Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

The sheriff looked up at the glass roof, as if to ask for comfort and help in his deep tribulations. The only apparent result was the arrival of a moon-faced young man wearing shiny rimless spectacles and a shiny blue suit. I needed no intuition to tab him as the deputy coroner. He carried a black medical bag, and the wary good humor of men whose calling is death.

Surveying the situation from the doorway, he raised his hand to the sheriff and made a beeline for the body. A sheriffs captain with a tripod camera followed close on his heels. The sheriff joined them, issuing a steady flux of orders.

Sam Yogan bowed slightly to me, his forehead corrugated, his eyes bland. He picked up a watering can, filled it at a tin sink in the corner, and moved with it among the cymbidiums. Disregarding the flashbulbs, he was remote as a gardener bent in ritual over flowers in a print.

I WALKED AROUND to the front of the house and rapped on the screen door. Zinnie answered. She had changed to a black dress without ornament of any kind. Framed in the doorway, she looked like a posed portrait of a young widow, carefully painted in two dimensions. The third dimension was in her eyes, which had green fire in their depths.

“Are you still here?”

“I seem to be.”

“Come in if you like.”

I followed her into the living-room, noticing how corseted her movements had become. The room had altered, too, though there was no change in its physical arrangement. The murder in the greenhouse had killed something in the house. The bright furnishings looked cheap and out of place in the old room, as if somebody had tried to set up modern housekeeping in an ancestral cave.

“Sit down if you like.”

“Am I wearing out my welcome?”

“Everybody is,” she said, a little obscurely. “I don’t even feel at home here myself. Come to think of it, maybe I never did. Well, it’s a little late to go into that now.”

“Or a little early. No doubt you’ll be selling.”

“Jerry was planning to sell out himself. The papers are practically all drawn up.”

“That makes it convenient.”

Facing me in front of the dead hearth, she looked into my eyes for a long minute. Being a two-way experience, it wasn’t unpleasant at all. The pain she’d just been through, or something else, had wiped out a certain crudity in her good looks and left them pretty dazzling. I hoped it wasn’t the thought of a lot of new money shining in her head.

“You don’t like me,” she said.

“I hardly know you.”

“Don’t worry, you never will.”

“There goes another bubble, iridescent but ephemeral.”

“I don’t think I like you, either. That’s quite a spiel you have, for a cheap private detective. Where do you come from, Los Angeles?”

“Yep. How do you know I’m cheap?”

“Mildred couldn’t afford you if you weren’t.”

“Unlike you, eh? I could raise my prices.”

“I bet you could. And I was wondering when we were going to get around to that. It didn’t take long, did it?”

“Get around to what?”

“What everybody wants. Money. The other thing that everybody wants.” She turned, handling her body contemptuously and provocatively, identifying the first thing. “You might as well sit down and we’ll talk about it.”

“It will be a pleasure.”

I sat on the end of a white bouclé oblong, and she perched tightly on the other end, with her beautiful legs crossed in front of her. “What I ought to do is tell Ostie to throw you the hell out of here.”

“For any particular reason. Or just on general principles?”

“For attempted blackmail. Isn’t blackmail the idea?”

“It never crossed my mind. Until now.”

“Don’t kid me. I know your type. Maybe you like to wrap it up in different words. I pay you a retainer to protect my interests or something like that. It’s still blackmail, no matter how you wrap it.”

“Or baloney, no matter how you slice it. But go on. It’s a long time since anybody offered me some free money. Or is this only a daydream?”

She sneered, not very sophisticatedly. “How dare you try to be funny, with my husband not yet cold in his grave.”

“He isn’t in it yet. And you can do better than that, Zinnie. Try another take.”

“Have you no respect for a woman’s emotions – no respect for anything?”

“Show me some real ones. You have them.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I’d have to be blind and deaf not to. You go around shooting them off like fireworks.”

She was silent. Her face was unnaturally calm, except for the deep dimension of the eyes. “You mean that scene on the front porch, no doubt. It didn’t mean a thing. Not a thing.” She sounded like a child repeating a lesson. “I was frightened and upset, and Dr. Grantland is an old friend of the family. Naturally I turned to him in trouble. You’d think even Jerry would understand that. But he’s always been irrationally jealous. I can’t even look at a man.”

She sneaked a look at me to see if I believed her. Our eyes met.

“You can now.”

“I tell you I’m not in the least interested in Dr. Grantland. Or anybody else.”

“You’re young to retire.”

Her eyes narrowed rather prettily, like a cat’s. Like a cat, she was kind of smart, but too self-centered to be really smart. “You’re terribly cynical, aren’t you? I hate cynical men.”

“Let’s stop playing games, Zinnie. You’re crazy about Grantland. He’s crazy about you. I hope.”

“What do you mean, you hope?” she said, laying my last doubt to rest.

“I hope Charlie is crazy about you.”

“He is. I mean, he would be, if I let him. What makes you think he isn’t?”

“What makes you think it?”

She put her hands over her ears and made a monkey face. Even then, she couldn’t look ugly. She had such good bones, her skeleton would have been an ornament in any closet.

“All this talky-talk,” she said. “I get mixed up. Could we come down to cases? That business on the porch, I know it looks bad. I don’t know how much you heard?”

I put on my omniscient expression. She was still coming to me, pressed by a fear that made her indiscreet.

“Whatever you heard, it doesn’t mean I’m glad that Jerry is dead. I’m sorry he’s dead.” She sounded surprised. “I felt sorry for the poor guy when he was lying there. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t have it – that we couldn’t make it together – Anyway, I had nothing to do with his death, and neither did Charlie.”

“Who said you did?”

“Some people would say it, if they knew about that silly fuss on the porch. Mildred might.”

“Where is Mildred now, by the way?”

“Lying down. I talked her into taking some rest before she goes back to town. She’s emotionally exhausted.”

“That was nice of you.”

“Oh, I’m not a total all-round bitch. And I don’t blame her for what her husband did.”

“If he did.” With nothing much to go on, I threw that in to test her reaction.

She took it personally, almost as an insult. “Is there any doubt he did it?”

“There always is, until it’s proved in court.”

“But he hated Jerry. He had the gun. He came here to kill Jerry, and we know he was here.”

“We know he was here, all right. Maybe he still is. The rest is your version. I’d kind of like to hear his, before we find him guilty and execute him on the spot.”

“Who said anything about executing him? They don’t execute crazy people.”

“They do, though. More than half the people who go to the gas-chamber in this state are mentally disturbed – medically insane, if not legally.”