by Matthew Head
Since Nicole had asked him not to hang around the club, he was left with an awkward interval of time to kill, and being a good Frenchman, he decided to kill it in a café. With money fresh in his pocket and, he thought, a rich woman who would keep him supplied with more from now on, he went to the Deux Magots instead of one of the smaller inexpensive places he would ordinarily have used, and had a cup of coffee. Perhaps the waiter could verify this. But he had felt restless, and had left the café.
He hesitated then, and when Monsieur Duplin told him to go ahead, Tony said, “You are not going to believe me.”
“That is not your affair,” said Monsieur Duplin. “Tell me the truth.”
“I went to a church.”
“Very well. What church?”
“To St. Sulpice.”
“What did you do there?”
“Nothing. I took a place in the back of the church.”
“Very well. How long did you stay?”
“Perhaps half an hour.”
“And then?”
“There is a gramophone shop at the corner of the Boulevard Raspail. I went there.”
“Can you verify that?”
“No. I did not go into the shop.”
“Then why did you go there? Tell your story without these questions.”
“I went there because there was a display of Nicole’s records. It gave me pleasure to look at them with my name on them. I have done this before. Then I walked along the boulevard looking in other shop windows. Then it was time to appear for rehearsal so I walked back to the club. But I did not go in. There was a police ambulance in the street. They put Nicole in—I did not know it was Nicole, but who else could it be except Nicole or Bijou?—and then a policeman remained at the door. I did not want anything to do with the police. So I went home. I stayed there until you came for me. That is all.”
Monsieur Duplin stood contemplating Tony in silence, as we all stood waiting for what he was going to say. When he spoke, finally, he said to the officer, “This man is to be discharged.” The girl gave a wailing cry of relief. Monsieur Duplin looked at her and added, “—but this woman is to be held.” The girl was stunned into silence.
“Take the woman,” Monsieur Duplin said to the officer. “The man will come with me.”
All this time, Mary Finney was at The Flea Club. She went with no definite idea in mind, she told me—that is, with no definite question she thought she might find the answer to. She wanted to see whether the place itself might suggest questions and answers, not necessarily by anything new she would discover there, not necessarily by anything tangible, but by the general air and suggestion, through a kind of osmosis. She wanted to try to visualise some of the things I had told her, she said, in the places where they had happened.
She let herself in by the cellar entrance, closed the door behind her, and stood for a few moments looking at the dim, suggestive room. The greyed winter light seeped down from the small high windows leaving the corners in obscurity. The place was as cold, she thought, as a tomb, and the word tomb kept playing in her mind. Professor Johnson’s two great pits, empty and desolate, sank into the floor as if they were bottomless. She walked now between the crowded tables and stared into these pits, thinking how like they were to graves waiting for bodies. Then, turning from them, she tried to visualise the room full of the night crowd, with Nicole singing and Tony playing. She tried to visualise Tony and Freddy and Mrs. Jones as I had found them there that evening, Freddy and Mrs. Jones arguing over Tony as if he were up for sale (as indeed, it now appeared, he had been) and, finally, Tony leaving and Mrs. Jones wailing that she loved him. Then she tried to see Mrs. Jones and Freddy, as Mrs. Jones threw her drink over him, and then Freddy alone, as he sat there in humiliation and degradation. She tried to imagine Bibi finding Freddy, and taking him out to a taxi. She went over to the small bedroom, imagining Nicole there, and imagining her getting up, that morning, to admit somebody who had sat with her at a table, with a glass of whisky and soda, and then killed her. She didn’t know, yet, what I was learning at that time—that Bijou had arrived, according to Tony’s story, and then that Tony had let himself in, finding Bijou there and sharing a breakfast with her, before Nicole appeared and fetched the cash box to give him an advance.
