The Chill (29 page)

“You’re a forgiving man.”

“Oh no I’m not. I went to her with anger in my heart that Sunday I saw her picture in the paper, with her husband. What right did she have to a happy marriage after what she did to me? That’s what was on my mind.”

“Did you tell her what was on your mind?”

“Yessir, I did. But my anger didn’t last. She reminded me so of her mother in appearance. It was like going back twenty years to happier times, when we were first married. We had a real good year when I was in the Navy and Connie was pregnant, with her.”

His mind kept veering away from his current troubles. I could hardly blame him, but I urged him back to them:

“You gave your daughter a hard time the other Sunday, didn’t you?”

“I did at first. I admit that. I asked her why she lied about me in court. That was a legitimate question, wasn’t it?”

“I should say so. What was her reaction?”

“She went into hysterics and said she wasn’t lying, that she saw me with the gun and everything and heard me arguing with her mother. Which was false, and I told her so. I wasn’t even in Indian Springs that night. That stopped her cold.”

“Then what?”

“I asked her why she lied about me.” He licked his lips and said in a hushed voice: “I asked her if she shot her mother herself, maybe by accident, the way Alice kept that revolver lying around loose. It was a terrible question, but it had to come out. It’d been on my mind for a long time.”

“As long ago as your trial?”

“Yeah. Before that.”

“And that’s why you wouldn’t let Stevens cross-examine her?”

“Yeah. I should have let him go ahead. I ended up cross-questioning her myself ten years later.”

“What was the result?”

“More hysterics. She was laughing and crying at the same time. I never felt so sorry for anybody. She was as white as a sheet and the tears popped out of her eyes and ran down her face. Her tears looked so
pure.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she didn’t do it, naturally.”

“Could she have? Did she know how to handle a gun?”

“A little. I gave her a little training, and so did Alice. It doesn’t take much gun-handling to pull a trigger, especially by accident.”

“You still think it could have happened that way?”

“I don’t know. It’s mainly what I wanted to talk to you about.”

These words seemed to release him from an obscure bondage. He climbed down out of the upper bunk and stood facing me in the narrow aisle. He had on a Seamans black turtleneck, levis, and rubber-soled deck shoes.

“You’re in a position to go and talk to her,” he said. “I’m not. Mr. Stevens wont. But you can go and ask her what really happened.”

“She may not know.”

“I realize that. She got pretty mixed up the other Sunday. God knows I wasn’t trying to mix her up. I only asked her some questions. But she didn’t seem to know the difference between what happened and what she said in court.”

“That story she told in court—did she definitely admit she made it up?”

“She made it up with a lot of help from Alice. I can imagine how it went. ‘This is the way it happened, isn’t it?’ Alice would say. ‘You saw your old man with the gun, didn’t you?’ And after a while the kid had her story laid out for her.”

“Would Alice deliberately try to frame you?”

“She wouldn’t put it that way to herself. She’d know for a fact I was guilty. All she was doing was making sure I got punished for my crime. She probably fed the kid her lines without knowing she was faking evidence. My dear sister-in-law was always out to get me, anyway.”

“Was she out to get Connie, too?”

“Connie? She doted on Connie. Alice was more like her mother than her sister. There was fourteen-fifteen years’ difference in their ages.”

“You said she wanted Connie to herself. Her feelings for Connie could have changed if she found out about Bradshaw.”

“Not
that
much. Anyway, who would tell her?”

“Your daughter might have. If she told you, she’d tell Alice.”

McGee shook his head. “You’re really reaching.”

“I have to. This is a deep case, and I can’t see the bottom of it yet. Did Alice ever live in Boston, do you know?”

“I think she always lived here. She’s a Native Daughter. I’m a native son, but nobody ever gave me a medal for it.”

“Even Native Daughters have been known to go to Boston. Did Alice ever go on the stage, or marry a man named Macready, or dye her hair red?”

“None of those things sound like Alice.”

I thought of her pink fantastic bedroom, and wondered.

“They sound more,” McGee was saying, and then he stopped. He was silent for a watching moment. “I’ll take that cigarette you offered me.”

