The Chill (7 page)

I started toward the hotel coffee shop. Fargo came running after me along the corridor. The rectangular dark glasses lent his face a robotlike calm which went oddly with the movements of his legs and arms.

“I almost forgot to ask you. You get a line on this Begley?”

“I talked to him for quite a while. He didn’t give too much. He’s living with a woman on Shearwater Beach.”

“Who’s the lucky woman?” Fargo said.

“Madge Gerhardi is her name. Do you know her?”

“No, but I think I know who he is. If I could take another look at him—”

“Come over there now.”

“I can’t. I’ll tell you who I
think
he is under all that seaweed, if you promise not to quote me. There’s such a thing as accidental resemblance, and a libel suit is the last thing I need.”

“I promise not to quote you.”

“See that you don’t.” He took a deep breath like a skin diver getting ready to go for the bottom. “I think he’s a fellow named Thomas McGee who murdered his wife in Indian Springs about ten years ago. I took a picture of McGee when I was
a cub reporter on the paper, but they never used the picture. They never play up those Valley cases.”

“You’re sure he murdered his wife?”

“Yeah, it was an open-and-shut case. I don’t have time to go into details, in fact they’re getting pretty hazy at this late date. But most of the people around the courthouse thought he should have been given first degree. Gil Stevens convinced the jury to go for second degree, which explains how he’s out so quick.”

Remembering Begley’s story about his ten years on the other side of the world, the other side of the moon, I thought that ten years wasn’t so very quick.

  The fog was dense along Shearwater Beach. It must have been high tide: I could hear the surf roaring up under the cottages and sucking at their pilings. The smell of iodine hung in the chilly air.

Madge Gerhardi answered the door and looked at me rather vaguely. The paint on her eyelids couldn’t hide the fact that they were swollen.

“You’re the detective, aren’t you?”

“Yes. May I come in?”

“Come in if you want. It won’t do any good. He’s gone.”

I’d already guessed it from her orphaned air. I followed her along a musty hallway into the main room, which was high and raftered. Spiders had been busy in the angles of the rafters, which were webbed and blurred as if fog had seeped in at the corners. The rattan furniture was coming apart at the joints. The glasses and empty bottles and half-empty bottles standing around on the tables and the floor suggested that a party had been going on for some days and might erupt again if I wasn’t careful.

The woman kicked over an empty bottle on the way to the settee, where she flung herself down.

“It’s your fault he’s gone,” she complained. “He started to pack right after you were here this afternoon.”

I sat on a rattan chair facing her. “Did Begley say where he was going?”

“Not to me he didn’t. He did say I wasn’t to expect him back, that it was all off. Why did you have to scare him, anyway? Chuck never did anybody any harm.”

“He scares very easily.”

“Chuck is sensitive. He’s had a great deal of trouble. Many’s the time he told me that all he wanted was a quiet nook where he could write about his experiences. He’s writing an autobiographical novel about his experiences.”

“His experiences in New Caledonia?”

She said with surprising candor: “I don’t think Chuck ever set foot in New Caledonia. He got that business about the chrome mine out of an old
National Geographic
magazine. I don’t believe he ever left this country.”

“Where has he been?”

“In the pen,” she said. “You know that, or you wouldn’t be after him. I think it’s a dirty crying shame, when a man has paid his debt to society and proved that he can rehabilitate himself—”

It was Begley she was quoting, Begley’s anger she was expressing, but she couldn’t sustain the anger or remember the end of the quotation. She looked around the wreckage of the room in dim alarm, as if she had begun to suspect that his rehabilitation was not complete.

“Did he tell you what he was in for, Mrs. Gerhardi?”

“Not in so many words. He read me a piece from his book the other night. This character in the book was in the pen and he was thinking about the past and how they framed him for a murder he didn’t commit. I asked him if the character stood for him. He wouldn’t say. He went into one of his deep dark silences.”

She went into one of her own. I could feel the floor trembling
under my feet. The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution. The woman said:

“Was Chuck in the pen for murder?”