Dr. Finney went upstairs to the bar, then, and tried to imagine it smoky and crowded, with Bibi at her station waiting for “teekleesh” customers. She imagined Luigi there, stringing me along and then meeting Marie Louise. She imagined Audrey with René, Tony with Freddy, Nicole singing, in her glamour make-up and her lamé gown, instead of soiled, crumpled, and bloody as she had seen her that morning. Going upstairs she imagined Mrs. Jones in hysterics as Tony held her and Nicole slapped her face to bring her round. She went into Nicole’s bedroom and imagined Marie Louise and Luigi there, imagined me banging on the door, imagined them scurrying downstairs and out the boulevard door while I more or less stood guard for them.
Here Dr. Finney made a brief telephone call to Emily Collins. Then she went downstairs to the cellar again and recalled in detail the only part of the whole story, up to that point, that she had been directly a part of. She re-enacted our entrance—Emmy’s, Professor Johnson’s, mine, and her own, and our discovery of Nicole. She sat at the table where Nicole had sat, sat there for a long time in the near-dark, thinking that she knew what had happened to Nicole now. Then the telephone rang.
As soon as I got away from Freddy and Monsieur Duplin, I went to a pay station and rang The Flea Club. Dr. Finney answered, and I gave her the gist of what had happened that afternoon. She asked me a couple of questions, particularly about Tony’s account of his morning, and I answered them, in line with the summary I have just given of what had been going on. Then she asked me how many of the guests 1 had lined up for that night. I hadn’t done very well, but told her I would get on the ball and do everything I could. She told me she would see me at the hotel half an hour or so before dinner—she didn’t think she’d have time to change—and then she hung up.
Then she crossed directly over to the corner of the room where Professor Johnson’s workmen’s tools were stacked, selected a shovel, turned on the lights, and began to dig. After five minutes or so she had discovered what she expected to discover. Then she sat down again and did a final job of putting her information, her theories, and her surmises into order.
She never said so to me, but I know damn well how she felt: she felt smug.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE BLUE WINTER twilight had already set in when I got back to the Prince du Royaume. Emmy let me into the suite. She was, in a way, all dressed up, which meant that she had changed from one indescribable garment to another, and had a general look of being freshly talcumed.
“I thought I’d get ready for the party early,” she said. “Things have been so quiet around here.”
“Where I was they weren’t,” I told her. “Also I’m behind in party arrangements. I’ve got to get hold of the rest of these people and see that they get there.”
“I’ve taken care of some of that,” Emmy said. “Things have been quiet but I didn’t mean nothing’s happened. Quite a bit has happened. I’ve several things to tell you, and I’ll begin immediately.” She had a list of reminders, written on a small neat card, which she checked herself against from time to time.
“In the first place, I’ll tell you about Audrey,” she said, “partly because it sounded so important at the time but turns out to mean nothing at all. Marie Louise called down and said Audrey was awake and terribly worried about something she wanted to tell Dr. Finney. I said Mary wasn’t in but I would come up if that would help. Audrey didn’t like that very much but I told Marie Louise to tell her that I’d relay whatever it was to Mary just as soon as I saw her, which would be before Audrey could see her, so Audrey said for me to come on up. Gracious, she did look pitiful.”
“She’s been having a rough time.”
“I know. At first I thought she might be worried about s
omething she had said under the sodium pentathol, because Mary says she did do quite a lot of talking about extraordinary things. But they don’t remember what they say, you know.”
“She’s lucky, then.”
“But it wasn’t about anything she had already said. Do you know, she called me up there to tell me a perfectly pointless lie.”
“That’s the way she is. Sort of feels that almost any lie is a kind of protection, just by virtue of not being the truth.”
“Isn’t that pitiful? Well, she beat about the bush in the most elaborate manner, but what it came down to was that she wanted to tell me she had been with René that morning when Nicole was attacked. They were not in either of their hotels, she said, and of course that’s the kind of thing the police can check.”
“They might have been somewhere else for the night.”
“I don’t care about all that. What I mean is that whether or not they were out, she lied about where they were.”
“Where were they?”
“I don’t know. She said they were at the Louvre.”
