Puzzle for Wantons

by Patrick Quentin

  And we did—that is, Chuck, Lorraine, the Wyckoffs, Iris, and I. Mimi and Lover didn’t come. They had planned, said Mimi, to spend the morning with Edna St. Vincent Millay. Poetry was a great healer. The sun and the superb beauty of Lake Tahoe should have been great healers too. We dashed about the Lake, ate a sumptuous Pleygel lunch at Emerald Bay, swam, and lay on the soft silver sand. Iris was with me. I had everything a warweary husband could have desired. And yet I could not relax.

  Although Janet had pooh-poohed it, the Count’s incredible letter had carried an implied threat on her life. That threat had linked itself in my mind with a remark Laguno had made to Dorothy the night before when Iris and I had interrupted their tête-à-tête in the trophy room. Curare has a certain nobility. It should be used with artistry to kill only the most legitimate murderees.

  Iris and I had interpreted that as a malicious thrust at Dorothy. What if we had got it wrong, and some sort of conspiracy had existed between the Count and Dorothy to do away with Janet and make their “sweet music sing to eternity” on the proceeds of “The Monster’s” estate?

  What if there had been some plan of that sort which had gone wrong? Or if somebody else had got in ahead of them and murdered Dorothy before she and Laguno….

  As our little speedboats flashed us home across the green velvet lake, I felt a mounting anxiety over what had already happened and what might yet come.

  When we reached the dock, Mimi. Burnett, all Wendied up in gingham, was waiting for us without her plump Peter Pan. She hurried to Chuck Dawson with some talk about a long distance call which had come in for him. As she looped her girlish arm through his muscular one and drew him away, I watched her, wondering. Lorraine was watching too.

  Suddenly she snapped, “She’s got my poor wretched brother roped. Does she think she can corral my fiancé too?”

  I had never before heard Lorraine make a spiteful remark. Her face was flushed with indignation. I reflected that Lover was penniless while Chuck Dawson seemed to have all the money in the world. Was Mimi deciding to change lovers in midstream? Was that the lesson she had learned from her day with Edna St. Vincent Millay?

  Back in the privacy of our own room, Iris and I, unshackled at last, started gabbing each other’s ears off about the episode at the breakfast table. I wasn’t surprised to discover that my wife had reached much the same conclusions as I. She had, in fact gone me one better.

  “I’ve been thinking, Peter. What if Laguno and Dorothy had planned to have Dorothy stick Janet with the curare and then by mistake Dorothy got stuck herself? Of course, nothing fits with anything. Wyckoff’s a heart specialist. He’d have known right away if Dorothy had been poisoned. If she was, he’s got to be tied into it somehow. And what about Chuck? And is Bill Flanders telling the truth? And then, the Count—he’s a right royal rat all right. But, even with Dorothy to egg him on, do you think he has the spunk actually to try to murder Janet?”

  “I don’t—” I began, and stopped as a knock came on the door.

  Iris said, “Come in,” and Janet Laguno herself stalked into the room. She was still wearing the tousled grey skirt and the magenta sweater. A cigarette drooped from her broad mouth. I was getting to like her for her defiantly unalluring appearance; just as I had liked the savage candour of her behaviour at breakfast. Janet Laguno had a certain stature. She was afraid of no man.

  She was holding a piece of paper. “Well, children, I’m still here. Lorraine went Emily Post about evicting Stefano, and I called every hotel in Reno for a room and there wasn’t one. So I stay on till tomorrow.”

  She perched herself on the arm of one of the zebra chairs and patted her knee with the paper.

  “Surprise, surprise, my dears. This document is, of all things, a will. A new will. I want the two of you to witness it.” She grimaced. “Of course, you’ll think I’m a silly neurotic female. I probably am. No one in their right mind would ever have married Stefano anyway. I haven’t made this will for any melodramatic reason. I know Stefano hasn’t the guts to try to do anything to me. But Destiny has an evil sense of humour. It’s just conceivable that I might fall and break my neck in the bathtub or trip over a croquet hoop. If my beloved Pumpkin ever got a cent of my money, I’d spend the rest of eternity in an apoplectic fit.”

  Iris and I exchanged a rattled glance. Although Janet was making light of it, this fitted too well with our anxieties. The Countess Laguno unfolded the paper and handed it me, spilling a long caterpillar of ash from her cigarette.

