Puzzle for Puppets

by Patrick Quentin

  What was laughingly called dinner went on without him.

  Nobody talked. It must have been as much of a relief to the others as it was to me when Lorraine got up and suggested moving to the trophy room for coffee and liquers.

  In her earlier days Lorraine had spent a year in Darkest Africa and Darkest South America indulging a violent though temporary passion for big-game hunting. The trophy room was a monument to that tomboyish year—a huge, cavernous place decorated with the heads and necks of almost every known species of game and the grimmest mementoes of the Amazonian arts of love and war.

  The trophy room, I felt, wasn’t exactly a suitable room for coffee and liqueurs But then no room in Lorraine’s house was suitable for anything.

  In a jittery band, we all trooped into the trophy room to find that Bill Flanders was already there, sitting in a corner under a great hunk of elephant. Although the exmarine looked white and drawn, the passion seemed to have gone out of him. He did not even glance at his wife as she strolled by and started guzzling kümmel less than three feet away.

  No one referred to the episode at the table. The evening was so far out of control that there was nothing anyone could have said, anyway.

  To get away from it all, Iris and I moved off to one of the glass-topped trophy cases. It happened to be filled with blow-pipes and poisoned darts which presumably had been projected at Lorraine by indignant but incompetent Amazonian marksmen.

  Sitting next to the cabinet on a high thronelike chair was the most terrifying object in the trophy room. Several years ago Lorraine had been persuaded by a “ravishingly clever” female to sit for a life-size portrait doll. Lorraine had thought it a divine idea, but the finished product had been a little too much even for her. For some reason, however, she preserved it in the trophy room, where it perched in a long lime-green evening gown, staring at the world with a simpering idiot smile. Iris and I gazed at it lugubriously, wondering how we were going to get through the evening.

  Lorraine must have been wondering, too. After a few sour minutes in which her divorcing couples sat around clattering coffee cups, she jumped up in a swirl of puce, smiling the devastating smile which always signalled the birth of another divine idea.

  “Babies,” she said, “it’s so dismal here. Let’s all get in cars and drive down to Chuck’s place in Reno and gamble. There’s nothing like roulette. Really there isn’t.”

  Lorraine’s remedy for all sticky situations was to dash off and have fun. Whether or not her theory was valid, I had never seen an idea accepted with such enthusiasm. Everyone scuttled from the trophy room to get coats and wraps. Iris and I were in the fore. We almost ran upstairs to our unnerving zebra-striped bedroom suite—the product, no doubt of an interior decorator who had got too drunk too often at El Morocco. I closed the door on the emotional maelstrom of the house.

  Iris, looking lovelier than even Mr. Hurrell’s glamour photographs of her, tossed back her hair the way she does when she’s worried.

  “Peter darling, tell me. Is the leave being a frightful flop? These ghastly people. You don’t want to go to Reno, do you?”

  I knew my wife had a wanton passion for slot machines. I kissed her, which was something I could have done indefinitely.

  “We’d better go, honey. Lorraine’s got herself into such a messy situation. Someone ought to stick by her. Besides, I’m getting used to having a movie star for a wife. I’ll enjoy showing you off.”

  Iris stared at me. “You really mean that, Peter?”

  “Sure.” I wasn’t going to have her eating her heart out feeling she’d double-crossed me because Mr. Somethingstein of Magnificent Pictures had turned her into a national product like com flakes. “Get your wrap, beautiful.” Iris pulled her cape from the closet, slung it over her shoulders, and came back to me.

  “Peter, why did those husbands accept Lorraine’s mad invitation?”

  “I was trying to figure that out, too.”

  “That poor Bill Flanders. Darling—you don’t really think he’d try to kill Dorothy, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t blame him,” I said. “A little killing would do Dorothy the world of good.”

  “Maybe he will,” mused Iris. “Maybe I’ll get mixed up in a murder and get thrown out of Hollywood on a moral turpitude clause. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  Somehow that didn’t sound quite as funny as it should have. My wife crossed to the dressing table, unlocked a drawer, and produced a plump and obscene blue pottery piggy bank. She tucked it under her arm.

  “Okay, darling,” she said. “Let’s go to Reno and show ourselves off.”

