"What do you want with Dolly?"
"It's none of your business. She's my flesh and blood, not yours."
"Dolly has a husband. I represent him."
"You can go and represent him in some other constituency. I'm not interested in you or her husband."
"But suddenly you're interested in Dolly. Does it have anything to do with the story in the paper?"
"Maybe it has and maybe it hasn't." In her language, that meant yes. She added defensively: "I've been interested in Dolly since she was born. I know better than a lot of strangers what's good for her."
"Dr. Godwin isn't a stranger."
"No. I wish he was."
"I hope you're not thinking of taking her out of here."
"Maybe I am and maybe I'm not." She dug some Kleenex out of her purse and used it to clean her glasses. I could see a newspaper folded small in the purse.
"Miss Jenks, did you read the description of the revolver that was found in Dolly's bed?"
She replaced her glasses quickly, as though to cover the startled look in her eyes. "Naturally I read it."
"Did it ring any bell with you?"
"Yes. It sounded like the revolver I used to have, so I came into town to the courthouse to have a look at it. It looks like mine all right."
"You admit that?"
"Why shouldn't I? I haven't seen it for over ten years."
"Can you prove it?"
"Of course I can prove it. It was stolen from my house before Constance was shot. Sheriff Crane theorized at the time that it might have been the gun McGee used on her. He still thinks so. McGee could easily have taken it. He knew where it was, in my bedroom."
You didn't tell me all this this morning."
"I didn't think of it. It was only theory, anyway. You were interested in facts."
"I'm interested in both, Miss Jenks. What's the police theory now? That McGee killed Miss Haggerty and tried to frame his daughter?"
"I wouldn't put it past him. A man who would do what he did to his wife--" Her voice sank out of hearing in her throat.
"And they want to use his daugher to nail McGee again?"
She didn't answer me. Lights went on inside, and there were sounds of movement culminating in Godwin's opening the door. He shook his keys at us, grinning fiercely.
"Come inside, Miss Jenks."
She stamped up the concrete steps. Godwin had cleared the front room of everyone but Alex, who was sitting on a chair against the wall. I stood unobtrusively in the corner beside the silent television set.
She faced him, almost as tall in heels as he was, almost as wide in her coat, almost as stubborn in her pride. "I don't approve of what you're doing, Dr. Godwin."
"What am I doing?" He sat on the arm of a chair and crossed his legs.
"You know what I'm referring to. My niece. Keeping her cooped up here in defiance of the constituted authorities."
"There's no defiance involved. I try to do my duty, the Sheriff tries to do his. Sometimes we come into conflict. It doesn't necessarily mean that Sheriff Crane is right and I'm wrong."
"It does to me."
"I'm not surprised. We've disagreed before, on a similar issue. You and your friend the Sheriff had your way on that occasion, unfortunately for your niece."
"It did her no harm to testify. Truth is truth."
"And trauma is trauma. It did her incalculable harm, which she's still suffering under."
"I'd like to see that for myself."
"So you can make a full report to the Sheriff?"
"Good citizens cooperate with the law," she said sententiously. "But I'm not here on the Sheriff's behalf. I came here to help my niece."
"How do you propose to help her?"
"I'm going to take her home with me."
Godwin stood up shaking his head.
"You can't stop me. I've been her guardian since her mother died. The law wifi back me up."
"I think not," Godwin said coldly. "Dolly's of age, and she's here of her own free will."
"I'd like to ask her that question for myself."
"You're not going to ask her any questions."
The woman took a step toward him and thrust her head forward on her neck. "You think you're a little tin god, don't you, masterminding my family's affairs? I say you've got no right to keep her here under duress, making us all look bad. I've got a position to keep up in this county. I spent the day with some very high-level people from Sacramento."
"I'm afraid I don't follow your logic. But keep your voice down, please." Godwin himself was using the slow weary monotone that I had first heard on the telephone twenty-four hours before. "And let me assure you again, your niece is here of her own free will."
"That's right." Alex came forward into the verbal line of fire. "I don't believe we've met. I'm Alex Kincaid, Dolly's husband."
She disregarded his hand.
"I think it's important for her to stay here," he said. "I have confidence in the doctor, and so has my wife."
"I'm sorry for you then. He had me bamboozled, too, until I found out what went on in his office."
Alex looked inquiringly at Godwin. The doctor turned his hands out as if he was feeling for rain. He said to Miss Jenks:
"You graduated in sociology, I believe."
"What if I did?"
"From a woman of your training and background, I'd expect a more professional attitude toward the practice of psychiatry."
"I'm not talking about the practice of psychiatry. I'm talking about the practice of other things."
"What other things?"
"I wouldn't soil my tongue with them. But please don't think I didn't know my sister and what went on in her life. I've been remembering things--the way she used to primp and preen Saturday mornings before she came in to town. And then she wanted to move here, to be closer."
"Closer to me?"
"So she told me."
Godwin's face was white, as if all its color had been drawn into the darkness of his eyes. "You're a silly woman, Miss Jenks, and I've had enough of you. I'll ask you to leave now."
