Staircase 4

by Helen Reilly

  Involuntarily, her thoughts went to where she seldom permitted them to go these days, to John Muir. She had known John for years. He had been a close friend of her dead brother’s, he was one of Mark’s oldest and closest friends. There was nothing new or strange about him. She had always liked being with him, in his company, without giving the matter much thought. And then, on a night in May, in her crowded living-room, between moment and moment, while John was standing above her looking down and she was looking up at him, it happened. She thought with a feeling of intense surprise, Why—I love this man.

  The acknowledgment of it must have been in her eyes. John’s gray ones fastened on hers had widened and darkened, then narrowed. His humor, his irony, the near-violence of his keen, casual, and cutting judgments, had fallen away. He put out a hand and she rose without a word and they went out on the terrace together. Standing there in coolness, beyond the rim of light from the windows, she reached up and touched his face with her fingers. His hands were on her shoulders. He started to draw her toward him, and stopped. The screen door opened and someone—Alice Amory—came out calling her name. That was the closest, physically, that they had ever come.

  For a brief space—looking back, it was hard to measure time—she had been filled with a deep and undemanding content. John Muir existed. He was. It was all she needed to know. That particular stage didn’t last long. Her desire to be near him, with him, grew by leaps and bounds. With it came realization, and pain.

  John Muir had said nothing to her after that night on the terrace. They saw each other occasionally but never alone. He created no opportunity to see her alone. Presently she became conscious that she had made a horrible mistake. She was engaged to Mark. Mark loved her and she had thought all along that she loved him. She did, in a different way, a better way, perhaps. But could she marry Mark, feeling as she felt, doing what she had done? He would have to be the judge. On the eve of telling him, he had come down with polio. And then she couldn’t tell him. She knew, without the doctors saying so, that she was the person who had kept Mark alive during those first dreadful days. His offer to release her from her engagement had been genuine. To have accepted it would have been like picking up an ax and striking him with the naked blade.

  She had said, “The sooner we’re married the better pleased I’ll be,” and had meant it. Her infatuation for John Muir was a poisonous growth that could lead to nothing but destruction, had to be rooted out.

  Circumstances had made her fight with herself easier. As soon as Mark was out of danger John Muir had gone to South America on business. He was to be there six months. By the time he got back she and Mark would be in the West, where they intended to stay for perhaps a year, moving about as it suited them.

  Gabrielle went around a sun-drenched corner. Midway along the block the tall, red-brick house in which she had an apartment drowsed in the heat. She inserted her key in the inner vestibule door and mounted the stairs. The shadowy coolness swung around her like a cloak, was refreshing after the glare outside. Call Susan and find out if Tony had gotten home, how bad things were. She reached the top of the stairs and turned. Her door was at the end of the hall. Fifteen feet short of it she came to a standstill. The man she had thought of as thousands of miles away was there, in shadow, leaning against the wall to the right of the door.

  Chapter Two: Warning from an old love

  GABRIELLE CAUGHT HER PURSE IN TIGHT FINGERS as though it were a post and she could steady herself by clinging to it.

  “Hello, Gabrielle.”

  Tall and hard, John Muir moved his shoulders away from the wall and stood erect. He looked at the girl in front of him, at her braced figure, slender in blue linen, at her face, matte-white against waves of dark hair framed by a huge circle of leghorn, at the tilted eyes staring at him between rims of dark lash. Only her lips—she had a lovely mouth—had any color. What he had to say to her couldn’t be said here.

  “Surprised to see me?” he asked. “I’ve been ringing your bell for the last five minutes.”

  His tone was careless, almost curt. It was the tone he used when he was bored, uninterested. It steadied Gabrielle.

  “The bell doesn’t work, John. When did you get into New York? Mark doesn’t know you’re here. I just left him.”

  Finding it curiously difficult to move, Gabrielle advanced to her door and unlocked it. Inside the shaded living-room she pulled off her hat, lowered the Venetian blinds another foot, and began to talk into the silence behind her a little feverishly. “Mark will be awfully glad to see you. So will Alice and Tyrell Amory. Now you’re up you’ll stay for our wedding, of course. It’s to be on Saturday at noon.”

