The Doomsters (20 page)

“Did I say that? I didn’t mean it that way.”

There was a breathing silence.

“How did you mean it?”

“I wasn’t trying to pin down any exact time. What I said was in a general manner of speaking.”

“Did
she have it on the day of her death?”

“I can’t remember. It was a long time ago—more than three years. It doesn’t matter, anyway.” Her statement had the force of a question. Her gray head turned toward me, the skin of her neck stretched in diagonal folds like recalcitrant material being twisted under great pressure.

“Do you know what happened to Mrs. Hallman’s gun?”

“I never was told, no. For all I know it’s safe at the bottom of the ocean.”

“Mrs. Hallman had it the night she drowned herself?”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t know.”

“Did she drown herself?”

“Sure she did. But I couldn’t swear to it. I didn’t see her jump in.” Her pale gaze was still on me, cold and watchful under slack folded lids. “What is it that’s so important about her gun? Do you know where it is?”

“Don’t you?”

The strain was making her irritable. “I wouldn’t be asking you if I knew all about it, would I?”

“The gun is in an evidence case in the sheriff’s office. It
was used to shoot Jerry Hallman today. It’s strange you don’t know that, Mrs. Hutchinson.”

“How would I know what they shot him with?” But the color of confusion had deepened in her face. Its vessels were purplish and congested with the hot shame of an unpracticed barefaced liar. “I didn’t even hear the shot, let alone see it happen.”

“There were two shots.”

“That’s news to me. I didn’t hear either one of them. I was in the front room with Martha, and she was playing with that silver bell of her mother’s. It drowned out everything.”

The old woman sat in a listening attitude, screwing up her face as if she was hearing the shots now, after a long delay. I was certain that she was lying. Apart from the evidence of her face, there was at least one discrepancy in her story. I scanned back across the rush and welter of the day, trying to pin it down, but without success. Too many words had been spilled. The sense of discrepancy persisted in my mind, a gap in the known through which the darkness threatened, like sea behind a dike.

Mrs. Hutchinson shuffled her slippered feet in token flight. “Are you trying to tell me I shot him?”

“I made no such accusation. I have to make one, though. You’re hiding something.”

“Me hide something? Why should I do that?”

“It’s the question I’m asking myself. Perhaps you’re protecting a friend, or think you are.”

“My friends don’t get into that kind of trouble,” she said angrily.

“Speaking of friends, have you known Dr. Grantland long?”

“Long enough. That doesn’t mean we’re friends.” She corrected herself hastily: “A special nurse doesn’t consider
herself friends with her doctors, not if she knows her place.”

“I gather he got you your job with the Hallmans.”

“He recommended me.”

“And he drove you into town today, shortly after the shooting.”

“He wasn’t doing it for me. He was doing it for
her.”

“I know that. Did he mention the shooting to you?”

“I guess he did. Yes. He mentioned it, said it was a terrible thing.”

“Did he mention the gun that was used?”

She hesitated before answering. The color left her face. Otherwise she was completely immobile, concentrating on what she would say and its possible implications. “No. Martha was with us, and all. He didn’t say anything about the gun.”

“It still seems queer to me. Grantland saw the gun. He told me himself that he recognized it, but wasn’t certain of the identification. He must have known that you were familiar with it.”

“I’m no expert on guns.”

“You gave me a good description of it just now. In fact, you probably knew it as well as anyone alive. But Grantland didn’t say a word to you about it, ask you a single question. Or did he?”

There was another pause. “No. He didn’t say a word.”

“Have you seen Dr. Grantland since this afternoon?”

“What if I have?” she answered stolidly.

“Has Grantland been here tonight?”

“What if he was? Him coming here had nothing to do with me.”

“Who did it have to do with? Zinnie?”

Rose Parish stirred on the couch beside me, nudging my knee with hers. She made a small coughing noise of distress. This encouraged Mrs. Hutchinson, as perhaps it was
intended to. I could practically see her resistance solidifying. She sat like a monument in flowered silk:

“You’re trying to make me talk myself out of a job. I’m too old to get another job. I’ve got too much property to qualify for the pension, and not enough to live on.” After a pause, she said: “No! I’m falsifying myself. I could always get along someway. It’s Martha that keeps me on the job. If it wasn’t for her, I would have quit that house long ago.”

