We All Killed Grandma (20 page)

I said, “I thought you’d probably know about my mother. But that’s right, she died almost twenty-seven years ago and that’d be before you were our family doctor.”

“But—I still don’t understand, Rod. Your mother died of a brain tumor. That’s got nothing to do with an inheritance of insanity.”

I put down my knife and fork and stared at him. “Are you sure of that? How do you know, if you weren’t our doctor then?”

“I’m reasonably sure. Your father told me that. And why would he have lied about it? Well—I’ll qualify that. People aren’t proud of insanity in the family, no, and sometimes do lie about it. But hardly to their doctor, even if it’s something that had no direct bearing on what they’re talking about professionally.”

I said, “Doctor, this is important to me. Very important. Can that be verified by checking the death certificate or something?”

“That can be done, but it would have to wait till tomorrow when the city hall records department is open. I think I can find out for you right away, if it’s that important. Your father told me Dr. Klassner operated. He’s an old man now—but still a brilliant brain surgeon—and he’s still practicing. If I can find him at home—”

“Will you try, right away?”

“Of course, Rod.” He’d finished his dinner, ahead of me, and was waiting for me to catch up before he started his dessert. He got up and walked to the front hallway where the telephone booth was. I saw him go into it.

I couldn’t eat any more and pushed my plate back away from me.

He was in the booth for what seemed to be hours. Finally he came out and headed back for our table. I watched his face as he crossed the room toward me and tried to guess what he’d learned.

He sat down before he spoke. He said, “I talked to Klassner and he remembered the case. Quite well, as it happened, because she was the first patient to die under his knife in an operation of that sort. Yes, Rod, it was a brain tumor. No doubt of that. Where did you get the idea that she was insane? You couldn’t have been old enough to remember anything about it.”

“Arch told me.” I went on and told him just what Arch had said.

He nodded. “He’d have been about six or seven then so he would remember. And what he told you is true, of course. She did have spells of absent-mindedness and kept forgetting things and not hearing when people spoke to her. And she did attempt suicide once, Klassner told me. That was before the case came into his hands, before the proper diagnosis was made. And after the suicide attempt she was taken to a private sanitarium—not exactly an asylum, but one that was mostly for mental patients, which is what she was thought to be. Then a series of sudden blinding headaches—so bad that she screamed with pain—led to the true diagnosis, that her symptoms might be due to a physical cause, pressure on the brain. Klassner was called in and confirmed the diagnosis. He operated immediately—but too late to save her. He said that if only
the tumor had caused physical pain right from the start the right diagnosis would undoubtedly have been made in time, before the tumor had grown too large to be removed safely.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

He said, “And that means that if you’ve been thinking you have a hereditary tendency toward insanity you’re off the beam, Rod. Mental symptoms caused by a tumor of the brain are no more inheritable than a broken leg.”

I stood up and my knees felt weak. I put money on the table and said, “Please pay the check with this, Doctor, and excuse me. I’ve got to call someone right away.”

He tried to push the money back to me and then shrugged and left it. He said, “All right, I’ll let you pay for my dinner and won’t bill you for the checkup.”

“To hell with the checkup,” I told him. “But you can bill me for anything I’ve got for the information you just got for me and it’ll be cheap.”

I didn’t use the phone in the hallway of the restaurant; I wanted a few minutes to think first. Maybe I was about to make a damn fool of myself, maybe my deductions weren’t right. But I had to try.

It was starting to rain but I hardly noticed. I walked a block and then I couldn’t wait any longer—and I was afraid to think any more—so I went into the lobby of the hotel I was about to pass and went to a phone booth.

I called Robin.

I heard her calm, grave voice. “Yes?”

“This is Rod, Robin. I’ve got to talk to you, right away. It’s important, too important to try to be diplomatic about. Are you going to be home?”

“Rod, whatever it is, we—we just
shouldn’t
see one another, ever. Please believe me. I should never have asked you in, the time you came around.”

“I’ve got to tell you something,” I said. “If you don’t trust me to come there will you meet me somewhere else? Anywhere we can talk? Even a hotel lobby where there are lots of other people around. Anywhere.”

