I had to go to work the next day. There were appointments all morning. And yet I dreaded leaving Virginia. It was overanxious, I knew, to worry about Trant. If he did show up, she could handle any disastrous situation at least as effectively as I. Hadn’t she already proved that point? But it was more personal than that. It was myself of whom I was really afraid. When I was with her, it was all right. Her closeness, the sight of her, the ability to put out my hand and touch her kept my trust intact. It was only when I was away from her that the insidious doubts were apt to nag. She could have spoken to Olsen at the Club Marocain. She could have made a date to meet him at the apartment. She could have invented that call from Sheila. The front-door key … the gun …
She came with me into the hall. Her face was pale and peaked from our horrible night but she was trying her best to be cheerful.
“Don’t worry, darling. If he comes, I can lie myself blue in the face. At least that’s something I’ve become quite expert at.”
I wished she hadn’t said that. I kissed her and went to the elevator.
I was actually flagging a cab on 61st Street when I changed my mind and decided to walk. There was no conscious reason for this. I merely started down Madison Avenue on foot. It was only when I was passing Constance Spry that I realised it had, from the beginning, been my destination.
For a moment, having no plan because there was no reasonable plan to have, I paused, looking in the window at huge unseasonable chrysanthemums, azaleas foaming pink, white and purple, and sprays of orchids delicate as clusters of sleeping butterflies. Three days ago Esmeralda had come here with Olsen’s twenty-dollar bill. Where? Stuck in the top of her stocking? They might remember her. But what if they did? What possibility …?
A large woman in lumpy tweeds who could well have been a classmate of Aunt Peggy’s at Miss Something or Other’s Academy had emerged from a chauffeur-driven limousine and pushed past me into the store. On impulse, I followed.
The air inside was moist and pleasant with the perfume of flowers and the indefinable freshness that growing plants exhale. The woman was clearly a treasured customer, for she was greeted by two assistants and taken off to inspect an enormous rubber plant. “We hope you’ll find it large enough, Mrs. Carmichael.” Large enough, I wondered, for what?
A third assistant came to me. As he stood awaiting my order I felt ridiculous embarrassment.
I said, “This is rather complicated. A friend of mine bought some flowers here three days ago. I want to reduplicate the order but I forgot to ask her what the flowers actually were. All I know is they cost twenty-dollars and my friend …”
I described Esmeralda as well as I knew how. The description seemed totally inadequate. It could have applied to any one of a million women, but to my astonishment the clerk said, “With three rings on her right hand? Diamond—er—diamond rings? A foreign lady, dark—with an accent?”
I had forgotten the er-diamond rings.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s it. You remember her?”
“Of course, sir.” I was given a man-to-man smirk which indicated that we shared a mutual enthusiasm for pseudo-Arabian stomach dancers direct from the Soukhs of Meknes. “I waited on your friend myself.”
“So maybe you could look up your records and check on the order,” I said.
“There’s no need, sir.” The smile now was the self-satisfied smile of the trained observer. “I always remember my customers’ orders. You’re right. The price was twenty dollars. She bought a large bunch of strelitzia. That is, sir—bird-of-paradise flowers.”
In the first moments that meant nothing at all. Okay. I had learned what Esmeralda had bought. Strelitzia—exactly the sort of flamboyant flowers which she would have thought suitable for “important” people. To have learned that was to have learned nothing.
It came then, hitting me with a staggering impact. But could it…? Of course it could. The days when I had believed in coincidences were way in the past. I was back in the suite at the Pierre. Princess Natasha, tiny, exquisite, was leaning towards me on the French Provincial-type couch.
“Now, Lewis, you tell me all that is latest of the chic Américain.”
And behind her, on the grand piano, thrusting up from an hotel vase—the large bunch of bird-of-paradise flowers!
In my excitement I forgot the clerk. I started for the door. His voice trailed after me.
“Oh, sir, excuse me, sir. Didn’t you say you wished the order reduplicated?”
When I left Constance Spry, I was carrying a long white box of strelitza. It enhanced what was already a festive mood. And I knew exactly what I was going to do with them. What could be a more effective weapon with which to launch my attack on the Prince and the Princess? I had started for the Pierre before I remembered that the Lerchikov’s never arose before ten-thirty. That didn’t matter anyway. It would be better to go to the office first and call Virginia—to let her know that for once, at the most unlikely moment, chance had come over to our side.
When I reached the office, Mary, looking very cool and pretty in a cucumber-green dress, came up to me.
“The police lieutenant’s here again. I asked him to wait in your office.”
I went into the office, carrying the flowers. Lieutenant Trant was sitting in my chair behind my desk. He got up. I thought: If he makes a crack about the florist’s box, I’ll kill him. He didn’t. He didn’t even smile that amiable smile which I had learned to loathe. He merely walked over to another chair on which he had put his coat. He picked up the coat and sat down, holding the coat over his knees as if he were at the theatre.
He said nothing at all. So that was to be the tactics for today, was it? He sat looking at me without any discernible expression at all as I walked past him and sat down behind the desk. I knew he was more than conscious of the intimidating effect of his silence, and if it hadn’t been for my success at Constance Spry, I would have been intimidated all right. Now there was only caution, caution reinforced by a wonderful feeling of hope. Whatever he was going to say, I was one up on him. Olsen had gone to the Prince and Princess. They too had been somehow tangled in his web. Not only Sheila—the Lerchikovs.
Vaguely it came to me that I was thinking of my family now as if they were as much my enemies as Lieutenant Trant. Well, all right. I was ready to fight them, just as I was ready to fight Trant.
The silence had become so grotesque that it had to be broken.
I said, “Well, Lieutenant, did the cat get your tongue?”
I found I could look at him without the slightest trace of anxiety. How extraordinary, I thought, that such a little thing as the flowers could have brought so much confidence. I even tried to trace in the deceptive eyes, the bland, ministerial face some clues as to what it was going to be this time.
He said, “I thought it would be better, Mr. Denham, to speak to you here—rather than at your apartment.”
So that was it. This was to be something new against Virginia, and the current approach was to work on me alone, to try in a devious way to play on any suspicions I might have, to try to separate us. Divide and conquer.
I was, of course, wrong. Or at least it seemed so, for he said, “Quentin Olsen was shot by a Colt .32 revolver.”
“He was?” I said.
It occurred to me how subtly our relationship was changing. I still hadn’t admitted the slightest involvement in the murder, nor had he ever actually put any accusation into words. And yet now here we were—almost out in the open.
“I’ve just been speaking to your uncle, Mr. Denham. Your uncle—Mr. Eugene Denham.”
Of course. I had known he would check with everyone involved in our alibi.
“You have?” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Denham, and he tells me you own a Colt .32.”
That had always had to come. Now that it was here, it didn’t seem too bad. How typical, though, that it was from Uncle Gene he had learned about the gun. To Uncle Gene, in the infinitude of his removal from the sordid side of life, the police force was a sacrosanct institution for the protection of property rights. If the police—yes, sir, New York’s finest-wanted any information from him, it would be conscientiously and precisely forthcoming.
“I was wondering, Mr. Denham, if you’d be kind enough to let me look at this gun of yours.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and my voice sounded perfectly unruffled to me. “I don’t have it any more.”
“You don’t?”
“No. As my uncle probably told you, he gave it to my first wife as a measure of protection when she was alone in the apartment. After she died, I had no use for it. I…” Suddenly panic came. What had I done with it? “I threw it away.”
“You threw it away?”
“Yes. I’ve got a thing about guns. They make me nervous. A couple of months after my wife’s death, I came upon it in a drawer. I threw it out with the garbage.”
I had always thought Trant incapable of any emotion as human as exasperation, but now exasperation showed quite clearly in his eyes.
“So it’s quite a coincidence that Mr. Olsen was shot by the same type of gun?”
“I think,” I said, “if you have your research staff go into it, you’ll find there are quite a few Colt .32s in New York City.”
He smiled then as if even he had realised the inanity of his remark. The smile became almost friendly. Watch out, I thought.
This time I was right.
He said, “Your uncle told me something else, Mr. Denham. And it’s this that made me feel it was more sensible, more tactful, in fact, to speak to you here in the office.”
He paused. His hand, resting on the desk top, beat a little soft pattering tattoo. That was something new from the bag of theatrical tricks which had once seemed so unnerving.
