Росс Макдональд - The Chill

My destination was near the highway, on a heavily used thoroughfare lined mainly with new apartment buildings. Their faddish pastel colors and scant transplanted palms seemed dingy and desolate in the fog.

The nursing home was a beige stucco one-storied building taking up most of a narrow deep lot. I rang the bell at eight o’clock precisely. Dr. Godwin must have been waiting behind the door. He unlocked it and let me in himself.

“You’re a punctual man, Mr. Archer.”

His changeable eyes had taken the stony color of the morning. I noticed when he turned to shut the door behind us that his shoulders were permanently stooped. He was wearing a fresh white smock.

“Sit down, won’t you? This is as good a place to talk as any.”

We were in a small reception room or lounge. I sat in one of several worn armchairs aimed at a silent television set in one corner. Through the inner door I could hear the rattle of dishes and the bright voices of nurses beginning the day.

“Is this your place, doctor?”

“I have an interest in it. Most of the patients here are mine. I’ve just been giving some shock treatments.” He smoothed the front of his smock. “I’d feel less like a witch-doctor if I knew why electric shocks make depressed people feel better. So much of our science, or art, is still in the empirical stage. But the people do get better,” he said with a sudden grin, too sudden to touch his watching, waiting eyes.

“Is Dolly?”

“Yes, I think she’s somewhat better. We don’t have overnight cures, of course. I want to keep an eye on her for at least a week. Here.”

“Is she fit to be questioned?”

“I don’t want you to question her, or anyone else remotely connected with the– the world of crime and punishment.” As if to remove the curse from his refusal, he flung himself loosely into the armchair beside me, asked me for a cigarette and let me light it.

“Why not?”

“I do not love the law in its current primitive state, where sick people are trapped into betraying themselves in their sickness and then treated by the courts as if they were well. I’ve been fighting the situation for a long time.” He rested his ponderous bald head on the back of the chair, and blew smoke toward the ceiling.

“What you say suggests that Dolly is in danger from the law.”

“I was making a general statement.”

“Which applied specifically to Dolly. We don’t have to play games, doctor. We’re both on the same side. I don’t assume the girl is guilty of anything. I do think she has information which may help me to clear up a murder.”

“But what if she’s guilty?” he said, watching for my reaction.

“Then I’d want to cooperate with you in getting charges reduced, finding mitigating circumstances, making a case for merciful treatment by the court. Remember I’m working for her husband. Is she guilty?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have talked to her this morning?”

“She did most of the talking. I don’t ask many questions. I wait and I listen. In the end you learn more that way.” He gave me a meaningful look, as if I should start applying this principle.

I waited and listened. Nothing happened. A plump woman with long black hair straggling down the back of her cotton robe appeared in the inside doorway. She stretched out her arms to the doctor.

He lifted his hand like a weary king. “Good morning, Nell.”

She gave him a bright agonized smile and softly withdrew, like a woman walking backward in her sleep. Her outstretched arms were the last I saw of her.

“It would be helpful if you told me what Dolly had to say this morning.”

“And possibly dangerous.” Godwin crushed out his cigarette in a blue ceramic ashtray which looked homemade. “There is after all a difference between you and me. What a patient says to me is a professional confidence. You have no professional standing. If you refused to repeat information in court you could be jailed for contempt. I could, under the law, but I’m not likely to be.”

“I’ve sweated out contempt before. And the police won’t get anything out of me that I don’t choose to tell them. That’s a guarantee.”

“Very well.” Godwin nodded his head once, decisively. “I’m concerned about Dolly and I’ll try to tell you why without any professional jargon. You may be able to put together the objective jigsaw puzzle while I’m reconstructing the subjective one.

“You said no professional jargon, doctor.”

“Sorry. First there’s her history. Her mother Constance McGee brought her to me at the instigation of her sister Alice, a woman I know slightly, when Dolly was ten years old. She wasn’t a happy child. In fact she was in some danger of becoming really withdrawn, for good reason. There’s always good reason. Her father McGee was an irresponsible and violent man who couldn’t handle the duties of fatherhood. He blew hot and cold on the child, spoiled her and punished her, constantly fought with his wife and eventually left her, or was left, it hardly matters. I would have preferred to treat him instead of Dolly, since he was the main source of the trouble in the family. But he was unreachable.”

“Did you ever see him?”

“He wouldn’t even come in for an interview,” Godwin said with regret. “If I could have reached him, I might have been able to prevent a murder. Perhaps not. From what I’ve been told he was a severely maladjusted man who needed help but never got it. You can understand my bitterness about the gap between psychiatry and the law. People like McGee are allowed to run around loose, without preventive action of any kind, until they commit a crime. Then of course they’re hauled into court and sent away for ten or twenty years. But not to a hospital. To a prison.”

“McGee’s out now. He’s been in town here. Did you know that?”

“Dolly told me this morning. It’s one of the many severe pressures on her. You can understand how a sensitive child brought up in an atmosphere of violence and instability would be plagued by anxiety and guilt. The worst guilt often arises when a child is forced, by sheer instinctive self-preservation, to turn against her parents. A clinical psychologist I work with helped Dolly to express her feelings in clay and doll-play and so on. There wasn’t too much I could do for her myself, since children don’t have the mental equipment to be analyzed. But I did try to assume the role of the calm and patient father, provide some of the stability that was missing in her young life. And she was doing pretty well, until the disaster occurred.”

“You mean the murder?”

He swung his head in sorrow. “McGee worked himself into a self-pitying rage one night, came to the aunt’s house in Indian Springs where they were staying, and shot Constance through the head. Dolly was alone in the house with her mother. She heard the shot and saw McGee taking off. Then she discovered the body.”

His head went on swinging slowly like a heavy silent bell. I said:

“What was her reaction at the time?”

“I don’t know. One of the peculiar difficulties of my work is that I often have to perform a public function with private means. I can’t go out and lasso patients. Dolly never came back to me. She no longer had her mother to bring her in from the Valley, and Miss Jenks, her aunt, is a busy woman.”

“But didn’t you say that Alice Jenks suggested treatment for Dolly in the first place?”

“She did. She also paid for it. Perhaps with all the trouble in the family she felt she couldn’t afford it any longer. At any rate, I didn’t see Dolly again until last night, with one exception. I went to court the day she testified against McGee. As a matter of fact I bearded the judge in his chambers and told him that it shouldn’t be allowed. But she was a key witness, and they had her aunt’s permission, and they put her through her sad little paces. She acted like a pale little automaton lost in a world of hostile adults.”