The Galton Case

by Ross Macdonald

  “Why do you say you must have, if you don’t remember?”

  “Gordon saw me.”

  I looked at Sable. He wouldn’t look at me. He stood against the wall, trying to merge with the wall.

  “Gordon wasn’t here,” I said. “He was at Mrs. Galton’s house when you telephoned.”

  “But he came. He came right over. Peter was lying there on the grass for a long time. He was making a funny noise, it sounded like snoring. I unbuttoned the top of his shirt to help him breathe.”

  “You remember all this, but you don’t remember stabbing him?”

  “I must have blanked out on that part. I’m always blanking out on things, ask Gordon.”

  “I’m asking you, Mrs. Sable.”

  “Let me think. I remember, I slid my hand down under his shirt, to see if his heart was beating properly. I could feel it there thumping and jumping. You’d think it was a little animal trying to get out. The hair on his chest was scratchy, like wire.”

  Sable made a noise in his throat.

  “What did you do then?” I said.

  “I—nothing. I just sat for a while and looked at him and his poor old beatup face. I put my arms around him and tried to coax him awake. But he went on snoring at me. He was still snoring when Gordon got there. Gordon was angry, catching me with him like that. I ran into the house. But I watched from the window.”

  Suddenly her face was incandescent. “I didn’t kill him. It wasn’t me out there. It was Gordon, and I watched him from the window. He picked up Peter’s knife and pushed it into his stomach.” Her clenched hand repeated its down-ward gesture, striking her own soft abdomen. “The blood spurted out and ran red on the grass. It was all red and green.”

  Sable thrust his head forward. The rest of his body, even his arms and hands, remained stuck to the wall:

  “You can’t believe her. She’s hallucinating again.”

  His wife seemed not to hear him. Perhaps she was tuned to a higher frequency, singing like salvation in her head. Tears streamed from her eyes:

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Hush now.” Howell quieted her face against his shoulder.

  “This is the truth, isn’t it?” I said.

  “It must be. I’m certain of it. Those self-accusations of hers were fantasy after all. This account is much more circumstantial. I’d say she’s taken a long step toward reality.”

  “She’s crazier than she ever was,” Sable said. “If you think you can use this against me, you’re crazier than she is. Don’t forget I’m a lawyer—”

  “Is that what you are—a lawyer?” Howell turned his back on Sable and spoke to his wife: “Come on, Alice, we’ll put a bandage on that cut and you can get some clothes on. Then we’ll take a little ride, back to the nice place with the other ladies.”

  “It isn’t a nice place,” she said.

  Howell smiled down at her. “That’s the spirit. Keep saying what you really think and know, and we’ll get you out of there to stay. But not for a while yet, eh?”

  “Not for a while yet.”

  Holding her with one arm, Howell stretched out his other hand to Sable. “The key to your wife’s room. You won’t be needing it.”

  Sable produced a flat brass key which Howell accepted from him without a word. The doctor walked Alice Sable down the hallway toward the court.

  chapter 30

  GORDON SABLE watched them go with something approaching relief. The bright expectancy had left his eyes. He had had it.

  “I wouldn’t have done it,” he said, “if I’d known what I know now. There are factors you don’t foresee—the factor of human change, for example. You think you can handle anything, that you can go on forever. But your strength wears away under pressure. A few days, or a few weeks, and everything looks different. Nothing seems worth struggling for. It all goes blah.” He made a loose bumbling sound with his lips: “All gone to bloody blah. So here we are.”

  “Why did you kill him?”

  “You heard her. When I got back here she was crying and moaning over him, trying to wake him up with kisses. It made me sick to death.”

  “Don’t tell me it was a sudden crime of passion. You must have known about them long before.”

