The Doomsters (14 page)

“You’re the only doctor I know in town.”

“You didn’t tell me you knew Dr. Grantland,” the receptionist said accusingly.

“I must have forgotten to.”

“Very likely,” Grantland said. “You can go now, Miss Cullen, unless you’ve made some more of these special appointments for me.”

“He told me it was an emergency.”

“I said you can go.”

She went, with a backward look from the doorway. Grantland’s face was trying various attitudes: outrage, dignified surprise, bewildered innocence.

“What are you trying to pull on me?”

“Not a thing. Look, if you don’t want to treat me, I can find another doctor.”

He weighed the advantages and disadvantages of this,
and decided against it. “I don’t do much in the surgical line, but I guess I can fix you up. What happened to you, anyway—did you run into Hallman again?” Zinnie had briefed him well, apparently.

“No. Did you?”

He let that go by. We went through a consulting-room furnished in mahogany and blue leather. There were sailing prints on the walls, and above the desk a medical diploma from a college in the middle west. Grantland switched on the lights in the next room and asked me to remove my coat. Washing his hands at the sink in the corner, he said over his shoulder:

“You can get up on the examination table if you like. I’m sorry my nurse has gone home—I didn’t know I’d be wanting to use her.”

I stretched out on the leatherette top of the metal table. Lying flat on the back wasn’t a bad position for self-defense, if it came to that.

Grantland crossed the room briskly and leaned over me, turning on a surgical light that extended on retractable arms from the wall. “You get yourself gun-whipped?”

“Slightly. Not every doctor would recognize the marks.”

“I interned at Hollywood Receiving. Did you report this to the police?”

“I didn’t have to. Ostervelt did it to me.”

“You’re not a fugitive, for God’s sake?”

“No, for God’s sake.”

“Were you resisting arrest?”

“The sheriff just lost his temper. He’s a hot-headed old youth.”

Grantland made no comment. He went to work cleaning my cuts with swabs dipped in alcohol. It hurt.

“I’m going to have to put some clamps in that ear. The other cut ought to heal itself. I’ll simply put an adhesive bandage over it.”

Grantland went on talking as he worked: “A regular surgeon could do a better job for you, especially a plastic surgeon. That’s why I was a little surprised when you came to me. You’re going to have a small scar, I’m afraid. But that’s all right with me if it’s all right with you.” He pressed a series of clamps into my torn ear. “That ought to do it. You ought to have a doctor look at it in a day or two. Going to be in town long?”

“I don’t know.” I got up, and faced him across the table. “It could depend on you.”

“Any doctor can do it,” he said impatiently.

“You’re the only one who can help me.”

Grantland caught the implication, and glanced at his watch. “I’m late for an appointment now—”

“I’ll make it as fast as I can. You saw a pearl-handled gun today. You didn’t mention that you’d seen it before.”

He was a very quick study. Without a second’s hesitation, he said: “I like to be sure of my facts before I sound off. I’m a medical man, after all.”

“What are your facts?”

“Ask your friend the sheriff. He knows them.”

“Maybe. I’m asking you. You might as well tell a straight story. I’ve been in touch with Glenn Scott.”

“Glenn who?” But he remembered. His gaze flickered sideways.

“The detective Senator Hallman hired to investigate the murder of his wife.”

“Did you say murder?”

“It slipped out.”

“You’re mistaken. She committed suicide. If you talked to Scott, you know she was suicidal.”

“Suicidal people can be murdered.”

“No doubt, but what does that prove?” A womanish petulance tugged at his mouth, disrupting his false calm. “I’m sick and tired of being badgered about it, simply
because she happened to be my patient. Why, I saved her life the week before she drowned. Did Scott bother to tell you that?”

“He told me what you told him. That she attempted suicide in this office.”

“It was in my previous office. I moved last year.”

“So you can’t show me the bullethole in the ceiling.”

“Good Lord, are you questioning that? I got that gun away from her at the risk of my own life.”

“I don’t question it. I wanted to hear it from you, though.”

“Well, now you’ve heard it. I hope you’re satisfied.” He took off his smock and turned to hang it up.

