“When I was eighteen my mother died. My father went a year later. He couldn’t buy anything to fill up his loneliness, or cure a lung cancer. So there I was, the second-richest girl in the world, perhaps, with houses and cars and boats and horses and God knows what, surrounded by bankers and lawyers, and an army of men, young and old, who told me I was beautiful and desirable, and each time one of them looked at me I could see the dollar signs in their eyes, like the wolf in a Disney cartoon. It’s funny, but nice guys shied away from me because they saw the money as an obstacle. Only the heels danced attendance. They make a joke out of the phrase ‘poor little rich girl.’ Don’t you believe it, Haskell. It’s hell.”
“I told Craig you could buy the best help there is,” I said, when she didn’t go on. “He said you couldn’t buy love, or tenderness, or sympathy.”
“He said that?”
“Sounded like he meant it,” I said.
“You can’t love anyone because they see you in an impossible frame of reference,” she said. “Deep down you know that everyone wants to steal from you: your banker, your lawyer, your estate manager, the people you buy from, the bellboy who holds out his hand for a tip, your friends, who begin to feel that they’re entitled to part of what you have—because they don’t see why you should have it and not them. You can’t ever help anybody—enough! You’re ripe for picking! I’m telling you this miserable sob story, Haskell, so you’ll understand what happened to me.”
“Small dividend?” I asked, holding out the shaker.
She ignored the question. “At a certain level, wealth is relative,” she said. “I suspect I have a great deal more money than Emlyn Teague, but he has so much that you couldn’t tell the difference when it comes to being able to acquire anything on earth you want. I met Emlyn at a party somewhere. He’s not unattractive in a weird way. His story isn’t unlike mine. Like Gary said to you, he was in the position of being able to buy almost anything but love, or tenderness, or sympathy. The first night we met we had a kind of funny, gay time together. I remember he took me home, very early in the morning, from some night spot. On my doorstep—my gold-plated doorstep—he said:
“ ‘Do you feel anything?’
“ ‘Like what?’ I asked him.
“ ‘Like a mad, irresistible desire to make love to me?’
“ ‘I wish I did,’ I told him. ‘It would be nice to make love to someone who wasn’t making a mental appraisal of the value of the silverware.’
“ ‘I wish I did,’ he said, ‘for the same reason. But that being settled, my pet, there’s no reason we can’t join forces in having some fun out of life.’ ”
“So we became friends, Haskell, for the curious reason that we knew neither one of us wanted anything from the other. I thought, at first, that he was a kind of joyful madman. He loved practical jokes. He’d go to endless pains and expense to make them come off. He made me laugh and I needed to laugh. Emlyn’s bosom friends were a little harder to learn to take—Jeremy, and Oscar, and Van, and Ivor. Their notion was that part of the joyful-madness department was a kind of free-love compact. They expected me to be like Bobby Towers, available whenever and wherever. You may not understand why I felt a little guilty that I couldn’t say ‘yes’ to everything. It was part of their way of life, and they were providing me with the first real fun I’d ever had, so I ought to have been willing. But I wasn’t. The result was that I tried to even things up by entering into Emlyn’s pranks and games with all the energy I had. I was the mad, mad, mad one of the lot. I’ve thrown more money away on crazy escapades than most people earn in a lifetime. It’s pretty incredible when you stop to think of it. And pretty soon nothing was quite gay enough or produced quite enough laughs. That’s when the quality of the games began to change—an element of sadism began to be part of them—before I realized it was happening. People were being really hurt; not laughed at, but hurt.”
“Like Julie Frazer,” I said.
She looked at me, her eyes very bright. I’d brought her up short, but I realized she’d been remembering with a kind of excitement. I felt just a little revolted.
“That was when it first began to go sour for me,” she said, her voice very low. “I’m not going into case histories with you, I can’t. But I wanted out. I went to Emlyn one night and told him I had had fun, but I was through. I wasn’t getting kicks out of it anymore. I was beginning to feel like a heel. Mind you, Haskell, I should have long ago, but I hadn’t.
“ ‘You can’t quit, my pet,’ Emlyn told me. ‘You’re one of us. You’re in with us up to your pretty neck.’
“ ‘I’ve had enough,’ I told him.
“ ‘But we need you,’ he said. ‘You’ve become our trademark.’
“I told him I was sorry, but I’d had it.
“Then he laid it on the line to me. I hadn’t stopped to think, but actually we were guilty of crimes—legal crimes. They’d been committed for laughs, but they were nonetheless punishable. No one in the group could quit. It wouldn’t be safe for the rest.
“ ‘You might turn next to religion,’ Emlyn said, with his evil little smile. ‘Where would we be if you took to confession for the good of your immortal soul—if any?’
“He’d kept a kind of log on all our activities for the last five years. He had each one of us hooked. I had to go on until I could find a way out. Presently, Emlyn came up with a new game. It involved—well, never mind what it involved. It topped anything we’d done before in malice. At the last minute I ran out on them. I had a little power boat at Santa Monica, and on a night I was supposed to be meeting the others, I took off in it. They wouldn’t be able to find me out on the ocean.
