Women's Wiles

by Joyce Harrington

  At a door that was open, the majordomo stepped aside and bowed me into a room abloom with splashes of red, green, and gold. “Attend here comfortably, monsieur,” he said. “A moment will transpire before the mademoiselle arrives.”

  It was hardly a room to feel at home in. The decor was too dazzling. The mantelpiece alone, constructed of a peach-colored marble, was worth an hour’s rapt study. A mask of Dionysius dominated its center, with ormolu garlands streaming from either side of his head. Above was a two-paneled mirror framed in gold that served as a foundation for a carving of Hades seizing a voluptuous Persephone while a band of satyrs looked on from the sanctuary of a wood.

  “Mister Charles Homer.” The voice, a vibrant contralto, might have issued from the Theban glade above the mantelpiece. “But may I call you Charles?”

  Slowly turning, I beheld Millicent Goodis in the flesh. And I use the term advisedly, for flesh consummate, flesh alive and pulsing, flesh perfected in lithe yet lush harmonies—this was the essence of impact at first sight.

  She was 35 or so, but the years had brought her to an ideal maturity—not of ripeness, but of still ripening. She wore her glistening black hair in a severe style which enhanced the luminous quality of her brown eyes and the flawless white delicacy of her face. She was dressed in a white silk blouse that plunged and rose and black satin trousers that clung tenderly tight to each exquisite curve from waist to ankle.

  Yea, Millicent Goodis was every inch a magnificent mammal.

  I might have gaped at her interminably like a transfixed bumpkin if something directly to her right, something quite enormous and of another species, had not beckoned the corner of my eye for attention. Even so it required a profound effort of will to shift my line of vision from beauty to the beast. And beast it was—a canine type of brindle hue that stood taller than any of its kind in my acquaintance, and must have weighed close to 200 pounds without the collar, a huge leather device with cruel iron brads.

  “May I ask once more,” said Millicent Goodis in that dusky voice, “may I call you Charles, Mister Homer?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course. And what do you call that?”

  She laid a slender-fingered hand on the animal’s great skull and it looked up at her worshipfully. “This is Michael, a rather recent acquisition. Isn’t he superb?”

  “Of his kind, yes. And just what kind is he?”

  “He’s an Irish wolfhound, aren’t you, Michael?”

  Michael appeared to nod assent.

  “Gentle and intelligent, looks like,” I said fatuously. “Big as he is.”

  “Gentle indeed,” said Millicent Goodis with a faint smile, “but not too intelligent. I don’t believe the lower orders should be too intelligent, do you, Charles?”

  “I haven’t ever prepared a brief on the subject.”

  “A brief? Oh, yes, that’s a legal term, isn’t it? And of course you’re a lawyer, Charles. I’d forgotten for the moment. Most lawyers I meet run so grossly to age and adipose tissue that I find it difficult to associate a young and attractive man with the profession.”

  Needless to say, the flattery dazzled me, but before I could expose my susceptibility with some stammering foolishness, the black majordomo rolled a service cart into the room and headed toward a set of French doors.

  “It’s such a lovely day,” said Millicent Goodis, “that I felt we should take lunch on the terrace. You do approve, don’t you, Charles?”

  “Utterly,” I said.

  Closely squired by the hound, she approached me and slipped her arm in mine. Her delicious propinquity, combined with a subtly rapacious perfume, sent an enervating tingle in radial formation from the solar plexus to all parts of my body. I felt as though I had been suddenly deprived of the simplest volition, and given in its place a euphoric desire to bask forever in her lovely presence. Happy slaves must have felt this way, and animals well cared for.

  I accompanied her to the sun-filled terrace with no less devotion than Michael.

  “And what have you provided for us, Anatole?” she asked, addressing the majordomo. “Champagne?”

  “Mais oui, mademoiselle.” He held aloft a magnum swathed in spotless white and sweating cold beads of moisture. “A Veuve Clicquot of a very good year.” He deftly twisted the restraining wire and released the cork with a hollow pop. “Permit me,” he said, pouring a glass half-full and holding it out to Millicent Goodis.

