The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  29

  NORA PICKED UP The New York Times from her doorstep, unlocked her front door, and automatically checked the signal on the security keypad. The green light burned; no one had touched the system since she had left the house. She carried the paper downstairs and opened the door to the family room. There, lost in untroubled sleep, was Davey, throw rug twisted around his hips, eyes closed, mouth open just wide enough for him to lick his lips.

  She knelt in front of Davey and drew her hand down his cheek. His eyes fluttered open. “What time is it?”

  She looked at the digital clock next to the CD player. “Seven-seventeen. You have to get up.”

  “Why? Jeez, did you forget it was Saturday?”

  “It’s Saturday? Good God,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so mixed up, I guess I thought it was Monday.”

  He noticed what she was wearing. “You already did your run? It’s so early.” He sat up and took a closer look at her face. “Did you get any sleep?” He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. A faint smell of used alcohol clung to his skin. He drooped back against the wall and looked at her. “You really have this completely wired look. I didn’t think Spectre was that exciting. In fact, from what I saw, it was kind of sucky.”

  This did not seem the time to risk telling him her theory about Clyde Morning. “Well, I had an idea or two, but I should take another look at the manuscript before I talk about them.”

  “Oh?” He tilted his head and looked wary.

  “I just want to make sure of a few things. Do you want to go back to sleep?”

  He rubbed his cheek. “Might as well get up. Maybe I can get in some golf before lunch. Would that be okay with you?”

  “Good idea.” Nora kissed his whiskery, slightly stale cheek and stood up. In the living room, she realized that she was still carrying the newspaper and tossed it onto a chair.

  After a hurried shower, Nora turned off the water and left the compartment just as naked Davey entered the bathroom. When she reached for a towel, he grabbed one of her buttocks. She bunched the towel in front of his chest and pushed him toward the shower.

  She toweled herself dry, wrapped the towel around her trunk, and came out into the bedroom to get dressed. Naked, pink, and rubbing his hair with a towel, Davey came out of the bathroom and said, “The only problem with going to the club so early is that you have to play with these old jock-type guys, and they all treat me like somebody’s retarded grandson. They never pay attention to anything I say.”

  The telephone next to the bed rang. Both of them stared at it. “Must be a wrong number,” Davey said. “Get rid of them.”

  Nora picked up the telephone and said, “Hello?”

  A male voice she had heard before but did not recognize pronounced her name.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Holly Fenn, Mrs. Chancel. I’m sorry to bother you so early, but in the midst of all the excitement down here, something came up that you might be able to help us with.”

  Davey appeared before her in a pale green polo shirt, boxer shorts, and blue knee-high socks. “So who is this idiot?”

  She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Holly Fenn.”

  “I don’t know anybody named Holly Fenn.”

  “That cop. The detective.”

  “Oh, that guy. Swell.”

  Fenn said, “Hello?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind performing a little public service for your local police, I wonder if you and your husband could come down here to the station. As friends of Mrs. Weil’s.”

  Davey removed a pair of khaki pants from the dry cleaner’s plastic bag and tossed the bag, now entangled with the hanger, toward the wastebasket, missing by a yard.

  “I don’t quite understand,” she said. “You want to talk to us about Natalie?” Davey muttered something and thrust one leg into the trousers.

  “I might have some good news for you,” Fenn said. “It seems your friend may not be dead after all. LeDonne found her, or someone who claims to be Mrs. Weil, down on the South Post Road just a little while ago. Can you be in soon? I’d appreciate your help.”

  “Well, sure,” she said. “That would be great news. But what do you need us for, to identify her?”

  “I’ll fill you in when you get here, but that’s about it. You might want to come around to the back of the station. Everything’s crazy around here.”

  “See you in about ten minutes,” she said.

  “In the midst of the pandemonium, I’m grateful to you,” Fenn said. “Thanks.” He hung up.

