The Doomsters

8

MILDRED HALLMAN’S CAR was an old black Buick convertible. It was parked behind my cab, wide of the curb. I paid off the cab-driver and got in. Mildred was sitting on the right-hand side of the front seat.

“You drive, will you?” She said as we started: “Between Carl and Mother, I’m completely squeezed out. They both need a keeper, and in the end it always turns out to be me. No, don’t think I’m feeling sorry for myself, because I’m not. It’s nice to be needed.”

She spoke with a kind of wilted gallantry. I looked at her. She’d leaned her head against the cracked leather seat, and closed her eyes. Without their light and depth in her face, she looked about thirteen. I caught myself up short, recognizing a feeling I’d had before. It started out as paternal sympathy but rapidly degenerated, if I let it. And Mildred had a husband.

“You’re fond of your husband,” I said.

She answered dreamily: “I’m crazy about him. I had a crush on him in high school, the first and only crush I ever had. Carl was a big wheel in those days. He barely knew I existed. I kept hoping, though.” She paused, and added softly: “I’m still hoping.”

I stopped for a red light, and turned right onto the highway which paralleled the waterfront. Gas fumes mixed with the odors of fish and underwater oil wells. To my left, beyond a row of motels and seafood restaurants, the sea lay low and flat and solid like blue tiling, swept clean and polished. Some white triangular sails stood upright on it.

We passed a small-boat harbor, gleaming white on blue, and a long pier draped with fishermen. Everything was as pretty as a postcard. The trouble with you, I said to myself: you’re always turning over the postcards and reading the messages on the underside. Written in invisible ink, in blood, in tears, with a black border around them, with postage due, unsigned, or signed with a thumbprint.

Turning right again at the foot of the main street, we passed through an area of third-rate hotels, bars, pool halls. Stunned by sun and sherry, unemployed field hands and rumdums paraded like zombies on the noon pavements. A Mexican movie house marked the upper limits of the lower depths. Above it were stores and banks and office buildings, sidewalks bright with tourists, or natives who dressed like tourists.

The residential belt had widened since I’d been in Purissima last, and it was still spreading. New streets and housing tracts were climbing the coastal ridge and pushing up the canyons. The main street became a country blacktop which wound up over the ridge. On its far side a valley opened, broad and floored with rich irrigation green. A dozen miles across it, the green made inlets between the foothills and lapped at the bases of the mountains.

The girl beside me stirred. “You can see the house from here. It’s off the road to the right, in the middle of the valley.”

I made out a sprawling tile-roofed building floating low like a heavy red raft in the ridged green. As we went downhill, the house sank out of sight.

“I used to live in that house,” Mildred said. “I promised myself I’d never go back to it. A building can soak up emotions, you know, so that after a while it has the same emotions as the people who live in it. They’re in the cracks in the walls, the smoke stains on the ceiling, the smells in the kitchen.”

I suspected that she was dramatizing a little: there was some of her mother in her after all: but I kept still, hoping she’d go on talking.

“Greed and hate and snobbery,” she said. “Everyone who lived in that house became greedy and hateful and snobbish. Except Carl. It’s no wonder he couldn’t take it. He’s so completely different from the others.” She turned toward me, the leather creaking under her. “I know what you’re thinking – that Carl is crazy, or he was, and I’m twisting the facts around to suit myself. I’m not, though. Carl is good. It’s often the very best people who crack up. And when he cracked, it was family pressure that did it to him.”

“I gathered that, from what he said to me.”

“Did he tell you about Jerry – constantly taunting him, trying to make him mad, then running to his father with tales of the trouble Carl made?”

“Why did he do that?”

“Greed,” she said. “The well-known Hallman greed. Jerry wanted control of the ranch. Carl was due to inherit half of it. Jerry did everything he could to ruin Carl with his father, and Zinnie did, too. They were the ones who were really responsible for that last big quarrel, before the Senator died. Did Carl tell you about that?”

“Not very much.”

“Well, Jerry and Zinnie started it. They got Carl talking about the Japanese, how much the family owed them for their land – I admit that Carl was hipped on the subject, but Jerry encouraged him to go on and on until he was really raving. I tried to stop it, but nobody listened to me. When Carl was completely wound up, Jerry went to the Senator and asked him to reason with Carl. You can imagine how much reasoning they did, when they got together. We could hear them shouting all over the house.

“The Senator had a heart attack that night. It’s a terrible thing to say about a man, but Jerry was responsible for his father’s death. He may even have planned it that way: he knew his father wasn’t to be excited. I heard Dr. Grantland warn the family myself, more than once.”

“What about Dr. Grantland?”

“In what way do you mean?”

“Carl thinks he’s crooked,” I hesitated, then decided she could hold it: “In fact, he made some pretty broad accusations.”

“I think I’ve heard them. But go on.”

“Conspiracy was one of them. Carl thought Grantland and his brother conspired to have him committed. But the doctor at the hospital says there’s nothing to it.”

