Black Widow

by Patrick Quentin

  He opened the door for me with his usual cheerful grin. His hair was flopping down across his forehead. He was in shirt sleeves with a large white apron over his shirt and pants.

  “Hi, Peter. Just been cleaning the bathroom. Lottie can create more chaos in five minutes. She’s out, by the way. Iris called her. She forgot her nervous breakdown and ran.”

  “I know,” I said. “I asked Iris to call her. I wanted to talk to you alone.”

  “Fine.” His grin broadened. “Good news, I hope. I did my best with Iris this morning. Didn’t think I got anywhere, but at least I tried.” He put his big arm around my shoulders and drew me into the living-room. “What’ll it be? Scotch? Rye? Scotch, of course.”

  He strolled over to Lottie’s horrible chromium bar and poured drinks for both of us.

  “Here, Peter.” He sat down opposite me on a stool, crossing his knees. Brian was one of those men who can look boyish without looking silly. “Okay. What’s on your mind?”

  This wasn’t at all the way the scene should have started. I looked at him, part of my confidence undermined by the atmosphere of friendly domesticity he had created. Could he really be as bland as this and still be guilty? Of course he could. It is only folklore to suppose that murderers are hounded by their consciences. They’re insensitive. That’s one of the reasons why they are murderers.

  It was that insensitivity, that sublime self-assurance that I would have to work on. My hunch was not to mention murder. There was a good chance he didn’t know that Trant had broken the suicide theory. I should be as bland as he. Blander.

  I said, “I’ve just been talking to Gordon.”

  “Gordon? Gordon Ling?”

  “He knows about you and Nanny, Brian.” That was obviously the most effective lie. “He’s found out you were the one she’d been taking to his place.”

  I had, I supposed, expected him to deny it or at least to be flustered. I was astonished when he merely threw out his hands with a wry little smile and said, “So he tumbled to it, did he? I thought he would—sooner or later.” He paused. “He hasn’t told Lottie, has he?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God for that!” And then: “I’m glad you’ve found out. I should have told you long ago.”

  “You should?”

  “Of course. But it was Lottie, Peter. I was scared to death she’d get on to it. And, with the suicide established and everything, I figured: Peter’s in it anyway. How’s it going to help him if I mess myself up in it, too? Better for everyone if I keep my mouth shut. That’s what I decided. You do understand? You don’t think I’m too much of a heel?”

  His expression had just the correct amount of ruefulness and charm. He was even smoother than I had thought. I understood it all, of course. I had been right about his self-assurance and his underestimation of Trant. He thought that I and everyone else still believed in the suicide theory—so what was there to worry about? Gordon and I had found out he’d been mixed up with Nanny. But that was just another wrinkle to the suicide. He was calmly assuming that Gordon and I, as his friends, would never expose him just for the sake of exposing him, when the case was already closed.

  I was going to get a neat little man-to-man admission. “Poor kid, maybe I was partly to blame.”

  And that would be that.

  I said, “You’d better tell me about it.”

  “All of it, Peter? From the beginning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Honest, if I’d thought I could have helped you by telling earlier—”

  “Sure.”

  “Then you’re not mad at me.”

  He smiled gratefully and, leaning forward, patted my knee.

  And Lottie, I thought, had never let him be an actor!

  “Now, when did I meet her?” He was puckering his forehead. “Can’t exactly remember, but it was quite early in the run of Star Rising. It was one night just after curtain time. I’d been down at the theater with Lottie and was going home. I was coming out of the stage door—and so was this girl. We walked together down the alley. I hardly noticed her, matter of fact. Then, suddenly, I felt her hand on my sleeve. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, “but aren’t you Charlotte Marin’s husband?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ She said, ‘I thought so. Being Charlotte Marin’s husband! How wonderful that must be!’ We started talking then as we walked along. She told me she was Gordon’s niece. I didn’t have anything to do that evening. Almost before I realized it, I was asking her if she felt like dinner. She said, ‘Oh, that would be marvelous. I could eat a bear.’”

