Black Widow

by Patrick Quentin

  At any other time, this would have been a major tragedy to be averted at all costs. But I, who had lost so much, still had my pride, and now my pride was more important than my pocketbook. I was damned if I was going to eat any more mud, go crawling up there begging Lottie Marin to forgive me because she’d accused me of every sin in the calendar and tried to break up my marriage.

  Brian was watching me hopefully.

  I said, “Thanks for letting me know. But I couldn’t be less impressed. If she’s that much of a bastard, let her go ahead and do whatever she wants to do.”

  “But you know Lottie, Peter. She doesn’t really mean it. She just gets worked up.”

  “Yes,” I said, “she’s a charmer and thank God you’re the one that’s married to her and not me.”

  “Then you won’t try?”

  “I won’t.”

  He stood a moment in silence. “Okay. I see your point. I don’t blame you.” He paused. “Has Iris really moved out?”

  “She has.”

  “She shouldn’t have done that.”

  “She’s done it.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t want Lottie to know. She’s done enough damage already.”

  “I wish you’d tell me. I wouldn’t tell Lottie.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  He flushed. “I just thought—maybe I’d go talk to her. Hell, do you think I feel good about it all? Lottie barging in and everything?”

  “You wouldn’t get anywhere.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I could straighten her out. Peter, let me try. I’d feel a lot better. And I won’t tell Lottie—honest.”

  He looked at me pleadingly as if he were asking me to do him a favor instead of wanting to do one for me. It was nice to have a friend.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I gave him the address of Iris’s hotel. He grinned. “Fine. I’ll try to make her see sense. Well, I’d better be running along or I’ll catch hell.” He started for the door and then turned. “Sure you won’t come up and try?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “Okay. You know best. ’By, now.”

  After Miss Amberley, I hadn’t any hopes of Brian as an ambassador to Iris, but his kindness in offering himself made me feel a little better about Lottie’s betrayal. I went into the kitchen and made some coffee. I was drinking it when the phone rang. It was Miss Mills. “Morning, Peter. How are you?”

  “Alive. Anything more from Trant?”

  “Not yet. Do you still want me to go around to the station house and try him out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Listen, I’m weaseling on my promise. I said I’d hold the office down without you. But I can’t. Thomas Wood’s here.”

  Thomas Wood was the author of Let Live.

  “He’s just flown in bright as a bird from Ann Arbor, clapping his wings, full of fun and scholarly wit. He thought he’d surprise us, he said.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Peter, he’s bursting with plans for the play and raring to meet a real live producer. I’m not important enough. He has me tabbed as an old mop you keep around to wipe the floor with. I’m sorry, but you’ve just got to come and cope.”

  “All right,” I said. “Have you heard about Lottie?”

  “What about the darling thing?”

  “She’s going to be sick. Yesterday I called her a couple of well-chosen names. Now she’s getting Doctor Norris to write out a certificate for a two weeks’ release from the play. Nervous exhaustion.”

  “Peter, you can’t let her do that. Go right upstairs and whimper like a cocker spaniel.”

  “I’d rather choke to death.”

  She paused and then said resignedly, “Okay, if that’s the way the land lies. Want me to try?”

  “Can you see it working?”

  “No, frankly. Then there’ll be no performance this afternoon?”

  “Not if she goes through with it.”

  “Shall I notify the cast?”

  “Better wait till we hear officially.”

  “Well, well,” said Miss Mills, “what a lovely week we’re having. Your Taurus must be in a particularly dreary trine. Listen, you’ve simply got to come and charm Mr. Wood now. We don’t want to lose two plays in one fell et cetera.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then the moment you show up, I’ll go around to Trant.”

  I went to the office. Miss Mills had already called Trant with some cock-and-bull story of wanting his advice. He’d said to come right around. She kissed me.

  “Peter, I don’t look too much like a spy, do I?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’ll do my best. You do your best with Mr. Wood. He’s in your office.”