“I was told tonight that he murdered his wife ten years ago. I haven’t confirmed it. Can you?”

She shook her head. Her face had lengthened as if by its own weight, like unbaked dough. “It must be a mistake.”

“I hope so. I was also told that his real name is Thomas McGee. Did he ever use that name?”

“No.”

“It does tie in with another fact,” I said, thinking aloud. “The girl he went to visit at the Surf House had the same name before she was married. He said the girl resembled his daughter. I think she is his daughter. Did he ever talk about her?”

“Never.”

“Or bring her here?”

“No. If she’s his daughter, he wouldn’t bring her here.” She reached for the empty bottle she had kicked over, set it on its base, and slumped back onto the settee, as if morally exhausted by the effort.

“How long did Begley, or McGee, live here with you?”

“A couple of weeks is all. We were going to be married. It’s lonely living here without a man.”

“I can imagine.”

She drew a little life from the sympathy in my voice: “They just don’t stay with me. I try to make things nice for them, but they don’t stay. I should have stuck with my first husband.” Her eyes were far away and long ago. “He treated me like a queen but I was young and foolish. I didn’t know any better than to leave him.”

We listened to the water under the house.

“Do you think Chuck went away with this girl you call his daughter?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “How did he leave here, Mrs. Gerhardi? By car?”

“He wouldn’t let me drive him. He said he was going up to the corner and catch the L.A. bus. It stops at the corner if you signal it. He walked up the road with his suitcase and out of sight.” She sounded both regretful and relieved.

“About what time?”

“Around three o’clock.”

“Did he have any money?”

“He must have had some for the bus fare. He couldn’t have had much. I’ve been giving him a little money, but he would only take what he needed from me, and then it always had to be a loan. Which he said he would pay back when he got his book of experiences on the market. But I don’t care if he never pays me back. He was nice to have around.”

“Really?”

“Really he was. Chuck is a smart man. I don’t care what he’s done in the course of his life. A man can change for the better. He never gave me a bad time once.” She made a further breakthrough into candor: “I was the one who gave him the bad times. I have a drinking problem. He only drank with me to be sociable. He didn’t want me to drink alone.” She blinked her gin-colored eyes. “Would you like a drink?”

“No thanks. I have to be on my way.” I got up and stood over her. “You’re sure he didn’t tell you where he was going?”

“Los Angeles is all I know. He promised I’d hear from him but I don’t expect it. It’s over.”

“If he should write or phone will you let me know?”

She nodded. I gave her my card, and told her where I was staying. When I went out, the fog had moved inland as far as the highway.

I
STOPPED
at the motel again on my way to the Bradshaw house. The keyboy told me that Alex was still out. I wasn’t surprised when I found his red Porsche parked under the Bradshaws’ hedge beside the road.

The moon was rising behind the trees. I let my thoughts rise with it, imagining that Alex had got together with his bride and they were snug in the gatehouse, talking out their troubles. The sound of the girl’s crying wiped out the hopeful image. Her voice was loud and terrible, almost inhuman. Its compulsive rhythms rose and fell like the ululations of a hurt cat.

The door of the gatehouse was slightly ajar. Light spilled around its edges, as if extruded by the pressure of the noise inside. I pushed it open.

“Get out of here,” Alex said.

They were on a studio bed in the tiny sitting room. He had his arms around her, but the scene was not domestic. She seemed to be fighting him, trying to struggle out of his embrace. It was more like a scene in a closed ward where psychiatric nurses will hold their violent patients, sometimes for hours on end, rather than strap them in canvas jackets.

Her blouse was torn, so that one of her breasts was almost naked. She twisted her unkempt head around and let me see her face. It was gray and stunned, and it hardly changed expression when she screamed at me:

“Get out!”

“I think I better stick around,” I said to both of them.

I closed the door and crossed the room. The rhythm of her crying was running down. It wasn’t really crying. Her eyes
were dry and fixed in her gray flesh. She hid them against her husband’s body.

His face was shining white.

“What happened, Alex?”