“This isn’t easy to say, Mr. Denham. I mean, it’s not the sort of thing one would choose to ask a newly married man, but …”
“The Byword of Rome?” I was smiling a smile which I hoped was just as synthetically friendly as his. “Were those the actual words Uncle Gene used? He rather likes to stick with a phrase once he’s got it.”
It was good to see him disconcerted. He tried to cover it by his own brand of sarcasm.
“So your wife has finally decided to catch you up on her past, Mr. Denham.”
The anger I felt was the first healthy anger I’d experienced since I’d known him. Did I have Constance Spry to thank for that, too?
I said, “I’ve been remarkably patient with you, Lieutenant. I’ve let you come here and to the apartment. I’ve let you drop a snide hint here, a dirty little insinuation there. I’ve put up with you because, after all, you do have a job to do, and if this is the way you think you should go about it, okay, that’s your business. But let’s get one thing straight. I don’t need my Uncle Gene or you or anyone else to tell me about my wife. She told me everything I have the slightest interest in hearing herself. I don’t give a damn whether some old half-assed buddy of Unde Gene’s saw her on a South American’s yacht. I don’t give a damn whether Confidential magazine or whatever those things are called gives over an entire issue to an exposé of her past. This isn’t the Middle Ages. I didn’t marry my wife with a built-in chastity-belt guarantee. And if all you want to do is to try to poison my mind against her, you can consider yourself kicked out of this office. Does that message get across?”
“Yes, Mr. Denham,” he said, “it does.”
And he did then the one and only thing that he could have done to undermine me. His face became exactly the same as the faces of Hugo and Tanya and Sheila. He was looking at me with sadness—that was the only word for it—with an almost tender sympathy for a poor infatuated booby who wouldn’t have had the sense to come in out of a snowstorm.
My rage surged up in me and I heard myself saying, “Okay, you’ve got a murder to investigate. Investigate it. Since you keep on creeping back to us, I can only suppose you have nothing better to do—no evidence, no imagination enough to try to look for it where it might reasonably be found. Oh, no. You’re stuck on us like a stylus on a beat-up old phonograph record. Okay. If that’s the best you can do as a cop, all right. Stay with it. But for God’s sake, give up this corny cat-and-mouse bit which might, just might, intimidate a housewife in Red Bank, New Jersey, although I doubt it. If you think my wife killed Olsen, say so. If you think I’m protecting her, say so. But don’t say it until you’ve got at least some vestige of evidence to back you up, because, as you’re so fond of saying, I don’t believe in wasting time and I happen to be a working man who just happens to have a morning’s work ahead of me.”
I could trace the taste of bile in my mouth. It was harsh and bitter and yet it was welcome, a part of the relief that speaking my mind had brought. There was no sense of insincerity, hardly any realisation that part at least of what I had said had been a tremendous bluff. At last I had turned on an enemy and attacked.
Even then, of course, Lieutenant Trant, being Lieutenant Trant, gave me no chance to savour my victory. Meekly, with every symptom of being completely chastened, he sat there in the chair, his lips drooping in a rueful smile.
“Well, Mr. Denham, all I can say is that you have shaken me. Considerably shaken me, because you’ve hit on a very sensitive spot. You see, it is most important to me to feel that in my job I handle people—well, with grace. To think that I’ve given you the impression of—of deviousness, of playing what you call a game of cat and mouse! I can assure you that nothing was further from my intention. But … well, I’m sorry. All I can say is I am deeply sorry.”
Much as I would have relished accepting that grovel at its face value, he had made it perfectly obvious that every word had been spoken in mockery.
He got up from the chair then. He folded his coat over his arm and started for the door. Something in the carriage of his neck, as I saw it from the back, warned me that the victory I had thought I had won had been completely illusory.
I was right once more. He turned at the door.
“I’ll remember what you said about evidence, Mr. Denham. There is, as it happens, one little thing, one very little thing. You see, I went back to Esmeralda this morning and asked her to identify something from your apartment.”
With one hand still on the doorknob, he felt with the other in his pocket. He came out with a small circular object which he held up for me to inspect.
It was a black overcoat button.
“Esmeralda thought, Mr. Denham, that this might very well be a button from Mr. Olsen’s overcoat—the missing overcoat. Of course, it’s almost impossible for anyone to make positive identification of an ordinary metal black button. And yet, on the other hand, if it turns out to be a French button …”
He opened the door.
“Good-bye, Mr. Denham.”
The door closed behind him.
After he’d gone, I sat at the desk, thinking about him, remembering him, with hatred, in our living room, leaning forward, martini in hand, spilling the little pile of buttons with such an elaborately accidental clumsiness. “Ooops!” Should I call Virginia and warn her that the enemy had moved yet another step closer? No. What was the point of making it worse for her. Wait until I’d found out at least something to counterweigh Trant. The Lerchikovs.
I didn’t call the Pierre. My frustrated rage against Trant had transferred itself to the Prince and Princess. Why give them any warning of attack? This was no longer a contest in which the rules of sportsmanship applied. I picked up the box of flowers and, going into the outer office, told Mary to cancel my morning appointments.
I walked to the Pierre, which was only a few blocks away. I ignored the house phones. I went up in an elevator as padded and mahoganied as a Greek shipping magnate’s coffin. I waded through wall-to-wall carpeting to the door of the Lerchikovs’ suite. From inside I could hear the sound of rather faltering Chopin. I rang the buzzer. The music stopped. I rang again. Then Princess Natasha’s voice, high and imperious, clearly imagining a maid, called, “Entrez!”
I might at one time have found it charming that the Princess should feel it unnecessary to descend to English for a simple American serving wench. Now it seemed merely affected, and my anger found its focus. Who the hell did they think they were, these relics from a way of life which had been liquidated by the noose and the firing squad half a century ago? From where did they get the gall to be tossing Uncle Gene’s dollars around in a luxurious hotel suite, just because they had graciously consented to let their granddaughter marry into “une famille de l’Amérique du Nord, assez riche, vous savez, mais—zut, un tout petit peu bourgeoise quand même”?
I rang again, and Princess Natasha opened the door.
She was so pretty that her first impact as always jolted me. She must have been almost seventy but the structure was still intact—bones as delicate as dove’s bones, quick hands on tiny wrists, blonde hair still shiny as a girl’s, with a little girl’s bright blue eyes and a little girl’s tip-tilted nose. You could imagine her running, the hair streaming behind her, from room to room in some enormous Muscovite palace, hunting behind silk pillows and huge Winterhalter family portraits for the Fabergé Easter eggs hidden for her by her doting Papa. By contrast she made even Tanya seem lumpish and peasanty.
She was wearing a white wrapper with a swirl of maribou feathers at the neck (charged to Uncle Gene at Bonwit’s?). When she saw me, her hands fluttered affectionately to my arms, drawing me into the suite.
“Is Lewis, is our poor Lewis. No. Do not worry. I know. I hear. They tell me. You poor boy. You poor dear boy.” She was pulling me down the foyer towards the sitting room, calling, “Vladimir, Vladimir, guess who comes? Is Lewis. Our poor Lewis.” And the eyes, blue as the summer seas in the Crimea, quivered their lashes at me. “Do not worry. They tell me. They call. The Hugo. Oh, you poor dear boy. Your pretty new wife. Quel désastre.”
The Hugo! I might have known the Hugo would have been on the phone. It was uncanny how corporate they were. They weren’t individuals any of them. They had built themselves into a sort of multi-headed, multi-limbed monster—the Denhams.
What was that dragon in Greek mythology with the hundred heads? The Hydra. Well, it had been successfully slaughtered, hadn’t it?
The sitting-room was in full view now. I looked tautly for the strelitzias. There they still were, just as I had remembered them, orange and spiky on the piano behind the French Provincial couch. But there were masses of other flowers too, sent presumably by Tanya and Uncle Gene. Suddenly, what had seemed so positive to me in Constance Spry lost all its certainty. How could I have been so brash as to assume, with no evidence at all, that Esmeralda’s strelitzias were these strelitzias? And yet … They had been two dollars a stalk. If there were ten stalks …
I finished counting them just as we stepped across the threshold. There were ten.
Prince Vladimir was wearing a blue brocade robe, suggesting Metternich at some informal moment of backstairs wheelerdealing at the Congress of Vienna. He was seated by a breakfast table covered with silver dishes, plates and glasses, all of them, I noticed, empty, for the Prince and Princess were fond of their food. Thin to emaciation, with his Paderewski shock of white hair, Prince Vladimir was leaning forward, gazing with a child’s intensity at a colour television set on which for a moment a girl held up a box of detergent only to turn into a group of dancing cartoon gnomes as he pushed a button on the remote-control box in his hand.
