The Doomsters (2 page)

I didn’t bother explaining that it was only an expression, which seemed to have hit the literal truth. “More than one of you broke out, eh?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes narrowed suspiciously, still watching my face.

“Where are the others, Carl?”

“There’s only the one other,” he said haltingly. “Who he is doesn’t matter. You’ll read about it in the papers, anyway.”

“Not necessarily. They don’t publicize these things unless the escapees are dangerous.”

      I
LET
that last word hang in the silence, turning this way and that, a question and a threat and a request. Carl Hallman looked at the window over the sink, where morning shone unhampered. Sounds of sporadic
traffic came from the street. He turned to look at the door he had come in by. His body was taut, and the cords in his neck stood out. His face was thoughtful.

He got up suddenly, in a brusque movement which sent his chair over backwards, crossed in two strides to the door. I said sharply:

“Pick up the chair.”

He paused with his hand on the knob, tension vibrating through him. “Don’t give me orders. I don’t take orders from you.”

“It’s a suggestion, boy.”

“I’m not a boy.”

“To me you are. I’m forty. How old are you?”

“It’s none of your—” He paused, in conflict with himself. “I’m twenty-four.”

“Act your age, then. Pick up the chair and sit down and we’ll talk this over. You don’t want to go on running.”

“I don’t intend to. I never wanted to. It’s just—I have to get home and clean up the mess. Then I don’t care what happens to me.”

“You should. You’re young. You have a wife, and a future.”

“Mildred deserves someone better than me—than I. My future is in the past.”

But he turned from the door, from the bright and fearful morning on the other side of it, and picked up the chair and sat in it. I sat on the kitchen table, looking down at him. His tension had wrung sweat out of his body. It stood in droplets on his face, and darkened the front of his shirt. He said very youngly:

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“What I think doesn’t matter, I’m not your head-shrinker. But if you are, you need the hospital. If you’re not, this is a hell of a way to prove you’re not. You should go back and get yourself checked out.”

“Go back? You must be cr—” He caught himself.

I laughed in his face, partly because I thought he was funny and partly because I thought he needed it. “I must be crazy? Go ahead and say it. I’m not proud. I’ve got a friend in psychiatry who says they should build mental hospitals with hinged corners. Every now and then they should turn them inside out, so the people on the outside are in, and the people on the inside are out. I think he’s got something.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“What if I am? It’s a free country.”

“Yes, it is a free country. And you can’t make me go back there.”

“I think you should. This way, you’re headed for more trouble.”

“I can’t go back. They’d never let me out, now.”

“They will when you’re ready. If you turn yourself in voluntarily, it shouldn’t go against you very hard. When did you break out?”

“Last night—early last evening, after supper. We didn’t exactly break out. We piled the benches against the wall of the courtyard. I hoisted the other fellow up to the top and he helped me up after him, with a knotted sheet. We got away without being seen, I think. Tom—the other fellow—had a car waiting. They gave me a ride part of the way. I walked the rest.”

“Do you have a special doctor you can see, if you go back?”

“Doctor!” It was a dirty word in his vocabulary. “I’ve seen too many doctors. They’re all a bunch of shysters, and Dr. Grantland is the worst of them. He shouldn’t even be allowed to practice.”

“Okay, we’ll take away his license.”

He looked up, startled. He was easy to startle. Then anger rose in him. “You don’t take me seriously. I came to
you for help in a serious matter, and all I get is cheap wisecracks. It makes me mad.”

“All right. It’s a free country.”

“God damn you.”

I let that pass. He sat with his head down for several minutes, holding himself still. Finally he said: “My father was Senator Hallman of Purissima. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“I read in the papers that he died last spring.”

He nodded jerkily. “They locked me up the next day, and wouldn’t even let me go to his funeral. I know I blew my top, but they had no right to do that. They did it because they didn’t want me snooping.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“Jerry and Zinnie. Zinnie is my sister-in-law. She’s always hated me, and Jerry’s under her thumb. They want to keep me shut up for the rest of their lives, so that they can have the property to themselves.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve had a lot of time to think. I’ve been putting things together for six months. When I got the word on Dr. Grantland—Well, it’s obvious they paid him to have me committed. They may even have paid him to kill Father.”