  The function of the horrible pig was to save Iris from herself and the slot machines. Some atavistic New England instinct in her was against gambling, and she salvaged her conscience by saving her winnings to buy War Bonds. She was very prim about it. She had even bought me a similar nightmare pig, but I was too proud to be seen with it, and it was locked away in a suitcase under the bed. Iris, however, had no compunctions. She took the pig everywhere, dropping into its bloated stomach each half-dollar, quarter, and dime as it was won.

  As Iris and I and the piggy bank started down the corridor, we were just in time to see Mimi Burnett’s elfin figure slip into the room that was always kept for Chuck Dawson. Mimi was the sort of girl who would slip furtively into other people’s rooms. But I did wonder dimly why Lover’s fiancée should be having a private tête-à-tête with Lorraine’s fiancé. Life was surely scrambled enough already without that.

  When Iris and I reached the main hall, it was empty. We moved to the trophy room whose heavy wooden doors were closed. I opened the doors. Two people were standing at the far end of the room by the cabinet of poison darts—the Count Laguno and Dorothy Flanders, who looked even more luscious than usual in a white ermine wrap with long white leather gloves to her elbows. They looked startled when they heard us and swung round.

  I said awkwardly, “Sorry if we broke in on anything.”

  “Broke in on anything?” drawled Dorothy. “What do you think the Count was doing? Making indelicate propositions?”

  Count Stefano Laguno looked like an elegant lizard with a Continental education. He smiled, showing not very good teeth.

  In a smooth, Oxfordish voice he said, “I was merely giving Mrs. Flanders a lecture on the Indians of the Amazon, Lieutenant Duluth. A bungling people. They have discovered one of the most deadly poisons in the world—curare. One drop of it in the blood stream will kill the strongest man or woman. And yet they use it unimaginatively—merely to kill deer or other Indians.” His slant eyes slid to Dorothy, and it seemed to me that they glowed with a sly malice. “Curare has a certain nobility. It should be used with artistry—to kill only the most legitimate murderees. Don’t you think so, Dorothy?”

  Dorothy yawned. “Stefano, I’m sure you say the cleverest things if anyone had time to think them out. I never have the time.” She looped her voluptuous gloved arm through his. “Come on or Lorraine will be honking horns at us.”

  The two of them moved out of the room. I stared at Iris. She stared at me.

  “Well—” she said. And that was about all there was to say.

  While the Count had been talking, I had moved up to the cabinet that contained the Indian weapons. I stared down at the poison darts, evil little things with a reddish coating of curare still on their tips. They had been arranged in three groups, each group splaying out to make a fan design. Idly I counted the darts in the first group. There were six. There were six in the second group. I looked at the third group and my heart started thumping.

  In the third fan there were only five darts. And, as I looked more closely, I saw indentations in the green baize between the darts, as if, quite recently, their positions had been changed. I counted the marks where the baize had been rubbed down. There were six of them.

  That surely could mean only one thing. Someone must have removed the sixth dart and rearranged the remaining five to make the loss undetectable to
a casual glance. I tried the lid of the cabinet. It was unlocked.

  Iris was strolling towards me. “What are you looking at, dear?”

  Hastily I turned my back on the table. What I was thinking was far too melodramatic to tell even Iris.

  “Looking at?” I echoed. “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.”

  III

  Three cars, with a Pleygel disregard for gas rationing, were waiting on the huge area of gravel in front of the house. Lorraine herself was at the wheel of the first, an old station wagon which she almost always used in preference to the glossier models at her disposal. She beckoned to Iris and me, and we bundled in, Iris in front with Lorraine and little Fleur Wyckoff, I in the back with Dr. Wyckoff and Dorothy. Screaming something to Lover in the automobile behind, Lorraine swerved the station wagon down the perilous drive with its breathtaking glimpses of the sleeping Lake Tahoe.

  There was a full moon, shining bright as a brass button against the midshipman-blue sky. The drive to Reno over the vast hump of Mount Rose was a thing of uncanny beauty. As the car soared up towards the peak and our ears cracked at the altitude, lonely canyons toppled away on either side of us, giving place to high woodlands and mountain meadows of blue magic. A deer cantered across the road. The Nevada air was redolent of pine.

