Murder At the Flea Club

by Matthew Head

  MURDER AT THE FLEA CLUB

  Matthew Head

  FELONY & MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK

  Matthew Head is the pseudonym of John Edwin Canaday (1907-1985), an art critic and writer. Canaday was a New York Times art critic for seventeen years and authored several monographs of visual art scholarship. Late in life he wrote restaurant reviews for the Times. Under the “Matthew Head” pen name, he wrote seven mystery novels, three of which are set in the Congo and based on his experiences traveling there as a French translator in 1943. Canaday was born in Fort Scott, Kansas; his series sleuth, Dr. Mary Finney, is from Fort Scott as well.

  MURDER AT THE FLEA CLUB

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  FOR A WHILE I ran this sort of art gallery in Paris. You have to get a year in Paris out of your blood sooner or later, and this seemed to be a good time to do it. I was between jobs. At least I hoped I was between jobs, since I hoped one would materialise in the future, one having terminated in the recent past. I have a small income in any case, and the art gallery broke even, which was a surprise, so I didn’t have anything to worry about, really. Altogether it was a pleasant enough year, although I almost froze to death. Three years in the Congo on government assignments taught me how to keep cool in the heat, but they did something to me. I haven’t been warm in the cold since.

  The African experience was the main reason I started the art gallery. I made a good friend down there, a medical missionary named Dr. Mary Finney, who has acquired a certain secondary reputation as an amateur detective. I never expected to see her in Paris. Her territory covers the rougher parts of the Congo, and in between giving injections to the natives she runs across quite a lot of good stuff in the way of tribal masks and fetishes. She doesn’t care anything for these and never did, which was wonderful for me because she would pass them on to me, so that I have really a pretty good collection. That kind of thing sells readily nowadays and I stocked my art gallery with the excess from my own collection, and Dr. Finney kept sending me new things from time to time. Along with this primitive sculpture I had a small stable of starveling painters from neighbouring garrets. It wasn’t a bad little art gallery at all.

  However, this isn’t the story of an art gallery, it’s the story of a murder, which occurred at a place called The Flea Club. I should say right now that my name is Hooper Taliaferro, pronounced Tolliver, I always have to add. No detailed description of me is necessary. Medium as to looks, intelligence, ambition, and so on, but I get along. My only real talent is as a spectator. I am one of the best people to be found anywhere, when it comes to just watching. It is really my life work.

  This was in February. I had just given myself a couple of weeks’ vacation and had spent it in Siena, thinking it would be warmer. I nearly froze there too. On the morning I got back to Paris the city was covered with snow. It bleached everything to soft whites and pearly greys; snow lay on the trees along the boulevards so that they receded in diminishing feathery clusters of white; the stone nymphs and goddesses in the Tuileries gardens held snow in great armfuls; along the streets and sidewalks the people and even the automobiles moved slowly and silently.

  I walked for a long time with the special feeling of security you get when your coat and hat and overshoes keep you warm and dry against the chill and damp of the surrounding air. All the familiar places were simplified, all their primary accents intensified, by the deposits of snow along their projections. The snow had fallen during the night and now it was continuing into the morning. As I walked it began to stop, until the sky began to clear, with a suggestion of gold here and there where the sun was going to be. Through my glove, with my hand in the pocket of my coat, I could feel the neat angular shapes of two letters, my accumulated mail for the past two weeks. One of them had a Belgian Congo stamp representing an okapi, and the other was from a female cousin in Madison, Wisconsin, with several stamps including profile portraits of some good men—Washington, Jefferson and Adams. One of the letters was going to involve me in the murder at The Flea Club; the other, in its solution.

  In winter the cafés enclose their sidewalk areas in glass-paned shelters, and keep a coal-stove burning in there. If you get a table close to the stove, it’s really good. I turned now towards the Champs-Elysées, not ordinarily a habitat of mine, but crowded with cafés expensive enough to have good fires. At the far end of the avenue the Arc de Triomphe, usually so substantial, hung like a piece of gauze. In the café there was only a scattering of people, which meant that I would feel free to sit as long as I wanted to, and they were good-looking, well-dressed people, always pleasanter to see in cold weather than the poor.

  My female cousin from Madison is not a part of this story, except for the events her letter set in motion. “Hoop dear,” it began, and then it briefed me on the children’s colds for that season, and so forth and so on, and then:

  Incidentally, do you remember Abby Bingham? [I did not—or barely did, a small child of no particular individuality who had played with us.] Hadn’t heard from her for years, but she telephoned me the other day passing through town with her husband. Her name is Corbett now and she has four children—imagine, little Abby! We had such a nice talk on the phone. Of course she wanted to know all about you, and she was simply thrilled to hear you were in Paris. It seems a good friend of her sister’s is in Paris too and Abby thinks you might enjoy meeting somebody from home. [Oddest idea in the world, but everybody has it.] She is a Mrs. Bellen—a widow if you please and very good-looking, Abby says, so watch your step, eh Hoopy? Seriously, though, Abby would appreciate it if you would look Mrs. Bellen up. She is at something called the Prince du Royaume on the Rue François Premier. Does that make sense? Now this is sort of confused but her daughter is along with her and Abby says please be very tactful because there is something very sad or something. It is really the reason they are in Paris, but I couldn’t get it straight on the phone, the daughter is insane or pregnant or something terrible like that, I couldn’t get it straight on the phone, Abby was talking so fast and I was so excited hearing from her after all this time. Anyway it is the Mrs. B., not her daughter, that you’re supposed to look up. Now you do that, and don’t forget us homebodies with all your fancy adventures, and remember I gave Abby my word of honour you would look up Mrs. Bellen. Must stop. Love, MARGE.

