The Chill Page 5

  She lived back of Foothill Drive in a hillside house made out of aluminum and glass and black enameled steel. The nearest rooftop floated among the scrub oaks a quarter of a mile down the slope. You could stand in the living room by the central fireplace and see the blue mountains rising up on one side, the gray ocean falling away on the other. The offshore fog was pushing in to the land.

  “Do you like my little eyrie?”

  “Very much.”

  “It isn’t really mine, alas. I’m only renting at present, though I have hopes. Sit down. What will you drink? I’m going to have a tonic.”

  “That will do nicely.”

  The polished tile floor was almost bare of furniture. I strolled around the large room, pausing by one of the glass walls to look out. A wild pigeon lay on the patio with its iridescent neck broken. Its faint spreadeagled image outlined in dust showed where it had flown against the glass.

  I sat on a rope chair which probably belonged on the patio. Helen Haggerty brought our drinks and disposed herself on a canvas chaise, where the sunlight would catch her hair again, and shine on her polished brown legs.

  “I’m really just camping for now,” she said. “I haven’t sent for my furniture, because I don’t know if I want it around me any more. I may just leave it in storage and start all over, and to hell with the history. Do you think that’s a good idea, Curve-ball Lefty Lew?”

  “Call me anything, I don’t mind. I’d have to know the history.”

  “Ha. You never will.” She looked at me sternly for a minute, and sipped her drink. “You might as well call me Helen.”

  “All right, Helen.”

  “You make it sound so formal. I’m not a formal person, and neither are you. Why should we be formal with each other?”

  “You live in a glass house, for one thing,” I said smiling. “I take it you haven’t been in it long.”

  “A month. Less than a month. It seems longer. You’re the first really interesting man I’ve met since I arrived here.”

  I dodged the compliment. “Where did you live before?”

  “Here and there. There and here. We academic people are such nomads. It doesn’t suit me. I’d like to settle down permanently. I’m getting old.”

  “It doesn’t show.”

  “You’re being gallant. Old for a woman, I mean. Men never grow old.”

  Now that she had me where she apparently wanted me, she wasn’t crowding so hard, but she was working. I wished that she would stop, because I liked her. I downed my drink. She brought me a second tonic with all the speed and efficiency of a cocktail waitress. I couldn’t get rid of the dismal feeling that each of us was there to use the other.

  With the second tonic she let me look down her dress. She was smooth and brown as far as I could see. She arranged herself on the chaise with one hip up, so that I could admire the curve. The sun, in its final yellow flareup before setting, took possession of the room.

  “Shall I pull the drapes?” she said.

  “Don’t bother for me. It’ll be down soon. You were going to tell me about Dolly Kincaid alias Dorothy Smith.”

  “Was I?”

  “You brought the subject of her up. I understand you’re her academic counselor.”

  “And that’s why you’re interested in me, n’est-ce pas?” Her tone was mocking.

  “I was interested in you before I knew of your connection with Dolly.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Here I am to prove it.”

  “Here you are because I lured you with the magic words Dorothy Smith. What’s she doing on this campus anyway?” She sounded almost jealous of the girl.

  “I was sort of hoping you knew the answer to that.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Dolly gives conflicting stories, probably derived from romantic fiction—”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, “She’s a romantic all right—one of these romantic idealists who are always a jump or two behind her unconscious mind. I ought to know, I used to be one myself. But I also think she has some real trouble-appalling trouble.”

  “What was her story to you?”

  “It was no story. It was the lousy truth. We’ll come to it later on, if you’re a good boy.” She stirred like an odalisque in the dying light, and recrossed her polished legs. “How brave are you, Mr. Lew?”

  “Men don’t talk about how brave they are.”

  “You’re full of copybook maxims,” she said with some malice. “I want a serious answer.”

  “You could always try me.”

  “I may at that. I have a use—I mean, I need a man.”

  “Is that a proposal, or a business proposition, or are you thinking about some third party?”

  “You’re the man I have in mind. What would you say if I told you that I’m likely to be killed this weekend?”

  “I’d advise you to go away for the weekend.”

  She leaned sideways toward me. Her breast hardly sagged. “Will you take me?”

  “I have a prior commitment.”

  “If you mean little Mr. Alex Kincaid, I can pay you better than he can. Not to mention fringe benefits,” she added irrepressibly.

  “That college grapevine is working overtime. Or is Dolly the source of your information?”

  “She’s one of them. I could tell you things about that girl that would curl your hair.”

  “Go ahead. I’ve always wanted curly hair.”

  “Why should I? You don’t offer a quid pro quo. You don’t even take me seriously. I’m not used to being turned down flat, by the way.”

  “It’s nothing personal. I’m just the phlegmatic type. Anyway, you don’t need me. There are roads going in three directions-Mexico, the desert, or Los Angeles—and you have a nice fast car.”

  “I’m too nervous to drive any distance.”

  “Scared?”

  She nodded.

  “You put up a good front.”

  “A good front is all I have.”

