Chapter 22

The Monster

The maid knocked at ten to make down the beds, and we hurriedly bundled Merrilee into the closet. While the maid worked, Tom stood in front of the closet door to prevent slipups. There weren’t any and, when she had left, I said, “You all have assignments. Merrilee, yours is to stay out of sight in this suite until a certain time, as I’ll explain. Tom knows what he has to do. Betsy and Twit-Twit are in charge of communications.”

“Which means?” Betsy said.

“Which means that at ten-thirty Tom and I begin a little poker game in the smoking room. With a number of other people. But after about an hour—around eleven-thirty—I will stand up, stretch, and rub my left eye. That’s the signal. One of you will be watching from outside on the deck. You will take turns watching, spelling each other every few minutes so you won’t be too noticeable.

“Meanwhile, Tom and I will have properly conditioned the people at the poker table. When you see my signal, you will immediately phone Merrilee here in the suite, and she will come up to the smoking room and walk in quietly to our table and stand there, saying nothing, but looking at everyone around the table solemnly. She will, in effect, be someone who has returned from the dead.”

“You mean it?” Merrilee asked.

“You will have risen from the sea, as far as anyone knows. Because everyone thinks you went overboard. That’s the effect we want. You’re an actress. Act it.”

She shivered. “All right. I’ll rise dead from the sea.”

“As a matter of fact, you could even wet your hair a little. And sprinkle a little water in your face. That’s all. We have a lot to do. Let’s go.”

“I like this,” said Betsy. “I’m going to reconnoiter right now, and spot a good window and a phone. Not that I know what I’m doing.”

“It’s just as well you don’t.”

Betsy left. Twit-Twit was watching me.

“How many players will we have?” said Tom.

“Better figure on both seven and eight. How are you at dealing from the bottom of the deck?”

“I’d rather do it the way you first suggested. That way we can be sure.”

“Okay. Gamble on it. The whole thing is a gamble. If we wind up with six or nine players, you can duck out to the men’s room and reshuffle.”

“Right.” He went into his room to lay out the decks on the bed.

From outside came the crash of a door. The Steak-Lovers were back from dinner. “Do anything you damned well please,” he was snarling when the door slammed. Then it slammed again, and I heard him stalk down the hall.

“What are you planning to do?” Twit-Twit said.

“Solve two murders. In fact, I think I already have. Now what remains to be done is to get a confession.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“I don’t think it will be. But it’s the only way I can figure to get the reaction we need.”

From the hall came yet another slam from next door. I listened to a woman’s heels punch the hall carpet as she moved quickly past, and then I opened our door a crack. Mrs. Steak-Lover was walking with angry quickness down the hall. Behind her, the door of their room was slightly ajar.

I whispered to Twit-Twit. “Do me a favor. Follow that dame and see what she’s up to. I’m going into their stateroom a moment. If she acts like she’s coming back right away, duck back and warn me. Get going.”

She didn’t pause to ask questions; she hurried down the hall. I fixed our door latch so I could get back in. No one was in sight. I went next door, stepped inside, and closed the door behind me.

The stateroom was in considerable disarray. Cosmetics were scattered on a dressing table, men’s and women’s shoes littered the floor, pants both male and female were draped on chairs, and the night stand next to one bed held a bourbon bottle and a used glass. A coffee table in front of the small sofa bore an open case of artists’ materials, carefully cleaned brushes, a full complement of casein paints, and a small canvas portraying an ogreish man’s face done in nauseating purples and ochres and signed, “Gladys.”

I went into the bathroom. There were two more bourbon bottles on the back of the toilet and some letters, suggesting where Steak-Lover did his reading. But the thing that caught my eye was a note, scrawled in lipstick, and stuck to the mirror over the wash basin. It read:

You will never make me do that again for you, you vile son of a bitch

I wondered what ‘that’ was, although I could guess. I glanced at the letters. They indicated that Steak-Lover’s name was Johnson, that he was a radio engineer for a broad-casting company in the Midwest, and that he had left undone something in connection with a studio hookup that he was supposed to have done before he left. “Give my best to your charming Gladys,” one letter concluded.

Suddenly I hated Steak-Lover, in a nasty, vindictive way. Perhaps it was the tension I had been under. Perhaps I am just a petty person.

Anyway, there was a pair of gaudy pajamas hanging on the bathroom door and, using his razor which lay on the wash stand, I carefully razored the legs almost completely from the seat, so they would fall apart when he put them on. I thought of the shoes in the other room. I neatly cut almost through all his shoelaces, so they would break when he pulled them tight.

I began to feel better. That is what frustration does; it turns men into beasts. And being a beast can be fun.

A motion at the door to the hall caught my eye. Someone was standing in it—Twit-Twit.

“Having fun?”

“You scared hell out of me. She coming?”

“No. She won’t be for quite a while, if I’m any judge.”

“Then stand there and watch out for her. I have a few more things to do.”

I’d seen some thumbtacks in the paint box. I took them, as well as hairpins from the dressing table, and spread them between the sheets in Steak-Lover’s bed. Into his bourbon bottle I poured a quantity of his antidandruff hair tonic.

Some suits and shirts hung in the closet. The vital button on a man’s shirt is the one that holds the collar together. With the razor blade I severed the threads of all of Steak-Lover’s vital shirt buttons to the point of near-breaking. With the handle of a paintbrush I pushed the toothpaste down into his toothpaste tube and squeezed shaving cream in.

“That’ll teach him not to brush after every meal,” I said.

Twit-Twit was alternately glancing down the hall and watching what I was doing with fascinated approval. She said, “Don’t overlook the bureau.”

“Right.”

In the bureau drawer there were several pairs of socks; I razored the toes from each and flushed the cut-off toes down the toilet so that he could not make his wife repair them. Spying his toothbrush, I dipped it in a bottle of underarm deodorant. His bottle of bay-rum after-shave lotion I emptied and refilled with bourbon, while Twit-Twit’s face filled with fiendish glee.

Finally I took his several fresh razor blades and, without removing them from their paper jackets, individually rubbed the edges against the mirror to dull them.

I looked around. It seemed I had done everything I could to make his world brighter. No matter what else happened, this day would not have been lived in vain.

One last inspiration occurred. I unscrewed half a dozen light bulbs from the wall fixtures and lamps, and tucked them between the mattress and springs of his bed, so when he lay down on it later he would be lulled to sleep by a pleasant series of artillery-like explosions.

I toweled off the objects on which I might have left fingerprints and asked Twit-Twit, “Where’d the wife go?”

“I thought you would never ask. She went for a walk. On the sun deck.”

“In this storm? She’ll get soaked and freeze to death.”

“I don’t think so. I followed her up. She met that funny little man who always wears white-mesh gloves. When I last peeked, they were striding the deck in rain and wind. His arm was very much about her. And her head was on his shoulder.”

Good for her. She was getting a little of her own out of life, in spite of her husband. I threw the towel on his pillow.

But the mention of her made me think of something else. Would he blame her for my undergraduate jokes?

I dipped a brush in the inkwell on the desk and printed on a sheet of the ship’s letter paper:

THE MONSTER WAS HERE

(SIGNED) THE MONSTER

I left it on a chair seat, in view of the door, and we got out and into our suite fast and without trouble.

“Now for the action,” I said.