The Man with Two Wives

by Patrick Quentin

  He tapped me on the arm with his magazine truncheon. In the excitement of planning, he had become almost exuberant, in love with his own idea of himself as the man who never let anything defeat him. I looked at him, feeling sick in the stomach.

  “This is your story, Bill. Keep it simple. Later we can work out the details. Last night, Daphne was here alone. She hates spending the night alone in this big apartment with only the servants. Betsy’s apartment is like a second home to her. She had no particular date; she knew Betsy was away and you would be alone too, so she called you up and asked if she could spend the night at your place. She arrived about seven; you had a quiet dinner together, listened to the phonograph, played Scrabble. That’s important. We need something that kept you up late because we don’t know when he was killed yet. We don’t want to run any risk of their claiming she could have slipped out after you’d gone to bed. You stayed up till around two-thirty or three. Remember that. And keep it simple at the moment. The police won’t press on a first interview. I’ll see to that.”

  He tapped me with the truncheon again. “You see, boy? There’s not a flaw anywhere. Your cook was off. I found that out from my cook. They went to the movies together—which means there was only Ellen. Ellen cooked dinner for you. That’s a lucky break. Ellen’s a good, sensible girl. You won’t have any difficulty fixing her. Give her something. Give her anything—up to a thousand. More if necessary, for those nieces in England or whatever it is she’s always yakking about. But she’s got to testify that Daphne was there. Ellen’s the crux, the extra witness. Everything will rest on…”

  He broke off as Henry came in. The old man hovered at the door and, in his official announcing voice, intoned, “Lieutenant Trant, sir—from the Homicide Bureau.”

  A man entered the room, carrying a bulky manila envelope. He was tall and quite young with a sort of unobtrusive elegance about him which didn’t belong with my idea of a policeman. He moved quietly. Everything about him was quiet. He brought his own atmosphere with him. To me, he was infinitely ominous.

  But, at that moment, there was nothing that didn’t seem ominous. C. J. himself, the great heavy room with its red leather, its massive weight of books, its somber, hanging draperies were as sinister and unreal as objects in a dream of horror. My predicament, too, seemed something out of a night fantasy. But I knew it was real. I could see how it had all developed with terrifying logic from my lie on the phone. I had said I was alone. Of course C. J. had grabbed at what had seemed the ideal opportunity to protect Daphne from whatever foolishly reckless Daphneish thing she had done. To him, I was the alibi. To him, his beloved daughter was safe and I was immensely in favor as the instrument of her salvation.

  If I told the truth to the police now, I would not only compromise Daphne, I would expose myself to C. J. as an adulterer and a liar whose lies had tricked him out of any other opportunity to shield his daughter.

  But, there again, if I accepted the deal and played along with C. J…

  Ellen’s a good, sensible girl. You won’t have any difficulty fixing her… Ellen’s the crux…

  Ellen’s face rose in my mind; and Angelica’s, and Betsy’s. I could see all their faces, crowding around me, challenging me; but most clearly of all I saw my own inevitable destruction. Everything I had done since last night had seemed the most sensible thing to do at the moment, the surest move to protect myself and Betsy from crippling embarrassment, but every step I had taken had led me stumbling deeper and deeper into a maze.

  If only there’d been time. If only that quiet, ominous young man had walked in five, four, three minutes later, I might have been able to explain to C. J. and save at least something. But it hadn’t happened that way. It had happened this way.

  I’ve already released it to the press.

  C. J. was hurrying to greet the detective. He was in total camouflage, all smiles, briskness and condescension—the Leading Citizen eager as always to assist the representatives of His Law.

  I wanted to run away. In my demoralization, it seemed to be the only solution. I wanted to dash like panicked child out of that great room, down the passage, out of the apartment and away.

  I almost did it. I had even started to search wildly in my mind for some excuse, however preposterous, when C. J. swung round to me with his hand on the detective’s arm and said, “Bill, I want you to meet Lieutenant Trant. Trant, this is my son-in-law, Bill Harding.”

