The Doomsters Page 6

  “Excuse me, Mr. Carmichael,” Zinnie said. “That must be my husband.”

  Walking quickly, she disappeared around the side of the house. Carmichael pulled his gun and trotted after her. I followed along, around the attached greenhouse which flanked the side of the house.

  A silver-gray Jaguar stopped behind the Buick convertible in the driveway. Running across the lawn toward the sports car, under the towering sky, Zinnie looked like a little puppet, black and white and gold, jerked across green baize. The big man who got out of the car slowed her with a gesture of his hand. She looked back at me and the deputy, stumbling a little on her heels, and assumed an awkward noncommittal pose.

  chapter 10

  THE driver of the Jaguar had dressed himself to match it. He had on gray flannels, gray suede shoes, a gray silk shirt, a gray tie with a metallic sheen. In striking contrast, his face had the polished brown finish of hand-rubbed wood. Even at a distance, I could see he used it as an actor might. He was conscious of planes and angles, and the way his white teeth flashed when he smiled. He turned his full smile on Zinnie.

  I said to the deputy: “That wouldn’t be Jerry Hallman.”

  “Naw. It’s some doctor from town.”

  “Grantland?”

  “I guess that’s his name.” He squinted at me sideways. “What kind of detective work do you do? Divorce?”

  “I have.”

  “Which one in the family hired you, anyway?”

  I didn’t want to go into that, so I gave him a wise look and drifted away. Dr. Grantland and Zinnie were climbing the front steps. As she passed him in the doorway, Zinnie looked up into his face. She inclined her body so that her breast touched his arm. He put the same arm around her shoulders, turned her away from him, and propelled her into the house.

  Without going out of my way to make a lot of noise, I mounted the veranda and approached the screen door. A carefully modulated male voice was saying:

  “You’re acting like a wild woman. You don’t have to be so conspicuous.”

  “I want to be. I want everyone to know.”

  “Including Jerry?”

  “Especially him.” Zinnie added illogically: “Anyway, he isn’t here.”

  “He soon will be. I passed him on the way out. You should have seen the look he gave me.”

  “He hates anybody to pass him.”

  “No, there was more to it than that. Are you sure you haven’t told him about us?”

  “I wouldn’t tell him the time of day.”

  “What’s this about wanting everybody to know then?”

  “I didn’t mean anything. Except that I love you.”

  “Be quiet. Don’t even say it. You could throw everything away, just when I’ve got it practically made.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you afterwards. Or perhaps I won’t tell you at all. It’s working out, and that’s all you need to know. Anyway, it will work out, if you can act like a sensible human being.”

  “Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

  “Then remember who you are, and who I am. I’m thinking about Martha. You should be, too.”

  “Yes. I forget her sometimes, when I’m with you. Thank you for reminding me, Charlie.”

  “Not Charlie. Doctor. Call me doctor.”

  “Yes, Doctor.” She made the word sound erotic. “Kiss me once, Doctor. It’s been a long time.”

  Having won his point, he became bland. “If you insist, Mrs. Hallman.”

  She moaned. I walked to the end of the veranda, feeling a little let down because Zinnie’s vivacity hadn’t been for me. I lit a consolatory cigarette.

  At the side of the house, childish laughter bubbled. I leaned on the railing and looked around the corner. Mildred and her niece were playing a game of catch with a tennisball. At least it was catch for Mildred, when Martha threw the ball anywhere near her. Mildred rolled the ball to the child, who scampered after it like a small utility in-fielder in fairy blue. For the first time since I’d met her, Mildred looked relaxed.

  A gray-haired woman in a flowered dress was watching them from a chaise longue in the shade. She called out:

  “Martha! You mustn’t get overtired. And keep your dress clean.”

  Mildred turned on the older woman: “Let her get dirty if she likes.”

  But the spell of the game was broken. Smiling a perverse little smile, the child picked up the ball and threw it over the picket fence that surrounded the lawn. It bounced out of sight among the orange trees.

  The woman on the chaise longue raised her voice again:

  “Now look what you’ve done, you naughty girl—you’ve gone and lost the ball.”

