Black Widow

by Patrick Quentin

  It would have been less horrible if she had not been enjoying herself so much. She was just like Lottie. There must be something about my predicament, I thought, that gave women a sexual titillation. Nanny Ordway had me, like a prisoner of the Arabs, tied to a bench for the women to mutilate. Miss Amberley was having a wonderful time with her knife.

  I glanced at her, too bored with her to feel any antagonism. “Did you tell Lieutenant Trant about your brother’s involvement in this?”

  “I certainly did not.”

  “Why?”

  “Hadn’t you done enough damage already? Did my brother’s name have to get splashed all over the headlines? He’s a responsible man with a responsible job. Does he have to be martyrized, too?”

  All those rhetorical questions! John Amberley was still sitting there quietly on the couch with the piles of books pushing against his thin hips. He was obviously suffering. I understood that tired, sick look now—it was the look of a man who had tragically lost his girl. I was very nearly exhausted. I thought: What’s the use of going on? Is it worth tormenting him and myself—for what? I’ll never prove anything here. But something, maybe the fading support of the Martinis, made me persist.

  I said, “Mr. Amberley, did Nanny Ordway tell you all these lies about me, too?”

  “She never mentioned your name. I never realized—That is, until I read in the papers, until I came here this evening and Claire told me—”

  “I’d kept it from him,” cut in Miss Amberley. “He loved her. Why should I have made him unhappy with all that filth?”

  “You didn’t think it’d make him unhappy to marry her—even though you thought she was having an affair with another man?”

  Miss Amberley flushed. “I was trying to save Nanny. You wouldn’t understand that. If she’d married John, she would have been saved.”

  Dear little Nanny Ordway who’d had to be saved from me. “Okay, okay,” I said. I turned back to John Amberley. “She was mad.”

  “Mad!” shrilled Miss Amberley. “How dare you suggest—”

  “She was mad,” I persisted. “Can I possibly make you believe that, Mr. Amberley? Nanny Ordway was insane.”

  John Amberley’s face was white. In a thin, closed voice, he asked, “You expect me to believe that a girl with whom I was in love could have been insane without my realizing it?”

  “She fooled you. The way she fooled me and your sister.”

  “That’s a lie,” cried Miss Amberley. “A filthy, disgusting lie.”

  “Yes,” said John Amberley very quietly, “that is a lie, Mr. Duluth.”

  His restraint, his underemphasized contempt were much more deadly than his sister’s bald hostility. It was hopeless. It was trying to prove black was white again. I said, “I’m sorry for you. Do you at least believe that?”

  “Oh, yes. You probably are. I am sorry for myself.” Surprisingly the ghost of a smile haunted his lips. “I’m learning quite a lot of things about myself, Mr. Duluth. None of them are very attractive. I’m a meteorologist by profession, you know. It’s my job to sift a mass of frequently conflicting data, to correlate it, and to reach some satisfactory conclusion. In the laboratory, even the most complex problems sooner or later succumb to the scientific method. One of the things I’ve discovered about myself is that I can’t import that scientific method into my private life. It should be possible to admit that you may believe what you say, that there was some mistake with Nanny, that you are not what I think you are. But I can’t keep an open mind. I can’t. I can only sit here and look at you and think—”

  He brought a clenched fist up to his mouth. It was a little child’s gesture. I’d seen babies do it to try to keep themselves from crying. It was a shocking, naked moment.

  I got up. “You shouldn’t have let me in.”

  “No. I’m sorry. Please. Don’t go.” Anger at himself or shame had given him control again. “If I feel a shabby emotion, I don’t have to give way to it. You have your problems, too. You came here to ask questions. If it can help you—If anyone can be helped, it’s better than this. Go ahead. Ask whatever you like.”

  He was a very strange young man. I sat down again. Oddly enough, I was staying now for his sake as much as for my own.

  “All right,” I said. “Can you tell me the name of anyone else who knew her—anyone who might still have an open mind about her?”

