I got to C. J.’s office just before one and just before Mr. Blandon. I gave C. J. the report on Ellen. It seemed to satisfy him. Mr. Blandon was an immensely important personage. Normally, he would have been miles out of my ken. C. J.’s decision to include me at the lunch was obviously his first step in launching me as Lambert’s successor. I knew I had to be at my best and I found myself, through the interminable meal, exhibiting the right dazzling smile, saying the right things to show not only that I was a “live-wire” and a “good kid” but that I did the correctly chic things at the correctly chic times. From C. J.’s affability, I could tell I was making a hit, but that didn’t stop the lunch from being an agony.
Mr. Blandon was a Beverly Hills drinker. We had four gibsons before we ate, wine with the food, and then brandy. All the time behind the social strain and the deadening muzziness caused by the liquor, I was fighting for a solution to the Angelica problem. On his second brandy, Mr. Blandon got festive. He started to show an interest in “fun,” and, to my horror, C. J. instantly offered me as a guide for a little town-painting. I had visions of spending the rest of the day guiding Mr. Blandon from cocktail bar to night club. But, at the very last minute, he decided he was tired and would go back to his hotel to rest up from his trip.
It was three-thirty when I got away from them.
I took a taxi to the Wilton. I had no plan. There didn’t seem to be any plan at all. My mind was blunted by liquor and exhaustion.
The Wilton was a moderate-priced, dreary, respectable hotel. In the bleakly modern lobby which the management had installed in the mistaken hope that it would brighten the place up, I asked for Angelica at the desk.
“What name, sir?”
“Mr. Harding.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Harding, she’s expecting you.”
I went up in the elevator which suggested old ladies and not-quite-fashionable house dogs like Scotties. Suddenly my nerve broke and I knew with absolute certainty that Lieutenant Trant would be standing outside Angelica’s door.
He wasn’t, of course. I pressed the buzzer. Angelica opened the door.
“The police haven’t come,” she said.
chapter 9
I followed her into the dreary hotel bedroom. There was a box radio on the chest of drawers with a slot where you dropped quarters if you wanted to play it. Her beat-up suitcase lay on a folding stool. The whole setting seemed a negation. And Angelica, with her heavy black hair, her beauty which had so often made me betray myself but which now was as oppressive to me, as embarrassing as her very existence, seemed the negation of everything. I didn’t feel sorry for her. I didn’t have any human feeling for her at all. She was just the thing in the way, the thing that made everything impossible, the thing to be disposed of.
She looked very tired as if she hadn’t slept at all. She lit the inevitable cigarette. The sound of the struck match rasped me. She stood, watching me passively, waiting for me to say something. I remembered that only the night before I had been recklessly making love to her, imagining in some lunatic manner that she was my real happiness and my life with Betsy and Rickie nothing but a sham. Remembering this, I cringed and my anger flared up against her. Goddamit, she was the one who had dragged Jaimie into our lives—with her sordid, two-year obsession, her stifling female submissiveness which had humbly clung to him in spite of all the humiliations he had piled on her and had then just as humbly let him discard her. She’d picked him; why hadn’t she kept him? Why had she let him tangle into Daphne’s life? Why, at a word of dismissal from him, had she meekly packed her bag and come lugging it to me?
Savagely, I said, “Well, I hope there’s enough havoc for you?”
I suppose I knew that was a totally unreasonable accusation. I suppose I realized that she had every right in the world to counterattack. But she didn’t. She just stood by the window, her hair gleaming around her shoulders, looking quiet and sad.
She said, “Tell me about Jaimie.”
“What is there to tell? Someone shot him. Last night. In his apartment.”
“But—who?”
“How should I know? What did I know about Jaimie Lumb? You’re the one who should know.”
In a very small voice, she asked, “Do you think I did it?”
