Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

“I don’t understand why you say that.”

“I was jealous of her, that’s why. I was afraid I was projecting my own wish onto her, that all I wanted was to get her out of the way.”

“Because you’re in love with Carl?”

“Am I so obvious?”

“Very honest, anyway.”

In some incredible reserve of innocence, she found the energy to blush. “I’m a complete fake. The worst of it is, I intend to go right on being one. I don’t care if he is my patient, and married to boot. I don’t care if he’s ill or an invalid or anything else. I don’t care if I have to wait ten years for him.”

Her voice vibrated through the cafeteria. Its drab utilitarian spaces were filling up with white-coated interns, orderlies, nurses. Several of them turned to look, startled by the rare vibration of passion.

Rose lowered her voice. “You won’t misunderstand me. I expect to have to wait for Carl, and in the meantime I’m not forgetting his wife. I’ll do everything I can for her.”

“Do you think an insanity plea could be made to stick?”

“I doubt it. It depends on how sick she is. I’d guess, from what I’ve observed and what you tell me, that she’s borderline schizophrenic. Probably she’s been in-and-out for several years. This crisis may bring her completely out of it. I’ve seen it happen to patients, and she must have considerable ego strength to have held herself together for so long. But the crisis could push her back into very deep withdrawal. Either way, there’s no way out for her. The most we can do is see that she gets decent treatment. Which I intend to do.”

“You’re a good woman.”

She writhed under the compliment. “I wish I were. At least I used to wish it. Since I’ve been doing hospital work, I’ve pretty well got over thinking in terms of good and bad. Those categories often do more harm than – well, good. We use them to torment ourselves, and hate ourselves because we can’t live up to them. Before we know it, we’re turning our hatred against other people, especially the unlucky ones, the weak ones who can’t fight back. We think we have to punish somebody for the human mess we’re in, so we single out the scapegoats and call them evil. And Christian love and virtue go down the drain.” She poked with a spoon at the cold brown dregs of coffee in her cup. “Am I making any sense, or do I just sound softheaded?”

“Both. You sound soft-headed, and you make sense to me. I’ve started to think along some of the same lines.”

Specifically, I was thinking about Tom Rica: the hopeful boy he had been, and the man he had become, hopeless and old in his twenties. I vaguely remembered a time in between, when hope and despair had been fighting for him, and he’d come to me for help. The rest of it was veiled in an old alcoholic haze, but I knew it was ugly.

“It’s going to be a long time,” Rose was saying, “before people really know that we’re members of one another. I’m afraid they’re going to be terribly hard on Mildred. If only there were some mitigation, or if there weren’t so many. She killed so many.”

“There were mitigating circumstances in the first one – the one that started her off. A judge trying it by himself would probably call it justifiable homicide. In fact, I’m not even sure she did it.”

“Really?”

“You heard what Tom Rica said. He blamed that death on Grantland. Did he add anything to that in the course of the night?”

“No. I didn’t press him.”

“Did he do any talking at all?”

“Some.” Rose wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“What did he say?”

“It’s all rather vague. After all, I wasn’t taking notes.”

“Listen, Rose. There’s no point in trying to cover up for Tom, not at this late date. He’s been blackmailing Grantland for years. He broke out of the hospital with the idea of converting it into a big-time operation. Carl probably convinced him that Grantland had something to do with his father’s death, as well as his mother’s, and that there was a lot of money involved. Tom persuaded Carl to come over the wall with him. His idea was to pile more pressure on Grantland. In case Carl couldn’t boil up enough trouble by himself, Tom sent him to me.”

“I know.”

“Did Tom tell you?”

“If you really want to know, he told me a lot of things. Have you stopped to wonder why he picked on you?”

“We used to know each other. I guess my name stuck in his head.”

“More than your name stuck. When he was a boy in high school, you were his hero. And then you stopped being.” She reached across the littered table and touched the back of my hand. “I don’t mean to hurt you, Archer. Stop me if I am.”

“Go ahead. I didn’t know I was important to Tom.” But I was lying. I knew. You always know. On the firing range, in the gym, he even used to imitate my mistakes.

“He seems to have thought of you as a kind of foster-father. Then your wife divorced you, and there were some things in the newspapers, he didn’t say what they were.”

“They were the usual. Or a little worse than the usual.”

“I am hurting you,” she said. “This sounds like an accusation, but it isn’t. Tom hasn’t forgotten what you did for him before your private trouble interfered. Perhaps it was unconscious on his part, but I believe he sent Carl to you in the hope that you could help him.”

“Which one? Tom or Carl?”

“Both of them.”

“If he thought that, how wrong he was.”

“I disagree. You’ve done what you can. It’s all that’s expected of anyone. You helped to save Carl’s life. I know you’ll do what you can for Tom, too. It’s why I wanted you to know what he said, before you talk to him.”

Her approval embarrassed me. I knew how far I had fallen short. “I’d like to talk to him now.”

The security ward occupied one end of a wing on the second floor. The policeman guarding the steel-sheathed door greeted Rose like an old friend, and let us through. The morning light was filtered through a heavy wire mesh screen over the single window of Tom’s cubicle.

He lay like a forked stick under the sheet, his arms inert outside it. Flesh-colored tape bound his hands and wrists. Except where the beard darkened it, his face was much paler than the tape. He bared his teeth in a downward grin: “I hear you had a rough night, Archer. You were asking for it.”

“I hear you had a rougher one.”

“Tell me I asked for it. Cheer me up.”

“Are you feeling better?” Rose asked him.

He answered with bitter satisfaction: “I’m feeling worse. And I’m going to feel worse yet.”

“You’ve been through the worst already,” I said. “Why don’t you kick it permanently?”

“It’s easy to say.”

“You almost had it made when you were with us,” Rose said. “If I could arrange a few months in a federal hospital–”

“Save your trouble. I’d go right back on. It’s my meat and drink. When I kick it there’s nothing left, I know that now.”

“How long have you been on heroin?”

“Five or six hundred years.” He added, in a different, younger voice: “Right after I left high school. This broad I met in Vegas–” His voice sank out of hearing in his throat. He twitched restlessly, and rolled his head on the pillow, away from Rose and me and memory. “We won’t go into it.”

Rose moved to the door. “I’ll go and see how Carl is.”

I said, when the door had closed behind her: “Was it Maude who got you started on horse, Tom?”

“Naw, she’s death on the stuff. She was the one that made me go to the hospital. She could have sprung me clean.”

“I hear you saying it.”

“It’s the truth. She got my charge reduced from possession so they’d send me up for treatment.”