The Doomsters

by Ross Macdonald

  “How did you get the word on Dr. Grantland?”

  “I promised never to divulge that fact. There’s a—there are other people involved.”

  “Have you talked to anybody else about these suspicions of yours?”

  “I talked to Mildred, last time she visited me. Last Sunday. I couldn’t say very much, with those hospital eavesdroppers around. I don’t know very much. It’s why I had to do something.” He was getting tense again.

  “Take it easy, Carl. Do you mind if I talk to your wife?”

  “What about?”

  “Things in general. Your family. You.”

  “I don’t object if she doesn’t.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “On the ranch, outside Purissima—No, she doesn’t live there now. After I went to the hospital, Mildred couldn’t go on sharing the house with Jerry and Zinnie. So she moved back into Purissima, with her mother. They live at 220 Grant—but I’ll show you, I’ll come along.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But I must. There are so many things to be cleared up. I can’t wait any longer.”

  “You’re going to have to wait, if you want my help. I’ll make you a proposition, Carl. Let me take you back to the hospital. It’s more or less on the way to Purissima. Then I’ll talk to your wife, see what she thinks about these suspicions of yours—”

  “She doesn’t take me seriously, either.”

  “Well, I do. Up to a point. I’ll circulate and find out what I can. If there’s any real indication that your brother’s trying to cheat you, or that Dr. Grantland pitched any low curves, I’ll do something about it. Incidentally, I charge fifty a day and expenses.”

  “I have no money now. I’ll have plenty when I get what’s coming to me.”

  “Is it a deal then? You go back to the hospital, let me do the legwork?”

  He gave me a reluctant yes. It was clear that he didn’t like the plan, but he was too tired and confused to argue about it.

  chapter 3

  THE morning turned hot and bright. The brown September hills on the horizon looked like broken adobe walls you could almost reach out and touch. My car went miles before the hills changed position.

  As we drove through the valley, Carl Hallman talked to me about his family. His father had come west before the first war, with enough inherited money to buy a small orange grove outside of Purissima. The old man was a frugal Pennsylvania German, and by the time of his death he’d expanded his holdings to several thousand acres. The main single addition to the original grove had come from his wife, Alicia, who was the descendant of an old land-grant family.

  I asked Carl if his mother was still alive.

  “No. Mother died, a long time ago.”

  He didn’t want to talk about his mother. Perhaps he had loved her too much, or not enough. He went on talking about his father instead, with a kind of rebellious passion, as though he was still living in his father’s shadow. Jeremiah Hallman had been a power in the county, to some extent in the state: founding head of the water association, secretary of the growers’ co-operative, head of his party’s county central committee, state senator for a decade, and local political boss to the end of his life.

  A successful man who had failed to transmit the genes of success to his two sons.

  Carl’s older brother Jerry was a non-practicing lawyer. For a few months after he graduated from law school, Jerry had had his shingle out in Purissima. He’d lost several cases, made several enemies and no friends, and retired to the family ranch. There he consoled himself with a greenhouseful of cymbidium orchids and dreams of eventual greatness in some unnamed field of activity. Prematurely old in his middle thirties, Jerry was dominated by his wife, Zinnie, a blonde divorcee of uncertain origin who had married him five years ago.

  Carl was bitter on the subject of his brother and sister-in-law, and almost equally bitter about himself. He believed that he’d failed his father all the way down the line. When Jerry petered out, the Senator planned to turn over the ranch to Carl, and sent Carl to Davis to study agriculture. Not being interested in agriculture, Carl flunked out. His real interest was philosophy, he said.

  Carl managed to talk his father into letting him go to Berkeley. There he met his present wife, a girl he’d known in high school, and shortly after his twenty-first birthday he married her, in spite of the family’s objections. It was a dirty trick to play on Mildred. Mildred was another of the people he had failed. She thought that she was getting a whole man, but right at the start of their marriage, within a couple of months, he had his first big breakdown.

  Carl spoke in bitter self-contempt. I took my eyes from the road and looked at him. He wouldn’t meet my look:

  “I didn’t mean to tell you about my other—that other breakdown. Anyway, it doesn’t prove I’m crazy. Mildred never thought I was, and she knows me better than anybody. It was the strain I was under—working all day and studying half the night. I wanted to be something great, someone even Father would respect—a medical missionary or something like that. I was trying to get together enough credits for admission to medical school, and studying theology at the same time, and—Well, it was too much for me. I cracked up, and had to be taken home. So there we were.”

  I glanced at him again. We’d passed through the last of the long string of suburbs, and were in the open country. To the right of the highway, the valley lay wide and peaceful under the bright sky, and the hills had stepped backwards into blueness. Carl was paying no attention to the external world. He had a queer air of being confined, almost as though he were trapped in the past, or in himself. He said:

  “It was a rough two years, for all of us. Especially for Mildred. She did her best to put a good face on it, but it wasn’t what she had planned to do with her life, keeping house for in-laws in a dead country hole. And I was no use to her. For months I was so depressed that I could hardly bear to get up and face the daylight. What there was of it. I know it can’t be true, but the way I remember those months, it was cloudy and dark every day. So dark that I could hardly see to shave when I got up at noon.