“Why did she try to commit suicide in your office?”

He was very still for an instant, frozen in the act of placing the white garment on a hook. Between the shoul-derblades and under the arms, his gray shirt was dark with sweat. It was the only indication that I was giving him a hard time. He said:

“She wanted something I wasn’t prepared to give her. A massive dose of sleeping pills. When I refused, she pulled this little revolver out of her purse. It was touch and go whether she was going to shoot me or herself. Then she pointed it at her head. Fortunately I managed to reach her, and take the gun away.” He turned with a bland and doleful look on his face.

“Was she on a barb kick?”

“You might call it that. I did my best to keep it under control.”

“Why didn’t you have her put in a safe place?”

“I miscalculated, I admit it. I don’t pretend to be a psychiatrist. I didn’t grasp the seriousness of her condition. We doctors make mistakes, you know, like everybody else.”

He was watching me like a chess-player. But his sympathy gambit was a giveaway. Unless he had something
important to cover up, he’d have ordered me out of his office long ago.

“What happened to the gun?” I said.

“I kept it. I intended to throw it away, but never got around to it.”

“How did Carl Hallman get hold of it?”

“He lifted it out of my desk drawer.” He added disarmingly: “I guess I was a damn fool to keep it there.”

I’d been holding back my knowledge of Carl Hallman’s visit to his office. It was disappointing to have the fact conceded. Grantland said with a faint sardonic smile:

“Didn’t the sheriff tell you that Carl was here this morning? I telephoned him immediately. I also got in touch with the State Hospital.”

“Why did he come here?”

Grantland turned his hands palms outward. “Who can say? He was obviously disturbed. He bawled me out for my part in having him committed, but his main animus was against his brother. Naturally I tried to talk him out of it.”

“Naturally. Why didn’t you hold on to him?”

“Don’t think I didn’t try to. I stepped into the dispensary for a minute to get him some thorazine. I thought it might calm him down. When I came back to the office, he was gone. He must have run out the back way here.” Grantland indicated the back door of the examination room. “I heard a car start, but he was gone before I could catch him.”

I walked over to the half-curtained window and looked out. Grantland’s Jaguar was parked in the paved lot. Back of the lot, a dirt lane ran parallel with the street. I turned back to Grantland: “You say he took your gun?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time. It wasn’t exactly
my
gun, either. I’d practically forgotten it existed. I didn’t even think of it till I found it in the greenhouse beside poor Jerry’s body. Then I couldn’t be sure it was the same
one, I’m no expert on guns. So I waited until I got back here this afternoon, and had a chance to check the drawer of my desk. When I found it gone I got in touch with the sheriff’s department right away—much as I hated to do it.”

“Why did you hate to do it?”

“Because I’m fond of the boy. He used to be my patient. You’d hardly expect me to get a kick out of proving that he’s a murderer.”

“You’ve proved that, have you?”

“You’re supposed to be a detective. Can you think of any other hypothesis?”

I could, but I kept it to myself. Grantland said:

“I can understand your feeling let down. Ostervelt told me you’re representing poor Carl, but don’t take it too hard, old man. They’ll take his mental condition into account. I’ll see to it personally that they do.”

I wasn’t as sad as I looked. Not that I was happy about the case. Every time I moved, I picked up another link in the evidence against my client. But this happened with such clockwork regularity that I was getting used to it and beginning to discount it. Besides, I was encouraged by the firm and lasting faith which I was developing in Dr. Grantland’s lack of integrity.

      T
WILIGHT
was thickening in the street outside. The white-walled buildings, fluorescent with last light, had taken on the beauty and mystery of a city in Africa or someplace else I’d never been. I nosed my
car out into a break in the traffic, turned right at the next intersection, and parked a hundred feet short of the entrance to Grantland’s back lane. I hadn’t been there five minutes when his Jaguar came bumping along the lane. It arced out into the street on whining tires.

Grantland didn’t know my car. I followed him fairly closely, two blocks south, then west on a boulevard that slanted toward the sea. I almost lost him when he made a left turn onto the highway on the tail end of a green light. I followed through on the yellow as it turned red.

