Two-Thirds of a Ghost

by Helen McCloy

  Silence made Basil suddenly aware that he and Meg had an audience, listening more and more intently to every word. Before she could answer his last question, he turned back to Tony, as if Meg’s story were quite unimportant.

  “Was there ever any indication that Amos Cottle had been recognized by someone out of his past?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Tony. “You, Gus?”

  “No.”

  “Even when he appeared regularly on TV?” persisted Basil.

  “Oh.” Tony’s brow wrinkled. “That did worry us a bit. The offer was too good to turn down, but we realized it was risky. That was when I suggested to Amos that he grow a beard. It did change his appearance quite a lot. And of course the alcoholism must have changed him a good deal from what he was say ten or twelve years ago.”

  “Is it conceivable that someone recognized another man in Amos Cottle without your knowing anything about it? That perhaps he was even murdered by some-one.who came out of his past, and for some reason that had nothing to do with his being Amos Cottle?”

  “It’s conceivable, I suppose, but what motive for murder could last so long?”

  “There’s always property,” said Basil. “In his other incarnation he was someone who had disappeared for at least the six years he was known as Cottle. Suppose he was presumed dead and someone inherited his property because of that. Or suppose a former wife of his remarried. Once he was on TV, this person who had profited by his presumed death or remarried because of it might see him and recognize him and live in daily dread that someone else would recognize him, too, and ruin everything. That situation provides a strong motive for murder. Such a murderer would be hard to unmask, for nothing in Amos Cottle’s life would connect him with Cottle in any way.”

  “It’s possible,” admitted Tony. “But after all, Amos was killed by someone who was here last night. This hypothetical person out of Amos’s forgotten past would have to be one of the Puseys or Emmett Avery.”

  ‘‘Or me.” Lepton smiled wickedly. “The rest of you were all a part of his life as Amos Cottle, but we four were meeting him in person for the first time.”

  ‘‘And came to the meeting provided with cyanide?” objected Tony.

  “The murderer might have recognized him first on TV,” retorted Lepton. “I don’t have a set myself but I’m sure Emmett and the Puseys have.”

  Basil returned Lepton’s smile. “I shall keep all these interesting possibilities in mind.”

  Lepton bowed to the challenge. “I’m not a psychiatrist nor the son of a psychiatrist, but another thought occurs to me: is it possible that Amos did recover his real memory without telling anyone about it? Even his guardian angels, Gus and Tony?”

  Gus looked astonished. “Why wouldn’t he tell us?”

  Lepton shrugged. “Perhaps he wanted a little private life of his own. Perhaps he enjoyed remaining a mystery to you and Tony—the walking enigma without a memory. Or perhaps his past was so shameful he didn’t want anyone to know about it.”

  Basil was interested. “Are you suggesting that he recovered his memory without informing his new associates and then sought out some of his old associates, thereby, consciously or unconsciously, giving one of them a motive and an opportunity to kill him anonymously, as it were?”

  “Why not?” Lepton found this possibility diverting. “A man without an official past is pretty vulnerable, isn’t he?”

  Basil looked at Vera. “How’ did you meet him?”

  “On a TV show. I was an assistant director for the network, assigned to an interview program, and it was Amos’s second interview. His second book was just out. He usually came to the studio with Gus, but that night, after the show had been, going on about five months, Amos came alone. Gus’s little girl was having her tonsils out and he couldn’t make it.”

  “My mistake,” murmured Gus.

  “So,” Vera smiled with self-satisfaction. “I really got to know Amos for the first time. After the show we went out to supper together. He didn’t drink anything himself that night, but he bought me a bottle of champagne and he told me how lonely he was. The rest was easy.”

  “Poor Amos!” Tony looked at Vera malevolently, then turned to Basil. “You can imagine how Gus and I felt when we got Amos’s telegram from Asheville. They had been married at City Hall two days before. I flew down and sobered up Amos in time for the next show. I didn’t know what to do with Vera until I thought of the Hollywood caper. For three months she lived with Amos and he didn’t do a stroke of work all that time. Too drunk.”

