Girl on the Best Seller List

by Packer, Vin

  “So are we,” the detective said. “We’re concerned too.”

  “Then why would she writefo there?” said the sergeant.

  “I don’t know,” the detective said. “Do you have any clues, Mrs. Stewart?” “No.”

  “Want to tell us what you talked about at lunch with Mrs. Wealdon?” “No.”

  “Why should she be scared of you, Mrs. Stewart?” “Why should she befcared of you, Mrs. Stewart?” the sergeant said.

  “Yes,” said the detective, “whyshould she be fcared?” Min Stewart said nothing.

  The detective motioned to the sergeant, and they went into the bedroom.

  “I’ll leave here with the lovely lady,” said the detective, indicating the dead body of Gloria Wealdon still on the bed, “but the chief wants you to keep them here until he arrives.”

  “He’s going to question them here?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that?” said the sergeant.

  On the floor there was the broken globe, and the figure of a saint.

  “Soap,” the detective said. “Somebody carved something out of soap.”

  “Looks like a nun. They Catholics?”

  “Don’t let it influence you either way, Carrington,” the detective said facetiously. “Secora must have knocked this over when he ran out of here.”

  “Since when have I been partial to Catholics?” “Just don’t start now.”

  “They aren’t Catholics,” the sergeant said. “I never heard that.”

  “I’m going to leave Secora’s statement with you, and you can give it to the chief. It won’t do him much good now, because I took it down in shorthand, but it’ll be useful later when he wants to compare his statement with the one I got while Secora was still shaking.”

  “What do you think of it?” the sergeant said. “How about that Min Stewart?”

  “Christ, Carrington, it could be practically anyone in the town, couldn’t it? Who the hell liked her after that lousy book?”

  “I don’t think it’s anybody here,” said the sergeant

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” the detective said. “Blockhead!” He began to laugh. “I never heard such a blockhead statement asfcare andfo being proof Gloria Wealdon was drugged when she wrote her notes. You’re a dilly, Sergeant, a real dilly!”

  “You got to hand it to me, it doesn’t make any sense her spelling words that way.”

  “I got to hand it to you,” said the detective, placing the soap sculpture in the sergeant’s hand. “Here, and don’t get your fingerprints on it, sweetheart, because I won’t alibi you. I think you probably did it, anyway. Didn’t she have a mean cop in that book? Or a stupid one?”

  “She didn’t have any cops in it,” said the sergeant. “That’s what was wrong with it.” “C’mon,” the detective said. “It stinks in here.”

  • • •

  While the detective and the sergeant were out of the room, Fern Fulton went across and knelt by Min Stewart’s side.

  “Where’d Freddy go, Min?”

  “I think he went to find Virginia, dear. Don’t worry.” “Fern,” said Mannerheim, “just relax now. Just take it easy.”

  “Glo’s dead,” Fern said again. Her face wrinkled up again in that peculiar way of a woman’s crying. “Oh migod, I don’t know what to think any more. I don’t know what to think about anything. I know something’s terribly, terribly wrong.”

  “It’ll be all right soon,” said Min Stewart. “Freddy will be back and it’ll be all right soon.”

  “Go sit down, Fern,” said Mannerheim. He helped her to her feet and across the room.

  Secora looked at him. He said, “I didn’t do it, Doctor. I swear, I just came across her body like that. I didn’t do it. I just f-f-f-fow-ond,” and he began to cry again too; the deep, inside sobbing.

  Jay went back and sat beside Min Stewart.

  “I think he’s still in this house,” said Min.

  “Shhh, Min, easy now. You won’t do yourself any good.”

  “I do. They never searched. Isn’t it peculiar that they never searched, Jay?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is. I don’t think we’ve ever had a murder in Cayuta. They’re probably very uncertain about procedure.”

  “At least not one anyone’s ever known about.” “What do you mean?”

  “I mean at least Cayuta has not had a murder anyone knows about.”

