“Then you noticed the baby, your own bastard son. For some reason you couldn’t bear to leave him in the room with the dead woman. Perhaps you had the child’s safety and welfare in mind. I’d like to think so. At any rate you picked him up and carried him down the road to a neighbor’s car. The child got hold of a button on your coat which may have been loosened during your struggle with Dolly. It was still in his fist when the neighbor woman found him. The button has brought this whole thing home to you.
“When Dolly’s husband was indicted for her murder, his friend Ralph Simpson set out to track down its source. He probably knew of your affair with Dolly, and had a pretty good idea where the button came from. He went up to Tahoe and got you to employ him and eventually found the coat where you had hidden it. Perhaps he confronted you with it. You fired him and came back here. Instead of taking the coat to the police, as he ought to have, he followed you south with it. He may have had a dream of solving the crime by himself – Simpson was a failure who needed a success – or maybe the dream went sour in him and turned into money-hunger. Did he attempt to blackmail you?”
He spoke inarticulately into the pillow.
“It doesn’t greatly matter now,” I said. “It will come out at the trial. It will come out that you took a silver icepick from your house when you went to meet Simpson. I think it was no accident that the icepick was a wedding present from Dolly’s parents. It was certainly no accident that you buried his body in what had been Ronald Jaimet’s back yard. I don’t know what was going on in your head. I don’t believe you could tell me if you tried. A psychiatrist would be interested in what went on in that back yard when Dolly was a child.”
Blackwell cried out. His voice was thin and muffled. It sounded like a ghost trapped in the haunted house of his mind. I remembered his saying that he was dead and I pitied him as you pity the dead, from a long way off.
He turned his head sideways. His visible eye was open, but featureless as a mollusk in the harsh shell of his brow.
“Is that how it was?” he said. There seemed to be no irony in his question.
“I don’t claim to know all the details. If you’re willing to talk now, correct me.”
“Why should I correct your errors for you?”
“You’re talking for the record, not for me. Is that Harriet’s blood in the bathroom?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill her?”
“Yes. I cut her throat.” His voice was flat and unemotional.
“Why? Because she caught on to you and had to be silenced?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do with her body?”
“You’ll never find it.” A kind of giggle rattled out of his throat and made his lips flutter. “I’m a dirty old man, as Dolly said. Why don’t you put me out of my misery? You have a gun, don’t you?”
“No. I wouldn’t use it on you if I had. You’re not that important to me. Where is your daughter’s body?”
The giggle erupted again, and amplified itself into a laugh. Whoops of laughter surged up into his throat and choked him. He sat up coughing.
“Get me some water, for pity’s sake.”
For pity’s sake I started into the bathroom. Then I heard the furtive rustle of his movement. One of his hands was groping under the pillow. It came out holding a revolver which wavered in my direction and then held steady.
“Get out of here or I’ll shoot you. You don’t want to be the fifth one.”
I backed through the doorway.
“Close the door. Stay in there.”
I obeyed his orders. The bathroom seemed hideously familiar. The towel lay like a maimed thing in the sink.
Blackwell’s gun went off on the other side of the door. It was still in his mouth when I reached him, like a pipe of queer design which he had fallen asleep smoking.
29
I GOT BACK to Isobel Blackwell around noon. All morning county cars had bumped down the old blacktop road, and county men had tramped back and forth along the gangway to the beach house. I told my story, and Blackwell’s, till it grated on my tongue. If I had any doubts of Blackwell’s credibility, I suppressed them. I was bone-tired, and eager to see the case ended.
They trundled his body away. We searched for Harriet’s body in the house and under it, and up and down the beach. We went back to Malibu and examined her car. It told us nothing.
“The consensus is that Harriet’s in the sea,” I told Isobel Blackwell, “that he disposed of her body in the same way he disposed of the topcoat. And like the topcoat it will probably come in with the next big tide.”
We were in her sitting room. The drapes were closed, and she had left the lights off. Perhaps she didn’t want me to see her face; perhaps she didn’t want to see mine. She sat in a long chair and peered at me through the artificial gloom as if I was as monstrous as the things I had had to tell her. The side-to-side movement of her head, the gesture of incomprehension and denial, was threatening to become habitual.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Blackwell. I thought you’d rather hear it from me than get it from the police or read it in the newspapers.”
“Does it have to be in the newspapers?”
“It will be. You don’t have to read them. After you’ve gathered yourself together, you ought to take a long trip, put all this behind you.” My suggestion sounded feeble in my own ears.
“I couldn’t face a journey now.” After a pause, she said in a softer voice: “I thought horrors like this only occurred in Greek plays.”
“The horrors will pass. Tragedy is like a sickness, and it passes. Even the horrors in the Greek plays are long since past.”
“That’s not much comfort to me here and now.”
“It’s something to think about.”
“I don’t want to think.” But she sat locked in thought, as still as ancient marble, her mind transfixed by the Medusa fact: “How could he bring himself to kill Harriet? He loved her.”
“In a sick way. Where girls were concerned, even his own, he was a mother’s boy playing with dolls in the attic. Love like that can change to hatred if it’s threatened. You cut off the doll’s head–”
“He cut off her head?”
“I was speaking figuratively. Apparently he cut her throat with an old razor blade. He used the same blade to slash Campion’s painting.”
Her head had begun its sidewise movement again. “I can understand why Mark had to kill Dolly, or thought he had to. Once he’d used her, she threatened him by her very existence. Ralph Simpson was a threat, and even Ronald must have seemed to be. But Harriet was his own daughter.”
“I suspect she was another threat to him, the most intimate one of all. Did Harriet know about his affair with Dolly?”
“I’m afraid so. Mark had a horrible habit of confession. I don’t suppose he poured it all out, but he did say something to Harriet last spring. He may have felt it was bound to come out, and it was his duty to prepare her. It didn’t have the desired effect.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Harriet came to me with it. She said she had to talk to someone. She was greatly upset, much more deeply upset than I’d ever seen her. She regressed to a very low age level; she was literally bawling with her head in my lap. I didn’t think she should be encouraged to throw childish fits at her age. I told her she ought to be able to take it if I could.”
“How did she handle that?”
“She got up and left the room. We didn’t discuss the subject again. I felt that Mark had made a mistake in telling her. It didn’t improve the situation among the three of us.”
“When did this happen?”
“Some time in March or April. I imagine Mark was concerned about the birth of the child, and that’s why he spoke to Harriet, though he never said a word about it to me. Looking back, it does throw some light on what Harriet was feeling. Dolly had displaced her in Mark’s affections, as she thought. A couple of months later she attached herself to Dolly’s widower. Do you suppose she was aware of what she was doing?”