The Drowner (17 page)

“Doc Nile told me that once, too. But what the hell am I supposed to do? She does her work. She gets along with everybody. She’s just now coming in.”

“Sam, how does she…”

“Hold it a minute.”

After two minutes Sam came back on the line. In a low voice he said, “Cheery as a clam. Said she had a nice lunch. Said it came as a shock to her about you and me having to find out who she’d killed lately. It’s a joke to her, Paul. Now, dammit, get her off your mind and find out who really did kill my girl.”

Ernie said, “Sure, I remember Angie making a call. After she walked out with the other gals, she come back in and made a call and she was in the booth there quite a spell. Then we talked some and she took off… You’re quite welcome, mister. No trouble at all. Only what’s it about?”

The stooped, lethargic, hollow-eyed man at Happy Lanes said, “Call for Angie? Not over this phone, not last night, mister. Nobody gets back of this here counter but me, and nobody touches this phone, so come the end of the month I don’t get any long-distance bills I don’t remember. It could have come on the pay phone over in the restaurant part, but if a person was calling here, it would come on this phone just about always because it’s the one in the book.”

The front hall of the little gray house smelled musty, and Angie’s monstrous mother had a voice like a prolonged screech. She loomed like an enraged hippo in the shadowy sultry air. “She was home some after eleven and she didn’t go out again, and I demand to know what kind of questions you think you’re asking and what right you got asking them. I raised me a decent clean girl and we got no secrets between us, and the last thing in the world she’d be doing would be sneaking out. Oh, I know all about the other young girls in this town, how they go scampering off in the brush every chance they get, rolling onto their backs for anything wears pants, but my Angela ain’t one of them.”

“This is just a routine insurance investigation.”

“I bet it is. I just bet it is. Routine, hah? Making yourself a chance to bring Angie in on something she’s got nothing to do with so you can come snuffling around after her. You just might as well give up, mister, because you nor nobody else is going to get anyplace with my Angie. I taught her early and I taught her good. No man alive is going to lay his stinking hands on her sweet body. Men got just that one thing on their mind, day and night, and the good Lord knows there’s enough sluts in this town you can find to pleasure you just by snapping your fingers, so you don’t have to come around here.”

“I’m afraid you have the wrong idea, Mrs. Powell.”

She tilted ponderously toward him, a sneer imbedded in the pouches of fat. “You know something, young man? I have wrong ideas
all
the time. I walk out into the world and I look on every side, and my mind reels with the number of wrong ideas I have.” She pointed a finger like a small uncooked pork sausage at the center of his face. “And every single one of them turns out to be right. So you get on out of my house.”

After he had stepped out, he turned back and spoke to the shadowy vastness through the screen. “By the way, how did she get those scars on her arm?”

“Mortifying the flesh, mister. Mortifying the flesh to drive out the devil, which is something you wouldn’t understand.”

It took Doctor Rufus Nile ten minutes each for the last three patients, while Stanial waited. Nile had a yen for some cold beer, so he locked the office and they drove to a dark, cool, pleasant, downtown tavern where they carried the large steins of dark draught beer back to a paneled booth with a scarred, scrubbed table-top.

“When a man doesn’t take the first opening he gets, it means he has a small speech planned,” Nile said. He thrust his chin toward Paul and boggled his eyes. “Hah?”

“A careful statement, because it might be tied in with professional ethics. In my investigation of whether or not it was an accidental drowning or suicide, I seem to have opened up another possibility, Doctor. And it could involve somebody you seem to have had a professional opinion about. So I’ll be blunt about it. Do you think Angie Powell is capable of murder?”

Nile gave several little jumps of surprise and consternation. He smacked his lips, tugged his ear, patted his chest, turned his stein around and around.

“Let me get organized here. Hah? First off, psychiatry isn’t my field. Second, Angie was the second delivery I made after I took over the practice in this place. Third, I like Angie. I think I understand her from knowing something of the background. Murder? That would be a pretty drastic way of expressing some disapproval, wouldn’t it?”

“On any logical basis. But is she logical?”