  John Muir spoke then. “Gabrielle, don’t turn your back. Turn around. Look at me. Don’t be afraid.” Gabrielle swung. She was shaking, and appalled. “What gave you the idea that I was afraid, John? You’re being a little ridiculous, aren’t you?”

  She looked at him straightly, at his fine head, at the face she knew so well, green-speckled gray eyes under flying brows, wide and well-shaped mouth.

  He said easily, “I don’t think I’m being ridiculous, or I wouldn’t be here. I didn’t come up on business connected with the firm. I came up to talk to you about Mark. I’m going back with the plane that leaves LaGuardia at five-thirty.” He glanced at a watch strapped to a lean wrist. “Which doesn’t give me much time.”

  He dropped down on the arm of the wing chair beside the bookcase, linked brown fingers around a crossed knee. “I never dreamed you were going through with it—that Mark would let you. You don’t love him, Gabrielle. And he—It won’t work.”

  Gabrielle stared at a sheaf of zinnias and bachelor’s buttons brilliant against a stretch of dove-gray wall. She was dazed at John Muir’s onslaught at the last minute, after months of silence. What right had he to come here and talk to her like this? Was it, she thought bitterly, because he considered that she had given him the right? She was the one who had made the move, here in this room four months ago—she was the attacker, John Muir the attacked. A kiss in the dark, an interrupted kiss, snatched at a party. Was that how he saw it, saw her, as light, devious, tricky, promiscuous, willing to play around off the reservation as a pastime, not fit to marry a decent man?

  She took a cigarette out of her purse, flicked the jeweled lighter Mark had given her, fought for control, and achieved it. “Who says I don’t love Mark?”

  John Muir studied her. “I say so. Oh, you love Mark, sure, we all do. But you’re not in love with him. And fondness, affection, pity—aren’t enough, not with a man like Mark. No matter how hard you try, you’re not going to be able to fool him, not indefinitely, anyhow.”

  Fool him, fool Mark. So that was what John Muir had decided, that she was marrying Mark for her own selfish purposes, for money, perhaps.

  “Listen, Gabrielle—”

  But Gabrielle wouldn’t listen. She was too angry. She touched Mark’s ring, moved it so that it caught the light, and said sweetly. “I like you, John. You’d be quite a nice person if you weren’t such a profound egotist, so completely wrapped up in yourself, so sure that you’re invariably right. Everybody’s out of step but Johnny-splendid. Only it just doesn’t happen to be that way. I don’t know what made you think so, unless”—she paused, frowned at the tip of her cigarette, and then smiled gently—“could it be—could it be, John, that you got the idea into your head that I had conceived a hankering for you on the night here that I had too much Swedish punch?” Her heart was beating like a trip hammer, in, out, in, out. She couldn’t stand much more of it. She stopped smiling and crushed out her cigarette, so furious that speech was troublesome. “I’ve had about enough. Will you go now, please?”

  John didn’t move. He remained where he was, fingering the strap on his wrist and looking at her from under dark brows, his sharply focused gaze inscrutable. “Don’t marry Mark, Gabrielle. I’m warning you.”

  His voice wasn’t rough or loud, it was low, even. There was sadness in it,
and an odd sort of finality. Coldness played up and down Gabrielle’s spine. John hadn’t answered her gibe, had let it go past him as though she hadn’t spoken. She said calmly, “I’m marrying Mark at noon on Saturday.”

  John Muir uncoiled his length in a single lithe motion, was on his feet. “You’ve made up your mind?”

  “I never unmade it. I—”

  He didn’t wait for her to finish. He swung, opened the door, closed it behind him, and was gone.

  Gabrielle’s knees would no longer support her. She sank into the nearest chair. The pain was frightful.

