Murder At the Flea Club

by Matthew Head

  I always told Nicole that she ought to drop the lamé gowns and the rhinestone bracelets and the blondined hair and the shaved-off and repainted eyebrows and the blue eye shadow and try being Marguerite Bontemps. But she was afraid to change. She was beginning to make a reputation as Nicole and besides, she said, whoever heard of a night-club singer who didn’t look the part? Which I said was exactly the point.

  She never said so, but perhaps she didn’t like remembering Marguerite Bontemps. She was born on a farm, a real peasant. At the beginning of the war she had run off and come to Paris, not because of the war, not for fear of the Germans, although the farm was in Alsace, not too far from the border, but because the city offered her two things she had discovered she was going to need within the next several months—anonymity, and a charity ward. She kept body and soul together one way or another, largely by kitchen work and other domestic employment, and later on as a waitress. The baby was born six months after her arrival in Paris. She must have had a terrible struggle but she managed to support herself and care for the baby by various desperate stratagems until nearly the end of the war, when things began to pick up for her personally in spite of the toughness of the general situation, and she was able to place the child in a convent home near Grenoble, where it still was when I knew her.

  She began to sing almost by accident. Like so many Alsatians she spoke as much German as French, and during the Occupation she began making her own doggerel translations of popular songs of the Piaf type, singing them literally on street corners. She had always enjoyed singing, imitating Piaf and other popular favourites from gramophone records. Her voice had a harsh quality when she forced the high notes of her small range, and almost a guttural quality on the lower ones, although it was of extraordinary sweetness and warmth in between. Now she suddenly discovered that these natural defects gave a piquancy to her singing that a conventionally better voice would never have had.

  She had a bad experience at this time. She said that it never occurred to her that singing for Germans’ tips was any worse than waiting at tables for them, but one afternoon she was pretty badly knocked about by three women who might have done her real harm if the police hadn’t intervened. She never sang in German again, but she had discovered her voice, and she worked from that time on towards a single goal—to be a singer and make a living at it. She was not at first ambitious for a name and she didn’t even consider the possibility that she might make really big money. She set about capitalising on her voice as she might have set about investing a small unexpected inheritance. She had a little something and she intended to make maximum use of it within the limits of safety.

  Nicole never at any time had a great stroke of luck. She had no rich sponsor. She sang anywhere, under any conditions, for any money she could get, accumulating a reputation with a tenacity and a single-mindedness almost obsessive. She worked in her profession with exactly the same acceptance of long hours and hard work and exactly the same recognition of the importance of every small profit that she would have expected if she had been opening a shop. She was astute, she was intensely practical, and as a singer she was increasingly sensitive. In her middle thirties, at The Flea Club, she was coming into her own.

  She was not only the singer at The Flea Club, she was also its general manager for the members. She kept the books, which nobody ever bothered to look at, did what buying was necessary, handled the cash, and supervised the staff, which was small. Her crutch and her support and her Rock of Gibraltar was an old woman we knew only as Bijou, who was part personal maid and part housekeeper. Nicole’s life seemed as steady, as open, as industrious, and as well regulated as you could ask. It was, if anything, lacking in variety and excitement.

  This was the woman that Mary Finney, Emily Collins, Professor Johnson and I were to discover, with her head bashed in, half buried in one of the pits of Professor Johnson’s excavations in the basement of The Flea Club, on the morning of the day which we had expected to consume by Emmy’s chronological tour of ecclesiastical architecture and architectural remains in Paris.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT HAD BEEN a Saturday morning when I met Audrey Bellen for the first time, and it was the same afternoon when Mary Finney and Emily Collins came in on the plane. So much I have already set down in this account. It was on the Tuesday morning following that we found Nicole. A lot happened in between, which I can’t really be blamed for not having recognised at the time as events which were to culminate in a murder. Now, in my apartment back of the gallery, with her feet propped up on another chair (“Excuse the vulgarity, Hoop, but I always think better this way”) Mary Finney sat ruminating out loud. The police had taken over The Flea Club; the four of us had answered what questions they had thought necessary for the time being; we had had lunch (“Go ahead and eat what’s put before you, Hoop. I appreciate your spiritual distress and I know some people can’t stand the sight of blood, but I’ve got an idea and I think you’re going to need your strength.”) and Emily Collins and Professor Johnson had gone off together to try to crowd post-Flea Club Ecclesiastical Architecture into what remained of the day. I was making coffee on my alcohol lamp. One thing I’ll say for myself: I make good coffee. I had been telling Dr. Finney about Nicole—where she came from, what her career had been, and so on—all the things I have just set down here.

  “You’ve been a member of this Flea Club thing for some time, haven’t you, Hoopy?”

  “Eight months or so.”

  “You know the people around here. The ones that knew this Nicole best.”

  “I don’t know anyone who’d want to kill her.”

  “That’s what I’m getting at. How do you know you don’t know anyone who’d want to kill her?”

  “I don’t know anyone that I can imagine would want to kill her for any reason whatso—”

  “That’s an altogether different matter. Depends on the quality of your imagination. Also, you’re too close to it. Now me—I’m not close to it at all.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And my imagination runs towards suspicion. Emmy thinks it’s awful, but there it is. You, Hoop—you’re sort of a trusting, think-the-best-of-people, innocent-type boy.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it as a compliment. Now what I want you to do, I want you to tell me all about everybody.”

  “You want me to—I wouldn’t know where to begin!”

  “Yes you would. Think of The Flea Club for a minute. Go ahead, visualise it.” I went ahead and visualised it. “Now just name somebody, anybody.”

  “Audrey.” It just popped out.

  “See?” Dr. Finney said, “We’ve already started.”

  “Would you mind,” I said, and whatever she thought about the quality of my imagination, I was getting suspicious, “telling me where we’re going?”

  “I’m going to get my talk together for this police banquet thing. Now wait a minute,” she said, putting up her hand as I started to protest. “I realise this has to be a purely artificial kind of thing, but it’s going to be an exercise in method and then I’ll expound it with my conclusions to these French cops. I haven’t got any idea I’ll be lucky enough to catch a murderer—”

  “Oh, yes you have.”

  She gave me a really nice grin.

  “What is this method that I’m going to need my strength for, to give you an exercise in?” I asked.

  She settled herself into the chair, taking on a look of permanence like some great natural monument. “Well, it goes like this. Somebody gets knocked on the head. Somebody else, obviously, did it. Everybody’s surprised. Now, murder always happens for a big reason. At least it’s big to the people involved. All of a sudden it happens, and part of the shock is that you realise it hasn’t actually come out of a clear sky, something’s been going on for a long while—”

  “Not necessarily such a long—”

  “—in the lives of at least two people, murderer and murderee, that you haven�
��t even suspected. Fingerprints and all that stuff I don’t know anything about. But what I figure is, if you examine the lives of the people all around the victim you find some things in their lives that don’t explain themselves. And in the victim’s life too. Now if you can invent an explanation that fills all the holes, it might be the true one. You invent explanations no matter how unsupported they may seem to be except by one little inconsistency in that person’s life, and if the same explanation explains away the inconsistencies in another’s, then maybe you’re getting things to dovetail. See?”

  “I guess so. I don’t know how comfortable it makes me feel around you, though. We’ve all got inconsistencies.”

  “I take it for granted you didn’t knock Nicole on the head,” Dr. Finney said graciously, “and I say again this is just an abstract exercise. We’ve only got a few hours—just this afternoon and tonight—so we’ll arbitrarily limit the characters to those around The Flea Club. You ready to begin telling me about this Audrey person?”

  “Where do I begin?”

  “What’s her connection with The Flea Club, for instance? A member?”

  “No. She turns out to be all tied up with somebody I know who is a member.”

  “All right. Tell me about her. From the beginning.”

