The Doomsters

31

I CAME TO crawling across the floor of a room I’d never seen. It was a long, dim room which smelled like a gas station. I was crawling toward a window at the far end, as fast as my cold and sluggish legs would push me along.

Behind me, a clipped voice was saying that Carl Hallman was still at large, and was wanted for questioning in a second murder. I looked back over my shoulder. Time and space came together, threaded by the voice from Grantland’s radio. I could see the doorway into the lighted hall from which my instincts had dragged me.

There was a puff of noise beyond the doorway, a puff of color. Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring. I got my feet under me and my hands on a chair, carried it to the window and smashed the glass out of the frame.

Air poured in over me. The dancing flames behind me began to sing. They postured and beckoned when I looked at them, and reached for my cold wet legs, offering to warm them. My dull brain put several facts together, like a boy playing with blocks on the burning deck, and realized that my legs were gasoline-soaked.

I went over the jagged sill, fell further than I expected to, struck the earth full length and lay whooping for breath. The fire bit into my legs like a rabid fox.

I was still going on instinct. All instinct said was, Run. The fire ran with me, snapping. The providence that suffers fools and cushions drunks and tempers the wind to shorn lambs and softening hardheads rescued me from the final barbecue. I ran blind into the rim of a goldfish pond and fell down in the water. My legs Suzette sizzled and went out.

I reclined in the shallow, smelly blessed water and looked back at Grantland’s house. Flames blossomed in the window I had broken and grew up to the eaves like quick yellow hollyhocks. Orange and yellow lights appeared behind other windows. Tendrils of smoke thrust delicately through the shake roof.

In no time at all, the house was a box of brilliant jumping lights. Breaking windows tinkled distinctly. Trellised vines of flame climbed along the walls. Little flame salamanders ran up the roof, leaving bright zigzag trails.

Above the central furnace roar, I heard a car engine start. Skidding in the slime at the bottom of the pool, I got to my feet and ran toward the house. The sirens were whining in the city again. It was a night of sirens.

Radiating heat kept me at a distance from the house. I waded through flowerbeds and climbed over a masonry wall. I was in time to see Grantland gun his Jaguar out of the driveway, its twin exhausts tracing parallel curves on the air.

I ran to my car. Below, the Jaguar was dropping down the hill like a bird. I could see its lights on the curves, and further down the red shrieking lights of a fire truck. Grantland had to stop to let it pass, or I’d have lost him for good.

He crossed to a boulevard running parallel with the main street, and followed it straight through town. I thought he was on his way to the highway and Mexico, until he turned left on Elmwood, and again left. When I took the second turn, into Grant Street, the Jaguar was halfway up the block with one door hanging open. Grantland was on the front porch of Mrs. Gley’s house.

The rest of it happened in ten or twelve seconds, but each of the seconds was divided into marijuana fractions. Grantland shot out the lock of the door. It took three shots to do it. He pushed through into the hallway. By that time I was braking in front of the house, and could see the whole length of the hallway to the stairs. Carl Hallman came down them.

Grantland fired twice. The bullets slowed Carl to a walk. He came on staggering, as if the knife in his lifted hand was holding him up. Grantland fired again. Carl stopped in his tracks, his arms hanging loose, came on in a spraddling shuffle.

I started to run up the walk. Now Mildred was at the foot of the stairs, clinging to the newel post. Her mouth was open, and she was screaming something. The scream was punctuated by Grantland’s final shot.

Carl fell in two movements, to his knees, then forehead down on the floor. Grantland aimed across him. The gun clicked twice in his hand. It held only seven shells. Mildred shuddered under imaginary bullets.

Carl rose from the floor with a Lazarus grin, bright badges of blood on his chest. His knife was lost. He looked blind. Bare-handed he threw himself at Grantland, fell short, lay prone and still in final despair.

My feet were loud on the veranda boards. I got my hands on Grantland before he could turn, circled his neck with my arm and bent him over backwards. He was slippery and strong. He bucked and twisted and broke my hold with the hammering butt of the gun.

Grantland moved away crabwise along the wall. His face was bare as bone, a wet yellow skull from which the flesh had been dissolved away. His eyes were dark and empty like the eye of the empty gun that he was still clutching.

A door opened behind me. The hallway reverberated with the roar of another gun. A bullet creased the plaster close above Grantland’s head and sprinkled it with dust. It was Ostervelt, in the half-shadow under the stairs: “Out of the way, Archer. You, Doctor, stand still, and drop it. I’ll shoot to kill you this time.”