  At half-past five that afternoon Gabrielle entered the Finsbury, the apartment hotel on Central Park West where Mark lived, took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, got out the little key on the gold key ring Mark had had made for her, and opened the front door. It was a massive affair, with iron strap hinges. One of the hinges creaked. The reason she didn’t ring was that Mark’s housekeeper, Mrs. Pendleton, generally took a nap in the afternoon and didn’t care to be disturbed.

  Gabrielle carried her bags inside, put them down in the foyer, and listened.

  Rain spattered suddenly against the tall windows in the living-room beyond. The wind was rising. It was twenty-eight minutes of six. John Muir’s plane had already left LaGuardia Field, but if Mark was here and he had found out by some chance that John Muir had been in New York that afternoon, what was she to say to him? At best it would look odd that John Muir had flown up without letting Mark know, and that once here he hadn’t gotten in touch with him directly. Certainly the subject matter of their talk wasn’t intended to be known, that was implicit in what he had said to her. But John Muir was unpredictable. He might have phoned Mark before he left for the airport, might have mentioned his visit to her. If so, and if she said nothing about seeing him, it would seem peculiar. He had been away for three months, expected to be away another three. His return to New York would be important, an event, to his friends.

  How cold and withdrawn he had been at the end, how unlike the man she had thought she knew… She put his image resolutely aside. What she could see of the immense living-room, running two stories to a beamed ceiling, was empty. But Mark could be in his study off on the left. He wasn’t. The door was open. She mounted the little winding staircase to the upper floor, feeling like a thief, went along the gallery to the room above the dining-room that Mark had had redone for her. A fuller view of the living-room and Mark’s study showed them both untenanted. All right, where did that get her? It was simply putting off the evil day. In an hour, an hour and a half at the most, she would be at the Waldorf with Joanna Middleton and Mark would come and she would have to say something about John Muir’s being in New York and his visit to her—or not say it.

  Be guided by circumstances, she thought, tiredly, shutting the white door on the vista below, a heavy-handed mixture of Gothic and baroque. John had laughed when he first saw it. Mark had asked why and John had said, “It’s rather overpowering, but the baronial atmosphere suits you.” It was true. There was a bigness about Mark, a generosity and sweetness that made him seem like a denizen of more spacious times.

  Except for Mrs. Pendleton, drowsing somewhere in her lair, she was alone. Gabrielle opened her bags and began to unpack. Cream-colored walls; hand-blocked linen, yellow, orange, blue, and scarlet, at the windows; built-in bookcases; low, soft chairs; tables; lamps; most of her pictures had been transferred a week ago. It had grown darker out. Lightning flashed briefly. She hung the red chalk above the desk, put her blue Wedgwood pitcher under it, rearranged the chairs and shifted some of the lamps. She and Mark would be here for only two months now, but Mark had a three-year lease on the apartment and both of them wanted something approximating a home to return to.

  Her pleasure in the pretty room was gone. She was bruised and sore and shaken. Forget about John Muir and what he thought of her, she told herself curtly, and went on unpacking small personal objects, paused to switch on the lights, and continued with her work.

  It was almost half-past six when she finished. The storm had begun in earnest, filled the room with the slash of rain and the dull boom of distant thunder. The lights of the city were cobwebbed and golden in the wet lavender dusk. Nothing to do now but put on powder and fresh lipstick and go. She dawdled, acknowledging frankly to herself that she was afraid of Joanna Middleton’s sharp eyes, her tongue, not for herself but for Mark. She could imagine Joanna saying, John Muir flew up here to New York and didn’t let any of us—let Mark know? You were the only one he saw? But—how odd! Mark was the last person in the world to be suspicious, but he was peculiarly sensitive, and his friends meant a lot to him.

  Put Joanna off, Gabrielle decided suddenly. Ring up and say she wasn’t feeling well and thought it better to go straight to bed. She crossed to the desk. There was no book in the room. Call Information for the Waldorf’s number; she lifted the receiver. Someone, Mrs. Pendleton, was using the phone downstairs. The dial was clicking. Gabrielle dropped the instrument into its cradle. It wouldn’t take her long to get home and she could phone Joanna from there just as well.

