The Doomsters (17 page)

Mildred paid no attention to him. She climbed into the Buick, waited until the truck was out of the way, and made a sweeping turn in front of me. I was bothered by the way she handled herself and the car. She moved and drove obliviously, like someone alone in black space.

      M
Y
quasi-paternal instinct followed her home; I went along for the ride. She made it safely, and left the black convertible at the curb. When I pulled in behind it, she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk:

“What are you trying to do?”

“Seeing Millie home.”

Her response was flat. “Well, I’m home.”

The old house leaned like a tombstone on the night. But there were lights inside, behind cracked blinds, and the sound of a broken soprano voice. I got out and followed Mildred up the walk:

“You almost got yourself run over.”

“Did I?” She tinned at the top of the veranda steps. “I don’t need a keeper, thank you. In fact, all I want is to be let alone.”

“The deep tangled wildwood,” the lost and strident voice sang from the house. “And all the loved songs that my infancy knew.”

“Is your mother all right, Mildred?”

“Mother’s just dandy, thank you. She’s been drinking all day.” She looked up and down the dark street and said in a different voice: “Even the crummy people who live on this street look down their noses at us. I can’t put up a front any more. I’d simply like to crawl into a hole and die.”

“You need some rest.”

“How can I get any rest? With all this trouble on my shoulders? And that?”

Cast by the light from one of the front windows, her
shadow lay broken on the steps. She gestured toward the window. Behind it her mother had finished her song and was playing some closing bars on a badly tuned piano.

“Anyway,” Mildred said, “I have to go to work tomorrow morning. I can’t miss another half day.”

“Who do you work for, Simon Legree?”

“I don’t mean that. Mr. Haines is very nice. It’s just, if I go off schedule, I’m afraid I’ll never get back on.”

She fumbled in her black plastic bag for her key. The doorknob turned before she touched it. The outside light came on over our heads. Mrs. Gley opened the door, smiling muzzily:

“Bring your friend in, dear. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Your mother’s always pleased and proud to entertain your friends.”

Mrs. Gley didn’t seem to recognize me; I was part of the indiscriminate past blurred out by the long day’s drinking. She was glad to see me anyway.

“Bring your friend in, Mildred. I’ll pour him a drink. A young man likes to be entertained; that’s something you’ve got to learn. You’ve wasted too much of your youth on that good-for-nothing husband—”

“Stop making a fool of yourself,” Mildred said coldly.

“I am not making a fool of myself. I am expressing the feelings of my womanly heart. Isn’t that so?” she appealed to me. “You’ll come in and have a drink with me, won’t you?”

“Be glad to.”

“And I’ll be glad to have you.”

Mrs. Gley spread her arms out in a welcoming gesture, and toppled toward me. I caught her under the arms. She giggled against my shirt front. With Mildred’s help, I walked her into the sitting-room. She was awkward to handle in her draperies, like a loosely shrouded corpse.

But she managed to sit upright on the sofa and say in gracious tones:

“Excuse me. I was overcome by dizziness for a moment. The shock of the night air, you know.”

Like someone struck by a bullet, invisible and inaudible, she fell softly sideways. Very soon, she began to snore.

Mildred straightened our her mother’s legs, smoothed her purplish red hair and put a cushion under her head. She took off her own cloth coat and covered the lower part of her mother’s body. She did these things with neutral efficiency, without tenderness and without anger, as though she’d done them many times before and expected to do them many times again.

In the same neutral way, like an older woman speaking to a younger, she said: “Poor mother, have sweet dreams. Or no dreams. I wish you no dreams at all.”

“Can I help to get her upstairs?” I said.

“She can sleep here. She often has. This happens two or three times a week. We’re used to it.”

Mildred sat at her mother’s feet and looked around the room as if to memorize its shabby contents. She stared at the empty eye of the television set. The empty eye stared back at her. She looked down at her mother’s sleeping face. My feeling that their ages were reversed was stronger when she spoke again:

“Poor redhead. She used to be a genuine redhead, too. I give her money to have it dyed. But she prefers to dye it herself, and save the money for drinking. I can’t really blame her. She’s tired. She ran a boarding-house for fourteen years and then she got tired.”