  I was watching Dorothy Flanders out of the corner of my eye. Her beauty was as cold and inhuman as the night’s. It was a beauty of line and curve, a surface beauty with nothing behind it except a magnificent digestive tract. Her blonde hair glistened like silver. Her profile was silver too, a cameo against the darkness.

  No one spoke. We had brought our uneasiness with us, and the night did not relax it. I could see the back of Fleur’s head, a little pool of stillness. But it was her husband of whom I was most conscious. He sat beyond Dorothy, rigid and unyielding. Once, when we swerved around a bend, Dorothy threw out a hand to steady herself against him.

  That was the only time he showed a spark of life. The instant her fingers touched his knee, he dragged it away as if he had been bitten by a poisonous snake.

  We had reached the peak of the mountain and were toppling down the far flank when a horn honked and a green coupé roared abreast of us. Chuck Dawson was at the wheel. Mimi Burnett, like a shabby pink butterfly, drooped at his side. Lorraine waved and shouted, but Chuck paid no attention. His cowboy face set in a grim mask, he shot the coupé past us, disappearing ahead in a reckless cloud of dust.

  “That Chuck!” exclaimed Lorraine. “I could kill him a hundred times a day. Thinking he can race me!”

  She jammed her foot on the accelerator. The old station wagon hurtled in pursuit. A twist in the mountain road loomed and Fleur gave a scream.

  “Lorraine, please. Not so fast. Not on these roads.”

  Lorraine sighed. “Oh, I suppose you’re right. Chuck’s always making me do the craziest things. Mr. Throckmorton says I’ll break my neck one day. But then Mr. Throckmorton’s on the gloomy side although I adore him, of course.” She slackened her pace and added suddenly, “He’s cute, isn’t he? I don’t mean Mr. Throckmorton. I mean Chuck. He’s my favourite fiancé in years.”

  Dorothy, who seemed to think any remark about a man was directed at her, stirred. “Very attractive, dear. But just what is he? Where’s he from?”

  “Who cares what people are or where they’re from? Simply everyone in Nevada adores him.”

  “When are you going to marry him, dear?”

  “Marry him!” Lorraine abandoned the wheel for a Gallic gesture. “Really, my dear, you’re one to talk about marriage.” She navigated another turn and gave a whoop of delight. “He’s got a flat”

  Chuck’s green coupé was drawn up at the side of the road, its rear axle sagging. Chuck was tinkering with a jack while Mimi fluttered around him. When they saw us, both of them waved us to stop. But Lorraine merely poked her frizzy head out of the window and jeered, “Nyah.”

  She took a childish delight in her victory over her favourite fiancé. She was still humming under her breath as we plunged into the Washoe Valley and the lights of Reno, rowdy as a drunken duchess’ tiara, sparkled in the blue darkness ahead.

  There’s something about Reno, a smallness, a cheerful strut, the vulgar tolerance of a Madam come up in the world. Unlike every other town in the country, there’s no cleavage between the respectable and the disreputable elements. Housewives with steel-rimmed spectacles, glamorous divorcees from the East, soldiers, cowboys, judges, Indians, and hoboes all rub shoulders contentedly on the garish streets. They all eat at the same places, drink at the same bars, throw away the same silver dollars over the same gambling tables. You can be rich in Reno and lose. You can be poor and win. No one stays on the top or the bottom long enough for the mould to harden. It makes for a nice town.

  Lorraine swerved into Virginia Street and under the brash electric sign announcing Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World. We turned past the Palace Club and down to where tall columns of neon light said: CHUCK’S CLUB.

  We parked and scrambled out. Chuck’s gambling place, although recently opened, followed the familiar pattern of Harold’s, the Bank Club, all the others. It had even acquired its own raffish homeless dogs who lay sprawled across the threshold, hoping like the famous Curly to build themselves up into luck charms and wheedle T-bone steaks out of superstitious gamblers. We stepped over them and into the glare and smoke and chatter.

  Saturday night was going full blast. Under a low mirrored ceiling, girl dealers with bows on elaborate coiffeurs flicked cards to society matrons and Indians across green baize Black Jack tables. The wheel of fortune creaked in a corner. A voice was blaring out the results of a Keno race, while, indifferent to it, military and civilian behinds bent over crap tables. Backless evening gowns, rags, uniforms and playsuits jostled each other, each with his or her own wishful and doomed system for coming out ahead of the house.