“Vladimir, look!” said Princess Natasha, unnecessarily, it seemed to me, since I was standing directly in front of him. “Here is Lewis.”
Prince Vladimir pressed another button and got Roy Rogers or somebody galloping. Petulantly, like a baby with a disappointing rattle, he snapped down the OFF button and dropped the contraption on the floor.
“Gunmen!” he said. “Gunmen and prostitutes.” A reference, presumably, to the girl with the detergent. “The land of the free? The land of the gunmen and the prostitutes. And breakfast fit only for pigs.”
He was in one of his “Isn’t America lucky to have us?” moods. I thought of their cramped little apartment in Lausanne with its photographs of the Czar and various Queens of Spain and the smell of somebody else’s sauerkraut trailing up from the floor below, and it occurred to me how ideally suited the Lerchikovs were as victims for the Olsens of the world. Their whole economy was based on the exploitation of Uncle Gene and, snob though he was, Uncle Gene demanded from his tame titles behaviour as exemplary as he demanded from the Denhams themselves. If Olsen had caught them out in something, one word to Uncle Gene would have cut them off forever from their favouritie pastime of condemning the American way of life in eighty-dollar-a-day American suites, on American yachts and American Caribbean villas.
Of course I was right about them. Then trust the hunch. And be tough. Don’t be distracted by the insidious enchantment of Princess Natasha.
She was hovering around the flowers now, letting her laugh tinkle.
“Oh, Vladimir, the dear boy. He brings a gift. Gifts! They make me again the little girl.”
She took the box and opened it. As she folded back the tissue paper inside, I said, “I brought strelitzias because I thought the ones Quentin Olsen brought you would be dead by now. But”—I pointed to the table—“I see they’re still as good as new.”
That remark had ruined whatever it was the Princess had been planning to say. Her face had started a smile but instantaneously it was changed into a pout of pretty bewilderment. It reminded me of Prince Vladimir pushing the television buttons.
“Olsen?” she echoed. “What is this Olsen? Ah yes, of course. The fleuriste fiom whom come the flowers.” The smile was back again as she scooped the strelitzias out of the box and cradled them decoratively against the silk wrapper. “How big are your American fleuristes! And how chic, mon Dieu! But alas, les violettes américaines—they have no scent.”
She was moving away from me. She reached the piano and started with little cries of pleasure to add my strelitzias to Olsen’s. Did she really believe that by pretending something hadn’t been said it would automatically be rendered unsaid? Probably. Probably that was what blue blood did to you. Probably the Czar even at Tsarskoe Selo had never got around to remembering Lenin’s name correctly.
I glanced at Prince Vladimir. He was merely looking noble and slightly plaintive. But that was typical too. If the name Olsen had registered, it wouldn’t have occurred to him that he should do anything about it. He was too used to letting the Princess cope with a world which had become so proletariat as to be far beneath his notice.
It was extraordinary how effective their attitude was. In spite of myself, they had made me feel crass and ham-handed, as if I were some shambling serf from the stables who had been graciously invited into one of the lesser reception rooms of the palace for a glass of tea on his Saint’s Day.
I said, “You know who Olsen is, Princess.”
“Olsen?” she twittered. “Olsen. Always you speak from this Olsen. What is then this Olsen? A chauffeur perhaps from your Uncle Gene who brings the flowers? Or perhaps from Tanya?” She stood back from her handiwork. “There. Look! How pretty!”
Luckily, that annoyed me enough so that all vestiges of “proper respect” were shorn away.
I said, “Quentin Olsen was a well-known blackmailer who was murdered two nights ago. The day before, around eleven-thirty, just a short while before I came here to lunch, in fact, Quentin Olsen came to see you with those flowers.” Just to make it stronger, because I put nothing past her, I embroidered. “There’s no doubt about it at all. The elevator man remembers him distinctly. He even waited at the elevator until Olsen had reached your door. So let’s get this over with once and for all. What was he blackmailing you about? You’d better tell me unless you’d prefer me to turn the whole matter over to the police.”
“Lewis!”
Princess Natasha had been preparing to add a few of the strelitzia sprays to a huge vase of blue and yellow iris. She dropped the sprays then and stood so still that she could almost have been turned to porcelain. I glanced at Prince Vladimir to see what damage had been done in that department. Confronted by a situation whose vulgarity was far too appalling for ears such as his, he had fled to the only available refuge. He had dropped back in his chair and was pressing one of the remote-control television buttons. The high piping voices of a group of little girls started singing the praises of somebody’s cake mix.
“Lewis!” said Princess Natasha again. She had made a remarkable recovery. Very calmly, she moved to her favourite couch and sat down, folding her hands in her lap, crossing her tiny feet in front of her—the darling child unjustly accused of pulling her sister’s hair in the nursery. “Lewis! What a thing do you say? Blackmail? What is this blackmail? C’est le chantage, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui,” I said, “c’est le chantage.”
The pretty bewilderment was now grotesquely overdone. She craned her neck towards the Prince.
“Vladimir, you hear?” This seemed unlikely since the cake-mix tots were still piping their heads off. “Oh, Lewis, what a thought! What a thought! Le chantage! That man? That great man with the red hair and the big, big hands … so … so … degoûtant!”
I said, “You don’t have to identify him. We both know him.”
“But Olsen? Is his name? Olsen? You think we know the name of such a man? Such a person who pushes in. Who is it? How do we know? Who is this person, pushing in and saying : Look, I bring you flowers, please listen to me.”
“You mean,” I said, utterly unconvinced, “that you never saw him before he came here?”
“See him before? You think we know such people as that? Pouff. What companies you think we keep? He say … Oh yes … He say, Princess Lerchikov, you know from me. You remember from me. I am playing at the piano when you stay in Antigua. This you remember, Princess. Remember? He thinks we remember? Some man who sits playing at the piano? Who does he think we are? Teen-agers, bobby-soxers who sit and go whee-whee—with their jazzmen?”
Even the most stable-smelling serf could have seen through that. Of course she’d known perfectly well that Olsen had been the pianist from the Beach Club in St. John. Almost certainly she knew much, much more, but at least that was plain.
“I say to him …” she was talking with great emphasis now as if she were sure that firmness of tone guaranteed honesty—“I say to him, All right. You play at the piano in Antigua? All right. You say we know you? All right. I say that, did I not, Vladimir? So what, I say, is this coming with flowers? And he says to me—he was standing just where you are standing now—and he say, Please, is for money.”
She seemed completely to have forgotten that only a few moments before she had denied that he had been there at all. Probably that was the blue blood too. She had found the story she wanted me to believe, so it was up to me to ignore everything that had gone before.
“He asked you for money?” I said.
“For money. Oh, what a sad story. It is like the peasants in the old country—always the story is so sad. The poor old grandmother dies. The pretty young daughter is once more again ravished. Quelle tragédie. Always the same. And from him? Oh, he must leave the country quick, at once. Enemies have said bad things for him. He must go—quick, but how without the money? And we—because he sees us in Antigua, sees that we are so kind, so pleins de coeur, we must give the money. We must give please one thousand dollar.” She raised her voice to compete with the television. “Is that not so, Vladimir? You remember? The man who came—that brutish man with the flowers? The man who say to give one thousand dollar?”
Her story had become so ridiculous that it was hardly worth the time to refute it. And yet, through the patent falsehoods, I could glimpse little bits of reality. If Sheila had been telling the truth, Olsen’s predicament could well have been grave. Ray Callender had given him twenty-four hours to leave the country. He would have had to clear up any unfinished business in a hurry.
That was it, of course.
The Princess’s blue eyes were watching me with such simple trust in her own powers of deception that I almost hated disillusioning her.
I said, “What you mean is that Olsen had been blackmailing you ever since Antigua. He had to get out of the country on the run so he came to squeeze one last payment out of you.”
Her eyes were so wide-open now that I felt the actual eyeballs would drop out of their sockets to lie on the floor revealing what I had always suspected, that they were made out of exquisite white and lapis-lazuli china.
“Lewis, you do not believe me!”
“I’m sorry.”