  “Hmmm? Oh, yes, yes,” said Jay, barely able to smile. “Yes, of course.”

  “I just have the idea he’s very close by, Jay. I know my son.”

  “Well, if he is — ”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “You see.”

  “Min, I’m not at all convinced Louie did this.” “Aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not. I’ve never thought of Louie as homicidal at all. Suicidal maybe, but not — ”

  “Oh. Jay, really, who knowswho is a homicidal type? If anyone were able to tell that surely, why wouldn’t we have fewer homicides? No, Jay, the mind can’t tell you everything, but sometimes the heart can tell you what the mind isn’t able to.”

  “And your heart told you Louie did this?”

  “I don’t want to think that, but …”

  “Then don’t.”

  “He’s schizophrenic, you say.”

  “Yes, a catatonic.”

  “She should have listened to me.”

  “It’s too late to ponder over what Gloria Wealdon should or should not have done now. And it’s too early to imagine you know what Louie could or couldn’t do. Min, schizophrenia is the psychotic reaction par excellence. It’s the most complicated, mysterious mental disease we have; we don’t know very much at all about it.”

  “Do you agree he could have gotten here in time to kill her?”

  “I think hecould have.”

  “Then don’t tell me anything more.”

  “Lord, Min, we don’t even know how she died.”

  “She was poisoned probably. They always throw up, I should imagine.”

  “But a person can throw up for many reasons, Min. She could have been choked, or shot, anything….”

  “Louie’d poison her, I think.”

  “You’re just torturing yourself,” said Jay Mannerheim.

  • • •

  When the detective and the sergeant came from the other room, Fern Fulton said, “What is anyone doing about my daughter, my husband?”

  “We’re looking for them, Mrs. Fulton. Both of them, particularly him.”

  “You don’t think Freddy …”

  “He was here,” said the sergeant. “He was here and he left, and we’d like to have a word with him, if that doesn’t put him to too much trouble.”

  “Freddy wouldn’t kill a fly,” said Fern Fulton.

  “Mrs. Wealdon wasn’t a fly,” the sergeant said.

  Oddly, Stanley Secora stopped crying long enough to giggle; then he began sobbing again.

  “I’m going to have a look around the house,” the detective said. “Might as well while I’m waiting.”

  “It’s a publicity stunt,” said Fern Fulton. “I don’t believe she’s dead.”

  “You want to have a look, m’am?” said the sergeant.

  “No.”

  “Then kindly keep still about publicity stunts.”

  The detective was rummaging around, opening and closing doors in the house.

  Min whispered to Jay, “Now, they’ll find him.”

  “You think your son’s here, Mrs. Stewart?” said the sergeant.

  “Hecould be here.”

  “I wonder what he’d be doing here?” “We none of us exactly planned this gathering,” said Min.

  “No, we none of us did.” The sergeant looked suspiciously at her. “We none of us did, did we, m’am!”

  After a few moments, the ambulance from the Cayuta hospital came, and with it the county coroner, the chief of police, an intern and half a dozen neighborhood boys of all sizes
and shapes chasing after them. The chief of police told them they would all be arrested if they did not get away from the Wealdon house, but they stayed in a little knot out front, unmoving, knowing that, whatever it was inside, it was really serious, and that the chief of police would not carry through his threat, because something had happened inside the house that was very, very bad…. What? They scratched their elbows and their legs and leaned against one another, watching the house.

  The men all marched into the Wealdons’ solemnly, and all but the chief of police went into the bedroom.

  The chief of police smiled. “Howdy?” he said.

  Jay Mannerheim said hello back, but no one else said anything. The chief of police looked embarrassed.

  He said, “I guess we got some trouble on our hands. You folks don’t mind cooperating with me, I hope. I’m going to have to keep you here, so if you want to call your loved ones, you can.”

  He used the phrase “your loved ones” only when things were serious; but, really, things had never been this serious; a few killings in the migrant camps nearby, but never the murder of a respectable woman. At least, she was supposed to be respectable. Never mind she wrote dirty books — that wasn’t the business of the police department.

