Three hours. Now two hours and forty minutes. Twenty minutes had gone, somehow, since Jay’s call.
I ought to phone the shop. For the sake of that crazed, pathetic creature, if for no other reason. Something should be done to stop her before she got herself and Jay into serious trouble. I was known there. To identify the buyer, that much at least offered no problem. After that, well, then it would be up to Jay.
Within two minutes I had reached Mr. Valiant, the manager, and began my exploration, keeping it simple.
“This is Shana Hepworth, Mr. Valiant.”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Hepworth. What can I do for you?”
“I’m calling about a gift that was sent to me from your shop. A matching set of beaten silver jars for face creams.”
“Yes, I know that item. Rather special, we had four sets. Anything wrong?”
“Well, the lady who sent them to me, probably a customer, seems to have forgotten to enclose a card. Naturally, I’d like to know, so I can tell her how much I appreciate the set. They’re really exquisite.”
“Just a moment,” he said. “I remember the sale, but I’ll have to check the records. I have them right here.” In the short pause I heard his indistinct request, made to someone else. “Yes. That was the day before yesterday, the only one of the sets we’ve sold. Our records have it that the item was bought, taken away, and then I think it was brought back for us to gift-wrap. Yes. Then we had the set delivered to you. But it wasn’t bought by a lady. By a gentleman.”
The walls, the floor, the whole room shook. All the worse because, underneath my frantic reasoning, I had expected it. But a reply had to be made, something, anything.
“Oh?”
Mr. Valiant was jocose.
“Hardly a customer of yours. An admirer, I’d say.”
I knew what the name must be, but did I have the strength, would it be too stupid, should I risk still another hope, from the few chips of it remaining, upon a description of the man?
No. It could not be accurate, the odd request might conceivably become in itself an added threat to Jay, and anything I now found could only grow progressively more horrible.
Speaking by rote, from a remembered role in this office and only this morning, already an age ago, I said:
“No, not an admirer. I wanted something special to display a new line of creams the salon has been experimenting with, and I asked Mr. Ravoc to use his best judgment.”
“You have it right,” said Mr. Valiant. “Mr. Jay Ravoc.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s purely a business matter I’d forgotten for a moment. Thank you, Mr. Valiant. That was all.”
But that was not all. He was still there.
“How would you like a large order of similar sets, Mrs. Hepworth? These we have are each individually designed, handmade, of course, and rather expensive. But if you want something for your new line, unique, but in a large lot, I think we could fill your order, at a very good price.”
“I haven’t reached that stage yet, Mr. Valiant,” I told him. “This first order was a tentative thing. When this line is ready for the market, I’ll call you again.”
Silence came back into the office as we hung up, quietness that filled and overflowed the room. He had simply taken it with him from the shop, prepared it or had it prepared, then brought it back to be wrapped and delivered. Without much concealment. There was now at least one point in the process at which he could be identified with certainty, the shop, and probably there were more. Actually, he had made no effort at subterfuge. Merely omitted a message, a personal card.
No real evasion had been necessary. Just the opposite. He wanted me to know. But he thought it better to be careful strangers did not.
And still, why? There are only one or the other of two motives behind all such sudden onslaught: calculated greed, or an eruption from those subterranean forges and furnaces where a thing I used to think of as love was always being made, and often made wrong. This hardly related to money. Therefore it must be the other, some blast of jealousy, senseless to me. But not to Jay. He had made that brief, startling, disjointed reference to the dead Barna, And another mystifying allusion to my interest in attending that dinner for the scarred and blemished.
Why shouldn’t I be interested? I had long ago come to know that half the patrons of the salon were haunted by a dread of invisible flaws, nonexistent defects, magnified handicaps, age, plainness, sometimes even youth, nightmares that were psychological, not physical It was just common sense to know about this business I am in, the ghosts we exorcise, the jars and bottles and cartons and phials of reassurance they took away. And who would know better than those to whom the fear had size and shape that could literally be measured, maybe the reassurance, too?
Or so I thought, before ten disappointing minutes of the humdrum affair showed I had been mistaken.
Now, though, even I could see this was the simplest kind of self-deception. Then, and now.
That reassurance I wanted to know about was not for my customers. It was for me. Why I needed it was clear enough, now. I had felt it then.
This was Jay’s doing, and his alone. Belle Griscom was not out of his past. She was his present and future. I was the past. They wanted me out of their lives. He had decided to cut me completely away from them, and had taken that drastic way of doing it, not caring whether the warning gift injured me or not, knowing I could not afford to strike back.
Trying to look at it, for the first time without sentiment, I saw that I could not afford to retaliate, or even let it become known. My standing, the large business of the salon, the relationship there had once been between. Jay and myself, this kind of a spotlight thrown upon them would be too much to endure. They were safe. And they knew it. She understood this business, and Jay understood me.
They were just a little bit too safe. Their adventure had strong overtones of blackmail, and that was not safe for me, either. But stronger than that, they seemed so safe—this in itself gave me a new kind of emotion that had not been in their easy calculations. Rage.