  Still holding the receiver, Nora looked at Davey, who was now at his shoe rack, deliberating. “I still don’t get it,” she said. Davey glanced at her, made an interrogatory noise in his throat, and bent down to select penny loafers. “He wants us to come down to the station because that policeman who was at Natalie’s house— LeDonne?—because he says LeDonne found a woman who said she was Natalie down on the South Post Road.”

  Davey slowly straightened up and frowned at her. “So why do they need us?”

  “I’m not really sure.”

  “It’s stupid. All they have to do is look at her driver’s license. What’s the point of dragging us in?”

  “I don’t know. He said he’d explain when we got there.”

  “It can’t be Natalie. You saw her bedroom. People don’t get up and walk away from a bloodbath like that.”

  “According to you, Paddi Mann did,” she said.

  His face turned a bright, smooth red, and he moved away to slip on the loafers. “I didn’t say that. I said she disappeared.

  Natalie was murdered.”

  “Why are you blushing?”

  “I’m not blushing,” he said. “I’m pissed off. You expect cops to be kind of dim and incompetent, but this is a new low. They pick up some screwball who says she’s Natalie, and we have to waste the morning doing their job for them.” He paced to the door, shoved his hands in his pockets, and gave her a guarded look. “I hope you know enough not to blurt out anything I told you last night.”

  Nora noticed that the receiver was still in her hand and replaced it. “Why would I?”

  “I wish we had time to get something to eat,” Davey said. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”

  A few minutes later, the Audi was zipping beneath the trees that lined Old Pottery Road as Davey wondered aloud if he should tell the police about finding Paddi Mann’s copy of Night Journey in Natalie Weil’s bedroom. “The problem is, I took it. I bet I could get into trouble for that.”

  For Nora, the question represented another instance of Hugo Driver’s amazing ability to go on making trouble long after his death. “There’s no reason to bring it up.”

  Davey gave her an injured look. “This is serious, Nora. Maybe I shouldn’t go in with you. This woman can’t be Natalie, but what if she is?”

  “If she can’t be, she isn’t. And if somehow she is Natalie, she’ll have a lot more to talk about than a copy of Night Journey.”

  “I guess so.” He sighed. “You said you had some idea about Spectre.”

  “Oh!” she said. “When I was running into the Bird Shelter, something about the writing occurred to me. But I could be wrong.”

  Davey accelerated downhill toward the green light on the Post Road, signaled for a turn, and swung north into the fast lane.

  “You know how you used to joke about Clyde Morning and Marletta Teatime being the same person? I think they really could be.”

  He gave her an incredulous glance.

  “Last month, I read a Marletta Teatime novel, remember? The Grave Is Waiting?”

  “The Waiting Grave,” Davey said.

  “Right. Some things in the style struck me as funny. Marletta had people say ‘too true’ a couple of times when they agreed with something. Who says ‘too true’? English people, maybe, or Australians, but Americans don’t say it. In Spectre, people say ‘too true’ over and over.”

  “Ob
viously Clyde reads her books.”

  “But there’s more. Marletta started half a dozen sentences with the word ‘indeed.’ The same thing happens in Spectre. And there’s something about shoes. In the Marletta book, the gardener character, the one who kills the little boy, his shoes are crosshatched with scuff marks. That’s how you find out later that he was impersonating a minister in the other town. Well, in Spectre, Morning keeps saying that George Whatshisname’s shoes are crosshatched with scuff marks. It’s not even a very good description.”

  “Oh great, now you’re an editor.”

  Nora said nothing.

  “You know what I mean. I don’t think it’s a bad description, that’s all.”

  “Okay, look at their joke names,” Nora said. “Morning and Teatime, it’s like being called six o’clock and four o’clock.”

  “Hah,” Davey said. “You know, maybe Morning invented Teatime as a pseudonym. It’s not actually impossible.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If he had two names, he could unload twice as many books. God knows, he must have needed the money. All he had to do was set up Marletta’s post office box and a separate bank account. Nobody ever saw either one of them, anyhow.”

  “So if they were the same person, it wouldn’t cause any problems?”

