Mary Lindsay came into the office.
“There’s a Lieutenant Trant from Police Headquarters to see you.”
Quite unreasonably, the look of concern on her face annoyed me.
“Not to arrest me, I hope.”
That just slipped out. It was exactly the corny sort of boss-secretary bit which Mary and I had never gone in for. Was I already behaving self-consciously?
“Then shall I send him in?”
“Right away.”
I lit a cigarette, testing my hand. It was steady enough, though God knew why. Every second that had passed since Virginia’s call had been increasing the pressure of tension. How could this be happening so quickly? Surely not the cigarette-case. They couldn’t have traced its ownership yet, could they? And even if they had, it would be Virginia they’d be interviewing, not me. What could they want from me? Wildly—not believing myself at all—I thought: Perhaps it’s nothing at all. Merely a coincidence. Why not? Coincidences happen, don’t they?
Mary was there again.
“Lieutenant Trant.”
A man was walking into the office. He was tall and quite young, with a face which made no immediate impact. He didn’t look like a policeman at all. That was my first impression. Neither his clothes nor his way of moving, nor the almost affected casualness of his manner was right. He could have been—what? A Madison Avenue hot-shot? Not quite. A fashionable young Episcopalian minister? That was more like it. A top-brass churchman in charge of upper-crust souls who might, at that very moment, have been coming, impeccably showered, from a brisk set of squash with Hugo at the Club.
“Good morning, Mr. Denham. I’m Lieutenant Trant from Homicide. I hope I’m not disturbing anything.”
“Not at all, Lieutenant,” I said. “Sit down.”
He took off his coat, put it on a chair and seated himself across the desk from me.
I said, “Well, Lieutenant, what can I do for you?”
He sat looking at me. The very indefiniteness of his features—were his eyes blue or grey?—was oddly intimidating. He was smiling, but the smile, revealing very white teeth, suggested neither friendliness nor hostility. It was merely a smile, conveying whatever I chose to make it convey.
“Just a few questions, Mr. Denham. I think we should be able to clear this up fairly easily.”
If that remark was meant to put me at my ease, it failed.
“Mind if I smoke, Mr. Denham?”
“Of course not.”
As his hand moved to his pocket I had the chilling notion that he was going to produce Virginia’s case. He didn’t. He merely took out a packet and lit a cigarette.
“Mr. Denham, I believe I’m right in saying you know a night-club called the Club Marocain?”
There it was. In spite of all the painstaking preparations I’d made for this moment, I felt completely unarmed. Should I know the Club Marocain? Or shouldn’t I? Know it, of course. Whatever else he had up his sleeve he’d obviously found some connection between me and the club.
“Yes,” I said. “I know the Club Marocain. But what’s the Club Marocain got to do with me?”
Wasn’t that right? Wasn’t it the sort of question that someone ignorant of his mission would make? That, I was beginning to see, was the crippling difficulty of having something to conceal. You forgot your normal reactions.
In a voice of excessive politeness, the lieutenant was saying, “I apologise, Mr. Denham, if I sound a little mysterious. But I’m sure you’ll realise in due course that I am wasting neither your time nor mine.” He paused. “It’s true, isn’t it, that you were at the Club Marocain two nights ago?”
Before I had a chance to answer, the blank smile came. “That’s really an unnecessary question because I’ve already checked on the reservations. A table for two was ordered by a Mr. Lewis Denham and picked up at a quarter to twelve. Perhaps you’d be kind enough to tell me who you went there with?”
“Of course. I went with my wife.”
“Your wife?” One of the eyebrows made a faint upward curve. “There seems to be a little confusion here, Mr. Denham. While I was waiting I had a casual chat with your secretary. She happened to mention that you were a widower.”
Goddamn it, I thought. That goes to show.
“It’s not as confusing as it sounds,” I said. “Virginia and I were married in Mexico last week. I haven’t made the news public yet because I wanted to let my family be the first to know.”
“I see,” said Lieuteant Trant. He was gazing now not at me but at a large glass ashtray on the desk in front of him. It gave the ashtray an importance which was almost hypnotic. “Then I assume that the lady with the British accent who answered the phone at your apartment was your new wife, Virginia?”
Had it been my imagination or had he very slightly stressed the word “Virginia”? The cigarette-case. To V. from Q. Had it been a blunder mentioning her name at all?
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, well, I should be congratulating you, shouldn’t I?” He did look at me then. The ambiguous eyes were faintly quizzical. “Now, Mr. Denham, I’d be grateful if you’d tell me just what purpose you and your wife had in going to the Club Marocain?”
“Purpose?” I said. “What purpose does anyone have in going to a night-club?”
“You just went there to be entertained?”
“Of course.”
“I see,” said Lieutenant Trant and he paused again as if I’d said something very important which had to be pondered. All this, I imagined, was part of his technique. I found it both intimidating and annoying. “However, it’s true, isn’t it, that a short time after you’d arrived, you were joined by two other people, an older woman and a younger man?”
He must have talked to the waiter who served us. Even as tiny a deduction as that steadied me. At least I knew something.
“Yes,” I said, “although I wouldn’t say they joined us. They just happened to sit at the next table and they happened to be friends of mine.”
“You’d made no previous arrangement to meet them there?”
“None whatever.”
“And I imagine you’d have no objection to giving me their names? Merely to corroborate all this, of course.
Once again the need to appear a normal, innocent citizen presented excruciating problems. Wasn’t this oblique approach, which veiled his intentions in a mist, completely illegitimate? Could the police interrogate private individuals without letting them know what they were being interrogated about? Didn’t I, at this point, have to register exasperation, even belligerence?
As if he had uncannily read my thoughts, he said, “I apologise once again, Mr. Denham. I know how odd all this must seem to you and I’m sure you realise you’re under no obligation to co-operate whatsoever. I’m only hoping that you’ll be patient with me for just a little while longer.”
There was the smile again—the white, disarming smile which I was beginning to distrust. What could I do to pretend to be disarmed?
I said, “Naturally I’m curious to know what it’s all about, but if you don’t want to tell me, that’s perfectly all right.”
“I’m extremely grateful, Mr. Denham. Then will you be good enough to give me the names of your friends at the next table?”
“Gladly. The woman was Mrs. Sheila Potter, my former wife’s stepmother. The young man was a writer called Ray Callender.”
He took out a notebook. It was an old, beat-up notebook. It didn’t at all go with his elegance.
