The man

with two wives

Patrick Quentin

A Dell Mystery

chapter 1

The strangest part of it all was that I had just been thinking of Angelica. My wife and I had been to the theater with the Fowlers, Paul and Sandra had come home with us for a drink afterward, and I had driven them back to their apartment in the Village. I don’t know what had brought Angelica into my mind, because it had been months, almost years since I’d cured myself of her, and the evening had been as remote as anything could be from that rhapsodic, dangerous, doomed period in Europe when she had been my wife and, it had seemed, my only love. Paul and Sandra Fowler, of course, had known her in the old days, and Paul, for all his prosperity and new steadiness, still had some of Angelica’s gaiety and recklessness of spirit. But I saw Paul all the time. It couldn’t have been that. I think it was the Village itself which brought her back. The Village, although Angelica and I had never actually lived there together, was Angelica’s sort of place. Perhaps that was why the image of her came, as vivid as if it had been only yesterday that she had deserted me and our son for Charles Maitland in Portofino.

And then, improbably, like a ghost conjured up, I saw her through the car window, standing on West 10th Street outside a shabby brownstone apartment house, paying off a taxi.

Sheer astonishment—nothing more complicated—made me stop the car and go up to her. The taxi had driven away and the March night was bitter. She was standing, bareheaded, searching in her pocketbook.

“Hello, Angelica,” I said.

Nothing ever took Angelica by surprise. That was one of her most characteristic traits. She merely looked up with those large, inscrutable gray eyes and said, “Bill, Bill Harding.”

In the old days after the divorce and in the early months of my second marriage, I had imagined this meeting a thousand times, and I had always seen it as a Great Moment, involving drama, vindictiveness and even, perhaps, an insane flare-up of my old infatuation. But her refusal to make anything of it affected me and I seemed to feel nothing at all except mild curiosity and mild wariness.

I said, “I didn’t know you were in New York.”

“We only arrived a few weeks ago.”

I didn’t ask if “we” involved Charles Maitland. I said, “You’ve married again?”

“No, I’m not married.”

She had moved and, in the illumination from the street light, I could see her clearly for the first time. She was still as beautiful as she had ever been, and I had always thought Angelica the most beautiful woman I had known. But there was a difference that jolted me. Her most essential qualities, her lightheartedness and her conviction that she knew what was right for her, seemed to be missing. She was wearing an old coat with a red scarf knotted at her throat. She looked sick and somehow pathetic.

I said, “You’re not well, are you?”

“Not very. I’ve had flu. I suppose I shouldn’t have gone out tonight, but I had to.”

She took keys from her pocketbook. I said, “You’re staying here?”

“The apartment belongs to some friend of Jaimie’s who’s in Mexico. He lent it to me.”

“And you live here alone?”

“Yes. Jaimie has a place on the east side. He prefers it that way. It gives him more freedom.” She avoided my gaze. “Jaimie’s a writer. He’s in a bad phase now. But, one day, he’s going to do something good.”

So she hadn’t changed a bit, I thought. Wouldn’t she ever grow out of her obsessive desire to worship some self-appointed genius? Hadn’t she learned at least that lesson from me—and Charles Maitland? I felt unreasonably exasperated with the unknown Jaimie who was none of my business. She just stood there with the keys in her hand. She didn’t invite me in, but she didn’t seem to want me to go either.

In the clipped, social voice which she had always reserved for bores, she asked, “I suppose you’re not writing any more?”

“No. It finally dawned on me that I wasn’t a novelist.”

She jingled the keys and it was only then that, under the knuckle of her third finger, I noticed the garnet ring carved like a dolphin which had been my mother’s and which I had given her six years ago just before we were married from her father’s house on the Claxton campus. The sight of the ring and the incredible fact that she was still wearing it threw me off balance.

In the same bright clipped voice, she went on, “You married Betsy Callingham, didn’t you? It was in the papers.”

“Yes.”

“And you do something with her father’s magazines?”

“I’m in the advertising end.”

“You’re—what?”

She swayed slightly from one foot to the other. I wondered, uneasily, whether she could be drunk. In the old days I had never seen her take more than one highball, even at the wildest party.

“But you’re happy?” she asked. “That’s the point. I mean…”

She lurched sideways. I caught her just as her legs crumpled under her. Her body, in my arms, was limp and unnaturally hot.

I said, “You are sick.”

“It’s nothing. Just the flu. I’ll be all right. I’m sorry.”

She leaned more heavily against me. None of the old excitement I had always felt when I touched her had revived. I took the keys.

“You ought to be in bed. I’ll get you up to the apartment.”

“No, no, I’m…”

I helped her up the steps and unlocked the glass-paneled front door. The apartment was on the third floor. The door opened into a tiny living room which was painted shrimp pink. There was no furniture except a rickety table and a monstrous “amusing” Victorian arm-chair, decorated with stags’ antlers. Through another open door, I could see the bedroom with a pair of Angelica’s shoes scattered on the bare floor.

She sank into the chair with the antlers. I went into the bedroom, found a pair of pajamas and brought them to her.

“Can you undress yourself?”

“Of course. And, Bill, there’s no need. Really…”

I went back through the bedroom into the kitchen. It was one of those kitchen-bathrooms with a tub. A few dishes were strewn on the table and a few cans. At the divorce she’d stubbornly refused any help from me, but she’d inherited something from her grandfather just before we’d broken up. The uncomfortable thought came: Is she broke? I went back into the bedroom.

Angelica, with the pajamas buttoned up to her throat, was lying in the bed. She looked defenseless, like a tired child, underminingly like Rickie, our son.

I said, “Hadn’t I better call a doctor?”

“No. I’m all right now. It wasn’t anything.” She gave a vague smile. “Go, please, Bill. This has happened and it’s over and thank you. There’s no point in resuming diplomatic relations.”

She had dropped back against the pillows. The top button of her pajama jacket had slipped loose. The skin of her throat seemed curiously dark as if it had been bruised. The pillows were awkwardly sandwiched on top of each other. I lifted her head up and started to straighten them. As my fingers went under the corner, they touched some metallic object. I pulled it out.

It was an old chipped .45 Colt automatic.

I could hardly believe it. For Angelica, who had always been the least theatrical of women, a gun was as unlikely a possession as a leopard cub.

I said, “What have you got this for?”

She hadn’t noticed what I’d done. When I spoke, she turned, saw the gun and made a feeble gesture toward it with her hand, the hand with my ring on it.

“Give it to me.”

“I want to know what you’ve got it for.”

“It’s none of your business, is it? I need it. That’s all there is to that.”

I was looking at her throat again. She saw me looking and threw her hand up to fix the button. I pushed her hand away and pulled down the material. The dull red bruises were cruelly exposed. There was no doubt in the world what had caused them.

In utter astonishment, I said, “Someone tried to strangle you.”

“Please, Bill.”

“When did this happen?”

“Oh, a few days ago. It was nothing. He was drunk. He…”

“This—Jaimie?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t go to the police?”

“Of course I didn’t go to the police.”

The downstairs buzzer started to shrill in the kitchen. A look of complete exhaustion came over her face. The screech blared uninterruptedly on.

“He’ll keep it up all night,” she said.

“Jaimie?”

She nodded. “I didn’t want him here. That’s why I went out. To meet him in a bar. But he didn’t show up. I might have known he’d come here anyway. I should have waited.”

“I’ll get rid of him.”

The front she had tried to keep up was completely shattered now. Her pride, her dislike of me, whatever complicated feelings she must have had toward me, were no longer important.

“Please, Bill. Explain. Tell him I did wait at the bar. Tell him I’m sick. That I can’t see him. Not tonight.” The nerve-fraying blare stopped and then began again. I put the gun down on the bed and started for the living room. Her voice followed me, horribly maternal.

“But don’t hurt him. Please. It isn’t his fault. They turned down his novel. He’d been working on it for two years. If he’s drunk, you can’t blame him, and he needs me. I’m the only one. In his way he loves me.”

In his way he loved her! I didn’t listen to any more. I was too disgusted. I went down to the hall. Through the glass door, I could see a man leaning unsteadily against the buzzers. I opened the door, went straight to him and shoved him away. He staggered, almost losing his balance. Then he turned and stood blinking at me.

He was slim and young. In the dim illumination, he looked about nineteen and, although he was stupidly drunk, he was one of the handsomest boys I had ever seen. His hair was jet black. And so were his eyes. A morbid image came of him and Angelica together, and absurd vestigial jealousy joined my anger.

I said, “Get out of here.”

He blinked again and started to weave in a grotesque caricature of a prize fighter. Then he lunged past me and jammed his finger on the buzzer again.

I grabbed his arm and swung him away. He hurled himself at me, flailing with both arms, kicking, trying to gouge me with his knee. It was ludicrously ineffective, but it was frightening too because of the homicidal fury in him. All I did was step aside. As he lurched past me, still raining meaningless blows in the air, I hit him hard on the temple and he fell heavily onto the hall floor.

I looked down at him, my heart pounding from a kind of triumphant physical satisfaction. I obviously couldn’t leave him lying there. If I did, he would come to and, once I’d left, start on the buzzer again. I went out and stood at the top of the front steps. A woman was getting out of a taxi at the curb. I flagged the cab and went back to Jaimie. He was still lying crumpled on the floor. I felt through his pockets and found his wallet. There were three dollars in it. I took them out and put the empty wallet back in his pocket.

As I did so, the woman from the taxi came into the hall. She was tall and blonde with large cynical eyes and prominent front teeth like a beaver’s.

“Boys!” she commented. “They will have their fun!”

She took out a key and went into the hall. I lugged Jaimie to his feet. He was conscious again but hopelessly muzzy. I got him into the cab, gave the driver an address at random in Brooklyn and a ten-dollar bill.

“Don’t let him out till you get there,” I said. “His poor old mother’s waiting up for him.”

I climbed back to the apartment. Angelica was still in the bed. The gun was no longer visible.

She said, “You didn’t hurt him?”

I wanted to shout at her: A couple of days ago he tried to strangle you; he scared you into buying a gun for protection; and now you’re babbling about his not being hurt.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t hurt him.”

I made up some story about having argued him into going home. I couldn’t tell whether she believed me or not. I didn’t care.

She said, “I didn’t want to mix you up in this. It’s the last thing in the world I wanted. But, if you knew him! He’s not bad really. All the things he does… He’s just unhappy. He…”

Suddenly she started to cry. She was lying on her side, her face, under the glossy black hair, pressed against the pillows. The sobs were deep, racking, without hope. Against all the promptings of my reason, my body remembered hers and ached for her. She seemed as much a part of me still as Betsy or Rickie. “Angelica,” I said.

“Go away.” She pushed herself up against the pillows. Bitterness distorted her face, making it the face of a stranger. “Go back to the Callingham yachts and the Callingham Cadillacs. They’ll be tapping their feet.”

The spell was broken then. There was nothing here for me. Without looking back, I hurried into the living room, threw the keys down on the table and left.

I felt as if I had escaped disaster by a hair.

chapter 2

It was only just after one when I got home to Beekman Place. Betsy was in bed, reading, with her reading glasses on. She took them off when I came in and smiled her warm, transfiguring smile. She had always thought she was ugly and that no one could want her except for her money. It had been her obsession before she married me. “C. J.’s older daughter. Not Daphne. The homely one, the one who’s given to good works.” At the sight of her, smiling, so sure that her world was stable now, I felt a rush of tenderness and of gratitude that our marriage had done so much for both of us.

She didn’t ask why I was late; she didn’t even ask if I’d stopped for a nightcap with the Fowlers. Betsy was always scrupulous about respecting my independence. That was because the Callinghams were so rich and I worked for her father. She was determined not to be the Boss’s Daughter.

“Rickie was awake when I got back,” she said. “Ellen couldn’t do a thing with him. I had to sing to him. It’s his new thing. I croaked like a laryngitic crow for hours, but he thought it was divine.”

In the car I’d taken it for granted that I’d tell her about Angelica. I’d never kept anything from her. But now, as I started to undress, it seemed far more complicated. Betsy, I knew, was intimidated by Angelica’s beauty and the feeling I’d once had for her. I knew, too, that always at the back of her mind was the dread that Angelica, as Rickie’s mother, might try to take him away from us. Betsy couldn’t have children herself and her love for Rickie was as strong really as her love for me. Suddenly I decided: What’s the point of telling her? It’d only worry her for no reason and I’ll never see Angelica again anyway.

Lying in bed we talked of our date with C. J. the next night and about the Betsy Callingham Leukemia Fund which Betsy had started after her mother died of leukemia and her father had shamelessly directed all his affection to his younger daughter, Daphne. Before our marriage, the Fund had been the most important thing in Betsy’s life and now it came second only to Rickie and me. The annual Spring Drive was just starting and our dinner with my father-in-law was to be a key one since Betsy and Paul Fowler, who worked as her manager, were hoping to start the Drive rolling with an enormous check from C. J. Betsy knew it was going to be tough, for C. J., with his frightening tycoon’s whimsicality, was always as slippery as he was tyrannical. But she was confident they’d pull it off and, in her confidence, she was relaxed and happy.

Her happiness was infectious. Soon I’d forgotten all about West Tenth Street. I was at home; I was with my wife whom I loved; everything was normal and good and fine. That was the mood in which I fell asleep.

I dreamed of Angelica. It was a confused nightmare from which I awoke with a start. I could hear Betsy’s quiet breathing in the bed next to me. But the dream was still real and suddenly the contrast between my happiness and Angelica’s disintegration seemed grotesquely unfair. As if a sense of guilt had been lying dormant all this time, I felt like a criminal accused at the bar and, in spite of myself, our years together, which I had tried so hard to forget, opened in front of me like the pages of some embarrassing manuscript unearthed from a trunk.

It had all begun so uneventfully, with me as a ferociously ambitious ex-Marine finishing college on the G. I. Bill, and Angelica, as the beautiful, restless daughter of the widowed English professor at Claxton. It was Heat of Noon, of course, which made everything so different for us. In a burst of creative exuberance, urged on by Angelica’s enthusiasm, I had written my first novel in less than six months. When, astonishingly, Heat of Noon was accepted by a publisher, we had married and when, later, it had been even more astonishingly praised by the critics and bought for Hollywood, we had shaken the Iowa dust of Claxton from our shoes and sailed for Europe. After a rhapsodic six months wandering from Spain through Italy to France, we had rented a little house in Provence. That was where the new rich life was supposed to begin.

I had hardly thought of that house in Provence for years, but now, as I lay quietly in bed, remembering, some monstrous perversity transfigured the bed into the bed in Provence and it was Angelica lying there peacefully at my side. A hand slipped into mine. For the fraction of a second I thought it was Angelica’s hand.

Betsy said, “You’re awake, aren’t you, dear?”

“Yes.”

“There isn’t anything wrong?”

“No, baby.”

My wife’s hand, so confident, so ignorant of betrayal, squeezed my fingers and then patted my leg. With a savage determination to punish myself, I forced my memory on to what had happened later, to the dark days. In our first year of Provence, Angelica produced Rickie and I produced one half of a second novel which I tore up. During the next two years, fresh abortive beginnings were squeezed out and abandoned while I was, in turn, arrogant, surly, hopeful and panicked. Finally, with the thin pretense of finding me “stimulation,” we left the house and drifted from one tourist resort to another where, every night, I lounged in bistros while Angelica sat patiently with me and Rickie was left with the femme de chambre in the hotel room. That summer half the international riff-raff made one sort of advance or another to Angelica, particularly Charles Maitland, a young novelist who was, if possible, more self-deluded, more self-pitying than I. But she ignored them all. I seemed to be her entire life and, with nothing left but our love, she became as essential to me as air.

Then, without the slightest warning, the end came. We were both in Portofino and so was Charles Maitland, when Paul Fowler turned up from my Marine days glamorously and prosperously with his new wife on the Callingham yacht. I had never met really rich people before and the Callinghams’ bland assurance before a world which had been conquered both fascinated me and made me even more aware of my own failure. They had been in Portofino a week when I dined one night on the yacht without Angelica who had stayed with Rickie. As it happened, C. J. had picked up Heat of Noon and read it. With the vagueness of the very rich, he hadn’t realized that I was the author and mercilessly tore it apart. Somehow that was the last straw. When I left the yacht, I got drunk in a little dockside ostería and staggered home in the blackest mood I had ever known. I remembered climbing the stairs to our room, thinking: If it wasn’t for Angelica, I’d kill myself.

I turned on the light in the bare little bedroom. Rickie was lying in his cot, but Angelica wasn’t there. Instead there was a note. It said:

I’m sorry, Bill. I’ve left with Charles. You get the divorce and take Rickie. I won’t contest. ANGELICA.

For a moment, as I lay in the dark bed next to Betsy, the bitterness of that remote betrayal seemed as real as if I were still in that hot little waterfront room. My moment of night anxiety was over now. Of course it was absurd to harbor any feeling of guilt about Angelica. She’d gone her way, with her eyes wide open, and I had gone mine. Luckily, my way had been the Callinghams’ way and through the Callinghams, particularly through Betsy, I had found health again.

I moved over in the bed until my body was touching my wife’s. She was asleep. I kissed her, put my arm around her and slipped back into untroubled sleep…

At that time my position at Callingham Publications was even trickier than usual. There was going to be a VP opening and C. J., with his perverse passion for tantalizing his employees, had already half promised the job to me and half to Dave Manners who had been with the concern far longer than I and who, inevitably, resented me as the Boss’s Pet.

As it happened, I wasn’t the Boss’s Pet at all. Being Betsy’s husband was, if anything, a handicap because, although C. J. only half realized it, he was exasperated by Betsy’s independence and success with the Fund and with her marriage. I was always certain that, if I made one false step, he would be delighted to turn with magnificently righteous indignation on Betsy. “You see? This is what comes of giving a job to a broken-down novelist just because you married him.”

That next morning, the atmosphere was tense. Once Dave Manners was summoned to the Presence and then I was summoned twice. On both occasions, I was sure C. J. was going to make some statement about the Vice-Presidency and on both occasions he fooled me. The first summons was for nothing at all. At the second he merely beamed over his huge desk, looking, with his broad shoulders, his broad mouth and his bright protuberant eyes, even more than usual like a very clever, very dangerous frog.

“I’ve just remembered. Isn’t it tonight Betsy’s coming out to plague me about that damn charity?”

He knew, of course, exactly what he was doing to me. C. J. always knew what he was doing, and he had worked out some devious method of testing people by keeping them in suspense. If I hadn’t known him so well and, in a funny way, been fascinated by him as by a complicated character I’d created in a novel, I could gladly have killed him right there and then.

“I hope you’ll be along,” he said. “I’ll need a little moral support. These single-minded females! Scare me to death.”

“I’ll be along,” I said.

“Fine, boy. And for God’s sake, tell that wife of yours not to deliver her speech until after we’ve dined. Terrible for the gastric juices. Make it seven sharp.”

We made Oyster Bay at seven sharp, in full evening regalia, in spite of the fact that Paul Fowler’s car was being repaired and we had to pick him and Sandra up on the way.

I was glad that Paul was along. Betsy, ironically enough, just because she needed her father’s love and approval so much, was always tense and at her worst around him, and the stately splendors of C. J.’s establishment, now I had gotten over being dazzled, were a strain on me too. Paul’s combination of cynicism and childish gusto, which had endeared him to me when we were in the Marines together made him the perfect catalyst at C. J.’s. A Californian whose family had been wealthy and prominent generations before the Callinghams were ever heard of, he was the one person who dared to kid C. J., and the old man liked it. C. J. also had a connoisseur widower’s weakness for Sandra, Paul’s decorative and disarmingly bone-headed wife whose official title with Paul was always the Prop.

“I can tell you, Bill, my oldest war-buddy, in the darkest secrecy, the Prop isn’t made of flesh and blood. She was manufactured from the most expensive plastic. By whom? By the wicked advertisers in your wicked magazines. And for what purpose? To be the most irresistible object on which to hang diamonds, Cadillacs and mink. And I, poor simple soul, am doomed to do the hanging. Pity my dilemma. Think of the vast drain on my moral resources and my pocketbook. The Betsy Callingham Leukemia Fund! It ought to be the Sandra Fowler Fur, Jewel and Automobile Fund.”

That particular evening at C. J.’s was much like all the others, with too many servants, too much to eat, too much to drink and far too much Daphne. At nineteen, Daphne Callingham was the most spoiled brat I had ever known. It was all C. J.’s fault, of course. If he hadn’t adored her so blindly and convinced her that every man was her natural slave, she might have been rather a dear. At least she was pretty enough with her blue pug eyes and her mane of red hair. In her scatterbrained way, she was even kind and generous, too, if it didn’t inconvenience her too much.

That night she sat next to me at dinner and directed at me an absurd battery of allure. She always made mad charm at me and I knew it was almost entirely to annoy Betsy. That was the one thing about her I actively disliked. Ever since I’d known the Callinghams, she had been obsessed with proving the point that she was the “glamorous” one and Betsy “the mouse.” I resented it because, even now, Betsy was still sensitive enough to be flustered and hurt.

C. J., when he wasn’t being gracious with the Prop, glanced down the table purringly at Daphne. Paul, too, the shrewd politician, was busy flattering her. All this isolated Betsy and the whole mood of the table was such as to make her feel stuffy and clumsy and fun killing. I grinned encouragement at her between the elaborate prongs of the central silver epergne and she grinned back. But I knew she was unhappy.

And nobody mentioned the Fund.

It only came up after we men had sat baronially around the port for a while and finally “joined the ladies.” Paul managed to ease Daphne away into a corner of the huge living room. I settled on a Louis Quinze sofa next to the Prop, shutting her off from C. J. This left Betsy and her father facing each other, relatively alone. Even then C. J. made it as difficult for her as possible. But she did at last force herself into beginning her little obviously prepared plea. C. J. broke in almost at once.

“My dear Betsy, please spare me a harangue. I am under no delusion as to why you are here tonight, and you, I am sure, are under no delusion that any rhetorical pyrotechnics on your part can influence my decision to the slightest degree.”

C. J., who had been born in the slums of Cincinnati and had educated himself with the same savage determination with which he had enriched himself, relished polysyllables. He smirked his frog smirk and twisted his balloon brandy glass. Then, with the unctuousness of one of his own editorials, he launched into a speech about Standing On One’s Own Feet. Ever since the Fund started, he said, he had been the one who had buttressed it. If Betsy had the right pride in her work, she should have realized by now that she couldn’t depend for ever on an indulgent father…

I listened with indignation. It was not only unkind; it was preposterously unfair. Betsy had started the Fund with money left her by her mother; she had done everything herself; all she had ever asked from him had been an annual subscription and reasonable publicity in his periodicals. He knew all that as well as I did. And yet, the lecture rolled ponderously on.

Over in their corner, I saw Paul lean toward Daphne and whisper in her ear. Then they both joined us. C. J. was winding up his peroration.

“And so, my dear Betsy, I have decided, after the most mature reflection, that this year you should prove to yourself that you can get on perfectly well without any assistance from me whatsoever.”

Betsy’s face was carefully expressionless, but I knew how shrewdly calculated to hurt her that had been. I was so angry that I blundered to her defense. C. J.’s brow started to furrow with displeasure. In the middle of my speech, I caught a desperate glance from Paul and, feeling awkward and frustrated, let it all drop. For a moment, there was a long, clammy silence.

Then Daphne exclaimed, “So you’re not going to give Betsy her subscription, Daddy?”

“No, Piggy. She must fend for herself.”

“Why, of all the mean, dreary old tycoons.” Daphne gave her fashionable-girls’-school giggle and sat down on C. J.’s lap, curling her thin bare arms around his neck. “Really, I’ve never heard anything so depressing in my entire life. Poor old Betsy! What’s she got but her dismal old Fund? And you know it’ll fall flat on its face without you. How can you be so square?”

With a quick glance at Betsy, she started pulling one of his ears. Her crude cozening was obviously motivated just as much by a desire to flaunt her power over him as by any genuine impulse to help her sister. It embarrassed me in the extreme. It was even more embarrassing when I saw from C. J.’s face that he was succumbing to it. His cheeks became pink and puffy; his mouth pursed; he even giggled in a basso imitation of his daughter.

In less than a quarter of an hour, he had abandoned his platform of Standing On One’s Own Feet as if it had never existed and was signing a check “just this time as a favor to Piggy.”

As he handed Betsy the check, I noticed a gleam of satisfied malice in his eyes and it dawned on me that, as so often before, he had completely taken me in. Both his pompous speech and his foolish-father routine with Daphne had been merely games, part of an obscure, perverse, rich-man’s joke. In his infinite complexity, he had decided from the beginning to give Betsy the money, but he had had an impulse to humiliate her first and Daphne had provided him with the most effective method of insult.

At times like that the whole Callingham atmosphere depressed and frightened me, and the rest of the evening, so far as I was concerned, was stifling. But C. J. seemed to enjoy it immensely. Luckily, he always went to bed early. At ten-thirty we were dismissed.

As I was getting my coat, Daphne pulled me aside and, grinning in triumph, held up a twenty-five-cent piece.

“Paul bet me a quarter I couldn’t break the old boy down. Pretty smooth work, wasn’t it?” She batted the lashes over her big eyes. “I’m coming to town tomorrow. Now that I’ve saved her dreary old Fund for her, the least Betsy can do is to loan you to me for lunch.” Lunching with Daphne was a lengthy and exhausting occupation. But I knew that crossing her would only make the whole family thing more difficult for Betsy.

“Sure,” I said.

In the car, Betsy was wonderful. She made no mention of my ill-starred effort at championing her, and no one would have known her father had hurt her. It was, I knew, a matter of pride with her. Paul was fine, too. He didn’t refer to the quarter episode. He merely took it all as a run-of-the-mill successful transaction.

The Fowlers decided to come home with us for a drink, but when we had almost reached Beekman Place the Prop discovered she had a headache. After any evening in which she hadn’t been the center of attraction, she was apt to have a headache. It was the only method of asserting herself that she had figured out. Paul, as always, was as gentle as a lamb with her.

“My poor baby, it’s all that weight of gray matter.”

“No, Paul, it isn’t. It’s those liqueurs of C. J.’s.”

I let Betsy off at Beekman Place and drove the Fowlers down again to their apartment. As I started back uptown alone, my depression hadn’t left me. Even after three years of happy marriage, there were still moments when I felt trapped, when I felt that Betsy and I, for all our show of independence, were nothing but slightly superior slaves in C. J.’s vast empire. That had been a particularly unfortunate day. I’d been frustrated about the Vice-Presidency; I’d had to watch helpless while C. J. goaded my wife; and, on top of it all, I’d had to let a dizzy nineteen-year-old girl command me into taking her to lunch. Like the Prop, I suppose, I felt a desire to assert myself.

I glanced out of the car. I was almost in front of Angelica’s apartment.

chapter 3

I knew that it was rash to stop the car. I didn’t kid myself that I owed Angelica a duty call. I didn’t even particularly want to see her. It was just a stubborn, confused impulse to do something which had nothing to do with the Callinghams—something, in fact, of which C. J. would heartily disapprove. For, in his Champion-of-American-Morality moods, he still tiraded against “that shoddy woman we rescued you from and all that degenerate bunch in Europe.”

I parked in front of the house, pressed the buzzer and, when the door catch was released, went up the dismal stairs to the apartment.

Angelica opened the door. I had been expecting the wan invalid of the day before. The change was astonishing. She was fully dressed in a black suit with a yellow scarf knotted at her throat. The suit wasn’t anything much, but the way she wore it and her extraordinary, unaffected beauty made the Prop seem synthetic and Daphne a nouveau riche little floosie. I felt unreasonably happy that I was there.

“I was passing,” I said. “I thought I’d drop up and see how you were. You look much better.”

Her gray eyes, taking in my evening clothes, showed no surprise and no particular welcome. “Do you want to come in for a minute?”

I followed her into the shrimp-pink living room. It was scrupulously tidy. The door was open into the bedroom. It, too, seemed just as neat. The effect was still one of extreme poverty, but the squalor was gone. In my rebellion from C. J.’s flamboyant luxury, its sparseness struck me as refreshing.

Angelica took a cigarette out of an open package and lit it with a kitchen match. She was treating me like a formal acquaintance, studiedly rejecting me as an ex-husband.

She said, “I was silly and hysterical last night. I must have given you a very wrong impression.”

“You were sick,” I said.

“About Jaimie, I mean. I exaggerated it all, made it seem most melodramatic. It isn’t. I want to make that clear. I don’t need any help. I am not, in any way, a Damsel in Distress.”

“You aren’t?”

“He’s difficult, of course, particularly when he’s drunk, and last night he’d been drunk for a week. But he’s all right again now. He came around this afternoon. He was fine. Everything’s fine.”

Her ludicrous attempt to whitewash Jaimie and her obvious desire to slam the door of her life in my face exasperated me.

I said, “It sounds like a beautiful romance. How long has it been going on? Did it, by any chance, overlap with Charles Maitland?”

She looked faintly surprised rather than angry at that shabby crack. “I’d almost forgotten Charles. Jaimie and I met in Positano two years ago.”

“Then isn’t it about time you made an honest man of him?”

“Married him, you mean? Jaimie would never marry me. Never in a million years. He’s all set to marry an heiress with diamonds in a strongbox and a yacht. Isn’t that the established pattern for all authors and ex-authors?”

Although I knew I had that taunt coming to me, my anger flared up. I realized it was pointless to be angry. It was three years out of date. But I had been cheated out of a final scene in Portofino and here it seemed to be coming, soured from being so long bottled up.

“And you’re satisfied with that sort of a relationship?”

“Completely.”

“You weren’t satisfied with me.”

“Bill…!”

“I see what was wrong now. I was the right type. Bumming around Europe, making like the Great American Novelist! But I wasn’t quite far enough down the drain, was I? Charles Maitland had it all over me, and Jaimie’s got it all over both of us. I didn’t try to strangle you. I even did my best to support you and, of course, I committed the cardinal, bourgeois sin of marrying you.”

Her face was white and gaunt. My body was tingling with a need to hurt her, to pay her out, now, years later when it no longer mattered.

“Congratulations. It’s a glorious life you’ve built up for yourself. No wonder you threw your own kid away; no wonder you haven’t even bothered to ask me how Rickie is. No wonder…”

I saw her hand flying out toward my cheek. I caught it. For a moment we stood glaring at each other. Then, suddenly, my anger collapsed like a pricked balloon.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business. I’ll go now.”

“Yes. it’s best if you go.”

I looked at her standing there, so beautiful, so pigheaded, so convinced she wasn’t doomed. Without any justification at all I felt an obligation to protect her.

“If you ever need me…”

“I won’t need you or anyone…”

“But if you do, call me. Will you promise?”

“All right,” she said. “I promise.”

I leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. I had intended it to be a token kiss, establishing once and for all a complete severance from our old passion, but her lips unexpectedly melted against mine. Their familiarity was like an electric shock. I put my arm around her waist, drew her to me and we clung together in a long bewildering embrace.

We both broke away simultaneously. I knew it had meant nothing; it was just an accident, a slip-back in time. But my heart was pounding. My legs were weak as skimmed milk. And the realization came, profoundly shocking to me, that I had never, in the three years of my marriage to Betsy, felt this way with her.

She stood looking at me, the gray eyes quite inscrutable. Even the hideous background of the shrimp-pink living-room wall couldn’t diminish her beauty. The physical exultation ebbed away and its place was taken by something that was almost hatred. I longed for her to invite me back into the apartment so that I could refuse with contempt. But she merely started to close the door.

“Good-by, Bill.”

“Good-by, Angelica,” I said.

When I got home, Betsy was asleep.

At the office next morning, around twelve-thirty, just when I was expecting Daphne, my secretary announced a Mr. James Lumb. I’d never heard of him, but he insisted on seeing me and, in a few seconds, Jaimie walked into the office. I recognized him at once.

He was obviously sober. In fact, with his black hair slicked and a perfectly pressed, expensive suit, he looked immaculate, like the Coast’s latest and hottest starlet on a gracious personal appearance tour. At least, he would have if his smoky black eyes had been a little less intelligent and his exploitation of his sex-allure a little less smooth.

To my annoyance, I noticed that there was no visible bruise where I had hit him.

He had a briefcase under his arm. Without being asked, he sat down, called me by my first name, spoke with bantering amusement about our “duel” and then produced his novel from the briefcase, announcing that he was sure I was dying to read it. Angelica had told him all about me, he said. He’d even read Heat of Noon.

“Noon’s pretty good. Too bad you gave up writing.” With incredible brashness, he put the manuscript down on my desk and glanced at a Dufy on the wall. “But, there again, maybe you did the smart thing. This setup’s a far cry from being the starving novelist.” A sudden, chummy smile exposed the whitest of white teeth. “Tell me about the Callinghams. The old man must be something. I hear his place at Oyster Bay’s fantastic.” That was the moment when Daphne burst into the office in a flurry of mink and high, infectious laughter.

Ever since I’d known her, I’d watched Daphne grab. But, when I introduced her to Jaimie, the acquisitiveness in her eyes was more shameless than I had ever seen it. He might have been just the right bracelet in Cartier’s window. I glanced from her to Jaimie. The greed was there too, but far more cleverly concealed. I sat behind my desk watching while they charmed each other and ignored me. At length Daphne turned to me with a dazzling smile.

“Bill, darling, you are a bore suddenly getting tied up in a conference when I came all the way into town to lunch with you.”

Never was a more crudely baited hook more crudely snatched.

“Oh, Miss Callingham, if you’re free for lunch, I would be delighted…”

“Oh, Mr. Lumb, you are a positive angel.” Daphne pouted at me in insincere regret. “Now, Bill, darling, you won’t have me on your conscience.”

“Take your time on the novel, Bill,” said Jaimie. “There’s no rush.”

They were put of the office in a flash. I had watched the comedy with amusement and even a little malice. It wasn’t my job to supervise my sister-in-law. And certainly it wasn’t my job to regulate the fidelity of my ex-wife’s temperamental boy-friend.

I had lunch with a colleague and contentedly discussed circulation figures.

During the next two weeks, I forgot about Jaimie and Daphne and even about Angelica. Both Betsy and I were busy, Betsy with Paul over the Spring Drive and I at the office where C. J. was fiendishly spinning out his cat-and-mouse game between me and Dave Manners.

It came as a complete surprise one evening when Betsy asked, “Who’s this Jaimie Lumb? Daphne was in the Fund office this morning, raving about him. She says he’s a friend of yours.”

I hedged. “Oh, he’s a writer. I hardly know him. He was in my office one day and Daphne met him.”

“Well, it seems to be quite a thing. Last week-end she took him to Oyster Bay and he made a big hit with Father. She’s mad for me to meet him. So I asked them for Thursday. I asked the Fowlers, too. That’s all right, isn’t it?”

“Sure. I guess so.”

Betsy was watching me with a little questioning furrow between her eyes. “You don’t have anything against him, do you?”

I thought of Jaimie, drunk and homicidal, staggering in the hallway at West 10th Street, and then, suddenly, I remembered the exact sensation of Angelica’s lips against mine.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know anything in particular.”

On Thursday, Paul and the Prop arrived first. By the time Jaimie and Daphne showed up, everything was going fine and it went on going fine, too. Jaimie was even smoother than I’d thought he would be. He’d grown up in the same small California town with the Prop and his bantering reminiscences with her made her feel important and, automatically, endeared him to Paul. Even Betsy, who was compassionate but shrewd about people, was charmed by him, while Daphne was walking on air.

It was only after dinner that I was jolted out of my false equanimity. Daphne got me alone.

“Isn’t he divine? Bill, dear, I’m going to marry him.”

“Marry him!”

“He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s hooked, poor darling. Dearest, sweetest Bill, you’ve always been my ally. He doesn’t have a cent. Daddy and Betsy are going to be appallingly grim about it. You will help, won’t you?”

Later in the evening Jaimie got me alone, too. He was smiling that intimate “old pal” smile.

“Bill, feller, wonder if you’d do me a favor. I guess Angelica doesn’t come here much. I mean there’s none of that first and second wife chumminess, is there? In fact—” the smile dimpled at the corners—“you probably don’t talk about Angelica to Betsy.”

“No,” I said.

“Then, as a favor to me, don’t tell Angelica about Daphne. I mean—I don’t want to hurt her. I want to ease this thing over on her at the right moment. You understand?”

It was all so bland, such a nice little neutrality pact. I wanted to push his face in.

After everyone had left, Betsy said, “I may be a dope, darling, but I thought he was charming. I asked them to come again whenever they want to.”

They came twice during the next week. The second time we were just about to give an after-the-theater party for Helen Reed, a well-known actress who was going to help Betsy launch the Drive in Philadelphia. That was the evening on which they formally announced their engagement. They hadn’t told C. J. yet. They had come to us, they said, to gain our moral support first.

I had, of course, been warned. But I had also, as much through bad luck as bad management, given my tacit support to them both and now it would have been very tricky for me to raise the first objection. I had been depending on Betsy’s level-headedness to apply the brakes. But I had banked without Jaimie’s charm for women and without Betsy’s reluctance to appear the spoil-sport older sister. She gave them her blessing.

They left just as the guests were arriving and it wasn’t until two, after Helen Reed and her entourage finally called it a day, that Betsy and I had a moment alone.

“Father will hate it,” Betsy said. “As far as he’s concerned, only a Duke would be good enough for Daphne.”

“I wasn’t a Duke,” I said.

“But I wasn’t Daphne. He hated having me around. He couldn’t wait to get rid of me.”

It was months since I’d heard that particular tone, that vestige of the old “I’m-the-unwanted-one” insecurity which used to torment her so much. “You know that’s only half true, at most, darling.”