“Mary Powell was a bad patient. Seems like the minute she found out she was pregnant she started stuffing herself. Just three months married when she got pregnant. Acted as if she’d caught leprosy from little Jimmy. Treated Jimmy for some prostate trouble a few years back, and I know for a fact that from the day she found out she was pregnant, she never let Jimmy resume marital relations with her. Frankly, she hated it so much I could say stuffing herself was a defense against it, but I’m no psychiatrist. The forty pounds she put on while she was carrying Angie made it a difficult birth. But it was a fine healthy girl baby. And Mary kept right on eating. And the bigger she got the more religious she got. Must be three hundred pounds now, and got just about the meanest temper in town.”

“And Angie got her sexual orientation from her mother?”

“Give you an example. Angie was a sunny little girl, popular with the other kids. Anyway, there was a little boy in the neighborhood. Can’t recall his name. They moved away long ago. Angie was about seven years old, I’d judge. Children have sexual curiosity. Absolutely normal all over the world. In primitive tribes, who are more enlightened about these things than we are, it is accepted. But if we catch the kids, we try to convince them they’ve done something filthy. Same as our cultural attitude toward masturbation. We try to make out only sick kids do it, and we try to pretend it isn’t a perfectly normal and natural stage in sexual development of the individual, that is only a mild clinical symptom of immaturity if it continues into the adult years.

“So one afternoon Mary Powell just happens to go around the garage and there is Angie and the neighbor boy solemnly examining each other. She moves fast for a big woman. She give the boy a crack across the face that sends him howling home with two broken teeth, and she yanks up a stake out of the garden and she beats her daughter as bad as I’ve ever heard of a kid being beaten without killing it. Mary should have been jailed and damned near was, and would have been if the church hadn’t gotten behind her. Angie was three weeks in the hospital. Broken ribs, ruptured kidney, contusions, abrasions, lacerations, internal bleeding. She was my case, and I guess it was the last time any male creature has seen Angie in her birthday suit. For female problems, she and her mother go to a lady doctor in Orlando. Time she got released, she was a little hollow-eyed ghost, and just about as quiet as one. Mary kept her out of school all that year. And she was one silent little girl for at least two years after that. Anybody could guess that with a background like that, that girl was going to have some trouble in her adolescence. And she did, when she was fifteen. They brought her to me from the high school with a high fever and a badly infected arm. It could have killed anybody less husky. I slapped her into the hospital and for the first twenty-four hours, I wasn’t sure. The infection started with a burn. And there were other burns on the underside of that same arm, some of them healed and some of them still scabbed. And I could not find out how she got them. Not until I stuck a little sodium pentothal into her, and suddenly I had a classic case of hysteria on my hands. Complete muscular rigidity, marble pallor, gibberish about dreams and visions, and some crazy identification with Joan of Arc. The fool child was holding her arm in a candle flame, and from the marks she’d done it about fifteen times.”

“And endure pain like that!”

“A good galloping case of hysteria with religious overtones has elements of auto-hypnosis in it, and there’s a good chance she couldn’t even feel the pain. Like the optimistic idiot I am, I talked to Mary about getting help for the girl. But Mary was proud of her! Imagine that?”

“Mortification of the flesh. Driving out the devil.”

Nile stared at him keenly. “Her words exactly. I guess you can understand the burning. Here was a girl… is a girl… with superb physical equipment. All the glands are working. She ovulates and she’s got big useful breasts and a good fertile pelvic structure, and the female hormones are feeding into her system right on schedule. Now if she could have yearned for the normal sexual experience, but avoided it because she thought it was wrong, then she would have been left with just a feeling of guilt and shame for having such evil instincts. But here is a big healthy girl so emotionally crippled there’s no yearning at all, no curiosity, no feeling of guilt. It was pounded into her with a garden stake long ago that any sex thought is horrifying and nauseating. So, emotionally, it does nauseate her. And there is that fine body with no outlet. Hence the hysteria. The religious visions. The whole sickening ball of wax. Mary Powell ought to be fed to the ’gators for doing that to her own child.”

“Can that inner conflict make her dangerous?”

“Back to murder? Hah? It could. Under the right circumstances, it could. But it wouldn’t be murder to her. She wouldn’t do anything she thought was wrong.”