I longed to fling at her: Why not? You were besotted with him; he treated you like mud; only a couple of hours before he was killed, he was throwing you out of his life. But she hadn’t killed him. The Medical Examiner had proved that. And I still had enough sense to know that there wasn’t any time for recriminations. She wasn’t a murderess; she was merely a nuisance. Somehow she had to be neutralized—for Betsy’s sake, for Daphne’s sake, for C. J.’s sake and most of all, for my sake.
I said, “I know you didn’t kill him. The police say he was shot between one-thirty and two-thirty. By one-thirty, you’d been at my place over an hour.”
She said, “Then you’ve already talked to the police?”
“Of course I have.”
“And—so has that woman, the nurse?”
“Yes.”
“So you had to tell them about me. It’ll all come out in the papers, and Betsy will have to know. I’ve loused everything up for you, haven’t I? Oh, Bill, I’m so sorry.”
Her face showed nothing but concern for me and lack of love for herself. My God, I thought, does she have to be noble about it? And suddenly, the fix I had to explain to her, the fix which had seemed so sound and practical and ingenious when I’d explained it to Paul Fowler, seemed to go sour inside me.
I said, “As a matter of fact, I haven’t told them about you. Neither has Ellen.”
I told her what I had done. And, as I told her, I saw myself no longer as the deft operator, triumphantly crowned by a vice-presidency, but as a wretched little underling, squirming hither and thither, discarding every principle in a craven effort to save my own hide and propitiate my master. It might have been easier if only she hadn’t watched me all the time. But those big, gray eyes never left my face and although they never showed the slightest reproach, their faintly puzzled attentiveness seemed to be passing judgment on me as if she was thinking: So this is the man I used to love.
Although I knew I was the one who was attributing the role to her, I could only think of her as a moral arbiter and I hated her for it. Who did she think she was, to put herself up in judgment over me?
When I had finished, she was still looking at me. She lit another cigarette and said almost matter-of-factly, “So that’s where it stands now?”
“Yes.”
“You’re committed to Daphne. If the police find me and I have no alibi, I’ll have to tell the truth and ruin everything for you with Mr. Callingham, or… if I don’t tell the truth, they’ll probably think I did it. They’ll arrest me, won’t they?”
Once again that bald statement of the facts sounded like an accusation. But her voice hadn’t changed at all and she was still looking at me with that maddening, almost apologetic meekness. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “What do you want me to do?”
Die, I thought. Disappear. Become obliterated. There she was. Angelica—my doom, the woman who had always been destined to destroy me.
She had turned to look out of the window across the sooty panorama of roofs and chimneys. She turned. “I never went to Jaimie’s apartment, you know; he wouldn’t let me. We were only in New York a few weeks and we didn’t have any friends in common. Perhaps the police won’t trace me.”
“They’ll trace you all right. Jaimie was killed with your gun.”
“My gun?”
“The gun you had under your pillow that night. Trant found it by the body and showed it to me. I recognized it right away. Did you know Jaimie had it?”
She nodded. “Oh, yes. He took it. Three days ago.”
“Why?”
“It was when he came around to tell me he was going to marry Daphne. I was supposed to make a big scene. I didn’t. That infuriated him and… Oh, well, we were in the bedroom. I
managed to get the gun out from under the pillow. That quieted him down. Later, when he left, he asked if he could have it. He didn’t have any money. He wanted to pawn it. So he took it.”
She had told me that perfectly calmly as if it was a perfectly ordinary episode which might have occurred in any perfectly ordinary human relationship. I visualized the two of them, sordidly in love with their own melodrama, fighting, threatening each other with the gun and then, just as irresponsibly, making it up and deciding that the gun could be pawned so that Jaimie, probably, could buy a couple of cocktails for Daphne at a fashionable bar. The full squalor and chaos of her life was brought back to me and I found I was completely freed from the feeling of guilt which she had created. Whatever she might once have been, she was nothing now but a tramp—a neurotic tramp, corrupted by a morbid affair which I would never begin to understand but which I could, with the greatest of ease, despise. The desire to hurt her returned with my new, comfortable contempt for her.