  “I kept telling him to write!” cried Vera indignantly. “I didn’t want him to stop. I just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t be more reasonable about his drinking.”

  “You got on his nerves,” said Philippa. “He told me so after you left.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Vera’s retort was hot, but there was self-doubt in her eyes. “Amos never liked you! He wouldn’t confide in you!”

  Lepton tried to create a diversion. “All artists of any talent are vain and touchy and hard to live with. It’s no reflection on you, Vera, that you got on Amos’s nerves. Anyone else would have had the same effect on him. He was the type who has to live alone. You probably maddened him. After all, he was a man of some intellect and the only services he needed from you were—shall we say, unintellectual? As his mistress, you would have had a great success and it might even have become a permanent relation. As his wife, you were doomed to failure from the beginning. He couldn’t stand any woman in daily doses. Why should a man have to pay such a price for a few minutes’ pleasure?”

  “There speaks the true-born bachelor,” remarked Philippa.

  Vera rose regally. “Dr. Willing, all these people hate me. How much longer do I have to remain in this house and be insulted?”

  “Hate is a rather strong word,” protested Gus. “We weren’t happy about your marriage to Amos, but you have no right to suggest…”

  “I have a perfect right to suggest anything I please!” returned Vera. “Do you know what your wife thinks of me? She thinks I’m an incompetent actress and a vicious woman! She said so.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Meg…Gus half turned in his chair.

  Meg flushed a beautiful pink. “It’s true. I—I don’t suppose it will do any good if I say I’m sorry.”

  “No, it won’t.” Vera glared at Meg like an angry child. She was completely out of control now. Her voice had lost all its sweet artifice. “I’m going to pay you back for that if it’s the last thing I ever do!”

  “When did you say this, Meg?” demanded Gus.

  “I wrote Amos a letter die night I heard Vera was coming back,” Meg explained in a stifled voice. “I wrote Vera at the same time suggesting she stay with us. I was confused and—well, I put the letter to Amos in the envelope to Vera and airmailed it to the Coast before she left.”

  “You see?” Vera turned to Basil triumphantly. “When can I go back to New York, Dr. Willing?”

  “Any time you like,” returned Basil. “Captain Drew asked me to tell you that any of you are free to return to New York now, if you wish to do so, but the police would like you to remain in either New York or Connecticut for the next few days.”

  “Hallelujah!” Vera was jubilant. “I’m going upstairs and pack my things right now.” Her gaze swept the circle. “Would you people like to know what I think about you?”

  “No,” said Philippa quickly.

  Vera allowed her glance to stray from face to face in a calculated theatrical pause. “I think there is something damned queer about this whole setup. All you parasitic leeches living on Amos’s life blood! I think one of you murdered him and I’m going to find out which one. Meg Vesey, I may be an incompetent actress, but you’re going to find out now just how vicious I can be as a woman.” Her eyes shifted to Tony and Gus. “Sam Karp will call you two literary executors in the morning and give you a choice of changing the terms of Amos’s contract or being sued.”

&nb
sp; “You have no grounds for suit!” cried Tony furiously.

  “Sam has a mighty cute lawyer.” Vera turned abruptly with a swish of satin and marched out of the room. No one made an effort to detain her. No one spoke until the clatter of her heels on the stairs had died away.

  “Typical Hollywood exit,” remarked Philippa. “In fact, the whole scene was pure Hollywood. Cinderella in blue satin and mink—the lovely, warm-blooded, impetuous daughter of the common people—denouncing the parasitic, supercilious rich with more decibels than manners.”

  “I always wondered if Vera could raise her voice,” murmured Meg.

  “And now you know.”

  Meg smiled at Gus ruefully. “I’m sorry about that letter.”

  He squeezed her hand. “It doesn’t matter now. It never mattered really.”

  She shook her head. “Vera would be easier to handle now if it wasn’t for my letter. I’m afraid she’s going to make trouble about those contracts.”

  “She would have done that anyway,” said Tony. “But legally she’s stuck. I have some pretty cute lawyers of my own and they went all over those contracts with a fine-toothed comb before they were signed.”

