In his apartment, lying on the couch in near-darkness, with but a single narrow shaft of light entering from his tiny alcove kitchen, Devlin slowly smoked a cigarette and stared at nothing.
The fireplace before him was cold and dry, its aged bricks looking stark and lifeless in their abandonment. On the table next to the couch, convenient to Devlin’s reach, rested a brandy bottle, half empty; the glass next to it, a heavily detailed goblet from Dublin, produced a faint hue of red from the syrupy residue that clung to its bowl. They would have made a pretty picture, the bottle and the glass, side by side as they were on the grained marble of the tabletop, had it not been for an unclean ashtray, cluttered with the leavings of Devlin’s chain smoking, which set near enough to them to spoil the effect with its ugliness.
Devlin’s face was fixed and unrelaxed, evidence that he was disturbed over the thoughts that were troubling him. His eyes were perhaps a little more narrowed than they would have been in ordinary concentration, and the line of his jaw more firm, steadier, than usual; all of which was due to the fact that what was on his mind at that moment involved not only the common element of trouble but also the uncommon element of the involvement of a friend: Todd Holt.
It was almost a certainty to Devlin, however unreal the proposition seemed, that Todd was somehow involved in the J. Walter Keyes case. To what extent exactly, he had not the vaguest notion. It might be only a superficial involvement, or it might be very complex and complicated; but there was no point at this stage in even speculating as to the degree or, for that matter, the reason behind it. Todd had changed: that much was certain. His ideas—his philosophy, if you wanted to call it that—seemed to have altered radically. Where in the past he had always voiced the most ardent respect for law and justice and the courts, he now, practically in one fell swoop, condemned them all, jointly and severally.
And those two friends of his: that psychologist Price, and that human calculator Barry Chace: those two, in Devlin’s opinion, were far from being ideal associates for even a mature person, much less an impressionable young man whose final standards had yet to be formed. Devlin wondered how Todd had come to know them. A case he had worked on, perhaps, or through mutual friends of Jan’s and his—
Even more important than that, Devlin carried the thought a step further, was how Todd had fallen in with Dr. Fox and the enigmatic Reverend Abraham O’Hara. Was it possible that they had some kind of hold on him, something that forced him to do their bidding: some dark, scandalous thing about Jan, perhaps, that Todd was concealing from her father—
Damn, he thought, abruptly sitting up, the thing was like a live bacteria in his mind: each thought fiendishly multiplied into half a dozen new ones. He snatched up the brandy bottle and half filled his goblet. Throwing its contents into his mouth, he held it there, letting it lie over his submerged tongue, feeling its bite slowly assault the sensitive inner lining of his cheeks until it burned too bitterly to retain. He swallowed, and immediately sucked in on the nearly gone cigarette he held, relishing the mixed tobacco-alcohol affect it created.
Abigail Daniels, he thought, was the key to the whole puzzle; she had to be. No one else served to even vaguely connect Keyes with the three men whom Devlin now strongly suspected were involved: Fox, O’Hara, and Holt. So she definitely was the link, the interlocking part that could group the other jumbled pieces into some sort of picture or pattern. But she was the one person he could not get to, the one source of information he could not tap, the one factor which, as long as she was in the custody of Dr. Damon Fox, he would have to work around.
Devlin drained his glass and set it down. With the fingers of both hands he roughly kneaded the temples of his head, where the thick feeling of a headache was beginning. Stuffy in here, he thought; he rose and crossed the room to open a window. The cool late night air drifted in, pleasantly engulfing him. Turning, he studied the tight little apartment, filled as it was with a smoky, brandy-laced atmosphere, the single shaft of light grown hazy and tired, the open bedroom door uninviting despite his weariness; and the fireplace, its bricks often a symbol of strength, of the quality of man, failing him now with its cold, tombstone-like countenance.
Devlin shivered once, briefly, and moved back into the room to a work-table, from the cluttered top of which he picked up an Irish woolen crewneck sweater and slipped it over his head. On a small desk next to the table laid his wallet, keys, notebook, money, and all the other things he habitually emptied from his pockets upon arriving home for the night. On impulse he picked up the wallet and keys and left the apartment.
It was cool and beginning a breeze when he got downstairs and slid behind the wheel of his car. The police radio came on automatically when he started the motor; he reached over to turn it off; he was in no mood at that moment to listen to its static announcements of violence. Guiding the car off the lot, he drove into the quiet night.
