by Rufus King
“No,” Hugo said decisively. “Bodies rise, not matter how securely they may seem to be anchored. I tell you not to worry about it. I carried it from that room and put it in the quick freezer, where it will keep cold until I arrange for its permanent disposal.”
“But won’t dear Christine miss it?” Cordelia asked. “I mean if she goes back to look for it and finds it gone?”
“She will rationalize that fact as easily as she rationalized the deed itself. Christine will simply decide that the blow she struck had not been fatal. She will be satisfied that Laura Destin recovered from it and, in panic, fled.”
“Fled on what?” Godfrey asked.
“In her car, naturally. How do you suppose she got here? It is a small coupe. I found it parked on the drive and have already put it in the garage with the others for the night.”
“I cannot help but think,” Cordelia announced with sudden precision, “that this time Christine has overstepped.”
Godfrey said, “My God!” and added: “Let us hope that it doesn’t become a habit with her.”
“More so than ever now, we must be very kind to her.”
Alan said abruptly: “I don’t like the idea of that body being in the freezer. Can’t you get rid of it tonight, Hugo?”
“I think you are right. I shall attend to it after everyone is asleep.”
“You are certain that the murderer—was—Christine?”
Hugo gave Alan and Cordelia and Godfrey a pregnant look.
“Isn’t it advisable to let the matter rest on that assumption? For all of us?” he said.
How clever, Cordelia thought, dear Hugo is! There was so rarely any circumlocution about him: he would strike to the heart of a problem, the true heart, and make it so simple to understand. And in this one the heart was Christine. Through a slight haze (again rosy) Cordelia saw Christine coming into the room with Lida. Christine simply did not look like a murderess. Cordelia’s eyes passed fondly over Hugo and Godfrey and Alan. No, she decided, none of them does. She sighed reluctantly and thought: Too bad that one of them is.
“Alan,” Christine said, “I’ve just promised Lida that tomorrow we will have a picnic luncheon by the lake. I want her to enjoy the few moments she wall be here with us.”
“Did you see any sign of Laura Destin?” Lida asked Alan.
“No.”
“Miss Belder,” Hugo said incisively, “let us simply forget about it. The woman suffered one of her aberrations and came to call on Christine. That is all.”
“And took herself away again,” Cordelia added helpfully. “For good.”
They settled themselves for bridge. Cordelia wisely announced that she would simply sit and watch the game, and Alan cut out. He was magnetized to the cellaret, where he mixed himself a stiff drink. Could he, he asked himself dispassionately, stand all this? Was it good for him? He looked in a Venetian mirror paneled on the wall. Haggard, yes, but the old stuff was still there, still capable of doing its tricks. Sanity presented, as a sole solution to safety, the imperative need of getting Christine to flee with him.
As to the leverage to use to induce her into flight, it was stupid of him not to have hit upon the solution before: He could dangle Hollywood, with its glittering bedizenments, as a bait. God knew, he thought bitterly, that Hollywood would amuse the old wreck.
The fact that his theatrical career had been interred with a full embalming job in Jupiter Returns did not matter. Not now, when the studios were grabbing everyone left by the draft who could still move onto a set without a wheel chair. Publicity—a career—his features flashed before swooning (female) millions—before Joe.
No.
No, that was out, because Joe was tireless and would never rest. All that was left him in this contrary, this wickedly thankless world was a flight in solo. But on what? Alan took another deep pull on the drink, and his thoughts slid brilliantly into groove: how fatuous that the idea hadn’t struck him a thousand times before now! Christine’s jewels. Yes, he would steal the jewels and be off. And never come back.
Mexico?
Warming into pleasanter reality with each stiff swallow waxed a Mexican dream. It evolved in cinematic structure, with himself a velvet-trousered caballero luxuriously installed in a hacienda, thanks to Christine’s jewels.
