The Doomsters (28 page)

“Yes. Suddenly I saw what I had done. Especially to Carl. It was my fault he was being hunted like a murderer. I was the murderer. I saw what I was, and I wanted to put an end to myself before I killed more people.”

“What people are you talking about?”

Averting her face, she stared fixedly at the rumpled pillow at the head of the bed.

“Were you planning to kill Carl? Is that why you sent us away to Mrs. Hutchinson’s, when he was already here?”

“No. It was Martha I was thinking about. I didn’t want anything to happen to Martha.”

“Who would hurt her if you didn’t?”

“I was afraid I would,” she said miserably. “It was one of the thoughts that came to me, that Martha had to be killed. Otherwise the whole thing made no sense.”

“And Carl too? Did he have to be killed?”

“I thought I could do it,” she said. “I stood over him with the knife in my hand for a long time while he was sleeping. I could say that I killed him in self-defense, and that he confessed all the murders before he died. I could get the house and the money all to myself, and pay off Dr. Grantland. Nobody else would suspect me.

“But I couldn’t go through with it,” she said. “I dropped the knife on the floor. I couldn’t hurt Carl, or Martha. I wanted them to live. It made the whole thing meaningless, didn’t it?”

“You’re wrong. The fact that you didn’t kill them is the only meaning left.”

“What difference does it make? From the night I killed Alicia and my baby, every day I’ve lived has been a crime against nature. There isn’t a person on the face of the earth who wouldn’t hate me if they knew about me.”

Her face was contorted. I thought she was trying not to cry. Then I thought she was trying to cry.

“I don’t hate you, Mildred. On the contrary.”

I was an ex-cop, and the words came hard. I had to say them, though, if I didn’t want to be stuck for the rest of my life with the old black-and-white picture, the idea that there were just good people and bad people, and everything would be hunky-dory if the good people locked up the bad ones or wiped them out with small personalized nuclear weapons.

It was a very comforting idea, and bracing to the ego. For years I’d been using it to justify my own activities, fighting fire with fire and violence with violence, running on fool’s errands while the people died: a slightly earth-bound Tarzan in a slightly paranoid jungle. Landscape with figure of a hairless ape.

It was time I traded the picture in on one that included a few of the finer shades. Mildred was as guilty as a girl could be, but she wasn’t the only one. An alternating current of guilt ran between her and all of us involved with her. Grantland and Rica, Ostervelt, and me. The redheaded woman who drank time under the table. The father who had deserted the household and died for it symbolically in the Senator’s bathtub. Even the Hallman family, the four victims, had been in a sense the victimizers, too. The current of guilt flowed in a closed circuit if you traced it far enough.

Thinking of Alicia Hallman and her open-ended legacy of death, I was almost ready to believe in her doomsters. If they didn’t exist in the actual world they rose from the depths of every man’s inner sea, gentle as night dreams, with the back-breaking force of tidal waves. Perhaps they existed in the sense that men and women were their own doomsters, the secret authors of their own destruction. You had to be very careful what you dreamed.

The wave of night had passed through Mildred and left her cold and shaking. I held her in my arms for a little while. The light outside the window had turned to morning. The green tree-branches moved in it. Wind blew through the leaves.

      I
TALKED
to Rose Parish at breakfast, in the cafeteria of the local hospital. Mildred was in another part of the same building, under city police guard and under sedation. Rose and I had insisted on these things, and got our way. There would be time enough for further interrogations, statements, prosecution and defense, for all the awesome ritual of the law matching the awesome ritual of her murders.

Carl had survived a two-hour operation, and wasn’t out from under the anesthetic. His prognosis was fair. Tom Rica was definitely going to live. He was resting in the men’s security ward after a night of walking. I wasn’t sure that Rose and the others who had helped to walk him, had done him any great favor.

Rose listened to me in silence, tearing her toast into small pieces and neglecting her eggs. The night had left bruises around her eyes, which somehow improved her looks.

“Poor girl,” she said, when I finished. “What will happen to her?”

“It’s a psychological question as much as a legal question. You’re the psychologist.”