  “Naughty girl,” the child repeated shrilly, and began to chant: “Martha’s a naughty girl, Martha’s a naughty girl.”

  “You’re not, you’re a nice girl,” Mildred said. “The ball isn’t lost. I’ll find it.”

  She started for the gate in the picket fence. I opened my mouth to warn her not to go into the trees. But something was going on in the driveway behind me. Car wheels crunched in the ground, and slid to a stop. I turned and saw that it was a new lavender Cadillac with gold trim.

  The man who got out of the driver’s seat was wearing fuzzy tweeds. His hair and eyes had the same coloring as Carl, but he was older, fatter, shorter. Instead of hospital pallor, his face was full of angry blood.

  Zinnie came out on the veranda to meet him. Unfortunately her lipstick was smeared. Her eyes looked feverish.

  “Jerry, thank God you’re here!” The dramatic note sounded wrong, and she lowered her voice: “I’ve been worried sick. Where on earth have you been all day?”

  He stumped up the steps and faced her, not quite as tall as she was on her heels. “I haven’t been gone all day. I drove down to see Brockley at the hospital. Somebody had to give him the bawling-out he had coming to him. I told him what I thought of the loose way they run that place.”

  “Was that wise, dear?”

  “It was some satisfaction, anyway. These bloody doctors! They take the public’s money and—” He jerked a thumb toward Grantland’s car: “Speaking of doctors, what’s he doing here? Is somebody sick?”

  “I thought you knew, about Carl. Didn’t Ostie stop you at the road?”

  “I saw his car there, he wasn’t in it. What about Carl?”

  “He’s on the ranch, carrying a gun.” Zinnie saw the shock on her husband’s face, and repeated: “I thought you knew. I thought that’s why you were staying away, because you’re afraid of Carl.”

  “I’m not afraid of him,” he said, on a rising note.

  “You were, the day he left here. And you should be, after the things he said to you.” She added, with unconscious cruelty, perhaps not entirely unconscious: “I believe he wants to kill you, Jerry.”

  His hands clutched his stomach, as though she’d struck him a physical blow there. They doubled into fists.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You and Charlie Grantland?”

  The screen door rattled. Grantland came out on cue. He said with false joviality: “I thought I heard someone taking my name in vain. How are you, Mr. Hallman?”

  Jerry Hallman ignored him. He said to his wife: “I asked you a simple question. What’s he doing here?”

  “I’ll give you a simple answer. I had no man around I could trust to take Martha into town. So I called Dr. Grantland to chauffeur her. Martha is used to him.”

  Grantland had come up beside her. She turned and gave him a little smile, her smudged mouth doubling its meaning. Of the three, she and Grantland formed the paired unit. Her husband was the one who stood alone. As if he couldn’t bear that loneliness, he turned on his heel, walked stiffly down the veranda steps, and disappeared through the front door of the greenhouse.

  Grantland took a gray handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped Zinnie’s mouth. The center of her body swayed toward him.

  “Don’t,” he said urgently. “He kno
ws already. You must have told him.”

  “I asked him for a divorce—you know that—and he’s not a complete fool. Anyway, what does it matter?” She had the false assurance, or abandon, of a woman who has made a sexual commitment and swung her whole life from it like a trapeze. “Maybe Carl will kill him.”

  “Be quiet, Zin! Don’t even think it—!”

  His voice broke off. Her gaze had moved across me as he spoke, and telegraphed my presence to him. He turned on his toes like a dancer. The blood seeped out from underneath his tan. He might have been a beady-eyed old man with jaundice. Then he pulled himself together and smiled—a downward-turning smile but a confident one. It was unsettling to see a man’s face change so rapidly and radically.

  I threw away the butt of my cigarette, which seemed to have lasted for a long time, and smiled back at him. Felt from inside, like a rubber Halloween mask, my smile was a stiff grimace. Jerry Hallman relieved my embarrassment, if that is what I was feeling. He came hustling out of the greenhouse with a pair of shears in his hand, a dull blotched look on his face.

  Zinnie saw him, and backed against the wall. “Charlie! Look out!”