  In spite of the circumstances, I felt stealing over me the fascination which any new glimpse into Nanny Ordway’s life always brought me. The parallel between Brian’s first meeting with her and my own was terrifyingly close. The light hand on the sleeve—the oblique praise. And then: Oh, no, I don’t want a drink, but I’m simply starved.

  Brian’s voice was running on. They had gone to a movie. They had inevitably made a second casual date—and then a third.

  He looked up at me from the drink—earnestly. “You know, Peter? I guess you’ll think this is a disloyal thing to say, but being married to Lottie—It’s fine, of course. Couldn’t be happier. But—well, when she’s acting, it gets kind of lonely sometimes. We’ve got a whole raft of friends, of course. But they’re all mostly Lottie’s friends. Half the time I think they just put up with me because I’m Lottie’s husband. So, it was pleasant to have found a kid like that, someone to pal around with when Lottie was at the theater.”

  They had met more and more often. Even though Brian had been careful to keep it all from Lottie, it had been a perfectly innocent relationship. And then, one afternoon, Nanny had invited him to tea at Gordon’s.

  For the first time a faint flush spread over his face. “That was when—when the other thing began, Peter. Even now, I don’t quite know how it happened. But it did. And then, once it had happened—you can’t imagine what it was like. I mean—the change in her. She was like a wild thing. She loved me, she said. She’d been crazy about me from the first moment she saw me. She’d love me forever. She’d die for me.”

  He got up from the stool. “I was in a hell of a stew. You don’t have to believe this, but it’s true. I’d never been unfaithful to Lottie before. I hadn’t wanted to be. I was all mixed up and—and scared to death about Lottie. Because, if she found out—You know Lottie, Peter. You know the way she is.”

  I knew Lottie. I was beginning to know Brian. But, above all, I now knew Nanny Ordway supremely well. The Nanny-spider hadn’t had only one technique for catching flies. There had been the “sincere” technique for the shy John Amberley; the pixie technique for the happily married Peter Duluth; the sexually flattering technique for Lottie’s emasculated pet husband.

  “I’d wanted to stop it right there, Peter. But somehow it didn’t stop. It dragged on and on. All the time she was getting crazier and crazier about me. Then, one day, it all came to a head. She said she couldn’t go on like that. It was breaking her up having to share me. I had to tell Lottie and get a divorce.”

  Technically, I suppose, I felt sorry for him. With his vanity and foolish optimism, he had been such an easy victim for the Nanny-spider—a helpless male spider, destined, in true arachnid fashion, to be devoured by his mate. But my sympathy was tinged with contempt. The murderer, however boyish and charming, who kills through weakness and hides behind his best friend, is not the most attractive character in the world. No, when the time came to jump in and trip him up, it wasn’t going to worry me.

  “I was horrified, Peter. I mean, about the divorce thing. I—I tried to explain how impossible it would be. I owed everything to Lottie, I said. And not only that. Without Lottie, I wouldn’t have a cent. She’d throw me right out, I said. How the hell could Nanny and I live on nothing?”

  He was pacing up and down the room now, explaining how he had argued and pleaded with Nanny. As he told it, his guileless belief that everything would be all right just because he wanted it to be al
l right, had been almost incredible. He had really thought he had charmed her into respecting his comfortable berth with Lottie and forgetting all about the divorce. He had suspected no ulterior purpose when she had asked him to slip her in to Lottie’s party. He had even been naïve enough, after he had known she was cultivating me, not to speculate on her motives.

  “I saw her all the time at Gordon’s, after the party, Peter. And she did talk about some plan she had. But—I was dumb, I guess—I never linked up her plan with you. I suppose, back of my mind, I was hoping she’d switch to you and give me a let-out. For a while, I even kidded myself it would happen that way.” The tip of his tongue came out to moisten his lip. “But, of course, I’d never made a bigger mistake in my life.”

  I was feeling very tense now, for, suddenly, it had occurred to me that his story wasn’t going the way I had expected it to go. If he had merely wanted to give me a version of his relationship with Nanny which was convincing enough to explain away the use of Gordon’s apartment, hadn’t he already gone too far? Wasn’t he coming dangerously near a point where he would incriminate himself without any help from me? Had I then completely misunderstood him? Had he, from the beginning, been planning a full confession?