He drove for an hour, until it became obvious that neither the coolness streaming in on his face nor the steady motion of the car was going to dissuade the headache that seemed determined to plague him tonight. He eased the car to the curb in a wide residential street, a dark, quiet street with overhanging trees, and parked there to rest.
He had meant to lay his head back against the seat and close his eyes; to consciously let his body relax and hope that the combination of quiet and darkness and coolness would banish the headache. But instead, he sat with both hands on the steering wheel as if still driving, and stared out the open window next to his face at a large, moonlight-bathed house directly across the street.
It was, he knew without thinking about it, the residence of J. Walter Keyes.
The house where, on a night that now seemed a very long time ago, the whole affair had begun. Briefly he wondered why his subconscious had brought him there; why that subtle, all-powerful part of his mind had taken over back in his airless little apartment and sent him driving into the night. Did it guide him here because this was where the key to the puzzle lay? Or did it simply bring him back to her?
A picture of her focused among his troubled thoughts and swept them aside. The tallness of her came easily to his mind, as did the set of her wide shoulders and the lay of her blood-colored hair, and the way her lips parted—
He opened the car door and stepped out. A breeze caught the fine hair at the base of his neck and chilled him with a passing tickle, making him shiver involuntarily. He gently, quietly pushed the door closed and walked away from the car.
The house was dark from the front, with not a sign of light or movement in any of its windows either upstairs or down. The circular drive before it was empty of cars. The surrounding lawn, manicured to splendid perfection, covered the grounds like a taut cloak, disturbed only by a long, grotesquely rectangular shaft of light that split the dark continuity from the far side of the house.
Devlin moved across the drive and toward the spear of light as if it were a hypnotic beacon drawing him to it. He stepped through a hedge and past the thick base of an ancient tree, and in the quickness of a single step left the thick lawn behind and silently crossed a concrete slab of patio.
The light, he saw, came through an undraped glass door pushed halfway back behind a sliding screen. Its source was a large table lamp behind one section of a double couch in a room that looked to Devlin to be a small library or study of some sort.
On the couch, dressed in the same brocaded housecoat as the first time he had seen her, Jennifer Jordan Keyes lay reading.
Devlin remained for a moment in the shadows away from the light, watching the woman, studying the intense set of her face as she rapidly consumed line after line of the page before her. Her eyes, he noted, were narrowed, her lips tighter than they should have been, almost as if she were searching for some concealed thing that she would not find; as if she were trying to strip the book she held of some secret.
Moving quietly, Devlin let himself enter the light and stood next to the sliding screen.
“Miss Jordan,” he said. She sat up at once, half closing the book; her eyes widened at the sudden, unexpected sound of a voice.
“Who is it? Who’s there?”
“Devlin.”
She rose and walked in long strides over to the door, the ankle-length housecoat slapping at her legs with each step. At the door, she stopped and peered out hesitantly.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Devlin said.
“You didn’t,” she lied, boldly and coolly. She made no move to unlock the door, but merely stood, looking at him through the screen, making an obviously controlled effort to keep her eyes riveted to his.
“You’re not going to make yourself go through that again, are you?” Devlin said with quiet frankness.
“Go through what again?” she challenged.
“Staring at me until I force you to look away.”
Jennifer Jordan parted her lips to speak, then thought better of it and closed them again.
“No,” she finally said, after a long pause, “no, I’m not.” She reached out and unlocked the door, then turned immediately and walked back to the couch.
Devlin slid open the door just enough to step inside, and closed and locked it behind him. He followed her back to the couch where she had sat down and was looking up at him reservedly.
“I need something to cut the taste of brandy out of my mouth,” he said easily. “You don’t happen to keep any Irish whiskey in the house, do you?”
“Why don’t you see for yourself, Mr. Devlin,” she said icily. “The bar is right across the hall, the room you were in the other night.”
He nodded and walked over to the inside door, aware of but unmoved by her cold tone. “Anything for you?” he asked, almost as an afterthought.
“Nothing, thank you.”
When he returned a few moments later she was sitting in the same place, the same position, but he knew she had moved at least briefly because the book she had been holding was now on a table at the end of the couch.
“No Irish whiskey,” he said, indicating the glass in his hand, “but warm vermouth will do just as well. It’ll cut the taste of anything except blood.” He sat down in a chair opposite her. “Have you ever tasted blood, Miss Jordan?”
“No. Nor Irish whiskey either, for that matter. It’s rather cheap, isn’t it?”
“Irish whiskey or blood, Miss Jordan?”
“Irish whiskey.” Her mouth tightened ever so slightly.