  She drank it and handed the glass back to Anatole with a commendatory smile. He filled it to the brim this time, and then did the same for me.

  “A glass of champagne is the best way to begin a friendship,” said my hostess by way of toast, “and the only way to end one.”

  “If end it must,” I added.

  “But everything must end, Charles. Naturally.”

  “May I call you Millicent?”

  “Do. And do be seated.”

  The table was set for color photography. Smoked salmon with the tone and texture of pink rose petals lay luxuriantly over green hillocks of lettuce; black olives, nestled gleaming against stalks of pale celery hearts; a white cheese redolently mottled with age sat against a double stack of wheaten crackers; black caviar shimmered in one silver dish, a carmined bisque of lobster in another.

  The presence of my attaché case seemed awkward, yet as I placed it out of sight beside my chair, it reminded me that I had come here for business, not for pleasure.

  “Millicent,” I began, savoring her name in spite of myself like a magic incantation, “Millicent, Millicent.”

  “Yes, Charles?”

  “Millicent, this—this champagne is delectable.”

  “It rather suits any occasion, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m beginning to think so.”

  “And you’re thinking something else too, aren’t you?”

  “I am? Well, perhaps so.” I looked across the table into the unknown depths of her lustrous eyes, and was all but lost to reason.

  “I believe I can even read your mind, Charles.”

  “I hope not.” I finished the champagne thirstily. “Or rather, I hope so.”

  “You are thinking how much nicer it would be to lavish this interval on pleasant inconsequentialities than to discuss the matter which brought you here.”

  “You are endowed with uncanny insight as well as with enchanting beauty,” I said with uncommon felicity.

  She gave me a curious look of approval, and then turned to the majordomo, who had practically dematerialized himself against the backdrop of a tall boxed plant dripping a profusion of scarlet flowers. “Anatole, refill our glasses, please.” He detached his black-and-red image from the floral camouflage and complied in dignified silence with the mademoiselle’s request.

  “You may withdraw for the nonce,” Millicent said, and Anatole backed off and disappeared through the French doors.

  “You’re accustomed to good service, I see,” I said.

  She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “It’s a birthright, Charles. I expect it.”

  “I see.”

  “But I don’t always get it.” She raised her glass and looked amusedly at me over the sparkling rim. “Right now, for instance, I would give much to obtain a moment’s beguilement, but I realize I must first help you to dispose of a most urgent problem.”

  “Urgent?” I asked.

  “That was the word you used on the phone yesterday.”

  “That’s right.” I raised my glass. “Let’s drink to a speedy solution.”

  “By all means.”

  We drained our glasses simultaneously.

  “Now,” I said, “I regretfully come to the matter of Patrick O’Dell.”

  The wolfhound began barking furiously.

  “Silence,” Millicent commanded, “or I’ll have Anatole confine you to the cellar.”

  The animal whimpered pitifully for a moment, then subsided.

  “What brought that on?” I asked.

  “Probably the name of Patrick O’Dell.”


  “Incredible. Does the dog know Pat, by any chance?”

  “The real question, Charles, is whether I knew Patrick O’Dell, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is, Millicent.”

  “What makes you so interested in the answer?”

  “Well, as I told you on the phone yesterday, I need the information for a client.”

  “Is the client’s identity to remain a secret?”

  “Not necessarily. Her name is Norma Confrey. She’s a cousin of mine.”

  “And what is her relationship to Patrick O’Dell?”

  The dog started a deep growl and stifled it.

  “They’re going to be married,” I said. “That is, if I can find him.”

  Millicent poured more champagne for both of us, then said, “How is it, Charles, that you connect my name with Patrick O’Dell’s?”

  “I’m not exactly the original maker of this connection. The idea came from Norma.” Draining half the wine, I reached for my attaché case. “When Pat turned up missing six days ago, Norma went to his apartment. She had a key because it is soon supposed to be their apartment and she was shifting the furniture in her spare time.”

