The Drowner

by John D. MacDonald

  Nile gave several little jumps of surprise and consternation. He smacked his lips, tugged his ear, patted his chest, turned his stein around and around.

  “Let me get organized here. Hah? First off, psychiatry isn’t my field. Second, Angie was the second delivery I made after I took over the practice in this place. Third, I like Angie. I think I understand her from knowing something of the background. Murder? That would be a pretty drastic way of expressing some disapproval, wouldn’t it?”

  “On any logical basis. But is she logical?”

  “Mary Powell was a bad patient. Seems like the minute she found out she was pregnant she started stuffing herself. Just three months married when she got pregnant. Acted as if she’d caught leprosy from little Jimmy. Treated Jimmy for some prostate trouble a few years back, and I know for a fact that from the day she found out she was pregnant, she never let Jimmy resume marital relations with her. Frankly, she hated it so much I could say stuffing herself was a defense against it, but I’m no psychiatrist. The forty pounds she put on while she was carrying Angie made it a difficult birth. But it was a fine healthy girl baby. And Mary kept right on eating. And the bigger she got the more religious she got. Must be three hundred pounds now, and got just about the meanest temper in town.”

  “And Angie got her sexual orientation from her mother?”

  “Give you an example. Angie was a sunny little girl, popular with the other kids. Anyway, there was a little boy in the neighborhood. Can’t recall his name. They moved away long ago. Angie was about seven years old, I’d judge. Children have sexual curiosity. Absolutely normal all over the world. In primitive tribes, who are more enlightened about these things than we are, it is accepted. But if we catch the kids, we try to convince them they’ve done something filthy. Same as our cultural attitude toward masturbation. We try to make out only sick kids do it, and we try to pretend it isn’t a perfectly normal and natural stage in sexual development of the individual, that is only a mild clinical symptom of immaturity if it continues into the adult years.

  “So one afternoon Mary Powell just happens to go around the garage and there is Angie and the neighbor boy solemnly examining each other. She moves fast for a big woman. She give the boy a crack across the face that sends him howling home with two broken teeth, and she yanks up a stake out of the garden and she beats her daughter as bad as I’ve ever heard of a kid being beaten without killing it. Mary should have been jailed and damned near was, and would have been if the church hadn’t gotten behind her. Angie was three weeks in the hospital. Broken ribs, ruptured kidney, contusions, abrasions, lacerations, internal bleeding. She was my case, and I guess it was the last time any male creature has seen Angie in her birthday suit. For female problems, she and her mother go to a lady doctor in Orlando. Time she got released, she was a little hollow-eyed ghost, and just about as quiet as one. Mary kept her out of school all that year. And she was one silent little girl for at least two years after that. Anybody could guess that with a background like that, that girl was going to have some trouble in her adolescence. And she did, when she was fifteen. They brought her to me from the high school with a high fever and a badly infected arm. It could have killed anybody less husky. I slapped her into the hospital and for the first twenty-four hours, I wasn’t sure. The infection started with a burn. And there were other burns on the underside of that same arm, some of them healed and some of them still scabbed. And I could not find out how she got them. Not until I stuck a little sodium pentothal into her, and suddenly I had a classic case of hysteria on my hands. Complete muscular rigidity, marble pallor, gibberish about dreams and visions, and some crazy identification with Joan of Arc. The fool child was holding her arm in a candle flame, and from the marks she’d done it about fifteen times.”

  “And endure pain like that!”

  “A good galloping case of hysteria with religious overtones has elements of auto-hypnosis in it, and there’s a good chance she couldn’t even feel the pain. Like the optimistic idiot I am, I talked to Mary about getting help for the girl. But Mary was proud of her! Imagine that?”

  “Mortification of the flesh. Driving out the devil.”

  Nile stared at him keenly. “Her words exactly. I guess you can understand the burning. Here was a girl … is a girl … with superb physical equipment. All the glands are working. She ovulates and she’s got big useful breasts and a good fertile pelvic structure, and the female hormones are feeding into her system right on schedule. Now if she could have yearned for the normal sexual experience, but avoided it because she thought it was wrong, then she would have been left with just a feeling of guilt and shame for having such evil instincts. But here is a big healthy girl so emotionally crippled there’s no yearning at all, no curiosity, no feeling of guilt. It was pounded into her with a garden stake long ago that any sex thought is horrifying and nauseating. So, emotionally, it does nauseate her. And there is that fine body with no outlet. Hence the hysteria. The religious visions. The whole sickening ball of wax. Mary Powell ought to be fed to the ’gators for doing that to her own child.”

  “Can that inner conflict make her dangerous?”

  “Back to murder? Hah? It could. Under the right circumstances, it could. But it wouldn’t be murder to her. She wouldn’t do anything she thought was wrong.”

  “It would be execution?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Which would exempt her from the legal definition of sanity, the knowledge of right and wrong. Tell me, Doctor, could she think God instructed her to kill?”

  “God, or Joan of Arc, or Father Divine. It’s the classic rationalization. She would think of herself as an instrument, obedient to outside orders.”

  “Could such murders be cleverly done under those circumstances?”

  “I’ve heard they can be. And the murderer has one advantage over the normal kind.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They are absolutely sure of themselves, and so they don’t get trapped by their own feeling of guilt. Stanial, I hope to God you’re wrong. And I notice you said murders. Would you be thinking of Gus Gable?”

  “Yes.”

  “Back in the office I’ve got an EKG on him three months old. Shows a healthy heart. Harv Walmo phoned me about that. So I guess by now Bert Dell has taken a look in there.”

  “Where would he do it?”

  “Probably over to Crocker and Gain’s place, because they didn’t bother taking Gus to the hospital.”

  “Could you find out?”

  Nile stood up and selected a dime from his change. “Bert loves to do autopsies, and he loves to talk about them.”

  Nile was frowning when he came back to the table five minutes later, carrying two fresh steins. He sat down and said, “Not a hell of a lot of sense to it. Bruised and ruptured diaphragm. And the pericardium was ripped open and it looked to him as if the heart had been bruised somehow. With a congenital defect the pericardium can bust if you build up enough fluid pressure, but he couldn’t see any signs of anything like that. That pericardium is thin, tough, elastic tissue. And the bruise was along the bottom sector of the right ventricle. Bert said a funny thing. He said it was like Gus had fallen just exactly right onto something blunt, like a fence post.”

  “Could it be done with a fist?”

  Nile shook his head. “She’s a big girl but she couldn’t hit that hard. No man could either. Gus would have had to be in a slumped over position. Maybe some projecting object inside the car when it hit the tree.”

  “If that came second, why did he hit the tree?”

  “And he didn’t hit it hard, did he?”

  “Doctor, you told Sam Kimber Angie needed help.”

  Nile nodded abruptly several times. He combed his wild hair with his fingers and huffed on the lenses of his glasses. “Last year she worked for me, part time. Came in Saturdays to get the billing straightened out. The girl who was doing the billing left in a hurry. She clipped about two thousand dollars from me, according to th
e auditors, and left. I had a feeling about Angie. She was … well, she was too perfect. Smiling and fast and efficient. Always the same. As if you could lift her blouse in the back and find the place for the key to wind her up. Sometimes that kind of … imperviousness is a clue to extreme tension.”

  “Doctor, did she have a key to your office?”

  “Did she? Yes. She’d come in alone. Why?”

  “Never mind. What were you saying?”

  “I meddle. It’s my curse. I wanted to see how much adjustment she’d made. I had a clinical photograph, eight by ten, an adult male. Fine specimen. I put it with some papers I gave her. She came in and handed it back, saying it must have gotten in the papers by accident. She was as casual as a nurse. I didn’t take it. I asked her what it was. She glanced at it again. She said it was a picture of a man in flowing white robes. She wasn’t lying, Stanial. That was what she saw. Next time I saw Sam I told him she was a sick girl. No point in trying to tell her mother.”

  “Does she know anatomy?”

  “Some. She trained to be a nurse but she dropped out after a few months. Oh, you mean about Gus? In the back of my mind I’ve been wondering. Could I cause that damage? How? Physically he was in very sloppy condition. I could put him out, brace him in a flexed position, and possibly, just possibly, if I didn’t care if I tore him up a little, I could depress the diaphragm deeply enough to press my hand against the heart itself, stop it perhaps.”

  “She’s a strong girl.”

  “She’s not a monster, you know.”

  “But she could do a monstrous thing if she thought she had been told to do it. If she heard the right voices. And there’s a sort of symbolism to it. It has the mark of insanity.”

  “If it was done that way!”

  “What would make her talk about it?”

  Nile shrugged. “Sodium pentothal again. Hypnosis. I’d say she’s a good hypnotic subject. But it has to be at her request or at the request of the court, my friend. Hah?”

  “I feel sorry for her, Doctor.”

  “She’s an extreme case, certainly. But spare a little sorrow for the rest of them. More people than you could count have bitched up lives on account of this crazy culture. The Puritan heritage says that sex is nasty. Life says sex is constructive fun. So we go around smirking, sneaking, making it a nasty mystery. The most sex-conscious, sex-oppressed nation in history. I treat a lot of the by-products—frigidity, impotence, despair. And it’s the most tortured ones, the most disturbed ones, who want to scrub what they think is filth out of their own minds, but they can’t, so they want to censor everything they can reach because it makes them feel cleaner, and very righteous. Such a stinking fuss over the simple beautiful mechanics of fertilization. If clothes were against the law, we’d be cured in one generation. Hah?”

  Nile dropped him off back at his car, and at the motel desk he found a note from Barbara saying she was at the motel pool. There was heft and dazzle in the late afternoon sun, but the high pile of thunderheads across the eastern sky gave the day an odd light. There were small gusts of hot wind which rattled the palm fronds. All the metal chairs under the faded umbrellas were empty, and she was alone in the small pool, in a white cap and a yellow suit, gliding with slow efficiency back and forth the length of the pool, shoulders rolling slightly, hands slipping into the water cleanly. From time to time one foot would lift too high, and the hard chunking sound revealed the power of her stroke. She did not see him until he walked around to the end and waited there for her. Then she stopped and clung to the gutter, slightly winded, and smiled up at him, squinting in the light, shaking the water out of her eyes.

  “You’re pretty good,” he said.

  “Out of condition. But I wanted to do something exhausting.” She levered herself up into a sitting position on the apron and got to her feet. “And I saw a special on swim suits down the street. Three ninety-five.” She walked ahead of him to the table where she had left her towel and sandals, walking with the constrained and slightly knock-kneed stride of the woman who knows herself observed. She yanked the cap off and fluffed her brown hair. There was a pink cast of fresh sunburn over the ivoried smoothness of her round arms and legs.

  She dried her face and her bare shoulders and sat in the umbrella shade and looked up at him ruefully. “I talked an awful lot last night, Paul.”

  He moved the other chair into the shade and sat near her. “No need to feel apologetic.”

  “Not apologetic, exactly. Just sort of stupid and whiney.”

  “It was a bad day for you.”

  “Thank you for listening. And I want to stop feeling awkward with you. But I don’t know how, exactly. Too much self-exposure went on.”

  He smiled at her. “How much is too much? Would you feel better if I tried to even it up? I can make some juicy confessions.”

  “Paul, I didn’t mean …”

  “Take last night. The attraction is strong. Don’t tell me you haven’t sensed it. And you were on the ragged edge of a sort of emotional collapse. And I came close to giving you another problem, and I don’t think you could have coped.”

  “I … I don’t know.” She bit her lip. “But you didn’t.”

  “No. I didn’t. And after I got back to my place, I regretted it bitterly. What the hell, I said to myself. What are you trying to prove, Stanial? There it was and you walked away from it, and it won’t ever be that easy again.”

  “But I don’t …”

  “I am not a very nice guy, Barbara. Maybe what I am trying to do right now, instead of making you feel better, is trying to set you up. And that’s all I would want. No emotional obligations. No moral obligations. Just the simplest, oldest hunger in the world. Tip my hat and walk away. Thank you, m’am.”

  She looked at him with an oddly anguished expression, and in a barely audible voice said, “Maybe I’m not … worth any more than that.”

  “You’re worth so much more … I walked away.”

  She dropped her glance, and her posture in the chair had a look of meekness, almost of supplication. In the curious orange sunlight the droplets of water from the pool glistened on the fine-grained texture of her knees and thighs.

  “I’m not very valuable,” she said.

  “Don’t be such a fool!” he said irritably.

  She looked at him calmly and nodded, as though approving some inner statement. “Attraction, yes. I did sense that. And it doesn’t mean much, I suppose. But I guess it’s the only starting place people have. It flatters me, Paul. It’s nice to have you want me. I guess I need that kind of reassurance these days. I’ve felt like a drab for a long time. I haven’t liked myself very much.”

  “I like you.”

  “Which is just what I wanted to hear. And I like you, too. And that should be enough, I suppose. So I want to say okay. Let’s. What difference would it possibly make to anybody in the world? But I can’t be so … cold-blooded.”

  “I don’t want you to be. Damn it, Barbara, I was only …”

  She laughed and looked away. “You don’t want any involvement, and apparently I can’t get along without one. A rationalization? Is that what I have to have? It’s a lousy price to pay. A whore’s bargain, but maybe not quite as honest. But don’t be completely pessimistic, dear Paul. Maybe when this is over, I can sell myself the idea it would be a nice dramatic gesture, a touching farewell.”

  “Why do you do this to yourself?”

  She smiled directly into his eyes. “Because I’m a plain tiresome slob. Now sit still and let me work some of this off.” She snapped her cap on and went to the pool so quickly it was like escape. She dived cleanly. On these laps she drove herself, her body riding higher in the water, making her kick turns with a racing haste. He saw lightning in the east, forking down through the black sky under the thunderheads.

  When she came back she was panting and gasping. She half fell into the chair and leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Her torso in the yellow sheath suit swelled and collapsed
in the fast rhythm of her breathing.

  “Now …” she said. “Tell me … if you found out … anything new.”

  “I think I know who killed her.”

  She tensed and her eyes opened wide, and the hard surge of her breathing changed, faltered, continued again. But by the time he had finished all there was to tell, all the guesses and the conjectures and hunches, there had been more than enough time, many times over, for her to recover from the strenuous exertion. She was hunched over, her elbows on her knees, head tilted sideways, looking at him with a dazed, sick expression.

  “And that man, too?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “But not for the money.”

  “I think she took the money. But I don’t think it was the main thing. She thinks … it was a good thing to do, to kill them. And she probably had to kill Gable because he suspected her. She’s been very bold and very clever.”

  “But what will you do now, Paul?”

  “The autopsy is going to bother Sheriff Walmo. I don’t have a single specific thing to go on. Doctor Nile accepts it as a possibility, perhaps even a probability, but I don’t think anyone else in this area who knows her will be able to be suspicious of her. She’s such a … big, sunny, healthy kid. Sam Kimber can’t make himself believe it. I don’t know what I can do next. Look for the money. Try to trap her. I don’t know exactly. She’s dangerous. I know that when I look at her the next time I’m going to begin to doubt the whole thing. And that is what makes her especially dangerous.”

  “You can tell from Lu’s letter she thought there was something very odd about Angie Powell. She felt uneasy.”

  “So do I.”

  Barbara frowned and said, “Mr. Kimber would like to be certain, one way or another, wouldn’t he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He could lie to her, just to make sure, couldn’t he? If she killed my sister because she was having an affair with Mr. Kimber, what would she do if Mr. Kimber told her I was going to stay down here and live with him?”