Murder At the Flea Club

by Matthew Head

  No maid, no guests, no Marie Louise. Just Audrey, in a crisp black dress of some kind with threads of green and violet here and there, in a little hallway with white and gold walls and a grey carpet and a big bunch of pink roses on a little table, doubled in the mirror behind them. Beyond the hallway there was a glimpse of a living-room, shadowy in the early-evening light, with lamps lit, suggestive of luxurious intimacy. There was even a real fire in an undersized, delicately carved marble fireplace. The silence was impregnated with the impression of twenty-dollar gold pieces flowing unnoticed down the drain.

  “Hoopy!” Audrey murmured. I had met her a little more than twenty-four hours before, and so far as she knew I had seen her only once, but her tone suggested a lifetime of intimacy between us, with many many happy intimate years to follow—especially this afternoon. She murmured, “Perfectly delightful,” and I was as suspicious as hell.

  The way she closed the door behind us was like whispering a secret. I followed her into the living-room. There were bottles and glasses on a little table by a couple of chairs. More roses, breathing their scent into the room like so much life blood, and a faint suggestion of another scent—Audrey herself, bathed and sweetened for the sacrifice.

  Little bits of golden light trembled in the vermouth. If this is a make, I thought, it’s going to have to be awfully quiet and elegant. It would be a shame if anybody got rowdy. A sigh, perhaps a little shudder—nothing more.

  “I thought it was a party,” I said.

  She looked at me and murmured, “It is. Just you and me. I told you it was ever so special.”

  It was all so exquisite and precious that something was going to have to crack soon. She made a little motion towards the fireplace, crossing and sinking into one of a pair of chairs there, while her dress rustled confidence as to how delightful Audrey was within it. I sat in the other chair and she raised her eyebrows faintly as she gestured towards the table, meaning would I mix a little something, and I began combining ice and gin and vermouth. She smiled and nodded yes when I looked at her, and half whispered to me the single word, lemon. It was another secret. Just between me and her. She liked lemon in her martinis, and she had let me in on it.

  I began wondering what would happen if I said something really vulgar, such as, “Audrey, this is a lot of crap. What do you want?” I began wondering so hard that after a couple of minutes, I said it. I had never used the word to a woman before.

  She laughed brightly, but this time it came out in pieces. She said, “Well! Really! Mr. Taliaferro! How very direct!”

  “I’m a direct type boy. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate all this. I do. But it’s such a long way around.”

  She looked at me hard for a minute, hunting a cue, and then she reached with great deliberation towards an enamelled box on the table and took a cigarette from it. I started for a match but she shook her head and waved me off, and lit it for herself, not making a minuet of it now, but lighting it to get it lit, the way a man would. She took one long thoughtful drag and held the smoke in her lungs until my own began to feel strained, then she blew it out into the room, killing the scent of the roses and knocking hell out of the mood she had been building up. Then she stubbed the cigarette out and dropped it in the ashtray and leaned back, looking at me with a half-smile but not a phony one, and said in a cool voice, “I haven’t quite figured you out, after all. That was a little offensive.”

  “I guess it was,” I said. “I apologise a little.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  I poured two drinks and picked up one and offered it to her. She took the glass, said, “Thanks, Hoop,” and set it down in front of her. She didn’t touch it again. I took a sip or two of mine, and then she said, “Very well. It’s about Marie Louise. She’s taken quite a shine to you.”

  “Come again?”

  She repeated exactly: “It’s about Marie Louise. She’s taken quite a shine to you.”

  “Marie Louise has? To me?”

  “Yes,” she said, almost irritably, then controlled herself and said, “You’re surprised?”

  “More than surprised. I find it hard to believe.”

  “So do I. Not that you’re unattractive, I don’t mean that. But it isn’t like Marie Louise.”

  “How not?”

  “It’s a long story and a little complicated.”

  “Go ahead and tell it, if you want to.”

  “Of course I want to. That’s what I got you up here for.”

