by Leslie Ford
“What goes on?” Gus said suddenly. He’d turned to look at the house. It was surprise that alerted him, nothing more. He wasn’t worried, only surprised to see the house all lighted up at a quarter past two in the morning. “Better stop.”
Connie Maynard had already decided that. Her foot was on the brake and she was slipping easily along the curb.
“Maybe Janey’s—” She started to say maybe Janey was sick, but that was a mistake. She realized abruptly that with the scene she’d made out in the country, and even in spite of her denials there was anything behind it, it could look very strange. “Maybe Janey’s got company—strays from our party.” She said it lightly as she stopped the car. The fact that there were no cars except Gus’s old coupe in front of the house occurred to her at once. “Or maybe just Orvie,” she said. “Let’s both go in, shall we? Maybe there’s a cup of coffee. Or I could even do with a drink, after what I’ve been through—or what you’ve been through with me.”
“Okay.” Gus opened the door and held it while she slid across the seat and out at the brick walk. He was looking up at the house, a little worried, she thought, in spite of what she’d said. Worried about the kid, probably, she decided as he closed the door. She went up the walk with him, her pulse beating quickly, her throat dry, not with any agonized remorse, but dry the way it was at the races or when she saw Gus suddenly come into a room. She held her breath sharply as he put his key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the door. And let it go as sharply as she stepped inside and looked around. The policeman? Where had he got to? There was no one in the hall, and no one moving upstairs. She was listening intently to hear them up there. Then she turned and looked into the lighted dining-room. Gus had shut the door and come on in. He was there in the double door beside her. Both of them were looking at Janey, in her yellow wool dressing-gown, her head on her folded arms, her eyes closed, her long lashes sweeping her pale cheeks, asleep, quietly asleep. Connie’s heart leaped for an instant.
“Why, she’s asleep.” Gus said it in the surprised way people say unexpected obvious truths.
Connie stood motionless there. Her eyes, moving around the room, fell suddenly on a small bright-orange capsule, on the floor against the table leg. She moved a step to hide it from Gus. Her hands were trembling. Then she had taken them. She looked quickly back at Janey, aware that Gus had moved. He was going over to the table.
“Why don’t you just let her sleep, Gus, till she wakes up?” Connie Maynard said. “She doesn’t look as if she’d had much sleep lately, does she?” She went close to the table herself, bent down quickly, and picked up the orange capsule, slipped it into her coat pocket.
“No, I’ll get her upstairs.”
As he spoke, Janey stirred and opened her eyes. “Gus!”
She got up quickly. “Oh, Gus!” She put her hands out to him, and saw Constance Maynard. She dropped her hands to her sides and took a step forward.
“Janey, what’s happened? What the—” Gus stopped and began again. “Janey, what’s the matter?”
“Just waiting for you, dear,” Connie said. She stifled a slight yawn. “It is frightfully late, of course. But now we’re here what about a drink?” She looked at Janey. “Or do you want to go to bed? Don’t mind me if you do. I’ll swallow it down and scoot along. I wish newspaper offices closed down on Saturday.” She turned to Gus. “What about a drink, boss? And don’t look at Janey like that. A girl’s got a right to wait up for her husband. And it’s her dining-room, isn’t it? I mean if she likes to sleep sitting up?”
“Shut up, Connie.” He cut her off brusquely. She knew she was making him sore, but that was all right. If he was sore at her he wouldn’t be too patient with Janey. That was the point right now. No man, especially not Gus Blake, liked the idea of a woman waiting up for him, especially when another woman was a witness to it.
“What’s the idea, Janey?” he asked impatiently.
Connie’s eyes smiled. She was so right. And Janey was such a little sheep. All she did was open her vapid blue eyes a little wider, move back another step, take hold of the back of the chair and moisten her pale lips.
If I ever wait up for him, Connie thought, I won’t have on cotton pajamas and a woolen bathrobe, and I’ll comb my hair and put on some lipstick. And I won’t let him push me around like this.