  Gabrielle put on her hat. She was picking up her purse and gloves when she heard the explosion, a short, sharp, staccato bark that sounded like a shot. She jumped nervously, relaxed. It was a car backfiring in the street or one of those unexplained noises you constantly heard in New York. Nevertheless she held herself tightly as she walked to the door, opened it, switched off the lamps, and closed the door behind her. The gallery was dim. The living-room below was illuminated. Mrs. Pendleton must have turned on the lights.

  Gabrielle started along the gallery, her heels clicking in the stillness. She had traversed less than half its length when she heard a second sound. It wasn’t violent like the first, it was high and thin, a musical note off key. It was the front door opening or closing.

  Gabrielle stood still. She gripped the railing with her hand. The odor that assailed her nostrils was cordite. The explosion that had made her jump while she was shut up in her room wasn’t a backfire. It was a shot and the shot had been fired somewhere within these walls.

  She flew along the gallery and down the steps into the foyer. The front door was closed. Silence, emptiness, a faint moan somewhere? She stumbled into the living-room, turned her head, and saw Mark. He was lying on the floor of the study, almost in the middle of the floor, in an awkward twisted position, one leg at a sharp angle, his arms flung out. He was hurt, wounded. There was blood welling over the front of his suit high up near his chin. His eyes were open. He was staring at her, didn’t seem to see her.

  “Mark—” She rushed to him, knelt. Mark didn’t speak. He was unconscious. A doctor—there were doctors in the building—help. Gabrielle got to her feet and ran. She was through the front door. Someone was coming toward her along the hall. It was Joanna Middleton. She cried to Joanna out of a strangled throat, and ran on, was ringing the elevator bell, keeping her finger on it. At the end of uncounted eons help came. The elevator man first, and then other people, a doctor among them. After that a stretcher appeared and two men in white, interns. Mark was lifted, placed on the stretcher, and carried out. It was the last Gabrielle saw of him, alive. Mark died on the way to the hospital without recovering consciousness.

  Chapter Three: Up against a stone wall

  “MARK—MR. MIDDLETON—DID NOT KILL HIMSELF.”

  Gabrielle spoke slowly, careful to keep her voice at an even pitch. The slightest hint of hysteria would ruin whatever chances he had. The room in which she sat was the Commissioner’s office on the second floor of Police Headquarters on Centre Street, a big room, heavily carpeted, with long windows at one end looking out on changing foliage in thin sunlight. Behind his desk Commissioner Carey remained silent, as did the half-dozen other officials present.

  Gabrielle’s closest friends, Tyrell and Alice Amory, flanked her on either side. They had been Mark’s friends, too. They had refused to let her come alone. Tyrell Amory was the first one she had called on t
hat dreadful night in August. Next to John Muir, he had been the nearest to Mark. She looked at Tyrell for support.

  Tyrell wasn’t looking at her, he was looking moodily at the floor. His brush of fair hair was almost white in the gloom, his clever scholarly face was worried. He kept stroking his hair with a thin hand. He had left his work at the laboratory, important work in which he was engrossed, to come here with her and do what he could to help. It was an empty gesture. He no longer agreed with her. Bit by bit, during the seven weeks since Mark’s death, he had been won over.

  Gabrielle glanced at Alice Amory, slight and dark and elegant, playing nervously with the alligator bag in her lap. Alice too had been sympathetic in the beginning. Now she was simply playing along with a lip service that no longer had any conviction behind it. These friends of Mark’s, and of her own too, of course, had believed her at first. They didn’t now. They agreed with the police that Mark’s death was suicide. Gabrielle knew it was murder.

  Late afternoon light beat pitilessly on her eyelids, became part of the blind pattern of skepticism and unbelief that surrounded her. She moved in an aura of darkness. She repeated her assertion, speaking to no one directly, but to all of them. “Mark did not kill himself. Why should he? We were going to be married in three days. He was happy, he was full of plans. He wasn’t the sort of man who would do a thing like that. Don’t you see?” Her eyes went from face to face, all closed, all unresponsive. There was a despairing fall to her voice. It faded out.