Murder for the Bride

by John D. MacDonald

  At least there was one point of contact with the big blond man—the old doll who had lodged the complaint. I remembered her from the time when Laura had rented the apartment. I hadn’t liked her then. Now I was more certain than ever that I didn’t like her.

  I stopped in at a small bar and grill and ate a greasy hamburger. I walked to the apartment. The people on the street were suffering with the heat. Two female tourists, obviously northern schoolteachers, walked by me trying to keep up a holiday spirit. But their dresses were pasted to them and the heat had turned their faces to putty gray. One creature came mincing down the sidewalk toward me as I turned in at the sidewalk doorway to the apartment. It wore a pale blue linen suit, a man’s suit, a Panama hat. It wore a blue veil and a necklace of coral beads. The heat didn’t seem to bother it a bit. It smirked at me through the veil.

  A dime-store cardboard sign was fastened to the old lady’s ground-floor apartment door with gilt thumbtacks. I pressed the bell and heard the distant dingle of the inside bell. The door opened so suddenly that it surprised me. I hadn’t heard her approaching. The apartment behind her was dark as night. She blinked out at me. She had a small blotched squirrel-like face, surrounded by tangled masses of gray hair. Even in all that heat she was wearing a shapeless cardigan sweater over a cotton dress so faded you couldn’t tell what the original print was. I saw why she had been so soundless. Her crumpled old feet were bare.

  “I know you,” she said. “You’re her husband, ain’t you?”

  “Yes. I want to talk to you.”

  “I got nothing to say to you, Mr. Bryant. A while back, of course, before she got herself killed, I would have had a lot to say to you about her carrying on and all, but now there isn’t anything to say.”

  She started to shut the door. I stuck my foot in and I guess she forgot she was barefooted. She took a healthy kick at my shin, then gave out a little yelp and started hobbling around in a circle, moaning. I went in and shut the door. It was so dark I could just make her out.

  “I’ll have the law on you! Forcin’ yourself in here on a …”

  “Look, I live here. Maybe I just want to complain about the decorating.”

  She went over and sat down and started rubbing her bruised toes. “You want to ask questions about her, don’t you? Well, I’m not getting mixed up in it.”

  I leaned against the door and lit a cigarette. It was self-protection. The apartment smelled rancid, old, weary.

  “Did you ever stop to think that maybe you are mixed up in it?”

  She was utterly still for several moments. “How do you mean that?”

  “Suppose they pick up the big blond man, the one she was entertaining and the one you complained about. Suppose he killed her. Who else is going to be the police witness that he used to come to see her? Maybe the big man will have friends who won’t want you to live long enough to testify.”

  I could almost hear the wheels turning over in her mind.

  “I didn’t see nobody,” she said with sullen emphasis.

  “Oh, come now! It’s all on the police blotter.”

  “You’re just trying to scare me,” she said, and there was the hint of a moan behind the words.

  “You know enough to be able to scare yourself. Maybe you’d like somebody on your side. I want to know who killed my wife. I want to know about the big blond man who came to see her.”

  “I don’t know anything,” she whispered.

  I opened the door. “O.K.,” I said casually. “Suit yourself.”

  As I got one foot out into the hallway she said, “Don’t go away, Mr. Bryant.”

  I shut the door again. “Tell me about him. Maybe I can find him. Maybe it’s safer for you if I find him instead of the police.”

  She sat huddled in the dark room, unmoving. When she spoke it was in a dim, faraway voice, as though she were thinking aloud. “A big man, a great big man. Not really fat. The weather bothered him. You could see that. Always sweating. He’d go up the stairs at all hours and the whole place would creak. I don’t like stuff like that going on. I get the apartment free because I look out for the place. I could lose my job.”

  “How did he dress?”

  “Always white suits and no necktie. Dark shirts.”

  “Deep voice?”

  “I only heard him talk once. A little thin high voice he has. With an accent. I don’t know what kind. That hair of his, blond and worn real bushy in back.”

