The Man with Two Wives

by Patrick Quentin

  She went to the phone and called Mrs. Mallet. She was tactful about it, claiming there’d been a mixup in the accounting and that she wanted to check to make sure Mrs. Mallet got full credit. She put down the phone and turned to me.

  “It was a thousand. And she was all het up when I talked about her getting full credit because she’d wanted it to be anonymous. A lot of the richest ones always give anonymously. They don’t like the publicity; it loads them with crank begging letters. So—that’s it, isn’t it?”

  “I guess it is. At least that’s one of his angles. It’s smooth, too. The full financial statement’s published, but he has a tame public accountant and, if ten people gave a thousand anonymously and only one thousand-buck donation shows up in the statement that’ll satisfy them all if they happen to check. Each one would figure the thousand-buck donation was hers. Even if they all knew each other and knew you, he’s pretty safe because those rich women are going to be far too ladylike to go around mentioning the actual sums they give to charity.”

  She stood there by the phone, her lips tight, taking it.

  “So that’s the end of the Fund—the humiliating departure of that wonderful, public-spirited Betsy Callingham from the public scene. She wasn’t Florence Nightingale, after all. She was only a front for a crook—and a very special variety of crook at that, her father’s mistress’ complaisant husband. What are you going to do now, Bill?”

  “Call Macguire, I guess. It’s his job to take it from here on.” My heart was bleeding for her. I crossed to her and took her in my arms. “Betsy, baby, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, darling. It’s just fate or some depressing abstract thing like that. You fight; you do your best; but it just doesn’t work out. I guess I’m whatever that child is, Saturday’s child? Sunday’s child? The one who’s full of woe.” She tried to smile. She put her finger up and touched my cheek. “Go on, baby, call Macguire. Get it over with.”

  I took the card Trant had given me out of my pocket and dialed Macguire’s number. I put my arm back around my wife’s waist. Macguire was still at the office. I told him the whole story. I was malicious enough to feel pleased by his flustered, unprofessional excitement. This was wonderful. This was remarkable. This certainly changed the picture. He’d call Trant right away.

  “You can get the Fund books?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then get them. And what about Fowler? Can you get him over to your apartment?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then call him. I’ll come too. Yes, I know how to handle this. I can be there in under half an hour. Call him. Ask him to come at six-thirty. Don’t let him suspect anything. Just make it informal. Ask him for a drink.”

  “Okay.”

  “This is something. I congratulate you, Mr. Harding. This is something.”

  I dropped the receiver. Betsy said, “I’ll go get the books, shall I?”

  “I guess so.”

  “But call Paul first. Make sure you can get him.”

  I called Paul. He answered the phone himself. The sound of his voice, cheerful, friendly, so familiar, made everything seem faintly unreal. I told him I wanted to talk to him, that I was downtown and would be home at six-thirty. Would he come?

  “Sure, Butch. And Bill, about yesterday, I still feel a skunk.”

  So much had happened that “yesterday” meant nothing to me. “Yesterday?”

  “About letting you down with the cop. Honest, Bill, if you want me to go to him…”

  “Just come over here, Paul.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Without a word, Betsy went out of the room. Soon she came back with her coat on. I looked at her, thinking, almost with awe: I could never be like that—never in a million years. She’s got more guts than an army with banners.

  “I’ll get the books, Bill. It won’t take long.”

  I went to her and took her in my arms again. “Baby, you’re wonderful.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. “What’s being wonderful? It’s a boring attribute equally distributed among the Callingham family. Father’s wonderful, isn’t he? He built up a mighty empire; he raised two remarkable daughters; he keeps the discreetest mistress in Manhattan; he foisted her husband off on me. He…”

  I kissed her on the mouth. “Don’t, baby.”

  “Bill, do you suppose he did it on purpose? Do you suppose he put Paul into the Fund because he guessed what would happen? Just to laugh at me? Just to slap me down again?”

  It could have happened that way, of course. C. J. with his labyrinthine perversity was more than capable of it.

  “I hate him,” she said almost matter-of-factly. “That’s another illuminating discovery I’ve made. I hate my father.”

  The look of disenchantment on her face was poignant to me, but dimly I realized that, whatever she thought now, all this was going to be fine for her—even the destruction of the Fund. Of us all Betsy was the only one whom C. J. hadn’t managed to corrupt, but it was only by a miracle that she had survived his persistent contempt and her own obsession that she should deserve his respect. Yes, it was far better to have her hate him at last. That was worth losing the Fund for a hundred times over. We were both of us free of C. J. now.

  I said, “Go on, baby. Hate him. And then forget him and forget the Fund. You don’t need either of them.” I was going to add: You’ve got me. Then I remembered Angelica and had enough sense to keep silent. I wasn’t going to say that again until I had proved to her that I really meant it.

  For a moment she stood there, looking at me with a long, clear scrutiny.

  “I always wanted to be my father’s daughter,” she said. “Looking back, it wasn’t the loftiest of ambitions, was it?”

  I grinned at her, thinking: It’s all right. She’s going to be okay.

  “Run along, baby,” I said, “and get those books. You might as well be in at the kill.”

  I saw her off at the front door; then I went back into the living room and poured myself a drink. I felt jittery, but not enough to mar my new, powerful sense of assurance for Betsy and my conviction that together Macguire and I were going to be able to swing this thing. I thought of Angelica. Perhaps that very night she’d be out of her cell—free. It was good to be able to feel calm and friendly about her. At last I could relax and look at my first marriage and our relationship after marriage with sense and without rancor. I could see now why she’d left me and I could see that I, in my dazzlement by the Callingham wealth, had been just as unattractively naïve and blinded as Angelica in her pitiful pursuit of honesty along the gutters of the Charles Maitlands and the Jaimie Lumbs. I could admit that, when I’d found her again, I’d wanted her physically; I could even admit that I’d always probably go on wanting her with a part of me. I could also face the fact that now, after what had happened, she’d proved herself to be a goddam good person. This dismal affair had tested her. It had tested me too. We’d both shown up okay. Now we could go our several ways in peace.

  Soon Macguire arrived. He was lugging a big suitcase. He was almost ludicrously on the ball and immediately announced his plan. I was to handle Paul alone while he waited in another room with a tape recorder. He produced the tape recorder from the suitcase. It all seemed movie-ish to me but that apparently was how they did things. He installed himself in the dining room, which adjoined the living room. He’d just plugged a small spike microphone into the wall when the door buzzer sounded.

  “Pretend you’ve already inspected the books, Mr. Harding. Make your case as strong as you possibly can. Get him flustered.”

  Macguire was much more excited than I. I went to the door. Feeling a little tense and faintly conscious of the betrayal of friendship, I let Paul in.

  chapter 24

  He was grinning his wide, candid grin. He threw his topcoat down on the Angelica couch.

  “Betsy here?”

  “No, but she’ll be back soon.”

  “So this is an Angelica session?”

&
nbsp; “Sort of.”

  We went into the living room. Of his own accord, he sat down on a couch right against the dining-room wall. I mixed him a drink at the bar, steeling myself. It was irrelevant to remember now, of all times, that I was fond of him. It was even more irrelevant to remind myself that Jaimie Lumb had been a lousy little blackmailer whose death was unmourned by anyone. It wasn’t from any abstract desire to see legal justice done that I was doing this. It had got far beyond that. I was doing it because it had to be done to save Betsy and Angelica—and myself. Being soft-hearted now was only being soft-headed.

  I took the drink to him. He accepted it, watching me, the blue eyes solemn with concern.

  “So the D. A.’s going ahead with the trial anyway?”

  “It’s set for next week.”

  “Gee! And you’re still sticking to your story? You’re going to appear in court?”

  I sat down opposite him, feeling more awkward than anything else and extremely conscious of Macguire’s eager-beaver ear and Macguire’s tape recorder lurking in the next room.

  “I’d appear in court if I had to,” I said. “But there won’t be any trial. I’m going to stop it.”

  “Stop it?”

  “I’ve found out who killed Jaimie.”

  He looked shaken—so obviously shaken that I could hardly believe it. It is difficult to conceive what being a murderer is like, but I’d always imagined it involved a certain amount of insensitivity and very steady nerves.

  “You’ve found out?” he echoed. “My God—how?”

  “Through Daphne. Daphne knew about C. J. and Sandra. She’s known for years. This morning she told me.”

  A vein in his neck was pulsing and pinkish, looking grotesque against the pallor of his skin.

  “After Daphne,” I said, “I went to Sandra. You know how she is. She told me the works. It wasn’t hard to figure out that you couldn’t have been buying her all that junk on your salary. Once I’d got onto that, it was a cinch to check with the Fund’s books. And not only that; I got the dope from Mrs. Mallet too. I was in the office the day you were thanking her over the phone for a donation. It shows up on the record as five hundred. Mrs. Mallet wrote a check for a thousand.” I paused, forcing myself to go on looking at him although the disintegration of his face was unpleasant to see. “That’s enough, isn’t it? Daphne. Sandra. The books. Mrs. Mallet. The Sandra Fowler Fur, Jewel and Automobile Fund.”

  He just sat with the glass in his hand. At length he said in a flat voice, “So.”

  “So you admit it?”

  “Sure I admit it. It was the most amateur embezzlement in the history of crime, anyway. I never could figure why it had such a long run.” A faint trace of the old sardonic smile showed in his eyes. “You don’t need an interminable psychological explanation of motive, do you? You’ve been a Callingham serf yourself. Not such a serfish serf, though. At least you haven’t had the Great C. J. visiting your apartment, two afternoons a week, year after year, discreetly, like a Scarsdale matron with a season ticket to the Philharmonic.” He shrugged. “Hell, I’m not going to try to justify myself. I’m not that much of a dope. I went into this thing with my eyes wide open. I figured Sandra on any terms was better than no Sandra at all. But you try it for six years; you just try it with that poor dopey girl eating it all up, thinking C. J.’s a cross between Napoleon and le bon Dieu, reading you his speeches out of the newspapers at breakfast. ‘Gee, honey, C. J. made another speech last night to the Boy Scouts of Worcester, Mass. Freedom, it says here, America’s Priceless Heritage…”

  He put a hand up to his eyes. “Wouldn’t you have felt you’d earned every dirty red cent you could chisel out of that family? The Sandra Fowler Fur, Jewel and Automobile Fund. If I could, I’d have looted every penny out of that egomaniacal poor-box.”

  He dropped his hand and looked at me with a wry, apologetic grimace. “Gee, Butch. I’m sorry. Carrying on like this. Go ahead. Let’s get it over with. Let’s have our lovely spiritual purge.”

  In the delicate balance, my sense of excitement was overweighing my reluctant sympathy for him. I thought of Macguire’s recorder whirring.

  I said, “Okay. There was that. Then Sandra gave me the rest when she told me Jaimie had found out about C. J. and had gotten onto the embezzlement too. She didn’t realize she was telling me that, of course, but it was obvious. You were the one who first called Jaimie a blackmailer. And he was, wasn’t he? He saw he’d got onto something good with you. He tried a shakedown and then… Sandra tied it all up when she told me about fixing her hair. The night of the murder, when you were at home with her, she was locked up in the bedroom for four hours.”

  As he listened, his expression had subtly changed. Now there was an unnervingly genuine look of astonishment mixed with the discomfiture on his face.

  “You’re not trying to tell me that’s what you think? That—I killed him?”

  I told myself that, of course, even though he’d admitted the embezzlement, he wouldn’t admit the murder. I must have been an imbecile to expect it to be as easy as that. But I was uncomfortably conscious of that almost stunned look of astonishment.

  “You poor benighted dope!” he said. “So you’re not hep to it after all.”

  “Not hep to what?”

  “Of course Jaimie got onto me and the Fund. Of course he came to me—right there at the office—and laid the whole thing on the line. But he wasn’t interested in me. What was I? Just a small-time crook playing a piddling little peanut racket that wasn’t in his league at all. Only one thing interested Jaimie Lumb—marrying Daphne.”

  I struggled against confusion. “You’re trying to say it was C. J.? Jaimie’s plan was to put the screws on C. J.?”

  “C. J.!” he echoed. “My God, he had more sense than to dare to try meddling with C. J. What was the need for it anyway? He’d been so smooth with C. J. that C. J. was mad for him. C. J. hadn’t the faintest idea that he’d beaten Daphne up and got her drunk and all that. You’d covered it up. C. J. wasn’t the problem. There were only two things standing in the way of Jaimie Lumb, Bridegroom of Genius—you and Betsy.”