“I thought your father’s death was accidental.”

“It was, according to Dr. Grantland.” Carl’s eyes were hot and sly, and I didn’t like the look of them. “It’s possible it really was an accident. But I happen to know that Dr. Grantland has a bad record. I just found that out last week.”

It was hard to tell if he was fantasying. Like any other private detective, I’d had to do with my share of mental cases, but I was no expert. Sometimes even the experts had a hard time distinguishing between justified suspicion and paranoid symptoms. I tried to stay neutral:

“How did you get the word on Dr. Grantland?”

“I promised never to divulge that fact. There’s a—there are other people involved.”

“Have you talked to anybody else about these suspicions of yours?”

“I talked to Mildred, last time she visited me. Last Sunday. I couldn’t say very much, with those hospital eavesdroppers around. I don’t
know
very much. It’s why I had to
do
something.” He was getting tense again.

“Take it easy, Carl. Do you mind if I talk to your wife?”

“What about?”

“Things in general. Your family. You.”

“I don’t object if she doesn’t.”

“Where does she live?”

“On the ranch, outside Purissima—No, she doesn’t live there now. After I went to the hospital, Mildred couldn’t go on sharing the house with Jerry and Zinnie. So she moved back into Purissima, with her mother. They live at 220 Grant—but I’ll show you, I’ll come along.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But I must. There are so many things to be cleared up. I can’t wait any longer.”

“You’re going to have to wait, if you want my help. I’ll make you a proposition, Carl. Let me take you back to the hospital. It’s more or less on the way to Purissima. Then I’ll talk to your wife, see what she thinks about these suspicions of yours—”

“She doesn’t take me seriously, either.”

“Well, I do. Up to a point. I’ll circulate and find out what I can. If there’s any real indication that your brother’s trying to cheat you, or that Dr. Grantland pitched any low curves, I’ll do something about it. Incidentally, I charge fifty a day and expenses.”

“I have no money now. I’ll have plenty when I get what’s coming to me.”

“Is it a deal then? You go back to the hospital, let me do the legwork?”

He gave me a reluctant yes. It was clear that he didn’t like the plan, but he was too tired and confused to argue about it.

      T
HE
morning turned hot and bright. The brown September hills on the horizon looked like broken adobe walls you could almost reach out and touch. My car went miles before the hills changed position.

As we drove through the valley, Carl Hallman talked to me about his family. His father had come west before the first war, with enough inherited money to buy a small orange grove outside of Purissima. The old man was a frugal Pennsylvania German, and by the time of his death he’d expanded his holdings to several thousand acres. The main single addition to the original grove had come from his wife, Alicia, who was the descendant of an old land-grant family.

I asked Carl if his mother was still alive.

“No. Mother died, a long time ago.”

He didn’t want to talk about his mother. Perhaps he had loved her too much, or not enough. He went on talking about his father instead, with a kind of rebellious passion, as though he was still living in his father’s shadow. Jeremiah Hallman had been a power in the county, to some extent in the state: founding head of the water association, secretary of the growers’ co-operative, head of his
party’s county central committee, state senator for a decade, and local political boss to the end of his life.

A successful man who had failed to transmit the genes of success to his two sons.

Carl’s older brother Jerry was a non-practicing lawyer. For a few months after he graduated from law school, Jerry had had his shingle out in Purissima. He’d lost several cases, made several enemies and no friends, and retired to the family ranch. There he consoled himself with a greenhouseful of cymbidium orchids and dreams of eventual greatness in some unnamed field of activity. Prematurely old in his middle thirties, Jerry was dominated by his wife, Zinnie, a blonde divorcee of uncertain origin who had married him five years ago.