“Is your mother a widow?”

“I don’t know.” She raised her eyes to my face. “It hardly matters. My father took off when I was seven years old. He had a wonderful chance to buy a ranch in Nevada for very little down. Father was always getting those wonderful
chances, but this was the one that was really going to pay off. He was supposed to come back for us in three weeks or a month, when everything was settled. He never did come back. I heard from him just once. He sent me a present for my eighth birthday, a ten-dollar gold piece from Reno. There was a little note along with it, that I wasn’t to spend it. I was to keep it as a token of his love. I didn’t spend it, either. Mother did.”

If Mildred felt resentment, she didn’t show it. She sat for a time, silent and still. Then she twitched her slender shoulders, as though to shake off the dead hand of the past:

“I don’t know how I got off on the subject of Father. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” She changed the subject abruptly: “This man Rica, at the Buenavista Inn, what kind of a person is he?”

“Pretty dilapidated. There’s not much left but hunger. He’s been on dope for years. As a witness he may be useless.”

“As a witness?”

“He said that Carl told him he didn’t shoot Jerry.”

Faint color rose in her face, and her eyes brightened. “Why didn’t you tell
me
that?”

“You didn’t give me a chance to. You seemed to have a rendezvous with a truck.”

Her color deepened. “I admit I had a bad reaction. You oughtn’t to have put your arm around me.”

“I meant it in a friendly way.”

“I know. It just reminded me of something. We were talking about those people at the Inn.”

“I thought you didn’t know them.”

“I don’t know them. I don’t want to know them.” She hesitated. “But don’t you think you should inform the police about what that man said?”

“I haven’t made up my mind.”

“Did you believe what he said?”

“With reservations. I never did think that Carl shot his brother. But my opinion isn’t based on Rica’s testimony. He’s a dream-talker.”

“What is it based on?”

“It’s hard to say. I had a strange feeling about the events at the ranch today. They had an unreal quality. Does that fit in with anything you noticed?”

“I think so, but I couldn’t pin it down. What do you mean, exactly?”

“If I could say exactly, I’d know what happened out there. I don’t know what happened, not yet. Some of the things I saw with my own eyes seemed as if they’d been staged for my benefit. Your husband’s movements don’t make sense to me, and neither do some of the others. That includes the sheriff.”

“It doesn’t mean Carl is guilty.”

“That’s just my point. He did his best to try and prove that he was, but I’m not convinced. You’re familiar with the situation, the people involved. And if Carl didn’t shoot Jerry, somebody else did. Who had a motive?”

“Zinnie had, of course. Only the idea of Zinnie is impossible. Women like Zinnie don’t shoot people.”

“Sometimes they do if the people are their husbands, and if they have strong enough motives. Love and money are a strong combination.”

“You know about her and Dr. Grantland? Yes, of course, you must. She’s pretty obvious.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“Not long, I’m sure of that. Whatever there is between them started after I left the ranch. I heard rumors downtown. One of my best friends is a legal secretary. She told me two or three months ago that Zinnie wanted a divorce from Jerry. He wasn’t willing to give it to her, though. He threatened to fight her for Martha, and apparently she
dropped the whole idea. Zinnie would never do anything that would lose her Martha.”

“Shooting Jerry wouldn’t lose her Martha,” I said, “unless she was caught.”

“You’re not suggesting that Zinnie did shoot him? I simply don’t believe it.”

I didn’t believe it, either. I didn’t disbelieve it. I held it in my mind and turned it around to see how it looked. It looked as ugly as sin.

“Where’s Zinnie now, do you know?”

“I haven’t seen her since I left the ranch.”

“What about Martha?”

“I suppose she’s with Mrs. Hutchinson. She spends a lot of her life with Mrs. Hutchinson.” Mildred added in a lower tone: “If I had a little girl like Martha, I’d stay with her and look after her myself. Only I haven’t.”

Her eyes brightened with tears. I realized for the first time what her barren broken marriage meant to her.

The telephone rang like an alarm clock in the hall. Mildred went to answer it.

“This is Mildred Hallman speaking.” Her voice went higher. “No! I don’t want to see you. You have no right to harass me.… Of course he hasn’t. I don’t need anyone to protect me.”

