The Chill

by Ross Macdonald

  “I know. But Dolly’s been doing some talking, too. She says that Helen Haggerty is dead. She has blood on her hands, by way of supporting evidence. I think we’d better go up there and see where the blood came from.”

  He gulped. “Yes. Of course. It isn’t far from here. In fact it’s only a few minutes by the bridle path. But at night we’ll probably get there faster in my car.”

  We went out to his car. I asked him to stop at the gatehouse, and glanced in. Dolly was lying on the studio bed with her face turned to the wall. Alex had covered her with a blanket. He was standing by the bed with his hands loose.

  “Dr. Godwin is on his way,” I said in a low voice. “Keep him here till I get back, will you?”

  He nodded, but he hardly appeared to see me. His look was still inward, peering into depths he hadn’t begun to imagine until tonight.

  chapter 9

  BRADSHAW’S COMPACT CAB was equipped with seat-belts, and he made me fasten mine before we set out. Between his house and Helen’s I told him as much as I thought he needed to know about Dolly’s outpourings. His response was sympathetic. At my suggestion, he left his car by the mailbox at the foot of Helen’s lane. When we got out I could hear a foghorn moaning from the low sea.

  Another car, a dark convertible whose shape I could barely make out through the thickening air, was parked without lights down the road. I ought to have shaken it down. But I was pressed by my own private guilt, and eager to see if Helen was alive.

  Her house was a faint blur of light high among the trees. We started up the hairpinning gravel driveway. An owl flew low over our heads, silent as a traveling piece of fog. It lit somewhere in the gray darkness, called to its mate, and was answered. The two invisible birds seemed to be mocking us with their sad distant foghorn voices.

  I heard a repeated crunching up ahead. It resolved itself into footsteps approaching in the gravel. I touched Bradshaw’s sleeve, and we stood still. A man loomed up above us. He had on a topcoat and a snap-brim hat I couldn’t quite see his face.

  “Hello.”

  He didn’t answer me. He must have been young and bold. He ran straight at us, shouldering me, spinning Bradshaw into the bushes. I tried to hold him but his downhill momentum carried him away.

  I chased his running footfalls down to the road, and got there in time to see him climbing into the convertible. Its engine roared and its parking lights came on as I ran toward it. Before it leaped away, I caught a glimpse of a Nevada license and the first four figures of the license number. I went back to Bradshaw’s car and wrote them down in my notebook: FT37.

  I climbed up the driveway a second time. Bradshaw had reached the house. He was sitting on the doorstep with a sick look on his face. Light poured over him from the open door and cast his bowed shadow brokenly on the flagstones.

  “She is dead, Mr. Archer.”

  I looked in. Helen was lying on her side behind the door. Blood had run from a round bullet hole in her forehead and formed a pool on the tiles. It was coagulating at the edges, like frost on a dark puddle. I touched her sad face. She was already turning cold. It was nine-seventeen by my watch.

  Between the door and the pool of blood I found a faint brown hand-print still sticky to the touch. It was about the size of Dolly’s hand. She could have fallen accidentally, but the thought twisted through my head that she was doing her best to be tried for murder. Which didn’t necessarily mean that she was innocent.

  Bradshaw leaned like a convalescent in the doorway. “Poor Helen. This is a heinous thing. Do you suppose the fellow who attacked us—?”

  “I’d say she’s been dead for at least two hours. Of course he may have come back to wipe out his traces or retrieve his gun. He acted guilty.”

  “He certainly did.”

  “Did Helen Haggerty ever mention Nevada?”

  He looked surprised. “I don’t believe so. Why?”

  “The car our friend drove away in had a Nevada license.”

  “I see. Well, I suppose we must call the police.”

  “They’ll resent it if we don’t.”

  “Will you? I’m afraid I’m feeling rather shaken.”

  “It’s better if you do, Bradshaw. She worked for the college, and you can keep the scandal to a minimum.”