  I couldn’t get any more out of her. When I walked out into the relative brightness of the hallway it was like coming out of a movie. There was that same moment of directional hesitation. I went up to the apartment. The box of cosmetics was gone. The scent of Laura was still in the place. I opened the French doors onto the narrow balcony with its eroded crust of lacy wrought iron and looked down into Rampart Street two stories below. Laura had looked down into the street and decided against asking Jill to help her. Laura had walked down that same street with a big blond man with a high voice, a man who sweated a lot in the heat.

  I phoned the Star News and asked for Jill. As I waited I could hear the busy clacking of the wire-service machines. She came on the line with a crisp, businesslike note in her voice. I could see how she would look there, gray eyes scanning the interrupted copy, face wryly out of line, yellow pencil in her dark hair, possibly a carbon smudge on her cheek.

  “This is Dil,” I said.

  Her voice dropped a full scale. “I’m so glad you called. I was worried about you, Dil. You acted so strange when I dropped you off. I’ll be through here in …”

  I interrupted her. “Look, you told me that Laura and the big guy went to a restaurant and ate out in the courtyard. What place was it?”

  “The Court of Three Flags, Dil. Over on …”

  “I know the place.”

  “Dil!”

  “What is it?”

  “You’re not thinking clearly about this. You can’t. It’s three o’clock now. Tram asked me to come out for a drink at his place before dinner. I’ll pick you up.”

  “I’m no good for a party now, Jill. Besides …”

  “I know. You met Laura at Tram’s house. It won’t hurt you to go back out there. They send pilots right back up. I’ll be in front of your place at five-fifteen.” She hung up on me.

  I went to the Court of Three Flags. To enter the restaurant you turn through an arched doorway and walk along a dark, scabrous hallway lined with peeling murals of New Orleans history. At the end of the hallway is a bar facing a huge fireplace. Beyond the bar is the open courtyard with fish and fountains and greenery and starched waiters. It’s one of those places that’s half tourist trap, half legitimate eating place. At that hour of the afternoon the late lunchers had departed and the early evening crowd hadn’t arrived. There was a drugged sleepiness about the place. A bartender polished a glass endlessly, his eyes half closed.

  I climbed onto a perilously high bar stool and he shuffled over to me. Grief is a funny and unexpected sort of thing. Instead of saying, “Good afternoon,” I wanted to say, “I buried my wife today.” It was right on the tip of my tongue before I got myself under control again.

  I ordered Scotch on the rocks and he built it in an Old-Fashioned glass and put it in front of me. As he started to wander away, I said, “I’m trying to find out something. A couple of weeks ago a tall woman with platinum-blonde hair came in here and had dinner in the court out there with a huge guy in a white suit, a guy with blond hair worn long in back, a high voice, and an accent.”

  He turned toward me and opened his eyes wide for the first time. Black, alert eyes, like the eyes of a wary animal. His face was the shape of an inverted pyramid, wide across the forehead, slanting down to a pointed, rather feral chin. He had dusty black hair and lips so red they looked bloody.

  “What are you trying to find out?”

  I hunched forward a little. I winked at him. “The lady was my wife, friend. I’m trying to find out who she was with. I want to find out who wait
ed on them.”

  He shrugged. It was very Gallic. “All kinds we get. Big, little, fat, thin. A million blondes. We do a big business. You tell me what time of day and what table, maybe I can tell you the waiter.”

  “Maybe I can find out and tell you tomorrow.”

  He shrugged again. “It won’t do no good, mister. What does a waiter know?”

  “He’d know if the man is a regular customer.”

  The bartender closed his eyes for a moment. “Big blond guy with hair long in back, and a high voice?”

  “That’s right,” I said eagerly.

  “There’s one guy like that I see a few times. I haven’t seen him lately. About six-four, maybe two hundred seventy pounds. Shoulders like an ox.”

  “Do you remember anything else about him?”

  “Wait a minute now. Don’t rush me. Something about a drink order. Me, I remember the drink orders.”

  He turned and stared at the bottles on the back bar for inspiration. He snapped his fingers. “Now I got it! Straight gin, imported, no ice, in a cocktail glass with a couple drops of orange bitters. Of course, it could still be the wrong guy.”