Perhaps in his central darkness Grantland yearned for death. He threw the useless gun at Ostervelt, jumped across Carl’s body, took off from the veranda and seemed to run in air.

Ostervelt moved to the doorway and sent three bullets after him in rapid fire, faster than any man runs. They must have been very heavy. Grantland was pushed and hustled along by their blows, until his legs were no longer under him. I think he was dead before he struck the road.

“He oughtn’t to have ran,” Ostervelt said. “I’m a sharpshooter. I still don’t like to kill a man. It’s too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one.” He looked down at his Colt .45 with a kind of shamed awe, and replaced it in its holster.

I liked the sheriff better for saying that, though I didn’t let it run away with me. He was looking out toward the street where Grantland’s body lay. People from the other houses had already begun to converge on him. Carmichael appeared from somewhere and kept them off.

Ostervelt turned to me. “How in hell did you get here? You look like you swam through a swamp.”

“I followed Grantland from his house. He just got finished setting fire to it.”

“Was he off his rocker, too?” Ostervelt sounded ready to believe anything.

“Maybe he was in a way. His girlfriend was murdered.”

“I know that. What’s the rest of the story? Hallman knocked off his girl, so Grantland knocked Hallman off?”

“Something like that.”

“You got another theory?”

“I’m working on one. How long have you been here?”

“Couple of hours, off and on.”

“In the house?”

“Out back, mostly. I came in through the kitchen when I heard the gunfire. I just relieved Carmichael at the back. He’s been keeping guard on the house for more than four hours. According to him nobody came in or went out.”

“Does that mean Hallman’s been in the house all this time?”

“It sure looks like it. Why?”

“Zinnie’s body was warm when I found her.”

“What time was that?”

“Shortly before eleven. It’s a cold night for September. If she was killed before eight, you’d expect her to lose some heat.”

“That’s pretty thin reasoning. Anyway, she’s refrigerated now. Why in hell didn’t you report what you found when you found it?”

I didn’t answer him. It was no time for argument. To myself, I had to admit that I was still committed to Carl Hallman. Mental case or not, I couldn’t imagine a man of his courage shooting his brother in the back or cutting a defenseless woman.

Carl was still alive. His breathing was audible. Mildred was kneeling beside him in a white slip. She’d turned his head to one side and supported it on one of his limp arms. His breath bubbled and sighed.

“Better not move him any more. I’ll radio for an ambulance.” Ostervelt went out.

Mildred didn’t seem to have heard him. I had to speak twice before she paid any attention. She looked up through the veil of hair that had fallen over her face: “Don’t look at me.”

She pushed her hair back and covered the upper parts of her breasts with her hands. Her arms and shoulders were rough with gooseflesh.

“How long has Carl been here in the house?”

“I don’t know. Hours. He’s been asleep in my room.”

“You knew he was here?”

“Of course. I’ve been with him.” She touched his shoulder, very lightly, like a child fingering a forbidden object. “He came to the house when you and Miss Parish were here. While I was changing my clothes. He threw a stick at my window and came up the back stairs. That’s why I had to get rid of you.”

“You should have taken us into your confidence.”

“Not her. That Parish woman hates me. She’s been trying to take Carl away from me.”

“Nonsense,” though I suspected it wasn’t entirely nonsense. “You should have told us. You might have saved his life.”

“He isn’t going to die. They won’t let him die.”

She hid her face against his inert shoulder. Her mother was watching us from the curtained doorway below the stairs. Mrs. Gley looked like the wreck of dreams. She turned away, and disappeared into the back recesses of the house.

I went outside, looking for Carmichael. The street was filling up with people now. Rifles glinted among them, but there was no real menace in the crowd. Carmichael was having no trouble keeping them away from the house.

I talked to him for a minute. He confirmed the fact that he had been watching the house from various positions since eight o’clock. He couldn’t be absolutely sure, but he was reasonably sure, that no one had entered or left it in that time. Our conversation was broken up by the ambulance’s arrival.

I watched two orderlies roll Carl Hallman into a wire basket. He had a leg wound, at least one chest wound, and one wound in the abdomen. That was bad, but not so finally bad as it would have been in the days before antibiotics. Carl was a durable boy; he was still breathing when they carried him out.

I looked around for the knife that had dropped from his hand. It wasn’t there any longer. Perhaps the sheriff had picked it up. From what I had seen of it at a distance, it was a medium-sized kitchen knife, the kind that women use for paring or chopping. It could also have been used for stabbing Zinnie, though I still didn’t see how.