“Have you the copy with you, Mrs. Gervais?”
“Yes.”
He read the typed sheet. It was professional, just as everything Mabel turned her mind to was professional. He saw that it concerned a hit-run accident in the Oyster Bay section of Long Island. Victim, a woman—unidentified—poor—presumably alone in the world—a migrant immigrant worker—left lying dead—heartless motorist—one of those irresponsible drunken drivers—medical aid at the moment might have saved the woman’s life—police investigating but frankly admit that total lack of clues or witnesses probably would throw the case into the unsolved category.
“I shall want this to be authentic looking,” Mabel said. “I’ve brought a column for yesterday’s Times and suggest that you use it for the reverse side of my copy.”
“Very well, Mrs. Gervais.”
“I shall drive over and pick it up tomorrow morning.”
Toward the middle of the following week Mabel permitted Lewis to begin tapering off. Naturally, he developed the shakes, was wretchedly ill both physically and mentally, and his nerves were shot to pieces. During this miserable period while his mind and his moral resources were at their lowest ebb Mabel stamped home her version of the accident and gave him the clipping that Sellingsby had printed.
His first coherent decision was just what she had expected it would be: he wanted to give himself up. Mabel’s success in talking him out of doing so was largely made possible because Lewis’s character was incurably spongy and malleable. It was a weakness caused not by any basic lack of moral fiber but by the fact of his having been since childhood so dotingly woman-ridden—first by his mother and then through his mothers know-best routine having so instantly, so adroitly been taken over by Mabel.
It smothered Lewis under a species of kindly bondage from which he simply had no compassionate implements for escape.
Mabel used her usual strategic opening of pretending to agree.
“You are right, Lewis. Ethically it is the decent thing to do. Or rather it would be so if it would do any good, any real good, Lewis, to offset the terrible consequences.”
“I’ve thought about them. Something like ten or twenty years, isn’t it, for manslaughter? Well, even that wouldn’t be as bad as feeling like a sinful coward for the rest of my life. Mabel, I—”
“Yes, Lewis?”
“I couldn’t expect you to wait for me, Mabel. I mean there are several states that will grant a divorce on the grounds of felony—or there is always Paris, Mabel.”
She gave him one hard, probing look, testing the suspicion of an almost eagerness in his suggestion of divorce. Then she cut loose her heavy guns.
Difficult as the feat is to believe, Mabel actually managed to look pathetic, nobly resigned, and brutally stricken unto death. She asked Lewis quietly whether he hadn’t failed to realize there could be no Paris for her, or anywhere else. Because she would be thrown into prison with him as an accessory after the fact. Because of her silence. Because in her deep devotion and protectiveness she had arranged his escape from the scene of the crime, had willingly jeopardized her own freedom, her position in society, and had risked the stigma of jailbird rather than have him penalized for what basically was but an act of fate.
She repeated, “And if giving ourselves up would do any good, Lewis.”
He was blasted to the very core at this ill-omened picture which, as a matter of honest fact, had never occurred to him at all. His gentle soul revolted at the notion of this saintly woman (his mother had said so) being repaid for her unselfish goodness in such bitter coin.
Lewis was sunk. But deep inside him a fester of shame was rooted and would stay with him for good. It was the shame of moral cowardice, and what griped him most was that never-to-be-forgotten phrase in the newspaper clipping about medical aid at the moment of the accident possibly having had the power to save the woman’s life. It seeded a nightmare that would recur for years on end.
Worst of all it curiously established an unbreakable linkage of himself to Mabel, a partnership in criminal silence, a strange compelling need on his part to shield her forever from any suffering through his wretched act. It was a shackle with far greater strength than the chains of gratitude and one from which Lewis never, advertently, would shake himself free.
* * * *
The hours of the sleepless night rolled on. The panorama changed, moving the scene to Washington, then to Broadlands, from the palatial halls of which Mabel’s politico-social progress had embraced a series of ruthlessly calculated steps, each leading her successively higher on the stairway to her goal. The one that was possibly the cruelest of them all had involved Jenny, the motherless daughter of Senator David Briggs Heatherwing, and it offered a good example of Mabel’s Machiavellian technique.