  I asked, “Where’s Marie Louise now?”

  “Out. I left her at a movie. She’s alone. And that shows how important this is. I’m not supposed to let her be alone at all, but I didn’t know how else to talk to you. I’m picking her up for dinner, and I’m staying in tonight to be with her. Will you have dinner with us?”

  “I don’t know. Are you asking me again to baby-sit afterwards?”

  “Don’t be rude, Hoop. There’s nothing in it for either of us that way. I wanted to go about all this more gracefully, but you chose another tone. I’ve been so worried all day. I’m trying to tell you these things, and it isn’t easy. It’s just that all of a sudden you’ve come to occupy a—rather special place in our lives, or anyway, you could, and—oh, I don’t know! Everything’s so unexpected and difficult.”

  She seemed to be having real difficulty, and it allayed my suspicions. I was certain she was a facile liar, and if she was really having all this trouble saying what she wanted to, maybe she was trying to tell the truth. She knit her brows, adding five years to her age, reached for a cigarette, and then crumpled it and threw it in the fire without lighting it.

  “Listen,” she said at last, as if she had reached an agreement with herself, “I’ll be as direct as I can about it. I suppose it won’t sound any less strange if I try to approach it head on. And I won’t blame you if you just say no to the whole thing. I really won’t. Believe that. Although I hope you’ll say yes.”

  Long pause, then more slowly, “I’ve had a lot of trouble with Marie Louise lately. Maybe you’ve heard whispers of it. That’s why we’re here—in Europe, that is. She’s depressed to the point of needing psychiatric attention. There’s not a reason in the world for it—she’s pretty, as you can see. We’re wealthy and she can have everything she wants. She’s always been attractive to boys, so much so that I’ve had a very difficult time managing things, and until lately she’s had a good healthy interest in them. When this new thing began to develop, I got so worried about her that I had psychiatrists to the house, passing them off as guests, and they all said the same thing. She’s not over the edge, but she’s near it. Anything could—could push her over the edge, any time. I don’t want analysis for her because I’m convinced that at this stage it could do more harm than good. I don’t think she has any suspicion things are as dangerous as they are. And if you breathe a single word of this to her, I swear I’ll kill you.”

  She hadn’t looked directly at me all this time and she didn’t look directly at me now. She seemed to be thinking over what she had said, and then she did look at me, and said, “You understand that? I’ll kill you. Shall I go on?”

  “Yes. Please do.”

  “All right. I thought maybe if we made this trip I could pull her out of it. So far as I can see it hasn’t done a bit of good. Sometimes she’s worse, if anything. I’ve done everything I know how—we’ve bought enough clothes to last for years, we’ve seen every show in town, we’ve flown to London and Rome and everything else, but none of it does any good. Maybe I’m not any good at the job. But it seems to me I’ve offered the best there is to be had in the way of diversion—and it doesn’t take. What do you think?”

  “You’re asking me right in the middle.”

  “I know. What do you think, anyway?”

  “Mostly I think I’d be bored stiff in Marie Louise’s place.”

  “Bored stiff!” she cried. “Really, Hooper, if she’s bored with all this I’m sure I don’t know—”

  “I mean t
hat if she’s bored with a week of it, three months of it is just that much worse. You haven’t said so, but I imagine in Rome you bought clothes and went to everything you could get tickets for and so on, and the same in London, and so on. It’s all been just more of the same thing, hasn’t it?”

  “Oh, I see that! “ she said. “Of course I understand that! But it’s so abnormal! And the thing is, she’s met dozens of people, some of the most attractive young men you can imagine, and she’s simply impossible about it. She refuses to go out with them, or if she does she comes home and says she’s had a perfectly miserable time. The way she did with you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said with feeling. “The way she did with me.”

  “She said it was perfectly dreadful.”

  “You told me this morning she had such a lovely time.”

