Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

Grantland’s face took on its jaundiced look. He sat on the edge of the mattress with his head down. “You’ve been keeping track of my movements, have you?”

“It’s time somebody did. Who was the emergency patient who called you out tonight?”

“It doesn’t matter. Nobody you know.”

“You’re wrong again. It matters, and I’ve known Tom Rica for a good many years. You gave him an overdose of heroin and left him to die.”

Grantland sat in silence. “I gave him what he asked for.”

“Sure. You’re very generous. He wanted a little death. You gave him the whole works.”

Grantland began to speak rapidly, surrounding himself with a protective screen of words: “I must have made a mistake in the dosage. I didn’t know how much he was used to. He was in a bad way, and I had to give him something for temporary relief. I intended to have him moved to the hospital. I see now I shouldn’t have left him without an attendant. Apparently he was worse off than I realized. These addicts are unpredictable.”

“Lucky for you they are.”

“Lucky?”

“Rica isn’t quite dead. He was even able to do some talking before he lost consciousness.”

“Don’t believe him. He’s a pathological liar, and he’s got a grudge against me. I wouldn’t provide him with drugs–”

“Wouldn’t you? I thought that’s what you were doing, and I’ve been wondering why. I’ve also been wondering what happened in your office three years ago.”

“When?” He was hedging for time, time to build a story with escape hatches, underground passages, somewhere, anywhere to hide.

“You know when. How did Alicia Hallman die?”

He took a deep breath. “This will come as a surprise to you. Alicia died by accident. If anyone was culpable, it was her son Jerry who was. He’d made a special night appointment for her, and drove her to my office himself. She was terribly upset about something, and she wanted drugs to calm her nerves. I wouldn’t prescribe any for her. She pulled a gun out of her purse and tried to shoot me with it. Jerry heard the shot. He rushed in from the waiting-room and grappled with her. She fell and struck her head on the radiator. She was mortally hurt. Jerry begged me to keep it quiet, to protect him and his mother’s name and save the family from scandal. I did what I could to shield them. They were my friends as well as my patients.”

He lowered his head, the serviceable martyr.

“It’s a pretty good story. Are you sure it wasn’t rehearsed?”

He looked up sharply. His eyes met mine for an instant. There were red fiery points in their centers. They veered away past me to the window and I glanced over my shoulder. The window framed only the half-lit sky above the city.

“Is that the story you told Carl this morning?”

“It is, as a matter of fact. Carl wanted the truth. I felt I had no right to keep it from him. It had been a load on my conscience for three years.”

“I know how conscientious you are, Doctor. You got your hooks into a sick man, told him a lying story about his mother’s death, gave him a gun and sicked him on his brother and turned him loose.”

“It wasn’t like that. He asked to see the gun. It was evidence of the truth. I suppose I’d kept it with that in mind. I brought it out of the safe and showed it to him.”

“You kept it with murder in mind. You had it loaded, ready for him, didn’t you?”

“That simply isn’t so. Even if it were, you could never prove it. Never. He grabbed the gun and ran. I was helpless to stop him.”

“Why did you lie to him about his mother’s death?”

“It wasn’t a lie.”

“Don’t contradict me, brother.” I wagged the gun to remind him of it. “It wasn’t Jerry who drove his mother into town. It was Sam Yogan. It wasn’t Jerry who beat her to death. He was in Berkeley with his father. You wouldn’t stick your neck out for Jerry, anyway. I can only think of two people you’d take that risk for – yourself, or Zinnie. Was Zinnie in your office with Alicia?”

He looked at me with flaring eyes, as if his brains were burning in his skull. “Go on. This is very interesting.”

“Tom Rica saw a woman come out of there dripping blood. Was Zinnie wounded by Alicia’s shot?”

“It’s your story,” he said.

“All right. I think it was Zinnie. She panicked and ran. You stayed behind and disposed of her mother-in-law’s body. Your only motive was self-protection, but Zinnie wouldn’t think of that, with the fear and guilt she had on her mind. She wouldn’t stop to think that when you pushed that body into the ocean, you were converting justifiable manslaughter into murder – making a murderer out of your true love. No doubt she was grateful to you.

“Of course she wasn’t your true love at the time. She wasn’t rich enough yet. You wouldn’t want her, or any woman, without money. Sooner or later, though, when the Senator died, Zinnie and her husband were due to come into a lot of money. But the years dragged on, and the old man’s heart kept beating, and you got impatient, tired of sweating it out, living modestly on the profits from pills while other people had millions.

“The Senator needed a little help, a little send-off. You were his doctor, and you could easily have done it for him yourself, but that’s not the way you operate. Better to let somebody else take the risks. Not too many risks, of course – Zinnie was going to be worth money to you. You helped her to set the psychological stage, so that Carl would be the obvious suspect. Shifting the blame onto Carl served a double purpose. It choked off any real investigation, and it got Carl and Mildred out of the picture. You wanted the Hallman money all to yourself.

“Once the Senator was gone, there was only one hurdle left between you and the money. Zinnie wanted to take it the easy way in a divorce settlement, but her child got in the way of a divorce. I imagine you did, too. You had one death to go, for the whole five million less taxes and a wife who would have to take orders the rest of her life. That death occurred today, and you’ve practically admitted that you set it up.”

“I admitted nothing. I gave you practical proof that Carl Hallman killed his brother. The chances are he killed Zinnie, too. He could have made it across town in a stolen car.”

“How long ago was Zinnie killed?”

“I’d say about four hours.”

“You’re a liar. Her body was warm when I found it, less than an hour ago.”

“You must have been mistaken. You may not think much of me, but I am a qualified doctor. I left her before eight, and she must have died soon after. It’s midnight now.”

“What have you been doing since then?”

Grantland hesitated. “I couldn’t move for a long time after I found her. I simply lay on the bed beside her.”

“You say you found her in bed?”

“I did find her in bed.”

“How did the blood get in the hall?”

“When I was carrying her out.” He shuddered. “Can’t you see that I’m telling you the truth? Carl must have come in and found her asleep. Perhaps he was looking for me. After all, I’m the doctor who committed him. Perhaps he killed her to get back at me. I left the door unlocked, like an idiot.”

“You wouldn’t have been setting her up for him? Or would you?”

“What do you think I am?”

It was a hard question. Grantland was staring down at Zinnie’s clothes, his face distorted by magnetic lines of grief. I’d known murderers who killed their lovers and grieved for them. Most of them were half-hearted broken-minded men. They killed and cried and tore their prison blankets and twisted their blankets into nooses. I doubted that Grantland fitted the pattern, but it was possible.