  “The other people in the house were like gray ghosts around me, even Mildred, and I was the grayest ghost of all. Even the house was rotting away. I used to wish for an earthquake, to knock it down and bury us all at once—Father and me and Mildred and Jerry and Zinnie. I thought a good deal about killing myself, but I didn’t have the gumption.

  “If I’d had any gumption, or any sense, I’d have gone for treatment then. Mildred wanted me to, but I was too ashamed to admit I needed it. Father wouldn’t have stood for it, anyway. It would have disgraced the family. He thought psychiatry was a confidence game, that all I really needed was hard work. He kept telling me that I was pampering myself, just as Mother had, and that I’d come to the same bad end if I didn’t get out in the open air and make a man of myself.”

  He snickered dolefully, and paused. I wanted to ask him how his mother had died. I hesitated to. The boy was digging pretty deep as it was, and I didn’t want him to break through into something he couldn’t handle. Since he’d told me of his earlier breakdown and the suicidal depression that followed it, my main idea was to get him back to the hospital in one mental piece. It was only a few miles more to the turnoff, and I could hardly wait.

  “Eventually,” Carl was saying, “I did go to work on the ranch. Father had been slowing down, with some sort of heart condition, and I took over some of his supervisory duties. I didn’t mind the work itself, out in the groves with the pickers, and I suppose it did me some good at that. But in the long run it only led to more trouble.

  “Father and I could never see eye to eye on anything. He was in orange-growing to make money, the more money the better. He never thought in terms of the human cost. I couldn’t stand to see the way the orange-pickers were treated. Whole families, men and women and kids, herded into open trucks and hauled around like cattle. Paid by the box, hired by the day, then shunted on their way
. A lot of them were wetbacks, without any legal rights. Which suited Father fine. It didn’t suit me at all. I told Father what I thought of his lousy labor policy. I told him that this was a civilized country in the middle of the twentieth century and he had no right to push people around like peons, cut them off from employment if they asked for a living wage. I told him he was a spoiled old man, and I wasn’t going to sit idly by and let him oppress the Mexican people, and defraud the Japanese!”

  “The Japanese?” I said.

  Carl’s speech had been coming in a faster rhythm, so fast that I could hardly follow it. There was an evangelical light in his eye. His face was flushed and hot.

  “Yes. I’m ashamed to say it, but my father cheated some of his own best friends, Japanese people. When I was a kid, before the War, there used to be quite a few of them in our county. They had hundreds of acres of truck gardens between our ranch and town. They’re nearly all gone now. They were driven out during the war, and never came back. Father bought up their land at a few cents on the dollar.

  “I told him when I got my share of the ranch, I’d give those people their property back. I’d hire detectives to trace them and bring them back and give them what was theirs. I intended to do it, too. That’s why I’m not going to let Jerry cheat me out of the property. It doesn’t belong to us, you see. We’ve got to give it back. We’ve got to set things right, between us and the land, between us and other people.

  “Father said that was nonsense, that he’d bought the land perfectly honestly. In fact, he thought that my ideas were crazy. They all did, even Mildred. We had a big scene about it that last night. It was terrible, with Jerry and Zinnie trying to turn him against me, and Mildred in the middle, trying to make peace. Poor Mildred, she was always in the middle. And I guess she was right, I wasn’t making too much sense. If I had been, I’d have realized that Father was a sick man. Whether I was right or wrong—and of course I was right—Father couldn’t stand that kind of a family ruction.”

  I turned off the highway to the right, onto a road which curved back through an underpass, across flat fields, past a giant hedge of eucalyptus trees. The trees looked ancient and sorrowful; the fields were empty.

  chapter 4

  CARL sat tense and quiet in the seat beside me. After a while he said:

  “Did you know that words can kill, Mr. Archer? You can kill an old man by arguing with him. I did it to my father. At least,” he added on a different note, “I’ve thought for the last six months that I was responsible. Father died in his bath that night. When Dr. Grantland examined him, he said he’d had a heart attack, brought on by overexcitement. I blamed myself for his death. Jerry and Zinnie blamed me, too. Is it any wonder I blew my top? I thought I was a parricide.

  “But now I don’t know,” he said. “When I found out about Dr. Grantland, it started me thinking back all over again. Why should I go by the word of a man like that? He hasn’t even the right to call himself a doctor. It’s the strain of not knowing that I can’t stand. You see, if Father died of a heart attack, then I’m responsible.”

  “Not necessarily. Old men die every day.”

  “Don’t try to confuse me,” he said peremptorily. “I can see the issue quite clearly. If Father died of a heart attack, I killed him with my words, and I’m a murderer. But if he died of something else, then someone else is the murderer. And Dr. Grantland is covering up for them.”

  I was pretty certain by now that I was listening to paranoid delusions. I handled them with kid gloves:

  “That doesn’t sound too likely, Carl. Why don’t you give it a rest for now? Think about something else.”

  “I can’t!” he cried. “You’ve got to help me get at the truth. You promised to help me.”

