“I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions,” I said.
“Gee, I dunno about that.”
“I’ll fill you in,” Slovekin said, “if it doesn’t take too long. Thanks, Gwen.”
“You’re more than welcome. Remember you promised I could have a print. I haven’t had my picture taken since God made little green apples.”
She touched the side of her face, delicately, hopefully, and hustled into the building on undulating hips. Slovekin deposited the camera in the back seat of his press car. We got into the front.
“Did she see Hallman enter the culvert?”
“Not actually,” Slovekin said. “She made no attempt to follow him. She thought he was just a bum from the jungle on the other side of the tracks. Gwen didn’t catch onto who he was until the police got here and asked some questions. They came up the creekbed from the beach, incidentally, so he couldn’t have gone that way.”
“What was his condition?”
“Gwen’s observations aren’t worth much. She’s a nice girl, but not very bright. Now that she knows who he is, he was seven feet tall with horns and illuminated revolving eyeballs.” Slovekin moved restlessly, turning the key in the ignition. “That’s about all there is here. Can I drop you anywhere? I’m supposed to cover the movements of the sheriff’s posse.” His intonation satirized the phrase.
“Wear your bulletproof vest. Turning seventy hunters loose in a town is asking for double trouble.”
“I agree. So does Spaulding, my editor. But we report the news, we don’t make it. You got any for me, by any chance?”
“Can I talk off the record?”
“I’d rather have it on. It’s getting late, and I don’t mean late at night. We’ve never had a lynching in Purissima, but it could happen here. There’s something about insanity, it frightens people, makes them irrational, too. Their worst aggressions start popping out.”
“You sound like an expert in mob psychology,” I said.
“I sort of am. It runs in the family. My father was an Austrian Jew. He got out of Vienna one jump ahead of the storm troopers. I also inherited a prejudice in favor of the underdog. So if you know something that will let Hallman off the hook, you better spill it. I can have it on the radio in ten minutes.”
“He didn’t do it.”
“Do you know he didn’t for certain?”
“Not quite. I’d stake my reputation on it, but I have to do better than that. Hallman’s being used as a patsy, and a lot of planning went into it.”
“Who’s behind it?”
“There’s more than one possibility. I can’t give you any names.”
“Not even off the record?”
“What would be the use? I haven’t got enough to prove a case. I don’t have access to the physical evidence, and I can’t depend on the official interpretation of it.”
“You mean it’s been manipulated?”
“Psychologically speaking, anyway. There may have been some actual tampering. I don’t know for sure that the gun that was found in the greenhouse fired the slugs in Jerry Hallman.”
“The sheriff’s men think so.”
“Have they run ballistics tests?”
“Apparently. The fact that it was his mother’s gun has generated a lot of heat downtown. They’re going into ancient history. The rumor’s running around that Hallman killed his mother, too, and possibly his father, and the family money got him off and hushed it up.” He gave me a quick, sharp look. “Could there be anything in that?”
“You sound as if you’re buying it yourself.”
“I wouldn’t say that, but I know some things it could jibe with. I went to see the Senator last Spring, just a few days before he died.” He paused to organize his thoughts, and went on more slowly. “I had dug up certain facts about a certain county official whose re-election was coming up in May. Spaulding thought the Senator ought to know these facts, because he’d been supporting this certain official for a good many years. So had the paper, as a matter of fact. The paper generally went along with Senator Hallman’s ideas on county government. Spaulding didn’t want to change that policy without checking with Senator Hallman. He was a big minority stockholder in the paper, and you might say the local elder statesman.”
“If you’re trying to say he was county boss and Ostervelt was one of his boys, why beat around the bush?”
“It wasn’t quite that simple, but that’s the general picture. All right, so you know.” Slovekin was young and full of desire, and his tone became competitive: “What you don’t know is the nature of my facts. I won’t go into detail, but I was in a position to prove that Ostervelt had been taking regular payoff money from houses of prostitution. I showed Senator Hallman my affidavits. He was an old man, and he was shocked. I was afraid for a while that he might have a heart attack then and there. When he calmed down, he said he needed time to think about the problem, perhaps talk it over with Ostervelt himself. I was to come back in a week. Unfortunately, he died before the week was up.”
“All very interesting. Only I don’t see how it fits in with the idea that Carl killed him.”
“It depends on how you look at it. Say Carl did it and Ostervelt pinned it on him, but kept the evidence to himself. It would give Ostervelt all the leverage he needed to keep the Hallman family in line. It would also explain what happened afterwards. Jerry Hallman went to a lot of trouble to quash our investigation. He also threw all his weight behind Ostervelt’s re-election.”
“He might have done that for any number of reasons.”
“Name one.”
“Say he killed his father himself, and Ostervelt knew it.”
“You don’t believe that,” Slovekin stated.
He looked around nervously. The little blonde ankled up to the side of the car with my Monarchburger. I said, when she was out of hearing:
“This is supposed to be a progressive county. How does Ostervelt keep his hold on it?”
“He’s been in office a long time, and, as you know, he’s got good political backing, at least until now. He knows where the bodies are buried. You might say he’s buried a couple of them himself.”