I gave him a cigarette and lighted it. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. I must have been thinking aloud.”

“Who were you thinking about?”

“Nobody you know. Forget it, eh?”

“Come on, McGee. You’re supposed to be leveling with me.”

“I still have a right to my private thoughts. It kept me alive in prison.”

“You’re out of prison now. Don’t you want to stay out?”

“Not if somebody else has to go in.”

“Sucker,” I said. “Who are you covering for now?”

“Nobody.”

“Madge Gerhardi?”

“You must be off your rocker.”

I couldn’t get anything more out of him. The long slow weight of prison forces men into unusual shapes. McGee had become a sort of twisted saint.

H
E WAS ABOUT
to be given another turn of the screw. When I climbed out into the cockpit I saw three men approaching along the floating dock. Their bodies, their hatted heads, were dark as iron against the exploding sunset.

One of them showed me a deputy’s badge and a gun, which he held on me while the others went below. I heard McGee cry out once. He scrambled up through the hatch with blue handcuffs on his wrists and a blue gun at his back. The single look he gave me was full of fear and loathing.

They didn’t handcuff me, but they made me ride to the courthouse with McGee in the screened rear compartment of the Sheriff’s car. I tried to talk to him. He wouldn’t speak to me or look in my direction. He believed I had turned him in, and perhaps I had without intending to.

I sat under guard outside the interrogation room while they questioned him in tones that rose and fell and growled and palavered and yelled and threatened and promised and refused and wheedled. Sheriff Crane arrived, looking tired but important. He stood over me smiling, with his belly thrust out.

“Your friend’s in real trouble now.”

“He’s been in real trouble for the last ten years. You ought to know, you helped to cook it for him.”

The veins in his cheeks lit up like intricate little networks of infra-red tubing. He leaned toward me spewing martini-scented words:

“I could put you in jail for loose talk like that. You know where your friend is going? He’s going all the way to the green room this time.”

“He wouldn’t be the first innocent man who was gassed.”

“Innocent? McGee’s a mass murderer, and we’ve got the evidence to prove it. It took my experts all day to nail it down: The bullet in the Haggerty corpse came from the same gun as the bullet we found in McGee’s wife—the same gun he stole from Alice Jenks in Indian Springs.”

I’d succeeded in provoking the Sheriff into an indiscretion. I tried for another. “You have no proof he stole it. You have no proof he fired it either time. Where’s he been keeping the gun for the last ten years?”

“He cached it someplace, maybe on Stevens’s boat. Or maybe an accomplice kept it for him.”

“Then he hid it in his daughter’s bed to frame her?”

“That’s the kind of man he is.”

“Nuts!”

“Don’t talk to me like that!” He menaced me with the cannon ball of his belly.

“Don’t talk like that to the Sheriff,” the guard said.

“I don’t know of any law against the use of the word ‘nuts.’ And incidentally I wasn’t violating anything in the California Code when I went out to the yacht to talk to McGee. I’m cooperating with a local attorney in this investigation and I have a right to get my information where I can and keep it confidential.”

“How did you know he was there?”

“I got a tip.”

“From Stevens?”

“Not from Stevens. You and I could trade information, Sheriff. How did
you
know he was there?”

“I don’t make deals with suspects.”

“What do you suspect me of? Illegal use of the word nuts’?”

“It isn’t so funny. You were taken with McGee. I have a right to hold you.”

“I have a right to call an attorney. Try kicking my rights around and see where it gets you. I have friends in Sacramento.”

They didn’t include the Attorney General or anybody close to him, but I liked the sound of the phrase. Sheriff Crane did not. He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man. He said after a moment’s thought:

“You can make your call.”

The Sheriff went into the interrogation room—I caught a glimpse of McGee hunched gray-faced under a light—and added his voice to the difficult harmony there. My guard took me into a small adjoining room and left me by myself with a telephone. I used it to call Jerry Marks. He was about to leave for his appointment with Dr. Godwin and Dolly, but he said he’d come right over to the courthouse and bring Gil Stevens with him if Stevens was available.