  The chief of police was on his way into the bedroom when the detective appeared at the top of the basement stairs and called out: “I need some help here. I’ve found someone.”

  Min Stewart stiffened. “Oh, Jay,” she said. “Jay, here it comes. I must steel myself now.”

  “She scratches like a little tom-cat,” said the detective.

  The sergeant and the detective helped the struggling girl into the living room.

  Fern Fulton ran to her daughter, nearly hysterical.

  “She was hiding in the basement,” said the detective. “Secora, let her sit where you are.”

  Stanley Secora crossed the room to the side where Jay sat with Min Stewart. “Don’t push her,” he said to the sergeant, and then clapped his hand over his mouth. “I mean — ”

  “We’re not pushing her,” the sergeant said. “She won’t stop kicking.”

  “Virginia!” said Mrs. Fulton. “Oh, Virginia!”

  The pair fell in the chair together and embraced, both weeping, the girl with her face buried in her mother’s bosom.

  They were bringing the body out now, down the steps of the split level, through the foyer to the hall.

  They were opening the screen door, and working the stretcher out to the sidewalk.

  “There’s a sheet over the face,” said a young boy’s voice. “Someone’s dead.”

  Eighteen

  Many people think that love is two-toned, if not multi-colored, but love is one color only, and that color is red. Red! red! red! — whirling before your eyes bright as a poppy, commanding as a traffic light, only you do not stop for the color of love — you go, you forget all the rules and just go!

  — FROM Population 12,360

  FREDDY FULTON drove South on Route 2.

  In half an hour he would reach Elbridge. He was sure he would find Virginia there with Edwina, but now a new thought bothered him. What was happening to Edwina? What was happening to change her so remarkably, now, near the end of everything between them?

  This thought overshadowed the fear of Edwina’s going to Gloria for help with her novel.(Help. Freddy wanted to laugh. Edwina would tell Gloria the whole business in an eye’s wink; she wouldn’task Gloria Wealdon anything. All she’d been doing since their affair came to an end was tell people about it. Anyone — the bartender at the Elbridge Inn, a stranger, one of her men, anyone — just tell people. Pound it out on the typewriter and blab it out all over the place, but tell, tell, tell!)

  It had not been easy for Freddy Fulton to make the decision to sever his relationship with Edwina. One would imagine it was the easiest thing in the world for a man to do — break up with someone who was not his wife and who had not even been faithful to him as a mistress. It should have been easy, too, by all logic and reason; he should have been able simply to say, “It’s all over now,Edwina; I’ve had enough. I don’t want you any more.” Another man, maybe any other man in the world but Freddy Fulton, would have been quite glib about coming to such a decision, but Freddy Fulton was the only man who loved Edwina Dare. That was the difference.

  • • •

  Freddy supposed, too, that it was just another of life’s infinite ironies that Edwina Dare was not even a beautiful woman. He guessed she did not even have that casual kind of prettiness that made men turn and look at a woman on the street and wonder what it would be like to have her in bed. She was simply a woman he had very slowly fallen in love with, a woman who had begun by helping him order books on plant management down at The Book Mart in Cayuta, and who had ended by capturing him so completely and thoroughly in every possible connotation of the word that he was ready to divorce Fern for her and give up Virginia. But she would not even allow this — her religion, she said (only she called it “my faith”) — and it never seemed to make any difference to her that she was his mistress and not his wife, because her “faith” did not believe in divorce. She had married, she told him, when she was very young; and her husband had left her because she was unfaithful. She had never pulled any punches, never tried to pretend that her husband was unfaithful or that something else had gone wrong; she had simply told him straight out.

