Archer - The Chill Part 9

"They'll resent it if we don't."

"Will you? I'm afraid I'm feeling rather shaken."

"It's better if you do, Bradshaw. She worked for the college, and you can keep the scandal to a minimum."

"Scandal? I hadn't even thought of that."

He forced himself to walk past her to the telephone on the far side of the room. I went through the other rooms quickly. One bedroom was completely bare except for a kitchen chair and a plain table which she had been using as a working desk. A sheaf of test papers conjugating French irregular verbs lay on top of the table. Piles of books, French and German dictionaries and grammars and collections of poetry and prose, stood around it. I opened one at the flyleaf. It was rubberstamped in purple ink: Professor Helen Haggerty, Maple Park College, Maple Park, Illinois.

The other bedroom was furnished in rather fussy elegance with new French Provincial pieces, lambswool rugs on the polished tile floor, soft heavy handwoven drapes at the enormous window. The wardrobe contained a row of dresses and skirts with Magnin and Bullocks labels, and under them a row of new shoes to match. The chest of drawers was stuffed with sweaters and more intimate garments, but nothing really intimate. No letters, no snapshots.

The bathroom had wall-to-wall carpeting and a triangular sunken tub. The medicine chest was well supplied with beauty cream and cosmetics and sleeping pills. The latter had been prescribed by a Dr. Otto Schrenk and dispensed by Thompson's Drug Store in Bridgeton, Illinois, on June 17 of this year.

I turned out the bathroom wastebasket on the carpet. Under crumpled wads of used tissue I found a letter in an airmail envelope postmarked in Bridgeton, Illinois, a week ago and addressed to Mrs. Helen Haggerty. The single sheet inside was signed simply "Mother," and gave no return address.

Dear Helen It was thoughtful of you to send me a card from sunny Cal my favorite state of the union even though it is years since I was out there. Your father keeps promising to make the trip with me on his vacation but something always comes up to put it off. Anyway his blood pressure is some better and that is a blessing. I'm glad you're well. I wish you would reconsider about the divorce but I suppose that's all over and done with. It's a pity you and Bert couldn't stay together. He is a good man in his way. But I suppose distant pastures look greenest.

Your father is still furious of course. He won't let me mention your name. He hasn't really forgiven you for when you left home in the first place, or forgiven himself either I guess, it takes two to make a quarrel. Still you are his daughter and you shouldn't have talked to him the way you did. I don't mean to recriminate. I keep hoping for a reconcilement between you two before he dies. He is not getting any younger, you know, and I'm not either, Helen. You're a smart girl with a good education and if you wanted to you could write him a letter that would make him feel different about "things." You are his only daughter after all and you've never taken it back that he was a crooked stormtrooper. That is a hard word for a policeman to swallow from anybody and it still rankles him after more than twenty years. Please write.

I put the letter back in the wastebasket with the other discarded paper. Then I washed my hands and returned to the main room. Bradshaw was sitting in the rope chair, stiffly formal even when alone. I wondered if this was his first experience of death. It wasn't mine by a long shot, but this death had hit me especially hard. I could have prevented it.

The fog outside was getting denser. It moved against the gla.s.s wall of the house, and gave me the queer sensation that the world had dropped away, and Bradshaw and I were floating together in s.p.a.ce, unlikely _gemini_ encapsulated with the dead woman.

"What did you tell the police?"

"I talked to the Sheriff personally. He'll be here shortly. I gave him only the necessary minimum. I didn't know whether or not to say anything about Mrs. Kincaid."

"We have to explain our discovery of the body. But you don't have to repeat anything she said. It's purely hearsay so far as you're concerned."

"Do you seriously regard her as a suspect in this?"

"I have no opinion yet. We'll see what Dr. G.o.dwin has to say about her mental condition. I hope G.o.dwin is good at his job."

"He's the best we have in town. I saw him tonight, oddly enough. He sat at the speaker's table with me at the Alumni dinner, until he was called away."

"He mentioned seeing you at dinner."

"Yes. Jim G.o.dwin and I are old friends." He seemed to lean on the thought.

I looked around for something to sit on, but there was only Helen's canvas chaise. I squatted on my heels. One of the things in the house that puzzled me was the combination of lavish spending and bare poverty, as if two different women had taken turns furnis.h.i.+ng it. A princess and a pauper.

I pointed this out to Bradshaw, and he nodded: "It struck me when I was here the other evening. She seems to have spent her money on inessentials."

"Where did the money come from?"

"She gave me to understand she had a private income. Heaven knows she didn't dress as she did on an a.s.sistant professor's salary."

"Did you know Professor Haggerty well?"

"Hardly. I did escort her to one or two college functions, as well as the opening concert of the fall season. We discovered a common pa.s.sion for Hindemith." He made a steeple of his fingers. "She's a--she was a very presentable woman. But I wasn't close to her, in any sense. She didn't encourage intimacy."

I raised my eyebrows. Bradshaw colored slightly.

"I don't mean s.e.xual intimacy, for heaven's sake. She wasn't my type at all. I mean that she didn't talk about herself to any extent."

"Where did she come from?"

"Some small college in the Middle West, Maple Park I believe. She'd already left there and come out here when we appointed her. It was an emergency appointment, necessitated by Dr. Farrand's coronary. Fortunately Helen was available. I don't know what our Department of Modern Languages will do now, with the semester already under way."

He sounded faintly resentful of the dead woman's absenteeism. While it was natural enough for him to be thinking of the college and its problems, I didn't like it. I said with deliberate intent to jolt him: "You and the college are probably going to have worse problems than finding a teacher to take her place."

"What do you mean?"

"She wasn't an ordinary female professor. I spent some time with her this afternoon. She told me among other things that her life had been threatened."

"How dreadful," he said, as though the threat of murder were somehow worse than the fact. "Who on earth--?"

"She had no idea, and neither have I. I thought perhaps you might. Did she have enemies on the campus?"

"I certainly can't think of any. You understand, I didn't know Helen at all well."

"I got to know her pretty well, in a hurry. I gathered she'd had her share of experience, not all of it picked up in graduate seminars and faculty teas. Did you go into her background before you hired her?"

"Not too thoroughly. It was an emergency appointment, as I said, and in any case it wasn't my responsibility. The head of her department, Dr. Geisman, was favorably impressed by her credentials and made the appointment."

Bradshaw seemed to be delicately letting himself off the hook. I wrote down Geisman's name in my notebook.

"Her background ought to be gone into," I said. "It seems she was married, and recently divorced. I also want to find out more about her relations with Dolly. Apparently they were close."

"You're not suggesting a Lesbian attachment? We have had--" He decided not to finish the sentence.

"I'm not suggesting anything. I'm looking for information. How did Professor Haggerty happen to become Dolly's counselor?"

"In the normal way, I suppose."

"What is the normal way of acquiring a counselor?"

"It varies. Mrs. Kincaid was an uppercla.s.sman, and we usually permit uppercla.s.smen to choose their own counselors, so long as the counselor in question has an opening in his or her schedule."

"Then Dolly probably chose Professor Haggerty, and initiated the friends.h.i.+p herself?"

"She had every chance to. Of course it may have been pure accident."

As if we had each received a signal on a common wavelength, we turned and looked at Helen Haggerty's body. It seemed small and lonely at the far end of the room. Our joint flight with it through cloudy s.p.a.ce had been going on for a long time. I looked at my watch. It was only nine-thirty-one, fourteen minutes since our arrival. Time seemed to have slowed down, dividing itself into innumerable fractions, like Zeno's s.p.a.ce or marijuana hours.

With a visible effort, Bradshaw detached his gaze from the body. His moment of communion with it had cost him the last of his boyish look. He leaned toward me with deep lines of puzzlement radiating from his eyes and mouth: "I don't understand what Mrs. Kincaid said to you. Do you mean to say she actually confessed this--this murder?"

"A cop or a prosecutor might say so. Fortunately none was present. I've heard a lot of confessions, good ones and phony ones. Hers was a phony one, in my opinion."

"What about the blood?"

"She may have slipped and fallen in it."

"Then you don't think we should mention any of it to the Sheriff?"

"If you don't mind stretching a point."

His face showed that he minded, but after some hesitation he said: "Well keep it to ourselves, at least for the present. After all she was a student of ours, however briefly."

Bradshaw didn't notice his use of the past tense, but I did, and it depressed me. I think we were both relieved by the sound of the Sheriff's car coming up the hill. It was accompanied by a mobile laboratory. Within a few minutes a fingerprint man and a deputy coroner and a photographer had taken over the room and changed its character. It became impersonal and drab like any room anywhere in which murder had been committed. In a curious way the men in uniform seemed to be doing the murder a second and final time, annulling Helen's rather garish aura, converting her into laboratory meat and courtroom exhibits. My raw nerves jumped when the bulbs flashed in her corner.

Sheriff Herman Crane was a thick-shouldered man in a tan gabardine suit. His only suggestion of uniform was a slightly broad-brimmed hat with a woven leather band. His voice had an administrative ring, and his manner had the heavy ease of a politician, poised between bullying and flattery. He treated Bradshaw with noisy deference, as if Bradshaw was a sensitive plant of undetermined value but some importance.

Me he treated the way cops always treated me, with occupational suspicion. They suspected me of the misdemeanor of doing my own thinking. I did succeed in getting Sheriff Crane to dispatch a patrol car in pursuit of the convertible with the Nevada license. He complained that his department was seriously understaffed, and he didn't think road blocks were indicated at this stage of the game. At this stage of the game I made up my mind not to cooperate fully with him.

The Sheriff and I sat in the chaise and the rope chair respectively and had a talk while a deputy who knew speedwriting took notes. I told him that Dolly Kincaid, the wife of a client of mine, had discovered the body of her college counselor Professor Haggerty and reported the discovery to me. She had been badly shocked, and was under a doctor's care.

Before the Sheriff could press me for further details, I gave him a _verbatim_ account, or as close to _verbatim_ as I could make it, of my conversation with Helen about the death threat. I mentioned that she had reported it to his office, and he seemed to take this as a criticism: "We're understaffed, like I said. I can't keep experienced men. Los Angeles lures 'em away with salaries we can't pay and pie in the sky." I was from Los Angeles, as he knew, and the implication was that I was obscurely to blame. "If I put a man on guard duty in every house that got a crank telephone call, I wouldn't have anybody left to run the department."

"I understand that."

"I'm glad you do. Something I don't understand--how did this conversation you had with the decedent happen to take place?"

"Professor Haggerty approached me and asked me to come up here with her."

"What time was this?"

"I didn't check the time. It was shortly before sundown. I was here for about an hour."

"What did she have in mind?"

"She wanted me to stay with her, for protection. I'm sorry I didn't." Simply having the chance to say this made me feel better.

"You mean she wanted to hire you, as a bodyguard?"

"That was the idea." There was no use going into the complex interchange that had taken place between Helen and me, and failed.

"How did she know you were in the bodyguard business?"

"I'm not, exactly. She knew I was an investigator because she saw my name in the paper."

"Sure enough," he said. "You testified in the Perrine case this morning. Maybe I ought to congratulate you because Perrmne got off."

"Don't bother."

"No, I don't think I will. The Perrine broad was guilty as h.e.l.l and you know it and I know it."

"The jury didn't think so," I said mildly.

"Juries can be fooled and witnesses can be bought. Suddenly you're very active in our local crime circles, Mr. Archer." The words had the weight of an implied threat. He flung out a heavy careless hand toward the body. "This woman, this Professor Haggerty here, you're sure she wasn't a friend of yours?"

"We became friends to a certain extent."

"In an hour?"

"It can happen in an hour. Anyway, we had a previous conversation at the college today."

"What about before today? Did you have other previous conversations?"

"No. I met her today for the first time."

Bradshaw, who had been hanging around us in various anxious att.i.tudes, spoke up: "I can vouch for the truth of that, Sheriff, if it will save you any time."

Sheriff Crane thanked him and turned back to me: "So it was a purely business proposition between her and you?"

"It would have been if I had been interested." I wasn't telling the precise truth, but there was no way to tell it to Crane without sounding foolish.

"You weren't interested. Why not?"

"I had other business."

"What other business?"

"Mrs. Kincaid had left her husband. He employed me to locate her."

"I heard something about that this morning. Did you find out why she left him?"

"No. My job was to locate her. I did."

"Where?"

I glanced up at Bradshaw. He gave me a reluctant nod. I said: "She's a student at the college."

"And now you say she's under a doctor's care? What doctor?"

"Dr. G.o.dwin."

"The psychiatrist, eh?" The Sheriff uncrossed his heavy legs and leaned toward me confidentially. "What does she need a psychiatrist for? Is she out of her head?"

"She was hysterical. It seemed like a good idea to call one."

"Where is she now?"

I looked at Bradshaw again. He said: "At my house. My mother employed her as a driver."

The Sheriff got up with a rowing motion of his arms. "Let's get over there and talk to her."

"I'm afraid that won't be possible," Bradshaw said.