“Of course it’s true. I reminded him of Mother and he loathed Mother. He married her before he was rich. He thought she was a drag on him. But she loved him. Mother believed in love.” She turned to me almost fiercely. “Bill, we married because we loved each other, didn’t we?”

I took her in my arms and kissed her on the mouth. “Baby, what a crazy thing to have to ask.”

She clung to me for a moment; soon she was perfectly assured again.

“Well, Daphne loves this boy. It’s transformed her. Anyone can see that, just as anyone can see that she’ll be ruined if she stays around Father much longer. That’s why we’ve got to help them.” She paused. “And it’s you who’ll have to bear the brunt of it. They met through you and it’s you Father will hold responsible.”

Of course C. J. would hold me responsible, and I was responsible. I saw then just how precarious the false position into which I’d drifted had become. I realized that, since I had left it so late, my absurd little interlude with Angelica would sound far guiltier than it had been and that it would hurt Betsy much more than if I’d blurted it all out at the beginning. But it had to be done.

I was just about to speak when I was saved by the bell—literally. It was the front doorbell. I answered it and Daphne was standing there.

For the first moment, I hardly recognized her. Her right eye was swollen; her skin was the color of dough; and her evening dress under the mink wrap was ripped down the front. When she saw me, she broke into hysterical sobs and fell into my arms. Her breath reeked of liquor.

Betsy and I got her into the guest-room bed and extracted some sort of story from her. After they’d left us, Jaimie had taken her to a dive. They’d done a lot of heavy drinking and then gone back to his apartment where, in a sudden drunken fury, he’d jumped on her like a homicidal maniac and tried to strangle her. She had somehow managed to escape; she’d run out of the apartment; someone she’d met on the stairs had got her a taxi. C. J. had a penthouse apartment in town; but she’d been afraid of the servants and come straight to us.

She was in a pitiful state of panic, and most of all she was terrified of C. J. She couldn’t possibly have driven back to Oyster Bay, anyway, but she’d promised to be home by one.

“If Daddy knew, he’d kill me. Betsy, you’ve got to do something about Daddy.”

Betsy was seething with anger. However much Daphne exasperated her on occasion, the integrity of the Callingham clan was sacred to her and trouble in the family turned her into a lioness. She called C. J. who was still up and raging, and managed to invent some convincing excuse about Daphne staying with us.

It was after three when we got to bed.

“What a mercy it happened when it did,” said Betsy. “Now, at least, we know what he is. And to think I was all dewy eyed about a marriage! Well, that’s the end of Jaimie Lumb at any rate.”

“Yes,” I said and breathed a sigh of relief.

Betsy wangled it for Daphne to stay three days with us. Once she was sure we’d covered up for her, Daphne decided it had all been a “mad, exciting episode.” When she left, she patted the still puffy eye and giggled.

“I’ll tell Daddy I ran into a door. He’ll swallow anything from me.”

That seemed to be that…

Three days after, I saw Daphne and Jaimie chattering and laughing together at a corner table at Twenty-One. When I got back to the office, I called Betsy. She could hardly believe it, but she said she’d take care of it. That evening she told me she’d had a big scene with Daphne who’d been defiant and childishly infatuated with Jaimie again. According to Daphne, it had been Jaimie’s passion for her which had driven him mad. Betsy assured me this was a direct quote. She had cowed Daphne into a promise of dropping him only by threatening to tell C. J.

Next day Betsy went off with Helen Reed for the Drive in Philadelphia and I was left alone with Rickie and his nurse. The nurse, Ellen, a brisk, snobbish blonde imported from England, had always been a thorn in my flesh. It was Betsy who paid her salary and she was enormously conscious of the fact, adoring all Callinghams and treating me like an incompetent footman. Betsy didn’t really like her any more than I did, but she was extremely efficient and Betsy, with rather touching stepmother insecurity, preferred a nurse who wouldn’t compete in Rickie’s affections.

The apartment with Ellen at the helm was a very different place. On the second night of Betsy’s absence, I was at home alone. Rickie had had a tooth pulled and I’d made a special occasion out of reading him to sleep. It had been the cook’s night off and Ellen had made me some supper. Earlier, Paul had called and asked me over to spend the evening with him and the Prop, but I hadn’t felt like going out. After dinner, I read for a while and then went to bed at midnight.

I was just undressing when the phone rang. I recognized Angelica instantly and I was quite off my guard. My heart started to race.

“Bill, I’m sorry. It’s late to call. But you’re alone, aren’t you? I mean, I saw in the paper that Betsy had gone to Philadelphia.”

I thought: You’d be crazy to make anything out of this. She’s nothing to you. She’s worse than nothing. She’s poison.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m alone.”

“I’m just down the block. There’s something… Bill, could I come up and see you for a minute?”

“Sure,” I said. “Come right up. It’s the fourth floor. ”The moment I’d said that I knew I’d betrayed myself and Betsy, but in the same instant I started to rationalize. How could I turn down my ex-wife if she was in trouble? It wasn’t even indiscreet. Ellen was asleep at the back of the apartment; the night elevator man was professionally uninquisitive.

The excitement in me made me feel drunk. I was in pajamas. I put on a robe and went back to the living room. As I was poking the fire, I noticed Betsy’s reading glasses on a table by the sofa. She must have forgotten them. She’d only started to use them a few months ago and she was still rather shy of having me see her wearing them.

At the sight of them, all the excitement was gone and I saw myself as I actually was, a shoddy philanderer, hoping to cheat on the woman I loved with a woman who didn’t give a damn whether I lived or died.

The buzzer sounded. I went to the door and let Angelica in.

chapter 4

She was wearing an old black coat and no hat, and was carrying a suitcase. She looked pale, haggard and exhausted. I could tell that something bad had happened.

“I walked up,” she said. “I thought it was best to keep the elevator man out of this.”

I took the suitcase and her coat and led her into the living room. She sat down in front of the fire, opened her pocketbook and started to search for a cigarette. I brought her one. My hand with the lighter touched hers. It was cold and unsteady.

In her clipped, brittle voice, she said, “I’m sorry about all this, but at least it won’t take long. I was wondering if you could lend me some money. I don’t need much. Twenty dollars would do. But I’ve got to have some money—for a hotel room.” She smiled, trying to show how amusing everything was. “Jaimie came around tonight and threw me out of the apartment. His friend’s coming back unexpectedly from Mexico, he says, and needs it.”

“At midnight?”

“Presumably.”

By that time I shouldn’t have been surprised at anything Jaimie did to her. But I was surprised and angry that she was taking this latest humiliation so submissively.

I said, “You mean you don’t have any money at all?”

“I had the dime to call you. I walked uptown. I was hoarding my capital. It’s the end of the month and my check from Grandfather’s estate doesn’t come in till Wednesday.”

“And Jaimie knows that’s all you’ve got?”

“Jaimie knows how much everyone’s got, down to the last cent. That’s one of his many talents. But why should he care? There’s no longer any relationship between us, beautiful or otherwise. It was all finished three days ago in a glorious blaze of something or other.”

“Finished?”

“Really, Bill, you don’t have to act surprised. I hear you and Betsy had a charming dinner party for him and Daphne the other night.”

There was no accusation in her voice. Behind the strained facetiousness there was nothing except a kind of dull desperation. But I was terribly conscious of the fact that I, in a way, was responsible for what had happened to her.

Feebly, knowing it wouldn’t help anyone, I said, “They’ll never let him marry Daphne.”

“He’ll marry Daphne. When Jaimie wants something, he gets it. He wanted an heiress; he’s found one. And my occupation’s gone. I would have left New York right after he told me the great news. I was only hanging on until my check came and I could buy a ticket home.”

She stubbed her cigarette. “Probably he invented the friend tonight as an excuse for throwing me out. It’s the sort of joke that amuses him. But what difference does it make?” She got up abruptly. “If you’ll be nice enough to give me the money, I can be on my way.”

She was going home. There was no relationship between us. There never could have been any intelligible relationship. In fact, it was much better for me that she should be out of New York. As I looked at her, standing by the mantel, trying to be jaunty, I felt pity and then, unexpectedly, a wrenching sense of loss.

“So you’re going back to Claxton?” Saying the name brought a host of memories.

“Last week I got a letter from Father. His housekeeper just died. He’s in total chaos. At least I can scrub floors for him.”

“For how long?”

“Forever. Why not?” Her mouth started to twitch at the corners. “There’s nothing else I’m good for, is there? I loused up my life. I almost loused up yours. Now even the lowest little heel in New York has no use for me.” She laughed. “Maybe I shouldn’t go back to Claxton. Maybe I’ll louse up the entire English Department too.”

She dropped into a chair. Her profile was like a corpse’s profile. Her misery, her contempt for herself were like corpses in the room too. I hated watching her, hated submitting her to being watched. At random, grabbing any excuse, I asked if she was hungry and, before she could stop me, hurried out into the kitchen.

As I made a sandwich and poured a glass of milk, I was haunted by an image of her walking fifty blocks up Manhattan, exhausted, hungry, carrying the suitcase, hoarding her single dime. Plunging back into the past, I saw her lying at my side in the bedroom in Provence, with the mimosa tapping at the window, charging the air with its sweetness. I waited in the kitchen, dreading to go back to her.

Then I went back and it was all right. She was in control again. She even smiled a warm, relaxed smile when I gave her the tray.

I don’t know which of us started reminiscing about Claxton, but we slipped into it perfectly naturally. We remembered the most trivial incidents. She even laughed. I laughed too. When she had finished eating, she took a drink. Some color came back into her cheeks. I was more and more conscious of how beautiful she was, of how pleasantly intimate the room was and of the fact that we were alone. Part of me, I suppose, knew that this was the most dangerous thing that could happen. But it was a remote part, easy to ignore. We were back as if nothing had changed, back long before Portofino, back before the bad days had begun.

Angelica smoked continuously and, somehow, the cigarette box never got near her. Each time I took her a cigarette and each time, as I lit it for her and her hand, warm and alive again, brushed against mine, I felt a tingle of excitement. The last time I took her a cigarette, we were both laughing. My hand came into contact with hers. Suddenly she drew hers away.

“It’s charming here,” she said. “Betsy, I suppose?”

“I guess so.”

“She’s a wonderful wife for you, isn’t she?”

I knew she was signaling me to stop, but I also knew, by some telepathy of the nerves, that she was signaling against her will. I moved the fraction of an inch closer, feeling a little dizzy.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s a wonderful wife.”

“And Rickie?”

“He’s fine.”

“He…” She got up, twisting past me. “Could I see him?”

Her eyes were challenging me, ordering me back into my role as somebody else’s husband. That was why she had asked to see Rickie. I knew that. It was the only excuse for getting up that had occurred to her. If she had been thinking normally, seeing Rickie could only have meant another knife twist. If I had been thinking normally, I would have realized that taking her to him was the greatest betrayal I could make of Betsy. But I wasn’t-thinking normally. I was only playing the moment as it came.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s see him.”

We went down the corridor to Rickie’s room. A night light was burning. Rickie was lying on his back with his finger in his mouth and his black hair matted down over his eyes. We stood looking at him. Then his big black eyes opened. He gazed at me and with bland curiosity at Angelica.

At that moment the cuckoo in his corny Swiss cuckoo clock shot out, cuckooing two times. Rickie watched it.

“It’s two,” he said. “That’s very, very late, isn’t it, Pop?”

“Sure,” I said.

His eyes moved back to Angelica. “Who’s that?”

“It’s a friend,” I said.

“I had a tooth pulled today,” he said.

Suddenly Angelica said, “Let’s get out of here.”

She started for the door. I kissed Rickie, told him to go back to sleep and followed her. She was standing by the front door in the hall.

She said, “Give me the money, Bill. I’ve got to go.”

The thought of her leaving seemed unendurable. “Have one more drink.”

“No, Bill.”

“Just one more. After all, we’re saying good-by.”

I made drinks for us both in the living room and took them out to the hall. She accepted hers and I felt as if I had won a great victory.

I said, “It’s past two—a hell of a time to go searching for hotel rooms.”

“That doesn’t make any difference.”

“There’s a perfectly good guest room here.”

“No, Bill.”

“Why not? What difference can it possibly make?” The ice in her glass tinkled. I looked down. Her hand was trembling. I took the glass from her and put it down on a table.

When I took her in my arms, it seemed inevitable; I didn’t feel the slightest anxiety or the faintest pang of guilt. With my lips on hers, I drew her back to the hall couch. She had made no move to resist. As we sank down on it, she gave a little whimpering cry and clung to me as if I were the only safety in a world of terror. With her cry, my body recognized its final victory over my reason, and Betsy and the new life I had built without Angelica seemed nothing but a gimcrack cardboard structure which I had erected to fill the vacuum of my loneliness.

It was the cough I heard first. It was not loud, but its precise, chilly timbre seeped through to me vaguely as a sound that shouldn’t be there. Then it came again louder, unmistakable in its outraged decorum. I jumped away from Angelica.

Rickie’s nurse was standing immediately in front of us. She was wearing a white towel bathrobe. Her blonde hair, in a twisted pigtail, swung over one shoulder. Her face was a shade of purplish pink.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” she said. “I didn’t realize…”

Angelica sat up. I said stupidly, “Oh, Ellen…”

“Something woke Master Rickie. He called me. I was going to the kitchen to get him some hot milk. I didn’t realize…”

She turned from us and almost ran back down the passage.

For a long moment we sat in silence. Then Angelica got up, pulled her coat from under me and started to put it on.

In a dead little voice, she said, “Get me the money, Bill.”

I went to Betsy’s and my bedroom. My wallet was on the bureau. There was about thirty dollars in it. Now that the first anesthesia was wearing off, I felt foolish and frightened. I took all the money except a couple of dollars and gave it to Angelica. I knew it was grossly unfair to blame her. It had all been entirely my fault. I, who had so much to lose, had been the one so recklessly determined to lose it. But I rebelled against seeing it that way. Because I needed to, I could only think of myself as a victim. Angelica was the Enemy, the intruder who had inveigled her way into my life to destroy it a second time.

She put the money in her pocketbook. “Will she tell Betsy?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“I’m sorry.”

She picked up her suitcase and opened the front door. In my egoistic guilt and fear for my marriage, she looked small and colorless and enormously unmemorable. It seemed inconceivable that I could have imagined her into an object of desire. All I wanted was for her to go.

“Good-by, Angelica.”

At the door she lingered. “You can’t suggest a hotel, can you? I’m bad about New York.”

“Try the Wilton. It’s just over on Madison a couple of blocks down.”

“The Wilton. Thanks, Bill, and good-by.”

She slipped out of the door and closed it behind her. The two drinks were still on the hall table. I picked one up and gulped it. Angelica’s departure hadn’t helped. I was obsessed with shame and worry for Betsy whose whole life was based on her trust in me, who had grown from insecurity to security solely because she had come to believe that my love for her was as open and incorruptible as her love for me. Melodramatically, I saw a future where, my wife gone, my job gone, I faced a barren, empty existence again. I even contemplated hurrying into Ellen’s bedroom and pleading with her not to destroy Betsy’s happiness and mine.

But, all the time, I realized that I was only dramatizing the situation to try to salvage some shreds of pride. What I had done had merely been tawdry, almost farcical. Through absurdly romanticizing a sexual itch which should have died but hadn’t quite, I had made an idiot of myself and had been caught. That was all. Betsy would understand. Surely she would understand.

Next morning I awoke steady again, knowing I had to face what I had done and that, first of all, I had to face Ellen. In the nursery Rickie was eating his cereal. Ellen in the pretentious, starched white uniform which she always insisted on wearing, was sitting next to him, knitting some shapeless garment for one of her interminable nieces in England. She looked up with icy respectfulness.

I said, “About last night, Ellen, I want to explain…”

“Really, sir. It’s not my place to ask for explanations, I’m sure.”

I floundered on. “She’s an old friend. She’d been in difficulty…”

“Please.” Ellen jumped up and put her starched arms theatrically around Rickie. “Not in front of the little boy.”

Rickie gave an Indian war-whoop and parroted, “Not in front of the little boy.” It was all going hopelessly wrong.

I began again, “I fully intend to tell Mrs. Harding all about it.”

The phone rang. Grateful for a letout, I hurried out and took the call in the bedroom. It was C. J. I knew he had been in Boston the night before for a press convention. He must just have got back.

“Bill? What were you doing last night?”

His voice sounded strangled by some indeterminate violent emotion.

Before I could speak, he barked, “Were you alone?”

I could only think for the moment and of the fatal consequences of C. J., of all people, finding out about Angelica.

“Yes,” I lied. “I was alone.”

“Then come around right away. I’m at the apartment. Grab a taxi. Come this instant.”

“All right, but…”

“You know what’s happened? You’ve read the papers?”

“No,” I said, my confusion merging into a sense of disaster.

“That friend of yours. Jaimie Lumb. That phony novelist you and Betsy so carefully cultivated. He was murdered last night. They found him in his apartment—shot dead.”

chapter 5

I dropped the receiver and stood staring at it, not seeing it. In that first instant of shock, it seemed to me that the bottom was falling out of my world, and panic invaded me like slugs crawling over my skin. Jaimie had been killed. Why or by whom seemed at the moment a matter of complete indifference to me. All I could think of was that Angelica would be one of the first people the police would question. She would have to account for her movements. I would be questioned. Ellen would be questioned. Inevitably Ellen would tell what she had seen. Last night’s episode was no longer just a humiliating incident to be ironed out somehow between Betsy and me. The press would get hold of it. It would be pruriently exaggerated and screamed from headlines. C. J., with his imperial pride of family, would discard me as a son-in-law and throw me out of my job five minutes after he had read the papers.

But, in spite of my panic for myself, it was Betsy who took first place in my thoughts. This would destroy Betsy. However hard I tried to explain, I could never shield her from what other people would be thinking. Once the news had become a common scandal, it would be worse for her than it had been before she met me. She would be back again in her own mind as the Ugly One, the one despised by her sister, rejected by her father, the Pathetic One who had taken to Good Works. But not only that. Now she would also see herself branded as a laughingstock, the wife who hadn’t been able to hold her husband, the rich old maid, married for her money by an adventurer who had used her to drag himself up from nowhere and had cynically returned at the first possible moment to an intrigue with his worthless first wife.

I could visualize her, after the news broke, reading the papers. Perhaps even today in Philadelphia. Perhaps Helen Reed would be with her. “Darling, how terrible.” I could see her cringe. For months now, whenever there was anyone, friend, acquaintance or stranger to be faced, she would cringe.

My love for her, which I had managed so conveniently to put to one side the night before, assailed me, stinging me with remorse. How could I have done it? How, possibly, could I have submitted her to this? I raged against myself and raged futilely against Angelica with her saved dime, her “courage,” her fatal appeal to nostalgia and pity. Why had she ever come back into my life?

I started to dress, trying not to lose my head. Ellen was the crux. If Ellen hadn’t caught us, Angelica and I could think up a fairly innocent explanation for why we had been together. Could I appeal to Ellen—if not for my sake, then for Betsy’s? She was impressed by Betsy. With a sinking heart I remembered her, hostile, stonily respectable, in the nursery a few minutes before. Then I remembered C. J.’s “Come at once.” I was torn between two equally urgent and formidable alternatives. I settled for C. J. He was the more formidable. “What were you doing last night?” It would be wiser to find out first how much he knew. When I’d dressed, I hurried out of the apartment and down to the street. I looked for a taxi; then I thought of a newspaper. I bought one on First Avenue and flagged a cab.

In the cab I leafed through the paper.

First I found a report of C. J.’s speech at the press banquet. Then I located the announcement in a small paragraph on a middle page. It merely gave the bald fact that a man identified as James Lumb, twenty-five, novelist, had been found shot in an apartment on East 20th Street. It gave no details; it didn’t even give the time of death. But, as I gazed at it, Jaimie became real to me as an actual corpse lying somewhere—in the morgue?—and a new thought burst in, sending my panic surging upward. What if Angelica had killed him? Wasn’t that as logical an end as any for their squalid relationship with its obbligato of violence? If she’d killed him! If then she’d come lying to me, impelled by her perverse instinct to destroy, to tangle me in with her, to drag me down too! Perhaps the police already knew. Perhaps C. J. knew too. With his connections in high places, he could find out anything he wanted to find out.

The taxi drew up in front of C. J.’s apartment on Park Avenue. With a sensation of absolute doom, I got out.

I went through the luxurious foyer and up in the purring elevator. Henry, the husband of the couple who were permanently installed in C. J.’s penthouse apartment, opened the door, hovering in elderly, arthritic anxiety.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Harding, sir.”

I heard C. J.’s voice from the library: “Bill? Is that you, Bill?”

I went down the passage, past all the Dufys flamboyantly hung in half-darkness to show how much C. J. could afford to throw away. The library door was open. I walked in.

At the best of times, C. J. intimidated me. Now, as I saw him, broad and squat, standing there, surrounded by all the red leather furniture and the walls of books, most of which, improbably, he had read, anxiety and guilt turned him into the very symbol of retribution. I have only the vaguest idea of what I’d expected from him, but it had certainly been something overwhelmingly bad. As he hurried toward me, I steeled myself to face the beginning of the end.

“Bill! Boy! Thank God you’ve come. We don’t have a moment to lose. The police have called. They’ll be here any minute.”

He put his hands on my arms. C. J. practically never touched anyone. He had a fetish about it. Dimly, from that unexpected physical contact and the propitiatory “Bill! Boy!” I realized that I was not the pariah after all. It made me steady enough actually to see him instead of just imagine him. He looked exhausted and threatened and older than I had ever seen him. But the frog eyes were diamond bright and inflexible of purpose. I knew him so well. I could tell that whatever had happened had been a mortal blow to him. He was being the Great General at Bay but Undaunted. At the moment, any personal feelings he might have about me were in suspension. I was merely something that he needed, something that fitted somehow into a counterattack.

“Just listen. Bill,” he said. “I’ll give you the facts. There’s no time for anything else. Yesterday I was in Boston. I got back at seven-thirty this morning. I’d read about Lumb in the paper. When I got here, Daphne wasn’t in the apartment. Her bed hadn’t been slept in. Half an hour later, she came in. I made her tell me everything. Part of last night she was with Lumb; the rest of it she was alone. She had nothing to do with this. You’ve got to take my word for it. She had nothing to do with it at all.”

I might have realized that nothing but trouble for Daphne could have affected him as strongly as this. But I hadn’t thought of Daphne. I’d thought of nothing but myself and Angelica.

“The poor child!” he said. “The poor deluded little idiot! My God, when she told me what’s been happening; when she let me know how criminally irresponsible you and Betsy have been…” He had suddenly whipped himself up into a fury and then just as suddenly he suppressed it. Later there would be hell to pay for all of us. I saw that. But that was to be later. C. J. could control his moods like a machine. This wasn’t the moment for moral indignation. This was the moment for action.

He was looking at me urgently again, almost pleadingly. “Bill, we can’t let the police know what she did last night. It’s impossible. Quite out of the question. That’s the point. That’s what we’re going to fix.”

He was even smiling at me now. It was a sketchy, artificial attempt to show “how close we were.” When he needed to charm his underlings, C. J. never bothered to make the charm convincing.

“It’s perfectly simple. We’ve just got to keep our heads. The police know that Daphne was friendly with Lumb. There was some earlier episode with the neighbors. The neighbors put them on to her. But they don’t know anything about last night. I’m certain of it. I sounded them out on the phone. This will just be a formal, fact-finding interview.”

Not taking his eyes from my face, he picked up a magazine from a table and rolled it into a truncheon. “I saw the solution immediately. The moment I’d checked with you and found out you were alone last night, I knew it couldn’t go wrong. I’ve already briefed Daphne. I’ve already released it to the press, too. The News called a couple of minutes after I’d talked to you, and I saw my chance. There’s nothing like getting your side in first.”

He tapped me on the arm with his magazine truncheon. In the excitement of planning, he had become almost exuberant, in love with his own idea of himself as the man who never let anything defeat him. I looked at him, feeling sick in the stomach.

“This is your story, Bill. Keep it simple. Later we can work out the details. Last night, Daphne was here alone. She hates spending the night alone in this big apartment with only the servants. Betsy’s apartment is like a second home to her. She had no particular date; she knew Betsy was away and you would be alone too, so she called you up and asked if she could spend the night at your place. She arrived about seven; you had a quiet dinner together, listened to the phonograph, played Scrabble. That’s important. We need something that kept you up late because we don’t know when he was killed yet. We don’t want to run any risk of their claiming she could have slipped out after you’d gone to bed. You stayed up till around two-thirty or three. Remember that. And keep it simple at the moment. The police won’t press on a first interview. I’ll see to that.”

He tapped me with the truncheon again. “You see, boy? There’s not a flaw anywhere. Your cook was off. I found that out from my cook. They went to the movies together—which means there was only Ellen. Ellen cooked dinner for you. That’s a lucky break. Ellen’s a good, sensible girl. You won’t have any difficulty fixing her. Give her something. Give her anything—up to a thousand. More if necessary, for those nieces in England or whatever it is she’s always yakking about. But she’s got to testify that Daphne was there. Ellen’s the crux, the extra witness. Everything will rest on…”

He broke off as Henry came in. The old man hovered at the door and, in his official announcing voice, intoned, “Lieutenant Trant, sir—from the Homicide Bureau.”

A man entered the room, carrying a bulky manila envelope. He was tall and quite young with a sort of unobtrusive elegance about him which didn’t belong with my idea of a policeman. He moved quietly. Everything about him was quiet. He brought his own atmosphere with him. To me, he was infinitely ominous.

But, at that moment, there was nothing that didn’t seem ominous. C. J. himself, the great heavy room with its red leather, its massive weight of books, its somber, hanging draperies were as sinister and unreal as objects in a dream of horror. My predicament, too, seemed something out of a night fantasy. But I knew it was real. I could see how it had all developed with terrifying logic from my lie on the phone. I had said I was alone. Of course C. J. had grabbed at what had seemed the ideal opportunity to protect Daphne from whatever foolishly reckless Daphneish thing she had done. To him, I was the alibi. To him, his beloved daughter was safe and I was immensely in favor as the instrument of her salvation.

If I told the truth to the police now, I would not only compromise Daphne, I would expose myself to C. J. as an adulterer and a liar whose lies had tricked him out of any other opportunity to shield his daughter.

But, there again, if I accepted the deal and played along with C. J…

Ellen’s a good, sensible girl. You won’t have any difficulty fixing her… Ellen’s the crux…

Ellen’s face rose in my mind; and Angelica’s, and Betsy’s. I could see all their faces, crowding around me, challenging me; but most clearly of all I saw my own inevitable destruction. Everything I had done since last night had seemed the most sensible thing to do at the moment, the surest move to protect myself and Betsy from crippling embarrassment, but every step I had taken had led me stumbling deeper and deeper into a maze.

If only there’d been time. If only that quiet, ominous young man had walked in five, four, three minutes later, I might have been able to explain to C. J. and save at least something. But it hadn’t happened that way. It had happened this way.

I’ve already released it to the press.

C. J. was hurrying to greet the detective. He was in total camouflage, all smiles, briskness and condescension—the Leading Citizen eager as always to assist the representatives of His Law.

I wanted to run away. In my demoralization, it seemed to be the only solution. I wanted to dash like panicked child out of that great room, down the passage, out of the apartment and away.

I almost did it. I had even started to search wildly in my mind for some excuse, however preposterous, when C. J. swung round to me with his hand on the detective’s arm and said, “Bill, I want you to meet Lieutenant Trant. Trant, this is my son-in-law, Bill Harding.”

The young man’s eyes rested for a moment on my face. They were calm and clever and formally polite. They were yielding no information whatsoever. He held out his hand. I took it.

C. J. said, “I imagine you’ll be wanting to see my daughter, won’t you, Lieutenant?”

“If she can spare me a moment.”

“We’ve all got a moment for the police.” C. J. gave a waggish laugh. All the time, the bright, unflinching frog eyes were fixed on my face. “Bill, go find her. That’s my boy. She’s somewhere around—in her room, I think.”

I knew exactly what the eyes meant. They meant: Here’s your moment. Grab it. Make sure she’s rehearsed; make sure that neither of you steps a fraction of an inch out of line. It was now or never. This was the moment of ultimate commitment. Lieutenant Trant had turned from me and was studying one of C. J.’s Braques with mild aesthetic respect. C. J. was still fixing me with his black, almost hypnotic, glare.

If Angelica had done it, I thought, then there was no hope for me at all. Every move she had made would come out. No power on earth could keep what had happened at my apartment from being shouted all over the country. But if she hadn’t killed him, if she was going to be no more to the police than just another suspect, another acquaintance of the corpse, then…

“Bill,” said C. J. “Bill, boy, we don’t want to waste the lieutenant’s time, do we?”

“Sure,” I said. “Excuse me. I’ll get her, C. J.”

I hurried out of the library. It was done now. For better or worse, I was committed.

chapter 6

I hurried down the passage. In the enormous living room, I saw the butler dusting a Brancusi abstract. There seemed absolutely no connection between the everyday life of his moving duster and the life I was in. I knew I should be trying to organize some halfway intelligible plan from the chaos, but, for the moment, I was paralyzed by a vision of the appalling, dislocating power of murder. A venal, neurotic nonentity had been killed. I had nothing to do with it. I was merely a silly little man who had made a silly little man’s sexual lapse, as trivial as it was ignoble. And yet, because Jaimie had been killed, it had become puffed up with horror. There was Jaimie’s murder squatting like a great, obscene octopus, and already a tentacle had curled out, catching me, infecting me.

I found Daphne in her room, sitting on the bed. Whatever she had or hadn’t done, I had expected her to be in a state of near-collapse, but instead she was calmly fixing her nails. She had painted them a screaming magenta and was holding up a hand, studying it. When she heard me, she turned, her red hair flopping. “Hi, Bill, do you like it? It’s a new color.”

Her frivolous composure exasperated me. I asked, “Did you kill him?”

“Really, Bill, darling, that’s the most libelous thing you’ve ever said to me. I couldn’t kill a pollywog.”

“The police are here.”

“They are?”

“What did you do last night?”

“Oh, it’s a long story. I’m afraid I was rather rash. I’ll tell you all about it sometime. But now, I suppose, we’ll have to go and confront the Law, won’t we?”

She got up, waving her hands to dry off the polish. “Daddy’s told you what to say?”

“Yes.”

She sighed. “He was furious. When he showed me the thing in the paper about Jaimie, I guess I lost my nerve and told him most of what’s been happening. Not all, of course. But a discreetly censored version. And he was livid! Livid with you and Betsy mostly for letting poor little me fall into the clutches. Really, that poor, silly boy getting himself killed. It’s awful, really. And to think that I… well, we won’t go into that. Does Betsy know?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“She’ll certainly be the clucking mother hen, won’t she? Me! The things that happen to me!”

She looped her hand through my arm and grinned ruefully up at me. “I called you about seven. I came over. Ellen fixed dinner. We sat listening to the phonograph and played Scrabble. We went to bed about three. What did we listen to? Bach, don’t you think? It ought to be something chaste so they won’t get ideas. And what did we eat? We’d better not make that up. They’ll be scrounging around in your icebox to check the leftovers. What was it, darling?”

“Roast chicken,” I said.

“And bread sauce, I suppose, because Ellen’s so bloody British.”

“I think so.”

“Ugh. You didn’t do me very proud, did you?”

She started to drag me to the door. She was as incomprehensible to me as if she had come from some other planet. But her total lack of qualms steadied me a little. If we were to go through with this thing, this teen-age cast-iron reproduction of C. J. was what we needed.

In the library C. J. and Lieutenant Trant were sitting together on a red leather sofa. In spite of C. J.’s elaborate affability, they looked absurdly mismatched like a celebrity and somebody’s young cousin stuck with each other at a cocktail party. Lieutenant Trant jumped up. When C. J. introduced him to Daphne, his face was so polite and deferential that it seemed impossible that he could know anything damaging about her or, for that matter, about Angelica and me. For the first time, vague hope stirred in me. Perhaps at least there would be a respite.

Daphne had changed completely from the girl in the bedroom. And she wasn’t overdoing it. She was just calm enough, just flustered enough, with just the right hesitant awkward charm. She had acted all her life to C. J. Now acting was second nature to her.

She moved across the room and sat down in a chair, carefully straightening the skirt over her knees. She smiled at C. J. He smiled back. There wasn’t the slightest trace of conspiracy. They were being Daddy and Piggy Callingham, giving a gracious glimpse of their domestic life. They terrified me. No, not terrified—horrified.

Lieutenant Trant sat down almost shyly on the arm of a chair. I had always thought policemen had books and pencils and took notes. He had nothing. He just sat there, looking, not at Daphne, but at his own crossed knees.

“You understand, Miss Callingham, that this is a mere formality. I know it’s annoying. But annoying people is my job.” He smiled, letting the feeble little joke drop like a pin to the floor. “You knew James Lumb, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. I’d been seeing quite a lot of him recently. He was so amusing.” Daphne glanced at me. “He was a great friend of Bill’s.”

“She brought him down to Oyster Bay a couple of week-ends ago.” C. J. leaned forward, blandly putting the seal of respectability on the relationship. “Seemed like a fine young man. Cultivated. Made a very good impression.”

“Oh, yes,” said Daphne. “Everyone was crazy about him. Betsy and Bill gave a dinner party for him. Betsy was mad about him and the Fowlers and everyone.”

Lieutenant Trant was still looking at his knee as if there was something about it that puzzled and intrigued him.

“It seems,” he said in the same respectful tone, “that a few weeks ago there was an episode at his apartment, Miss Callingham. I don’t exactly know what it was—but there was some sort of disturbance between you and Mr. Lumb. It was the Browns, the people in the adjoining apartment, who told me of it. Apparently you ran out of Mr. Lumb’s apartment one evening. You seemed to be in distress. The Browns were coming up the stairs. You told them your name and they helped you get a taxi.”

I knew, of course, what that “episode” had been. In Lieutenant Trant’s carefully muted description, it seemed something vastly remote from the savage mayhem which had ended with Daphne, swollen-faced, hysterical and drunk staggering into my apartment. I glanced at Daphne.

“Oh, that,” she said. She permitted herself the faintest trace of her giggle. “It was all very silly. Jaimie’d drunk quite a lot of champagne. He—he got a bit fresh.” She turned again to C. J., smiling. “I thought it was time I left in a hurry.”

“I see.” Trant paused. “It was the Browns who discovered him last night. They are the only other tenants in the building. All the lower floors are rented out to business concerns. Last night they had been at a party. They came home very late—about four. As they were passing Mr. Lumb’s door, they saw blood streaming out from under it. They broke down the door, of course, and—they found him there, by the door, lying slumped beside the steam radiator, shot three times. Dead.”

“Ugh!” said Daphne.

Lieutenant Trant seemed to have solved the problem of his knee. He looked up from it. His face, scanning ours, was naïvely conscious of the fact that he had told a dramatic story and told it with effective understatement. The naïveté was there and also a diffidence which was almost obsequious. Suddenly, I was sure of what until then I hadn’t dared admit to myself. This wasn’t anything as a policeman. It had only been the circumstances which had made him seem ominous when he arrived. This was just some green rookie with a fancy manner who’d been sent up in a hurry and whose only concern with us was to try to impress the famous, wealthy Callinghams and to boast about it later to his pals.

Although I was still very conscious of the danger of my predicament and of C. J., I was no longer scared of Lieutenant Trant. It was extraordinary how that affected my morale. Knowing that sooner or later I would have to find out, I asked:

“What time was he killed?”

“Between one-thirty and two-thirty, Mr. Harding. That’s what the M. E. says.”

So Angelica couldn’t have killed him. By one o’clock she had been at my apartment almost an hour. To the police, she would just be someone, anyone, connected with Jaimie who had to be questioned. Relief poured through me. My mind which had been clogged by fear and guilt started working again and a plan came to me fully fledged, the way plans must constantly be coming to C. J.

Angelica would have to produce an alibi, of course, but why did it have to be with me? She had known Paul and the Prop in the Portofino days. The Fowlers had been alone last night. Paul had said so when he invited me over. Why couldn’t Angelica have spent the evening with them? When I explained to her, she would have to consent to the subterfuge; it was the least she could do. As for Paul, he would gladly stand by me. I didn’t have the slightest doubt in the world of that. Paul, with his friendly, amoral cheerfulness, would find my predicament ridiculous and even entertaining, but nothing more than that. Besides, he knew Betsy better than anyone did. He would realize as well as I how important it was for her to keep the truth from coming out.

There was still Ellen, of course. But, in my new optimism, even Ellen seemed hardly a menace, because of C. J. I hadn’t thought of it before, but I saw it now. All the snob in Ellen groveled before the great C. J. If I could get C. J. to cope with her instead of me, if he was the one who both flattered her and bribed her, she would jump at supporting Daphne’s alibi and, in consequence, clam up about Angelica.

Lieutenant Trant—meek now and innocuous to me as an office boy—was looking at Daphne.

“Once again, Miss Callingham, I want to remind you that this is a mere formality. But I’m sure you understand that we have to do this with all Mr. Lumb’s…”

Brightly, Daphne chipped in: “You mean you want me to tell you what I was doing last night? Of course. It’s all very simple. I spent the night at Bill’s. Daddy was away in Boston and I loathe sleeping alone here. It’s the understood thing that whenever Daddy’s away I go to Bill’s. Last night, Betsy—that’s my sister, Bill’s wife—was away in Philadelphia, so it was just the two of us. We had dinner; sat around, listening to records for a while; then we started playing Scrabble and didn’t get to bed, I guess, much before three.”

