The Galton Case
Page 23
“From punishment for murder.”
She shook her head solemnly. “It’s too late for that, son. Fredericks has took his punishment. He said he would rather have digger get him than go back behind walls. Fredericks hung himself, and I didn’t try to argue him out of doing it.”
We found him in a back room on the second floor. He was on an old brass bed, in a half-sitting position. A piece of heavy electrical cord was tied to the head of the bed and wrapped several times around his neck. The free end of the cord was clenched in his right hand. There was no doubt that he had been his own executioner.
“Get Sheila out of here,” I said to John.
She stood close to him. “I’m all right. I’m not afraid.”
Mrs. Fredericks came into the doorway, heavy and panting. She looked at her son with her head up:
“This is the end of it. I told him it was him or you, and which it was going to be. I couldn’t go on lying for him, and let you get arrested instead of him.”
He faced her, still the accuser. “Why did you lie for so long? You stayed with him after he killed my father.”
“You got no call to judge me for doing that. It was to save your life that I married him. I saw him cut off your daddy’s head with an ax, fill it with stones, and chunk it in the sea. He said that if I ever told a living soul, that he would kill you, too. You were just a tiny baby, but that wouldn’t of stopped him. He held up the bloody ax over your crib and made me swear to marry him and keep my lips shut forever. Which I have done until now.”
“Did you have to spend the rest of your life with him?”
“That was my choice,” she said. “For sixteen years I stood between you and him. Then you ran away and left me alone with him. I had nobody else left in my life excepting him. Do you understand what it’s like to have nobody at all, son?”
He tried to speak, to rise to the word, but the gorgon past held him frozen.
“All I ever wanted in my life,” she said, “was a husband and a family and a place I could call my own.”
Sheila made an impulsive movement toward her, “You have us.”
“Aw, no. You don’t want me in your life. We might as well be honest about it. The less you see of me, the better you’ll like it. Too much water flowed under the bridge. I don’t blame my son for hating me.”
“I don’t hate you,” John said. “I’m sorry for you, Mother. And I’m sorry for what I said.”
“You and who else is sorry?” she said roughly. “You and who else?”
He put his arm around her, awkwardly, trying to comfort her. But she was past comforting, perhaps beyond sorrow, too. Whatever she felt was masked by unfeeling layers of flesh. The stiff black silk she was wearing curved over her breast like armor.
“Don’t bother about me. Just take good care of your girl.”
Somewhere outside, a single bird raised its voice for a few notes, then fell into abashed silence. I went to the window. The river was white. The trees and buildings on its banks were resuming their colors and shapes. A light went on in one of the other houses. As if at this human signal, the bird raised its voice again.
Sheila said: “Listen.”
John turned his head to listen. Even the dead man seemed to be listening.
Also by
ROSS MACDONALD
LEW ARCHER MYSTERIES
“The finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.”
—The New York Times
The Chill
In The Chill, a routine search for a runaway bride entangles Archer in two murders, one twenty years old, the other so recent that the victim’s blood is still wet. What ensues is a detective novel with one of the most intricate plots ever spun by an American crime writer.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76807-6
The Drowning Pool
When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. In The Drowning Pool, Lew Archer takes this case in the L.A. suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland of corporate greed and family hatred—and sufficient motive for a dozen murders.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76806-8
Black Money
Lew Archer is hired to investigate a suspicious French “aristocrat” who has run off with his client’s girlfriend—only to uncover a mountain of gambling debts and a seven-year-old suicide with lethal repercussions in the present.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76810-6
The Far Side of the Dollar
Has Tom Hillman run away from his exclusive reform school, or has he been kidnapped? Are his wealthy parents protecting him or their own secrets? And why do all trails lead to a derelict Hollywood hotel?
Crime Fiction/0-679-76865-3
The Underground Man
As a mysterious fire rages through an affluent community in Southern California, Lew Archer tracks a missing—and possibly kidnapped—child and uncovers an entire secret history of wayward parents, wounded offspring, and murder.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76808-4
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
First Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Edition, December 1996
Copyright © 1959 by Ross Macdonald
Copyright renewed 1987 by Margaret Millar
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1959.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Library of Congress catalog card number: 59–6222
Vintage eISBN: 978-0-307-75967-2
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
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