The Doomsters

7

THE ADDRESS WHICH Carl had given me for his wife was near the highway in an older section of Purissima. The highway traffic thrummed invisibly like a damaged artery under the noon silence in the street. Most of the houses were frame cottages or stucco boxes built in the style of thirty years ago. A few were older, three-story mansions surviving from an era of elegance into an era of necessity.

Two-twenty was one of these. Its long closed face seemed abashed by the present. Its white wooden walls needed paint. The grass in the front yard had grown and withered, untouched by the human hand.

I asked the cab-driver to wait and knocked on the front door, which was surmounted by a fanlight of ruby-colored glass. I had to knock several times before I got an answer. Then the door was unlocked and opened, reluctantly and partially.

The woman who showed herself in the aperture had unlikely purplish red hair cut in bangs on her forehead and recently permanented. Blue eyes burned like gas-flames in her rather inert face.

Her mouth was crudely outlined in fresh lipstick, which I guessed she had just dabbed on as a concession to the outside world. The only other concession was a pink nylon robe from which her breasts threatened to overflow. I placed her age in the late forties. She couldn’t be Mrs. Carl Hallman. At least I hoped she couldn’t.

“Is Mrs. Hallman home?”

“No, she isn’t here. I’m Mrs. Gley, her mother.” She smiled meaninglessly. There was lipstick on her teeth, too, gleaming like new blood. “Is it something?”

“I’d like very much to see her.”

“Is it about – him?”

“Mr. Hallman, you mean?”

She nodded.

“Well, I would like to talk to him.”

“Talk to him! It needs more than talk to him. You might as well talk to a stone wall – beat your head bloody against it trying to change his ways.” Though she seemed angry and afraid, she spoke in a low monotone. Her voice was borne on a heavy breath in which Sen-Sen struggled for dominance. You inhaled it as much as heard it.

“Is Mr. Hallman here?”

“No, thank God for small mercies. He hasn’t been here. But I’ve been expecting him ever since she got that call from the hospital.” Her gaze, which had swiveled past me to the street, returned to my face. “Is that your taxi?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s a relief. Are you from the hospital?”

“I just came from there.”

I’d intended some misrepresentation, which she made me regret immediately: “Why don’t you keep them locked up better? You can’t let crazy-men run around loose. If you knew what my girl has suffered from that man – it’s a terrible thing.” She took the short easy step from motherly concern to self-concern: “Sometimes I think I’m the one who suffered most. The things I hoped and planned for that girl, and then she had to bring that one into the family. I begged and pleaded with her to stay home today. But no, she has to go to work, you’d think the office couldn’t go on without her. She leaves me here by myself to cope.”

She spread out her hands and pressed them into her bosom, the white flesh rising like dough between her fingers.

“It isn’t fair. The world is cruel. You work and hope and plan, then everything goes to pieces. I didn’t deserve it.” A few easy tears ran down her cheeks. She found a ball of Kleenex in her sleeve and wiped her eyes. They shone, undimmed by her grief, with a remarkable intensity. I wondered what fuel fed them.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Gley. I’m new on this case. My name is Archer. May I come in and talk to you?”

“Come in if you like. I don’t know what I can tell you. Mildred ought to be home over the noon-hour, she promised she would.”

She moved along the dim hallway, a middle-aged woman going to seed, but not entirely gone. There was something about the way she carried herself: old beauty and grace controlling her flesh, like an unforgotten discipline. She turned at a curtained archway behind which voices murmured.

“Please go in and sit down. I was just changing for lunch. I’ll put something on.”

She started up a flight of stairs which rose from the rear of the hallway. I went in through the curtains, and found myself in a twilit sitting-room with a lighted television screen. At first the people on the screen were unreal shadows. After I sat and watched them for a few minutes, they became realer than the room. The screen became a window into a brightly lighted place where life was being lived, where a beautiful actress couldn’t decide between career and children and had to settle for both. The actual windows of the sitting-room were heavily blinded.

In the shifting light from the screen, I noticed an empty glass on the coffee table beside me. It smelled of gin. Just to keep my hand in, I made a search for the bottle. It was stuffed behind the cushion of my chair, a half-empty Gordon’s bottle, its contents transparent as tears. Feeling a little embarrassed, I returned it to its hiding place. The woman on the screen had had her baby, and held it up to her husband for his approval.

The front door opened and closed. Quick heels clicked down the hallway, and paused at the archway. I started to get up. A woman’s voice said: “Who – Carl? Is that you, Carl?”

Her voice was high. She looked very pale and dark-eyed in the light from the screen, almost like a projection from it. She fumbled behind the curtains for a light switch. A dim ceiling light came on over my head.

“Oh. Excuse me. I thought you were someone else.”

She was young and small, with a fine small head, its modeling emphasized by a short boyish haircut. She had on a dark business suit which her body filled the way grapes fill their skins. She held a shiny black plastic bag, like a shield, in front of it.

“Mrs. Hallman?”

“Yes.” Her look said: who are you, and what are you doing here?

I told her my name. “Your mother asked me to sit down for a minute.”

“Where is Mother?” She tried to speak in an ordinary tone, but she looked at me suspiciously, as if I had Mother’s body hidden in a closet.

“Upstairs.”

“Are you a policeman?”

“No.”

“I just wondered. She phoned me at the office about half an hour ago and said she was going to ask for police protection. I couldn’t get away immediately.”