  “Not if we don’t tell anybody,” Davey said. “When Spectre is edited, we take out all the ‘indeeds’ and ‘too trues’ and the crosshatches, that’s all.”

  “You could get a little publicity out of it,” Nora said.

  “And make us look like fools. No thanks. The best thing is to keep quiet and let the problem go away by itself. Which is what I wish we could do with this stupid Driver business.”

  “What Driver business?”

  “It’s so ridiculous I don’t even want to talk about it.”

  “This is the problem your father told you about.”

  “The reason I had to watch that travesty. Okay, here goes.”

  Davey turned off the Post Road and drove toward the stone building of the Westerholm police station. The adjacent parking lot seemed unusually full to Nora.

  “How can that movie be a nuisance for Chancel House?”

  “It can’t be,” Davey said, sounding weary, “not in itself. What happened was, these two screwball women in Massachusetts went out to see that dumb movie right after they were going through some family papers in their basement.” Davey came out of the main lot and turned into the police department lot, which was as crowded as the one they had just left. Cars and vans were parked in front of the station.

  Nora said, “Look at those vans.” She pointed at two long vans bearing the logos and call letters of network news programs in New York.

  “Just what we need.”

  “These women found old family papers?”

  “They thought they found a way to scare a lot of money out of my old man. Their greasy lawyer did everything but admit it.”

  Davey had now driven to the far end of the police lot without finding an opening, and he circled around toward the parking places reserved for police vehicles.

  “I don’t get it,” Nora said.

  “They found notes a sister of theirs was supposed to have made. Like three pages. In a suitcase.” He pulled into an empty spot between two police cars.

  “They’re claiming that their sister wrote Night Journey?”

  Whatever the women in Massachusetts were claiming was apparently not to be discussed, because Davey immediately got out of the car. Nora opened her door, stood up, and saw Officer LeDonne approaching. He looked like a man under a great deal of pressure.

  “I’m not moving this car,” Davey said. “You asked us to come down here.”

  “Will you follow me into the station, please? Mr. Chancel? Mrs. Chancel? I’ll have to ask you to move pretty quickly, and not to talk to anyone until we’re with Chief Fenn.” He came toward them as he spoke and halted about two feet away from Davey. “Stick as close to me as you can.” He looked at them both, turned around, and set off toward the front of the building.

  When they came around the side of the station, Nora noticed something she had not taken in earlier. Unlike the cars in the main lot, these were occupied. The men and women waiting in their cars watched LeDonne lead the Chancels toward the steps of the police station.

  “Why, half the town is out here,” she said.

  “Been here since dawn,” LeDonne said.

  They hurried up the three long steps. Nora felt hundreds of avid eyes watching them from behind windshields and then was distracted by the commotion on the other side of the door. LeDonne sighed. “Up to me? We’d put ’em all in the holding pen and let ’em out one at a time.” He faced the door, motioned them nearer, and lunged inside. Davey moved in behind Nora, put his hands on her hips, and pushed.

  As Nora knew from her misadventure with the millionaire’s child, the tall desk manned by a sergeant dominated one side of the space beyond the entrance, and on the other stood two long rows of wooden benches. A few steps ahead of her, LeDonne was pushing his way through a crowd surging forward from the benches. Two uniformed men behind the desk shouted for order. Davey’s hands propelled her past an outheld microphone into a babble of questions and a sudden wave of bodies. Voices battered at her. Davey seemed to lift her off the ground and speed her along into the narrow vacancy behind LeDonne. From behind her right ear, Nora heard a reporter asking something about the Chancel family, but the question vanished as they turned into a wide hallway, where, abruptly, they found themselves alone.

  “Chief Fenn’s office is up ahead,” LeDonne told them, seeming to promise that everything would be answered there, and started off again, leading them past a series of doors with pebbled glass windows. On the far side of a wide metal staircase he opened a door with the words CHIEF OF DETECTIVES written on the opaque window.