“But, Lewis, my dear, what do you think from us? That we are bad people, bad wicked people who do things—oh, so wrong? Vladimir? Who is equerry to the Czar Nicolai Nicolaievitch? And me? Living so quiet, in my little maisonette in Lausanne, so quiet, so like a poor little bird? Us for the blackmail? Lewis dear, is your pretty wife, your poor wife with such troubles who makes yourself all poisoned in the mind.”
I wasn’t going to let her get off on that familiar Denham tack.
I said, “Why shouldn’t he be blackmailing you? He was blackmailing Sheila.”
Her reaction took me completely aback. She jumped up. The astonishment in her eyes seemed for the first time quite genuine. Astonishment—and shock.
“You know?” she said. “About Sheila?”
“Of course I know.”
“Mon Dieu!” She ran to the chair above whose top the white mane of Prince Vladimir’s hair was just visible. “Vladimir! You hear? He knows. Lewis knows from Sheila and Eugene. He knows that terrible man was making le chantage for Sheila and Eugene.”
For a second I was sure I’d been the victim of some auditory hallucination. Sheila and Eugene! She couldn’t have said that, could she? The Denham in me floundered in an attempt to accept the unthinkable. Then, gradually, I felt excitement welling up in me. She’d said it all right. She’d let it slip out because she’d made the mistake of assuming I already knew. Sheila—and Uncle Gene! So that had been the thing Olsen had had against Sheila, with the evidence which “included a photograph.” Not only Sheila but Uncle Gene who could have … No, watch out. Don’t let the amazement show. If you give yourself away, you’ll lose everything you’ve gained.
With a desperately manufactured casualness, I said, “So you know too. I had no idea.”
That had struck just the right note. Princess Natasha turned back to me, all a-flutter with a mutual sorrow which now could be mutually shared.
“Oh, the poor, poor things. What a tragedy for them, always to love each other, always to be so sneaky here and there, always to have as a barrier the Peggy, the sad unfortunate Peggy with her bottles of gin and her bottles of whisky. What a beast is this Olsen! What a monster to make from their tragedy his money of the devil.”
Only part of me was listening then, for something remarkable was happening to me. It was as if all my past were being radically changed. Sheila and Uncle Gene. Ever since I could remember, they had been to me the very symbols of the “civilized” way of life to which it was my duty to aspire. Sheila, the impeccable widowed social arbiter, the faithful family friend! Uncle Gene, the archetype of moral rectitude, the model husband, steadfastly loyal, in spite of every provocation, to a pathetic problem wife! The Denhams, as I had seen them and lived with them, had been an illusion, nothing but an invention of my own.
The Princess’s hand had settled on my sleeve. Its light pressure made me conscious of her voice again.
“Oh, Lewis dear, how happy I am now! How fine that all can be spoken plain. But now you see it? Yes? How I must keep from you the truth? You come here, you threaten about this Olsen, you make these crazy statements that he comes for us, to curse at us, to make le chantage for us. What can I say but foolish lies? Can I admit to you, oh no, my friend, it is not for us he comes, it is for Sheila and Eugene?”
The other hand had come to rest on my sleeve now. She was gazing up at me wistfully, as if the fact that she had been obliged to deceive me, even for the noblest of motives, had caused her inexpressible grief.
“Of course he comes for the blackmail—that beast of an Olsen. He comes so slimy with the flowers and the smiles. He say, Out I leave from the country. Your good friends make it to toss me out—quick. But you think I go as a little lamb? You like it that I call to the newspapers to tell to them that your Mrs. Potter and your Mr. Denham are in adultery? Oh no, you will give me one thousand dollar, I think.”
She had me by the hand then and had drawn me down to sit with her on the piano bench. The Princess liked sitting with people on small objects so she could clutch them and pat their knees and be generally cozy.
“Dear Lewis, give me please a cigarette.”
I took out my case, lit a cigarette for her and, dropping the case on the piano keys, offered my lighter. Lighting a cigarette for Princess Natasha was always a production.
“Ah,” she said, puffing smoke. “Ah.” She darted me a melting, sidelong smile. “So think, mon ami. Think how I feel for my poor friends, my dear ones. Such a scandal for them in the newspapers? Mon Dieu! But one thousand dollar! From where do we get a thousand dollar who are poor as the rats of the sewers? Answer me that, I say.”
She gave a little forlorn shrug and held up her hands for my inspection. For the first time I noticed they were ringless. “You see? Still I had ma bague, ma bague from diamonds and from rubies. How pretty it was, how precious the little heart with its memories of the old times, the good times. But—my dear ones. What of them? So I give my bague and I say to this Olsen, Not a word to the newspapers. Not a word, you hear? And away he goes and c’est ça. Fini. Now all the truth is known.”
Did I believe it had happened that way? Probably. The Princess loved making the dramatic gesture and such a situation would have given her a splendid opportunity for one. But none of that mattered any more. By now the Prince and Princess had dwindled in interest. They had merely become a means to an end. For, thanks to the Princess, Virginia and I were no longer completely at the mercy of Lieutenant Trant. There was another suspect after all, a far more formidable suspect than Sheila, but surely a far more plausible one too, for Uncle Gene, with the honour (that’s what he would call it) of the Denhams at stake, could have disposed of a whole barrage of blackmailing cocktail pianists without turning a hair. The prospect of confronting him was terrifying. I couldn’t even conceive of myself saying to him the things that would have to be said. But I would do it, of course. Right now before the net could finally close around Virginia, Right now—before I lost my nerve.
Almost anything in Princess Natasha’s eyes was an excuse for a celebration. Clapping her hands together, she was jumping up from the piano bench.
“And now, dear Lewis, a little champagne. You think so? Yes, I think so. Champagne. You hear that, Vladimir? I order the downstairs waiter and the champagne.”
She hurried to the phone.
“No,” I said. “Thanks, but I’ve got to go.”
Her hand butterflied off the receiver. “Not for a glass of champagne? Just one. So little. Just to say, We have had our mix-up, but now no mix-up no more?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She pursed up her lips, the little girl who had offered a kiss only to be rejected. “Ah, the Americans. How they rush. All the time. Rush—rush—rush.” She called to the Prince. “Vladimir. The Lewis—he leaves us. You hear?”
I moved to join her, planning to say good-bye to the Prince. He was asleep. On the television, a very mournful housewife was confiding her very mournful problems to another housewife in colour. But obviously the soap opera had not been effective enough to insulate Prince Vladimir from the painful vulgarity of my intrusion.
“He sleeps, the poor darling.” Princess Natasha looped her arm through mine and drew me towards the foyer. “It is the American breakfast—the oatmeal, the truite, the omelette aux fines herbes. So heavy the American breakfast.”
When we were in the foyer, she paused, giving me her most enchantingly conspiratorial smile. “Now, Lewis, you do not tell. This is a promise? To tell poor Sheila or poor Eugene what we do for them? That I give my diamond ring to keep them from scandale? Mon Dieu, if they would know this, my face would become red like the betterave—the beet root.”
It was then that I remembered I’d left my cigarette case behind. I went back for it past the sleeping Prince Vladimir to the piano. As I picked the case up, something glittering, half hidden beneath the Princess’s gauzy handkerchief, caught my eye. I moved the handkerchief. Suddenly everything about Princess Natasha was different.
She had made her splendid gesture of friendship, had she? She’d given Olsen her diamond and ruby ring, had she? She had done no such thing. There it was, lying beside the keys, exactly where one would expect a lady of the old school to drop her rings before sitting down to tinkle her Chopin.
What did that do to her version of the session with Olsen? What indeed? For a moment my thoughts were skittering in many directions, then the urgency of Uncle Gene overtook me. Not that Princess Natasha was far less ingenuous than I had suspected. Leave it there at the moment. Uncle Gene …!
“Oh, Lewis.” The Princess was pattering back into the living-room. Was it my imagination or did her voice sound false, almost shrill with anxiety? “Lewis, what is it you do?”
I held up the cigarette case. “Just getting my case. I’m always dropping it some place.”
“Oh dear.” Her smile was as prettily rueful as it had ever been. “And I think, the Lewis changes his mind. The Lewis stays after all for the glass of champagne. Oh, quel dommage!”
Downstairs in the lobby of the Pierre, I called Uncle Gene at the bank. Calling Uncle Gene, of course, didn’t involve getting Uncle Gene himself or even his secretary. His secretary’s secretary told me to hold for his secretary, and when I got Miss Coppleby, whose voice always managed to remind me that I was only an adopted Denham, I was told to hold again.