“Is that impossible? It may seem a little out of character, but strictly speaking, it’s not impossible.”
“Of course it’s impossible. That was Tuesday. The Louvre was closed. I had to scratch off the Louvre and substitute the Ecclesiastical Tour, remember?”
“So you did. Well I’ll be damned.”
“A perfectly pointless lie, as things turned out. Of course it makes you think of a lot of things that would explain it. Well, that’s the first thing on my list.”
She produced a small stub of pencil, neatly sharpened, and drew a line through an item.
“Now:” she said. “René called you not long after you and Mary left, to find out why this number had been left for him to call. I told him I thought it was important but not urgent and he could probably get you or Mary here later. He said he’d be at that number until 5:30, when he was going out. I must say, he sounded very charming on the telephone.”
“He would.”
“Then I had a little inspiration, and called Marie Louise to ask if she knew whether René might be going out with Audrey at 5:30. She asked Audrey and Audrey said she did have the date but was afraid she was going to feel too bad to keep it. Look too bad, I imagine she really meant. So I held that in reserve. But apparently the question had got Audrey to thinking because it wasn’t long after that she got worried and decided she had to tell that Louvre lie.”
The pencil drew another line.
“Well, Mary called. I was glad, because I hated thinking of her sitting down there in that spooky cellar. She wanted to know if anything had happened, and I told her about Audrey saying she was with René. Mary said that was perfect. And then she asked me to tell you to arrange for René to be her escort for dinner tonight. But I thought, why not arrange it with René myself, without bothering you? And do you know what I did?”
“Surrounded him.”
“No. I was mean to Audrey. I took Mary’s thermometer and went up and took Audrey’s temperature, which was perfectly normal, but I looked at the thermometer as if it weren’t, and said to Audrey that I didn’t think Dr. Finney would want her to go out. That was true as could be, of course, but had nothing to do with temperature. I practised deception, and really it wasn’t necessary. I could have said the same thing without the thermometer, couldn’t I? I feel I’ve been in Paris long enough; I’m beginning to absorb an instinct for duplicity from these people.”
“Don’t worry about it. It will pass. Did Audrey agree to stay in?”
“Yes, after a little hesitation. I also said a few things about how I didn’t like the look of those puffs around her eyes, and a few things like that, which I think might have encouraged her in her decision to stay home.”
“But Dr. Finney wants her there. She wants everybody there.”
“I know. I’ll reverse the decision, that’s all. Then I got Marie Louise outside and half-explained things to her as much as necessary, and said I wanted her to call René and make a date with him for Mary. Naturally Marie Louise thought it was impossible, and said she didn’t want to speak to René even on the telephone, but we talked about it awhile, and she changed her mind. I said, why couldn’t she call and say that she had an acquaintance in town who was invited to a dinner and had to have an escort and would René oblige just as a favour to the Bellens? We worked in a few interesting suggestions as to Mary’s tin and diamond holdings.”
“Her—?”
“Oh, yes, she does have them. A few years ago the International Missionary United Council gave her its $1,000 award, and she brought tin and diamond stock with it. I believe René got the impression that the holdings are considerably more extensive than they are, but no actual falsehoods were told.”
“Miss Collins, I’m packing you back to the honest simplicity of Africa tomorrow morning.”
“I really think you had better.”
“You gave poor René the impression that he was going out with a vivacious red-headed tin-and-diamond heiress.”
“Oh, no, he knows that Mary is an older woman. What he has no conception of is her invulnerability. The important thing is that I did manage to make the date. He’s meeting us in the foyer of the restaurant.”
“At the cost of your immortal soul.”
“Oh, dear,” said Emmy.
