Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

“There was wire in the window-glass. I shouldn’t have tried to bust it with my hands.”

“Why did you want to bust it?”

“I didn’t want to. He made me. He gave me a shot in the back office and said he’d be back in a minute. He never did come back. He turned the key on me.”

I squatted beside him. “Grantland locked you up?”

“Yeah, and the bastard’s going to pay for it.” Rica’s eyes swiveled toward me, heavy and occulted like ball bearings dusted with graphite. “I’m going to lock him up in San Quentin death row.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“He killed an old lady, see, and I’m a witness to it. I’ll stand up in any court and swear to it. You ought to’ve seen his office after he did it. It was a slaughterhouse, with that poor old lady lying there in the blood. And he’s a dirty butcher.”

“Hush now,” Rose said. “Be quiet now. Take it easy.”

“Don’t tell him that. Do you know who she was, Tom?”

“I found out. It was old lady Hallman. He beat her to death and tossed her in the drink. And I’m the one that’s gonna see him gassed for it.”

“What were you doing there?”

His face became inert. “I don’t remember.”

Rose gave me a look of pure hatred. “I forbid you to question him. He’s half out of his mind. God knows how much drug he’s had, or how much blood he’s lost.”

“I want his story now.”

“You can get it tomorrow.”

“He won’t be talking tomorrow. Tom, what were you doing in Grantland’s office that night?”

“Nothing. I was cruising. I needed a cap, so I just dropped by to see if I could con him out of one. I heard this shot, and then this dame came out. She was dripping blood.”

Tom peered at his own hands. His eyes rolled up and went blind. His head rolled loosely sideways.

I shouted in his ear: “What dame? Can you describe her?”

Rose cradled his head in her arms protectively. “We have to get him to a hospital. I believe he’s had a massive overdose. Do you want him to die?”

It was the last thing I wanted. I drove back to the all-night station and asked the attendant to call an ambulance.

He was a bright-looking boy in a leather windbreaker. “Where’s the accident?”

“Up the street. There’s an injured man on the sidewalk in front of Dr. Grantland’s office.”

“It isn’t Dr. Grantland?”

“No.”

“I just wondered. He came in a while ago. Buys his gas from us.”

The boy made the call and came out again. “They ought to be here pretty quick. Anything else I can do?”

“Did you say Dr. Grantland was here tonight?”

“Sure thing.” He looked at the watch on his wrist. “Not more than thirty minutes ago. Seemed to be in a hurry.”

“What did he stop for?”

“Gas. Cleaning gas, not the regular kind. He spilt something on his rug. Gravy, I think he said. It must’ve been a mess. He was real upset about it. The doc just got finished building himself a nice new house with wall-to-wall carpeting.”

“Let’s see, that’s on Seaview.”

“Yeah.” He pointed up the street toward the ridge. “It runs off the boulevard to the left. You’ll see his name on the mailbox if you want to talk to him. Was he involved in the accident?”

“Could be.”

Rose Parish was still on the sidewalk with Tom Rica in her arms. She looked up as I went by, but I didn’t stop. Rose threatened something in me which I wanted to keep intact at least a little longer. As long as it would take to make Grantland pay with everything he had.

HIS HOUSE stood on a terraced lot near the crest of the ridge. It was a fairly extensive layout for a bachelor, a modern redwood with wide expanses of glass and many lights inside, as though to demonstrate that its owner had nothing to hide. His Jaguar was in the slanting driveway.

I turned and stopped in the woven shadow of a pepper tree. Before I left my car, I took Maude’s gun out of the dash compartment. It was a .32 caliber automatic with a full clip and an extra shell in the chamber, ready to fire. I walked down Grantland’s driveway very quietly, with my hand in my heavy pocket.

The front door was slightly ajar. A rasping radio voice came from somewhere inside the house. I recognized the rhythmic monotonous clarity of police signals. Grantland had his radio tuned to the CHP dispatching station.

Under cover of the sound, I moved along the margin of the narrow light that fell across the doorstep. A man’s legs and feet, toes down, were visible through the opening. My heart skipped a beat when I saw them, another beat when one of the legs moved. I kicked the door wide open and went in.

Grantland was on his knees with a red-stained cloth in his hand. There were deeper stains in the carpet which he had been scrubbing.

He whirled like an animal attacked from the rear. The gun in my hand froze him in mid-action.

He opened his mouth wide as if he was going to scream at the top of his lungs. No sound came from him. He closed his mouth. The muscles dimpled along the line of his jaw. He said between his teeth: “Get out of here.”

I closed the door behind me. The hallway was full of the smell of gasoline. Beside a telephone table against the opposite wall, a gallon can stood open. Spots of undried gasoline ran the length of the hallway.

“Did she bleed a lot?” I said.

He got up slowly, watching the gun in my hand. I patted his flanks. He was unarmed. He backed against the wall and leaned there chin down, folding his arms across his chest, like a man on a cold night.

“Why did you kill her?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s a little late for that gambit. Your girl’s dead. You’re a dead pigeon yourself. But they can always use good hospital orderlies in the pen. Maybe you’ll get some consideration if you talk.”

“Who do you think you are? God?”

“I think maybe you did, Grantland. The big dream is over now. The best you have to hope for is a little consideration from a jury.”

He looked down at the spotted carpet under his feet. “Why would I kill Zinnie? I loved her.”

“Sure you did. You fell in love with her as soon as she got within one death of five million dollars. Only now she’s one death past it, no good to you, no good to anybody.”

“Do you have to grind my nose in it?” His voice was dull with the after-boredom of shock.

I felt a flicker of sympathy for him, which I repressed. “Come off it. If you didn’t cut her yourself, you’re covering for the ripper.”

“No. I swear I’m not. I don’t know who it was. I wasn’t here when it happened.”

“But Zinnie was?”

“Yes, she was. She was tired and ill, so I put her to bed in my room. I had an emergency patient, and had to leave the house.” His face was coming to life as he talked, as though he saw an opening that he could slip through. “When I returned, she was gone. I was frantic. All I could think of was getting rid of the blood.”

“Show me the bedroom.”

Reluctantly, he detached himself from the support of the wall. I followed him through the door at the end of the hallway, into the lighted bedroom. The bed had been stripped. The bloody bedclothes, sheets and electric blanket, lay in the middle of the floor with a heap of women’s clothes on top of them.

“What were you going to do with these? Burn them?”

“I guess so,” he said with a wretched sidewise look. “There was nothing between us, you understand. My part in all this was perfectly innocent. But I knew what would happen if I didn’t get rid of the traces. I’d be blamed.”

“And you wanted someone else to be blamed, as usual. So you bundled her body into her station wagon and left it in the lower town, near where Carl Hallman was seen. You kept track of his movements by tuning in the police band. In case he wasn’t available for the rap, you phoned the ranch and brought Zinnie’s servants in, as secondary patsies.”