“Neither did anyone else.”
She didn’t hear me. Her face had the look I had seen on it Thursday night, both frightened and expectant. A car stopped in the drive.
Chapter 32
I waited for Church with my gun out. He came into the doorway, bright-eyed and haggard under his Stetson. His hand went into the side pocket of his suit coat, which bulged with the shape of a gun.
“I thought that you would be the one,” he said.
“You should have shot me when you had the chance. I wouldn’t try it now, though. Your wife here scored a hundred in silhouette. I used to score ninety-nine in rapid fire.”
“I’m not competing, Archer. I don’t want your blood on my hands.”
“Let me see your hands.”
He held them out in front of him, palms up and empty. He winced when I took the gun out of his pocket. It was a blue steel revolver, a .38-caliber. The butt was suave from use. I twirled the well-oiled cylinder. It was fully loaded.
“Take it,” he said. “It’s the one you want.”
He looked from the gun to the woman. She had backed against the glass door to the patio. Her eyes were terrible green gashes in her still face. They overflowed, and I wondered who her grief was for. Herself?
“You told him, Hilda?”
She nodded dumbly.
He said to me: “You know, then.”
“Yes. Where have you been?”
“Out on the highway. I had a childish kind of idea that I could go away and leave it all behind, start over somewhere else.”
“So here you are.”
“Here I am. I realized that I couldn’t leave myself behind, that I’d have to go on living with myself no matter where I was. A cheerful prospect.” He was trying to be sardonic, to hold a style, but his raw pain showed through. “There’s more to it than that, of course. I couldn’t go away and leave Hilda to face these things alone. I’m guiltier than she is.”
She moaned. Her face was like a statue’s in the rain. “Brandon, let me go outside. Please? I can’t stand to hear you talk like that.”
“You won’t run away?”
“I promise.”
“You won’t hurt yourself?”
“No, Brandon.”
“All right. For a little while.” He turned to me as the glass door slid closed behind her. “She won’t leave the patio, don’t worry. She loves it there, and she hasn’t much time.”
“You still care for her?”
“She’s my child. That’s the hell of it, Archer. I can’t blame her, she’s not responsible. I’m the one who’s responsible. She acted under inner compulsion, hardly knowing what she was doing. I knew damn well what I was doing, right from the beginning. I went ahead and did it anyway. This is the payoff.”
He opened his large hands and looked down into them. “It really came Thursday night, when Kerrigan told me what she had done. He let out a few snide hints when we were at the motor court. I went to his house later, and he threw the whole thing at me. It was the first I knew of it. It was the first I knew that Anne was dead.
“I’m not making excuses for what I did. I don’t believe I would have done it, though, if I’d been thinking straight. He gave me a bad shock. I wasn’t prepared for it. The last I saw of Anne, you see, it was a sunny morning up at the lake, and we were happier than we’d ever been.” Bright droplets pimpled his forehead. He brushed at them impatiently. “God damn it, I’m falling into self-pity. It’s my vice.
“But it was like going through an earthquake that night at Kerrigan’s house. My whole life tilted up and fell on me. My girl was dead. My wife had killed her, and then she’d killed again. Kerrigan didn’t spare me anything, he said whatever he could think of to break my resistance. I didn’t really believe him until I questioned Hilda. But she admitted everything – everything she remembered.
“I couldn’t see any way out that night. I still can’t. I went out to the pass road and did what Kerrigan wanted me to do. You had it right, Archer.” The words came painfully from his grim mouth. “I relieved my men and let the heister go through, out of my county. It’s the thing I’m most ashamed of, out of all the things I have to be ashamed of.”
“He’s back in your county again.”
“I know. It doesn’t alter what I’ve done.”
I was embarrassed by the guns in my fists. I shoved them down into my jacket pockets, out of sight. My judgment of Church had been turned upside down in the last few minutes. He had broken some of the rules. His life had been disordered and passionate. But he was an honest man according to his lights.
“I’d have done the same,” I said.
“You’re not a sworn officer. And aren’t you changing your tune?”
“I was wrong yesterday. I retract what I said. Forget it.”
“I can’t forget the truth. I’ve been running around the countryside for the last forty hours pretending to enforce the law. Actually, I was looking for Anne. Kerrigan wouldn’t tell me where she was, it was another hold he had on me. Well, it’s over now. I suppose Westmore will be asking the grand jury for a formal accusation against me.”
“Not if I can help it. And I’m his main witness.”
He looked at me in surprise. “After what I’ve done?”
“After what you’ve done.”
“You’re an unusual man,” he said slowly.
“Double it. You’re the sort of conscience-stricken bastard who would get satisfaction out of public disgrace and maybe a term in your own jail. Naturally you feel guilty. You are guilty. You made some bad mistakes. The worst one you made was leaving Hilda at large after you knew that she’d committed murder. Kerrigan was no loss to anybody, but it might have been somebody else.”
“I know I shouldn’t have left her that night. Kerrigan forced me to: he made me go out to the pass. I should have taken her to the psychopathic ward. But I couldn’t then. My own mind wasn’t clear. I felt so wrong myself.”
His gaze moved past me to the glass door. Hilda was standing idly in the patio, staring at the white-flowered lemon tree. She seemed lost, as if she had wandered into someone else’s garden by mistake. Church made an inarticulate noise. He took off his hat and threw it at the wall and sat in an iron chair with his head in his hands. I sat down across from him.
When he uncovered his face, his eyes were not so feverishly bright. The lines in his face were deeper. His hands were shaking. He clasped them to hold them still, in a prayerful attitude. In spite of his rumpled business suit, he looked like a ravaged saint stretched on El Greco’s rack.
“Hilda’s going to spend a long time behind walls,” I said. “The place depends on whether or not she’s sane. Is she insane?”
“I don’t know what a jury will say. She’s emotionally disturbed, you can see that for yourself. She’s never been entirely normal since I’ve known her. It’s one of the reasons I married her, I think. Her life at home with Meyer was driving her insane, literally. Some men have a need to be needed. I’m one of them.
“I know now it’s more of a weakness than a strength, not a good basis for a marriage. It worked, though, for nearly ten years. If we could have had children, it might have worked permanently. Or if I hadn’t lost my will.” His eyes were on me, but they didn’t see me. He was deep inside of himself, probing for the truth he had to live by.
“I think will is just another name for desire. In the long run you can’t force yourself to will what you don’t desire. Or stay away from the things you really want.
“I wanted a son,” he said in a deeper voice. “She couldn’t give me one. The son I couldn’t have, all the other things I was missing out of life – they gradually wore me down. Our life together was empty. We tried to fill it with things, a new house, furniture–” he looked around the barren sunlit room “–but there was no fun in it. No love. I didn’t love Hilda any more, and I don’t think she ever loved me. She had too much fear in her heart to be able to love.”