“Gee, Butch, I never figured I’d be talking this way to you. But I guess you never figured you’d be accusing me of murder, either. Don’t tell anyone, but I strongly suspect that truth may be stranger than fiction. You never got on to her, did you? I could never quite understand why. You’re not a dope and you’re married to her. You ought to have had at least a glimmering of what baby’s like. But you never did. I guess she’d quite a miracle really. Since she’s stuck with this demented desire to be the Perfect Everything, she’s learned how to play it without a flaw. For you she’s the Perfect Wife and the Perfect Mother and she’s got away with it just the way she’s gotten away with being the Perfect Angel of Charity for her public. The Brave One, the Selfless One, the One Who Is Not Puffed Up. The One who always, somehow or other, is in the right and makes everyone else feel crass and guilty and unworthy. God knows what abyss of insecurity yawns beneath it all. I suspect it’s C. J. By and large, in the long run, everything that smells nasty around any of us can be traced to C. J. But the things I could tell you about that one. You try working for her. You watch the Angel of Mercy when there’s no one around but the hired help. The Slave Driver. My God, if she’d been in charge of building a pyramid, she’d not only have had it up in twenty-four hours with the desert strewn with the bodies of the dead and the dying, she’d have made it Her Pyramid, The Betsy Callingham Memorial Pyramid. She…”
“Shut up!” Suddenly, as I listened to that monstrously convincing distortion of my wife’s character, I lost control. Anger was like a redness quivering in the air in front of me. I jumped up. I knocked the coffee table aside. Just before I grabbed him, Paul jumped up, too, twisting away from me.
“But, Bill, my poor darling Bill…”
I lunged at him. He took my whole weight on his arms, holding me in front of him.
“Bill, baby. You’ve got to take it. That’s how it happened. Jaimie gave her three days to make up her mind. The third day was the murder day. She drove up from Phillie. She…”
Then everything happened at once. I broke away from his grip and hit him on the jaw. He staggered backward, falling over the arm of the couch. Macguire came running out of the dining room and the door buzzer sounded.
Betsy! I thought. I couldn’t think of anything else. Nothing else mattered. I ran to the door and opened it. Lieutenant Trant came in.
“Mr. Harding.”
Distracted and furious as I was, the sight of his face came as a shock. It was grim and set—like its own portrait in stone.
“Macguire’s here, isn’t he?”
Without waiting for me to answer, he walked past me into the living room. I went after him. Paul and Macguire were just standing there, both of them looking at us, paying no attention to each other.
Macguire said, “We’ve got it for you, Trant. On tape. An admission of the embezzlement and the solution of the murder.”
I swung around to him. “My God, you don’t believe all those preposterous lies! You…”
“Excuse me, Mr. Harding,” said Trant. He put his hand on my arm. His voice and his touch were very gentle but somehow it was as if he’d shouted at me to pay attention to him. “Just what are these preposterous lies?”
“It’s nothing. It’s just some…”
“It’s Mrs. Harding,” said Macguire. “Mr. Fowler claims that Lumb tried to threaten her into sanctioning his marriage to her sister and she killed him.”
Paul was carefully avoiding my gaze. He said, “In a way, it was my fault, Lieutenant. I knew her. I should have realized she’d never let herself be threatened any more than C. J. would. She’s C. J. over again. The arrogance, the Divine Right of Callingham. I should have warned him what he was letting himself in for. I just didn’t; that’s all.”
Behind the panic, the obscene worm of doubt was stirring again. Trant’s hand was still on my arm. He turned to look at me.
“Do you know where your wife went when she left the apartment?”
“Of course. She’s gone to the Fund office to get the books.”
“You’d told her you’d discovered the embezzlement and were going to confront Mr. Fowler—you and Macguire?”
“Of course.”
His eyes seemed to be boring into my face. “You were the one who was so sure Miss Roberts was innocent. You were the one who insisted I should keep an open mind. I guess I should have taken your advice days ago. But at least I took it this morning—after you’d left Centre Street.”
His eyes, whose very neutral grayness gave them a hypnotic quality, seemed now to be faintly sympathetic, almost pitying—the way Paul’s eyes had been.
“That’s when I followed up something that a better detective would have followed up earlier. It was something that was said right in this room, the day after the murder, when both you and I were present. Helen Reed said it to you. She said, ‘You should make your wife relax. We knocked ourselves out so badly that last night we collapsed into stunned exhaustion at 10 P.M. Last night, Mr. Harding. That was the night of the murder. There was a very obvious lead. At 10 P.M. on the night of the murder, in the middle of a crowded Fund drive, your wife went back to the hotel and went to bed at 10 P.M.”
The tip of his tongue came out to wet his lips. “This morning I called the Philadelphia police. I still thought of it just as a routine checkup. I did it largely because I’d decided the least I could do, after all you’ve been through for Miss Roberts, was everything there was to be done. This evening, about five minutes before Macguire called to tell me about the embezzlement, Philadelphia phoned in their report. Until I’d put them on to it, of course, they hadn’t any reason to connect the Callinghams with this case at all. Mr. Callingham’s pull had been powerful enough for us to have kept quiet about it. So they’d had no reason to do any checking on Mrs. Harding. But by then they had checked the hotel. It was true that Mrs. Harding went to her room at 10 P.M. and left instructions not to be disturbed. However, one of the garage attendants saw her take her car out at ten-thirty that night. He’d seen her picture in the paper and recognized her. And then, there’s a night maid on every floor. The night maid on Mrs. Harding’s floor is prepared to testify that she saw Mrs. Harding going back down the corridor to her room at approximately 5:15 A.M.”
I put out my hand and gripped the back of a chair. Trant’s voice went on, quiet, deliberately and unendurably dry as if he were reading out an official report.
“I got right into a police car and drove here. A couple of minutes after I’d arrived, when I was still in the car, I saw Mrs. Harding come out and flag a taxi. I followed her. She went to the Fund office building. I gave her a couple of minutes to get up there. Then I went up, too.” He stopped suddenly. In the flat silence which ensued, I realized that his hand was still on my arm.
He said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Harding. I’m sorry for myself too. There’s nothing I hate more than a case ending like this. But, maybe, under the circumstances, with so many innocent and important people who’d have to have been dragged through the trial…”
He stopped again. I made myself look at him.
Paul said, “You don’t mean she…”
“I guess she knew Mr. Fowler had only kept quiet to save his own skin. Once he’d been forced into admitting the embezzlement, she knew he’d go on to tell the truth. She knew it was hopeless. When I got to the office, the window was open. She’d jumped. I’m sorry, Mr. Harding. I’m sorry to have to tell you. I’m sorry I bungled it. I’m just simply sorry.”
“Of course that’s what she’d do.” Dimly I was conscious of Paul’s awed voice. “Now it can all be hushed up. The Champion of the Callingham Clan…”
I didn’t listen any more. I stood there, holding on to the chair, thinking: This is something I will never be able to believe. And then, through the shock, the horror, the confusion, I found to my astonishment that I believed it already. The One who was always, somehow or other, in the right and made everyone else feel crass and guilty and unworthy. The Perfect Wife. Up ’til
the end, just now—calling Mrs. Mallet, helping me, being brave—she’d been playing the part even though she knew by then it had become a ghastly pretense. And then, at last, she had spoken her own epitaph. I always wanted to be my father’s daughter. It wasn’t the loftiest of ambitions, was it? With tormenting insight, I realized that it hadn’t really been Betsy who had fooled me; it had been I who had fooled myself. Hadn’t I even admitted it to myself in that painful moment of self-knowledge the night before when I’d thought: Of course I admired her. Of course I used her for my comfort; and once I’d betrayed her, I’d felt shame and guilt and unworthiness. But had I ever given her love?
That had been it, hadn’t it? I’d never really given her love because I’d never really loved her. I’d only thought I ought to. The Perfect Wife hadn’t been the only sham.
I heard Trant’s voice, still apologetic, still awkward with sympathy. “Of course there’s no longer any reason to hold Miss Roberts. I’ll see they release her right away. And, of course, too, Mr. Harding, it’s you she has to thank. If it hadn’t been for you…”
I tried to think of what Betsy must have been going through all these days, of her anxieties, her terrors, her efforts to keep up a front which must have been infinitely harder than mine. But they didn’t register. And it appalled me that what should have been the greatest grief of my life was already nothing more than a faint, cosmic pity—as if I were grieving for someone I’d hardly known, the least suspected but the most insidiously corrupted of C. J.’s slaves who had killed a man rather than risk the collapse of her public personality.
Suddenly I thought of Angelica who had never given a damn about her public personality and there came, no longer in its distorted dream version, the memory of her hurrying toward me, her face radiant, her arms outstretched.
I wasn’t such a fool to love you, after all, was I? You just went one wrong way and I went another. Now that we both see our mistake…
For God’s sake, you don’t think I’m doing it because I love you!
That’s what I’d said. That’s what I—the guilt-ridden husband of somebody else, nagged by the delusion that love and the obligation to love were the same thing—had thought.
Had I been a sham about that, too?
Dell, 1959
The Man with Two Wives Page 20
