The Chill

Chapter 31

I went out into the grounds of the hotel. The high moon floated steadily in the sky and in the ornamental pools of the Spanish garden. There was yellower light behind the shutters of Mrs. Deloney’s cottage, and the sound of voices too low to be eavesdropped on.

I knocked on the door.

“What is it?” she said.

“Service.” Detective service.

“I didn’t order anything.”

But she opened the door. I slipped in past her and stood against the wall. Bradshaw was sitting on an English sofa beside the fireplace in the opposite wall. A low fire burned in the grate, and gleamed on the brass fittings.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, George.”

He jumped visibly.

Mrs. Deloney said: “Get out of here.” She seemed to have perfectly round blue eyes in a perfectly square white face, all bone and will. “I’ll call the house detective.”

“Go ahead, if you want to spread the dirt around.”

She shut the door.

“We might as well tell him,” Bradshaw said. “We have to tell someone.”

The negative jerk of her head was so violent it threw her off balance. She took a couple of backward steps and regrouped her forces, looking from me to Bradshaw as if we were both her enemies.

“I absolutely forbid it,” she said to him. “Nothing is to be said.”

“It’s going to come out anyway. It will be better if we bring it out ourselves.”

“It is not going to come out. Why should it?”

“Partly,” I said, “because you made the mistake of coming here. This isn’t your town, Mrs. Deloney. You can’t put a lid on events the way you could in Bridgeton.”

She turned her straight back on me. “Pay no attention to him, George.”

“My name is Roy.”

“Roy,” she corrected herself. “This man tried to bluff me yesterday in Bridgeton, but he doesn’t know a thing. All we have to do is remain quiet.”

“What will that get us?”

“Peace.”

“I’ve had my fill of that sort of peace,” he said. “I’ve been living close up to it all these years. You’ve been out of contact. You have no conception of what I’ve been through.” He rested his head on the back of the sofa and lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

“You’ll go through worse,” she said roughly, “if you let down your back hair now.”

“At least it will be different.”

“You’re a spineless fool. But I’m not going to let you ruin what remains of my life. If you do, you’ll get no financial help from me.”

“Even that I can do without.”

But he was being careful to say nothing I wanted to know. He’d been wearing a mask so long that it stuck to his face and controlled his speech and perhaps his habits of thought. Even the old woman with her back turned was playing to me as if I was an audience.

“This argument is academic, in more than one sense,” I said. “The body isn’t buried any longer. I know your sister Letitia shot your husband, Mrs. Deloney. I know she later married Bradshaw in Boston. I have his mother’s word for it–”

“His mother?”

Bradshaw sat up straight. “I do have a mother after all.” He added in his earnest cultivated voice, with his eyes intent on the woman’s: “I’m still living with her, and she has to be considered in this matter, too.”

“You lead a very complicated life,” she said.

“I have a very complicated nature.”

“Very well, young Mr. Complexity, the ball is yours. Carry it.” She went to a love-seat in a neutral corner of the room and sat down there.

“I thought the ball was mine,” I said, “but you’re welcome to it, Bradshaw. You can start where everything started, with the Deloney killing. You were Helen’s witness, weren’t you?”

He nodded once. “I shouldn’t have gone to Helen with that heavy knowledge. But I was deeply upset and she was the only friend I had in the world.”

“Except Letitia.”

“Yes. Except Letitia.”

“What was your part in the murder?”

“I was simply there. And it wasn’t a murder, properly speaking. Deloney was killed in self-defense, virtually by accident.”

“This is where I came in.”

“It’s true. He caught us in bed together in his penthouse.”

“Did you and Letitia make a habit of going to bed together?”

“It was the first time. I’d written a poem about her, which the college magazine printed, and I showed it to her in the elevator. I’d been watching her, admiring her, all through the spring. She was much older than I was, but she was fascinating. She was the first woman I ever had.” He spoke of her with a kind of awe still.

“What happened in the penthouse bedroom, Bradshaw?”

“He caught us, as I said. He got a gun out of the chest of drawers and hit me with the butt of it. Tish tried to stop him. He beat her face in with the gun. She got her hands on it somehow, and it went off and killed him.”