  Audrey brushed this aside with a gesture, and went on, “Perfectly dreadful. And that’s what’s so odd. That’s where you come in. This morning she told me how perfectly dreadful last night had been, one of the very worst, she said, and when I suggested that I call you and ask you for dinner, as a return for your kindness, she said no, absolutely not, that she didn’t want to see you again, ever. We had an awful scene about it. Then you telephoned, right in the middle of it, and I suppose you know what happened.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I simply asked her who it was on the phone, as politely as possible, I must say, and when she said she would absolutely not see you, naturally I took the telephone and tried to patch things up. Isn’t that perfectly natural?”

  I passed that one up, and she went on, “Then when I was talking to you she was pacing around the room and all of a sudden she absolutely bolted. She absolutely tore out into the hall and grabbed her coat and simply bolted out of the place. Well of course that was dreadful, because in her condition I always insist that she mustn’t go out alone.”

  “Perfectly natural,” I interpolated.

  She took it straight and said, “Of course. Then I was positively frantic, because how did I know what she was going to do, jump in the Seine or something, and there I was, not even dressed, I had on a housecoat and couldn’t possibly have followed her, even if I could have caught up with her. I did run out into the hall, but she was already tearing down the stairs—didn’t even wait for the elevator, mind you. Then I came running back—it was all so frantic—to try to get them to stop her at the desk, and there you were; still hanging on the line. By the time I got rid of you, of course she had got clear out of the hotel, and by the time I had put on a dress and got out on to the sidewalk, she wasn’t in sight anywhere. And that was that.”

  “All very exciting,” I said, “but it still doesn’t sound as if she had taken quite a shine to me.”

  “I’m coming to that. Well, you can imagine how I felt. I just didn’t know what to do. When you called back and I had to carry on that silly conversation as if everything was all right, I thought I would absolutely scream. I kept thinking of her throwing herself in the Seine and everything, although of course she’s an excellent swimmer, and—”

  “That mink coat of hers would sink anybody.”

  “She didn’t wear the mink, she wore her black cloth,” Audrey said, straight. She was a tough audience for gags that afternoon. “—and I was on the verge of calling the police, when in she walked. After leaving me with no word at all and nearly insane, nearly two hours. And what she’d been doing, I suppose I’ll never know.”

  “Didn’t she say.”

  “Oh, yes, she said, all right, but naturally I didn’t believe her,” Audrey said impatiently. “She came stalking in the door looking like death itself, and she wouldn’t say a thing to me except that she wanted to be left alone, and when I asked her what she had been doing she said she had gone to a café and had a cup of chocolate and sat there trying to think things out! I don’t believe that for a minute. She said she had other things to decide, and for me please to leave her alone. Well, I did, although I didn’t quit the apartment, you can be sure of that. I even had our lunches brought up and—I know it was silly, but I kept feeling afraid she might try to jump out of the window or something—cut her wrists or something, I’ve heard of things like that. But she seemed quite calm, when I would go into her room to see how she was. She was simply lying on the bed, and said she was trying to think things out, and really she seems to have done it. She suddenly appeared all dressed and freshened up and apparently in quite good spirits, and she told me that she had decided you were a most attractive man and that she wanted to see you again.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure? Hoop Taliaferro?”

  “Yes. Isn’t it fantastic?”

  “She didn’t go into any detail?”

  “Not exactly. Only in the most general way, that is. Only that you were nice-looking—which you are, Hoop, quite nice-looking, although I wish you’d stand better, and you ought to get that suit pressed—and extremely sympathetic, she said—which goodness knows I must say you haven’t been to me, especially, but that is beside the point—and that she hoped very much you would take her out again. Now isn’t that extraordinary?”

  “I don’t get it at all.”

