The Doomsters

30

HIS HOUSE stood on a terraced lot near the crest of the ridge. It was a fairly extensive layout for a bachelor, a modern redwood with wide expanses of glass and many lights inside, as though to demonstrate that its owner had nothing to hide. His Jaguar was in the slanting driveway.

I turned and stopped in the woven shadow of a pepper tree. Before I left my car, I took Maude’s gun out of the dash compartment. It was a .32 caliber automatic with a full clip and an extra shell in the chamber, ready to fire. I walked down Grantland’s driveway very quietly, with my hand in my heavy pocket.

The front door was slightly ajar. A rasping radio voice came from somewhere inside the house. I recognized the rhythmic monotonous clarity of police signals. Grantland had his radio tuned to the CHP dispatching station.

Under cover of the sound, I moved along the margin of the narrow light that fell across the doorstep. A man’s legs and feet, toes down, were visible through the opening. My heart skipped a beat when I saw them, another beat when one of the legs moved. I kicked the door wide open and went in.

Grantland was on his knees with a red-stained cloth in his hand. There were deeper stains in the carpet which he had been scrubbing.

He whirled like an animal attacked from the rear. The gun in my hand froze him in mid-action.

He opened his mouth wide as if he was going to scream at the top of his lungs. No sound came from him. He closed his mouth. The muscles dimpled along the line of his jaw. He said between his teeth: “Get out of here.”

I closed the door behind me. The hallway was full of the smell of gasoline. Beside a telephone table against the opposite wall, a gallon can stood open. Spots of undried gasoline ran the length of the hallway.

“Did she bleed a lot?” I said.

He got up slowly, watching the gun in my hand. I patted his flanks. He was unarmed. He backed against the wall and leaned there chin down, folding his arms across his chest, like a man on a cold night.

“Why did you kill her?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s a little late for that gambit. Your girl’s dead. You’re a dead pigeon yourself. But they can always use good hospital orderlies in the pen. Maybe you’ll get some consideration if you talk.”

“Who do you think you are? God?”

“I think maybe you did, Grantland. The big dream is over now. The best you have to hope for is a little consideration from a jury.”

He looked down at the spotted carpet under his feet. “Why would I kill Zinnie? I loved her.”

“Sure you did. You fell in love with her as soon as she got within one death of five million dollars. Only now she’s one death past it, no good to you, no good to anybody.”

“Do you have to grind my nose in it?” His voice was dull with the after-boredom of shock.

I felt a flicker of sympathy for him, which I repressed. “Come off it. If you didn’t cut her yourself, you’re covering for the ripper.”

“No. I swear I’m not. I don’t know who it was. I wasn’t here when it happened.”

“But Zinnie was?”

“Yes, she was. She was tired and ill, so I put her to bed in my room. I had an emergency patient, and had to leave the house.” His face was coming to life as he talked, as though he saw an opening that he could slip through. “When I returned, she was gone. I was frantic. All I could think of was getting rid of the blood.”

“Show me the bedroom.”

Reluctantly, he detached himself from the support of the wall. I followed him through the door at the end of the hallway, into the lighted bedroom. The bed had been stripped. The bloody bedclothes, sheets and electric blanket, lay in the middle of the floor with a heap of women’s clothes on top of them.

“What were you going to do with these? Burn them?”

“I guess so,” he said with a wretched sidewise look. “There was nothing between us, you understand. My part in all this was perfectly innocent. But I knew what would happen if I didn’t get rid of the traces. I’d be blamed.”

“And you wanted someone else to be blamed, as usual. So you bundled her body into her station wagon and left it in the lower town, near where Carl Hallman was seen. You kept track of his movements by tuning in the police band. In case he wasn’t available for the rap, you phoned the ranch and brought Zinnie’s servants in, as secondary patsies.”

Grantland’s face took on its jaundiced look. He sat on the edge of the mattress with his head down. “You’ve been keeping track of my movements, have you?”

“It’s time somebody did. Who was the emergency patient who called you out tonight?”

“It doesn’t matter. Nobody you know.”

“You’re wrong again. It matters, and I’ve known Tom Rica for a good many years. You gave him an overdose of heroin and left him to die.”

Grantland sat in silence. “I gave him what he asked for.”

“Sure. You’re very generous. He wanted a little death. You gave him the whole works.”

