The Doomsters

32

I FOUND Mrs. Gley in the dim, old mildew-smelling kitchen. She was barricaded behind an enamel-topped table under a hanging bulb, making a last stand against sobriety. I smelled vanilla extract when I approached her. She clutched a small brown bottle to her breast, like an only child which I was threatening to kidnap.

“Vanilla will make you sick.”

“It never has yet. Do you expect a woman to face these tragedies without a drink?”

“As a matter of fact, I could use a drink myself.”

“There isn’t enough for me!” She remembered her manners then: “I’m sorry, I ran out of liquor way back when. You look as if you could use a drink.”

“Forget it.” I noticed a bowl of apples on the worn woodstone sink behind her. “Mind if I peel myself an apple?”

“Please do,” she said very politely. “I’ll get you my paring knife.”

She got up and rummaged in a drawer beside the sink. “Dunno what happened to my paring knife,” she muttered, and turned around with a butcher knife in her hand. “Will this do?”

“I’ll just eat it in the skin.”

“They say you get more vitamins.”

She resumed her seat at the table. I sat across from her on a straight-backed chair, and bit into my apple. “Has Carl been in the kitchen tonight?”

“I guess he must have been. He always used to come through here and up the back stairs.” She pointed toward a half-open door in the corner of the room. Behind it, bare wooden risers mounted steeply.

“Has he come in this way before?”

“I hope to tell you he has. That boy has been preying on my little girl for more years than I care to count. He cast a spell on her with his looks and his talk. I’m glad he’s finally got what’s coming to him. Why, when she was a little slip of a thing in high school, he used to sneak in through my kitchen and up to her room.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve got eyes in my head, haven’t I? I was keeping boarders then, and I was ashamed they’d find out about the carryings-on in her room. I tried to reason with her time and again, but she was under his spell. What could I do with my girl going wrong and no man to back me up in it? When I locked her up, she ran away, and I had to get the sheriff to bring her back. Finally she ran away for good, went off to Berkeley and left me all alone. Her own mother.”

Her own mother set the brown bottle to her mouth and swallowed a slug of vanilla extract. She thrust her haggard face toward me across the table: “But she learned her lesson, let me tell you. When a girl gets into trouble, she finds out that she can’t do without her mother. I’d like to know where she would have been after she lost her baby, without me to look after her. I nursed her like a saint.”

“Was this since her marriage?”

“It was not. He got her into trouble, and he wasn’t man enough to stay around and help her out of it. He couldn’t stand up to his family and face his responsibility. My girl wasn’t good enough for him and his mucky-muck folks. So look what he turned out to be.”

I took another bite of my apple. It tasted like ashes. I got up and dropped the apple into the garbage container in the sink. Mrs. Gley depressed me. Her mind veered fuzzily, like a moth distracted by shifting lights, across the fibrous surface of the past, never quite making contact with its meaning.

Voices floated back from the front of the house, too far away for me to make out the words. I went into the corridor, which darkened as I shut the door behind me. I stayed in the shadow.

Mildred was talking to Ostervelt and two middle-aged men in business suits. They had the indescribable, unmistakable look of harness bulls who had made it into plain clothes but would always feel a little uncomfortable in them. One of them was saying: “I can’t figure out what this doctor had against him. Do you have any ideas on the subject, ma’am?”

“I’m afraid not.” I couldn’t see Mildred’s face, but she had changed to the clothes in which she’d met Rose Parish.

“Did Carl kill his sister-in-law tonight?” Ostervelt said.

“He couldn’t have. Carl came directly here from the beach. He was here with me all evening. I know I did wrong in hiding him. I’m willing to take the consequences.”

“It ain’t legal,” the second detective said, “but I hope my wife would do the same for me. Did he mention the shooting of his brother Jerry?”

“No. We’ve been over that. I didn’t even bring the subject up. He was dog-tired when he dragged himself in. He must have run all the way from Pelican Beach. I gave him something to eat and drink, and he went right off to sleep. Frankly, gentlemen, I’m tired, too. Can’t the rest of this wait till morning?”

The detectives and the sheriff looked at each other and came to a silent agreement. “Yeah, we’ll let it ride for now,” the first detective said. “Under the circumstances. Thanks for your co-operation, Mrs. Hallman. You have our sympathy.”