I might risk anything and everything to stop them cold with one crippling blow they would remember forever. Why not? I have always been romantic, myself, and I also appreciate humor. Let Jay go and take with him still another one of those crude but hilarious episodes to remember us by, the funniest souvenir in his entire boyish collection, my police charge of felonious assault against both of them.
I regretted not having allowed Dr. Dwight to go ahead with that suggestion when he made it. But the sentimental oversight could be repaired now. Call. Tell him to go ahead.
The untouched jar I had extended to Jay’s new love stood there still, in the center of my desk. Once more, I uncapped it. The smooth surface, bland and white, showed nothing. It merely writhed with a thousand hateful suggestions, all of Jay Ravoc. I knew too well what I had seen in him, only the vivid best, in occasional unthinking moods, moments of robust gaiety that gave the illusion he had something larger, a generous spirit. Now all of that had disappeared, swallowed up in the other person I had also known was there, the man who never relaxed, never stopped moving forward along his own path, not for a moment, always sparkling and always hard, like a deadly, floating iceberg. Snowy and white where visible, and utterly obliterating, where invisible. Like this, and now.
My phone rang. Dr. Dwight wanted to see me. Fine. I wanted to see him.
He nodded when he came in, but his question was perfunctory.
“How’s the hand?”
“All right,” I said. He seated himself on the opposite side of the desk. “Has that material been analyzed?”
“I have no report on it yet. But I have no doubt what it will be. Why?”
“I’ve changed my mind about reporting it to the authorities. I want the cream, the jar, everything, sent to the District Attorney. I want a criminal charge pressed against whoever did it.”
His eyes searched me, too thoughtfully, for a pause that was much too long.
“W
ell, that’s what I wanted to discuss with you. I’ve had a rather strange interview, Mrs. Hepworth. And I’m not sure I did the right thing.” I merely waited. “In fact, I’m not sure how I ought to handle this, at all. The man was a special investigator for an organization I’m sure you’ve heard about. The Generous Heart. He was a Mr. Charles Talcott, and he showed me his credentials. He seemed to know all about the burn you received this morning. That was why he came, in fact. Are you some sort of a patient, or a client of theirs, perhaps one of their advisers?” I merely shook my head. “He knew all about the matching set you received, the burn you got, told me his organization wanted to protect you, from yourself, if necessary, and rather pointedly asked me why I hadn’t reported this matter to the police. How he knew I hadn’t, I don’t know. Maybe it was a guess. Maybe he did know. At any rate, I did say you had asked me not to make an official report, as yet, and that your account of it was simply that you had received the burn in the course of experimenting with a new line of face creams.” He stopped, studying my eyes, my face, not certain of me, not sure of himself. “You do recall our conversation about how you got the injury?” I nodded. “Well, the explanation seemed harmless. At first. An easy way to get rid of the fellow without giving him any information of importance to anyone. But he seemed to reach a completely different conclusion. He was much impressed, and two or three times verified that you had, yourself, taken the responsibility for making that caustic cream. It gave me an uneasy feeling that it was anything but trifling. All the more so, since I know you had nothing to do with making that acid compound, and now you have decided to bring a criminal charge after all. I wonder. Do you see the position this may place both of us in?”
I stared at him, not believing it, not grasping it, yet stunned.
“I see. I can’t bring any charge. You can be forced to admit, I could be compelled to repeat, that I claimed there had been no attempt. I said I made that thing myself.”
Dr. Dwight emphatically overrode this.
“It doesn’t follow. The facts, Mrs. Hepworth, the facts are all that count, not the hysterical exclamations you made at the time, in pain and fright. But let me ask, do you know who sent you that gift?”
I looked at him for a very long time, not seeing him at all, seeing only the bleak wastes of my own grief.
“Yes. I know. It was sent by Jay.”
“By whom?”
His demand was so sharp, I knew my faint voice had been audible, but no more. I tried again, but couldn’t, this time, say the name, or even speak. Then finally I told him, still not clearly:
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does if you want to protect yourself against this man. Jay, you said.”
I summoned a wintry smile, for some remote man I still remembered, fashioned out of ice and snow.
“No. He won’t bother me any more. He has made himself safe, and that is all he wanted. He will never even see me again.”
“Are you sure?” Dr. Dwight prodded. “There is no predicting what a psychotic wants, or will do next. Do you know who this Charles Talcott was, and what he wanted? Is he to be trusted?”
I started to nod, then to shake my head, then froze without motion or feeling at all.
“He is his partner. Or wants to be. In any case, it doesn’t concern me any more. I don’t know who he is. Or care.”
Dr. Dwight poked and thrust for a possible fracture.
“But they may care, that is the point. Yon will have to make that complaint, simply to protect yourself. If you don’t, and don’t make it now, they will feel they can do anything with impunity. I’ll help you do it, myself. And thank God you made those first absurd statements to me, not to anyone else.” He caught some flicker of expression in my face as I tried to recall some connected incident. Recent. “You haven’t, have you? You haven’t told anyone else that this cream was one of your own experiments?”