“I see,” said Lieutenant Trant. He turned to me. Respectfulness had so obliterated his personality that I doubted whether I would recognize him if I met him again. “There were just the two of you, Mr. Harding. I mean, there wasn’t anybody who happened to drop in or…?”

“I imagine there was Ellen, wasn’t there, Bill?” C. J. was leaning forward again, being the Older Steadier Mind. “Your cook’s off Thursday, isn’t she? Doesn’t Ellen cook for you on Thursdays?”

This was the moment which, only a few minutes ago, had seemed quite unfaceable. Now it was nothing.

“That’s right,” I said. “Ellen was there. She’s my little boy’s nurse. She cooked dinner for us.”

“I see,” said Trant again. He paused, looking down, this time at the carpet. Maybe he was trying to remember its color so he would know what was currently fashionable in carpet shades. “Miss Callingham says you were a good friend of Mr. Lumb’s, Mr. Harding.”

“Not really,” I said. “In fact, I hardly knew him. It just happened to be through me that they met.”

“Then you couldn’t—that is, you wouldn’t have any idea who might have wanted to kill him?”

“Good heavens, no.”

“And you, Miss Callingham?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t,” said Daphne. “Really, it seems quite fantastic. I mean, I never knew anyone who got killed before. But then—he wasn’t really in my set, you know. I mean, he was sort of bohemian, sort of a change.”

“Of course.” Lieutenant Trant rose. We all got up also, perhaps a shade too quickly.

“Well, I don’t think I’ll have to bother you any longer. Thanks, all of you.” He picked up the manila envelope from a chair and started for the door. Then he turned. “Oh, by the way, Mr. Harding, perhaps you’d give me your address.” I gave it to him.

“And the name of this—this nursemaid?”

As he stood there watching me, it seemed to me that the eyes behind their almost vacuous surface showed a faint gleam of mockery. But the impression lasted only a second.

“Ellen.” I said. “Ellen Hodgkins.”

“Ellen Hodgkins. I shall have to speak to her, of course. Perhaps, when I do, I’ll have the pleasure of meeting you again.”

He started once more toward the door. He moved quietly and smoothly, like a cat.

“Good-by,” he said.

“Good-by, Lieutenant,” we all said at once.

For a while after he had closed the door, we stood motionless. Then simultaneously we crowded together, momentarily allied, conspirators.

Daphne giggled. “Well, that was a cinch.”

C. J. snapped, “Bill, go home right away. Get to Ellen before he does.”

My new self-confidence hadn’t left me. I said, “Wouldn’t it be safer to call her first?”

“Then call her.”

I crossed to the phone as if I intended to call. When I reached it, I turned back. “Perhaps it might be better if you talked to her, C. J.”

He was instantly formidable, the way he always was when a subordinate suggested any alteration in a plan of his. But years of the office had given me the right wiliness. I adopted a serious, young-executive expression.

“You see, C. J., there’s a certain problem there with Ellen. Betsy’s the one who pays her salary and I—well, you know how they are. I don’t carry much weight with her. But she worships the ground you walk on. Any suggestion from you…”

You could never tell with C. J. whether flattery fooled him or whether he merely demanded it and accepted it as his due. But the frown smoothed from his forehead; he pursed his lips in weighty contemplation; then the skin under his jowl started to puff like a frog’s when you stroke it with a straw.

“Well… yes, boy… perhaps you’re right… yes.”

He gestured to the phone. That meant I was to dial for him. He never dialed a number if anyone else was in the room. As I picked out my own number, I was fully aware of the risk I was taking. Ellen’s contempt for me might be stronger than her servile respect for C. J. She just might pour out the whole Angelica story to him in a burst of outraged prudery. But I didn’t think she would.

I heard her haughty, impersonal “The Harding residence” and handed the receiver to C. J. He had already arranged his face; it was the jocular, democratic open-hearted face he used for official banquets.

“Ellen?… This is Mr. Callingham. Good morning, Ellen. I’m afraid there’s been a little trouble and we need your help. Mr. Harding will explain it all to you shortly, but I wanted to speak with you myself. An acquaintance of Miss Daphne’s has been killed. Naturally, the police are making a routine investigation. We have decided that it will simplify things if we say that Miss Daphne had dinner with Mr. Harding yesterday evening and spent the night there. So, if a policeman, a Lieutenant Trant, comes to see you, just tell him you made supper for Mr. Harding and Miss Daphne and that Miss Daphne slept in the guest-bedroom. You understand?”

He had slurred it all over so that it had sounded as trivial as a request for a loan of a cup of flour. His voice purred on:

“By the way, Ellen, how is your poor little niece, the one who is sick?… She is? Oh, that’s too bad. Listen, Ellen, I’m glad to have this chance to chat with you. I’ve been giving the matter a great deal of thought recently and I’m not at all sure it wouldn’t be wiser to fly her over here. I know the British doctors are fine, none finer. But if we had her here where we could keep an eye on her, it would be less of a strain on your sister and…”

He broke off, listened and then gave a fat, Santa Claus laugh. “My dear girl, don’t be foolish. Your problems are our problems. We all think of you as one of the family. You know that. And you don’t imagine the price of a plane ticket is going to bankrupt me… Don’t thank me, Ellen. And—oh, Ellen, don’t forget what to say when Lieutenant Trant comes.”

He put down the phone and instantly the smiling, banquet face was wiped off.

“Explain it all in detail to her when you go home, Bill. I’ll see her next week and write a check for the niece.”

He gave a little grunt which indicated that the emergency was over, that he didn’t want anyone to bother him about it any more. I couldn’t help admiring him. Neither Lieutenant Trant nor Ellen had cost him the slightest effort or the slightest twinge of conscience. They had merely been minor obstacles to be swept aside so that he could have things arranged the way he wanted them to be arranged. That was what years of being in a position to corrupt had done for him.

But with my admiration for him, I also felt an admiration for myself. By the maneuvering of a dozen delicate balances, I had given myself at least the potentiality of salvation.

Daphne had lit a cigarette and was stretched out full length on one of the couches. “Well,” she said, “I’m quite an actress, aren’t I? Oozing with talent. Aren’t you proud of me, Daddy?”

She squirmed around and grinned provocatively up at C. J. who was moving past the couch. He stopped dead and without the slightest warning slapped her hard across the cheek.

“Proud of you after last night’s escapade?” He was quivering with rage. “Get out of here. Get out of my sight.”

“But, Daddy…” whimpered Daphne.

“Go to your room.”

For a moment, Daphne hesitated as if deciding whether or not she dared to defy him. Then, pale and petulant, she got up and flounced out of the library. C. J. turned to watch her leave. Behind the fury, there was a look on his face I had never seen before. It was almost anguish. So he loves her as much as that, I thought. It was the first time I had caught him with a normal human emotion. It touched me and embarrassed me too.

He seemed to have forgotten me. He just stood there, his broad shoulders stooped, his frog-face quite off its guard, abandoned to that curious mixture of love and despair.

I said, “Well, C. J., I’ll be going now.”

The sound of my voice was enough. He swung around to me. Suddenly there was nothing on his face but the rage—the bombastic, righteous C. J.-ish indignation which I knew so well.

“You!” he said. “You and Betsy! Were you out of your minds encouraging her, lying to me, covering up, conniving…?”

For almost five minutes he shouted at me. I listened, marveling at the skill with which Daphne had been able to twist everything so that the blame fell on Betsy and me.

“… you knew he was a dangerous neurotic. Anyone with half an eye could have seen that. And yet you threw her into his arms; you encouraged every imaginable folly. And when he attacked her—when one night he actually attacked her like a savage beast… did you do anything about it? No, you did not. Betsy lied to me. She kept lying to me on the phone. My God, if you’d come to me, if you’d given me the faintest glimpse of what was going on…”

As the abuse poured out of him, I made no effort to defend myself, partly because I felt safe in the realization of how much I had still been able to keep from him, but partly too because I was sorry for him and thought it would help him to vent some of his misery on me. After a while, I could tell that his genuine anger was ebbing away. But the tirade still went on unabated. It always did with C. J. Once he started to bawl someone out, he got carried away by the sheer theatrical pleasure of a scene. But I knew that the worst was over, and soon he was shifting to his other favorite role—the role of the monarch, infinitely merciful and forgiving.

“Well, Bill, you and Betsy are intelligent people. Now that this has happened, I’m sure you realize what fools you made of yourselves. There’s no need to rub it in. After all, no real harm was done.”

“No, C. J.”

A faint smile curled the corners of his mouth. “Matter of fact, I think I handled it pretty well, don’t you? That policeman won’t get anything out of Ellen.”

“No, C. J.”

“And don’t think I’m not grateful. If it hadn’t been for you, there’d have been quite a mess.”

“I guess so.”

He was looking straight at me. “I’m glad you married Betsy. I always thought she’d end up an old maid or, worse still, get into the clutches of some fortune hunter, someone who’d string her along and keep a stable of chorus girls on the side—someone I’d have to get rid of in a hurry. But it didn’t turn out that way. You’re a good sound man, Bill. I’m proud to have you as a son-in-law.”

For a moment I felt as if I were teetering again on the edge of an abyss. Suddenly C. J. turned into the brisk, live-wire boss, setting an example to his employees.

“Well, boy, we shouldn’t be standing here. There’s work to be done. I’ve got to get down to the office. Blandon’s flying in from L.A., you know. I want you to tackle him, too. You’ll join us for lunch. But you’d better go fix it all up with Ellen first.”

He started for the door and then, theatrically, as if he were trying to pretend that an idea had just occurred to him, he turned back. He looked enormously solemn.

“Oh, yes, Bill, I meant to tell you. Yesterday the final medical report came in on poor old Lambert. He’s got to give up the vice-presidency.”

As he paused, clearing his throat to enhance the weightiness of the utterance he was about to make, the phone rang. He gestured me to answer it. I crossed to it, anticipating what he was going to say, feeling a confused combination of excitement and shame. It was the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. They put Betsy on the phone.

Oddly enough, the sound of her voice didn’t make me feel guilty. It brought only a quick, warm feeling of pleasure and security.

“I called home and Ellen said she thought you’d be at Father’s. Bill, have you read the papers?”

“Yes,” I said. “We all know.”

“I only just saw it. It terrified me. It is all right, isn’t it? I mean, there isn’t anything with Daphne…?”

“No,” I said. “It’s all right.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. Don’t worry. I’ll tell you about it when I see you. You’re still coming back this evening?”

“Yes. It’s going very well. Helen Reed is being marvelous. Oh, Bill, I can’t tell you how relieved I am. I had visions of rushing back. I was frantic. I thought…”

C. J. tapped me on the arm. I glanced up. He was holding out his hand for the receiver. I gave it to him.

“Good morning, Betsy,” he said. “I’ve got a piece of news for you. I was just going to tell Bill, but I’d like you to hear it too. Lambert’s got to retire. I received the report yesterday. And I’ve decided there’s only one man in that department who can swing his job. Betsy, my dear, you have a vice-president for a husband.”

With a flourish, he dropped the receiver back onto the stand. He was beaming now all over his face.

“Don’t spread it around, Bill. I don’t want this to leak out until it’s official. But there it is. You take it from me. You’ve got my word for it.”

I had no illusions at all. The beaming face was the banquet face, the Ellen face. He had paid Ellen off with the plane ticket. Now he was paying me off too. Deeply implicated though I was in lies, I still had my pride and my pride came out as anger.

I said, “When did you think that up, C. J.? Ten minutes ago? If you did, I don’t want any part of it. If I don’t rate being vice-president on my own merits—to hell with it.”

Against all reason, saying that gave me great satisfaction. The banquet smile was wiped away. For a moment C. J.’s face was thunderous. Then a trace of amusement showed in his complex eyes.

“You’re a smart boy, aren’t you? You know how to handle me. Sure, Bill. Sure it’s on your merits. You’ve proved it right now. Dave Manners would never have dared say that to me.”

He stood looking at me. The look became abstracted, almost bored. Then, ignoring me completely, he walked out of the room.

chapter 7

I left C. J.’s apartment and took a taxi home. I was plagued by a sensation of urgency. It was after ten; C. J. expected me for lunch with his Coast sales manager at one. I had to see Ellen first, because C. J. would certainly expect a report. But, until I could get to Paul and Angelica, the crucial alibi for Angelica would remain only a plan in my head and my salvation was only potential.

As I let myself into the apartment, I heard Ellen’s voice in the living room. For a moment I thought she was talking to Rickie; then I realized that she must have taken him to his kindergarten school at least an hour ago. I went into the living room. Lieutenant Trant was sitting on the arm of a chair.

The sight of him jolted me. I hadn’t expected him to follow through so quickly. When Ellen saw me, she jumped up with exasperating primness. She never felt it her “place” to be seated in front of an employer except in the nursery. She even felt it was above her station to be in the living room at all. These standard symptoms of respect should have reassured me. But it wasn’t Ellen’s atmosphere which predominated in the room; it was Lieutenant Trant’s. He, too, had risen at my entrance. He was standing now, smiling at me with the same deferential unobtrusiveness which he had shown at C. J.’s. But somehow he didn’t look as young as he had seemed at C. J.’s, and nowhere near as simple.

“Hello, Mr. Harding. I’ve just been talking to Miss Hodgkins. I like to get things over with as quickly as possible.” He turned to Ellen who was looking down at the floor, being Just-Nobody-the-Child’s-Nurse. “Well, Miss Hodgkins, that all seems very satisfactory. I don’t think there’s any need to take up your time any longer.”

Ellen went out of the room. I was as sure as I could be that she had carried out C. J.’s instructions to the letter. And yet Lieutenant Trant made me uncomfortable. I was itching for him to leave so I could get finished with Ellen. But he seemed in no hurry at all. He even sat down on the arm of the chair again.

“Well,” he said, “it’s early yet, of course. But we don’t seem to be making much progress.”

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“The main trouble is that we haven’t found anyone yet who really knew him. There are only the Browns in the next apartment and they just knew him casually as neighbors. He sublet the apartment from Mrs. Brown’s mother. He came to New York very recently. From California, I believe.”

“I believe so.” I had taken it for granted that the police would almost immediately get on to the connection between Jaimie and Angelica. But suddenly I remembered what Angelica had told me at our second meeting. She had said she had never gone to Jaimie’s apartment; he had always come to hers. So long then as Trant’s only contact was the Browns, he might not get on to Angelica at all.

Trant was looking away from me at the picture over the mantel. “Of course, this might be just a routine killing by a thug, but there’s no sign of breaking or entering. It was quite a disappointment to me when none of you people could give me a lead. You say you hardly knew him?”

“That’s right.”

“You met him here in New York?”

That question was just as casual, just as respectful as all the others. He wasn’t even looking at me. I was almost certain that all this was nothing. He was just following the book and formally gathering information. And yet, in spite of my relief about Angelica, the discomfort he was creating increased.

Trying to be just as amiably chatty as he, I said, “Yes. I met him in New York. He was a friend of a friend of mine in Europe. He brought a novel manuscript into my office. He hoped I might be able to help him get it published. That’s where he met Daphne.”

“Perhaps you could give me the name of your mutual friend in Europe, Mr. Harding.”

“Charles Maitland,” I said quickly. “But I’m terribly sorry. I have no idea where he is right now.”

“I see.” The engaging smile came again. He got up from the chair arm and went over to examine the picture above the mantel more closely. “This is a Buffet, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, a little startled. What sort of a policeman was this?

Still studying the picture, he said, “At least we know something. It isn’t very much, I’m afraid. Yesterday evening, around six, the Browns knocked on Lumb’s door and asked him if he’d like to go along with them to their party. He said he had a date. So we know he must have been expecting to see someone that night—unless, of course, the idea of the party bored him and he just made an excuse.”

Lieutenant Trant finished his examination of the Buffet and came back to me. He put his hand in the pocket of his jacket. “The only thing we found which seemed out of place in a man’s apartment was this, Mr. Harding. I can’t imagine that you would be able to identify it.”

His hand came out of his pocket. Cupped in his palm was my mother’s dolphin ring which I had given to Angelica before our marriage.

I knew then that I was afraid of him. There was still no tangible reason for fear. In his voice there hadn’t been the slightest trace of suspicion and he was looking at me merely as one friend looks at another, with absolutely no professional wariness. But I was assaulted by the conviction that he hadn’t believed a word I said or a word any of us had said from the beginning, and the, fear was there, merging with surprise and anxiety at the sight of the ring.

“It’s a woman’s ring,” I said.

“Yes,” said Trant. And then, “Oh, well, it’s probably just some souvenir. Probably it belonged to his grandmother. It’s about that vintage.”

He put it back in his pocket. Moving with that curious fluid grace of his, he strolled over to a chair and picked up from it the manila envelope which I had seen him carrying at C. J.’s. He opened it with care and produced from it an object wrapped in a handkerchief.

“At least we’ve got this, Mr. Harding.” With elaborate daintiness, he started to lift back one of the handkerchief flaps. “I don’t know why I’m being so delicate. There aren’t any fingerprints. That’s already been checked. But at least we’ve got it. It was on the floor by his side. It shouldn’t be too difficult to trace its ownership. And when we’ve done that, of course, we will have a lead.”

The handkerchief flap was pulled right back now, revealing what lay inside. It was a Colt .45—an old chipped automatic. And, although I hadn’t given it the slightest thought for the last three weeks, I recognized it at once.

It was Angelica’s gun.

Lieutenant Trant’s voice was sounding with peculiar unreality like a voice played back on a faulty tape recorder. “It’s old. Probably bought at a hockshop. It’ll take time, of course. But we’ll track it down.” He gave a little laugh. “Of course, it’ll probably be a blind alley. Probably we’ll end up finding that Lumb bought it himself.”

Cautiously he wrapped the handkerchief around it again, put it back in the envelope and put the envelope under his arm.

“Oh, Mr. Harding, there’s one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

I looked at him, wondering if I was being even remotely successful in keeping my face in control. He was smiling again. The smile was almost shy.

“You aren’t, by any chance, the William Harding who wrote Heat of Noon?”

Of all the questions in the world, that was the one I had least expected.

“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

“I hope you’ll forgive me for raving. I know how embarrassing fans are. But I’ve read that book three times. I think it’s one of the finest novels to come out of the war.” He tapped the manila envelope. “Well, I’m busy and you’re busy. I’d better be on my way.”

He started for the door. “Good-by, Mr. Harding.”

“Good-by, Lieutenant.”

The door closed behind him, but it was as if he hadn’t left. I could still feel his friendly eyes on mine, still hear the quiet voice which had been free from the slightest tinge of accusation. Angelica’s ring had been in Jaimie’s apartment and Angelica’s gun had killed him. My panic stirred again, but I checked it. There were dozens of explanations for both those facts which in no way need inculpate Angelica. In fact, from the time element, I knew she’d had nothing to do with it. And yet Trant would certainly trace the gun to her. Trouble was not far off after all.

But there was no time to brood. I shook myself free of Trant’s atmosphere and went to find Ellen. She was in the nursery. With her passion for class stratification there was practically nowhere else she could be. The cook and the kitchen were just as definitely “beneath” her as Betsy, I, and the living room were “above.”

She was at her knitting gain. It was some sort of depressing pink tube made on a circular needle. A child’s skirt, perhaps? I had expected the icy condemnatory stare to which I had been submitted earlier that morning. To my surprise, the expression on her face was conspiratorial, almost flirtatious. I should have guessed it. This was the result of C. J.’s imperial bribe. I wasn’t that dreadful, loose-living Mr. Harding any more; I was the son-in-law of that dear, sweet Mr. Callingham. It encouraged me.

I asked, “It all went off all right, Ellen?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I said exactly what Mr. Callingham told me to say.”

“And Trant accepted it?”

“I’m sure he did, sir.”

Since she was being so cozy, I was cozy too. I said, “Mr. Callingham’s terribly grateful. You see, Daphne was alone last night and she’d been seeing quite a lot of this young man. He thought it would save embarrassment all around if we arranged it this way.”

She nodded her head emphatically. “Of course, sir. I understand completely, sir. It was that handsome Mr. Lumb, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “And, by the way, Mr. Callingham asked me to tell you that he’ll see you early next week and arrange for your niece’s passage.”

Once I’d made that rather indelicate reference to the bribe, I was afraid I had said the wrong thing. But I had underestimated her venality. She dropped the knitting and clasped her hands together. Her face was positively dewy with sentiment.

“Oh, Mr. Harding, if you knew how wonderful it will be for my sister and for poor little Gladys… Mr. Callingham’s a saint, sir. That’s what he is—a real saint.”

I found this new Ellen so unintimidating that I could move on to really dangerous ground with the minimum of embarrassment.

“About the other thing, Ellen—since it’s so important to Mr. Callingham that Daphne and I should have been alone here last night, I think, don’t you, that it would be more sensible if we both forget about the…”

“Oh, yes, sir. Oh, yes, indeed, I’m sure.” Her lips stretched in a wide smile which revealed pink gum. I had never seen her look roguish before. It was an alarming spectacle. “Those little things do happen, don’t they?”

“They do,” I said.

“And, anyway, we wouldn’t want Mrs. Harding upset, would we, sir? She being always so kind and thoughtful.”

I thought suddenly of Betsy’s homecoming and thought of it with unalloyed delight and a feeling of almost superstitious gratitude.

“Exactly,” I said. “She’s so kind and thoughtful.”

The wide stretch of gum was still visible but above it the eyes were beady now with the consciousness of her power over me.

“I’m sure you’ll love little Gladys, sir. She’s ever so pretty and quiet as a mouse. After she’s out of the hospital, sir, and cured again, I’m sure you and Mrs. Harding would hardly notice her if she had a nice long holiday here with her auntie. She’d be such company for me and a dear little playmate for Master Rickie.” I might have realized that Ellen, once she had savored the delights of being corrupted, would be eager for a second helping. And now that she had revealed her price tag as plainly as her gums, I saw that it might have been much worse. The cured, convalescent little Gladys was comfortably far in the future, a harmless enough burden to bear in exchange for a silence which meant so much to my life. I smiled back at her insincerely, sealing the bargain.

“Of course. Little Gladys can stay as long as she wants.”

Ellen picked up the knitting again and started to click the needle ends. “You’ll speak to Mrs. Harding about it when she comes home, won’t you, sir?”

“I certainly will.”

“She’s such a darling little thing, Gladys, always thinking of others. We all used to call her the little angel and…”

I didn’t object to being blackmailed, but I drew the line at having to waste precious moments listening to anecdotes about little Gladys. Still beaming all over my face, I made my excuses and left the nursery. In the living room I called Paul Fowler at the Fund office and asked if I could come around.

“Sure,” he said. “Come right over. And bring a big, fat check. What the Sandra Fowler Fur, Jewel and Automobile Fund is mad for is money, money, money…”

chapter 8

It was eleven-fifteen and the Fund offices were at 30th and Lexington. My cab could only crawl through the jammed mid-morning traffic. Our snail pace frayed my nerves, but the delay at least gave me a chance to review my plan for Angelica. In spite of my new respect for Trant as an antagonist, I couldn’t see that anything could go wrong with it. Paul and the Prop had no connection with Jaimie. Trant wouldn’t even be aware of their existence until such a time as they were produced by us as Angelica’s alibi. That would give us every opportunity to rehearse a whole imaginary evening in detail.

I was beginning to feel that this whole new world of subterfuge and countersubterfuge wasn’t so alarming, after all. All it needed was typical Callingham Publications, Inc., strategy applied to the private life. There was, I told myself, absolutely nothing to worry about. I even permitted myself to feel the satisfactions rather than the ironies of my promotion. I was vice-president. Dave Manners wasn’t. However it had happened, it had happened.

I found Paul in his office with his legs up on the desk, pouring charm into a telephone. He waved as I entered.

“… sure, Mrs. Mallet… absolutely, Mrs. Mallet, the whole thing’s deductible—if you’ve got the teensiest-weensiest doubt about it, just take it up with your teensy-weensy tax man…” He was grinning at me broadly and his lips, chewing gum, were making appalling grimaces around the receiver. Paul had the bluest and wisest eyes of anyone I had ever known. They were eyes which had seen everything and found everything both ludicrous and enchanting. The mere sight of him with his crumpled, wildly expensive suit, his ten-dollar necktie pulled at an angle and his cashmere socks slopped down over his shoes steadied me. I felt whatever shreds of guilt and embarrassment which still clung to me fading peacefully away.

“… a thousand bucks, Mrs. Mallet?… Gee, Mrs. Mallet, you are a dreamboat… The Betsy Callingham Leukemia Fund endorses you; it awards you its Red Badge of Courage. It… yes, Mrs. Mallet, I am in gay vein; I’m floating on air. That is the perpetual condition of those who work only for others in this our life… Good-by, dear Mrs. Mallet.”

He slammed down the receiver and made another ferocious grimace at it. Then, with immense solemnity, he glared a C. J. glare at me.

“Mr. Harding, boy, you have, of course, heard that the A.M.A. has finally discovered not only the cause of leukemia but the cause of all diseases. All diseases—but all of them—are caused by the dread virus Callinghamia and are contracted through the pores of the finger tips from contact with any copy of a Callingham Publication. In the name of science, Mr. Harding, in the name of generations yet unborn, it is our duty never to rest by day or night until each and every one of these dread scourges to humanity… Hi!”

He hadn’t heard about Jaimie’s murder. As I told him, he swung his legs off the desk top and sat up very straight, watching me keenly. I started then to tell him the whole Angelica story. I found it absurdly easy and, as I had expected, wonderfully purgative. It was as if I were seeing it all through his eyes rather than mine; and, as it came out, it seemed shorn of all feelings of shabbiness or folly. It just sounded like one of those sophisticated, against-yourself jokes which make for popularity at cocktail parties. He started to grin very soon in my narrative; when I told him about Ellen’s interruption of our embrace, he laughed out loud; he was roaring later when I described the predicament into which C. J.’s alibi for Daphne had put me. But his laughter was never heartless; with his extraordinary agility of mind and sympathy, he grasped the situation instantly and all its implications. His first thought was for Betsy. Of course Betsy must be shielded. He even thought of Angelica, which was more than I was doing.

“The poor kid. And she was so beautiful. The most beautiful girl I ever saw. Bill, I adore you. You’ve achieved the ultimate, the very quintessence of snafu. But it’s serious, of course it is. What are we going to do about it?”

I proposed my plan that he and his wife should give Angelica an alibi. He accepted it immediately and with enthusiasm. Then, for a moment, a shadow of doubt clouded his blue eyes.

“The Prop! She’s so dumb. You think she can get away with it?”

“I think so.”

“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. By the time the cop gets around to us she’ll have forgotten what she did last night anyway. And if she shows the faintest glimmerings of awareness, we can strap up her kisser with adhesive tape and explain to your Lieutenant that she’s suffering from a deeply-ingrained germ-psychosis.” He leaned across the desk and patted my arm. “Sure, boy. You don’t have a thing to worry about. The ex-Mrs. Harding spent the evening with us. It’s a cinch. We were alone. Not a soul pestered us. We’re the most ideal alibi-givers in all Christendom.” He paused. “By the way, where is Angelica?”

It seemed impossible, but, until then, I had never even thought of Angelica’s whereabouts. I’d suggested the Wilton and I’d assumed she’d gone there. But—suddenly anxiety came again.

“I think she’s at the Wilton.”

“Think! You’d better call and find out.” He gestured to the phone. “Tell her to come right over. The Prop, believe it or not, has planned a shopping spree for this afternoon. She’ll be in any minute to be taken expensively to lunch and then to toss the family nest egg away in a riot of sleazy black underwear. We’ll all four of us lunch together; we’ll brief Angelica; we’ll get it all over with.”

“I can’t have lunch,” I said. “I’ve got a date with C. J. and a VIP.” I glanced at my watch. It was twelve-thirty. I felt the anxiety spreading. “You could lunch with Angelica, though, and get it all straight. And afterward, when I’m through with C. J…”

I stretched my hand toward the phone. It started to ring. Paul picked it up, arranging his face into a fiendish Man from Outer Space expression.

“Paul Fowler at the instrument… Oh, hello, darling, where are you?… You are? But, baby, you… What?”

As he listened, the Martian face disappeared; he looked very solemn.

“What…? You did, baby?… Oh, no… Oh, no. Oh, good grief… No, baby. Never mind. No, no, forget it. Just come right over… Yes, darling, you know I love you, enormously improbable though it must seem.”

He put down the receiver. His face, as he watched me, was almost haggard, although he was smiling a smile which was meant to be jaunty.

“It won’t work,” he said. “We’ll have to think up something else.”

“Won’t work?”

“That cop of yours has too much on the ball. Apparently, Daphne mentioned us to him. He’s been around to the Prop. In fact, he’s just this minute left; that’s why she called. Among other things, he asked her what we were doing last night. She told him, of course, that we spent the evening together—alone.”

Suddenly it seemed to me that Lieutenant Trant was at my side, standing there, quietly, modestly, not looking at anything in particular. I did remember then that Daphne had mentioned the Fowlers. It had been the briefest, the most casual reference. She had merely said something about Betsy and me giving a party for Jaimie, and Betsy and the Fowlers having been crazy about him. That was all. And yet Lieutenant Trant had taken it in; somehow, in the briefest time, he had discovered who the Fowlers were and, with what seemed like satanic intuition, had gone directly from me to the Prop.

Once and for all he had neutralized the Fowlers and now Angelica was left standing outside our pattern, alone, in full view of the enemy, imperiling us all.

In my awe of him, all my old resentment of Angelica came rushing back. It was all her fault. She was the menace, the unwanted one, the one who should never have existed.

Paul was looking at me, the whites showing vividly around his blue irises. “Well, Bill, what do we do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call her at any rate.” He lugged a telephone book up onto the desk and searched through it. He found the number, reached for the phone and dialed it.

“Hotel Wilton? I want to speak to Mrs. Angelica Harding.”

I stood looking at him, still completely disconnected, wondering what I was going to do if she wasn’t there, if, on top of everything else, she had become inaccessible.

“You have no Mrs. Angelica Harding listed?”

I heard him say that and my heart plummeted. “Hold on a minute.” He looked at me. “What was her name before she married you?”

I’d never thought of that. I said, “Roberts.”

He said into the phone: “What about Angelica Roberts?” His face relaxed. “You have? Fine.” He was grinning now. “Angelica? Hold on a second.”

He handed me the phone. I took it, feeling a savage desire to punish her for the scare she had given me with the name on top of everything else.

“Angelica?”

“Hello, Bill.” Her voice brought her so startlingly back to me as a person rather than an abstract disaster, that it threw me off a little.

I said, “You know about Jaimie?”

“What about Jaimie?”

“You haven’t read the papers?”

“The papers? No, I haven’t been out of my room all morning. Why should there be anything in the papers?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “Last night, he was found in his apartment shot, murdered.”

She gave a little gasp. Then, for a long moment, there was complete silence. At length, in a voice so small that I could hardly hear it, she breathed, “Oh, no. No, it can’t be.”

“It can be.”

“Who did it? Who killed him?”

“That’s the least of our worries.”

“Bill, where are you? Can I come to you?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve got a lunch date with my father-in-law. But stay in the hotel.”

“Yes.”

“Whatever happens, don’t go out. Stay there. I’ll get around as soon as I can after lunch.”

“All right.”

“And if a policeman comes, a Lieutenant Trant, for God’s sake, get out of seeing him.”

“A policeman? Oh, yes, of course. I see.”

“Stay there. Don’t do anything; don’t see anyone until I show up.”

I dropped the receiver. I said to Paul, “I’ve got to get to C. J.”

“Sure, Bill, what can I do to help?”

“What is there you can do now?”

“You’ll be able to fix up something.”

“I will?”

“Sure, you will.” His warm, friendly face, about the only face in the world which I felt at that moment I could trust, was watching me anxiously. “But there’s just one thing, Bill. Remember the Slave Driver. I know what you did with Angelica was nothing. There isn’t a male in Manhattan who doesn’t play around with playing around once in a while. You don’t have to feel guilty about it. But do be careful with Betsy. Women don’t figure like us—particularly women like Betsy. If she heard about last night, if Ellen gave her a blow by blow account, it would raise hell with her. It would…” He broke off. “Goddamit, I should be interpreting your wife to you!”

He put his hand on my arm. “Don’t worry, Butch. You’ll work it out. Run along now to Daddy-in-law, like a good little vice-president.”

He went with me to the elevator. As I got into it, he put his hand on my arm again.

“Keep in touch. Old Mother Fund’s always here with her infinite bosom and her all-encompassing lap.”

I got to C. J.’s office just before one and just before Mr. Blandon. I gave C. J. the report on Ellen. It seemed to satisfy him. Mr. Blandon was an immensely important personage. Normally, he would have been miles out of my ken. C. J.’s decision to include me at the lunch was obviously his first step in launching me as Lambert’s successor. I knew I had to be at my best and I found myself, through the interminable meal, exhibiting the right dazzling smile, saying the right things to show not only that I was a “live-wire” and a “good kid” but that I did the correctly chic things at the correctly chic times. From C. J.’s affability, I could tell I was making a hit, but that didn’t stop the lunch from being an agony.

Mr. Blandon was a Beverly Hills drinker. We had four gibsons before we ate, wine with the food, and then brandy. All the time behind the social strain and the deadening muzziness caused by the liquor, I was fighting for a solution to the Angelica problem. On his second brandy, Mr. Blandon got festive. He started to show an interest in “fun,” and, to my horror, C. J. instantly offered me as a guide for a little town-painting. I had visions of spending the rest of the day guiding Mr. Blandon from cocktail bar to night club. But, at the very last minute, he decided he was tired and would go back to his hotel to rest up from his trip.

It was three-thirty when I got away from them.

I took a taxi to the Wilton. I had no plan. There didn’t seem to be any plan at all. My mind was blunted by liquor and exhaustion.

The Wilton was a moderate-priced, dreary, respectable hotel. In the bleakly modern lobby which the management had installed in the mistaken hope that it would brighten the place up, I asked for Angelica at the desk.

“What name, sir?”

“Mr. Harding.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Harding, she’s expecting you.”

I went up in the elevator which suggested old ladies and not-quite-fashionable house dogs like Scotties. Suddenly my nerve broke and I knew with absolute certainty that Lieutenant Trant would be standing outside Angelica’s door.

He wasn’t, of course. I pressed the buzzer. Angelica opened the door.

“The police haven’t come,” she said.

chapter 9

I followed her into the dreary hotel bedroom. There was a box radio on the chest of drawers with a slot where you dropped quarters if you wanted to play it. Her beat-up suitcase lay on a folding stool. The whole setting seemed a negation. And Angelica, with her heavy black hair, her beauty which had so often made me betray myself but which now was as oppressive to me, as embarrassing as her very existence, seemed the negation of everything. I didn’t feel sorry for her. I didn’t have any human feeling for her at all. She was just the thing in the way, the thing that made everything impossible, the thing to be disposed of.

She looked very tired as if she hadn’t slept at all. She lit the inevitable cigarette. The sound of the struck match rasped me. She stood, watching me passively, waiting for me to say something. I remembered that only the night before I had been recklessly making love to her, imagining in some lunatic manner that she was my real happiness and my life with Betsy and Rickie nothing but a sham. Remembering this, I cringed and my anger flared up against her. Goddamit, she was the one who had dragged Jaimie into our lives—with her sordid, two-year obsession, her stifling female submissiveness which had humbly clung to him in spite of all the humiliations he had piled on her and had then just as humbly let him discard her. She’d picked him; why hadn’t she kept him? Why had she let him tangle into Daphne’s life? Why, at a word of dismissal from him, had she meekly packed her bag and come lugging it to me?

Savagely, I said, “Well, I hope there’s enough havoc for you?”

I suppose I knew that was a totally unreasonable accusation. I suppose I realized that she had every right in the world to counterattack. But she didn’t. She just stood by the window, her hair gleaming around her shoulders, looking quiet and sad.

She said, “Tell me about Jaimie.”

“What is there to tell? Someone shot him. Last night. In his apartment.”

“But—who?”

“How should I know? What did I know about Jaimie Lumb? You’re the one who should know.”

In a very small voice, she asked, “Do you think I did it?”

I longed to fling at her: Why not? You were besotted with him; he treated you like mud; only a couple of hours before he was killed, he was throwing you out of his life. But she hadn’t killed him. The Medical Examiner had proved that. And I still had enough sense to know that there wasn’t any time for recriminations. She wasn’t a murderess; she was merely a nuisance. Somehow she had to be neutralized—for Betsy’s sake, for Daphne’s sake, for C. J.’s sake and most of all, for my sake.

I said, “I know you didn’t kill him. The police say he was shot between one-thirty and two-thirty. By one-thirty, you’d been at my place over an hour.”

She said, “Then you’ve already talked to the police?”

“Of course I have.”

“And—so has that woman, the nurse?”

“Yes.”

“So you had to tell them about me. It’ll all come out in the papers, and Betsy will have to know. I’ve loused everything up for you, haven’t I? Oh, Bill, I’m so sorry.”

Her face showed nothing but concern for me and lack of love for herself. My God, I thought, does she have to be noble about it? And suddenly, the fix I had to explain to her, the fix which had seemed so sound and practical and ingenious when I’d explained it to Paul Fowler, seemed to go sour inside me.

I said, “As a matter of fact, I haven’t told them about you. Neither has Ellen.”

I told her what I had done. And, as I told her, I saw myself no longer as the deft operator, triumphantly crowned by a vice-presidency, but as a wretched little underling, squirming hither and thither, discarding every principle in a craven effort to save my own hide and propitiate my master. It might have been easier if only she hadn’t watched me all the time. But those big, gray eyes never left my face and although they never showed the slightest reproach, their faintly puzzled attentiveness seemed to be passing judgment on me as if she was thinking: So this is the man I used to love.