He touched the lid of his right eye, and nodded toward the old woman. She was watching us from the corner, from the distance of her years.

“Mrs. Deloney hushed the matter up, or had it hushed up. You can hardly blame her, under the circumstances. Or blame us. We went to Boston, where Tish spent months in and out of the hospital having her face rebuilt. Then we were married. I was in love with her, in spite of the discrepancy in our ages. I suppose my feeling for my own mother prepared me to love Tish.”

His hooded intelligence flared up in his eyes so bright it was half-insane. His mouth was wry.

“We went to Europe on our honeymoon. My mother put French detectives on our trail. I had to leave Tish in Paris and come home to make my peace with Mother and start my sophomore year at Harvard. The war broke out in Europe that same month. I never saw Tish again. She fell sick and died before I knew it.”

“I don’t believe you. There wasn’t time for all that.”

“It happened very rapidly, as tragedy does.”

“Not yours, it’s been dragging on for twenty-two years.”

“No,” Mrs. Deloney said. “He’s telling the truth, and I can prove it to you.”

She went into another room of the cottage and came back with a heavily creased document which she handed me. It was an acte de décès issued in Bordeaux and dated July 16, 1940. It stated in French that Letitia Osborne Macready, aged 45, had died of pneumonia.

I gave it back to Mrs. Deloney. “You carry this with you wherever you go?”

“I happened to bring it with me.”

“Why?”

She couldn’t think of an answer.

“I’ll tell you why. Because your sister is very much alive and you’re afraid she’ll be punished for her crimes.”

“My sister committed no crime. The death of my husband was either justifiable homicide or accident. The police commissioner realized that or he’d never have quashed the case.”

“That may be. But Constance McGee and Helen Haggerty weren’t shot by accident.”

“My sister died long before either of those women.”

“Your own actions deny it, and they mean more than this phony death certificate. For instance, you visited Gil Stevens today and tried to pump him about the McGee case.”

“He broke my confidence, did he?”

“There was nothing there to be broken. You’re not Stevens’s client. He’s still representing McGee.”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“Why should he? This isn’t your town.”

She turned in confusion to Bradshaw. He shook his head. I crossed the room and stood over him:

“If Tish is safely buried in France, why did you go to such elaborate trouble to divorce her?”

“So you know about the divorce. You’re quite a digger for facts, aren’t you, quite a Digger Indian? I begin to wonder if there’s anything you don’t know about my private life.”

He sat there, looking up at me brightly and warily. I was a little carried away by the collapse of his defenses, and I said:

“Your private life, or your private lives, are something for the book. Have you been keeping up two establishments, dividing your time between your mother and your wife?”

“I suppose it’s obvious that I have,” he said tonelessly.

“Does Tish live here in town?”

“She lived in the Los Angeles area. I have no intention of telling you where, and I can assure you you’ll never find the place. There’d be no point in it, anyway, since she’s no longer there.”

“Where and how did she die this time?”

“She isn’t dead. That French death certificate is a fake, as you guessed. But she is beyond your reach. I put her on a plane to Rio de Janeiro on Saturday, and she’ll be there by now.”

Mrs. Deloney said: “You didn’t tell me that!”

“I hadn’t intended to tell anyone. However, I have to make Mr. Archer see that there’s no point in pressing this thing any further. My wife – my ex-wife – is an old woman, and a sick one, and she’s beyond extradition. I’ve arranged for her to have medical care, psychiatric care, in a South American city which I won’t name.”

“You’re admitting that she killed Helen Haggerty?”

“Yes. She confessed to me when I went to see her in Los Angeles early Saturday morning. She shot Helen and hid the gun in my gatehouse. I contacted Foley in Reno primarily to find out if he had witnessed anything. I didn’t want him blackmailing me–”

“I thought he already was.”

“Helen was,” he said. “She learned about my pending divorce in Reno, and she jumped to a number of conclusions, including the fact that Tish was still alive. I gave her a good deal of money, and got her a job here, in order to protect Tish.”