  “I will—” I started to say.

  Carl grabbed my right elbow. The car veered onto the shoulder, churning gravel. I braked, wrestling the wheel and Carl’s clutching hands. The car came to a stop at a tilt, one side in the shallow ditch. I shook him off.

  “That was a smart thing to do.”

  He was careless or unaware of what had happened. “You’ve got to believe me,” he said. “Somebody’s got to believe me.”

  “You don’t believe yourself. You’ve told me two stories already. How many others are there?”

  “You’re calling me a liar.”

  “No. But your thinking needs some shaking out. You’re the only one who can do that. And the hospital is the place to do it in.”

  The buildings of the great hospital were visible ahead, in the gap between two hills. We noticed them at the same time. Carl said:

  “No. I’m not going back there. You promised to help me, but you don’t intend to. You’re just like all the others. So I’ll have to do it myself.”

  “Do what?”

  “Find out the truth. Find out who killed my father, and bring him to justice.”

  I said as gently as possible: “You’re talking a little wild, kid. Now you keep your half of the bargain, and I’ll keep mine. You go back in and get well, I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “You’re only trying to humor me. You don’t intend to do anything.”

  “Don’t I?”

  He was silent. By way of proving that I was on his side, I said:

  “It will probably help if you’d tell me what you know about this Grantland. This morning you mentioned a record.”

  “Yes, and I wasn’t lying. I got it from a good source—a man who knows him.”

  “Another patient?”

  “He’s a patient, yes. That doesn’t prove anything. He’s perfectly sane, there’s nothing the matter with his mind.”

  “Is that what he says?”

  “The doctors say it, too. He’s in for narcotic addiction.”

  “That hardly recommends him as a witness.”

  “He was telling me the truth,” Carl said. “He’s known Dr. Grantland for years, and all about him. Grantland used to supply him with narcotics.”

  “Bad enough, if true. But it’s still a long way to murder.”

  “I see.” His tone was disconsolate. “You want me to think I did it. You give me no hope.”

  “Listen to me,” I said.

  But he was deep in himself, examining a secret horror. He sobbed once in dry pain. Without any other warning, he turned on me. Dull sorrow filmed his eyes. His hooked hands swung together reaching for my throat. Immobilized behind the steering wheel, I reached for the doorhandle to gain some freedom of action. Carl was too quick for me. His large hands closed on my neck. I struck at his face with my right hand, but he was almost oblivious.

  His close-up face was immense and bland, spotted with clear drops of sweat. He shook me. Daylight began to wane.

  “Lay off,” I said. “Damn fool.” But the words were a rusty cawing.

  I hit at him again, ineffectually, without leverage. One of his hands left my neck and came up hard against the point of my jaw. I went out.

  I came to in the dry ditch, beside the tiremarks where my car had stood. As I got up the checkerboard fields fell into place around me, teetering slightly. I felt remarkably small, like a pin on a map.

  chapter 5

  I TOOK off my jacket and slapped the dust out of it and started to walk toward the hospital. It lay, like a city state, in the middle of its own fields. It had no walls. Perhaps their place was taken by the hills which stood around it, jagged and naked, on three sides. Broad avenues divided the concrete buildings which gave no outward indication of their use. The people walking on the sidewalks looked not much different from people anywhere, except that there was no hurry, nowhere to hurry to. The sun-stopped place with its massive, inscrutable buildings had an unreal quality; perhaps it was only hurry that was missing.

  A fat man in blue jeans appeared from behind a parked car and approached me confidentially. In a low genteel voice he asked me if I wanted to buy a leather case for my car keys. “It’s very good hand-carved leather, sir, hand-crafted in the hospital.” He
displayed it.

  “Sorry, I don’t have any use for it. Where do I go to get some information, about a patient?”

  “Depends what ward he’s on.”

  “I don’t know the ward.”

  “You’d better ask at Administration.” He pointed toward a new-looking off-white building at the intersection of two streets. But he was unwilling to let me go. “Did you come by bus?”

  “I walked.”

  “From Los Angeles?”

  “Part of the way.”

  “No car, eh?”

  “My car was stolen.”

  “That’s too bad. I live in Los Angeles, you know. I have a Buick station wagon, pretty good car. My wife keeps it up on blocks in the garage. They say that keeps the tires from deteriorating.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I want that car to be in good condition.”

  Broad concrete steps led up to the entrance of the administration building. I put on my jacket over my wet shirt, and went in through the glass doors. The highly groomed brunette at the information desk gave me a bright professional smile. “Can I help you, sir?”

  “I’d like to see the superintendent.”

  Her smile hardened a little. “His schedule is very full today. May I have your name, please?”

  “Archer.”

  “And what do you wish to see him about, Mr. Archer?”

  “A confidential matter.”

  “One of our patients?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “Are you a relative?”

  “No.”

  “Which patient are you interested in, and what exactly is your interest? Sir.”

  “I’d better save that for the superintendent.”

  “You might have to wait all morning to see him. He has a series of conferences. I couldn’t promise even then that he could find time for you.”