Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (24 page)

Maude Adams didn’t feel like getting out of bed. The mushrooms had kept her awake most of the night, those jellylike things that grew on tree trunks. She dreamed she was walking a tightrope; she had to stay perfectly balanced otherwise she would fall into the fiery pit. She could make it, she thought, if only the dogs would stop barking.
Yowp-yowp-yow!
They howled, and the burro brayed:
ee-haw! ee-haw!
She felt herself losing balance …

She awoke suddenly, aware of the silence. Somebody had fed the dogs, the burro no longer brayed. Sunlight streamed through the window onto the potted coleus along the sill. She slid her legs out of bed and pulled on her flannel nightgown. As she reached for her quilted robe she smelled the coffee. She frowned as she belted the robe. That made two puzzling events this morning, the dogs fed and now the coffee …

She opened the bedroom door and saw him sitting at the kitchen table with a loaf of bread in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. She choked: “Danny!”

She stood quivering, unable to move her feet. His eyes fixed her like burning needles; his dark chestnut curls were tangled. The eight-inch blade had a dark stain running almost its full length.

“I’m … I’m going to call the sheriff.”

“No,” he said, rising from the chair. His voice sounded strained and high-pitched. “You’re not calling anybody.”

Liza felt it lurking in the corridors of the hospital: a nameless, nagging fear seemed to precipitate in the air and settle over the patients. A manic-depressive girl locked herself in a bathroom and slashed her arms with a broken mirror. The cuts were shallow, but the sight of Wanda standing there smiling while the blood dripped off her fingers so unsettled the attendant that Elizabeth had to send her home.

Maury Bompart, known throughout the hospital as Cricket, came to her with a spastic neck tendon which had frozen his head in a halftwist. He seemed to be trying to look over his right shoulder. Liza sent him to the hospital for heat-lamp treatments, then tried to write out her report. The paper was dry, slick—like moth wings. She turned the pencil between her fingers, saw the bright pink lines where the hard octagon edges had creased her palms. She turned to a clean sheet and wrote:

I am a psychiatrist.

Why?

Tossing paperclips, thumbtacks, file folders, reports—

What has this to do with—?

Elizabeth.

That’s my name. I had a weight problem. That went away when I got a husband. Then I had a husband problem. That went away too—

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking it would be better for me if Dan got away clean and never got in touch with me. He is the kind of hopeless cause a woman puts twenty years into and has nothing to show for it. I’ve got better things to do with my life.

Have I?????????

Someone was whistling in the hallway. It was a tuneless whistle which had no rhythm, but started and stopped at odd moments. There was no way she could ignore it; she
had to listen, with mind suspended, not knowing where the next note would fall …

She slid the papers into her drawer, locked her desk, and walked into the hall. It was empty. She went downstairs and saw three women sitting on a bench waiting their turn in the beauty shop. Gladys, a hebephrenic whose legs were covered with wet running sores, asked whether she should get her hair done in a roll or in a bun, “or maybe I should try a ponytail …”

“What can you lose?” asked Elizabeth, and walked on down the hall to the wood-working shop. A half-dozen patients sat at a long table gluing together little wooden locomotives. As they tilted their faces to look at her, she saw that their heads were surrounded by trembling, vibrating lines, like pencil marks drawn around a cut-out. Ted MacGregor glanced over his shoulder, flicked off the switch of his humming bandsaw, and walked to the counter brushing the sawdust from his denim apron. “You better come stay with me and Mary until they catch that killer.”

For a second she didn’t understand who he was talking about. Her brain was full of prickly knobbed little thoughts bouncing around like jackstraws; there was no way she could grasp a thought and examine it. She turned and started back upstairs. She seemed to be walking on a thin transparent shell; beneath it lay the eternal void, boiling, swirling, constantly in motion, pressing against her feet.

The administrator was pacing in front of her desk and cracking his knuckles. He started talking as she came in:

“Elizabeth, we do have a responsibility to guard the privacy of the patient, that’s true. But we also have a responsibility to the citizens of this state. I’m requesting that you turn over to the sheriff any information you might have which would lead to the capture of this dangerous person.”

