The Doomsters

by Ross Macdonald

  “And you wanted someone else to be blamed, as usual So you bundled her body into her station wagon and left it in the lower town, near where Carl Hallman was seen You kept track of his movements by tuning in the police band. In case he wasn’t available for the rap, you phoned the ranch and brought Zinnie’s servants in, as secondary patsies.”

  Grantland’s face took on its jaundiced look. He sat on the edge of the mattress with his head down. “You’ve been keeping track of my movements, have you?”

  “It’s time somebody did. Who was the emergency patient who called you out tonight?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Nobody you know.”

  “You’re wrong again. It matters, and I’ve known Tom Rica for a good many years. You gave him an overdose of heroin and left him to die.”

  Grantland sat in silence. “I gave him what he asked for.”

  “Sure. You’re very generous. He wanted a little death. You gave him the whole works.”

  Grantland began to speak rapidly, surrounding himself with a protective screen of words:

  “I must have made a mistake in the dosage. I didn’t know how much he was used to. He was in a bad way, and I had to give him something for temporary relief. I intended to have him moved to the hospital. I see now I shouldn’t have left him without an attendant. Apparently he was worse off than I realized. These addicts are unpredictable.”

  “Lucky for you they are.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Rica isn’t quite dead. He was even able to do some talking before he lost consciousness.”

  “Don’t believe him. He’s a pathological liar, and he’s got a grudge against me. I wouldn’t provide him with drugs—”

  “Wouldn’t you? I thought that’s what you were doing, and I’ve been wondering why. I’ve also been wondering what happened in your office three years ago.”

  “When?” He was hedging for time, time to build a story with escape hatches, underground passages, somewhere, anywhere to hide.

  “You know when. How did Alicia Hallman die?”

  He took a deep breath. “This will come as a surprise to you. Alicia died by accident. If anyone was culpable, it was her son Jerry who was. He’d made a special night appointment for her, and drove her to my office himself. She was terribly upset about something, and she wanted drugs to calm her nerves. I wouldn’t prescribe any for her. She pulled a gun out of her purse and tried to shoot me with it. Jerry heard the shot. He rushed in from the waiting-room and grappled with her. She fell and struck her head on the radiator. She was mortally hurt. Jerry begged me to keep it quiet, to protect him and his mother’s name and save the family from scandal. I did what I could to shield them. They were my friends as well as my patients.”

  He lowered his head, the serviceable martyr.

  “It’s a pretty good story. Are you sure it wasn’t rehearsed?”

  He looked up sharply. His eyes met mine for an instant. There were red fiery points in their centers. They veered away past me to the window and I glanced over my shoulder. The window framed only the half-lit sky above the city.

  “Is that the story you told Carl this morning?”

  “It is, as a matter of fact. Carl wanted the truth. I felt I had no right to keep it from him. It had been a load on my conscience for three years.”

  “I know how conscientious you are, Doctor. You got your hooks into a sick man, told him a lying story about his mother’s death, gave him a gun and sicked him on his brother and turned him loose.”

  “It wasn’t like that. He asked to see the gun. It was evidence of the truth. I suppose I’d kept it with that in mind. I brought it out of the safe and showed it to him.”

  “You kept it with murder in mind. You had it loaded, ready for him, didn’t you?”

  “That simply isn’t so. Even if it were, you could never prove it. Never. He grabbed the gun and ran. I was helpless to stop him.”

  “Why did you lie to him about his mother’s death?”

  “It wasn’t a lie.”

  “Don’t contradict me, brother.” I wagged the gun to remind him of it. “It wasn’t Jerry who drove his mother into town. It was Sam Yogan. It wasn’t Jerry who beat her to death. He was in Berkeley with his father. You wouldn’t stick your neck out for Jerry, anyway. I can only think of two people you’d take that risk for—yourself, or Zinnie. Was Zinnie in your office with Alicia?”

  He looked at me with flaring eyes, as if his brains were burning in his skull. “Go on. This is very interesting.”

