The Chill (31 page)

It wouldn’t make sense, of course, for Bradshaw to divorce her and remarry her immediately. But I had only Bradshaw’s word for his recent marriage to Laura. I was gradually realizing that his word stretched like an elastic band, and was as easily broken. I looked up Laura’s address—she lived in College
Heights—and was copying it into my notebook when the phone rang.

It was Jerry Marks. McGee denied having told the woman Tish or anyone else about the affair between Bradshaw and his wife. The only one he had discussed the subject with was Bradshaw.

“Bradshaw may have told the woman himself,” I said. “Or possibly the woman overheard McGee.”

“Possibly, but hardly likely. McGee says his conversation with Bradshaw took place in Bradshaw’s house.”

“He could have had the woman there while his mother was away.”

“You think she lives around here?”

“Somewhere in Southern California, anyway. I believe Bradshaw’s been leading a split-level life with her, and that she’s responsible for both the McGee and the Haggerty killings. I just got an improved description of her from Bradshaw’s mother. Better pass it along to the police. Do you have something to write on?”

“Yes. I’m sitting at the Sheriff’s desk.”

I recited Letitia Macready’s description, but I didn’t say anything about Laura Sutherland. I wanted to talk to her myself.

College Heights was a detached suburb on the far side of the campus from the city. It was a hodgepodge of tract houses and fraternity houses, duplexes and apartment buildings, interspersed with vacant lots sprouting for-sale signs. A boy with a guitar in one of the lighted fraternity houses was singing that this land belongs to you and me.

Laura lived in one of the better apartments, a garden apartment built around an open court with a swimming pool. A shirt-sleeved man slapping mosquitoes in a deck chair by the pool pointed out her door to me and mentioned with some complacency that he owned the place.

“Is anybody with her?”

“I don’t think so. She did have a visitor, but he went home”

“Who was he?”

The man peered up at my face. “That’s her private business, mister.”

“I expect it was Dean Bradshaw, from the college.”

“If you know, why ask?”

I walked to the back of the court and knocked on her door. She opened it on a chain. Her face had lost a good deal of its rosy beauty. She had on a dark suit, as if she was in mourning.

“What do you want? It’s late.”

“Too late for us to have a talk, Mrs. Bradshaw?”

“I’m not Mrs. Bradshaw,” she said without much conviction. “I’m not married.”

“Roy said you were last night. Which one of you is lying?”

“Please, my landlord’s out there.” She unchained the door and stepped back out of the widening light. “Come inside if you must.”

She closed the door and chained it behind me. I was looking at her instead of the room, but I had the impression of a tastefully decorated place where shaded lights gleamed peacefully on wooden and ceramic surfaces. I was searching her face for traces of a past wholly different from her present. There were no visible traces, no cruel lines or pouches of dissipation. But she hadn’t much peace in her. She was watching me as though I was a burglar.

“What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid,” she said in a frightened voice. She tried to control it with her hand at her throat. “I resent your barging into my home and making personal remarks.”

“You invited me in, more or less.”

“Only because you were talking indiscreetly.”

“I called you by your married name. What’s your objection to it?”

“I
have
no objection,” she said with a wan smile. “I’m very proud of it. But my husband and I are keeping it a secret.”

“A secret from Letitia Macready?”

She showed no particular reaction to the name. I’d already given up on the idea that it could be hers. No matter how well preserved her body or her skin might be, she was clearly too young. When Bradshaw married Letitia, Laura couldn’t have been more than a girl in her teens.

“Letitia who?” she said.

“Letitia Macready. She’s also known as Tish.”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“III tell you if you really want to know. May I sit down?”

“Please do,” she said without much warmth. I was the messenger who brought bad tidings, the kind they used to kill in the old days.

I sat on a soft leather hassock with my back against the wall. She remained standing.

“You’re in love with Roy Bradshaw, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t have married him if I weren’t.”

“Just when did you marry him?”

“Two weeks ago last Saturday, September the tenth.” A little color returned to her cheeks with the memory of the day. “He’d just got back from his European tour. We decided to go to Reno on the spur of the moment.”

“Had you spent some time with him there earlier in the summer?”

She frowned in a puzzled way, and shook her head.

“Whose idea was it to go to Reno?”

“Roy’s of course, but I was willing. I’ve been willing for some time,” she added in a spurt of candor.

“What held up the marriage?”

“It wasn’t held
up
, exactly. We postponed it, for various reasons. Mrs. Bradshaw is a very possessive mother, and Roy has nothing of his own except his salary. It may sound mercenary—” She paused in some embarrassment, and tried to think of a better way to phrase it.

“How old is his mother?”

“Somewhere in her sixties. Why?”

“She’s a vigorous woman, in spite of her infirmities. She may be around for a long time yet.”

Her eyes flashed with some of their fine old iceberg fire. “We’re not waiting for her to die, if that’s what you think. We’re simply waiting for the psychological moment. Roy hopes to persuade her to take a more reasonable view of—of me. In the meantime—” She broke off, and looked at me distrustfully. “But none of this is any concern of yours. You promised to tell me about the Macready person, whoever she is. Tish Macready? The name sounds fictitious.”

“I assure you the woman isn’t. Your husband divorced her in Reno shortly before he married you.”

She moved to a chair and sat down very suddenly, as if her legs had lost their strength. “I don’t believe it. Roy has never been married before.”

“He has, though. Even his mother admitted it, after a struggle. It was an unfortunate marriage, contracted when he was a student at Harvard. But he waited until this summer to end it. He spent part of July and all of August establishing residence in Nevada.”

“Now I know you’re mistaken. Roy was in Europe all that time.”

