The Chill (12 page)

“But didn’t you say that Alice Jenks suggested treatment for Dolly in the first place?”

“She did. She also paid for it. Perhaps with all the trouble in the family she felt she couldn’t afford it any longer. At any rate, I didn’t see Dolly again until last night, with one exception. I went to court the day she testified against McGee. As a matter of fact I bearded the judge in his chambers and told him that it shouldn’t be allowed. But she was a key witness, and they had her aunt’s permission, and they put her through her sad little paces. She acted like a pale little automaton lost in a world of hostile adults.”

His large body trembled with feeling. His hands burrowed under his smock, searching for a cigarette. I gave him one and lit it, and lit one for myself.

“What did she say in court?”

“It was very short and simple. I suspect that she was thoroughly rehearsed. She heard the shot and looked out her bedroom window and saw her father running away with the gun in his hand. One other question had to do with whether McGee had threatened Constance with bodily harm. He had. That was all.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. This isn’t my unaided recollection, as they say. I took written notes at the time, and I scanned them this morning.”

“Why?”

“They’re part of her history, evidently a crucial part.” He blew out smoke and looked at me through it, long and cautiously.

I said: “Does she tell a different story now?”

His face was working with complex passions. He was a man
of feeling, and Dolly was his office daughter lost for many years.

“She tells an absurd story,” he burst out. “I not only can’t believe it, I can’t believe that she believes it. She isn’t that sick.”

He paused, drawing deep on his cigarette, trying to get himself under full control. I waited and listened. This time he did go on:

“She claims now that she didn’t see McGee that night, and that in fact he had nothing to do with the murder. She says she lied on the witness stand because the various adults wanted her to.”

“Why would she say that now?”

“I don’t pretend to understand her. After an interval of ten years we’ve naturally lost what rapport we had. And of course she hasn’t forgiven me for what she considers my betrayal— my failure to look after her in the disaster. But what could I do? I couldn’t go to Indian Springs and kidnap her out of her aunt’s house.”

“You care about your patients, doctor.”

“Yes. I care. It keeps me tired.” He stubbed his cigarette in the ceramic ashtray. “Nell made this ashtray, by the way. It’s rather good for a first attempt.”

I murmured something in agreement. Above the subsiding clamor of dishes, a wild old complaining voice rose in the depths of the building.

“That story of hers,” I said, “may not be so very absurd. It fits in with the fact that McGee visited her on the second day of her honeymoon and hit her so hard with something that it knocked her right off the tracks.”

“You’re acute, Mr. Archer. That’s precisely what happened. He treated her to a long tirade on the subject of his innocence. You mustn’t forget that she loved her father, however ambivalently. He was able to convince her that her memory was
at fault, that he was innocent and she was guilty. Childhood memories are powerfully influenced by emotion.”

“That she was guilty of perjury, you mean?”

“Murder.” He leaned toward me. “She told me this morning she killed her mother herself.”

“With a gun?”

“With her tongue. That’s the absurd part. She claims she killed her mother and her friend Helen, and sent her father to prison into the bargain, all with her poisonous tongue.”

“Does she explain what she means by that?”

“She hasn’t yet. It’s an expression of guilt which may be only superficially connected with these murders.”

“You mean she’s using the murders to unload guilt which she feels about something else?”

“More or less. It’s a common enough mechanism. I know for a fact that she didn’t kill her mother, or he about her father, essentially. I’m certain McGee was guilty.”

“Courts can make mistakes, even in a capital case.”

He said with a kind of muted arrogance: “I know more about that case than ever came out in court.”

“From Dolly?”

“From various sources.”

“I’d be obliged if you’d let me in on it.”

His eyes veiled themselves. “I can’t do that. I have to respect the confidences of my patients. But you can take my word for it that McGee killed his wife.”

“Then what’s Dolly feeling so guilty about?”