“When you’re running you don’t take ordinary precautions. I’ve handled small boats all my life. I’m good at it. But that night, in my anxiety to get away, I didn’t stop to check on weather conditions. It was a beautiful, moonlit night, but, actually, small-craft warnings were up. I’d only been out about an hour when I was hit by a violent windstorm. Before I knew it, I was fighting for my life—all through the longest night of my life. It was just daylight when I ran aground on a rock ledge. I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was, but I had to abandon the boat and try to swim for shore which was at least a mile away.
“I don’t remember making it. Oh, not a blackout, Haskell. Simple Exhaustion. I did manage to crawl up onto a stretch of rocky shoreline, and there I passed out.
“When I came to, I was in a bunk somewhere, warmly wrapped in blankets, and I could smell the delicious aroma of fresh coffee. And when I sat up I saw Gary, that inevitable pipe in his mouth, coming toward me with a steaming cup of coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs. It turned out he had rented this little cabin on the beach. He’d gone out for an early morning walk and found me lying unconscious down at the high-tide line on the beach. He’d carried me to his cabin, dried me off, and left me to sleep it out. He introduced himself, and I knew who he was. I’d read his books. I told him I was ‘Dorothy Smith.’
“This was a new kind of man to me, Haskell, and a new kind of situation. ‘Dorothy Smith’ wasn’t the second-richest girl in the world. She was just ‘Dorothy Smith.’ I told Gary there was no one to worry about me. I didn’t have to get in touch with anyone.
“We talked for hours about his work, his philosophy of life, his values. He seemed to need to talk about himself. He’d been working out there in isolation too long. But—well, finally, it came around to my turn to talk about ‘Dorothy Smith.’ There wasn’t anything to tell about her unless I made it up on the spot. I, God knows, needed to talk out my problem. In the end I told him who I really was.”
She was silent for a moment. I glanced at my watch. It was already past eight o’clock and Shelda was probably fuming in the Grill Room. I’d promised her dinner at eight. But I couldn’t leave at that moment.
“I think Gary was a little stunned when he knew who I really was,” Doris said. “Of course he knew about me. Who doesn’t?” She allowed herself a little
bitter laugh. “But for the first time somebody seemed to understand my problem. I had the feeling the money made no difference to him. It sounds funny to put it in words, but it didn’t make any difference to him that I was rich. He didn’t like me because of it, nor would he run away from me because of it. I—I can’t go into the detail of it with you, Haskell. That’s mine—my own to share with no one. But I stayed there in the cabin with Gary for three days. I was in love. For the first time in my life I had a relationship with a man that was based on nothing except what I had to give as a woman. Suddenly I felt strong, and sure of myself. We agreed to go back to Beverly Hills together, where I’d sign off with Emlyn and embark on a new and wonderful life.”
“It didn’t happen?” I asked.
“Oh, we went back to my house together. And I gave a party for Emlyn and the crowd. They were to meet Gary, and Gary would have it out with Emlyn. They had to let me go, because if they didn’t, then Gary and I would face them down—we’d agree to leave them untouched if they’d set me free.
“Emlyn, as usual, was one step ahead of me. Gary had gone into town on an errand, and the minute he left my house Emlyn appeared. It seemed to amuse him that the poor little rich girl was in love. And then, coldly and deliberately, he told me what he could do to me, and what he could do to destroy Gary, and, in the end, to make any relationship intolerable. If I went into it with you, you’d understand why I saw that the dream was impossible.
“When Gary came back I put on the act of a lifetime. I told him I’d changed my mind. That the beach cottage had been one thing, but now that I was back at home I realized the only thing I really wanted was to go on with my life as it had been. I remembered the stony look on his face.
“ ‘You’re a liar,’ he said.
“I laughed at him.”
“ ‘They’ve put the screws on you,’ he said. ‘I tell you, if you’ve got the guts we can outfight them.’
“I knew better. I knew that in the end his faith in me and love for me would be carefully destroyed—with surgical skill. And so I sent him away. That was two months ago. To the best of my knowledge I haven’t been in touch with him since. You say I phoned him—”
“He says you phoned him.”
“If I did, it’s part of what’s missing,” she said. “Tell him to go away, Haskell. Emlyn won’t let us win.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Teague threatens you with jail, but he was involved in everything you were involved in. He’d have to go with you. You don’t think he’d do that, do you, just to have his way with you?”
Her face was a white, tragic mask, the corners of the scarlet mouth were drawn down.
“If it simply meant facing punishment—” she said.
“What else?”
“If I told you the things I’ve done, Haskell, you’d walk out of here without giving me another thought. If Gary was told, I don’t think he could bear it either. He might think he could, but when he heard, it would be the beginning of the end. He could never hold me in his arms without remembering what he knew; never look at me across the breakfast table without feeling a slow revulsion. As far as rest of the world is concerned, I’d be a leper with a bell around my neck.”
“Surely it would be just as bad for Teague,” I said.
