Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

The blind footsteps tapped across the ceiling. Mrs. Gley cocked her head like a molting red parrot. “Izzat Mildred?”

“Yes.”

“She ought to go to bed. Keep up her strength. She’s never been the same since she lost that child of grief.”

“How long ago did she lose it?”

“Three years, more or less.”

“Did she have a doctor to look after her?”

“Sure she did. It was this same Dr. Grantland, poor fellow. It’s a shame what had to happen to him. He treated her real nice, never even sent her a bill. That was before she got married, of course. Long before. I told her at the time, here was her chance to break off with that Carl and make a decent connection. A rising young doctor, and all. But she never listened to me. It had to be Carl Hallman or nothing. So now it’s nothing. They’re both gone.”

“Carl isn’t dead yet.”

“He might as well be. I might as well be, too. My life is nothing but disappointment and trouble. I brought my girl up to associate with nice people, marry a fine young man. But no, she had to have him. She had to marry into trouble and sickness and death.” Her drunken self-pity rose in her throat like vomit. “She did it to spite me, that’s what she did. She’s trying to kill me with all this trouble that she brought into my house. I used to keep a nice house, but Mildred broke my spirit. She never gave me the love that a daughter owes her mother. Mooning all the time over her no-good father – you’d think she was the one that married him and lost him.”

Her anger wouldn’t come in spite of the invocation. She looked in fear at the ceiling, blinking against the light from the naked bulb. The fear in her drained parrot’s eyes refused to dissolve. It deepened into terror.

“I’m not a good mother, either,” she said. “I never have been any good to her. I’ve been a living drag on her all these years, and may God forgive me.”

She slumped forward across the table, as if the entire weight of the night had fallen on her. Her harsh red hair spilled on the white tabletop. I stood and looked at her without seeing her. A pit or tunnel had opened in my mind, three years deep or long. Under white light at the bottom of it, fresh and vivid as a hallucination, I could see the red spillage where life had died and murder had been born.

I was in a stretched state of nerves where hidden things are coming clear and ordinary things are hidden. I thought of the electric blanket on the floor of Grantland’s bedroom. I didn’t hear Mildred’s quiet feet till she was half-way down the back stairs. I met her at the foot of them.

Her whole body jerked when she saw me. She brought it under control, and tried to smile: “I didn’t know you were still here.”

“I’ve been talking to your mother. She seems to have passed out again.”

“Poor mother. Poor everybody.” She shut her eyes against the sight of the kitchen and its raddled occupant. She brushed her blue-veined eyelids with the fingertips of one hand. Her other hand was hidden in the folds of her skirt. “I suppose I should put her to bed.”

“I have to talk to you first.”

“What on earth about? It’s terribly late.”

“About poor everybody. How did Grantland know that Carl was here?”

“He didn’t. He couldn’t have.”

“I think you’re telling the truth for once. He didn’t know Carl was here. He came here to kill you, but Carl was in his way. By the time he got to you, the gun was empty.”

She stood silent.

“Why did Grantland want to kill you, Mildred?”

She moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. “I don’t know.”

“I think I do. The reasons he had wouldn’t drive an ordinary man to murder. But Grantland was frightened as well as angry. Desperate. He had to silence you, and he wanted to get back at you. Zinnie meant more to him than money.”

“What’s Zinnie got to do with me?”

“You stabbed her to death with your mother’s paring knife. I didn’t see at first how it was possible. Zinnie’s body was warm when I found her. You were here under police surveillance. The timing didn’t fit, until I realized that her body was kept warm under an electric blanket in Grantland’s bed. You killed her before you drove to Pelican Beach. You heard over Grantland’s radio that Carl was seen there. Isn’t that true?”

“Why would I do a thing like that?” she whispered.

The question wasn’t entirely rhetorical. Mildred looked as if she earnestly desired an answer. Like an independent entity, her hidden fist jumped up from the folds of her skirt to supply an answer. A pointed blade projected downward from it. She drove it against her breast.

Even her final intention was divided. The knife turned in her hand, and only tore her blouse. I had it away from her before she could do more damage.

“Give it back to me. Please.”

“I can’t do that.” I was looking at the knife. Its blade was etched with dry brown stains.

“Then kill me. Quickly. I have to die anyway. I’ve known it now for years.”

“You have to live. They don’t gas women any more.”

“Not even women like me? I couldn’t bear to live. Please kill me. I know you hate me.”

She tore her blouse gaping and offered her breast to me in desperate seduction. It was like a virgin’s, unsunned, the color of pearl.

“I’m sorry for you, Mildred.”

My voice sounded strange; it had broken through into a tone that was new to me, deep as the sorrow I felt. It had nothing to do with sex, or with the possessive pity that changed to sex when the wind blew from the south. She was a human being with more grief on her young mind than it was able to bear.

MRS. GLEY groaned in her sleep. Mildred ran up the stairs away from both of us. I went up after her, across a drab brown hallway, into a room where she was struggling to raise the window.

It wasn’t a woman’s room, or anybody’s room. It was more like an unused guestroom where unwanted things were kept: old books and pictures, an old iron double bed, a decaying rug. I felt a strange proprietary embarrassment, like a pawnbroker who’s lent money on somebody else’s possessions, sight unseen.

The window resisted her efforts. I saw her watching me in its dark mirror. Her own reflected face was like a ghost’s peering from outer darkness.

“Go away and leave me alone.”

“A lot of people have. Maybe that’s the trouble. Come away from the window, eh?”

She moved back into the room and stood by the bed. There was a soiled depression in the cheap chenille spread where I guessed Carl had been lying. She sat on the edge of the iron bed.

“I don’t want any of your phony sympathy. People always want to be paid for it. What do you want from me? Sex? Money? Or just to see me suffer?”

I didn’t know how to answer her.

“Or do you simply want to hear me say it? Listen then, I’m a murderer. I murdered four people.”

She sat and looked at the faded flowers in the wallpaper. I thought that it was a place where dreams could grow rank without much competition from the actual.

“What did you want, Mildred?”

She put a name to one of the dreams. “Money. That was what set him off from everyone – the thing that made him so handsome to me, so – shining.”

“Do you mean Carl?”

“Yes. Carl.” Her hand moved behind her to the depression in the spread. She leaned on it. “Even tonight, when he was lying here, all dirty and stinking, I felt so happy with him. So rich. Mother used to say I talked like a whore, but I was never a whore. I never took money from him. I gave myself to him because he needed me. The books said he had to have sex. So I used to let him come up here to the room.”