Black Widow

by Patrick Quentin

  I said, “So you decided not to go to the police at all—for my sake?”

  “Yes, Peter.” A quick smile came. “Yes, boy. That’s it.”

  “But now—this evening—you’ve told all this to Trant?”

  The smile fled, and the “sincere” expression was back.

  “Peter, I hated to. Honest, I did. But when he said it was murder! That’s serious. You can get into terrible trouble if you hold back evidence on murder.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure you can, Gordon.”

  I looked at him. I thought gloomily of Lieutenant Trant. He had everything now—a handwriting expert to say the suicide note was a fake, the M.E. to say the hanging had been phony—and now Gordon Ling, the victim’s uncle, with a story as good as a death warrant for me.

  Lieutenant Trant, the seeker after truth, had at last drawn up the naked lady from the bottom of the well. That’s what he thought. He hadn’t really, of course. All he’d drawn up had been a dummy strategically planted there by Nanny Ordway—and her killer.

  But that made no difference so far as I was concerned. To all intents and purposes, I was trapped.

  I said, “Okay, Gordon, I’ve only one thing to say. Two things. I never had anything to do with Nanny Ordway. And I didn’t kill her.”

  He jumped at that. I didn’t for a moment think he believed me, but it was the perfect cue to shake off “uncle” and become the producer’s little pal again.

  “Of course, Peter, I never thought you did. That’s what I told Trant right away. ‘Peter a murderer?’ I said. ‘Why, that’s crazy.’”

  For a moment, some of the Nanny-spider’s poison seemed to be back in my veins. Give up. What’s the use? But anger came to my rescue. Hell, I thought. I’m not going to let Nanny Ordway and Lieutenant Trant defeat me. There must be some way.

  But the way wasn’t here—in this sham little apartment with this sham sycophantic actor.

  I got up.

  Sharply Gordon said, “Peter, you’re going?”

  He hadn’t meant to read relief into that line, but it was there.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “But—but where?” He clutched my arm—the Scarlet Pimpernel’s best friend warning him against the tumbrel. “Peter, don’t go to your apartment. Trant, he—I mean, he almost said he was going there to arrest you.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t go to the apartment.”

  “Then—where?”

  Where indeed? “Oh, somewhere,” I said.

  I went to the door. I passed the photograph of Iris. To Gordon. Good luck. Iris Duluth. Gordon came hurrying after me. It was the swishing skirt of the bathrobe, I decided, that made him seem so old-womanish.

  “Peter, I won’t tell them you were here. Honest I won’t.”

  “Thanks, Gordon.”

  “And you’re not mad at me? You do see? Under the circumstances?”

  “Yes, Gordon. I see.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I WAS OUT AGAIN on 38th Street. My session with Gordon had not been entirely barren. At least I knew for certain now that Trant, like me, believed that Nanny had been killed by her lover. The only difference was that Trant was convinced that the lover had been I.

  I started to walk down Madison Avenue. I came to a drugstore and went into it. Even a fugitive from justice has to eat. I sat at the fountain and ordered coffee and a sandwich. A couple of teen-aged girls were chattering over parfaits. “Really, he’s a screwball. A real screwball.” A woman with a poodle was getting stamps out of a stamp machine. No one paid me any attention. Why should they—yet? I looked just like anyone else.

  Proof, I thought. Trant had all the proof. I had none. I knew that Nanny had taken her lover to her uncle’s apartment. But how could I prove that I hadn’t been the lover? Gordon, for all his protests of sympathy, couldn’t help. He had stumbled on the fact that someone had been using his place only after the party at Lottie’s—after I had actually met Nanny Ordway. If only he had noticed it earlier, that would have proved something. But he hadn’t.

  It all boiled down to a question of time.

  The teen-aged girls went out together arm-in-arm. “Crazy? Is that character crazy?”

  When she died, Nanny had been five or six weeks pregnant. How long had I actually known her? That was easy. I had met her the day Iris left for Jamaica. October 6th. And she had been killed on November 9th. How long was that? Four weeks and six days. The tiniest margin of one day! That wasn’t enough to prove anything to anyone. If only there was another date—a date that could definitely place Nanny with a lover before the sixth of October.

  Suddenly, as I sipped my coffee, I thought of John Amberley. He’d told me he had proposed to Nanny on his birthday. And Claire Amberley—hadn’t she said just after his announcement, That was when I made her confide in me, the day she had told John to wait. I knew there was another man. I’d suspected it for some time.

  For some time before her brother’s birthday! If John Amberley’s birthday had been before October 6th, that would be proof.

  I got up and paid my check at the cashier’s desk, tangling with the leash of the poodle whose mistress was now hovering around the rack of Pocket Books. Hope was in the saddle again. Maybe Miss Amberley, my most merciless enemy, would turn out to be my savior after all. I picked up a taxi on Madison. I said, “Thirty-One Charlton Street.”

  I knew Miss Amberley too well now to take any chances with her. Down in the submerged little foyer of Number 31, I pressed the buzzer for the apartment above hers. The click came in the door. I hurried up the stairs to her apartment and knocked. I was so sure now that my luck was holding that it never occurred to me she might be out. I felt no surprise or relief when her voice came from inside.