“Buried them himself?”
“I was speaking more or less figuratively.” Slovekin’s voice had sunk to a worried whisper. “He’s shot down one or two escaping prisoners—shootings that a lot of the townspeople didn’t think were strictly necessary. The reason I mention it—I wouldn’t want to see you end up with a hole in the back.”
“That’s a hell of a thought, when I’m eating a sandwich.”
“I wish you’d take me seriously, Archer. I didn’t like what happened between you this afternoon.”
“Neither did I.”
Slovekin leaned toward me. “Those names you have in mind that you won’t give me—is Ostervelt one of them?”
“He is now. You can write it down in your little black book.”
“I already have, long ago.”
chapter 28
I WAITED for the green light and walked back across the highway. Chestnut Street was empty again, except for my car at the curb, and another car diagonally across from it near the corner of Elmwood. It hadn’t been there before, or I would have noticed it.
It was a new red station wagon very like the one I had seen in the drive of the Hallman ranch-house. I went up the street and looked in at the open window on the driver’s side. The key was in the ignition. The registration slip on the steering-post had Jerry Hallman’s name on it.
Evidently Zinnie had come back to tuck her baby in. I glanced across the roof of the wagon toward Mrs. Hutchinson’s cottage. Her light shone steadily through the lace-veiled windows. Everything seemed peaceful and as it should be. Yet a sense of disaster came down on me like a ponderous booby trap.
Perhaps I’d glimpsed and guessed the meaning of the blanket-covered shape on the floor at the rear of the wagon. I opened the back door and pulled the blanket away. So white that it seemed luminous, a woman’s bo
dy lay huddled in the shadow.
I turned on the ceiling light and Zinnie jumped to my vision. Her head was twisted toward me, glaring at me open-eyed. Her grin of fear and pain had been fixed in the rictus of death. There were bloody slits in one of her breasts and in her abdomen. I touched the unwounded breast, expecting a marble coldness. The body was still warm, but unmistakably dead. I drew the blanket over it again, as if that would do any good.
Darkness flooded my mind for an instant, whirling like black water in which three bodies turned unburied. Four. I lost my Monarchburger in the gutter. Sweating cold, I looked up and down the street. Across the corner of the vacant lot, a concrete bridge carried Elmwood Street over the creekbed. Further up the creek, around a bend, I could see the moving lights of the sergeant and his men.
I could tell them what I had found, or I could keep silent. Slovekin’s talk of lynching was fresh in my thought. Under it I had an urge to join the hunt, run Hallman down and kill him. Because I distrusted that urge, I made a decision which probably cost a life. Perhaps it saved another.
I closed the door, left the wagon as it stood, and went back to Mrs. Hutchinson’s house. The sight of me seemed to depress her, but she invited me in. Before I stepped inside, I pointed out the red wagon:
“Isn’t that Mrs. Hallman’s car?”
“I believe so. I couldn’t swear to it. She drives one like it.”
“Was she driving it tonight?”
The old woman hesitated. “She was in it.”
“You mean someone else was driving?”
She hesitated again, but she seemed to sense my urgency.
When her words finally came, they sounded as if an inner dam had burst, releasing waves of righteous indignation:
“I’ve worked in big houses, with all sorts of people, and I learned long ago to hold my tongue. I’ve done it for the Hallmans, and I’d go on doing it, but there’s a limit, and I’ve reached mine. When a brand-new widow goes out on the town the same night her husband was killed—”
“Was Dr. Grantland driving the car? This is important, Mrs. Hutchinson.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. It’s a crying shame. Away they go, as gay as you please, and the devil take the hindmost. I never did think much of her, but I used to consider him a fine young doctor.”
“What time were they here?”
“It was Martha’s suppertime, round about six-fifteen or six-thirty. I know she spoiled the child’s evening meal, running in and out like that.”
“Did Grantland come in with her?”
“Yes, he came in.”
“Did he say anything? Do anything?”
Her face closed up on me. She said: “It’s chilly out here. Come in if you want to talk.”
There was nobody else in the living-room. Rose Parish’s coat lay on the couch. I could hear her behind the wall, singing a lullaby to the child.
“I’m glad for a little help with that one. I get tired,” the old woman said. “Your friend seems to be a good hand with children. Does she have any of her own?”
“Miss Parish isn’t married, that I know of.”
“That’s too bad. I was married myself for nearly forty years, but I never had one of my own either. I never had the good fortune. It was a waste of me.” The wave of her indignation rose again: “You’d think that those that had would look after their own flesh and bone.”
I seated myself in a chair by the window where I could watch the station wagon. Mrs. Hutchinson sat opposite me:
“Is she out there?”
“I want to keep an eye on her car.”
“What did you mean, did Dr. Grantland say anything?”
“How did he act toward Zinnie?”
“Same as usual. Putting on the same old act, as if he wasn’t interested in her, just doing his doctor’s duty. As if I didn’t know all about them long ago. I guess he thinks I’m old and senile, but I’ve got my eyes and my good ears. I’ve watched that woman playing him like a big stupid fish, ever since the Senator died. She’s landing him, too, and he acts like he’s grateful to her for slipping the gaff to him. I thought he had more sense than to go for a woman like that, just because she’s come into a wad of money.”