After at least a minute of silence suggesting the hush of holy ground at the other end of the wire, Miss Coppleby’s voice came back.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Denham, but I’m afraid he’s quite tied up. And there’s a lunch date with Mrs. Denham on the pad for twelve forty-five.”
“But it’s very important,” I said.
“Oh, I see,” said Miss Coppleby, as if it were beyond the stretch of her imagination to concede that anything not connected with the highest finance could be important. “Oh dear. In that case, if you were to come around now, if you’re prepared to wait, that is, you might, you just might, be lucky enough to catch him.”
Through the years I had become so used to condescension from Miss Coppleby that it was only then I realised how much it annoyed me. That was a good beginning for a clash which was going to need every particle of iconoclasm I could muster. As I said, “All right,” and hung up, I found myself thinking of Miss Coppleby’s plump, pussycat face at a quite imaginary breakfast table where she opened her newspaper and read: Eugene Denham arrested for murder of blackmailer. It put me into so good a mood that I almost called Virginia, but I controlled myself. To raise her hopes now when hope was still so tentative would be as damaging to her morale as to have called about Trant and the button.
I got a taxi on Madison Avenue and gave the address in Wall Street. We passed Constance Spry and that seemed an omen. Suddenly—is that what happens when your capacity for enduring disaster has been taxed too far?—I felt almost light-hearted. Uncle Gene no longer seemed the unassailable Jehovah of my childhood. He was just a person like anyone else. No, not just a person. More, much more than that. Once I had defeated him, he would become our deliverer, because he could have killed Olsen just as he could with the ruthlessness for which he was celebrated, have used Virginia as his scapegoat. Why not?
It seemed as clear to me now as a floor plan on my drawing board. It went back to Antigua after all. Fifteen months ago. Sheila had established that. No Beth, of course. Once and for all my neurotic fantasies about Beth could be forgotten. But fifteen months ago in St. John, Olsen had found out about Sheila and Uncle Gene. First he had tried to blackmail Sheila. She had refused to pay him, with “disastrous results”. Of course! The disastrous results! Olsen had gone to Uncle Gene and blackmailed him as well. And Uncle Gene—hit in his most vulnerable spot, his fear of scandal—had started to pay. And he’d gone on paying until … until … what? Until, of course, fate or rather I had given him the opportunity he had been waiting for. Uncle Gene, who had at his disposal the bank’s international web of information service which equalled if not surpassed that of the police, could easly have unearthed the marriage in Paris. Once that was done, he had found his ideal cover. And not only that. Uncle Gene, being Uncle Gene, would have realised a secondary benefit. Two birds, as it were. Not only had he found in Virginia his ideal cover, he could also dispose at the same time of that most unwelcome addition to the Denham clan—the Byword of Rome.
We were passing through lower Fifth Avenue now. That was it. Why not? Uncle Gene could have got one of the keys Beth had spread around for dog-sitters. It had been Uncle Gene who had given her the gun. Hadn’t it also been Uncle Gene who had made a point that morning not only of telling Trant about the gun but of drawing his attention to Virginia’s “notorious” reputation in Europe as well?
Of course! This could be a far stronger case than the case against Sheila, far stronger even than Trant’s case against Virginia. Without any doubt …
Suddenly it all collapsed. Ray Callender! Callender had called Olsen’s bluff. That had to be true, didn’t it? There was not only his word, there was the Princess’s corroborative evidence of Olsen’s admitting to her that he had to get out of the country at once. Sheila had neutralised Olsen. He had no longer been a threat. Then why wouldn’t she have called Uncle Gene and let him know? Why wouldn’t Uncle Gene have realised that there was no reason in the world any more for Olsen to be murdered at all?
Doubts tumbled through me and with them all my built-in awe of Uncle Gene came landsliding back. Was I mad? Had my desperate anxiety for Virginia driven me quite out of my wits? Sitting here? In this taxi? Driving it to the bank to accuse Uncle Gene of murder?
It was all I could do to restrain myself from asking the cabbie to stop. When I reached the towering skyscraper building which currently housed the bank’s headquarters (they seemed to build a new one every year), I was little Lew Denham again, fourteen years old, in the black mourning suit for my parents, fidgeting in the great Denham library while Uncle Gene’s leonine brows bushed at me from over his desk.
“Now, my boy, I know you will be happy with us, but to be happy with us you must learn to be one of us.”
An elevator took me to the fortieth floor. On the theory that the higher up you are the higher up you’re put, Uncle Gene was installed in the penthouse. All the trivia of vaults and grilles and tellers and homeowners’ loans were left way, way below. There was nothing here to suggest anything so vulgar as the public. The atmosphere, with Chippendale instead of leather chairs and Renoirs instead of military prints, was identical to the atmosphere of the Club on Fifth Avenue—except, of course, that there were women, female underlings whose priestess-like effect was slightly more decorative than the decrepit old waiters at the other club.
A receptionist passed me on to an anonymous girl who took me to Miss Coppleby’s secretary who took me to Miss Coppleby, who, swelling imposingly through a black cashmere sweater, sat at her desk beneath a Dufy, no less.
“Oh yes. Mr. Lewis Denham, isn’t it?”
She had, after all, only known me for fifteen years.
I said, “When will he be free?”
Miss Coppleby said, “Oh, that. That, I’m afraid I couldn’t say.”
But she actually brought herself to move her fat butt off her swivel chair and precede me to a door, which she opened.
“This is the best we can do.” Who were “we”? Miss Coppleby and her big fat butt? “I will try to let Mr. Denham know you are here.”
She closed the door behind me with the finality of a jailer slamming shut forever the door of an oubliette on a minor but irritating revolutionary.
The waiting room was Japanese. It went with a formal Japanese garden that stretched on the roof outside. It was new to me, but then in Uncle Gene’s bank a few months was more than enough to have obsolescence set in. Probably they had acquired an affiliate in Japan who had flown them a garden as a gesture.
Japanese décor is supposed to bring serenity. It didn’t work that way for me. The couch on which I sat was much too low, it pressed my knees up almost to eye-level. The walls, papered with what seemed to be pages from ancient and doubtless holy oriental books, rejected me coolly. The nervousness which had started in the taxi accelerated its invasion of me. How was I going to begin? When Uncle Gene came through that door—abstractedly, turning back to finalise some instruction to Miss Coppleby—what was I going to say? “Look, Uncle …” or “Listen, Uncle Gene, let’s get one thing straight. If you think you can frame my wife …”?
The ridiculousness of those phrases turned my anger against myself. Goddamnit, I was an adult, wasn’t I? I was thirty-two years old. Just because Uncle Gene had adopted me and educated me and set me up in my profession, that didn’t mean he owned me, did it? Hadn’t I been indicating my gratitude for years? Hadn’t I almost slavishly tried to make myself do what he’d wanted me to do? Hadn’t I even married Beth?
I got up from the couch. That helped. The door opened and I swung around to face it like a prizefighter reacting to the clang of a bell.
Aunt Peggy walked into the room. Or rather, I suppose one could call it walking. At any rate, she disengaged her elbow from the supporting hand of an invisible Miss Coppleby, saying, “This will be all, thank you, Miss er …” Carefully closing the door behind her, she swayed a few steps into the room, saw me, blinked and stopped.
“Well,” she said. “Well, well, well.”
I had been warned of her lunch date with Uncle Gene. It didn’t surprise me to see her, but it did surprise me to see her drunk because it was only on thoroughly screened occasions that Uncle Gene risked a downtown lunch engagement. She was wearing her mink and a rather unexpected pink bowler hat which had tilted to an angle which surely was not intentional. The embarrassment which I always felt in her presence when she was drunk was there, but it was much more acute than usual because of what I now knew about Uncle Gene and Sheila. With a tautening of anxiety, I thought: What the hell am I going to do with this complication?
She hadn’t blinked because she’d seen me, it seemed. She had just blinked, for now, ignoring me completely, she started to manœuvre herself on the high-heeled, bulged-over shoes towards a black silk hassock. She sat down on it. Actually she didn’t, because she missed it and sat down instead upon the rush carpeting. It didn’t appear to bother her at all. She merely remained there, smiling in front of her, until I offered an arm and helped her to her feet.
I must have registered with her then because she said, “That’s a very low chair, Lewis.”