“I suppose you have letters and postcards to prove it?”

“Yes, I do,” she said with a relieved smile.

She went into another room and came back with a handful of mail tied with a red ribbon. I riffled through the postcards and put them in chronological order: Tower of London (postmarked London, July 18), Bodleian Library (Oxford, July 21), and so on down to the view of the English Gardens (Munich, August 25). Bradshaw had written on the back of this last card:

I sat and reread the incredible message. It was almost word by word the same as the one Mrs. Bradshaw had shown me. I tried to put myself in Bradshaw’s place, to understand his motive. But I couldn’t imagine what helpless division in a man’s nature, what weary self-mockery or self-use, would make him send identical lying postcards to his mother and his fiancée.

“What’s the matter?” Laura said.

“Merely everything.”

I gave her back her documents. She handled them lovingly. “Don’t try to tell me Roy didn’t write these. They’re in his writing and his style.”

“He wrote them in Reno,” I said, “and shipped them for remailing to a friend or accomplice who was traveling in Europe.”

“Do you
know
this?”

“I’m afraid I do. Can you think of any friend of his who might have helped him?”

She bit her lower lip. “Dr. Godwin spent the late summer traveling in Europe. He and Roy are very close. In fact Roy was his patient for a long time.”

“What was Godwin treating him for?”

“We haven’t discussed it, really, but I expect it had something to do with his excessive—his excessive dependence on
his mother.” A slow angry flush mounted from her neck to her cheekbones. She turned away from the subject. “But why would two grown men collaborate in such a silly letter-writing game?”

“It isn’t clear. Your husband’s professional ambitions probably enter into it. He obviously didn’t want anyone to know about his previous, bad marriage, or his divorce, and he went to great lengths to keep everything quiet. He got off a similar set of European postcards and letters to his mother. He may have sent a third set to Letitia.”

“Who
is
she?
Where
is she?”

“I think she’s here in town, or was as recently as last Friday night. She’s very likely been here for the last ten years. I’m surprised your husband never gave it away, even to someone as close as you.”

She was still standing over me, and I looked up into her face. Her eyes were heavy. She shook her head.

“Or maybe it isn’t so surprising. He’s very good at deceiving people, living on several levels, maybe deceiving himself to a certain extent. Mother’s boys get that way sometimes. They need their little escape hatches from the hothouse.”

Her bosom rose. “He isn’t a mother’s boy. He may have had a problem when he was younger, but now he’s a virile man, and I
know
he loves me. There must be a reason for all this.” She looked down at the cards and letters in her hand.

“I’m sure there is. I suspect the reason has to do with our two murders. Tish Macready is the leading suspect for both of them.”

“
Two
murders?”

“Actually there have been three, spaced over a period of twenty-two years: Helen Haggerty on Friday night, Constance McGee ten years ago, Luke Deloney in Illinois before the war.”

“Deloney?”

“Luke Deloney. You wouldn’t know about him, but I think Tish Macready does.”

“Is he connected with the Mrs. Deloney at the Surf House?”

“She’s his widow. You know her?”

“Not personally. But Roy was talking to her on the telephone shortly before he left here.”

“What did he say?”

“Simply that he was coming over to see her. I asked him who she was, but he was in too great a hurry to explain.”

I got up. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll see if I can catch him at the hotel. I’ve been trying to catch him all day.”

“He was here, with me.” She smiled slightly, involuntarily, but her eyes were confused. “Please don’t tell him I told you. Don’t tell him I told you anything.”

“I’ll try, but it may come out.”

I moved to the door and tried to open it. The chain delayed my exit.

“Wait,” she said behind me. “I’ve remembered something-something he wrote in a book of poems he lent me.”

“What did he write?”

“Her name.”

She started into the other room. Her hip bumped the doorframe, and Bradshaw’s cards and letters fell from her hands. She didn’t pause to pick them up.

She returned with an open book and thrust it at me a little blindly. It was a well-worn copy of Yeats’s
Collected Poems
, open to the poem “Among School Children.” The first four lines of the fourth stanza were underlined in pencil, and Bradshaw had written in the margin beside them the single word, “Tish.”

I read the four lines to myself:

I wasn’t certain what they meant, and said so.

Laura answered bitterly: “It means that Roy still loves her. Yeats was writing about Maud Gonne—the woman he loved all his life. Roy may even have lent me the Yeats to let me know about Tish. He’s very subtle.”

“He probably wrote her name there long ago, and forgot about it. If he still loved her, he wouldn’t have divorced her and married you. I have to warn you, though, that your marriage may not be legal.”

“Not legal?” She was a conventional woman, and the possibility jarred her. “But we were married in Reno by a judge.”

“His divorce from Tish,” I said, “is probably voidable. I gather she wasn’t properly informed of Bradshaw’s action. Which means that under California law he’s still married to her if she wants it that way.”

Shaking her head, she took the book of poems from my hands and tossed it with some violence into a chair. A piece of paper fluttered from between the leaves. I picked it up from the floor.

It was another poem, in Bradshaw’s handwriting:

At breakfast I had read the same poem aloud to Arnie and Phyllis. It had been printed twenty-odd years ago in the Bridgeton
Blazer
, over the initials G.R.B. I had a gestalt, and Bridgeton and Pacific Point came together in a roaring traffic of time. G.R.B. George Roy Bradshaw.

“When did he write this poem to you, Laura?”

“Last spring, when he lent me the Yeats.”

I left her reading it over to herself, trying to recapture the spring.

P
ASSING THROUGH
the lobby of the Surf House, I noticed Helens mother sitting by herself in a far corner. She was deep in thought and she didn’t look up until I spoke: