Archer - The Chill Part 37

"Everyone breaks promises. I didn't intend to fall in love with Connie. It simply happened. I met her in a doctor's waiting room quite by accident. But I didn't turn my back on your sister. I never have. I've done more for her than she ever did for me."

She sneered at him with the arrogance of a second-generation aristocrat. "My sister lifted you out of the gutter. What were you--an elevator boy?"

"I was a college student, and an elevator boy by my own choice."

"Very likely."

He leaned toward her, fixing her with his bright eyes. "I had family resources to draw on if I had wished."

"Ah yes, your precious mother."

"Be careful what you say about my mother."

There was an edge on his words, the quality of a cold threat, and it silenced her. This was one of several moments when I sensed that the two of them were playing a game as complex as chess, a game of power on a hidden board. I should have tried to force it into the open. But I was clearing up my case, and as long as Bradshaw was willing to talk I didn't care about apparent side-issues.

"I don't understand the business of the gun," I said. "The police have established that Connie McGee and Helen were shot with the same gun--a revolver that belonged originally to Connie's sister Alice. How did Tish get hold of it?"

"I don't really know."

"You must have some idea. Did Alice Jenks give it to her?"

"She very well may have."

"That's nonsense, Bradshaw, and you know it. The revolver was stolen from Alice's house. Who stole it?"

He made a steeple of his fingers and admired its symmetry. "I'm willing to tell you if Mrs. Deloney will leave the room."

"Why should I?" she said from her corner. "Anything my sister could endure to live through I can endure to hear."

"I'm not trying to spare your sensibilities," Bradshaw said. "I'm trying to spare myself."

She hesitated. It became a test of wills. Bradshaw got up and opened the inner door. Through it I could see across a hall into a bedroom furnished in dull luxury. The bedside table held an ivory telephone and a leather-framed photograph of a white-mustached gentleman who looked vaguely familiar.

Mrs. Deloney marched into the bedroom like a recalcitrant soldier under orders. Bradshaw closed the door sharply behind her.

"I'm beginning to hate old women," he said.

"You were going to tell me about the gun."

"I was, wasn't I?" He returned to the sofa. "It's not a pretty story. None of it is. I'm telling you the whole thing in the hope that you'll be completely satisfied."

"And not bring in the authorities?"

"Don't you see there's nothing to be gained by bringing them in? The sole effect would be to turn the town on its ear, wreck the standing of the college which I've worked so hard to build up, and ruin more than one life."

"Especially yours and Laura's?"

"Especially mine and Laura's. She's waited for me, G.o.d knows. And even I deserve something more than I've had. I've lived my entire adult life with the consequences of a neurotic involvement that I got into when I was just a boy."

"Is that what G.o.dwin was treating you for?"

"I needed _some_ support. Tish hasn't been easy to deal with. She drove me half out of my mind sometimes with her animal violence and her demands. But now it's over." His eyes changed the statement into a question and a plea.

"I can't make any promises," I said. "Let's have the entire story, then we'll think about the next step. How did Tish get hold of Alice's revolver?"

"Connie took it from her sister's room and gave it to me. We had some wild idea of using it to cut the Gordian knot."

"Do you mean kill Tish with it?"

"It was sheer fantasy," he said, "_folie a deux_. Connie and I would never have carried it out, desperate as we were. You'll never know the agony I went through dividing myself between two wives, two lovers--one old and rapacious, the other young and pa.s.sionate. Jim G.o.dwin warned me that I was in danger of spiritual death."

"For which murder is known to be a sure cure."

"I'd never have done it. I couldn't. Actually Jim made me see that. I'm not a violent man."

But there was violence in him now, pressing against the conventional fears that corseted his nature and held him still, almost formal, under my eyes. I sensed his murderous hatred for me. I was forcing all his secrets into the open, as I thought.

"What happened to the gun Connie stole for you?"

"I put it away in what I thought was a safe place, but Tish must have found it."

"In your house?"

"In my mother's house. I sometimes took her there when Mother was away."

"Was she there the day McGee called on you?"

"Yes." He met my eyes. "I'm amazed that you should know about that day. You're very thorough. It was the day when everything came to a head. Tish must have found the gun in the lockbox in my study where I'd hidden it. Before that she must have heard McGee complaining to me about my interest in his wife. She took the gun and turned it against Constance. I suppose there was a certain poetic justice in that."

Bradshaw might have been talking about an event in someone else's past, the death of a character in history or fiction. He no longer cared for the meaning of his own life. Perhaps that was what G.o.dwin meant by spiritual death.

"Do you still maintain you didn't know Tish killed her until she confessed it last Sat.u.r.day?"

"I suppose I didn't let myself realize. So far as I knew the gun had simply disappeared. McGee might very well have taken it from my study when he was in the house. The official case against him seemed very strong."

"It was put together with old pieces of string, and you know it. McGee and his daughter are my main concern. I won't be satisfied until they're completely cleared."

"But surely that can be accomplished without dragging Let.i.tia back from Brazil."

"I have only your word that she's in Brazil," I said. "Even Mrs. Deloney was surprised to hear it."

"Good heavens, don't you believe me? I've literally exposed my entrails to you."

"You wouldn't do that unless you had a reason. I think you're a liar, Bradshaw, one of those virtuosos who use real facts and feelings to make their stories plausible. But there's a basic implausibility in this one. If Tish was safe in Brazil, it's the last thing you'd ever tell me. I think she's hiding out here in California."

"You're quite mistaken."

His eyes came up to mine, candid and earnest as only an actor's can be. A telephone chirming behind the bedroom door interrupted our staring contest. Bradshaw moved toward the sound. I was on my feet and I moved more rapidly, shouldering him against the doorframe, picking up the bedside phone before it rang a third time.

"h.e.l.lo."

"Is that you, darling?" It was Laura's voice. "Roy, I'm frightened. She _knows_ about us. She called here just a minute ago and said she was coming over."

"Keep the door locked and chained. And you better call the police."

"That isn't Roy. Is it?"

Roy was behind me. I turned in time to see the flash of bra.s.s as the poker in his fist came down on my head.

chapter 32.

Mrs. Deloney was slapping my face with a wet towel. I told her to quit it. The first thing I saw when I got up was the leather-framed photograph beside her telephone. It seemed to my blurred vision to be a photograph of the handsome old black-eyed gentleman whose portrait hung over the fireplace in Mrs. Bradshaw's sitting room.

"What are you doing with a picture of Bradshaw's father?"

"It happens to be my own father, Senator Osborne."

I said: "So Mrs. Bradshaw's a virtuoso, too."

Mrs. Deloney looked at me as if my brains had been addled by the poker. But the blow had been a glancing one, and I couldn't have been out for more than a few seconds. Bradshaw was leaving the hotel parking lot when I got there.

His light car turned uphill away from the ocean. I followed him to Foothill Drive and caught him long before he reached his house. He made it easy for me by braking suddenly. His car slewed sideways and came to a shuddering halt broadside across the road.

It wasn't me he was trying to stop. Another car was coming downhill toward us. I could see its headlights approaching under the trees like large calm insane eyes, and Bradshaw silhouetted in their beam. He seemed to be fumbling with his seat-belt. I recognized Mrs. Bradshaw's Rolls in the moment before, with screeching brakes, it crashed into the smaller car.

I pulled off the road, set out a red blinker, and ran uphill toward the point of impact. My footsteps were loud in the silence after the crash. The crumpled nose of the Rolls was nuzzled deep in the caved-in side of Bradshaw's car. He lolled in the driver's seat. Blood ran down his face from his forehead and nose and the corners of his mouth.

I went in through the undamaged door and got his seat-belt unbuckled. He toppled limply into my arms. I laid him down in the road. The jagged lines of blood across his face resembled cracks in a mask through which live tissue showed. But he was dead. He lay pulseless and breathless under the iron shadows of the tree branches.

Old Mrs. Bradshaw had climbed down out of her high protected seat. She seemed unhurt. I remember thinking at the moment that she was an elemental power which nothing could ever kill.

"It's Roy, isn't it? Is he all right?"

"In a sense he is. He wanted out. He's out."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm afraid you've killed him, too."

"But I didn't mean to hurt him. I wouldn't hurt my own son, the child of my womb."

Her voice cracked with maternal grief. I think she half-believed she was his mother, she had lived the role so long. Reality had grown dim as the moonlit countryside around her.

She flung herself on the dead man, holding him close, as if her old body could somehow warm him back to life and rekindle his love for her. She wheedled and cooed in his ear, calling him a naughty malingering boy for trying to scare her.

She shook him. "Wake up! It's Moms."

As she had told me, night wasn't her best season. But she had a doubleness in her matching Roy's, and there was an element of play-acting in her frenzy.

"Leave him alone," I said. "And let's drop the mother bit. The situation is ugly enough without that."

She turned in queer slow furtiveness and looked up at me. "The mother bit?"

"Roy Bradshaw wasn't your son. The two of you put on a pretty good act--G.o.dwin would probably say it fitted both your neurotic needs--but it's over."

She got up in a surge of anger which brought her close to me. I could smell her lavender, and feel her force.

"I _am_ his mother. I have his birth certificate to prove it."

"I bet you do. Your sister showed me a death certificate which proves that you died in France in 1940. With your kind of money you can doc.u.ment anything. But you can't change the facts by changing them on paper. Roy married you in Boston after you killed Deloney. Eventually he fell in love with Constance McGee. You killed her. Roy lived with you for another ten years, if you can call it living, terrified that you'd kill again if he ever dared to love anyone again. But finally he dared, with Laura Sutherland. He managed to convince you that it was Helen Haggerty he was interested in. So you went up the bridle path on Friday night and shot her. Those are all facts you can't change."

Silence set in between us, thin and bleak like a quality of the moonlight. The woman said: "I was only protecting my rights. Roy owed me faithfulness at least. I gave him money and background, I sent him to Harvard, I made all his dreams come true."

We both looked down at the dreamless man lying in the road.

"Are you ready to come downtown with me and make a formal statement about how you protected your rights over the years? Poor Tom McGee is back in jail, still sweating out your rap."

She pulled herself erect. "I won't permit you to use such language to me. I'm not a criminal."

"You were on your way to Laura Sutherland's, weren't you? What were you planning to do to her, old woman?"

She covered the lower part of her face with her hand. I thought she was ill, or overcome with shame. But she said: "You mustn't call me that. I'm not old. Don't look at my face, look into my eyes. You can see how young I am."

It was true in a way. I couldn't see her eyes clearly, but I knew they were bright and black and vital. She was still greedy for life, like the imaginary Let.i.tia, the weird projection of herself in imitation leopardskin she had used to hide behind.

She s.h.i.+fted her hand to her heavy chin and said: "I'll give you money."

"Roy took your money. Look what happened to him." She turned abruptly and started for her car. I guessed what was in her mind: another death, another shadow to feed on: and got to the open door of the Rolls before her. Her black leather bag was on the floor where it had fallen in the collision. Inside the bag I found the new revolver which she had intended to use on Roy's new wife.

"Give me that."

She spoke with the authority of a Senator's daughter and the more terrible authority of a woman who had killed two other women and two men.

"No more guns for you," I said.

No more anything, Let.i.tia.

end.