  So I told her about the letter from my cousin in Madison, and how I went around to the Prince du Royaume, and how Audrey was already there in the lobby, and how we sat in one of the rose-quartz side rooms, and how Audrey was dressed, and what we said, and how she smelt, and how she finagled me into a date with Marie Louise to see Les Indes, and what my impressions were in general. I kept strictly to what had happened that morning without anything that came later, just as I have already set it down here.

  Dr. Finney leaned way back in her chair during the whole telling, her eyes on the ceiling, not saying a word, and when I would pause and look at her she would gesture ‘go on,’ right up until I came to the end, seeing Audrey off in the elevator, and getting the last whiff of field roses, and wondering what would happen with Audrey if you were fool enough to let it.

  I stopped, and Dr. Finney remained immobile in her chair, by now in a position which you would have to call sprawled. Her reddish, freckled face was blank, as it always was when special things were going on behind it, and as I looked I compared her with Audrey Bellen, not to Audrey’s advantage, and when she spoke I discovered that she had been making the same comparison, but in a different direction.

  “These damn pretty women,” she said suddenly, and sat up. “Especially these damn pretty women who stay pretty for ever. You know, Hoops, I was quite a bouncing corn-fed girl myself, back in Kansas, and there were even a couple of young fellows I probably should’ve taken up in their weakness, but I had this doctoring bug. Tell me—d’you think Audrey enjoys life? She have any fun?”

  “No, not really. I’ve a lot more to tell you about her. How do you want the rest of it—everything about Audrey now, or everybody all mixed up?”

  “Mixed up, sort of. I’ve got a working sketch of Audrey. Play her against somebody else.”

  “Marie Louise?”

  “The crazy pregnant daughter. Yes.”

  I tried to make my own face blank, because I knew something I wanted to hide from Mary Finney, something special about Marie Louise. I happened to know that Marie Louise had been in The Flea Club that morning, only a few hours ago, when Dr. Finney and Emmy and Professor Johnson and I had discovered Nicole, and that she had been there all night, and that I had got her out of there.

  “I don’t know whether it’s worth while spending your time telling you about Marie Louise. She’s not a Flea Club member in the first place—“

  “Nor is Audrey.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But Marie Louise—I mean she couldn’t have had anything to do with it, it’s absurd on the face of it, a sweet girl like that, so why waste time? If she’s obviously not the kind of girl who—well—”

  I stopped from sheer loss of momentum, dragged down by guilty conscience. Dr. Finney looked at me with suspicion and then certainty. “Well I’ll be damned,” she said deliberately, but not with irritation. “Hiding something! Do you know what a nice wide-open pan you’ve got? Well, all in good time.”

  She sighed heavily. “Let’s make some more coffee on that thing,” she said, “and you tell me about Marie Louise.” We both got up and went over to the table and started fussing around. I went to the bathroom to get some tap water, still thinking about Marie Louise, and I heard Mary Finney call from the other room, asking, “Slept with her yet?”

  “What!” I yelled, outraged. “Certainly not!”

  “Well, you needn’t be so vehement,” said Dr. Finney mildly. “People do.”

  I came back into the room, saying huffily, “She’s a nice girl.” Dr. Finney had the lamp going. It looked cheery, and Dr. Finney herself was so calm and homely that I decided I didn’t mind what she asked me.

  “As a matter of fact I wasn’t thinking of Marie Louise,” she said. “I was thinking of Audrey.”

  “I don’t think it’s any of your business.”

  “You might be right. Unless it could have to do with the question at hand. And who knows, it might. So I might be asking you again. And if I do, don’t shout. And don’t swear. It’s unbecoming in a young man. Now tell me about Marie Louise.”

  And so while we made the coffee, and then while we went back and sat down and drank it, I told her about the first time I saw Marie Louise.

  I certainly can make good coffee. I admit it. Even on an old beat-up alcohol lamp.

