Private Chauffeur
N.R. De Mexico
I
GARY HEASLIP
Gary Heaslip was not sure he liked the way she looked at him. It made him feel uncomfortable, even a little undressed. He glanced down in brief inventory at his polished tan shoes, his medium-costly Harris tweed suit and what he could see of his darkly quiet necktie. He found nothing to justify the way she was studying him.
"Would you be good enough to step over there by the light?"
He stepped, choking off an impulse to refuse. He thought, shouldn't she be asking for references? Inquiring about previous experience?
Her voice, throaty and huskily sensuous, said, "How tall are you?"
"Five eleven and a half." What had that to do with being a chauffeur?
"Married?"
"Not recently."
"I asked you a question."
"I answered it. Unmarried."
"Good. You'll do!" She rose to her feet. "Can you start at once?"
"I have some things to pick up at my hotel. But I suppose I can." He walked toward her from the window and looked down at her. "Wouldn't it help if I knew your name, Miss--uh?"
"Mrs. Carter. Mrs. Ivan Carter." She was still eyeing him. In that odd way. It was, he felt, the way he should have been looking at her. So he did. Somewhere around thirty-eight, he figured, although she appeared younger. That would make her, well, maybe five years older than he was. But the maturity lay in her manner, not in her looks, which were strictly the kind that took a man's mind off his work. Her hair was dark red. It framed a skin as fine and youthful and unmarred as a child's.
He thought, "Some dame!" and felt vaguely reassured that he was thinking normally again.
"What are your arrangements with the agency?"
"They get half my salary for the first four weeks."
"I'll take care of that," Mrs. Carter said, "If you're quite ready, we can pick up your things and get right out to the house."
"Look, Mrs. Carter, isn't it customary to ask references of employees? Don't you want to know anything about background?"
She smiled. Suddenly she was altogether lovely. "If you insist," she said. "The agency recommends you very highly, and--you rather recommend yourself."
"Roger," he said. With a slight semi-military salute, he held the door open for her.
A Cadillac convertible stood at the curb. "You drive," she said.
He walked around the front of the car and got into the driver's seat.
"We'll go to your hotel first. Then I'll direct you. He started the car. "Mrs. Carter, did the agency tell you I expect three hundred and forty a month, with keep?"
"Of course. I intend to improve on that if--if all goes well."
Gary shook his head. The whole thing didn't make sense. The way Mrs. Carter had interviewed him had been like a Catherine of Russia selecting a cavalry recruit, or a horse breeder studying a stud stallion. He thought, maybe she's one of those dolls who buy up men for personal use--like toothbrushes. Even the salary was odd, because when he'd gone to the agency for a job he'd told them that it had to pay over eighty a week, and it hadn't occurred to him that they'd offer him a job as a chauffeur.
He pulled up in front of the hotel and turned off the ignition. "I'll be right down, Mrs. Carter," he said.
"You may call me," she said, as he was getting out from behind the wheel, "Dolores--when we're alone."
"Roger," he said, passed in front of the car, and disappeared into the hotel.
DOLORES CARTER
Nerves were a thing Dolores Carter refused to endure. She was angry with their manifestations in others, and intolerantly contemptuous of her own. It was Dolores' personal contention that one should always be in absolute control of oneself.
Now she was actively annoyed to find herself picking with fine lacquered fingernails at the junction of leather and metal where the door panel met the sill of the car. She stopped herself with an angry movement and leaned back in the seat.
She kept thinking she was a victim of her own indecision. It was an unaccustomed role for Dolores. Supposing the young man--Gary Heaslip--refused her scheme? Supposing--just supposing--he took the inevitable opportunity for blackmail?
What, after all, did she know about him? When she had come to Mr. Preston at the agency she had laid a whole deck of cards on the table. She wanted, she had told him, a young man who was attractive, unmarried, healthy, intelligent. She was willing to pay him any fair amount for duties that would be a little more than those of a chauffeur.