  “It isn’t,” I said. My voice was a croak. I remembered the little bottle of orange bitters, half used, that I had found in the apartment kitchen, and the three quarts of House of Lords gin.

  I finished my drink, paid for it with a five-dollar bill, and waved away the change. As I started away he said, “It isn’t none of my business, Mac.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “That guy. I remember him a little better now. If you want to make trouble, you better go after him with one hell of a big club. Don’t let the voice and the hair fool you. In this business you get so you can pick the fakes. That boy is rough. He’s got a real cold blue eye.”

  I turned back to the bar and wrote down my phone number. I gave him another ten. “If he comes in, you phone me. Keep phoning me there until you get me.”

  “Who do I ask for?”

  “Mr. Bryant.”

  He stood very still for a long moment and then pushed the ten back across the bar. He looked sad, as though he were disappointed in me. I knew then that the name was a mistake.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked him.

  “I read the papers, friend. I even remember names. No, thanks. No part of this for me.”

  He went back to polishing his glassware. His eyes were half shut again. He didn’t hear anything I said.

  In five years Tram Widdmar had built the sagging firm he inherited into one of the strongest import-export outfits in the city. To do so, he had had to make a clean break with the traditional methods of doing business. Maybe it was as a symbol of the break that he had hired the Brazilian architect to design his new home, and had sold the ancient Widdmar home to a historical society.

  The new place is built of glass and stone and cypress. It doesn’t look out upon anything. It looks inward, at its own enclosed court, and somehow gives the impression not of cold, objective function, but of warmth and pleasure and good living.

  There were a few other cars there when we arrived, including one Cisitalia the color of a bluebottle fly, and one Jaguar in battleship gray.

  Tram was holding court in a shady corner of the huge patio. He wore a faded sarong tied around his thick brown waist. The group turned and looked at us as we walked diagonally across the patio. It was so close to being the same group as on the afternoon I had met Laura that it gave me a feeling of unreality. The rest of them knew it too, and I could feel the constraint in the air before Tram broke it with his booming welcome. Even Jill was dressed much as she had been on that day—a lacy Mexican half blouse pulled down off her slim shoulders, her midriff bare above the hand-blocked Mexican skirt. It seemed in that moment that I would once again look beyond Tram and see Laura standing there, see the speculative interest in her sherry-brown eyes, that once again our eyes would meet and cling for a moment and everything in the world would be changed for us.

  Even Bill French, who had brought her to Tram’s cocktail party, was there. He has a lean clever face with a gathering of weather wrinkles at the corners of his outdoor eyes. I mumbled greetings to all those I knew and acknowledged the introductions to those I didn’t.

  Sammy, Tram’s Negro butler, was tending the bar. “The usual, Mr. Bryant?” he asked, reaching for the Scotch.

  I did a childish thing. I made my voice a bit too loud and said, “Just straight gin with a dash of orange bitters, Sammy. No ice.” I looked around at the faces of all those people I had always considered to be my friends, blackly suspicious of every one of them. I don’t know what sort of reaction I expected. My manner must have been very strange. Probably they were just startled. But they looked like strangers—like people I had never seen before. In that moment I wondered if they were all in some vast and evil conspiracy.

  Jill took my arm and said, “Goodness, what a revolting-sounding drink, Dil!”

  They all laughed, a bit too loudly, and Sammy made the drink with a pained expression and handed it to me. More guests arrived as I drank it. The warm gin was nauseous, but I choked it down. It hit my stomach and seemed to explode in all directions.

  After the second one, things got a bit vague. I found myself over by the pool, sitting on the edge of it in the dusk shadows with Bill French beside me. He had been talking and I couldn’t remember what he was talking about. I frowned and concentrated on what he was saying.

  “… sure was quite a hunk of woman, Dil. God, on the way north she used to take sun baths every day. Right out on the boat deck. Had a white terry-cloth outfit. A pair of tight trunks and a narrow little halter. The old Mobile never had the brightwork polished so much as on that trip. The crew went around glassy-eyed.”

  “Was she friendly?”

