Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
BOOKS BY FLETCHER FLORA
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
BONUS SHORT STORY: THE INVISIBLE GAUNTLET
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
The Irrepressible Peccadillo is copyright © 1962 by Fletcher Flora. “The Invisible Gauntlet” is copyright © 1964 by Fletcher Flora. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1964.
This special edition is copyright © 2015 by Wildside Press, LLC.
BOOKS BY FLETCHER FLORA
Blow Hot, Blow Cold
Desperate Asylum
(aka Whisper of Love)
Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (with Stuart Palmer)
Killing Cousins
Leave Her To Hell
Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart
Lysistrata
Most Likely To Love
Park Avenue Tramp
Skuldoggery
Strange Sisters
Take Me Home
The Brass Bed
The Devil’s Cook
The Hot Shot
The Irrepressible Peccadillo
The Seducer (aka Campus Woman)
Wake Up With a Stranger
Whispers of the Flesh
CHAPTER 1
It was a kind of natural conspiracy. Everything worked out just right to go wrong, and that’s the way it went. I figured from the first to be a damn fool at last, and that’s what I was.
It was late in the afternoon of a day that was in June, and I was in my office talking to Mrs. Roscoe Burdock, who wanted to divorce Mr. Roscoe Burdock, her husband, for beating the hell out of her while drunk. Mr. Burdock was, I mean. Drunk, that is. According, at least, to the testimony of Mrs. Burdock, which was probably not strictly unbiased. The truth of the matter was, I suspected, that Mr. and Mrs. Burdock were both drunk, which was a suspicion based soundly on precedent.
Mrs. Burdock is of no particular consequence in this account, except that there she was in my office, late in the afternoon of this particular day, and I wished she wasn’t. I wished that she had never come, or would at least go away, because I was developing a feeling of sadness and loneliness that was already pretty bad and would keep on getting worse, because that was the kind of evening it was going to be.
You know the kind of evening I mean? It goes on and on, evening forever, under the softest kind of light drawn up from the edges of the world into the sky above the first transparent shadows of night, and there’s a breeze that barely stirs the leaves of the trees, and in among the leaves are about a million God-damn cicadas sawing away with their legs, or vibrating their wings, or doing whatever cicadas do to make the sad-sounding and lovely racket that they make. That’s the kind of evening I mean, and it is not the kind in which someone like Mrs. Roscoe Burdock is welcome or wanted. It is the kind into which you withdraw alone to weep without tears, remembering every pretty girl you ever kissed or didn’t kiss, and thinking with sorrow of all the things you haven’t done that you will almost certainly never do, and of all the places you have never gone where you will surely never go. It is an adolescent kind of emotionalism, immune to reason. A man in its spell is in danger.
I was in its spell, or beginning to be, and in danger, although I didn’t know it, and Mrs. Burdock was telling me how Roscoe had held her by the hair and belted her in the eye. She had the shiner to prove it, but I wasn’t especially impressed.
“Roscoe’s pretty impulsive when he’s drunk,” I said.
“Roscoe,” Mrs. Burdock said, “is a lousy bully and a bum.”
I leaned back and made a little tent of fingers over which I sighted through Venetian blinds at the neon sign of the Rexall drugstore on the corner across from the Merchant’s Bank Building, in which I had, second floor front, my office. I avoided looking at Mrs. Burdock’s face, which had been, the last time I looked, both belligerent and aggrieved, as well as oily and ugly, and did not meet my modest and flexible specifications of a pleasant sight.
“You’re entitled to your opinion,” I said. “I’m thinking, however, of the last time this happened. Perhaps you remember.”
“Of course I remember. How could I forget something that happened only last week? Every time the bum gets drunk, he takes a swing at me.” Mrs. Burdock paused, staring at me with sudden sour hostility, as if I had invaded her privacy. “What I don’t understand, though, is how you happen to know anything about that occasion. It was a private fight.”
“I wasn’t referring to the last time Roscoe got violent,” I said. “I was referring to the last time you wanted to get a divorce. After I had given your case considerable time and work, you and Roscoe kissed and made up and left me holding the bag.”
It crossed my mind that it had really been Roscoe who held the bag, but it didn’t strike me as being funny, however true. I was far too sorrowful to think that anything was funny. Everything was sad. Everything was going or gone. It would soon be too late for anything, and the elegy of dreams would shortly be sung in the trees by a million sad cicadas.
“That was a mistake you can bet I won’t make again,” Mrs. Burdock said.
“I further recall,” I said, “that you called me a shyster and accused me of trying to break up the happy relationship between you and Roscoe for the sake of a dirty fee.”
“I was wrong,” Mrs. Burdock said, “and I admit it.”
“A fee,” I said, “no part of which I have ever collected.”
Mrs. Burdock quivered in her chair. I did not see her, but I felt her. She was probably offended by my lack of sensibility in considering anything so base as a fee when a crisis in human relations was in progress. After a few seconds, she grunted and stood up. I did not see her, but I heard her.