“It’s a Japanese hassock,” I said.
“That is as may be, but that chair is a very low chair.”
The drunkenness was quite farcical, quite unlike her normal, slow-motion muzziness. She must have stopped the limousine on her way and belted down a trio of medicinal martinis. I looked wildly around for any object of furniture into which she could suitably be manipulated. There was a wicker chair by the window. I settled her into it. She started to pull off her gloves. It was an immensely complicated undertaking, involving infinite little tugs at the finger tips.
Finally she gave it up and, darting me a look of the fiercest malice, she said, “I would have said that my sense of colour was impeccable. Quite impeccable.”
The look was so ferociously demanding that it could not be ignored.
I said, “Of course it is, Aunt Peggy.”
She leaned towards me, clinging to one of the chair arms for balance. “Adelaide Himmelford,” she said very clearly and emphatically, “is an extremely common woman. Miss Draper’s Academy? Perhaps. A classmate? Perhaps. I am willing to grant you that. But to marry a dentist and in Newark to boot merely proves what I was always totally aware and conscious of—that she was a person of no standing whatsoever, socially speaking, financially speaking, or spiritually speaking.”
It wasn’t at all funny. At least not then. It wasn’t even pathetic because I wouldn’t let it be. I had come there to challenge Uncle Gene. It was desperately important that I remain single-minded.
“Lewis!” she said, and then paused and then said again very loudly, “Lewis. I shall ask your opinion. To stop me on Fifth Avenue is one thing. Why not? One has one’s responsibilities towards one’s classmates, regardless. And to invite me for an apéritif to Schrafft’s … well, that is debatable although Schrafft’s is clearly her sort of place. But to say in Schrafft’s—in Schrafft’s, mind you—over a tremendous double daiquiri which she downed without turning a hair—to say to me, to make a criticism in Schrafft’s of me and my—hat!”
Aunt Peggy made a vestigial move of the hand towards her head.
“Lewis,” she said, “just tell me this. Is a woman of the calibre of Adelaide Himmelford entitled to take it upon herself to say that my hat is too pink? That pink was a colour for debutantes and what not and … I don’t care. But that a woman of that sort should peer at me through those terrible artificial roses and say, Margaret Morrison—she still calls me Margaret Morrison, which is in itself affected-Margaret Morrison, we are both more than thirty years too old for pink!”
That final “pink” came out in an explosion which seemed to take all the air out of her. She sank back into the chair and, quite horribly, tears sprouted in her eyes. Then the eyes closed and her mouth dropped open with a sharp little snoring sound.
Uncle Gene came hurrying in then. I could tell from his harried expression that Miss Coppleby had gone scurrying with the news.
“My dear,” he began. “My dear …”
When he saw her, he broke off. He turned to me, not greeting me, merely registering the fact that I was there and therefore exploitable.
“Lewis, as you see, your aunt is unwell. You will take her home. The limousine is downstairs.”
He turned then and started to leave the room, sublimely assuming that that would be that. This display of arrogance was exactly what I had needed.
I said, “I’m not going to take her home. I’ve come to talk to you.”
He swung back as astonished as if Miss Coppleby had suddenly goosed him.
“But, Lewis, you can see for yourself …”
I said, “I’ve come to speak to you. And then …” Of course. Get it all over at once. Confront them both at the same time. “To you and to Sheila Potter.”
He was no fool. That was enough to give him at least a danger signal. I could tell from an infinitesimal slacking of his jaw.
I said, “But you’re right. Aunt Peggy is obviously ‘unwell’. She’s obviously got to be taken home. Okay. We’ll take her together—and meanwhile I’ll call Sheila.”
There was an un-Japanese phone by the couch. Watching Uncle Gene, keeping the tension going, I went to it and dialled. Aunt Peggy said quite distinctly, “Pink.” It didn’t deflect Uncle Gene’s steady gaze from my face. Sheila answered the phone.
I said, with deliberate rudeness for Uncle Gene’s benefit, “I want you to go to Uncle Gene’s immediately. Uncle Gene and I will meet you there.”
Uncle Gene did make an effort to assert himself then. As I slammed down the receiver, he said, “Lewis, that’s no way to talk to Sheila.”
I said, “Let’s get Aunt Peggy out of here, shall we?”
It was wonderful having the upper hand. I didn’t deceive myself, of course. I knew it was only caution that was keeping him under control. The anger was there all right but he wasn’t going to let it show until he knew just what it was I had up my sleeve.
Together, one armpit each, we lifted Aunt Peggy to her feet. We walked her out of the room and past Miss Coppleby, who quickly averted her gaze. Clearly Uncle Gene had imbued in his staff the Denham philosophy of not seeing what was unfit to be seen. We got Aunt Peggy down the long, lonely elevator ride and out through the stretches of imposing lobby to the limousine. Leon, the driver, opened the rear door and, when we pushed Aunt Peggy inside, stood at attention as if she were the First Lady instead of a sack of potatoes.
Uncle Gene didn’t say a word on the trip uptown. He knew what he was doing. The silence was to give the rebellious nephew time to think better of whatever rash act it was that he was planning to make.
Once when we stopped for a street light, Aunt Peggy sat up, smiled and said brightly, “What a lovely day.”
Uncle Gene turned to her, smiling patiently, putting his hand on her knee. “Yes, dear,” he said. “Yes, it’s a lovely day.”
“Your hand,” said Aunt Peggy crossly, “is on my knee.”
That more than anything else undermined me because it vividly brought alive to me the stultifying ordeal of Uncle Gene’s married life. Who else could have stood it all those years? Who was I to blame him for turning to Sheila? I stopped that train of thought. I wasn’t blaming him for Sheila. That was his own affair. I was blaming him for killing Olsen and pinning the murder on Virginia.
Uncle Gene had sold the house on 70th Street when Hugo and I grew up. They were living now in an apartment on Sutton Place. When we arrived, we got Aunt Peggy out of the limousine and past the doorman, to whom she must have been a familiar sight, and up in the elevator.
Uncle Gene let us into the apartment. There was no sign of Sheila. Was it possible she was defying me? With great gentleness, Uncle Gene led Aunt Peggy away from the foyer towards her bedroom.
“Now, my dear, a little rest and you’ll be as right as rain.”
As right as rain! In her pink, ruffled bedroom? Did Uncle Gene still refuse to admit to himself that there was a gin bottle hidden in the window seat or in the laundry basket in the bathroom? Or had he, through the interminable years, just lost his will to fight?
I went into the living-room. It was huge and commanded the inevitable panorama of the East River. Oddly enough, in spite of its splendours, it didn’t intimidate me the way Sheila’s apartment did. They had moved there too recently. It held no youthful associations. But as I gazed down at the traffic swarming over the 59th Street bridge, Lieutenant Trant seemed horribly present. I had been away from Virginia for four hours now, and Lieutenant Trant could make better use of four hours than anyone I knew. What was he up to? I thought of the buttons and again I was plagued by his baffling delay in inspecting the apartment, the carpet, the car. If he’d been waiting for lack of evidence, wasn’t the button evidence enough? What if he were there right now? What if he’d shown up with a search warrant?
Anxiety for Virginia hit me like a karate blow. Why had I left her alone? What was I doing here?
“Now, Lewis.” Uncle Gene’s voice sounded behind me. I turned to see him entering the room and closing the double doors behind him. Without Aunt Peggy, he was himself again. The eyes, under the lion’s eyebrows, were glittering with an icy alertness. He moved to the window and stood so that his back was to the light. He was even taking that small advantage.
“All right,” he said. “You have come to me about Virginia Harwood. I am perfectly aware of the situation. A police officer came to see me this morning. He was quite explicit. Well, what do you expect me to do for you?”
So that was the way he had chosen to play it! I had never mentioned Sheila. All that was to be ignored like Aunt Peggy’s “seediness”. He had launched his counterattack before I had attacked at all.
“Do for me!” I exclaimed. “Have I asked you to do anything for me?”
He decided to consider that question rhetorical. “Now, Lewis, I am sure you are intelligent enough to realise that before I agree to help you, you must agree to help yourself. I know how stubborn you are. I have always known it and done my best to handle you with this in mind. You will admit, I think, that I took the news of this extraordinary marriage very well. On the theory that what was done could not be undone, I was prepared to make the best of it, as indeed were Hugo and Tanya. There is always the chance that in the right environment Virginia Harwood might rehabilitate herself. Women of that sort can be very adaptable. But when in less than a week we find that she is involved in a murder, and not merely any murder, but the murder of a former husband, a man apparently of the most criminal character …”
“For God’s sake!” I said. It was all I could get out in my anger.