The slow shake of my head was an automatic reflex, not in denial, but in wondering admission that I had.
He knew what I was about to say, but I told him, just the same.
“Yes. Just a few minutes ago, I called the jeweler about it. To ask. I told him I wanted the set to display a new line.”
Dr. Dwight looked suddenly tired. But not as tired and gray as I felt, myself.
Chapter X
Jay Ravoc
I never knew there were so many red traffic lights in the whole country as those I saw during the first half of my drive up to the city. Every time I thought I had a new and better slant on the quarrel with Shana, the evasive talk with Vincent, with the investigator, this time the right perspective, feeling I even had the right answer finally, and knew exactly what had to be done about it, and the sooner the better, there was another stop light at a crossing, and I sweated through still another wait. But after the first half of the trip in, during which I had all these answers, each time a different one, I settled down to do some serious thinking.
They were all interested in one thing, though other matters also held their attention. All three of them, even Shana,, wanted Campaign Consultants to take on Generous Heart. Why? This agency had always been small, relatively, very old and obscure, and never with any apparent “future much larger than it had when it first began, away back in the last century.
Then, it had been the usual missionary affair, started by a sociological parson ahead of his times, carried farther by a couple of enthusiastic reformers, and backed by a coterie of reluctant converts, all wealthy, conscripted into dutiful but chilly service for this cause they owned, and since they owned it, it was respectable. It had always been a closed corporation, a pet charity not endowed with much, not asking for much, not doing much. Until now.
Now, suddenly, it was making this major bid. Why? These old institutions, running on the momentum of their investments, under the direction of habit-ridden relics, have had miraculous rejuvenations before. But they have also, and more often, been looted before.
On liquid resources alone, they rarely have much to offer in the way of loot. Still, maybe it would seem worth bagging to those making the try. Or perhaps, and still more likely, that’s where Campaign Consultants came in. We had been elected to stage a drive. That would bring in a haul worth taking.
But why us? There were nearly a score of other professional fund raisers. Why CC?
We did have a reputation, for one thing. In the field, CC’s methods and standing could be compared with those of any client institution, no matter how conservative. CC and Generous Heart, with the traditions generally attributed to that cause, would make a good combination. If its present bid to widen the appeal and streamline the work could be accepted as on the level.
But there was something about the way this proposition had been put to Vincent that had him frightened, not sold. Stanley, too, according to him. And now even Shana, who didn’t know the difference between a cannister drive and a report breakfast. How could she be even remotely concerned, in Generous Heart or any other agency, except possibly as a contributor, a volunteer?
There was nothing in any of this to suggest a legitimate resurrection. The first sign of life, whenever a dodo woke up, always came in the form of a query about the percentage we charged. And after that, satisfied we didn’t work on a percentage basis, we heard nothing except the amount it would be agreeable to have us raise for them exactly how to go about raising it, and whose feelings positively must not be outraged by getting the wrong place at the opening dinner, or maybe it was somebody’s middle initial accidentally left out of the campaign stationery. There had been none of these familiar signs, in this move the agency was now making. That left only a confidence operation, strictly for loot, as the logical answer. There could be no other. It had to be that.
But this one was a little different. A lot different. And I thought I had known them all. That they had sold themselves to Shana, I found impossible to imagine, either how or why, though I had to accept it. She had been clear enough about the contract. Sign it, Ja
y. I want you to. That was her first, her real request, in spite of changing her mind and withdrawing it, later.
And Vincent’s vote. Sign, guy.
And Griscom, I feel you can be convinced, too, when you talk this over with your associates.
All of this added up to something different from those petty frauds and overloaded benefits, strictly personal, those planless embezzlements or those short, furtive raids familiar to philanthropy, as to all other big industries. This was more than the usual stealthy grab made by a deft, quick hand. There was something in that hand, this time, a cold and tangible weapon. It made no effort at concealment. The opposite, in fact. Whoever held the weapon wanted me to know it was there, openly disclosing it, at the same time indicating it would be both healthier and less embarrassing to pretend it wasn’t there.
But it was there. Businesslike, vicious. Vincent was right, that a calculated wrecking action would strip us of clients, leave CC an outcast among fund raisers. Provided the attacking publicity outweighed or jammed our own. A year ago, I would not have dreamed that was possible. But now, with a commercial revivalist on every street, and every client correspondingly more sensitive to the risk of a stampede, I was not so sure. Every saint in the trade had his corps of press agents. And professional investigators, as Vincent put it.
And all of them drew upon the acquiescence of frightened captives, like Vincent. Or was he, himself, an active and willing accomplice in this shakedown? And Shana? It was past belief, but true, that in a way she also now accused and threatened me. She had plainly alluded to my making another try at ruining her face, with God knows what imaginary pins stuck into a wax figure, probably on Halloween. Another try? Unbelievable nonsense.
The Generous Heart Page 14