I said, “I suppose you gave him my ring to pawn, too. The police found it in his apartment.”
Her flush came slowly. I saw it first in her throat; then it climbed steadily upward to her face.
“Yes. I gave him the ring.”
“To pawn?”
“Why not?” The flush had made her face young and vulnerable, but her eyes were flashing. “You don’t imagine that I was cherishing it as a fond souvenir, do you?”
“You were wearing it that first night in the bar.”
“What if I was wearing it?”
“You—” I checked myself. It was absurd to let things drift in that direction. At random, I said, “Where did you buy the gun?”
“In a Third Avenue hockshop.”
“You registered for it with your own name?”
“Of course.”
“Angelica Harding?”
“Angelica Roberts.”
I should have realized that. When Paul had called the hotel there had been the moment of suspense about names. But I had always, for some reason, thought of her with my name and the habit had stuck. Now, suddenly, my wits were operating, again and I realized that maybe from that one little fact we were saved after all. “What address did you give?” I said.
“The address on West Tenth Street. That’s where I was living.”
Once again, it was as if Lieutenant Trant were in the room, standing just outside the range of my vision. But this time he wasn’t a menace. Neither was Angelica. They didn’t matter any more, either of them. Because I saw that they could both be manipulated. Trant would get on to the Third Avenue pawnshop. Of course he would. And he would find the name of the purchaser of the gun. But what would he, in fact, find? Not the name Angelica Harding with its inevitable and fatal pointer to me, but merely the name, Angelica Roberts, at the address on West Tenth Street. He would go to West Tenth Street. He would find that a woman of that name, whom nobody had known, had lived for a few weeks in someone else’s apartment and had left. He might suspect her. He would certainly suspect her if only for the fact that she owned the gun and had disappeared on the night of the murder. But, however much he suspected her, how was he going to find her—if she wasn’t there?
And she wouldn’t be there. She wouldn’t even be in New York. He would be stuck with searching the entire United States for a woman called Roberts—one of the commonest names in the country. Even Trant, with his frightening acuity, could surely never track her down to a tank-town college campus in Iowa.
Relief and excitement brought exaggerated optimism. Now it had come, the plan seemed obvious and foolproof. And it only involved making Angelica do what she had already decided to do. It wouldn’t mean any permanent danger for her, either, because Trant, surely, would eventually find the hoodlum, the bar pickup or whoever it was that had killed Jaimie, and the name Angelica Roberts would be completely forgotten.
I felt as alert again now as C. J. Angelica had sat down on the bed. The blush had gone and with it all traces of her moment of anger. I could see on her face only the old resignation to fate, the old meekness—the “why was I born” expression.
I said, “No one at West Tenth Street knows you, do they?”
“Just the woman across the way.”
“She doesn’t know you come from Claxton?”
“Of course not.”
“Then listen…”
In my enthusiasm, I had no doubts about her accepting the idea, and I was right. While I told her the plan, she listened in complete silence and when I was through, she merely said in a tight little voice:
“There’s a train at 5:35 this afternoon. I called Penn Station this morning.”
I glanced at my watch. It was only five after four. “Have you left anything in the apartment?”
“Yes. Most of my things.”
“Are there suitcases?”
“Yes.”
“Then give me the keys. I’ll go get them. No, that’s too risky. I don’t trust Trant. I’ll send Paul. You start packing here. We can easily make that train.”
Without any comment, she crossed to the highboy, picked up her pocketbook and brought the keys out for me. Then I thought of money. Last night I’d given her all I had in my wallet and it was too late for the bank.
I said, “Do you have enough to settle up the hotel bill?”
“I’ve got all you gave me. There’s just the room and the sandwich I had sent up for lunch.”
“That’ll be more than enough. Okay. I’ll get the money for the ticket from Paul.”