  “Tom Rica saw a woman come out of there dripping blood. Was Zinnie wounded by Alicia’s shot?”

  “It’s your story,” he said.

  “All right. I think it was Zinnie. She panicked and ran. You stayed behind and disposed of her mother-in-law’s body. Your only motive was self-protection, but Zinnie wouldn’t think of that, with the fear and guilt she had on her mind. She wouldn’t stop to think that when you pushed that body into the ocean, you were converting justifiable manslaughter into murder—making a murderer out of your true love. No doubt she was grateful to you.

  “Of course she wasn’t your true love at the time. She wasn’t rich enough yet. You wouldn’t want her, or any woman, without money. Sooner or later, though, when the Senator died, Zinnie and her husband were due to come into a lot of money. But the years dragged on, and the old man’s heart kept beating, and you got impatient, tired of sweating it out, living modestly on the profits from pills while other people had millions.

  “The Senator needed a little help, a little send-off. You were his doctor, and you could easily have done it for him yourself, but that’s not the way you operate. Better to let somebody else take the risks. Not too many risks, of course—Zinnie was going to be worth money to you. You helped her to set the psychological stage, so that Carl would be the obvious suspect. Shifting the blame onto Carl served a double purpose. It choked off any real investigation, and it got Carl and Mildred out of the picture. You wanted the Hallman money all to yourself.

  “Once the Senator was gone, there was only one hurdle left between you and the money. Zinnie wanted to take it the easy way in a divorce settlement, but her child got in the way of a divorce. I imagine you did, too. You had one death to go, for the whole five million less taxes and a wife who would have to take orders the rest of her life. That death occurred today, and you’ve practically admitted that you set it up.”

  “I admitted nothing. I gave you practical proof that Carl Hallman killed his brother. The chances are he killed Zinnie, too. He could have made it across town in a stolen car.”

  “How long ago was Zinnie killed?”

  “I’d say about four hours.”

  “You’re a liar. Her body was warm when I found it, less than an hour ago.”

  “You must have been mistaken. You may not think much of me, but I am a qualified doctor. I left her before eight, and she must have died soon after. It’s midnight now.”

  “What have you been doing since then?”

  Grantland hesitated. “I couldn’t move for a long time after I found her. I simply lay on the bed beside her.”

  “You say you found her in bed?”

  “I did find her in bed.”

  “How did the blood get in the hall?”

  “When I was carrying her out.” He shuddered. “Can’t you see that I’m telling you the truth? Carl must have come in and found her asleep. Perhaps he was looking for me. After all, I’m the doctor who committed him. Perhaps he killed her to get back at me. I left the door unlocked, like an idiot.”

  “You wouldn’t have been setting her up for him? Or would you?”

  “What do you think I am?”

  It was a hard question. Grantland was staring down at Zinnie’s clothes, his face distorted by magnetic lines of grief, I’d known murderers who killed their lovers and grieved for them. Most of them were half-hearted broken-minded men. They killed and cried and tore their prison blankets and twisted their blankets into nooses. I doubted that Grant
land fitted the pattern, but it was possible.

  “I think you’re basically a fool,” I said, “like any other man who tries to beat the ordinary human averages. I think you’re a dangerous fool, because you’re frightened. You proved that when you tried to silence Rica. Did you try to silence Zinnie, too, with a knife?”

  “I refuse to answer such questions.”

  He rose jerkily and moved to the window. I stayed close to him, with the gun between us. For a moment we stood looking down the long slope of the city. Its after-midnight lights were scattered on the hillsides, like the last sparks of a firefall.

  “I really loved Zinnie. I wouldn’t harm her,” he said.

  “I admit it doesn’t seem likely. You wouldn’t kill the golden goose just when she was going to lay for you. Six months from now, or a year, when she’d had time to marry you and write a will in your favor, you might have started thinking of new angles.”

  He turned on me fiercely. “I don’t have to listen to any more of this.”