  “I don’t deny that.” Sable shifted his stance, as if to prepare himself for a shift in his story. “Culligan picked her up in Reno last summer. She went there to divorce me, but she ended up on a gambling spree with Culligan egging her on. No doubt he collected commissions on the money she lost. She lost a great deal, all the ready money I could raise. When it was gone, and her credit was exhausted, he let her share his apartment for a while. I had to go there and beg her to come home with me. She didn’t want to come. I had to pay him to send her away.”

  I didn’t doubt the truth of what he was saying. No man would invent such a story against himself. It was Sable who didn’t seem to believe his own words. They fell weightlessly from his mouth, like a memorized report of an accident he didn’t understand, which had happened to people in a foreign country:

  “I never felt quite the same about myself after that. Neither of us did. We lived in this house I’d built for her as if there were always a glass partition between us. We could see each other, but we couldn’t really speak. We had to act out our feelings like clowns, or apes in separate cages. Alice’s gestures became queerer, and no doubt mine did, too. The things we acted out got uglier. She would throw herself on the floor and strike herself with her fist until her face was bruised and swollen. And I would laugh at her and call her names.

  “We did such things to each other,” he said. “I think we were both glad, in a strange way, when Culligan turned up here in the course of the winter. Anthony Galton’s bones had been unearthed, and Culligan had read about it in the papers. He knew who they belonged to, and came to me with the information.”

  “How did he happen to pick you?”

  “It’s a good question. I’ve often asked myself that good question. Alice had told him that I was Mrs. Galton’s lawyer, of course. It may have been the source of his interest in her. He knew that her gambling losses had put me in financial straits. He needed expert help with the plan he had; he wasn’t clever enough to execute it alone. He was just clever enough to realize that I was infinitely cleverer.”

  And he knew other things about you, I thought. You were a loveless man who could be bent and finally twisted.

  “How did Schwartz get in on the deal?”

  “Otto Schwartz? He wasn’t in on it.” Sable seemed offended by the notion. “His only connection with it was the fact that Alice owed him sixty thousand dollars. Schwartz had been pressing for payment, and it finally reached the point where he was threatening both of us with a beating. I had to raise money somehow. I was desperate. I didn’t know which way to turn.”

  “Leave out the drama, Sable. You didn’t go into this conspiracy on the spur of the moment. You’ve been working on it for months.”

  “I’m not denying that. There was a lot of work to be done. Culligan’s idea didn’t look too promising at first. He’d been carrying it around ever since he ran into the Fredericks boy in Canada five or six years ago. He’d known Anthony Galton in Luna Bay, and was struck by the boy’s resemblance to him. He even brought Fredericks into the States in the hope of cashing in on the resemblance in some way. But he ran into trouble with the law, and lost track of the boy. He believed that if I’d stake him, he could find him again.

  “Culligan did find him, as you know, going to school in Ann Arbor. I went east myself in February, and saw him in one of the student plays. He was a fairly good actor, with a nice air of sincerity about him. I decided when I talked to him that he could carry the thing off if anyone could. I introduced myself as a Hollywood producer interested in his talent. Once he was hooked on that, and had taken money from me, he wasn’t too hard to talk around to the other.

  “I prepared his story for him, of course. It required considerable thought. The most difficult pr
oblem was how to lead investigation of his actual Canadian background into a blind alley. The Crystal Springs orphanage was my inspiration. But I realized that the success of the imposture depended primarily on him. If he did succeed in bringing it off, he would be entitled to the lion’s share. I was modest in my own demands. He simply gave me an option to buy, at a nominal price, a certain amount of producing oil property.”

  I watched him, trying to understand how a man with so much foresight could have ended where Sable was. Something had cut off the use of his mind from constructive purposes. Perhaps it was the shallow pride which he seemed to take in his schemes, even at this late date.

  “They talk about the crime of the century,” he said. “This would have been the greatest of all—a multi-million-dollar enterprise with no actual harm done to anyone. The boy was simply to let himself be discovered, and let the facts speak for themselves.”

  “The facts?” I said sharply.