“Please don’t ask me to.”

“You’ve got a chain on the door of the apartment. Just
open the door on the chain and I’ll talk to you that way, from the hall. Any way except over the phone.”

She didn’t say anything for seconds and I just waited; there wasn’t anything more that I could say.

Finally, “All right, Rod, come on around.”

Not cordially, but it was as much as I could expect.

I went to the parking lot and got my car. It was dusk by now and the rain was coming down a little harder. Cars slithering through it with their parking lights on.

I parked the Linc and crossed the sidewalk through the rain. Into the apartment building and up, and I knocked on the door.

It opened, not on the chain. Robin said, “Come on in, Rod.” I went in. She said, “Sit down, Rod. I didn’t want you to come and this has got to be the last time, but—whatever it is you want to tell me, we might as well be civilized about it. Shall I make us each a drink?”

I didn’t want a drink but I knew how much difference it would make in the atmosphere if we each had one. I said, “Yes, Robin, thanks.” I sat in the chair while she went out into the kitchen. She came back with drinks, handed me mine and then sat on the sofa across from me.

I had to begin, somehow.

I said, “Robin, did or didn’t I tell you about my mother?”

She looked puzzled. “About your mother?
What
about her? She died when you were a baby, didn’t she?”

That made it a little harder to explain. I said, “I’ll have to start over from a different angle and get back to that later and tie it in. Robin, you wouldn’t tell me why we were divorced. I think I know now. You wanted children and I didn’t. Is that right?”

“Well—that was part of it.”

“I think it was a large part and that most of whatever other resentments you might have had against me came from that. Listen, Robin, even though I haven’t my memory back I learned tonight that I was wrong about something I thought was true before.

“Listen, sometime during the first year of our marriage I learned—or thought I learned—that my mother had died insane. I thought I had a hereditary tendency to insanity
and must have—obviously would have—decided that I shouldn’t ever have children for that reason.”

“But—all right, tell it your own way. I don’t understand yet what you’re getting at, Rod.”

I said, “Obviously I didn’t tell you the reason why I didn’t want children. I can only guess why I didn’t, but I’ll try to guess. I saw that you wouldn’t be happy without them—and probably that you wanted a child or children of your own so badly that adopting would be a poor solution—and I must have decided that the only fair thing I could do was to step out of your life while there was time, while you could still find—and damned easily—another man who could give you the fulfillment you wanted. I must have known that if I’d told you the truth—or what I then thought was the truth—about why I didn’t want children of my own, you’d stick to me in spite of it. But you’d never have been happy yourself.”

She stared at me. “You might have reasoned as quixotically as that. You fool, you might have.”

“I must have, otherwise, I’d have told you. But Robin, tonight I learned—and beyond doubt—that Arch had been wrong. He was too young to know or understand all the facts; my mother’s apparent insanity was from a physical cause, a brain tumor. I’m not tainted by heredity. I can have children.”

She took a sip of her drink and the ice tinkled in the glass. Then her eyes looked at me across the top of it. “Is that what you wanted to tell me, Rod?”

“No,” I said. “That’s only the build-up, what makes it possible for me to say the rest. I love you to hell and back, and I want you to marry me again.”

“I’m sorry. No. And if you feel that way then I was definitely right in saying this is the last time we should ever see one another.”

“But Robin—
why?
Please tell me
why.
Wasn’t that the reason—at least the main reason—for our divorce?”

“Please don’t let’s talk about it any more.”

“Robin, you’re not being fair. I’ve got a right to know. You’re taking unfair advantage of the fact that you remember what happened between us and I don’t. This is
the most important thing in the world for me. If I lose out, may I not know
why
?”

Her eyes met mine and held. After seconds she said, “Maybe you have the right to know, at that. Maybe it would have been better if I’d told you right away. Rod, I’d never suspected your sanity, even thought of it, until a week ago last Monday night.

“Rod, I was
there
that night, at your grandmother’s. And you killed her.”

F
OR
some reason it didn’t throw me at all. Perhaps because I’d feared it, almost believed it, for so long. I’d lived with that idea by day and slept with it by night, despite all logic, so now it didn’t throw me at all.