  “Scandal? I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  He forced himself to walk past her to the telephone on the far side of the room. I went through the other rooms quickly. One bedroom was completely bare except for a kitchen chair and a plain table which she had been using as a working desk. A sheaf of test papers conjugating French irregular verbs lay on top of the table. Piles of books, French and German dictionaries and grammars and collections of poetry and prose, stood around it. I opened one at the flyleaf. It was rubber-stamped in purple ink: Professor Helen Haggerty, Maple Park College, Maple Park, Illinois.

  The other bedroom was furnished in rather fussy elegance with new French Provincial pieces, lambswool rugs on the polished tile floor, soft heavy handwoven drapes at the enormous window. The wardrobe contained a row of dresses and skirts with Magnin and Bullocks labels, and under them a row of new shoes to match. The chest of drawers was stuffed with sweaters and more intimate garments, but nothing really intimate. No letters, no snapshots.

  The bathroom had wall-to-wall carpeting and a triangular sunken tub. The medicine chest was well supplied with beauty cream and cosmetics and sleeping pills. The latter had been prescribed by a Dr. Otto Schrenk and dispensed by Thompson’s Drug Store in Bridgeton, Illinois, on June 17 of this year.

  I turned out the bathroom wastebasket on the carpet. Under crumpled wads of used tissue I found a letter in an airmail envelope postmarked in Bridgeton, Illinois, a week ago and addressed to Mrs. Helen Haggerty. The single sheet inside was signed simply “Mother,” and gave no return address.

  Dear Helen

  It was thoughtful of you to send me a card from sunny Cal my favorite state of the union even though it is years since I was out there. Your father keeps promising to make the trip with me on his vacation but something always comes up to put it off. Anyway his blood pressure is some better and that is a blessing. I’m glad you’re well. I wish you would reconsider about the divorce but I suppose that’s all over and done with. It’s a pity you and Bert couldn’t stay together. He is a good man in his way. But I suppose distant pastures look greenest.

  Your father is still furious of course. He won’t let me mention your name. He hasn’t really forgiven you for when you left home in the first place, or forgiven himself either I guess, it takes two to make a quarrel. Still you are his daughter and you shouldn’t have talked to him the way you did. I don’t mean to recriminate. I keep hoping for a reconcilement between you two before he dies. He is not getting any younger, you know, and I’m not either, Helen. You’re a smart girl with a good education and if you wanted to you could write him a letter that would make him feel different about “things.” You are his only daughter after all and you’ve never taken it back that he was a crooked stormtrooper. That is a hard word for a policeman to swallow from anybody and it still rankles him after more than twenty years. Please write.

  I put the letter back in the wastebasket with the other discarded paper. Then I washed my hands and returned to the main room. Bradshaw was sitting in the rope chair, stiffly formal even when alone. I wondered if this was his first experience of death. It wasn’t mine by a long shot, but this death had hit me especially hard. I could have prevented it.

  The fog outside was getting denser. It moved against the glass wall of the house, and gave me the queer sensation that the world had dropped away, and Bradshaw and I were floating together in space, unlikely gemini encapsulated with the dead woman.

  “What did you tell the police?”

  “I talked to the Sheriff personally. Hell be here shortly. I gave him only the necessary minimum. I didn’t know whether or not to say anything about Mrs. Kincaid.”

  “We have to explain our discovery of the b
ody. But you don’t have to repeat anything she said. It’s purely hearsay so far as you’re concerned.”

  “Do you seriously regard her as a suspect in this?”

  “I have no opinion yet. We’ll see what Dr. Godwin has to say about her mental condition. I hope Godwin is good at his job.”

  “He’s the best we have in town. I saw him tonight, oddly enough. He sat at the speaker’s table with me at the Alumni dinner, until he was called away.”

  “He mentioned seeing you at dinner.”

  “Yes. Jim Godwin and I are old friends.” He seemed to lean on the thought.

