Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

Mildred said that quietly, without any change in tone, without apparent feeling. Her face was expressionless. Only her forefinger moved on her skirted knee, tracing a small pattern: a circle and then a cross inside of the circle; as though she was trying to exorcise bad thoughts.

“I certainly wouldn’t have killed him if he’d died when he was supposed to. Dr. Grantland had said a year, but the year went by, then most of another year. I wasn’t the only one waiting. Jerry and Zinnie were waiting just as hard. They did their best to stir up trouble between Carl and his father, which wasn’t hard to do. Carl was a little better, but still depressed and surly. He wasn’t getting along with his father, and the old man kept threatening to change his will.

“One night Jerry baited Carl into a terrible argument about the Japanese people who used to own part of the valley. The Senator jumped into it, of course, as he was supposed to. Carl told him he didn’t want any part of the ranch. If he ever did inherit any share of it, he’d give it back to the people who’d been sold up. I never saw the old man so angry. He said Carl was in no danger of inheriting anything. This time he meant it, too. He asked Jerry to make an appointment with his lawyer in the morning.

“I telephoned Dr. Grantland and he came out, ostensibly to see the Senator. Afterwards I talked to him outside. He took a very dim view. It wasn’t that he was greedy, but he was thousands of dollars out of pocket. It was the first time he told me about the other man, this Rickey or Rica who’d been blackmailing him ever since Alicia’s death. The same man who escaped with Carl last night.”

“Grantland had never mentioned him to you?”

“No, he said he’d been trying to protect me. But now he was just about bled white, and something had to be done. He didn’t tell me outright that I had to kill the Senator. I didn’t have to be told. I didn’t even have to think about it. I simply let myself forget who I was, and went through the whole thing like clockwork.”

Her forefinger was active on her knee, repeating the symbol of the cross in the circle. She said, as if in answer to a question: “You’d think I’d been planning it for years, all my life, ever since–”

She broke off, and covered the invisible device on her knee with her whole hand. She rose like a sleepwalker and went to the window. An oak tree in the backyard was outlined like a black paper cutout against the whitening sky.

“Ever since what?” I said to her still back.

“I was just remembering. When my father went away, afterwards, I used to think of funny things when I was in bed before I went to sleep. I wanted to track him down, and find him, and–”

“Kill him?”

“Oh no!” she cried. “I wanted to tell him how much we missed him and bring him back to Mother, so that we could be a happy family again. But if he wouldn’t come–”

“What if he wouldn’t come?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t remember.” She struck the window where her reflection had been, not quite hard enough to break it.

DAWN WAS COMING on over the trees, like fluorescent lights in an operating room. Mildred turned away from the white agony of the light. Her outburst of feeling had passed, leaving her face smooth and her voice unshaken. Only her eyes had changed. They were heavy, and the color of ripe plums.

“It wasn’t like the first time. This time I felt nothing. It’s strange to kill someone and have no feeling about it. I wasn’t even afraid while I was waiting for him in his bathroom closet. He always took a warm bath at night to help him sleep. I had an old ball-peen hammer I’d found on Jerry’s workbench in the greenhouse. When he was in the bathtub, I slipped out of the closet and hit him on the back of the head with the hammer. I held his face under the water until the bubbles stopped.

“It only took a few seconds. I unlocked the bathroom door and locked it again on the outside and wiped the key and pushed it back under the door. Then I put the hammer where I found it, with Jerry’s things. I hoped it would be taken for an accident, but if it wasn’t I wanted Jerry to be blamed. It was really his fault, egging Carl on to quarrel with his father.

“But Carl was the one they blamed, as you well know. He seemed to want to be blamed. I think for a while he convinced himself that he had actually done it, and everyone else went along with it. The sheriff didn’t even investigate.”

“Was he protecting you?”

“No. If he was, he didn’t know it. Jerry made some kind of a deal with him to save the county money and save the family’s face. He didn’t want a murder trial in his distinguished family. Neither did I. I didn’t try to interfere when Jerry arranged to send Carl to the hospital. I signed the papers without a word.

“Jerry knew what he was doing. He was trained in the law, and he arranged it so that he was Carl’s legal guardian. It meant that he controlled everything. I had no rights at all, as far as the family estate was concerned. The day after Carl was committed, Jerry hinted politely that I might as well move out. I believe that Jerry suspected me, but he was a cagey individual. It suited him better to blame it all on Carl, and keep his own cards face down.

“Dr. Grantland turned against me, too. He said he was through with me, after the mess I’d made of things. He said that he was through protecting me. For all he cared, the man he’d been paying off could go to the police and tell them all about me. And I mustn’t think that I could get back at him by talking him into trouble. It would be my word against his, and I was as schitzy as hell, and he could prove it. He slapped me and ordered me out of his house. He said if I didn’t like it, he’d call the police right then.

“I’ve spent the last six months waiting for them,” she said. “Waiting for the knock on the door. Some nights I’d wish for them to come, will them to come, and get it over with. Some nights I wouldn’t care one way or the other. Some nights – they were the worst – I’d lie burning up with cold and watch the clock and count its ticks, one by one, all night. The clock would tick like doom, louder and louder, like doomsters knocking on the door and clumping up the stairs.

“I got so I was afraid to go to sleep at night. I haven’t slept for the last four nights, since I found out about Carl’s friend on the ward. It was this man, Rica, the one who knew all about me. I could imagine him telling Carl. Carl would turn against me. There’d be nobody left in the world who even liked me. When they phoned me yesterday morning that Carl had escaped with him, I knew that this had to be it.” She looked at me quite calmly. “You know the rest. You were here.”

“I saw it from the outside.”

“That’s all there was, the outside. There wasn’t any inside, at least for me. It was like a ritual which I made up as I went along. Every step I took had a meaning at the time, but I can’t remember any of the meanings now.”

“Tell me what you did, from the time that you decided to kill Jerry.”

“It decided itself,” she said. “I had no decision to make, no choice. Dr. Grantland phoned me at the office a little while before you got to town. It was the first I’d heard from him in six months. He said that Carl had got hold of a loaded gun. If Carl shot Jerry with it, it would solve a lot of problems. Money would be available, in case this man Rica tried to make more trouble for us. Also, Grantland would be able to use his influence with Zinnie to head off investigation of the other deaths. I’d even have a chance at my share of the property. If Carl didn’t shoot Jerry, the whole thing would blow up in our faces.