The Doomsters

34

DAWN WAS COMING on over the trees, like fluorescent lights in an operating room. Mildred turned away from the white agony of the light. Her outburst of feeling had passed, leaving her face smooth and her voice unshaken. Only her eyes had changed. They were heavy, and the color of ripe plums.

“It wasn’t like the first time. This time I felt nothing. It’s strange to kill someone and have no feeling about it. I wasn’t even afraid while I was waiting for him in his bathroom closet. He always took a warm bath at night to help him sleep. I had an old ball-peen hammer I’d found on Jerry’s workbench in the greenhouse. When he was in the bathtub, I slipped out of the closet and hit him on the back of the head with the hammer. I held his face under the water until the bubbles stopped.

“It only took a few seconds. I unlocked the bathroom door and locked it again on the outside and wiped the key and pushed it back under the door. Then I put the hammer where I found it, with Jerry’s things. I hoped it would be taken for an accident, but if it wasn’t I wanted Jerry to be blamed. It was really his fault, egging Carl on to quarrel with his father.

“But Carl was the one they blamed, as you well know. He seemed to want to be blamed. I think for a while he convinced himself that he had actually done it, and everyone else went along with it. The sheriff didn’t even investigate.”

“Was he protecting you?”

“No. If he was, he didn’t know it. Jerry made some kind of a deal with him to save the county money and save the family’s face. He didn’t want a murder trial in his distinguished family. Neither did I. I didn’t try to interfere when Jerry arranged to send Carl to the hospital. I signed the papers without a word.

“Jerry knew what he was doing. He was trained in the law, and he arranged it so that he was Carl’s legal guardian. It meant that he controlled everything. I had no rights at all, as far as the family estate was concerned. The day after Carl was committed, Jerry hinted politely that I might as well move out. I believe that Jerry suspected me, but he was a cagey individual. It suited him better to blame it all on Carl, and keep his own cards face down.

“Dr. Grantland turned against me, too. He said he was through with me, after the mess I’d made of things. He said that he was through protecting me. For all he cared, the man he’d been paying off could go to the police and tell them all about me. And I mustn’t think that I could get back at him by talking him into trouble. It would be my word against his, and I was as schitzy as hell, and he could prove it. He slapped me and ordered me out of his house. He said if I didn’t like it, he’d call the police right then.

“I’ve spent the last six months waiting for them,” she said. “Waiting for the knock on the door. Some nights I’d wish for them to come, will them to come, and get it over with. Some nights I wouldn’t care one way or the other. Some nights – they were the worst – I’d lie burning up with cold and watch the clock and count its ticks, one by one, all night. The clock would tick like doom, louder and louder, like doomsters knocking on the door and clumping up the stairs.

“I got so I was afraid to go to sleep at night. I haven’t slept for the last four nights, since I found out about Carl’s friend on the ward. It was this man, Rica, the one who knew all about me. I could imagine him telling Carl. Carl would turn against me. There’d be nobody left in the world who even liked me. When they phoned me yesterday morning that Carl had escaped with him, I knew that this had to be it.” She looked at me quite calmly. “You know the rest. You were here.”

“I saw it from the outside.”

“That’s all there was, the outside. There wasn’t any inside, at least for me. It was like a ritual which I made up as I went along. Every step I took had a meaning at the time, but I can’t remember any of the meanings now.”

“Tell me what you did, from the time that you decided to kill Jerry.”

“It decided itself,” she said. “I had no decision to make, no choice. Dr. Grantland phoned me at the office a little while before you got to town. It was the first I’d heard from him in six months. He said that Carl had got hold of a loaded gun. If Carl shot Jerry with it, it would solve a lot of problems. Money would be available, in case this man Rica tried to make more trouble for us. Also, Grantland would be able to use his influence with Zinnie to head off investigation of the other deaths. I’d even have a chance at my share of the property. If Carl didn’t shoot Jerry, the whole thing would blow up in our faces.

“Well, Carl had no intention of shooting anybody. I found that out when I talked to him in the orange grove. The gun he had was his mother’s gun, which Dr. Grantland had given him. Carl wanted to ask Jerry some questions about it – about her death. Apparently Grantland told him that Jerry killed her.

“I didn’t know for certain that Jerry suspected me, but I was afraid of what he would say to Carl. This was on top of all the other reasons I had to kill him, all the little snubs and sneers I’d had to take from him. I said I’d talk to Jerry instead, and I persuaded Carl to hand over the gun to me. If he was found armed, they might shoot him without asking questions. I told him to stay out of sight, and come here after dark if he could make it. That I would hide him.