Although I knew I was the one who was attributing the role to her, I could only think of her as a moral arbiter and I hated her for it. Who did she think she was, to put herself up in judgment over me?

When I had finished, she was still looking at me. She lit another cigarette and said almost matter-of-factly, “So that’s where it stands now?”

“Yes.”

“You’re committed to Daphne. If the police find me and I have no alibi, I’ll have to tell the truth and ruin everything for you with Mr. Callingham, or… if I don’t tell the truth, they’ll probably think I did it. They’ll arrest me, won’t they?”

Once again that bald statement of the facts sounded like an accusation. But her voice hadn’t changed at all and she was still looking at me with that maddening, almost apologetic meekness. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “What do you want me to do?”

Die, I thought. Disappear. Become obliterated. There she was. Angelica—my doom, the woman who had always been destined to destroy me.

She had turned to look out of the window across the sooty panorama of roofs and chimneys. She turned. “I never went to Jaimie’s apartment, you know; he wouldn’t let me. We were only in New York a few weeks and we didn’t have any friends in common. Perhaps the police won’t trace me.”

“They’ll trace you all right. Jaimie was killed with your gun.”

“My gun?”

“The gun you had under your pillow that night. Trant found it by the body and showed it to me. I recognized it right away. Did you know Jaimie had it?”

She nodded. “Oh, yes. He took it. Three days ago.”

“Why?”

“It was when he came around to tell me he was going to marry Daphne. I was supposed to make a big scene. I didn’t. That infuriated him and… Oh, well, we were in the bedroom. I managed to get the gun out from under the pillow. That quieted him down. Later, when he left, he asked if he could have it. He didn’t have any money. He wanted to pawn it. So he took it.”

She had told me that perfectly calmly as if it was a perfectly ordinary episode which might have occurred in any perfectly ordinary human relationship. I visualized the two of them, sordidly in love with their own melodrama, fighting, threatening each other with the gun and then, just as irresponsibly, making it up and deciding that the gun could be pawned so that Jaimie, probably, could buy a couple of cocktails for Daphne at a fashionable bar. The full squalor and chaos of her life was brought back to me and I found I was completely freed from the feeling of guilt which she had created. Whatever she might once have been, she was nothing now but a tramp—a neurotic tramp, corrupted by a morbid affair which I would never begin to understand but which I could, with the greatest of ease, despise. The desire to hurt her returned with my new, comfortable contempt for her.

I said, “I suppose you gave him my ring to pawn, too. The police found it in his apartment.”

Her flush came slowly. I saw it first in her throat; then it climbed steadily upward to her face.

“Yes. I gave him the ring.”

“To pawn?”

“Why not?” The flush had made her face young and vulnerable, but her eyes were flashing. “You don’t imagine that I was cherishing it as a fond souvenir, do you?”

“You were wearing it that first night in the bar.”

“What if I was wearing it?”

“You—” I checked myself. It was absurd to let things drift in that direction. At random, I said, “Where did you buy the gun?”

“In a Third Avenue hockshop.”

“You registered for it with your own name?”

“Of course.”

“Angelica Harding?”

“Angelica Roberts.”

I should have realized that. When Paul had called the hotel there had been the moment of suspense about names. But I had always, for some reason, thought of her with my name and the habit had stuck. Now, suddenly, my wits were operating, again and I realized that maybe from that one little fact we were saved after all. “What address did you give?” I said.

“The address on West Tenth Street. That’s where I was living.”

Once again, it was as if Lieutenant Trant were in the room, standing just outside the range of my vision. But this time he wasn’t a menace. Neither was Angelica. They didn’t matter any more, either of them. Because I saw that they could both be manipulated. Trant would get on to the Third Avenue pawnshop. Of course he would. And he would find the name of the purchaser of the gun. But what would he, in fact, find? Not the name Angelica Harding with its inevitable and fatal pointer to me, but merely the name, Angelica Roberts, at the address on West Tenth Street. He would go to West Tenth Street. He would find that a woman of that name, whom nobody had known, had lived for a few weeks in someone else’s apartment and had left. He might suspect her. He would certainly suspect her if only for the fact that she owned the gun and had disappeared on the night of the murder. But, however much he suspected her, how was he going to find her—if she wasn’t there?

And she wouldn’t be there. She wouldn’t even be in New York. He would be stuck with searching the entire United States for a woman called Roberts—one of the commonest names in the country. Even Trant, with his frightening acuity, could surely never track her down to a tank-town college campus in Iowa.

Relief and excitement brought exaggerated optimism. Now it had come, the plan seemed obvious and foolproof. And it only involved making Angelica do what she had already decided to do. It wouldn’t mean any permanent danger for her, either, because Trant, surely, would eventually find the hoodlum, the bar pickup or whoever it was that had killed Jaimie, and the name Angelica Roberts would be completely forgotten.

I felt as alert again now as C. J. Angelica had sat down on the bed. The blush had gone and with it all traces of her moment of anger. I could see on her face only the old resignation to fate, the old meekness—the “why was I born” expression.

I said, “No one at West Tenth Street knows you, do they?”

“Just the woman across the way.”

“She doesn’t know you come from Claxton?”

“Of course not.”

“Then listen…”

In my enthusiasm, I had no doubts about her accepting the idea, and I was right. While I told her the plan, she listened in complete silence and when I was through, she merely said in a tight little voice:

“There’s a train at 5:35 this afternoon. I called Penn Station this morning.”

I glanced at my watch. It was only five after four. “Have you left anything in the apartment?”

“Yes. Most of my things.”

“Are there suitcases?”

“Yes.”

“Then give me the keys. I’ll go get them. No, that’s too risky. I don’t trust Trant. I’ll send Paul. You start packing here. We can easily make that train.”

Without any comment, she crossed to the highboy, picked up her pocketbook and brought the keys out for me. Then I thought of money. Last night I’d given her all I had in my wallet and it was too late for the bank.

I said, “Do you have enough to settle up the hotel bill?”

“I’ve got all you gave me. There’s just the room and the sandwich I had sent up for lunch.”

“That’ll be more than enough. Okay. I’ll get the money for the ticket from Paul.”

I called Paul to make sure he was back from lunch. He was there. I put down the receiver. Angelica had dutifully opened the suitcase and was folding a dress into it.

I said,. “When you’re ready, take a taxi to Penn Station. Wait for us at the Information desk.”

She didn’t answer. She just went on packing. I left her and took a taxi to the Fund office. There was time to give Paul only the briefest outline and no time at all to ask what the Prop had had to say about Trant. He lent me two hundred dollars from the Fund safe and hurried off with the keys to West Tenth Street.

A taxi got me to Penn Station before five. Angelica, in the old black coat, with a scarf knotted at her throat, was standing by the Information desk. I went to the ticket office and bought a one-way ticket to Claxton. I bought some magazines too. I returned to Angelica and gave her the ticket and the rest of the money. She took them in silence, putting them in her pocketbook. We just stood there, waiting for Paul.

He showed up about ten after five, lugging two suitcases. He grinned at Angelica rather shyly.

“Hello, Angelica.”

“Hello, Paul.”

He dropped the suitcases. “I packed everything that could conceivably have belonged to a female. Even a meerschaum pipe. You never know.” He smiled at us. “Well, kids, good luck etcetera. I have to dash back to the office and a lovely rich lady I’m planning to fleece. Call me as soon as you can, Bill, and I’ll give you the Prop dope.”

He waved and hurried away before I could thank him. The train was already in and people were streaming onto the platform. We followed them. I found Angelica a seat, put the suitcases up on the rack and the magazines on the seat. There were still ten minutes before the train was due to start. We both went out again and stood together on the platform.

I don’t know why she followed me out or why I didn’t leave. Part of me was dying to escape from her, but something—some vestige of nostalgia—held me in check. After all, there she was, alone, unwanted, defeated, crawling back to the one place in the world which still held a welcome for her. Now that I’d solved her and she was beyond harming me any more, I felt a sort of affection for her—and pity.

She said, “There’s nothing else I should know, is there?”

“I don’t think so. I’ll write and tell you how it develops.”

“And I’ll pay back the money.”

“Forget about that.”

“No,” she said. “No. It’s a debt.”

The thought floated through my mind of how avidly Ellen had swallowed her bribe and how anomalously I had accepted the vice-presidency. The contrast wasn’t comfortable. I stopped thinking about it. The people on the platform were thinning out. A man passed us, pushing a magazine cart.

I said, “Remember me to your father.”

“All right.”

She looked so beautiful and so forlorn. I wondered what was in her mind and then shrank from contemplating it. Clumsily, I said, “I hope you’ll be happy there.”

“Happy?” She turned the great gray eyes on me. “You think I’ll be happy?”

“You may not realize it now, but you’ll be far better off without Jaimie.”

“I will?”

Her expression of hopelessness exasperated me. I said, “For God’s sake, this isn’t the end of everything.”

“Not for you.” Her eyes suddenly revealed her to me. They were hard with contempt and loathing. “Nothing’s the end for you because it can always be fixed. Someone gets killed. Fix it. Someone knows too much. Fix that. Someone’s in the way. Get her on a train; fix her. You’ve learned,” she said. “You’ve certainly learned. You and the Callinghams—that was a marriage of true minds if there ever was one.”

She swung away from me and started toward the train. I took a step after her.

“Angelica…”

But she didn’t turn back. She reached the train; she climbed up the steps and disappeared into the coach.

I walked away down the platform. My heart was pounding with anger. Damn her, I thought, she’s a prig as well as a tramp. What the hell does she think I should have done? Lost my job, lost my wife, thrown everything away for some preposterous principle of abstract truth? But my anger didn’t last long. Soon I was mingling with the crowds of the station’s central lobby, thinking: It will be after six when I get home; maybe Betsy will already be there. The thought of Betsy brought an exquisite sensation of relief.

Angelica was a thing of the past. I had seen the last of my nemesis—forever.

chapter 10

I called Paul from a pay booth in the station. He’d just got back to the office.

“I didn’t tell the Prop a thing at lunch,” he said. “I thought it was best not to overtax those gray cells.”

“Fine.”

“And the cop doesn’t seem to have done much damage. He was only with her for a couple of minutes. She didn’t even tell him she’d known Jaimie in California. I congratulated her on her acumen. But she just asked what acumen was and said she hadn’t told him because she’d forgotten. I think she thought acumen was a kind of fur—a very expensive fur which she should immediately have yards of. Everything’s fine, then?”

“I think so.”

“Good boy. Call me whenever you need me. Old Mother Fund operates on a twenty-four hour schedule.”

“Thanks, Paul.”

“Oh, by the way—the Slave Driver’s back. When I got in, there was a note that she’d called. Bill, be smooth with her.”

“Of course.”

“I love you, Bill. There’s something about you. You’re sexy.”

“’Bye, Paul. I’ll send you a check for the money in the morning.”

“You better had. Two hundred? That’d almost cover the Prop’s week-end perfume consumption.”

I took a taxi home, feeling wonderful. As I opened the apartment door, I heard voices in the living room. I went in. Betsy and Helen Reed were there. With them was Lieutenant Trant, sitting, inevitably, on the arm of a chair, with a cocktail in his hand.

He’d haunted my mind so much that for a moment I thought he was a guilt-engendered mirage. He wasn’t, of course.

Betsy said, “Bill, you know Lieutenant Trant, don’t you? He just stopped by to see whether I could help at all about Jaimie.”

Trant nodded. “They persuaded me to have a drink, Mr. Harding. But I’ll have to be getting along.”

“Really!” said Helen Reed. “Murder in the Callingham circle. Wonders will never cease.”

I told myself it was perfectly routine for Trant to be there. Of course he’d have to interview Betsy as another of his meager links to Jaimie. As usual, he’d got in ahead of me. But this time it didn’t matter. There was nothing he could trick out of Betsy.

My wife looked worn out, but her happy, transfiguring smile delighted me and invalidated my fear of Trant. I went to her and kissed her.

Helen said, “Bill, darling, for pity’s sake, make that wife of yours put her feet up for a while. Me, I’m going to put mine up for a year. If you knew how we knocked ourselves out! Gab, gab, gab, charm, charm, charm until last night we collapsed into stunned exhaustion at ten P.M. The Vichyssoise we’ve drunk! The monumental Main Line bosoms we’ve enchanted with our dazzling charitable smiles! If I ever see another simple black frock with pearls I’ll scream.”

Betsy said, “Helen was wonderful, Bill.”

“Wonderful?” Helen said. “I was celestial. But what are we doing, chattering about our triumphs? Bill, darling, Betsy’s told me the Great News. Many congratulations. I haven’t the faintest idea what Vice-President in Charge of Advertising is, but I know it’s something absolutely divine. Let’s drink to it.”

Betsy was beaming her pride at me. “Yes, Bill, let’s drink to it.”

They all toasted me solemnly—including Trant. Soon he left and Helen left a couple of minutes later. The moment we’d seen her off at the front door, I said: “What did Trant ask you, Betsy?”

“Nothing, really. Just about Jaimie. There wasn’t much I could tell.”

“You didn’t tell him about Jaimie beating up Daphne?”

“Of course not. He wasn’t interested in Daphne anyway. Daphne was here last night with you.”

I’d always been going to tell her about the Daphne “fix,” of course. There had never been any doubt about that.

I said, “She wasn’t.”

“She wasn’t? But the Lieutenant said…”

“C. J. and I fixed it.”

“But, Bill, whatever…?”

The cook came in then and announced dinner. After she’d left, I said, “Let’s have our reunion dinner in peace. I’ll tell you it all afterward. It’s nothing to worry about.”

She looked at me doubtingly. I put my arms around her and kissed her. She clung to me as if she had been away from me for months.

“I missed you so much, Bill. Won’t I ever get over being stupid about you?”

“I hope not,” I said.

As I kissed her again, reveling in the calmness, the rightness of it, I found I was looking over her shoulder at the couch where I had been kissing Angelica the night before. Incredibly, it didn’t seem to matter. Angelica had no reality whatsoever.

After dinner, I told her about C. J.’s manufactured alibi for Daphne. I knew she would hate the fakery of it. Miraculously for a child of C. J.’s, she had a passion for straightforwardness. But I also knew that, unlike Angelica, she would see that it had had to be done. She was Callingham enough for that. Conscious of how much I was holding back from her, that part of the story seemed innocuous, almost dull, and I was surprised when she took it anxiously.

“But what did Daphne do last night?”

“I don’t know.”

“But she was with Jaimie, you say?”

“That’s what C. J. said. Part of the time she was with him, part of the time she was alone.”

“Then at least Father knows what she was doing?”

“I don’t even know that. Daphne said something about having to tell him most of the truth.”

“Then she only told him what she wanted to tell him. You know that.” My wife got up. “How can you and Father be so calm about it? Making that alibi’s one thing, but if Daphne was with Jaimie, if somebody saw them together… You know her. She could have done something completely crazy and if we don’t know what it was…”

Her anxiety was infecting me. She was right, of course. There had been no time to think about Daphne. But now I could see a dozen ways in which Trant might be able to break the alibi.

Betsy was saying, “We’ll have to make her tell us what happened.”

“I guess so.”

“Please, Bill, you call her. You know how she is with me. Ask her to come around here—or we’ll go there.”

“All right,” I said.

I called C. J.’s apartment. Henry answered and said, “Oh, yes, sir, Miss Daphne’s in her room. I’ll put you through.”

Soon I heard Daphne. “Bill? How divine of you to call. I’m under house arrest. Really, Daddy’s being too dreary for words. I’ve never been so bored in my life.”

I said, “Betsy’s back.”

“Heaven forfend. I suppose she’s up to her ears in righteous indignation?”

“She thinks we ought to talk more about last night—so do I.”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, dear. Oh, dear.” And then, “Well, why not? Anything’s better than this boredom.”

“So we’ll come right over?”

“You can’t leave her behind, I suppose?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Okay, then. Bring her. Let her get it out of her system. But, Bill, darling…”

“Yes.”

“For pity’s sake, avoid the library. Daddy’s in there alone—brooding. If he sees anyone—but anyone—he’ll maul them like… like… Oh, what are those dogs?”

“Police dogs.”

“No, Bill. Don’t be a moron. Those other ones—the ones with bow-legs and fangs and…”

“Bulldogs,” I said.

“Yes, of course. Bulldogs. How divine of you.”

She rang off. I put down the receiver. Betsy said, “We go there?”

“Yes. C. J.’s ordered her to stay in her room. She says he’s in a fighting mood and we’d better avoid him.”

“How did she sound?”

“Oh—like Daphne.”

“She didn’t sound…” Betsy was watching me steadily and the anxiety on her face was almost fear. It startled me.

“Sound like—what?”

Suddenly she said, “What if she’d killed him!”

I suppose that thought must have crossed my mind, but it had made no impression. There had been so many, many other things that had frightened me more. But now it had been said and it had to be faced.

Daphne could have killed him, of course. I doubted whether there was any extravagance of which she was incapable if she felt an imperial Callingham whim. I remembered the look on C. J.’s face that morning—the look of mingled love and despair, and the thought of him, shut up, brooding, in the library, took on a new, ominous significance. But, because Betsy looked so worried and it was Betsy I cared about, I tried to minimize.

I said, “I asked her. She said she didn’t.” That sounded silly even to me. I put my arms around her and kissed her. “You mustn’t get ideas like that in your head. It’ll be all right. I promise. Go get your coat. We’ve got to be going.”

For a moment she stayed there in the circle of my arm. I could see the worry fading out of her face, and I felt a stirring of guilt. She’d been perfectly sensibly afraid that Daphne might have killed Jaimie and now, just because I’d said she hadn’t, without the slightest reason to back me up, she wasn’t afraid any more.

That was how much she trusted me.

She went off to the bedroom for her coat. I got mine in the hall and waited for her. I might have known that getting rid of Angelica wouldn’t be enough. There was always going to be some little thing like this to remind me of how double-faced I had become. Nothing’s the end for you because it can always be fixed. Angelica’s voice, hard with contempt, echoed in my ear. I thought of her on that train. What was she doing? Reading the magazines? Sitting? Just sitting and pompously thinking what a hollow man I was?

I forced my mind to something else—to Daphne. There was danger there, but it wasn’t personal danger for me. There was nothing about Daphne that could compromise me.

And then, as I heard Betsy coming down the hall toward me, a thought hit me like a blow between the eyes. What if Daphne knew about Angelica? At eleven Jaimie had gone to Angelica and thrown her out of the apartment. What if Daphne had still been with him then and he had told her what he was going to do? “You know—Angelica, Bill’s ex-wife… Hasn’t he told you she was in New York? He sees her all the time.”

I turned toward Betsy. It was horrible because, although I loved her and needed her as I had never needed her before, she wasn’t my ark of security any more; she, like Angelica, had become a menace—the woman I had to deceive, the woman whom the merest chance remark from Daphne might undeceive.

I said, hating my sneaky diplomacy, “Darling, you look all in. Remember what Helen said. Why don’t you go to bed and let me do this alone?”

“Oh, no, I’m all right.”

“But—you know how Daphne is about you. Maybe it’d be smarter if I handled her without you.”

She smiled at me, sure of her duty, defeating me. “Of course not, darling. I annoy her. I know that. But in the long run, if she’s difficult, I’m the only one in the family who can beat her down.” She slipped her hand through my arm. “Come on.”

Betsy’s car, in which she’d driven Helen Reed up from Philadelphia, was still outside the apartment house. We took it and I drove to C. J.’s. Betsy sat up very straight.

“We mustn’t let her squirm out of it. We’ve got to find out the whole truth.”

“Sure,” I said.

She put her hand on my knee. “Darling, you’ve been wonderful. It must have been a nightmare for Father. I don’t know what he would have done without you…”

chapter 11

Henry let us in and led us straight to Daphne’s room. Daphne was lying on a pink chaise longue with her shoes kicked off. She twisted around to look at us, blinking petulantly.

“I hope you’ve brought a file in a loaf of bread. Really, Daddy’s a monster. Larry Morton showed up to take me to the Lisdons’ party. Daddy knows I wanted to go, but he made me say I was sick. Sick! I shall be sick soon—mortally sick with whatever it is you get in prisons. Scurvy.”

She didn’t move. Betsy went to her and kissed her. Daphne eyed her scrutinizingly.

“Darling, you look terrible. What on earth have you been doing in Philadelphia?”

Betsy sat down on the edge of the chaise longue. Her lips were rather tight, but I could tell that she was determined not to let Daphne irritate her. She said, “We’ve got to know what happened last night. There’s a million and one reasons. Even you must see.”

Daphne continued to look at her for a moment and then turned the pretty frog eyes on me. I was feeling less uneasy now. In the car I had remembered a conversation I’d had with Jaimie at the party. Jaimie had asked me not to mention Daphne to Angelica and had made it quite plain that he was keeping his women departmentalized. There was, therefore, a good gamble that Daphne wouldn’t know anything to undermine me. But I was still wary. I smiled at her, backing up my wife.

“Yes. Tell us. We’ve got to be sure Trant can’t break the alibi.”

“Oh, that Lieutenant.” Daphne shrugged. “My dear, he couldn’t break a date.” She reached down from the chaise longue with one of her stockinged feet and tried to wriggle it into a shoe. “Oh, well, what difference does it make? If you’re so nosy, I might as well tell you. But, for pity’s sake, don’t get holy. Really, after Daddy, I couldn’t stand it.”

“We won’t get holy, dear,” said Betsy. “Just tell us.”

Daphne abandoned the shoe and tucked her legs up under her. “It’s all your fault anyway. If it hadn’t been for you, it wouldn’t have happened. I’d have got bored with Jaimie the way anyone gets bored with anything after a while. But, oh, no, you had to butt in—screaming like lunatics just because he got drunk that one time and tried to maul me, rallying around with bludgeons when I decided, out of sheer Christian charity, to forgive him, trying to bully me out of seeing him, threatening to tell Daddy…” She tossed the mane of red hair. “If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s people who butt in.” She darted a glance at Betsy. “It was that divine sister-to-sister talk before you went to Philadelphia that did it, darling. After all that good, sound, solid admonishment from Little Mother Betsy, I said: To hell with them. They say I won’t marry Jaimie. I say I will. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? That’s how any girl with self-respect would react.”

It was, in any case, how one would expect Daphne Callingham to react. The little puzzled frown had come between my wife’s eyes. “So you really were in love with him?”

“In love? Who knows about love? He was pretty and I wanted him. Even lovely social girls with lovely social backgrounds can be inflamed, you know, with desire. If it wasn’t love, at least it was a challenge.”

She was watching Betsy behind half-closed lashes, hoping she’d managed to shock her.

“Really, it all seems absurd now, but it didn’t seem silly then. It was the Cause. After you—thank God—had left for Philadelphia, I saw him all the time. I told him I wanted to marry him and was going to marry him and we’d better do something about it. Looking back, he was terribly dumb. I guess that’s because he was so stuck on himself. He said there wasn’t anything to worry about. Everything would be all right. In a couple of weeks, he’d have you crazy about him again and Daddy crazy about him and you’d all come to the wedding crawling on your hands and knees with orange blossoms in your teeth. Vanity, my dears. That’s all it was. Appalling vanity. He thought he could charm the fangs out of a shark, that one.”

She turned to me and held out her hand imperiously. That was always her C. J.-ish method of asking for a cigarette. I gave her one and lit it for her. Through the smoke, she said:

“I told him he was a jerk, of course. I told him he didn’t know you and he didn’t know Daddy. Particularly he didn’t know Daddy. For example, I said, if you ever told Daddy that he’d beaten me up, Daddy wouldn’t only forbid the banns or whatever you do to banns; he would run him out of the Eastern Seaboard, tarred and feathered, on a rail personally wrenched from around the Public Library. But he just smirked and looked beautiful and charming. Honestly, you could have eaten him. And that’s where the matter stood—until last night.” She looked down at the cigarette. “Ugh, this is one of those revolting things with a filter. Give me a real cigarette. I’m a grownup girl.”

I didn’t have any other cigarettes. Betsy felt in her pocketbook and produced a pack. I went through the ritual of lighting Daphne’s new cigarette.

“Last night,” she was saying, “I was here at home. Daddy—thank God, too—had gone to Boston. I didn’t have a date with Jaimie. As a matter of fact, I’d got the days mixed up on the Lisdon party and I was waiting for Larry to pick me up. He didn’t come, of course, because it was the wrong day, but that made me mad. So I had a couple of drinks. I’ve got a smooth system of drinking without Henry reporting it to Daddy. I keep a bottle of gin and a bottle of vermouth hidden behind the books in the library and I get Henry to bring me ice and a coke. Then I furtively—But am I out of my mind, revealing my innermost secrets to you? Anyway, I had a couple of drinks and I was mad at Larry for standing me up, mad, of course, at you, and even madder at Jaimie for being so feeble. Then, suddenly, like a vision, the plan came to me. It all centered around Daddy’s character. You know how he is. Heavens, we don’t have to go into Daddy at this late date. He’s the wickedest old crook since they opened up the Yukon, but to him he’s Queen Victoria. There was a way to fix it. I saw it, as I said, in a vision. What would Daddy hate more than an undesirable son-in-law? There was, of course, only one answer. I haven’t suffered years of agony as a child listening to him reading Dickens out loud for nothing. The thing that Daddy would hate more than an undesirable son-in-law was…” She leaned forward dramatically, curling her lips back from the small, white teeth “… was a ruined daughter!”

She giggled again. “It was a great idea. Even now I have to admit it. It was the most glorious conception of the twentieth century. I would rush to Jaimie’s arms, spend the night in his apartment, hopelessly compromise myself and then confront Daddy with it dead-on. Listen! I’d say. Take your pick. Let me marry Jaimie or I’ll tip off all the columnists of those rival newspaper magnates who love you so dearly that C. J.’s cherished baby daughter was ruined last night in a one-room apartment in a most unfashionable section of Lower Manhattan. Wouldn’t it have been divine? It would have been straight out of David Copperfield and it would have worked.” She clasped her hands together in mock ecstasy. “Of course it would have worked. And how rapturous it would have been just to see his face!”

There was a point, I thought, beyond which frivolity becomes almost magnificent.

Betsy was watching her anxiously. “So you went to Jaimie’s apartment?”

“I certainly did. I got my car out of the garage and hurtled there. And can you imagine what he was doing? He was in the kitchen—that disastrous little kitchen! You should see it!—cooking spaghetti for his dinner. Isn’t that touching? He was absolutely poverty-stricken, you know. He didn’t have a single cent to his name. And not only that, he was stripped to the waist. You have to be, in that kitchen when the oven’s on, if you want to stay alive. I can’t tell you how divinely husband-worthy he looked. And he was, thank heaven, drinking Martinis, too. So I pulled him out of the kitchen and started drinking the Martinis—and explained my plan.”

“When was this?” I said.

“Oh, I guess I got there around seven something, but it lasted hours and hours. I mean, the Martini drinking and explaining my plan.” She stubbed her cigarette in an ash tray. “And was he a dope! You always went on yelling about Jaimie as if he was a monster of evil and corruption. My dears, you couldn’t have been wronger. He was just as prissy as you two—prissier, if possible. At first he was horrified. Doing such a terrible thing? Doing it to the Great C. J.? I could have killed him, but I didn’t. I just talked at him and talked at him and talked at him—and you know me. I’m old Miss Water-Drop when I want to be. And it worked. Around ten or something, I’d worn him down. It was divine. You should have seen us. Me twirling my black mustache and dear little Jaimie with all that torso, fluttering his lovely lashes and simpering and saying, ‘Oh, no, no, not that…’”

Betsy broke in, “But he agreed to this plan?”

“Oh, yes, he agreed in the end. But he was fantastically elaborate about it. It was all something about the neighbors. The people in the next apartment. They were out at some party and he had invited them in for a drink when they got back. He couldn’t possibly put them off because he sublet the apartment from their mother for nothing, and they would have to come in for the drink, but if they saw me, there would be hell to pay because they were terribly strict about women in the apartment. They’d raise a stink, throw us out and… I don’t know. He went on about it as if it was the end of the world. I’d have thought anyone would have adored being thrown out of that apartment. But that’s beside the point. The point is he said he knew a friend. It was a cinch. We could use this friend’s apartment. I was just to sit and he’d go off and work things with this friend. So he made me some more Martinis and he went off, leaving me alone.”

I was warily alert now, for the story was coming dangerously into my ken. The friend, of course, whose apartment Jaimie had gone to get must have been Angelica. The story he’d given to Angelica about its owner’s unexpected return had been, as she had guessed, a lie.

Daphne had reached out and grabbed Betsy’s pocket-book and was searching it for the cigarettes. She found one and pulled it out. I lit it for her.

“I was quite high by that point,” she said. “And it all seemed deliriously funny. I mean, Jaimie being such an old maid. I even got the idea that I had scared him so much with my shameless advances that he’d fled into the night like a stricken deer. But he hadn’t. Quite soon he came back. It was all fixed, he said. His friend had moved out of the apartment of another friend. We could go. So we got in the car and went.”

“Where was this other apartment?” asked Betsy.

“Oh, I don’t know. Somewhere sordidly in the bosom of the Village. Jaimie did the driving. But, my dear, it was hideous. You can’t conceive. It was painted shrimp pink and there was a chair—you won’t believe this, but it’s true. At least, I think it’s true unless it was a Martini hallucination—but it was entirely, but entirely, made out of stags’ antlers. And once he’d dragged me there, Jaimie started explaining about his goddam neighbors. I wasn’t caring much one way or the other by then. In fact, the most dreadful doubts were assailing me. What was I letting myself in for? In the past he’d always seemed divinely virile, breathing down my neck, knocking me about, doing the most acceptable things. But suddenly there he was fussing around like an agitated scout master and I thought: Is this what I’ve decided I want? Am I recklessly plunging into matrimony with just another fine clean-cut American boy—another Bill Harding?”

She smiled at me. “Darling Bill, I didn’t think that at all. I’m just being bitchy. But there he was, going on and on and on, saying that the neighbors were coming back from the party around midnight to have the drink with him and that he had to be there to let them in. So he was going back. He’d be through with them in half an hour—and after that he’d return and our glorious night of love would begin. So that’s what he did. He left me there. I guess it was about eleven-thirty. And there I was stuck with no Martinis and that terrible antler chair. And, my dears, the most humiliating thing happened. Sheer emotional exhaustion, faintly tinged with gin, set in. I just lay down on the bed a moment for a brief period of spiritual reflection. And the next thing I knew, the dreary light of morning was oozing through the window. It was six-thirty A.M. and there I was, not ravished at all, just mussed and tawdry and toothbrushless and hung-over—and completely alone.”

chapter 12

My anxieties that she might have known about Angelica had completely subsided now, but I had been listening with close attention. Either she was telling the truth or she wasn’t. She was such a good liar, as she had proved that morning with Trant, that it was impossible to tell. Part of the story, however, must be true. She must have been in Angelica’s apartment. She couldn’t have thought up that antler chair. But had she, in fact, just passed out? What if she had become furious at Jaimie’s nonappearance, gone back to his apartment, started a drunken brawl and seen the gun? I put that hypothesis out of my mind. It was far more comfortable to take her story at its face value.

Even then all sorts of things were wrong. The Browns had told Trant that Jaimie, in refusing their offer to take him to the party, had said he had a date. The date certainly hadn’t been with Daphne who had descended on him unannounced. The Browns, too, had said nothing about a planned drink with Jaimie after the party. In fact, they hadn’t come back from it at midnight; they hadn’t come back until after four. And Jaimie’s explanation about the Browns’ objections to women in the apartment was obviously bogus. If he’d really told Daphne that, he’d almost certainly had a private date which she, barging in with her wild plan, had imperiled. Being unable to get rid of her any other way, he’d given that limp explanation and had been forced into the elaborate necessity of throwing Angelica out so that he could store Daphne there for the time being. If Daphne was telling the truth, Jaimie had gone back to his apartment to keep the date, whatever it had been—and had been murdered. If Daphne wasn’t telling the truth…

Once again I stopped that train of thought.

I glanced at Betsy. She was looking relieved. “So that’s all that happened?”

Daphne nodded. “Yes, darling, I told you there was nothing to cluck about. I drove my own car. There were no taxi-drivers, no one at all who could possibly have seen me with him. Don’t you think I’ve got enough sense to have thought that out already? That’s absolutely all that happened. Except, of course, that I was livid with rage at Jaimie and scared silly that Daddy would have got back from Boston. I rushed home, but, of course, I was too late, and Daddy was there with the newspaper. He challenged me with it the moment I came in. And, really, I felt so deathlike, apart from anything else, and he was such a monstrous bully that he forced the whole thing out of me.”

“The whole thing?” asked Betsy.

Daphne giggled. “Well, darling, not quite the whole thing. At least I wasn’t that infantile. I didn’t say anything about my plan. I just said I’d been out with Jaimie and had got a little tipsy and had been scared to come home so I’d got Jaimie to put me up at a friend’s apartment. But that was bad enough. You know how Daddy is about the Evils of Alcohol for Growing Girls, and then all the other earlier things came out. Of course, I did everything I could to put all the blame on you and Bill, but even so…”

She got up from the chaise longue and stretched herself with a theatrical yawn. “Oh, what’s the point of going into it all? There’s not a thing in the world to worry about. Daddy’s furious at the moment, but he’ll get over it. By tomorrow he’ll be crawling to me. ‘Piggy, darling, dearest Piggy, perhaps I was too harsh…’” She swung around to Betsy. “You’ve heard it now and you promised not to deliver one of your high-school graduation addresses on The Home, Honor and The American Way of Life. So get the hell out of here—both of you. I still feel terrible. I’m going to bed.”

Betsy got up. I moved toward her. We both stood looking at Daphne. Suddenly she grinned at us—it was a broad, affectionate grin.

“You poor dear creatures! Why do you worry so much? You’ll be the death of yourselves—worrying like that. Haven’t you gotten used to me yet? Haven’t you resigned yourself to the fact that I am Daphne Callingham, the Scourge of the Bistros?”

She went to Betsy, put her arms around her and kissed her. “Betsy, darling, you’re my lovely, dreary older sister and I adore you.”

She turned to me then and kissed me long and caressingly on the mouth. “And you—you’re a doll. I didn’t mean that about the scout master. You’d make a lousy scout master; you’d be terrible in birdlore. You’re divine too.”

She broke away from me and made shooing gestures with her hands.

“Now, scram. Run away about your little businesses. The Scourge of the Bistros has to roll out her prayer mat.”

She could be disarming when she wanted to be and she knew it.

We didn’t stop to see C. J. Betsy was dead tired; I was all in too. On the drive home, Betsy said, “Did you believe her?”

“Yes. I think so. Did you?”

“It could have happened that way, couldn’t it?”

“Sure.”

She gave a bleak little shrug. “Thank heaven you and Father acted so quickly. Think how it would have been if the police and the papers had got onto that story!”

I could imagine it all vividly and, looking back, I shuddered to visualize what would have happened if I’d lost my nerve and not backed C. J. up with the alibi.

My wife glanced at me. “Daphne is pretty awful, isn’t she?”

“She is a little frightening.”

“It’s Father’s fault, of course. Poor Father, though. Do you think he’s afraid she did it?”

“Maybe. We’ll never know anyway. He’d never admit it.”

“Perhaps we should have stopped in and seen him. But I don’t suppose it would have done any good.”

“No good at all.”

For a moment she didn’t talk; then she asked, “What do you think actually happened?”

“If Daphne’s telling the truth, Jaimie had a date with someone. So he dumped her at the other apartment and went back to the date.”

“And was killed.”

“And was killed.”

“Let’s hope so.” My wife moved closer and let her head drop down on my shoulder. “At least, let’s hope we’re out of it now.”

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t be,” I said, and I didn’t. The day of disasters had come to an end miraculously with none of the disasters having destroyed me. During those moments, with my wife’s head nestling, quiet and trusting, on my shoulder, I felt almost completely safe. Daphne hadn’t known about Angelica. Angelica was out of the way. Trant, with any luck, might turn out to be just another policeman whom we would never have to see again. And, beyond everything, Betsy was back. Betsy suspected nothing. Betsy would never have to know.

Nothing’s the end for you because it can always be fixed. Angelica’s parting taunt came back to me, but now I found I could treat it with amused complacency. I contrasted her life with mine which had been preserved for me by fixing. Poor Angelica, she could have done with a little fixing in her own life.

When we let ourselves into the apartment, Ellen appeared around the corner of the passage from the kitchen. She saw us and stopped with a little gasp. She always did that. It was part of her elaborate behavior pattern to consider casual meetings between employers and employees as unseemly. But this time I was sure that the meeting had been contrived. She was all smiles and bright, calculating eyes.

“So you’ve been out, Madam.”

“We just went to see Daphne,” said Betsy.

Ellen turned the smile on me. “I wonder if you’ve had time yet, sir, to tell Madam about little Gladys.”

Betsy said, “Mr. Harding’s told me that Father’s planning to fly her over here for an operation.”

“Oh, it’s not only that.” Ellen was purring. “Mr. Harding suggested that, after the operation, she should have a lovely long stay here. It will be so nice for me—and so nice for Master Rickie. A little companion.”

She disappeared down the passage. For a moment, Betsy stood looking after her. I thought she was going to say something, but she didn’t. We went to our bedroom. Betsy went into the bathroom and I undressed. When she came out of the bathroom, my wife stood in the doorway, looking at me.

“Bill, did you really say Ellen could have that child living here?”