“And yourself.”

“And myself. I do have a reputation to protect, though I’ve done nothing illegal.”

“No. You’re very good at arranging for other people to do your dirty work. You brought Helen here as a kind of decoy, didn’t you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you.” But he shifted uneasily.

“You took Helen out a few times and passed the word that she was your intended. She wasn’t, of course. You were already married to Laura and you hated Helen, with good reason.”

“That’s not true. We were on quite a friendly basis, in spite of her demands. She was a very old friend, after all, and I couldn’t help sympathizing with her feeling that she deserved something from the world.”

“I know what she got – a bullet in the head. The same thing Constance McGee got. The same thing Laura would have got if you hadn’t set Helen up as a substitute victim for Tish.”

“I’m afraid you’re getting much too complicated.”

“For a complicated nature like yours?”

He looked around the room as if he felt imprisoned in it, or in the maze of his own nature. “You’ll never prove any complicity on my part in Helen’s death. It came as a fearful shock to me. Letitia’s confession was another shock.”

“Why? You must have known she killed Constance McGee.”

“I didn’t know it till Saturday. I admit I had my suspicions. Tish was always savagely jealous. I’ve lived with the dreadful possibility for ten years, hoping and praying that my suspicions were unfounded–”

“Why didn’t you ask her?”

“I suppose I couldn’t face it. Things were already so difficult between us. It would have meant admitting my love for Connie.” He heard his own words, and sat quiet for a moment, his eyes downcast, as if he was peering down into a chasm in himself. “I really did love her, you know. Her death almost finished me.”

“But you survived to love again.”

“Men do,” he said. “I’m not the sort of man who can live without love. I loved even Tish as long and as well as I could. But she got old, and sick.”

Mrs. Deloney made a spitting sound. He said to her:

“I wanted a wife, one who could give me children.”

“God help any children of yours, you’d probably abandon them. You broke all your promises to my sister.”

“Everyone breaks promises. I didn’t intend to fall in love with Connie. It simply happened. I met her in a doctor’s waiting room quite by accident. But I didn’t turn my back on your sister. I never have. I’ve done more for her than she ever did for me.”

She sneered at him with the arrogance of a second-generation aristocrat. “My sister lifted you out of the gutter. What were you – an elevator boy?”

“I was a college student, and an elevator boy by my own choice.”

“Very likely.”

He leaned toward her, fixing her with his bright eyes. “I had family resources to draw on if I had wished.”

“Ah yes, your precious mother.”

“Be careful what you say about my mother.”

There was an edge on his words, the quality of a cold threat, and it silenced her. This was one of several moments when I sensed that the two of them were playing a game as complex as chess, a game of power on a hidden board. I should have tried to force it into the open. But I was clearing up my case, and as long as Bradshaw was willing to talk I didn’t care about apparent side-issues.

“I don’t understand the business of the gun,” I said. “The police have established that Connie McGee and Helen were shot with the same gun – a revolver that belonged originally to Connie’s sister Alice. How did Tish get hold of it?”

“I don’t really know.”

“You must have some idea. Did Alice Jenks give it to her?”

“She very well may have.”

“That’s nonsense, Bradshaw, and you know it. The revolver was stolen from Alice’s house. Who stole it?”

He made a steeple of his fingers and admired its symmetry. “I’m willing to tell you if Mrs. Deloney will leave the room.”

“Why should I?” she said from her corner. “Anything my sister could endure to live through I can endure to hear.”

“I’m not trying to spare your sensibilities,” Bradshaw said. “I’m trying to spare myself.”

She hesitated. It became a test of wills. Bradshaw got up and opened the inner door. Through it I could see across a hall into a bedroom furnished in dull luxury. The bedside table held an ivory telephone and a leather-framed photograph of a white-mustached gentleman who looked vaguely familiar.

Mrs. Deloney marched into the bedroom like a recalcitrant soldier under orders. Bradshaw closed the door sharply behind her.

“I’m beginning to hate old women,” he said.

“You were going to tell me about the gun.”