I called Paul to make sure he was back from lunch. He was there. I put down the receiver. Angelica had dutifully opened the suitcase and was folding a dress into it.
I said,. “When you’re ready, take a taxi to Penn Station. Wait for us at the Information desk.”
She didn’t answer. She just went on packing. I left her and took a taxi to the Fund office. There was time to give Paul only the briefest outline and no time at all to ask what the Prop had had to say about Trant. He lent me two hundred dollars from the Fund safe and hurried off with the keys to West Tenth Street.
A taxi got me to Penn Station before five. Angelica, in the old black coat, with a scarf knotted at her throat, was standing by the Information desk. I went to the ticket office and bought a one-way ticket to Claxton. I bought some magazines too. I returned to Angelica and gave her the ticket and the rest of the money. She took them in silence, putting them in her pocketbook. We just stood there, waiting for Paul.
He showed up about ten after five, lugging two suitcases. He grinned at Angelica rather shyly.
“Hello, Angelica.”
“Hello, Paul.”
He dropped the suitcases. “I packed everything that could conceivably have belonged to a female. Even a meerschaum pipe. You never know.” He smiled at us. “Well, kids, good luck etcetera. I have to dash back to the office and a lovely rich lady I’m planning to fleece. Call me as soon as you can, Bill, and I’ll give you the Prop dope.”
He waved and hurried away before I could thank him. The train was already in and people were streaming onto the platform. We followed them. I found Angelica a seat, put the suitcases up on the rack and the magazines on the seat. There were still ten minutes before the train was due to start. We both went out again and stood together on the platform.
I don’t know why she followed me out or why I didn’t leave. Part of me was dying to escape from her, but something—some vestige of nostalgia—held me in check. After all, there she was, alone, unwanted, defeated, crawling back to the one place in the world which still held a welcome for her. Now that I’d solved her and she was beyond harming me any more, I felt a sort of affection for her—and pity.
She said, “There’s nothing else I should know, is there?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll write and tell you how it develops.”
“And I’ll pay back the money.”
“Forget about that.”
“No,” she said. “No. It’s a debt.”
&n
bsp; The thought floated through my mind of how avidly Ellen had swallowed her bribe and how anomalously I had accepted the vice-presidency. The contrast wasn’t comfortable. I stopped thinking about it. The people on the platform were thinning out. A man passed us, pushing a magazine cart.
I said, “Remember me to your father.”
“All right.”
She looked so beautiful and so forlorn. I wondered what was in her mind and then shrank from contemplating it. Clumsily, I said, “I hope you’ll be happy there.”
“Happy?” She turned the great gray eyes on me. “You think I’ll be happy?”
“You may not realize it now, but you’ll be far better off without Jaimie.”
“I will?”
Her expression of hopelessness exasperated me. I said, “For God’s sake, this isn’t the end of everything.”
“Not for you.” Her eyes suddenly revealed her to me. They were hard with contempt and loathing. “Nothing’s the end for you because it can always be fixed. Someone gets killed. Fix it. Someone knows too much. Fix that. Someone’s in the way. Get her on a train; fix her. You’ve learned,” she said. “You’ve certainly learned. You and the Callinghams—that was a marriage of true minds if there ever was one.”
She swung away from me and started toward the train. I took a step after her.
“Angelica…”
But she didn’t turn back. She reached the train; she climbed up the steps and disappeared into the coach.
I walked away down the platform. My heart was pounding with anger. Damn her, I thought, she’s a prig as well as a tramp. What the hell does she think I should have done? Lost my job, lost my wife, thrown everything away for some preposterous principle of abstract truth? But my anger didn’t last long. Soon I was mingling with the crowds of the station’s central lobby, thinking: It will be after six when I get home; maybe Betsy will already be there. The thought of Betsy brought an exquisite sensation of relief.
Angelica was a thing of the past. I had seen the last of my nemesis—forever.
The Man with Two Wives Page 8