When she had fallen within the baleful tug of Mabel’s orbit Jenny Heatherwing was eighteen. A friendly, openhearted girl with a refreshing absence of enameled sophistication, she presented the direct opposite to everything that Mabel had been at a similar age. She had beauty. It was the sort that suggested Kansas mornings, while still escaping any touch of the milk-fed. She liked people for the simple reason that she just couldn’t help liking them. She worshiped her father and was positive with a blind assurance that his career would end up in the White House.
He, Senator Heatherwing, was an implacably rigid party-machine politician, no matter how prettily coated with an aura of passable statesmanship. He belonged to the influential corn belt and Mabel, with her uncanny felicity for the long-range view, had spotted him as a dark horse of the most promising tinge. She was unique among the social overlords in foreseeing this and Heatherwing never got over his doglike loyalty to her because of it. Not even after the tragic crash. (“Her brain must have snapped,” he said. “The pace was too much.”)
Jenny gradually was absorbed by Mabel as a protégé. Painlessly so, under the chloroform of little kindnesses. The senator went in for a good deal of shuttling about on various missions such as fence mendings among the home constituents, committee snooping junkets in Europe, and occasional good neighbor affronts upon the patient courtesy of Mexico and South America.
As a result of these parental absences, Mabel ultimately moved Jenny bag and baggage into a suite at Broadlands, thus making her to all purposes a daughter of the house. And thus, equally, enmeshing her straight into the heart of the web. There had been no altruism in this gesture whatsoever. Jenny’s beauty was a useful foil, a deliberately startling offset to Mabel’s ugliness and, what was of special importance, Jenny proved a strong magnet for the junior (and not so junior) striped pants among the State Department and the embassies.
At the outset there had been one conceivably bothersome fly in the ointment: a young man in Jenny’s home town. He, Aaron Stone, and Jenny had grown up as neighbors and had gone to school together. So far as Mabel could gather, it was the old, old story. Love, yes, but nothing spectacular along the purple passion order. No fireworks, just an abiding acceptance that each would end up by spending the rest of life with the other, and it never occurred to either of them to believe otherwise.
But it did occur otherwise to Mabel, because she was already developing the use she would make of Jenny, and had started to incorporate the girl as a valuable pawn in her campaign. However, Mabel decided it was safe to let the Aaron menace rest on ice. Later, if it should show signs of stirring into an annoying activity, she would decide how to deal with it.
There was an inhuman irony in the fact that Senator Heatherwing himself gave her the weapon.
Heatherwing physically was a stolid, earthy-looking six-footer. He televised magnificently and his radio voice during interviews was like the handshake of your best friend. Morally, except for one miserable lapse, his record was as clean as any sensible politician could possibly keep it and still manage to stay in office. Naturally, he was anything but a chump and yet, like a chump, he took his trouble, this single blunder to Mabel to ask her to help him out. He did so because by that
time he had come to think of her as the staunchest sort of friend, as the one person among the cabals and rat races of Washington he could surely trust.
Mabel caught the nervous tension in his voice when he telephoned Broadlands and asked whether he might see her privately. She evaluated to a drawn line the haggard quality of his face when he joined her in the living room of her suite.
“You need a drink, Dave.”
“I do.”
“Over there—the cellaret.”
“You, Mabel?”
“No.”
Heatherwing poured a stiff one and drank it straight.
“I’m in trouble.”
“Tell me.”
It was money, of course: the ageless temptation that comes in the lives of a good many otherwise prudent men to make a shady financial killing on the market. The details were mechanically trite—a confidential knowledge of a proposed presidential legislative request to Congress that would shoot a certain commodity sky high—Heatherwing’s plunging all his money, plus all he could borrow, through a masking dummy on the Exchange—then a last-minute shift in administration policy, and the bust.
“It’s the borrowed money that is frightening you, isn’t it, Dave?”
“Yes.”
“Dave—Dave, you idiot, why didn’t you come to me?”
“I couldn’t. You know that. With you being what you are to Jenny, like a mother. You know I couldn’t have, Mabel, let you know about it. But now I’ve got to. I’m sick, Mabel. Sick straight through.”
“Threats?”
“Yes.”
“Who loaned you the money?”
Heatherwing mentioned the name of one of the more notorious percentage boys. There was, he said, a time limit. He had to fork over by tomorrow or the stench of the deal would be loosed to the Washington columnists and commentators.