Grantland began to speak rapidly, surrounding himself with a protective screen of words: “I must have made a mistake in the dosage. I didn’t know how much he was used to. He was in a bad way, and I had to give him something for temporary relief. I intended to have him moved to the hospital. I see now I shouldn’t have left him without an attendant. Apparently he was worse off than I realized. These addicts are unpredictable.”

“Lucky for you they are.”

“Lucky?”

“Rica isn’t quite dead. He was even able to do some talking before he lost consciousness.”

“Don’t believe him. He’s a pathological liar, and he’s got a grudge against me. I wouldn’t provide him with drugs–”

“Wouldn’t you? I thought that’s what you were doing, and I’ve been wondering why. I’ve also been wondering what happened in your office three years ago.”

“When?” He was hedging for time, time to build a story with escape hatches, underground passages, somewhere, anywhere to hide.

“You know when. How did Alicia Hallman die?”

He took a deep breath. “This will come as a surprise to you. Alicia died by accident. If anyone was culpable, it was her son Jerry who was. He’d made a special night appointment for her, and drove her to my office himself. She was terribly upset about something, and she wanted drugs to calm her nerves. I wouldn’t prescribe any for her. She pulled a gun out of her purse and tried to shoot me with it. Jerry heard the shot. He rushed in from the waiting-room and grappled with her. She fell and struck her head on the radiator. She was mortally hurt. Jerry begged me to keep it quiet, to protect him and his mother’s name and save the family from scandal. I did what I could to shield them. They were my friends as well as my patients.”

He lowered his head, the serviceable martyr.

“It’s a pretty good story. Are you sure it wasn’t rehearsed?”

He looked up sharply. His eyes met mine for an instant. There were red fiery points in their centers. They veered away past me to the window and I glanced over my shoulder. The window framed only the half-lit sky above the city.

“Is that the story you told Carl this morning?”

“It is, as a matter of fact. Carl wanted the truth. I felt I had no right to keep it from him. It had been a load on my conscience for three years.”

“I know how conscientious you are, Doctor. You got your hooks into a sick man, told him a lying story about his mother’s death, gave him a gun and sicked him on his brother and turned him loose.”

“It wasn’t like that. He asked to see the gun. It was evidence of the truth. I suppose I’d kept it with that in mind. I brought it out of the safe and showed it to him.”

“You kept it with murder in mind. You had it loaded, ready for him, didn’t you?”

“That simply isn’t so. Even if it were, you could never prove it. Never. He grabbed the gun and ran. I was helpless to stop him.”

“Why did you lie to him about his mother’s death?”

“It wasn’t a lie.”

“Don’t contradict me, brother.” I wagged the gun to remind him of it. “It wasn’t Jerry who drove his mother into town. It was Sam Yogan. It wasn’t Jerry who beat her to death. He was in Berkeley with his father. You wouldn’t stick your neck out for Jerry, anyway. I can only think of two people you’d take that risk for – yourself, or Zinnie. Was Zinnie in your office with Alicia?”

He looked at me with flaring eyes, as if his brains were burning in his skull. “Go on. This is very interesting.”

“Tom Rica saw a woman come out of there dripping blood. Was Zinnie wounded by Alicia’s shot?”

“It’s your story,” he said.

“All right. I think it was Zinnie. She panicked and ran. You stayed behind and disposed of her mother-in-law’s body. Your only motive was self-protection, but Zinnie wouldn’t think of that, with the fear and guilt she had on her mind. She wouldn’t stop to think that when you pushed that body into the ocean, you were converting justifiable manslaughter into murder – making a murderer out of your true love. No doubt she was grateful to you.

“Of course she wasn’t your true love at the time. She wasn’t rich enough yet. You wouldn’t want her, or any woman, without money. Sooner or later, though, when the Senator died, Zinnie and her husband were due to come into a lot of money. But the years dragged on, and the old man’s heart kept beating, and you got impatient, tired of sweating it out, living modestly on the profits from pills while other people had millions.

“The Senator needed a little help, a little send-off. You were his doctor, and you could easily have done it for him yourself, but that’s not the way you operate. Better to let somebody else take the risks. Not too many risks, of course – Zinnie was going to be worth money to you. You helped her to set the psychological stage, so that Carl would be the obvious suspect. Shifting the blame onto Carl served a double purpose. It choked off any real investigation, and it got Carl and Mildred out of the picture. You wanted the Hallman money all to yourself.

