Murder At the Flea Club

by Matthew Head

  Harry raised his hands and let them fall, in a gesture of utter resignation and despair.

  “And so now I think I will go,” said Mrs. Jones, grasping her handbag and rising from her chair. “Harry.”

  Harry rose also, with all the spirit and vigour of an old whipped dog. Mrs. Jones said, “So—if some of you will relay my message to Audrey. You’ve all been very sweet, and I’ve loved seeing you. We must all get together again soon. Don’t worry about Tony. I’m going now to bail him out.” Her eyes moved over us, one at a time—Bibi, Freddy, myself, Dr. Finney, Marie Louise, and then stopped on Luigi.

  “Have you been here all the time?” she said. She looked him up and down and said, as if for future reference. “You’re terribly handsome. Well—good-bye for now, everybody,” and out she walked, with Harry following on his leash.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE MINUTE THE door closed behind Harry and Mrs. Jones, Dr. Finney jumped up and said, “Freddy, thanks, but we can’t go out to lunch. Now you and Bibi go away. Oh, I forgot—if you want Bibi to learn manners, I’ve got just the place. We want the two of you to come to dinner with us tonight. There’ll be some other people there—maybe about a hundred—but we’re having a special table. It’s a kind of celebration for me and I’m giving a talk. Emmy’ll call you about the place and time and all. Good-bye now,” she said, not even waiting for Freddy to say he would or wouldn’t come.

  She continued to fidget while Freddy explained to Bibi the proper way to make her good-byes, which she did very prettily, and they left. Then Marie Louise said she was going right up to stay with Audrey, and would order lunches for herself and Luigi in the room. She kissed Dr. Finney on the cheek, startling her a little, and then turned to leave with Luigi, saying she would send Emmy down. “No,” Dr. Finney said, “order a lunch for Emmy too. Hoopy and I have errands to do and Emmy’d love company. Hates to eat alone.” So that was arranged, and Marie Louise and Luigi left, and Dr. Finney and I were alone in the apartment.

  She had a tense, brisk, no-time-for-questions look about her that kept me quiet while she charged over to the telephone and, after a respectably brief interval, got Monsieur Duplin on the line. It was Dr. Finney, she explained, and Mrs. Jones was on her way to bail Tony out, with a lawyer, and as far as she was concerned, Dr. Finney that is, it was O.K. for Tony to be bailed out or whatever the French equivalent was, if Monsieur Duplin wanted to release him, and although she would have preferred to talk with Tony herself, if possible, she was sending a Mr. Taliaferro down instead, which told me what my errand was. And, if possible, please delay things with Mrs. Jones until Mr. Taliaferro was also on hand. Possible?

  She said thanks, hung up, told me to put on my coat and hat, said I was going to go in a taxi with her as far as The Flea Club, where I was to give her my key and drop her, and then I was to go on to witness whatever spectacle took place, if any, between Tony and Mrs. Jones and Harry, and report everything to her in detail.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve thought about Taliaferro’s lunch?” I asked, when we had got under way in the taxi.

  “You can eat later,” she said. “I don’t want you to miss Jonesy.”

  “And what will you be doing all this time?”

  “I’ll be wandering around The Flea Club.”

  “Just why?”

  “Just to see whether anything suggests itself. There are loose ends. Old Bijou is the loosest. She’s a faithful-retainer type, isn’t she?”

  “The most faithful and devoted imaginable.”

  “Yet she seems to have lit out. With the missing cash box, if you want to make things simple, but it seems too simple.”

  “Not consistent with Bijou, either. Very poor but, as far as Nicole was concerned, very honest.”

  “Missing, nevertheless, which must be explained,” Dr. Finney said. “And I’ve simply got to get to René. Preferably before the dinner tonight, but try to get in touch with him and if I can’t see him before the dinner, be sure he comes to that, anyway. One hell of a lot revolves about him. And when you see Mrs. Jones and Harry, make sure you ask them for tonight.”