“It would be execution?”

“Exactly.”

“Which would exempt her from the legal definition of sanity, the knowledge of right and wrong. Tell me, Doctor, could she think God instructed her to kill?”

“God, or Joan of Arc, or Father Divine. It’s the classic rationalization. She would think of herself as an instrument, obedient to outside orders.”

“Could such murders be cleverly done under those circumstances?”

“I’ve heard they can be. And the murderer has one advantage over the normal kind.”

“What’s that?”

“They are absolutely sure of themselves, and so they don’t get trapped by their own feeling of guilt. Stanial, I hope to God you’re wrong. And I notice you said murders. Would you be thinking of Gus Gable?”

“Yes.”

“Back in the office I’ve got an EKG on him three months old. Shows a healthy heart. Harv Walmo phoned me about that. So I guess by now Bert Dell has taken a look in there.”

“Where would he do it?”

“Probably over to Crocker and Gain’s place, because they didn’t bother taking Gus to the hospital.”

“Could you find out?”

Nile stood up and selected a dime from his change. “Bert loves to do autopsies, and he loves to talk about them.”

Nile was frowning when he came back to the table five minutes later, carrying two fresh steins. He sat down and said, “Not a hell of a lot of sense to it. Bruised and ruptured diaphragm. And the pericardium was ripped open and it looked to him as if the heart had been bruised somehow. With a congenital defect the pericardium can bust if you build up enough fluid pressure, but he couldn’t see any signs of anything like that. That pericardium is thin, tough, elastic tissue. And the bruise was along the bottom sector of the right ventricle. Bert said a funny thing. He said it was like Gus had fallen just exactly right onto something blunt, like a fence post.”

“Could it be done with a fist?”

Nile shook his head. “She’s a big girl but she couldn’t hit that hard. No man could either. Gus would have had to be in a slumped over position. Maybe some projecting object inside the car when it hit the tree.”

“If that came second, why did he hit the tree?”

“And he didn’t hit it hard, did he?”

“Doctor, you told Sam Kimber Angie needed help.”

Nile nodded abruptly several times. He combed his wild hair with his fingers and huffed on the lenses of his glasses. “Last year she worked for me, part time. Came in Saturdays to get the billing straightened out. The girl who was doing the billing left in a hurry. She clipped about two thousand dollars from me, according to the auditors, and left. I had a feeling about Angie. She was… well, she was too perfect. Smiling and fast and efficient. Always the same. As if you could lift her blouse in the back and find the place for the key to wind her up. Sometimes that kind of… imperviousness is a clue to extreme tension.”

“Doctor, did she have a key to your office?”

“Did she? Yes. She’d come in alone. Why?”

“Never mind. What were you saying?”

“I meddle. It’s my curse. I wanted to see how much adjustment she’d made. I had a clinical photograph, eight by ten, an adult male. Fine specimen. I put it with some papers I gave her. She came in and handed it back, saying it must have gotten in the papers by accident. She was as casual as a nurse. I didn’t take it. I asked her what it was. She glanced at it again. She said it was a picture of a man in flowing white robes. She wasn’t lying, Stanial. That was what she
saw.
Next time I saw Sam I told him she was a sick girl. No point in trying to tell her mother.”

“Does she know anatomy?”

“Some. She trained to be a nurse but she dropped out after a few months. Oh, you mean about Gus? In the back of my mind I’ve been wondering. Could I cause that damage? How? Physically he was in very sloppy condition. I could put him out, brace him in a flexed position, and possibly, just possibly, if I didn’t care if I tore him up a little, I could depress the diaphragm deeply enough to press my hand against the heart itself, stop it perhaps.”

“She’s a strong girl.”

“She’s not a monster, you know.”

“But she could do a monstrous thing if she thought she had been told to do it. If she heard the right voices. And there’s a sort of symbolism to it. It has the mark of insanity.”

“If it was done that way!”

“What would make her talk about it?”

Nile shrugged. “Sodium pentothal again. Hypnosis. I’d say she’s a good hypnotic subject. But it has to be at her request or at the request of the court, my friend. Hah?”