From there the Jaguar was easy to keep in sight. It headed south on the highway through the outskirts where marginal operators purveyed chicken-fried steaks and saltwater taffy, Mexican basketry and redwood mementoes. The neon-cluttered sub-suburbs dropped behind. The highway snaked up and along brown bluffs which rose at a steep angle above the beach. The sea lay at their foot, a more somber reflection of the sky, still tinged at its far edge with the sun’s red death.

About two miles out of town, as many minutes, the Jaguar’s brakelights blazed. It heeled and turned onto a black top shelf overlooking the sea. There was one other car in the turnout, a red Cadillac with its nose against the guardrail. Before the next curve swept me out of sight, I saw Grantland’s car pull up beside the Cadillac.

There was traffic behind me. I found another turnout a quarter of a mile further on. By the time I’d made my turn and got back to the first turnout, the Jaguar was gone and the Cadillac was going.

I caught a glimpse of the driver’s face as he turned onto the highway. It gave me the kind of shock you might get from seeing the ghost of someone you’d once known. I’d known him ten years before, when he was a high-school athlete, a big boy, nice looking, full of fermenting energy. The face behind the wheel of the Cadillac: yellow skin
stretched over skull, smokily lit by black unfocused eyes: could have belonged to that boy’s grandfather. I knew him, though. Tom Rica.

I turned once again and followed him south. He drove erratically, slowing on the straightaway and speeding up on the curves, using two of the four lanes. Once, at better than seventy, he left the road entirely, and veered onto the shoulder. The Cadillac skidded sideways in the gravel, headlights swinging out into gray emptiness. The bumper clipped the steel guardrail, and the Cadillac slewed wildly in the other direction. It regained the road and went on as if nothing had happened.

I stayed close behind, trying to think my way into Tom Rica’s brain and along his damaged nerves and do his driving for him. I’d always felt an empathy for the boy. When he was eighteen and his unmaturing youth had begun to go rank, I’d tried to hold him straight, and even run some interference for him. An old cop had done it for me when I was a kid. I couldn’t do it for Tom.

The memory of my failure was bitter and obscure, mixed with the ash-blonde memory of a woman I’d once been married to. I put both memories out of my mind.

Tom was steadying down to his driving. The big car held the road, and even stayed in one lane most of the time. The road straightened out, and began to climb. Just beyond the crest of the rise, a hundred feet or more above the invisible sea, a red neon sign flashed at the entrance to a private parking lot: Buenavista Inn.

The Cadillac turned in under the sign. I stopped before I got to it, and left my car on the shoulder of the road. The inn lay below, a pueblo affair with a dozen or more stucco cottages staggered along the shadowy terraces. About half of them had lights behind their blinds. There was a red neon Office sign above the door of the main building beside the parking lot.

Tom parked the Cadillac with several other cars, and left it with its lights burning. I kept the other cars between me and him. I didn’t think he saw me, but he began to run toward the main building. He moved in a jerky knock-kneed fashion, like an old man trying to catch a bus which had already left.

The door under the red sign opened before he reached it. A big woman stepped out onto the platform of light projected from the doorway. Her hair was gold, her skin a darker gold. She wore a gold lamé gown with a slashed neckline. Even at a distance, she gave the impression of a shining hardness, as though she’d preserved her body from age by having it cast in metal. Her voice had a metallic carrying quality:

“Tommy! Where’ve you been?”

If he answered, I couldn’t hear him. He stopped on his heels in front of her, feinted to the left, and tried to move past her on the right. The action was a sad parody of the broken-field running he’d once been pretty good at. Her flashing body blocked him in the doorway, and one of her round gold arms encircled his neck. He struggled weakly. She kissed him on the mouth, then looked out over his shoulder across the parking lot.

“You took my car, you naughty boy. And now you left the lights on. Get inside now, before somebody sees you.”

She slapped him half-playfully, and released him. He scuttled into the lighted lobby. She marched across the parking lot, an unlikely figure of a woman with a broad serene brow, deep eyes, an ugly hungry tortured mouth, a faint pouch under her chin. She walked as if she owned the world, or had owned it once and lost it but remembered how it felt.