“And the addresses, Mr. Denham?”
I gave him Sheila’s address. He wrote it in the book and put the book back in his pocket.
“Now, Mr. Denham, wasn’t there someone else who at least for a brief period of time visited your table?”
I’d known for several seconds that this was bound to come. All that had gone before had been his devious method of leading up to this moment. He’d talked to the waiter. Remember that.
“Someone else?” Did my voice sound all right? “No, I don’t think there was anyone else.”
“No one at all? No one who perhaps just paused a moment to talk to you?”
“No, Lieutenant, I’m almost certain there wasn’t anyone. That is, you wouldn’t mean the pianist, would you?”
“Yes, Mr. Denham. I would mean the pianist.”
“A big man with reddish hair?”
“That’s right.”
“Then all this is something to do with the pianist at the Club Marocain?”
“Yes, Mr. Denham.”
It was amazing, I thought, how well I could do it now. “Then I’m sorry, Lieutenant, you’ve come to the wrong person. I’d never seen him before in my life.”
“Never?”
“Never. If you want to find out anything about him, Mrs. Potter’s the one to talk to. Not that she’d be much help either. He came over and introduced himself to her and she remembered having seen him playing at the Beach Club in St. John, Antigua.”
“And you had nothing to do with him at all?”
“Listen, Lieutenant, isn’t this getting a little monotonous?”
“Nothing whatsoever?”
“Nothing.”
“Nor your wife either?”
Watch it. “My wife? Now I come to think of it, she wasn’t even at the table when he came over. He talked to Sheila Potter for two minutes. No more, just passing the time of day. I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but that patience you’re so fond of talking about isn’t going to last for ever. What the hell is all this about?”
“All right, Mr. Denham. I’ll tell you what all this is about.” His eyes were watching me with the flat, unwinking intentness of a cat. “The pianist at the Club Marocain—whose name was Quentin Olsen—was murdered last night.”
“Murdered!”
“He was found just after two A.M. in an alleyway downtown without an overcoat on. It was obvious he hadn’t been killed there. The body had been brought from somewhere else and dumped. He had been shot, Mr. Denham, two times.”
I returned his stare, hoping that my dissembling blandness was still as effective as his.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Lieutenant. But what possible connection could this have with me?”
I had absolutely no idea what was going to come. Not the cigarette-case. I was almost sure of that now. If he did have it, he wasn’t connecting it with me. Then what? It was the total ignorance of the direction from which the blow would strike that made it so hard.
Casually—with the same studied nonchalance which had struck me from the first moment when he’d come into the room—Lieutenant Trant put his hand in his pocket and brought out an envelope. He opened the envelope. He was holding out to me a small, irregular piece of paper torn, it seemed, from the edge of a tabloid.
“Mr. Denham, since you say you only met Quentin Olsen once for a few moments at the club and since you say you had no dealings with him whatsoever, perhaps you can explain why this was in his breast pocket.”
I took the piece of paper. Written on it in large clumsy print were my address and my telephone number.
Of all my conflicting emotions, it was rage at my failure to have searched the body that predominated. I had only the vaguest notion of why Olsen should have my address in his pocket. But now, thanks to that one fatal slip on my part, everything that Virginia and I had done could go for nothing, for our plan had been based on the assumption that there would be nothing—not even the cigarette-case—to connect us immediately and directly with the murder. So long as that had been true, the fact that Virginia had been Olsen’s wife had represented only a vague and remote threat. Now all that was changed. Because of this little bit of paper, we were already at the head of Trant’s list of suspects. Unless I could make him lose interest in us—and how could I possibly do that?—wasn’t he bound to investigate until eventually he unearthed the marriage in Paris or—much easier—the Mexican divorce? Once he’d found out about either of them and about Olsen’s career as a blackmailing crook, Virginia’s position would be almost as hopeless as if we’d called the police in the first place. There would be nothing but our elaborate and perilous alibi to shield her.
Fighting this new anxiety, I forced on myself an even greater control. I handed the piece of paper back to him.
“Well, Lieutenant, I understand now.”
“Understand—what?”
“Why you’ve been questioning me.”
“I was hoping you meant you understood what your address was doing in his pocket.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but as to that I haven’t the slightest idea.”
Dimly I realized that was the first actual lie I had told, starting me irrevocably on a path from which there could be no turning back. The lieutenant was restoring the piece of paper to the envelope with nerve-racking caution.
“I’d be glad to hear it.”
“When he stopped at the table to talk to Mrs. Potter, did she introduce you?”
“As a matter of fact, she did.”
“But you didn’t give him your address?”
“I certainly didn’t.”
“But he got your name.” Lieutenant Trant was smiling again and this time the smile had a maddeningly factitious amiability. “There was nothing to prevent him looking in the telephone book and writing down your address, was there?”
“Nothing at all.”
The smile went. “But there again he would hardly have taken the trouble to write down your address unless he had some reason for wanting to get in touch with you again, would he?”
“It wouldn’t seem so.”
“But you can’t think of any reason he might have had?”
“None at all.”
“Of course, at this early stage, we know virtually nothing about what sort of a man Olsen was, so we still have no idea as to what sort of reason he would have for wanting to get in touch with people.” Lieutenant Trant gave a shrug. “We don’t seem to be getting very far, do we?”
“Nowhere, I’d say.”
“But I’m sure you admit, Mr. Denham, since he had your address in his pocket that it was logical to assume he was planning to pay you a visit.”
“Perhaps.”
“But he didn’t pay you a visit?”
“He didn’t.”
“Or try to get in touch with you in any way?”
“No way I know of.”
“Ah well. Now, Mr. Denham, it so happens that Quentin Olsen had a girl friend—a girl I’m sure you remember since she’s the principal attraction at the Club Marocain.”
“Esmeralda ?” His girl friend. Here at last was something, the first piece of new information Trant had given me.
“Esmeralda,” repeated Trant. “I went to see her before I came here. I showed her your address and told her your name and I must admit she said she’d never heard of you. But she did say that Olsen was out most of yesterday afternoon, that he came back to the hotel for a moment around four-thirty, told her he had to see someone and left just after five. She never saw him again and the medical examiner seems to feel he was shot sometime not long after that—say, five-thirty, six-thirty. It seems to me that the person he went to see was probably the person who shot him, who concealed his body and later on drove it downtown. At the risk of sounding monotonous again, Mr. Denham, you must admit that for a moment at least you seemed the most likely candidate.”