I asked quite calmly. “Did you see me kill her, Robin?”

“No, but you
must
have. I heard the shots and got there just after. And you’d gone in the house just before that and there was no one else there and—”

I interrupted. “Will you start at the beginning, Robin? Why were you there?”

“Because—I hate to tell you this, now that it’s all over, now that it’s hopeless, but the night before our divorce I—I almost changed my mind, Rod. I guess I wanted to be talked into changing it, anyway. I telephoned you early in the evening and you weren’t home. I didn’t want to stay there and keep phoning; you might be out all evening. So I borrowed Dad’s car and drove here. I left Halchester at seven and got back here at about eleven. I phoned again from the edge of town and you still weren’t home so I drove to that place you’re staying, four-something Cuyahoga and parked in front. I phoned once more from a place across the street from there and then I sat in the car thinking I’d see you when you came in.

“But I sat there only a little while when I got the idea that you might have gone to your grandmother’s. To see
her or to see Arch; I remembered that they both stayed up late. And it was better than sitting there waiting so I drove there. I got there—I didn’t notice the exact time—somewhere about midnight. But just as I turned into that block I saw you going into the gate and up onto the porch of the house.”

“Had I come in a taxi or was I walking?”

“I—I think you were walking. At least I didn’t see a taxi and you were still outside the gate, on the sidewalk, when I saw you as I turned the corner. And by the time I pulled up in front you were inside the house.

“I—didn’t go in right away. I sat in the car for a few minutes, thinking maybe you’d just dropped in there on some brief errand and that you’d be coming out again right away. I hoped you would because I didn’t want to go in and see you for the first time there in front of your grandmother and Arch, if Arch was there. But then I heard the shots and I ran up to the door and—”

“Wait,” I said. “You heard shots, plural, around or after midnight?”

“It sounded like two shots, just a few minutes after you went into the house. I ran up to the door and you’d left it ajar. I rang the bell and called out, both, and nobody answered. I went on back along the hall toward the room Grandma used as her study; I could see there was a light on in there. And there she was, lying on the floor dead, with a bullet hole in her forehead. And your gun lying on the floor.”

“Robin, that wasn’t my gun. Grandma had one like it; she was killed with her own gun. They proved that by comparing bullets. Besides, my gun is in my apartment—and it hasn’t been fired since I bought it. Walter Smith checked it to make sure. You can check with him on that.”

“I thought it was yours, Rod. But even if it wasn’t—if you shot her with another gun—”

I said, “If I killed her it was with her gun, not mine. But that’s one reason Walter Smith thinks I didn’t do it. The gun was
gone
; whoever killed her took it away with him. Or—wait a minute. You say you saw her dead and the gun lying there. But it wasn’t there when I phoned the police and they came.”

“I took it, Rod.”

“You took it? Why?”

“Because—I thought it was your gun. And you’d just gone in there and I’d heard the shots and—well, I took it. I picked it up to take it away because I didn’t want you arrested for murder and it went off in my hand and made a hole in the wall—and then I ran out with it and got in my car. I slowed down when I was crossing a bridge on the way back to Halchester and threw it out of the car window, over the railing.”

I couldn’t sit there any longer; I put down my almost untouched drink and stood up. I began to pace the length of the rug.

“I—I still don’t understand why you took the gun, Robin. If you thought I’d committed a murder—”

“Women sometimes do funny things,” Robin said.

I tried to keep my mind away from what could have been Robin’s only reason for trying to protect me by removing evidence.

I said, “You say the gun went off when you picked it up?”

She nodded. “I picked it up just like you’re supposed to pick up a gun and I guess my finger just automatically rested on the trigger. But I didn’t
pull
it, Rod. It just went off.”

I said, “It was a hair-trigger gun so that’s understandable. But, damn it, there are too many shots. There were two empty cartridges found on the floor. But Henderson—Grandma’s friend next door—heard one at around eleven-thirty. You heard two after I went into the house around midnight and then fired one accidentally yourself while you were picking up the gun. That’s four shots and only two cartridges. And, for that matter, only two bullets found. The one that killed her and the one they found in the wall—and you fired that.”