“Why?”

“It’s a bad-luck house, that’s why. It brings bad luck to everybody who goes there. Yes, and I’d be happy to see it burn to the ground like Sodom. That may sound like a terrible thing for a Christian woman to say. No loss of life; I wouldn’t wish that on them; there’s been loss of life enough. I’d just like to see that house destroyed, and that family scattered forevermore.”

I thought without saying it that Mrs. Hutchinson was getting her awesome wish.

“What are you leading up to?” I said. “I know the doctor and Zinnie Hallman are interested in each other. Is that the fact you’re trying to keep from spilling? Or is there more?”

She weighed me in the balance of her eyes.
“Just
who are you, Mister?”

“I’m a private detective—”

“I know that much. Who’re you detecting for? And who against?”

“Carl Hallman asked me to help him.”

“Carl did? How could that be?”

I explained briefly how it could be. “He was seen in your neighborhood tonight. It’s why Miss Parish and I came here to your house, to head off any possible trouble.”

“You think he might try and do something to the child?”

“It occurred to us as a possibility,” Rose Parish said. “I wouldn’t worry about it. We probably went off half-cocked. I honestly don’t believe that Carl would harm anyone.”

“What about his brother?”

“I don’t believe he shot his brother.” She exchanged glances with me. “Neither of us believes it.”

“I thought, from the paper and all, they had it pinned on him good.”

“It nearly always looks like that when they’re hunting a suspect,” I said.

“You mean it isn’t true?”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Somebody else did it?”

Her question hung unanswered in the room. An inner door at the far end was opening slowly, softly. Martha slipped in through the narrow aperture. Elfin in blue sleepers, she scampered into the middle of the room, stood and looked at us with enormous eyes.

Mrs. Hutchinson said: “Go back to bed, you minx.”

“I won’t. I’m not sleepy.”

“Come on, I’ll tuck you in.”

The old woman rose ponderously and made a grab for the child, who evaded her.

“I want Mommy to tuck me in. I want my Mommy.”

In the middle of her complaint, Martha stopped in front of Rose Parish. A reaching innocence, like an invisible antenna, stretched upward from her face to the woman’s face, and was met by a similar reaching innocence. Rose opened her arms. Martha climbed into them.

“You’re bothering the lady,” Mrs. Hutchinson said.

“She’s no bother, are you, honey?”

The child was quiet against her breast. We sat in silence for a bit. The tick of thought continued like a tiny stitching in my consciousness or just below it, trying to piece
together the rags and bloody tatters of the day. My thoughts threatened the child, the innocent one, perhaps the only one who was perfectly innocent. It wasn’t fair that her milk teeth should be set on edge.

      N
OISES
from outside, random voices and the scrape of boots, pulled me out of my thoughts and to the door. A guerrilla formation of men carrying rifles and shotguns went by in the street. A second, smaller group was fanning out across the vacant lots toward the creekbed, probing the tree-clotted darkness with their flashlights.

The man directing the second group wore some kind of uniform. I saw when I got close to him that he was a city police sergeant.

“What’s up, Sergeant?”

“Manhunt. We got a lunatic at large in case you don’t know it.”

“I know it.”

“If you’re with the posse, you’re supposed to be searching farther up the creek.”

“I’m a private detective working on this case. What makes you think that Hallman’s on this side of the highway?”

“The carhop at the Barn says he came through the culvert. He came up the creek from the beach, and the chances are he’s following it right on up. He may be long gone by now, though. She was slow in passing the word to us.”

“Where does the creekbed lead to?”

“Across town.” He pointed east with his flashlight. “All the way to the mountains, if you stay with it. But he won’t get that far, not with seventy riflemen tracking him.”

“If he’s gone off across town, why search around here?”

“We can’t take chances with him. He may be lying doggo. We don’t have the trained men to go through all the houses and yards, so we’re concentrating on the creek.” His light came up to my face for a second. “You want to pitch in and help?”