  Chuck, I reflected, must be cleaning up.

  I was apt to forget that Lorraine, as one of the richest girls in the world, was a nationwide celebrity. The combination of her and Iris made for a sensational entrance even in that hard-bitten throng. As we passed through the maze of tables, almost everyone turned to stare at them and whisper. Lorraine, used to nothing else, was completely unconscious of her news value. Iris tried bravely to be equally nonchalant But Dorothy, who got her stares, too, was very different. She reacted, hip and bust, to each hungry male eye until I expected her to dislocate something.

  Lorraine was saying, “I wonder where the others are,” when the second party from the house trooped in—Lover French, the Lagunos, and Bill Flanders, hobbling on his crutch. Lorraine waved them over. They came, very glum. I imagined their drive had been as unsociable as ours.

  Lover, looking prim, as if this vulgar atmosphere wasn’t going to be suitable for his innocent fiancée, said, “Chuck and Mimi had a flat We passed them. They’ll be along any minute.”

  “Wonderful.” Lorraine surveyed the circle of sour faces with a ravishing smile which was meant to sell them all on the idea of burying their individual hatchets. “Let’s have fun, darlings. After all, I mean, there’s nothing like fun. Let’s have a drink.”

  She herded us all to the raucous, beer-stained bar and bought drinks for everyone, leaving the change from a twenty dollar bill as a tip for the grinning barman. She gulped her coke high.

  “Everyone does what they want. It’s much more fun that way. I’m going to play roulette.” She slipped her arm through her half-brother’s. “Come on, Lover. You’re a stuffy old fuss-budget and you think gambling a sin. But you’re going to bring me luck. I feel it in my bones. Dorothy—” she grabbed Mrs. Flanders with her free arm—“there’s something monumental about you. I think you’ll be lucky, too. Eleven’s the number, my pets. It’s simply, absolutely bound to come up.”

  Iris, clutching her piggy bank, gave me a rather guilty smile and slipped over to the half-dollar slot machine by the roulette table. The rest of the party seemed most reluc
tant to join in the spirit of Lorraine’s “fun.” Studiedly ignoring each other, they started one by one to drift aimlessly after their hostess.

  The roulette table was crowded, but the players parted like the Red Sea to give Lorraine Pleygel space. She pulled a hundred dollar bill from her frivolous purse and tossed it to the flashy female croupier, greeting her like an old friend. Bill Flanders had edged his way to the table between Dorothy and Lover. The Wyckoffs, keeping close together, but never looking at each other, pressed after him. The Count Laguno was hovering around Dorothy’s back. Everyone was crammed tightly together.

  The wheel was spinning. The green board with its black and red numbers was gaily sprinkled with red and yellow and blue chips. Lorraine had received a cluster of henna five-dollar chips. She pushed some to Dorothy.

  “For luck, darling. Give a couple to Lover. It’ll do him good to be dashing.”

  Dorothy scooped the chips up greedily. Lover watched with clucking disapproval.

  Lorraine said, “Eleven’s the number, angels.”

  Her hand hovered over her pile of chips. Somebody shouted, “Lorraine!” She turned from the table. Chuck Dawson and Mimi Burnett were hurrying towards us past Indians and dowagers and Chinamen and soldiers. They had another, unknown man in tow. Chuck, swaggering through friendly greetings, pats on the back, and the ravenous glances of divorcees, elbowed his way to Lorraine’s side. He grinned.

  “You rat,” he said, “leaving us to rot by the roadside.” He took her arm with rough affection. “Come on, baby. There’s an admirer of yours who wants to meet you.” His other hand gripped the startled Lover by the collar. “And you, my boy, ought to be ashamed. You know your girl friend says ‘Naughty to gamble.’”

  He grabbed the brother and sister away from the table. Lover struggled with outraged dignity. Lorraine protested, “But, Chuck, darling, I’m playing.” But she did not make an issue out of it. She obviously liked having him treat her rough. “Play for me,” she called to Dorothy.