"I'm staying here till I see my niece. I want to know what you're practicing on her."
"It would do her no good. In your present mood you'd do no good to anyone." He moved around her to the door and held it open. "Good night."
She didn't move or look at him. She stood with her head down, a little dazed by the anger that had gone through her like a storm.
"Do you wish to be forcibly removed?"
"Try it. You'll end up in court."
But a kind of shame had begun to invade her face. Her mouth was twitching like a small injured thing. It had said more than she intended.
When I took her by the arm and said, "Come on, Miss Jenks," she let me lead her to the door. Godwin closed it on her.
"I have no patience with fools," he said.
"Have a little patience with me, though, will you, doctor?"
"I'll give it a try, Archer." He took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. "You want to know if there's any truth in her innuendo."
"You make it easy for me."
"Why not? I love the truth. My entire life is a search for it."
"Okay, was Constance McGee in love with you?"
"I suppose she was, in a way. Women patients traditionally fall in love with their doctors, particularly in my field. It didn't persist in her case."
"This may strike you as a foolish question, but did you love her?"
"I'll give you a foolish answer, Mr. Archer. Of course I loved her. I loved her the way a doctor loves his patients, if he's any good. It's a love that's more maternal than erotic." He spread his large hands on his chest, and spoke from there: "I wanted to serve her. I didn't succeed too well."
I was silenced.
"And now, gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I have hospital rounds in the morning." He swung his keys.
Alex said to me in the street: "Do you believe him?"
"Unless or until I have proof tha
t he's lying. He's not telling all he knows but people seldom do, let alone doctors. I'd take his word ahead of Alice Jenks's."
He started to climb into his car, then turned back toward me, gesturing in the direction of the nursing home. Its plain rectangular façade loomed in the fog like a blockhouse, the visible part of an underground fortress.
"You think she's safe there, Mr. Archer?"
"Safer than she'd be on the streets, or in jail, or in a psycho ward with a police psychiatrist quizzing her."
"Or at her aunt's?"
"Or at her aunt's. Miss Jenks is one of these righteous women who doesn't let her left lobe know what her right lobe is doing. She's quite a tiger."
His eyes were still on the front of the nursing home.
Deep inside the building, the wild old voice I had heard that morning rose again. It faded like the cry of a seabird flying away, intermitted by wind.
"I wish I could stay with Dolly, and protect her," Alex said.
He was a good boy.
I broached the subject of money. He gave me most of the money in his wallet. I used it to buy an airline ticket to Chicago and return, and caught a late flight from International Airport.
chapter 19
I left the toll road, which bypassed Bridgeton, and drove my rented car through the blocks of housing tracts on the outskirts of the city. I could see the clump of sawed-off skyscrapers in the business district ahead, and off to the left, across the whole south side, the factories. It was Sunday morning, and only one of their stacks was pouring smoke into the deep blue sky.
I stopped for gas at a service station and looked up Earl Hoffman's address in the telephone directory. When I asked the attendant how to get to Cherry Street, where Hoffman lived, he pointed in the general direction of the factories.
It was a middle-class street of substantial two-story houses which had been touched but not destroyed by the blight that creeps outward from the centers of cities. Hoffman's house was of grimy white brick like the others, but the front porch had been painted within living memory. An old Chevrolet coupé stood at the curb in front of it.
The doorbell didn't work. I knocked on the screen door. An old young man with more nose than chin opened the inner door and looked at me through the screen in a sad way.
"Mr. Haggerty?"
"Yes."
I told him my name and trade and where I was from. "I was with your wife--your ex-wife--shortly before she was killed."
"It's a dreadful thing."
He stood absently in the doorway, forgetting to ask me in. He had a frowzy sleepless look as if he'd been up most of the night. Though there was no gray on his head, white hairs glistened in his day-old beard. His small eyes had the kind of incandescence that goes with conscious suffering.
"May I come in, Mr. Haggerty?"
"I don't know if it's such a good idea. Earl's pretty broken up.
"I thought he and his daughter had been on the outs for a long time."
"They were. It only makes it harder for him, I think. When you're angry with someone you love, you always expect at the back of your mind there'll be a reconciliation some day. But now there will never be anything."
He was speaking for his father-in-law but also for himself. His empty hands moved aimlessly at his sides. The fingers of his right hand were stained dark yellow by nicotine.
"I'm sorry," I said, "that Mr. Hoffman isn't feeling well. I'm afraid I'll have to talk to him anyway. I didn't come from California for the ride."
"No. Obviously not. What is it you have to discuss with him?"
"His daughter's murder. He may be able to help me understand it."
"I thought it was already solved."
"It isn't."
"Has the girl student been cleared?"
"She's in process of being cleared," I said with deliberate vagueness. "You and I can go into all that later. Right now I'm very eager to talk to Hoffman."
"If you insist. I only hope you can get some sense out of him."