What, actually, did Preston think? Now that she considered it, he could interpret what she said in a quite equivocal light. Wasn't it almost traditional among the great middle class that women of wealth could be constantly found behind the nearest rosebush with the family chauffeur? Oh, hell! What did it matter what Preston thought?
The thing was that Dolores knew she had handled the whole matter foolishly. She had accepted Preston's assurances that Heaslip could be relied on without actually checking a single fact.
What was it he had said? "I'm not sure," Preston had said, "that Mr. Heaslip will be at all willing to take a job as a chauffeur, Mrs. Carter. He specified that he wanted any job that would keep him in this area, but frankly I'm not sure he'll be willing to go into domestic service. He's not entirely the type for it."
She reconsidered Heaslip. Tall, good looking, with dark, curly hair, broad shoulders, slim erect body--he was almost the ideal of what she sought! But he didn't look like a chauffeur. He didn't talk like one. His courtesy was the politeness of one who gives, not takes, orders. He went around the front of the car; not the rear. A chauffeur, any chauffeur, knew better than that.
And then there was Irene to be considered. After all, Irene was only seventeen--just a kid, though she already had the look of a lovely woman. Could Heaslip be trusted around Irene?
Well, now there was nothing left but to take the plunge and see how he reacted ... What on earth was the matter with that man? What was taking him so long?
Dolores got out of the car and impatiently strode into the Hampton House lobby. With an assertive clopping of spike heels she crossed to the desk. "Will you ring Mr. Heaslip?" she said.
"Certainly, madam. Just--oh, here he is now."
She turned. Gary, carrying a large cowhide bag, had come up behind her. "Tom, check me out, please."
Selfconsciously, aware of the transparency of her light frock in the sun-filled doorway; she moved a little ahead of him, using his body to block off the desk clerk's view as they went out on the steps. Then she waited, so that they were descending the steps side by side.
That was when she saw Ivan.
Her husband was sitting behind the wheel of the Jaguar runabout he affected for his more personal jaunts, double parked a few feet ahead. He was grinning.
"Hi, Lor," Ivan called, waving gaily. "Having fun?" Then, without another word, he jazzed the engine of the small car and shot down Seventh Street.
There was no doubt in Dolores' mind of what her husband was thinking.
ERICA LEDBITTER
The principal emotion Erica Ledbitter felt these days was shame. Deep, burning shame. A sense of personal degradation, a holding of herself in contempt. Oh, sitting in the little room that was her office in the Carter house, it was easy to see how it had happened. Any single incident in the long chain of events which had brought her to this situation was understandable, maybe even forgivable. But the totality of the chain was not. Any lonely girl, attractive as she knew herself to be and often isolated with her employer, might well drift into an affair with him. It was almost expected in the modern world. She knew it and accepted it. But to go on, down and down and down into the depths where Dr. Ivan Carter's fancy led--that
she need not have done. And no plea of innocence, of ignorance, of dreadful loneliness, could excuse the repetition, the passive acceptance over and over again, of what Carter demanded.
Erica looked around the small room. It was remarkably gloomy. The walls were solid with medical texts, bound volumes of surgical journals. Atop the glass-fronted bookcases stood an assemblage of loving cups, earned by the defeat of all comers at golf, tennis, yachting and, strangely enough, ping-pong. Mounted on the residual wall space was a lordly moosehead, and an attractive array of fish, erstwhile of the waters off the Florida Keys. In the remaining areas hung a plethora of framed diplomas from Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Heidelberg, Vienna, Berlin and Amsterdam. There were, too, certificates of membership in the American Surgical Congress, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Sons of the American Revolution, the Society of the Cincinnati, and the Society of Mayflower Descendents.
The room was, Erica felt, no more than a vast assemblage of Doctor Ivan Carter's trophies--and she was perfectly aware that she, herself, was no more than another of Dr. Carter's trophies.
Through the, window, somewhat narrowed by the heavy brocade drapes that parenthesized it, she could see the deep garden running down to the inlet and the seawall, against which was moored the gleaming hull of the Ivalor III.
