The chihuahuas were asleep on Andrew’s lap. He sat listening, faintly disgusted, pitying, but, worst of all, torn once more by bewildering doubts. Here was the Thatchers’ Maureen again, Maureen the ministering angel, the only friend to the old defeated sewing woman. And yet neither the sobs, the words, nor the voice quite rang true and, every now and then, as Rowena La Marche looked over at him, there seemed to be a calculation in the narrowed eyes or, more accurately, a kind of desperation. Was it caused by fear of him? Or was it merely an inner conflict between the desire to melodramatize herself to someone and the need for a drink which couldn’t be taken as long as he was there?
The choked, prattling voice was saying, “And she’d come here, Mr. Jordan. Every Thursday afternoon she’d come. Just to sit. Just to talk and sit. And she’d sit there where you’re sitting and do you know what she’d talk about? You. All the time, you, her husband, her wonderful husband. There was love. You don’t have to tell me. I know what love is. I’ve always had a lot of love. Maureen, I would say, Maureen dear, that’s why you’re so kind to me. You’ve got love, and those who have love have loads of love extra to give away.”
Once again the eyes inside the encircling mascara flicked their odd furtive glance at him.
“To think of it. Hoodlums—dirty bums from off of the street, breaking in and destroying all that love.”
He said, “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Oh, I didn’t,” she said quickly. “Not for a month, I didn’t. And it had never happened before. Not a glimpse of her for a month. I was worried at first. Then I figured, Dear Maureen with all those parties, all those grand friends, how can I expect her to keep it up regular? But she’ll come, I said to myself. When she’s good and ready, she’ll …”
The voice disintegrated into a hopeless moan. She was dabbing all over her face with the handkerchief. Suddenly the three chihuahuas woke up. They didn’t get off Andrew’s lap. They merely all sat up, all gazing toward the door, all wriggling in what seemed an ecstasy of anticipation. Andrew looked beyond Rowena La Marche to the door and, as he did so, it opened and a man came in. The three dogs leaped off his lap and ran to the man, beside themselves with joy. Rowena La Marche jumped up and swung around. Andrew got up too, for the man who had come into the room was his stepfather.
Lem was jauntily dressed as usual with a black chesterfield and a black homburg. He had a gift-wrapped package under his arm. In the first moment he had stooped to pat the chihuahuas. It was only when he unbent that he saw Andrew.
“Andrew!” The expression on his face was an extraordinary combination of astonishment and panic.
“Yes,” said Rowena La Marche, twisting and retwisting the sodden handkerchief with chip-nailed fingers. “Look, Lem. Look who’s here.”
With a sickly version of the smile he reserved for his wife, Lem put the package down and came to Andrew, holding out his hand.
“Well,” he said, “what a surprise. I had no idea you knew my sister.”
“He came,” panted Rowena La Marche. “He just rung the bell and there he was. And I’ve been telling him. About Maureen, I mean. How good she was, how time and time again she’d come when there was no need, just to bring me a little gift, just to cheer me up. I’ve been telling him she was an angel—an angel straight from heaven.”
She turned back to the chair and sank into it. All the dogs bounded into her lap, competing for the best position, snarling and nipping at each other.
There was a Lalique glass clock on the bookshelf. It said, 3:15. Andrew remembered Lieutenant Mooney.
“Yes,” Lem was saying in a hushed, funereal voice. “Rowie’s right, old boy. Wonderful what Maureen did for her. Absolutely wonderful. And I’ll bet she never even let you know. Maureen wasn’t one to boast about her charities. Not Maureen, was she, Rowie?”
Andrew knew then that he hadn’t believed a word either of them had said. He also knew that he hadn’t the faintest idea of what this was all about.