I couldn’t remember blushing in years, but I felt the blood warming my cheeks. “I just thought, since C. J. was bringing her over, we ought to make the gesture.” As I said it, I knew that would seem an improbable explanation. I also knew that, with her sensitive stepmother’s love for Rickie, she would feel puzzled and hurt that I hadn’t consulted her before deciding on something so drastic as the random importation of a perfectly unknown influence into his life.

“But we—we don’t know anything about Gladys.” Betsy crossed to the bed and pulled down the covers. “She may be a horror. If she’s anything like Ellen, she probably is. Bill, I don’t quite see. Why did you do it?”

“I guess I got carried away. I’m sorry. But I don’t see how we can get out of it now.”

She climbed into the bed with a little sigh of contentment and smiled up at me. “Oh, well, I’m far too stuffy about Rickie anyway. Probably Gladys will be a monster but probably a monster’s exactly what Rickie needs.”

I might have known she would let it go. Betsy never made a fuss. Gratitude merged with my repentant love for her. I went to the bathroom. When I came out, Betsy had turned out the light. I got into the bed with her and she moved toward me. I put my arms around her.

“Oh, darling,” she said, “it’s so good to be home.”

I ran my hands down her body, feeling the familiar lines, marveling that she was there again and that incredibly it was all right.

“Betsy,” I said.

“Philadelphia was quite an ordeal—even with Helen.”

“I know.”

For a moment she relaxed completely. Then she said, “I’m so glad you told me the truth.”

“The truth?”

“You could easily have pretended that Daphne really had been here.”

“Why should I have done that?”

“It would have been like you. You’re always trying to protect me from unpleasant things. You don’t need to, you know. I’m as tough as a mountain goat. And I’m so glad you didn’t this time. Now I’m as implicated as you or Father. That’s what I want.”

Guilt was stirring again, marring everything.

She edged closer. “Bill.”

“Yes, baby.”

“What did you actually do last night? Were you here all the time alone?” She hesitated and then added in a little awkward whisper, “Missing me?”

The guilt was like something lying in the bed between us—like Angelica. My body ached with a sensation of unworthiness and shame. But it wouldn’t always be like this, I told myself. Of course it wouldn’t. Everything was over now. Soon I would forget it. And I would make it up to her. Lying there, with my arms around her, I swore I would make it up to her.

“Yes, baby,” I said. “I was missing you.”

She kissed me suddenly, almost fiercely.

“I’ve got you,” she said. “I don’t have to be like Daphne. I’ve got a husband who loves me. I’m all right. I’ve got you…”

chapter 13

I was right about forgetting. After a few days, it was almost as if nothing had happened. Or rather, as if everything had become better. My promotion to Vice-President in Charge of Advertising was officially announced at Callingham Publications. Everybody in the department was friendly about it—even Dave Manners. C. J. was at his most benign. I was busy and Betsy was busy too with Paul on the Drive, but we had our evenings together and we even managed to get away with Rickie for an unseasonably warm and sunny week-end at Oyster Bay. Paul and the Prop were there, and Daphne came too with Larry Morton, her richest and most eligible beau. It was all frivolous, luxurious and Callingham at its best. Sometimes—very occasionally—I thought of Angelica but only with astonishment that I should have made such a fuss about something of such little importance. In fact, in my re-established happiness with Betsy, I was beginning to feel that the whole episode had been beneficial. I had got out of my system the last, unwholesome vestiges of my first marriage, and no harm had been done.

Preparations for the importation of Gladys had begun and Ellen never let us forget it. Apart from that, there was nothing to remind me of Jaimie at all.

And then, one evening after dinner, about ten days later, the phone rang. Betsy answered it and said, “It’s for you, dear. It’s that Lieutenant—Lieutenant Trant.” She handed me the phone and stood beside me, obviously curious. The sensation of uneasiness which I had almost forgotten came rushing back and with it the alarming realization that Betsy, standing there, would hear whatever it was Trant had to say. As casually as I could, I asked, “Baby, would you get me a drink?”

As she crossed to the bar, I said into the phone, “Hello, Trant.”

“Good evening, Mr. Harding.” His voice was as quiet, as friendly as I had remembered it. “There’s been a development in the Lumb case. I thought you might be interested.”

“Yes,” I said.

“We’ve traced the ownership of the gun. It was bought about three weeks before the murder in a Third Avenue hockshop by a woman who signed herself Angelica Roberts, with an address on West Tenth Street.”

From the beginning I had been prepared for that to happen. There wasn’t, I told myself, any reason to worry. But, even so, hearing him actually mention Angelica’s name was a shock and the realization that, if I hadn’t been resourceful, Betsy would have heard it made my hand on the receiver sticky. I glanced across at her. She was still at the bar, mixing my drink.

Trant was saying, “I’ve just been down to Tenth Street. There’s no Angelica Roberts listed as a tenant. Most of the tenants were out and the ones I talked to had never heard of a woman by that name. Probably she gave a phony address.”

“Probably,” I said.

“But I’ll go down and try again tomorrow.” He paused. “I suppose you’ve never heard of her? Angelica Roberts?”

Betsy was crossing back to me with the drink.

“No,” I said “I don’t think I have.”

“Perhaps you’d ask Miss Callingham when you see her. I hardly like to bother them on something like this. But if, by any chance, she knows anything, you could ask her to get in touch with me.”

“Of course,” I said.

Betsy put the drink in my hand.

“I just called,” said Trant, “because I know you and the Callinghams are interested. I thought I’d keep you abreast.”

“Of course,” I said again. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

He rang off. I put down the receiver, turning my back to the telephone so that Betsy wouldn’t see the damp finger marks.

“What did he want?” she asked.

“It was just to let me know they’d traced the ownership of the gun Jaimie was killed with. Some woman bought it in a hockshop.”

“Some woman? What woman?”

“I don’t know. Some name I never heard of.”

For a moment, the room, Betsy, watching me mildly, her curiosity completely satisfied—everything seemed changed. All the tranquility was gone, or rather it was like a false front insidiously constructed to conceal the danger lurking behind. Nothing had happened, of course. By the blindest chance, it had all turned out all right. But Trant could easily have given the message to Betsy instead of asking for me. He could easily have called Daphne himself instead of deputizing me. And if Betsy or Daphne had heard Angelica’s name…! For the rest of the evening, as I sat with Betsy, the embarrassments of what might have happened and hadn’t were constantly with me. I was back realizing that a plan for safety was not the same as safety itself. If this little disaster had so nearly struck, then there might, at any minute of the night or day, be others.

The period of my smugness was over. From then on, I would be on my guard.

At five o’clock the next day, just as I was getting ready to leave the office, Molly McClintock came in, her face arranged in a mask of mock terror.

“This is it, chum-vice-president!” she said. “The cops. A Lieutenant Trant from Homicide.”

I had forgotten how individual Trant was. As he came in, unobtrusive, quiet, with no kind of flourish whatsoever, he couldn’t possibly have been anyone else. It was that—his “Trantness”—of which I was most conscious, and, of course, the realization that he was the Enemy.

I offered him a chair, but he didn’t sit down. He stood across the desk from me, smiling.

“I’m haunting you, aren’t I?” he said. “I’ve just been down to West Tenth Street again. You’ll be glad to know I’ve had quite a bit more luck.”

His unrevealing eyes—were they gray or blue?—shifted from my face to the walls as if he were looking for more pictures to admire. There weren’t any. I had been moved into Mr. Lambert’s office and hadn’t gotten around to changing anything. All there was on the wall was a moose head which Mr. Lambert had shot in Canada. Trant settled for that, studying it with his cautious, unassuming scrutiny.

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. As blandly as I could, I asked, “You mean you’ve traced this woman?”

Instantly his eyes moved back from the moose to me. “We haven’t found her—yet, Mr. Harding. But we’ve found out enough to be interested in her—very interested.”

“Interested?”

Lieutenant Trant did sit down then. He dropped into the chair opposite me, took a cigarette from a cigarette case and lit it. I’d never remembered seeing him smoke before. There was a kind of ritualistic air about it.

He said, “This time, when I went back to Tenth Street, the woman in the third floor front was home—a Mrs. Schwartz.”

He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at the small cylinder of ash on its end and then looked rather vaguely at the desk. I pushed an ash tray toward him. He put the cigarette down on it and left it there.

“Mrs. Schwartz,” he said, “was very co-operative.”

I told myself that his deliberate movements, his pauses, his trick of saying a simple sentence as if it had enormous hidden significance were all just police devices which he used automatically. There was no reason to believe they had any particular pertinence to me. But, even so, because I felt guilty, they frayed me.

“As I said,” he went on, “Mrs. Schwartz lives on the third floor. There’s only one other apartment on her floor. It belongs to a man who’s in Mexico at the moment. A few months ago, Mrs. Schwartz tells me, about two months, in fact, a woman called Angelica Roberts moved into that apartment. This woman, said Mrs. Schwartz, had a constant male visitor. I asked her if she knew his name. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘his name is Jaimie Lumb.’”

He picked up the cigarette from the ash tray, blinked at it and put it down again. In spite of myself, I felt my old superstitious fear of him returning and with it my old exasperation against Angelica. Did she always have to mess up everything? She had said that the woman in the apartment across the hall had known nothing about her. Did she call it nothing that Mrs. Schwartz had known Jaimie’s name?

“Mrs. Schwartz,” Trant was continuing, “is a widow and, like many widows without anything particular to do, she interests herself in her neighbors. She found Miss Roberts intriguing. Not only was she very attractive, apparently, but she was having an extremely stormy relationship with Mr. Lumb. There were, it seems, constant and rather noisy episodes. But Mrs. Schwartz isn’t one to complain. In fact, all that drama on the third floor brightened things up a lot. It also gave her a chance to play the good neighbor. About a month after Miss Roberts moved in, she got sick with a virus infection. There was no one to take care of her, so Mrs. Schwartz elected herself ministering angel. She took her in food, straightened up, did all that. And, so Miss Roberts wouldn’t have to get out of bed to let her in, it was arranged that Mrs. Schwartz should have a second door-key made. One evening, after Mrs. Schwartz had come in from the movies, she thought she’d run in and see if Miss Roberts needed anything. She ran in—and she ran into Mr. Lumb, very drunk and disorderly, in the process of strangling Miss Roberts in the bedroom.”

His affected, totally unpoliceman-like way of telling the story was something new, and somehow its very flippancy was ominous. As I listened, I felt the saliva of nervousness in my mouth and I cursed Angelica for an irresponsible fool. Why hadn’t she told me the neighbor had been involved to that extent?

Trant was leaning slightly across the desk, smiling, friendly, terrifyingly without guile.

“Mrs. Schwartz’ sudden intrusion apparently quieted Mr. Lumb down and he went away. The next day, when Mrs. Schwartz went in, she saw deep red throttling marks on Miss Roberts’ throat, but Miss Roberts made no comment. What she did do, although she was still sick, was to go out for a couple of hours. Later, when Mrs. Schwartz was fixing her pillows, she found under them—a gun. She said, ‘So that’s what you went out to buy.’ And Miss Roberts said, ‘Yes.’”

The corners of Trant’s mouth were drooping ruefully. “I apologize for the melodrama of this story, Mr. Harding. I’m sure it’s a far cry from the world you and the Callinghams live in. And I’m afraid it gets even more so. Because in a couple of days Mr. Lumb was back as if nothing had happened and the fights, the reconciliations, the whole pattern started again.”

He was looking down at his hands now as if he was wondering whether or not he needed a manicure.

“Mrs. Schwartz hadn’t heard that Mr. Lumb had been killed. When I told her and told her the date, she was at her most illuminating. She distinctly remembered the last time she saw Mr. Lumb at the house. It was three days before the murder. That night, apparently, Mr. Lumb made a big scene, of which Mrs. Schwartz heard part. The gist of the scene was that Mr. Lumb had fallen in love with someone else and was going to marry her and Miss Roberts should consider herself kissed good-by. The someone else, I feel (don’t you?), was Daphne Callingham. Our friend, apparently, was out to better himself.”

He leaned back in his chair, tilting its front legs off the ground, completely relaxed as if he was sure that this story of the “Lower Depths of Manhattan” was just as impersonally, professionally interesting to me as it was to him.

“Mrs. Schwartz wasn’t home on the night of the murder. She was out at her sister’s at Jamaica. But she came back the next day and she swears that Miss Roberts had still been in residence before she left, but that, when she came back, the apartment was vacant and all Miss Roberts’ belongings were gone. Later, she took me into the apartment. And she was right. The whole place had been stripped of anything resembling a clue.”

He tilted the chair legs back onto the carpet with a little thudding sound. “So that’s the picture, Mr. Harding. Miss Roberts owned the gun; Miss Roberts was, to say the least of it, a woman accustomed to violence; Miss Roberts had been jilted—and Miss Roberts disappeared on the night of the murder. It doesn’t look, does it, as if we’ll have to search anywhere else for the murderer?”

I had my anxiety under control now but I could feel it squirming inside me like a maggot. I had never expected this. I had merely imagined Trant finding the name and address, going to West Tenth Street, drawing a blank and keeping an open mind. But now, of course, thanks to Mrs. Schwartz, he couldn’t keep an open mind. It was inevitable that he would assume Angelica was guilty. Why, in heaven’s name, hadn’t Angelica told me about Mrs. Schwartz and prepared me? Now she wasn’t going to be just one of several leads in the case; she had become the Case and Trant would move heaven and earth to find her.

I sat behind the desk, trying to look unconcerned, waiting for the inquisition to begin. I hadn’t the faintest idea what the inquisition would be, but I was so sure of Trant’s omniscience that I was prepared for everything—except what actually happened.

With no warning at all, he got up from the chair and held out his hand.

“Well, that’s it, Mr. Harding. I’ll be running along.”

I took his hand, not believing it could end this way.

“I hope you didn’t mind me barging in. I deliberately came to you rather than to Mr. Callingham because—” his smile was almost a grin—“I imagine you may want to censor the story a bit for your father- and sister-in-law. I don’t think either of them would like it too well if they knew that Mr. Lumb wasn’t quite the fine, cultivated, clean-cut young man they supposed. But at least you can tell them not to worry. It looks as if we have the case cracked. Of course, we’ve got to find this Angelica Roberts. She seems to have disappeared without a trace. But we’ll find her. Tell them that. Tell them not to worry.”

He started for the door. Then he turned, glancing back at me. “Oh, by the way, did you ask Miss Callingham if she’d heard of Angelica Roberts?”

I looked at him, thinking: He is going. He’s really going.

“Yes,” I lied. “I’m afraid the name didn’t mean anything to her.”

“Which isn’t surprising under the circumstances. Okay, Mr. Harding. Thanks a lot.” His eyes shifted up from me to the moose head on the wall. “Who’s that? One of the late vice-presidents?”

With a little wave of the hand, he went out of the office and closed the door behind him. His cigarette, a long column of ash with a red, smoldering end, was still burning on the ash tray.

chapter 14

After he’d gone, I sat at the desk, fighting the jitters. I told myself: It’s all right. He won’t be able to find her. Even Trant can’t possibly trace her to Claxton. But I forced myself to be realistic and racked my brains to figure out any way in which he might get a clue to her whereabouts. He might, of course, in time—if he covered every hotel—trace her to the Wilton. But what if he did? Surely, he would draw a blank there. Then I thought: If he gets to the Wilton, the desk clerk may remember that a Mr. Harding came to see Angelica Roberts. It was like a nightmare where you’re in a building and you see a crack in the wall here, then there, then there, then there… Suddenly I saw my plan, which had seemed so flawlessly designed to save me, as a net which I had woven and which was now inextricably entangling me.

All I could think of to steady myself was to call Paul. He was still at the Fund office. Betsy was still there, too. On the pretense of going over to pick her up, I managed a few moments alone with Paul. It was the right thing to do. When I told him the new developments, he took them with the utmost calm. Trant would never trace Angelica, he said, in a million years. As for the desk clerk at the Wilton, if I got that extreme in finding things to worry about, I’d go out of my mind. I suspected that his calm was merely put on to soothe me, but even so it worked.

Betsy came in while we were still talking.

“Hello,” she said. “What are you two conspiring about?”

“You,” said Paul. “We’re planning to erect a monument to you as the Angel of the Money Bags, but we’re not completely agreed on the site. Bill thinks it should be the stage of the Music Hall. I, on the other hand, feel it should be built, majestically, on the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”

He came with Betsy and me to the door, his arms around our shoulders.

“Good night,” he said, “you lovely, grass-rootsy, regular, home-loving, common American couple.”

He’d made it better for me. At least the jitters didn’t come back. But I was still wary, still prepared for anything. Therefore, when, two days later, Trant called me at the office, I at least had my wits about me. His voice was as friendly as ever. I was beginning to hate that bland, unfaltering friendliness.

“Hello, Mr. Harding. You couldn’t come down to the precinct house right away, could you?”

I played with the idea of saying I was tied up, but I knew that was only putting off the evil day.

“Sure,” I said. And then, “Anything happened?”

“Yes,” he said. “Something’s happened, Mr. Harding. I’ll expect you in about half an hour?”

“All right.”

In the taxi going downtown, the jitters were very close. I fought against them. “Something’s happened.” That was all he had said. That didn’t mean the worst. That could mean anything.

I’d never been in a precinct house before. Its bleak severity had a chilling effect. A cop behind a desk sent me upstairs to a large, bare room where a handful of detectives were sitting around, writing reports, reading newspapers, listening to a muted radio. They were all extremely uninterested in me. One of them took me to Trant’s office. Trant wasn’t there. I was told to wait.

The office was hardly an office; it was merely a cubicle cut off from the main room. It had the spare, ascetic quality of a monk’s cell. To my surprise, I saw on the neat desk a copy of my novel. It had been years since I’d thought of myself as a novelist. The sight of the book stirred complicated emotions and, over my anxiety, I thought with a mixture of embarrassment and pleasure: Is he going to ask me to sign it?

Trant came in very soon. He greeted me with the inevitable, unflagging courtesy. From the beginning he had acted as if we had been close chums for years. Now that quiet assumption of intimacy was unnerving in the extreme.

He took the chair behind the desk and, for a moment, just sat there, watching me without saying anything. Then casually he picked up my novel, turned it over so that the back dust cover was exposed, and handed it to me across the desk. As I took it, he said:

“I was always told that authors never read their blurbs, Mr. Harding. Apparently, it’s true.”

If someone—one moment before—had asked me what was on the dust jacket of Heat of Noon, I honestly wouldn’t have been able to tell them anything. But in the instant in which my hand took the book from his, I remembered and, with a sense of disaster too crushing for any reaction of self-preservation, I thought: This is the end.

I looked at the jacket. That it should have come from this! That, of all the things which could have betrayed me, it should have been the novel. There, of course, on the back of the dust cover, was the photograph of Angelica and me, standing, very young and conscious of our importance, under an elm tree on the Claxton campus. I remembered the taking of the photograph as if it had happened five minutes before. It was I who had insisted that Angelica be included. I had been so proud of her. There it was—the photograph. There even was the dolphin ring plainly visible on her finger. And there was the blurb which I had once read with such naïve satisfaction but which I hadn’t thought of in years.

William Harding, the brilliant young author of Heat of Noon, is an ex-marine and only twenty-four years old. When writing Heat of Noon, he was still a GI Bill sophomore at Claxton University, Iowa. Recently married to Angelica Roberts, daughter of the Professor of English at Claxton, he and his wife are planning to spend a year in Italy and France…

Dimly Lieutenant Trant’s voice came through to me. And dimly, through my visions of a future in ruins, I realized that the voice was just as soft, just as unhostile as ever.

“The book was a big help, Mr. Harding. I just happened to pick it up one evening after I’d been at your office. And there was the picture—there was the name. I can’t claim any intelligence in the matter. It was sheer luck.”

I made myself look at him. “So you found her?”

“It wasn’t very complicated to call the police in Claxton.” Incredibly, he was still smiling. “Quite frankly, Mr. Harding, for a while I was puzzled by you. I’ve heard of all sorts of amnesia. But the specialized amnesia of forgetting your own wife’s name was something rather new. I had the most elaborate suspicions of you. I let myself get quite carried away. Which is, of course, a great mistake for a policeman. I’m always telling myself that, but I never seem to learn. I apologize.”

He leaned across the desk, took the book from me and put it down on a neat pile of papers.

“Of course you knew your first wife’s name was Angelica Roberts. But, of course too, you didn’t for a moment connect her with this case. You haven’t seen her for over three years, have you? You imagined she was somewhere in Europe, infinitely remote, with no connection whatsoever to Jaimie Lumb.”

I went on looking at him, completely at sea. Could he really have said that? Was he then as fantastically stupid as I had first thought him to be? Or was this just some new, subtle, perverse trick for trapping me?

Desperately playing the advantage for the thousand and first chance that it might, in fact, be a real advantage, I said the most neutral thing I could say. I repeated, “So you found her?”

“Oh, yes, it couldn’t have been simpler. She was right there in Claxton living with her father. The police picked her up right away and then called me after they’d talked to her. That’s when I stopped thinking of you as a puzzlement, Mr. Harding. Her statement couldn’t have been clearer so far as you were concerned. She’d known you were in New York and she’d agreed to let Mr. Lumb take his novel to you, but she made him promise not to mention her to you. Even later, when he broke into the Callingham circle, she made him keep the promise. She had never seen you or communicated with you in any way, she said. In fact, she had strong objections to having any connection with you whatsoever. She wanted the past to be completely wiped out.”

Angelica! I thought. And the feel of her was so near that it was as if she were with me in that horrible little cell-like office. I saw, of course, what she was doing, but the craziness of it, the quixoticism, the enormous magnanimity were almost more than I could grasp. When the police arrested her in Claxton, she had known she had my whole new life in her hands. And she was playing it my way. Against all reason, against the withering contempt of her last parting from me, she had decided to save Betsy for me and C. J. for me… Angelica! I thought with a kind of wonder. And slowly the marvel of it began to grow.

I looked back into Trant’s clever eyes, the knowledge of my improbable reprieve merging with another, far more immediate sense of fear for Angelica.

“So she was the one—your Angelica Roberts?”

“Oh, yes. She admitted everything. She admitted buying the gun; she admitted having quarreled with Lumb; she admitted being thrown over by him; she admitted leaving town on the day after the murder. She admitted everything.”

The sick feeling of anxiety for her had quite overwhelmed any sense of victory now. “But not the murder.”

“Oh, no. That would have been expecting too much, Mr. Harding. She claims, it seems, that Mr. Lumb came to her at about eleven on the night of the murder and told her she had to leave the apartment. Apparently it had been he who had loaned it to her and he told her the man who owned it had come back unexpectedly and needed it. So she packed a suitcase, she says, and, having nowhere to go, went to a movie—alone, and after that to a hotel. The next day she went back for the rest of her things and took the train to Claxton.”

His face was grave, maddeningly sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harding, I’m sure this must be a shock for you. On the strength of the statement, they had to hold her. She made no difficulties and waived extradition. So they’re bringing her here on the train. She’ll be in some time tonight. If she wants to see you, of course, you will be allowed to visit her.”

“You mean she’s arrested?”

“She’s being held, yes, for further questioning.”

He got up then and stretched out his hand. He was always doing that at the most improbable times. Suddenly I loathed him for his refusal to act in any way like a policeman. I loathed him for his incomprehensible sympathy, for his perverse determination never to press an advantage, for his seemingly meaningless habit of taking your side rather than his own. From the way I’d reacted, he must have had a thousand reasons for suspecting how deeply implicated I was. Any other cop in the world would have only just started the inquisition at that point. But not Trant. He couldn’t possibly behave as simply as that.

“I’ll let you know the moment they bring her in, Mr. Harding. I’ll call you. Will you be at home?”

Betsy and I were dining with C. J. I would somehow have to fix that. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be at home.”

He was smiling again. “I wouldn’t worry too much yet, Mr. Harding. After all, people have been known to go to the movies alone. It’s possible she is telling the truth. And if she can prove the alibi she will, of course, be released immediately.”

If she can prove the alibi! Was that a deliberate goad? Did he know everything there was to know after all? I didn’t begin to understand him. But I was gradually beginning to realize my predicament and to see that it was almost more excruciating than total defeat would have been. For Angelica was rescuing me at the expense of sacrificing herself. The only thing that could save her was the alibi; and the only thing that could destroy me—was the alibi.

Lieutenant Trant was still holding out his hand. I looked at it and I thought: I’ve got to tell him now. I can’t let Angelica take this fantastic risk. If I don’t tell him, I’ll never be able to live with myself.

I opened my mouth to speak but before I could do so, he had said, “Then I’ll call you, Mr. Harding. It’ll probably be around ten.”

He gestured toward the door. He was dismissing me.

chapter 15

So I hadn’t told. I had tried, but Trant hadn’t given me the chance. As I went home in a taxi, I clung to that fact, telling myself that somehow it exonerated me. And, shamefully, I began to manufacture reasons to justify continued silence. After all, this was Angelica’s idea, not mine. For all I knew, she had thought up some plan for clinching her alibi at the movies which had nothing to do with me. It would have been stupid and rash to have blurted everything out before, at least, I’d had a chance to talk with her. In any case, she was innocent and, I told myself, people don’t get convicted for crimes they haven’t committed. Possibly in a few days Trant would find the murderer anyway and she’d be released. If she chose to shield me, why, with so much at stake, didn’t I have enough sense to accept the good fortune of my reprieve and leave it at that?

It almost worked. When I let myself into the apartment, my conscience had been temporarily lulled. In the future—some vague future—I might have to do something drastic, but at the moment the sensible thing was to stall. I would have to tell Betsy that Angelica had been arrested, of course; it would be in the papers anyway. But that was all. I would be all right so long as I didn’t lose my nerve, the way I had so nearly lost it in Trant’s office.

Betsy was home. I found her in the bedroom, changing to go to C. J.’s. When I told her about Angelica her face became almost stupid with astonishment. My efforts to deceive her had been so successful that it took her some seconds to grasp the fact that I really meant Angelica, the Angelica who ought to have been in Europe.

“But, if Jaimie knew Angelica, if she was here in New York, why didn’t he ever tell us?”

“She made him promise not to—apparently. Betsy, they’re bringing her in this evening. Trant says I can see her. I think I should. Is it okay for you to go to C. J.’s alone?”

“Of course it is. I’d better tell him too, hadn’t I, before he reads the papers. He’ll be furious at the publicity of her having been married to you and everything.” She looked at me, stricken. “Did she do it?”

“Don’t ask me!”

“Oh, why did she have to come back? Why did she have to ruin everything? Why couldn’t she…? I’m sorry, Bill. The poor woman. Of course you’ve got to do everything you can for her.”

She sat down on the bed and started putting on her stockings. “It’s terrible for you.” Her lips tightened into a formidable line. “And Rickie,” she said. “Whatever happens, we must keep Rickie from hearing about this. Rickie must never know—never.”

I hung miserably around the bedroom while she finished dressing. When she was ready, she went to the kitchen to tell the cook to get me some dinner. I saw her off at the front door. She kissed me.

“Try not to worry, darling.”

As she stood there with my arm around her, the little puzzled furrow showed between her eyes.

“Did you say Angelica was the one who bought the gun?”

“Yes.”

“Then, when Trant called you about it the other day, didn’t you know then that it was Angelica?”

“I guess she used another name,” I said.

“Oh, I see.” She smiled at me, perfectly convinced. “Good-by, darling. I’ll do the best I can with Father. And tell Angelica from me that—that I hope it will be all right.”

Trant called at ten-thirty.

“She’s here. They’ve got her at Centre Street. She’s ready to see you.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right down.”

“And I wouldn’t worry too much, Mr. Harding. We’re arranging for a lawyer. Everything that’s possible will be done for her.”

Centre Street had the same chilly impersonal gloom as the precinct house only on a larger scale. I had expected Trant to be there, but he wasn’t. They knew about me, though. A cop took me through interminable passages to a small bleak room and left me. Soon Angelica came in with another cop. The cop left us alone. But I didn’t feel alone. I was very conscious that he was waiting outside, that Angelica had been brought from a cell, that, rearing up between us, Trantlike, was the Law. I was horribly conscious, too, of my own embarrassment.

Angelica was wearing the same old black suit that she had worn when I put her on the train. Vaguely I’d thought that anyone would be changed by what had happened to her. She looked pale and tired but really not changed at all. And beautiful, of course. Always that indestructible, exasperating beauty.

She didn’t greet me, and her face was stubborn. I knew the expression so well from the old days. It was her “I’m the one who knows what’s right” expression.

She said, “I’m not going to tell them. You know that, don’t you?”

“I gathered it.”

“This won’t take long. I want to explain. And then I want you to go. I’ve done a lot of thinking and it’s all completely clear. This isn’t your thing. It’s mine. If I hadn’t called you that night, you wouldn’t have any connection with it at all. There’s no point in dragging you in. It isn’t as if there was anything to worry about. I’m innocent until they prove me guilty. They can never prove I wasn’t at a movie. Besides, I didn’t do it. You know that. All they can do is to hold me here for a couple of days.”

She had her pocketbook with her. Her hand moved to it and then stopped.

“Have you got a cigarette?”

I brought out a pack, lit a cigarette for her and said clumsily, “Keep the pack.”

She took it and put it in her pocketbook, watching me with that level, determined gaze.

“You do understand, don’t you? Probably in a few days they’ll find out who did it and that will be that. Then, if I’d told or you’d told, you’d only hate me and hate yourself for the rest of your days. So there it is. That’s all I’ve got to say. Go home. Leave this to me.” She was, of course, only saying what I had already said to myself. She was using the identical arguments. And, because I so passionately needed to be convinced, the arguments, coming from her, sounded even more persuasive. I felt temptation sliding through me. But, at the same time, I despised myself for being tempted.

Uncannily, as if she had read my thoughts, she added, “And don’t think I’m doing this for you. I’m not in the slightest. I’m doing it for myself.”

“For yourself?”

“Is that so difficult to understand? What have I been doing all these years! Charles Maitland! Jaimie Lumb! Kidding myself I could redeem people through the ennobling influence of my love! Never realizing that it was just fatuous vanity and a lovely excuse for drifting around in the gutter myself! It’s about time I faced up to something real for a change. I picked Jaimie. It’s up to me to take everything that goes with him. I’ve needed a good kick in the pants for years. This is it.”

Suddenly she smiled. “So don’t have a guilty conscience or anything, Bill. It’s all right. I want it this way. If I need you, I’ll tell you. But I won’t need you. So—good-by.”

Quickly, cheating me out of a chance to make my own decision, she walked out of the room. For a moment I stood there in crippling self-division. She had done it so smoothly, so tactfully, that part of me was more than ready to leave it her way. After all, wasn’t she even right about herself? Of course her life had been a mess. Of course the shock of being arrested had opened her eyes to herself and of course she would probably get some satisfactory moral chastening out of a moderate amount of unpleasantness and discomfort. And would it be any more than that?

But I couldn’t fool myself. I understood what she was doing better, probably, than she did herself. In spite of her big talk about change, she hadn’t changed at all. She had just transferred her Charles Maitland Jaimie Lumb Mother of the Downtrodden attitude to me. Now I was the one she could be noble for; I was the one who was Needing Her.

She had found yet another way of unmanning me. I hated it. I didn’t want to need her. I loathed the realization that from now on my life with Betsy would owe its very existence to Angelica’s heroic gesture. If I’d followed my instincts, I would have run out into the corridor after them, dragged them back and blurted out the whole truth to the cop. But I didn’t, of course. I merely took a taxi home.

Betsy hadn’t come back. I poured myself a drink. For the hundredth time I told myself that it was all right, that I’d only done what anyone else would have done in my position. It didn’t work.

Betsy came home around midnight. She hurried into the living room without taking off her coat.

“Bill, what happened?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I saw her. That’s all.”

She stood in the doorway, looking at me. “But she didn’t say anything?”

“Nothing really.”

She took off her coat and threw it over a chair. “I told Father. He hit the ceiling at first. Then he calmed down. He called the Police Commissioner. He’s a friend of his. He asked him to try to keep it out of the papers that she’d been married to you. I guess the Commissioner’s going to do what he can.”

She came to me, sitting on the arm of my chair, her face glossed with concern. “Bill, darling, don’t look so wretched. You did all you could for her. I know it’s horrible for you. But it isn’t as if—as if…”

She broke off.

“As if—what?” I said.

“I mean, as if you cared for her any more. I mean, of course you care, but… oh, Bill.”

She pressed her face against mine. I knew then that all evening she had been tormenting herself with the idea that, because this had happened, my old love for Angelica might blaze up. Was I going to succeed in hurting her whatever I did?

Not wanting to touch her, not wanting to touch anyone, I put my arms around her and eased her down onto my lap.

“Betsy. Betsy, baby, you know this doesn’t make any difference between us.”

She kissed me hungrily on the lips. “I am sorry for her. Really I am. But it’s you and Rickie who matter. It’s you I’m thinking of.”

We went to bed but even that was blighted. Long after she had gone to sleep, I lay awake, thinking of her and of Rickie and of Angelica in a cell at Centre Street. I tried to be grateful to Angelica. But I couldn’t. I could only hate her. Damn her. Why had she ever been born?

I slept at last and woke up feeling no better. I got through the day at the office. I even got through an interview with C. J. in which he told me of his talk with the Police Commissioner and pompously informed me that he did not hold my former connection with Angelica against me. But I felt emasculated and as exhausted as if I had been sick for weeks. The evening with Betsy was an ordeal. And the night that followed. And the next two days.

Angelica’s arrest was in the papers, but she was always called Angelica Roberts and there was not much excitement about it. She was just an obscure woman held for questioning in an obscure murder. Without the Callingham connection, it wasn’t newsworthy. And I never heard from Trant. Because I was sure by then that he must suspect me and was merely, for some sinister reason, biding his time, his silence was as nerve-racking as an onslaught. A dozen times I decided I couldn’t bear my anomalous position any longer and toyed with the idea of calling him and confessing everything. But each time the shreds of a self-preservation instinct and the thought of Betsy deterred me.

On the morning of the third day, just as I was going out to lunch, Trant called me at the office. Hearing his voice was almost a relief.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Harding. I have bad news for you. Miss Roberts’ lawyer has done all he can to establish the alibi. So have we. But there’s no evidence to support it at all. This morning the D. A. decided to go ahead and indict.”

“You mean she’ll come up for trial?”

“Exactly. I’m afraid she hasn’t been at all cooperative. The D. A. is quite convinced she’s guilty. And he’s sure he can get a conviction without much trouble.”

The end came without my making any conscious decision. Almost before I knew what I was saying, I blurted, “I’ve got to see you right away.”

“Of course, Mr. Harding. I’m here at Centre Street. Come right down.” He paused and then added, “I’m glad you’ve made up your mind at last. In the long run it’ll be easier for everyone.”

chapter 16

I took a taxi to Centre Street. I had never dreamed I would do it like this, without consulting Betsy, without warning C. J. But I was beyond caring about anything except the sheer physical necessity of relieving the pressure. I didn’t even try to understand Trant’s cryptic remark. Only one thing mattered—to pay my debt to Angelica, to escape from that suffocating obligation once and for all.

At Centre Street, a cop took me to the same room I’d been taken to before or to one exactly like it. Soon Trant came. He was smiling that usual, friendly, intimidating smile.

“I hope you haven’t changed your mind, Mr. Harding.”

“I haven’t changed my mind.”

There was a wooden table with a chair behind it. He sat down looking at me.

“Just to make sure you won’t, I think I should explain a few things first. I’m afraid I haven’t been exactly on the level with you. Policemen, unfortunately, can’t afford to play by the rules. I’ve known most of this from the beginning. You see, the moment Mr. Callingham mentioned your name on the phone, I wondered if you were the William Harding of Heat of Noon. As a matter of routine, before seeing you, I checked with the photograph of your dust jacket. I’d just come from Lumb’s and I had that dolphin ring in my pocket. Of course I recognized it right away as the ring your ex-wife was wearing in the photograph. So I knew then that she was involved and that probably you were too. Later, when you denied recognizing the ring, I knew you were hiding something. And then—later still—when I showed your photograph to Mrs. Schwartz and she recognized you as the man she’d seen fighting with Mr. Lumb in the hall of Miss Roberts’ apartment house—I realized what it was you were hiding.”

With a dim curiosity, as if it had nothing whatsoever to do with me, I thought: So the woman who came out of the taxi that first night, the blonde with the beaver teeth, had been Mrs. Schwartz.

Lieutenant Trant was leaning toward me across the desk, being as gentle and long suffering as ever. “I could, of course, have challenged you at the beginning. But I thought I had you summed up pretty well—if only from reading Heat of Noon. I’d say you’re a romantic man, Mr. Harding, but you’re also a responsible man. You don’t like being pushed around, but in the end you’ll always do what you think’s right. If I pushed you around, I decided, I wouldn’t get anywhere. But, on the other hand, if I let you simmer, softened you up once in a while, you’d come around, in your own good time, to realizing that your duty as a citizen was more important than any notion of romantic chivalry.”

I was listening to him with difficulty, trying, through my exhaustion, to follow the words with some sort of intelligence. The clever eyes, which now seemed almost smugly conscious of their own cleverness, were still fixed on my face.

“And it worked, didn’t it? A little later than I’d expected, but it worked. Once you knew she was going to be indicted anyway, once you knew that you couldn’t appreciably help her any more, you decided to tell the truth. The D. A., I assure you, can do with your testimony. It will make everything a lot easier.”

I was still struggling to catch up with him. Through the fog, his quiet, fantastically unpoliceman-like voice ran on: “You’d been seeing your ex-wife since she got back to New York, hadn’t you? You’d even been trying to help her with her difficult and dangerous and completely worthless lover. When he was shot, you knew at once that she’d killed him. I’m not implying that you had any actual evidence, that you have been in any legal sense an accessory after the fact. It was merely that you knew enough of the circumstances to be sure she’d done it. And since your attitude was ‘He deserved it,’ you made your decision. You were going to stand by her; you were going to clam up to the police; you were even going to help her make a getaway.”