  “The apparent facts, if you like. I’m not a philosopher. We lawyers don’t deal in ultimate realities. Who knows what they are? We deal in appearances. There was very little manipulation of the facts in this case, no actual falsification of documents. True, the boy had to tell one or two little lies about his childhood and his parents. What did a few little lies matter? They made Mrs. Galton just as happy as if he was her real grandson. And if she chose to leave him her money, that was her affair.”

  “Has she made a new will?”

  “I believe so. I had no part in it. I advised her to get another lawyer.”

  “Wasn’t that taking a chance?”

  “Not if you know Maria Galton as I know her. Her reactions are so consistently contrary that you can depend on them. I got her to make a new will by urging her not to. I got her interested in looking for Tony by telling her it was hopeless. I persuaded her to hire you by opposing the whole idea of a detective.”

  “Why me?”

  “Schwartz was prodding me, and I had to get the ball rolling. I couldn’t take the chance of finding the boy for myself. I had to have someone to do it for me, someone I could trust. I thought, too, if we could get past you, we could get past anyone. And if we failed to get past you, I thought you’d be—more flexible, shall we say?”

  “Crooked, shall we say?”

  Sable winced at the word. Words meant more to him than the facts they stood for.

  A door opened at the end of the corridor, and Alice Sable and Dr. Howell came toward us. She hung on the doctor’s arm, dressed and freshly groomed and empty-faced under her makeup. He was carrying a white leather suitcase in his free hand.

  “Sable has made a full confession,” I said to Howell. “Phone the Sheriff’s office, will you?”

  “I already have. They ought to be here shortly. I’m taking Mrs. Sable back where she’ll be properly attended to.” He added in an undertone: “I hope this will be a turning-point for her.”

  “I hope so, too,” Sable said. “Honestly I do.”

  Howell made no response. Sable tried again:

  “Good-by, Alice. I really do wish you well, you know.”

  Her neck stiffened, but she didn’t look at him. She went out leaning on Howell. Her brushed hair shone like gold in the sunlight. Fool’s gold. I felt a twinge of sympathy for Sable. He hadn’t been able to carry her weight. In the stretching gap between his weakness and her need, Culligan had driven a wedge, and the whole structure had fallen.

  Sable was a subtle man, and he must have noticed some change in my expression:

  “You surprise me, Lew. I didn’t expect you to bear down so hard. You have a reputation for tempering the wind to the shorn lamb.”

  “Stabbing Culligan to death wasn’t exactly a lamblike gesture.”

  “I had to kill him. You don’t seem to understand.”

  “On account of your wife?”

  “My wife was only the beginning. He kept moving in on me. He wasn’t content to share my wife and my house. He was very hungry, always wanting more. I finally saw that he wanted it all to himself. Everything.” His voice trembled with indignation. “After all my contributions, all my risks, he was planning to shut me out.”

  “How could he?”

  “Through the boy. He had something on Theo Fredericks. I never learned what it was, I couldn’t get it out of either of them. But Culligan said that it was enough to ruin my whole plan. It was his plan, too, of course, but he was irresponsible enough to wreck it unless he got his way.”

  “So you killed him.”

  “The chance offered itself, and I took it. It wasn’t premeditated.”

  “No jury will believe that, after what you did to your wife. It looks as premeditated as hell. You waited for your chance to knock off a defenseless man, and then tried to push the guilt onto a sick woman.”

  “She asked for it,” he said coldly. “She wanted to believe that she killed him. She was half-convinced before I talked to her, she felt so guilty about her affair with him. I only did what any man would do under the circumstances. She’d seen me stab him. I had to do something to purge her mind of the memory.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing on your long visits, pounding guilt into her mind?”

  He struck the wall with the flat of his hand. “She was the cause of the trouble. She brought him into our life. She deserved to suffer for it. Why should I do all the suffering?”

  “You don’t have to. Spread it around a little. Tell me how to get to the Fredericks boy.”