Erica hated everything she saw. They were no more than symbols of the bondage of guilt in which Ivan somehow held her. She pushed back the typewriter, which stood on a castered stand, letting the manuscript of a paper entitled Remedial Surgery in Application to Acute Conditions Resulting from Duodenal Ulcer slide to the floor in wild disarray. She went into the lavatory adjoining and looked at herself in the cabinet mirror over the washbowl, pulling off the dark-rimmed reading glasses that gave her face a secretarial air.
There was nothing seriously wrong with her face, she decided. The lips were soft and well shaped; the nose was a trifle bobbed, but not unpleasantly. The chin was rounded, but not weak. The dark shadows under her eyes were only passing reflections, concealable with a little make-up and ready to vanish with a few nights of undisturbed sleep. Her dark hair was longer than the present fashion--too warm for the season.
Then she thought, what is wrong with me?
All it really took to break the chain, to get loose, to get away, was the simple decision to do it. After all, what real hold--apart from the fancied ones of her inner emotions--did Ivan have over her? None. No hold at all.
Well then? What were you waiting for? Someone to pull you out by the seat of your panties? Some Lochinvar to come riding out of the west in a--a Rolls Royce? You couldn't expect one of Ivan's rare private patients to interrupt his interview with the surgeon to say, "By the way, doctor, I'm taking your office nurse away." That term, "office nurse," was a euphemism for what she really was--his secretary. The fact was that Ivan's patients viewed her as a bill collector with an attractive figure. She was part of the furniture.
To hell with it!
She left the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. To hell with it! She bent, picked up the scattered typescript of duodenal ulcer and threw it fluttering across the room. She walked out of the office into the dimmer hallway and stalked to the stairs, then ran with clattering heels up to her room. Firmly, so as not to frighten herself with haste, she flung things into a suitcase. Dresses, panties, bras, make-up, stockings, garter belts, cosmetics, creams, perfumes, deodorants, nailfiles, lacquers, shampoos, shoes, sweaters, blouses.
And when the suitcase was overflowing she dragged a trunk from the closet and continued the helter-skelter stuffing. House coat, negligees, slips, skirts, blouses,, scarves, lighters, cigarette cases, documents, books. You could pack a lifetime into a trunk.
Erica found the watch, then. A little, jeweled watch she had never pinned to the bosom of any dress. Its spring lid snapped open with a catch and reported both the time and the fact that Erica Ledbitter had been an outstanding student in Miss Glander's Academy for Young Ladies no longer ago than the year of Grace, nineteen hundred and forty seven.
Miss Glander's Academy had been almost a home--a reasonable facsimile, certainly. After the first terror of being sent out alone from her uncle's house following the death of her parents--after that first fright had worn away--she had been happy there.
In the hallway outside, she could hear the phone ringing. It was ringing there and in the study, in the library and in the downstairs hall. An outside bell clattered by the garage. She thought of the order of precedence. When a phone rang in the Carter house, hers was the first obligation to answer. If she didn't, then Paula May, the maid, was supposed to take it. Next came Vera, the cook. Failing Vera, Charles the chauffeur would respond. But if Charles were away--and he was because he had been fired--then the whole thing fell upon the Carters. First there was Ivan's daughter, Irene. Then Mrs. Carter and finally--if the buck were passed far enough back--Ivan himself might condescend to answer and, because he often indulged in heavy whimsy, he was likely to say, "City Morgue?"
The trilling summons kept on, imperious and demanding. Habit demanded that she should run out into the hallway, snatch up the phone, take a deep breath to conceal the haste with which she had come, and say, "Doctor Ivan Carter's residence ...?" It took all of her character to defy that grim jockey. But, after a while, the phone stopped ringing.
She locked suitcase and trunk, dropping the latter key into her bag. Then the unanswered phone began to itch, somewhere in her conscience. What if it had been an emergency? Somebody who needed Ivan immediately? Well, there was no way to reach him.
Anyway, the unanswered phone showed there was no one else in the house.