“It’s plain you’re trying to avoid taking my case,” she said, “and so I had better get me another lawyer.”
“What I’m trying to avoid,” I said, “is the charge of trifling with the holy union of a happy couple joined by God.”
“It pleases you to make fun of me,” she said with dignity, “and what you are, after all, is the shyster I called you.”
I chose to ignore both indictments, the latter because it didn’t logically follow, and the former because it wasn’t true. Whatever my status as a lawyer, I took no pleasure in giving Mrs. Burdock the treatment, and I did it only to expedite her departure. To this extent, at least, it was effective, and my pleasure, what little there was, was derived solely from watching her massive stern clear the doorframe by the merest margins, larboard and starboard, on the way out.
I had risen at the last moment in a tardy concession to courtesy, and before I could sit down and take sight again on the Rexall sign across the street, I was distracted by the red head of Millie Morgan, which appeared in the doorway and came into the room. Millie is my secretary, and her head was followed, naturally, by the rest of her. The rest of Millie happens to be even more distracting than her head, especially when she takes dictation with her knees crossed, and the fact that my wife tolerates her amiably is less a commentary on my stability than on my wife’s serene confidence in her own assets, which are, in fact, considerable.
“What
was wrong with Mrs. Burdock?” Millie said.
“Roscoe belted her in the eye.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean when she came out just now. She looked as if you’d made improper advances or something.”
“Pleased and flattered, you mean?”
“Don’t be absurd. Offended, I mean. Like a haughty hippo.”
“Do you think Mrs. Burdock would actually be offended if I were to make improper advances? There’s a good chance, I think, that she might be receptive. Even enthusiastic.”
“That’s because you’re abnormally lewd and vain. Do you make salacious speculations about all your female clients?”
“Only when they’re exceptionally seductive, like Mrs. Burdock. Of course these good lookers are often disappointing when you put them to the test. I’ll let you know about Mrs. Burdock later. We have a date to go for a drive in the country tonight. We’re going to try sex.”
“You’d better watch out. You’re going to get sued some day.”
“That’s all right. I know a good lawyer.”
“Do you? I don’t. The only lawyer I know couldn’t crack a case of beer.”
“In that case, you’re fired. Go on home.”
“I’m not going home. I’ve got a date for cocktails and dinner with an engineer. We may try sex ourselves.”
“You’ll like it,” I said. “It’s fun.”
I watched her go through the doorway, as I had watched Mrs. Burdock go before her, but there was quite a difference. My pleasure was differently incited, for one thing, and the larboard and starboard clearance was much greater, for another. When she was gone, I sat down and submitted again to the abortive sorrows of the incipient evening, the elegiac contemplation of going and gone, and I sat there alone for about twenty or thirty minutes, I think, before looking at my watch and seeing that it was almost five-thirty and time to be starting home. I got up and went through the outer office, a matter of half a dozen steps, and on into the hall. I slammed the door behind me and turned to try it, to see if the lock had caught or not, and there on the frosted glass of the door in neat little gold letters was a name, W. Gideon Jones, which was mine, and a designation, attorney-at-law, which was what I had become and what I was.
It seemed to me that an attorney-at-law was something a man might be if he didn’t have the imagination or daring to be something else, and I stood there looking at the neat little gold letters and thinking of all the fine and exciting things I had never done and would never do because I was a picayune fellow who had lived all his life, time out for the university and a service hitch, in one small city of thirty thousand souls and a million cicadas. I might have gone to Florida and bought a boat and taken people deep sea fishing. I might have gone to Paris and lived on the Left Bank and had some Henry Miller experiences. I might have been a soldier of fortune in hot and gaudy tropic lands. At the very least, if I had to be a lawyer, I might have been, for God’s sake, Perry Mason instead of Gideon Jones.
But there I was for a fact. Gideon Jones and no escaping it. Although it was a grim and unsatisfactory state of affairs, it was something that had to be accepted and lived with, and it occurred to me that acceptance might be a hell of a lot easier if I were to go over to the Kiowa Room, which was the cocktail lounge in the Hotel Carson, and have a couple of gimlets before going home. The more I thought about it, the more the Kiowa Room seemed like a good place to go, and drinking gimlets a good thing to do, and so I went there and did that, and I would have been better off, as it turned out, if I hadn’t.
CHAPTER 2
The gimlet was good, the bartender was taciturn, and I was grateful for both of these conditions. The bartender’s name was Chauncy, and he had skin the color of Swiss chocolate surrounding large, limpid eyes that expressed mutely a legend of sorrow. On many occasions in the past we had settled issues of grave importance, Chauncy and I, but this evening he plainly preferred reflection to conversation, which suited me fine, and I think that he was probably anticipating the cicadas himself, and was maybe even listening to a private prelude by means of some kind of special sensual attunement peculiar to what he was.