Sold one by one, they would surely last until he had roped in a rich senora in her dotage, complete with either a silver mine or oil wells. Yes, he would do it. Let Christine (no longer precious, nor an albatross) face her fate with the Dove as best she might. Let Joe cool off in his own good time. He felt excitingly free and at his most alluring by the time he had finished the drink. He was, in fact, again his good old self. But that surface would never do. He assumed a frown of truculent, boyish worry when the rubber over at the bridge table was done.
“Christine,” he said, “I have been thinking. That woman may have had robbery in mind.”
Christine looked up from the score pad.
“Quite possibly. I always felt she was a thief.”
“She might return. Get me your jewels, and I will put them in the safe for the night.”
Alan saw the narrowing of Hugo’s eyes and the swift belligerence that came over Godfrey’s broad face. Inwardly he smiled. Okay, punks, he thought, think what you like, for there is nothing you can do: there’s a stiff in that freezer, and none of you can open his trap.
Christine stood up and left the room.
“That’s a good idea,” Lida said.
Idly Alan wondered whether Lida might have any trinkets of worth with which to swell the loot. He imagined not, not with her here, unless it were the diamond clip which Cordelia, awash with scotch, had given her.
Hugo said softly: “I wondered when you’d get around to that, old man.”
Alan went right on riding the crest. “Do not,” he said truculently to Hugo, “call me old man.” Then Christine was back in the room. Her jewel case wasn’t with her. She carried instead a tagged key.
“But the jewels, dear?” Alan said.
Christine’s brittle little laugh gave Alan a chill. Too frequently in his experience with her had similar small laughs been the prelude to some deviltry of a truly fiendish sort.
“Dear,” she said, “I shall save you from worrying through a sleepless night. Several years ago I had my collection copied in excellent paste. The genuine stones are in a vault in New York. If Laura did plan to come back and steal them, all she would get would be glass.”
“They look so real, Aunt Christine,” Lida said, while thinking that never had a man possessed so many hues, for Alan’s stunning face was shifting chromatically from an oyster gray to the color of eggplant.
“Yes,” Christine said, “it was a good job. My furs, however, are a different matter. I store them here during the summer, Lida, in our quick freezer. It’s never kept locked, but tonight it would be wiser.”
“Oh dear!” wailed Cordelia.
Alan all but strangled out: “Your furs, Christine?”
“Alan, stop standing there like a Stoughton bottle. As I remember it, Laura used to be hypnotically fascinated with my sables.”
Christine walked over to the freezer door.
“Let me, dear!” Alan cried, jumping after her. “Give me the key, dear!”
“Alan, isn’t this solicitude more than usually thick? I wonder whether it will turn cold tomorrow.”
Alan’s teeth were almost chattering.
“Cold?”
Christine put a hand on the freezer doorknob. “Perhaps a beaver jacket for the picnic—it takes so long to get the chill out when they’ve been hanging in here. Have you any warm things, Lida?”
“Yes, I’ve a sweater, Aunt Christine.”
“Tomorrow,” Godfrey boomed, “will be hot as blazes, Christine.”
“I rather think you are right.”
Christine locked the freezer door.
“Do let me take care of the key, dear?”
Alan implored. Christine slipped the key into the house-
gown pocket. “Alan, I will not be treated as though both of my feet were in the grave.”
It was all too much. With one tragic cry of “Grave!” Alan crumpled and fell flat on his face.
“He’s fainted,” Cordelia announced placidly, “and I really think it will do him good.”
CHAPTER XIV
Day broke on a rancid sky, and by eleven o’clock the morning had developed into a horror: gray, damp, and chill. The morning room was depressing beyond words and presented, in a cold, somber light, all the slight traces of disorder from the night before.
Godfrey was clearing up. His thoughts were bleak, and it deeply offended his sense of the fitness of things on observing Lida as she ran happily down the turret stairs and came into the room. She looked abominably wholesome and rested, in an almost schoolgirl skirt and blouse.
She said with what Godfrey considered perfectly putrid brightness: “Good morning, Mr. Lance.”
Godfrey looked at his watch. He looked at her hideously bright smile.