  Dramatists who have just had their first play accepted fall into one of two categories. Either they are little mice who don’t dare say boo to an assistant stage manager or else they’re George Bernard Shaw. Thomas Wood was George Bernard Shaw. He wanted tickets for all the hit shows. He wanted interviews. Even though the play had hardly got off my desk, he was full of inspirations for direction, casting, and sets. To make it worse, in his professorial Michigan retreat he didn’t seem to read the lurid newspapers. His greatest inspiration was that the chief female part in Let Live was a natural for Iris. As a matter of fact, it would have suited her, but I spent an uncomfortable period giving him every reason but the right one as to why I didn’t think she would consider it. I suppose I could have told him the truth—that my wife had left me because a girl had been found hanging from my bedroom chandelier.

  It was over an hour before I finally got rid of him, and even then I had to promise to get him matinee tickets and to take him to dinner and another show myself that evening. He expected it, and I couldn’t afford to antagonize him.

  Just after he left the office, Lottie’s agent called. He had never liked me and he got quite a kick out of announcing Lottie’s “nervous collapse.” I fumed and fretted for the book, but I knew there was nothing I could do. Dr. Norris, of course, had given his certificate. I could just see him, brisk, cheerful, thrilled to death at doing a favor for a Star. The agent offered to bring the certificate around so that I could frame it and hang it on the wall. I slammed down the receiver. The stenographer started trying to contact the cast. I went around to the theater to get the announcement of a two-weeks shutdown posted.

  The stage manager happened to be there. I told him to put up a notice on the bulletin board. While we were talking, Gordon Ling came out of his dressing-room. Gordon was one of those small-time actors who always hang around the theater when they’re working, probably because they’re bored with their dreary little furnished rooms and the theater makes them feel they’re big shots. “Lottie’s not really sick, is she?”

  “That’s what her doctor says.”

  His handsomely ageing face broke into an awkward smile. “You’re having a rough time, Peter.”

  “We take the rough with the smooth.”

  “She was bitchy last night. You should have heard her.”

  “I’m sure it was a liberal education.”

  “Peter, I wish there was something I could do.” I was surprised, looking at him, to realize that he meant it. I’d never thought Gordon Ling had any feeling for me. When you’re down, you find sympathy in the most unexpected places. “How about lunch on me? Think that would do any good?”

  “Well—” I began.

  Then Iris’s voice broke in behind me. “Sorry, Gordon, but Peter’s having lunch with me.”

  I turned. My wife was standing just inside the stage door in front of the bulletin board. She was smiling. But it wasn’t a real smile; it was something she was putting on for Gordon, the stage-door man, and whoever else happened to be around—a public smile.

  “That’s all right, isn’t it, Peter?”

  “Sure.”

  “They told me at the office that you were here.”

  She took my arm. We went out togethe
r into the alley that led to the street. Her arrival had taken me completely by surprise. I felt very shy and tense.

  She said awkwardly, “This is Brian’s idea.”

  So that was it.

  “He came around. He was very sweet. He said why not have lunch with Peter, at least? It’ll look better for the columnists if nothing else. Go somewhere where you’ll be seen, like Sardi’s. Shall we go to Sardi’s?”

  “Okay,” I said. My voice was just as awkward as hers.

  Sardi’s was just around the corner. We went there and were given our usual table. A lot of theatrical people were eating lunch. They all looked at us. From the point of view of Brian’s plan for concealing the fact that we had split up, their polite curiosity helped. But it didn’t help us as man and wife. It was the goldfish treatment plus.

  I knew, almost at once, that it was going to be the most disastrous lunch of my life because Iris was trying to hate me. She didn’t hate me yet. I knew that. If she had, she wouldn’t have come to lunch just because Brian had asked her to. But she was trying. Nanny’s letter had poisoned her; Miss Amberley had poisoned her. She’d had plenty of time to think in her hotel bedroom, and there was only one conclusion she could have reached—that I was a louse. That was why she was fighting against me and against her love for me.