“I don’t mind it killing me,” Heatherwing said. “I mind it killing Jenny.”
“How much?”
“It’s—thirty thousand dollars.”
Mabel went to a desk and took out her checkbook.
Two weeks later when the canceled voucher came back to her, Mabel swung a framed Renoir on its hinge and tucked the voucher into a small wall safe where she kept her more serviceable mementos of future worth.
* * * *
Some months and several ladder steps later the final fish that Mabel had been angling for was hooked. By this time, of course, her parties at Broadlands had struck their stride in the glittering galas that crowned her as first hostess among the political and diplomatic camarillas of the town.
As a further bulwark to these champagne-and-caviar freeloadings her campaign contributions were huge and were managed with an adroitness that loopholed them smoothly through the Hatch Act. Her compulsion toward her goal had degenerated into a fetid disease, and her success as a manipulator of such congressmen and key national figures whom she wanted to bag was such that she began to believe herself invincible.
The hooking of Alden Habling of the State Department convinced her that the job was set and that the moment was ripe for throwing her Sunday punch—the one designed to land Lewis in the Brussels Embassy.
Jenny was the bait that Mabel had used to gaff Habling, in spite of the fact that he was a widower and Jenny’s senior by a good twenty years. You could give him the edge on this, however, because apart from having kept himself physically fit (handball, tennis, polo) his lean, unmustached face had refused to accept middle age. He was far too keenly interested in life. His background, as a matter of course, embodied wealth, Groton, and Harvard.
After several months of squiring by Habling had made Jenny think of him as a most delightful companion and fond friend, he had said one day to Mabel, “I’ll be grateful to you all my life for this. Whenever you want the moon just tell me, Mabel.”
The moon promptly metamorphosed itself into the embassy at Brussels. Yes, at that particular point in time Mabel’s luck was going full blast, and she was ready to cash in on it with the most important party she had ever thrown—its climax to be the betrothal announcement of Jenny and Habling, the clinching delivery of the dew-dabbed beauty into his generous and anxious hands.
The party was not to be one of her lush extravaganzas. Anything but. The job, in its jewel-box intimacy, was scheduled to take place over the coming weekend at the chalet for the opening of the Adirondack deer season. Five days away. Only five days before the last-act curtain would go up and suddenly, peculiarly, some sixth sense had begun to nag Mabel into being nervous about it. That she should feel this disquiet about any of her plans (plots) was without precedent. There seemed no reason.
No cloud lay visible on the clear horizon, and all the preliminary moves were scientifically cooking in a slow oven. Lewis at the moment was in Georgia as the guest of Senator Downsberry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The two other members of this party were the Postmaster General, Terrence Xavier Olcott, and Habling.
Jenny’s father had originally been included but a strep throat, aggravated by a general nervous breakdown, had popped him into Walter Reed. There was nothing critical about his condition, but he did need a rest and a good overhaul.
As for this coming weekend the identical group were to be at the chalet for a deer hunt, the only difference being that Mabel would be with them, along with Olcott’s wife and Downsberry’s wife and Jenny—both sexes being highly diverted (they were pathetically eager to be so) at such an unorthodox female intrusion on the he-man’s last stand.
Truly the setup was perfect, and yet there existed this odd state of nervousness, and Mabel held a sober respect for premonition. Historically she was not alone in her viewpoint when you considered the superstitions common to many Titans of the past—Caesar with his omen-stuffed gods—Napoleon with his touch of orientalism and fetish for his “star”—Hitler and his mystical glorifications and moody forebodings.
The worrisome tocsin had persisted through a stupid luncheon with a stupid Cabinet wife in the Mayflower Lounge. Mabel could not shake it off, so while Harris drove her back to Broadlands she examined her bastions, searching for an avenue no matter how obscure along which danger could approach to attack them.
Lewis? Absurd. As the angler had been complete to Izaak Walton so Lewis by now was the complete puppet to herself. The attrition of rich living had smoothed him handsomely through the years, and the strings she jerked to activate his movements had attained the soft quality of non-irritating silk. No danger there. Nothing but a valuable lump of distinguished-looking putty in her hands.
