Росс Макдональд - The Chill

“You said she wanted Connie to herself. Her feelings for Connie could have changed if she found out about Bradshaw.”

“Not that much. Anyway, who would tell her?”

“Your daughter might have. If she told you, she’d tell Alice.”

McGee shook his head. “You’re really reaching.”

“I have to. This is a deep case, and I can’t see the bottom of it yet. Did Alice ever live in Boston, do you know?”

“I think she always lived here. She’s a Native Daughter. I’m a native son, but nobody ever gave me a medal for it.”

“Even Native Daughters have been known to go to Boston. Did Alice ever go on the stage, or marry a man named Macready, or dye her hair red?”

“None of those things sound like Alice.”

I thought of her pink fantastic bedroom, and wondered.

“They sound more,” McGee was saying, and then he stopped. He was silent for a watching moment. “I’ll take that cigarette you offered me.”

I gave him a cigarette and lighted it. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. I must have been thinking aloud.”

“Who were you thinking about?”

“Nobody you know. Forget it, eh?”

“Come on, McGee. You’re supposed to be leveling with me.”

“I still have a right to my private thoughts. It kept me alive in prison.”

“You’re out of prison now. Don’t you want to stay out?”

“Not if somebody else has to go in.”

“Sucker,” I said. “Who are you covering for now?”

“Nobody.”

“Madge Gerhardi?”

“You must be off your rocker.”

I couldn’t get anything more out of him. The long slow weight of prison forces men into unusual shapes. McGee had become a sort of twisted saint.

He was about to be given another turn of the screw. When I climbed out into the cockpit I saw three men approaching along the floating dock. Their bodies, their hatted heads, were dark as iron against the exploding sunset.

One of them showed me a deputy’s badge and a gun, which he held on me while the others went below. I heard McGee cry out once. He scrambled up through the hatch with blue handcuffs on his wrists and a blue gun at his back. The single look he gave me was full of fear and loathing.

They didn’t handcuff me, but they made me ride to the courthouse with McGee in the screened rear compartment of the Sheriff’s car. I tried to talk to him. He wouldn’t speak to me or look in my direction. He believed I had turned him in, and perhaps I had without intending to.

I sat under guard outside the interrogation room while they questioned him in tones that rose and fell and growled and palavered and yelled and threatened and promised and refused and wheedled. Sheriff Crane arrived, looking tired but important. He stood over me smiling, with his belly thrust out.

“Your friend’s in real trouble now.”

“He’s been in real trouble for the last ten years. You ought to know, you helped to cook it for him.”

The veins in his cheeks lit up like intricate little networks of infra-red tubing. He leaned toward me spewing martiniscented words:

“I could put you in jail for loose talk like that. You know where your friend is going? He’s going all the way to the green room this time.”

“He wouldn’t be the first innocent man who was gassed.”

“Innocent? McGee’s a mass murderer, and we’ve got the evidence to prove it. It took my experts all day to nail it down: The bullet in the Haggerty corpse came from the same gun as the bullet we found in McGee’s wife – the same gun he stole from Alice Jenks in Indian Springs.”

I’d succeeded in provoking the Sheriff into an indiscretion. I tried for another. “You have no proof he stole it. You have no proof he fired it either time. Where’s he been keeping the gun for the last ten years?”

“He cached it someplace, maybe on Stevens’s boat. Or maybe an accomplice kept it for him.”

“Then he hid it in his daughter’s bed to frame her?”

“That’s the kind of man he is.”

“Nuts!”

“Don’t talk to me like that!” He menaced me with the cannon ball of his belly.

“Don’t talk like that to the Sheriff,” the guard said.

“I don’t know of any law against the use of the word ‘nuts.’ And incidentally I wasn’t violating anything in the California Code when I went out to the yacht to talk to McGee. I’m cooperating with a local attorney in this investigation and I have a right to get my information where I can and keep it confidential.”

“How did you know he was there?”

“I got a tip.”

“From Stevens?”

“Not from Stevens. You and I could trade information, Sheriff. How did you know he was there?”

“I don’t make deals with suspects.”

“What do you suspect me of? Illegal use of the word ‘nuts’?”

“It isn’t so funny. You were taken with McGee. I have a right to hold you.”

“I have a right to call an attorney. Try kicking my rights around and see where it gets you. I have friends in Sacramento.”

They didn’t include the Attorney General or anybody close to him, but I liked the sound of the phrase. Sheriff Crane did not. He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man. He said after a moment’s thought:

“You can make your call.”

The Sheriff went into the interrogation room – I caught a glimpse of McGee hunched gray-faced under a light – and added his voice to the difficult harmony there. My guard took me into a small adjoining room and left me by myself with a telephone. I used it to call Jerry Marks. He was about to leave for his appointment with Dr. Godwin and Dolly, but he said he’d come right over to the courthouse and bring Gil Stevens with him if Stevens was available.

They arrived together in less than fifteen minutes. Stevens shot me a glance from under the broken white wings of his hair. It was a covert and complex glance which seemed to mean that for the record we were strangers. I suspected the old lawyer had advised McGee to talk to me, and probably set up the interview. I was in a position to use McGee’s facts in ways that he couldn’t.

With soft threats of habeas corpus proceedings, Jerry Marks sprung me out. Stevens remained behind with the Sheriff and a Deputy D.A. It was going to take longer to spring his client.

A moon like a fallen fruit reversing gravity was hoisting itself above the rooftops. It was huge and slightly squashed.

“Pretty,” Jerry said in the parking lot.

“It looks like a rotten orange to me.”

“Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. I learned that at my mother’s knee and other low joints, as a well-known statesman said.” Jerry always felt good when he tried something he learned in law school, and it worked. He walked to his car swiftly, on the balls of his feet, and made the engine roar. “We’re late for our appointment with Godwin.”

“Did you have time to check on Bradshaw’s alibi?”

“I did. It seems to be impregnable.” He gave me the details as we drove across town. “Judging by temperature loss, rate of blood coagulation, and so on, the Deputy Coroner places the time of Miss Haggerty’s death as no later than eight-thirty. From about seven until about nine-thirty Dean Bradshaw was sitting, or standing up talking, in front of over a hundred witnesses. I talked to three of them, three alumni picked more or less at random, and they all agreed he didn’t leave the speaker’s table during that period. Which lets him out.”

“Apparently it does.”

“You sound disappointed, Lew.”

“I’m partly that, and partly relieved. I rather like Bradshaw. But I was pretty certain he was our man.”