Росс Макдональд - The Chill

“Mrs. Deloney hushed the matter up, or had it hushed up. You can hardly blame her, under the circumstances. Or blame us. We went to Boston, where Tish spent months in and out of the hospital having her face rebuilt. Then we were married. I was in love with her, in spite of the discrepancy in our ages. I suppose my feeling for my own mother prepared me to love Tish.”

His hooded intelligence flared up in his eyes so bright it was half-insane. His mouth was wry.

“We went to Europe on our honeymoon. My mother put French detectives on our trail. I had to leave Tish in Paris and come home to make my peace with Mother and start my sophomore year at Harvard. The war broke out in Europe that same month. I never saw Tish again. She fell sick and died before I knew it.”

“I don’t believe you. There wasn’t time for all that.”

“It happened very rapidly, as tragedy does.”

“Not yours, it’s been dragging on for twenty-two years.”

“No,” Mrs. Deloney said. “He’s telling the truth, and I can prove it to you.”

She went into another room of the cottage and came back with a heavily creased document which she handed me. It was an acte de décès issued in Bordeaux and dated July 16, 1940. It stated in French that Letitia Osborne Macready, aged 45, had died of pneumonia.

I gave it back to Mrs. Deloney. “You carry this with you wherever you go?”

“I happened to bring it with me.”

“Why?”

She couldn’t think of an answer.

“I’ll tell you why. Because your sister is very much alive and you’re afraid she’ll be punished for her crimes.”

“My sister committed no crime. The death of my husband was either justifiable homicide or accident. The police commissioner realized that or he’d never have quashed the case.”

“That may be. But Constance McGee and Helen Haggerty weren’t shot by accident.”

“My sister died long before either of those women.”

“Your own actions deny it, and they mean more than this phony death certificate. For instance, you visited Gil Stevens today and tried to pump him about the McGee case.”

“He broke my confidence, did he?”

“There was nothing there to be broken. You’re not Stevens’s client. He’s still representing McGee.”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“Why should he? This isn’t your town.”

She turned in confusion to Bradshaw. He shook his head. I crossed the room and stood over him:

“If Tish is safely buried in France, why did you go to such elaborate trouble to divorce her?”

“So you know about the divorce. You’re quite a digger for facts, aren’t you, quite a Digger Indian? I begin to wonder if there’s anything you don’t know about my private life.”

He sat there, looking up at me brightly and warily. I was a little carried away by the collapse of his defenses, and I said:

“Your private life, or your private lives, are something for the book. Have you been keeping up two establishments, dividing your time between your mother and your wife?”

“I suppose it’s obvious that I have,” he said tonelessly.

“Does Tish live here in town?”

“She lived in the Los Angeles area. I have no intention of telling you where, and I can assure you you’ll never find the place. There’d be no point in it, anyway, since she’s no longer there.”

“Where and how did she die this time?”

“She isn’t dead. That French death certificate is a fake, as you guessed. But she is beyond your reach. I put her on a plane to Rio de Janeiro on Saturday, and she’ll be there by now.”

Mrs. Deloney said: “You didn’t tell me that!”

“I hadn’t intended to tell anyone. However, I have to make Mr. Archer see that there’s no point in pressing this thing any further. My wife – my ex-wife – is an old woman, and a sick one, and she’s beyond extradition. I’ve arranged for her to have medical care, psychiatric care, in a South American city which I won’t name.”

“You’re admitting that she killed Helen Haggerty?”

“Yes. She confessed to me when I went to see her in Los Angeles early Saturday morning. She shot Helen and hid the gun in my gatehouse. I contacted Foley in Reno primarily to find out if he had witnessed anything. I didn’t want him blackmailing me–”

“I thought he already was.”

“Helen was,” he said. “She learned about my pending divorce in Reno, and she jumped to a number of conclusions, including the fact that Tish was still alive. I gave her a good deal of money, and got her a job here, in order to protect Tish.”

“And yourself.”

“And myself. I do have a reputation to protect, though I’ve done nothing illegal.”

“No. You’re very good at arranging for other people to do your dirty work. You brought Helen here as a kind of decoy, didn’t you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you.” But he shifted uneasily.

“You took Helen out a few times and passed the word that she was your intended. She wasn’t, of course. You were already married to Laura and you hated Helen, with good reason.”

“That’s not true. We were on quite a friendly basis, in spite of her demands. She was a very old friend, after all, and I couldn’t help sympathizing with her feeling that she deserved something from the world.”

“I know what she got – a bullet in the head. The same thing Constance McGee got. The same thing Laura would have got if you hadn’t set Helen up as a substitute victim for Tish.”

“I’m afraid you’re getting much too complicated.”

“For a complicated nature like yours?”

He looked around the room as if he felt imprisoned in it, or in the maze of his own nature. “You’ll never prove any complicity on my part in Helen’s death. It came as a fearful shock to me. Letitia’s confession was another shock.”

“Why? You must have known she killed Constance McGee.”

“I didn’t know it till Saturday. I admit I had my suspicions. Tish was always savagely jealous. I’ve lived with the dreadful possibility for ten years, hoping and praying that my suspicions were unfounded–”

“Why didn’t you ask her?”

“I suppose I couldn’t face it. Things were already so difficult between us. It would have meant admitting my love for Connie.” He heard his own words, and sat quiet for a moment, his eyes downcast, as if he was peering down into a chasm in himself. “I really did love her, you know. Her death almost finished me.”

“But you survived to love again.”

“Men do,” he said. “I’m not the sort of man who can live without love. I loved even Tish as long and as well as I could. But she got old , and sick.”

Mrs. Deloney made a spitting sound. He said to her:

“I wanted a wife, one who could give me children.”

“God help any children of yours, you’d probably abandon them. You broke all your promises to my sister.”

“Everyone breaks promises. I didn’t intend to fall in love with Connie. It simply happened. I met her in a doctor’s waiting room quite by accident. But I didn’t turn my back on your sister. I never have. I’ve done more for her than she ever did for me.”

She sneered at him with the arrogance of a second-generation aristocrat. “My sister lifted you out of the gutter. What were you – an elevator boy?”

“I was a college student, and an elevator boy by my own choice.”

“Very likely.”

He leaned toward her, fixing her with his bright eyes. “I had family resources to draw on if I had wished.”

“Ah yes, your precious mother.”

“Be careful what you say about my mother.”

There was an edge on his words, the quality of a cold threat, and it silenced her. This was one of several moments when I sensed that the two of them were playing a game as complex as chess, a game of power on a hidden board. I should have tried to force it into the open. But I was clearing up my case, and as long as Bradshaw was willing to talk I didn’t care about apparent side-issues.