She shook her head, slowly. “That’s where the basic difference is between Emlyn and me,” she said. “I’m suddenly drowning in a sea of shame and remorse. He glories in it. It’s what makes him attractive to evil people like Jeremy and Oscar and Van and Bobby and Ivor. If I did the revealing, he would have a field day. He’d enjoy his role as the Prince of Darkness. There are always people who’d flock to him. He’d probably avoid legal punishment because he manipulated the rest of us so that we were the actors and he a delighted audience. He doesn’t want things changed, but if they were changed, he’d go on—with a new crew. And listen to me, Haskell. If Gary tries to fight Emlyn, he’ll lose what he’s fighting for. Even the memory of three magic days will be hopelessly tarnished, turned into something loathsome. Persuade him to go away, Haskell. Please, please!”
“Evil” is a kind of Biblical word that I don’t use in my everyday vocabulary. It may mean something precise to some people, like a direct violation of one or all of the ten commandments. To me it means something over-all, something that permeates a situation or a society, an atmosphere. I was reminded of a statement in one of Rebecca West’s articles on modern treason. She said, in effect, that in our highly sophisticated age there is almost no man who doesn’t know the difference between good and evil; that the frightening thing about this is the general preference for evil.
I came out of Suite 9F that evening with the uncomfortable feeling that I’d been walking along the edge of some slimy, contaminated area. I felt pity for Doris Standing, but I was reluctant to reach out to help her for fear I might become infected. If she’d meant to convince me that she couldn’t be rescued from her entanglement with Teague, she’d been pretty successful.
I went to my quarters where Gary Craig was waiting for me. I telephoned down to the grill to tell Shelda I’d be there in about ten minutes. Then, while I was putting studs into a clean dress shirt, I gave Craig a brief rundown on my meeting with Doris. He listened, a cold pipe gripped between his teeth.
“I’m not running out on her,” he said, when I’d finished.
“She desperately wants you to,” I said.
“She’s sick,” Craig said. “You don’t ran out on a sick person even if you can’t stand the smell of festering wounds. Maybe I couldn’t make a life with her if I knew the whole truth. Maybe I’m that weak. But I can pry her loose from Teague, and, by God, that’s what I’m going to do. She won’t see me?”
“No.”
“Can I get by the watchdog outside her door?”
“Not without Hardy’s permission.”
“Where’s Hardy?”
“I don’t know at the moment.”
“I see you’re not really on my side, Haskell. You want me out of here?”
“Hell, no,” I said. “I’m just reporting facts to you.” I glanced at the stack of newspapers I’d left with him. “Find anything in those back issues?”
He shook his head gloomily. Then he seemed to make up his mind about something. “You say Teague has reserved a table in your night club for eleven o’clock?”
“Yes.”
“So I can arrange for a head-on collision,” he said.
“It sounds silly, but you’ll need a dinner jacket and some pull with Cardoza, the captain, to get into the Blue Lagoon.”
“I’m going home now for clothes,” he said. “You can provide the pull with Cardoza, can’t you?”
“I suppose so. But what good will a public brawl do you?”
“Teague will have to start the brawl,” Craig said. “I’ll just supply him with the impulse.”
Part 2
One
MY GIRL, SHELDA, IS a delightfully unpredictable person. When she has complete justification for flipping her wig—like my being forty minutes late for a dinner date—she can be mild as a lamb. If I’m over polite to the eighty-year-old dowager who lives in the south penthouse, she can be as unreasonably jealous as if I’d sneaked a date with Sophia Loren. I expected to be shellacked when I joined her in the grill. Instead, she smiled contentedly at me from a corner table. Mr. Quiller, the new captain in the grill, was bending over her, solicitously. I could see she had a martini and a plate of hors d’oeuvres.
Mr. Quiller gave me an exemplary bow and held my chair for me. Before I could look at the menu, Fred, the waiter at that station, appeared with a martini in a little carafe and a chilled glass.
“Well, did she sell you?” Shelda asked, with a suspicious sweetness, when we were alone. “Ruysdale told me you were visiting her in her bedroom.”
“Her suite,” I said.
Shelda looked very lovely in a low-cut black dinner dress. When I’m close to her, I stop thinking how attractive other w
omen are. There’s no need to think about them; only the need to offer a silent prayer of thanks that I am, at least for now, Shelda’s guy.
“I humble myself with regrets,” I said. “But she got talking and it seemed it might be valuable to listen.”
Mr. Quiller was with us again, bending over Shelda to refill her martini glass.
“He seems very nice,” she said, when Quiller had gone.
“And lucky,” I said. “He’s the only man in the room who can bend over you like that and not have everyone in the room know that he’s looking down the front of your dress.”
“You really think he was?” she said, pretending to be pleased. I mean, I hope she was pretending. At any rate I didn’t bite.
“It’s quite a story if you care to hear it,” I said, “and we seem to be building up to something later this evening. Shall we order? God knows when I may get yanked away again.”
“Don’t you think I should have a second man who would take up the slack when you’re late—or walk out on me in the middle of a date?” Shelda asked.
Evil That Men Do Page 7