“Before this marriage,” continued Uncle Gene as if I were something incapable of answering back like a tape recorder, “you might have thought for a moment about the obligations you owe to your family, to the people who have accepted you as part of their lives. Since you obviously didn’t and obviously do not intend to now, I can only suggest that you think a little about yourself. The lieutenant tells me that all the evidence points to your wife. This Olsen had more than enough information about her to threaten her with blackmail, and judging from what little I myself found out about her this does not surprise me in the least. He was shot with a gun similar to the gun you own. There is even every indication that he was planning to meet her before he was killed. There is, in fact, nothing to prevent the police from arresting her—except for one thing.”
He raised a minatory hand. “Now, Lewis, do not interrupt. This Olsen was killed around five-thirty; the body was kept somewhere until later that night, when it was transferred to Wall Street. But all through this period, it seems, you claim that your wife was with you. Now this is it, Lewis. This is what you must tell me as a man would tell his own father. Have you been lying to protect her? If you’ve been willing to incriminate yourself to protect a woman who is clearly little more than a common … a common … you are more an idiot than I imagined you to be. But if that is what you have been doing, this is the time to admit it, and I shall use whatever influence I possess to see that you are dealt with as leniently as possible.”
I had read many times about “speechless rage,” but I had not known that the phrase could be literally true. All the time he had been talking, my tongue seemed to have swollen, filling my mouth, choking me. The two of them! Uncle Gene and Lieutenant Trant, sitting there in his goddam skyscraper office, calmly considering me, the imbecile adopted orphan who had to be saved from myself and my criminal enslavement to a common … a common …! I had never before hated Uncle Gene. Even in the most browbeaten moments of my childhood, I had respected him as much as I had resented him. But now, when I thought of what I suspected he was doing … no, what I knew he was doing—for hadn’t everything he’d said been exactly what he would have said if he’d killed Olsen and was pinning the murder on Virginia?—I felt sheer, unadulterated hatred.
He was looking at me now with the celestially resigned patience of St. Peter on the job at the gates of heaven. I knew that at any moment he was going to ask, “Well, Lewis, what do you have to say for yourself?”
That brought my voice back.
I said, “I’m glad to hear your opinion of me and of Virginia. And, of course, I can understand your reluctance to accept another scandal in the family. After all, you and Sheila Potter are about all the Denham traffic can bear.”
“Lewis.”
I had known what would happen to him and in my fury I had thought I was going to welcome it, but the sudden crumbling of a face which I had never before seen without its dignity was painful to watch.
“Lewis,” he said again.
I said, “Didn’t you know that’s why I came to see you? To let you know that I’ve found out? It’s been years, hasn’t it? You’ve been sleeping with Sheila for years.”
It was while I was saying it that the double doors opened and Sheila Potter came in. She had heard what I said. It stopped her dead in her tracks beside a blue wing chair. She put her hand on to its back to steady her as she glanced from me to Uncle Gene.
It was to Uncle Gene she went. She gently touched his arm.
“It’s all right, Gene. It doesn’t really matter.” She turned back to me then. “So you’ve found out. I was almost sure of it when you called me in that truly ominous fashion. But how did you do it, Lewis? At least I think I’m entitled to know that.”
She was quite unruffled again. Her smile was her normal, gracious smile—the smile for dear Lewis of whom, after all, she was rather fond. Why did nothing ever come easily? Why could I save Virginia only at the cost of smashing all the relationships which, before I knew her, had been for better or worse in my life?
Should I tell her that Princess Natasha had betrayed her? No. Why? Why let them know anything they didn’t have to know.
I said, “I just found out, that’s all.” And then, because I might as well make a clean sweep, I added, “And I asked you here to let you know that I’m going to tell Lieutenant Trant. There’s nothing you can do to stop me. You can tell him anything you like about Virginia and the cigarette case. It’s gone far, too far, for that to matter any more.”
Uncle Gene, in a state of what seemed to be total collapse, had sunk down into a couch. She sat down beside him, taking his big, bony hands in hers. I had never thought about her being the stronger of the two. That, of course, was because I had only known Uncle Gene in his public character.
She looked at me, not at all rattled, it seemed.
“You think,” she said, “that telling the lieutenant about us will somehow help Virginia?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You realise what a scandal would do for your Aunt Peggy—for all of us?”
“Yes,” I said.
Uncle Gene raised his head then. His face was still nakedly exposed. It was difficult to look at.
“Lewis, I beg you …”
Uncle Gene begging!
“No, Gene.” Sheila patted his shoulder and stood up. “I think this is something for me.”
She came to stand in front of me. She was wearing no makeup at all and her face, in showing its age, suggested the rejection of all pretence. Had that been deliberate? I wondered. Had she, after I’d called, carefully thought out the appearance and attitude most likely to disarm me?
“Lewis dear, I know how much you love Virginia. I can imagine how you are suffering for her, and if you think she’s innocent, I for one am more than prepared to believe you’re right. Of course I can see why you’d be desperately eager to find out anything—anything at all to make things easier for her. But, Lewis, my dear Lewis … some things, once they’re broken, are beyond repair. So I wish you’d listen to me for a moment, just for a moment before you …”
There was a sudden little puckering under her eyes and a catch had come in her voice. I would have been certain the catch was genuine if I had been able any longer to believe that anyone’s reactions were genuine.
“Lewis dear, your Uncle Gene and I have been in love for twenty-three years. I met him a week after I’d married Edward Potter. You never knew Beth’s father, did you? So you’ll never realise how pathetically dependent … Well, I suppose there may be some women who could have done it to him but I was not one of them. You see, strange as it may seem nowadays, your uncle and I were both trying to be civilized human beings. So that was that. The great renunciation! Your uncle married your Aunt Peggy, and virtue was triumphant. But virtue, Lewis dear, never seems to triumph for very long. We tried but it happened and it went on happening and …”
She put her hand on my arm. It seemed to me that the last few days had been a succession of feminine Denham hands—Sheila’s, Tanya’s, Princess Natasha’s—all tugging at my sleeve, offering comfort, reminding me of obligation, pleading for my sympathy. What the hell did I care about the spiritual struggles and tribulations of Uncle Gene and Sheila Potter in their Ladies’ Home Journal dilemma of twenty-three years ago?
“Lewis, I’m not asking for your pity. I don’t suppose we deserve it, although, through the years, we’ve punished ourselves thoroughly enough by a ridiculous Puritan sense of guilt. But think of your aunt. At least we’ve kept her from even suspecting. Think what it would do to her if she had this to face too.”
“Yes.” That came almost inaudibly from Uncle Gene. “Yes, Lewis, I beg you for the sake of your aunt!”
“And why?” broke in Sheila. “What can you gain for Virginia by killing Peggy, because that’s what it’ll do and you know it will. Lewis, can’t you believe me? Whatever you may think, your Uncle Gene and I had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Quentin Olsen’s death.”
I had been waiting for a false note to be struck and there it was, revealing once and for all the phoniness of this emotional onslaught upon my loyalties. All vestiges of sympathy for them were routed.
“Nothing to do with Olsen’s death?” I said. “When he’d been blackmailing you both to a fare-thee-well for the past fifteen months?”
“Blackmailing us?” Uncle Gene jumped up. There had been something in that which had restored his normal bullying vitality. “Lewis, that is preposterous. This Olsen blackmailing us? How dare you make such an accusation!”
The sheer gall of that statement threw me momentarily off my guard.
I said, “You mean you can stand there and …”
“But it’s true.” Sheila’s voice broke in, deflecting me from Uncle Gene. “Your uncle knows nothing about this, nothing at all. At first when I tried to call Olsen’s bluff, he threatened to go to Peggy. I knew that would be disastrous, so when I gave in I paid him exactly double what he asked for, just for that very reason—to keep him from tormenting Peggy or Gene. At least I could stop that. It was better to have only one of us suffer.”
“Sheila!” Uncle Gene went to her, hovering solicitously over her. “Then all this time …?”
“Why should I have brought you into it?” she said. “What good would it have done?”
It was only then, as I looked at Uncle Gene, seeing his astonishment, sure, quite sure that it wasn’t a pretence, that I remembered the one flaw in my theory of his guilt. I had put it out of my mind for the very reason that it had been damaging enough to nullify everything. But now as I remembered it, I saw that Sheila had swept it away. If she had let Uncle Gene know that Ray Callender had stymied Olsen, there would have been no motive for him to kill Olsen. But she hadn’t told him—because to stall off the “disaster” of anything getting to Aunt Peggy’s ears, she had kept Uncle Gene from knowing anything about the blackmail at all.
At last the way was clear for me. I felt no sense of victory, no satisfaction even. I merely knew that the time had come.
“Do you want to know what I’m going to tell Trant?” I said.
In the intensity of their concern for each other, they seemed almost to have forgotten me. Now they both turned to face me.
I said, not to Uncle Gene but to Sheila, “You and Ray Callender had given Olsen twenty-four hours to get out of the country. You thought you had him licked. Oh, don’t worry. I believe every word you told me. Of course you didn’t kill him, because you had him where you wanted him. But Uncle Gene didn’t know that. He didn’t know a thing about any of it—as Olsen would have been the first to realise.”
I turned to Uncle Gene. I was feeling curiously disembodied.
“Olsen wasn’t going to leave the country empty-handed. Why the hell should he when he had such a golden opportunity in Sutton Place. Two days ago he came here, didn’t he? You didn’t know him from Adam. He was just a man who barged in out of the blue. He told you he knew about you and Sheila. He threatened to go to the papers unless you gave him a blank cheque. You were sensible enough to know you were helpless but sensible enough to play for time too. You promised him the money. You told him to meet you …” Watch out! Don’t mention the key or my apartment. To admit that I knew Olsen had been there would be to betray our removal of the body. “… to meet you at a given place at five-thirty to deliver the money. You did that. You showed up at five-thirty—and you killed him.”
“Killed him!” gasped Sheila.
“Yes,” I said. “Because of you, but more, I think, because of Aunt Peggy. He’d have killed anyone before he’d run the risk of Aunt Peggy finding out about you.”
I hadn’t expected the newly restored Uncle Gene to crack, so the confusion of astonishment and outrage on his face didn’t impress me. For a moment there was complete silence. Then there sounded a small but grotesquely audible hiccup. One of the double doors wobbled open and Aunt Peggy loomed.
“Well,” she said with a giggle, “well, well, well. This seems to be the appropriate moment for my entrance.”
Uncle Gene and Sheila jumped apart, although in fact they had not been touching each other. It was a situation quite beyond all of us. And what made it even more unlikely was the fact that in her hand Aunt Peggy held a tooth glass of gin. Never through the long years of Denham pretence had Aunt Peggy any more than the rest of us admitted the true cause of her “seediness”. Never had liquor been seen to pass her lips.
Now she tilted her glass to her mouth and gulped. She radiated her plastic doll’s smile like a rather erratic lighthouse beam, letting it settle on me.
“Lewis,” she said, “Lewis dear, what a fuss! Jabber, jabber, jabber. I mean to say! Sheila and Gene. What a bore. Sheila and Gene. That old, old boring thing? I mean, when things go on and on, they’re so boring. Who wants to bother?”
Ignoring me then, she started towards Sheila.
“Sheila darling, I heard your voice in the hall and you’re just the person I want to see. You remember Adelaide Himmelford? Of course you remember her.” She had reached Sheila then and leaned forward to kiss her. The kiss made contact with Sheila’s cheek but something was happening to her legs. “You’ll never believe what Adelaide Himmelford said to me. I mean, it was outrageous, quite outrageous.” She was clinging to Sheila for support now, and as she spoke, she slowly slid down the length of her, one hand managing somehow to keep the tooth glass from spilling. “Darling Sheila, you’ll understand. I know you will. You’re such a comfort. Always such a …”
She reached the floor and the drink did spill then. It made a little dark piddle across the Aubusson.
It was hardly the moment for wry psychological reflections, but as we all stood gazing down at her, the irony of the situation almost managed to shoo out the farce and the horror. Sheila and Uncle Gene had spent interminable, guilt-ridden years trying to shield Aunt Peggy from “that old, old thing, that boring thing” which she had known from the start and which was infinitely less important to her than Adelaide Himmelford’s criticism of her pink hat.
Drunks, I thought. They were more mysterious than the Near, the Middle and the Far East combined.
Both Sheila and Uncle Gene had dropped to their knees and were bending distractedly over her.
“Peggy!” exclaimed Uncle Gene. “Peggy dear.”
And Sheila was gently lifting up her head.
For a moment the two of them were totally concerned with her. I might not have existed for them. Then Uncle Gene remembered me.
He got up. His knee joints creaked, which somehow was pathetic in the patriarch of the Denhams, the intrepid captain of the Arabella. He glanced down once again to make certain that Sheila was ministering. Then, reassured, he turned his attention to me. I had no idea what was coming, no idea even what I felt about him any more. All I knew was that what had happened was probably the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to him.
“Lewis,” he said, “you will, I’m sure, do what you think is right. Nothing I say can stop you. But will you take my word for it that the accusation you have just made is entirely unfounded in fact? Until the lieutenant mentioned his name to me, I had never heard of Olsen in my life. I knew nothing of his persecution of Sheila. He never came to this house. I have had no connection with him whatsoever. And, incidentally, if you’d bothered to check your facts before making this melodramatic charge, you would have found out that between four and six-thirty on the day of the murder, I was in a board meeting at the bank.”
A board meeting at the bank. Could he be inventing that? Was it possible he imagined himself influential enough to persuade a whole board meeting of cronies to give him a false alibi? No. Of course not. Then—not Sheila. Not Uncle Gene. This trail, too, had led me absolutely nowhere.
As the whole jerrybuilt structure of my theory started to topple around me, Uncle Gene’s voice came through to me once again, the voice which from childhood had represented the ultimate authority.
“Therefore, Lewis, if you insist on going to the police, on ruining my life and Sheila’s, you have the power to do so. But before you make an irrevocable decision, I feel you should ask yourself whether there is any justification for sacrificing the happiness of your own family—quite meaninglessly—through some infatuated loyalty to a woman who is certainly a liar, certainly a whore and almost certainly a murderess.”
There it was again. Wherever I turned, it always came back to the same thing. I longed for the rage and bitterness with which to blast him. But they didn’t come. All I felt was a paralysing exhaustion.
Not Sheila … not Uncle Gene.
Satisfied that he had taken care of me, Uncle Gene had turned away. Once again he was on his knees beside Sheila, bending over Aunt Peggy.
Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere in the world but there.
As I left the room, I heard Uncle Gene’s voice, soft, solicitous.
“Peggy, my dear. Can you hear me, my dear?”
And Sheila’s voice, equally solicitous, sounded too. “Peggy darling, it’s all going to be all right.”
They were fussing over her as if she were the most important thing in their lives.
Maybe she was.
I was out on the street again but I was afraid to go home. Thanks to Uncle Gene, what I had dreaded would happen had happened. In my mind, Virginia was once again coming into the living room in her green coat, gazing down at the body with its great, red-haired outthrust hand—pretending she didn’t know her own husband.
Liar?
The candles on the dining-room table were flickering. “If I wasn’t working and some man asked me out to Maxim’s …”
Whore?
“Our Love Is Here to Stay.” My address scribbled on the scrap of paper in Olsen’s pocket. The door opened with a key, the overcoat in the closet, the gun in the drawer of the bedside table …
I knew it was vital to get home and find out what might have happened. But I couldn’t possibly because of the fear that if I went to Virginia now, I would see what Uncle Gene saw, what Sheila saw, what Hugo saw—what Lieutenant Trant saw.
I went back to the office. I could think of nothing else to do. I had a two-thirty appointment anyway. I sat through it and through another. Gradually things got better. It had been Uncle Gene. That was all. Part of me was still immature enough to confuse his voice with the voice of God. In recognizing this weakness, I could conquer it. Uncle Gene wasn’t my life, Virginia was my life. Was I crazy to have left her alone and unprotected all this time?
I told Miss Lindsay I would be gone for the rest of the day. As I went up in the apartment elevator, the feeling of home was there. Home because of Virginia. The home which I could and would protect against every enemy—Uncle Gene, Sheila, all of them, even against the Denham in myself.
Lieutenant Trant’s overcoat was neatly folded on a chair in the hall.