  Over cocktails, I said, “I hear you were at Miss Amberley’s yesterday afternoon.”

  “Yes.”

  “She made it worse, didn’t she?”

  Iris carefully did not look at me. “She told me about her brother.”

  “Whose beautiful romance I blighted.”

  She flared suddenly. “Is that so funny? That a man was in love with her and wanted to marry her? That, in spite of all that, you—”

  “I—what?”

  She did look at me then. “Peter, if only you’d told me the truth from the beginning—If only you’d trusted me, instead of lying, evading—”

  I felt a kind of savage mirth. If I’d trusted her! If I’d admitted that I’d been a fool, a seducer, and a knave—she would have forgiven me! Everything would have been dandy!

  The injustice of it all was too much for me and I said bitterly, “You and Lottie.”

  Her eyes glinted. “And what does that mean? Me and Lottie?”

  “You’re just the same. There’s not a cent’s worth of difference between you.”

  “What a thing to say!”

  “It’s true. It—” The futility of my anger occurred to me. “Iris, baby, I’m sorry.”

  “Please!”

  “I’ve missed you so much.”

  “No, Peter. No.”

  After that we talked a little, but it was practically impossible to think of subjects without overtones. I didn’t mention that Lieutenant Trant would probably arrest me at any minute; I didn’t even mention Lottie’s secession. I was afraid if I did she would imagine I was trying to make her sorry for me. Every moment was torture now, but I was already dreading the time when it would have to be over.

  We dragged it out somehow until coffee. Then Alec Ryder came over from another table. It was almost a relief to see him. As usual, he treated us exactly as if we were just another married couple of whom he was fond.

  “I seem to be giving a party tonight. I do hope you’ll both come.”

  I said, “I’m sorry. I’ve got a playwright on my hands.”

  He turned to Iris, smooth as his Bronzini silk tie. “How about you, Iris? You can make it, can’t you?”

  Iris glanced at me quickly, then she looked back at Alec. “Yes,” she said, “I think I can. Yes, Alec, I’d love it.”

  “Fine. Around six-thirty.”

  He went back to his table. A faint flush was spreading over my wife’s cheeks. I could read her thoughts as clearly as if they were scrawled across the menu. She was going to take up Alec’s offer to do the play in England.

  “Iris—” I began.

  Her bright smile chilled off my words. “It’s getting rather late. I really think I should be leaving.”

  Late for what? Leaving to go where? I looked at her. I thought in total defeat: Is this the last time I’m ever going to see her?

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll get the check.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SHE GOT UP QUICKLY and left the table before the waiter came. A lot of people watched her taut, hurried flight toward the door. She hadn’t, I knew, meant to expose our marital quandary to the world. She’d left because the tension between us had become as unendurable for her as for me. But the damage was done. Brian’s well-intended scheme had boomeranged. All afternoon theatrical telephones would be jangling.

  “My dear, have you heard the latest Nanny Ordway thing? Peter and Iris were at Sardi’s for lunch and—” Alec Ryder and his party, passing the table on their way out, gave me careful smiles. The waiter came with the check.

  I said, “Get me a double brandy.”

  He brought it. I gulped most of it and ordered a second. I knew I was giving up. The moment of ultimate blackness which I had, half resignedly, been awaiting from the beginning had finally arrived. Now it had come, it brought with it an almost voluptuous sense of relief. I’d fought. I’d done my best. I’d lost. Okay. Let Nanny Ordway have her full triumph—with half of Sardi’s looking on.