“Not much of a one, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself. You really called the shots last night. When I was talking to Mildred, I remembered what you said about whole families breaking down together, but putting it off onto the weakest one. The scapegoat. Carl was the one you had in mind. In a way, though, Mildred is another.”

“I know. I’ve watched her, at the hospital, and again last night. I couldn’t miss her mask, her coldness, her not-being-there. But I didn’t have the courage to admit to myself that she was ill, let alone speak out about it.” She bowed her head over her uneaten breakfast, maltreating a fragment of toast between her fingers. “I’m a coward and a fraud.”

“I don’t understand why you say that.”

“I was jealous of her, that’s why. I was afraid I was projecting my own wish onto her, that all I wanted was to get her out of the way.”

“Because you’re in love with Carl?”

“Am I so obvious?”

“Very honest, anyway.”

In some incredible reserve of innocence, she found the energy to blush. “I’m a complete fake. The worst of it is, I intend to go right on being one. I don’t care if he is my patient, and married to boot. I don’t care if he’s ill or an invalid or anything else. I don’t care if I have to wait ten years for him.”

Her voice vibrated through the cafeteria. Its drab utilitarian spaces were filling up with white-coated interns, orderlies, nurses. Several of them turned to look, startled by the rare vibration of passion.

Rose lowered her voice. “You won’t misunderstand me. I expect to have to wait for Carl, and in the meantime I’m not forgetting his wife. I’ll do everything I can for her.”

“Do you think an insanity plea could be made to stick?”

“I doubt it. It depends on how sick she is. I’d guess, from what I’ve observed and what you tell me, that she’s borderline schizophrenic. Probably she’s been in-and-out for several years. This crisis may bring her completely out of it. I’ve seen it happen to patients, and she must have considerable ego strength to have held herself together for so long. But the crisis could push her back into very deep
withdrawal. Either way, there’s no way out for her. The most we can do is see that she gets decent treatment. Which I intend to do.”

“You’re a good woman.”

She writhed under the compliment. “I wish I were. At least I used to wish it. Since I’ve been doing hospital work, I’ve pretty well got over thinking in terms of good and bad. Those categories often do more harm than—well, good. We use them to torment ourselves, and hate ourselves because we can’t live up to them. Before we know it, we’re turning our hatred against other people, especially the unlucky ones, the weak ones who can’t fight back. We think we have to punish somebody for the human mess we’re in, so we single out the scapegoats and call them evil. And Christian love and virtue go down the drain.” She poked with a spoon at the cold brown dregs of coffee in her cup. “Am I making any sense, or do I just sound soft-headed?”

“Both. You sound soft-headed, and you make sense to me. I’ve started to think along some of the same lines.”

Specifically, I was thinking about Tom Rica: the hopeful boy he had been, and the man he had become, hopeless and old in his twenties. I vaguely remembered a time in between, when hope and despair had been fighting for him, and he’d come to me for help. The rest of it was veiled in an old alcoholic haze, but I knew it was ugly.

“It’s going to be a long time,” Rose was saying, “before people really know that we’re members of one another. I’m afraid they’re going to be terribly hard on Mildred. If only there were some mitigation, or if there weren’t so many. She killed so many.”

“There were mitigating circumstances in the first one—the one that started her off. A judge trying it by himself would probably call it justifiable homicide. In fact, I’m not even sure she did it.”

“Really?”

“You heard what Tom Rica said. He blamed that death on Grantland. Did he add anything to that in the course of the night?”

“No. I didn’t press him.”

“Did he do any talking at all?”

“Some.” Rose wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“What did he say?”

“It’s all rather vague. After all, I wasn’t taking notes.”

“Listen, Rose. There’s no point in trying to cover up for Tom, not at this late date. He’s been blackmailing Grantland for years. He broke out of the hospital with the idea of converting it into a big-time operation. Carl probably convinced him that Grantland had something to do with his father’s death, as well as his mother’s, and that there was a lot of money involved. Tom persuaded Carl to come over the wall with him. His idea was to pile more pressure on Grantland. In case Carl couldn’t boil up enough trouble by himself, Tom sent him to me.”

