The Doomsters

10

THE DRIVER of the Jaguar had dressed himself to match it. He had on gray flannels, gray suede shoes, a gray silk shirt, a gray tie with a metallic sheen. In striking contrast, his face had the polished brown finish of hand-rubbed wood. Even at a distance, I could see he used it as an actor might. He was conscious of planes and angles, and the way his white teeth flashed when he smiled. He turned his full smile on Zinnie.

I said to the deputy: “That wouldn’t be Jerry Hallman.”

“Naw. It’s some doctor from town.”

“Grantland?”

“I guess that’s his name.” He squinted at me sideways. “What kind of detective work do you do? Divorce?”

“I have.”

“Which one in the family hired you, anyway?”

I didn’t want to go into that, so I gave him a wise look and drifted away. Dr. Grantland and Zinnie were climbing the front steps. As she passed him in the doorway, Zinnie looked up into his face. She inclined her body so that her breast touched his arm. He put the same arm around her shoulders, turned her away from him, and propelled her into the house.

Without going out of my way to make a lot of noise, I mounted the veranda and approached the screen door. A carefully modulated male voice was saying: “You’re acting like a wild woman. You don’t have to be so conspicuous.”

“I want to be. I want everyone to know.”

“Including Jerry?”

“Especially him.” Zinnie added illogically: “Anyway, he isn’t here.”

“He soon will be. I passed him on the way out. You should have seen the look he gave me.”

“He hates anybody to pass him.”

“No, there was more to it than that. Are you sure you haven’t told him about us?”

“I wouldn’t tell him the time of day.”

“What’s this about wanting everybody to know then?”

“I didn’t mean anything. Except that I love you.”

“Be quiet. Don’t even say it. You could throw everything away, just when I’ve got it practically made.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll tell you afterwards. Or perhaps I won’t tell you at all. It’s working out, and that’s all you need to know. Anyway, it will work out, if you can act like a sensible human being.”

“Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

“Then remember who you are, and who I am. I’m thinking about Martha. You should be, too.”

“Yes. I forget her sometimes, when I’m with you. Thank you for reminding me, Charlie.”

“Not Charlie. Doctor. Call me doctor.”

“Yes, Doctor.” She made the word sound erotic. “Kiss me once, Doctor. It’s been a long time.”

Having won his point, he became bland. “If you insist, Mrs. Hallman.”

She moaned. I walked to the end of the veranda, feeling a little let down because Zinnie’s vivacity hadn’t been for me. I lit a consolatory cigarette.

At the side of the house, childish laughter bubbled. I leaned on the railing and looked around the corner. Mildred and her niece were playing a game of catch with a tennis ball. At least it was catch for Mildred, when Martha threw the ball anywhere near her. Mildred rolled the ball to the child, who scampered after it like a small utility infielder in fairy blue. For the first time since I’d met her, Mildred looked relaxed.

A gray-haired woman in a flowered dress was watching them from a chaise longue in the shade. She called out: “Martha! You mustn’t get overtired. And keep your dress clean.”

Mildred turned on the older woman: “Let her get dirty if she likes.”

But the spell of the game was broken. Smiling a perverse little smile, the child picked up the ball and threw it over the picket fence that surrounded the lawn. It bounced out of sight among the orange trees.

The woman on the chaise longue raised her voice again: “Now look what you’ve done, you naughty girl – you’ve gone and lost the ball.”

“Naughty girl,” the child repeated shrilly, and began to chant: “Martha’s a naughty girl, Martha’s a naughty girl.”

“You’re not, you’re a nice girl,” Mildred said. “The ball isn’t lost. I’ll find it.”

She started for the gate in the picket fence. I opened my mouth to warn her not to go into the trees. But something was going on in the driveway behind me. Car wheels crunched in the ground, and slid to a stop. I turned and saw that it was a new lavender Cadillac with gold trim.

The man who got out of the driver’s seat was wearing fuzzy tweeds. His hair and eyes had the same coloring as Carl, but he was older, fatter, shorter. Instead of hospital pallor, his face was full of angry blood.

Zinnie came out on the veranda to meet him. Unfortunately her lipstick was smeared. Her eyes looked feverish.

“Jerry, thank God you’re here!” The dramatic note sounded wrong, and she lowered her voice: “I’ve been worried sick. Where on earth have you been all day?”

He stumped up the steps and faced her, not quite as tall as she was on her heels. “I haven’t been gone all day. I drove down to see Brockley at the hospital. Somebody had to give him the bawling-out be had coming to him. I told him what I thought of the loose way they run that place.”