  Grantland turned to face Jerry as he came up the steps, a dumpy middle-aging man who couldn’t stand loneliness. His eyes had a very solitary expression. The shears projected outward from the grip of his two hands, gleaming in the sun, like a double dagger.

  “Yah, Charlie!” he said. “Look out! You think you can get away with my wife and my daughter both. You’re taking nothing of mine.”

  “I had no such intention.” Grantland stuttered over the words. “Mrs. Hallman telephoned—”

  “Don’t ‘Mrs. Hallman’ me. You don’t call her that in town. Do you?” Standing at the top of the steps with his legs planted wide apart, Jerry Hallman opened and closed the shears. “Get out of here, you lousy cod. If you want to go on being a man, get off my property and stay off my property. That includes my wife.”

  Grantland had put on his old-man face. He backed away from the threatening edges and looked for support to Zinnie. Green-faced in the shadow, she stood still as a bas-relief against the wall. Her mouth worked, and managed to say:

  “Stop it, Jerry. You’re not making sense.”

  Jerry Hallman was at that trembling balance point in human rage where he might have alarmed himself into doing murder. It was time for someone to stop it. Shouldering Grantland out of my way, I walked up to Hallman and told him to put the shears down.

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?” he sputtered.

  “You’re Mr. Jerry Hallman, aren’t you? I heard you were a smart man, Mr. Hallman.”

  He looked at me stubbornly. The whites of his eyes were yellowish from some internal complaint, bad digestion or bad conscience. Something deep in his head looked out through his eyes at me, gradually coming forward into light. Fear and shame, perhaps. His eyes seemed to be puzzled by dry pain. He turned and went down the steps and into the greenhouse, slamming the door behind him. Nobody followed him.

  chapter 11

  VOICES rose on the far side of the house, as if another door had opened there. Female and excited, they sounded like chickens after a hawk has swooped. I ran down the steps and around the end of the veranda. Mildred came across the lawn toward me, holding the little girl’s hand. Mrs. Hutchinson trailed behind them, her head turned at an angle toward the groves, her face as gray as her hair. The gate in the picket fence was open, but there was no one else in sight.

  The child’s voice rose high and penetrating. “Why did Uncle Carl run away?”

  Mildred turned and bent over her. “It doesn’t matter why. He likes to run.”

  “Is he mad at you, Aunt Mildred?”

  “Not really, darling. He’s just playing a game.”

  Mildred looked up and saw me. She shook her head curtly: I wasn’t to say anything to frighten the child. Zinnie swept past me and lifted Martha in her arms. The deputy Carmiehael was close behind her, unhitching his gun.

  “What happened, Mrs. Hallman? Did you see him?”

  She nodded, but waited to speak till Zinnie had carried the little girl out of hearing. Mildred’s forehead was bright with sweat, and she was breathing rapidly. I noticed that she had the ball in her hand.

  The gray-haired woman elbowed her way into the group. “I saw him, sneaking under the trees. Martha saw him, too.”

  Mildred turned on her. “He wasn’t sneaking, Mrs. Hutchinson. He picked up the ball and brought it to me. He came right up to me.” She displayed the ball, as if it was important evidence of her husband’s gentleness.

  Mrs. Hutchinson said: “I was never so terrified in my born days. I couldn’t even open my mouth to let out a scream.”

  The deputy was getting impatient. “Hold it, ladies. I want a straight story, and fast. Did he threaten you, Mrs. Hallman—attack you in any way?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “I did most of the talking. I tried to persuade Carl to come in and give himself up. When he wouldn’t, I put my arms around him, to try and hold him. He was too strong for me. He broke away, and I ran after him. He wouldn’t come back.”

  “Did he show his gun?”

  “No.” She looked down at Carmichael’s gun. “Please, don’t use your gun if you see my husband. I don’t believe he’s armed.”

  “Maybe not,” Carmichael said noncommittally. “Where did all this happen?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  She turned and started toward the open gate, moving with a kind of dogged gallantry. It wasn’t quite enough to hold her up. Suddenly she went to her knees and crumped sideways on the lawn, a small dark-suited figure with spilled brown hair. The ball rolled out of her hand. Carmichael knelt beside her, shouting as if mere loudness could make her answer:

  “Which way did he go?”