I heard her hang up, but she didn’t come back to the sitting-room. Instead she went into the front of the house. I found her in a room off the hallway, standing in the dark by the window.

“What’s the trouble?”

She didn’t answer. I found the light switch by the door, and pressed it. A single bulb winked on in the old brass chandelier. Against the opposite wall, an ancient piano grinned at me with all its yellow keys. An empty gin bottle stood on top of it.

“Was that Sheriff Ostervelt on the telephone?”

“How did you know?”

“The way you react to him. The Ostervelt reaction.”

“I hate him,” she said. “I don’t like her, either. Ever since Carl’s been in the hospital, she’s been acting more and more as if she owns him.”

“I seem to have lost the thread. Who are we talking about?”

“A woman called Rose Parish, a social worker at the State Hospital. She’s with Sheriff Ostervelt, and they both want to come here. I don’t want to see them. They’re people-eaters.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re people who live on other people’s troubles. I hope I headed them off. I’ve had enough bites taken out of me.”

“I think you’re wrong about Miss Parish.”

“You know her?”

“I met her this morning, at the hospital. She seemed very sympathetic to your husband’s case.”

“Then what’s she doing with Sheriff Ostervelt?”

“Probably straightening him out, if I know Miss Parish.”

“He can use some straightening out. If he comes here, I won’t let him in.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“I suppose I am. No. I hate him too much to be afraid of him. He did a dreadful thing to me.”

“You mean the day you took Carl to the hospital?”

Mildred nodded. Pale and heavy-eyed, she looked as if her youth had run out through the unstopped wound of that day.

“I’d better tell you what actually happened. He tried to make me his—his whore. He tried to take me to Buenavista Inn.”

“That same day?”

“Yes, on the way back from the hospital. He’d already made three or four stops, and every time he came back to the car he was drunker and more obnoxious. Finally I asked him to let me off at the nearest bus station. We were in Buena Vista by then, just a little way from home, but I couldn’t put up with him any longer.

“I was forced to, however. Instead of taking me to the bus station, he drove out the highway to the Inn, and parked above it. The owner was a friend of his, he said—a wonderful woman, very broad-minded. If I wanted to stay there with her, she’d give me a suite to myself, and it wouldn’t cost me a cent. I could take a week’s vacation, or a month’s—as long as I liked—and he would come and keep me company at night.

“He said he’d had this in mind for a long time, ever since his wife passed away, before that. Now that Carl was out of the way, he and I could get together at last. You should have heard him, trying to be romantic. The great lover. Leaning across me with his bald head, sweating and breathing hard and smelling of liquor.”

Anger clenched in my stomach like a fist. “Did he try to use force on you?”

“He tried to kiss me. I was able to handle him, though, when he saw how I felt about him. He didn’t assault me, not physically, if that’s what you’re getting at. But he treated me as if I—as if a woman whose husband was sick was fair game for anybody.”

“What about Carl’s alleged confession? Did he try to use it to make you do what he wanted?”

“Yes, he did. Only please don’t do anything about it. The situation is bad enough already.”

“It could get worse for him. Abuse of office cuts two ways.”

“You mustn’t talk like that. It will only make things worse for Carl.”

A car purred somewhere out of sight. Then its headlights entered the street.

“Turn off the light,” Mildred whispered, “I have a feeling it’s them.”

I pressed the switch and crossed to the window where she stood. A black Mercury Special pulled in to the curb behind my convertible. Ostervelt and Miss Parish got out of the back seat. Mildred pulled down the blind and turned to me:

“Will you talk to them? I don’t want to see them.”

“I don’t blame you for not wanting to see Ostervelt. You ought to talk to Miss Parish, though. She’s definitely on our side.”

“I’ll talk to her if I have to. But she’ll have to give me a chance to change my clothes.”

Their footsteps were on the porch. As I went to answer the door, I heard Mildred running up the stairs behind me.

      M
ISS
P
ARISH
and the sheriff were standing in uncomfortable relation to each other. I guessed they’d had an argument. She looked official and rather imposing in a plain blue coat and hat. Ostervelt’s face was shadowed by his wide hatbrim, but I got the impression that he was feeling subdued. If there had been an argument, he’d lost.