  “Neither do I. I’m just telling you what happened. So I told her I’d ask you to dinner some time soon, which would be the perfectly natural and normal thing to do socially, and we would hope for the best after that, but then she began to get terribly disturbed again, and said no, she wanted to go out with you, she didn’t want to have you to dinner with me there. Well, I was awfully put out with her. After all, I was doing my best and getting very little thanks for it, but I was handling her with kid gloves, absolute kid, and told her for goodness’ sake what did she expect, did she expect you to call again, after the way she had treated you on the phone that morning?”

  Audrey made a helpless gesture. “So that’s the way we left it, that there was nothing to do but for me to ask you to dinner so you would maybe reciprocate and ask her out later, but she said she thought she would die in the meantime, and I almost think I would too, Hoop, I’m so curious to find what it’s all about. So then I was really terribly clever. I sat down and wrote you a note inviting you to dinner, and told her I was going out to mail it. But I wasn’t, I was going out to telephone you to come here this afternoon, since I couldn’t do it with Marie Louise in the room. And I did.”

  “And here I am.”

  “Yes. So I took her and left her at this movie—where I ought to be picking her up right now, by the way. Naturally I didn’t tell her I was going to urge you to take her out. But I do, Hoop, I beg you. Of course you can take me up on that dinner invitation too. I mailed it, but I beg you to take Marie Louise out.”

  “What’s my wonderful wonderful surprise?”

  “What surprise?”

  “The one I was going to get at this cocktail party.”

  “Why, that Marie Louise likes you so much, silly!”

  “Oh, Audrey. Baloney.”

  “All right, take it any way you please. I talked that way because I wanted to be sure you’d come, that’s all. Now I’ve told you all of it.”

  I sat there trying to make head or tail out of this rigmarole, without much luck, even by making liberal allowance for Audrey’s lying, which was bound to be in there somewhere. But ten minutes with Marie Louise would tell me whether she had really wanted to see me again or not, so about that not even Audrey would be telling a lie.

  “Tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “Before I leave, I’ll drop a note at the desk for Marie Louise, telling her I dropped by and was disappointed not to find her in—does she know you asked me for a cocktail?”

  “No. And I’ll get the glasses out of the way.”

  “—and that I’ll call her later to make a date for an evening soon. We’ll go to dinner and I’ll take her to a place I know where there’s a good singer—place called The Flea Club.”

  It was a low blow, and it worked. I real
ly caught her off base. “The Flea Club!” she cried out, her voice taking things into its own hands for a change. Then she controlled herself and said more quietly, “Goodness, Hoop, do you really think, for a young girl, that is…”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  She lied spontaneously, “No, I haven’t,” and then immediately knew that a lie was foolish. “What am I talking about?” she said with a kind of laugh. “I mean, yes, I have.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of taking her downstairs,” I said, “although I’m a member. Maybe I will, at that. If my job is to keep her diverted, I might as well divert her all the way.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t really hurt her,” Audrey said uneasily. “I’ll just have to trust you.” She rose. “You’ll leave that note for her downstairs, won’t you? I’m rather tired now and I have to pick her up at that movie. I think you’ve been awfully obliging.”

  “A pleasure, Mrs. Bellen,” I said, and she took me to the door.

  She took hold of the knob, turned it, and opened the door a couple of inches. Then she pushed it shut, released the knob, and turned her back to the door, as if to bar me from going out.

  “Hoop. Wait.”

  She looked like somebody about to go off the high dive who had never gone off more than the edge of the bank before. Her eyes were wide and a little glassy. This was exactly the time for me to stop being even a spectator and to get out of there. I knew it; I felt a slight chilly contraction along my spine that told me she was going to do something worse than she had done yet. But I did just what she told me to. I waited.

  Audrey said in a tight hard voice, “You said you were a direct type boy.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, I’m going to be direct with you.”

  She pressed her hands together for a moment, then with an obvious effort of will separated them, letting one fall to her side, but the fingers of the other began fiddling at the neckline of her dress. Then, catching herself up again, she lowered that hand too, gave one more short little laugh, and said, “I don’t want you to take Marie Louise out just once or twice. I want you to make a—a real campaign out of it.”