  He glanced at me from the corners of his eyes. “I’d want a quid pro quo.” The legal phrase seemed to encourage him. He went on in quickening tempo until he was almost chattering: “As a matter of fact, he should take the blame for most of this frightful mess. If it will help to clear up the matter, I’m willing to turn state’s evidence. Alice can’t be made to testify against me. You don’t even know that what she said was true. How do you know her story is true? I may be simply covering up for her.” His voice was rising like a manic hope.

  “How do you know you’re alive, Sable? I want your partner. He was in San Mateo this morning. Where is he headed for?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “I don’t know why I should co-operate with you if you won’t co-operate with me.”

  I still had his empty rifle in my hands. I reversed it and raised it like a club. I was angry enough to use it if I had to.

  “This is why.”

  He pulled his head back so sharply it rapped the wall. “You can’t use third-degree methods on me. It isn’t legal.”

  “Stop blowing bubbles, Sable. Was Fredericks here last night?”

  “Yes. He wanted me to cash a check for him. I gave him all the cash I had in the house. It amounted to over two hundred dollars.”

  “What did he want it for?”

  “He didn’t tell me. Actually, he wasn’t making too much sense. He talked as if the strain had been too much for him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I can’t reproduce it verbatim. I was upset myself. He asked me a lot of questions, which I wasn’t able to answer, about Anthony Galton and what happened to him. The imposture must have gone to his head; he seemed to have himself convinced that he actually was Galton’s son.”

  “Was Sheila Howell with him?”

  “Yes, she was present, and I see what you mean. He may have been talking for her benefit. If it was an act, she was certainly taken in by it. But as I said, he seemed to be taken in by it himself. He became very excited, and threatened me with force unless I told him who murdered Galton. I didn’t know what to tell him. I finally thought of the name of that woman in Redwood City—the Galtons’ former nurse.”

  “Mrs. Matheson?”

  “Yes. I had to tell him something, get rid of him somehow.”

  A patrol car whined up the hill and stopped in front of the house. Conger and another deputy climbed out. Sable was going to have a hard time getting rid of them.
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  chapter 31

  THEY dropped me at the airport, and I got aboard a plane. It was the same two-engine bucket, on the same flight, that had taken me north three weeks ago. Even the stewardess was the same. Somehow she looked younger and more innocent. Time had stood still for her while it had been rushing me along into premature middle age.

  She comforted me with Chiclets and coffee in paper cups. And there was the blessed Bay again, and the salt flats.

  The Matheson house was closed up tight, with the drapes pulled over the windows, as if there was sickness inside. I asked my cab-driver to wait and knocked on the front door. Marian Matheson answered it herself.

  She had been living on my time-schedule, and growing old rapidly. There was more gray in her hair, more bone in her face. But the process of change had softened her. Even her voice was gentler:

  “I’ve been sort of expecting you. I had another visitor this morning.”

  “John Galton?”

  “Yes. John Galton—the little boy I looked after in Luna Bay. It was quite an experience meeting him after all these years. And his girl, too. He brought his girl along.” She hesitated, then opened the door wider. “Come in if you want.”

  She took me into the darkened living-room and placed me in a chair.

  “What did they come to you for, Mrs. Matheson?”

  “The same thing you did. Information.”

  “What about?”

  “That night. I thought he had a right to know the truth, so I told him all I told you, about Culligan and Shoulders.” Her answer was vague; perhaps she was trying to keep the memory vague in her mind.

  “What was his reaction?”

  “He was very interested. Naturally. He really pricked up his ears when I told him about the rubies.”

  “Did he explain his interest in the rubies?”

  “He didn’t explain anything. He got up and left in a hurry, and they rocketed off in that little red car of his. They didn’t even wait to drink the coffee I was brewing.”

  “Were they friendly?”

  “To me, you mean? Very friendly. The girl was lovely to me. She confided they were going to get married as soon as her young man worked his way out of the darkness.”