The Chill

by Ross Macdonald

  “It’s not my job to.”

  Making a bitter face over this and the last of his whisky, he rose slowly. “Well, you need your sleep, and I have a phone call to make. Thanks for the drink.” He turned with his hand on the doorknob. “And thanks for the conversation.”

  “Any time. Are you going to call your father?”

  “No. I’ve decided not to.”

  I felt vaguely gratified. I was old enough to be his father, with no son of my own, and that may have had something to do with my feeling.

  “Who are you going to call, or is that a private matter?”

  “Dolly asked me to try and get in touch with her Aunt Alice. I guess I’ve been putting it off. I don’t know what to say to her aunt. I didn’t even know she had an Aunt Alice until tonight.”

  “I remember she mentioned her. When did Dolly ask you to make the call?”

  “In the nursing home, the last thing. She wants her aunt to come and see her. I didn’t know if that was a good idea or not.”

  “It would depend on the aunt. Does she live here in town?”

  “She lives in the Valley, in Indian Springs. Dolly said she’s in the county directory. Miss Alice Jenks.”

  “Let’s try her.”

  I found her name and number in the phone book, placed the toll call, and handed the receiver to Alex. He sat on the bed, looking at the instrument as if he had never seen one before.

  “What am I going to say to her?”

  “You’ll know what to say. I want to talk to her when you’re finished.”

  A voice rasped from the receiver: “Yes? Who is this?”

  “I’m Alex Kincaid. Is that Miss Jenks? … We don’t know each other, Miss Jenks, but I married your niece a few weeks ago … Your niece, Dolly McGee. We were married a few weeks ago, and she’s come down with a rather serious illness … No, it’s more emotional. She’s emotionally disturbed, and she wants to see you. She’s in the Whitmore Nursing Home here in Pacific Point. Dr. Godwin is looking after her.”

  He paused again. There was sweat on his forehead. The voice at the other end went on for some time.

  “She says she can’t come tomorrow,” he said to me; and into the receiver: “Perhaps Sunday would be possible? … Yes, fine. You can contact me at the Mariner’s Rest Motel, or … Alex Kincaid. I’ll look forward to meeting you.”

  “Let me talk to her,” I said.

  “Just a minute, Miss Jenks. The gentleman here with me, Mr. Archer, has something to say to you.” He handed over the receiver.

  “Hello, Miss Jenks.”

  “Hello, Mr. Archer. And who are you, may I ask, at one o’clock in the morning?” It wasn’t a light question. The woman sounded anxious and irritated, but she had both feelings under reasonable control.

  “I’m a private detective. I’m sorry to disrupt your sleep with this, but there’s more to the situation than simple emotional illness. A woman has been murdered here.”

  She gasped, but made no other comment.

  “Your niece is a material witness to the murder. She may be more deeply involved than that, and in any case she’s going to need support. So far as I know you’re her only relative, apart from her father—”

  “You can leave him out. He doesn’t count. He never has, except in a negative way.” Her voice was flat and harsh. “Who was killed?”

  “A friend and counselor of your niece’s, Professor Helen Haggerty.”

  “I never heard of the woman,” she said with combined impatience and relief.

  “You’ll be hearing a great deal about her, if you’re at all interested in your niece. Are you close to her?”

  “I was, before she grew away from me. I brought her up after her mother’s death.” Her voice became flat again: “Does Tom McGee have anything to do with this new killing?”

  “He may have. He’s in town here, or he was.”

  “I knew it!” she cried in bleak triumph. “They had no business letting him out. They should have put him in the gas chamber for what he did to my little sister.”

  She was choked with sudden emotion. I waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, I said:

  “I’m anxious to go into the details of that case with you, but I don’t think we should do it over the phone. It really would be helpful if you could come here tomorrow.”

  “I simply can’t. There’s no use badgering me. I have a terribly important meeting tomorrow afternoon. Several state officials will be here from Sacramento, and it will probably go on into the evening.”