  “That’s right. You don’t. I’m as sick of it as you are. Let’s go, Grantland.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Then we’ll tell them to come and get you. It will be rough while it lasts, but it won’t last long. You’ll be signing a statement by morning.”

  Grantland hung back. I prodded him along the hallway to the telephone.

  “You do the telephoning, Doctor.”

  He balked again. “Listen. There doesn’t have to be any telephoning. Even if your hypothesis were correct, which it isn’t, there’s no real evidence against me. My hands are clean.”

  His eyes were still burning with fierce and unquenched light. I thought it was a light that burned from darkness, a blind arrogance masking fear and despair. Behind his several shifting masks, I caught a glimpse of the unknown dispossessed, the hungry operator who sat in Grantland’s central darkness and manipulated the shadow play of his life. I struck at the shape in the darkness.

  “Your hands are dirty. You don’t keep your hands clean by betraying your patients and inciting them to murder. You’re a dirty doctor, dirtier than any of your victims. Your hands would be cleaner if you’d taken that gun and used it on Hallman yourself. But you haven’t the guts to live your own life. You want other people to do it for you, do your living, do your killing, do your dying.”

  He twisted and turned. His face changed like smoke and set in a new smiling mask. “You’re a smart man. That hypothesis of yours, about Alicia’s death—it wasn’t the way it happened, but you hit fairly close in a couple of places.”

  “Straighten me out.”

  “If I do, will you let me go? All I need is a few hours to get to Mexico. I haven’t committed any extraditable offense, and I have a couple of thousand—”

  “Save it. You’ll need it for lawyers. This is it, Grantland.” I gestured with the gun in my hand. “Pick up the telephone and call the police.”

  His shoulders slumped. He lifted the receiver and started to dial. I ought to have distrusted his hangdog look.

  He kicked sideways and upset the gasoline can. Its contents spouted across the carpet, across my feet.

  “I wouldn’t use that gun,” he said. “You’d be setting off a bomb.”

  I struck at his head with the automatic. He was a millisecond ahead of me. He swung the base of the telephone by its cord and brought it down like a sledge on top of my head.

  I got the message. Over and out.

  chapter 31

  I CAME to crawling across the floor of a room I’d never seen. It was a long, dim room which smelled like a gas station. I was crawling toward a window at the far end, as fast as my cold and sluggish legs would push me along.

  Behind me, a clipped voice was saying that Carl Hallman was still at large, and was wanted for questioning in a second murder. I looked back over my shoulder. Time and space came together, threaded by the voice from Grantland’s radio. I could see the doorway into the lighted hall from which my instincts had dragged me.

  There was a puff of noise beyond the doorway, a puff of color. Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring. I got my feet under me and my hands on a chair, carried it to the window and smashed the glass out of the frame.

  Air poured in over me. The dancing flames behind me began to sing. They postured and beckoned when I looked at them, and reached for my cold wet legs, offering to warm them. My dull brain put several facts together, like a boy playing with blocks on the burning deck, and realized that my legs were gasoline-soaked.

  I went over the jagged sill, fell further than I expected to, struck the earth full length and lay whooping for breath. The fire bit into my legs like a rabid fox.

  I was still going on instinct. All instinct said was, Run. The fire ran with me, snapping. The providence that suffers fools and cushions drunks and tempers the wind to shorn lambs and softening hardheads rescued me from the final barbecue. I ran blind into the rim of a goldfish pond and fell down in the water. My legs Suzette sizzled and went out.

  I reclined in the shallow, smelly blessed water and looked back at Grantland’s house. Flames blossomed in the window I had broken and grew up to the eaves like quick yellow hollyhocks. Orange and yellow lights appeared behind other windows. Tendrils of smoke thrust delicately through the shake roof.

  In no time at all, the house was a box of brilliant jumping lights. Breaking windows tinkled distinctly. Trellised vines of flame climbed along the walls. Little flame salamanders ran up the roof, leaving bright zigzag trails.