My eyes were still fixed on his face. It was as if I couldn’t tear them away from his bland, assured smile.

“You see, I even know that you went to the Hotel Wilton on the day after the murder. Probably you gave her money. Probably, too, you saw her onto the train. Probably—because that’s the sort of man you are—you would even have tried to give her an alibi if you’d been alone on the night of the murder instead of with Miss Callingham.”

Because my mental processes were so blunted it was only then that I understood—only then after he had crossed every t and dotted every i. And, for a moment, I was so staggered that I could feel nothing but astonishment at the cleverness with which he had discovered everything and then preposterously misunderstood it.

I said, “You think I’ve come here to give evidence against Angelica?”

“Well, haven’t you, Mr. Harding?”

“My God,” I said, “and I thought you were smart. I’ve come here to tell you she’s innocent. At two o’clock, at the time Jaimie was murdered, she was with me—in my apartment.”

I told him everything, the episode with Ellen, my lie to C. J. on the phone, my inextricable involvement in the false alibi for Daphne, Daphne’s relationship with Jaimie in detail, her own version of what she’d done that night and my conviction that Jaimie had been killed by someone with whom he’d had a date. As I told him, I even felt a kind of sour satisfaction in realizing how wrong he’d been. I hadn’t forgotten I was throwing everything away, my job, the Callinghams, perhaps even Betsy, but the restored self-respect that came with confession was worth it. This was the greatest of the many ironies—that only by rejecting Angelica’s sacrifice and making the sacrifice myself could I free myself from her.

I didn’t bother to look at Trant while I was talking. He had ceased to exist as a person. He was just an ear, a disembodied intelligence in a confessional.

“So that’s the way it was,” I finished. “And I was crazy not to have told you at the beginning.”

“So that’s the way it was, Mr. Harding.” Trant spoke for the first time since I had started my confession. The sound of his voice made me look at him. There was no way of telling whether he was embarrassed at having made such a fool of himself. There was no way, either, of telling what he was thinking about me. His face was veiled, quite expressionless.

“So Miss Callingham has been lying?”

“Yes.”

“And Mr. Callingham has been lying?”

“Yes.”

“And Ellen has been lying?”

“Yes.”

“And Miss Roberts has been lying even at the risk of getting herself convicted of murder?”

“Of course she’s been lying. She has some quixotic notion of protecting me. She knows what all this will mean with Mr. Callingham and—well, with my wife.”

“I see.” For a moment Trant just sat looking at nothing with his hands on the table. Then he got up. “Excuse me. I’ll be back.”

I sat alone, not thinking where he had gone, not thinking anything but: It’s over. I knew how I was going to feel later when I confronted C. J. and when I confronted Betsy. But it didn’t really matter now. Now I felt purged—at peace with myself for the first time in weeks.

Eventually Trant came back. “I’ve been to see Miss Roberts. She wants to talk to you. I’m having them bring her here.”

I hadn’t prepared myself for that, and all my resentment of her came crowding back. I’d done it. I’d gotten her out of her jam. Having to face her on top of everything else was too much.

“You can have as long as you want with her, Mr. Harding. And don’t think there’ll be any traps. No one will be listening. You will be quite alone.”

The door opened then and she came in with a cop. Trant and the cop left, shutting the door behind them. Angelica hurried toward me.

“Bill, you didn’t tell, did you? Trant was just trying to trick me.”

“I told,” I said.

Her eyes were incredulous. “But why?”

“They indicted you.”

“I know that. But it doesn’t mean anything. Even if they try me, they’re not going to convict me. How many times do I have to tell you?” She paused. Her face was wearing that same maddening expression of stubbornness. “I told Trant that if you’d really said what he claimed you said, you were lying. I said you must have some absurd guilt fixation about me and felt you had to martyrize yourself.”

I looked back at her, amazement warring with indignation. “Are you crazy?”

“What’s crazy about it? The only thing you want in life is to cling on to the Callinghams, isn’t it? You’ve done everything in the world to try to keep it that way. You didn’t really want to tell. When you heard I’d been indicted, you just had a qualm of conscience. Thanks, Bill. But I don’t need that kind of gesture.”

There she was. At it again! Mulishly determined to be the One and Only Martyr. Did she even have to meddle with the only decent impulse I’d had in weeks? Suddenly I didn’t hate her any more because she no longer had the slightest power to tempt me. Because I was free of her at last, she was just another woman—a silly, muddled, well-intentioned woman who was a terrible nuisance and nothing more.

I said, “There’s no point in arguing. There’s nothing to argue about. I’ll get Trant now. I’ll bring him in here. You can retract that absurd statement about my guilt fixation and tell him the truth.”

For a long moment she stood watching me as if she’d never seen me before.

“You really mean that, don’t you?”

“Of course I mean it.”

“But—but I still don’t see why.”

To get you out of my life for good. I couldn’t say that. I said, “Does it matter why?”

“You mean…?”

Her face crumpled. All the stubbornness and pride disintegrated. In a thin little voice, she said, “Bill.”

As I looked at her, embarrassed and bewildered, she took a quick step toward me.

“Oh, Bill, I was so scared. I can admit it now. Sitting there in that cell, I was so scared. I was sure you’d never risk anything to help me. And I swore, so long as you wanted it that way, I wasn’t going to force you. Even just now when Trant said you’d told… oh, how could I have been so wrong?”

“Wrong?” I echoed uneasily.

A radiant smile had come, transfiguring her face. “For three years I’ve been so wrong. If you knew what I thought when I left you in Portofino, when I saw you with the Callinghams, dazzled, bowing down to the risen sun. I thought I was so smart. I thought I really understood you at last. You didn’t want to write, I thought. That was just what I’d made you think you wanted. You didn’t want me and my sort of life. All you wanted was a miserable safe little job under safe solid patronage with a safe solid wife thrown in. I watched you and I thought I understood and I said: There’s nothing here for me. Charles Maitland is better than this.”

She came to me, putting her hands on my arms. “But I was wrong, wasn’t I? I wasn’t such a fool to love you, after all. You only thought you wanted that life. You just went one wrong way and I went another. But now we both see our mistakes. When you kissed me that night in my apartment, I tried not to kid myself. I said: It’s nothing. It’s just a hangover from the past. And then, on the night that Jaimie was killed… Oh, Bill, I didn’t want it to happen. I swear I wanted everything to stay right between you and Betsy so long as you wanted it that way. I swore I wouldn’t be an interloper. But now that you realize all that was phony, now that you’re ready to let it all go…”

As I felt on my arms the touch of her hands which had once had so much power over me and which, even now, could stir an idiotic response, I felt horror slide through me. I said, “For God’s sake, you don’t think I’m doing this because I love you!”

She stepped back from me as if I’d hit her and her smile faded before a look of excruciating embarrassment.

“I thought… When you said, I… Then—then why did you tell Trant?”

“So that I can live with myself,” I said. “So that I can face Betsy without feeling the lowest of heels.”

I knew that it was cruel to say it like that. I also knew that I had to be cruel to save myself from becoming suffocated by this new, appalling misconception of hers. But, having said it, all the satisfaction there had been in escaping from my false position disappeared. Now what had to be done with Trant was just a dreary, sterile chore with no joy.

Angelica’s shoulders were stooped. She looked haggard and old. In a voice that was almost a whisper, she said, “And I thought, sitting in that cell, that I’d hit the bottom. The bottom! I’m only just beginning to go down the hill.”

She looked up at me. “Okay. Get Trant. I’ll tell him anything you want. I never knew that people really did things like this for an abstract principle. I take my hat off to you. You’re the noblest martyr of them all!”

chapter 17

I went out of the room. The cop was in the corridor. I told him I wanted Trant. He went away. I stayed outside. I couldn’t endure the thought of waiting inside with Angelica. Soon Trant came. We went in together and I told him that Angelica was ready to confirm my story. His face remained unrevealing. He merely said he would take our statements. A detective came in with a shorthand machine. Trant told me to wait outside while he took Angelica’s statement. Eventually he called the cop in who came out again with Angelica. They passed me going up the corridor. She didn’t look at me. I didn’t look at her. Then I went in and repeated my statement while the detective tapped away at his machine. It didn’t take too long, but to me it seemed interminable.

When the detective had gone away, I said to Trant, “You’ll let her go now?”

“It’s hardly as simple as that, Mr. Harding. This job’s got to be finished first. Miss Hodgkins, of course, will corroborate your story. I must see her.”

He had to do that, of course. I could visualize Ellen’s face, gleaming with satisfied malice, when she was at last “reluctantly” forced to expose that trashy, no-good Mr. Harding. With Ellen the new ordeal would begin. I said, “Shall I call her?”

“No, Mr. Harding. But you can come with me if you will.”

We drove to my apartment in a police car. Trant was still withdrawn into himself. That was all right with me. Betsy, thank heavens, was at the office. We found Ellen alone in the nursery. She got up immediately and stood with lowered eyes, assuming the correctly respectful pose of an underling about to be interviewed by the Law.

Trant said: “As you know, Miss Hodgkins, an Angelica Roberts has been arrested for Mr. Lumb’s murder. This Angelica Roberts is Mr. Harding’s ex-wife. Mr. Harding has just made a statement at Centre Street. In his statement, he claims that he and Mr. Callingham between them persuaded you not to tell the truth about the night of the murder.”

Ellen looked up. The blue, gimlet eyes flashed to my face and then to Trant’s. “Not the truth, sir?”

“Mr. Harding claims that Miss Callingham was never in this apartment at all and that, just about the time of the murder, Miss Roberts was here with him. He claims, in fact, that he was making love to her and that you interrupted them. You realize, of course, how important this is for Miss Roberts and you mustn’t be frightened that you’ll get into trouble. All you have to do is to tell the truth.”

The blush—the inevitable, Ellen blush—had broken out. Vaguely, not really caring any more, I waited for the gleam of malice to show in her eyes. But it didn’t come. Instead she merely registered a mixture of bewilderment and embarrassment.

“Excuse me, sir, but I don’t quite understand. Mr. Harding says…”

She broke off, twisting her hands together in a fluster.

Patiently Trant repeated what he had said. When he was through, she shot me a look of startled incomprehension which seemed completely convincing.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. But I don’t really know what Mr. Harding means. Of course Miss Daphne was here. I served the supper to her myself. And as for the other lady and the—the other circumstances… if she was here, sir, I’m afraid I didn’t see her.”

For a moment I couldn’t believe it—but only for a moment. Then I realized that I should have been prepared for this from the beginning. Angrily I said to Trant:

“She’s lying. It’s perfectly obvious. Mr. Callingham bribed her by promising to have her niece flown over from England. She’s scared if she tells the truth that Mr. Callingham will withdraw the offer.”

Ellen’s flush heightened. Not a muscle of Trant’s face moved.

“Is that true, Miss Hodgkins?”

She burst into a torrent of words. “Of course Mr. Callingham is bringing my little niece over for an operation. Of course he is. Mr. Callingham’s always so good and considerate. He treats me like one of the family. They all do—Mrs. Harding, Miss Daphne, all of them. They’re wonderful to me. But—but to suggest that he was bribing me into saying what isn’t true! As if Mr. Callingham would do a thing like that.” She turned to me, her eyes bright with outraged respectability. “Really, Mr. Harding! And I’ve always tried to do my best, I’m sure. I’ve always tried to give satisfaction here. But now…”

Her words were choked off into a helpless blubbering.

Trant said, “So, according to you, there isn’t a word of truth in Mr. Harding’s statement?”

“Of course there isn’t. I’ve never been so insulted in my life. If it wasn’t for Mrs. Harding and the little boy, I’d…”

She threw one of her starchy white arms up to hide her face.

Trant said, “All right, Miss Hodgkins. That’ll be all for the moment.”

“But, Lieutenant…” I began.

“That will be all.”

He left the nursery. I hurried after him into the living room, furious and frustrated.

I said, “You can’t believe her. You can’t be such a fool.”

He sat down on the arm of a chair and said quite impassively, “It isn’t a question of whether I believe her or not, Mr. Harding. The point is she hasn’t corroborated your story. If you want me to act on it, you’d better find some other corroboration.”

“You’ve got Angelica’s corroboration.”

“I wouldn’t call that very satisfactory. Miss Roberts denied it all at first. She only confirmed it after she’d been alone with you and had plenty of time to be coached. And after all, it’s obviously to her advantage to confirm it, isn’t it?”

It was absurd. It couldn’t be happening this way. I fought against the feeling of returning nightmare.

Trant said, “I gather you haven’t told any of this to your wife.”

“Of course I haven’t.”

“Then you’ll have to find something else.” He sat there watching me. His face showed a faint curiosity, nothing more. “What about the elevator man? You say Miss Roberts came here carrying a suitcase. This apartment is four flights up. She must have taken the elevator.”

I remembered what Angelica had said when she came into the apartment that night. I walked up. I thought I’d keep the elevator man out of this. “No,” I said. “She walked up.”

“Four flights? Why?”

“She thought it would be more discreet at that time of night not to be seen.”

“I see,” said Trant.

It was only then, when the nightmare feeling was gaining ground, that I thought of Paul. And suddenly it was all right again. Paul knew everything.

“I told Paul Fowler the whole story the day after the murder.”

“You did?”

“If I get him over and he tells you exactly the same story without any prompting from me, that’ll be corroboration, won’t it?”

Trant blinked. “Call him.”

I called Paul and asked him to come right over. He was amenable, as always.

“Sure, Butch. Nothing wrong, I trust?”

“Just come,” I said.

He arrived in about twenty minutes, cheerful, grinning, breezing in. My exaggerated pleasure at seeing him made me fully conscious of the fantastic reversal of this new situation in which I was having to fight every inch of the way, not to save my life but to wreck it.

“Paul, this is Lieutenant Trant. They’ve indicted Angelica. She’s coming up for trial and…”

“Please.” Trant’s voice cut in crisply. “Sit down, Mr. Fowler.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Mr. Fowler, Mr. Harding has made a certain statement about the night of Mr. Lumb’s murder. He claims he made the same statement to you on the day after the crime. I’d like you to repeat it to me.”

Paul darted a quick glance at me.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Tell him everything.”

“Everything?” He turned back to Trant and made a little rueful gesture. “I adore telling everything, Lieutenant. It’s one of my favorite pursuits. But just what do you want me to tell everything about?”

“Didn’t Mr. Harding come to you on the day after the crime?”

“Probably. He’s always dropping in at the office.”

“And didn’t he tell you something about himself and Miss Roberts?”

“Gee whiz!” With a comedy-ape grimace, Paul scratched the top of his head. “Can I be as dumb as I think I am? Bill—and Angelica? Did Bill ever see Angelica when she came to New York?”

I’d accepted Ellen’s betrayal. The moment she’d denied me, I’d realized that that was all I could ever have expected from her venality and her servile respect for C. J. But this was beyond my comprehension. I looked in complete confusion at Paul’s frank, baffled face.

“Paul, for God’s sake, tell the truth. Don’t you see it’s the only way to save Angelica?”

The blue, wise, affectionate eyes turned to mine. “Gosh, Bill, why didn’t you warn me? Of course I’d do anything I could to help. You know that. But I’m not a mind reader and I left the crystal ball at home. I…”

Trant broke in, “You haven’t any idea what Mr. Harding’s talking about, have you?”

“Gosh, he might have told me something, Lieutenant. I don’t know. People are always telling me things and half the time it’s in one ear and out the other.” He leaned forward earnestly. “But he’s right if he’s telling you that Angelica didn’t do it. Of course she didn’t do it. She’s the last person in the world to do a thing like that. You police make me mad. Why are you always doing things the wrong way around? Lumb was a louse, wasn’t he? He’d been living off Angelica; he’d been planning to live off the Callinghams. Creeps like that have scores of people who want to murder them. Probably he was blackmailing someone; probably he was blackmailing dozens of people. All you’ve got to do is…”

“Paul,” I broke in. “Tell him.”

He stopped dead, threw me one sheepish glance and then looked away. There was a long flat silence. At length Trant got up from the arm of the chair.

“Okay, Mr. Fowler. Sorry to have troubled you. That’ll be all right now.”

Looking crushed and miserable Paul got up too. I’d never seen anyone appear more innocently bewildered, unless it had been Ellen. I was deep in the nightmare now.

I said, “Don’t go, Paul. I want you to stay and explain.”

“If Mr. Harding wants you to stay,” said Trant, “that’s okay with me. But I’d like to talk to him alone for a moment. Perhaps you’d wait somewhere else.”

“Sure. Sure I’ll stay, Bill, if you want me to.” Paul started for the door and then turned. “Gee, I’m sorry. And I’m just as sorry for Angelica as you are. But—what’s a guy to do?”

He went out, closing the door behind him.

I said to Trant, “Just let me talk to him a couple of minutes. I’ll make him tell you it all.”

“Of course you would. He’s obviously a good friend. I’m sure he’d confirm anything you wanted him to confirm—once you’d told him what it was.”

“But he’s lying.”

“So you’ve said. Miss Hodgkins was lying because she’d been bribed by Mr. Callingham. What is Mr. Fowler lying for?”

“He—he must have some crazy notion of protecting me. He knows what all this will mean for me with Mr. Callingham and my wife. He must figure it’s better for me to let Angelica take the rap. If only you’d let me…”

“Your friends seem very fond of protecting you, Mr. Harding.”

There had been no derision whatsoever in his voice as he said that. He had merely made the flat statement. But his impassivity and his stubborn refusal to be impressed by anything except facts maddened me. At last I made myself admit what had to be admitted.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I haven’t said that, Mr. Harding. In fact, I’m sure you’re telling the truth about Miss Callingham’s real relations with Lumb and I’m even prepared to believe you’re telling the truth when you say she wasn’t here on the night of the murder—if only because I find it hard to conceive that you’d discredit her alibi if it had been a real one. It’s perfectly possible that Miss Hodgkins might, as you claim, have been bribed up to that point. But as for Miss Roberts…”

I broke in. “But just tell me one thing. Why the hell would I be lying? Why would I bring witnesses to you if I’d known beforehand that they would deny everything? Why would I willfully discredit Daphne’s’ alibi and admit to something as tawdry as trying to deceive my wife with another woman unless…”

“When a murder’s committed in Manhattan, Mr. Harding, do you know how many innocent people come to us and make confessions? Usually it’s about four confessions to every homicide. Only last week, a girl was killed in Bronxville. A bank manager from a Madison Avenue bank confessed to having killed her. He’d never even seen her in his life.”

His eyes, watching me, were patient—quiet, unhostile as ever, and patient.

I said, “But for God’s sake, they’re nuts.”

“I wouldn’t say all of them were nuts, Mr. Harding. And, in any case, you’re not confessing to murder.”

“Then why…?”

“Why would you be lying?” He finished the sentence for me. “There is a very simple reason.”

“What’s that?”

“That you’re in love with her.”

That was the worst moment of all. Until then, although I’d known what was happening, I’d never really believed, in spite of Ellen and Paul, that this preposterous misunderstanding could go on for more than a short while. I knew the truth and because I knew the truth, it had seemed inevitable to me that once it had been told it must be obvious to everyone else. But now, as Trant stood there, as the faintly smug look of a man “understanding all” showed in his eyes, I could see it from his point of view. I had thought him farcically naïve. He wasn’t naïve, of course. He was far too subtle and sophisticated. That was his trouble. He wouldn’t accept my version of the truth because his was much more ingenious. And why should he, when everything pointed to Angelica’s guilt, when I, who could have come forward days before, had left it as late as this and when—to crown it all—he, like Angelica, had hit upon this terrifyingly plausible and wrongest of all reasons to explain me away? I loved her!

I had to face what had happened. The edifice of lies which I had built had been so firmly erected that now I couldn’t demolish it, and all that my great gesture had achieved was to cast doubt on C. J.’s alibi for Daphne. It left Angelica exactly where she had been before.

I glared at him, my anger undermined by this new crippling sensation of helplessness.

“You think she’s guilty, don’t you?”

“The D. A. thinks she’s guilty. So does the Commissioner. And, in spite of what you tell me about Miss Callingham, all the evidence still points to it—except, of course, this last-minute evidence of yours.”

Exasperated beyond endurance, I said, “Don’t you policemen have any flexibility of mind? Why should last-minute evidence be false evidence. Why do you have to tidy it up with the absurd idea that I’m in love with Angelica? I love my wife. Angelica’s just a goddam nuisance. I’m telling the truth not because I want to but because it’s the truth, and I’m telling it at the last minute because I’ve been too cowardly to come forward earlier. Why don’t you make an effort to believe me? Is my story so improbable? Go after Daphne. I don’t think she did it, but at least you may get something out of her. Angelica’s innocent. It doesn’t give you any satisfaction to indict an innocent woman, does it?”

He was watching me as patiently as ever. If only he’d get mad once in a while! “Aren’t you expecting rather a lot of me, Mr. Harding? You say: Go after Miss Callingham. And yet you produce no evidence against her or against anyone else. In fact, you yourself say you don’t think she’s guilty, and there’s no shred of a motive anyway. She just made a fool of herself and her father, reasonably enough, wants to keep it as quiet as he can. I’m not a super-sleuth, you know. I’m just a guy with a job and a boss like you. My boss happens to be the Commissioner and the Commissioner happens to be a friend of Mr. Callingham. Already I’ve had one call from the Commissioner asking me to do all I can to keep it out of the papers that Miss Roberts had any connection with the Callingham family at all. That’s how eager Mr. Callingham is to avoid scandal and that’s how influential he is. What do you think would happen to my job if, to serve no purpose at all, with no evidence whatsoever except your uncorroborated statement which both Miss Callingham and Miss Hodgkins would deny, I started accusing Mr. Callingham of bribing witnesses and let the press boys scream out in their headlines: C. J. CALLINGHAM SHIELDS DAUGHTER IN MURDER RAP, CLAIMS SON-IN-LAW? Do you seriously expect me to do all that just because you want me to believe that a woman, with all the evidence against her, happens to be innocent?”

He gave a shrug. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harding. I try to treat people in homicide cases like human beings. They kid me about it at Headquarters. But I’ve only got so much milk of human kindness to go around. I’ll do all I can as tactfully as I can to investigate Miss Callingham. Of course I will. I investigate everything so long as there’s anything to investigate. I do have, oddly enough, a certain flexibility of mind. But I wish you’d take my advice. If you’re telling the truth, that’s another matter. That’s up to you. But if you’re just having a Knight-on-a-White-Horse jag, give it up before you make yourself a pest to everyone and get into serious trouble. I may be the long-suffering sucker. But the D. A. isn’t and the Commissioner isn’t. If you go ahead with this, it’ll come out that you denied knowledge of the ring, that you shielded a suspect, even helped her to get out of town and, unless your father-in-law goes to bat for you which I very much doubt, you may find yourself picked up as an accessory. So—before you go on, just think a little and think about your son and that fine wife of yours, too.” He was lecturing me like a grave, white-bearded elder. I could have killed him.

“And one thing more, Mr. Harding. You know now just what I can do and what I can’t do. If you are telling the truth about Miss Roberts, please remember that, even so, it’s quite useless coming to me unless you’ve got some proof. But if you do get any proof, I will be delighted because—oddly enough again—I like to see justice done.”

He held out his hand. The friendly smile looked a little frayed around the edges.

“Well, that’s all, I guess, for the moment.”

I took his hand. What difference did it make? Quietly, as if to him this was a perfectly routine end of a perfectly routine chore, he went out of the room.

chapter 18

Anger was a futile weapon against Lieutenant Trant. It just didn’t work. But there was still Paul on whom to vent my frustrated indignation. I raged out of the living room and found him in Betsy’s and my bedroom, sitting on the bed. He jumped up when he saw me, the picture of contrition. Even before I could attack him, he was pouring out his apologia. He’d only been thinking of me. I’d got carried away. He’d realized it and seen it was up to him to try to rescue me from myself. It was madness to infuriate C. J., to humiliate Betsy at this stage of the game. Angelica wasn’t guilty. The trial was in the indefinite future. She’d brought it all on herself anyway and a little unpleasantness wasn’t going to hurt her. Later, perhaps…

There they were, rehashed once more, all the old tired arguments which I’d made, which Angelica had made, which once had seemed so plausible but which I now knew weren’t arguments at all.

I said, “And why the hell do you think you have any right to regulate my life?”

He smiled his broad, disarming smile. “Because I’m fond of you, you lug. You think I could sit there watching you cut your throat and then jump in to help you thrust the blade into your jugular vein?” He paused, watching me unhappily. “There’s me to think of too, you know. I’m as dependent on Betsy and C. J. as you are, and the Callinghams, God bless them, are not long on sweet reasonableness. If I’d joined your crusade and swept through the streets of Manhattan, shouting: C. J. Callingham is a wicked liar, what do you think would happen to my job? Do you want the Prop selling apples at the corner of 42nd Street and the Avenue of the Americas?”

“But you don’t have to depend on that job.” Although he’d never actually told me, I’d always assumed that Paul, being the last Fowler of the Fowler clan, had an ample private income.

He stared at me in unfeigned astonishment. “My poor deluded boy, you think the Fowler fortune is still extant? That little hunk of gold was alchemized into mink years ago. I’m old Mother Fund for the sheer altruistic joy of the cash involved. Except for my salary, I don’t have one small smooth dime to my name.”

I saw his real motive then. He’d basically only been thinking of saving his own skin. He was just another collateral serf in the Callingham empire like Ellen. My anger was tinged by disgust, although I realized what little right I had to be disgusted at him. How long had I been the noble one? Only about five minutes.

Paul’s face was touchingly miserable now. I felt unfair as well as hypocritical in having blamed him. He’d never made any pretense at being a hero. And he was genuinely fond of me. Of course he was.

“Bill,” he blurted, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it meant so much to you.”

“That’s okay.”

“I’d forgotten what feeling like a heel feels like. I’m not given to it at all. Call the cop, Bill. Tell him we’ll be right over. To hell with it. I’ll back you up. Good old purge-yourself-with-pity-and-terror Paul. That’s me.”

I knew he meant it and all my old affection for him returned, but once again I was made conscious of the irony of my predicament.

“It’s too late,” I said. “So far as Trant’s concerned, you’re loused up for good as a witness. If you told him word for word what I’d told him, he wouldn’t believe you now. He’d just write you off as a soft-hearted guy backing up a crazy friend. And I’m not just interpreting him. He said that himself. I’ve got to find some other way.”

A look of undisguised relief passed over his face. “Well, in that case…” He grinned ruefully. “Guess I’ll be running along back under the Slave Driver’s yoke.”

“Sure.”

“’Bye, Bill. Happy suicide.”

He went out of the room. I heard him going away down the passage.

I sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette. I wasn’t angry with Paul or with Trant or even with myself any more. The incredible thing that had happened, now I was used to it, seemed to have given me a cold detachment. With frightening vividness, I saw my life as I’d been living it, as Paul was living it, as Dave Manners was living it, as everyone in the C. J. despotism was living it, and I knew—just like that—that I didn’t want any part of it.

There had been a time—an all-too-recent time—when I would have accepted this new twist as a godsend. I’d made my noble gesture and it hadn’t worked. Now even the police were advising me to scuttle back, chastened but unhurt, to my safe little niche. Yes, there’d been a time all right when I’d have jumped at it. But I didn’t want it now.

And it wasn’t for Angelica, except insofar as she was an innocent person in a jam where she didn’t belong. I’d escaped completely from Angelica. It was for myself. (Dimly I remembered that Angelica had said something very like that and I’d mocked her for it. But I put it out of my mind.) If you didn’t learn anything from life, you might as well be dead. And, in the last few agonizing days, it seemed, I had learned a few things at least. I knew now that I didn’t want to be a vice-president just because C. J. had chosen to award me a prize for the biggest lie of the year. I didn’t want to accept Betsy’s love on the falsest of false pretenses. I didn’t want a home for Rickie that stank the way this one was beginning to stink. I didn’t want to be a Dave Manners any more; I didn’t want to be an Ellen Hodgkins; I didn’t want to be a Paul Fowler.

Now that I’d been forced to take a good look at myself, I knew that the only way to be bearable to myself was to go smashing on, whatever happened, yelling out the truth until in the end, if only from exhaustion, they would have to believe me. And I saw, too, exactly what I had to do. First I had to give up everything to which I was no longer entitled and which, in any case, I no longer wanted. I’d go to C. J.; I’d let him know that I’d lied to him and was going publicly to disavow the lie; then I’d resign. After that, I’d tell Betsy everything, too. If she left me, she left me. But now that I was looking directly instead of obliquely, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t leave me. If she was what I thought she was, she’d take it and she’d understated that only by saving Angelica, at whatever cost, could I regain my validity as a husband. And, once I’d done that, we could come together on a level of honesty. I’d get a job far away from the corrupting benevolence of C. J. We could start a life that was a life.

If I was merely strutting, I wasn’t conscious of it. I didn’t in any way feel a Colorful Figure of Drama. I only felt stubborn and at peace—the way I had felt at Centre Street.

I looked at my watch. It was only three-thirty. C. J. would still be at the office. When something had to be done, there was nothing like doing it quickly. I went to Callingham Publications, Inc.

I was with C. J. an hour. He knew it all anyway. Ellen had called him. I might have realized she would jump to the phone the moment I left the house, to prove once and for all that she was the humblest, perhaps, but the most loyal of all the retainers.

It is strange how, when you finally turn head-on to face something that you have dreaded, most of its horror evaporates. C. J. was far angrier, far more righteously indignant, far more vindictive than I ever dreamed he could be. He raged, he yelled, he made every kind of threat. It would be my word against his and Daphne’s. Did I imagine that the Police Commissioner, his oldest and dearest friend, would give the slightest credence to anything I tried to say? What was I anyway but a third-rate little upstart whom he, out of the goodness of his heart, had raised out of the gutter? By God, if I imagined I’d ever find a job anywhere else, I was out of my mind. He’d hound me; he’d—he’d get me committed. That’s what he’d do. If I dared to breath a word of this to the papers, he knew psychiatrists… And, as for Betsy’s income, if I thought I was going to live off that, I’d soon find out that his lawyers would break her mother’s will. Finally, when all these increasingly extravagant threats didn’t work, he swung completely around to a honeyed, wheedling, Father-to-Son-in-Law characterization. How could I do this to poor little Daphne?

“Listen, Bill, you’re a sensible man and I’m a sensible man. If you don’t think we’re paying you enough around here, I can run to a raise, a considerable raise. Let me call that Lieutenant and tell him you had a kind of brainstorm and that, because you’d been married at one time to the woman…”

It was all embarrassing, of course, and rather funny. But to me, with my new-found sense of direction, that was all it was. It was as if I were listening to someone from a totally different culture—like a cannibal chief or a Malayan head-hunter.

He was screaming again when I left the office. As I passed his secretary’s desk, she looked at me in stricken apprehension—with the Callingham Publications, Inc. expression which I had known so well and which I hoped and prayed I would never see again.

“Mr. Harding. For pity’s sake, what have you been saying to him?”

“Just—good-by,” I said.

Good-by! The word seemed wonderful to me. As I drove home, I savored its bouquet. I wasn’t Vice-President in Charge of Advertising any longer. I wasn’t anything but a man on my own again. And I felt ten years younger. Everything was miraculously changing. Now, after C. J., even the prospect of confessing to Betsy was no longer painful. It was, incredibly, pleasant. At last the invisible barrier between us would be smashed. That night we would be husband and wife again for the first time in weeks.

As I let myself into the apartment, Ellen and Rickie were in the hall. Ellen must just have brought him back from his afternoon walk. When she saw me, she flushed a deep crimson and started pulling Rickie down the passage toward the nursery. But he yelled out, “Hi, Pop,” and, breaking free of her grip, ran to me, jumping up at me enthusiastically. I picked him up in my arms. Ellen paused, glanced at me and then scurried on to the nursery. Rickie put his arms around my neck.

“There’s such a jerk in my school. His name is Basil. Isn’t that a jerky name?”

As I held him and looked at his solemn face, I thought, with elation: Soon, thank God, there won’t be any more Ellens or fancy apartments with fancy nurseries; there’ll just be me and my wife and my son. An image came of Ellen in her white, vestal nightgown with the plump pigtail flopping over her shoulder, as she had glared, right there, at Angelica and me on the couch. Something woke Master Rickie. Her words came back to me and, impulsively, I said to Rickie, “Do you remember that woman I brought to see you one night when you were in bed?”

“You mean the night when I had my tooth pulled and I was awake at two o’clock?”

“Yes. That night. Do you remember her?”

“Oh, her.” Rickie was twisting a bunch of my hair into a knot with immense concentration. “Of course I remember her. She was my other mother, wasn’t she? The one I used to have before we lived here.”

It happened just like that—almost as if Fate were helping me now that I had started to help myself. It seemed almost unbelievable that Rickie had recognized Angelica when he hadn’t seen her for almost three years. But it had happened. He did remember her. And not only that; he remembered the time he had seen her from the cuckoo clock striking two, and the actual day—the day when he’d been to the dentist which would be unanswerably established in the dentist’s appointment book. The day… the hour…

There was a witness. I was holding him in my arms. I had the laugh on Trant after all.

I felt excitement flowing through me. A key sounded in the door behind me. I turned, still holding Rickie.

Betsy came in. Her face lit up with its quick, appealing smile.

“Hi,” she said. “The whole family to greet me.”

chapter 19

Now! I thought. I’ll tell her now.

Rickie clambered down out of my arms and ran to Betsy who bent and kissed him in that quick, almost desperate way she had with him as if, at any minute, someone might snatch him away from her.

“Bill, darling, be an angel and fix me a drink. I’ve had what used to be called a terrible day at the office. I’m going to change. I’ll be out in a minute.”

She went down the corridor, holding Rickie’s hand, while he chattered on about the jerk called Basil. I went into the living room and made Martinis. As I waited for Betsy, I felt tense and nervous—but it was an almost pleasurable nervousness, the way an actor must feel just before a first-night curtain, a nervousness tempered by the knowledge that nothing could be gained by running away and that everything could be won by going ahead.

Betsy came in smiling. She’d changed, into a green dress. She looked fresh and young.

“Ah!” she said. “Where’s that Martini?”

She came to me and, as I handed her the cocktail, she kissed me.

“Darling, you don’t know what’s the matter with Ellen, do you? When I went into the nursery, she scurried out like a herd of stampeded zebras. Do you suppose something’s gone wrong with little Gladys?”

“No,” I said. “It’s not that.”

She sat down on the couch, looking up at me and sipping the cocktail. “So you do know?”

“Yes. I know.”

A thought, which hadn’t occurred to me in the egotism of my Great Moral Transformation, came to plague me. C. J. would never subscribe to the Fund again. He might even, in his vindictiveness, try to wreck it. That would be an enormous blow to Betsy—a second enormous blow. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the full realization of what I had to tell her, and shame for what I had done soured the satisfaction that my efforts to redeem myself had brought.

She was watching me with a little puzzled frown between her eyes. “Bill, is something the matter?”

“Do you remember saying once that you didn’t want me to protect you from unpleasant things?”

“Of course I remember. Bill, what is it? Is it—is it something to do with Angelica?”

The fact that Angelica was the first disaster that sprang to her mind showed me how right I had been, how deeply ingrained her insecurity about Angelica was. I felt guilt again and fury against myself and love and pity for Betsy hopelessly mingled together.

I said, “Yes, it’s about Angelica.”

“You mean, they’re bringing her to trial?”

“Yes. But it isn’t that. Betsy, before I tell you, I’ve got to make one thing plain. I know what you’re thinking. So I’m going to say it. I don’t have any feeling for Angelica at all. Whatever I did, however it comes out when I tell you, you’ve got to believe that. It’s you I love.”

She put the drink down on the coffee table and got up, her face very white and set.

I said, “You believe that, don’t you?”

“Tell me, Bill. Tell me. What is it?”

“All afternoon I’ve been with C. J. I’ve resigned.”

“Resigned? But—but what has that to do with Angelica?”

“I resigned because I had to tell C. J. I couldn’t stand by Daphne’s phony alibi any more. You see, Angelica’s been indicted; they’d almost certainly convict her because she doesn’t have an alibi. But she does have an alibi. At two o’clock, the time Jaimie was killed, she was here in this apartment with me. This morning I went to Centre Street and told Trant everything.”

It was terrible to see her face, not because she was collapsing but because she was making such an immense effort to keep control.

In a voice dry as dust, she said, “But you never saw her; you never even knew she was in New York. She made Jaimie promise, you said…”

I went to her and put my hands on her arms which were resting straight and stiff at her sides. “I didn’t tell you. I wanted to. I meant to. Then I kept putting it off and off… and, baby, if I tell you the truth, you’ll know it’s the truth, won’t you? And when I swear to you that she doesn’t mean one hoot in hell to me…”

“Please.” She drew herself away from my hands. “Please… just tell me. That’s all. Just tell me.”

I told her everything that had happened from my first meeting with Angelica in the bar to the climactic night when she had come to the apartment. I left nothing out. Because now I could understand it and see it in its proper perspective, I could even admit to her how I’d felt about Angelica, the false excitement, the flare-up from the past, even the final, humiliating sexuality which had been aborted by Ellen. It was the time, I knew, to get it all out. This was the real crisis of our marriage. It mustn’t be blurred.