He paused as if he was waiting for me to make some comment. When I didn’t, he shrugged again. “Oh well, things are seldom as simple as that, are they? After ten years on the force I should be resigned to that fact by now.”
It was a most peculiar sort of duel, because he, just as much as I, was pretending that no duel existed. There had never for a single second been anything in his voice, his tone or his manner to indicate an accusation. Was it possible then that I had been imagining his deviousness? Had his interest in me after all been merely casual and had I been able to satisfy it? That was the undermining thing about Lieutenant Trant. You just couldn’t tell.
“Well, Mr. Denham, that seems to be that, doesn’t it?”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been more helpful.”
“On the contrary, you’ve been most co-operative, but I’m afraid I’ve been wasting my time and your time after all. So let’s get this over as quickly as possible. Let’s hear—just for the record—what you actually were doing yesterday between shall we say five o’clock and … oh well, from five o’clock on.” Be careful. Don’t let him put you too much at your ease. I gave him the detailed account of our actions which I had rehearsed with Virginia. To my relief it sounded quite plausible. He made no attempt to mterrupt me. He merely wrote it all down with quick, competent strokes in the notebook.
It was only after I’d finished and he’d closed the book that he looked at me. The smile was almost a grin.
“Well, Mr. Denham, that’s one of the most crowded evenings I’ve come across in some time. What an impressive alibi it would make. Too bad it’s all got to go to waste, isn’t it?”
Was I supposed to take that as a joke? He got up. He put on his coat. He came back to the desk, holding out his hand. I got up too.
“Good-bye, Mr. Denham.”
I took his hand. “Good-bye, Lieutenant.”
He crossed to the door. At the door he turned.
“I’m sorry to have aroused your curiosity without being able to satisfy it. I can imagine how tantalised you must be. But don’t worry, Mr. Denham. The moment I find out why Olsen had your address in his pocket, I’ll make a point of letting you know. Oh yes”—he took a card from his wallet and handed it to me—“in case you should want to get in touch with me … here.”
I was absolutely sure then that he hadn’t believed a word I’d told him. That didn’t imply that he actively disbelieved me. He was merely letting me know that if I’d been hoping to get away with anything, he was going to see to it that I didn’t.
He left the office and closed the door behind him.
I sat down at my desk again. Now that he was no longer actually in the room it was much harder to keep my anxiety under control. He would go to Virginia—of course he would—if only to check on my alibi, and he would use on her that same devious, intimidating technique of saying one thing and implying a dozen others. How should she handle him? It was desperately important to decide. Should she deny ever having heard of Olsen? That would have fitted our original plan, and if we could bank on Trant’s failure to discover the marriage in Paris, it was still the obvious way for her to play it. But what if he didn’t believe her any more than he’d believed me, what if he checked and eventually found out the truth through Mexico? Wouldn’t the lie then turn out to be far more dangerous than an admission now that at one time she had been married to Olsen but had lost touch with him long ago? The alternatives jarred against each other. The longer I struggled with them the more uncertain I became. Don’t wait any longer. Call her. Maybe the very fact of doing something would clear my mind.
I had an outside phone which didn’t go through the switchboard. I called the apartment. Virginia answered immediately.
“Has he gone?”
“Yes. But he’s coming to you. He didn’t say so, but I know he is. Look, it’s bad. He found my address in Olsen’s pocket.”
“Oh no! And the cigarette-case, too?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t mention it but that doesn’t mean a thing. He’s as tricky as they come and we’ve got to be terribly careful.”
I told her everything that had happened, concluding, “When he comes, give him the alibi just the way we rehearsed it. That’s what I did and it sounds all right. But that isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that he’s going to ask you if you knew Olsen.”
Quickly she said, “My God, he’s suspicious of us now. He’ll investigate. He’ll find out about the marriage in Paris.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Then—then what shall I say? Shall I admit it? But I can’t. How can I? He’ll discover what sort of a person Quentin was. He’ll be certain he came to blackmail me and … Oh, Lew, what am I going to do?”
It was only then that I realised how completely impossible our situation had become. A decision either way would be disastrous. Except for one thing—time. To admit she’d been married to Olsen would give us no time at all. But to stall—to try as long as possible to put off the inevitable—would at least give us time in which perhaps—just perhaps—I could find an escape hole in the net which was now about to encircle us. But how could I do that? By deflecting his interest from us, of course. By finding another suspect.
“Listen,” I said. “Don’t tell him.”
“But, Lew …”
“You don’t know a thing. You’ve never heard of Quentin Olsen. You never even saw him at the Club Marocain. Whatever he tries to trick out of you …”
I broke off as I heard the other phone in the apartment ringing.
She said, “Oh God, that’ll be him.”
I heard her footsteps clicking away. Soon she was back and her voice sounded on the edge of hysteria.
“He’s coming.”
“Right away?”
“Yes. Oh, Lew, are you sure that’s right?”
“Yes. You know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just give him the alibi. That’s all.”
“But if he produces the cigarette-case?”
“You never saw it, either.”
“But—but what if later on …?”
“To hell with later on. Somebody killed that man, somebody’s trying to frame you, and if Trant’s going to fall into a trap that he’s meant to fall into … then it’s up to me … Please. Believe me. Do what I say. Just do what I say, darling, and …”
Mary came in with some papers in her hand. She stopped by the door.
I said into the phone, “Okay, fine. Then I’ll be seeing you,” and hung up.
Mary said, “I’ve finally got the Denver contracts straight.”
It was absurd, with so much else to worry about, that I should feel embarrassed with her. There had never been anything romantic in our relationship. My clumsiness in having failed to tell her about Virginia involved no sort of betrayal. And yet I felt guilty and foolish when I said, “I guess it’s time to reveal my dark secret. That was my wife.”
“Your wife!”
For a moment her face was quite blank. Then she gave a quick, warm smile.
“Why that’s wonderful. I’m so glad. I do congratulate you.”
“I know you’ll like each other.”
“I’m sure we will.”
She had been much better at it than I. If, as a friend, she had felt slighted at the delayed confidence, there was no sign of it. I felt exaggeratedly relieved. And once she’d left, my self-assurance zoomed. Things weren’t as bad as they had seemed. At least I had a plan of action—a plan which obviously must start at the only available starting-point … Esmeralda.