  “You’d better read it,” she said. “I don’t believe in having people sign things they don’t read.”

  Iris read the will at my elbow. It was short and simple. It invalidated all former wills; it emphatically cut out Stefano; it left her entire estate to—Bill Flanders.

  We both looked up astonished. Iris said, “Bill Flanders? But—but I didn’t know he was an intimate friend or—”

  “He isn’t. Not particularly.” Janet crushed her cigarette into some strange glass thing which either was or wasn’t an ash tray. “But I don’t have any family of my own, except for one nauseating aunt in Seattle. I was talking to to Bill this afternoon. He’s a nice guy; he lost his leg fighting for us; and he’s been left penniless thanks to Dorothy. I’m sorry for him. And I can think of nothing that would make Stefano more furious than to have Dorothy’s widower supplant him. So—” She threw out her hands. “Sign will you, babies? Here’s my pen. People never have pens in moments of crisis.”

  Iris and I both affixed rather shaky signatures to the bottom of the document. Janet rose and gave the will back to me.

  “I suppose I should have made two copies. But I didn’t So you keep it, just to be safe.” She crossed to the door and paused, grinning sourly over her shoulder. “And don’t look so ominous, my dears. Nothing’s going to happen to me. The Monster never felt healthier in its life.”

  As the door closed behind her, Iris muttered, “I only hope she’s right.” We locked the will away in the drawer that served as a safe for Iris’ piggy bank. In a definitely jittery mood we got ready for dinner and went downstairs.

  Sunset and cocktails had started on the terrace. Janet and Bill Flanders, together on a love seat, were gazing out at a crimson sky, split by the giant peaks of the Sierras. Lorraine, Mimi, and Chuck Dawson, ignoring the beauties of nature, were drinking Martinis under a yellow umbrella.

  As Iris and I joined them, Chuck, very handsome and cowboy in corduroy pants and a leather jacket, was kidding Lorraine about her citified clothes and saying her silver-scale swimming suit made her look like a haddock. At this, Mimi gave a tinkling laugh and threw a whimsical smile up at him. Lorraine snapped, “All right, Chuck, if you don’t like it, I’ll throw it away.” Mimi’s hand slipped down Chuck’s arm and settled on his fingers. Lorraine, her face blazing, whipped round on her and said, “For God’s sake, stop pawing Chuck.”

  Chuck looked uncomfortable. Mimi’s deep-set eyes glinted. I was startled at the violence of the tension between the two women.

  But Lover appeared then, archly jovial, with Fleur Wyckoff on his arm. Mimi ran to him, crying, “Naughty Lover to leave me and look at the sunset with someone else. Lorraine’s been saying the most awful things.”

  Clinging to Lover’s sleeve, she found refuge in engaged bliss.

  Wyckoff came next. After him, contemptuously indifferent to hostile stares, the Count Laguno strolled out of the french windows and poured himself a Martini. Forgetting her worries, Lorraine started being the high-power hostess again. By the time we moved inside for dinner, she was as chattery and gay as ever.

  Dinner was monopolized by the hot swimming pool and how divine it was going to be to swim there by moonlight. For some reason her guests were more rebellious than usual. Chuck grumbled and most ill-advisedly suggested a trip to Reno instead. Janet announced she had no suit. Even little Fleur raised her mousy voice. But Lorraine, in magnificent form, carried all before her.

  An hour or so later the whole pee
vish bunch of us went upstairs for our swimming things, then congregated on the drive. There were two cars. Lorraine went first in the old station wagon, with Iris and me, Bill Flanders, Janet Laguno, and Fleur. The moon had not yet risen. We plunged down the hill in murky gloom. Crickets were scraping; tree frogs were cheeping. There was a heady tang to the country darkness. Lorraine brought the car to a halt before the glimmering silhouette of a poplar grove.

  “Here we are.”

  We scrambled out and passed through a white gate. Lorraine found a light switch and the darkness leaped into illumination.

  The towering poplars had been planted in a rectangle with flowering shrubs at their feet. In the centre of the glade stretched an immense swimming pool with a broad stone border. Dressingrooms, built like individual cottages made little villages on the two long sides. Ropes of multicoloured lights twinkled above the gleaming water.

  “It’s rather nice, isn’t it?” said Lorraine. “I don’t know why I don’t use it more. Peter, Bill, men go over the other side to change.”