  The faint smile still lingered on his lips as if he thought I had used his phrase “an open mind” to mock him and approved of my mockery.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help there, Mr. Duluth. Nanny came into our life by chance. We knew nothing of her friends.”

  “What about her parents?”

  “They are both dead. They came from Virginia. Quite a good old family, apparently, but they were poor. They were both killed in an automobile accident when she was sixteen. Since then she had been on her own.”

  “She talked once as if her mother were still alive.”

  “Well, she isn’t,” snapped Miss Amberley, cutting off that channel.

  I went on. “How long have you known her, Mr. Amberley?”

  “About six months.”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “Here in the Village. At a night club.” John Amberley glanced at his sister. “What was its name, Claire?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Oh, yes, Sylvia’s. On West Tenth Street. She was working there as a waitress.”

  “A waitress?”

  “They have girls waiting on table,” said John Amberley. “It’s all very informal. One of those carefree Bohemian places. I was down from Wood’s Hole for the week-end. Claire took me there. It’s one of her haunts. I don’t have much experience with what you might call night life. She thought it might amuse me. Nanny happened to be the waitress who served us. She—she was obviously different from the other girls, more intelligent, more sensitive. There was some fool thing about Henry James. I had The Ambassadors with me. She made some remark about it. I didn’t expect a waitress in a night club to know about Henry James. But he was her favorite author. After she’d brought our beer, she sat down at the table with us. That’s allowed at the club. It’s that sort of place. We got to talking. And both Claire and I—Didn’t we, Claire?”

  He broke off. He looked vague, as if he had lost track of what he had been going to say. I realized then just how much of an effort it was for him to talk this way and marveled at the self-discipline that impelled him, against every inclination, to help a man who—so far as he knew—had caused his girl’s suicide.

  But my interest in him was overshadowed by my absorption in Nanny Ordway. For the first time, I was seeing her doing things that had not been connected with me, leading the life which, in the end, had caused such havoc for all of us. I could see her vividly in that arty Village night club, aggressively unobtrusive, quiet-spoken, with her hair flopping over her face, young, naïve, getting the subtle effect.

  Henry James. Oh, excuse me for mentioning it, but I’m mad about Henry James.

  Claire Amberley had crossed to her brother’s side. She stood with her hand on his shoulder like a clumsy, militant muse.

  “John, don’t talk any more. Why should you torture yourself for him?”

  “Please, Claire, let me do this my way. Mr. Duluth, does this give any picture? Does this help?”

  “Help!” snorted Miss Amberley.

  I said, “I’d be very grateful if you’d go on.”

  “Well, she sat there with us, off and on, when she wasn’t serving, all evening. We talked about lots of things. She was so quick, so alive. Both Claire and I were impressed. We went back the next evening, didn’t we, Claire? And that time she told us something of herself. She was living in some furnished room with another girl.”

  “What girl?”

  “Oh, I don’t know that. She didn’t say. But it was all very inconvenient for her and—well, before the evening was out, Claire suggested she should move in here with
her. Nanny was terribly diffident. She always hated accepting favors. But between us, we managed to persuade her.”

  The way I had managed to persuade her to take my key! I could see Nanny Ordway again in Claire Amberley’s blue satin evening dress (Had she had to be persuaded into borrowing that, too?), turning quickly from the window seat while I held the key out to her. Oh, no, no, I could never—Nanny Ordway who hated accepting favors but who always seemed to have ended up accepting them. A furnished room with an unknown girl—Miss Amberley and the Village—me and Sutton Place. Always a step up. There was a character clue that was all too sane.

  John Amberley’s voice was running on. “I had to go back to Wood’s Hole after the week-end, of course, but Nanny moved in with Claire the next day. Both Claire and I had decided that there was no point in her going on working at that place. It wasn’t right for her. And she’d told us how it was her dream to be a writer. Well, Claire was perfectly prepared to let her live in the apartment with her as long as she liked, to give her a chance with her writing. She was company for Claire and—”

  “And she was mad, of course,” put in Miss Amberley’s voice, gravid with sarcasm. “Naturally when I picked a girl to live with me, to be my friend, I would choose a raving maniac.”

