Росс Макдональд - The Chill

“Not too thoroughly. It was an emergency appointment, as I said, and in any case it wasn’t my responsibility. The head of her department, Dr. Geisman, was favorably impressed by her credentials and made the appointment.”

Bradshaw seemed to be delicately letting himself off the hook. I wrote down Geisman’s name in my notebook.

“Her background ought to be gone into,” I said. “It seems she was married, and recently divorced. I also want to find out more about her relations with Dolly. Apparently they were close.”

“You’re not suggesting a Lesbian attachment? We have had–” He decided not to finish the sentence.

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m looking for information. How did Professor Haggerty happen to become Dolly’s counselor?”

“In the normal way, I suppose.”

“What is the normal way of acquiring a counselor?”

“It varies. Mrs. Kincaid was an upperclassman, and we usually permit upperclassmen to choose their own counselors, so long as the counselor in question has an opening in his or her schedule.”

“Then Dolly probably chose Professor Haggerty, and initiated the friendship herself?”

“She had every chance to. Of course it may have been pure accident.”

As if we had each received a signal on a common wavelength, we turned and looked at Helen Haggerty’s body. It seemed small and lonely at the far end of the room. Our joint flight with it through cloudy space had been going on for a long time. I looked at my watch. It was only nine-thirty-one, fourteen minutes since our arrival. Time seemed to have slowed down, dividing itself into innumerable fractions, like Zeno’s space or marijuana hours.

With a visible effort, Bradshaw detached his gaze from the body. His moment of communion with it had cost him the last of his boyish look. He leaned toward me with deep lines of puzzlement radiating from his eyes and mouth:

“I don’t understand what Mrs. Kincaid said to you. Do you mean to say she actually confessed this – this murder?”

“A cop or a prosecutor might say so. Fortunately none was present. I’ve heard a lot of confessions, good ones and phony ones. Hers was a phony one, in my opinion.”

“What about the blood?”

“She may have slipped and fallen in it.”

“Then you don’t think we should mention any of it to the Sheriff?”

“If you don’t mind stretching a point.”

His face showed that he minded, but after some hesitation he said: “Well keep it to ourselves, at least for the present. After all she was a student of ours, however briefly.”

Bradshaw didn’t notice his use of the past tense, but I did, and it depressed me. I think we were both relieved by the sound of the Sheriff’s car coming up the hill. It was accompanied by a mobile laboratory. Within a few minutes a fingerprint man and a deputy coroner and a photographer had taken over the room and changed its character. It became impersonal and drab like any room anywhere in which murder had been committed. In a curious way the men in uniform seemed to be doing the murder a second and final time, annulling Helen’s rather garish aura, converting her into laboratory meat and courtroom exhibits. My raw nerves jumped when the bulbs flashed in her corner.

Sheriff Herman Crane was a thick-shouldered man in a tan gabardine suit. His only suggestion of uniform was a slightly broad-brimmed hat with a woven leather band. His voice had an administrative ring, and his manner had the heavy ease of a politician, poised between bullying and flattery. He treated Bradshaw with noisy deference, as if Bradshaw was a sensitive plant of undetermined value but some importance.

Me he treated the way cops always treated me, with occupational suspicion. They suspected me of the misdemeanor of doing my own thinking. I did succeed in getting Sheriff Crane to dispatch a patrol car in pursuit of the convertible with the Nevada license. He complained that his department was seriously understaffed, and he didn’t think road blocks were indicated at this stage of the game. At this stage of the game I made up my mind not to cooperate fully with him.

The Sheriff and I sat in the chaise and the rope chair respectively and had a talk while a deputy who knew speedwriting took notes. I told him that Dolly Kincaid, the wife of a client of mine, had discovered the body of her college counselor Professor Haggerty and reported the discovery to me. She had been badly shocked, and was under a doctor’s care.

Before the Sheriff could press me for further details, I gave him a verbatim account, or as close to verbatim as I could make it, of my conversation with Helen about the death threat. I mentioned that she had reported it to his office, and he seemed to take this as a criticism:

“We’re understaffed, like I said. I can’t keep experienced men. Los Angeles lures ’em away with salaries we can’t pay and pie in the sky.” I was from Los Angeles, as he knew, and the implication was that I was obscurely to blame. “If I put a man on guard duty in every house that got a crank telephone call, I wouldn’t have anybody left to run the department.”

“I understand that.”

“I’m glad you do. Something I don’t understand – how did this conversation you had with the decedent happen to take place?”

“Professor Haggerty approached me and asked me to come up here with her.”

“What time was this?”

“I didn’t check the time. It was shortly before sundown. I was here for about an hour.”

“What did she have in mind?”

“She wanted me to stay with her, for protection. I’m sorry I didn’t.” Simply having the chance to say this made me feel better.

“You mean she wanted to hire you, as a bodyguard?”

“That was the idea.” There was no use going into the complex interchange that had taken place between Helen and me, and failed.

“How did she know you were in the bodyguard business?”

“I’m not, exactly. She knew I was an investigator because she saw my name in the paper.”

“Sure enough,” he said. “You testified in the Perrine case this morning. Maybe I ought to congratulate you because Perrine got off.”

“Don’t bother.”

“No, I don’t think I will. The Perrine broad was guilty as hell and you know it and I know it.”

“The jury didn’t think so,” I said mildly.

“Juries can be fooled and witnesses can be bought. Suddenly you’re very active in our local crime circles, Mr. Archer.” The words had the weight of an implied threat. He flung out a heavy careless hand toward the body. “This woman, this Professor Haggerty here, you’re sure she wasn’t a friend of yours?”

“We became friends to a certain extent.”

“In an hour?”

“It can happen in an hour. Anyway, we had a previous conversation at the college today.”

“What about before today? Did you have other previous conversations?”

“No. I met her today for the first time.”

Bradshaw, who had been hanging around us in various anxious attitudes, spoke up: “I can vouch for the truth of that, Sheriff, if it will save you any time.”

Sheriff Crane thanked him and turned back to me: “So it was a purely business proposition between her and you?”

“It would have been if I had been interested.” I wasn’t telling the precise truth, but there was no way to tell it to Crane without sounding foolish.

“You weren’t interested. Why not?”

“I had other business.”

“What other business?”

“Mrs. Kincaid had left her husband. He employed me to locate her.”

“I heard something about that this morning. Did you find out why she left him?”

“No. My job was to locate her. I did.”

“Where?”