Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

“He told me what you told him. That she attempted suicide in this office.”

“It was in my previous office. I moved last year.”

“So you can’t show me the bullet hole in the ceiling.”

“Good Lord, are you questioning that? I got that gun away from her at the risk of my own life.”

“I don’t question it. I wanted to hear it from you, though.”

“Well, now you’ve heard it. I hope you’re satisfied.” He took off his smock and turned to hang it up.

“Why did she try to commit suicide in your office?”

He was very still for an instant, frozen in the act of placing the white garment on a hook. Between the shoulder blades and under the arms, his gray shirt was dark with sweat. It was the only indication that I was giving him a hard time. He said: “She wanted something I wasn’t prepared to give her. A massive dose of sleeping pills. When I refused, she pulled this little revolver out of her purse. It was touch and go whether she was going to shoot me or herself. Then she pointed it at her head. Fortunately I managed to reach her, and take the gun away.” He turned with a bland and doleful look on his face.

“Was she on a barb kick?”

“You might call it that. I did my best to keep it under control.”

“Why didn’t you have her put in a safe place?”

“I miscalculated, I admit it. I don’t pretend to be a psychiatrist. I didn’t grasp the seriousness of her condition. We doctors make mistakes, you know, like everybody else.”

He was watching me like a chess-player. But his sympathy gambit was a giveaway. Unless he had something important to cover up, he’d have ordered me out of his office long ago.

“What happened to the gun?” I said.

“I kept it. I intended to throw it away, but never got around to it.”

“How did Carl Hallman get hold of it?”

“He lifted it out of my desk drawer.” He added disarmingly: “I guess I was a damn fool to keep it there.”

I’d been holding back my knowledge of Carl Hallman’s visit to his office. It was disappointing to have the fact conceded. Grantland said with a faint sardonic smile: “Didn’t the sheriff tell you that Carl was here this morning? I telephoned him immediately. I also got in touch with the State Hospital.”

“Why did he come here?”

Grantland turned his hands palms outward. “Who can say? He was obviously disturbed. He bawled me out for my part in having him committed, but his main animus was against his brother. Naturally I tried to talk him out of it.”

“Naturally. Why didn’t you hold on to him?”

“Don’t think I didn’t try to. I stepped into the dispensary for a minute to get him some thorazine. I thought it might calm him down. When I came back to the office, he was gone. He must have run out the back way here.” Grantland indicated the back door of the examination room. “I heard a car start, but he was gone before I could catch him.”

I walked over to the half-curtained window and looked out. Grantland’s Jaguar was parked in the paved lot. Back of the lot, a dirt lane ran parallel with the street. I turned back to Grantland: “You say he took your gun?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time. It wasn’t exactly my gun, either. I’d practically forgotten it existed. I didn’t even think of it till I found it in the greenhouse beside poor Jerry’s body. Then I couldn’t be sure it was the same one, I’m no expert on guns. So I waited until I got back here this afternoon, and had a chance to check the drawer of my desk. When I found it gone I got in touch with the sheriff’s department right away – much as I hated to do it.”

“Why did you hate to do it?”

“Because I’m fond of the boy. He used to be my patient. You’d hardly expect me to get a kick out of proving that he’s a murderer.”

“You’ve proved that, have you?”

“You’re supposed to be a detective. Can you think of any other hypothesis?”

I could, but I kept it to myself. Grantland said: “I can understand your feeling let down. Ostervelt told me you’re representing poor Carl, but don’t take it too hard, old man. They’ll take his mental condition into account. I’ll see to it personally that they do.”

I wasn’t as sad as I looked. Not that I was happy about the case. Every time I moved, I picked up another link in the evidence against my client. But this happened with such clockwork regularity that I was getting used to it and beginning to discount it. Besides, I was encouraged by the firm and lasting faith which I was developing in Dr. Grantland’s lack of integrity.

TWILIGHT WAS THICKENING in the street outside. The white-walled buildings, fluorescent with last light, had taken on the beauty and mystery of a city in Africa or someplace else I’d never been. I nosed my car out into a break in the traffic, turned right at the next intersection, and parked a hundred feet short of the entrance to Grantland’s back lane. I hadn’t been there five minutes when his Jaguar came bumping along the lane. It arced out into the street on whining tires.

Grantland didn’t know my car. I followed him fairly closely, two blocks south, then west on a boulevard that slanted toward the sea. I almost lost him when he made a left turn onto the highway on the tail end of a green light. I followed through on the yellow as it turned red.

From there the Jaguar was easy to keep in sight. It headed south on the highway through the outskirts where marginal operators purveyed chicken-fried steaks and salt-water taffy, Mexican basketry and redwood mementoes. The neon-cluttered sub-suburbs dropped behind. The highway snaked up and along brown bluffs which rose at a steep angle above the beach. The sea lay at their foot, a more somber reflection of the sky, still tinged at its far edge with the sun’s red death.

About two miles out of town, as many minutes, the Jaguar’s brake lights blazed. It heeled and turned onto a black top shelf overlooking the sea. There was one other car in the turnout, a red Cadillac with its nose against the guardrail. Before the next curve swept me out of sight, I saw Grantland’s car pull up beside the Cadillac.

There was traffic behind me. I found another turnout a quarter of a mile further on. By the time I’d made my turn and got back to the first turnout, the Jaguar was gone and the Cadillac was going.

I caught a glimpse of the driver’s face as he turned onto the highway. It gave me the kind of shock you might get from seeing the ghost of someone you’d once known. I’d known him ten years before, when he was a high-school athlete, a big boy, nice-looking, full of fermenting energy. The face behind the wheel of the Cadillac: yellow skin stretched over skull, smokily lit by black unfocused eyes: could have belonged to that boy’s grandfather. I knew him, though. Tom Rica.

I turned once again and followed him south. He drove erratically, slowing on the straightaway and speeding up on the curves, using two of the four lanes. Once, at better than seventy, he left the road entirely, and veered onto the shoulder. The Cadillac skidded sideways in the gravel, headlights swinging out into gray emptiness. The bumper clipped the steel guardrail, and the Cadillac slewed wildly in the other direction. It regained the road and went on as if nothing had happened.

I stayed close behind, trying to think my way into Tom Rica’s brain and along his damaged nerves and do his driving for him. I’d always felt an empathy for the boy. When he was eighteen and his unmaturing youth had begun to go rank, I’d tried to hold him straight, and even run some interference for him. An old cop had done it for me when I was a kid. I couldn’t do it for Tom.

The memory of my failure was bitter and obscure, mixed with the ash-blonde memory of a woman I’d once been married to. I put both memories out of my mind.