  John Amberley was saying, “I came down again the next week-end. The three of us went about together. Claire had got very fond of her then. And I—well, I’ve never been particularly a ladies’ man, Mr. Duluth. I’ve always been absorbed with my work and—and, well, a bit shy, maybe. But with Nanny it was different. She wasn’t one of those girls who make you feel small. She—I started to write to her, and she wrote back. I came down whenever I could. She seemed to be fond of me, at least as Claire’s brother, and she was interested in the family. We’ve been in Boston a good many generations, you know. There are quite a lot of interesting ancestors. Of course, we don’t have as much money as we used to. But I knew things like that didn’t matter to her. I knew she was sweet and fine, much too good for me. I should have guessed she would have far—far more stimulating, glamorous men interested in her. But I didn’t realize. I—I thought I had a chance. I asked her to marry me. And—well, that’s all, really.”

  His naïve frankness and his humility were embarrassing now. I understood him even less than I had. Perhaps there was some New England guilt sense that urged him on to strip himself bare in front of me as an atonement for hating me as a “successful” rival.

  He made a little gesture with his hand toward his sister. “Perhaps, Mr. Duluth, there’s something else you would like to ask Claire?”

  “I don’t think there is,” said Miss Amberley. “I think he’s had enough of me already.” She was the Arab woman with the knife again. “Would you like to hear any more, Mr. Duluth? Would you like to hear her pitiful confessions of love? Her anxieties about the divorce? Her trust, her touching faith in your sincerity? Her hopes that you weren’t just using her, that you would stand by your promises, that it would come out right in the end? Would you like to hear what she thought of my brother? How much she respected him? How much she would have liked to settle down quietly with him and marry him—but how one part of her was spellbound by you? Oh, that’s only a beginning. I could talk indefinitely. I could give you countless examples of her screaming insanity.”

  Miss Amberley was right. I’d had enough of her. I got up. I said, “I’m sure you could talk indefinitely, Miss Amberley, but I think that’s a pleasure I’ll forego.” I crossed to John Amberley. I held out my hand. “Thanks. You’ve been very kind.”

  He looked at my hand a moment and then took it. “I’m sorry, Mr. Duluth. I should have been able to control myself a great deal better.”

  Suddenly Miss Amberley laughed. “Listen to them. Isn’t it wonderful? The two noble males kissing and making up!”

  The green protuberant eyes fixed me then with a look of undiluted malevolence.

  “What does it feel like to be such a charmer? To meet you is to love you, isn’t it? Everyone falls at your feet.”

  “Yes,” I said savagely, “the nation’s sweetheart. That’s me.”

  “But it’s too bad, isn’t it, that people see through you in the end?” Her tongue came out to moisten her lips. It was a mannerism I remembered from the station house. Dimly I wondered whether that was why she didn’t wear lipstick—because she was tired of the taste of it.

  “Yes,” she said. “Take your wife, for example.”

  “What about my wife?”

  “Oh, nothing.” She shrugged. “Just that she was here this afternoon. She’s charming, perfectly charming. Poor dear, it was really pathetic. She so much wanted to believe your extraordinary theory that Nanny was mad. She even had some gullible idea that I would back you up. But once I’d told her about John, about what a wonderful person Nanny really was, she realized, of course, just how gullible the idea had been. She left here, I assure you, fully informed and with no illusions.”

  She crossed to the door and opened it for me. I thought how delighted she was going to be when Lieutenant Trant showed up one fine morning and announced that I was a murderer as well as a moral leper. She wouldn’t be able to contain herself for joy.

  “Yes, Mr. Duluth.” She was still smiling. This was to be the final, orgiastic thrust of the knife. “I’m afraid you don’t have a wife any more. Too bad, isn’t it? Drop in again whenever you’re in the neighborhood. I’m almost always here.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I WALKED OUT onto Charlton Street. A mist had come up from the river. It impregnated the air with dampness and blurred the street lights. Claire Amberley’s final announcement had hurt me just as much as it had been intended to hurt. I might have guessed Iris would visit her. In her confusion and unhappiness, who else was there to whom she could turn for enlightenment? Like me, she had hoped that Miss Amberley might somehow hold out a lifeline. Well, she knew better now.

