The Doomsters (5 page)

“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 coffeetable 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 lightswitch. 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 coffeetable 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.

      M
ILDRED
H
ALLMAN’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 righthand 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 smokestains 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.”