  Her face looked closed and dark, perhaps because the sunlight had faded from the room. Only her hair seemed to hold the light. Beyond the slopes of her body I could see the mountains darkening down.

  “Who wants to kill you, Helen?”

  “I don’t know exactly. But I’ve been threatened.”

  “How?”

  “Over the telephone. I didn’t recognize the voice. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, or something in between.” She shuddered.

  “Why would anybody threaten you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said without meeting my eyes.

  “Teachers do get threatened from time to time. It usually isn’t too serious. Have you had a run-in with any local crackpots?”

  “I don’t even know any local people. Except the ones at the college, of course.”

  “You may have a psychoneurotic in one of your classes.”

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing like that. This is serious.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have my ways of knowing.”

  “Is it anything to do with Dolly Kincaid?”

  “Perhaps. I can’t say for sure. The situation is so complicated.”

  “Tell me about the complicated situation.”

  “It goes a long way back,” she said, “all the way back to Bridgeton.”

  “Bridgeton?”

  “The city where I was born and raised. The city where everything happened. I ran away, but you can’t run away from the landscape of your dreams. My nightmares are still set in the streets of Bridgeton. That voice on the telephone threatening to kill me was Bridgeton catching up with me. It was the voice of Bridgeton talking out of the past.”

  She was unconscious of herself, caught in a waking nightmare, but her description of it sounded false. I still didn’t know whether to take her seriously.

  “Are you sure you’re not talking nonsense out of the present?”

  “I’m not making this up,” she said. “Bridgeto
n will be the death of me. Actually I’ve always known it would.”

  “Towns don’t kill people.”

  “You don’t know the proud city of my birth. It has quite a record along those lines.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In Illinois, south of Chicago.”

  “You say that everything happened there. What do you mean?”

  “Everything important—it was all over before I knew it had started. But I don’t want to go into the subject.”

  “I can’t very well help you unless you do.”

  “I don’t believe you have any intention of helping me. You’re simply trying to pump me for information.”

  It was true. I didn’t care for her as she wished to be cared for by someone. I didn’t entirely trust her. Her handsome body seemed to contain two alternating persons, one sensitive and candid, one hard and evasive.

  She rose and went to the glass wall that faced the mountains. They had turned lavender and plum, with dark nocturnal blue in their clefts and groins. The entire evening, mountains and sky and city, was inundated with blue.

  “Die blaue Stunde,” she said more or less to herself. “I used to love this hour. Now it gives me the mortal shivers.”

  I got up and stood behind her. “You’re deliberately working on your own emotions.”

  “You know so much about me.”

  “I know you’re an intelligent woman. Act like one. If the place is getting you down leave it, or stay here and take precautions. Ask for police protection.”

  “You’re very free with brilliant suggestions not involving you. I asked for protection yesterday after I got the threatening telephone call. The Sheriff sent a man out. He said such calls were common, and usually involved teenagers.”

  “Could it have been a teenager?”

  “I didn’t think so. But the deputy said they sometimes disguise their voices. He told me not to worry.”

  “So don’t worry.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m afraid, Lew. Stay with me?”

  She turned and leaned on my chest, moving her body tentatively against me. The only real feeling I had for her was pity. She was trying to use me, and using herself in order to use me.

  “I have to run along,” I said. “I told you at the start I have a prior commitment. But I’ll check back on you.”

  “Thanks so much!”

  She pulled away from me, so violently that she thudded like a bird against the glass wall.

  chapter 7

  I DROVE downhill through deepening twilight toward the Mariner’s Rest Motel, telling myself in various tones of voice that I had done the right thing. The trouble was, in the scene I had just walked out of, there was no right thing to do—only sins of commission or omission.

  A keyboy wearing a gold-braided yachting cap who looked as though he had never set foot on a dock told me that Alex Kincaid-had registered and gone out again. I went to the Surf House for dinner. The spotlit front of the big hotel reminded me of Fargo and all the useless pictures I had ordered from him.

  He was in the dark room adjoining his little office. When he came out he was wearing rectangular dark glasses against the light. I couldn’t see his eyes, but his mouth was hostile. He picked up a bulky manila envelope from the desk and thrust it at me.

  “I thought you were in a hurry for these prints.”

  “I was. Things came up. We found her.”

  “So now you don’t want ’em? My wife worked in this sweat-box half the afternoon to get ’em ready.”

  “I’ll take them. Kincaid will have a use for them if I don’t. How much?”

  “Twenty-five dollars including tax. It’s actually $24.96.”

  I gave him two tens and a five, and his mouth went through three stages of softening. “Are they getting back together?”

  “I don’t know yet”

  “Where did you find her?”

  “Attending the local college. She has a job driving for an old lady named Bradshaw.”

  “The one with the Rolls?”

  “Yes. You know her?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. She and her son generally eat Sunday buffet lunch in the dining room. She’s quite a character. I took a candid picture of them once, on the chance they’d order some copies, and she threatened to smash my camera with her cane. I felt like telling the old biddy her face was enough to smash it.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “I can’t afford such luxuries.” He spread out his chemical-stained hands. “She’s a local institution, and she could get me fired.”