I saw what he meant when he took me through the house to "Earl's den," as Haggerty called it. It was furnished with a closed roll-top desk, an armchair, a studio couch. Through a haze compounded of whisky fumes and smoke I could see a big old man sprawled in orange pajamas on the couch, his head propped up by bolsters. A strong reading light shone on his stunned face. His eyes seemed out of focus, but he was holding a magazine with an orange cover that almost matched his pajamas. The wall above him was decorated with rifles and shotguns and hand guns.
"When I recall the loss of all my perished years," he said huskily.
Old cops didn't talk like that, and Earl Hoffman looked like no exception to the rule. His body was massive, and could have belonged to a professional football player or a wrestler gone to pot. His nose had once been broken. He had a clipped gray head and a mouth like bent iron.
"That's beautiful poetry, Bert," the iron mouth said.
"I suppose it is."
"Who's your friend, Bert?"
"Mr. Archer, from California."
"California, eh? That's where my poor little Helen got knocked off."
He sobbed, or hiccuped, once. Then he swung himself onto the edge of the couch, letting his bare feet fall heavily to the floor.
"Do you know--did you know my little daughter Helen?"
"I knew her."
"Isn't that remarkable." He rose swaying and clasped my hands in both of his, using me to support him. "Helen was a remarkable girl. I've just been reading over one of her poems. Wrote it when she was just a teen-age girl at City College. Here, I'll show you."
He made a fairly elaborate search for the orange-covered magazine, which was lying in plain sight on the floor where he had dropped it. The name of it was the _Bridgeton Blazer_, and it looked like a school production.
Haggerty picked it up and handed it to him: "Please don't bother with it, Earl. Helen didn't write it anyway."
"Didn't write it? 'Course she wrote it. It's got her initials on it." Hoffman flipped through the pages. "See?"
"But she was only translating from Verlaine."
"Never heard of him." Hoffman turned to me, thrusting the magazine into my hands. "Here, read this. See what a remarkable gift poor little Helen had."
I read:
When the violins
Of the autumn winds
Begin to sigh
My heart is torn
With their forlorn
Monotony.
And when the hour
Sounds from the tower
I weep tears
For I recall
The loss of all
My perished years.
And then I go
With the winds that blow
And carry me
There and here
Like a withered and sere
Leaf from a tree.--H.H.
Hoffman looked at me with one of his unfocused eyes. "Isn't that beautiful poetry, Mr. Arthur?"
"Beautiful."
"I only wisht I understood it. Do you understand it?"
"I think so."
"Then keep it. Keep it in memory of poor little Helen."
"I couldn't do that."
"Sure you can. Keep it." He snatched it out of my hands, rolled it up, and and thrust it into my jacket pocket, breathing whisky in my face.
"Keep it," Haggerty whispered at my shoulder. "You don't want to cross him."
"You heard him. You don't want to cross me."
Hoffman grinned loosely at me. He clenched his left fist, examined it for defects, then used it to strike himself on the chest. He walked on spraddled legs to the roll-top desk and opened it. There were botfies and a single smeared tumbler inside. He half-filled the tumbler from a fifth of bourbon and drank most of it down. His son-in-law said something under his breath, but made no move to stop him.
The heavy jolt squeezed sweat out on Hoffman's face. It seemed to sober him a litfie. His eyes focused on me.
"Have a drink?"
&nb
sp; "All right. I'll take water and ice in mine, please." I didn't normally drink in the morning but this was an abnormal occasion.
"Get some ice and a glass, Bert. Mr. Arthur wants a drink. If you're too mucky-muck to drink with me, Mr. Arthur isn't."
"The name is Archer."
"Get _two_ glasses," he said with his foolish grin. "Mr. Archer wants a drink, too. Sit down," he said to me. "Take the load off your feet. Tell me about poor little Helen."
We sat on the couch. I filled him in quickly on the circumstances of the murder, including the threat that preceded it, and Helen's feeling that Bridgeton was catching up with her.
"What did she mean by that?" The lines of the grin were still in his face like clown marks but the grin had become a rictus.
"I've come a long way to see if you can help me answer that question."
"Me? Why come to me? I never knew what went on in her mind, she never _let_ me know. She was too bright for me." His mood swayed into heavy drunken self-pity. "I sweated and slaved to buy her an education like I never had, but she wouldn't give her poor old father the time of day."
"I understand you had a bad quarrel and she left borne."
"She told you, eh?"
I nodded. I had decided to keep Mrs. Hoffman out of it. He was the kind of man who wouldn't want his wife ahead of him in anything.
"She tell you the names she called me, crook and Nazi, when all I was doing was my bounden duty? You're a cop, you know how a man feels when your own family undermines you." He peered at me sideways. "You are a cop, aren't you?"
"I have been."
"What do you do for a living now?"
"Private investigation."
"Who for?"
"A man named Kincaid, nobody you know. I knew your daughter slightly, and I have a personal interest in finding out who killed her. I think the answer may be here in Bridgeton."
"I don't see how. She never set foot in this town for twenty years, until last spring. She only came home then to tell her mother she was getting a divorce. From _him_." He gestured toward the back of the house, where I could hear ice being chipped.
"Did she do any talking to you?"
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