  “Peter—” his voice was awkward now—“do you think I should go on?”

  “Why not, Brian?”

  “I mean—this is strictly between you and me. You understand that, don’t you?”

  His expression was affectionate, almost foolishly convinced of our mutual sympathy and trust. I saw it all then. Of course I had misunderstood him! He was even more staggeringly stupid and conceited than I had imagined. He had found it painful to have to keep to himself the fact that he had murdered Nanny. He was welcoming an opportunity to get it off his chest. And I, of course, was the obvious father confessor—because I was a pal, a pal who had suffered as much as he had from Nanny Ordway, a pal who would be blithely prepared, out of friendship, to listen, to say, “There there, Brian,” and, by keeping my mouth shut, to become an accessory after the fact.

  For a moment I was staggered. Then I was pleased. It was going to be much easier than I had imagined. I wasn’t going to have to try to trick him. All I had to do was to sit there and let him convict himself out of his own mouth.

  “Sure, Brian,” I said. “Of course I understand. This is strictly between you and me. Go on.”

  A relieved smile spread across his face. “Okay, Peter. I’ll feel a lot better going the whole way. You see, it all came to a head the—the day she died. That morning, around noon, she called me from downstairs in your apartment. That was the first time she’d done it, and I was scared about Lottie, but luckily Lottie was out at the photographer’s. She said she had wonderful news. I was to come down right away. When I got there, she was radiant. I’d never seen her like it. She threw her arms around my neck. She said, ‘It’s all right, darling. All our problems are solved at last. My plan worked. I’ve fixed it.’ I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about, Peter. I swear it. And when she explained, I could hardly believe it. I mean, I’d never dreamed a girl could be like that. You—you know, of course?”

  I said, “She told you how she’d framed me?”

  He nodded. “That and—and how she was pregnant. She told me that first and it pretty much threw me. A doctor’d done a test and it was positive. We were having a baby, she said. Wasn’t that wonderful? She went on cooing about our baby before she told me about the other thing. Then I got it full in the face—how she’d planted the evidence against you with her roommate, with Gordon, with Lucia, with Iris—everything. ‘It’s a cinch,’ she said. ‘When the time comes, I’ll slap a paternity suit on him. With all that proof, he’s never going to take it to court. I’ll get a great fat settlement. All we’ve got to do is wait awhile. Then when I collect, you can divorce Lottie. We’ll have enough money. We’ll be able to live together with our baby.’”

  Very quietly, he went on. “When I heard that, Peter, I thought she was a maniac. No, I didn’t. Not really. I only saw I was caught, that she had turned out to be even stronger than Lottie, that she’d never let me go. I didn’t want her. God knows, I didn’t want any part of her. I tried to argue. I said it wouldn’t be fair to you. She just laughed. Then I said it wouldn’t be fair to Lottie, and she laughed again. ‘That old bag,’ she said. ‘Who cares about that old bag?’ That made me mad. I said I’d be damned if I’d go along with any such stinking scheme against my own best friend. She got mad, too, then. She started yelling at me. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘if you’re not grateful for all I’ve done, if you haven’t the decency to stand by your own baby, let’s respect your beautiful friendship with Peter Duluth. Let’s stick to the real story. Let’s slam it all over the headlines. ‘Charlotte Marin’s Husband Fathers Young Girl’s Baby.’ That’d look pretty, wouldn’t it? Lottie would love that, wouldn’t she?”

  He broke off. I could see it all as if I’d been there. The Nanny-spider out in the open at last—ready to devour her mate. Grudgingly, I thought, Poor devil. At least Nanny Ordway hadn’t loved me. I had been spared that.

  “Somehow, Peter, I went on stalling. I asked her at least to give me time to think. Finally she said okay, she’d give me till three o’clock. I was to come down again at three. And if I didn’t agree by then—”

  There was a sudden commotion in the hall. He broke off. We both sprang to our feet. Lottie came storming into the living-room, followed by Iris.