“Nothing’s the matter, Gus,” Janey was saying, “I—I guess I just went to sleep, is all.” She turned her small white face to him and tried to smile. “I’m sorry you caught me. Why don’t you get Connie a drink? There’s some Scotch in the pantry. And then take her home.”
“That’s big of you, madam,” Connie said pleasantly. “But I can get home with no trouble whatsoever. I would like a drink.”
“I’ll get you one if you two dames will shut up.”
Gus pushed a chair into the table, pushed open the pantry door, and let it swing shut.
“You know the green-eyed business is frightfully young, Janey,” Constance Maynard said evenly. “Did you drop this? I found it here on the floor.” She took the orange capsule out of her pocket and held it out to Janey. She smiled again. The girl really had thought of taking them tonight. She could tell by the way her body stiffened and her saucer eyes opened even wider. “Take it, dear. It’s yours. You don’t have to worry. It takes guts to really go to sleep.”
She felt Janey’s cold finger tips touch her hand as she silently took the capsule and put it in the pocket of her dressing-gown. She started almost convulsively as Gus pushed the pantry door open again.
“Didn’t your mother stay, Janey?” he asked. Connie’s eyes smiled again. He was the picture of the intelligent male trying to find out what was going on in the minds of a couple of women, one acting true to form, the other off on a tangent that made no sense of any kind.
“Oh, if she did then you can take me home, can’t you?” Connie said quickly. “I do really hate to go alone.” She took the highball he handed her, raised it to her lips, and smiled across the rim of it at Janey.
“Is your mother here?” Gus asked impatiently. “I told you—”
Janey found her voice. “Yes. She’s here. She’s upstairs.” Her fingers tightened on the back of the chair. “I’ve made up the couch in the study for you. And if you—if you don’t mind, I’ll go on up and go to bed. Good night. Good night, Connie.”
NINE
THE IRON CURTAIN would be fluttering in as many shreds as a grass skirt if the news of the world spread as fast and as pervasively as local gossip in Smithville. It dripped from the sable wings of night and sped forth refreshed on the golden wings of the morn. On Saturday morning everybody in Smithville was feeling exceedingly sorry for Janey Blake. Her overdraft varied from one hundred to one thousand dollars, but there was no variation in the reason for it—the slot machines, the way Gus Blake was carrying on, tearing around the country with John Maynard’s divorced daughter. Even after Janey had driven a burglar out of the house singlehanded, Gus Blake had come home and brought the Maynard girl with him and gone off with her again, not getting back till five o’clock in the morning, leaving little Mrs. Blake and the kid alone there in the house all night. It made the patrolman watching the house sore as a pup. It was a dirty trick, with Mrs. Blake scared as she was and pretending she wasn’t. The milkman who saw Miss Maynard kissing Gus Blake at two o’clock in the morning on Fetter Street didn’t care what they did if she hadn’t nearly run into his truck just as he was starting out. They could kiss each other all they pleased—what worried him was five hundred bottles of milk and cream and an undetermined amount of cottage cheese. And everybody felt exceedingly sorry for Janey. Everybody, with two exceptions. One was Constance Maynard, who still, however, in a way and when she didn’t stop to think, felt a little sorry for Janey, in the slightly contemptuous and offhand way a beautiful sleek panther might feel about a young sheep she was trailing across an open field of daisies.
The second exception was the murderer of Paul M. Wernitz.
&
nbsp; There was nothing in all this that made Smithville very different from any other town. Gus Blake was finding that out daily as he tried to make it sound unique and interesting for the Centennial edition of the Gazette. Nor was domestic conversation very different, even in the homes of the people who had been to the Maynards’ party the night before and had to be at the office the same time Saturday morning as they were the other five working days of the week.
Martha Ferguson, the red-haired wife of the president of Smithville’s leading bank, pulled the plug out of the coffeepot and glanced up, past her red-haired freckle-faced thirteen-year-old daughter, earnestly frying bacon and eggs, at the clock on the back of the electric range. It was ten minutes past eight, and Jim was still not down. Fortunately her son did not have to shave yet, and a bath, so far as she knew, had never taken him more than three minutes except under compulsion since he’d graduated from outside assistance. He was over at the sink, in as much of his football gear as was permitted by the house rules, diluting the frozen orange juice. Martha Ferguson put two more slices of bread in the toaster.
