The Chill

Chapter 8

I stopped at the motel again on my way to the Bradshaw house. The keyboy told me that Alex was still out. I wasn’t surprised when I found his red Porsche parked under the Bradshaws’ hedge beside the road.

The moon was rising behind the trees. I let my thoughts rise with it, imagining that Alex had got together with his bride and they were snug in the gatehouse, talking out their troubles. The sound of the girl’s crying wiped out the hopeful image. Her voice was loud and terrible, almost inhuman. Its compulsive rhythms rose and fell like the ululations of a hurt cat.

The door of the gatehouse was slightly ajar. Light spilled around its edges, as if extruded by the pressure of the noise inside. I pushed it open.

“Get out of here,” Alex said.

They were on a studio bed in the tiny sitting room. He had his arms around her, but the scene was not domestic. She seemed to be fighting him, trying to struggle out of his embrace. It was more like a scene in a closed ward where psychiatric nurses will hold their violent patients, sometimes for hours on end, rather than strap them in canvas jackets.

Her blouse was torn, so that one of her breasts was almost naked. She twisted her unkempt head around and let me see her face. It was gray and stunned, and it hardly changed expression when she screamed at me:

“Get out!”

“I think I better stick around,” I said to both of them.

I closed the door and crossed the room. The rhythm of her crying was running down. It wasn’t really crying. Her eyes were dry and fixed in her gray flesh. She hid them against her husband’s body.

His face was shining white.

“What happened, Alex?”

“I don’t really know. I was waiting for her when she got home a few minutes ago. I couldn’t get much sense out of her. She’s awfully upset about something.”

“She’s in shock,” I said, thinking that he was close to it himself. “Was she in an accident?”

“Something like that.”

His voice trailed off in a mumble. His look was inward, as if he was groping for the strength to handle this new problem.

“Is she hurt, Alex?”

“I don’t think so. She came running down the road, and then she tried to run away again. She put up quite a battle when I tried to stop her.”

As if to demonstrate her prowess as a battler, she freed her hands and beat at his chest. There was blood on her hands. It left red dabs on his shirt-front.

“Let me go,” she pleaded. “I want to die. I deserve to.”

“She’s bleeding, Alex.”

He shook his head. “It’s somebody else’s blood. A friend of hers was killed.”

“And it’s all my fault,” she said in a flat voice.

He caught her wrists and held her. I could see manhood biting into his face. “Be quiet, Dolly. You’re talking nonsense.”

“Am I? She’s lying in her blood, and I’m the one who put her there.”

“Who is she talking about?” I said to Alex.

“Somebody called Helen. I’ve never heard of her.”

I had.

The girl began to talk in her wispy monotone, so rapidly and imprecisely that I could hardly follow. She was a devil and so was her father before her and so was Helen’s father and they had the bond of murder between them which made them blood sisters and she had betrayed her blood sister and done her in.

“What did you do to Helen?”

“I should have kept away from her. They die when I go near them.”

“That’s crazy talk,” Alex said softly. “You never hurt anybody.”

“What do you know about me?”

“All I need to. I’m in love with you.”

“Don’t say that. It only makes me want to kill myself.” Sitting upright in the circle of his arms, she looked at her bloody hands and cried some more of her terrible dry tears. “I’m a criminal.”

Alex looked up at me, his eyes blue-black. “Can you make any sense of it?”

“Not much.”

“You can’t really think she killed this Helen person?” We were talking past Dolly as if she was deaf or out of her head, and she accepted this status.

“We don’t even know that anybody’s been killed,” I said. “Your wife is loaded with some kind of guilt, but it may belong to somebody else. I found out a little tonight about her background, or I think I did.” I sat on the shabby brown studio bed beside them and said to Dolly: “What’s your father’s name?”

She didn’t seem to hear me.

“Thomas McGee?”

She nodded abruptly, as if she’d been struck from behind. “He’s a lying monster. He made me into a monster.”

“How did he do that?”

The question triggered another nonstop sentence. “He shot her,” she said with her chin on her shoulder, “and left her lying in her blood but I told Aunt Alice and the policemen and the court took care of him but now he’s done it again.”

“To Helen?”

“Yes, and I’m responsible. I caused it to happen.”

She seemed to take a weird pleasure in acknowledging her guilt. Her gray and jaded looks, her tearless crying, her breathless run-on talking and her silences, were signs of an explosive emotional crisis. Under the raw melodrama of her self-accusations, I had the sense of something valuable and fragile in danger of being permanently broken.