I checked over the list of people who were to be Dr. Finney’s guests at that dinner, and although I am not superstitious I was at least interested to note that it added up to thirteen—Marie Louise and Luigi, Audrey and René, Freddy and Bibi, Mrs. Jones and Harry, Dr. Finney and Emily Collins and Monsieur Duplin and myself, and Tony. Thirteen. I checked off those who had already been told about it, and saw that since Emmy had lured René into the deal, I had been remiss only in the cases of Mrs. Jones and Harry and Tony. I went through hell to get Mrs. Jones on the telephone but I did, and although she said that she had no intention of subjecting herself to further humiliations, I thought she sounded curious enough so that she was likely to change her mind and come to fill the place I said I would save for her. And if she came, Harry was bound to come too. But I never did get Tony. I hated to face Mary Finney with this, especially since I had had him right there that afternoon, but I just didn’t have any idea how to get hold of him. The best I could do was to leave a message for Monsieur Duplin to the effect that if he had any way of getting in touch with him, which of course he would have, then he was to see that Tony got there.
Audrey told me on the telephone that she couldn’t come, because that horrid little Miss Collins had told her she couldn’t. I said that little Miss Collins now said she could. Audrey said all right, she’d come. Then she said, no she wouldn’t, she looked too terrible. Then she said oh, all right, if I wanted her to, she would. She see-sawed around until I stopped her on a “yes she would” and we left it like that. Marie Louise got on the line and said if Dr. Finney really insisted, then all right, she herself would see that Audrey came along with her and Luigi.
Do you remember Charlie Chaplin in a picture called ‘The Gold Rush’? Remember that pitiful scene where he had everything all set up for a party, and nobody came?
Well, nobody came to Mary Finney’s party. Not a soul. Nobody except all the policemen, that is, and of course Emmy and me, and Monsieur Duplin.
We came into the lobby expecting to find René waiting for us, and there sat Monsieur Duplin, alone, all bright eyes and little pot belly and pressed suit with a ribbon in the lapel and, above all, all smiles. He jumped up and kissed Dr. Finney’s hand—a considerable feat in itself since Jack Dempsey couldn’t have been less prepared for it or more startled than Dr. Finney was—and then did the same for Emmy, who went as rigid as a poker and then seemed to turn quite limp for a moment.
Dr. Finney craned her neck in search of René as if he might be behind a chair or something of the kind, but before she could ask a question Monsieur Duplin said, “I have taken the liberty, if you please, of intercepting Mons
ieur Velerin-Pel.” He was still smiling all over the place.
“Intercepting?” said Dr. Finney. “How come?”
I translated “how come?” for Monsieur Duplin, who then said, “It seemed most advisable, dear Doctor, that Monsieur Velerin-Pel not attend the function tonight. You must allow me to explain.”
“I certainly must,” Dr. Finney agreed emphatically.
“But first you must allow me to say that I have also intercepted two others of your guests. The boy and the girl. She is quite lovely, I find. And he a very handsome young man. An extremely attractive couple.”
Dr. Finney stood transfixed with suspicion, but instead of asking a question she said, “Yeah.”
Monsieur Duplin stood smiling until it was obvious that no one was going to say anything, and then added, completely unabashed, “And the mother was with them. Mrs. Bellen. So naturally, it was necessary to enlarge my interception to include her.”
“Most natural thing in the world,” said Dr. Finney, grimly. “And I suppose something similar has happened to Mrs. Jones and Harry?”
Monsieur Duplin looked serious and sympathetic and said, “Ah, that was more complicated. The man, Harry, the lawyer, spoke to me at length concerning the best interests of his client, demanding to know what we wanted of her presence at the dinner. So naturally I told him to reassure himself. I said that it was not necessary for them to come. But the woman, who seems to be of great force, took from him the telephone and told me that of course she would come. And so it was necessary that I send a man to their place outside Neuilly to make certain that they did not. It would have been most disastrous.”
“And Tony?” questioned Dr. Finney. “Did you bother to find him?”
“Ah, yes?” said Monsieur Duplin gently. “We found Tony.”
Dr. Finney looked her question at him this time, and he murmured, “Yes. Quite so. Intercepted.”
“My goodness,” said Dr. Finney, elaborately icy, “I wonder what could be holding Freddy and Bibi?”
