The Chill

Chapter 6

In the parking lot behind the building Professor Helen Haggerty was sitting at the wheel of the new black Thunderbird convertible. She had put the top down and parked it beside my car, as if for contrast. The late afternoon sunlight slanting across the foothills glinted on her hair and eyes and teeth.

“Hello again.”

“Hello again,” I said. “Are you waiting for me?”

“Only if you’re left-handed.”

“I’m ambidextrous.”

“You would be. You threw me a bit of a curve just now.”

“I did?”

“I know who you are.” She patted a folded newspaper on the leather seat beside her. The visible headline said: “Mrs. Perrine Acquitted.” Helen Haggerty said: “I think it’s very exciting. The paper credits you with getting her off. But it’s not quite clear how you did it.”

“I simply told the truth, and evidently the jury believed me. At the time the alleged larceny was committed here in Pacific Point, I had Mrs. Perrine under close surveillance in Oakland.”

“What for? Another larceny?”

“It wouldn’t be fair to say.”

She made a mock-sorrowful mouth, which fitted the lines of her face too well. “All the interesting facts are confidential. But I happen to be checked out for security. In fact my father is a policeman. So get in and tell me all about Mrs. Perrine.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Or I have a better idea,” she said with her bright unnatural smile. “Why don’t you come over to my house for a drink?”

“I’m sorry, I have work to do.”

“Detective work?”

“Call it that.”

“Come on.” With a subtle movement, her body joined in the invitation. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. You don’t want to be a dull boy and make me feel rejected. Besides, we have things to talk about.”

“The Perrine case is over. Nothing could interest me less.”

“It was the Dorothy Smith case I had in mind. Isn’t that why you’re on campus?”

“Who told you that?”

“The grapevine. Colleges have the most marvelously efficient grapevines, second only to penitentiaries.”

“Are you familiar with penitentiaries?”

“Not intimately. But I wasn’t lying when I told you my father was a policeman.” A gray pinched expression touched her face. She covered it over with another smile. “We do have things in common. Why don’t you come along?”

“All right. I’ll follow you. It will save you driving me back.”

“Wonderful.”

She drove as rapidly as she operated, with a jerky nervousness and a total disregard for the rules of the road. Fortunately the campus was almost empty of cars and people. Diminished by the foothills and by their own long shadows, the buildings resembled a movie lot which had shut down for the night.

She lived back of Foothill Drive in a hillside house made out of aluminum and glass and black enameled steel. The nearest rooftop floated among the scrub oaks a quarter of a mile down the slope. You could stand in the living room by the central fireplace and see the blue mountains rising up on one side, the gray ocean falling away on the other. The offshore fog was pushing in to the land.

“Do you like my little eyrie?”

“Very much,”

“It isn’t really mine, alas. I’m only renting at present, though I have hopes. Sit down. What will you drink? I’m going to have a tonic.”

“That will do nicely.”

The polished tile floor was almost bare of furniture. I strolled around the large room, pausing by one of the glass walls to look out. A wild pigeon lay on the patio with its iridescent neck broken. Its faint spreadeagled image outlined in dust showed where it had flown against the glass.

I sat on a rope chair which probably belonged on the patio. Helen Haggerty brought our drinks and disposed herself on a canvas chaise, where the sunlight would catch her hair again, and shine on her polished brown legs.

“I’m really just camping for now,” she said. “I haven’t sent for my furniture, because I don’t know if I want it around me any more. I may just leave it in storage and start all over, and to hell with the history. Do you think that’s a good idea, Curveball Lefty Lew?”

“Call me anything, I don’t mind. I’d have to know the history.”

“Ha. You never will.” She looked at me sternly for a minute, and sipped her drink. “You might as well call me Helen.”

“All right, Helen.”

“You make it sound so formal. I’m not a formal person, and neither are you. Why should we be formal with each other?”

“You live in a glass house, for one thing,” I said smiling. “I take it you haven’t been in it long.”

“A month. Less than a month. It seems longer. You’re the first really interesting man I’ve met since I arrived here.”

I dodged the compliment. “Where did you live before?”

“Here and there. There and here. We academic people are such nomads. It doesn’t suit me. I’d like to settle down permanently. I’m getting old.”

“It doesn’t show.”

“You’re being gallant. Old for a woman, I mean. Men never grow old.”

Now that she had me where she apparently wanted me, she wasn’t crowding so hard, but she was working. I wished that she would stop, because I liked her. I downed my drink. She brought me a second tonic with all the speed and efficiency of a cocktail waitress. I couldn’t get rid of the dismal feeling that each of us was there to use the other.

With the second tonic she let me look down her dress. She was smooth and brown as far as I could see. She arranged herself on the chaise with one hip up, so that I could admire the curve. The sun, in its final yellow flareup before setting, took possession of the room.

“Shall I pull the drapes?” she said.

“Don’t bother for me. It’ll be down soon. You were going to tell me about Dolly Kincaid alias Dorothy Smith.”

“Was I?”

“You brought the subject of her up. I understand you’re her academic counselor.”

“And that’s why you’re interested in me, n’est-ce pas?” Her tone was mocking.

“I was interested in you before I knew of your connection with Dolly.”

“Really?”

“Really. Here I am to prove it.”

“Here you are because I lured you with the magic words Dorothy Smith. What’s she doing on this campus anyway?” She sounded almost jealous of the girl.