She sat down behind her desk and looked at him. His eyes looked like peeled grapes floating in milk. “What are you talking about, Ted?”

“I am talking about the tape you made of Bollinger.”

Tape of Bollinger
. In her mind’s eye she saw coils of tape wrapped around a mummified figure. “I see.” She nodded and pressed her palm together. “We respect the privacy of the patient except where it conflicts with the needs of law enforcement.”

Ted pressed his hand to his stomach and winced. “It isn’t that simple. I am besieged, Elizabeth, literally besieged with calls from people seeking reassurance. Not one has expressed any concern about the privacy of the patient. They want to know where is he, and they want to have their guns ready in case he should appear.”

“I can’t see that relevant to our situation.”

“You can’t?” He sighed. “I wish I’d stayed in the clinical field, where things are simple. Those people who called me are taxpayers. Whether we like it or not, we have to recognize that they vote for public officials, and these officials control our budget, and that is what makes our paychecks negotiable. Are you with me?”

She nodded. “You’re about to tell me there is already enough public sentiment against our coddling of criminals. We mustn’t tarnish our public image further by appearing to protect a mass murderer.”

“I am merely suggesting—”

“Throwing Bollinger’s head to the mob.”

“Not his
head
.”

“The contents of his head, which he revealed to me in private, assuming I was a trustworthy professional.”

“Look—I support you, up to a point. But that point has now been reached. The escape of Dan Bollinger has reopened the whole can of worms, and the sheriff believes that he may have revealed to you the names of those three who helped him get away.”

“To
mer?”

“To you. The sheriff has been interrogating the attendant, and it appears that they were operating on inside information. The switchboard reports a call made from your office to the crisis ward, shortly after midnight.” He took off his glasses, polishing them on his blue necktie while he looked at her sternly. “Can you explain it?”

His eyes turned black and began to smoke; black worms crawled out of the sockets and hung down his cheeks. The worms had little smiley-faces like people stuck on letters. Egad! Smiley-faces …

She felt laughter bubbling up inside her throat, but managed to keep her voice steady. “No, Ted. I can’t explain it. One of life’s little mysteries …”

He drew a deep breath; white lines appeared around his thin nostrils. “I am trying to save your career, Liza, and will continue up to a point. After that you’ll have to accept the consequences of your actions.”

“All right. I’ll do it.”

“You’ll give the tape to the sheriff?”

“I’ll accept the consequences of not giving it to him.”

For a minute he looked at her, then he made a savage, slashing gesture with the edge of his hand. “All right, Liza. You’re on your own. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

After the door closed behind him she took the little transistor radio out of her desk and turned it on low volume. The announcer said that roadblocks had been set up on all routes leaving the county. He gave a description of Dan, and asked all persons seeing him to call the sheriff immediately, but to take no action themselves, since Bollinger was armed and dangerous.

She felt slightly sick as she turned off the radio and put it back in the drawer. She took out her shoulder bag and locked the desk, then went out.

She drove her little gray Caddy in a series of closed circles around the chapel, the old swimming pool, the new tennis courts, glancing before and behind her each time she doubled her route. She felt detached from the strolling patients, the cheerful cottages, the clipped lawns and shrubbery she had come to regard as her native turf. She didn’t care if she never saw any of it again.
Is this a death wish? Or can it be that I have merely abandoned the pose of being a rational creature in control of my own actions?

WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE?
The question bounced around her mind. Nobody answered.

She took the back road leading out past the old dairy
barn. The afternoon was glassy, glaring. As she drove along the river bottom, she could feel the heat oozing out of the dry corn fields on each side of the road.

She crossed the railroad tracks, stopped to look both ways, then swung onto the state highway. The two-lane ribbon followed a deep slash in the tall oak forest. Deep cuts alternated with fifis, but the road itself was only a monotonous, gentle rise and fall. It made her feel disoriented, to have the landscape bobbing up and down on both sides of the car. The whine of tires was broken only by the occasional flutter of a helicopter.

Weird—to think that a manhunt was going on, and that she was responsible for it. Above the treetops on her left she saw a chopper wheeling and gyring in a search pattern; low on the western horizon flapped another. She thought of newly hatched wasps on a summer afternoon.