“It is almost eleven o’clock,” he said. “You shall have no breakfast.”
“Such a lovely rest!” Lida’s smile deepened. “And I bet everybody else is in bed, too.”
“You are wrong.”
“Is Miss Banning down?”
“Cordelia left here early with Hugo to get some things for this disgusting picnic we are to be compelled to suffer.”
“Well, I’ll see her when they get back.”
Godfrey stopped gathering up score pads and looked at Lida sharply. What did this bursting moppet know? Had she got on to something? Cordelia so truly was the one weak link in the chain which bound her and himself and Alan and Hugo in the fetters of their uncomfortable secret.
“What do you want to see Cordelia about?”
“I want to return the diamond clip she gave me. I feel sure it was nothing but an impulsive gesture on her part. I just know that it must be an heirloom.”
“It hasn’t had time.”
“Well, I feel she must cherish it, and I don’t feel right about keeping it.”
“You are a sensible girl. Return the clip. Before,” Godfrey added darkly, “its heat burns you.”
“I’ve left it out on my bureau so I won’t forget. Has Mr. Admont recovered from his attack of nerves? Is he all right this morning?”
“Alan is changing his clothes. The silly fool sat up all night on a chair before Christine’s door. I think he is mad. He remains obsessed with the fixed idea that something desperate may happen to her. I reject the old anecdote about a saber-toothed tiger.”
“Is she up?”
“What folly! Christine is having her breakfast in bed. We make a pool every morning as to which of her stock excuses she will use for doing so. Care to get in on it?”
“Not today, thank you.” Lida smiled and looked through a window at the dreary sky. “It’s pretty stormy-looking, isn’t it? Do you suppose the picnic will be called off?”
“No. When Christine decides on a thing it is done. As a result, as soon as Cordelia and Hugo get back we will spread ourselves out on moist rocks beneath a canopy of dripping trees and not only enjoy ourselves but damn well better had.”
“I like picnics.”
“I am convinced that you do.”
“Where will we have it?”
“There is an execrable open fireplace built on the shore of the lake at about a five-minute walk from here. On that primitive and repulsive arrangement I am supposed to broil chickens and roast ears of corn. The prospect embraces all the grotesque horror of an Albrecht Durer print.”
“Well, it sounds pretty elegant right now.”
“Do not look upon me as such a beast.”
“But I’m not!”
“You are. A ravenous young beast. I shall get you some coffee and one piece of toast as soon as I finish clearing up.”
“Then this time you can’t stop me from helping you.” Lida began to plump chair cushions, while Godfrey put the bridge table away and started rearranging chairs.
He said: “After this malodorous imitation of a fête champêtre de grand luxe is over with, I shall start your portrait. I have changed my mind. I shall not do your flesh in lettuce green. I shall do it in cerulean blue. Behind you will be dolls and asphodels.”
Lida had reached, in her plumping, the armchair where she had left the mad Destin woman seated last night and from which Miss Destin seemed so weirdly to have disappeared. She lifted the seat cushion, and there (it’s almost like a splash of blood, Lida thought) lay the cerise handbag which Laura Destin had carried. “Oh!” Lida said, thoroughly shocked.
“You are hurt?”
“It’s her handbag.”
Lida picked up the bag and replaced the chair cushion. “Whose?” Godfrey asked.
“Laura Destin’s.”
“Impossible! Why do you say it is?”
“The color. You couldn’t mistake it. Oh, Mr. Lance, don’t you see what it means? She never left here.”
“I tell you it is settled that she did leave here. It is all agreed.”
“Never. Not without her bag. No woman would.”
We are going to have trouble with this little chit, Godfrey thought. He repressed an immediate desire to either give her a sound spanking or choke her. He forced such delightful follies firmly to one side and said with the calmest sort of moderation: “You must remember that she is mad. What is it Hugo calls it? A persecution complex.”
“I don’t care what sort of a complex. I still don’t believe she would have gone away without her bag.” Godfrey loomed quite close to Lida.