  I looked around for something to sit on, but there was only Helen’s canvas chaise. I squatted on my heels. One of the things in the house that puzzled me was the combination of lavish spending and bare poverty, as if two different women had taken turns furnishing it. A princess and a pauper.

  I pointed this out to Bradshaw, and he nodded: “It struck me when I was here the other evening. She seems to have spent her money on inessentials.”

  “Where did the money come from?”

  “She gave me to understand she had a private income. Heaven knows she didn’t dress as she did on an assistant professor’s salary.”

  “Did you know Professor Haggerty well?”

  “Hardly. I did escort her to one or two college functions, as well as the opening concert of the fall season. We discovered a common passion for Hindemith.” He made a steeple of his fingers. “She’s a—she was a very presentable woman. But I wasn’t close to her, in any sense. She didn’t encourage intimacy.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Bradshaw colored slightly.

  “I don’t mean sexual intimacy, for heaven’s sake. She wasn’t my type at all. I mean that she didn’t talk about herself to any extent.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “Some small college in the Middle West, Maple Park I believe. She’d already left there and come out here when we appointed her. It was an emergency appointment, necessitated by Dr. Farrand’s coronary. Fortunately Helen was available. I don’t know what our Department of Modern Languages will do now, with the semester already under way.”

  He sounded faintly resentful of the dead woman’s absenteeism. While it was natural enough for him to be thinking of the college and its problems, I didn’t like it. I said with deliberate intent to jolt him:

  “You and the college are probably going to have worse problems than finding a teacher to take her place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She wasn’t an ordinary female professor. I spent some time with her this afternoon. She told me among other things that her life had been threatened.”

  “How dreadful,” he said, as though the threat of murder were somehow worse than the fact. “Who on earth—?”

  “She had no idea, and neither have I. I thought perhaps you might. Did she have enemies on the campus?”

  “I certainly can’t think of any. You understand, I didn’t know Helen at all well.”

  “I got to know her pretty well, in a hurry. I gathered she’d had her share of experience, not all of it picked up in graduate seminars and faculty teas. Did you go into her background before you hired her?”

  “Not too thoroughly. It was an emergency appointment, as I said, and in any case it wasn’t my responsibility. The head of her department, Dr. Geisman, was favorably impressed by her credentials and made the appointment.”

  Bradshaw seemed to be delicately letting himself off the hook. I wrote down Geisman’s name in my notebook.

  “Her background ought to be gone into,” I said. “It seems she was married, and recently divorced. I also want to find out more about her relations with Dolly. Apparently they were close.”

  “You’re not suggesting a Lesbian attachment? We have had—” He decided not to finish the sentence.

  “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m looking for information. How did Professor Haggerty happen to become Dolly’s counselor?”

  “In the normal way, I suppose.”

  “What is the normal way of acquiring a counselor?”

  “It varies. Mrs. Kincaid was an upperclassman, and we usually permit upperclassmen to choose their own counselors, so long as the counselor in question has an opening in his or her schedule.”

  “Then Dolly probably chose Professor Haggerty, and initiated the friendship herself?”

  “She had every chance to. Of course it may have been pure accident.”

  As if we had each received a signal on a common wave-length, we turned and looked at Helen Haggerty’s body. It seemed small and lonely at the far end of the room. Our joint flight with it through cloudy space had been going on for a long time. I looked at my watch. It was only nine-thirty-one, fourteen minutes since our arrival. Time seemed to have slowed down, dividing itself into innumerable fractions, like Zeno’s space or marijuana hours.

  With a visible effort, Bradshaw detached his gaze from the body. His moment of communion with it had cost him the last of his boyish look. He leaned toward me with deep lines of puzzlement radiating from his eyes and mouth:

  “I don’t understand what Mrs. Kincaid said to you. Do you mean to say she actually confessed this—this murder?”

  “A cop or a prosecutor might say so. Fortunately none was present. I’ve heard a lot of confessions, good ones and phony ones. Hers was a phony one, in my opinion.”