“No,” she said. “Carl needed hospital treatment. I signed the necessary papers. That was all aboveboard. Only, Jerry made me and Carl sign other papers at the same time, making him Carl’s legal guardian. I didn’t know what it meant. I thought it was just a part of the commitment. But it means that as long as Carl is ill, Jerry controls every penny of the estate.”

Her voice had risen. She brought it under control and said more quietly: “I don’t care about myself. I’d never go back there anyway. But Carl needs the money. He could get better treatment – the best psychiatrists in the country. It’s the last thing Jerry wants, to see his brother cured. That would end the guardianship, you see.”

“Does Carl know all this?”

“No, at least he’s never heard it from me. He’s mad enough at Jerry as it is.”

“Your brother-in-law sounds charming.”

“Yes indeed he is.” Her voice was thin. “If it was just a question of saving Jerry, I wouldn’t move a step in his direction. Not a step. But you know what will happen to Carl if he gets into any kind of trouble. He’s already got more guilt than he can bear. It could set him back years, or make him permanent – No! I won’t think about it. Nothing is going to happen.”

She twisted in the seat away from me, as though I represented the things she feared. The road had become a green trench running through miles of orange trees. The individual rows of trees, slanting diagonally from the road, whirled and jumped backward in staccato movement. Mildred peered down the long empty vistas between them, looking for a man with straw-colored hair.

A large wooden sign, painted black on white, appeared at the roadside ahead: Hallman Citrus Ranch. I braked for the turn, made it on whining tires, and almost ran down a big old man in a sheriffs blouse. He moved away nimbly, then came heavily back to the side of the car. Under a wide-brimmed white hat, his face was flushed. Veins squirmed like broken purple worms under the skin of his nose. His eyes held the confident vacancy that comes from the exercise of other people’s power.

“Watch where you’re going, bud. Not that you’re going anywhere, on this road. What do you think I’m here for, to get myself a tan?”

Mildred leaned across me, her breast live against my arm: “Sheriff! Have you seen Carl?”

The old man leaned to peer in. His sun-wrinkles deepened and his mouth widened in a smile which left his eyes as vacant as before. “Why hello, Mrs. Hallman, I didn’t see you at first. I must be going blind in my old age.”

“Have you seen Carl?” she repeated.

He made a production out of answering her, marching around to her side of the car, carrying his belly in front of him like a gift. “Not personally, I haven’t. We know he’s on the ranch, though. Sam Yogan saw him to talk to, not much more than an hour ago.”

“Was he rational?”

“Sam didn’t say. Anyway, what would a Jap gardener know about it?”

“A gun was mentioned,” I said.

The sheriff’s mouth drooped at the corners. “Yeah, he’s carrying a gun. I don’t know where in hell he got hold of it.”

“How heavy a gun?”

“Sam said not so heavy. But any gun is too big when a man is off his rocker.”

Mildred let out a small cry.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Hallman. We got the place staked out. We’ll pick him up.” Tipping his hat back, he pushed his face in at her window. “You better get rid of your boyfriend before we do pick him up. Carl won’t like it if you got a boyfriend, driving his car and all.”

She looked from him to me, her mouth a thin line. “This is Sheriff Ostervelt, Mr. Archer. I’m sorry I forgot my manners. Sheriff Ostervelt never had any to remember.”

Ostervelt smirked. “Take a joke, eh?”

“Not from you,” she said without looking at him.

“Still mad, eh? Give it time. Give it time.”

He laid a thick hand on her shoulder. She took it in both of hers and flung it away from her. I started to get out of the car.

“Don’t,” she said. “He only wants trouble.”

“Trouble? Not me,” Ostervelt said. “I try to make a little joke. You don’t think it’s funny. Is that trouble, between friends?”

I said: “Mrs. Hallman’s expected at the house. I said I’d drive her there. Much as I’d love to go on talking to you all afternoon.”

“I’ll take her to the house.” Ostervelt gestured toward the black Mercury Special parked on the shoulder, and patted his holster. “The husband’s lurking around in the groves, and I don’t have the men to comb them for him. She might need protection.”

“Protection is my business.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“What do you know? You got a license, maybe?”

“Yes. It’s good statewide. Now do we go, or do we stay here and have some more repartee?”

“Sure,” he said, “I’m stupid – just a stupid fool, and my jokes ain’t funny. Only I got an official responsibility. So you better let me see that license you say you got.”

Moving very slowly, the sheriff came around to my side of the car again. I slapped my photostat into his hand. He read it aloud, in an elocutionary voice, pausing to check the physical description against my appearance.

“Six-foot-two, one-ninety,” he repeated. “A hunk of man. Love those beautiful blue eyes. Or are they gray, Mrs. Hallman? You’d know.”

“Leave me alone.” Her voice was barely audible.

“Sure. But I better drive you up to the house in person. Hollywood here has those beautiful powder-blue eyes, but it don’t say here” – he flicked my photostat with his forefinger “–what his score is on a moving target.”

I picked the black-and-white card out of his hand, released the emergency brake, stepped on the gas. It wasn’t politic. But enough was enough.