  The young man’s eyes rested for a moment on my face. They were calm and clever and formally polite. They were yielding no information whatsoever. He held out his hand. I took it.

  C. J. said, “I imagine you’ll be wanting to see my daughter, won’t you, Lieutenant?”

  “If she can spare me a moment.”

  “We’ve all got a moment for the police.” C. J. gave a waggish laugh. All the time, the bright, unflinching frog eyes were fixed on my face. “Bill, go find her. That’s my boy. She’s somewhere around—in her room, I think.”

  I knew exactly what the eyes meant. They meant: Here’s your moment. Grab it. Make sure she’s rehearsed; make sure that neither of you steps a fraction of an inch out of line. It was now or never. This was the moment of ultimate commitment. Lieutenant Trant had turned from me and was studying one of C. J.’s Braques with mild aesthetic respect. C. J. was still fixing me with his black, almost hypnotic, glare.

  If Angelica had done it, I thought, then there was no hope for me at all. Every move she had made would come out. No power on earth could keep what had happened at my apartment from being shouted all over the country. But if she hadn’t killed him, if she was going to be no more to the police than just another suspect, another acquaintance of the corpse, then…

  “Bill,” said C. J. “Bill, boy, we don’t want to waste the lieutenant’s time, do we?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Excuse me. I’ll get her, C. J.”

  I hurried out of the library. It was done now. For better or worse, I was committed.

  chapter 6

  I hurried down the passage. In the enormous living room, I saw the butler dusting a Brancusi abstract. There seemed absolutely no connection between the everyday life of his moving duster and the life I was in. I knew I should be trying to organize some halfway intelligible plan from the chaos, but, for the moment, I was paralyzed by a vision of the appalling, dislocating power of murder. A venal, neurotic nonentity had been killed. I had nothing to do with it. I was merely a silly little man who had made a silly little man’s sexual lapse, as trivial as it was ignoble. And yet, because Jaimie had been killed, it had become puffed up with horror. There was Jaimie’s murder squatting like a great, obscene octopus, and already a tentacle had curled out, catching me, infecting me.

  I found Daphne in her room, sitting on the bed. Whatever she had or hadn’t done, I had expected her to be in a state of near-collapse, but instead she was calmly fixing her nails. She had painted them a screaming magenta and was holding up a hand, studying it. When she heard me, she turned, her red hair flopping. “Hi, Bill, do you like it? It’s a new color.”

  Her frivolous composure exasperated me. I asked, “Did you kill him?”

  “Really, Bill, darling, that’s the most libelous thing you’ve ever said to me. I couldn’t kill a pollywog.”

  “The police are here.”

  “They are?”

  “What did you do last night?”

  “Oh, it’s a long story. I’m afraid I was rather rash. I’ll tell you all about it sometime. But now, I suppose, we’ll have to go and confront the Law, won’t we?”

  She got up, waving her hands to dry off the polish. “Daddy’s told you what to say?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed. “He was furious. When he showed me the thing in the paper about Jaimie, I guess I lost my nerve and told him most of what’s been happening. Not all, of course. But a discreetly censored version. And he was livid! Livid with you and Betsy mostly for letting poor little me fall into the clutches. Really, that poor, silly
boy getting himself killed. It’s awful, really. And to think that I… well, we won’t go into that. Does Betsy know?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  “She’ll certainly be the clucking mother hen, won’t she? Me! The things that happen to me!”

  She looped her hand through my arm and grinned ruefully up at me. “I called you about seven. I came over. Ellen fixed dinner. We sat listening to the phonograph and played Scrabble. We went to bed about three. What did we listen to? Bach, don’t you think? It ought to be something chaste so they won’t get ideas. And what did we eat? We’d better not make that up. They’ll be scrounging around in your icebox to check the leftovers. What was it, darling?”

  “Roast chicken,” I said.

  “And bread sauce, I suppose, because Ellen’s so bloody British.”

  “I think so.”

  “Ugh. You didn’t do me very proud, did you?”

  She started to drag me to the door. She was as incomprehensible to me as if she had come from some other planet. But her total lack of qualms steadied me a little. If we were to go through with this thing, this teen-age cast-iron reproduction of C. J. was what we needed.