Jenny? Mabel brushed the notion aside as child’s play. She intended to talk with the girl before they left for the chalet, and the line she would take was already formulated: motherly, wise—surely you must see, my dear, that Alden Habling is the true answer rather than that childhood, schoolgirl crush. Then if words were to fail, if the menace of Aaron Stone sprang alive, there remained as a club the hinged Renoir and the wall safe with its incontrovertibly persuasive contents.
Mama?
It was fantastic, Mabel thought, that right out of the blue she should suddenly think of mama, and ridiculously so in any terms of threat. As a matter of fact it was even more fantastic that mama, persistently, still lived. If you could call it living, and Mabel supposed that technically you had to. No, no danger, never from mama.
Who then? What then? From where?
It was in this prickling frame of mind that Mabel found a telegram awaiting her at Broadlands. The wire was from the chalet, from Hyacinth. This was unusual, and in her special nervous state of mind it was startlingly so. During the fleet moment while her eyes skipped from the signature to the start of the message proper Mabel’s thoughts were of fire: a burned-down chalet—no deer hunt—the never-failing setback attendant on any last minute cancellation or change in a vitally cardinal plan.
DEAR MADAM PREPARE YOURSELF FOR UNSPEAKABLE ASTONISHMENT AND SURPRISE. [This Mabel did.] AN ESTABLISHMENT OF HUGE PRESTIGE IN KITCHENER ONTARIO HAVE A
PURPOSE TO PUBLISH THE ELITE AMONG MY POEMS. A MIRACLE. A MATTER OF NATIONAL FAME. NOTHING LESS COULD HAVE PERSUADED ME TO ABSENT MYSELF FROM THE CHASE FOR THE COMING WEEKEND. IT IS A SUMMONS FROM A FATE MUCH TALLER THAN OUR MORTAL BODIES. I MAKE HASTE BY MOTORBUS TO PUT MY SIGNATURE UPON THIS EVENT. BE CALM. ALL IS PREPARED. TO SERVE THE COMFORT OF YOUR FASHIONABLE GUESTS I HAVE INSTALLED MY DEAR COUSIN ETIENNE. HE IS A GOOD COOK BUT FOR HIS PUDDINGS AND IS A WITTY FELLOW WITH HIS VIOLIN. ALWAYS GAY. WHEN NEXT I FACE YOU IT IS AS A MAN OF DISTINCTION SUITABLE TO THE FAITH YOU HAVE PUT IN ME. BANISH ALL FEARS BUT THAT THE DEDICATION TO THIS VOLUME OF TREASURE IS AN HONOR RESERVED FOR YOUR SAINTED SELF ON PAGE ONE. A FINE REWARD FOR YOU TO REAP AT LONG LAST. WITH A RESPECT AND A GRATEFUL EMOTION THAT SHALL KNOW NO DEATH I AM HYACINTH DUBOIS
With true French economy this brochure came collect.
Mabel’s first reaction was one of shattering relief that the chalet was not a charred crisp, but the feeling was promptly supplanted by a slow rage. The very essence of the chalet was Hyacinth. He offered the ineluctable something that transformed the place from being just any plush hunting lodge into a special effect.
Furthermore, the guest who next to Habling was specially to be cozened was Senator Downsberry with his invaluable influence as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The rub was that in addition to being a paralyzing bore he fancied himself as a poet. His cute couplets and lengthier doggerel were the bane of every Washington hostess as well as of Capitol Hill.
To underscore the deadliness of the situation, Mabel already had given Hyacinth’s poetics a big buildup with the senator. She had painted him as a throwback to the days of minstrelsy, and Downsberry in consequence was keenly looking forward to lobbing back and forth a few stanzas with this “original,” this character, this unspoiled bard of the timbered hills. (The senator’s words, not Mabel’s.)
And therefore, Mabel decided as she went upstairs to her living room, come hell or high water a Hyacinth would Senator Downsberry meet.
She summoned Miss Nest, the same Miss Nest who had been mama’s social secretary and who kept right on being Mabel’s. There wasn’t much of her left. A wispy woman to begin with, she was now, in her sixties, wispier still with translucent flesh over bones that still managed courageously to be strong, with the same pince-nez chained to a spring-brooch on her imperceptible breast and with a hemline that had never budged above her instep.
The Murder Megapack Page 6