Ostervelt lingered behind after they left to offer Mildred his own brand of sympathy. It took the form of a heavy pass. One of his hands held her waist. The other stroked her body from breast to thigh. She stood and endured it.

Anger stung my eyes and made me clench my fists. I hadn’t been so mad since the day I took the strap away from my father. But something held me still and quiet. I’d been wearing my anger like blinders, letting it be exploited, and exploiting it for my own unacknowledged purposes. I acknowledged now that my anger against the sheriff was the expression of a deeper anger against myself. In plain terms, he was doing what I had wanted to be doing.

“Don’t be so standoffish,” he was saying. “You were nice to Dr. Grantland; why can’t you be nice to me?”

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

“Sure you do. You’re not as hard to get as you pretend to be. So why play dumb with Uncle Ostie? My yen for you goes back a long ways, kid. Ever since you were a filly in high school giving your old lady a hard time. Remember?”

Her body stiffened in his hands. “How could I forget?”

Her voice was thin and sharp, but his aging lust converted it into music. He took what she said for romantic encouragement.

“I haven’t forgotten, either, baby,” he said, huskily. “And things are different now, now that I’m not married any more. I can make you an offer on the up-and-up.”

“I’m still married.”

“Maybe, if he lives. Even if he does live, you can get it annulled. Carl’s going to be locked up for the rest of his life. I got him off easy the first time. This time he goes to the Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

“No!”

“Yes. You been doing your best to cover for him, but you know as well as I do he knocked off his brother and sister-in-law. It’s time for you to cut your losses, kid, think of your own future.”

“I have no future.”

“I’m here to tell you you have. I can be a lot of help to you. One hand washes the other. There’s no legal proof he killed his father, without me there never will be. It’s a closed case. That means you can get your share of the inheritance. Your life is just beginning, baby, and I’m a part of it, built right into it.”

His hands busied themselves with her. She stood quiescent, keeping her face away from his. “You always wanted me, didn’t you?”

There was despair in her voice, but he heard only the words. “More than ever now. There’s plenty of shots in the old locker. I’m planning to retire next year, after we settle the case and the estate. You and me, we can go anywhere we like, do anything we want.”

“Is this why you shot Grantland?”

“One of the reasons. He had it coming, anyway. I’m pretty sure he masterminded Jerry’s murder, if that’s any comfort to you – talked Carl into doing it. But it makes a better case without Grantland in it. This way there’s no danger that the Senator’s death will have to be dragged in. Or the thing between you and Grantland.”

Mildred lifted her face. “That was years ago, before my marriage. How did you know about it?”

“Zinnie told me this afternoon. He told Zinnie.”

“He always was a rat. I’m glad you shot him.”

“Sure you are. Uncle Ostie knows best.”

She let him have her mouth. He seemed to devour it. She hung limp in his arms until he released her.

“I know you’re tired tonight, honey. We’ll leave it lay for now. Just don’t do any talking, except to me. Remember we got a couple of million bucks at stake. Are you with me?”

“You know I am, Ostie.” Her voice was dead.

He lifted his hand to her and went out. She wedged a newspaper between the splintered door and the doorframe. Coming back toward the stairs, her movements were awkward and mechanical, as though her body was a walking doll run by remote control. Her eyes were like blue china, without sight, and as her heels tapped up the stairs I thought of a blind person in a ruined house tapping up a staircase that ended in nothing.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Gley was subsiding lower and lower on her bones. Her chin was propped on her arms now. The brown bottle lay empty at her elbow.

“I was thinking you deserted me,” she said with elocutionary carefulness. “Everybody else has.”

The blind footsteps tapped across the ceiling. Mrs. Gley cocked her head like a molting red parrot. “Izzat Mildred?”

“Yes.”

“She ought to go to bed. Keep up her strength. She’s never been the same since she lost that child of grief.”

“How long ago did she lose it?”

“Three years, more or less.”

“Did she have a doctor to look after her?”

“Sure she did. It was this same Dr. Grantland, poor fellow. It’s a shame what had to happen to him. He treated her real nice, never even sent her a bill. That was before she got married, of course. Long before. I told her at the time, here was her chance to break off with that Carl and make a decent connection. A rising young doctor, and all. But she never listened to me. It had to be Carl Hallman or nothing. So now it’s nothing. They’re both gone.”