She stopped abruptly, and looked around the room. Its furnishings would have been antiques if they’d ever possessed distinction. The carpet was threadbare, the wallpaper faded and stained brown in patches. The mohair sofa that matched the chair I’d sat in was ripped and spilling its guts. The mahogany veneer was peeling off the coffee table which held the empty glass. It was no wonder Mrs. Gley preferred darkness and gin and television to the light of morning.

The girl went past me in a birdlike rush, snatched up the glass, and sniffed at it. “I thought so.”

On the screen behind her a male announcer, not so very male, was telling women how to be odorless and beloved. The girl turned with the glass in her hand. For a second I thought she’d throw it at the screen. Instead she stooped and switched the television off. Its light faded slowly like a dream.

“Did Mother pour you a drink?”

“Not yet.”

“Has anyone else been here?”

“Not that I know of. But your mother may have the right idea. I mean, about police protection.”

She looked at me in silence for a minute. Her eyes were the same color as her mother’s, and had the same intensity, almost tangible on my face. Her gaze dropped to the glass in her hand. Setting it down, she said under cover of the movement: “You know about Carl? Did Mother tell you?”

“I talked to Dr. Brockley at the hospital this morning. I had a run-in with your husband earlier. As a matter of fact he took my car.” I told her about that.

She listened with her head bowed, biting one knuckle like a doleful child. But there was nothing childish about the look she gave me. It held a startled awareness, as if she’d had to grow up in a hurry, painfully. I had a feeling that she was the one who had suffered most in the family trouble. There was resignation in her posture, and in the undertones of her voice: “I’m sorry. He never did anything like that before.”

“I’m sorry, too.”

“Why did you come here?”

I had several motives, some more obscure than others. I picked the easiest: “I want my car back. If I can handle it myself, without reporting it as a theft–”

“But you said yourself that we should call the police.”

“For protection, yes. Your mother’s frightened.”

“Mother’s very easily frightened. I’m not. Anyway, there’s no basis for it. Carl’s never hurt anyone, let alone Mother and me. He talks a lot sometimes – that’s all it amounts to. I’m not afraid of him.” She gave me a shrewd and very female glance. “Are you?”

Under the circumstances, I had to say I wasn’t. I couldn’t be sure, though. Perhaps that was my reason for coming there – the obscurest motive that underlay the others.

“I’ve always been able to handle Carl,” she said. “I’d never have let them take him to the hospital, if I could have kept him here and looked after him myself. But somebody had to go to work.” She frowned. “What can be keeping Mother? Excuse me for a minute.”

She left the room and started up the stairs. The ringing of a telephone brought her down into the hallway again. From somewhere upstairs her mother called: “Is that you, Mildred? The phone’s ringing.”

“Yes. I’ll get it.” I heard her lift the receiver. “This is Mildred. Zinnie? What do you want? Are you sure? No, I can’t. I can’t possibly I don’t believe it” Then, on a rising note: “All right. I’ll come.”

The receiver dropped in its cradle. I went to the door and looked into the hallway. Mildred was leaning against the wall beside the telephone table. Her face was wan, her eyes shock-bright. Her gaze shifted to me, but it was so inward I don’t think it took me in.

“Trouble?”

She nodded mutely and drew in a shuddering breath. It came out as a sigh: “Carl’s at the ranch now. One of the hands saw him. Jerry isn’t there, and Zinnie’s terrified.”

“Where’s Jerry?”

“I don’t know. In town, probably. He follows the stock market every day until two, at least he used to.”

“What’s she so scared about?”

“Carl has a gun with him.” Her voice was low and wretched.

“You’re sure?”

“The man who saw him said so.”

“Is he likely to use it?”

“No. I don’t think so. It’s the others I’m worried about – what they might do to Carl if there’s any shooting.”

“What others?”

“Jerry, and the sheriff and his deputies. They’ve always taken orders from the Hallmans. I’ve got to go and find Carl – talk to him, before Jerry gets back to the ranch.”

But she was having a hard time getting under way. She stood stiff against the wall, hands knotted at the ends of their straight arms, immobilized by tension. When I touched her elbow, she shied: “Yes?”

“I have a taxi waiting. I’ll take you out there.”

“No. Taxis cost money. We’ll go in my car.” She scooped up her bag and pressed it under her arm.

“Go where?” her mother cried from the top of the stairs. “Where are you going? You’re not going to leave me alone.”

Mrs. Gley came down in a rush. She had on a kind of tea gown whose draperies flew out behind her, like the tail of a blowzy comet.

Her body swayed softly and heavily against the newel post at the foot of the stairs. “You can’t leave me alone,” she repeated.

“I’m sorry, Mother. I have to go to the ranch. Carl’s out there now, so there’s nothing for you to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry about, that’s a good one. I’ve got my life to worry about, that’s all. And your place is with your mother at this time.”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“Am I? When all I ask is a little love and sympathy from my own daughter?”

“You’ve had all I’ve got.”

The younger woman turned and started for the door. Her mother followed her, a clumsy ghost trailing yellowing draperies and the powerful odor of Sen-Sen. Either her earlier drinks were catching up with her, or she had another bottle upstairs. She made her final plea, or threat: “I’m drinking, Mildred.”

“I know, Mother.”

Mildred opened the door and went out.

“Don’t you care?” her mother screamed after her.

Mrs. Gley turned to me as I passed her in the doorway. The light from the window over the door lent her face a rosy youthfulness. She looked like a naughty girl who was trying to decide whether or not to have a tantrum. I didn’t wait to find out if she did.