  In the office stood a rolltop desk, a long, green metal desk facing two wooden chairs, and a gray metal table pushed up against a pale green cinder-block wall. Both the metal desk and the table were covered with papers, and more papers bristled from the open rolltop. A narrow window behind the green desk looked out on the police parking lot, where the Audi stood like a trespasser in the rows of black-and-white cars.

  “Holly Fenn is a slob,” Davey said, surveying the room with his arms crossed over his chest. “Are we surprised? No, we are not.”

  Nora sat on a wobbly wooden chair, and Holly Fenn charged through the door, carrying a thick, battered notebook before him like a weapon. “I suppose the press sort of closed in on you out there.”

  “They did,” she said, and laughed. “What are they doing here, anyhow?”

  Fenn stood up. “Our chief thought we could manage them a little better inside the station.” He held his hand out toward Davey, who shook it. “Thanks for showing up like this, Mr. Chancel.”

  “I meant, what are they doing here?” Nora said. “I don’t understand how they found out so fast about this woman who says she’s Natalie.”

  Fenn paused halfway to his desk and turned to look at her. “You mean you really don’t know?”

  “Guess not,” she said.

  “Didn’t you see the papers this morning?”

  She saw herself tossing the newspaper toward a chair.

  “Oh, my God.” Davey put his hands on the top of his head. “You did it? You got him?”

  “Looks like it.” For a moment Fenn looked almost pleased with himself.

  “Did what?” Nora asked.

  “Brought in our murderer,” Fenn said. “Been in custody since about ten last night. I think Popsie Jennings must have called the Times herself. You know Popsie, don’t you?”

  Both Chancels knew the notorious Popsie Jennings, who owned a women’s clothing store on Main Street called The Unfettered Woman and lived in the guesthouse of her third husband’s estate on the good side of Mount Avenue, about a quarter of a mile from the Poplars. A short, solid, blond woman in her mid-fifties with a Gitane
voice and a fondness for profanity, Popsie looked as though she had been born on a sailboat and raised on a golf course, but she had lived unconventionally, even raucously, and was supposed to have named her dress shop after her conception of herself. She was rumored to have in her bedroom two paintings of horses by George Stubbs given her by her first husband, and to declare that all three were well hung—the paintings, the horses, and the first husband.

  “He broke into Popsie’s house?” Davey said. “He’s lucky he didn’t wind up tied naked to a bed and force-fed vodka.”

  “He almost was,” said Fenn. “He came over to her house around nine last night. She got suspicious, nailed him with an andiron, taped his hands and feet together while he was out, and then got a cleaver and said she’d castrate him if he didn’t confess.”

  “Wow,” Nora said. “Popsie was pretty sure of herself.”

  “Pretty damn mad, too.”

  “So who was the guy?” asked Davey.

  “I suppose you know him, too. Richard Dart.”

  “Dick Dart?” Davey sat down clumsily on the chair next to Nora’s and gave her a look of utterly empty astonishment. “I went to school with him. His brother, Petey, was in my class, and Dick was in the sophomore class when I graduated. We were never friends or anything like that, but I see him around town now and then. I introduced him to Nora a couple of months ago— remember, Nora?”

  She shook her head, wondering why they were not talking about Natalie Weil and still not quite capable of taking in that she had actually met the man she had called the Wolf of Westerholm. “Where?”

  “Gilhoolie’s. Right after it opened.”

  And then she remembered the languid, drawling man in the awful bar, the man who had complimented her scent when she had not been wearing one. So she had spoken to, had looked into the eyes of, had been lightly touched by, the man she called the Wolf, who turned out to be a creepy, aging preppy with a drinking problem. The reason he acted as though he hated women turned out to be that he really did hate women. Still, Dick Dart did not at all match the vague mental images she had formed of Wester-holm’s murderer. He was too ordinary in the wrong ways, and not at all ordinary in other wrong ways. But maybe she should have guessed that the Wolf would have an ill-concealed sense of his own superiority.