While I was talking, she never sat down. She just stood there, motionless, in front of the couch, watching me. I was pulled between relief and suspense—the relief of stripping away all the flyblown wallpaper of lies and agonizing suspense at how she was going to take it. I couldn’t tell from her face. It was like stone, indomitable, Spartan—the face of the unwanted Callingham child who had learned from the cradle that everything in life was hostile anyway and had to be endured. Her face made me cruelly conscious of the fact that I, who should have been the exception, had joined with the hostile world against her. I hated myself then even more than I had hated myself in the days of actual deception.

“I was going to tell you,” I said. “After the Ellen episode, I was so disgusted with myself I swore I was going to let you know everything the moment you got back from Philadelphia. Then the murder came and C. J.’s call and, before I knew it, I was trapped into the alibi for Daphne. Baby, can you see? Through all the unattractiveness, the stupidity, can you…?”

Her face had relaxed. Suddenly, as incredulous gratitude rushed through me, she smiled.

“You poor thing!” she said.

“I’m not a poor thing. I’m a jerk and a heel.”

I wanted to go to her and take her in my arms. But I felt too ashamed and dimly, in my happiness, I realized that the melodramatic clichés had validity after all. I couldn’t cross to her because “I didn’t feel worthy of her.”

Her smile had gone. She was watching me solemnly. “How did Father take it?”

“He made every kind of threat.”

“But you resigned. You didn’t let him fire you.”

“Sure I resigned.”

“I’m glad about that part, anyway. You never really belonged there with all those people eating out of Father’s hand. I hated it for you and I always felt it was my fault you were there.”

I said: “C. J. won’t subscribe to the Fund any more.”

“Do you think I care about that when he’s always made me come crawling for every cent? I don’t need Father. Neither of us needs Father.”

She did need her father, of course. All her life she had tried doggedly to win his approbation. But she was ready to reject him for me; I looked at her with a kind of awe, thinking: Does anyone have a wife like this? I said, “And you understand about Angelica?”

Her Martini was standing on the table by her side. She picked it up, took a sip and put the glass down. “Yes. I understand. When any woman’s as beautiful as that…”

Her voice faltered. I read the danger signals, crossed to her quickly and put my arms around her.

“It isn’t that. It’s nothing to do with how she looks. It was just a hangover from the past. I was sorry for her living there in all that squalor and then…”

“Bill,” she said. “Please don’t go on about it.”

Her eyes flashed to mine and then dropped away. I drew her closer and kissed her. For a moment she was stiff in my arms; then she relaxed against me. It was all right again, and my gratitude and happiness were complete.

Gradually she edged away from me. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. When they arrested Angelica, didn’t she tell them all this?”

“No. She didn’t want to cause any trouble for me.”

“Didn’t want to cause trouble for you? But—but they’ve let her go now.”

“Not yet. When I told Trant this morning, he didn’t believe me.”

“Didn’t believe you?”

“I know it sounds crazy. But Angelica had denied it all. And then, when I brought him here to Ellen, she denied it too. She was scared of C. J., of course, scared he’d renege on little Gladys. And Paul, too. I’d told him everything, you know. But when Trant challenged him, he denied it too.”

She turned to face me. “Paul denied it too?”

“You know how he is? He was trying to protect me and then he was scared of C. J. too. He thought if he stood by me, C. J. would hold it against him. Trant had been skeptical from the beginning. But after that you can’t really blame him. He figured I was making it all up, that I had some crazy idea of trying to save her because I was in love with her. He couldn’t act on it, he said, until I got him some proof.”

If I hadn’t been so carried away by my new sense of well-being, I might have realized what was happening. But I didn’t. I merely blundered on.

“But it’s going to be all right. I saw that just now when you came in, when I was talking to Rickie. There is a witness, after all. I took Angelica in to see Rickie that night. It was the day he’d been to the dentist and, when we were with him, the cuckoo clock struck two. He remembers all that and he remembers Angelica too. He called her his other mother, the one he used to have before he lived…”

“Bill!” The word exploded from her. I looked at her, suddenly shocked out of my euphoria. Her face was almost without color and her lips were a thin, hard line. “You’re not going to drag Rickie into this?”

“But, baby…”

“Are you out of your mind? A little child. Six years old. Dragging him to the police with some impossible, rehearsed tale. Frightening him to death, warping him…”

“But, Betsy, it’s the only way to save Angelica.”

“Save Angelica. That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it? Rickie doesn’t matter. You don’t care what it does to Rickie, that for the rest of his life he’ll remember that his mother was in jail as a murderer. If you take him there, if they still go ahead, he’ll have to appear in court. He’ll never forget it—how could he?—for as long as he lives.”

She was furiously angry. But it wasn’t that which made me cringe. It was the look in her eyes of misery and complete defeat. Why hadn’t I realized that, in Rickie, I was slashing at the very core of her being? Why had I been such a moron as to expect, since she could take almost anything, that she could take everything?

My hand went out to her, but she twisted violently away and dropped down onto the couch.

“Go on,” she said. “Do it. I can’t stop you. He’s your son and Angelica’s son. He’s not mine.”

If it had been anyone else but Betsy, any ordinary, undisciplined, emotionally erratic person, the shrill, near-hysterical tone of her voice would not have been so horrible. And she was right, of course, about Rickie and the trial. I hadn’t thought it through that far.

My throat aching, I said, “Betsy, I’m sorry. I hate to do it. But if it’s the only way to save an innocent woman…”

“Innocent? How do I know she’s innocent?”

“But, baby, I told you. I… My God, you don’t think I’m inventing all this, too, do you?”

She looked up at me. Her face was in control again. It was the cold stone mask.

“I don’t know whether you’re inventing it or not. I don’t think it particularly matters. But I wish you hadn’t lied to me.”

“Lied?”

“I wish you hadn’t said you loved me. For a moment I believed it.” She picked up her Martini glass again and sat staring at it. “Maybe she’s innocent; maybe she isn’t. Maybe you’re inventing this story; maybe you’re not. But one thing’s certain now. I’ve always known it anyway. I tried to kid myself. And sometimes it worked. Oh, yes, you admire me. You think I’m a fine wife and mother and all that, but the woman you love is Angelica.”

She raised her glass to me in an icy little toast.

It was bad enough that she’d said it, but there was something which made it much worse because, now the words had been spoken and we had gone so far into frankness, some obscure inner part of me whose existence I had never really admitted before, asked: Isn’t at least part of what she said true? Of course I admired her; of course I thought she was a wonderful wife and mother. I’d depended on her devotion, used her for my comfort and, once I’d betrayed her, felt shame and guilt and unworthiness and a dozen other virtuous sentiments. But had I ever really given her love? Had I ever, for a moment, given myself to her the way I used to give myself so abundantly and eagerly to Angelica? I listened to myself with the bitter knowledge that I was listening to the truth. I’d lost so much that day. Now I was losing the illusion that I had been a real husband. I hadn’t. I’d been a sham.

As I stood looking at my wife, I remembered what Angelica had said only that morning. I thought I’d hit bottom, but I’m only just beginning to go down the hill. She could have said that about me too. Baring your breast and crying Mea Culpa wasn’t an end in itself as I had so naïvely believed. Confession didn’t mean absolution. It was only the beginning of self-knowledge.

It would take years, I thought, before I could finish paying my debt to Betsy.

Feeling bleak as winter, I sat down on the couch next to her.

“Darling…”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s not your fault. Don’t think I blame you or anything. I’ll get used to it.”

“But Betsy…”

The cook came in then and said, “Dinner’s ready.”

Betsy flashed her a bright, social smile. “Thanks, Mary.” She rose, picked up her Martini and turned the bright social smile on me. “Let’s take our cocktails in with us, shall we?”

chapter 20

Betsy never let the bright social manner drop while the cook served dinner. She’d always been a stickler for keeping up a front. Her pride was one of the many things I admired about her, but that night it only made me more conscious of how much she was suffering.

After dinner, I tried again to explain, but she refused categorically to talk about Angelica. Apart from that, she was perfectly reasonable. There were no recriminations, no threats to leave me. Of her own accord, she announced that of course I would have to take Rickie to Trant. It was my duty. But she spoke about Rickie as if he were some vague abstraction and, when my hand touched hers as I passed her a coffee cup, she flinched. She was as remote from me as if an ice-floe surrounded her.

She wasn’t being that way to punish me. I knew that. She had fled back into herself because the one thing she had always dreaded had—she thought—happened. Betsy Callingham—the Ugly One—the One Given to Good Works—had lost out again. I felt as helpless to comfort her as I felt guilty.

Almost immediately after she had drunk her coffee, she got up and said, “I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve got a boring headache. I think I’ll go to bed.” She even forced herself to smile. “Hadn’t you better call Trant to make sure he’ll be ready for Rickie tomorrow? And don’t worry about the kindergarten. I’ll call up tomorrow and explain that Rickie won’t be in.”

She went out of the room. I longed to be able to run after her, take her in my arms and say: To hell with Angelica. I won’t drag Rickie into this. Let it all ride. But I knew I couldn’t, of course. And I knew too that Betsy would be the first person to veto it. My choice had been made; there was no turning back now.

I called Centre Street. Trant wasn’t there and they suggested the precinct house. He wasn’t there, either. But, when I told them my name, they gave me his private number. It seemed wildly improbable somehow that Trant should have an apartment, a private life like everyone else. He answered the phone himself. I told him about Rickie. He didn’t interrupt me at all. When I had finished, he merely said, “You realize what you’re doing, Mr. Harding? If the D. A. decides to go ahead anyway, your son will have to testify in court.”

“Sure. I realize that.”

He paused. I thought he was going to say something else. But in a voice that sounded tired, he merely said, “Okay. Bring him down to Centre Street tomorrow morning. Around nine-thirty?”

“All right.”

“Good night, Mr. Harding.”

For a while I lounged around the living room, dreading the prospect of going to bed. But soon the pointless loafing became unendurable and I went into the bedroom. Betsy had left the light on at my side of the bed. She was lying on her side, her eyes closed. But I knew she wasn’t asleep. The sight of her pale, gaunt face touched me to the quick. I undressed in the bathroom, turned out the light and got into bed with her. The tension in her was like something tangible in the bed between us. Impulsively, even though I knew that the gulf between us was unbridgeable, I put out my arms toward her.

The moment I touched her, she jumped.

“No, Bill. No.”

Her voice was fierce and her hands were pushing me away. For a while I lay there beside her as tense and, maybe, as miserable as she. Then I got up and went to the guest bedroom. I didn’t sleep for a long time. I tried to tell myself that it would all be all right eventually. Once the thing with Rickie was done and it had justified itself, I would he able to make Betsy happy again. I would get a new job. Ellen would have been fired. We’d move into a small apartment. The new life, in which I gave Betsy as much as I took from her, would happen. This was only interim suffering.

But I was haunted by an image of Rickie, perched on the witness stand while his mother sat opposite him in the dock. And when I fell asleep, it was of Angelica I dreamed. She was coming toward me, her face radiant, her arms outstretched. I wasn’t such a fool to love you, after all. She clutched my arms and, gradually, her hands and arms changed into obscene, greenish-gray tentacles and the tentacles were dragging me down into the darkness.

I awoke at eight and, from some absurd desire to keep up pretenses, made the bed. Betsy was already out of our room and invisible. I dressed and went to the nursery. I had planned to tell Ellen to leave me alone with Rickie. But it wasn’t necessary. The moment I entered the room, she scuttled out. Rickie had finished his breakfast and was sitting alt the table, swinging his legs. I felt like an executioner.

“Hi,” I said. “You and I are going to see a man and tell him about your other mother.”

“Why?”

“Because he wants to know.”

“When are we going?”

“Right now.”

“But I’m going to school.”

“Not this morning. It’ll be fun to skip school for once, won’t it?”

“No,” he said.

But with the unquestioning acceptance of childhood, he was perfectly calm about it. I helped him put on his coat. As we went toward the front door, he said, “Is Mummy coming too?”

“No, just you and me.”

“Why?”

“She’s got other things to do.”

“So have I. I’ve got to go to school. But I’m going. Can I take my llama?”

“Sure,” I said.

He ran back to the nursery and rejoined me, carrying the llama.

In the taxi to Centre Street, I asked him about Angelica again and he repeated the whole story just as he’d told it to me the night before. He understood that there was a man who wanted to ask him questions. He wasn’t really interested in why, and when we reached Centre Street, he wasn’t even interested in where we were.

“There are hundreds of policemen, Pop.”

“Yes.”

“It must be safe here.”

“I guess it is.”

A cop took us through all the passages again to the same dreary room. Rickie hugged the llama and sat down on a wooden chair. Trant came in very soon, quiet, unsmiling and unusually brisk. He seemed embarrassed with Rickie as if he didn’t know how to handle children. I had thought there was nothing he couldn’t handle and his awkwardness gave me a dim satisfaction.

“Your father has told you why we asked you to come here?”

“Yes,” said Rickie.

“I want you to answer a few questions.”

“I know you do.”

“Did your father bring a woman in to see you one night when you were in bed?”

“Yes, he did. She was the other mother I used to have.”

“Were you asleep when they came in?”

“Oh, yes. But I woke up, didn’t I, Pop?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re sure that it wasn’t a dream?”

“A dream?” echoed Rickie. “Oh, I don’t dream about things like that. I dream about elephants and llamas—and sometimes about squirrels.”

Trant looked slightly flustered. “And you know what time your father and this woman came into the bedroom?”

“It was two o’clock. I never in my life was awake at two o’clock. Never. Practically no children ever have. And it was two because the cuckoo said so and the cuckoo came out twice. It’s red and the clock’s green and there’s windows and a door, aren’t there, Pop?”

“Yes,” I said, “my eyes fixed on Trant’s face.

“And what was the day when this happened?”

“The day I got my tooth pulled.” Rickie watched Trant solemnly over the head of the llama. “It was a great big tooth and I told my other mother. I said, ‘I had a tooth pulled today,’ but she wasn’t interested. She just went out of the room, didn’t she, Pop?”

“Yes,” I said; And turning to Trant, “You can call the dentist and check Rickie’s appointment. It’s the day all right.”

He just sat there, looking at Rickie. “Did you tell anyone about this?”

“Oh, yes,” said Rickie. “I told Ellen. I said since she used to be my mother why wasn’t she still my mother and why didn’t she live with us. And Ellen said I had another much better mother and you only need one.”

He had even told Ellen. I hadn’t known that. Surely that clinched it and exposed Ellen once and for all as a false witness. I glanced at Trant. His face was as unrevealing as ever.

He said, “If you saw this woman again, would you know her?”

“Of course,” said Rickie. “Wouldn’t you?”

Abruptly Trant rose and lifted Rickie down from the chair. “Come along with me.” Without looking at me, he said, “You can come too if you want to, Mr. Harding.”

We went to another larger room. A cop was there. Trant said, “Okay” and the cop went away. Soon he came back with four women and Angelica. Trant had done a good job. The other women were all dark, all about Angelica’s height and age and all dressed about the same way. The cop lined them up against the wall. Angelica didn’t look at me or at Rickie.

Trant said, “Now, Rickie, do you see the woman there?”

Without any hesitation, Rickie went right up to Angelica. “Hello,” he said.

Angelica bent and picked him up. “Hello, Rickie.”

Rickie showed her his llama. “This is a llama. It comes from Peru. It spits right in your eye. Not this one but the real llama.”

I turned to Trant, savoring a bitter triumph. “So,” I said.

He merely nodded to the cop and the women started trooping out. Angelica put Rickie down.

He said, “Are you going now?”

“Yes.”

“Well—see you around.”

Angelica left with the other women. Trant and Rickie and I went down the corridor to a room where a lot of detectives were sitting behind desks. Trant said to Rickie, “You stick around here a couple of minutes. I’ve got to talk to your father.”

He took me back to the original room and sat down behind the bare wooden table. It had all gone off so much better than I’d expected that I was beginning to hope. A positive identification had been made before witnesses. Surely that would be enough to justify Angelica’s release. Rickie’s appearance in court, which Betsy so much dreaded and which was one at least of the stumbling blocks between us, would not be necessary.

Trant was looking at me. His mouth moved in a faint smile.

“Well, Mr. Harding, I apologize.”

“You believe me now?”

“I believe that Miss Roberts was at your apartment at two o’clock on the night of the murder, yes.”

“And we can prove through Rickie that Ellen’s lying, can’t we?”

“Yes, Mr. Harding, you can probably do that.”

“So that’s it, isn’t it? You can let Angelica go.”

His smile faded. “The D. A. called me this morning. He’s set the date of the trial for a week from today.”

I glared at him. “But you’ve got this evidence now and it changes everything. My God, are you as scared of them as all that? Has Mr. Callingham been at them again?”

“Mr. Callingham has called the Commissioner at least a dozen times. He’s called the D. A. too. He’s told them that you’re a dangerous neurotic who is insanely vindictive because he had to fire you for incompetence. He is prepared to produce psychiatrists who will swear that nothing you may say is to be given any kind of credence. Oh, yes, Mr. Callingham’s been at them again. But…” he paused—“that isn’t the reason. It has nothing to do with Mr. Callingham. It’s something I happened to find out last night just after you called.”

His face was totally devoid of expression. “When the M. E. estimated the time of death at between one-thirty and two-thirty he was taking into consideration the fact that the body was slumped by the steam radiator in the hall and the radiator was on full blast. Last night, after you’d called, I realized your story might give Miss Roberts an alibi for two o’clock. Then, suddenly, it occurred to me that it was strange for the heat in an apartment house like that to be full on at four o’clock in the morning.”

Once again he paused. “I checked and found that no one had got around to interviewing the janitor. So I went and saw him. It’s just as well I did. On the night of the murder he’d been at his daughter’s house. He’d got pretty high and hadn’t left until almost three. When he got home, it was after three-thirty and he found the furnace had been out for hours. Unlike many janitors, he was conscientious and right then he built up the furnace again. That’s why it was going full blast when the police found the body. But the radiator had been hot less than half an hour. Before that, the radiator and the apartment had been stone cold which, of course, changed the picture. When I called the M. E. and told him, he set the time of the murder back from one to two hours. Mr. Lumb must have been killed, he said, between eleven-thirty at the earliest and one at the latest. The D. A. has, of course, read both your statement and Miss Roberts’. In the light of the new medical evidence, he’s decided, naturally enough, that the statements don’t affect the position, even if they happen to be true. An alibi at two o’clock is no longer an alibi for the time of the murder.”

As I listened, I felt as if the walls were closing in on me. “But Angelica called me from a drugstore near my apartment at twelve. Before that she’d walked over forty blocks uptown. She couldn’t possibly have been anywhere near Jaimie’s apartment at eleven-thirty.”

“That’s what you say, Mr. Harding. And that may even be what Miss Roberts told you. But how do you know she didn’t take a taxi? Surely you must see that your evidence has practically no value whatever any more. I’m sorry. You’ve done your best, but…” He looked down at his hands again with that pointless concentration which I had noticed the first time I’d met him. “There’s something that I have to discuss with you. The D. A. and the Commissioner have put it up to me and I’m flattered that they have so much trust in me. As it’s turned out, the entire handling of the trial now depends on you and you can do one of two things. It’s up to you to make your choice.”

His eyes, shifting to my face, were as unyielding as gray steel. “In the first place, you can go ahead with this effort to save Miss Roberts. No one can stop you. But at least I can point out to you what it will involve. We’ll have to give up any attempt to shield Miss Callingham, of course. The whole story will have to come out, let the chips fall where they may, with a three-ring circus in the newspapers. The trial will begin as scheduled. You and your son will be the star witnesses for the defense. I know how damaging it will be for a child of your son’s age to endure his own mother’s murder trial, but as he is your only corroborative witness, even though he isn’t enough to establish an alibi, it seems to me you’ll have to use his testimony. Then, of course, there will be your own testimony. You will claim that Miss Roberts arrived at your apartment soon after twelve, having walked all the way from West Tenth Street with a suitcase. You will have no evidence but your own word. It will be up to you to convince the jury by your powers of persuasion alone.”

He looked down at his hands again. “Frankly, Mr. Harding, I don’t think it will be easy. Against you, the prosecutor will, of course, have Mr. Callingham who will do everything that money and vindictiveness can do to discredit you. But there won’t only be that. Once Miss Callingham’s alibi is officially destroyed, Miss Hodgkins will no longer have any reason to lie. In fact, if you use Rickie’s testimony, Mr. Callingham will certainly insist on Miss Hodgkins giving hers, and she will tell the court that, a few hours after the crime, she caught you and Miss Roberts making love. You will be branded as an adulterer and, when the rest of your actions after the crime are brought out, everything you did will confirm the fact that you were besottedly in love with your first wife and doing everything in your power to shield her. The Prosecutor may even convince the jury that you were an accomplice and that you deliberately arranged for her to come to you as soon after the murder as possible for an alibi. Certainly he’ll convince them that you were an infatuated man whom Miss Roberts could easily have used as a dupe. If you go through with this, Mr. Harding, I would say your chances of being able to help her to any appreciable degree are about one to a million—or less. I’ve already mentioned the damage to your son. I don’t have to point out the public humiliation your wife will suffer. And as for you, the notoriety of the trial should make it difficult for you to get any kind of adequate employment for a long time.”

His voice was so low now that it was difficult to follow. “That’s what is more or less bound to happen if you take that course, Mr. Harding. The other course is simple. You admit you’re licked. You let the trial proceed without you and your son. Miss Callingham’s escapade will not come out. We will prefer no charges against you. And, as I understand it, Mr. Callingham is even prepared, under those circumstances, to have you back in your old job or, if you prefer it, to guarantee you a similar position elsewhere.”

He looked up again. “That’s what the D. A. and the Commissioner have asked me to put up to you. We haven’t the slightest desire to influence your decision one way or the other. We just want to know. The Commissioner and the D. A. in fact are waiting in the D. A.’s office now for me to telephone your answer to them.”

Although I’d gone on listening, there had been no real need. From the moment he’d told me of the alteration in the murder time, I’d realized that Angelica could have been lying to me. She could have taken a taxi. She could have called me to use me as a catspaw in a trumped-up alibi. Had I then done everything for nothing? Had I thrown my career away and tormented my wife only to be exposed as an absurd, gullible fool tricked by a murderess? Depression seized me and with it came the greatest temptation I had felt. There was still a way out, mortifying though it was. C. J. was still waiting with the biggest bribe of all. If I decided that Angelica was guilty after all, I could put the clock back as if nothing had happened. Even, to make it less painful, I could go, not back to Callingham Publications, but to a “similar position elsewhere.”

But there was something I hadn’t accounted for—anger. As I sat opposite Trant, I felt, far stronger than any other emotion, a stubborn anger against them all—against C. J. for his bland assumption that I was still corruptible, against Trant’s tactful, loaded neutrality, even against Betsy for the pressure that her unhappiness was putting on me. I was sick and tired of being pushed around. I’d had my fill of it. Whatever I did from now on, it was going to be me who was doing it. To hell with their evidence. To hell with Trant’s apocalyptic descriptions of my future. Was I going to let them infect me with their doubts about Angelica? Although I’d fought so hard against admitting it, hadn’t I always known that she’d done everything since the arrest to shield me? If she’d come to me that night, guiltily, for an alibi, why in heaven’s name hadn’t she used me as one? Did the truth always have to be complicated? Why couldn’t it be simple for once? And if the truth was simple…

I said to Trant, “Can I see her?”

“Of course.” He got up. “I thought you’d probably want to. She’s waiting down the corridor.” He went to the door and opened it. A cop was outside. He said, “Take Mr. Harding to Miss Roberts.”

I went with the cop a few yards down the corridor to another door. He opened it and stood aside for me to enter. Angelica was sitting there alone. The cop shut the door behind me.

Angelica got up. She looked haggard and homely. I’d never thought she could look homely.

“Have they told you about the change in the murder time?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then it’s useless. There’s nothing you can do to help. You see that, don’t you? You’d be mad to appear at the trial.”

I wanted to feel indifferent to her; it would have made it so much easier. But it wouldn’t work. I was conscious at last that what had happened to me through her was nothing in comparison to what had happened to her. If she’d told the truth about me to the police at Claxton, she might not be here. In a way, it was through me that she had to sit there in a cell, watching the net close around her, alone, day after day, with the fear of death. And even now, in this extremity, it was of me she was thinking not of herself. Okay. So she loved me or thought she loved me or thought I had loved her. But what difference did that make? It was pathetic, no more than that. Only a monster could have failed to feel grateful to her and chastened.

I said, “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“No, Bill.”

“And you did walk all the way from Tenth Street to my apartment, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. I didn’t have any money. I only had that dime.”

I looked at her and I thought: What’s been the matter with me? I knew this woman better even than I knew Betsy. Although I was miles apart from her now, I had once been as close to her as anyone can be to anyone. I knew her weaknesses. She was feckless, stubborn, as romantic and impractical as her father. But I also knew her strengths. She’d never had a revengeful bone in her body. She could no more have killed a man because he’d tired of her than she could fly. She was far too humble and far too honest. Suddenly, confronted by the axiomatic fact of her nature, the evidence, the D. A. and all the Jesuitical intricacies of Lieutenant Trant seemed perfect nonsense to me.

I said, “I’ll appear at the trial—and so will Rickie.”

“But, Bill…”

“If they’re dumb enough to try an innocent woman, I’m not going to stand by and watch. To hell with them. Let it all come down.” In the assurance of my anger, another idea came. “Better yet. I’ll find out who did it. Someone did it. No one else is thinking about that small, unimportant fact. If I find out who did it, I won’t have to appear at the trial. Neither will you. There won’t be any trial.”

She stood there, listlessly, as if she had no more vitality at all. Somehow the forlorn, defenseless quality of her face reminded me of Rickie and my anger raged up. All of them were yelling about how Rickie had to be protected; how the poor, sensitive little boy had to be spared the ordeal of appearing in court. What about his mother?

I said, “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll find out who did it. Don’t worry. We’ll lick this.”

I went back to Trant. When I told him my decision to appear at the trial, he made no attempt to argue with me. He merely smiled his quiet, noncommittal smile.

“I rather suspected it would come out this way. I’ll call the D. A. and let him know. From now on, you won’t be seeing too much of us. Your contact, of course, will be Miss Roberts’ lawyer. His name is Macguire. He’s an excellent lawyer.” He took a card from his pocket and handed it to me. “Here’s the address. I’d advise you to go around right away. You’ll need all the time you can get.”

He rose. “You know where your son is, don’t you? You can pick him up on your way out.”

I was hardly listening to him. I was thinking now of Betsy’s face when I told her how deep into the darkness I had condemned her to travel. Then I realized that, as always, he was holding out his hand.

I took it automatically. “So long, Lieutenant.”

“Good-by.” He had dropped the professional mask. For a moment he looked almost like a human being and his smile was almost a human smile.

“The D. A. will be mad as a hornet,” he said. “You know something, Mr. Harding? You’re quite a guy.”

chapter 21

My decision to break the case had been born on the spur of the moment from anger. But, as I took Rickie home, dreading the interview ahead of me with Betsy, I saw that in finding the murderer lay the only hope for all of us. And was it necessarily so impossible an undertaking? I had my theory of Jaimie’s date which Trant had so airily brushed aside. Perhaps the Browns might know something. Trant had questioned them, but Trant with his pig-headed, single-track approach could have overlooked a lead in their testimony. There was Daphne, too. If she’d speak to me after what I’d done to her and C. J.—which I doubted—I might get a clue from her. Because there was nothing else to cling to, I clung to that. I would find out who killed Jaimie. I would stop the trial. At least I would spare Betsy that ultimate humiliation.

When I got to the apartment, my wife wasn’t there. I’d expected she’d stay home from the office. But she hadn’t. That postponed the ordeal. I called Macguire and went to see him. I was with him an hour. He was young and amiable and presumably bright. He showed enthusiasm tempered with faint incredulity at my determination to appear in court for the defense. But his smile became maddeningly quizzical when I told him I was going to find the murderer and suggested that he should help me.

“Of course I’ve been doing everything I can, Mr. Harding, and of course I’ll go on trying. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t try either. But I’m afraid you’ll find the amateur detective is an invention of fiction writers. In the final analysis, finding murderers is a job for the police. Don’t underestimate Trant. Whatever the higher-ups may have decided, he’ll keep an open mind and go on following every lead. He’s by far the best man they’ve got. He was my year at Princeton. Trust him.”

Trust Trant because he’d been Macguire’s buddy at Princeton! I might have known Trant was an Ivy League man. That’s where he’d learned how to be wrong the clever way. I looked back at the lawyer’s condescending, clannishly professional eyes and wrote him off. I got the Browns’ address from him and went to see them.

Mr. Brown wasn’t there, but Mrs. Brown was, a small, pretty blonde with a cold. When I explained I was Angelica’s ex-husband, she couldn’t have been more sympathetic. She told me everything, but it was exactly the way Trant had repeated it to me and the Callinghams.

I said, “But there’s nothing else you’ve thought of?”

“Not exactly. But my husband and I talk about it all the time and we’re quite sure Jaimie did have a date and now we also think the date had something to do with money.”

“Money?”

“You see, he hadn’t paid a cent of rent since he’d moved into mother’s apartment. But—well, it wasn’t too much anyway and my husband and I rather liked him so we made a kind of gag of it. That evening, when we asked him to go to the party with us and he refused, saying he had this date, he said, ‘Don’t tempt me or your mother’ll never forgive you.’ My husband and I think he must have been talking about the rent and hinting that, because of this date, he was expecting to be solvent again.”

That wasn’t much. It was hardly anything. But it was all she had to offer. She came to the door with me, blowing her nose.

“Good luck,” she said.

Because nothing else occurred to me, I called Daphne. Henry answered, sounding startled when he heard my name. I didn’t expect Daphne to come to the phone, but she did.

“Bill, you’ve got your nerve. Don’t you know you’re a leper around this establishment?”

“I’m sorry, Daphne. I didn’t want to louse up your alibi.”

“But you certainly loused it, didn’t you? Police reports come rattling in for Daddy like machine-gun bullets. I hear the latest is you’re going to appear at the trial and bare your bosom and bare Daddy’s bosom and bare my bosom—all over the front pages. I’m going to be branded as a scarlet woman from coast to coast.” She giggled. “Really, when you get going, you certainly go, don’t you?”

There had been times in the past when I had been stuffily shocked by her frivolity. Now I adored it.

I said, “I want to talk to you. You wouldn’t come out and meet me, would you?”

“Of course, darling. You’ve become my favorite man. I can’t conceive why you married Betsy and didn’t marry me. Where shall we meet? Somewhere extremely chic where I can toast you in champagne.”

I mentioned a fashionable cocktail bar she liked which wasn’t far from her apartment. I got there first, but soon she came in, a-dazzle with mink and smiles. I ordered champagne. She lifted her glass to me.

“To the only man who’s ever stood up to Father! And long live scandal. I can hardly wait. When do you think I’ll be denounced in the headlines? But what can I do to help? That’s the important thing. I’m your ally, darling. The courageous female cleaving to the doomed hero whence all but her had fled.”

There was a genuine affection in her smile. It surprised and touched me. I told her my decision to try to break the case and explained my theory that Jaimie had dumped her at Angelica’s because he’d had a date at his own apartment. She took it all very seriously and admitted that I was probably right.

“Of course, I was so stinking on Martinis at the time that it all seemed perfectly natural. But I guess that’s what it was.”

“You wouldn’t have any idea whom he was planning to meet?”

“Why, no. He was an awful liar, but he was always going on about not knowing a soul in New York. Not a soul, of course, except the Prop.”

“The Prop?”

“You know that. They grew up together in California. Once he’d met up with her again at you and Betsy’s, he was seeing her all the time.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. Once he said he was trying to get a job through her or something.”

“A job?”

“Well, not exactly a job, but something or other…” She giggled. “Now don’t start getting ideas. They weren’t having an affair. That’s one thing I can be absolutely certain about.”

There was a curious gleam in her eyes. I said, “Why can you be so sure?”

“Because I know. That’s why.” She looked at me for a moment, the strange, musing expression still in her eyes. Then she said, “Why don’t I tell you anyway? Daddy’s being so stinking about you. I can’t begin to list the campaigns he’s planning against you. And what do you have to fight back with? Nothing, you poor dear, but your bare manly fists.”

She leaned across the table and patted my arm. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to let Betsy know unless you really have to? Poor old Betsy. She’s always put Daddy up on a pedestal. Heaven knows why. If she got an inkling of this, she’d go into a decline.”

“Sure,” I said, bewildered. “I promise.”

“I’ve been dying to divulge my secret for years, but I never quite dared.” She picked up her champagne glass and toasted the air. “I know Jaimie wasn’t having an affair with the Prop because no one can have an affair with the Prop. She’s not on the market. She’s Daddy’s sex life.”

That came to me as an overwhelming surprise. As I stared at her, she went on:

“I found it out when I was a kid. On the yacht, in fact. Just before we got to Portofino and met you. I went into a cabin and saw them. In those days I was a tender, virginal little bud and it quite pinned my ears back. But only for a while.” She smiled wryly. “Soon I got hep to the fact that I was on to something good. From then on, being Father’s pet was a cinch. I had him where I wanted him and I’ve kept him there.” For a moment I could only think of that as a piece of Callinghamiana, a devastatingly unexpected twist which threw a completely new light on C. J., the Prop, Paul and Daphne herself. But gradually, with incredulous excitement, I saw that it could have an immediate, vital significance.

I said, “This is still going on?”

“Oh, yes. Discreetly, twice a week in the afternoons when Paul’s at work. It’s a ritual. Father knows I know, but we never talk about it. In fact, we’ve never talked about it: I just get a speedboat or some other little trinket once in a while, and I know his conscience has been acting up. Oh, he’s mad for me, too, of course—so I get it both ways, adoration and shame. It’s the jackpot.”

The excitement was spreading through me. As if, because of the date, he was expecting to be solvent again! “When you went to Jaimie with that crazy plan of yours, didn’t he claim there was nothing to worry about, that the wedding would go through, that he’d have your father eating out of his hand in a week? Isn’t it possible he was so against your plan simply because he was afraid it might louse up his own, better one?”

Daphne’s face was awed, almost frightened. “You mean, if he’d got that out of the Prop? If he’d been planning to use it as a lever on Daddy to let him marry me? Bill, what are we getting into?”

“What—indeed?”

“But I never dreamt… What are you going to do?”

“Call the Prop,” I said.

I got up from the table and went into the telephone booth. The Prop was home. She said, “Sure, Bill, come on over. I’m so bored. Television. Why don’t they invent something new?”

I went back to Daphne. “You are telling the truth, aren’t you?”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“And you don’t mind my going through with this?”

She shook her head. “No. You’ve got to. I see that. But, for pity’s sake, watch your step.”

“I’m going to talk to the Prop right now.” I started to signal the waiter but she stopped me.

“It’s all fixed, darling. I paid when you were phoning.” She still looked rather scared but a small, almost shy smile came. “After all, you’re unemployed now. You don’t have to buy champagne for me. And don’t worry about me. I’ll stay on here a while. Getting sozzled on champagne alone in a public place is as good a way as any of launching my new international career as the Beautiful and Damned Miss C.”

I stood looking down at her, thinking how much there was to know about Daphne Callingham and how little—in the past—I’d even begun to scratch the surface of it. I leaned across the table and kissed her.

“You’re an angel.”

“Oh, no, I’m not. I’m a bitch and you know it. Onward and upward. And let me know what new disasters you dig up for me. I’m collecting disasters now, like snuffboxes and paper-weights.”

chapter 22

The Fowlers lived just below Washington Square. It wasn’t a particularly fashionable neighborhood, but their apartment was like Hollywood’s dream of Park Avenue. The maid let me in. The maid seemed always to be there and almost always washing or pressing something for the Prop. She was an amiable, long-suffering maid. She took me to the living room. The Prop was lying on a couch in lounging pajamas watching television. She got up when she saw me. She was the only woman I’d ever known who could get up from lying on a couch without a single wrinkle coming in her clothes or a single hair falling out of place. Until recently the hair had been red; now it was platinum. It looked neither more nor less real platinum than it had red. But she didn’t look real anyway. As Paul said, she wasn’t like a flesh-and-blood model; she was like a model the way they come out in the four-color ads.

She turned off the television and crossed to kiss me. She was always affectionate. She had on a very light perfume and amethysts. She was mad about amethysts. They were so nice, she said, to knock about in at home in the afternoons. What Daphne had told me was still so fresh in my mind that I hadn’t really absorbed it. She still seemed just the same Prop, the placid, adored wife whose greatest emotional jag was to change the color of her nail polish.

She knew Angelica was arrested, of course, but that’s all she knew. As simply as I could I outlined my predicament to her, and her wonderful blank face without a trace of a line somehow managed to register sympathy.

“Gee, honey, all that stink in court. It’s going to be rugged for you and Betsy. And Betsy’s going to hate it about Rickie. You know how she is.”

I said, “There’s only one way to get out of it, Sandra, and that’s to stop the trial. And the only way to stop the trial is to find out who actually killed Jaimie. You see that?”

“Sure, I see it. But how would you do that? I mean people aren’t just going to come to you and say, ‘I did it.’ People aren’t like that.”

“Has Trant been here to see you—I mean, apart from that first time?”

“He was here just a couple of days ago.”

“Did you tell him about knowing Jaimie in California?”

“Gee, should I have? I didn’t. I didn’t tell him much of anything. Paul always says not to talk to the cops. Sooner or later something happens and you regret it.”

I said, “But you did know Jaimie in California?”

“Sure. He used to work in the Piggly-Wiggly. That’s a kind of store they have out there like the A&P. Carting groceries to the cars. I’d known him ever since I can remember almost. And then some rich, older babe got crazy about him and took him off to Europe.”

