Murder At the Flea Club

by Matthew Head

  Let me just put it this way: we managed to get her out. The wound on her head was sticky and clogged with earth. In no time Emmy had appeared with water and a wet bar cloth, and Dr. Finney was washing and exploring the wound, and saying, “Hoop, somebody just left here. This is fresh. You two men go look through the place. Hurry up. And take something along to hit somebody with if you find him.”

  I grabbed a shovel, and so did Professor Johnson, and we went up to the bar floor. We looked into the washrooms and behind the bar and behind the stage and that was all there was to it. Then we started upstairs and I said, “We’re crazy. He might still be in the basement. He might kill them.”

  “I’ll go,” Professor Johnson said. “You go on up. Call if you need me.”

  It wasn’t my kind of business and I wasn’t happy at it. With Professor Johnson gone everything seemed awfully quiet. I knew there wasn’t much chance I would find anybody. If somebody had been there when we came, which was obvious, since they had been interrupted in filling the pit, they had only to run up the cellar stairs and out the boulevard door which operated on a spring lock. But I kept a tight hold on my shovel all the same. The door to Nicole’s living-room was open. I peered in. The furniture returned my look incuriously. The door to the bedroom was closed. I turned the knob without making any noise at all, waited to get the feel of it, and then pushed it open suddenly.

  There they were, the Italian boy and Marie Louise. The room was full of a warmish glow, with the pale morning sun cutting through the slats of the shutters on one wall, and the heater making a red live spot near the bed. They were as pretty as anything I ever expect to see, Marie Louise the colour of the inside of a shell, and Luigi as brown as if he were sunburned all over, both of them against the rumpled white of the sheet. They were beautifully and wonderfully asleep. It was a shame to have to back up and close that door, but I did. Then I knocked on it, hard.

  Silence.

  Then a stirring and a kind of whispering and mumbling. Then Luigi’s voice, a little thick and deepened.

  “Nicole?” he said doubtfully. I hadn’t knocked in a ladylike manner.

  “It’s not Nicole, it’s Hooper Taliaferro.”

  No answer, but I could imagine that the silence was full of alarm on the other side of the door. “Hooper Taliaferro,” I repeated. “Friend.” I hated the thought of all the sudden waking excitement and scare I must be throwing them into. “Wake up and open up.”

  Sounds of agitation. Mattress-and-springs sounds, and footsteps, a kind of scampering, which had to be Marie Louise making for shelter.

  Luigi: “Wait a minute.”

  “I’m sorry, this is urgent. Get dressed and leave here in a hurry. Don’t stop for nothing.”

  Agitated whispers and rustlings. “Just a minute.”

  The door opened and Luigi stood there, barefoot, his hair every which way all over his head, in shirt and pants, still fastening his belt.

  “Nicole isn’t here,” he said, “I don’t want you to think I’ve been with Nicole. Just because I—”

  “I know you haven’t been with Nicole. Shut up and listen. There’s been a terrible accident downstairs and the police will be here. People are in the cellar. If you hurry maybe you can get out the door on to the boulevard.” I raised my voice and called out into space, “You too, Marie Louise.”

  There was a small shriek from behind a closed door beyond the bed—the bathroom probably. The door opened part way and Marie Louise’s head appeared round its edge. “For goodness’ sake,” she said, “how did you know I was here? Did—” and then as if she guessed, her eyes widened and she gave another small shriek and closed the door.

  “Never mind. Just hurry.”

  Luigi had been getting into his socks and shoes. He tied the laces and jumped up, found his necktie lying on the floor, picked it up, and began tying it. By the time he had got into his coat, Marie Louise came out of the bathroom, all dressed and running a comb through her hair. She had on a street dress, not the fancy dress I had left her in not very many hours before at the Prince du Royaume. Her face was about as red as faces get, and she was saying, “Now you listen to me, Hooper Taliaferro—”

  “You’re listening, I’m talking,” I said. “You’ve got to get out of here. Incidentally where does Audrey think you are? With me?”

  She said something just as much beside the point, considering what the situation was, “What’s that shovel for?”