  “It’s a charming guest list you’re working up. Half the people on it ready to cut the throats of the other half, and more bed and re-bed combinations than you could shake a copy of Krafft-Ebing at. A divine little crew. Also you’ve a naïve faith in my ability to coerce these people into dining with the police. Do you know that Mrs. Jones is an international socialite? You don’t get her to dinner on the spur of the moment.”

  “The spur of this moment,” Dr. Finney said, “is like the spur of no moment she has ever experienced. Who’s this famous party-arranger? Elsa Maxton or something? Maxwell. Elsa Maxwell’d give ten years of her life to fix a party with half the novelty mine’s going to have. You ask these people. They’ll come. If not from curiosity, then through fear. Supposing you’d knocked Nicole on the head. Wouldn’t you be afraid not to attend something where you might be so suspiciously conspicuous by your absence?”

  “I might, if I were bright enough. I’ll try, anyhow. Try to get everybody for you, I mean.”

  “Good boy. Now pass me that key.” She told the driver to stop at the Deux Magots, an unsuspicious spot, so she could walk to The Flea Club from there. She got out of the taxi and strode down the boulevard without a backward glance and, as I watched the firmness and decision of her gait, I was awfully damn glad I wasn’t hiding anything in particular that she was interested in ferreting out.

  At the mairie where Tony was being held, I was directed with a degree of respect that indicated the eminence of my connection with Monsieur Duplin and Dr. Finney to a small close waiting-room smelling of damp wood and disinfectant, where Mrs. Jones and Harry occupied one bench, and an extremely discouraged-looking girl of about twenty occupied the one opposite. With a Freddy to put her into the hands of the technicians who had overhauled Bibi, she could have been ravishing, but she looked cheap, dishevelled, and badly worn as she sat there in the evil little room. As I entered she shifted her glance from Mrs. Jones to me, sized me up as another member of the class in league against her, and began staring at an empty corner of the room in resentful pretence of indifference to the three of us.

  When Tony appeared in the doorway she was on him in a flash, clawing at his shoulder as if she would tear him apart, and for a moment I thought she was attacking him, until I saw that it was a kind of frenzied embrace. She babbled to him in French so disfigured by argot and so muffled by the crazy rubbing of her face against his shoulder that I could catch only phrases: “… darling…do to you?…hurt you…take you from me…darling…” Tony looked much less immaculate than usual. His shirt was tired and he hadn’t shaved; his beard made a pattern as sharp and even as a stencilled one around his lips and up his cheeks. He was pale, and in this sordid little room his jacket with its padded shoulders and tight waist, wrinkled now around the buttons, looked sleazy and raffish. His expression was at once tense and closed; it did not change as he found the girl’s wrists and, gripping them, forced her away from him. He spoke to her in a voice too low and guttural for me to catch anything he said. She wailed, and struggled to press herself against him once more, but the officer who had followed Tony into the room took her firmly by the elbows, and as Tony released her, this man propelled her back to the bench and forced her down on to it. She sat there, obedient to authority as she had learned to be as long as she was in its presence, glaring at the officer in hatred and despair.