“I know.”

“Did Tom tell you?”

“If you really want to know, he told me a lot of things. Have you stopped to wonder why he picked on you?”

“We used to know each other. I guess my name stuck in his head.”

“More than your name stuck. When he was a boy in high school, you were his hero. And then you stopped being.” She reached across the littered table and touched the back of my hand. “I don’t mean to hurt you, Archer. Stop me if I am.”

“Go ahead. I didn’t know I was important to Tom.” But I was lying. I knew. You always know. On the firing range, in the gym, he even used to imitate my mistakes.

“He seems to have thought of you as a kind of foster-father. Then your wife divorced you, and there were some
things in the newspapers, he didn’t say what they were.”

“They were the usual. Or a little worse than the usual.”

“I am hurting you,” she said. “This sounds like an accusation, but it isn’t. Tom hasn’t forgotten what you did for him before your private trouble interfered. Perhaps it was unconscious on his part, but I believe he sent Carl to you in the hope that you could help him.”

“Which one? Tom or Carl?”

“Both of them.”

“If he thought that, how wrong he was.”

“I disagree. You’ve done what you can. It’s all that’s expected of anyone. You helped to save Carl’s life. I know you’ll do what you can for Tom, too. It’s why I wanted you to know what he said, before you talk to him.”

Her approval embarrassed me. I knew how far I had fallen short. “I’d like to talk to him now.”

The security ward occupied one end of a wing on the second floor. The policeman guarding the steel-sheathed door greeted Rose like an old friend, and let us through. The morning light was filtered through a heavy wire mesh screen over the single window of Tom’s cubicle.

He lay like a forked stick under the sheet, his arms inert outside it. Flesh-colored tape bound his hands and wrists. Except where the beard darkened it, his face was much paler than the tape. He bared his teeth in a downward grin:

“I hear you had a rough night, Archer. You were asking for it.”

“I hear you had a rougher one.”

“Tell me I asked for it. Cheer me up.”

“Are you feeling better?” Rose asked him.

He answered with bitter satisfaction: “I’m feeling worse. And I’m going to feel worse yet.”

“You’ve been through the worst already,” I said. “Why don’t you kick it permanently?”

“It’s easy to say.”

“You almost had it made when you were with us,” Rose said. “If I could arrange a few months in a federal hospital—”

“Save your trouble. I’d go right back on. It’s my meat and drink. When I kick it there’s nothing left, I know that now.”

“How long have you been on heroin?”

“Five or six hundred years.” He added, in a different, younger voice: “Right after I left high school. This broad I met in Vegas—” His voice sank out of hearing in his throat. He twitched restlessly, and rolled his head on the pillow, away from Rose and me and memory. “We won’t go into it.”

Rose moved to the door. “I’ll go and see how Carl is.”

I said, when the door had closed behind her: “Was it Maude who got you started on horse, Tom?”

“Naw, she’s death on the stuff. She was the one that made me go to the hospital. She could have sprung me clean.”

“I hear you saying it.”

“It’s the truth. She got my charge reduced from possession so they’d send me up for treatment.”

“How could she do that?”

“She’s got a lot of friends. She does them favors, they do her favors.”

“Is the sheriff one of her friends?”

He changed the subject. “I was going to tell you about this kid in Vegas. She was just a kid my own age, but she was main-lining already. I met her at this aluminus party where they wanted me to play football for their college. The old boys had a lot of drinks, and we young people had some, and then they wanted me to put on a show with this kid. They kept chunking silver dollars at us when we were doing it. We collected so many silver dollars
I had a hard time carrying them up to her room. I was strong in those days, too.”

“I remember you were.”

“Damn them!” he said in weak fury. “They made a monkey out of me. I let them do it to me, for a couple of hundred lousy silver dollars. I told them what they could do with their football scholarship. I didn’t want to go to college anyway. Too much like work.”

“What’s the matter with work?”

“Only suckers work. And you can pin it in your hat Tom Rica is no sucker. You want to know who finally cured me of suckering for all that uplift crap? You did, and I thank you for it.”