The Chill

by Ross Macdonald

  “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.

  chapter 12

  ABOUT 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 th
e 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?”

  “Yes. He seems to think that Dolly is hiding from him.”

  “Did you tell Sheriff Crane where she was?”

  “Yes. Shouldn’t I have?”

  “He trotted right over to the nursing home to question her. Dr. Godwin wouldn’t let him.”

  “Dr. Godwin is a great one for taking matters into his own hands. I don’t believe myself that people in trouble should be coddled and swaddled in cotton wool, and what I believe for the rest of the world holds true for my own family. We’ve always been a law-abiding family, and if Dolly is holding something back, she ought to come out with it. I say let the truth be told, and the chips fall where they may.”

  It was quite a speech. She seemed to be renewing her old disagreement with Godwin about Dolly’s testimony at the trial.

  “Those chips can fall pretty hard, sometimes, when they fall on people you love.”

  She watched me, her sensitive mouth held tight, as if I had accused her of a weakness. “People I love?”

  I had only an hour, and no sure intuition of how to reach her. “I’m assuming you love Dolly.”

  “I haven’t seen her lately—she seems to have turned against me—but I’ll always be fond of her. That doesn’t mean”—and the deep lines reasserted themselves at the corners of her mouth—”that I’ll condone any wrongdoing on her part. I have a public position—”

  “Just what is your position?”

  “I’m senior county welfare worker for this area” she announced. Then she looked anxiously behind her at the empty street, as if a posse might be on its way to relieve her of her post.

  “Welfare begins at home.”

  “Are you instructing me in the conduct of my private life?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Let me tell you, you don’t have to. Who do you think took the child in when my sister’s marriage broke up? I did, of course. I gave them both a home, and after my sister was killed I brought my niece up as if she was my own daughter. I gave her the best of food and clothes, the best of education. When she wanted her own independence, I gave her that, too. I gave her the money to go and study in Los Angeles. What more could I do for her?”

  “You can give her the benefit of the doubt right now. I don’t know what the Sheriff said to you, but I’m pretty sure he was talking through his little pointed hat.”

  Her face hardened. “Sheriff Crane does not make mistakes.”

  I had the sense of doubleness again, of talking on two levels. On the surface we were talking about Dolly’s connection with the Haggerty killing but underneath this, though McGee had not been mentioned, we were arguing the question of McGee’s guilt.

  “All policemen make mistakes,” I said. “All human beings make mistakes. It’s even possible that you and Sheriff Crane and the judge and the twelve jurors and everybody else were mistaken about Thomas McGee, and convicted an innocent man.”

  She laughed in my face, not riotously. “That’s ridiculous, you didn’t know Tom McGee. He was capable of anything. Ask anybody in this town. He used to get drunk and come home and beat her. More than once I had to stand him off with a gun, with the child holding onto my legs. More than once, after Constance left him, he came to this house and battered on the door and said he would drag her out of here by the hair. But I wouldn’t let him.” She shook her head vehemently, and a strand of iron-gray hair fell like twisted wire across her cheek.

  “What did he want from her?”

  “He wanted domination. He wanted her under his thumb. But he had no right to her. We Jenks are the oldest family in town. The McGees across the river are the scum of the earth, most of them are on welfare to this day. He was one of the worst of them but my sister couldn’t see it when he came courting her in his white sailor suit. He married her against Father’s bitter objections. He gave her a dozen years of hell on earth and then he finally killed her. Don’t tell me he was innocent. You don’t know him.”

  A scrub jay in the pepper tree heard her harsh obsessive voice and raised his own voice in counter-complaint. I said under his noise:

  “Why did he kill your sister?”

  “Out of sheer diabolical devilment. What he couldn’t have he chose to destroy. It was as simple as that. It wasn’t true that there was another man. She was faithful to him to the day she died. Even though they were living in separate houses, my sister kept herself pure.”

  “Who said there was another man?”

  She looked at me. The hot blood left her face. She seemed to lose the confidence that her righteous anger had given her.

  “There were rumors,” she said weakly. “Foul, dirty rumors. There always are when there’s bad blood between a husband and wife. Tom McGee may have started them himself. I know his lawyer kept hammering away at the idea of another man. It was all I could do to sit there and listen to him, trying to destroy my sister’s reputation after that murdering client of his had already destroyed her life. But Judge Gahagan made it clear in his instructions to the jury that it was just a story he invented, with no basis in fact.”

  “Who was McGee’s lawyer?”

  “An old fox named Gil Stevens. People don’t go to him unless they’re guilty, and he takes everything they have to get them off.”

  “But he didn’t get McGee off.”

  “He practically did. Ten years is a small price to pay for first-degree murder. It should have been first-degree. He should have been executed.”

  The woman was implacable. With a firm hand she pressed her stray lock of hair back into place. Her graying head was marcelled in neat little waves, all alike, like the sea in old steel engravings. Such implacability as hers, I thought, could rise from either one of two sources: righteous certainty, or a guilty dubious fear that she was wrong. I hesitated to tell her what Dolly had said, that she had lied her father into prison. But I intended to tell her before I left.

  “I’m interested in the details of the murder. Would it be too painful for you to go into them?”

  “I can stand a lot of pain. What do you want to know?”

  “Just how it happened.”

  “I wasn’t here myself. I
was at a meeting of the Native Daughters. I was president of the local group that year.” The memory of this helped to restore her composure.

  “Still I’m sure you know as much about it as anyone.”

  “No doubt I do. Except Tom McGee,” she reminded me.

  “And Dolly.”

  “Yes, and Dolly. The child was here in the house with Constance. They’d been living with me for some months. It was past nine o’clock, and she’d already gone to bed. Constance was downstairs sewing. My sister was a fine seamstress, and she made most of the child’s clothes. She was making a dress for her that night. It got all spotted with blood. They made it an exhibit at the trial.”

  Miss Jenks couldn’t seem to forget the trial. Her eyes went vague, as if she could see it like a ritual continually being repeated in the courtroom of her mind.

  “What were the circumstances of the shooting?”

  “It was simple enough. He came to the front door. He talked her into opening it.”

  “It’s strange that he could do that, after her bad experiences with him.”

  She brushed my objection aside with a flat movement of her hand. “He could talk a bird out of a tree when he wanted to. At any rate, they had an argument. I suppose he wanted her to come back with him, as usual, and she refused. Dolly heard their voices raised in anger.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Upstairs in the front bedroom, which she shared with her mother.” Miss Jenks pointed upward at the boarded ceiling of the veranda. “The argument woke the child up, and then she heard the shot. She went to the window and saw him run out to the street with the smoking gun in his hand. She came downstairs and found her mother in her blood.”

  “Was she still alive?”

  “She was dead. She died instantaneously, shot through the heart.”

  “With what kind of a gun?”

  “A medium-caliber hand-gun, the Sheriff thought. It was never found. McGee probably threw it in the sea. He was in Pacific Point when they arrested him next day.”

  “On Dolly’s word?”

  “She was the only witness, poor child.”