Carl was bitter on the subject of his brother and sister-in-law, and almost equally bitter about himself. He believed that he’d failed his father all the way down the line. When Jerry petered out, the Senator planned to turn over the ranch to Carl, and sent Carl to Davis to study agriculture. Not being interested in agriculture, Carl flunked out. His real interest was philosophy, he said.

Carl managed to talk his father into letting him go to Berkeley. There he met his present wife, a girl he’d known in high school, and shortly after his twenty-first birthday he married her, in spite of the family’s objections. It was a dirty trick to play on Mildred. Mildred was another of the people he had failed. She thought that she was getting a whole man, but right at the start of their marriage, within a couple of months, he had his first big breakdown.

Carl spoke in bitter self-contempt. I took my eyes from the road and looked at him. He wouldn’t meet my look:

“I didn’t mean to tell you about my other—that other breakdown. Anyway, it doesn’t prove I’m crazy. Mildred never thought I was, and she knows me better than anybody.
It was the strain I was under—working all day and studying half the night. I wanted to be something great, someone even Father would respect—a medical missionary or something like that. I was trying to get together enough credits for admission to medical school, and studying theology at the same time, and—Well, it was too much for me. I cracked up, and had to be taken home. So there we were.”

I glanced at him again. We’d passed through the last of the long string of suburbs, and were in the open country. To the right of the highway, the valley lay wide and peaceful under the bright sky, and the hills had stepped backwards into blueness. Carl was paying no attention to the external world. He had a queer air of being confined, almost as though he were trapped in the past, or in himself. He said:

“It was a rough two years, for all of us. Especially for Mildred. She did her best to put a good face on it, but it wasn’t what she had planned to do with her life, keeping house for in-laws in a dead country hole. And I was no use to her. For months I was so depressed that I could hardly bear to get up and face the daylight. What there was of it. I know it can’t be true, but the way I remember those months, it was cloudy and dark every day. So dark that I could hardly see to shave when I got up at noon.

“The other people in the house were like gray ghosts around me, even Mildred, and I was the grayest ghost of all. Even the house was rotting away. I used to wish for an earthquake, to knock it down and bury us all at once—Father and me and Mildred and Jerry and Zinnie. I thought a good deal about killing myself, but I didn’t have the gumption.

“If I’d had any gumption, or any sense, I’d have gone for treatment then. Mildred wanted me to, but I was too ashamed to admit I needed it. Father wouldn’t have stood
for it, anyway. It would have disgraced the family. He thought psychiatry was a confidence game, that all I really needed was hard work. He kept telling me that I was pampering myself, just as Mother had, and that I’d come to the same bad end if I didn’t get out in the open air and make a man of myself.”

He snickered dolefully, and paused. I wanted to ask him how his mother had died. I hesitated to. The boy was digging pretty deep as it was, and I didn’t want him to break through into something he couldn’t handle. Since he’d told me of his earlier breakdown and the suicidal depression that followed it, my main idea was to get him back to the hospital in one mental piece. It was only a few miles more to the turnoff, and I could hardly wait.

“Eventually,” Carl was saying, “I did go to work on the ranch. Father had been slowing down, with some sort of heart condition, and I took over some of his supervisory duties. I didn’t mind the work itself, out in the groves with the pickers, and I suppose it did me some good at that. But in the long run it only led to more trouble.

“Father and I could never see eye to eye on anything. He was in orange-growing to make money, the more money the better. He never thought in terms of the human cost. I couldn’t stand to see the way the orange-pickers were treated. Whole families, men and women and kids, herded into open trucks and hauled around like cattle. Paid by the box, hired by the day, then shunted on their way. A lot of them were wetbacks, without any legal rights. Which suited Father fine. It didn’t suit me at all. I told Father what I thought of his lousy labor policy. I told him that this was a civilized country in the middle of the twentieth century and he had no right to push people around like peons, cut them off from employment if they asked for a living wage. I told him he was a spoiled
old man, and I wasn’t going to sit idly by and let him oppress the Mexican people, and defraud the Japanese!”