Росс Макдональд - The Chill

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know exactly. She died in Europe when the Nazis ran over France. Mrs. Deloney still hasn’t got over it. She was talking about her sister’s death today.”

Something that felt like a spider with wet feet climbed up the back of my neck into the short hairs and made them bristle. The ghost of Tish or a woman (or a man?) using her name had come to the door of the house in Indian Springs ten years ago, more than ten years after the Germans overran France.

“Are you certain she’s dead, Mrs. Hoffman?”

She nodded. “There was quite a writeup in the papers, even the Chicago papers. Tish Osborne was the belle of Bridgeton in her time. I can remember back in the early twenties her parties were famous. The man she married, Val Macready, had meat-packing money on his mother’s side.”

“Is he still alive?”

“The last I heard of him, he married an Englishwoman during the war and was living in England. He wasn’t a Bridgeton boy and I never really knew him. I just read the society pages, and the obituaries.”

She sipped her cocoa. Her look, her self-enclosed posture, seemed to be telling me that she had survived. Her daughter Helen had been brighter, Tish Osborne had been wealthier, but she was the one who had survived. She would survive Earl, too, and probably make a shrine of the study where he kept his liquor in the roll-top desk.

Well, I had caught one of the old ladies. The other one would be tougher.

“Why did Mrs. Deloney fly out here?”

“I guess it was just a rich woman’s whim. She said she wanted to help me out in my time of trouble.”

“Were you ever close to her?”

“I hardly knew her. Earl knows her better.”

“Was Helen close to her?”

“No. If they ever met each other, it’s news to me.”

“Mrs. Deloney came a long way to help out a comparative stranger. Has she given you any particular help, apart from changing hotels?”

“She bought me lunch and dinner. I didn’t want her to pay, but she insisted.”

“What were you to do in return for the free room and board?”

“Nothing.”

“Didn’t she ask you not to talk about her sister Tish?”

“That’s true, she did. I wasn’t to say anything about her carrying on with Luke Deloney, or the rumors that went around about his death. She’s very sensitive about her sister’s reputation.”

“Abnormally sensitive, if Tish has really been dead for over twenty years. Who weren’t you supposed to mention these things to?”

“Anybody, especially you.”

She drowned her nervous little giggle in the remains of her cocoa.

I went out into the grounds of the hotel. The high moon floated steadily in the sky and in the ornamental pools of the Spanish garden. There was yellower light behind the shutters of Mrs. Deloney’s cottage, and the sound of voices too low to be eavesdropped on.

I knocked on the door.

“What is it?” she said.

“Service.” Detective service.

“I didn’t order anything.”

But she opened the door. I slipped in past her and stood against the wall. Bradshaw was sitting on an English sofa beside the fireplace in the opposite wall. A low fire burned in the grate, and gleamed on the brass fittings.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, George.”

He jumped visibly.

Mrs. Deloney said: “Get out of here.” She seemed to have perfectly round blue eyes in a perfectly square white face, all bone and will. “I’ll call the house detective.”

“Go ahead, if you want to spread the dirt around.”

She shut the door.

“We might as well tell him,” Bradshaw said. “We have to tell someone.”

The negative jerk of her head was so violent it threw her off balance. She took a couple of backward steps and regrouped her forces, looking from me to Bradshaw as if we were both her enemies.

“I absolutely forbid it,” she said to him. “Nothing is to be said.”

“It’s going to come out anyway. It will be better if we bring it out ourselves.”

“It is not going to come out. Why should it?”

“Partly,” I said, “because you made the mistake of coming here. This isn’t your town, Mrs. Deloney. You can’t put a lid on events the way you could in Bridgeton.”

She turned her straight back on me. “Pay no attention to him, George.”

“My name is Roy.”

“Roy,” she corrected herself. “This man tried to bluff me yesterday in Bridgeton, but he doesn’t know a thing. All we have to do is remain quiet.”

“What will that get us?”

“Peace.”

“I’ve had my fill of that sort of peace,” he said. “I’ve been living close up to it all these years. You’ve been out of contact. You have no conception of what I’ve been through.” He rested his head on the back of the sofa and lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

“You’ll go through worse,” she said roughly, “if you let down your back hair now.”

“At least it will be different.”

“You’re a spineless fool. But I’m not going to let you ruin what remains of my life. If you do, you’ll get no financial help from me.”

“Even that I can do without.”

But he was being careful to say nothing I wanted to know. He’d been wearing a mask so long that it stuck to his face and controlled his speech and perhaps his habits of thought. Even the old woman with her back turned was playing to me as if I was an audience.

“This argument is academic, in more than one sense,” I said. “The body isn’t buried any longer. I know your sister Letitia shot your husband, Mrs. Deloney. I know she later married Bradshaw in Boston. I have his mother’s word for it–”

“His mother?”

Bradshaw sat up straight. “I do have a mother after all.” He added in his earnest cultivated voice, with his eyes intent on the woman’s: “I’m still living with her, and she has to be considered in this matter, too.”

“You lead a very complicated life,” she said.

“I have a very complicated nature.”

“Very well, young Mr. Complexity, the ball is yours. Carry it.” She went to a love-seat in a neutral corner of the room and sat down there.

“I thought the ball was mine,” I said, “but you’re welcome to it, Bradshaw. You can start where everything started, with the Deloney killing. You were Helen’s witness, weren’t you?”

He nodded once. “I shouldn’t have gone to Helen with that heavy knowledge. But I was deeply upset and she was the only friend I had in the world.”

“Except Letitia.”

“Yes. Except Letitia.”

“What was your part in the murder?”

“I was simply there. And it wasn’t a murder, properly speaking. Deloney was killed in self-defense, virtually by accident.”

“This is where I came in.”

“It’s true. He caught us in bed together in his penthouse.”

“Did you and Letitia make a habit of going to bed together?”

“It was the first time. I’d written a poem about her, which the college magazine printed, and I showed it to her in the elevator. I’d been watching her, admiring her, all through the spring. She was much older than I was, but she was fascinating. She was the first woman I ever had.” He spoke of her with a kind of awe still.

“What happened in the penthouse bedroom, Bradshaw?”

“He caught us, as I said. He got a gun out of the chest of drawers and hit me with the butt of it. Tish tried to stop him. He beat her face in with the gun. She got her hands on it somehow, and it went off and killed him.”

He touched the lid of his right eye, and nodded toward the old woman. She was watching us from the corner, from the distance of her years.