“Carl isn’t dead yet.”

“He might as well be. I might as well be, too. My life is nothing but disappointment and trouble. I brought my girl up to associate with nice people, marry a fine young man. But no, she had to have him. She had to marry into trouble and sickness and death.” Her drunken self-pity rose in her throat like vomit. “She did it to spite me, that’s what she did. She’s trying to kill me with all this trouble that she brought into my house. I used to keep a nice house, but Mildred broke my spirit. She never gave me the love that a daughter owes her mother. Mooning all the time over her no-good father – you’d think she was the one that married him and lost him.”

Her anger wouldn’t come in spite of the invocation. She looked in fear at the ceiling, blinking against the light from the naked bulb. The fear in her drained parrot’s eyes refused to dissolve. It deepened into terror.

“I’m not a good mother, either,” she said. “I never have been any good to her. I’ve been a living drag on her all these years, and may God forgive me.”

She slumped forward across the table, as if the entire weight of the night had fallen on her. Her harsh red hair spilled on the white tabletop. I stood and looked at her without seeing her. A pit or tunnel had opened in my mind, three years deep or long. Under white light at the bottom of it, fresh and vivid as a hallucination, I could see the red spillage where life had died and murder had been born.

I was in a stretched state of nerves where hidden things are coming clear and ordinary things are hidden. I thought of the electric blanket on the floor of Grantland’s bedroom. I didn’t hear Mildred’s quiet feet till she was half-way down the back stairs. I met her at the foot of them.

Her whole body jerked when she saw me. She brought it under control, and tried to smile: “I didn’t know you were still here.”

“I’ve been talking to your mother. She seems to have passed out again.”

“Poor mother. Poor everybody.” She shut her eyes against the sight of the kitchen and its raddled occupant. She brushed her blue-veined eyelids with the fingertips of one hand. Her other hand was hidden in the folds of her skirt. “I suppose I should put her to bed.”

“I have to talk to you first.”

“What on earth about? It’s terribly late.”

“About poor everybody. How did Grantland know that Carl was here?”

“He didn’t. He couldn’t have.”

“I think you’re telling the truth for once. He didn’t know Carl was here. He came here to kill you, but Carl was in his way. By the time he got to you, the gun was empty.”

She stood silent.

“Why did Grantland want to kill you, Mildred?”

She moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. “I don’t know.”

“I think I do. The reasons he had wouldn’t drive an ordinary man to murder. But Grantland was frightened as well as angry. Desperate. He had to silence you, and he wanted to get back at you. Zinnie meant more to him than money.”

“What’s Zinnie got to do with me?”

“You stabbed her to death with your mother’s paring knife. I didn’t see at first how it was possible. Zinnie’s body was warm when I found her. You were here under police surveillance. The timing didn’t fit, until I realized that her body was kept warm under an electric blanket in Grantland’s bed. You killed her before you drove to Pelican Beach. You heard over Grantland’s radio that Carl was seen there. Isn’t that true?”

“Why would I do a thing like that?” she whispered.

The question wasn’t entirely rhetorical. Mildred looked as if she earnestly desired an answer. Like an independent entity, her hidden fist jumped up from the folds of her skirt to supply an answer. A pointed blade projected downward from it. She drove it against her breast.

Even her final intention was divided. The knife turned in her hand, and only tore her blouse. I had it away from her before she could do more damage.

“Give it back to me. Please.”

“I can’t do that.” I was looking at the knife. Its blade was etched with dry brown stains.

“Then kill me. Quickly. I have to die anyway. I’ve known it now for years.”

“You have to live. They don’t gas women any more.”

“Not even women like me? I couldn’t bear to live. Please kill me. I know you hate me.”

She tore her blouse gaping and offered her breast to me in desperate seduction. It was like a virgin’s, unsunned, the color of pearl.

“I’m sorry for you, Mildred.”

My voice sounded strange; it had broken through into a tone that was new to me, deep as the sorrow I felt. It had nothing to do with sex, or with the possessive pity that changed to sex when the wind blew from the south. She was a human being with more grief on her young mind than it was able to bear.