  Above the central furnace roar, I heard a car engine start. Skidding in the slime at the bottom of the pool, I got to my feet and ran toward the house. The sirens were whining in the city again. It was a night of sirens.

  Radiating heat kept me at a distance from the house. I waded through flowerbeds and climbed over a masonry wall. I was in time to see Grantland gun his Jaguar out of the driveway, its twin exhausts tracing parallel curves on the air.

  I ran to my car. Below, the Jaguar was dropping down the hill like a bird. I could see its lights on the curves, and further down the red shrieking lights of a fire truck. Grantland had to stop to let it pass, or I’d have lost him for good.

  He crossed to a boulevard running parallel with the main street, and followed it straight through town. I thought he was on his way to the highway and Mexico, until he turned left on Elmwood, and again left. When I took the second turn, into Grant Street, the Jaguar was halfway up the block with one door hanging open. Grantland was on the front porch of Mrs. Gley’s house.

  The rest of it happened in ten or twelve seconds, but each of the seconds was divided into marijuana fractions. Grantland shot out the lock of the door. It took three shots to do it. He pushed through into the hallway. By that time I was braking in front of the house, and could see the whole length of the hallway to the stairs. Carl Hallman came down them.

  Grantland fired twice. The bullets slowed Carl to a walk. He came on staggering, as if the knife in his lifted hand was holding him up. Grantland fired again. Carl stopped in his tracks, his arms hanging loose, came on in a spraddling shuffle.

  I started to run up the walk. Now Mildred was at the foot of the stairs, clinging to the newel post. Her mouth was open, and she was screaming something. The scream was punctuated by Grantland’s final shot.

  Carl fell in two movements, to his knees, then forehead down on the floor. Grantland aimed across him. The gun clicked twice in his hand. It held only seven shells. Mildred shuddered under imaginary bullets.

  Carl rose from the floor with a Lazarus grin, bright badges of blood on his chest. His knife was lost. He looked blind. Bare-handed he threw himself at Grantland, fell short, lay prone and still in final despair.

  My feet were loud on the veranda boards. I got my hands on Grantland before he could turn, circled his neck with my arm and bent him over backwards. He was slippery and strong. He bucked and twisted and broke my hold with the hammering butt of the gun.

>   Grantland moved away crabwise along the wall. His face was bare as bone, a wet yellow skull from which the flesh had been dissolved away. His eyes were dark and empty like the eye of the empty gun that he was still clutching.

  A door opened behind me. The hallway reverberated with the roar of another gun. A bullet creased the plaster close above Grantland’s head and sprinkled it with dust. It was Ostervelt, in the half-shadow under the stairs:

  “Out of the way, Archer. You, Doctor, stand still, and drop it. I’ll shoot to kill you this time.”

  Perhaps in his central darkness Grantland yearned for death. He threw the useless gun at Ostervelt, jumped across Carl’s body, took off from the veranda and seemed to run in air.

  Ostervelt moved to the doorway and sent three bullets after him in rapid fire, faster than any man runs. They must have been very heavy. Grantland was pushed and hustled along by their blows, until his legs were no longer under him. I think he was dead before he struck the road.

  “He oughtn’t to have ran,” Ostervelt said. “I’m a sharpshooter. I still don’t like to kill a man. It’s too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one.” He looked down at his Colt .45 with a kind of shamed awe, and replaced it in its holster.

  I liked the sheriff better for saying that, though I didn’t let it run away with me. He was looking out toward the street where Grantland’s body lay. People from the other houses had already begun to converge on him. Carmichael appeared from somewhere and kept them off.

  Ostervelt turned to me. “How in hell did you get here? You look like you swam through a swamp.”

  “I followed Grantland from his house. He just got finished setting fire to it.”

  “Was he off his rocker, too?” Ostervelt sounded ready to believe anything.

  “Maybe he was in a way. His girlfriend was murdered.”

  “I know that. What’s the rest of the story? Hallman knocked off his girl, so Grantland knocked Hallman off?”