“When was this?”
“Oh, a couple of days before—it happened.”
“And you’d never seen anything like that before?”
“No. Nothing.”
“And she never said anything?”
“No, sir. Not a thing. Not her.”
I said, “It wasn’t the way you think. I never had anything to do with her. She was crazy.”
Lucia’s tongue came out to moisten her lips. “Sure. Sure, it was like you say. A terrible thing. Mr. Duluth, is it okay if I start with the cleaner? It’s kind of late.” She hadn’t believed me. Her warmhearted Italian nature didn’t hold me any ill will for what she thought I’d done, but my feeble self-defense was embarrassing her.
“Of course,” I said.
I got up and went into the bedroom. Lucia had made the bed. I lay down on it. I thought lying down might help my headache. What else did I have to do, anyway? Lottie would probably never forgive me for calling her a stupid, messy woman, or for laughing at her. She hated being laughed at more than anything in the world. Maybe she would seriously try to break her contract. She’d done it once before when she’d fought with a producer. If she left Star Rising, it would fold in a week. Lottie was the whole play. I didn’t even have an understudy. The sensible thing would be to go upstairs right away, to purr over her, to tell her what a wonderful friend she was and how only she could soothe my aching breast. But I wasn’t going through all that crap. It just wasn’t worth it.
An image of Nanny Ordway rose in my mind—Nanny as described by Miss Amberley on the night before her death, sitting like a statue in front of her typewriter, tap, tap, tapping. Hadn’t she said to me that night when she left the apartment that she still had work to do? Had that work been the letter to Iris which had irrevocably proved me a heel and a liar?
What could have been in her mind? Iris was right when she had said that even a crazy person had to have motives. Could Nanny Ordway, in her self-created fantasy world, really have kidded herself I was in love with her? Had she managed to make herself believe all the stories she had told Miss Amberley? Could she have lain there in my bed in Iris’s pajamas dreaming that I was with her until the dream seemed true? Had the letter to Iris, then, been written, not in spite, but in a mad decision to bring an imaginary romance to a heroic end in renunciation and suicide?
The secret of death!
I would have to solve it. My life would never be livable until I had understood what had wrecked it. Nor would there be any hope of a true reconciliation with Iris.
Suddenly the bedroom, doubly haunted now, became unendurable. I got up off the bed and went back to the living-room. Lucia was vacuuming over by the window.
“I’m going out.”
She switched off the vacuum. “What you say, Mr. Duluth?”
“I’m going out.”
“Okay. And don’t you go breaking your heart now. It’ll all be all right.”
“Good-by, Lucia.”
I didn’t feel up to going to the office and exposing myself to the sage advice and the sympathy of Miss Mills. I walked at random to Third Avenue. Sunlight was splashing down through the El. Trucks lumbered by. People were walking back and forth past the little delicatessens and the cluttered windows of the antique stores. I turned south. I could extract no nourishment from the bustle around me. It was as if Third Avenue rejected me, as if everyone who hurried by could see that I was walking hand in hand with a ghost.
I came to a movie house and went in. Next to sleep, movies are the best anodyne. But Nanny Ordway was still with me. I could almost feel her in the empty seat next to me. If I shifted my knee one inch to the left, it would touch hers. If I turned my head, there she would be with her dark hair flopping around her shoulders, her pale, little-girl face tilted upward as she watched the figures on the screen.
She was with me after the movies when I went out into the sunlight again. She followed me to the Riker’s where I ate because I had to eat something. I walked up to Central Park and wandered around. I tried a big, brassy stage show at the Roxy, but I couldn’t shake Nanny Ordway.
When I returned to the apartment at six o’clock, she came, too. She was sitting on the window seat, looking down at the East River. It’s lovely—the room—the window. What nonsense I talked about being poor!
She had taken Iris’s place and moved in.