“We’d better not try to question her any more,” I said. “I doubt right now she can tell the difference between true and false.”

“Can’t I?” she said malignly. “Everything I remember is true and I can remember everything from year one, the quarrels and the beatings, and then he finally shot her in her blood–”

I cut in: “Shut up, Dolly, or change the record. You need a doctor. Do you have one in town here?”

“No. I don’t need a doctor. Call the police. I want to make a confession.”

She was playing a game with us and her own mind, I thought, performing dangerous stunts on the cliff edge of reality, daring the long cloudy fall.

“You want to confess that you’re a monster,” I said.

It didn’t work. She answered matter-of-factly: “I am a monster.”

The worst of it was, it was happening physically before my eyes. The chaotic pressures in her were changing the shape of her mouth and jaw. She peered at me dully through a fringe of hair. I’d hardly have recognized her as the girl I talked to on the library steps that day.

I turned to Alex. “Do you know any doctors in town?”

He shook his head. His short hair stood up straight as if live electricity was running through him from his contact with his wife. He never let go of her.

“I could call Dad in Long Beach.”

“That might be a good idea, later.”

“Couldn’t we take her to the hospital?”

“Not without a private doctor to protect her.”

“Protect her from what?”

“The police, or the psycho ward. I don’t want her answering any official questions until I have a chance to check on Helen.”

The girl whimpered. “I don’t want to go to the psycho ward. I had a doctor in town here a long time ago.” She was sane enough to be frightened, and frightened enough to cooperate.

“What’s his name?”

“Dr. Godwin. Dr. James Godwin. He’s a psychiatrist. I used to come in and see him when I was a little girl.”

“Do you have a phone in the gatehouse?”

“Mrs. Bradshaw lets me use her phone.”

I left them and walked up the driveway to the main house. I could smell fog even at this level now. It was rolling down from the mountains, flooding out the moon, as well as rising from the sea.

The big white house was quiet, but there was light behind some of the windows. I pressed the bell push. Chimes tinkled faintly behind the heavy door. It was opened by a large dark woman in a cotton print dress. She was crudely handsome, in spite of the pitted acne scars on her cheekbones. Before I could say anything she volunteered that Dr. Bradshaw was out and Mrs. Bradshaw was on her way to bed.

“I just want to use the phone. I’m a friend of the young lady in the gatehouse.”

She looked me over doubtfully. I wondered if Dolly’s contagion had given me a wild irrational look.

“It’s important,” I said. “She needs a doctor.”

“Is she sick?”

“Quite sick.”

“You shouldn’t ought to leave her alone.”

“She isn’t alone. Her husband’s with her.”

“But she is not married.”

“We won’t argue about it. Are you going to let me call a doctor?”

She stepped back reluctantly and ushered me past the foot of a curved staircase into a book-lined study where a lamp burned like a night light on the desk. She indicated the telephone beside it, and took up a watchful position by the door.

“Could I have a little privacy, please? You can search me on the way out”

She sniffed, and withdrew out of sight. I thought of calling Helen’s house, but she wasn’t in the telephone directory. Dr. James Godwin fortunately was. I dialed his number. The voice that eventually answered was so quiet and neutral that I couldn’t tell if it was male or female.

“May I speak to Dr. Godwin?”

“This is Dr. Godwin.” He sounded weary of his identity.

“My name is Lew Archer. I’ve just been talking to a girl who says she used to be your patient. Her maiden name was Dolly or Dorothy McGee. She’s not in a good way.”

“Dolly? I haven’t seen her for ten or eleven years. What’s troubling her?”

“You’re the doctor, and I think you’d better see her. She’s hysterical, to put it mildly, talking incoherently about murder.”

He groaned. With my other ear I could hear Mrs. Bradshaw call hoarsely down the stairs:

“What’s going on down there, Maria?”

“The girl Dolly is sick, he says.”

“Who says?”

“I dunno. Some man.”

“Why didn’t you tell me she was sick?”

“I just did.”

Dr. Godwin was talking in a small dead voice that sounded like the whispering ghost of the past: “I’m not surprised this material should come up. There was a violent death in her family when she was a child, and she was violently exposed to it. She was in the immediate pre-pubic period, and already in a vulnerable state.”

I tried to cut through the medical jargon: “Her father killed her mother, is that right?”

“Yes.” The word was like a sigh. “The poor child found the body. Then they made her testify in court. We permit such barbarous things–” He broke off, and said in a sharply different tone: “Where are you calling from?”