They arrived together in less than fifteen minutes. Stevens shot me a glance from under the broken white wings of his hair. It was a covert and complex glance which seemed to mean that for the record we were strangers. I suspected the old lawyer had advised McGee to talk to me, and probably set up the interview. I was in a position to use McGee’s facts in ways that he couldn’t.

With soft threats of
habeas corpus
proceedings, Jerry Marks sprung me out. Stevens remained behind with the Sheriff and a Deputy D.A. It was going to take longer to spring his client.

A moon like a fallen fruit reversing gravity was hoisting itself above the rooftops. It was huge and slightly squashed.

“Pretty,” Jerry said in the parking lot.

“It looks like a rotten orange to me.”

“Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. I learned that at my mother’s knee and other low joints, as a well-known statesman said.” Jerry always felt good when he tried something he learned in law school, and it worked. He walked to his car swiftly, on the balls of his feet, and made the engine roar. “We’re late for our appointment with Godwin.”

“Did you have time to check on Bradshaw’s alibi?”

“I did. It seems to be impregnable.” He gave me the details
as we drove across town. “Judging by temperature loss, rate of blood coagulation, and so on, the Deputy Coroner places the time of Miss Haggerty’s death as no later than eight-thirty. From about seven until about nine-thirty Dean Bradshaw was sitting, or standing up talking, in front of over a hundred witnesses. I talked to three of them, three alumni picked more or less at random, and they all agreed he didn’t leave the speaker’s table during that period. Which lets him out.”

“Apparently it does.”

“You sound disappointed, Lew.”

“I’m partly that, and partly relieved. I rather like Bradshaw. But I was pretty certain he was our man.”

In the remaining minutes before we reached the nursing home, I told him briefly what I’d learned from McGee, and from the Sheriff. Jerry whistled, but made no other comment.

Dr. Godwin opened the door for us. He wore a clean white smock and an aggrieved expression.

“You’re late, Mr. Marks. I was just about ready to call the whole thing off.”

“We had a little emergency. Thomas McGee was arrested about seven o’clock tonight. Mr. Archer happened to be with him, and he was arrested, also.”

Godwin turned to me.
“You
were with McGee?”

“He sent for me, and he talked. I’m looking forward to comparing his story with his daughter’s.”

“I’m afraid you aren’t—ah—co-opted to this session,” Godwin said with some embarrassment. “As I pointed out to you before, you don’t have professional immunity.”

“I do if I’m acting on Mr. Marks’s instructions. Which I am.”

“Mr. Archer is correct, on both counts,” Jerry said.

Godwin let us in reluctantly. We were outsiders, interlopers in his shadowy kingdom. I had lost some of my confidence in his benevolent despotism, but I kept it to myself for the present.

He took us to the examination room where Dolly was waiting. She was sitting on the end of a padded table, wearing a sleeveless white hospital gown. Alex stood in front of her, holding both her hands. His eyes stayed on her face, hungry and worshipping, as if she was the priestess or the goddess of a strange one-member cult.

Her hair was shining and smooth. Her face was composed. Only her eyes had a sullen restlessness and inwardness. They moved across me and failed to give any sign of recognition.

Godwin touched her shoulder. “Are you ready, Dolly?”

“I suppose I am.”

She lay back on the padded table. Alex held on to one of her hands.

“You can stay if you like, Mr. Kincaid. It might be easier if you didn’t.”

“Not for me,” the girl said. “I feel safer when he’s with me. I want Alex to know all about—everything.”

“Yes. I want to stay.”

Godwin filled a hypodermic needle, inserted it in her arm, and taped it to the white skin. He told her to count backward from one hundred. At ninety-six the tension left her body and an inner light left her face. It flowed back in a diffused form when the doctor spoke to her:

“Do you hear me, Dolly?”

“I hear you,” she murmured.

“Speak louder. I can’t hear you.”

“I hear you,” she repeated. Her voice was faintly slurred.

“Who am I?”

“Dr. Godwin.”

“Do you remember when you were a little girl you used to come and visit me in my office?”

“I remember.”

“Who used to bring you to see me?”

“Mommy did. She used to bring me in in Aunt Alice’s car.”

“Where were you living then?”