  Mrs. Hutchinson waved her arm toward the groves. “Right through there, in the direction of town.”

  The young deputy got up and ran through the gateway in the picket fence. I ran after him, with some idea of trying to head off violence. The ground under the trees was adobe, soft and moist with cultivation. I never had gone well on a heavy track. The deputy was out of sight. After a while he was out of hearing, too. I slowed down and stopped, cursing my obsolescent legs.

  It was purely a personal matter between me and my legs, because running couldn’t accomplish anything, anyway. When I thought about it, I realized that a man who knew the country could hide for days on the great ranch. It would take hundreds of searchers to beat him out of the groves and canyons and creekbeds.

  I went back the way I had come, following my own footmarks. Five of my walking steps, if I stretched my legs, equaled three of my running steps. I crossed other people’s tracks, but had no way to identify them. Tracking wasn’t my forte, except on asphalt.

  After a long morning crowded with people under pressure, it was pleasant to be walking by myself in the green shade. Over my head, between the tops of the trees, a trickle of blue sky meandered. I let myself believe that there was no need to hurry, that trouble had been averted for the present. Carl had done no harm to anybody, after all.

  Back-tracking on the morning, I walked slower and slower. Brockley would probably say that it was unconscious drag, that I didn’t want to get back to the house. There seemed to be some truth in Mildred’s idea that a house could make people hate each other. A house, or the money it stood for, or the cannibalistic family hungers it symbolized.

  I’d run further than I’d realized, perhaps a third of a mile. Eventually the house loomed up through the trees. The yard was empty. Everything was remarkably still. One of the french doors was standing open. I went in. The dining-room had a curious atmosphere, unlived in and unlivable, like one of those three-walled rooms laid out in a museum behind silk rope: Provincial California Spanish, Pre-Atomic Era. The living-room, with its magazines and dirty glasses and Hollywood-Cubist furniture, had the same deserted quality.
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  I crossed the hallway and opened the door of a study lined with books and filing cabinets. The Venetian blinds were drawn. The room had a musty smell. A dark oil portrait of a bald old man hung on one wall. His eyes peered through the dimness at me, out of a lean rapacious face. Senator Hallman, I presumed. I closed the study door on him.

  I went through the house from front to back, and finally found two human beings in the kitchen. Mrs. Hutchinson was sitting at the kitchen table, with Martha on her knee. The elderly woman started at my voice. Her face had sharpened in the quarter-hour since I’d seen her. Her eyes were bleak and accusing.

  “What happened next?” Martha said.

  “Well, the little girl went to the nice old lady’s house, and they had tea-cakes.” Mrs. Hutchinson’s eyes stayed on me, daring me to speak. “Tea-cakes and chocolate ice cream, and the old lady read the little girl a story.”

  “What was the little girl’s name?”

  “Martha, just like yours.”

  “She couldn’t eat chocolate ice cream, ’cause of her algery.”

  “They had vanilla. We’ll have vanilla, too, with strawberry jam on top.”

  “Is Mummy coming?”

  “Not right away. She’ll be coming later.”

  “Is Daddy coming? I don’t want Daddy to come.”

  “Daddy won’t—” Mrs. Hutchinson’s voice broke off. “That’s the end of the story, dear.”

  “I want another story.”

  “We don’t have time.” She set the child down. “Now run into the living-room and play.”

  “I want to go into the greenhouse.” Martha ran to an inner door, and rattled the knob.

  “No! Stay here! Come back here!”

  Frightened by the woman’s tone, Martha returned, dragging her feet.

  “What’s the matter?” I said, though I thought I knew. “Where is everybody?”

  Mrs. Hutchinson gestured toward the door that Martha had tried to open. I heard a murmur of voices beyond it, like bees behind a wall. Mrs. Hutchinson rose heavily and beckoned me to her. Conscious of the child’s unwavering gaze, I leaned close to the woman’s mouth. She said: