Archer - The Chill Part 13

About halfway up the pa.s.s road I came out into sunlight. The fog below was like a sea of white water surging into the inlets of the mountains. From the summit of the pa.s.s, where I paused for a moment, further mountains were visible on the inland horizon.

The wide valley between was full of light. Cattle grazed among the live oaks on the hillsides. A covey of quail marched across the road in front of my car like small plumed tipsy soldiers. I could smell newrnown hay, and had the feeling that I had dropped down into a pastoral scene where nothing much had changed in a hundred years.

The town of Indian Springs didn't entirely dispel the feeling, though it had its service stations and its drive-ins offering hamburgers and tacos. It had a bit of old-time Western atmosphere, and more than a bit of the old-time sun-baked poverty of the West. Prematurely aging women watched over their brown children in the dooryards of crumbling adobes. Most of the loiterers in the main street had Indian faces under their broadbrimmed hats. Banners advertising Old Rodeo Days hung limply over their heads.

Alice Jenks lived in one of the best houses on what appeared to be the best street. It was a two-storied white frame house, with deep porches upstairs and down, standing far back from the street behind a smooth green lawn. I stepped onto the gra.s.s and leaned on a pepper tree, fanning myself with my hat. I was five minutes early.

A rather imposing woman in a blue dress came out on the veranda. She looked me over as if I might possibly be a burglar cleverly creeping up on her house at eleven o'clock in the morning. She came down the steps and along the walk toward me. The sun flashed on her gla.s.ses and lent her searchlight eyes.

Close up, she wasn't so alarming. The brown eyes behind the gla.s.ses were strained and anxious. Her hair was streaked with gray. Her mouth was unexpectedly generous and even soft, but it was tweezered like a live thing between the harsh lines that thrust down from the base of her nose. The stiff blue dress that curved like armor plate over her monolithic bosom was old-fas.h.i.+oned in cut, and gave her a dowdy look. The valley sun had parched and roughened her skin.

"Are you Mr. Archer?"

"Yes. How are you, Miss Jenks?"

"I'll survive." Her handshake was like a man's. "Come up on the porch, we can talk there."

Her movements, like her speech, were so abrupt that they suggested the jitters. The jitters under firm, perhaps lifelong, control. She motioned me into a canvas glider and sat on a reed chair facing me, her back to the street. Three Mexican boys on one battered bicycle rode by precariously like high-wire artists.

"I don't know just what you want from me, Mr. Archer. My niece appears to be in very serious trouble. I talked to a friend in the courthouse this morning--"

"The Sheriff?"

"Yes. He seems to think that Dolly is hiding from him."

"Did you tell Sheriff Crane where she was?"

"Yes. Shouldn't I have?"

"He trotted right over to the nursing home to question her. Dr. G.o.dwin wouldn't let him."

"Dr. G.o.dwin is a great one for taking matters into his own hands. I don't believe myself that people in trouble should be coddled and swaddled in cotton wool, and what I believe for the rest of the world holds true for my own family. We've always been a law-abiding family, and if Dolly is holding something back, she ought to come out with it. I say let the truth be told, and the chips fall where they may."

It was quite a speech. She seemed to be renewing her old disagreement with G.o.dwin about Dolly's testimony at the trial.

"Those chips can fall pretty hard, sometimes, when they fall on people you love."

She watched me, her sensitive mouth held tight, as if I had accused her of a weakness. "People I love?"

I had only an hour, and no sure intuition of how to reach her. "I'm a.s.suming you love Dolly."

"I haven't seen her lately--she seems to have turned against me--but I'll always be fond of her. That doesn't mean"--and the deep lines rea.s.serted themselves at the corners of her mouth--"that I'll condone any wrongdoing on her part. I have a public position--"

"Just what is your position?"

"I'm senior county welfare worker for this area," she announced. Then she looked anxiously behind her at the empty street, as if a posse might be on its way to relieve her of her post.

"Welfare begins at home."

"Are you instructing me in the conduct of my private life?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Let me tell you, you don't have to. Who do you think took the child in when my sister's marriage broke up? I did, of course. I gave them both a home, and after my sister was killed I brought my niece up as if she was my own daughter. I gave her the best of food and clothes, the best of education. When she wanted her own independence, I gave her that, too. I gave her the money to go and study in Los Angeles. What more could I do for her?"

"You can give her the benefit of the doubt right now. I don't know what the Sheriff said to you, but I'm pretty sure he was talking through his little pointed hat."

Her face hardened. "Sheriff Crane does not make mistakes."

I had the sense of doubleness again, of talking on two levels. On the surface we were talking about Dolly's connection with the Haggerty killing but underneath this, though McGee had not been mentioned, we were arguing the question of McGee's guilt.

"All policemen make mistakes," I said. "All human beings make mistakes. It's even possible that you and Sheriff Crane and the judge and the twelve jurors and everybody else were mistaken about Thomas McGee, and convicted an innocent man."

She laughed in my face, not riotously. "That's ridiculous, you didn't know Tom McGee. He was capable of anything. Ask anybody in this town. He used to get drunk and come home and beat her. More than once I had to stand him off with a gun, with the child holding onto my legs. More than once, after Constance left him, he came to this house and battered on the door and said he would drag her out of here by the hair. But I wouldn't let him." She shook her head vehemently, and a strand of iron-gray hair fell like twisted wire across her cheek.

"What did he want from her?"

"He wanted domination. He wanted her under his thumb. But he had no right to her. We Jenks are the oldest family in town. The McGees across the river are the sc.u.m of the earth, most of them are on welfare to this day. He was one of the worst of them but my sister couldn't see it when he came courting her in his white sailor suit. He married her against Father's bitter objections. He gave her a dozen years of h.e.l.l on earth and then he finally killed her. Don't tell me he was innocent. You don't know him."

A scrub jay in the pepper tree heard her harsh obsessive voice and raised his own voice in counter-complaint. I said under his noise: "Why did he kill your sister?"

"Out of sheer diabolical devilment What he couldn't have he chose to destroy. It was as simple as that. It wasn't true that there was another man. She was faithful to him to the day she died. Even though they were living in separate houses, my sister kept herself pure."

"Who said there was another man?"

She looked at me. The hot blood left her face. She seemed to lose the confidence that her righteous anger had given her.

"There were rumors," she said weakly. "Foul, dirty rumors. There always are when there's bad blood between a husband and wife. Tom McGee may have started them himself. I know his lawyer kept hammering away at the idea of another man. It was all I could do to sit there and listen to him, trying to destroy my sister's reputation after that murdering client of his had already destroyed her life. But Judge Gahagan made it clear in his instructions to the jury that it was just a story he invented, with no basis in fact."

"Who was McGee's lawyer?"

"An old fox named Gil Stevens. People don't go to him unless they're guilty, and he takes everything they have to get them off."

"But he didn't get McGee off."

"He practically did. Ten years is a small price to pay for first-degree murder. It should have been first-degree. He should have been executed."

The woman was implacable. With a firm hand she pressed her stray lock of hair back into place. Her graying head was marcelled in neat little waves, all alike, like the sea in old steel engravings. Such implacability as hers, I thought, could rise from either one of two sources: righteous certainty, or a guilty dubious fear that she was wrong. I hesitated to tell her what Dolly had said, that she had lied her father into prison. But I intended to tell her before I left.

"I'm interested in the details of the murder. Would it be too painful for you to go into them?"

"I can stand a lot of pain. What do you want to know?"

"Just how it happened."

"I wasn't here myself. I was at a meeting of the Native Daughters. I was president of the local group that year." The memory of this helped to restore her composure.

"Still I'm sure you know as much about it as anyone."

"No doubt I do. Except Tom McGee," she reminded me.

"And Dolly."

"Yes, and Dolly. The child was here in the house with Constance. They'd been living with me for some months. It was past nine o'clock, and she'd already gone to bed. Constance was downstairs sewing. My sister was a fine seamstress, and she made most of the child's clothes. She was making a dress for her that night. It got all spotted with blood. They made it an exhibit at the trial."

Miss Jenks couldn't seem to forget the trial. Her eyes went vague, as if she could see it like a ritual continually being repeated in the courtroom of her mind.

"What were the circ.u.mstances of the shooting?"

"It was simple enough. He came to the front door. He talked her into opening it."

"It's strange that he could do that, after her bad experiences with him."

She brushed my objection aside with a flat movement of her hand. "He could talk a bird out of a tree when he wanted to. At any rate, they had an argument. I suppose he wanted her to come back with him, as usual, and she refused. Dolly heard their voices raised in anger."

"Where was she?"

"Upstairs in the front bedroom, which she shared with her mother." Miss Jenks pointed upward at the boarded ceiling of the veranda. "The argument woke the child up, and then she heard the shot. She went to the window and saw him run out to the street with the smoking gun in his hand. She came downstairs and found her mother in her blood."

"Was she still alive?"

"She was dead. She died instantaneously, shot through the heart."

"With what kind of a gun?"

"A medium-caliber hand-gun, the Sheriff thought. It was never found. McGee probably threw it in the sea. He was in Pacific Point when they arrested him next day."

"On Dolly's word?"

"She was the only witness, poor child."

We seemed to have an unspoken agreement that Dolly existed only in the past. Perhaps because we were both avoiding the problem of Dolly's present situation, some of the tension between us had evaporated. I took advantage of this to ask Miss Jenks if I could look over the house.