“I don’t know what on earth’s keeping your dad this morning,” she said. “The Maynards’ hoedown certainly doesn’t account for it. We were home by twelve.” She waited for the toast to pop up, took it out, and buttered it. “Do you people realize,” she said, “that all over the United States there are people just like us, waiting for the man of the house to get out of the bathroom and come down and eat? Millions and millions of them. Anybody that thinks the bathroom in the American home is a sanitary device is nuts. It’s nothing but a throwback to the prehistoric cave where the male could hide in comfort in his fur skins while the female and the young were outside in the cold hunting sticks to rub together. And if you spill much more of that orange juice, sweetie, there won’t be any left.”
She laughed at her son and went out into the hall.
“Jim, are you ever coming down? What on earth are you doing? If you’re eating soap, there’s bacon and eggs down here. You’ve got to get to the bank. You’re only president of it—you don’t own it.”
“Coming, darling.” Jim Ferguson, hurrying down from the landing, stopped to check his pockets for handkerchief, billfold, change, and fountain pen. She waited for him at the foot of the stairs.
“Do something about those checks of poor little Janey today, Jim.” She spoke earnestly, lowering her voice so the children could not hear her. “I simply can’t bear to think of her going around with all this hanging over her. Can’t we lend her the money to cover the things, Jim? I could get it from Dad. He might just as well loosen up a bit before he dies. I’ll write to him today. But for heaven’s sake, come and eat.”
At the Nelson Cadwallader Symses’ house in Bateman Street, Connie Maynard’s Aunt Mamie Syms towered like the chairman of the Committee of the Whole at the head of the heavy empire table in the old-fashioned dining room, where militant pieces of family furniture stood about against the brown-papered walls as if they had waited too long to march out and at last had given up hope. The dust of Aunt Mamie’s tenure had faded off their spit and polish into an adamantine gray except on the surface portions that even Aunt Mamie’s down-at-the-heel maid couldn’t overlook. As the long narrow windows were seldom washed and were hung with sun-faded brown rep curtains, it was hardly noticeable, and Aunt Mamie’s vigorous attention was fixed on civic, not domestic, problems. Except at the moment. She took off her reading-glasses and put down her paper.
“Dorsey,” she said.
Aunt Mamie’s son was older than Martha Ferguson’s, and instead of a football jersey and simulated Notre Dame pants he wore a chalk-stripe blue suit, a blue shirt, and blue-striped tie. He was already through his breakfast, waiting for another cup of coffee, the only product of the Syms kitchen that could be called even average.
“Dorsey.” Aunt Mamie tapped the table with a wing of her horn rimmed glasses that were as near a gavel as anything at hand. “Where is your father?”
Dorsey Syms turned the Maynard brown eyes and the Maynard smile toward his mother as he put down the sporting and financial section and pushed his plate back. He didn’t answer. Aunt Mamie’s questions were mostly rhetorical, or if not rhetorical, fully capable of being, and intended to be, answered from the chair.
“I hope,” Aunt Mamie said, glancing toward the clock on the big Empire sideboard, “that he hasn’t forgotten he’s supposed to look over the letter I’ve written. Gus Blake tampered with the last one I wrote. I can spell quite as well as anyone else. I was deeply mortified, the way it came out in the paper. Your father’s just dawdling this morning—dawdle, dawdle.”
Dorsey smiled at her. She’d forgotten she was late for breakfast herself. No one, however, could ever accuse her of dawdling.
“And just when I’ve got to see Doctor Mason,” his mother added. “I have a very severe headache. It must be my eyes.”
Only a stout effort on the part of a stout woman kept Aunt Mamie from putting her head on her hands and all three on the breakfast table. Dorsey smiled again and looked at his watch.
“Why don’t you just wait, Mother?” he said. “Maybe it’ll wear off. I mean, you don’t have to use your eyes much today or tomorrow. Maybe they’ll clear up if you rest them a little. You do too much.”
“Well, perhaps, Dorsey.”