“Was that wise, dear?”

“It was some satisfaction, anyway. These bloody doctors! They take the public’s money and–” He jerked a thumb toward Grantland’s car: “Speaking of doctors, what’s he doing here? Is somebody sick?”

“I thought you knew, about Carl. Didn’t Ostie stop you at the road?”

“I saw his car there, he wasn’t in it. What about Carl?”

“He’s on the ranch, carrying a gun.” Zinnie saw the shock on her husband’s face, and repeated: “I thought you knew. I thought that’s why you were staying away, because you’re afraid of Carl.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” he said, on a rising note.

“You were, the day he left here. And you should be, after the things he said to you.” She added, with unconscious cruelty, perhaps not entirely unconscious: “I believe he wants to kill you, Jerry.”

His hands clutched his stomach, as though she’d struck him a physical blow there. They doubled into fists.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You and Charlie Grantland?”

The screen door rattled. Grantland came out on cue. He said with false joviality: “I thought I heard someone taking my name in vain. How are you, Mr. Hallman?”

Jerry Hallman ignored him. He said to his wife: “I asked you a simple question. What’s he doing here?”

“I’ll give you a simple answer. I had no man around I could trust to take Martha into town. So I called Dr. Grantland to chauffeur her. Martha is used to him.”

Grantland had come up beside her. She turned and gave him a little smile, her smudged mouth doubling its meaning. Of the three, she and Grantland formed the paired unit. Her husband was the one who stood alone. As if he couldn’t bear that loneliness, he turned on his heel, walked stiffly down the veranda steps, and disappeared through the front door of the greenhouse.

Grantland took a gray handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped Zinnie’s mouth. The center of her body swayed toward him.

“Don’t,” he said urgently. “He knows already. You must have told him.”

“I asked him for a divorce – you know that – and he’s not a complete fool. Anyway, what does it matter?” She had the false assurance, or abandon, of a woman who has made a sexual commitment and swung her whole life from it like a trapeze. “Maybe Carl will kill him.”

“Be quiet, Zin! Don’t even think it–!”

His voice broke off. Her gaze had moved across me as he spoke, and telegraphed my presence to him. He turned on his toes like a dancer. The blood seeped out from underneath his tan. He might have been a beady-eyed old man with jaundice. Then he pulled himself together and smiled – a downward-turning smile but a confident one. It was unsettling to see a man’s face change so rapidly and radically.

I threw away the butt of my cigarette, which seemed to have lasted for a long time, and smiled back at him. Felt from inside, like a rubber Halloween mask, my smile was a stiff grimace. Jerry Hallman relieved my embarrassment, if that is what I was feeling. He came hustling out of the greenhouse with a pair of shears in his hand, a dull blotched look on his face.

Zinnie saw him, and backed against the wall. “Charlie! Look out!”

Grantland turned to face Jerry as he came up the steps, a dumpy middle-aging man who couldn’t stand loneliness. His eyes had a very solitary expression. The shears projected outward from the grip of his two hands, gleaming in the sun, like a double dagger.

“Yah, Charlie!” he said. “Look out! You think you can get away with my wife and my daughter both. You’re taking nothing of mine.”

“I had no such intention.” Grantland stuttered over the words. “Mrs. Hallman telephoned–”

“Don’t ‘Mrs. Hallman’ me. You don’t call her that in town. Do you?” Standing at the top of the steps with his legs planted wide apart, Jerry Hallman opened and closed the shears. “Get out of here, you lousy cod. If you want to go on being a man, get off my property and stay off my property. That includes my wife.”

Grantland had put on his old-man face. He backed away from the threatening edges and looked for support to Zinnie. Green-faced in the shadow, she stood still as a bas-relief against the wall. Her mouth worked, and managed to say: “Stop it, Jerry. You’re not making sense.”

Jerry Hallman was at that trembling balance point in human rage where he might have alarmed himself into doing murder. It was time for someone to stop it. Shouldering Grantland out of my way, I walked up to Hallman and told him to put the shears down.

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” he sputtered.

“You’re Mr. Jerry Hallman, aren’t you? I heard you were a smart man, Mr. Hallman.”

He looked at me stubbornly. The whites of his eyes were yellowish from some internal complaint, bad digestion or bad conscience. Something deep in his head looked out through his eyes at me, gradually coming forward into light. Fear and shame, perhaps. His eyes seemed to be puzzled by dry pain. He turned and went down the steps and into the greenhouse, slamming the door behind him. Nobody followed him.