"I don't see what for."

"You've given me a very clear account of the murder. I want to try and relate it to the physical layout."

She said doubtfully: "I don't have much more time, and frankly I don't know how much more of this I can stand. My sister was very dear to me."

"I know."

"What are you trying to prove?"

"Nothing. I just want to understand what happened. It's my job."

A job and its imperatives meant something to her. She got up, opened the front door, and pointed out the place just inside it where her sister's body had lain. There was of course no trace of the ten-year-old crime on the braided rag rug in the hall. No trace of it anywhere, except for the blind red smear it had left in Dolly's mind, and possibly in her aunt's.

I was struck by the fact that Dolly's mother and her friend Helen had both been shot at the front door of their homes by the same caliber gun, possibly held by the same person. I didn't mention this to Miss Jenks. It would only bring on another outburst against her brother-in-law McGee.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" she said unexpectedly.

"No thanks."

"Or coffee? I use instant. It won't take long."

"All right. You're very kind."

She left me in the living room. It was divided by sliding doors from the dining room, and furnished with stiff old dark pieces reminiscent of a nineteenth-century parlor. There were mottoes on the walls instead of pictures, and one of them brought back with a rush and a pang my grandmother's house in Martinez. It said: "He is the Silent Listener at Every Conversation." My grandmother had hand-embroidered the same motto and hung it in her bedroom. She always whispered.

An upright grand piano with a closed keyboard stood in one corner of the room. I tried to open it, but it was locked. A photograph of two women and a child stood in the place of honor on the piano top. One of the women was Miss Jenks, younger but just as stout and overbearing. The other woman was still younger and much prettier. She held herself with the naive sophistication of a small-town belle. The child between them, with one hand in each of theirs, was Dolly aged about ten.

Miss Jenks had come through the sliding doors with a coffee tray. "That's the three of us." As if two women and a little girl made a complete family. "And that's my sister's piano. She played beautifully. I never could master the instrument myself."

She wiped her gla.s.ses. I didn't know whether they were clouded by emotion or by the steam from the coffee. Over it she related some of Constance's girlhood triumphs. She had won a prize for piano, another for voice. She did extremely well in high school, especially in French, and she was all set to go to college, as Alice had gone before her, when that smoothtalking devil of a Tom McGee-- I left most of my coffee and went out into the hallway. It smelled of the mold that invades old houses. I caught a glimpse of myself in the clouded mirror beside the deer-horn hatrack. I looked like a ghost from the present haunting a b.l.o.o.d.y moment in the past. Even the woman behind me had an insubstantial quality, as if her large body was a husk or sh.e.l.l from which the essential being had departed. I found myself a.s.sociating the smell of mold with her.

A rubber-treaded staircase rose at the rear of the hall. I was moving toward it as I said: "Do you mind if I look at the room Dolly occupied?"

She allowed my momentum to carry her along and up the stairs. "It's my room now."

"I won't disturb anything."

The blinds were drawn, and she turned on the overhead light for me. It had a pink shade which suffused the room with pinkness. The floor was thickly carpeted with a soft loose pink material. A pink decorator spread covered the queen-sized bed. The elaborate three-mirrored dressing-table was trimmed with pink silk flounces, and so was the upholstered chair in front of it.

A quilted pink long chair stood by the window with an open magazine across its foot. Miss Jenks picked up the magazine and rolled it in her hands so that its cover wasn't visible. But I knew a _True Romance_ when I saw one.

I crossed the room, sinking to the ankles in the deep pink pile of her fantasy, and raised the blind over the front window. I could see the wide flat second-story porch, and through its railings the pepper tree, and my car in the street. The three Mexican boys came by on their bicycle, one on the handlebars, one on the seat, one on the carrier, trailed by a red mongrel which had joined the act.

"They have no right to be riding like that," Miss Jenks said at my shoulder. "I have a good mind to report them to the deputy. And that dog shouldn't be running around loose."

"He's doing no harm."

"Maybe not, but we had a case of hydrophobia two years ago."

"I'm more interested in ten years ago. How tall was your niece at that time?"

"She was a good big girl for her age. About four feet and a half. Why?"

I adjusted my height by getting down on my knees. From this position I could see the lacy branches of the pepper tree, and through them most of my car, but nothing nearer. A man leaving the house would scarcely be visible until he pa.s.sed the pepper tree, at least forty feet away. A gun in his hand could not be seen until he reached the street. It was a hasty and haphazard experiment, but its result underlined the question in my mind.

I got up off my knees. "Was it dark that night?"

She knew which night I meant. "Yes. It was dark."

"I don't see any street lights."

"No. We have none. This is a poor town, Mr. Archer."

"Was there a moon?"

"No. I don't believe so. But my niece has excellent eyesight. She can spot the markings on a bird--"