“Once the Senator was gone, there was only one hurdle left between you and the money. Zinnie wanted to take it the easy way in a divorce settlement, but her child got in the way of a divorce. I imagine you did, too. You had one death to go, for the whole five million less taxes and a wife who would have to take orders the rest of her life. That death occurred today, and you’ve practically admitted that you set it up.”

“I admitted nothing. I gave you practical proof that Carl Hallman killed his brother. The chances are he killed Zinnie, too. He could have made it across town in a stolen car.”

“How long ago was Zinnie killed?”

“I’d say about four hours.”

“You’re a liar. Her body was warm when I found it, less than an hour ago.”

“You must have been mistaken. You may not think much of me, but I am a qualified doctor. I left her before eight, and she must have died soon after. It’s midnight now.”

“What have you been doing since then?”

Grantland hesitated. “I couldn’t move for a long time after I found her. I simply lay on the bed beside her.”

“You say you found her in bed?”

“I did find her in bed.”

“How did the blood get in the hall?”

“When I was carrying her out.” He shuddered. “Can’t you see that I’m telling you the truth? Carl must have come in and found her asleep. Perhaps he was looking for me. After all, I’m the doctor who committed him. Perhaps he killed her to get back at me. I left the door unlocked, like an idiot.”

“You wouldn’t have been setting her up for him? Or would you?”

“What do you think I am?”

It was a hard question. Grantland was staring down at Zinnie’s clothes, his face distorted by magnetic lines of grief. I’d known murderers who killed their lovers and grieved for them. Most of them were half-hearted broken-minded men. They killed and cried and tore their prison blankets and twisted their blankets into nooses. I doubted that Grantland fitted the pattern, but it was possible.

“I think you’re basically a fool,” I said, “like any other man who tries to beat the ordinary human averages. I think you’re a dangerous fool, because you’re frightened. You proved that when you tried to silence Rica. Did you try to silence Zinnie, too, with a knife?”

“I refuse to answer such questions.”

He rose jerkily and moved to the window. I stayed close to him, with the gun between us. For a moment we stood looking down the long slope of the city. Its after-midnight lights were scattered on the hillsides, like the last sparks of a firefall.

“I really loved Zinnie. I wouldn’t harm her,” he said.

“I admit it doesn’t seem likely. You wouldn’t kill the golden goose just when she was going to lay for you. Six months from now, or a year, when she’d had time to marry you and write a will in your favor, you might have started thinking of new angles.”

He turned on me fiercely. “I don’t have to listen to any more of this.”

“That’s right. You don’t. I’m as sick of it as you are. Let’s go, Grantland.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Then we’ll tell them to come and get you. It will be rough while it lasts, but it won’t last long. You’ll be signing a statement by morning.”

Grantland hung back. I prodded him along the hallway to the telephone.

“You do the telephoning, Doctor.”

He balked again. “Listen. There doesn’t have to be any telephoning. Even if your hypothesis were correct, which it isn’t, there’s no real evidence against me. My hands are clean.”

His eyes were still burning with fierce and unquenched light. I thought it was a light that burned from darkness, a blind arrogance masking fear and despair. Behind his several shifting masks, I caught a glimpse of the unknown dispossessed, the hungry operator who sat in Grantland’s central darkness and manipulated the shadow play of his life. I struck at the shape in the darkness.

“Your hands are dirty. You don’t keep your hands clean by betraying your patients and inciting them to murder. You’re a dirty doctor, dirtier than any of your victims. Your hands would be cleaner if you’d taken that gun and used it on Hallman yourself. But you haven’t the guts to live your own life. You want other people to do it for you, do your living, do your killing, do your dying.”

He twisted and turned. His face changed like smoke and set in a new smiling mask. “You’re a smart man. That hypothesis of yours, about Alicia’s death – it wasn’t the way it happened, but you hit fairly close in a couple of places.”

“Straighten me out.”

“If I do, will you let me go? All I need is a few hours to get to Mexico. I haven’t committed any extraditable offense, and I have a couple of thousand–”

“Save it. You’ll need it for lawyers. This is it, Grantland.” I gestured with the gun in my hand. “Pick up the telephone and call the police.”

His shoulders slumped. He lifted the receiver and started to dial. I ought to have distrusted his hangdog look.

He kicked sideways and upset the gasoline can. Its contents spouted across the carpet, across my feet.

“I wouldn’t use that gun,” he said. “You’d be setting off a bomb.”

I struck at his head with the automatic. He was a millisecond ahead of me. He swung the base of the telephone by its cord and brought it down like a sledge on top of my head.

I got the message. Over and out.