“I see Rowie, of course,” Lem was saying. “I come as often as I can.” The smile, intended for Andrew, was far too bluff. “When I can sneak off from your mother, that is. Your mother’s a fine woman, old boy, but—well, I don’t think she and Rowie would have much in common. So, when I can, I come over, cheer Rowie up a bit. She hasn’t many friends. No one but me, really, and Maureen …”
It was Rowena La Marche who made Andrew decide to leave, not that he felt anything could be achieved by staying. But her face was in torment now and he knew what that meant. There had to be a nip from the bottle and, until he left, her pride or her alcoholic’s self-delusion of sobriety would prevent her from getting it.
It had been a meaningless interview and Andrew left it that way. He picked up the overnight bag. Lem took him to the door, prattling almost as incoherently as Rowena La Marche. Andrew could tell, although his stepfather lacked the courage to approach the subject directly, that he was longing to beg him not to let his mother know about these fraternal interludes in his life.
“Terrible for you, old boy. Absolutely terrible. If any of us can help, we’re ready at any time. Me, Rowie—any of us. Just call on us, old boy. Is that a promise?”
Me, Rowie—any of us. Who were “any of us?” The chihuahuas?
The dogs didn’t come to see him off. As Lem closed the door behind him, he could still hear them whimpering and snarling on Rowena La Marche’s baby-blue lap.
He took a cab back to the apartment; he unpacked the overnight bag and, after some hesitation, slipped the jewels into the back of one of the highboy drawers. That would have to do for the moment. The police had tidied the place up. It was painfully the same as it had always been and the familiarity brought Maureen more vividly back to him than ever before. She seemed, ghostlike, to be everywhere, hovering just beyond the line of his vision, as if she were trying to communicate with him, to reassure him, to beg him to believe in her.
His head had started to ache. He knew he would need all his energies for the ordeal with Lieutenant Mooney. He went into the bathroom for aspirin. Maureen was there too.
You are the easiest person in the world to love.
At four o’clock precisely the lieutenant appeared. Bulkily impressive, he came into the living room and sat down without taking off his coat.
“Well, Mr. Jordan, find the apartment okay? They fixed it up all right for you?”
The heavy walk, the impassive face, the almost clumsy slowness of the lieutenant’s gestures were all intended to give the impression of a kindly routine cop, Andrew realized that, but the effect didn’t quite come off. The small blue eyes were much too intelligent.
“I don’t plan on keeping you long right now, Mr. Jordan. A couple of questions, that’s all. I’ve just been to see your brother. Didn’t have much to say for himself. It seems he does a lot of traveling. Hasn’t been seeing much of you and your wife since you married, he said.”
“Not too much.”
“Your mother said about the same thing. Guess as a family you’re not too close.”
The lieutenant was fumbling in the pocket of his topcoat. He brought out a thick dog-eared leather notebook.
“I didn’t let your mother know that it wasn’t hoodlums who did it. A fine woman like that—you’ve got to respect her feelings as long as it’s possible. I’m holding it back from the press too—for the time being.”
Without looking up, he flipped through the book.
“Mr. Jordan, about this woman you said your wife called from Mr. Stanton’s party, this woman you said lost a sapphire clip—Gloria Leyden.”
He did look up then and the faintest gleam in his eyes—a second’s revelation of triumph—warned Andrew of what was going to come.
“You had the name right. Gloria Leyden. I got her address from Mr. Stanton. I went to see her before I talked to your brother. She lives with another girl, Mary Cross, who used to share an apartment with your wife. Miss Cross was out but Miss Leyden was there. She said she was at
Mr. Stanton’s party. She said she left early, too. But when I asked her if she’d lost a sapphire clip and whether your wife called her up later to check, she—Mr. Jordan, I think you got a bit screwed up there. Miss Leyden never lost no sapphire clip. Your wife didn’t call her either.”
Thanks to the warning, there’d been time for Andrew to steady himself. All right. Maureen hadn’t been calling Gloria Leyden. That had finally been established. It meant she probably hadn’t been spending the afternoon helping Bill Stanton, either. But, instead of the pain which this proof of her untruthfulness would once have brought he felt the faint excitement of facts fitting into a pattern. The anonymous letter—a threatening enemy—a blackmailer. Why not? Wouldn’t that explain all the small, bewildering mysteries of their married life? Someone had known about the Pasadena affair—or some other later episode in New York. Maureen, faced with a blackmailer, had tried to handle him alone. A blackmailer, an ever-increasing pressure, and finally a struggle for the gun.