Good. She went into the hallway and called a taxi, then hurried back to her room to attend to odds and ends. Later on, when she had settled down somewhere, she would send for the trunk at her uncle's. Now she wrote out a shipping label addressing it to Erica Ledbitter care of William Channing Ledbitter, Durhamville, New York, and affixed it to the trunk.
After that she walked to the window and waited. Perhaps she should change her name. So that Carter wouldn't find her. But why? What could he do if he did find her? Once she was free of him, wasn't she free forever? Wouldn't she, by leaving Carter's house, disconnect all the tenuous little threads which bound her here? It was perfectly simple, and with some complacence she saw the small taxi swinging into the long curving drive that led up to the Carter house. She picked up her bag and strode into the hallway. She felt a sense of urgency, as though this must be done quickly or some terrible thing might materialize to stop her. The doorbell rang, and she went down through the great entrance hall, opened the door and asked the small, wizened hackie if he would bring down the trunk.
"Depends on how heavy it is, Miss," the little man said. "Folks my size can only handle things up to a certain weight." He smiled.
"I think if we try it together we can manage," Erica said.
She set the suitcase by the open front door and the little man followed her up the wide flight. The hackie studied the trunk for a moment. "I'll have to get it up on my shoulders, like, and then you walk behind me and sort of hold it in place."
They moved painfully out into the hallway, past the rows of bedroom doors to where the great newel posts marked the turning of the staircase. Erica felt, mysteriously, almost thieflike.
They were halfway down the stairs with the trunk when she heard the car churning the gravel in front of the house.
"Wait a second," she said to the little taximan, feeling a trembling weakness come into her legs. She stood for moment, regaining control. "Alright." They stalled down the stairs again. They had reached the foot of the steps when Ivan appealed in the doorway.
"Well," he said. Not astonished. A flat, assertive remark. "Well." Then to the cab driver, "Put that thing down there, please."
The driver backed and let the balanced trunk slip from his back onto the floor.
Erica felt herself overcome with indignation. What right had this man ...?
"I don't thi
nk," Ivan said, "that Miss Ledbitter will be leaving just now." He reached in his pocket, pulled out a five dollar bill and walked toward the driver who stood, at vast ill-ease, where he had dropped the trunk. The little man looked from the doctor to the girl and back again.
Erica said, "Ivan, you have no right to--"
"Really," Ivan said, "don't you think this is a little silly? And it's hardly very fair to me. If you want to leave, there's nothing I can do to stop you. You're not a prisoner. You don't have to sneak out while I'm away for the afternoon. But in all justice you ought to give me a chance to get a new secretary. After all, if I were to discharge you, you'd think it only fair for me to give you notice. Wouldn't you? Don't you think I deserve the same consideration?" He turned to the driver. "Would you leave your employer without notice?"
The hackie was embarrassed. Erica could feel his unease. He wanted to take the money and go. If only there were some way of communicating to him why she had to leave ... but there was no such way.
Ivan turned on his easy flow of words again. "I don't ask much," he said "But I do think that you owe me a month's notice. At least help to break in somebody else."
That wasn't it. That wasn't it at all. He wasn't saying this for her, but for the cab driver. "I imagine you've dropped the ulcer paper right in the middle. Do you think anyone else will be able to read those shorthand notes? I'll have to dictate the whole thing again. That's a month's work completely shot. It just isn't reasonable."
She wanted to say, damn your month's work. She wanted to say, what about my life? If I don't leave now, you know damned well I'll never be able to.
"If it were a matter of salary, or something of that nature? But you've never even asked for an increase. Of course I'd be glad to give you more."
The hackie shifted from one foot to another, aware only of his own acute discomfort.
"Is there anything I've done to you? If there is, say something about it. Now's the time."
But there was nothing she could say. Not with the cab driver standing there. The indignities to which Ivan had subjected her, the subtle malevolence of his perverse mind--these were things of shame. He knew she couldn't talk about them in front of anyone.
Private Chauffeur Page 1