“I was sort of hoping you knew the answer to that.”

“Don’t you?”

“Dolly gives conflicting stories, probably derived from romantic fiction–”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “She’s a romantic all right – one of these romantic idealists who are always a jump or two behind her unconscious mind. I ought to know, I used to be one myself. But I also think she has some real trouble – appalling trouble.”

“What was her story to you?”

“It was no story. It was the lousy truth. We’ll come to it later on, if you’re a good boy.” She stirred like an odalisque in the dying light, and recrossed her polished legs. “How brave are you, Mr. Lew?”

“Men don’t talk about how brave they are.”

“You’re full of copybook maxims,” she said with some malice. “I want a serious answer.”

“You could always try me.”

“I may at that. I have a use – I mean, I need a man.”

“Is that a proposal, or a business proposition, or are you thinking about some third party?”

“You’re the man I have in mind. What would you say if I told you that I’m likely to be killed this weekend?”

“I’d advise you to go away for the weekend.”

She leaned sideways toward me. Her breast hardly sagged. “Will you take me?”

“I have a prior commitment.”

“If you mean little Mr. Alex Kincaid, I can pay you better than he can. Not to mention fringe benefits,” she added irrepressibly.

“That college grapevine is working overtime. Or is Dolly the source of your information?”

“She’s one of them. I could tell you things about that girl that would curl your hair.”

“Go ahead. I’ve always wanted curly hair.”

“Why should I? You don’t offer a quid pro quo. You don’t even take me seriously. I’m not used to being turned down flat, by the way.”

“It’s nothing personal. I’m just the phlegmatic type. Anyway, you don’t need me. There are roads going in three directions – Mexico, the desert, or Los Angeles – and you have a nice fast car.”

“I’m too nervous to drive any distance.”

“Scared?”

She nodded.

“You put up a good front.”

“A good front is all I have.”

Her face looked closed and dark, perhaps because the sunlight had faded from the room. Only her hair seemed to hold the light. Beyond the slopes of her body I could see the mountains darkening down.

“Who wants to kill you, Helen?”

“I don’t know exactly. But I’ve been threatened.”

“How?”

“Over the telephone. I didn’t recognize the voice. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, or something in between.” She shuddered.

“Why would anybody threaten you?”

“I don’t know,” she said without meeting my eyes.

“Teachers do get threatened from time to time. It usually isn’t too serious. Have you had a run-in with any local crackpots?”

“I don’t even know any local people. Except the ones at the college, of course.”

“You may have a psycho-neurotic in one of your classes.”

She shook her head. “It’s nothing like that. This is serious.”

“How do you know?”

“I have my ways of knowing.”

“Is it anything to do with Dolly Kincaid?”

“Perhaps. I can’t say for sure. The situation is so complicated.”

“Tell me about the complicated situation.”

“It goes a long way back,” she said, “all the way back to Bridgeton.”

“Bridgeton?”

“The city where I was born and raised. The city where everything happened. I ran away, but you can’t run away from the landscape of your dreams. My nightmares are still set in the streets of Bridgeton. That voice on the telephone threatening to kill me was Bridgeton catching up with me. It was the voice of Bridgeton talking out of the past.”

She was unconscious of herself, caught in a waking nightmare, but her description of it sounded false. I still didn’t know whether to take her seriously.

“Are you sure you’re not talking nonsense out of the present?”

“I’m not making this up,” she said. “Bridgeton will be the death of me. Actually I’ve always known it would.”

“Towns don’t kill people.”

“You don’t know the proud city of my birth. It has quite a record along those lines.”

“Where is it?”

“In Illinois, south of Chicago.”

“You say that everything happened there. What do you mean?”

“Everything important – it was all over before I knew it had started. But I don’t want to go into the subject.”

“I can’t very well help you unless you do.”

“I don’t believe you have any intention of helping me. You’re simply trying to pump me for information.”

It was true. I didn’t care for her as she wished to be cared for by someone. I didn’t entirely trust her. Her handsome body seemed to contain two alternating persons, one sensitive and candid, one hard and evasive.

She rose and went to the glass wall that faced the mountains. They had turned lavender and plum, with dark nocturnal blue in their clefts and groins. The entire evening, mountains and sky and city, was inundated with blue.

“Die blaue Stunde,” she said more or less to herself. “I used to love this hour. Now it gives me the mortal shivers.”

I got up and stood behind her. “You’re deliberately working on your own emotions.”

“You know so much about me.”

“I know you’re an intelligent woman. Act like one. If the place is getting you down leave it, or stay here and take precautions. Ask for police protection.”

“You’re very free with brilliant suggestions not involving you. I asked for protection yesterday after I got the threatening telephone call. The Sheriff sent a man out. He said such calls were common, and usually involved teenagers.”

“Could it have been a teenager?”

“I didn’t think so. But the deputy said they sometimes disguise their voices. He told me not to worry.”

“So don’t worry.”

“I can’t help it. I’m afraid, Lew. Stay with me?”

She turned and leaned on my chest, moving her body tentatively against me. The only real feeling I had for her was pity. She was trying to use me, and using herself in order to use me.

“I have to run along,” I said. “I told you at the start I have a prior commitment. But I’ll check back on you.”

“Thanks so much!”

She pulled away from me, so violently that she thudded like a bird against the glass wall.