Free The Doomsters by Ross MacDonald

too strong for me. He broke away, and I ran after him. He wouldn’t come back.”
    “Did he show his gun?”
    “No.” She looked down at Carmichael’s gun. “Please, don’t use your gun if you see my husband. I don’t believe he’s armed.”
    “Maybe not,” Carmichael said noncommittally. “Where did all this happen?”
    “I’ll show you.”
    She turned and started toward the open gate, moving with a kind of dogged gallantry. It wasn’t quite enough to hold her up. Suddenly she went to her knees and crumped sideways on the lawn, a small dark-suited figure with spilled brown hair. The ball rolled out of her hand. Carmichael knelt beside her, shouting as if mere loudness could make her answer:
    “Which way did he go?”
    Mrs. Hutchinson waved her arm toward the groves. “Right through there, in the direction of town.”
    The young deputy got up and ran through the gateway in the picket fence. I ran after him, with some idea of trying to head off violence. The ground under the trees was adobe, soft and moist with cultivation. I never had gone well on a heavy track. The deputy was out of sight. After a while he was out of hearing, too. I slowed down and stopped, cursing my obsolescent legs.
    It was purely a personal matter between me and my legs, because running couldn’t accomplish anything, anyway. When I thought about it, I realized that a man who knew the country could hide for days on the great ranch. It would take hundreds of searchers to beat him out of the groves and canyons and creekbeds.
    I went back the way I had come, following my own footmarks. Five of my walking steps, if I stretched my legs, equaled three of my running steps. I crossed other people’s tracks, but had no way to identify them. Tracking wasn’t my forte, except on asphalt.
    After a long morning crowded with people under pressure, it was pleasant to be walking by myself in the green shade. Over my head, between the tops of the trees, a trickle of blue sky meandered. I let myself believe that there was no need to hurry, that trouble had been averted for the present. Carl had done no harm to anybody, after all.
    Back-tracking on the morning, I walked slower and slower. Brockley would probably say that it was unconscious drag, that I didn’t want to get back to the house. There seemed to be some truth in Mildred’s idea that a house could make people hate each other. A house, or the money it stood for, or the cannibalistic family hungers it symbolized.
    I’d run further than I’d realized, perhaps a third of a mile. Eventually the house loomed up through the trees. The yard was empty. Everything was remarkably still. One of the french doors was standing open. I went in. The dining-room had a curious atmosphere, unlived in and unlivable, like one of those three-walled rooms laid out in a museum behind silk rope: Provincial California Spanish, Pre-Atomic Era. The living-room, with its magazines and dirty glasses and Hollywood-Cubist furniture, had the same deserted quality.
    I crossed the hallway and opened the door of a study lined with books and filing cabinets. The Venetian blinds were drawn. The room had a musty smell. A dark oil portrait of a bald old man hung on one wall. His eyes peered through the dimness at me, out of a lean rapacious face. Senator Hallman, I presumed. I closed the study door on him.
    I went through the house from front to back, and finally found two human beings in the kitchen. Mrs. Hutchinson was sitting at the kitchen table, with Martha on her knee.The elderly woman started at my voice. Her face had sharpened in the quarter-hour since I’d seen her. Her eyes were bleak and accusing.
    “What happened next?” Martha said.
    “Well, the little girl went to the nice old lady’s house, and they had tea-cakes.” Mrs. Hutchinson’s eyes stayed on me, daring me to speak. “Tea-cakes and chocolate ice cream, and the old lady read the little girl a story.”
    “What was the little girl’s