Surely you can’t suspect my son of murder?”

I said something vague and soothing. The eyes of the man in the portrait followed me out. I was glad the father wasn’t alive, in view of what I might have to do to Roy.