  “Who is it?”

  “Trant,” I said in the voice that had done me service already that day. “Lieutenant Trant.”

  The door started to open. Before it was pulled more than a quarter of the way inside, I pushed through and shut it behind me.

  Miss Amberley was standing straight in front of me. She was wearing the same old paint-stained smock. Does she live in the thing? I thought. Her bulging green eyes, hard as metal, were glaring at me with an expression of mingled indignation and alarm.

  “You told me to drop in whenever I was in the neighborhood.”

  “I—I thought it was Lieutenant Trant.”

  “I said it was Lieutenant Trant.” I took a step toward her. “I want you to help me.”

  “Help you!” She laughed. “If there was a desert, if there was a flask of water—”

  “You’d let me die of thirst?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I looked at her. I wondered how it felt to have all that hatred. What Miss Amberley needs, I thought, is a good sharp shock.

  I said, “You know, of course, that Nanny was murdered?”

  “Murdered!” She echoed the word in a strange little piping gasp. Instinctively she cringed away from me. I took advantage of it.

  “She was murdered, and Trant’s going to arrest me. He’s looking for me now. I might just as well have two murders to my credit as one.”

  I had said that with obvious sarcasm, but, incredibly, she took it seriously as a threat. Her face seemed to dissolve into a pointless pattern of terror.

  With a lightning movement that almost took me unawares, she spun around toward the telephone. I jumped on her and caught her wrists. Her arms quivered at my touch as if I were a leper.

  “No—no—no.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “Don’t hurt me. Please. Don’t hurt me.”

  “Will you tell me what I want to know?”

  “Anything.”

  “Your brother proposed to Nanny on his birthday, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, yes. You know that. He told you.”

  “But, before that, you’d suspected she had a lover. Isn’t that what you said? Before the birthday?”

  “Yes, of course. Weeks before.
I knew. Anyone can tell.”

  “When is your brother’s birthday?”

  She was struggling to free her wrists now, aimlessly, feebly, the way a chicken goes on fluttering after its head has been cut off.

  “When,” I repeated, “is your brother’s birthday?”

  “October,” she said. “October the second.”

  October 2nd! And I had met Nanny Ordway on October 6th. It worked. I had pulled it off.

  I said, “And right after that, on the same day, on October the second, you made her admit she had a lover?”

  “Yes, that’s right. I told you.”

  “But she didn’t mention my name—not until much later?”

  “No. I told you that, too.” For a moment her hatred of me got the better of her panic. “But it was you. Of course it was you. She didn’t mention your name. But what difference does that make—when she described you.”

  “Described me?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Amberley. “The husband of a famous actress.”

  Even now, that moment of all the many startling moments of the day is most vivid in my mind. Because there, suddenly out of the blue, was a solution. It hit me with a staggering impact. I released Miss Amberley’s wrists. She gave a gasp and ran backward away from me, stumbling down onto one of the cluttered studio couches.

  I stood for a moment, trying to get my excitement under control. Suddenly Miss Amberley leaped from the couch to the phone.

  “Quick,” she screamed into the receiver. “Get me the police. Quick.”

  I hurried out of the apartment. As I ran down the stairs, I could still hear that voice, hoarse, triumphant now.

  “The police—Get me the police.”

  There were a dozen different things to be thought of, but from them all, it was the image of Iris which rose up, dwarfing everything else. In the last few hectic hours, there had been no time to pamper my misery at the loss of my wife. But now that release had miraculously come, I could think only of Iris. She’d been to Alec’s party. Certainly Alec had approached her about the play in England. Maybe, in her manufactured mood of hatred for me, she’d already signed to go to London. The thought sent a chill through me. I ran into a candy store and dialed her hotel. They told me she wasn’t there. Then she was still at Alec’s. Alec was at the Pierre. I found the number. I was put through to Alec’s suite. His quiet, amiable voice said, “Hello.”

  “Alec,” I said. “This is Peter. Is Iris there?”

  He paused a moment. “I’m sorry, Peter. She’s just left.”

  The pause had given him away. “She’s there,” I said.

  “No, she isn’t.”

  “Alec, I’ve got to talk to her. It’s desperately important. I—”

  “One moment.”

  There was another pause. Then Iris’s voice came, cool, studiedly hostile. “Really, Peter. Alec’s in the middle of reading me his play.”

  “I’ve got to see you.”

  “But there’s nothing to see me about. Couldn’t you tell that at lunch?”

  Didn’t she know? Didn’t everyone know by now?

  I said, “Nanny was murdered.”

  I could hear her draw in her breath rapidly. “No.”

  “Trant’s got all the evidence in the world. He’s going to arrest me.”

  “Peter!”

  “I’ve got to see you.”

  “Of course.” It was wonderful to hear the old, natural voice, the unthinking sympathy. “Of course, Peter. I’ll come right away. Where are you? At the apartment?”

  “No. And we can’t go there. Probably the police are watching it.”

  “Then where?” She paused. “How about Mother’s? I have a key.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Then—then I’ll just explain to Alec and come. Is it all right—I mean, to tell Alec?”

  “Why not?”

