There was despair in her voice, but he heard only the words. “More than ever now. There’s plenty of shots in the old locker. I’m planning to retire next year, after we settle the case and the estate. You and me, we can go anywhere we like, do anything we want.”
“Is this why you shot Grantland?”
“One of the reasons. He had it coming, anyway. I’m pretty sure he masterminded Jerry’s murder, if that’s any comfort to you – talked Carl into doing it. But it makes a better case without Grantland in it. This way there’s no danger that the Senator’s death will have to be dragged in. Or the thing between you and Grantland.”
Mildred lifted her face. “That was years ago, before my marriage. How did you know about it?”
“Zinnie told me this afternoon. He told Zinnie.”
“He always was a rat. I’m glad you shot him.”
“Sure you are. Uncle Ostie knows best.”
She let him have her mouth. He seemed to devour it. She hung limp in his arms until he released her.
“I know you’re tired tonight, honey. We’ll leave it lay for now. Just don’t do any talking, except to me. Remember we got a couple of million bucks at stake. Are you with me?”
“You know I am, Ostie.” Her voice was dead.
He lifted his hand to her and went out. She wedged a newspaper between the splintered door and the doorframe. Coming back toward the stairs, her movements were awkward and mechanical, as though her body was a walking doll run by remote control. Her eyes were like blue china, without sight, and as her heels tapped up the stairs I thought of a blind person in a ruined house tapping up a staircase that ended in nothing.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Gley was subsiding lower and lower on her bones. Her chin was propped on her arms now. The brown bottle lay empty at her elbow.
“I was thinking you deserted me,” she said with elocutionary carefulness. “Everybody else has.”
The blind footsteps tapped across the ceiling. Mrs. Gley cocked her head like a molting red parrot. “Izzat Mildred?”
“Yes.”
“She ought to go to bed. Keep up her strength. She’s never been the same since she lost that child of grief.”
“How long ago did she lose it?”
“Three years, more or less.”
“Did she have a doctor to look after her?”
“Sure she did. It was this same Dr. Grantland, poor fellow. It’s a shame what had to happen to him. He treated her real nice, never even sent her a bill. That was before she got married, of course. Long before. I told her at the time, here was her chance to break off with that Carl and make a decent connection. A rising young doctor, and all. But she never listened to me. It had to be Carl Hallman or nothing. So now it’s nothing. They’re both gone.”
“Carl isn’t dead yet.”
“He might as well be. I might as well be, too. My life is nothing but disappointment and trouble. I brought my girl up to associate with nice people, marry a fine young man. But no, she had to have him. She had to marry into trouble and sickness and death.” Her drunken self-pity rose in her throat like vomit. “She did it to spite me, that’s what she did. She’s trying to kill me with all this trouble that she brought into my house. I used to keep a nice house, but Mildred broke my spirit. She never gave me the love that a daughter owes her mother. Mooning all the time over her no-good father – you’d think she was the one that married him and lost him.”
Her anger wouldn’t come in spite of the invocation. She looked in fear at the ceiling, blinking against the light from the naked bulb. The fear in her drained parrot’s eyes refused to dissolve. It deepened into terror.
“I’m not a good mother, either,” she said. “I never have been any good to her. I’ve been a living drag on her all these years, and may God forgive me.”
She slumped forward across the table, as if the entire weight of the night had fallen on her. Her harsh red hair spilled on the white tabletop. I stood and looked at her without seeing her. A pit or tunnel had opened in my mind, three years deep or long. Under white light at the bottom of it, fresh and vivid as a hallucination, I could see the red spillage where life had died and murder had been born.
I was in a stretched state of nerves where hidden things are coming clear and ordinary things are hidden. I thought of the electric blanket on the floor of Grantland’s bedroom. I didn’t hear Mildred’s quiet feet till she was half-way down the back stairs. I met her at the foot of them.
Her whole body jerked when she saw me. She brought it under control, and tried to smile: “I didn’t know you were still here.”
“I’ve been talking to your mother. She seems to have passed out again.”
“Poor mother. Poor everybody.” She shut her eyes against the sight of the kitchen and its raddled occupant. She brushed her blue-veined eyelids with the fingertips of one hand. Her other hand was hidden in the folds of her skirt. “I suppose I should put her to bed.”
“I have to talk to you first.”
“What on earth about? It’s terribly late.”
“About poor everybody. How did Grantland know that Carl was here?”
“He didn’t. He couldn’t have.”
“I think you’re telling the truth for once. He didn’t know Carl was here. He came here to kill you, but Carl was in his way. By the time he got to you, the gun was empty.”
She stood silent.
“Why did Grantland want to kill you, Mildred?”
She moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. “I don’t know.”
“I think I do. The reasons he had wouldn’t drive an ordinary man to murder. But Grantland was frightened as well as angry. Desperate. He had to silence you, and he wanted to get back at you. Zinnie meant more to him than money.”
“What’s Zinnie got to do with me?”
“You stabbed her to death with your mother’s paring knife. I didn’t see at first how it was possible. Zinnie’s body was warm when I found her. You were here under police surveillance. The timing didn’t fit, until I realized that her body was kept warm under an electric blanket in Grantland’s bed. You killed her before you drove to Pelican Beach. You heard over Grantland’s radio that Carl was seen there. Isn’t that true?”
“Why would I do a thing like that?” she whispered.
The question wasn’t entirely rhetorical. Mildred looked as if she earnestly desired an answer. Like an independent entity, her hidden fist jumped up from the folds of her skirt to supply an answer. A pointed blade projected downward from it. She drove it against her breast.
Even her final intention was divided. The knife turned in her hand, and only tore her blouse. I had it away from her before she could do more damage.
“Give it back to me. Please.”
“I can’t do that.” I was looking at the knife. Its blade was etched with dry brown stains.
“Then kill me. Quickly. I have to die anyway. I’ve known it now for years.”
“You have to live. They don’t gas women any more.”
“Not even women like me? I couldn’t bear to live. Please kill me. I know you hate me.”
She tore her blouse gaping and offered her breast to me in desperate seduction. It was like a virgin’s, unsunned, the color of pearl.
“I’m sorry for you, Mildred.”
My voice sounded strange; it had broken through into a tone that was new to me, deep as the sorrow I felt. It had nothing to do with sex, or with the possessive pity that changed to sex when the wind blew from the south. She was a human being with more grief on her young mind than it was able to bear.
33
MRS. GLEY groaned in her sleep. Mildred ran up the stairs away from both of us. I went up after her, across a drab brown hallway, into a room where she was struggling to raise the window.