  “Protection,” I said, and let her wonder. “The hell with it. Nicole’s been badly hurt, downstairs. There’s a doctor there now and there’ll be police if they aren’t there already. I’ve got to get right down there. The two of you, get out of here by the boulevard door right away. Don’t leave anything behind. When you go out on the street, just do it naturally and hope you won’t be noticed in the crowd. Don’t let anybody know you were here, under any circumstances, or you’ll be involved in a nasty investigation. Also it’ll come out that you spent the night together, if that makes any difference to you. It doesn’t to me. Personally, I congratulate the two of you. Now I’m leaving. I’ll keep anybody from coming upstairs, somehow, if I can, for the next few minutes. Keep your mouths shut—or lie, but you weren’t here. See? Now get out.”

  I went down to stave people off the cellar stair. The last I saw of Marie Louise and Luigi, they were just standing there with their mouths open.

  When I got back to the cellar, a police ambulance was outside and Nicole was being carried out. I asked Mary Finney, “Is she dead?”

  “She’s alive,” Dr. Finney said. “Beyond that, I can’t tell.”

  “Was she conscious? Did she say anything?”

  “She said something,” said Dr. Finney. “It sounded like ‘gutzeit.”

  And so, having confessed to Dr. Finney, I had brought things up to date. Through my windows we could see the first suggestion of chilly grey light in the street. Dr. Finney heaved a great sigh, lowered her feet, and began putting on her shoes.

  “Exactly why didn’t you want to tell me about Marie Louise and Luigi?” she asked.

  “After all,” I said.

  “Oh, that,” said Dr. Finney. “I respect your motives as a gentleman, but I deplore the hell out of your attitude as my co-sleuth. No other reason?”

  “Also, the whole thing was too sweet and innocent to have anything to do with a murder. If you had seen them lying there—”

  “I practically did, the way you gloated over it.”

  “They didn’t have anything to do with what happened downstairs. I didn’t see any reason why their night together should be contaminated by getting mixed up with any subsequent investigation.”

  “I’m inclined to think you’re absolutely right, Hoopy. Inclined but not convinced. Now I’m going back to the hotel.” She stood, making smoothing motions of adjustment here and there. “Here’s the programme. It’s almost six now. We’ll have breakfast in that seraglio where I’m holed up—eight-thirty. First I want to talk to Marie Louise. That won’t be hard to arrange, one way or another, I imagine. Then I’ve got to arrange somehow to talk to most of these other people you’ve mentioned. We’ll just have to manage somehow. I figure we’ve got toe-holds on most of them, one way or another, but you’ll have to help.”

  “Do what I can,” I said. “Freddy’s easy, of course. And Tony should be. I don’t know about Mrs. Jones—”

  “Anybody who can get Tony can get Mrs. Jones, I imagine.”

  “Probably. I’m not sure about René.”

  “Get him through Audrey.”

  “And get Audrey through me. All right, I suppose we can get everybody—if we can find them at home.”

  “We’ll find them. We’ll call before they have a chance to stagger out. From the sound of everything you’ve told me about them, they ought to be available until noon.”

  “All right. Do you think we can call again about Nicole now?”

  I had called as often as she would let me, during the past eighteen hours.
But, “Go ahead, if you’ll rest easier,” she said.

  It didn’t make me rest any easier, but I had been ready for the news. Nicole was dead.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A PAIR OF waiters, with the air of minor deities, were arranging a breakfast table in Dr. Finney’s suite at the Prince du Royaume. As upon a sacrificial altar, they spread a celestially white cloth and four napkins folded into pyramids. The offerings came next—china, silver, baskets of brioches and croissants, jars of pale butter, urns of cream and sugar, pitchers of coffee and chocolate, and a great ornamental bowl full of fresh ripe apricots and cherries, garnished with grape leaves, flown from wherever apricots and cherries and grape leaves can be flown from to Paris in midwinter, to indicate that the whole business was really on an astral plane, removed from such limiting considerations as time, space, and the seasonal relationship between the earth and the sun, not to mention the vulgarity of money as anything but a convenient and inexhaustible medium of exchange.