I called the Club Marocain. It was not until the dial tone was actually sounding that I realised the risk of going to see her as myself. She would tell Trant. What was there to stop her? And how could I explain why the perfectly innocent husband of a perfectly innocent wife should be showing such interest in a crime which had nothing to do with either of them? When the Club Marocain answered, I said I was a reporter trying to get in touch with Esmeralda. They gave me the address right away. It was the Hotel Crystal, one of those seedy, anomalous hotels in the West Forties on the fringes of the theatre district. I called the hotel. Esmeralda was in her room. Although the thick, husky voice sounded dubious, she said I could come right over. Ten minutes later I was getting out of a taxi in front of the Hotel Crystal.
Esmeralda’s room was squalid enough in itself, but Esmeralda—or Esmeralda and Quentin Olsen together—had made it considerably more so. There were clothes of both sexes strewn around on the beds, on the only chair and even on the chest of drawers, which was also piled with an indiscriminate assortment of cold cream jars, junk jewellery and a single golden sequin-covered slipper.
Off stage, Esmeralda, who had seemed passably Arabian in her sleazy near-nakedness at the Club Marocain, was obviously no more a product of the Soukhs of Meknes than I. At a guess I would have placed her as a Czech or a Pole, certainly an Eastern European. Unexpectedly, however, she was far more attractive fully clothed. It wasn’t of course the Denham style of attractiveness. Hugo, with his impeccable taste for virginal princesses, would have winced from the full curves which shamelessly ripened the little black dress, and the huge black eyes which watched me with a suspiciousness at once stupid and wary. But given the right grandparents and the right convent, she could have competed with Tanya or any other beauty on her own ground.
I was a little thrown because I hadn’t expected in the urgency of my mission that I’d feel any personal reaction at all.
She made no effort to tidy the room and no effort to charm me, which broke every rule I’d ever heard of for an “artiste” handling the Press. She merely let me pass her into the room, closed the door behind her and said, “You come from the newspapers?”
“That’s right.”
“And you come to ask about Ollie?”
Ollie? Quentin Olsen. Ollie. She went to the chest of drawers and, with a hand made dazzling by three phony diamond rings, deftly pulled a packet of cigarettes out from under a pair of stockings as if that were her normal place for keeping them.
She lit a cigarette.
Without looking directly at me, she said, “Tell the newspaper I know nothing. I am a girl from a foreign place. It is bad for me now to be alone and to make my bread. But of what happened, I know nothing.”
That’s what she would have said anyway. She was still not looking at me but merely at some arbitrary point in front of her. Then, for the fraction of a second, the black eyes slid sideways, glancing at me, assessing me. I knew what that meant—money. But I was scared in my role of reporter of being too brazen about it. Wait until she made a more explicit demand.
I sat down on one of the beds. “Had you known Mr. Olsen long?”
“Known?” she echoed suspiciously as if by “know” she thought I had mean “known carnally”.
“I mean, just when did you meet him?”
She shrugged. “Oh, two years, three years, maybe. I dance for him in Paris—Zürich. Wherever he says. He says come to New York. I come.”
“So he got you the job at the Club Marocain?”
“He buys himself part of this club from another man. They want a sexy dancer. So Ollie says—come.”
For some reason my reactions had been delayed. It was only then that the panic hit. My God, she’d known Olsen for three years. Mustn’t she therefore at least have heard about the marriage to Virginia? What if she’d already told Trant? What if his whole interview with me at the office had been an elaborate hoax?
I said, “Since you’ve known him so long. you must know a lot about him. I mean about his private life. For example, was he married?”
It seemed like an hour before she answered.
“Was he married?” The sulky, wary gleam in her eyes was completely unchanged. “I do not know. I do not know things like that. Nothing. He did not tell me things like that.”
So to Olsen she had just been a body, something to sleep with when there was nothing better available, something to exploit off and on in the tawdry clubs?
I said, “Do you have any idea why anyone should have killed him?”
“How would I know in a country which is a strange land? This I say already to the police. Already I say it all to the police.” She did look at me then, but the huge black eyes, which could have been beautiful if there’d been any intelligence to brighten them, hardly seemed to be seeing me. They were veiled, sleepwalker’s eyes. Dope? Probably. Then, once again, there appeared in them a faint but unmistakable glint of avarice. “Why do I say what I know again for your newspaper? For what good?”
This was the moment.
“If you tell me something I can use,” I said, “I’ll give you twenty dollars.”
“Now?”
“No, later.”
“Twenty-five later.”
“Okay. Tell me everything you know about what Olsen did yesterday.”
“Already I tell the police.”
“Tell me.”
“About ten we get up from here. We have breakfast down below in the restaurant. After that he went out.”
“To do what?”
“How do I know? To see someone, he said.”
“Who?”
“How do I know? To see someone, he said.”
She put the cigarette into her full, unmade-up lips and, letting it droop there, puffed on it.
I said, “That’s not worth twenty-five bucks, is it?”
The beringed hand, palm upward, rather dirty, shot out. “Ten dollars now.”
“All right.”
I took a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet and dropped it into the cupped hand. She grabbed it and incredibly—surely people didn’t do that—tugged up the skirt of her dress and tucked the bill into the top of her stocking.
“I do not know who the person was but it was someone important.”
“How do you know that?”
“Ollie give me twenty dollars. Go out, he said, while I take a bath, and buy flowers. Twenty dollars for flowers? I say. Yes, he said, and spend every cent at some grand shop. So I go out to the big shop. What is this called? On Madison Avenue? Constance?”
“Constance Spry?”
“Yes. And I buy them. Twenty dollars for flowers. Ollie never spent so much for flowers and such things, not except for someone important. You are with someone and you notice what they do.”
What else, I wondered, had she noticed? That Quentin Olsen was a blackmailer? If she had, it was probable that she had been at least a tacit accomplice. It was highly unlikely she would admit it.
I said, “Do you know what he did when he went to see such people?”
“What he did?” She shrugged. “Speak with them, I suppose. I do not ask such things of men.”
The implacablity of her tone told me there was nothing to be gained from that direction.
“Did you see him again after he went with the flowers to these important people?”
“Yes. About four-thirty he come back. Only for a short time. Then he went out again.”
“To do what?”
“To see someone. Some man. The police tell me the name but I forget. Denning. Denton, something like that.”