  I seldom look up friends of friends, but it was an unusual morning anyway, and the Rue François Premier was near-by. Things happen in such curious ways; certainly Audrey Bellen turned out to be the last person you’d have expected to meet through the connection of a girl like my female cousin. And the Prince du Royaume was a far, far cry from Madison, Wisconsin.

  The entrance lobby was as intimate, as chaste, as crystalline, as if it had been carved from a glacier. Here and there the ice was rimmed with gold. Crystal chandeliers released occasional rays of light which shattered against a monumental series of torchères in gilt and onyx. The lobby was small, long in proportion to its width, with several small pale draped recesses alongside, suggesting boudoirs. They held a few effectively disposed chairs and tables, Louis XVI, that could have gone into any museum.

  In the alcoves the glacial air was relieved. They had been carved not from ice but from rose quartz. The exquisite furniture sat within the pastel glow
with the air of aristocrats awaiting the call to the tumbrils.

  This little dream world was populated by two people when I entered: an elegant pomaded young man behind the reception desk at the end of the lobby, and a woman in a blond mink coat who emerged from one of the boudoir-like recesses and gave me a quick glance of routine curiosity as I approached the desk. I gave her my own routine glance and, without thinking about it, classified her as slightly over-age, rich, good-looking, idle, and probably available to any interested, clean, adequately built, vigorous, and preferably inventive male.

  I asked the pomaded young man for Mrs. Bellen.

  “I am Mrs. Bellen,” said the woman. “Are you Mr. Taliaferro?”

  She was small, neatly made, and might have been taken for thirty-five by any passer-by, or forty by most people of her own class familiar with preservative devices, but she was probably recognisable as an easy forty-five by trained cosmeticians. There was nothing wrong with her face. She had large eyes of a light, impure blue, widely spaced, and nicely modelled cheekbones with small hollows beneath them—perhaps a shade too deep, these hollows. A shortish, straight nose. Mouth just a little strained, but expertly painted in an arresting off-geranium colour. She exuded a delicious scent, in discreet little whiffs, very light and flowery, just enough to suggest that you lean forward and smell more. Her hair was dark blonde, frankly touched up here and there, cut shortish with every hair in place, and she wore a small concoction of a hat in which fantasy struggled in a losing compromise with discipline. She could have been nothing in the world but an American. It was impossible to be sure, without preliminary by-play, whether she was a respectable wealthy suburban matron or a wealthy suburban whore.

  “How awfully nice of you to look me up,” she said. “I had no idea you really would.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why should you?”

  “Well…”

  “Let’s sit down.”

  She moved towards one of the recesses and I followed her. Her carriage was easy and straight. There was no tottering on the exaggeratedly high heels. Her ankles were a delight, and above them a pair of perfectly shaped but somehow rather hard-looking legs disappeared into shadowy mink caresses. She paused in front of a chair the colour of frozen champagne, upholstered in rose taffeta—and now I recognised the scent she used, rose, like field roses on a sunny day, and as long as I knew Audrey it was always roses, roses, roses.

  She sat.

  With some people, sitting is only a matter of shifting the area of support from the feet to the posterior without losing balance. With others it is a calculated act. With Mrs. Bellen it was straight out of ballet—graceful, easy, precise, smooth and alluring, terminating in a perfect attitude. She held it, smiling, while I lowered myself into the chair opposite her, then she relaxed a little and leaned back, throwing open her coat.

  Now you can throw open a coat in a dozen different ways, and there is no reason why a coat shouldn’t be thrown open in a warm room when you are fully dressed underneath it, yet Mrs. Bellen managed to make the throwing open of her coat an exposure. All she exposed was a black suit that nipped in at the waist and then flared out again. It was like a hundred other suits you might see on any fashionable street except that you could tell this one cost as much as most of the others put together. The suit really nipped in; she had a good waist and above it plenty of evidence—possibly perjured—of good breasts. She crossed her legs, knowing exactly how they looked from any angle, proffering a foot for examination. Her feet were small and as beautifully made as the ankles, and enclosed, if you can call it that, in shoes composed of a high heel, an invisible sole, and about five straps per shoe—at, conservatively, somewhere around twenty dollars a strap. They had been designed on the premise that the wearer would never encounter any hazard of weather greater than one step from a taxi to a marqueed entrance, and that they would make any man aware of his own burliness. They did me. I felt taller and hairier.

  Smiling, Mrs. Bellen said, “So you’re Ellen’s cousin.”

  “I don’t know any Ellen. I’m a cousin of a friend of somebody who has a sister that knows you.”

  “Oh, dear! As bad as that! Such an imposition!”