  In the library C. J. and Lieutenant Trant were sitting together on a red leather sofa. In spite of C. J.’s elaborate affability, they looked absurdly mismatched like a celebrity and somebody’s young cousin stuck with each other at a cocktail party. Lieutenant Trant jumped up. When C. J. introduced him to Daphne, his face was so polite and deferential that it seemed impossible that he could know anything damaging about her or, for that matter, about Angelica and me. For the first time, vague hope stirred in me. Perhaps at least there would be a respite.

  Daphne had changed completely from the girl in the bedroom. And she wasn’t overdoing it. She was just calm enough, just flustered enough, with just the right hesitant awkward charm. She had acted all her life to C. J. Now acting was second nature to her.

  She moved across the room and sat down in a chair, carefully straightening the skirt over her knees. She smiled at C. J. He smiled back. There wasn’t the slightest trace of conspiracy. They were being Daddy and Piggy Callingham, giving a gracious glimpse of their domestic life. They terrified me. No, not terrified—horrified.

  Lieutenant Trant sat down almost shyly on the arm of a chair. I had always thought policemen had books and pencils and took notes. He had nothing. He just sat there, looking, not at Daphne, but at his own crossed knees.

  “You understand, Miss Callingham, that this is a mere formality. I know it’s annoying. But annoying people is my job.” He smiled, letting the feeble little joke drop like a pin to the floor. “You knew James Lumb, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I did. I’d been seeing quite a lot of him recently. He was so amusing.” Daphne glanced at me. “He was a great friend of Bill’s.”

  “She brought him down to Oyster Bay a couple of week-ends ago.” C. J. leaned forward, blandly putting the seal of respectability on the relationship. “Seemed like a fine young man. Cultivated. Made a very good impression.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Daphne. “Everyone was crazy about him. Betsy and Bill gave a dinner party for him. Betsy was mad about him and the Fowlers and everyone.”

  Lieutenant Trant was still looking at his knee as if there was something about it that puzzled and intrigued him.

  “It seems,” he said in the same respectful tone, “that a few weeks ago there was an episode at his apartment, Miss Callingham. I don’t exactly know what it was—but there was some sort of disturbance between you and Mr. Lumb. It was the Browns, the people in the adjoining apartment, who told me of it. Apparently you ran out of Mr. Lumb’s apartment one evening. You seemed to be in distress. The Browns were coming up the stairs. You told them your name and they helped you get a taxi.”

  I knew, of course, what that “episode” had been. In Lieutenant Trant’s carefully muted description, it seemed something vastly remote from the savage mayhem which had ended with Daphne, swollen-faced, hysterical and drunk staggering into my apartment. I glanced at Daphne.

  “Oh, that,” she said. She permitted herself the faintest trace of her giggle. “It was all very silly. Jaimie’d drunk quite a lot of champagne. He—he got a bit fresh.” She turned again to C. J., smiling. “I thought it was time I left in a hurry.”

  “I see.” Trant paused. “It was the Browns who discovered him last night. They are the only other tenants in the building. All the lower floors are rented out to business concerns. Last night they had been at a party. They came home very late—about four. As they were passing Mr. Lumb’s door, they saw blood streaming out from under it. They broke down the door, of course, and—they found him there, by the door, lying slumped beside the steam radiator, shot three times. Dead.”

  “Ugh!” said Daphne.

  Lieutenant Trant seemed to have solved the problem of his knee. He looked up from it. His face, scanning ours, was naïvely conscious of the fact that he had told a dramatic story and told it with effective understatement. The naïveté was there and also a diffidence which was almost obsequious. Suddenly, I was sure of what until then I hadn’t dared admit to myself. This wasn’t anything as a policeman. It had only been the circumstances which had made him seem ominous when he arrived. This was just some green rookie with a fancy manner who’d been sent up in a hurry and whose only concern with us was to try to impress the famous, wealthy Callinghams and to boast about it later to his pals.