“Miss Belder, you are beginning to interest me,” he said.
“I think she must have been frightened by something after she came in.”
“Why?”
“Because she shoved the bag under the cushion to hide it.”
This busy, nimble young brain! Godfrey would have liked nothing better than to crush it, in the manner with which it pleased him to crush such summer insects as offended his comfort. How infinitely more Gestapo she was becoming than Hugo had been. And dangerous. For Hugo had had his own skin to look out for, in a community sense, as had the rest of them.
He said judicially: “Yes, with a normal person such would be a logical deduction. But Laura Destin is not normal.” (How like Hugo, he hoped, he was beginning to sound!) “Hugo has told us that the vagaries indulged in by psychopathic cases are legion, and that the persecution complex is especially unpredictable.”
“But it’s Miss Destin who’s persecuting Aunt Christine. You’re trying to make it appear the other way around.”
“Only,” Godfrey all but shouted in complete exasperation, “after Christine had persecuted her first! We can be sure that some shadow, some sound coming in from the forest, must have startled Miss Destin into protecting her bag by concealing it. And then, overwhelmed by this self-suggested fear, she fled in panic from the house. Forever gone!”
“Well, I don’t see why you say she must have fled into the forest if that’s where the sound came from that frightened her. Mr. Lance, you just don’t make sense.”
Godfrey gritted his teeth. He suppressed one of his favorite oaths. He said as calmly as possible: “I suggest that you leave the bag in the desk drawer and forget about it. If Miss Destin should come back—although I feel positive that she will not—we will give it to her.”
“Well-all right.”
Lida put the bag in a desk drawer as Alan started drearily coming down the turret stairs. He was haggard from lack of sleep, and his skin looked chalky above the flaming dressing gown which he wore. He walked lethargically toward the door to Christine’s suite. Even he knew that what little brain he possessed was completely numb, and he didn’t care.
“Good morning,” Lida said brightly.
Alan gave her a sour smile. He said: “I doubt it.”
“Why do you not go to bed and get some sleep?” Godfrey asked.
“My head is splitting.”
> Godfrey smiled pursily and said: “Nothing that a happy picnic will not cure.”
“Oh God!”
Alan went into Christine’s rooms, and Godfrey said: “If he were not the viper which he is, I could almost feel sorry for him. Come, I will make you your coffee.”
“I’ll be right with you as soon as I empty these ash trays.”
“Very well.”
Godfrey left the room, and Lida swiftly dumped the ash trays into a jardiniere beside the desk. Then she took the cerise handbag from the drawer and opened it.
On top of its clutter of contents lay the gold casing of a lipstick. A part of the cosmetic stuck out. It was roughly edged. Lida looked at the floor below the armchair, where the bag had been. She saw, pressed into the rose-toned rug where a foot had crushed it, the broken-off end of the lipstick.
A probable scene unfolded. Lida felt she could almost vision it as it might have occurred: the woman sitting in the chair where she had left her, already nervous and on edge, then a nervous attempt to repair her make-up: the cerise bag opened and the lipstick taken out, the mirror held and the cosmetic in the act of being applied to her lips when—Well?
It could have been a number of things, but each, to have snapped the stick off in that fashion, must have been violently startling in nature.
Startled?
Could it not have been struck from her hand?
What lay in back of that sudden desire for concealing the bag, which must have been an almost reflex response to the fright?
Lida poked further within the bag. She found a folder outlining the allures of Texas as a winter resort. In a separate compartment were some bills. There were three five-hundred-dollar bills. A shiver ran through Lida: no, never in the world would the woman have voluntarily left that bag. There were a car registration and a driver’s license. The name on them was Belle Crystal, the address an upper-west-side one in New York. An alias, of course. But even so…
Faintly Lida heard the front-door chime ring. She closed the bag and decided not to put it back in the desk. She put it instead where she had found it, under the cushion of the chair where the woman had sat.
She went out and along the hallway to the entrance hall. She opened the front door.