I had a couple of Martinis. I was a little wary of drink, so I went into the kitchen, found a can of soup, heated it, and drank it. I ate some cheese and crackers, too. I knew then that Nanny Ordway had me on the run. The only thing to do was to turn and fight. Knowledge is power. Francis Bacon had said that and presumably he knew what he was talking about. The only way to defeat Nanny Ordway was to obtain more knowledge of her.
If, for example, I could find someone who had known her, who could prove that she had been mad, then I could take that person to Iris and even to Lieutenant Trant. But where could I start my search? Incredible as it now sounded, I knew virtually nothing about Nanny Ordway. Once she had mentioned a mother, but the publicized fact of her death had, apparently, caused no relative or friend to come forward. It was as if she had deliberately fostered her anonymity.
There was only one person who could help me. Miss Amberley.
I made myself another Martini. I would need it if I had to face Miss Amberley. There was no use phoning and finding out whether she was in. If she knew I was coming, she’d barricade the door. I’d have to go down there and somehow force myself on her.
I drank the Martini. The phone rang. I rushed to answer it. I suppose I thought it would be Iris. It was Miss Mills.
“Hello, Peter.”
“Hello.”
“Iris just called me.”
“She did?”
“She told me everything, about the letter and all. She’s very unhappy.”
“I know.”
“I tried to argue with her but there wasn’t anything I could do. Peter, you can’t blame her.”
“Of course not.”
“I suppose I ought to be bright and cheerful and full of cosy little prospects for the future. But we’re neither of us quite that moronic, are we?”
“No.”
“Peter, are you all right?”
“I’m all right.”
“Don’t come to the office tomorrow if you don’t feel like it. My weary old shoulders can carry it for a while. But if there’s any room in your life for a pig-lady, goddamit, Peter, you know I’d do anything.”
“Thanks, Miss Mills.”
“And there’s one thing more I think you should know. That policeman, Lieutenant Trant, was around this afternoon. He asked a lot of questions—exactly when you came in from that movie, whether I could find any more of the drawings Nanny made, things like that. I was a little worried. I thought you said the case was closed so far as homicide was concerned.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Well, it isn’t.”
That was a comforting piece of news!
“He’s a charmer, that one. He turned on the full male heat—special brand reserved for older girls. He could tell how smart I was, how I would be the first to realize that it was best for everyone’s sake to have the truth established. All that crap. He was smooth, too—didn’t give away a darn thing. Peter, do you want me to try to find out what he’s up to?”
“Think you can?”
“Oh, sure. I put on the greatest seduced act since Madame Butterfly. He thinks I’m mad for him. He told me if ever I thought of anything, any little thing, I was to run around to his office at the station house. Then I’ll try it? I’ll go around and snuff about tomorrow?”
“Fine.”
Miss Mills did not speak for a moment, but the line was still active.
“Peter, it was right to tell you that, wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was.” I knew she was miserable because she, like Lottie, was wondering whether or not I’d break. I didn’t want her to be miserable. I had
caused enough trouble already. I said, “Don’t worry about me.”
“Worry? Me worry? Don’t be silly, Peter. Gay as a lark, I.”
She hung up. Now that I had heard about Lieutenant Trant, I was glad I’d had that third Martini. I went out and took a taxi to 31 Charlton Street.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE TAXI DRIVER lost his way. Drivers often do in the Village. They’re used to the geometric simplicity of uptown Manhattan. A few inconsistencies, a twist or two in a street, and they are defeated. We came to Charlton Street from the wrong direction past gloomy, night-closed factories which gave the impression of life vegetated.
I couldn’t get Lieutenant Trant out of my mind. Had the final autopsy reports come in and, incredibly, pointed to murder? I doubted it. Only yesterday Trant had said they would take several days. Was, then, his moral indignation against me so extreme that for some private satisfaction of his own, he was jumping the gun and starting a murder investigation anyway? I doubted that, too. Detectives—even detectives like Lieutenant Trant—didn’t operate that way.
If he was starting an investigation, it was because he had found some other evidence to believe that Nanny Ordway might have been murdered. Something, perhaps, connected with the drawings he had mentioned to Miss Mills.
