Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Archer.” She stepped between us, turning her back on me and her full maternal charm on Ostervelt. “Why don’t you wait for me in the car, Sheriff? I’ll talk to Mrs. Hallman if she’ll let me. It’s obvious that her husband hasn’t been here. That’s all you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but–” He glared at me over her shoulder. “I didn’t like that crack.”

“You weren’t intended to. Make something out of it.”

The situation was boiling up again. Miss Parish poured cool words on it: “I didn’t hear any crack. Both you men are under a strain. It’s no excuse for acting like boys with a chip on your shoulder.” She touched Ostervelt’s shoulder, and let her hand linger there. “You will go and wait in the car, won’t you? I’ll only be a few minutes.”

With a kind of caressing firmness, she turned Ostervelt around and gave him a gentle push toward the street. He took it, and he went. She gave me a bright, warm look.

“How did you get him eating out of your hand?”

“Oh, that’s my little secret. Actually, something came up.”

“What came up?”

She smiled. “I did. Dr. Brockley couldn’t make it; he had an important meeting. So he sent me instead. I asked him to.”

“To check up on Ostervelt?”

“I have no official right to do anything like that.” The door of the Mercury slammed in the street. “We’d better go inside, don’t you think? He’ll know we’re talking about him.”

“Let him.”

“You men. Sometimes I feel as though the whole world were a mental hospital. It’s certainly a safe enough assumption to act on.”

After the day I’d put in, I wasn’t inclined to argue.

I opened the door and held it for her. She faced me in the lighted hallway.

“I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“I got involved.”

“I understand you have your car back.”

“Yes.” But she wasn’t interested in my car. “If you’re asking the question I think you are, I’m working for your friend Carl. I don’t believe he killed his brother, or anybody else.”

“Really?” Her bosom rose under her coat. She unbuttoned the coat to give it the room it needed. “I just got finished telling Sheriff Ostervelt the same thing.”

“Did he buy it?”

“I’m afraid not. The circumstances are very much against Carl, aren’t they? I did manage to cool the old man off a bit.”

“How did you manage that?”

“It’s official business. Confidential.”

“Having to do with Carl?”

“Indirectly. The man he escaped with, Tom Rica. I really can’t give you any more information, Mr. Archer.”

“Let me guess. If I’m right, I know it already. If I’m wrong, there’s no harm done. Ostervelt got Rica off with a state-hospital commitment when under the law he should have been sent to the pen.”

Miss Parish didn’t say I was wrong. She didn’t say anything.

I ushered her into the front room. Her dark awareness took it in at a glance, staying on the empty bottle on top of the piano. There was a family photograph beside it, in a tarnished silver frame, and a broken pink conch shell.

Miss Parish picked up the bottle and sniffed it and set it down with a rap. She looked suspiciously toward the door. Her bold profile and mannish hat reminded me of a female operative in a spy movie.

“Where’s the little wife?” she whispered.

“Upstairs, changing her clothes.”

“Is she a drinker?”

“Never touches the stuff. Her mother drinks for both of them.”

“I see.”

Miss Parish leaned forward to examine the photograph. I looked at it over her shoulder. A smiling man in shirtsleeves and wide suspenders stood under a palm tree with a strikingly pretty woman. The woman held a long-dressed child on her arm. The picture had been amateurishly tinted by hand. The tree was green, the woman’s bobbed hair was red, the flowers in her dress were red. All the colors were fading.

“Is this the mother-in-law?”

“Apparently.”

“Where is she now?”

“Dreamland. She passed out.”

“Alcoholic?”

“Mrs. Gley is working at it.”

“What about the father?”

“He dropped away long ago. He may be dead.”

“I’m surprised,” Miss Parish murmured. “I understood Carl came from quite a wealthy – quite a good background.”

“Wealthy, anyway. His wife doesn’t.”

“So I gather.” Miss Parish looked around the mortuary room where the past refused to live or die. “It helps to fill in the picture.”

“What picture?” Her patronizing attitude irked me.

“My understanding of Carl and his problems. The type of family a sick man marries into can be very significant. A person who feels socially inadequate, as sick people do, will often lower himself in the social scale, deliberately declass himself.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions too fast. You should take a look at his own family.”

“Carl’s told me a great deal about them. You know, when a person breaks down, he doesn’t do it all by himself. It’s something that happens to whole families. The terrible thing is when one member cracks up, the rest so often make a scapegoat out of him. They think they can solve their own problems by rejecting the sick one – locking him up and forgetting him.”

“That applies to the Hallmans,” I said. “It doesn’t apply to Carl’s wife. I think her mother would like to see him put away for good, but she doesn’t count for much.”

“I know, I mustn’t let myself be unfair to the wife. She seems to be quite a decent little creature. I have to admit she stayed with it when the going was rough. She came to see Carl every week, never missed a Sunday. Which is more than you can say for a lot of them.” Miss Parish cocked her head, as if she could hear a playback of herself. She flushed slowly. “Good heavens, listen to me. It’s such a temptation to identify with the patients and blame the relatives for everything. It’s one of our worst occupational hazards.”

She sat down on the piano stool and took out a cigarette, which I lit for her. Twin lights burned deep in her eyes. I could sense her emotions burning behind her professional front, like walled atomic fires. They didn’t burn for me, though.

Just to have something burning for me, I lit a cigarette of my own. Miss Parish jumped at the snap of the lighter; she had nerves, too. She turned on the stool to look up at me: “I know I identify with my patients. Especially Carl. I can’t help it.”

“Isn’t that doing it the hard way? If I went through the wringer every time one of my clients does–” I lost interest in the sentence, and let it drop. I had my own identification with the hunted man.

“I don’t care about myself.” Miss Parish crushed out her cigarette rather savagely, and moved to the doorway. “Carl is in serious jeopardy, isn’t he?”

“It could be worse.”

“It may be worse than you think. I talked to several people at the courthouse. They’re raking up those other deaths in his family. He did a lot of talking, you know, at the time he was committed. Completely irrational talking. You don’t take what a disturbed person says at its face value. But a lot of men in law enforcement don’t understand that.”

“Did the sheriff tell you about Carl’s alleged confession?”

“He hinted around about it. I’m afraid he gives it a lot of weight. As if it proved anything.”

“You sound as if you’ve heard it all before.”

“Of course I have. When Carl was admitted six months ago he had himself convinced that he was the criminal of the century. He accused himself of killing both his parents.”

“His mother, too?”