I was sitting on a stool at the bar with my back to the room, and there were shadows in the glass behind the bar, the dim reflections of remote patrons, but I did not try to identify any of these shadows as people I knew who might want to make problems of themselves by being gregarious. I drank the gimlet unmolested and was well on with a second, supplied by Chauncy in response to a gesture, before someone spoke from behind my left shoulder into my left ear.
The voice came clearly from the distaff side of sex, and it contained a remarkable husky quality that I had heard before and remembered well, but at first I couldn’t believe that I was hearing it now. It was the kind of voice that a woman sometimes acquires with a sore throat or from drinking far too much gin. You do not quickly forget this kind of voice under any circumstances whatever, and you do not forget it at all, even after seven years of silence, if you have heard it with all the nuances of tenderness and passion and sometimes anger.
“One of the nicest things about coming back to a place,” it said, “is meeting old friends in general and some old friends in particular. Hello, old friend.”
I looked into the mirror and saw the face that went with the voice, and it was practically the same face that had gone with it when I had last encountered them together. Seven years in passing will leave a trace here and a trace there on the best and most durable of faces, however, and this one was a little leaner than I remembered it, a little more posed and guarded against being caught unaware. Still, for all that, one of the loveliest faces, surely, in all the world, and one that I had never thought to see again. Part of gone. A passage in the evening elegy of cicadas. Part, although I didn’t know it, of the natural conspiracy of a particular day.
I spun slowly, half a turn of the stool, and faced the face directly. Beth Webb was its name. I had loved it once, and it had loved me. It had said so, at least, although in the end it hadn’t acted so.
“Well, for God’s sake,” I said. “Hello.”
“You look about the same,” Beth said. “Hair, teeth, no glasses yet. Is everything really yours?”
“All mine. I wear glasses to read. You can hardly expect a man to survive seven years without deteriorating a little.”
“Has it been that long? Actually seven years?”
“Seven lean years. The period of famine. Wasn’t there something like that in the Bible or somewhere?”
“Darling, I’m sorry. Has it been difficult for you?”
“Not at all. Everything has been fine.”
“Well, you mustn’t sound too cheerful about it. I’ll feel better if you suffered just a little. What’s that you’re drinking? It looks good.”
“It’s called a gimlet, and it’s made of gin and lime juice.”
“Is that all? Just gin and lime juice?”
“That’s all. If you don’t count the cucumber slice.”
“It doesn’t sound quite as good as it looks. I’ll have one with you, however, if you’ll ask me.”
“Excuse me. Will you have a gimlet with me?”
“Yes, I will, thank you.”
I ordered one for her with a gesture to Chauncy, and another for myself with the same gesture, which made one more than I’d planned to have, and I carried both of them over to a little table where she had gone to sit while I was waiting. It was a very small table, and we accidentally touched knees for an instant under it, and I thought sadly that it had been a long time, seven lean years of famine, since I had touched her knee, either accidentally or on purpose, under a table or elsewhere. She was wearing a black dress with a narrow skirt, a sheath, and a tiny black hat on her pale blond head, which was natural. She had always looked good in black, and she still did. My fingers had always itched for her when she wore it, and they still did. I had a drink
of my third gimlet while she was having a drink of her first.
“How do you like the gimlet?” I said.
“Much better than I expected, I’m happy to say. It’s remarkable how the lime juice disguises the gin.”
“Bear in mind that it’s only disguised. It’s still there, three to one.”
“That’s quite a strong drink, isn’t it? Do you think several of them would make me drunk?”
“It’s possible. Even probable. It would depend on your tolerance for gin.”
“I think I would like getting drunk on gimlets. Would you care to get drunk on gimlets with me?”
“Time was I’d have accepted with pleasure. Now I must beg to be excused. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, please. I deserve your scorn. I may simply get drunk on gimlets all alone.”
“Do I detect a note of bitterness? Is it possible that the lean years have been difficult for you too?”
“Now good, now bad. One doesn’t expect too much, darling. Tell me about yourself. What have you been doing all this time?”
“Routine stuff. Practicing law. Getting married.”
“I heard about that. It made me sad, and I wanted to cry.”
“I was weak. I should have mourned you in celibacy all my life.”
“That would have been romantic, but hardly called for. After all, I couldn’t expect you to do what I was not willing to do myself.”
“True. Celibacy would not have suited you. Such a waste.”
“Thank you, darling. You made that abundantly clear, I remember, long ago. What is your wife like?”
“Small but potent. She has brown hair and nice legs and a warm heart. Her name is Sydnie, but I call her Sid. We were married three years ago.”
“She’s lucky. You tell her I said she’s lucky.”
“Cut it out, Beth. She’s not lucky, but she’s satisfied. So am I, and it’s a nice arrangement.”
“I’ve tried and tried to remember her, but I can’t. Did I know her?”
“No. She came here after you went away.”
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