  I had almost finished the second drink and was sitting with the glass tilted in my hand when a strange sensation began to stir in me. It was a peculiar feeling of recognition as if the tilted brandy glass, my own knuckles bent around it, even the wrinkled tablecloth all had some immense significance which was just beyond my grasp. It had happened before. All this had happened before. In some nightmare, in some—

  It came to me then. Of course! Twelve years ago—the night after my first wife died! I had been sitting just here—at this same table. A double brandy. I could hear my own voice from the past as I gave the order. I could even see the waiter. Not the same waiter who had served Iris and me today, but another one who had left years ago. Luigi. That had been his name. Luigi, with his tired waiter’s smile and his big, hairy wrists sticking out of his waiter’s jacket.

  That had been the beginning. A double brandy—and this sensation of relief, this perverse pleasure in yielding. Let it all go. Who cares?

  Suddenly I was plunged back into the sordid months of collapse that had followed, months stale with self-pity and the smell of alcohol, spiraling downward to their nadir in the discreet, expensive sanitarium. Had I learned nothing from all that? Did I have to go through it all a second time?

  Hell, I thought.

  I put the drink down. I called the waiter over and paid the check.

  I was out on the street before I realized I had won my greatest victory.

  Because it was a victory. Miraculously, I had sloughed off all the deadening weight of anxiety. I was no longer Peter Duluth in his tight little sheath of despair, suffering as no man had ever suffered before. I was just a guy in a jam—a guy who had better do something about it quickly.

  Wasn’t there a breed of spider which paralyzed its victims with a poisoned bite and kept them alive but passive for the eventual meal? That was the Nanny-spider. But Nanny’s numbing venom had not been quite powerful enough. I was tougher than she had thought.

  I felt an improbable exhilaration which brought an extraordinary clarity of mind. I had not seduced Nanny Ordway. Iris and everyone thought that I had. I had almost come to believe it myself. But I had not seduced Nanny Ordway.

  When her poison had been in my veins and I had been the willing victim, I had decided that she must have been mad because that was the only explanation which could still make me guilty—of folly and obtusity. But suddenly, like all the other bugaboos, that one, too, was exorcized. Why had I gone on trying so futilely to prove Nanny Ordway had been mad? Lieutenant Trant didn’t think she had been mad. Miss Amberley, John Amberley, had both been sure of her sanity. And hadn’t I, too, been sure of it when she’d been alive? For the first time in days I started to have conf
idence again in my own judgment of character. Nanny Ordway had been sly, perhaps, double-faced, scheming. But of course she had not been mad.

  Lieutenant Trant thought she had been murdered. Okay. Why wasn’t that a solution no more unlikely than a solution of suicide? And why wasn’t it, instead of being another stone around my neck, a lifeline to pull me to safety? For, if she had been murdered, I hadn’t murdered her. Someone else had. Someone who must have hung her to my chandelier and left her there to victimize me.

  If that was the way it had happened, Nanny Ordway was not the only Enemy. There was another Enemy who was not a ghost, who was alive and who could still be grappled with.

  Taxis were streaming up Broadway. I flagged one and had it drive me home.

  The telephone was ringing when I entered the apartment. I went to answer it. Miss Mills’s voice said, “Peter, where on earth have you been? I’ve been calling for half an hour.”

  “Did you see Trant?”

  “Yes, I saw him and—” She broke off.

  “And—what?”

  “It’s bad, Peter. It couldn’t be worse. I’m coming right over.”

  She hung up. If Miss Mills said it was bad, it was bad. Trant, then, had proved it was murder? He was going to arrest me? My new stability was not shaken. Peter Duluth, the phoenix risen from his own ashes! I lit a cigarette. I waited for her—quite calmly, confident there was something I could and would do.

  She arrived in about ten minutes. She came running into the living-room. I’d never seen her distracted before. It touched me. Miss Mills and anxiety didn’t go together.

  I said, “Trant thinks it’s murder and he thinks I murdered her?”

  She gazed at me, startled. She had thought I’d be a nervous wreck, of course. All of them—all of the people who were fond of me—were still haunted by what had happened to me once.

  I put my hands on her arms. “Is that it, Miss Mills?”