  I struggled against a desire to call my wife. Even before Miss Amberley, a call could have got us nowhere. It was doubly hopeless now. Miss Amberley, large, pinkfaced, triumphant, still loomed in my mind. Damn her, I thought. Damn her for a meddling, evil-minded bitch. But it was stupid to blame her—just as it had been stupid to imagine I could glean any help from her. Claire Amberley, in her starved, man-shy way, had been as enamored of Nanny Ordway as her brother. She wasn’t a real villain. She was only another victim.

  It was Nanny Ordway from whom all horror flowed and who still, even after the halting confessions of John Amberley, remained remorselessly enigmatic. Nanny Ordway, whom I had seen as a spider but who now seemed to me like this mist, intangible, insidious, stealing tentaclewise through my clothes, crawling even down my throat into my lungs.

  I turned out of Charlton Street into Sixth Avenue. I saw a bar and went into it, bringing trails of mist with me. A couple of customers sat on stools drearily watching vaudeville on a television set. I ordered a rye and water. I didn’t have any faith in its effect, but it might at least cloud out the Amberleys.

  All it did was to make me think of Lieutenant Trant. Would he show up at the apartment tomorrow, maybe, and accuse me of murder? If he did, what could I say in my own defense which hadn’t already been said a dozen times?

  Nothing.

  There was still Sylvia’s on West Tenth Street—the only doorway left open that might lead me to the real Nanny Ordway.

  Sylvia’s. That was all.

  On television some disinterred comic was singing “If You Knew Susie” and making like Eddie Cantor. I paid for my drink and went out into the mist, looking for a taxi to take me to Sylvia’s.

  I found a taxi and the driver found Sylvia’s, grumbling at the mist, grumbling at the lot of all taxi drivers, but surprisingly picking out Sylvia’s from a warren of other obscure little night clubs.

  The place was in darkness. I told the driver to wait and went to try the door. It was locked. I stood a moment glowering at the darkened door, feeling that even glass and metal and wood had t
urned against me.

  But there was nothing I could do. I knew the end of a day when I saw one. I got back into the taxi and gave my home address. Nanny Ordway climbed into the taxi with me. She was still there when I got out at Sutton Place.

  She went to bed with me that night, too.

  I was awakened next morning by the front door buzzer. My first thought, bringing a cold flutter in my stomach, was Lieutenant Trant. I went to the door in my pajamas. Brian was standing there. He looked very handsome and unhappy.

  “Hi, Peter, can I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  He walked into the living-room. “I can’t stay. Lottie doesn’t know I’m here. I told her I was going around the block for cigarettes. Peter, you had a big fight with her yesterday.”

  Had I? “Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”

  “She’s terribly mad.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  “She’s really on the rampage. Last night at the theater and then again this morning. Peter, I hate to butt in, but you’d better come up and try to calm her down.”

  The mere thought of Lottie made me tired. “I’m sorry, Brian. I can’t face her right now.”

  “You’d better. She’s going to break her contract.”

  “She can’t break her contract.”

  “There’s a sickness clause.”

  “But she’s not sick.”

  “Lottie can be anything she wants to be. You know that. She’s worked herself up into the tizzy of all time. She’s babbling about her heart, her nerves. She’s going to call Doctor Norris. She’s going to make him write a certificate saying she has to have two weeks off for her nerves. I can’t do anything with her. Maybe you can’t either any more. But, for your own sake, you’d better try.”

  So here it was. Nanny Ordway was still on the job. Without Lottie, Star Rising automatically shut down. Without Lottie, I’d have the whole production on full pay on my hands without a penny coming in. Probably, too, I would have the play die under me if Lottie chose to go on being “nervous” indefinitely.