  Mrs. Jones had watched this performance with the air of royalty in the presence of vermin. She rose now (while Harry jumped to attention, making uncertain twitching motions which indicated that he was looking out for her best interests) and said, “Tony, who is this girl?” The officer told her she would have to speak French. She repeated the question, translating it literally, word for word, so that “girl” took on its unflattering connotation. “Salope!” the girl shrieked. “Chamelle!” Tony said nothing, but I looked at him and thought that this
boy who now looked like a common boulevard pickpocket or café procurer was the same boy who, neat and enigmatic at The Flea Club, had seemed impervious to its excitements, vanities, and frustrations. As he stood there, unspeaking, in the few seconds we waited for him to answer Mrs. Jones’s question, I realised that I really knew nothing about Tony. He had a neat, taut figure; he had attractive, symmetrical, well-washed features; he had a genuine facility as a kind of glorified street musician; above all he had the ability to keep his mouth shut and his face blank. But what he was really like, I simply did not know, because he hid it. And it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps Tony really was a son-of-a-bitch, and that at least one of the inconsistencies Mary Finney was always looking for and then trying to explain, was that Mrs. Jones had fallen for an un-son-of-a-bitch when her eye up to then had been infallible in picking out the real cream of that crop, and that even if she didn’t know Tony was a son-of-a-bitch she had developed such a sensitivity to the type that perhaps Tony wasn’t an exception, but the logical successor to her Italian count, her Georgian prince, her English jockey, her American prize fighter, and René. I had an odd and uncomfortable feeling, partly because I was aware of a disloyalty to Tony because my mind was changing about him when he was in a tough spot, and partly because I felt a sense of loss that a person I had thought was just naturally good was, maybe, not good at all. I realised that Tony had carried quite a burden for me, representing, all alone, man’s innate capacity for goodness in spite of the general brutalisation, deception, and chicane of the world. Now I thought he had dropped the ball, and whether or not the curious guilt I felt meant that I had failed somewhere, I knew I’d never feel the same about Tony again. I wouldn’t have put it all like this at the moment; all I knew was that things changed, and left an uncomfortable empty feeling behind them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE VARIOUS THINGS that happened during the next three quarters of an hour in that room were so broken up and confused that when I tried to summarise them for Mary Finney afterwards, I couldn’t put them into anything like their original sequence. Boiled down to essentials and put into some kind of order, things went like this:

  Mrs. Jones demanded again to know who the girl was. Tony finally answered, in a sullen and defeated way, to the general effect that she was simply his girl, that’s all. Mrs. Jones took this so hard that she didn’t even scream; she just grew rigid. She should have been accustomed to sharing her men, none of her claims having been the original ones and all of them having proved to be temporary in any case, but she was accustomed to the marital rotation conventional within her own international circle, whose membership was elastic enough to encompass attractive males from the race track, the prize ring, the lower reaches of Bohemia, or the metropolitan jungle which had produced Tony, but could not stretch wide enough to include the females originally appended to these candidates. Tony’s misfortune was that he was caught between his past and his future at the awkward moment when he was engaged in the transition from one level to another, and it was obvious that Mrs. Jones felt sullied. She felt so sullied that she sat down on the bench and got out the little box again from her handbag and took a pill. “Harry!” she commanded. Harry plopped obediently on to the bench beside her. She began to whisper to him, and if I could have heard at all, I was prevented from it by the arrival of Freddy Fayerweather.

  I should have been ready for this. In spite of all his good intentions for reform, and in spite of his contention that he would be willing to strangle orphans, Freddy was too kindhearted and too weak-willed to stay away from Tony when Tony was in trouble. He entered accompanied by a pleasantly potbellied and keen-eyed little Frenchman whom I identified as Dr. Finney’s Monsieur Duplin even before he introduced himself.

  Freddy cast Tony a quick, uncertain glance, looked at me in surprise, and then said to Mrs. Jones, “But Hattie dear! I didn’t think you really would!”

  Monsieur Duplin explained then that Freddy had come to him with the statement that if Tony refused to say where he had been at the time of the murder, he, Freddy, had heard a verbal statement from a lady that Tony had been with her at the time. He had come to Monsieur Duplin to ask him to face Tony with this information, and to get Tony to identify the lady. “Although of course I’d have done it myself, if Tony refused,” Freddy admitted, “and of course I wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known you’d really be down here, Hattie. I must say I think it’s big of you. Sacrificing your reputation,” he said, managing to infect the word with a strong suggestion that the remaining shreds and tatters of Mrs. Jones’s good name were hardly worth the effort, “for a simple boy of the streets. Really too sweet of—”

  But Harry rose, interrupting, “My client denies the allegation.”