  Meg rose, looking happier than she had for the last two days. “I want to get back to Polly as soon as I can. Dr. Willing, if you don’t need me for anything further, I’ll go up and change.”

  “Want to borrow a suit?” asked Philippa.

  “Thanks, but the velvet dress won’t matter in the car and we’re going straight home.”

  Basil said good-bye to Philippa. Tony and Gus trailed him to the front door.

  “I suppose we’ll be seeing you again in town?” said Tony without enthusiasm.

  “Most likely you will.” Basil’s measured glance considered Tony thoughtfully. “I doubt if this case can be solved until we find out more about Cottle’s real identity. What became of the clothing he wore when he was found six years ago?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tony.

  “Maybe the Stratfield Police Department kept it,” suggested Gus.

  “By this time, it’s probably vanished,” said Basil. “Like the muddy track of the car that skidded into Amos. There never was a case where the physical trail was colder. But there are other clues besides tire prints and personal effects. Less tangible things that don’t change with time.”

  “Such as?” probed Tony.

  “The things that Amos wrote,” returned Basil. “And he wrote so much. There ought to be a thousand clues to his birthplace and his former occupation, his family, his friends, his hobbies, in those four books he wrote in four years, to say nothing of his unpublished scripts. A man can’t write novels without putting a great deal of his own past into them.’’

  “But he’d lost all memory of his past!” cried Gus in amazement.

  “When you say his memory was lost, you don’t mean it was annihilated—not as long as he was still alive. You mean simply that it was lost to conscious recall, buried in the subconscious. Every fiction writer drawls heavily on his subconscious. Such clues are all the more eloquent because they are unconscious and therefore completely candid. ‘Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!’ ‘‘

  “I see what you mean.” The idea seemed to make Tony uncomfortable. “The author portrays himself in every line he writes and portrayal is always betrayal. The lie is the man.”

  Basil nodded. “Even a small, everyday lie is a clue to the personality and preoccupations of the liar, like a dream or any other confection of the mind, that is half-conscious and half-unconscious, as all creative acts must be. How much more revealing are four long novels which are, psychologically speaking, four long lies.”

  “Wouldn’t it be kinder to say that a lie is a short work of fiction?” suggested Gus. “‘A story’ as my daughter says?”

  Basil laughed. “Let’s say that fiction and lies are both works of creative art, and creation always reveals the creator. As Cottle’s literary executors, will you give me permission to go through every scrap of unpublished work he left behind him?”

  Gus and Tony exchanged an uneasy glance. “We can hardly say no,” remarked Tony at last. “I’m sure you could get a search warrant or a writ of habeas corpus or something if we did. All the stuff is in Amos’s house now and the police have the keys. But I hope you don’t find out anything about Amos that will hurt the sales of his posthumous books.”

  Basil’s glance probed Tony’s poker face. “You don’t have much faith in Amos Cottle, do you?”

  “I don’t have much faith in anybody,” returned Tony.

  When Basil’s car had gone, Gus said, “Should I offer to drive Vera to New York?”

  “No.” Tony was emphatic. “You’d be sure to have an accident with Meg and Vera in the same car. I’ll drive Vera to the station. If there’s no train within the next hour from Westport or Norwalk, I’ll take her to Stamford. Come into the study and we’ll look up the timetable.”

  In the breakfast room, Philippa was putting out a cigarette she had just lighted. “What a morning!” She sighed deeply. “All the skeletons are out of the cupboard now!”

  “Are they?” said Lepton quietly.

  She had risen as she spoke. Now he rose, too, and came around the table to her side. His dark gaze held hers, fascinated. He spoke in a low, almost uninterested voice. “You were sleeping with him, weren’t you?”

  Philippa was unused to shock tactics. She made a mistake. “How did you know?”

  “The look in your eyes when you learned he was only half a man.” Lepton’s gaze grew speculative. “How does it feel to sleep with—two-thirds of a ghost?”

  Philippa shuddered uncontrollably and covered her face with her hands.

