The Doomsters (3 page)

“The Japanese?” I said.

Carl’s speech had been coming in a faster rhythm, so fast that I could hardly follow it. There was an evangelical light in his eye. His face was flushed and hot.

“Yes. I’m ashamed to say it, but my father cheated some of his own best friends, Japanese people. When I was a kid, before the War, there used to be quite a few of them in our county. They had hundreds of acres of truck gardens between our ranch and town. They’re nearly all gone now. They were driven out during the war, and never came back. Father bought up their land at a few cents on the dollar.

“I told him when I got my share of the ranch, I’d give those people their property back. I’d hire detectives to trace them and bring them back and give them what was theirs. I intended to do it, too. That’s why I’m not going to let Jerry cheat me out of the property. It doesn’t
belong
to us, you see. We’ve got to give it back. We’ve got to set things right, between us and the land, between us and other people.

“Father said that was nonsense, that he’d bought the land perfectly honestly. In fact, he thought that my ideas were crazy. They all did, even Mildred. We had a big scene about it that last night. It was terrible, with Jerry and Zinnie trying to turn him against me, and Mildred in the middle, trying to make peace. Poor Mildred, she was always in the middle. And I guess she was right, I
wasn’t
making too much sense. If I had been, I’d have realized that Father was a sick man. Whether I was right or wrong—and of course I
was
right—Father couldn’t stand that kind of a family ruction.”

I turned off the highway to the right, onto a road which
curved back through an underpass, across flat fields, past a giant hedge of eucalyptus trees. The trees looked ancient and sorrowful; the fields were empty.

      C
ARL
sat tense and quiet in the seat beside me. After a while he said:

“Did you know that words can kill, Mr. Archer? You can kill an old man by arguing with him. I did it to my father. At least,” he added on a different note, “I’ve thought for the last six months that I was responsible. Father died in his bath that night. When Dr. Grantland examined him, he said he’d had a heart attack, brought on by overexcitement. I blamed myself for his death. Jerry and Zinnie blamed me, too. Is it any wonder I blew my top? I thought I was a parricide.

“But now I don’t know,” he said. “When I found out about Dr. Grantland, it started me thinking back all over again. Why should I go by the word of a man like that? He hasn’t even the right to call himself a doctor. It’s the strain of not knowing that I can’t stand. You see, if Father died of a heart attack, then I’m responsible.”

“Not necessarily. Old men die every day.”

“Don’t try to confuse me,” he said peremptorily. “I can see the issue quite clearly. If Father died of a heart attack, I killed him with my words, and I’m a murderer. But if he died of something else, then someone else is the murderer. And Dr. Grantland is covering up for them.”

I was pretty certain by now that I was listening to paranoid delusions. I handled them with kid gloves:

“That doesn’t sound too likely, Carl. Why don’t you give it a rest for now? Think about something else.”

“I can’t!” he cried. “You’ve got to help me get at the truth. You promised to help me.”

“I will—” I started to say.

Carl grabbed my right elbow. The car veered onto the shoulder, churning gravel. I braked, wrestling the wheel and Carl’s clutching hands. The car came to a stop at a tilt, one side in the shallow ditch. I shook him off.

“That was a smart thing to do.”

He was careless or unaware of what had happened. “You’ve got to believe me,” he said. “Somebody’s got to believe me.”

“You don’t believe yourself. You’ve told me two stories already. How many others are there?”

“You’re calling me a liar.”

“No. But your thinking needs some shaking out. You’re the only one who can do that. And the hospital is the place to do it in.”

The buildings of the great hospital were visible ahead, in the gap between two hills. We noticed them at the same time. Carl said:

“No. I’m not going back there. You promised to help me, but you don’t intend to. You’re just like all the others. So I’ll have to do it myself.”

“Do what?”

“Find out the truth. Find out who killed my father, and bring him to justice.”

I said as gently as possible: “You’re talking a little wild, kid. Now you keep your half of the bargain, and I’ll keep mine. You go back in and get well, I’ll see what I can find out.”

“You’re only trying to humor me. You don’t intend to do anything.”

