The Chill

Chapter 32

Mrs. Deloney was slapping my face with a wet towel. I told her to quit it. The first thing I saw when I got up was the leather-framed photograph beside her telephone. It seemed to my blurred vision to be a photograph of the handsome old black-eyed gentleman whose portrait hung over the fireplace in Mrs. Bradshaw’s sitting room.

“What are you doing with a picture of Bradshaw’s father?”

“It happens to be my own father, Senator Osborne.”

I said: “So Mrs. Bradshaw’s a virtuoso, too.”

Mrs. Deloney looked at me as if my brains had been addled by the poker. But the blow had been a glancing one, and I couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds. Bradshaw was leaving the hotel parking lot when I got there.

His light car turned uphill away from the ocean. I followed him to Foothill Drive and caught him long before he reached his house. He made it easy for me by braking suddenly. His car slewed sideways and came to a shuddering halt broadside across the road.

It wasn’t me he was trying to stop. Another car was coming downhill toward us. I could see its headlights approaching under the trees like large calm insane eyes, and Bradshaw silhouetted in their beam. He seemed to be fumbling with his seat-belt. I recognized Mrs. Bradshaw’s Rolls in the moment before, with screeching brakes, it crashed into the smaller car.

I pulled off the road, set out a red blinker, and ran uphill toward the point of impact. My footsteps were loud in the silence after the crash. The crumpled nose of the Rolls was nuzzled deep in the caved-in side of Bradshaw’s car. He lolled in the driver’s seat. Blood ran down his face from his forehead and nose and the corners of his mouth.

I went in through the undamaged door and got his seat-belt unbuckled. He toppled limply into my arms. I laid him down in the road. The jagged lines of blood across his face resembled cracks in a mask through which live tissue showed. But he was dead. He lay pulseless and breathless under the iron shadows of the tree branches.

Old Mrs. Bradshaw had climbed down out of her high protected seat. She seemed unhurt. I remember thinking at the moment that she was an elemental power which nothing could ever kill.

“It’s Roy, isn’t it? Is he all right?”

“In a sense he is. He wanted out. He’s out.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m afraid you’ve killed him, too.”

“But I didn’t mean to hurt him. I wouldn’t hurt my own son, the child of my womb.”

Her voice cracked with maternal grief. I think she half-believed she was his mother, she had lived the role so long. Reality had grown dim as the moonlit countryside around her.

She flung herself on the dead man, holding him close, as if her old body could somehow warm him back to life and rekindle his love for her. She wheedled and cooed in his ear, calling him a naughty malingering boy for trying to scare her.

She shook him. “Wake up! It’s Moms.”

As she had told me, night wasn’t her best season. But she had a doubleness in her matching Roy’s, and there was an element of play-acting in her frenzy.

“Leave him alone,” I said. “And let’s drop the mother bit. The situation is ugly enough without that.”

She turned in queer slow furtiveness and looked up at me. “The mother bit?”

“Roy Bradshaw wasn’t your son. The two of you put on a pretty good act – Godwin would probably say it fitted both your neurotic needs – but it’s over.”

She got up in a surge of anger which brought her close to me. I could smell her lavender, and feel her force.

“I am his mother. I have his birth certificate to prove it.”

“I bet you do. Your sister showed me a death certificate which proves that you died in France in 1940. With your kind of money you can document anything. But you can’t change the facts by changing them on paper. Roy married you in Boston after you killed Deloney. Eventually he fell in love with Constance McGee. You killed her. Roy lived with you for another ten years, if you can call it living, terrified that you’d kill again if he ever dared to love anyone again. But finally he dared, with Laura Sutherland. He managed to convince you that it was Helen Haggerty he was interested in. So you went up the bridle path on Friday night and shot her. Those are all facts you can’t change.”

Silence set in between us, thin and bleak like a quality of the moonlight. The woman said:

“I was only protecting my rights. Roy owed me faithfulness at least. I gave him money and background, I sent him to Harvard, I made all his dreams come true.”

We both looked down at the dreamless man lying in the road.

“Are you ready to come downtown with me and make a formal statement about how you protected your rights over the years? Poor Tom McGee is back in jail, still sweating out your rap.”

She pulled herself erect. “I won’t permit you to use such language to me. I’m not a criminal.”

“You were on your way to Laura Sutherland’s, weren’t you? What were you planning to do to her, old woman?”

She covered the lower part of her face with her hand. I thought she was ill, or overcome with shame. But she said:

“You mustn’t call me that. I’m not old. Don’t look at my face, look into my eyes. You can see how young I am.”

It was true in a way. I couldn’t see her eyes clearly, but I knew they were bright and black and vital. She was still greedy for life, like the imaginary Letitia, the weird projection of herself in imitation leopardskin she had used to hide behind.

She shifted her hand to her heavy chin and said: “I’ll give you money.”

“Roy took your money. Look what happened to him.” She turned abruptly and started for her car. I guessed what was in her mind: another death, another shadow to feed on: and got to the open door of the Rolls before her. Her black leather bag was on the floor where it had fallen in the collision. Inside the bag I found the new revolver which she had intended to use on Roy’s new wife.

“Give me that.”

She spoke with the authority of a Senator’s daughter and the more terrible authority of a woman who had killed two other women and two men.

“No more guns for you,” I said.

No more anything, Letitia.

The End