Once the idea came, he was stubbornly sure he was right, and there flooded through him aching pity for his wife and a bitter hatred for her unknown persecutor.
The lieutenant was watching him. The gleam of triumph in his eyes was even more evident now. Andrew knew exactly how to interpret it. So far as Lieutenant Mooney was concerned, he had been caught out in a lie. Here was the old, most familiar of police patterns, the husband who had quarreled with his wife (weren’t the Adamses witnesses of the quarrel?), the husband who was desperately trying to lie because he had killed the wife.
The lieutenant’s tongue emerged between his lips. It was very pink. “Well, Mr. Jordan, do you still say you and your wife weren’t quarreling at that party?”
“We weren’t quarreling.”
“And you still say your wife called this Gloria Leyden?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“You went into that room and there she was on the phone? You said, ‘Who are you calling?’ And she said, ‘Gloria Leyden’?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hear any of the actual words she used on the phone?”
“I did. She said, ‘You’ve found it? Thank God, I was going out of my mind that she … ’ Then she saw me and stopped. I thought she was talking to Gloria Leyden’s roommate about the clip.”
“But she wasn’t, was she?”
“It looks that way.”
“Her explanation of the call to you was a lie. Why was she lying?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Because she’d been calling someone she didn’t want you to know about?”
“That could be one reason.”
“One reason? What other reason could there have been?” Lieutenant Mooney’s voice took on a minatory boom. “Mr. Jordan, you said there was no trouble between you, no secrets, no other woman, no other man. Do you still say that?”
What was to stop him saying, “I believe my wife was being blackmailed”? It seemed such a logical step to take that he felt his lips parting to say the words. Then, just in time, he realized that the only way to put up a convincing case for a blackmailer was to produce the letter to Rosemary, which would make himself a far more plausible suspect than any hypothetical blackmailer.
Feeling the sweat trickling down his armpits, he said, “There was no trouble between me and my wife. So far as I know there was no trouble in her life at all.”
“And yet she lied to you about a telephone call?”
“My God, how many wives lie to their husbands about telephone calls?”
“And get themselves murdered?” Lieutenant Mooney rose. He stood looming over Andrew, looking down, wooden-faced, holding his yellow pencil in his thick, red hand. “Okay, Mr. Jordan. Let’s review this situation. A couple of people at a party—people with no ax to grind—say they saw you quarreling with your wife. You deny it. You say your wife was calling a girl friend about a missing sapphire clip. The girl friend denies it. Your wife gets killed. Someone tried to fake it to look like hoodlums, but it wasn’t hoodlums. Then what was it? Someone with a grudge against your wife? You deny anyone had a grudge against her. Someone who came out of her past? You say there was no one in her past. Okay. What are we left with? A wife who got herself killed for no reason?”
Andrew returned his gaze. “At the moment it looks that way.”
“That’s all you’ve got to say?”
“That’s all.”
For a moment Lieutenant Mooney stood watching Andrew, the hint of triumph still in his eyes, as if this cumbersome near-accusation must have some miraculous effect on him. When nothing happened, he gave a stolid little shrug and, still standing, consulted his notebook once more.
“One other thing, Mr. Jordan. You told me your wife’s doctor said she couldn’t have kids without a difficult and dangerous operation.”
“That’s right.”
“I guess you know the name of this doctor?”
“Yes, it’s my mother’s doctor, Dr. Mortimer Williams.”
“Did you ever accompany your wife when she went to consult Dr. Williams?”
“No.”
“But you have his telephone number?”
“I can get it.”
Andrew went into the bedroom and found the number in Maureen’s telephone book. He returned to Lieutenant Mooney, who wrote the number down.
“Okay with you, Mr. Jordan, if I use your phone?”
“Naturally.”