  “Peter Duluth, what is this? What are you up to?”

  She was wearing a black hat with an eye veil. It was an absurd hat, glamorous for someone else but not for Lottie. As she plunged, chattering, toward us, the breath from her words sent the little veil puffing out like a jib in a squall.

  “The idea! Trying to fool me! The moment I saw Iris, I could tell she was furtive about something. Plotting, planning. Talking to Brian alone. What is it? What are you saying to Brian?”

  Iris, pale and unhappy, joined me. “I’m sorry, Peter. It didn’t work.”

  “Work! I’ll say it didn’t work.”

  Lottie had taken up her position squarely in front of Brian, gazing at me accusingly. I was angry and frustrated by her disastrously timed interruption. But, in spite of all that, I thought, What am I going to do with her? Half of me was still exasperated by her. She was an impossible woman; she’d done everything she could think of to bitch me and, just irritatingly, had gone on insisting she was my best friend. I shouldn’t be giving a damn what happened to her now. It was her own nosiness that was defeating her.

  But, somehow, Lottie was Lottie. You didn’t expect her to be any different. I had to finish with Brian now. Everything depended on it. But I just couldn’t bring myself to go it with Lottie right in the room, glaring up at me like a belligerent mother hen.

  I said, “Lottie, won’t you please go away?”

  “Go away! And whose apartment is this supposed to be?”

  “Yes, Lottie,” said Iris. “Please.”

  “What is this?” Lottie swung around to Brian. “Brian, what are they doing?”

  Brian looked as uncomfortable as I felt.

  “It’s nothing. It—”

  The front door buzzer sounded. It was almost a relief. At least it made a distraction.

  Iris said, “I’ll go.”

  She went out into the hall. Lottie, Brian, and I stood around like very bad actors in a very bad play with no direction at all.

  I could hear voices from the hall. Then Iris reappeared.

  “It’s—” she began.

  But there wasn’t any need for her to go on.

  Lieutenant Trant came strolling after her into the room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HE WAS SMILING his grave, ominous smile. He was exactly the way I had visualized he would be when he finally came to arrest me. I felt suddenly, ferociously angry with Lottie. Goddam her, I thought. If she hadn’t barged in, I’d have got the confession from Brian.

  Now, of course
, Brian would clam up. Now I had nothing.

  Standing on the room’s threshold, Lieutenant Trant was still maddeningly unpolicemanlike. He was the rather severe, rather elegant guest come to pay a social call. He should have cards printed up, I thought, and butlers should carry them in ahead of him on silver trays.

  Lieutenant Trant—Executioner.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  We were all looking at him with varying degrees of uneasiness. It was Lottie who took hold of the scene.

  “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t bring any good news. Certainly it’ll be a shock for some of you.” He paused, deliberately, it seemed to me, ignoring my presence. “Nanny Ordway didn’t commit suicide, Miss Marin. She was murdered.”

  I flashed a glance at Brian. He hadn’t changed much. He just looked a little paler and tauter. Somehow his big white apron, which had seemed normal enough before, now looked silly and rather embarrassing.

  Once again it was Lottie who held the stage. “Murder!” she exclaimed. “What nonsense. What nonsense everyone’s talking tonight.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Marin. It isn’t nonsense.”

  Trant was watching Brian now. Slowly, almost leisurely, he started to move toward him. “I apologize, Mr. Mullen, for my low habits, but this evening, when you and your wife were out to dinner, I had a microphone installed”—he gestured toward a semiabstract portrait of Lottie—“right behind that picture. There’s a recording machine down in Mr. Duluth’s apartment. I’ve been sitting down there, listening to everything you’ve been telling him.”

  I was at sea now. A Dictaphone in Brian’s apartment! Why not in mine? Was it conceivable that Trant had changed his victim, that all this time when I’d thought the Law was pursuing me—No, I thought. It couldn’t be that simple. Not with Trant. This was some kind of a trap.

  Lottie was looking at him. She was very quiet now, but it was the quiet she used on the stage before she built to a big scene. Any minute, I knew, she was going to butt in. She was going to cause havoc with Trant before she was through.