  “Naturally,” said Millicent, not too enigmatically.

  I opened the case in my lap and next resorted to the remainder of the wine. “Among Pat’s personal papers, Norma found a note purportedly written in your hand and at least signed by you. I checked the signature against the one that appears on several county documents—it’s yours all right, Millicent, or a beautiful forgery.”

  “And what did I say in this note to Miss Confrey’s precious Pat?” asked Millicent with a teasing note of challenge.

  The hound groaned for a split second.

  “You invited him to visit you at his earliest convenience for the purpose of renewing the brief but inspiring—these are your own adjectives—relationship begun so fortuitously at Hialeah.”

  “That’s the race track?”

  “That’s the race track.”

  “Is your Patrick O’Dell a jockey?”

  “He’s a veterinarian. Quite a good one, I guess. He had never been to Hialeah in his life until a month ago, and then he was called in to consult about a suspected bone disease in a horse.”

  Millicent again poured champagne. The bottle, like those self-replenishing vessels in Oriental myths, seemed full as ever. A slightly intoxicated thought rambled past my preoccupied mind: how endless a magnum is.

  “You have the alleged note in your possession, Charles?” Millicent was saying.

  “Yes. An azure rag-paper engraved with your crest. The G. Right here.” I extricated the letter in question from the Goodis, Millicent folder in my attaché case. “Your salutation is most affectionate. It almost makes me jealous. ‘My dearest Pat,’ you begin—now that’s strange, that’s very strange.”

  “Not really, Charles. At times I can be extremely affectionate.”

  “I mean the page is blank.” I spoke exclusively to myself as I turned the notepaper from one side to the other. “Not the trace of a single word. Not even the crest. Nothing.”

  “Perhaps I write my billets-doux with invisible ink.” Her laughter was musical but triumphant. “So much for the insidious horse doctor, Charles.”

  To cover my bewilderment, I took a deep draft of wine. Instead of clearing the fog gathered behind my eyes, it thickened it a bit. Across Millicent’s lingering laughter I detected a braying counterpoint.

  I got to my feet somewhat unsteadily, and saw the itchy mule standing big-eared and open-mouthed 30 feet off in an azalea bed. It wore, I noticed, a halter of woven jute. That’s what makes it itchy, I thought, but I must have expressed the thought aloud.

  “Itchy. Who in the world are you talking about, Charles?” Millicent was also on her feet. “Are you feeling well?”

  “I’m not sure. The champagne seems to have hit me.”

  “I think you should lie down then.” She set her glass aside, took me by the elbow, and led me to a nearby lounge chair with a depressible back. Her cool hand was a balm to my clammy, knitted brow, and I was about to surrender myself to gentle delirium when something prickly hot stabbed the back of my right hand. I came bolt upright.

  “What ails you, Charles?” Millicent exclaimed, with just the hint of annoyance.

  “Something—” Michael the wolfhound, at her side, caught my eye with his lolling bologna of a tongue, and I realized at once that that was what had touched me, licking voraciously (?) or amiably (?). “I’m out of kilter somehow. Forgive me. Doesn’t the wine affect you at all?”

  “Not noticeably. May I get you some more?”

  I said “Yes” when I meant “No.” I tried to amend the mistake by shaking my head vigorously, but somehow I nodded it idiotically instead.

  At the table, Millicent tilted the infinite magnum over the glasses. I recovered my ability to speak only when the fingers of my dog-kissed wet right hand received the crystal stem that bore the vinous blossom.

  “Another thing. Please. Please?”

  “Of course, my comely lawyer.”

  “Case. The attached—the attacked—the attaché. You understand. Please?”

  “Yes.” She loomed, a divine translucence, above me. “But why?”

  “A dossier,” I muttered, drinking the wine in spite of myself. “Contains dossier. On you. Your husbands, others, Durton Bray.”

  “You mean, Charles, you have been doing research into my past?”

  “Background. Legal routine. Questions arise. Where do the men go? Ask myself. Ask yourself. Now. Where?”