So that had been the prologue to Angelica’s attempt to “redeem” him through “the ennobling power of her love.”

I said, “But, once you’d met him again at our house, you saw quite a bit of him?”

“Oh, sure, he’d come around some afternoons. I always liked Jaimie. He was a screwball, I guess. But he was cute and we used to talk about this and that.”

“For example?”

“Oh, this and that.”

I disliked attacking her. It was like attacking a child. But it had to be done.

“Did you tell him about you and C. J.?” I said.

The Prop’s reactions were slow and monumentally untheatrical. She merely sat there for a long moment, blinking her great blue eyes in mild surprise. Then she said, “How do you know that? No one’s supposed to know.”

“Sandra, I hate butting into your private affairs like this. But it might have something to do with all this and I’ve got to know.”

“You mean—is it true? Of course it’s true. I do think it’s funny you finding out, though. C. J. didn’t tell you, did he?”

“No,” I said.

“But you think it’ll help you if I talk about it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s nothing much really. I mean, it’s been going on so long now. It all started when I first came to New York and I did a bit of modeling and there was this ad for Callingham Publications and I was the girl in it, reading the magazine and being the typical housewife or something. And C. J. saw the ad and asked to meet me. And—well, it just started. And ever since then it’s gone on. He didn’t want to marry me. He explained all that, he being so prominent and all and I guess his wife that died hadn’t been too hot on education and everything and had been a drag on him and he didn’t want that again so… that was the way it was. He’s funny really. I mean, he’s terribly old-fashioned. He’s got a thing about how we shouldn’t be seen in public together and all that. So he just comes here. Of course, earlier on, it wasn’t here; it was the apartment I was living in before I married Paul.”

After all my own agonizings and Betsy’s and Angelica’s, the Prop’s matter-of-factness was as refreshing as it was improbable. Just trying to imagine how it would feel to be like that threw me off a bit.

I said, “And all these years you’ve been able to keep it from Paul?”

“Oh, Paul knows about it.”

“He knows about it?”

“You see, it was all kind of through C. J. that Paul and I married. It was that time C. J. hired the yacht and took that trip in Europe. He wanted me to come too but, figuring the way he does and with his daughters along and all, of course he couldn’t. And Paul was in love with me at that time and C. J. heard about it. Paul didn’t have a job or anything. In fact, he was kind of down and out. And C. J. really fixed it up. I mean, he persuaded Betsy to give Paul the job on the Fund and that way we could get married and so we could all go on the yacht and it would be okay.”

I suppose if I hadn’t known the Prop so well I wouldn’t have believed her at that point. I would have taken it for granted that she was stringing me along with a preposterous tale to pay me out for being inquisitive. But I did know the Prop and I knew she was incapable of guile. That was what had happened and how it had happened.

Incredibly, for all these years, Paul had been working for Betsy, associating with C. J. on these terms. For a moment the thought of Paul and his staggeringly anomalous position monopolized my thoughts, but only for a moment, because I saw that the idea which had come to Daphne and me in the bar could be the right idea, after all. Controlling my excitement, I said, “Did you tell all this to Jaimie?”

She shook her head. “No, but he found out about it. One afternoon, when he dropped by, he saw C. J. coming out of the elevator. He was terribly smart, really, Jaimie. I mean, without my meaning to, he got it all out of me.”

So there it was. Excited and at the same time slightly intimidated by the implications of it all, I said:

“Don’t you see now, Sandra? Jaimie was determined to marry Daphne. He didn’t have a chance in hell to buck the Callingham clan on his own qualifications. But, once he knew this about C. J. and you, he had a bargaining point. He could have forced C. J. to come to his apartment to make a deal. Either C. J. let Jaimie marry Daphne or Jaimie released the scandal to the press.”

The Prop leaned slightly toward me, fingering an earring to make sure it was firmly attached. “Do you mean that it was C. J. who kept that date with him and killed him?”

“It could have been, couldn’t it? Can you see C. J. letting a little jerk like that get away with threatening him? Can you…?”

“But, Bill, honey, C. J. was in Boston that night giving a speech at the Press Banquet. The banquet went on ’til midnight. I read about it in the papers. I read his speech too. I always read his speeches. He’s a fine speaker. He could have been a politician. You know that? Of course he’s great anyway. But he could have got to the top of the tree. Maybe President.”

The naïve pride in her voice was as fantastic as everything else about her, but I was only vaguely conscious of it through the gloom of seeing my bubble pricked. I’d read that report of the banquet in the paper too. If I’d stopped to think, I would have realized that from the beginning it had eliminated C. J. as a suspect. But I hadn’t stopped to think, and it had taken the Prop, of all people, to disillusion me.

I looked dispiritedly around the luxurious room, feeling I’d invaded my best friend’s privacy for no purpose and that I was back where I’d started from.

“So I guess all this comes from C. J.?”

“Oh, no. Gee! The apartment and everything? That would be terrible—like I was a kept woman or something. C. J. wouldn’t go for that.”

I stared at her. “You mean he doesn’t give you a thing?”

“Oh, sure, he gives me gifts. Personal gifts. You know, like furs or maybe a bracelet or a necklace or… Gee, it’s always something. Sometimes I wish he’d lay off for a while because Paul…”

“What about Paul?”

“Paul’s funny too. You know, we don’t talk about C. J. I don’t think he’s ever once mentioned him after it was all fixed at the beginning. But I figure he thinks about him most all of the time and he’s gotten this idea that when C. J. gives me anything he’s got to go one bigger and better. I guess he figures it’ll make him seem a bigshot too and make me love him more. It’s dopey. I mean he ought to know I love him anyway. He’s just one thing and C. J.’s another. It’s just the way it worked out. That’s all. Sometimes I’d kind of like to explain he doesn’t have to spend all that money, but I’m not too hot at explaining and Paul—well, he’s the way he is.”

The excitement was stirring again. “Paul doesn’t have a private income, does he? He told me he didn’t.”

“Oh, no. Paul’s never had a cent since I knew him. He used to way back. But not now.”

“Then how in hell can he afford all this?”

The Prop looked puzzled. “That’s peculiar. That’s just what Jaimie asked. Why, he gets it from his salary, I guess. All that money he makes at the Fund.”

I didn’t know Paul’s salary. I’d never asked Betsy. But now it was forced on my attention, I knew as surely as I knew anything that, at the highest, it would never begin to cover those pathetic love gifts of his. “That’s just what Jaimie asked too.” Now that it had come it seemed so obvious that I was amazed it hadn’t occurred to me before. The Sandra Fowler Fur, Jewel and Automobile Fund. That was what Paul always called it, and constantly, too, he was making cracks about stealing the Fund’s cash. Wasn’t that exactly like Paul to make a flagrant, cynical joke of something which was, in fact, all too true? The pattern had fallen into place just when I least expected it. The date that would make Jaimie solvent! Jaimie hadn’t gone after C. J. C. J. had been far too big game for him. But Paul, the embezzler whom he’d caught out as simply as I’d caught him, was a different matter. For Jaimie, the small time blackmailer, Paul, properly handled, could have meant solvency for years.

I said, “Sandra, you remember the night of the murder, don’t you?”

“Sure I remember it. It was Thursday, the night I do my hair.”

“Your hair?”

“Gee, it’s terrible. It’s so complicated. Some girl from Beverly Hills showed me how, but I can’t find anyone who can fix it right. Honest, I’ve tried everywhere. So I always do it myself. Paul hates it. I mean, I never let him see me when I’m doing it. I look a mess. You wouldn’t believe it. So I fix it in the bathroom and lock myself up in the bedroom. Four hours it takes with all that ink stuff and everything. That’s why Paul hates it. You know how he is. He’s so restless. He hates just sitting there watching television alone. He never can figure out why I don’t do it in the daytime, but there’s so much to do, I never get around to it.”

That, then, had been Paul’s alibi! His evening at home with his wife had been an evening with the Prop locked in the bedroom for four hours, fixing her hair! It had all come with almost incredible ease. I got up, feeling unsteady.

“Thanks a lot, Sandra. I’m sorry about all this. I’ve got to be running along.”

“Gee, Bill, I’m sorry, too. I’d have liked to help.”

She came with me to the door. All through the interview a vague suggestion of puzzlement had lingered in her eyes. Just as we reached the door, it disappeared and she smiled a broad, delighted smile.

“I just figured out how you knew about me and C. J. It was Daphne, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“She came into the cabin once on the yacht. Years ago. I’d almost forgotten. Gee, that’s a relief. It’s been bothering me so.”

She kissed me. “I wouldn’t tell Betsy. I mean, she’s a bit old-fashioned too like her father, and with Paul working there at the Fund and everything… you understand?”

“Sure. And don’t tell Paul I came. There’s no point in letting him know.”

“Gee, no,” said the Prop, “I wouldn’t tell Paul anyway. Well, good-by, honey. See you soon.”

chapter 23

I’d got the solution. I was sure of it. There was no actual proof yet, but the fact that Paul had been embezzling seemed screamingly obvious now and, almost certainly, I could get all the proof of that I needed from the Fund’s books. George Dort, the treasurer of Callingham Publications, was a good friend of mine. Leper though I had become around the office, I knew George would check the books for me. I could get the books from Betsy. It was after five. She should be home now.

I took a taxi. For a while I felt nothing but the satisfaction of my unlikely triumph over Trant and Macguire and a kind of mingled astonishment and shock about Paul. But, as we got near home, the thought of what this would do to Betsy hit me. I was saving her from Rickie’s appearance in court and the public disintegration of our marriage, sure I was, but only at the expense of ripping apart the one other thing that mattered to her—her Fund. Whatever happened, it was always Betsy who had to take it on the chin. Poor Betsy, the only one of us whose nose wasn’t dirty one way or the other! As I let myself into the apartment, I heard her call, “Bill.” Then I heard her footsteps hurrying toward me and, for the second time that day, I felt like an executioner.

She came around the corner. I was expecting the chill, stone mask of the night before but, with a quickening of amazed gratitude, I saw that her face was warm and smiling.

“Oh, Bill.” She kissed me. “I’m so ashamed about last night. Can you forgive me?”

“Forgive you!”

“I’ve been with Father all afternoon, and he told me how you’ve decided to appear in court with Rickie. He’s incredible. He raged and stormed and made every conceivable threat to force me into trying to stop you. And as I listened to him, I thought: Last night I was just as monstrous as he’s being now. You think she’s innocent and, by God, that’s all that matters. Of course you’ve got to go ahead and fight them all. How could I have been such a feeble, whining dope?”

Why was I always letting Betsy surprise me? Hadn’t I learned by that time that she was the perfect wife—the perfect woman? I kissed her on the mouth and the cheek and the ear, ashamed that I had been dreading to confront her, feeling no more qualms at all about telling what I had to tell.

I said, “Maybe I won’t have to appear in court. Neither will Angelica. I think I’ve found out who killed Jaimie.”

With my arm still around her, I drew her into the living room, away from the hall couch, that symbol of my other rebel self which I had managed to defeat. I told her everything. I had planned to spare her the relationship between C. J. and the Prop, but I told her that too, because I realized then that to protect her was only to insult her. When I told her what I suspected about Paul, it was a dreadful blow to her. I could see that from her face. But she took it as I should have known she would take it. She merely gave a bleak little shrug.

“If it’s the truth, then it’s the truth. I can hardly believe it, but…”

“Paul is the one who keeps the books, isn’t he?”

“Of course he is. He does all the business end. That’s always been the arrangement.”

“You know how the Fowlers live. He couldn’t swing that on his salary, could he?”

“I don’t see how. The salary’s more or less a token salary. I always thought he had money of his own.”

“And how do you have the books audited?”

“Paul has some friend who’s a certified public accountant. Some man, I don’t know. But Paul’s always given him the job. He says he’s an old friend and needs the work.”

“You can get the books, can’t you?”

“Of course. They’re in the office safe.”

“I’m pretty sure George Dort will look them over for us. He’d be able to find out if they were fixed. I don’t know how Paul could wangle it, but…” An idea came. “Do you know a Mrs. Mallet?”

“Frances Mallet? Why, yes. You know her too. She’s Mrs. Godfrey’s sister.”

“Did she subscribe to the Fund this year?”

“Yes.”

“How much”

“She’s not on my list; she’s on Paul’s. We divide them up. So I only saw it on Paul’s statement. She gave five hundred.”

Excitedly, I said, “I was in the Fund office when you were away in Philadelphia. Paul was talking on the phone to Mrs. Mallet and he thanked her for a thousand.”

“A thousand. You’re sure?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Maybe she changed her mind. They often do.”

“Call her.”

“But I’ll look such a fool. I…” She gave a rueful smile. “Well, it seems I am a fool anyway, so what difference does it make?”

She went to the phone and called Mrs. Mallet. She was tactful about it, claiming there’d been a mixup in the accounting and that she wanted to check to make sure Mrs. Mallet got full credit. She put down the phone and turned to me.

“It was a thousand. And she was all het up when I talked about her getting full credit because she’d wanted it to be anonymous. A lot of the richest ones always give anonymously. They don’t like the publicity; it loads them with crank begging letters. So—that’s it, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is. At least that’s one of his angles. It’s smooth, too. The full financial statement’s published, but he has a tame public accountant and, if ten people gave a thousand anonymously and only one thousand-buck donation shows up in the statement that’ll satisfy them all if they happen to check. Each one would figure the thousand-buck donation was hers. Even if they all knew each other and knew you, he’s pretty safe because those rich women are going to be far too ladylike to go around mentioning the actual sums they give to charity.”

She stood there by the phone, her lips tight, taking it.

“So that’s the end of the Fund—the humiliating departure of that wonderful, public-spirited Betsy Callingham from the public scene. She wasn’t Florence Nightingale, after all. She was only a front for a crook—and a very special variety of crook at that, her father’s mistress’ complaisant husband. What are you going to do now, Bill?”

“Call Macguire, I guess. It’s his job to take it from here on.” My heart was bleeding for her. I crossed to her and took her in my arms. “Betsy, baby, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, darling. It’s just fate or some depressing abstract thing like that. You fight; you do your best; but it just doesn’t work out. I guess I’m whatever that child is, Saturday’s child? Sunday’s child? The one who’s full of woe.” She tried to smile. She put her finger up and touched my cheek. “Go on, baby, call Macguire. Get it over with.”

I took the card Trant had given me out of my pocket and dialed Macguire’s number. I put my arm back around my wife’s waist. Macguire was still at the office. I told him the whole story. I was malicious enough to feel pleased by his flustered, unprofessional excitement. This was wonderful. This was remarkable. This certainly changed the picture. He’d call Trant right away.

“You can get the Fund books?”

“Yes.”

“Then get them. And what about Fowler? Can you get him over to your apartment?”

“Sure.”

“Then call him. I’ll come too. Yes, I know how to handle this. I can be there in under half an hour. Call him. Ask him to come at six-thirty. Don’t let him suspect anything. Just make it informal. Ask him for a drink.”

“Okay.”

“This is something. I congratulate you, Mr. Harding. This is something.”

I dropped the receiver. Betsy said, “I’ll go get the books, shall I?”

“I guess so.”

“But call Paul first. Make sure you can get him.”

I called Paul. He answered the phone himself. The sound of his voice, cheerful, friendly, so familiar, made everything seem faintly unreal. I told him I wanted to talk to him, that I was downtown and would be home at six-thirty. Would he come?

“Sure, Butch. And Bill, about yesterday, I still feel a skunk.”

So much had happened that “yesterday” meant nothing to me. “Yesterday?”

“About letting you down with the cop. Honest, Bill, if you want me to go to him…”

“Just come over here, Paul.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Without a word, Betsy went out of the room. Soon she came back with her coat on. I looked at her, thinking, almost with awe: I could never be like that—never in a million years. She’s got more guts than an army with banners.

“I’ll get the books, Bill. It won’t take long.”

I went to her and took her in my arms again. “Baby, you’re wonderful.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “What’s being wonderful? It’s a boring attribute equally distributed among the Callingham family. Father’s wonderful, isn’t he? He built up a mighty empire; he raised two remarkable daughters; he keeps the discreetest mistress in Manhattan; he foisted her husband off on me. He…”

I kissed her on the mouth. “Don’t, baby.”

“Bill, do you suppose he did it on purpose? Do you suppose he put Paul into the Fund because he guessed what would happen? Just to laugh at me? Just to slap me down again?”

It could have happened that way, of course. C. J. with his labyrinthine perversity was more than capable of it.

“I hate him,” she said almost matter-of-factly. “That’s another illuminating discovery I’ve made. I hate my father.”

The look of disenchantment on her face was poignant to me, but dimly I realized that, whatever she thought now, all this was going to be fine for her—even the destruction of the Fund. Of us all Betsy was the only one whom C. J. hadn’t managed to corrupt, but it was only by a miracle that she had survived his persistent contempt and her own obsession that she should deserve his respect. Yes, it was far better to have her hate him at last. That was worth losing the Fund for a hundred times over. We were both of us free of C. J. now.

I said, “Go on, baby. Hate him. And then forget him and forget the Fund. You don’t need either of them.” I was going to add: You’ve got me. Then I remembered Angelica and had enough sense to keep silent. I wasn’t going to say that again until I had proved to her that I really meant it.

For a moment she stood there, looking at me with a long, clear scrutiny.

“I always wanted to be my father’s daughter,” she said. “Looking back, it wasn’t the loftiest of ambitions, was it?”

I grinned at her, thinking: It’s all right. She’s going to be okay.

“Run along, baby,” I said, “and get those books. You might as well be in at the kill.”

I saw her off at the front door; then I went back into the living room and poured myself a drink. I felt jittery, but not enough to mar my new, powerful sense of assurance for Betsy and my conviction that together Macguire and I were going to be able to swing this thing. I thought of Angelica. Perhaps that very night she’d be out of her cell—free. It was good to be able to feel calm and friendly about her. At last I could relax and look at my first marriage and our relationship after marriage with sense and without rancor. I could see now why she’d left me and I could see that I, in my dazzlement by the Callingham wealth, had been just as unattractively naïve and blinded as Angelica in her pitiful pursuit of honesty along the gutters of the Charles Maitlands and the Jaimie Lumbs. I could admit that, when I’d found her again, I’d wanted her physically; I could even admit that I’d always probably go on wanting her with a part of me. I could also face the fact that now, after what had happened, she’d proved herself to be a goddam good person. This dismal affair had tested her. It had tested me too. We’d both shown up okay. Now we could go our several ways in peace.

Soon Macguire arrived. He was lugging a big suitcase. He was almost ludicrously on the ball and immediately announced his plan. I was to handle Paul alone while he waited in another room with a tape recorder. He produced the tape recorder from the suitcase. It all seemed movie-ish to me but that apparently was how they did things. He installed himself in the dining room, which adjoined the living room. He’d just plugged a small spike microphone into the wall when the door buzzer sounded.

“Pretend you’ve already inspected the books, Mr. Harding. Make your case as strong as you possibly can. Get him flustered.”

Macguire was much more excited than I. I went to the door. Feeling a little tense and faintly conscious of the betrayal of friendship, I let Paul in.

chapter 24

He was grinning his wide, candid grin. He threw his topcoat down on the Angelica couch.

“Betsy here?”

“No, but she’ll be back soon.”

“So this is an Angelica session?”

“Sort of.”

We went into the living room. Of his own accord, he sat down on a couch right against the dining-room wall. I mixed him a drink at the bar, steeling myself. It was irrelevant to remember now, of all times, that I was fond of him. It was even more irrelevant to remind myself that Jaimie Lumb had been a lousy little blackmailer whose death was unmourned by anyone. It wasn’t from any abstract desire to see legal justice done that I was doing this. It had got far beyond that. I was doing it because it had to be done to save Betsy and Angelica—and myself. Being soft-hearted now was only being soft-headed.

I took the drink to him. He accepted it, watching me, the blue eyes solemn with concern.

“So the D. A.’s going ahead with the trial anyway?”

“It’s set for next week.”

“Gee! And you’re still sticking to your story? You’re going to appear in court?”

I sat down opposite him, feeling more awkward than anything else and extremely conscious of Macguire’s eager-beaver ear and Macguire’s tape recorder lurking in the next room.

“I’d appear in court if I had to,” I said. “But there won’t be any trial. I’m going to stop it.”

“Stop it?”

“I’ve found out who killed Jaimie.”

He looked shaken—so obviously shaken that I could hardly believe it. It is difficult to conceive what being a murderer is like, but I’d always imagined it involved a certain amount of insensitivity and very steady nerves.

“You’ve found out?” he echoed. “My God—how?”

“Through Daphne. Daphne knew about C. J. and Sandra. She’s known for years. This morning she told me.”

A vein in his neck was pulsing and pinkish, looking grotesque against the pallor of his skin.

“After Daphne,” I said, “I went to Sandra. You know how she is. She told me the works. It wasn’t hard to figure out that you couldn’t have been buying her all that junk on your salary. Once I’d got onto that, it was a cinch to check with the Fund’s books. And not only that; I got the dope from Mrs. Mallet too. I was in the office the day you were thanking her over the phone for a donation. It shows up on the record as five hundred. Mrs. Mallet wrote a check for a thousand.” I paused, forcing myself to go on looking at him although the disintegration of his face was unpleasant to see. “That’s enough, isn’t it? Daphne. Sandra. The books. Mrs. Mallet. The Sandra Fowler Fur, Jewel and Automobile Fund.”

He just sat with the glass in his hand. At length he said in a flat voice, “So.”

“So you admit it?”

“Sure I admit it. It was the most amateur embezzlement in the history of crime, anyway. I never could figure why it had such a long run.” A faint trace of the old sardonic smile showed in his eyes. “You don’t need an interminable psychological explanation of motive, do you? You’ve been a Callingham serf yourself. Not such a serfish serf, though. At least you haven’t had the Great C. J. visiting your apartment, two afternoons a week, year after year, discreetly, like a Scarsdale matron with a season ticket to the Philharmonic.” He shrugged. “Hell, I’m not going to try to justify myself. I’m not that much of a dope. I went into this thing with my eyes wide open. I figured Sandra on any terms was better than no Sandra at all. But you try it for six years; you just try it with that poor dopey girl eating it all up, thinking C. J.’s a cross between Napoleon and le bon Dieu, reading you his speeches out of the newspapers at breakfast. ‘Gee, honey, C. J. made another speech last night to the Boy Scouts of Worcester, Mass. Freedom, it says here, America’s Priceless Heritage…”

He put a hand up to his eyes. “Wouldn’t you have felt you’d earned every dirty red cent you could chisel out of that family? The Sandra Fowler Fur, Jewel and Automobile Fund. If I could, I’d have looted every penny out of that egomaniacal poor-box.”

He dropped his hand and looked at me with a wry, apologetic grimace. “Gee, Butch. I’m sorry. Carrying on like this. Go ahead. Let’s get it over with. Let’s have our lovely spiritual purge.”

In the delicate balance, my sense of excitement was overweighing my reluctant sympathy for him. I thought of Macguire’s recorder whirring.

I said, “Okay. There was that. Then Sandra gave me the rest when she told me Jaimie had found out about C. J. and had gotten onto the embezzlement too. She didn’t realize she was telling me that, of course, but it was obvious. You were the one who first called Jaimie a blackmailer. And he was, wasn’t he? He saw he’d got onto something good with you. He tried a shakedown and then… Sandra tied it all up when she told me about fixing her hair. The night of the murder, when you were at home with her, she was locked up in the bedroom for four hours.”

As he listened, his expression had subtly changed. Now there was an unnervingly genuine look of astonishment mixed with the discomfiture on his face.

“You’re not trying to tell me that’s what you think? That—I killed him?”

I told myself that, of course, even though he’d admitted the embezzlement, he wouldn’t admit the murder. I must have been an imbecile to expect it to be as easy as that. But I was uncomfortably conscious of that almost stunned look of astonishment.

“You poor benighted dope!” he said. “So you’re not hep to it after all.”

“Not hep to what?”

“Of course Jaimie got onto me and the Fund. Of course he came to me—right there at the office—and laid the whole thing on the line. But he wasn’t interested in me. What was I? Just a small-time crook playing a piddling little peanut racket that wasn’t in his league at all. Only one thing interested Jaimie Lumb—marrying Daphne.”

I struggled against confusion. “You’re trying to say it was C. J.? Jaimie’s plan was to put the screws on C. J.?”

“C. J.!” he echoed. “My God, he had more sense than to dare to try meddling with C. J. What was the need for it anyway? He’d been so smooth with C. J. that C. J. was mad for him. C. J. hadn’t the faintest idea that he’d beaten Daphne up and got her drunk and all that. You’d covered it up. C. J. wasn’t the problem. There were only two things standing in the way of Jaimie Lumb, Bridegroom of Genius—you and Betsy.”

He gulped what was left of his drink and put the glass down on the table in front of him. His eyes, all the time, were on my face. “To begin with, I thought maybe you’d got on to it and that was why you were letting Angelica take the rap. I wasn’t sure, of course. And I didn’t give a damn one way or the other. All I cared about was that the police should stay stuck with Angelica. They’d never have convicted her anyway, and as long as they were fixed on her, the other thing—which would inevitably have dragged my little soak-the-Fund project out into the daylight with it—could stay buried.” He paused. “But you never got wise, did you? And you’re not wise now. A couple of minutes ago, when you said you knew who killed him, I thought you really did know.”

The confused thoughts in my mind were darkening.

His voice ran on: “I’ve always known. I knew before it even happened. Jaimie didn’t have to keep up any pretty pretense with me. He’d caught me with my pants down and he knew it and, besides, he needed me. He outlined the entire campaign to me. He wasn’t worried about you. He could always shut you up by threatening to mention Angelica to C. J. and Betsy at the wrong moment. Betsy was the problem. Surely you knew Betsy had a terrific scene with Daphne, telling her, in her role of Old Mother Callingham, to lay off Jaimie for good. But maybe you don’t know she had another just as terrific scene with Jaimie before she went off to Phillie. He was smart, Jaimie. He didn’t underestimate her. He realized she was a woman of steel. He saw that, so long as she was holding out against him, he didn’t have one chance in hell of getting Daphne to the altar. So that had been his problem—how to fix Betsy. And, thanks to his fiendish luck in catching C. J. leaving my apartment and thanks to the poor Prop’s bone-headedness, he’d found his perfect fixer. Okay. Either she gave the marriage her blessing, or he’d blast it across every front page that her wonderful, her so divine, her infinitely public-spirited Betsy Callingham Leukemia Fund was nothing but a front for a two-bit racketeer.”

I could feel my heart pounding. I sat there, glaring at him, clutching my glass.

“That was the plan. To hit her where it hurt most—in her ineffable pride. To show her up as such a stupid lunkhead that she’d let a flagrant embezzlement go on for years right under her super-efficient nose. He threw the whole thing at me. And what was I to do? As he pointed out, it was even worse for me than for her to have the whole thing come out. If I had any sense, he said, I’d play along with him and make sure the job was so well done that she’d have to give in. So, not being the most unrealistic of characters, I became an ally malgré moi and, from the bottomless barrel of my experience, I gave him a couple of tips to clinch it. I said: Fine, do it your way. But make it this much better. Tell her you’ll accuse her in the press not just of being stupid but of being an accomplice. Tell her you’ll announce that she was wise to the embezzlement from the start but had let it go ahead because she was mad for me, that I’d been her lover for years. I knew what that would do to Miss Leukemia, Miss Ideal Wife and Mother. Her lovely white linen would be soiled in public. The cherished partner in Her Ideal Marriage would leave her.”

“Are you crazy?” I cut in. “Can you conceive for a second that she’d think I’d believe anything as preposterous as that?”

“Of course she’d think you’d believe it. She’d have believed it if it’d been the other way around. For the Callinghams, everyone’s guilty until they’re proved innocent. It’s the family motto. They’re not human; they’re only passing as human. They have about as much imagination as they have pity which is, say, one millionth of one per cent of the norm. Of course she’d think you’d believe it. And of course she’d think you’d leave her. She’d see her husband disappearing, her reputation disappearing. It would have thrown her into two trillion apoplectic fits.”

As I’d listened, as, insidiously, piece after piece fitted into a plausible pattern, panic had stirred in me, but now anger rushed in and obliterated it. For I saw what he was doing. So much for my pal, Paul Fowler! In his craven fear for his own skin, he was pulling the dirtiest foul of all time to try to keep me from exposing him. I yearned to jump up and smash my fist in his face. But, somehow, I had enough sense to remember Macguire and the recorder. This had to go on. This was our only hope. I had to put up with him, to let him spill out his filth until the moment came where I could trip him up. The blue eyes, watching me, were maddeningly affectionate, almost pitying now.

“Gee, Butch, I never figured I’d be talking this way to you. But I guess you never figured you’d be accusing me of murder, either. Don’t tell anyone, but I strongly suspect that truth may be stranger than fiction. You never got on to her, did you? I could never quite understand why. You’re not a dope and you’re married to her. You ought to have had at least a glimmering of what baby’s like. But you never did. I guess she’d quite a miracle really. Since she’s stuck with this demented desire to be the Perfect Everything, she’s learned how to play it without a flaw. For you she’s the Perfect Wife and the Perfect Mother and she’s got away with it just the way she’s gotten away with being the Perfect Angel of Charity for her public. The Brave One, the Selfless One, the One Who Is Not Puffed Up. The One who always, somehow or other, is in the right and makes everyone else feel crass and guilty and unworthy. God knows what abyss of insecurity yawns beneath it all. I suspect it’s C. J. By and large, in the long run, everything that smells nasty around any of us can be traced to C. J. But the things I could tell you about that one. You try working for her. You watch the Angel of Mercy when there’s no one around but the hired help. The Slave Driver. My God, if she’d been in charge of building a pyramid, she’d not only have had it up in twenty-four hours with the desert strewn with the bodies of the dead and the dying, she’d have made it Her Pyramid, The Betsy Callingham Memorial Pyramid. She…”

“Shut up!” Suddenly, as I listened to that monstrously convincing distortion of my wife’s character, I lost control. Anger was like a redness quivering in the air in front of me. I jumped up. I knocked the coffee table aside. Just before I grabbed him, Paul jumped up, too, twisting away from me.

“But, Bill, my poor darling Bill…”

I lunged at him. He took my whole weight on his arms, holding me in front of him.

“Bill, baby. You’ve got to take it. That’s how it happened. Jaimie gave her three days to make up her mind. The third day was the murder day. She drove up from Phillie. She…”

Then everything happened at once. I broke away from his grip and hit him on the jaw. He staggered backward, falling over the arm of the couch. Macguire came running out of the dining room and the door buzzer sounded.

Betsy! I thought. I couldn’t think of anything else. Nothing else mattered. I ran to the door and opened it. Lieutenant Trant came in.

“Mr. Harding.”

Distracted and furious as I was, the sight of his face came as a shock. It was grim and set—like its own portrait in stone.

“Macguire’s here, isn’t he?”

Without waiting for me to answer, he walked past me into the living room. I went after him. Paul and Macguire were just standing there, both of them looking at us, paying no attention to each other.

Macguire said, “We’ve got it for you, Trant. On tape. An admission of the embezzlement and the solution of the murder.”

I swung around to him. “My God, you don’t believe all those preposterous lies! You…”

“Excuse me, Mr. Harding,” said Trant. He put his hand on my arm. His voice and his touch were very gentle but somehow it was as if he’d shouted at me to pay attention to him. “Just what are these preposterous lies?”

“It’s nothing. It’s just some…”

“It’s Mrs. Harding,” said Macguire. “Mr. Fowler claims that Lumb tried to threaten her into sanctioning his marriage to her sister and she killed him.”

Paul was carefully avoiding my gaze. He said, “In a way, it was my fault, Lieutenant. I knew her. I should have realized she’d never let herself be threatened any more than C. J. would. She’s C. J. over again. The arrogance, the Divine Right of Callingham. I should have warned him what he was letting himself in for. I just didn’t; that’s all.”

Behind the panic, the obscene worm of doubt was stirring again. Trant’s hand was still on my arm. He turned to look at me.

“Do you know where your wife went when she left the apartment?”

“Of course. She’s gone to the Fund office to get the books.”

“You’d told her you’d discovered the embezzlement and were going to confront Mr. Fowler—you and Macguire?”

“Of course.”

His eyes seemed to be boring into my face. “You were the one who was so sure Miss Roberts was innocent. You were the one who insisted I should keep an open mind. I guess I should have taken your advice days ago. But at least I took it this morning—after you’d left Centre Street.”

His eyes, whose very neutral grayness gave them a hypnotic quality, seemed now to be faintly sympathetic, almost pitying—the way Paul’s eyes had been.

“That’s when I followed up something that a better detective would have followed up earlier. It was something that was said right in this room, the day after the murder, when both you and I were present. Helen Reed said it to you. She said, ‘You should make your wife relax. We knocked ourselves out so badly that last night we collapsed into stunned exhaustion at 10 P.M. Last night, Mr. Harding. That was the night of the murder. There was a very obvious lead. At 10 P.M. on the night of the murder, in the middle of a crowded Fund drive, your wife went back to the hotel and went to bed at 10 P.M.”

The tip of his tongue came out to wet his lips. “This morning I called the Philadelphia police. I still thought of it just as a routine checkup. I did it largely because I’d decided the least I could do, after all you’ve been through for Miss Roberts, was everything there was to be done. This evening, about five minutes before Macguire called to tell me about the embezzlement, Philadelphia phoned in their report. Until I’d put them on to it, of course, they hadn’t any reason to connect the Callinghams with this case at all. Mr. Callingham’s pull had been powerful enough for us to have kept quiet about it. So they’d had no reason to do any checking on Mrs. Harding. But by then they had checked the hotel. It was true that Mrs. Harding went to her room at 10 P.M. and left instructions not to be disturbed. However, one of the garage attendants saw her take her car out at ten-thirty that night. He’d seen her picture in the paper and recognized her. And then, there’s a night maid on every floor. The night maid on Mrs. Harding’s floor is prepared to testify that she saw Mrs. Harding going back down the corridor to her room at approximately 5:15 A.M.”

I put out my hand and gripped the back of a chair. Trant’s voice went on, quiet, deliberately and unendurably dry as if he were reading out an official report.

“I got right into a police car and drove here. A couple of minutes after I’d arrived, when I was still in the car, I saw Mrs. Harding come out and flag a taxi. I followed her. She went to the Fund office building. I gave her a couple of minutes to get up there. Then I went up, too.” He stopped suddenly. In the flat silence which ensued, I realized that his hand was still on my arm.

He said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Harding. I’m sorry for myself too. There’s nothing I hate more than a case ending like this. But, maybe, under the circumstances, with so many innocent and important people who’d have to have been dragged through the trial…”

He stopped again. I made myself look at him.

Paul said, “You don’t mean she…”

“I guess she knew Mr. Fowler had only kept quiet to save his own skin. Once he’d been forced into admitting the embezzlement, she knew he’d go on to tell the truth. She knew it was hopeless. When I got to the office, the window was open. She’d jumped. I’m sorry, Mr. Harding. I’m sorry to have to tell you. I’m sorry I bungled it. I’m just simply sorry.”

“Of course that’s what she’d do.” Dimly I was conscious of Paul’s awed voice. “Now it can all be hushed up. The Champion of the Callingham Clan…”

I didn’t listen any more. I stood there, holding on to the chair, thinking: This is something I will never be able to believe. And then, through the shock, the horror, the confusion, I found to my astonishment that I believed it already. The One who was always, somehow or other, in the right and made everyone else feel crass and guilty and unworthy. The Perfect Wife. Up ’til the end, just now—calling Mrs. Mallet, helping me, being brave—she’d been playing the part even though she knew by then it had become a ghastly pretense. And then, at last, she had spoken her own epitaph. I always wanted to be my father’s daughter. It wasn’t the loftiest of ambitions, was it? With tormenting insight, I realized that it hadn’t really been Betsy who had fooled me; it had been I who had fooled myself. Hadn’t I even admitted it to myself in that painful moment of self-knowledge the night before when I’d thought: Of course I admired her. Of course I used her for my comfort; and once I’d betrayed her, I’d felt shame and guilt and unworthiness. But had I ever given her love?

That had been it, hadn’t it? I’d never really given her love because I’d never really loved her. I’d only thought I ought to. The Perfect Wife hadn’t been the only sham.

I heard Trant’s voice, still apologetic, still awkward with sympathy. “Of course there’s no longer any reason to hold Miss Roberts. I’ll see they release her right away. And, of course, too, Mr. Harding, it’s you she has to thank. If it hadn’t been for you…”

I tried to think of what Betsy must have been going through all these days, of her anxieties, her terrors, her efforts to keep up a front which must have been infinitely harder than mine. But they didn’t register. And it appalled me that what should have been the greatest grief of my life was already nothing more than a faint, cosmic pity—as if I were grieving for someone I’d hardly known, the least suspected but the most insidiously corrupted of C. J.’s slaves who had killed a man rather than risk the collapse of her public personality.

Suddenly I thought of Angelica who had never given a damn about her public personality and there came, no longer in its distorted dream version, the memory of her hurrying toward me, her face radiant, her arms outstretched.

I wasn’t such a fool to love you, after all, was I? You just went one wrong way and I went another. Now that we both see our mistake…

For God’s sake, you don’t think I’m doing it because I love you!

That’s what I’d said. That’s what I—the guilt-ridden husband of somebody else, nagged by the delusion that love and the obligation to love were the same thing—had thought.

Had I been a sham about that, too?

Dell, 1959

Table of Contents

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

chapter 12

chapter 13

chapter 14

chapter 15

chapter 16

chapter 17

chapter 18

chapter 19

chapter 20

chapter 21

chapter 22

chapter 23

chapter 24