  “What about the morning?”

  “I have to prepare for them in the morning. We’re shifting over to a new state-county welfare program.” Latent hysteria buzzed in her voice, the hysteria of a middle-aged spinster who has to make a change. “If I walked out on this project, I could lose my position.”

  “We don’t want that to happen, Miss Jenks. How far is it from there to Pacific Point?”

  “Seventy miles, but I tell you I can’t make it.”

  “I can. Will you give me an hour in the morning, say around eleven?”

  She hesitated. “Yes, if it’s important. I’ll get up an hour earlier and do my paperwork. I’ll be at home at eleven. You have my address? It’s just off the main street of Indian Springs.”

  I thanked her and got rid of Alex and went to bed, setting my mental alarm for six-thirty.

  chapter 11

  ALEX WAS STILL SLEEPING when I was ready to leave in the morning. I let him sleep, partly for selfish reasons, and partly because sleep was kinder to him than waking was likely to be.

  The fog was thick outside. Its watery mass overlay Pacific Point and transformed it into a kind of suburb of the sea. I drove out of the motel enclosure into a gray world without perspective, came abruptly to an access ramp, descended onto the freeway where headlights swam in pairs like deep-sea fish, and arrived at a truck stop on the east side without any real sense that I had driven across the city.

  I’d been having a little too much talk with people whose business was talking. It was good to sit at the counter of a working-class restaurant where men spoke when they wanted something, or simply to kid the waitress. I kidded her a little myself. Her name was Stella, and she was so efficient that she threatened to take the place of automation. She said with a flashing smile that this was her aim in life.

  My destination was near the highway, on a heavily used thoroughfare lined mainly with new apartment buildings. Their faddish pastel colors and scant transplanted palms seemed dingy and desolate in the fog.

  The nursing home was a beige stucco one-storied building taking up most of a narrow deep lot. I rang the bell at eight o’clock precisely. Dr. Godwin must have been waiting behind the door. He unlocked it and let me in himself.

  “You’re a punctual man, Mr. Archer.”

  His changeable eyes had taken the stony color of the morning. I noticed when he turned to shut the door behind us that his shoulders were permanently stooped. He was wearing a fresh white smock.

  “Sit down, won’t you? This is as good a place to talk as any.”

  We were in a small reception room or lounge. I sat in one of several worn armchairs aimed at a silent television set in one corner. Through the inner door I could hear the rattle of dishes and the bright voices of nurses beginning the day.

  “Is this your place, doctor?”

  “I have an interest in it. Most of the patients here are mine. I’ve just been giving some shock treatments.” He smoothed the front of his smock. “I’d feel less like a witch-doctor if I knew why electric shocks make depressed people feel better. So much of our science, or art, is still in the empirical stage. But the people do get better,” he said with a sudden grin, too sudden to touch his watching, waiting eyes.

  “Is Dolly?”

  “Yes, I think she’s somewhat better. We don’t have overnight cures, of course. I want to keep an eye on her for at least a week. Here.”

  “Is she fit to be questioned?”

 
“I don’t want you to question her, or anyone else remotely connected with the—the world of crime and punishment.” As if to remove the curse from his refusal, he flung himself loosely into the armchair beside me, asked me for a cigarette and let me light it.

  “Why not?”

  “I do not love the law in its current primitive state, where sick people are trapped into betraying themselves in their sickness and then treated by the courts as if they were well. I’ve been fighting the situation for a long time” He rested his ponderous bald head on the back of the chair, and blew smoke toward the ceiling.

  “What you say suggests that Dolly is in danger from the law.”

  “I was making a general statement.”

  “Which applied specifically to Dolly. We don’t have to play games, doctor. Were both on the same side. I don’t assume the girl is guilty of anything. I do think she has information which may help me to clear up a murder.”

  “But what if she’s guilty?” he said, watching for my reaction.