  “Do you know the answer?”

  “No.”

  “Anatole.” Her low voice, suddenly raised, stabilized my spinning faculties.

  The black man soon appeared, also looming; and the white-fanged, hot-tongued hound.

  “I know they don’t come home again,” I said. “That much I do know.”

  “Cremate this attaché case, Anatole,” said Millicent in a voice as suddenly strange to me as my own. “Now.”

  “Oui, mademoiselle.”

  “We,” I said in a final struggle against utter incoherence. “We must not mis. Under. Stand? Please.”

  My last conscious thought was: how odd it is that Miss Goodis (which at this moment manifested itself on my fading mental retina as “Miss Goddess”) does not find my speech blockage odd…

  I slid expansively beneath a soft, slow avalanche of snowy sheep. The face of my part-time stenographer passed severally by, pursued by a recurring ram with horns the size of cornucopias. I tried to shout a warning, but couldn’t pronounce her right name, which was Hattie; it persisted in being enunciated as Penelope…

  When I regained consciousness, I was panting desperately, and for some reason was lying on my belly. I opened my eyes to look at my hands stretched out in a strange fashion on the lounge’s brocade pattern. But my hands were not hands. They were sable-furred paws. My jaw fell, and I emitted an astonished bark.

  An answering bark nipped at my muffled ears. Raising my protuberant muzzle, I turned an abashed eye on the Irish wolfhound and saw, truckling in its superstructure, the missing Patrick O’Dell. I wanted to say, “I’ll be damned,” but the words came out in three short yelps. Pat replied in kind.

  “The collar, Anatole.” It was Millicent Goodis’ enchanting voice, threaded this time with a strident note of command. “Quick—before he fully orients himself.”

  The majordomo came toward me with a chain choke collar. As he began to slip it over my head, I reacted with a new instinct and bit him viciously in the wrist and then leaped from the lounge and scampered across the terrace tiles to the lawn.

  The itchy mule was still loitering in the azalea bed, and it grinned as I approached. Burton Dray, of course—I recognized him from his pictures in the newspapers.

  I trotted to the driveway with Burton Dray lumbering along beside me. But as we neared the gate, I saw the bearded keeper approaching us with a bull whip coiled a
round his great forearm. He had been notified of developments, presumably by phone, from the mansion.

  I wasn’t a large dog, but I realized I wasn’t small enough to squeeze through the openwork of the gate, even if I were willing to risk a laying on of the lash. So I veered off the road and into the higher grass that bordered it. Promptly I knew the move had been a mistake. The grass was so thick and wiry that it considerably hampered my gait.

  Casting a glance over my haunches, I saw that the gatekeeper had also left the road and was covering a vast amount of ground on his pile-driver legs. He was already uncoiling the whip. In a matter of seconds he would be able to snap my legs out from under me with a flick of his wrist.

  It was then that Burton Dray, behaving more like a first-string guard than a second-string linebacker, charged past me and took the keeper out of action with the most bone-crushing block I’ve ever seen.

  A happy yip greeted the downfall. It came from Harold the Scottish terrier who came plowing, chin up, through a patch of dandelions. With my canine insight, I saw that Harold in reality was a sandy-haired man with a freckled face and a Puckish mouth. In my dossier there had been a rumored romance between Millicent Goodis and a man later apprehended for poaching on Andrew Goodis’ game preserve in Scotland. Perhaps this was the man.

  The poacher, as I recall, had vanished from the view of family and friends after his fine had been paid by an anonymous benefactor. But regardless of Harold’s origin, he had the true poacher’s ability to find a hole in a fence and he led me to it.

  As I prepared to leave, I indicated that my freckled friend should join me, but he shook his head sadly and managed to draw attention to his collar. Then it all came back in a flood of memory.

  It was the collar that held them in thralldom. When they made too deep an obeisance before their lovely enchantress, she slipped the collar over their heads and around their throats and they were held evermore in a bondage they could not break by themselves.