“Roy Bradshaw’s house. Dolly is in the gatehouse with her husband. It’s on Foothill Drive–”

“I know where it is. In fact I just got in from attending a dinner with Dean Bradshaw. I have another call to make, and then I’ll be right with you.”

I hung up and sat quite still for a moment in Bradshaw’s leather-cushioned swivel chair. The walls of books around me, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. I hated to get up.

Mrs. Bradshaw was waiting in the hallway. Maria had disappeared. The old woman was breathing audibly, as if the excitement was a strain on her heart. She clutched the front of her pink wool bathrobe against her loosely heaving bosom.

“What’s the trouble with the girl?”

“She’s emotionally upset.”

“Did she have a fight with her husband? He’s a hothead, I could hardly blame her.”

“The trouble goes a little deeper than that. I just called Dr. Godwin the psychiatrist. She’s been his patient before.”

“You mean to tell me the girl is–?” She tapped her veined temple with a swollen knuckle.

A car had stopped in the driveway, and I didn’t have to answer her question. Roy Bradshaw came in the front door. The fog had curled his hair tight, and his thin face was open. It closed up when he saw us standing together at the foot of the stairs.

“You’re late,” Mrs. Bradshaw said in an accusing tone. “You go out wining and dining and leave me here to cope all by myself. Where were you, anyway?”

“The Alumni banquet. You can’t have forgotten that. You know how those banquets drag on, and I’m afraid I made my own contribution to the general boredom.” He hesitated, becoming aware of something in the scene more serious than an old woman’s possessiveness. “What’s up, Mother?”

“This man tells me the little girl in the gatehouse has gone out of her mind. Why did you have to send me a girl like that, a psychiatric patient?”

“I didn’t send her.”

“Who did?”

I tried to break in on their foolishness, but neither of them heard me. They were intent on their game of emotional ping-pong, which had probably been going on since Roy Bradshaw was a boy.

“It was either Laura Sutherland or Helen Haggerty,” he was saying. “Professor Haggerty is her counselor, and it was probably she.”

“Whichever one it was, I want you to instruct her to be more careful next time. If you don’t care about my personal safety–”

“I do care about your safety. I care very much about your safety.” His voice was strained thin between anger and submissiveness. “I had no idea there was anything the matter with the girl.”

“There probably wasn’t,” I said. “She’s had a shock. I just called a doctor for her. Dr. Godwin.”

Bradshaw turned slowly in my direction. His face was strangely soft and empty, like a sleeping boy’s.

“I know Dr. Godwin,” he said. “What kind of a shock did she sustain?”

“It isn’t clear. I’d like to talk to you in private.”

Mrs. Bradshaw announced in a trembling voice: “This is my house, young man.”

She was telling me, but she was also reminding Bradshaw, flicking the economic whip at him. He felt its sting:

“I live here, too. I have my duties to you, and I try to perform them satisfactorily. I also have my duties to the students.”

“You and your precious students.” Her bright black eyes were scornful. “Very well. You can have your privacy. I’ll go outside.”

She actually started for the front door, drawing her bathrobe around her lumpy body as if she was being cast out into a blizzard. Bradshaw went after her. There were pullings and haulings and cajolings and a final goodnight embrace, from which I averted my eyes, before she climbed heavily up the stairs, with his assistance.

“You mustn’t judge Mother too harshly,” he said when he came down. “She’s getting old, and it makes it hard for her to adjust to crises. She’s really a generous-hearted soul, as I have good reason to know.”

I didn’t argue with him. He knew her better than I did.

“Well, Mr. Archer, shall we go into my study?”

“We can save time if we talk on the road.”

“On the road?”

“I want you to take me to Helen Haggerty’s place if you know where it is. I’m not sure I can find it in the dark.”

“Why on earth? Surely you’re not taking Mother seriously? She was simply talking to hear herself talk.”

“I know. But Dolly’s been doing some talking, too. She says that Helen Haggerty is dead. She has blood on her hands, by way of supporting evidence. I think we’d better go up there and see where the blood came from.”

He gulped. “Yes. Of course. It isn’t far from here. In fact it’s only a few minutes by the bridle path. But at night we’ll probably get there faster in my car.”

We went out to his car. I asked him to stop at the gatehouse, and glanced in. Dolly was lying on the studio bed with her face turned to the wall. Alex had covered her with a blanket. He was standing by the bed with his hands loose.

“Dr. Godwin is on his way,” I said in a low voice. “Keep him here till I get back, will you?”

He nodded, but he hardly appeared to see me. His look was still inward, peering into depths he hadn’t begun to imagine until tonight.