He heard his father coming slowly down the stairs. He pushed his chair back. It was a dirty trick, going off, leaving his father to cope with one of his mother’s champagne eyestrains. But there’d be a lot to do at the bank this morning. There were at least ten people in town who’d hotfoot it there as soon as they opened their morning mail. Which meant work for him in the savings department. The ones who had savings would have to take them out. The others— Dorsey Syms shrugged mentally. That was their problem. Old Doc Wernitz must have had some wry sense of humor, he thought. Maybe he got a kick out of hanging on to a lot of checks people wrote after their sixth highball and forgot about. Maybe he’d really enjoyed bringing them all in in one batch, just toward the holidays and at the end of the month, when most Smithville bank accounts were on their last legs anyway. Notices had gone out to ten depositors, six with savings. An eleventh should have gone, to Janey Blake. But it hadn’t. And there was no telling how many the other two banks across Courthouse Square had sent out.
He listened to his father coming along the hall. His father banked over at the Merchants National. It was the one determined stand Dorsey had ever known Nelson Cadwallader Syms to make. He’d refused, even in face of the plea of family solidarity, to bank where his wife’s brother John Maynard was on the Board of Directors. Poor old Nelly, Dorsey thought. He was probably expecting a notice himself that morning, and was in no hurry of any kind to get to the office to get it.
Dorsey went around the table and dropped a kiss on his mother’s feverish cheek. “I’ve got to rush,” he said. He raised his voice to carry to the hall. “So long, Dad. I’ve got to shove. See you later.” He went out the other way, through the kitchen. He always hated to see his father beaten down.
The butler at the Rogerses’ country house out on the Bay glanced apprehensively at the paper propped up in front of the master of the house at the foot of the dining-table. Mr. Rogers had cleared his throat twice already. The third time was the boiling-point, in caloric inverse to the bacon and eggs under the plastic lid covering Mr. Orval’s plate at the other end of the table. The butler’s palms were discreetly moist as he listened intently for Mr. Orval to burst out of his room upstairs. He could hear him then, running halfway down the stairs and slowing up to come the rest of the way quietly and soberly. Mr. Orval’s father did not like people being late to meals and having to race into the dining-room, no matter how many parties they’d been to the night before. The butler cleared his own throat noiselessly and breathed more freely as he poured a cup of coffee from the silver pot and put it at Mr. Orval’s place.
“Good morning, sir,” he said.
Mr. Rogers’s gray
brows beetled over the edge of his paper, but not before Orvie Rogers had had time to give his tie a yank into proper place.
“Good morning, son.”
“Good morning, Dad.”
Mr. Rogers went back to his paper, Orvie took the lid off his bacon and eggs.
The butler glided across the thick Chinese rug through the swinging door into the pantry as Mr. Rogers cleared his throat the third time. Behind the door he paused, listening discreetly. He wondered just how rough a session it was going to be. Mr. Orval was not any too fit. The expression on his face as he’d lifted the plastic lid had nothing to do with the bacon and eggs being cold. It had to do merely with their being. He heard Mr. Rogers clear his throat again.
“About those checks we were talking about, son.”
The butler glided swiftly away toward the kitchen. He had heard Mr. Rogers discuss checks with his son before at breakfast, and it was nothing he cared to listen to again.
“You’ll find a check on my desk, Orvie,” Mr. Rogers said. “I want you to take it by and give it to Janey. Tell her it’s a personal loan from me to her, and she can pay it back when and as she can.”
Orvie Rogers looked up quickly and opened his mouth. He closed it again as his father cleared his throat for the fifth time. “I understand this fellow Wernitz was murdered last night.”
“So I heard,” Orvie said. Even coffee tasted foul this morning.
“Good riddance. I wish we could get those machines out of Smith County. Nobody would think of cutting a hole in his pants pocket to let his money dribble out, and nobody with any gumption would put a nickel in a coin machine.”
His brows beetled over at Orvie again. He knew Orvie played the slot machines, and Orvie knew he knew it.
“In any case,” he said, “Janey’s a fine girl. I don’t want her mixed up with this filth. I’m very fond of Janey.”
