Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

“I know that. Did he mention the shooting to you?”

“I guess he did. Yes. He mentioned it, said it was a terrible thing.”

“Did he mention the gun that was used?”

She hesitated before answering. The color left her face. Otherwise she was completely immobile, concentrating on what she would say and its possible implications. “No. Martha was with us, and all. He didn’t say anything about the gun.”

“It still seems queer to me. Grantland saw the gun. He told me himself that he recognized it, but wasn’t certain of the identification. He must have known that you were familiar with it.”

“I’m no expert on guns.”

“You gave me a good description of it just now. In fact, you probably knew it as well as anyone alive. But Grantland didn’t say a word to you about it, ask you a single question. Or did he?”

There was another pause. “No. He didn’t say a word.”

“Have you seen Dr. Grantland since this afternoon?”

“What if I have?” she answered stolidly.

“Has Grantland been here tonight?”

“What if he was? Him coming here had nothing to do with me.”

“Who did it have to do with? Zinnie?”

Rose Parish stirred on the couch beside me, nudging my knee with hers. She made a small coughing noise of distress. This encouraged Mrs. Hutchinson, as perhaps it was intended to. I could practically see her resistance solidifying. She sat like a monument in flowered silk: “You’re trying to make me talk myself out of a job. I’m too old to get another job. I’ve got too much property to qualify for the pension, and not enough to live on.” After a pause, she said: “No! I’m falsifying myself. I could always get along someway. It’s Martha that keeps me on the job. If it wasn’t for her, I would have quit that house long ago.”

“Why?”

“It’s a bad-luck house, that’s why. It brings bad luck to everybody who goes there. Yes, and I’d be happy to see it burn to the ground like Sodom. That may sound like a terrible thing for a Christian woman to say. No loss of life; I wouldn’t wish that on them; there’s been loss of life enough. I’d just like to see that house destroyed, and that family scattered forevermore.”

I thought without saying it that Mrs. Hutchinson was getting her awesome wish.

“What are you leading up to?” I said. “I know the doctor and Zinnie Hallman are interested in each other. Is that the fact you’re trying to keep from spilling? Or is there more?”

She weighed me in the balance of her eyes. “Just who are you, Mister?”

“I’m a private detective–”

“I know that much. Who’re you detecting for? And who against?”

“Carl Hallman asked me to help him.”

“Carl did? How could that be?”

I explained briefly how it could be. “He was seen in your neighborhood tonight. It’s why Miss Parish and I came here to your house, to head off any possible trouble.”

“You think he might try and do something to the child?”

“It occurred to us as a possibility,” Rose Parish said. “I wouldn’t worry about it. We probably went off half-cocked. I honestly don’t believe that Carl would harm anyone.”

“What about his brother?”

“I don’t believe he shot his brother.” She exchanged glances with me. “Neither of us believes it.”

“I thought, from the paper and all, they had it pinned on him good.”

“It nearly always looks like that when they’re hunting a suspect,” I said.

“You mean it isn’t true?”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Somebody else did it?”

Her question hung unanswered in the room. An inner door at the far end was opening slowly, softly. Martha slipped in through the narrow aperture. Elfin in blue sleepers, she scampered into the middle of the room, stood and looked at us with enormous eyes.

Mrs. Hutchinson said: “Go back to bed, you minx.”

“I won’t. I’m not sleepy.”

“Come on, I’ll tuck you in.”

The old woman rose ponderously and made a grab for the child, who evaded her.

“I want Mommy to tuck me in. I want my Mommy.”

In the middle of her complaint, Martha stopped in front of Rose Parish. A reaching innocence, like an invisible antenna, stretched upward from her face to the woman’s face, and was met by a similar reaching innocence. Rose opened her arms. Martha climbed into them.

“You’re bothering the lady,” Mrs. Hutchinson said.

“She’s no bother, are you, honey?”

The child was quiet against her breast. We sat in silence for a bit. The tick of thought continued like a tiny stitching in my consciousness or just below it, trying to piece together the rags and bloody tatters of the day. My thoughts threatened the child, the innocent one, perhaps the only one who was perfectly innocent. It wasn’t fair that her milk teeth should be set on edge.

NOISES FROM OUTSIDE, random voices and the scrape of boots, pulled me out of my thoughts and to the door. A guerrilla formation of men carrying rifles and shotguns went by in the street.

A second, smaller group was fanning out across the vacant lots toward the creekbed, probing the tree-clotted darkness with their flashlights.

The man directing the second group wore some kind of uniform. I saw when I got close to him that he was a city police sergeant.

“What’s up, Sergeant?”

“Manhunt. We got a lunatic at large in case you don’t know it.”

“I know it.”

“If you’re with the posse, you’re supposed to be searching farther up the creek.”

“I’m a private detective working on this case. What makes you think that Hallman’s on this side of the highway?”

“The carhop at the Barn says he came through the culvert. He came up the creek from the beach, and the chances are he’s following it right on up. He may be long gone by now, though. She was slow in passing the word to us.”

“Where does the creekbed lead to?”

“Across town.” He pointed east with his flashlight. “All the way to the mountains, if you stay with it. But he won’t get that far, not with seventy riflemen tracking him.”

“If he’s gone off across town, why search around here?”

“We can’t take chances with him. He may be lying doggo. We don’t have the trained men to go through all the houses and yards, so we’re concentrating on the creek.” His light came up to my face for a second. “You want to pitch in and help?”

“Not right now.” With seventy hunters after a single buck, conditions would be crowded. “I left my red hat home.”

“Then you’re taking up my time, fellow.”

The sergeant moved off among the trees. I walked to the end of the block and crossed the highway, six lanes wide at this point.

The Red Barn was a many-windowed building which stood in the center of a blacktop lot on the corner. Its squat pentagonal structure was accentuated by neon tubing along the eaves and corners. Inside this brilliant red cage, a tall-hatted short-order cook kept several waitresses running between his counter and the cars in the lot. The waitresses wore red uniforms and little red caps which made them look like bellhops in skirts. The blended odors of gasoline fumes and frying grease changed in my nostrils to a foolish old hot-rod sorrow, nostalgia for other drive-ins along roads I knew in prewar places before people started dying on me.

It seemed that my life had dwindled down to a series of one-night stands in desolate places. Watch it, I said to myself; self-pity is the last refuge of little minds and aging professional hardnoses. I knew the desolation was my own. Brightness had fallen from my interior air.

A boy and a girl in a hand-painted lavender Chevrolet coupé made me feel better, for some reason. They were sitting close, like a body with two ducktailed heads, taking alternate sips of malted milk from the same straw, germ-free with love. Near them in a rusty Hudson a man in a workshirt, his dark and hefty wife, three or four children whose eyes were brilliant and bleary with drive-in-movie memories, were eating mustard-dripping hot dogs with the rapt solemnity of communicants.