  “I understand she’s loaded.”

  “Not only that. Her son is a big wheel in educational circles. He seems like a nice enough joe, in spite of the Harvard lah-de-dah. As a matter of fact he calmed her down when she wanted to smash my Leica. But it’s hard to figure a guy like that, a good-looking guy in his forties, still tied to his old lady’s apron-strings.”

  “It happens in the best of families.”

  “Yeah, especially in the best. I see a lot of these sad cookies waiting around for the money, and by the time they inherit it’s too late. At least Bradshaw had the guts to go out and make a career for himself.” Fargo looked at his watch. “Speaking of careers, I’ve already put in a twelve-hour day and I’ve got about two hours of developing to do. See you.”

  I started toward the hotel coffee shop. Fargo came running after me along the corridor. The rectangular dark glasses lent his face a robotlike calm which went oddly with the movements of his legs and arms.

  “I almost forgot to ask you. You get a line on this Begley?”

  “I talked to him for quite a while. He didn’t give too much. He’s living with a woman on Shearwater Beach.”

  “Who’s the lucky woman?” Fargo said.

  “Madge Gerhardi is her name. Do you know her?”

  “No, but I think I know who he is. If I could take another look at him—”

  “Come over there now.”

  “I can’t. I’ll tell you who I think he is under all that seaweed, if you promise not to quote me. There’s such a thing as accidental resemblance, and a libel suit is the last thing I need.”

  “I promise not to quote you.”

  “See that you don’t.” He took a deep breath like a skin diver getting ready to go for the bottom. “I think he’s a fellow named Thomas McGee who murdered his wife in Indian Springs about ten years ago. I took a picture of McGee when I was a cub reporter on the paper, but they never used the picture. They never play up those Valley cases.”

  “You’re sure he murdered his wife?”

  “Yeah, it was an open-and-shut case. I don’t have time to go into details, in fact they’re getting pretty hazy at this late date. But most of the people around the courthouse thought he should have been given first degree. Gil Stevens convinced the jury to go for second degree, which explains how he’s out so quick.”

  Remembering Begley’s story about his ten years on the other side of the world, the other side of the moon, I thought that ten years wasn’t so very quick.

  The fog was dense along Shearwater Beach. It must have been high tide: I could hear the surf roaring up under the cottages and sucking at their pilings. The smell of iodine hung in the chilly air.

  Madge Gerhardi answered the door and looked at me rather vaguely. The paint on her eyelids couldn’t hide the fact that they were swollen.

  “You’re the detective, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. May I come in?”

  “Come in if you want. It won’t do any good. He’s gone.”

  I’d already guessed it from her orphaned air. I followed her along a musty hallway into the main room, which was high and raftered. Spiders had been busy in the angles of the rafters, which were webbed and blurred as if fog had seeped in at the corners. The rattan furniture was coming apart at the joints. The glasses and empty bottles and half-empty bottles standing around on the tables and the floor suggested that a party had been going on for some days and might eru
pt again if I wasn’t careful.

  The woman kicked over an empty bottle on the way to the settee, where she flung herself down.

  “It’s your fault he’s gone,” she complained. “He started to pack right after you were here this afternoon.”

  I sat on a rattan chair facing her. “Did Begley say where he was going?”

  “Not to me he didn’t. He did say I wasn’t to expect him back, that it was all off. Why did you have to scare him, anyway? Chuck never did anybody any harm.”

  “He scares very easily.”

  “Chuck is sensitive. He’s had a great deal of trouble. Many’s the time he told me that all he wanted was a quiet nook where he could write about his experiences. He’s writing an autobiographical novel about his experiences.”

  “His experiences in New Caledonia?”

  She said with surprising candor: “I don’t think Chuck ever set foot in New Caledonia. He got that business about the chrome mine out of an old National Geographic magazine. I don’t believe he ever left this country.”

  “Where has he been?”

  “In the pen,” she said. “You know that, or you wouldn’t be after him. I think it’s a dirty crying shame, when a man has paid his debt to society and proved that he can rehabilitate himself—”

  It was Begley she was quoting, Begley’s anger she was expressing, but she couldn’t sustain the anger or remember the end of the quotation. She looked around the wreckage of the room in dim alarm, as if she had begun to suspect that his rehabilitation was not complete.

  “Did he tell you what he was in for, Mrs. Gerhardi?”

  “Not in so many words. He read me a piece from his book the other night. This character in the book was in the pen and he was thinking about the past and how they framed him for a murder he didn’t commit. I asked him if the character stood for him. He wouldn’t say. He went into one of his deep dark silences.”

  She went into one of her own. I could feel the floor trembling under my feet. The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution. The woman said:

  “Was Chuck in the pen for murder?”

  “I was told tonight that he murdered his wife ten years ago. I haven’t confirmed it. Can you?”