  When he tried to think what it was he loved about her, he was like many men: he either had to enlarge on her good qualities or tell himself he simply didn’t care what it was he loved about her; he just loved her, and he loved loving her, and that was all there was to it. But there were some things he could speak about — feelings, really, and sketchy ways of hers: the easy sound of soft laughter, husky voice inflections, the funny-sweet way she said his name, Fre-ad, as though it were two syllables. She wore her hair brushed up above her temples, and a vein throbbed there when she was tired. He knew the sudden way she would lean forward when she was excited, though her voice stayed always low. She read poetry. Sometimes, if she didn’t like a certain tie on him, she asked him not to wear it again because it wasn’t right for him; and she told him what colors she loved on him. He could talk and talk and talk to her, and she always listened, as though it was the most interesting thing she had ever heard; she always listened that way, even if he was talking about something that had happened at the plant, something not really important at all.

  Whatever it was about her, Freddy Fulton loved it, and he loved her probably more than he had ever loved any woman in his life. His decision to end their affair was due partly to her inability to be faithful to him and partly to his own inability to reconcile a love for this sort of woman with his love for his daughter and Fern. She used to tell him that the “other men” didn’t matter to her, and he somehow believed that, or knew it, or sensed it. Whatever it was, he knew she loved him, but he knew also that she had in her an inability to prove her love for him by not seeing others. Her “faith” was a convenient dodge. She would never let herself be wholly tied down to any man.

  Freddy had always thought that women like that were either wild ones who drank and caroused and cracked bad jokes with the boys, or else decadent-looking types who were nervous as cats and interested in very little in the world. But Edwina Dare was neither of these. She was an enigma.

  “You’re all I have, Fre-ad,” she had said when he told her about his decision. And he knew what she meant — that he was the only one whom she had ever loved and approximated a marriage with; the only one — and what a marriage! One where the husband was not home nights, or mornings, but maybe once or twice a week. One where each shared almost everything the other thought, but not a house and not a family and, most of the time, not even the same bed overnight. In a way, they shared Virginia, and Freddy was not sorry that he had let Edwina and her become close friends; but Virginia knew as well as he did that there was something unwholesome about Edwina and himself — unwholesome, and yet so right wh
en they were together that it literally brought tears to his eyes near the end, when he was making his decision.

  She had taken it bravely, but not wisely. In a way, he was pleased that she had not taken it wisely; pleased because her helter-skelter plans and ideas for the future showed her in such a vulnerable light, a light that reflected the terrible intensity of their love for one another. It was a selfish pleasure that somehow relieved a bit his own pain at the thought of their separation. Her idea to write the book seemed to him so idiotic that at times it made him laugh aloud, and at times it broke his heart to think of her having such an idea.

  Now, the book was written; and now, this change had come over her: this certain brazenness, as though she would not leave Elbridge or the vicinity of Cayuta without having left her mark. Why? Freddy could answer that question. It wasn’t anything that had gotten into Edwina; it was something that had gone out of her; it was the final dying of love, and with it the empty aftermath that had to be filled. There was no way to fill it; no children of their love, no home (just the old boarding house Mrs. Devrow left her, with memories of other men there, too); nothing but the same old job at the box and bag factory in that dizzy little upstate town she’d had reason to live in for five years, and then … the Future, a blank. The Future, and she must be very scared suddenly of that.

  Freddy pulled the sun blind down on the Buick’s windshield and frowned as he drove. No, he should not blame Edwina, or wonder at what had come over her. He knew she was spiteful and angry and even bent on revenge of some sort, and he knew she was ashamed of it because he didn’t deserve it; she was bitterly ashamed of everything she had done to him, ashamed of herself and sorry for herself. So this was the way she showed her spite and her anger; and the ways by which she sought her revenge were unconsciously over-blown ways.

  The book she wrote. What did she call it?Goodbye to Yesterday. In the book, she had made him run off the road in his automobile. Killed him off, in other words.

  Freddy felt a sick wave of nostalgia flood through him, remembering back on all the days and nights they had had which were sweet and very dear and then thinking of Edwina sitting up at night writing that book, writing how he had lost control at the wheel, writing how the car had spun, how he had screamed — writing, killing him off. That was one of her over-blown ways of getting even, without even really knowing it.