With my eye on the painted red wagon in which her body lay, I felt an obscure need to defend Zinnie:
“She didn’t seem like a bad sort of woman to me.”
“You talk about her like she was dead,” Mrs. Hutchinson said. “Naturally you wouldn’t see through her, you’re a man. But I used to watch her like the flies on the wall. She came from nothing, did you know that? Mr. Jerry picked her up in a nightclub in Los Angeles, he said so in one of the arguments they had. They had a lot of arguments. She was a driving hungry woman, always hungry for something she didn’t have. And when she got it, she wasn’t satisfied. An unsatisfied wife is a terrible thing in this life.
“She turned against her husband after the child was born, and then she went to work to turn the child against him. She even had the brass to ask me to be a divorce-court witness for her, so’s she could keep Martha. She wanted me to say that her husband treated her cruel. It would have been a lie, and I told her so. It’s true they didn’t get along, but he never raised a hand to her. He suffered in silence. He went to his death in silence.”
“When did she ask you to testify?”
“Three-four months ago, when she thought that a divorce was what she wanted.”
“So she could marry Grantland?”
“She didn’t admit it outright, but that was the idea. I was surprised, surprised and ashamed for him, that he would fall for her and her shabby goods. I could have saved my feelings. They make a pair. He’s no better than she is. He may be a lot worse.”
“What makes you say so?”
“I hate to say it. I remember him when he first moved to town, an up-and-coming young doctor. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for his patients. He told me once it was the great dream of his life to be a doctor. His family lost their money in the depression, and he put himself through medical school by working in a garage. He went through the college of hard knocks as well as medical college, and it taught him something. In those early days, six-eight years ago, when his patients couldn’t pay him he went right on caring for them. That was before he got his big ideas.”
“What happened, did he get a whiff of money?”
“More than that happened to him. Looking back, I can see that the big change in him started about three years ago. He seemed to lose interest in his medical practice. I’ve seen the same thing with a few other doctors, something runs down in them and something else starts up, and they go all out for the money. All of a sudden they’re nothing more than pill-pushers, some of them living on their own pills.”
“What happened to Dr. Grantland three years ago?”
“I don’t know for sure. I can tell you it happened to more people than him, though. Something happened to me, if you want the truth.”
“I do want the truth. I think you’ve been lying to me.”
Her head jerked up as if I’d tightened a rope. She narrowed her eyes. They watched me with a faded kind of guile. I said:
“If you know something important about Alicia Hallman’s death, it’s your duty to bring it out.”
“I’ve got a duty to myself, too. This thing I’ve kept locked up in my breast—it don’t make me look good.”
“You could look worse, if you let an innocent man take the blame for murder. Those men that went by in the street are after him. If you hold back until they find him and shoot him down, it’s going to be too late. Too late for Carl Hallman and too late for you.”
Her glance followed mine out to the street. Except for my car and Zinnie’s, it was still empty. Like the street’s reflection, her eyes grew dark with distant lights in them. Her mouth opened, and shut in a grim line.
“You can’t sit and hold back the truth while a whole family dies off, or is killed off. You call yourself a good woman—”
“Not any more, I don’t.”
Mrs. Hutchinson lowered her head and looked down at her hands in her lap. On their backs the branched blue veins showed through the skin. They swelled as her fingers retracted into two clenched fists. Her voice came out half-choked, as though the moral noose had tightened on her:
“I’m a wicked woman. I did lie about that gun. Dr. Grantland brought it up on the way into town today. He brought it up again tonight when she was with the child.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He said if anybody asked me about that gun, that I was to stick to my original story. Otherwise I’d be in a peck of trouble. Which I am.”
“You’re in less trouble than you were a minute ago. What was your original story?”
“The one he told me to tell. That she didn’t have the gun the night she died. That I hadn’t seen it for at least a week, or the box of shells, either.”
“What happened to the shells?”
“He took them. I was to say that he took the gun and the shells away from her for her own protection.”
“When did he feed you this story?”
“That very same night when he came out to the ranch.”
“It was his story. Why did you buy it from him?”
“I was afraid,” she said. “That night when she didn’t come home and didn’t come home, I was afraid she’d done herself a harm, and I’d be blamed.”
“Who would blame you?”
“Everybody would. They’d say I was too old to go on nursing.” The blue-veined hands opened and shut on her thighs. “I blamed myself. It was my fault. I should have stayed with her every minute, I shouldn’t have let her go out. She’d had a phone call from Berkeley the evening before, something about her son, and she was upset all day. Talking about killing herself because her family deserted her and nobody loved her. She blamed it all on the Doomsters.”
“The what?”
“The Doomsters. She was always talking about those Doomsters of hers. She believed her life was ruled by evil fates like, and they had killed all the love in the world the day that she was born. It was true, in a way, I guess. Nobody did love her. I was getting pretty sick of her myself. I thought if she did die it would be a relief to her and a good riddance. I took it upon myself to make that judgment which no human being has a right to do.”
The Doomsters Page 17