It was as if Lieutenant Trant were there in that dreadful little room with us. Trant telling Esmeralda—not asking her—that at five o’clock Olsen had gone to see Mr. Denning, Mr. Denton, Mr. Denham—me! Trant in action before I had even met him! Once again I became acutely conscious of the invisible net creeping around Virginia and me and of the fact that this was the only place where I had any chance to pick up any sort of trail which might save us. If I failed here—then what?
I said, “So that’s all you know about yesterday?”
“That is all.”
I took a shot in the dark. “What about the day before?”
“The day before?”
“You did your act at the Club Marocain, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And after the show the two of you came back here?”
“No,” she said. “He did not come—not until it was later.”
“He was seeing someone?”
“Yes.”
I took another ten-dollar bill out of my wallet.
“Who was it?”
For a moment she hesitated, ignoring the bill.
“Who was it?” I repeated.
“This I do not tell to the police.”
I took out a third bill. She snatched them greedily.
“Who it was I do not know. But I saw them. They were waiting for Ollie at the door of the stage.”
“They?”
“I do not know the names. Ollie did not make me meet people. But I saw them. A young man who is blond. A woman, more older, very pretty with a fur coat and a blue dress.”
In the first second I felt only astonishment, then gradually excitement came. Sheila and Ray Callender waiting at the stage door for Olsen! Everything that had happened that night at the Club Marocain was changed. I remembered the look of thunderous disgust on Ray. Callender’s face as he’d glared after the departing pianist. “Bastard!” I remembered too Sheila’s lightning lapse into social gossip about the Ellerys. Of course! She’d been covering up what Ray Callender had almost given away. And everything else—her pose as the gracious lady slumming, everything—had been a cover-up to throw Virginia and me off the scent of what they were actually doing there. Ray Callender hadn’t been showing Sheila “how the other half live”. They’d gone to the Club Marocain because they’d had business with Quentin Olsen. Business? What business could it have been but Olsen’s business—blackmail.
Esmeralda was still holding the bills. She was watching me dubiously.
“Is all right? That is what your newspaper wants? This is enough for thirty dollars?”
Enough for thirty dollars? It was enough.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s fine.”
She did have some peculiar ethical standards of her own, because it was only then, when she was sure that the bills were legitimately hers, that she lifted her skirt again and stuffed them alongside the other.
“I tell the truth, mister. I only tell what I know, but I tell all the truth.”
Had she? It didn’t matter any more. Within five minutes I was out of that squalid little room and in the street.
As I walked east, I passed a hamburger bar. Exhilaration had made me ravenous. I went in and ate, thinking: Sheila! Now that I knew, it all seemed obvious. Hadn’t Sheila met Callender in Antigua—Oslen’s stamping ground? Hadn’t even I suspected there was something between the two of them? What could have been simpler for a practised blackmailer like Olsen than to have found out something embarrassing about them, something which in less special circles might have been dismissed as harmless enough, but something which to Sheila, the Queen of the Denham clan, would have seemed disastrously scandalous. Sheila Potter sleeping with a boy young enough to be her son? I could imagine the appalled expression on Uncle Gene’s face and the even more agonised curve of Hugo’s mouth, the teeth clenching around the Dunhill pipe. Yes, Sheila would have paid any amount of money to keep that from coming out.
So—Sheila and Callender! Then that brought the telephone call back into the picture, didn’t it? Sheila had called Virginia after all in spite of her denials. She had called her to lure her out of the apartment so that she or Callender could inveigle Olsen there, kill him and make Virginia their scapegoat?
I was out of the restaurant now in a taxi, going back to the office. Suddenly the exhilaration petered out. Perhaps it was the unreconstructed Denham in me, but the idea of my ex-mother-in-law as a murderess seemed almost too unlikely to be possible. Could a woman who travelled with her own sheets and still thought of a dinner without finger-bowls as a snack conceivably …? But there was Callender, wasn’t there? With him to egg her on and possibly to do the actual killing, why not? But … but … How could they have known that Virginia had been Olsen’s wife and was therefore a suitable scapegoat? There again—why not? They could have found out from Olsen. My spirits were rising once more only to be dashed when I thought of the key. How could Sheila or anyone else have got into the apartment? From the dim recesses of my mind, a memory came to rescue me. Maisie. Beth and I used to spend an occasional week-end with some cousins in Rhode Island who had had a Great Dane. “Darling, we can’t take Maisie. She’d be scared out of her poor little doggy wits.” Beth had left keys to the apartment around for various Denham hirelings to dog-sit in our absence.
I was in the elevator going up to my office now, feeling triumphant. To hell with Lieutenant Trant. It didn’t matter how tricky he had been with Virginia or how much he might eventually discover about her. We were no longer the only suspects. We didn’t even have to be the principal suspects.
The loophole in the net had been found.
I had a client coming to see me at two-fifteen. It was just after ten past two. Mary said, “Your wife called. We had a nice long chat. She wants you to call her back.”
“Fine,” I said.
When she left, I called Virginia. I was almost light-hearted. So was she.
“Lew, I can hardly believe it. It went like a dream. He just asked me to confirm your alibi. That’s all. That’s absolutely all.”
“He didn’t ask you about Olsen?”
“Not a word. Not a word about the cigarette-case either. Oh, darling, you had me so terrified. I was expecting the Ogpu at least, but he was sweet, simply angelic.”
Lieutenant Trant—angelic? Was it possible I had totally misinterpreted him? It was very doubtful indeed.
“And do you know what he said when he left? He said Quentin was half owner of the Club Marocain. That his partner was a gangster. That almost certainly it would turn out to be just another underworld killing.”
In spite of myself, her euphoria infected me. Maybe that was the solution. Maybe even my lurid suppositions about Sheila Potter had been nothing more than hysteria.
My client arrived. He wanted an oatmeal factory to be constructed in Wisconsin. As I discussed possibilities with him, I found myself forgetting Quentin Olsen for minutes on end.
It was just after five when I got through with my work and took a taxi home. As I nodded to the doorman and walked into the lobby, I was still in my fool’s paradise. One of the elevators descended. I got in. Just as the door was about to close, another man hurried in after me.
“Hello, Mr. Denham,” said Lieutenant Trant.
The elevator started to rise. He was wearing the same coat and the same smile. This time he was carrying a very new light-leather brief-case. There was absolutely nothing in his appearance or in his manner to indicate a threat. Once again he could have been some crony of Hugo’s from the Club, dropping in on a friend perhaps for a cocktail. And yet the little box of the elevator seemed suffocatingly impregnated with danger.