“I’m sure that will come out, in time. It probably has to do with her resentment against her parents. It’s natural she’d want to punish them for the ugly failure of their marriage. She may well have fantasied her mother’s death, her father’s imprisonment, before those things emerged into reality. When the poor child’s vengeful dreams came true, how else could she feel but guilty? McGee’s tirade the other weekend stirred up the old feelings, and then this dreadful accident last night—” He
ran out of words and spread his hands, palms upward and fingers curling, on his heavy thighs.

“The Haggerty shooting was no accident, doctor. The gun is missing, for one thing.”

“I realize that. I was referring to Dolly’s discovery of the body, which was certainly accidental.”

“I wonder. She blames herself for that killing, too. I don’t see how you can explain that in terms of childhood resentments.”

“I wasn’t attempting to.” There was irritation in his voice. It made him pull a little professional rank on me: “Nor is there any need for you to understand the psychic situation. You stick to the objective facts, and I’ll handle the subjective.” He softened this with a bit of philosophy: “Objective and subjective, the outer world and the inner, do correspond of course. But sometimes you have to follow the parallel lines almost to infinity before they touch.”

“Let’s stick to the objective facts then. Dolly said she killed Helen Haggerty with her poisonous tongue. Is that all she said on the subject?”

“There was more, a good deal more, of a rather confused nature. Dolly seems to feel that her friendship with Miss Haggerty was somehow responsible for the latter’s death.”

“The two women were friends?”

“I’d say so, yes, though there was twenty years’ difference in their ages. Dolly confided in her, poured out everything, and Miss Haggerty reciprocated. Apparently she’d had severe emotional problems involving her own father, and she couldn’t resist the parallel with Dolly. They both let down their back hair. It wasn’t a healthy situation,” he said dryly.

“Does she have anything to say about Helen’s father?”

“Dolly seems to think he was a crooked policeman involved in a murder, but that may be sheer fantasy—a kind of secondary image of her own father.”

“It isn’t. Helen’s father is a policeman, and Helen at least regarded him as a crook.”

“How in the world would you know that?”

“I read a letter from her mother on the subject. I’d like to have a chance to talk to her parents.”

“Why don’t you?”

“They live in Bridgeton, Illinois.”

It was a long jump, but not so long as the jump my mind made into blank possibility. I had handled cases which opened up gradually like fissures in the firm ground of the present, cleaving far down through the strata of the past. Perhaps Helen’s murder was connected with an obscure murder in Illinois more than twenty years ago, before Dolly was born. It was a wishful thought, and I didn’t mention it to Dr. Godwin.

“I’m sorry I can’t be more help to you,” he was saying. “I have to go now, I’m already overdue for my hospital rounds.”

The sound of a motor detached itself from the traffic in the street, and slowed down. A car door was opened and closed. Men’s footsteps came up the walk. Moving quickly for a big man, Godwin opened the door before they rang.

I couldn’t see who his visitors were, but they were unwelcome ones. Godwin went rigid with hostility.

“Good morning, Sheriff,” he said.

Crane responded folksily: “It’s a hell of a morning and you know it. September’s supposed to be our best month, but the bloody fog’s so thick the airport’s socked in.”

“You didn’t come here to discuss the weather.”

“That’s right, I didn’t. I heard you got a fugitive from justice holed up here.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I have my sources.”

“You’d better fire them, Sheriff. They’re giving you misleading information.”

“Somebody is, doctor. Are you denying that Mrs. Dolly Kincaid née McGee is in this building?”

Godwin hesitated. His heavy jaw got heavier. “She is.”

“You said a minute ago she wasn’t. What are you trying to pull, doc?”

“What are
you
trying to pull? Mrs. Kincaid is not a fugitive. She’s here because she’s ill.”

“I wonder what made her ill. Can’t she stand the sight of blood?”

Godwin’s lips curled outward. He looked ready to spit in the other man’s face. I couldn’t see the Sheriff from where I sat, and I made no attempt to. I thought it was best for me to stay out of sight.

“It isn’t just the weather that makes it a lousy day, doc. We had a lousy murder in town last night. I guess you know that, too. Probably Mrs. Kincaid told you all about it.”

“Are you accusing her?” Godwin said.

“I wouldn’t say that. Not yet, anyway.”

“Then beat it.”

“You can’t talk like that to me.”

Godwin held himself motionless but his breath shook him as though he had a racing engine inside of him. “You accused me in the presence of witnesses of harboring a fugitive from justice. I could sue you for slander and by God I will if you don’t stop harassing me and my patients.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.” Crane’s voice was much less confident. “Anyway, I got a right to question a witness.”

“At some later time perhaps you have. At the present time Mrs. Kincaid is under heavy sedation. I can’t permit her to be questioned for at least a week.”

“A week?”

“It may be longer. I strongly advise you not to press the point. I’m prepared to go before a judge and certify that police questioning at the present time would endanger her health and perhaps her life.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I don’t care what you believe.”

Godwin slammed the door and leaned on it, breathing like a runner. A couple of white-uniformed nurses who had been peeking through the inner door tried to look as if they had business there. He waved them away.

I said with unfeigned admiration: “You really went to bat for her.”

“They did enough damage to her when she was a child. They’re not going to compound it if I can help it.”

“How did they know she was here?”

“I have no idea. I can usually trust the staff to keep their mouths shut.” He gave me a probing look. “Did you tell anyone?”

“Nobody connected with the law. Alex did mention to Alice Jenks that Dolly was here.”

“Perhaps he shouldn’t have. Miss Jenks has worked for the county a long time, and Crane and she are old acquaintances.”

“She wouldn’t tattle on her own niece, would she?”

“I don’t know what she’d do.” Godwin tore off his smock and threw it at the chair where I had been sitting. “Well, shall I let you out?”

He shook his keys like a jailer.

A
BOUT HALFWAY
up the pass road I came out into sunlight. The fog below was like a sea of white water surging into the inlets of the mountains. From the summit of the pass, where I paused for a moment, further mountains were visible on the inland horizon.

The wide valley between was full of light. Cattle grazed among the live oaks on the hillsides. A covey of quail marched
across the road in front of my car like small plumed tipsy soldiers. I could smell newmown hay, and had the feeling that I had dropped down into a pastoral scene where nothing much had changed in a hundred years.

The town of Indian Springs didn’t entirely dispel the feeling, though it had its service stations and its drive-ins offering hamburgers and tacos. It had a bit of old-time Western atmosphere, and more than a bit of the old-time sun-baked poverty of the West. Prematurely aging women watched over their brown children in the dooryards of crumbling adobes. Most of the loiterers in the main street had Indian faces under their broad-brimmed hats. Banners advertising Old Rodeo Days hung limply over their heads.

Alice Jenks lived in one of the best houses on what appeared to be the best street. It was a two-storied white frame house, with deep porches upstairs and down, standing far back from the street behind a smooth green lawn. I stepped onto the grass and leaned on a pepper tree, fanning myself with my hat. I was five minutes early.

A rather imposing woman in a blue dress came out on the veranda. She looked me over as if I might possibly be a burglar cleverly creeping up on her house at eleven o’clock in the morning. She came down the steps and along the walk toward me. The sun flashed on her glasses and lent her searchlight eyes.

Close up, she wasn’t so alarming. The brown eyes behind the glasses were strained and anxious. Her hair was streaked with gray. Her mouth was unexpectedly generous and even soft, but it was tweezered like a live thing between the harsh lines that thrust down from the base of her nose. The stiff blue dress that curved like armor plate over her monolithic bosom was old-fashioned in cut, and gave her a dowdy look. The valley sun had parched and roughened her skin.

“Are you Mr. Archer?”

“Yes. How are you, Miss Jenks?”

“I’ll survive.” Her handshake was like a mans. “Come up on the porch, we can talk there.”

Her movements, like her speech, were so abrupt that they suggested the jitters. The jitters under firm, perhaps lifelong, control. She motioned me into a canvas glider and sat on a reed chair facing me, her back to the street. Three Mexican boys on one battered bicycle rode by precariously like high-wire artists.

“I don’t know just what you want from me, Mr. Archer. My niece appears to be in very serious trouble. I talked to a friend in the courthouse this morning—”

“The Sheriff?”