  “Hell, no. Couldn’t get a word or a smile out of her until the last day out. You could have knocked me over with a pinfeather when she came up to me and started to be chummy. That’s when I asked her to go to the anniversary party. She asked about hotels and I recommended the Bayton.”

  I knew that I had been stupid in not thinking of Bill French before. What I was doing was trying to reconstruct a dead woman. I had to find out about her. Once I learned all about her, I would know who had killed her, because then I would know why she had been killed. I fought back the liquor mists from my brain.

  “I supposed you noticed her when she came aboard at Buenos Aires, Bill.”

  “Sure did,” he said feelingly. “You know how you wonder about passengers. You could see she had connections, the way she got handled at the dock. A big blond guy took her right through all the red-tape artists as though they weren’t there. Hey!”

  I realized that I had grabbed hold of his arm. “An enormous blond man, Bill?”

  “Yeah. I was at the head of the gangplank, and he asked me where Miss Rentane’s cabin was. With his hair long that way and his high voice, you could figure him for some sort of a pansy. But not when he looked right at you. He had an accent. I’d say Dutch or German. He acted like a big shot.”

  “Bill, how did Laura act on the trip? Did she seem nervous or anything?”

  “Not a bit. One thing, though. We made all the usual stops. Rio, Trinidad, Havana. She never got off the ship. She stayed right in her cabin. No, I wouldn’t say she seemed nervous. More like she was … disinterested.”

  “How about when you docked here?”

  “I don’t know about that. I’m pretty busy usually. We were rushing to get through for the celebration, you know. I told her when I’d pick her up at the Bayton.”

  There was no more information he could give me. Some of the guests had left. Jill asked me if I was ready to go. I thanked Tram and said good-by and we went out to Jill’s car and rode back into town. I took her to dinner and put a steak down on top of the tepid gin.

  “Are you getting anywhere, Dil?” she asked me, her gray eyes intent.

  “Me? Not getting a thing, honey.”

  “Dil
, you’re an engineer. What happens when the governor breaks on a machine?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it revs up to where it shakes itself to pieces.”

  “Don’t shake yourself to pieces, Dil. Let Captain Paris and his people handle it. Leave it to men like Barney Zeck. This is their affair.”

  I looked at her. “And mine. And thanks, Jill, for talking about engineering. You know what we do? We dig a hole and stuff dynamite in it. Then we rig a bunch of geophones at intervals. We run the leads from the geophones back to the electronic stuff in the shed. Then we blow the dynamite. The geophones pick up the echoes of the explosion bouncing off the substrata. We get a map of what’s underground. And that’s what I need to know about Laura. The substrata. I’ve got to plant some geophones around and then arrange an explosion.”

  She reached out and caught the first two fingers of my right hand in her fist. “Dil, listen to me. Do you want to know what she was? Maybe she was something—unclean. Maybe it won’t be good to know.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” I said. She took her hand back quickly and I thought I saw the glint of tears standing in her eyes before she turned her head away quickly. Then she smiled and was casual and we said good night by her car and I watched her drive away, moving too fast for the traffic.

  Chapter Five

  An hour after I said good night to Jill, I found myself on Royal Street standing in front of a place called the Rickrack. The Quarter comes alive at night. Walking down Bourbon or Burgundy or Royal is like standing on the curb while a parade goes by. As one band fades, the next one comes thumping along. As you pass each joint a wave of sound comes out of it with almost enough force to knock you down. The doormen in garish uniforms yelp at you to step right in, the show’s about to begin. B-girls with bad teeth give you the sloe eye. Strippers inside the joints work out routines using balloons, feathers, parrots, lovebirds, snakeskins. In the hot weather they sweat as they work, and it streaks their powder and makes their bodies glisten.

  Sailors and whores, drunken brokers and glassy-eyed schoolmarms, B-girls and pimps and college kids and ragged children and Air Force enlisted men drift up and down the sidewalks looking for something that is never there and never will be there. They are the forthright and honest ones. There are the others who infest the Quarter and come out into the lights after dark. Those with the dark and twisted minds, perpetually sneering at all evidences of a lusty normalcy.