“I was, wasn’t I?” He returned to the sofa. “It’s not a pretty story. None of it is. I’m telling you the whole thing in the hope that you’ll be completely satisfied.”

“And not bring in the authorities?”

“Don’t you see there’s nothing to be gained by bringing them in? The sole effect would be to turn the town on its ear, wreck the standing of the college which I’ve worked so hard to build up, and ruin more than one life.”

“Especially yours and Laura’s?”

“Especially mine and Laura’s. She’s waited for me, God knows. And even I deserve something more than I’ve had. I’ve lived my entire adult life with the consequences of a neurotic involvement that I got into when I was just a boy.”

“Is that what Godwin was treating you for?”

“I needed some support. Tish hasn’t been easy to deal with. She drove me half out of my mind sometimes with her animal violence and her demands. But now it’s over.” His eyes changed the statement into a question and a plea.

“I can’t make any promises,” I said. “Let’s have the entire story, then we’ll think about the next step. How did Tish get hold of Alice’s revolver?”

“Connie took it from her sister’s room and gave it to me. We had some wild idea of using it to cut the Gordian knot.”

“Do you mean kill Tish with it?”

“It was sheer fantasy,” he said, “folie à deux. Connie and I would never have carried it out, desperate as we were. You’ll never know the agony I went through dividing myself between two wives, two lovers – one old and rapacious, the other young and passionate. Jim Godwin warned me that I was in danger of spiritual death.”

“For which murder is known to be a sure cure.”

“I’d never have done it. I couldn’t. Actually Jim made me see that. I’m not a violent man.”

But there was violence in him now, pressing against the conventional fears that corseted his nature and held him still, almost formal, under my eyes. I sensed his murderous hatred for me. I was forcing all his secrets into the open, as I thought.

“What happened to the gun Connie stole for you?”

“I put it away in what I thought was a safe place, but Tish must have found it.”

“In your house?”

“In my mother’s house. I sometimes took her there when Mother was away.”

“Was she there the day McGee called on you?”

“Yes.” He met my eyes. “I’m amazed that you should know about that day. You’re very thorough. It was the day when everything came to a head. Tish must have found the gun in the lockbox in my study where I’d hidden it. Before that she must have heard McGee complaining to me about my interest in his wife. She took the gun and turned it against Constance. I suppose there was a certain poetic justice in that.”

Bradshaw might have been talking about an event in someone else’s past, the death of a character in history or fiction. He no longer cared for the meaning of his own life. Perhaps that was what Godwin meant by spiritual death.

“Do you still maintain you didn’t know Tish killed her until she confessed it last Saturday?”

“I suppose I didn’t let myself realize. So far as I knew the gun had simply disappeared. McGee might very well have taken it from my study when he was in the house. The official case against him seemed very strong.”

“It was put together with old pieces of string, and you know it. McGee and his daughter are my main concern. I won’t be satisfied until they’re completely cleared.”

“But surely that can be accomplished without dragging Letitia back from Brazil.”

“I have only your word that she’s in Brazil,” I said. “Even Mrs. Deloney was surprised to hear it.”

“Good heavens, don’t you believe me? I’ve literally exposed my entrails to you.”

“You wouldn’t do that unless you had a reason. I think you’re a liar, Bradshaw, one of those virtuosos who use real facts and feelings to make their stories plausible. But there’s a basic implausibility in this one. If Tish was safe in Brazil, it’s the last thing you’d ever tell me. I think she’s hiding out here in California.”

“You’re quite mistaken.”

His eyes came up to mine, candid and earnest as only an actor’s can be. A telephone chirming behind the bedroom door interrupted our staring contest. Bradshaw moved toward the sound. I was on my feet and I moved more rapidly, shouldering him against the doorframe, picking up the bedside phone before it rang a third time.

“Hello.”

“Is that you, darling?” It was Laura’s voice. “Roy, I’m frightened. She knows about us. She called here just a minute ago and said she was coming over.”

“Keep the door locked and chained. And you better call the police.”

“That isn’t Roy. Is it?”

Roy was behind me. I turned in time to see the flash of brass as the poker in his fist came down on my head.