She swung onto the trail leading to Dan’s cabin—then hit the brakes. Three men on horseback blocked the gullied drive. They were dressed western style, with rifle butts braced on their hips. One wore a shapeless black felt hat and a raveled denim jacket; his horse was an Arabian stallion, with a coat of dull silver. He rode up and stared down at her through the open window, dark eyes crinkled at the corners, bright hard and deadly. “Where you goin’?”

He had black hair falling down over his eyes; one cheek bulged with a chaw of tobacco. A silver star above his shirt pocket caught the sun and revealed the words: SPECIAL DEPUTY.

“Nowhere. Just driving.”

“Well, this trail’s blocked.” He swung off his silver-encrusted saddle and pointed to the black-and-yellow wooden barrier standing in the trail behind the other riders. “See that?”

She raised up in her seat and looked past him. The ground was scarred by hoof prints and fresh car tracks. “It doesn’t look very heavy.”

He spat a jet of brown juice and grinned. “I’d let you in there, little lady, but you might never get out. That’s
where Bollinger killed all them gals and buried ‘em.
i
reckon you know he escaped last night.”

“Oh really?” She looked at his rifle, then at the holstered gun which rode his hip. “Are you going to shoot him on sight?”

“We got orders to use our own judgment.” He hitched up his belt and thrust out his chest. “I sure as hell don’t aim to stand around talkin’ about his early toilet training while he guns me down.”

She felt an urge to step on the gas and twist the wheel to the right, to watch his face as the grill struck him … yes,
here
, right below the crotch, and then drive over him, rolling him up into a wad of broken bones and tissue with blood leaking out through the package of skin. Why? Why am I here, in the midst of
this!

She slipped the car in reverse, backed out of the lane, and drove west without looking back.
Now what?
She remembered a prim old lady sitting in the witness room, and a fat woman saying: “…
Certainly don’t let killer dope addicts prowl around MY house, Maude Adams”
Well, it wouldn’t hurt to have a look …

Once off the state highway, the county road system became a tangled skein of old logging trails covered by thin gravel. She got lost twice, and after an hour of churning up and down ridges, fording creeks spanned by concrete slabs, she spied a cluster of mailboxes. One read:
Harry Adams
. She drove across the bare sandstone and turned down a sunken lane bordered with conical cedars. She could see the patched roof of the barn behind a slight rise of ground. The house stood on her left, a white bungalow hidden behind a hedge of mock orange. As she lifted the loop of wire off the picket gate, she saw the woman standing in the doorway of the screened porch. She wore baggy jeans held up by a twisted leather belt, and a plaid flannel shirt buttoned at wrists and throat. Her eyes followed Elizabeth as she walked up the flagstone path.

“You’re the one who testified at the trial,” she said.

“Yes. Could we talk about Danny?”

“About Danny?” The faded blue eyes looped past her, swung around the horizon, then back to Liza. She stepped back from the door. “I dunno where he is, but you can come in and talk.”

The kitchen was bright and cheerful, with red linoleum, off-white walls, and a white dinette set with gingham-print vinyl covering the padded chairs. Elizabeth sat watching Miz Adams as she heated water, dipped out the granular instant coffee, and stirred it into thick china mugs. Elizabeth didn’t want to tell her she despised instant coffee; instead she steeled herself against the flat bland flavor which was neither coffee nor anything else, sipped and looked at the woman across the table. “Did you talk to Danny much?”

“Oh sure. He bought his eggs here, and his milk, so he’d come at least once a week. On rainy mornings or when it was cold he’d come in and sit by the fire and we’d talk about … I dunno. The weather, mostly. He didn’t have a tv so what could we talk about?”

She’s not telling me something, thought Liza. The signs were obvious to a trained eye: excessive gestures and eye movements, too-detailed answers to simple questions …

She wondered how ofteen Dan had sat in this kitchen, and what relationship he had with this woman. It couldn’t have been a great slice of his life, otherwise he would have told her about it. Or would he? He hadn’t told her about Lona …