“Only in price, Miss Jordan, not in quality,” he told her. “And only in price because Ireland is a very poor country.”
“Perhaps that’s why it produces such crude people,” she said, her voice warming with the insult.
“Perhaps,” Devlin agreed, ignoring the obvious meaning of her remark. He sipped some of the vermouth and rose to walk over to the table where she had put her book. It was face down, its spine turned away from him, so he had to pick it up to read its title.
“Psychopathia Sexualis,” he said, not looking at her. “Isn’t that rather elementary reading for a worldly actress like yourself?”
“What is it you want, Mr. Devlin?” she asked, casting aside all pretense of politeness. “Why are you here?”
“I’m not really certain why I’m here,” he said, putting the book back on the table and returning to his chair. “Something brought me here, something I haven’t been able to ferret out of my mind yet; perhaps it has something to do with your missing husband; perhaps it has only to do with you and what you and I both felt pass between us the other night.”
As he said it, brought it out into the open, he saw the tightness leave her face, saw the hint of flushness color her cheeks, saw her lips relax and part.
“That’s as much as I can tell you about why I’m here,” he continued. “As for what I want, I want you to trust me, believe in me, confide in me and be honest with me. I want you to stop being an actress and just be yourself.”
“I’ve tried that with people before,” she told him. “It never works. It didn’t even work with my own—” She broke off her words, biting down on her lower lip.
“Your own husband,” Devlin said, finishing the sentence for her. “Don’t bite your lip like that—”
“Why not? It’s my lip.”
“Your lips are very beautiful. They shouldn’t be bitten; not by you, anyway.”
She blushed slightly again and looked away. Her fingers moved nervously at the seam of the richly brocaded housecoat, then stopped suddenly and one hand reached up to touch her throat tentatively.
“You fancy yourself to be a very clever man, don’t you, Mr.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” Devlin admitted. “But I’m not trying to be clever with you. I wish you’d believe that.”
“Exactly what are you trying to be, then?” she asked, composing herself enough to face him again.
“Not anything really. Just your friend—if you want me for one.”
“And by what extraordinary stretch of the imagination did you decide that I wanted you for a friend?” she inquired aloofly.
“I didn’t decide it at all,” Devlin said quietly. “That’s for you to do. I only hope you decide as Jennifer Jordan the woman, not Jennifer Jordan the actress.”
“What makes you think one is different from the other?”
“I can see the difference in your eyes sometimes,” Devlin told her. “And I could feel it in your hand the night we met.”
“You’re quite a romanticist, aren’t you, Mr. Devlin?” Her voice softened ever so slightly.
“I suppose I am, about some things. Important things.”
“Like being oneself?”
“Yes. With people you like.”
“Do you like me, Mr. Devlin?”
“Very much. I’m sure you already know that. You must feel it, the same as I do.”
She looked away again and Devlin could sense her nervousness returning. There’s something inside her, he thought, some kind of dread that she wants very much to rid herself of, but doesn’t know how.
“Suppose I did stop acting,” she said, her voice growing tight and uncertain again. “Suppose I did do as you said, did just be myself; what makes you think it would do any good? What makes you think that things would be any better or any different? People don’t change the world, you know; the world changes people.”
“Sometimes people change themselves,” Devlin countered, “if they want to. ”
“You don’t know anything about me—” A tremble took over her voice.
“I will,” he said quietly, “when you tell me.”
“I can’t talk to you this way—across a lighted room—when I don’t even know you—”
She rose and stood for a moment, wringing her hands, looking about the room desperately, with fear in her eyes.
“There are things that can’t be said between strangers—between a man and a woman as unfamiliar to each other as we are—”
Her eyes darted here, there, avoiding Devlin’s steady gaze. She was visibly tormented.
“But I do need help—I need someone—I need someone familiar, not a stranger—”
Suddenly she stopped. Her hands stopped, and her darting eyes and the tremble in her voice. She grew calm, startlingly calm, and her whole body, her whole being, somehow projected it so that the room which an instant before had been electric with her panic, was abruptly swept clean of all tension.
Strangely serene, she reached to the lamp and turned it off. Moonlight appeared instantly from the undraped glass door through which Devlin had watched her; a dull, nearly phosphorus moonlight, almost unreal in its perfection.
She walked over to where Devlin sat and knelt before him and took the glass from his hand.
“This is the only way,” she said, in a voice now soft and placid.
She unbuttoned the housecoat and let it fall from her naked shoulders and hang precariously around her wide naked hips. She raised her hands to Devlin’s face.