  “Ordinarily, yes. In this case, already a pleasure.”

  “Oh, well, thank you!” she said, with just enough exaggeration to make it a little mocking, and just enough extra smile to take the bite out of it. She had not obviously examined me, but I already had the feeling that I was classified in her book, and classified fairly accurately, as to income, physique, and availability for general use if the occasion should arise for me to be used.

  I said, “The idea seems to be that I am supposed to show you Paris. But I get the impression you don’t really need much help.”

  “Well, we have been here some time, and we do have friends,” she said, almost as if in apology. “But it doesn’t make you any the less nice for bothering.”

  “Let’s do something anyway.”

  “Why, of course. I’d love to. When?”

  “Lunch?”

  “Oh, I can’t. I’m tied up for lunch.”

  “Dinner?”

  Then she gave me the first real surprise. So far she had been pleasant enough and all, but fairly true to type. She said matter-of-factly, “I’m a little old for you,” as she might have matter-of-factly stuck a hatpin through her cheeks.

  She looked at me speculatively, reached some kind of decision, and went on, “—and anyway I’m tied up for the evening too. I just can’t get out of it. I’d love to, but I just can’t. You know, I’m going to suggest something. I hope you won’t mind. Just feel free to refuse this, if you want to. Will you? Refuse if you want to, I mean.”

  “Yes. I’m a good refuser.”

  She stopped and looked at me questioningly, but not very questioningly, I thought. Pretty assured.

  “Ask,” I said.

  “You know, you’re really quite engaging, Mr. Taliaferro,” said Mrs. Bellen. She paused for one more smile and then got down to business. “It’s about my daughter. We have tickets for Les Indes Galantes and—have you seen it?”

  “No, I haven’t. I want to.” It was new just then, and tickets were next to impossible to get.

  “Well how very convenient! And then I stupidly confused my appointments and have this one that I simply can’t get out of, but I do want Marie Louise to go, and the poor child can’t go alone. My daughter, that is.”

  I can’t say exactly why I thought she was lying, but I was certain that she hadn’t until that moment decided to confuse some appointments. I was being used, on the spur of the moment, and by an expert.

  “Still a pleasure,” I said.

  “But that’s perfect! Really, I think it’s simply too—ah—fortuitous. Oh!—” shifting into a pretty expression of vexation—“but the tickets are in a dress section.”

  “That’s all right. I may not look it, but I own a tuxedo.”

  “Silly! I know that, Mr. Taliaferro! I was just letting you know.”

  “Excuse me. Look, perhaps we might include dinner before the show. All three of us. Are you tied up that early?”

  “I’m afraid I am. But I’m sure Marie Louise would love it. Poor child, she must get so tired of me. And really—you don’t mind my being frank?—perfectly frank, I mean. Do forgive me, but—really, there’s no reason you should be put to any expense. You see I’m taking advantage of being so much older than you—”

  “I’m thirty-odd,” I said.

  “Really? You look so much younger.” But she would have said the same if I’d claimed I was going on fourteen. “I’m forty even.”

  “No fooling! It should look that good on the rest of us, Mrs. Bellen.”

  “Well, thank you once more.” But she seemed to withdraw a little, and continued, “So why don’t you have dinner here at the hotel, just the two of you, and sign the check for me? It’s a three-star restaurant. You don’t mind my suggesting this?”

  “Mayb
e a little. Not much. Anyway, I know a nice little no-star restaurant that might offer your daughter some variety. Let me do it that way.”

  “You’re really very sweet. All right then, it’s arranged. Shall we say you pick her up here at six-thirty? The curtain’s early.”

  “All right. But there’s one thing we’re forgetting.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Miss Bellen.”

  “Marie Louise? How do you mean?”

  “Maybe she’d like to invite someone she knows better.”

  “Oh, I’ll see to that,” said Mrs. Bellen and, catching herself too late, changed it to, “Rather, I’m sure she’ll be happy with the arrangement.”

  “You are? Just why?” The atmosphere had been a little creamy from time to time, but that chilled it.

  She didn’t answer immediately, but instead rose to her feet, with all the care and effectiveness she had used in sitting down, and as I stood up she started walking slowly back towards the desk and the elevator, with me at her side. She was trying to decide whether to rebuke my impertinence, I decided, as a middle-aged woman should have done, or to treat it as persiflage, as a young girl would have been free to do. She ended by ignoring my question, and after a few steps she said, as if we had not been skirting an excessive familiarity, “You know, Mr. Taliaferro, I want to be certain you realise how very obliging you are being. I do appreciate it. You must get awfully tired of having to look up friends of friends.”

  “I do, Mrs. Bellen. But I mean it when I say this is different.”

  She stopped walking now, and, standing stock still, while I waited, she glanced towards the desk, as if to guess whether the clerk could hear or not, decided he couldn’t, and said to me in a very low voice, standing close to me, her face turned up, “I—I don’t know whether I should mention it. But—you might find Marie Louise a little—a little bit, how shall I say it?—a little bit odd in manner.”

  I felt a premonitory chill. Standing as close together as we were, I could feel her breath as she spoke, trying to tell me that her daughter was crazy.