  His voice sank to a whisper. “I’m not a ghost.”

  He pulled her hands away from her face. His embrace was so hard and urgent she thought she would faint with a pleasure as keen as pain itself. His lips found every nerve end.

  “Maurice…” she whispered with a kind of awe and drew back.

  Movement caught her eye. Her gaze went beyond his shoulder and it was then that she saw Vera, dressed for the street, watching them from the doorway, her face flushed with exultant malice.

  Before either of them could speak, Vera was gone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was two o’clock when Basil’s car turned into the driveway of the house where Amos Cottle had led his lonely life. Basil had invited Emmett Avery to meet him here at three. That gave Basil an hour alone to commune with Amos Cottle’s enigmatic ghost.

  As soon as he unlocked the door with the key he had picked up at the police station, he was impressed by the stillness within. Tony had said that every wall was soundproof. Basil had a theory of his own that many flaws and failings in contemporary writing can be traced to the hubbub of industrial society. Shelley would never have written his lyrical salute to the skylark quite so felicitously if there had been a pneumatic drill just outside his window and a radio going full blast on the other side of a matchboard partition. But Amos had achieved what so few modern writers can afford—the luxury of silence. And Amos had lived entirely alone. In this vacuum he had invoked the voice of stillness that must speak to writers as well as mystics if they are to attain ecstasy.

  Yet, in this perfect setting, Amos had been unhappy enough to long for the numbing effect of alcohol and the writing he had produced was of such uncertain quality that it had provoked a public wrangle between two prominent critics. Now he was dead the hush seemed haunted with echoes, a jostling throng at the very edge of the threshold of human hearing. If only there were some supersensitive sonic device that could break through the time barrier and pick up the dying fall of yesterday’s voices. Basil had a curious feeling that the house was trying to tell him something that should have been quite obvious.

  The great window’s made the outdoors part of the living room. The day had not yet lost its della Robbia clarity. The snowy world was still an innocent white against the tender blue of the
sky, sparkling clean in the winter sunshine. Basil’s glance moved slowly around the room and paused at the bizarre window’ above the fireplace. Its calculated illogic struck him as decadent and almost sinister, a contrived effect of deliberate madness. Of course, the house was Tony’s choice and the furniture came with the house. These were just layers in the elaborately built up façade of an artificial personality. So were the clothes, all of the finest quality, that filled the closet in the bedroom. There was no clue to the character of the real man.

  In the scrapbasket beside the bureau he saw a crumpled piece of tissue stained with something brownish red. Dried blood? Closer examination revealed lipstick of a peculiar russet shade that would be difficult for most complexions. But not for Philippa Kane’s. It was the same shade of lipstick she had worn this morning. It proved nothing and suggested a great deal. Evidently Amos had not been quite so lonely as most of his friends assumed.

  Basil inspected the kitchen briefly. Amos was no epicure. There were no exotic foods, frozen or fresh. This was a man who ate eggs and bacon for breakfast and meat or fish without sauce or condiment for dinner. An indifference to quality in food showed clearly in the choice of bread and coffee. There could be no question of Amos’s true nationality. Only an American would drink coffee that was largely Brazilian and eat bread that was largely air, when even supermarkets now offered tastier alternatives.

  The house was proving even more barren of obvious physical clues than Basil had expected. There were only two possibilities left—the papers in the desk and the books on the shelves.

  The most prominent shelves in the living room were packed with the four books Amos had written in the last four years. First came the trade editions in gaudy paper jackets, then the book-club and reprint editions. Finally scrapbooks in which a few letters and many clippings of reviews and advertisements had been pasted in chronological order.

  The first drawer of the desk was immaculate and sterile—typing paper, carbon, envelopes, great and small, pens, pencils, and erasers, bills, paid and unpaid, bank statements, income tax records, checkbooks. In the second drawer he found cardboard folders, some labeled contracts, others labeled letters. The third drawer yielded 421 pages of carbon typescript stapled inside a blue cardboard folder, marked in Amos’s own neat handwriting: