“He talked like a doctor, did he?”
“I’d say so, yes. He used a number of technical terms that weren’t familiar to me.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was a big chap, as I said, thickly built, perhaps my age or older. He had quite an impressive face, dark eyes and a high forehead.” The last word, for some reason, made Ferguson wince and sigh. “But there’s no need to describe him. You can see him for yourself.”
“Where?”
“In the studio. He’s the man I killed. I shot him with George’s rifle.”
“Is anybody with him?”
“Yes. I left the woman, Molly.”
“We’d better get up there. You can tell me the rest on the way.”
We left his rented car on the shoulder of the highway and drove up the coast in mine. Apart from a few trucks, there was no traffic. He explained how he had got on a first-name basis, in no time at all, with Hollywood’s most incendiary blonde. Call it an explanation, anyway.
He’d gone back to bed, but not to sleep, and lay there trying to make some sense of the night’s events. It turned out they weren’t over. He heard a scrambling and plunging in the undergrowth below the studio, and went outside with his flashlight. “It was the woman,” he said. “She’d got away from the house somehow and crossed the canyon on foot. She’d had to wade the creek, and her slacks were soaked to the waist. Her shirt, even her face and hair, were streaked with mud where she’d fallen. In spite of this, and the rather wild look in her eye, she was extraordinarily good-looking.
“I put my arm around her and helped her up the bank. My heart beat foolishly high. Frankly, I’m susceptible to women. Perhaps she sensed this. She turned to me as I shut the door of the studio and laid her poor soiled head on my shoulder.
“ ‘You won’t let him take me back?’ she said. ‘You’ll look after me, won’t you?’
“Under the circumstances, I couldn’t very well refuse. No matter who or what she was, she was a woman in distress.”
I admired Ferguson’s old-fashioned chivalry, but his naiveté alarmed me. “Did she tell you who she was?”
“Later. Not right away.”
“Did she seem frightened?”
“Very much so.”
“Crazy?”
“Not at the time. I’m not a doctor, of course. Neither was the man Sloan. According to her, Sloan was a psychopath, which was probably how he picked up his psychiatric jargon. He’d been holding her captive there in the house for more than twenty-four hours.”
“How did he get her there?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Did she know him?”
“No.”
“How did she know he was psycho?”
“By his treatment of her. She – ah – unbuttoned her blouse and showed me the marks on her shoulders and – and – breasts. I was embarrassed and revolted.” He was still embarrassed. “I wanted to call the police, but she wouldn’t allow it. She said that if it got into the papers, it would kill her with the public. That was the expression she used. It was then she told me who she was and that she’d been – mistreated.”
“Raped?”
“Yes. The poor woman got down on her knees and begged me to protect her against that monster. I disliked to see her humble herself to me. I’ve always had a lofty conception of women–”
“Get on with it,” I said.
His face darkened, and his mouth set stubbornly. “I want you to understand my motives. I’ve always had a lofty conception of women, as I said. I lifted her up to her feet and promised her that I would lay down my life, if necessary, to defend her.”
“You swallowed her story whole, then.”
“I believed her implicitly, at the time. I realize now there was a quality of hysteria in her, in the entire situation, and it infected me. Then, too, I’m a passionate man. I hadn’t touched a woman in a long time, and there she was, half naked in my arms.”
“Did you make love to her?”
“I admit that some such thought may have crossed my mind. I repressed it firmly. At that moment I heard the sound of an automobile climbing up the canyon. Almost without conscious thought, I took the rifle down from above the fireplace. It was still fully loaded. When the man knocked on the door, I opened the door to him and showed him the rifle.”
“Same man?”
“Yes. He’d taken off his white smock and put on a topcoat. I didn’t like the look of him at all. I told him I would shoot him unless he went away. He laughed in my face, called me an idiot. He said I’d let myself be taken in by an insane woman, a woman out of touch with reality.
“I didn’t believe him, but I was profoundly uneasy. I could feel the blood pounding at various points in my body; in my groin and head, and in my right forefinger. My finger was on the trigger of the rifle.
“ ‘Put the gun down, you damn fool,’ he said to me. ‘What story has she been telling you?’
“ ‘She said that you’ve been holding her, that she’s an actress named Molly Day.’
“He smiled, showing his teeth. His teeth were bad, and he had a bad breath. It smelled like the odor of corruption. You judge people by little things like that, and by the words they use, sometimes a single word.
“ ‘That bag?’ he said.
“I raised the rifle and shot him through the forehead.”
“Because he called her a bag?”
“That was one reason. He was clearly no doctor. No professional man would speak of one of his patients–”
“Did he have a weapon?”
“I assumed he had. I didn’t look for it.”
“What happened after you shot him? What was the woman’s reaction?”
“That was what troubled me. It’s why I came to you. She insisted I mustn’t on any account go to the police. She said that if I did she would kill herself.
“She picked up the rifle where I’d dropped it, and huddled on the bed with it across her lap. I tried to talk it out of her hands, but she refused to let me come near her. Her wild talk made me suspect that she was beside herself after all. Her very posture was unnerving. She crouched on the bed like a lioness, guarding the blessed telephone.”
“And she’s still there?”
“I left her there. What could I do? I drove down to the highway with the idea of telephoning the police. Then I remembered you, Archer.”
I was sorry he had. It sounded like one of those cases that couldn’t be satisfactorily ended. My client’s medieval moral equipment had already shown signs of breaking down. He belonged in a novel by Walter Scott, not on the front pages of the Los Angeles press.
“Why did you have to shoot him, Colonel?”
“I didn’t have to. That’s the hell of it. I could have handled him – there are few men I can’t handle. But I deliberately shot him. I chose to kill him.”
“Why?”
His fingers pulled at one side of his long equine face. “Evidently I’m a cold-blooded murderer.”
The studio hung like a treehouse on the steep slope of the canyon. It had rained up here during the night. The dirt road was wet. Actual butterflies danced in flight across free spaces of air, or played a game of tag without any rules among the branches.
“Where every prospect pleases,” Ferguson said heavily, “and only man is vile.”
I grunted at him irritably and parked my car at the edge of the narrow road. A jaybird erupted out of a red-berried bush. He sailed up onto the limb of a fir where he swung like a Christmas tree ornament yelling curses. A dozen chickadees flew out of a nearby oak and settled in one further away from the jaybird. Apart from the redwood studio below the road and the big stone house in the distance, there were no traces of human beings, vile or otherwise.