“Don’t I?”

He was silent. By way of proving that I was on his side, I said:

“It will probably help if you’d tell me what you know about this Grantland. This morning you mentioned a record.”

“Yes, and I wasn’t lying. I got it from a good source—a man who knows him.”

“Another patient?”

“He’s a patient, yes. That doesn’t prove anything. He’s perfectly sane, there’s nothing the matter with his mind.”

“Is that what he says?”

“The doctors say it, too. He’s in for narcotic addiction.”

“That hardly recommends him as a witness.”

“He was telling me the
truth,”
Carl said. “He’s known Dr. Grantland for years, and all about him. Grantland used to supply him with narcotics.”

“Bad enough, if true. But it’s still a long way to murder.”

“I see.” His tone was disconsolate. “You want me to think I did it. You give me no hope.”

“Listen to me,” I said.

But he was deep in himself, examining a secret horror. He sobbed once in dry pain. Without any other warning, he turned on me. Dull sorrow filmed his eyes. His hooked hands swung together reaching for my throat. Immobilized behind the steering wheel, I reached for the doorhandle to gain some freedom of action. Carl was too quick for me. His large hands closed on my neck. I struck at his face with my right hand, but he was almost oblivious.

His close-up face was immense and bland, spotted with clear drops of sweat. He shook me. Daylight began to wane.

“Lay off,” I said. “Damn fool.” But the words were a rusty cawing.

I hit at him again, ineffectually, without leverage. One of his hands left my neck and came up hard against the point of my jaw. I went out.

I came to in the dry ditch, beside the tiremarks where my car had stood. As I got up the checkerboard fields fell into place around me, teetering slightly. I felt remarkably small, like a pin on a map.

      I
TOOK
off my jacket and slapped the dust out of it and started to walk toward the hospital. It lay, like a city state, in the middle of its own fields. It had no walls. Perhaps their place was taken by the hills which stood around it, jagged and naked, on three sides. Broad avenues divided the concrete buildings which gave no outward indication of their use. The people walking on the sidewalks looked not much different from people anywhere, except that there was no hurry, nowhere to hurry to. The sun-stopped place with its massive, inscrutable buildings had an unreal quality; perhaps it was only hurry that was missing.

A fat man in blue jeans appeared from behind a parked car and approached me confidentially. In a low genteel voice he asked me if I wanted to buy a leather case for my car keys. “It’s very good hand-carved leather, sir, hand-crafted in the hospital.” He displayed it.

“Sorry, I don’t have any use for it. Where do I go to get some information, about a patient?”

“Depends what ward he’s on.”

“I don’t know the ward.”

“You’d better ask at Administration.” He pointed toward a new-looking off-white building at the intersection of two streets. But he was unwilling to let me go. “Did you come by bus?”

“I walked.”

“From Los Angeles?”

“Part of the way.”

“No car, eh?”

“My car was stolen.”

“That’s too bad. I live in Los Angeles, you know. I have a Buick station wagon, pretty good car. My wife keeps it up on blocks in the garage. They say that keeps the tires from deteriorating.”

“Good idea.”

“Yes,” he said. “I want that car to be in good condition.”

Broad concrete steps led up to the entrance of the administration building. I put on my jacket over my wet shirt, and went in through the glass doors. The highly groomed brunette at the information desk gave me a bright professional smile. “Can I help you, sir?”

“I’d like to see the superintendent.”

Her smile hardened a little. “His schedule is very full today. May I have your name, please?”

“Archer.”

“And what do you wish to see him about, Mr. Archer?”

“A confidential matter.”

“One of our patients?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“Are you a relative?”

“No.”

“Which patient are you interested in, and what exactly is your interest? Sir.”

“I’d better save that for the superintendent.”

“You might have to wait all morning to see him. He has a series of conferences. I couldn’t promise even then that he could find time for you.”

It was gently administered, but it was the brush-off. There was no way to get around her quiet watchdog poise, so I gave it a frontal push:

“One of your patients escaped last night. He’s violent.”

She was unruffled. “You wish to lodge a complaint?”

“Not necessarily. I need some advice.”

“Perhaps I can help you to it, if you’ll give me the patient’s name. Otherwise, I have no way of knowing which doctor is responsible for him.”

“Carl Hallman.”

Her thin eyebrows twitched upward: she recognized the name. “If you’ll sit down, sir, I’ll try to get the information for you.”

She picked up one of her telephones. I sat down and lit a cigarette. It was still early in the morning, and I was the only one in the waiting-room. Its colored furniture and shiny waxed tile floors were insistently cheerful. I cheered up slightly myself when a covey of bright young nurses came in, and went twittering down a corridor.

The woman behind the desk put down her telephone and crooked a finger at me. “Dr. Brockley will see you. He’s in his office now. You’ll find it in the building behind this one, in the main corridor.”

The second building was enormous. Its central corridor looked long enough to stage a hundred-yard-dash in. I contemplated making one. Ever since the Army, big institutions depressed me: channels, red tape, protocol, buck-passing, hurry up and wait. Only now and then you met a
man with enough gumption to keep the big machine from bogging down of its own weight.

The door with Dr. Brockley’s name above it was standing open. He came around from behind his desk, a middle-sized, middle-aged man in a gray herringbone suit, and gave me a quick hard hand.

“Mr. Archer? I happened to come in early this morning, so I can give you fifteen minutes. Then I’m due on the ward.”

He placed me in a straight chair against the wall, brought me an ashtray, sat at his desk with his back to the window. He was quick in movement, very still in repose. His bald scalp and watchful eyes made him resemble a lizard waiting for a fly to expose itself.

“I understand you have a complaint against Carl Hallman. Perhaps you should understand that the hospital is not responsible for his actions. We’re interested, but not responsible. He left here without permission.”

“I know that. He told me.”

“You’re a friend of Hallman’s?”

“I don’t know him at all. He came to my house early this morning to try and get my help.”

“What sort of help did he want?”

“It’s a pretty involved story, having to do with his family. I think a lot of it was pure delusion. The main thing seems to be, he feels responsible for his father’s death. He wants to get rid of the feeling. So he came to me. I happen to be a private detective. A friend of his recommended me to him.”

When I named my profession, or sub-profession, the temperature went down. The doctor said frostily:

“If you’re looking for family information, I can’t give it to you.”

“I’m not. I thought the best thing I could do for Hallman was bring him back here. I talked him into it, and we
almost made it. Then he got excited and started throwing his weight around. As a matter of fact—” I’d been holding it back, because I was ashamed of it—“he took me by surprise and stole my car.”

“It doesn’t sound like him.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t say he stole it. He was upset, and I don’t think he knew what he was doing. But he took it, and I want it back.”

“Are you sure he took it?”

Another bureaucrat, I thought, with a noose of red tape up his sleeve. Another one of those. I said:

“I confess, Doctor. I never had a car. It was all a dream. The car was a sex symbol, see, and when it disappeared, it meant I’m entering the change of life.”

He answered without a flicker of expression, smile or frown: “I mean, are you sure it wasn’t the other one who stole your car? Another patient was with him when he took off last night. Didn’t they stick together?”

“I only saw the one. Who was the other?”

Dr. Brockley lifted a manila folder out of his in-basket and studied its contents, or pretended to. “Normally,” he said after a while, “we don’t discuss our patients with outsiders. On the other hand, I’d like—” He closed the folder and slapped it down. “Let me put it this way. What do you intend to do about this alleged car theft? You want to see Hallman punished, naturally.”

“Do I?”

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I think he belongs in the hospital.”

“What makes you think so?”

“He’s flying, and he could be dangerous. He’s a powerful boy. I don’t want to be an alarmist, but he tried to throttle me.”

“Really? You’re not exaggerating?”

I showed him the marks on my neck. Dr. Brockley forgot himself for a second, and let his humanity show through, like a light behind a door. “Damn it, I’m sorry.” But it was his patient he was sorry for. “Carl was doing so well these last few months—no acting out at all. What happened to set him off, do you know?”