  “What about the blood?”

  “She may have slipped and fallen in it.”

  “Then you don’t think we should mention any of it to the Sheriff?”

  “If you don’t mind stretching a point.”

  His face showed that he minded, but after some hesitation he said: “We’ll keep it to ourselves, at least for the present. After all she was a student of ours, however briefly.”

  Bradshaw didn’t notice his use of the past tense, but I did, and it depressed me. I think we were both relieved by the sound of the Sheriff’s car coming up the hill. It was accompanied by a mobile laboratory. Within a few minutes a fingerprint man and a deputy coroner and a photographer had taken over the room and changed its character. It became impersonal and drab like any room anywhere in which murder had been committed. In a curious way the men in uniform seemed to be doing the murder a second and final time, annulling Helen’s rather garish aura, converting her into laboratory meat and courtroom exhibits. My raw nerves jumped when the bulbs flashed in her corner.

  Sheriff Herman Crane was a thick-shouldered man in a tan gabardine suit. His only suggestion of uniform was a slightly broad-brimmed hat with a woven leather band. His voice had an administrative ring, and his manner had the heavy ease of a politician, poised between bullying and flattery. He treated Bradshaw with noisy deference, as if Bradshaw was a sensitive plant of undetermined value but some importance.

  Me he treated the way cops always treated me, with occupational suspicion. They suspected me of the misdemeanor of doing my own thinking. I did succeed in getting Sheriff Crane to dispatch a patrol car in pursuit of the convertible with the Nevada license. He complained that his department was seriously understaffed, and he didn’t think road blocks were indicated at this stage of the game. At this stage of the game I made up my mind not to cooperate fully with him.

  The Sheriff and I sat in the chaise and the rope chair respectively and had a talk while a deputy who knew speed-writing took notes. I told him that Dolly Kincaid, the wife of a client of mine, had discovered the body of her college counselor Professor Haggerty and reported the discovery to me. She had been badly shocked, and was under a doctor’s care.

  Before the Sheriff could press me for further details, I gave him a verbatim account, or as close to verbatim as I could make it, of my conversation with Helen about the death threat. I mentioned that she had reported it to his office, and he seemed to take this as a criticism:

  “We’re understaffed, like I said. I can’t keep experienced men. Los Angeles lures ’em away with salaries we can’t pay and pie in the sky.” I
was from Los Angeles, as he knew, and the implication was that I was obscurely to blame. “If I put a man on guard duty in every house that got a crank telephone call, I wouldn’t have anybody left to run the department.”

  “I understand that.”

  “I’m glad you do. Something I don’t understand—how did this conversation you had with the decedent happen to take place?”

  “Professor Haggerty approached me and asked me to come up here with her.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I didn’t check the time. It was shortly before sundown. I was here for about an hour.”

  “What did she have in mind?”

  “She wanted me to stay with her, for protection. I’m sorry I didn’t.” Simply having the chance to say this made me feel better.

  “You mean she wanted to hire you, as a bodyguard?”

  “That was the idea.” There was no use going into the complex interchange that had taken place between Helen and me, and failed.

  “How did she know you were in the bodyguard business?”

  “I’m not, exactly. She knew I was an investigator because she saw my name in the paper.”

  “Sure enough,” he said. “You testified in the Perrine case this morning. Maybe I ought to congratulate you because Perrine got off.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “No, I don’t think I will. The Perrine broad was guilty as hell and you know it and I know it.”

  “The jury didn’t think so,” I said mildly.

  “Juries can be fooled and witnesses can be bought. Suddenly you’re very active in our local crime circles, Mr. Archer.” The words had the weight of an implied threat. He flung out a heavy careless hand toward the body. “This woman, this Professor Haggerty here, you’re sure she wasn’t a friend of yours?”

  “We became friends to a certain extent.”

  “In an hour?”

  “It can happen in an hour. Anyway, we had a previous conversation at the college today.”

  “What about before today? Did you have other previous conversations?”