There was a phone in the living room but Lieutenant Mooney got up ponderously and, going into the bedroom, shut the door behind him. Andrew thought of the jewels in the highboy drawer and it seemed completely insane to him that he hadn’t thrown them, like the wedding ring, down a drain. He started to pace up and down the room. Maureen seemed to be everywhere, slipping invisibly out of the kitchen, gliding toward him from the hall. She had been killed by a blackmailer, killed in a pathetic attempt to conceal from him a truth which, in their new love, could so easily have been forgiven. And here he was, instead of helping the police to bring her murderer to justice, lying, stalling, worrying about his own skin and Ned’s … Suddenly what he was doing seemed contemptible to him. To hell with the consequences. He must tell the lieutenant. He …
Lieutenant Mooney came out of the bedroom. Moving even more leisurely than ever, he lumbered across the room. He reached Andrew. He stopped in front of him.
“Well, Mr. Jordan, looks like you got a bit screwed up again. Dr. Williams says your wife’s one of his patients, yes, but there was nothing wrong with her that would keep her from having a baby, he says—no need for an operation, nothing.
He blinked. It was the slow, lethargic blink of a cow standing under a maple tree, chewing the cud.
“I’d figured as much already,” he said. “I’d figured it when the M.E. called me up to the lab this morning. He’d completed the autopsy. He wanted me to know that your wife was two months pregnant.”
TWELVE
Lieutenant Mooney sat down again, never taking his eyes from Andrew’s face. In the first second Andrew was too staggered to have any coherent thought or feeling.
The lieutenant’s voice came again. “You didn’t know that your wife was pregnant, Mr. Jordan?”
“I didn’t know.”
“Kind of odd, isn’t it? Pretending to you that she couldn’t have a child and then being two months pregnant?”
It was bewildering how time seemed to have lost all continuity, how fragments of the past were constantly superimposing themselves on the present. Andrew seemed to be both standing there opposite the lieutenant and lying again in bed with his wife …
“… it’s my fault, darling, being so giddy, dashing about all over the place. But ever since we knew about not having a baby … It’s that. You know it is, don’t you?
“I never realized it was so bad for you too.”
“Bad? Oh, darling …”
“Maybe if you went back to Dr. Williams?”
“I did. Two months ago. I never told you
. I wanted to put it all out of my mind.”
“Then why don’t we adopt a baby?”
“Oh, darling, soon perhaps. But not yet, not now …
From the present, Lieutenant Mooney’s quiet voice impinged. “You’re sure your wife told you she couldn’t have a baby, Mr. Jordan?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“She lied about Dr. Williams; she was two months pregnant; and she didn’t tell you. You got an explanation for that?”
With a pain more violent than any he had yet experienced, the truth came to Andrew. It was the truth, it had to be. Maureen arriving in New York, hating the Thatchers and a world which had destroyed what had seemed to her to be her great romance with the “prominent citizen of Pasadena,” Maureen imagining herself utterly disillusioned and cynical, eager for revenge against society for what it had done to her. Find an eligible man, any eligible man, marry him, let him support her. Marry Andrew Jordan. Why not? Marry Andrew Jordan, but don’t love him and, beyond anything, don’t get stuck having a child by him. Lie about Dr. Williams. Hadn’t that been it? Maureen, at nineteen, thinking she could be what she could never have been because, as Mrs. Thatcher had said, she was a “good girl with a lot of love to give”?
The lieutenant’s blue gaze was still fixed on his face. Andrew was very conscious of him and of the perils he represented. But at that moment he could only think of the picture he had created of his wife. Maureen, the would-be “realist” gradually discovering that it didn’t work, that her husband was a human being, that he loved her, that love could breed love. The change? And after the change someone showing up from her past who had known of her cynical motives for marrying which she now so bitterly regretted, someone who had persecuted her, made her life a nightmare of deception. And then, as if that had not been difficult enough, there had come the other thing rendering her dilemma even more excruciating. She was having a child and she wanted the child but how possibly could she find the courage to explain to her husband that she had tried to be a monster and failed?
The Green-Eyed Monster Page 10