“I suppose you’re just coming home from work, Mr. Denham?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Quite a coincidence. I was hoping to have a few minutes with your wife. It’s not going to interfere with your evening plans, is it?”
“Not at all,” I said.
The elevator reached our floor. With Lieutenant Trant a few modest steps behind me, I went to my front door and opened it.
“Lew, is that you?”
Virginia was hurrying out of the living-room.
“Oh, Lew, I …”
She saw Trant then. Her control was admirable. The vague social smile couldn’t have been better done.
“Oh, Lieutenant, you’re here again. Come in. You will have a drink, won’t you? I’ve got everything out ready for Lew.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Denham,” said Trant. “A drink’s an excellent idea.”
He was standing in the hall, taking off his coat with the familiar maddening nonchalance. He threw it on a chair. He picked up the brief-case again and hovered.
“Come in,” said Virginia. “Both of you.”
She made us drinks, chattering, I thought, in just the right way, not adopting a false personality but presenting her own at its most relaxed. Was I doing it as well? Or was the tension in me showing?
Lieutenant Trant took his martini and sat down on the arm of a chair only a few feet from the patch on the carpet which we’d scrubbed the night before.
“I apologise, Mrs Denham. I’m sure you didn’t expect me back so soon.”
“That’s perfectly all right, Lieutenant. What is it you want?”
Virginia came over and sat down on the couch with me. Was that a mistake? Did it make us too openly in alliance against him?
Lieutenant Trant took a sip of his martini. He looked around for a place to put down the glass. As he did so, I noticed to my horror that the neat little pile of black buttons which Virginia had cut off Olsen’s coat was still lying there beside his chair. I didn’t dare look at my wife, but I could tell from the stiffening of her body at my side that she had seen them too.
For the fraction of a second, Trant hesitated, then he put the glass down on the table. His hand, brushing against the pile of buttons, sent them scattering.
“Oops.”
He glanced down and then very casually gathered the buttons up, rearranging them into their original neat pile.
“Now, Mrs Denham …”
He broke the sentence off. Had the buttons given anything away? Surely not. Surely no one could have deduced anything sinister from a little pile of buttons. It was all right. It …
Lieutenant Trant had picked up the brief-case from his lap. He flicked open the zipper.
“You’ll think this rather peculiar, I’m sure, Mrs Denham, but policemen always pride themselves on their hunches. Usually, of course, with no justification at all.”
His hand went into the brief-case. I knew what was coming if only because by then I knew that I had been fatuous even for a moment to have underestimated Lieutenant Trant. As his hand came out of the brief-case, there was a gleam of metal. Then Virginia’s cigarette-case with its octagonally cut central ruby was lying in his palm.
“I was wondering, Mrs. Denham, if you’d ever seen this before.”
It was his trickiness almost more than the danger that shook me. He’d had the case all along. He’d come both to me and to Virginia, blandly concealing the fact, producing it only at the moment that in his devious mind must have seemed the most effective. He was holding the case out to Virginia. Don’t worry, I told myself. We had planned for this. Virginia knew what to say. She took the case in a perfectly steady hand. She was examining it with perfectly natural curiosity.
“Why, no, Lieutenant, I don’t think …”
“Open it, Mrs. Denham. Read the inscription on the inside of the lid.
Virginia opened the lid. She held the case quite far away and then almost up to her nose, bringing a vivid memory of that other time when she’d taken from me the photograph I’d found in Olsen’s wallet.
“To V.,” she said. “Gibraltar may tumble, but, Oh, my dear … Q. That’s what it says.”
“I know what it says.”
Virginia closed the case. She dropped it in her lap, smiling in mild bewilderment at Trant.
“No, Lieutenant. I’m very sorry but it means nothing to me at all.”
“V., Mrs. Denham. Q. is for Quentin Olsen, the pianist from the Club Marocain who was killed. But V.?” Trant gave a little shrug. “I know this is a wild shot in the dark, but your name’s Virginia, isn’t it?”
Until that moment Lieutenant Trant had managed to give me the uncanny impression of omniscience. Suddenly I wasn’t afraid of him any longer because there’d been a definite smugness in his voice when he’d come out with that. So that was all he had to go on. And that was the extent of his cleverness—a trite deduction which anyone, even the flattest-footed cop, could have made.
“Why, yes,” said Virginia, “my name’s Virginia. But … well, it’s a fairly common name, isn’t it? And then what about the Violas, the Veras, the Veronicas, the Violets?”
“Of course. I’m perfectly aware of all that.” Lieutenant Trant looked almost exaggeratedly crestfallen. “So you can’t help me about this case in any way?”
“No,” said Virginia, “I’m afraid I can’t.”
She handed the case back to him. He took it and sat passing it meditatively from one hand to the other.
“Really, Mrs. Denham, this is rather odd. You see, I’ve just been checking on your little pleasure jaunt to the Club Marocain two nights ago. I showed this case—which incidentally was found in the dead man’s pocket—to Mrs. Potter. She claims it belongs to you. She says she actually had it in her hand at the Club Marocain. She particularly remembers admiring the way the central ruby was cut. How is it, Mrs. Denham, that Mrs. Potter could be so completely mistaken?”
The sound of his voice hadn’t changed at all. There was nothing except the actual words themselves to indicate that he had completely outwitted us. As always, it seemed, the blow had come from the least expected direction. Of course Sheila had handled the case at the Club Marocain. Why, oh why, hadn’t I remembered that damning fact last night when there had still been a chance to retrieve it? Well, it had happened now and, even in my despair, I felt the faintest hint of relief that the terrifying game of double bluff was over. We had lost, but at least we had been freed from the excruciating nervous tension of evasions, lies and counter-lies. At last Lieutenant Trant would come out into the open. He would accuse Virginia, and I, thanks to Esmeralda, could force him to deflect at least some suspicion to Sheila.
It was at Virginia that I looked, not the lieutenant. To my astonishment, as she returned his gaze, she was revealing no visible signs of discomposure. Then, very slowly, her mouth moved in a small, rueful smile.
“Oh dear, Lieutenant, I didn’t get away with that, did I?”
“I’m glad you admit it, Mrs. Denham.”
“Of course I admit it.” Virginia turned from him, putting her hand lightly on my arm. “Lew darling, you must have thought I was mad when you saw me brazenly denying my own cigarette-case. It was awfully sweet of you not to give me away. Heaven knows what you must have been thinking.” She turned back to Trant. “And heaven knows, Lieutenant, what you’re thinking now.”
“Heaven probably does know, Mrs. Denham. But I also suspect you know too.”
“Oh yes. I see now how idiotic I was this morning. I should have come out with everything then. In fact, I almost did, but … well, it seemed so dreadfully embarrassing that I’m afraid I shirked it. Not so much because of you as because of my husband.”
Her hand moved down my arm and her fingers curled around mine. “Lew darling, please don’t say anything for a moment. Just listen and try to understand. I don’t blame you if you don’t, but try.”
I hadn’t the slightest idea of what was in her mind. I only knew that, unlike me, she wasn’t resigned to defeat yet. I sat watching her, very taut, hardly daring to hope.
“Well, Lieutenant, there’s no need to tell you I was less than frank this morning, is there? Of course I knew Quentin Olsen. But when you told me he’d been murdered, it was far more awkward for me than you probably realise even now. You see, at one time I was married to him and I’d never told my husband.”
Once again the quick, contrite smile had shifted to me. I was beginning to see.
“Lew, I meant to tell you dozens of times. Honestly I did, but …” She turned to Trant. “I believe you know we’ve only been married a week and it’s less than a month since we met. It may seem odd to you that I’ve told Lew practically nothing about my life, but when you’re in love, when everything seems almost too good to be true, you’re terrified of breaking the spell. I had every intention of letting him know about Quentin, but somehow the moment never came.”
Her hand slipped out of mine. She took a cigarette from a box on the table and lit it.
And then, Lieutenant, once we were married, it seemed so easy not to mention Quentin, not even to think about him. Certainly I never dreamed I’d run into him in America. But I was wrong. On our second day in New York, there he was on stage of the Club Marocain. You can imagine my embarrassment. I knew he’d come straight to the table the moment he saw me and I knew I’d have to blurt everything out not only to Lew but in front of his first wife’s mother, too. I suppose I should have faced it, but I didn’t. I just jumped up from the table and hurried to the ladies’ room. I stayed there until I knew it would seem dreadfully odd if I didn’t go back. Then I came out. I ran straight into Quentin at the bar.”
She put her half-smoked cigarette down on an ashtray. She was lying so smoothly now that as I listened, I was both fascinated and, in spite of myself, plagued once again by a disturbing twinge of doubt. I ran straight into Quentin at the bar. That’s what she’d said, and the timing had been such that it could have been perfectly possible. But it was just part of her act, wasn’t it? When she’d sworn to me that she hadn’t spoken to Olsen, she’d been telling the truth, hadn’t she? This was just improvised for Trant, wasn’t it?
The lieutenant was watching from bright, absolutely expressionless eyes as her voice ran on.
“He was delighted to see me, Lieutenant, because there’d never been any hard feelings between us when we separated. Naturally he wanted to hear my news and naturally when I told him about Lew he was thrilled, because apparently he knew Mrs. Potter and had just been chatting with them at the table. He was crazy to go back with me and buy us all a drink. And … well, this is the embarrassing part. This is what must make me seem like a terrible snob …”
She was smiling at Trant again, exactly the right candid smile at exactly the right time.
“Probably, Lieutenant, you know that the Denhams and Mrs. Potter are very proper and socially exalted. As it happens, the whole business of introducing me into the family was being a little delicate because I’m—well, I’m just a rather dubious British girl Lew found in Mexico. So perhaps you can see how I felt about Quentin joining us at the table. It wasn’t just the embarrassment of never having mentioned him to Lew. It was Quentin himself. He was everything the Denhams would disapprove of most. He’d come from a poor family, he’d never made much of his life, drifting from one thing to another. Our marriage in Paris had been, to put it mildly, Bohemian, and I knew he was bound to come out with some joking references to it and so … Well, to be frank, I absolutely dreaded that drink.”
It was terrible for me then, for the more her ability to lie dazzled me, the harder it was to suppress the inevitable question: If this sounds so true and I know it’s a lie, then what about …? From somewhere I found the strength to choke off a train of thought which could lead only to chaos.
She was glancing at Trant now as if she expected some sort of reaction. There was none.
“So, Lieutenant, to come to the cigarette-case which, after all, is the point, isn’t it? When we were talking together, it so happened that I took out my case. The moment I brought it out, of course, he recognised it because he’d given it to me when we were married. Heaven knows where he’d found the money from. It was the only really expensive thing that either of us had ever owned. That was when I got the idea. You see, I’d always felt a little guilty anyway about having kept it when we broke up and just when he’d been complaining about what a poor financial winter he’d had. So … I blush to admit this, Lieutenant, but obviously I’ve got to.”
She broke off and for a moment her hand, lying on the couch, touched mine. That small contact, revealing her fear, indicating her great need for me, made it all right again. She was taking this desperate chance not only for herself but for us. I was sure of it.
“I suppose you’d call it a deal, wouldn’t you, Lieutenant? Quentin was very sweet really, not at all the sort of person to have his feelings hurt. I offered him a cigarette and when he took the case I just pressed it into his hand and said, ‘There. That’s far more sensible than buying Lew a drink, isn’t it?’ Neither of us said anything else. There was no need. He put the case in his pocket, gave a little bow and blew me a kiss and that, I thought, was the end of Quentin Olsen for me.”
She gave a little self-mocking shrug. “So you can understand, Lieutenant, how I felt this morning when you came and told me he was dead. I’m also hoping that both you and Lew can understand why I didn’t tell you about the marriage. Of course I would have if you’d actually asked. But … well, you made it so easy just not to mention it. Not, of course, that it got me anywhere. In fact, it’s only made it worse, hasn’t it? I suppose I should accept the whole thing as a healthy lesson in the wages of cowardice.”
For a moment she sat in silence. Behind the brightness of her eyes I could trace for the first time a hint of the desperation from which that long and intricate lie had been born. I hoped and prayed that Trant wasn’t noticing it too. She made a tentative gesture with her hand.
“There’s only one thing more to say, Lieutenant. I never saw Quentin again after those few minutes at the bar. I don’t know how valid my word is to you any more—not very, I imagine—but I swear to you that is the truth and if there’s anything I can tell you about Quentin that might help, I’m more than ready to co-operate.” Her eyes turned back to me. “I’m sorry, Lew. That’s all I can say, isn’t it? I’m humiliated and ashamed of myself—and very sorry.”
Now it was over I could do nothing but marvel at the sheer nerve of her gamble and at its effectiveness. Not only had she accounted for the presence of her cigarette-case in Olsen’s pocket; by deftly playing the embarrassed wife, she had made her earlier failure to mention the marriage nothing more than the result of an awkward domestic dilemma and, furthermore, she had managed to turn me into a completely innocent by-stander. Hadn’t she, improbably, saved the day? However suspicious Trant might still be, hadn’t she neutralised the only evidence he had against us? Wasn’t it possible that, so long as our alibi held up, there was nothing drastic he could do?
The silence had gone on just long enough to make me realise it was up to me to act out the part she had assigned to me.
Still holding her hand, I said, “Well, darling, this is quite a surprise. But let’s get one thing straight. So far as I’m concerned, there wasn’t the slightest reason why you should have told me you’d been married before. It’s none of my business and, if I’d bothered to ask, you’d have told me, wouldn’t you?”
“Why yes,” she said, “I’m sure I would.”
“Then so much for that.” I turned to Trant and his blank, unwavering stare. “All right, Lieutenant. What are you going to do? I’m not a complete idiot. I realise this is a murder case. I can see why you were suspicious of me this morning when you found my address on Olsen. And I can see why you must have been even more suspicious of my wife when you identified that cigarette-case as hers. But it seems to me that she’s given you a perfectly good explanation for what her case was doing in his pocket and, incidentally, she’s cleared up the reason for my address being there too, hasn’t she? Since Olsen had been married to her, it was perfectly natural for him to jot down her address. So, surely, now that everything’s out in the open, there’s no point in suspecting Virginia of any complicity in the crime. Especially—now I come to think of it—since it was a physical impossibility for her to be involved. Didn’t you say Olsen was killed around six-thirty, that he’d been kept somewhere and finally dropped off downtown? As you may remember, Virginia was with me alone or with me and some member of my family from five until around two-thirty or three or whenever we got back from the Trinidad Room.”
Had I been too glib? It was, of course, impossible to tell with Trant. At any moment during Virginia’s disingenuous monologue and my equally disingenuous epilogue to it, he could have interrupted us, but he hadn’t. Even now he took his time. For a long moment he just sat looking first at Virginia, then at me.
At last he said, “Well, well, what a very full explanation of everything.”
Then as he sat there, he smiled. It was a broad, white, almost affectionate smile. Without any warning, he got up and held out his hand to Virginia.
She rose hesitantly, taking the hand.
“But you’re not going! I mean, there must be all sorts of questions.”
“I’m afraid you’ve answered all the questions I brought with me, Mrs. Denham. I’ll have to think up some more, won’t I? And that takes time.” He turned then, extending the hand to me. “Time, Mr. Denham, is something we agree about, isn’t it? We neither of us like to waste it.”
He was, quite unbelievably, moving towards the door. I followed him. At the door he turned back to Virginia. He was still holding the case. He stretched it out towards her.
“Look at me! I was almost walking away with your valuable case. I … But then, of course, it isn’t yours any more, is it? You gave it to Olsen before he was murdered, so now it’s officially part of his estate. How stupid of me to have got it muddled.”
He glanced down at the cigarette-case in his hand and then, slipping it into his pocket, moved out into the hall.
I went with him to the elevator.
When it came, he said, “Good-bye, Mr. Denham. Thank you very much, both of you—for the drink.”
I might have known he would play it that way. When had he failed to use to its full nerve-racking value his technique for leaving everything up in the air? But understanding his method didn’t lessen my fear of him or the frustrating anger that was seething through me. Thanks to Virginia, we were one up for the moment. But how long would that moment last? How long did one remain one up on Lieutenant Trant?
I went back into the living-room. Virginia was standing exactly where I had left her.
“He’s gone?”
“Yes,” I said. “And you were wonderful.”
“No.” Her face, unguarded now, showed panic. “I had to invent something and that was all I could think of. But it won’t work—not with Trant. I realised just as he was leaving. It’ll all fall apart because of Sheila.”
“Sheila?”
“Don’t you see? I told him I met Quentin at the bar and gave him the case before I came back to join you at the table. But it was only after I came back that I offered Sheila the case. Trant’s so clever and he didn’t believe me, you know he didn’t. All he has to do is to go back to Sheila—and he will. He’ll go to her and she’ll tell him.”
She was right, of course. Trant would do exactly that. Once again, when something at least seemed to have been rescued, lurking to betray us was the small, single, overlooked detail.
“Oh, Lew.” She came to me then. “We can’t go on like this. We just can’t. Please, please, let’s give up, let’s tell everything. It can’t be worse than this.”
“It’s all right,” I said, because I realised then that it still could be. “Let him go to Sheila. She won’t tell him anything because I’ll be there before him—and I can stop Sheila.”
I took her in my arms. I told her what I’d learned from Esmeralda.
“I could tell Trant right now. It’d be more than enough to keep him from arresting you, even if he wanted to. But I’m not going to let him know yet—not till I have to. Right now it’s Sheila.”
I called her.
“Listen, I’m coming right over. If Lieutenant Trant gets there before I do, say you’re out, say you can’t see him. Whatever you do, don’t talk to him.”
“But, Lewis …” Sheila’s voice was plaintive, agitated. “I’ve been waiting to call you. I knew the Lieutenant was going straight to you and I didn’t dare call too soon. But he’s already been here. He …”
“I know. But he’ll be back. Stall him, Sheila. I mean it. If you open your mouth to Trant, you’ll regret it to your dying day.”
“But, Lewis …”
I slammed down the receiver on Sheila’s astonished gasp. I turned back to Virginia. She had dropped into a chair. Her hands were up covering her face. My love for her, which was always there unblurred by all the other conflicting emotions, made my mouth dry. I dropped down beside her.
“Baby, it’ll be all right. I swear it. If Sheila doesn’t work, then I’ll find something else, and if that doesn’t work, then I’ll find something else. It’s all right, Virginia. I’m going to make it all right.”
She turned to me almost violently, pressing her face against my shoulder.
“It’s the lying,” she said. “That’s what’s so frightening. Having to think all the time, never being off your guard for a second.”
“I know,” I said.
She looked up at me. Her face was so close to mine that I could feel her eyelashes flickering against my cheek.
“It’s you,” she said. “That’s all that makes it possible. If I ever thought you’d stopped believing in me, I’d die …”