  The four of us—Mary Finney, Miss Collins, Marie Louise and myself—sat waiting to fall upon this fantasy and demolish it. When the waiters had pushed our chairs under us and left, Dr. Finney flipped her napkin open and said graciously, “Well, we might as well get busy and eat this stuff.”

  “Of course,” she said a few minutes later to Marie Louise, “there’s no reason why you should tell us what we want to know unless you want to.”

  It seemed to me that there was at least a friendly obligation, since I had discovered her and Luigi there and had let them get out without having to go through the police, but I didn’t object, especially since Marie Louise answered, “Oh, but I do. I want to tell the whole thing. It’ll be a relief—at last! There’s no reason why I should feel funny about it. After all, it’s only the truth.”

  “How old are you?” Dr. Finney asked. “Hoop thinks seventeen or eighteen.”

  “Seventeen!” she cried. “I’ve been eighteen for what seems like years and years, and I’ll be nineteen in exactly five weeks. If I were only seventeen, I’d go absolutely crazy waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “For nineteen. I’m going to tell you everything, absolutely everything, and I can’t help how it sounds. I can’t help how mean it sounds to Mama, or anything like that.”

  “Hooray,” commented Dr. Finney.

  “I wish I could say it all at once,” Marie Louise said. “Well—in the first place, you know we’re married.”

  Mary Finney said, “Naturally,” at the same time that I said, “You and who?”

  “Who?” cried Marie Louise. “Who do you think? Me and Luigi! My goodness, do you think I go to bed with every—”

  “Naturally not.”

  I said to Mary Finney, “How long have you known about this?”

  “From the time you told me about finding them in bed,” she said. Emily Collins gave a violent start, but without explaining anything Dr. Finney went on, using two words not ordinarily current in missionary circles, even the most medical, “She’s obviously neither bitch nor pushover.”

  “Mary!” breathed Miss Collins, and then, “What’s a pushover?”

  We explained, and I went back a few sentences and said to Marie Louise, “What do you mean, go crazy waiting? It doesn’t seem to me that you’ve waited for anything much.”

  “Better begin at the beginning, if you can decide where that would be,” said Dr. Finney.

  “The beginning,” Marie Louise said reflectively. “Well, that would be when I went off to school. Of course I had been in all these other places that were practically prisons they were so strict. But then my grandfather’s will said Audrey could choose the schools until I was eighteen, but when I was eighteen I could choose my own school. So—”

  “You called her ‘Mama’ a while ago and now you call her ‘Audrey’,” Dr. Finney interjected.

  “That’s what she likes me to call her, since Daddy died—Audrey. I don’t like it. I think it’s silly. Daddy always wanted me to call her Mama. Actually she’s only my stepmother anyway, but I never knew my own mother, she died when I was only two years old, and Audrey’s been around as long as I can remember. I guess mostly I call her Mama when she feels like my mother, and Audrey when she’s just like—a governess or boss or something.”

  “I see. Excuse all these interruptions, but what about this grandfather’s will? Where does all your money come from, yours and Audrey’s, just to get to the root of everything?”

  “I can’t say everything at once, and eat too,” said Marie Louise. “You see Daddy’s dead. He died a long time ago. I was twelve. I guess he didn’t amount to much, but he was awfully sweet. He never worked or anything. It was his money, not Audrey’s. Rather, it was his father’s—my grandfather’s money, that is, mine now, or will be when I’m nineteen.”

  “Clearer and clearer,” I murmured to myself, and then aloud, “Excuse me for asking, but has Audrey got any money at all?”

  “Goodness no!” said Marie Louise as if it were one of the fundamental facts of life that everyone should know without asking. “For that matter, neither did Daddy. Grandfather let us have practically anything, but it was always his, not ours. Then Daddy died, and all his life long he’d never had a nickel except what Grandfather had given him, and four years ago Grandfather died, and I guess the will was sort of a shock to Audrey, when you come down to it.”

  She paused a moment, said, “Poor Audrey,” in a not altogether compassionate tone, and then went on, “It’s quite a lot of money. And it’s all mine. Audrey gets an awfully big allowance, and so do I, except that she controls it. Until I’m nineteen. Then I get all the money and Audrey gets a little old dinky allowance—a hundred dollars a week, and that won’t keep her in face cream. Well, I’ll give her all of that old money she needs, but do you know—”

  She stopped again, so long that Dr. Finney said, “Know what?”

