Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

His hands clutched his stomach, as though she’d struck him a physical blow there. They doubled into fists.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You and Charlie Grantland?”

The screen door rattled. Grantland came out on cue. He said with false joviality: “I thought I heard someone taking my name in vain. How are you, Mr. Hallman?”

Jerry Hallman ignored him. He said to his wife: “I asked you a simple question. What’s he doing here?”

“I’ll give you a simple answer. I had no man around I could trust to take Martha into town. So I called Dr. Grantland to chauffeur her. Martha is used to him.”

Grantland had come up beside her. She turned and gave him a little smile, her smudged mouth doubling its meaning. Of the three, she and Grantland formed the paired unit. Her husband was the one who stood alone. As if he couldn’t bear that loneliness, he turned on his heel, walked stiffly down the veranda steps, and disappeared through the front door of the greenhouse.

Grantland took a gray handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped Zinnie’s mouth. The center of her body swayed toward him.

“Don’t,” he said urgently. “He knows already. You must have told him.”

“I asked him for a divorce – you know that – and he’s not a complete fool. Anyway, what does it matter?” She had the false assurance, or abandon, of a woman who has made a sexual commitment and swung her whole life from it like a trapeze. “Maybe Carl will kill him.”

“Be quiet, Zin! Don’t even think it–!”

His voice broke off. Her gaze had moved across me as he spoke, and telegraphed my presence to him. He turned on his toes like a dancer. The blood seeped out from underneath his tan. He might have been a beady-eyed old man with jaundice. Then he pulled himself together and smiled – a downward-turning smile but a confident one. It was unsettling to see a man’s face change so rapidly and radically.

I threw away the butt of my cigarette, which seemed to have lasted for a long time, and smiled back at him. Felt from inside, like a rubber Halloween mask, my smile was a stiff grimace. Jerry Hallman relieved my embarrassment, if that is what I was feeling. He came hustling out of the greenhouse with a pair of shears in his hand, a dull blotched look on his face.

Zinnie saw him, and backed against the wall. “Charlie! Look out!”

Grantland turned to face Jerry as he came up the steps, a dumpy middle-aging man who couldn’t stand loneliness. His eyes had a very solitary expression. The shears projected outward from the grip of his two hands, gleaming in the sun, like a double dagger.

“Yah, Charlie!” he said. “Look out! You think you can get away with my wife and my daughter both. You’re taking nothing of mine.”

“I had no such intention.” Grantland stuttered over the words. “Mrs. Hallman telephoned–”

“Don’t ‘Mrs. Hallman’ me. You don’t call her that in town. Do you?” Standing at the top of the steps with his legs planted wide apart, Jerry Hallman opened and closed the shears. “Get out of here, you lousy cod. If you want to go on being a man, get off my property and stay off my property. That includes my wife.”

Grantland had put on his old-man face. He backed away from the threatening edges and looked for support to Zinnie. Green-faced in the shadow, she stood still as a bas-relief against the wall. Her mouth worked, and managed to say: “Stop it, Jerry. You’re not making sense.”

Jerry Hallman was at that trembling balance point in human rage where he might have alarmed himself into doing murder. It was time for someone to stop it. Shouldering Grantland out of my way, I walked up to Hallman and told him to put the shears down.

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” he sputtered.

“You’re Mr. Jerry Hallman, aren’t you? I heard you were a smart man, Mr. Hallman.”

He looked at me stubbornly. The whites of his eyes were yellowish from some internal complaint, bad digestion or bad conscience. Something deep in his head looked out through his eyes at me, gradually coming forward into light. Fear and shame, perhaps. His eyes seemed to be puzzled by dry pain. He turned and went down the steps and into the greenhouse, slamming the door behind him. Nobody followed him.

VOICES ROSE on the far side of the house, as if another door had opened there. Female and excited, they sounded like chickens after a hawk has swooped. I ran down the steps and around the end of the veranda. Mildred came across the lawn toward me, holding the little girl’s hand. Mrs. Hutchinson trailed behind them, her head turned at an angle toward the groves, her face as gray as her hair. The gate in the picket fence was open, but there was no one else in sight.

The child’s voice rose high and penetrating. “Why did Uncle Carl run away?”

Mildred turned and bent over her. “It doesn’t matter why. He likes to run.”

“Is he mad at you, Aunt Mildred?”

“Not really, darling. He’s just playing a game.”

Mildred looked up and saw me. She shook her head curtly: I wasn’t to say anything to frighten the child. Zinnie swept past me and lifted Martha in her arms. The deputy Carmichael was close behind her, unhitching his gun.

“What happened, Mrs. Hallman? Did you see him?”

She nodded, but waited to speak till Zinnie had carried the little girl out of hearing. Mildred’s forehead was bright with sweat, and she was breathing rapidly. I noticed that she had the ball in her hand.

The gray-haired woman elbowed her way into the group. “I saw him, sneaking under the trees. Martha saw him, too.”

Mildred turned on her. “He wasn’t sneaking, Mrs. Hutchinson. He picked up the ball and brought it to me. He came right up to me.” She displayed the ball, as if it was important evidence of her husband’s gentleness.

Mrs. Hutchinson said: “I was never so terrified in my born days. I couldn’t even open my mouth to let out a scream.”

The deputy was getting impatient. “Hold it, ladies. I want a straight story, and fast. Did he threaten you, Mrs. Hallman – attack you in any way?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything?”

“I did most of the talking. I tried to persuade Carl to come in and give himself up. When he wouldn’t, I put my arms around him, to try and hold him. He was too strong for me. He broke away, and I ran after him. He wouldn’t come back.”

“Did he show his gun?”

“No.” She looked down at Carmichael’s gun. “Please, don’t use your gun if you see my husband. I don’t believe he’s armed.”

“Maybe not,” Carmichael said noncommittally. “Where did all this happen?”

“I’ll show you.”

She turned and started toward the open gate, moving with a kind of dogged gallantry. It wasn’t quite enough to hold her up. Suddenly she went to her knees and crumpled sideways on the lawn, a small dark-suited figure with spilled brown hair. The ball rolled out of her hand. Carmichael knelt beside her, shouting as if mere loudness could make her answer: “Which way did he go?”

Mrs. Hutchinson waved her arm toward the groves. “Right through there, in the direction of town.”

The young deputy got up and ran through the gateway in the picket fence. I ran after him, with some idea of trying to head off violence. The ground under the trees was adobe, soft and moist with cultivation. I never had gone well on a heavy track. The deputy was out of sight. After a while he was out of hearing, too. I slowed down and stopped, cursing my obsolescent legs.

It was purely a personal matter between me and my legs, because running couldn’t accomplish anything, anyway. When I thought about it, I realized that a man who knew the country could hide for days on the great ranch. It would take hundreds of searchers to beat him out of the groves and canyons and creekbeds.