  Although I was still very conscious of the danger of my predicament and of C. J., I was no longer scared of Lieutenant Trant. It was extraordinary how that affected my morale. Knowing that sooner or later I would have to find out, I asked:

  “What time was he killed?”

  “Between one-thirty and two-thirty, Mr. Harding. That’s what the M. E. says.”

  So Angelica couldn’t have killed him. By one o’clock she had been at my apartment almost an hour. To the police, she would just be someone, anyone, connected with Jaimie who had to be questioned. Relief poured through me. My mind which had been clogged by fear and guilt started working again and a plan came to me fully fledged, the way plans must constantly be coming to C. J.

  Angelica would have to produce an alibi, of course, but why did it have to be with me? She had known Paul and the Prop in the Portofino days. The Fowlers had been alone last night. Paul had said so when he invited me over. Why couldn’t Angelica have spent the evening with them? When I explained to her, she would have to consent to the subterfuge; it was the least she could do. As for Paul, he would gladly stand by me. I didn’t have the slightest doubt in the world of that. Paul, with his friendly, amoral cheerfulness, would find my predicament ridiculous and even entertaining, but nothing more than that. Besides, he knew Betsy better than anyone did. He would realize as well as I how important it was for her to keep the truth from coming out.

  There was still Ellen, of course. But, in my new optimism, even Ellen seemed hardly a menace, because of C. J. I hadn’t thought of it before, but I saw it now. All the snob in Ellen groveled before the great C. J. If I could get C. J. to cope with her instead of me, if he was the one who both flattered her and bribed her, she would jump at supporting Daphne’s alibi and, in consequence, clam up about Angelica.

  Lieutenant Trant—meek now and innocuous to me as an office boy—was looking at Daphne.

  “Once again, Miss Callingham, I want to remind you that this is a mere formality. But I’m sure you understand that we have to do this with all Mr. Lumb’s…”

  Brightly, Daphne chipped in: “You mean you want me to tell you what I was doing last night? Of course. It’s all very simple. I spent the night at Bill’s. Daddy was away in Boston and I loathe sleeping alone here. It’s the understood thing that whenever Daddy’s away I go to Bill’s. Last night, Betsy—that’s my sister, Bill’s wife—was away in Philadelphia, so it was just the two of us. We had dinner; sat around, listening to records for a while; then we started playing Scrabble and didn’t get to bed
, I guess, much before three.”

  “I see,” said Lieutenant Trant. He turned to me. Respectfulness had so obliterated his personality that I doubted whether I would recognize him if I met him again. “There were just the two of you, Mr. Harding. I mean, there wasn’t anybody who happened to drop in or…?”

  “I imagine there was Ellen, wasn’t there, Bill?” C. J. was leaning forward again, being the Older Steadier Mind. “Your cook’s off Thursday, isn’t she? Doesn’t Ellen cook for you on Thursdays?”

  This was the moment which, only a few minutes ago, had seemed quite unfaceable. Now it was nothing.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Ellen was there. She’s my little boy’s nurse. She cooked dinner for us.”

  “I see,” said Trant again. He paused, looking down, this time at the carpet. Maybe he was trying to remember its color so he would know what was currently fashionable in carpet shades. “Miss Callingham says you were a good friend of Mr. Lumb’s, Mr. Harding.”

  “Not really,” I said. “In fact, I hardly knew him. It just happened to be through me that they met.”

  “Then you couldn’t—that is, you wouldn’t have any idea who might have wanted to kill him?”

  “Good heavens, no.”

  “And you, Miss Callingham?”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t,” said Daphne. “Really, it seems quite fantastic. I mean, I never knew anyone who got killed before. But then—he wasn’t really in my set, you know. I mean, he was sort of bohemian, sort of a change.”

  “Of course.” Lieutenant Trant rose. We all got up also, perhaps a shade too quickly.

  “Well, I don’t think I’ll have to bother you any longer. Thanks, all of you.” He picked up the manila envelope from a chair and started for the door. Then he turned. “Oh, by the way, Mr. Harding, perhaps you’d give me your address.” I gave it to him.