A new idea that chilled came to me. Could Nanny have intended exactly this? Could she have been monstrous enough to have wanted her dream lover not only to lose his wife and his self-respect but also to be accused of her death? The secret of love merged with the secret of death? Why not? And why shouldn’t she succeed? She’d succeeded at everything else.
For certainly it was I and only I whom Lieutenant Trant would suspect. I remembered what I had thought of him at the station house—that, if he believed I was guilty of any crime punishable by law, he would track me to the ends of the earth. I’d start by checking your alibi. That was what he had said. And that, almost certainly, was what he had done before he had gone to Miss Mills. It was not probable that anyone would have recognized me at the movie house. Why should they?
Suddenly I saw myself hopelessly caught in a dead girl’s dream. I saw myself with two Furies stalking me now, Nanny Ordway and her dupe, Lieutenant Trant—the Victim and the Law. I saw myself running a race against time—to prove Nanny Ordway’s insanity before that insanity destroyed me.
The entrance to Number 31 was below street level. I went down the stone steps and pressed the buzzer marked Claire Amberley. Nanny’s name wasn’t written on the dog-eared card. Had Miss Amberley removed it already? Or had it never been there? I couldn’t remember.
An answering buzz sounded in the closed front door. I pushed it inward and walked up the chocolate-painted staircase to the second floor. As I turned from the stairhead into the landing, Miss Amberley was hovering outside her half-open door. She was wearing a green, paint-stained smock. I hadn’t known that artists, or anyone else for that matter, wore smocks any more. It stopped just below her knees, making her look even gawkier than I had remembered her. I hadn’t expected to come upon her so suddenly. She obviously had not expected me, either. A flush spread over her face. It was an unbecoming, spinsterish flush which belonged with a much older woman.
“You!” she said. “What are you doing here?”
I thought irrelevantly that here was another cliché that I must remember next time I directed a play. Clichés were beginning to pile up on me. I said, “I want to talk to you.”
“Well, you can’t. Not possibly.”
She took a step backward, fluttery and frightened, as if I were about to rape her. In so big, so mannish a girl, it was absurd, annoying, and somehow pathetic.
“My brother’s here. He’s just arrived from Wood’s Hole. He—”
Her banal social apologies petered out. She put her hand on the door. I had the impression that at any second she was going to bolt into the apartment. Then the door was pushed open from inside and a young man came out.
“What is it, Claire?”
Miss Amberley swung around. “John, it’s—Mr. Duluth.” She spoke my name as if it were Jack the Ripper.
The young man was tall and thin with a small head on a long neck. He had a short crew haircut and a stiff university manner. His nondescript face was just saved from being homely by a pair of steady, intelligent blue eyes. He looked tired or sick.
He said, “I’m John Amberley, Claire’s brother. What do you want, Mr. Duluth?”
“I want to talk to your sister.”
“No.” Now that she had a man to protect her, Miss Amberley wasn’t frightened any more, and her face had taken on the expression of spite and revulsion which I remembered from Lieutenant Trant’s office. “I refuse to talk to him, John.”
Her brother put his hand on her arm. “What do you want to talk about, Mr. Duluth?”
“Nanny Ordway,” I said.
“No,” said Miss Amberley again. “No.”
For a moment her brother hesitated. Then he said, “Come in, Mr. Duluth.”
“John!” cried Miss Amberley.
“Please, Claire. I want to talk to him. It can’t make things any worse than they are.”
Miss Amberley was surprisingly biddable. She didn’t object any more, and let him guide her inside the apartment. I followed.
The room with the navy-blue walls was even more cluttered than I had remembered. The easel had been dragged into the middle of the floor. One of the gray and brown Braque-ish still life, half finished, was standing on it. I had expected to feel Nanny Ordway here even more violently than in my own apartment. But I had been wrong. The books scattered on the studio couches, the wilting violets in a cheese glass, the highbrow disarray struck no responsive chord. It all fitted exactly with Miss Amberley. This was obviously her atmosphere. Nanny Ordway had merely been an interloper.