“I hid the gun away, inside my girdle – it hurt so much I fainted, there on the lawn. When I was alone, I switched it to my bag. Later, when Jerry was alone, I went into the greenhouse and shot him twice in the back. I wiped the gun and left it there beside him. I had no more use for it.”

She sighed, with the deep bone-tiredness that takes years to come to. Even the engine of her guilt was running down. But there was one more death in her cycle of killings.

And still the questions kept rising behind my teeth, always the questions, with the taste of their answers, salt as sea or tears, bitter as iron or fear, sweet-sour as folding money that has passed through many hands: “Why did you kill Zinnie? Did you actually believe that you could get away with it, collect the money and live happily ever after?”

“I never thought of the money,” she said, “or Zinnie, for that matter. I went there to see Dr. Grantland.”

“You took a knife along.”

“For him,” she said. “I was thinking about him when I took that knife out of the drawer. Zinnie happened to be the one who was there. I killed her, I hardly know why. I felt ashamed for her, lying naked like that in his bed. It was almost like killing myself. Then I heard the radio going in the front room. It said that Carl had been seen at Pelican Beach.

“It seemed like a special message intended for me. I thought that there was hope for us yet, if only I could reach Carl. We could go away together and start a new life, in Africa or on the Indian reservations. It sounds ridiculous now, but that’s what I thought on the way down to Pelican Beach. That somehow everything could be made good yet.”

“So you walked in front of a truck.”

“Yes. Suddenly I saw what I had done. Especially to Carl. It was my fault he was being hunted like a murderer. I was the murderer. I saw what I was, and I wanted to put an end to myself before I killed more people.”

“What people are you talking about?”

Averting her face, she stared fixedly at the rumpled pillow at the head of the bed.

“Were you planning to kill Carl? Is that why you sent us away to Mrs. Hutchinson’s, when he was already here?”

“No. It was Martha I was thinking about. I didn’t want anything to happen to Martha.”

“Who would hurt her if you didn’t?”

“I was afraid I would,” she said miserably. “It was one of the thoughts that came to me, that Martha had to be killed. Otherwise the whole thing made no sense.”

“And Carl too? Did he have to be killed?”

“I thought I could do it,” she said. “I stood over him with the knife in my hand for a long time while he was sleeping. I could say that I killed him in self-defense, and that he confessed all the murders before he died. I could get the house and the money all to myself, and pay off Dr. Grantland. Nobody else would suspect me.

“But I couldn’t go through with it,” she said. “I dropped the knife on the floor. I couldn’t hurt Carl, or Martha. I wanted them to live. It made the whole thing meaningless, didn’t it?”

“You’re wrong. The fact that you didn’t kill them is the only meaning left.”

“What difference does it make? From the night I killed Alicia and my baby, every day I’ve lived has been a crime against nature. There isn’t a person on the face of the earth who wouldn’t hate me if they knew about me.”

Her face was contorted. I thought she was trying not to cry. Then I thought she was trying to cry.

“I don’t hate you, Mildred. On the contrary.”

I was an ex-cop, and the words came hard. I had to say them, though, if I didn’t want to be stuck for the rest of my life with the old black-and-white picture, the idea that there were just good people and bad people, and everything would be hunky-dory if the good people locked up the bad ones or wiped them out with small personalized nuclear weapons.

It was a very comforting idea, and bracing to the ego. For years I’d been using it to justify my own activities, fighting fire with fire and violence with violence, running on fool’s errands while the people died: a slightly earthbound Tarzan in a slightly paranoid jungle. Landscape with figure of a hairless ape.

It was time I traded the picture in on one that included a few of the finer shades. Mildred was as guilty as a girl could be, but she wasn’t the only one. An alternating current of guilt ran between her and all of us involved with her. Grantland and Rica, Ostervelt, and me. The redheaded woman who drank time under the table. The father who had deserted the household and died for it symbolically in the Senator’s bathtub. Even the Hallman family, the four victims, had been in a sense the victimizers, too. The current of guilt flowed in a closed circuit if you traced it far enough.

Thinking of Alicia Hallman and her open-ended legacy of death, I was almost ready to believe in her doomsters. If they didn’t exist in the actual world they rose from the depths of every man’s inner sea, gentle as night dreams, with the back-breaking force of tidal waves. Perhaps they existed in the sense that men and women were their own doomsters, the secret authors of their own destruction. You had to be very careful what you dreamed.

The wave of night had passed through Mildred and left her cold and shaking. I held her in my arms for a little while. The light outside the window had turned to morning. The green tree-branches moved in it. Wind blew through the leaves.