Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

“Well, Carl had no intention of shooting anybody. I found that out when I talked to him in the orange grove. The gun he had was his mother’s gun, which Dr. Grantland had given him. Carl wanted to ask Jerry some questions about it – about her death. Apparently Grantland told him that Jerry killed her.

“I didn’t know for certain that Jerry suspected me, but I was afraid of what he would say to Carl. This was on top of all the other reasons I had to kill him, all the little snubs and sneers I’d had to take from him. I said I’d talk to Jerry instead, and I persuaded Carl to hand over the gun to me. If he was found armed, they might shoot him without asking questions. I told him to stay out of sight, and come here after dark if he could make it. That I would hide him.

“I hid the gun away, inside my girdle – it hurt so much I fainted, there on the lawn. When I was alone, I switched it to my bag. Later, when Jerry was alone, I went into the greenhouse and shot him twice in the back. I wiped the gun and left it there beside him. I had no more use for it.”

She sighed, with the deep bone-tiredness that takes years to come to. Even the engine of her guilt was running down. But there was one more death in her cycle of killings.

And still the questions kept rising behind my teeth, always the questions, with the taste of their answers, salt as sea or tears, bitter as iron or fear, sweet-sour as folding money that has passed through many hands: “Why did you kill Zinnie? Did you actually believe that you could get away with it, collect the money and live happily ever after?”

“I never thought of the money,” she said, “or Zinnie, for that matter. I went there to see Dr. Grantland.”

“You took a knife along.”

“For him,” she said. “I was thinking about him when I took that knife out of the drawer. Zinnie happened to be the one who was there. I killed her, I hardly know why. I felt ashamed for her, lying naked like that in his bed. It was almost like killing myself. Then I heard the radio going in the front room. It said that Carl had been seen at Pelican Beach.

“It seemed like a special message intended for me. I thought that there was hope for us yet, if only I could reach Carl. We could go away together and start a new life, in Africa or on the Indian reservations. It sounds ridiculous now, but that’s what I thought on the way down to Pelican Beach. That somehow everything could be made good yet.”

“So you walked in front of a truck.”

“Yes. Suddenly I saw what I had done. Especially to Carl. It was my fault he was being hunted like a murderer. I was the murderer. I saw what I was, and I wanted to put an end to myself before I killed more people.”

“What people are you talking about?”

Averting her face, she stared fixedly at the rumpled pillow at the head of the bed.

“Were you planning to kill Carl? Is that why you sent us away to Mrs. Hutchinson’s, when he was already here?”

“No. It was Martha I was thinking about. I didn’t want anything to happen to Martha.”

“Who would hurt her if you didn’t?”

“I was afraid I would,” she said miserably. “It was one of the thoughts that came to me, that Martha had to be killed. Otherwise the whole thing made no sense.”

“And Carl too? Did he have to be killed?”

“I thought I could do it,” she said. “I stood over him with the knife in my hand for a long time while he was sleeping. I could say that I killed him in self-defense, and that he confessed all the murders before he died. I could get the house and the money all to myself, and pay off Dr. Grantland. Nobody else would suspect me.

“But I couldn’t go through with it,” she said. “I dropped the knife on the floor. I couldn’t hurt Carl, or Martha. I wanted them to live. It made the whole thing meaningless, didn’t it?”

“You’re wrong. The fact that you didn’t kill them is the only meaning left.”

“What difference does it make? From the night I killed Alicia and my baby, every day I’ve lived has been a crime against nature. There isn’t a person on the face of the earth who wouldn’t hate me if they knew about me.”

Her face was contorted. I thought she was trying not to cry. Then I thought she was trying to cry.

“I don’t hate you, Mildred. On the contrary.”

I was an ex-cop, and the words came hard. I had to say them, though, if I didn’t want to be stuck for the rest of my life with the old black-and-white picture, the idea that there were just good people and bad people, and everything would be hunky-dory if the good people locked up the bad ones or wiped them out with small personalized nuclear weapons.

It was a very comforting idea, and bracing to the ego. For years I’d been using it to justify my own activities, fighting fire with fire and violence with violence, running on fool’s errands while the people died: a slightly earthbound Tarzan in a slightly paranoid jungle. Landscape with figure of a hairless ape.

It was time I traded the picture in on one that included a few of the finer shades. Mildred was as guilty as a girl could be, but she wasn’t the only one. An alternating current of guilt ran between her and all of us involved with her. Grantland and Rica, Ostervelt, and me. The redheaded woman who drank time under the table. The father who had deserted the household and died for it symbolically in the Senator’s bathtub. Even the Hallman family, the four victims, had been in a sense the victimizers, too. The current of guilt flowed in a closed circuit if you traced it far enough.

Thinking of Alicia Hallman and her open-ended legacy of death, I was almost ready to believe in her doomsters. If they didn’t exist in the actual world they rose from the depths of every man’s inner sea, gentle as night dreams, with the back-breaking force of tidal waves. Perhaps they existed in the sense that men and women were their own doomsters, the secret authors of their own destruction. You had to be very careful what you dreamed.

The wave of night had passed through Mildred and left her cold and shaking. I held her in my arms for a little while. The light outside the window had turned to morning. The green tree-branches moved in it. Wind blew through the leaves.

I TALKED to Rose Parish at breakfast, in the cafeteria of the local hospital. Mildred was in another part of the same building, under city police guard and under sedation. Rose and I had insisted on these things, and got our way. There would be time enough for further interrogations, statements, prosecution and defense, for all the awesome ritual of the law matching the awesome ritual of her murders.

Carl had survived a two-hour operation, and wasn’t out from under the anesthetic. His prognosis was fair. Tom Rica was definitely going to live. He was resting in the men’s security ward after a night of walking. I wasn’t sure that Rose and the others who had helped to walk him, had done him any great favor.

Rose listened to me in silence, tearing her toast into small pieces and neglecting her eggs. The night had left bruises around her eyes, which somehow improved her looks.

“Poor girl,” she said, when I finished. “What will happen to her?”

“It’s a psychological question as much as a legal question. You’re the psychologist.”

“Not much of a one, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself. You really called the shots last night. When I was talking to Mildred, I remembered what you said about whole families breaking down together, but putting it off onto the weakest one. The scapegoat. Carl was the one you had in mind. In a way, though, Mildred is another.”

“I know. I’ve watched her, at the hospital, and again last night. I couldn’t miss her mask, her coldness, her not-being-there. But I didn’t have the courage to admit to myself that she was ill, let alone speak out about it.” She bowed her head over her uneaten breakfast, maltreating a fragment of toast between her fingers. “I’m a coward and a fraud.”