“I don’t really know. I was waiting for her when she got home a few minutes ago. I couldn’t get much sense out of her. She’s awfully upset about something.”

“She’s in shock,” I said, thinking that he was close to it himself. “Was she in an accident?”

“Something like that.”

His voice trailed off in a mumble. His look was inward, as if he was groping for the strength to handle this new problem.

“Is she hurt, Alex?”

“I don’t think so. She came running down the road, and then she tried to run away again. She put up quite a battle when I tried to stop her.”

As if to demonstrate her prowess as a battler, she freed her hands and beat at his chest. There was blood on her hands. It left red dabs on his shirt-front.

“Let me go,” she pleaded. “I want to die. I deserve to.”

“She’s bleeding, Alex.”

He shook his head. “It’s somebody else’s blood. A friend of hers was killed.”

“And it’s all my fault,” she said in a flat voice.

He caught her wrists and held her. I could see manhood biting into his face. “Be quiet, Dolly. You’re talking nonsense.”

“Am I? She’s lying in her blood, and I’m the one who put her there.”

“Who is she talking about?” I said to Alex.

“Somebody called Helen. I’ve never heard of her.”

I had.

The girl began to talk in her wispy monotone, so rapidly and imprecisely that I could hardly follow. She was a devil and so was her father before her and so was Helen’s father and they had the bond of murder between them which made them
blood sisters and she had betrayed her blood sister and done her in.

“What did you do to Helen?”

“I should have kept away from her. They die when I go near them.”

“That’s crazy talk,” Alex said softly. “You never hurt anybody.”

“What do you know about me?”

“All I need to. I’m in love with you.”

“Don’t say that. It only makes me want to kill myself.” Sitting upright in the circle of his arms, she looked at her bloody hands and cried some more of her terrible dry tears. “I’m a criminal.”

Alex looked up at me, his eyes blue-black. “Can you make any sense of it?”

“Not much.”

“You can’t really think she killed this Helen person?” We were talking past Dolly as if she was deaf or out of her head, and she accepted this status.

“We don’t even know that anybody’s been killed,” I said. “Your wife is loaded with some kind of guilt, but it may belong to somebody else. I found out a little tonight about her background, or I think I did.” I sat on the shabby brown studio bed beside them and said to Dolly: “What’s your father’s name?”

She didn’t seem to hear me.

“Thomas McGee?”

She nodded abruptly, as if she’d been struck from behind. “He’s a lying monster. He made me into a monster.”

“How did he do that?”

The question triggered another nonstop sentence. “He shot her,” she said with her chin on her shoulder, “and left her lying in her blood but I told Aunt Alice and the policemen and the court took care of him but now he’s done it again.”

“To Helen?”

“Yes, and I’m responsible. I caused it to happen.”

She seemed to take a weird pleasure in acknowledging her guilt. Her gray and jaded looks, her tearless raying, her breathless run-on talking and her silences, were signs of an explosive emotional crisis. Under the raw melodrama of her self-accusations, I had the sense of something valuable and fragile in danger of being permanently broken.

“We’d better not try to question her any more,” I said. “I doubt right now she can tell the difference between true and false.”

“Can’t I?” she said malignly. “Everything I remember is true and I can remember everything from year one, the quarrels and the beatings, and then he finally shot her in her blood—”

I cut in: “Shut up, Dolly, or change the record. You need a doctor. Do you have one in town here?”

“No. I don’t need a doctor. Call the police. I want to make a confession.”

She was playing a game with us and her own mind, I thought, performing dangerous stunts on the cliff edge of reality, daring the long cloudy fall.

“You want to confess that you’re a monster,” I said.

It didn’t work. She answered matter-of-factly: “I am a monster.”

The worst of it was, it was happening physically before my eyes. The chaotic pressures in her were changing the shape of her mouth and jaw. She peered at me dully through a fringe of hair. I’d hardly have recognized her as the girl I talked to on the library steps that day.

I turned to Alex. “Do you know any doctors in town?”

He shook his head. His short hair stood up straight as if live electricity was running through him from his contact with his wife. He never let go of her.