  Tony jumped as if from a blow. The girl sprang up so suddenly that she was half across the room before the officer caught her. “It’s true!” she shrieked in an ugly voice. “Salope! Chamelle! So that’s where he was! Not even a woman! A skeleton! He didn’t come home, not at all.” And even in French it wouldn’t be right to put down what she began calling Mrs. Jones, but it boiled down to a general reference to ugly old cadavers who bought young men with their dirty money. The girl had real skill in invective, and it would have been a devastating experience even for a woman less vulnerable to the accusations than Mrs. Jones. The officer stopped it with a hand over the girl’s mouth.

  Monsieur Duplin asked Tony if he wanted to say anything now. He looked uncertain and shifty, obviously balancing several desperate factors against one another. Finally, deciding, he began, “I—” but his voice cracked so that he had to clear his throat and begin again. “Yes, I was with her,” he said.

  “My client denies—” piped Harry, but Mrs. Jones rose and stopped him. The room grew quiet as everybody waited for her to speak. She said with admirable aplomb, considering what she had been going through, “Very well. That is true. He was with me.” Tony looked like a man caught up off the brink of a precipice. “However,” said Mrs. Jones, looking at him with distaste, “he was not with me after six o’clock that morning. I didn’t know you were a fool, Tony. We could have got you out of this some way, but you’ve been a fool. I’m not going to compromise myself.” She laughed a little bit at the word, and corrected herself, “—with the law, I mean. Nobody wins now.” She said to Monsieur Duplin, “This boy was with me that night but he left my house at six in the morning. I’m sure that can be verified by the night servants if you’re interested. I’ve no idea where he went after that. Nor do I care. Come, Harry.” She swept to the door, turned, and looked at Tony but said to the room in general, “This was the quickest one I ever had.” She paused a moment, and added with considerable satisfaction, “And by far the least expensive.” Harry groaned, and followed her out the door.

  Now it was Tony who was shattered. I have thought and wondered about Tony a lot since these events. In retrospect I think it is possible to believe that he was, once, what he had seemed to all of us—a really good and honest kid, but not as strong a one as he seemed. The thing about Tony and The Flea Club is that he wasn’t attracted to it by temperament; he was there to make a living, and once there, he was debauched by it. With a background like Tony’s you can’t see so much conspicuous sonofabitchery among the moneyed without wondering why a little more of the money shouldn’t come your way, and I dare say that Freddy aggravated this dissatisfaction by needling Tony with the idea that his importance to Nicole and The Flea Club was greater than he was getting recognition for on his pay cheque. For that matter this might have been true, because Nicole was at heart a shopkeeper who was keeping expenses down. If it was true, it would have been the strongest kind of goad to push Tony into a profitable liaison with Mrs. Jones. But the timing had been terrible, and Tony stood there in front of us not only without honour, but without any compensation, either material or spiritual, for its loss. And from this desolation he began answering Monsieur Duplin’s questions.

  Yes, it was true, he said,
that he had left Mrs. Jones early that morning. They had gone all the way to her place outside Neuilly in a taxi that night before; he had paid for it, and it had left him without enough in his pockets for breakfast. He had had to walk to the Metro, which had taken close to half an hour, then he had gone to The Flea Club, to ask Nicole for an advance, if she was up, and to fix himself some breakfast in any case. He let himself in by the cellar entrance, with his key. Bijou was already there, but hadn’t begun to straighten the place up. She was sitting at one of the tables with a pot of coffee and a loaf of bread and some butter. He had sat there sharing the breakfast. They were surprised when Nicole came in from the cellar bedroom. She was wearing a dressing-gown. She had spent the night there because she was too tired to climb the stairs to her own room, she had told them. Tony asked her if he could have some money; she had gone to fetch the cash box and had given him an advance without question. She had had a cup of coffee and a piece of bread. She reminded him that they were to rehearse that morning, but had asked him not to stay around, but to come back later, around 10:30. This had struck him as odd, and he had no explanation for it. (I had: Marie Louise and Luigi.) When he left, Bijou was cleaning up the breakfast clutter. If they wanted verification of all this, he said, they could ask Bijou. He said this so naturally—at least as naturally as he was able to say anything, in his state—that I could see no reason to believe he knew that this was the last thing, so far, we knew about Bijou.