Claire Amberley moved to the easel and stood beside it, rejecting me with every ounce of her being. Her brother said, “Sit down, Mr. Duluth.”
He pushed some books aside on one of the studio couches and sat down himself, arranging his long, bony legs. I sat on the other couch. He couldn’t have been much more than thirty, but, as with his sister, there was an elderly air to him. I thought he was probably a master at one of the more elegant boys’ prep schools. He had that manner, the carefully underplayed dignity of an adult accustomed to the society of adolescents.
“Just what do you want to know about Nanny Ordway, Mr. Duluth?”
“As much as I can.”
“Why?”
“Because she was found dead in my apartment. Because, according to your sister, I had promised to marry her when, in fact, I hardly knew her. Because she’s managed to make a superlative mess of my life. Isn’t that reason enough to be curious?”
“A mess of his life!” cried Miss Amberley. “Did you hear that, John? What did I tell you?”
John Amberley put his hands on his knees. He was watching me with an odd intentness as if every detail of my appearance had some private importance to him. “This isn’t an easy situation, Mr. Duluth.”
“Did anyone say it was?”
“No. But it’s a little more complicated than you may realize.” He paused. “You see, I was in love with Nanny Ordway. I had asked her to be my wife.”
He made that unexpected announcement quietly, almost diffidently. It took me completely by surprise, and I felt a kind of weary despair. I had come here in the hopes of proving Nanny Ordway had been insane. All I found was a man who had asked her to marry him!
Suddenly I felt once again Nanny Ordway’s immediate physical presence, as if her dead hand was in mine. No. Not her hand. That was wrong. Because now I thought of her as a spider, a gray, unobtrusive little spider spinning delicate, devious webs, crouching in dark corners, crouching only to spring down the threads at her victims. The Victim’s victims. Me—John Amberley—Who else?
I said with disgust, “Is there no end to this thing?”
“She’s dead,” said John Amberley softly. “That’s so
me kind of an end, isn’t it?”
“I suppose you’re like your sister. You think I’m responsible.”
“Does it matter what I think?”
“Of course it matters. Would you like to be branded by all and sundry as a seducer? Would you like to go around bellowing the truth at the top of your lungs and have no one pay the slightest attention?”
“Why should anyone pay attention?” It was Miss Amberley’s cold, cutting voice that broke in. “There’s nothing hard to understand about you. In the beginning you were too craven to accept the moral guilt of having killed her. Now you’re stuck with your story and you can’t break down. How would you look if you did, if you admitted you were a cowardly liar as well as a corrupter of young girls?”
There it was—the same old argument against me. It was what they all believed. It was what even Iris believed. There was no point in wearing myself out in futile battles with Miss Amberley. I turned back to her brother.
“When did all this happen?”
“I asked Nanny to marry me a few weeks ago. On my birthday, as a matter of fact.”
“And she accepted?” I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had. Nothing about Nanny Ordway could surprise me any more.
“She neither accepted nor refused, Mr. Duluth. She asked me to wait awhile.”
“Why?”
“Because of you, of course,” put in Miss Amberley. “She was still hoping you’d divorce your wife, that you wouldn’t let her down.”
I ignored her. “Is that the reason she gave you, Mr. Amberley?”
“She gave no reason. I didn’t press her.”
“But I did.” Miss Amberley wasn’t to be ignored. She flounced into the conversation again, her arms folded across the front of her floppy smock. The pose gave her a pseudo-Oriental caste. She looked ludicrous, like a Wellesley girl playing a mandarin in a Drama Group production of a No play. But there was nothing ludicrous about the malice in her voice and in the protuberant green eyes. “That’s when I made her confide in me, the day she’d told John to wait. I knew there was another man. I’d suspected it for some time. I urged, I begged, I pleaded for John’s sake. Finally she told me about you. She admitted she was in love with the husband of a famous actress. Oh, she was loyal to you, of course. Nanny was always loyal. But it all came out when you called—the whole, charming, sweet-smelling story that I told to Lieutenant Trant.”
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