  He gulped what was left of his drink and put the glass down on the table in front of him. His eyes, all the time, were on my face. “To begin with, I thought maybe you’d got on to it and that was why you were letting Angelica take the rap. I wasn’t sure, of course. And I didn’t give a damn one way or the other. All I cared about was that the police should stay stuck with Angelica. They’d never have convicted her anyway, and as long as they were fixed on her, the other thing—which would inevitably have dragged my little soak-the-Fund project out into the daylight with it—could stay buried.” He paused. “But you never got wise, did you? And you’re not wise now. A couple of minutes ago, when you said you knew who killed him, I thought you really did know.”

  The confused thoughts in my mind were darkening.

  His voice ran on: “I’ve always known. I knew before it even happened. Jaimie didn’t have to keep up any pretty pretense with me. He’d caught me with my pants down and he knew it and, besides, he needed me. He outlined the entire campaign to me. He wasn’t worried about you. He could always shut you up by threatening to mention Angelica to C. J. and Betsy at the wrong moment. Betsy was the problem. Surely you knew Betsy had a terrific scene with Daphne, telling her, in her role of Old Mother Callingham, to lay off Jaimie for good. But maybe you don’t know she had another just as terrific scene with Jaimie before she went off to Phillie. He was smart, Jaimie. He didn’t underestimate her. He realized she was a woman of steel. He saw that, so long as she was holding out against him, he didn’t have one chance in hell of getting Daphne to the altar. So that had been his problem—how to fix Betsy. And, thanks to his fiendish luck in catching C. J. leaving my apartment and thanks to the poor Prop’s bone-headedness, he’d found his perfect fixer. Okay. Either she gave the marriage her blessing, or he’d blast it across every front page that her wonderful, her so divine, her infinit
ely public-spirited Betsy Callingham Leukemia Fund was nothing but a front for a two-bit racketeer.”

  I could feel my heart pounding. I sat there, glaring at him, clutching my glass.

  “That was the plan. To hit her where it hurt most—in her ineffable pride. To show her up as such a stupid lunkhead that she’d let a flagrant embezzlement go on for years right under her super-efficient nose. He threw the whole thing at me. And what was I to do? As he pointed out, it was even worse for me than for her to have the whole thing come out. If I had any sense, he said, I’d play along with him and make sure the job was so well done that she’d have to give in. So, not being the most unrealistic of characters, I became an ally malgré moi and, from the bottomless barrel of my experience, I gave him a couple of tips to clinch it. I said: Fine, do it your way. But make it this much better. Tell her you’ll accuse her in the press not just of being stupid but of being an accomplice. Tell her you’ll announce that she was wise to the embezzlement from the start but had let it go ahead because she was mad for me, that I’d been her lover for years. I knew what that would do to Miss Leukemia, Miss Ideal Wife and Mother. Her lovely white linen would be soiled in public. The cherished partner in Her Ideal Marriage would leave her.”

  “Are you crazy?” I cut in. “Can you conceive for a second that she’d think I’d believe anything as preposterous as that?”

  “Of course she’d think you’d believe it. She’d have believed it if it’d been the other way around. For the Callinghams, everyone’s guilty until they’re proved innocent. It’s the family motto. They’re not human; they’re only passing as human. They have about as much imagination as they have pity which is, say, one millionth of one per cent of the norm. Of course she’d think you’d believe it. And of course she’d think you’d leave her. She’d see her husband disappearing, her reputation disappearing. It would have thrown her into two trillion apoplectic fits.”

  As I’d listened, as, insidiously, piece after piece fitted into a plausible pattern, panic had stirred in me, but now anger rushed in and obliterated it. For I saw what he was doing. So much for my pal, Paul Fowler! In his craven fear for his own skin, he was pulling the dirtiest foul of all time to try to keep me from exposing him. I yearned to jump up and smash my fist in his face. But, somehow, I had enough sense to remember Macguire and the recorder. This had to go on. This was our only hope. I had to put up with him, to let him spill out his filth until the moment came where I could trip him up. The blue eyes, watching me, were maddeningly affectionate, almost pitying now.