“Not right now.” With seventy hunters after a single buck, conditions would be crowded. “I left my red hat home.”

“Then you’re taking up my time, fellow.”

The sergeant moved off among the trees. I walked to the end of the block and crossed the highway, six lanes wide at this point.

The Red Barn was a many-windowed building which stood in the center of a blacktop lot on the corner. Its squat pentagonal structure was accentuated by neon tubing along the eaves and corners. Inside this brilliant red cage, a tall-hatted short-order cook kept several waitresses running between his counter and the cars in the lot. The waitresses wore red uniforms and little red caps which made them look like bellhops in skirts. The blended odors of gasoline fumes and frying grease changed in my nostrils to a foolish old hot-rod sorrow, nostalgia for other drive-ins along roads I knew in prewar places before people started dying on me.

It seemed that my life had dwindled down to a series of one-night stands in desolate places. Watch it, I said to myself; self-pity is the last refuge of little minds and aging professional hardnoses. I knew the desolation was my own. Brightness had fallen from my interior air.

A boy and a girl in a hand-painted lavender Chevrolet coupé made me feel better, for some reason. They were sitting close, like a body with two ducktailed heads, taking alternate sips of malted milk from the same straw, germ-free with love. Near them in a rusty Hudson a man in a workshirt, his dark and hefty wife, three or four children whose eyes were brilliant and bleary with drive-in-movie memories, were eating mustard-dripping hot dogs with the rapt solemnity of communicants.

Among the half-dozen other cars, one in particular interested me. It was a fairly new Plymouth two-door with Purissima
Record
lettered across the door. I walked over for a closer look.

A molded prewar Ford with a shackled rear end and too much engine came off the highway on banshee tires and pulled up beside the Plymouth. The two boys in the front seat looked me over with bold and planless eyes and forgot about me. I was a pedestrian, earth-borne. While they were waiting for a carhop, they occupied themselves with combing and rearranging their elaborate hair-structures. This process took a long time, and continued after one of the waitresses came up to the side of their car. She was a little blonde, pert-breasted in her tight uniform.

“Drive much?” she said to the boys. “I saw you come into the lot. You want to kill it before it multiplies.”

“A lecture,” the boy at the wheel said.

The other boy leaned toward her. “It said on the radio Gwen saw the killer.”

“That’s right, she’s talking to the reporter now.”

“Did he pull a gun on her?”

“Nothing like that. She didn’t even know he
was
the killer.”

“What did he do?” the driver said. He sounded very eager, as if he was seeking some remarkable example to emulate.

“Nothing. He was poking around in the garbage pails. When he saw her, he took off. Listen, kids, I’m busy. What’ll it be?”

“You got a big George, George?” the driver asked his passenger.

“Yeah, I’m loaded. We’ll have the usual, barbecued baby and double martinis. On second thought, make it a couple of cokes.”

“Sure, kids, have yourselves a blast.” She came around the Plymouth to me. “What can I do for you, sir?”

I realized I was hungry. “Bring me a hamburger, please.”

“Deluxe, Stackburger, or Monarch? Monarchburger is the seventy-five-center. It’s bigger, and you get free potatoes with it.”

“Free potatoes sounds good.”

“You can eat it inside if you want.”

“Is Gwen inside? I want to talk to her.”

“I wondered if you were plainclothes. Gwen’s out behind with Gene Slovekin from the paper. He wanted to take her picture.”

She indicated an open gate in the grapestake fence that surrounded the rear of the lot. There were several forty-gallon cans beside the gate. I looked into the nearest one. It was half full of a greasy tangle of food and other waste. Carl Hallman was hard-pressed.

On the other side of the gate, a footpath led along the bank of the creek. The dry bed of the creek was lined with concrete here, and narrowed down to a culvert which ran under the highway. This was high enough for a man to walk upright through it.

Slovekin and the carhop were coming back along the path toward me. She was thirtyish and plump; her body looked like a ripe tomato in her red uniform. Slovekin was carrying a camera with a flashbulb attachment. His
tie was twisted, and he walked as if he was tired. I waited for them beside the gate.