  “—I don’t think she trusts me to give her enough. I think she feels sort of insecure about things. And then she’s so afraid I won’t marry the way she wants me to. She wants me to marry a prince or a duke or something, I think, or at least a rich man.”

  At this point Marie Louise smiled and added, “Well, I sure didn’t. Luigi’s father runs a grocery store. So what happened,” she went on, “was that after I’d been to all these awful schools like prisons that Audrey sent me to, when I was eighteen and could choose I said I was going to college in New York. So there I went, I went to Sarah Lawrence. That was a mistake—not the school, I don’t mean, but New York. I thought it would be the one place I’d be free at last, but Audrey had all these dozens of friends there and they kept pestering me and pestering me. It was all supposed to be so sweet and friendly and everything, but what they were really doing, they were checking up on me for Audrey all the time. Day and night, practically. I wouldn’t be surprised if Audrey paid them.”

  “Phooey,” I said. “Anybody can find a way to dodge people and get off alone in New York.”

  Marie Louise turned on me with spirit. “That’s what you think,” she said. “You just don’t know what it is to be a young girl and timid and inexperienced. Of course it’s different now,” she said with satisfaction, looking back from the heights of worldliness, “and as a matter of fact I did learn towards the end of the year how to get out by myself. Otherwise how do you suppose I ever managed to marry Luigi?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. How’d you ever make contact with Luigi in the first place?”

  “I walked into this little old grocery store,” said Marie Louise, “and there he was.”

  “You mean like with a price tag and everything?”

  “No, silly, behind the counter. Audrey had this friend down in the Village with an apartment, and she used to have me down to keep me guarded weekends. So once all these other awful old hags were in having cocktails and they ran out of soda, so I said I’d go out and get some. So I went into this little old grocery store and—” here Marie Louise almost melted�
�“and there was this beautiful little old Italian boy behind the counter. Luigi!”

  “Of all people!” I said, but Dr. Finney scowled at me.

  “So it wasn’t a mistake coming to New York after all. And I bought half a dozen bottles of soda and told him I’d be at the Metropolitan Museum Sunday afternoon, at two o’clock, at the postcard stand.”

  “Just like that? You said give me half a dozen bottles of soda and meet me at the Museum?”

  “Of course not,” Marie Louise said patiently. “We talked a little while first.”

  “What about?”

  “About us.”

  “But what did you have to say to each other?” I asked, really dumbfounded.

  “Why, everything! “ said Marie Louise. “What our names were, and how old we were, and what we were doing, and everything like that. We had plenty to talk about. It was his father’s store, and Luigi was going to night school and saving to go to law school. He still is. Still going to, I mean. So that’s what we talked about. All those things.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we decided to get married.”

  “Right then and there?”

  “No!” said Marie Louise. “Can’t you understand anything at all? First we went to all these museums. Everybody thought it was wonderful, how interested I was in museums. Sometimes I’d have to be with some of these friends of Audrey’s but they couldn’t take the museums. They’d say they’d pick me up later, and Luigi would always be following us around until these friends of Audrey’s would leave, then we’d be together. Audrey thinks I’m crazy about art, but it was really Luigi I was crazy about all the time. We kept getting crazier and crazier about each other. Then we decided to get married, and that’s when things began to get really complicated. I just couldn’t imagine telling Audrey. And Luigi’s family wouldn’t like it either, he said, with law school still to go to and everything. He minded being secret about it more than I did, but I told him I just couldn’t face Audrey with it beforehand. I could just imagine Audrey going to his family to buy them off and how insulting she would be. Because they were nice people, Luigi’s family, and they would be just thrown into a big mess by Audrey. You just don’t know Audrey, or you’d understand all this. So finally we decided we would sort of compromise. We wouldn’t run off to one of those funny places where you don’t have to wait. We would just go ahead and get a licence and get married, right in New York, and that’s what we did, all open and above board.”