Read Online The Doomsters by Ross MacDonald - Free Book Online Page A

out of the driver’s seat was wearing fuzzy tweeds. His hair and eyes had the same coloring as Carl, but he was older, fatter, shorter. Instead of hospital pallor, his face was full of angry blood.
    Zinnie came out on the veranda to meet him. Unfortunately her lipstick was smeared. Her eyes looked feverish.
    “Jerry, thank God you’re here!” The dramatic note sounded wrong, and she lowered her voice: “I’ve been worried sick. Where on earth have you been all day?”
    He stumped up the steps and faced her, not quite as tall as she was on her heels. “I haven’t been gone all day. I drove down to see Brockley at the hospital. Somebody had to give him the bawling-out he had coming to him. I told him what I thought of the loose way they run that place.”
    “Was that wise, dear?”
    “It was some satisfaction, anyway. These bloody doctors! They take the public’s money and—” He jerked a thumb toward Grantland’s car: “Speaking of doctors, what’s he doing here? Is somebody sick?”
    “I thought you knew, about Carl. Didn’t Ostie stop you at the road?”
    “I saw his car there, he wasn’t in it. What about Carl?”
    “He’s on the ranch, carrying a gun.” Zinnie saw the shock on her husband’s face, and repeated: “I thought you knew. I thought that’s why you were staying away, because you’re afraid of Carl.”
    “I’m not afraid of him,” he said, on a rising note.
    “You were, the day he left here. And you should be, after the things he said to you.” She added, with unconsciouscruelty, perhaps not entirely unconscious: “I believe he wants to kill you, Jerry.”
    His hands clutched his stomach, as though she’d struck him a physical blow there. They doubled into fists.
    “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You and Charlie Grantland?”
    The screen door rattled. Grantland came out on cue. He said with false joviality: “I
thought
I heard someone taking my name in vain. How are you, Mr. Hallman?”
    Jerry Hallman ignored him. He said to his wife: “I asked you a simple question. What’s he doing here?”
    “I’ll give you a simple answer. I had no man around I could trust to take Martha into town. So I called Dr. Grantland to chauffeur her. Martha is used to him.”
    Grantland had come up beside her. She turned and gave him a little smile, her smudged mouth doubling its meaning. Of the three, she and Grantland formed the paired unit. Her husband was the one who stood alone. As if he couldn’t bear that loneliness, he turned on his heel, walked stiffly down the veranda steps, and disappeared through the front door of the greenhouse.
    Grantland took a gray handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped Zinnie’s mouth. The center of her body swayed toward him.
    “Don’t,” he said urgently. “He knows already. You must have told him.”
    “I asked him for a divorce—you know that—and he’s not a complete fool. Anyway, what does it matter?” She had the false assurance, or abandon, of a woman who has made a sexual commitment and swung her whole life from it like a trapeze. “Maybe Carl will kill him.”
    “Be quiet, Zin! Don’t even think it—!”
    His voice broke off. Her gaze had moved across me as he spoke, and telegraphed my presence to him. He turned on his toes like a dancer. The blood seeped out from underneathhis tan. He might have been a beady-eyed old man with jaundice. Then he pulled himself together and smiled—a downward-turning smile but a confident one. It was unsettling to see a man’s face change so rapidly and radically.
    I threw away the butt of my cigarette, which seemed to have lasted for a long time, and smiled back at him. Felt from inside, like a rubber Halloween mask, my smile was a stiff grimace. Jerry Hallman relieved my embarrassment, if that is what I was feeling. He came hustling out of the greenhouse with a pair of shears in his hand, a dull blotched look on his face.
    Zinnie saw him, and backed against the wall. “Charlie! Look