  “Then I’d want to cooperate with you in getting charges reduced, finding mitigating circumstances, making a case for merciful treatment by the court. Remember I’m working for her husband. Is she guilty?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have talked to her this morning?”

  “She did most of the talking. I don’t ask many questions. I wait and I listen. In the end you learn more that way.” He gave me a meaningful look, as if I should start applying this principle.

  I waited and listened. Nothing happened. A plump woman with long black hair straggling down the back of her cotton robe appeared in the inside doorway. She stretched out her arms to the doctor.

  He lifted his hand like a weary king. “Good morning, Nell.”

  She gave him a bright agonized smile and softly withdrew, like a woman walking backward in her sleep. Her outstretched arms were the last I saw of her.

  “It would be helpful if you told me what Dolly had to say this morning.”

  “And possibly dangerous.” Godwin crushed out his cigarette in a blue ceramic ashtray which looked homemade. “There is after all a difference between you and me. What a patient says to me is a professional confidence. You have no professional standing. If you refused to repeat information in court you could be jailed for contempt. I could, under the law, but I’m not likely to be.”

  “I’ve sweated out contempt before. And the police won’t get anything out of me that I don’t choose to tell them. That’s a guarantee.”

  “Very well.” Godwin nodded his head once, decisively. “I’m concerned about Dolly and I’ll try to tell you why without any professional jargon. You may be able to put together the objective jigsaw puzzle while I’m reconstructing the subjective one.”

  “You said no professional jargon, doctor.”

  “Sorry. First there’s her history. Her mother Constance McGee brought her to me at the instigation of her sister Alice, a woman I know slightly, when Dolly was ten years old. She wasn’t a happy child. In fact she was in some danger of becoming really withdrawn, for good reason. There’s always good reason. Her father McGee was an irresponsible and violent man who couldn’t handle the duties of fatherhood. He blew hot and cold on the child, spoiled her and punished her, constantly fought with his wife and eventually left her, or was left, it hardly matters. I would have preferred to treat him instead of Dolly, since he was the main source of the trouble in the family. But he was unreachable.”

  “Did you ever see him?”

  “He wouldn’t even come in for an interview,” Godwin said with regret. “If I could have reached him, I might have been able to prevent a murder. Perhaps not. From what I’ve been told he was a severely maladjusted man who needed help but never got it. You can understand my bitterness about the gap between psychiatry and the law. People like McGee are allowed to run around loose, without preventive action of any kind, until they commit a crime. Then of course they’re hauled into court and sent away for ten or twenty years. But not to a hospital. To a prison.”

  “McGee’s out now. He’s been in town here. Did you know that?”

  “Dolly told me this morning. It’s one of the many severe pressures on her. You can understand how a sensitive child brought up in an atmosphere of violence and instability would be plagued by anxiety and guilt. The worst guilt often arises when a child is forced, by sheer instinctive self-preservation, to turn against her parents. A clinical psychologist I work with helped Dolly to express her feelings in clay and doll-play and so on. There wasn’t too much I could do for her myself, since children don’t have the mental equipment to be analyzed. But I did try to assume the role of the calm and patient father, provide some of the stability that was missing in her young life. And she was doing pretty well, until the disaster occurred.”

  “You mean the murder?”

  He swung his head in sorrow. “McGee worked himself into a self-pitying rage one night, came to the aunt’s house in Indian Springs where they were staying, and shot Constance through the head. Dolly was alone in the house with her mother. She heard the shot and saw McGee taking off. Then she discovered the body.”

  His head went on swinging slowly like a heavy silent bell. I said:

  “What was her reaction at the time?”

  “I don’t know. One of the peculiar difficulties of my work is that I often have to perform a public function with private means. I can’t go out and lasso patients. Dolly never came back to me. She no longer had her mother to bring her in from the Valley, and Miss Jenks, her aunt, is a busy woman.”

  “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 h
ouse.”

  “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.”