  “Then I’ll be there.”

  She hung up. I went out again onto the street. Absurdly, I had half expected that the whole picture of the Village would have been changed by Miss Amberley’s voice screaming: Quick, the police. But nothing was altered. There was no commotion. I hurried to Sixth Avenue. I got in a taxi and told the driver to drive like hell to Iris’s mother’s apartment on 84th Street.

  I knew Iris would be there ahead of me. She hadn’t had so far to go. I took the elevator up to the 12th floor. I knocked on the door. Iris opened it immediately. She was wearing a very grand cocktail dress. She had fixed herself up for Alec’s party.

  “Peter!”

  She shut the door and led me into the living-room, which was fussily and eerily shrouded in dust covers against her mother’s return from Jamaica.

  She’d had time to think. She was a little suspicious. “Peter, you didn’t make that up? If you did—”

  “I didn’t make it up.”

  I sat down on the back of one of the ghostly couches. “She was murdered?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Trant thinks you murdered her?”

  “He knows it.”

  “The fool!”

  The spontaneity with which she had said that banished my last, lingering anxieties.

  “You don’t think I killed her?” I said.

  “You? Commit a murder? Don’t be silly.” She crossed and stood in front of me. There was a trace of a smile on her face. “Besides, you’d never be that dumb. Kill someone in your own apartment? Hang her from your own chandelier?”

  There it was, the great reconciliation scene achieved with only a couple of lines of dialogue. I told her all I’d done since Miss Mills had brought me the news. I finished with Miss Amberley.

  “You see? On October second, Nanny admitted that she had a lover. I didn’t meet her until October sixth, the day you left. That proves it, unless you think I was having a secret affair with her before you went away.”

  “Without my realizing it? There isn’t a woman in the world who doesn’t know when her husband’s having an affair under her nose.”

  “There isn’t?”

  “Of course there isn’t.”

  I had never thought it would be hard to convince Iris. Now the simple part was over. The difficult part was beginning. I got up off the couch.

  I said, “Iris, baby. I know who it is. Nanny’s lover. The man who killed her.”

  Her lips parted in astonishment.

  “It’s a cinch,” I said. “There’s no proof, but it’s a cinch. Nanny used to go around backstage to see Gordon after Star Rising opened. He told me that. We know what she was like now, always on the prowl, trying to climb, fixated on celebrities. Gordon didn’t take her to that party at Lottie’s. How did she get there except through someone from the company? When Nanny admitted to Miss Amberley that she had a lover, four days before she’d met me, she gave the clue. She said her lover was the husband of a famous actress.”

  Iris was looking at me, half incredulous, half horrified. “You can’t mean—Peter, not Brian!”

  “Brian. Of course.”

  “No, Peter. It couldn’t be Brian.”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “But he’s so sweet. He—he was always trying to help us.”

  “A conscience, maybe?”

  Iris put her hand on my sleeve. “What are you going to do? Tell Trant?”

  “With so little proof? A few stray sentences that nobody else heard? Do you expect Trant would believe me when he’s got me pigeonholed as the biggest liar, coward, and libertine since Heliogabalus? And if it came to trial—think of the headlines, the photographers, especially with you in the middle of such a juicy scandal. No, it’s better to go to Brian, to try and break him.”

  “You think you can?”

  “I’ve got to. You call Lottie. Get her out of the apartment. Say you need her. Say you’re unhappy. She’ll come running.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  She went to the phone. She talked for a few moments and hung up.

  “It wor
ked. Poor Lottie, she was thrilled. I knew you’d need me. She said it over and over again. And Brian’s there. She’s going to the hotel right away. I’ll have to leave.”

  “So will I.”

  “But maybe Trant will be at the apartment, waiting for you.”

  “That’s a chance I’ll have to take.”

  She came to me suddenly, putting her arms around me. “Darling, how are you ever going to forgive me?”

  “For what?”

  “For the things I’ve said, for the things I’ve thought. For being a stinker, Peter. I didn’t want to be. I wanted so hard not to be a stinker. And—in the end—I was worse than Lottie. Much worse. I’m sorry. Darling, I’m so sorry,”

  I kissed her on the shoulder, on the throat, and on the mouth. I thought: There’s something to be said for unhappiness. It’s so pleasant when it stops.

  “Hurry, baby,” I said. “You don’t want Lottie to get there ahead of you.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I WENT BACK to our apartment house. I had expected the police to be watching it. But there was no sign of them. Bill, rather sheepish, I thought, was on the elevator.

  I said, “Take me up to Miss Marin’s, will you, Bill?”

  Everyone in the building talked about Miss Marin’s apartment. Probably half of the employees didn’t even know Brian’s last name was Mullen. It was odd to feel depressed now that I was struggling out of the trap. But the switch had been too quick for me. From the beginning, Nanny had been the Enemy—Nanny, the scheming, sly little destroyer. I hadn’t stopped feeling that way about her. And I hadn’t yet stopped thinking of Brian as my friend.

  It was a preposterously anachronistic attitude, of course. He wasn’t my friend any more. He was a murderer who had pinned the blame for his crime on me. That was how I had to think of him. I had committed myself now.