  I had changed my mind so many times about Marie Louise during the past three days, and she had given me such a shock that very morning, that when I had to tell Mary Finney about her, I had trouble sticking to exactly the impression she had made on me when she first came down into the lobby that Saturday night. I don’t know whether you’d have turned to look at Marie Louise if she had passed you on the street. Depends on what you want in a girl, and how quick your eye is. There was nothing exceptional about her at all, except that everything about her was right. Her hair was neither dark nor light, but somewhere in the vast middle register where most hair must be classified. It was thick and glossy, cut medium long-short, parted on one side and brushed back from her face. Her eyes were a grey-blue, with lashes a little darker than you would have expected. She had a nose-shaped nose without any particularly individual protrusions or declivities, and a sweet soft mouth which might or might not remain sweet and soft as she grew older. She seemed to be about seventeen or eighteen. Her skin was fresh and clear, and except for the usual brilliant lipstick, of which I certainly approve, she used a minimum of make-up. Probably none. She didn’t need it. As a matter of fact, she was an awfully pretty girl, but you were likely to miss it because she didn’t act like one.

  She came across the lobby in a mink coat nearly as luxurious as Audrey’s, open so that I saw a soft blue-grey dress of some kind which revealed everything while it exposed nothing. She had a lovely figure and nothing short of a barrel could have hidden it entirely. She walked beautifully, not the way Audrey walked, not with the calculation and artifice and suggestion of a mannequin, but with exactly the easiness and the natural grace that Audrey had lost for ever. She didn’t know she was walking one way or another. She just walked to get from one spot to another, and it was good.

  As I stood up she gave me a quick appraising glance that I thought held a certain amount of relief.

  “Hello,” she said.

  There’s no way to write it the way she said it. It was damn near rude. Not with intention, but because her complete indifference was apparent in the two syllables, behind their casualness. She wasn’t interested in me, she wasn’t interested in Les Indes Galantes, and she wasn’t interested in dinner. If she was interested in anything, it was in getting back to the hotel which we hadn’t even left yet. This is a bad thing in a young girl. And as she came closer I saw
that she had been crying. She had been crying hard and crying for a long time.

  “Mama’s upstairs,” she said impersonally. “She says to ask you would you like to come up for a drink ?” Her voice was soft and low, pleasant, but with the air of fatigue that I could see now around her eyes. I thought ‘mama’ was just about the most inappropriate word in the world for Audrey.

  “How about you?” I asked. “Would you like one?”

  “I don’t drink,” she said indifferently, and stopped, as if we could have stood there just as we were, for the next four hours, and she would have remained perfectly passive, not caring whether I said anything or whether we did anything. She was marking time, that’s all, and it wasn’t any more difficult to mark time with me than to mark it some other way. It was all the same to her.

  “Then we’ll go on to the restaurant and I’ll have something while we wait,” I said.

  “All right.”

  Without being a Don Juan, I have always had at least normal success with women, and once or twice I have surprised myself. But I was certainly a failure that night. I just couldn’t make any time at all. It wasn’t a game. I wasn’t on the make. All I wanted was to spend the time pleasantly. It was a restaurant I especially liked, but Marie Louise rose to the surface for one remark, one volunteered remark. “This is a nice little place,” she said, and then lapsed back into indifference. “It’s a damn nice little place,” I told her, “and not to be condescended to.” A little something flickered back of her eyes and she even gave the suggestion of a smile. “I didn’t mean to condescend,” she said. “I think it’s a nice little place and I said so.”

  Les Indes is a tremendous ballet spectacle, with a shipwreck and a live volcano spouting real flames at one point. During a ballet of flowers, when the queen appears—she’s a rose—the whole Opera is sprayed with rose perfume. (I thought of Audrey.) Marie Louise sat politely, no more stirred by everything that three centuries of French gimcrackery could work up for her entertainment than she was by her escort, which was some comfort to me. During the interval, when everybody strolls and gives everybody else the eye, I was proud to be with such a pretty girl, but if anybody tried to figure us out they must have thought either that we had had a lovers’ quarrel or been married a little too long. Or maybe they just thought we were English. Anyway, they looked at Marie Louise with immediate approval, and then came that quick waning of interest that comes with the discovery that there’s nothing stirring.