  The dressing-rooms were as luxurious as everything else that belonged to Lorraine. Each had its little sitting-room with waterproof upholstery on the chairs, a closet that could be locked, and shower-room. Bill and I were the first to be ready. In his swimming trunks, Bill Flander’s chunky, boxer’s physique made the useless stump of his leg even more pitiful. He hobbled with the crutch to a flight of steps in the centre of the pool and rolled into the water. I dived in after him.

  It was a voluptuous sensation, diving into water as warm as a warm bath. I lazed over onto my back, sniffing the faint medicinal odour of sulphur, letting the heat seep into me. The rainbow lights glittered like crazy stars. Beyond them, above the vaulting mountain peaks, I could see an opalescence in the sky which heralded the rising moon.

  Bill was splashing around, happy as a polar bear. Janet appeared from the women’s side. Her swimming suit deficiency had been remedied by Lorraine’s discarded fish-scale number. She dived in and came towards us, looking like some frightening phosphorescent monster of the deep.

  Iris came with Fleur and Lorraine, all in sober black. They dived in and soon we were sporting around in the velvety warmth. Some minor catastrophe happened to Fleur’s brassière top and, with much giggling, Lorraine and Janet whisked her away into a dressing-room to fix it. Iris, Bill, and myself were alone in the pool when the second carload arrived. Mimi, the only girl, tripped like a slightly ageing sylph over to the women’s section, and the male dressing-rooms rang with stamping feet, snatches of dialogue, and even an unidentifiable and off-key rendition of “Home on the Range.”

  The party was brightening up.

  Iris and I were lolling in the shallowest and warmest part of the pool when every light in the grove went out. Iris gripped my wrist. Grunts of disapproval sounded from the pitch blackness around us. Someone called out. Then Lorraine’s voice came gay and high. “Darlings, the lights are fused. Isn’t that divine? It’s much more fun in the dark. Don’t try and fix it, anyone. The moon will be up in a second anyway.”

  I heard a splash, saw a glimmer of white, heard other splashes. Everyone, apparently, agreed with Lorraine that it was divine to be in the dark. As a matter of fact, it was quite a sensation, swimming through that caressing warmth in anonymous blackness.

  People were calling to other people. There were little half frightened, half excited screams from the women. I completely lost track of Iris and was swimming blind. Every now and then I bumped against another hot, wet body. Once I heard Chuck Dawson’s voice. “Lorraine, baby. Is that you?” And Lorraine’s, “Yes, darling. Isn’t this fun?” I swam on. I collided with someone else. Tense hands were gripping my arms, and Mimi’s voice whispered, “Chuck, I’ve been looking for you all over. I’m scared. I’m—” “It isn’t Chuck,” I said before she gave herself away any more. Quickly I swam on to save her the embarrassment she ought to be feeling.

  After a while, the warmth of the water and the unrelieved blackness became stifling. The radiance in the sky was the only visible thing. Floating on my back, I watched it grow stronger and stronger. Then, with a jerk like a jack-in-the-box, the full moon soared up into the sky. You could see the poplars again, and the white dressing-rooms gleaming. A path of silver spread across the water. I could even see individual heads bobbing here and there in the pool.

  In those few seconds the Stygian darkness had been changed into a fairyland.

  I saw Iris and swam to join her. Chuck and Lorraine came crawling to us. Lorraine seemed annoyed about something.

  “Too hot,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before we’re boiled.”

  We were near the steps. She climbed out. Chuck followed. Iris and I went too. I wanted a cigarette.

  “There’s a bar down here,” said Lorraine. She called over the water, “Come on, angels, we’re all going to have a drink.”

  The guests started splashing out of the water. Lover came first, helping Bill Flanders up the steps to his crutch. Then Mimi came, her arm around Fleur’s waist. Wyckoff pulled himself up at the far end and came paddling towards us, while the Count Laguno, self-consciously ignoring the fact that he was being ignored, slicked back his black hair and clambered up at our feet.

  Lorraine glanced around. “Are we all here?”

  “Janet,” said Fleur. “Where’s Janet?”

  “Janet!” Lorraine called the name indifferently. “Come on out, Janet.”

  There was no reply. My pulse quickening I gazed out over the moonlit expanse of water. Nothing broke its calm surface.

  “Janet!” Mimi called it then. “Janet, where are you?”

  “Maybe she got out before the moon came up. Maybe she’s in the dressing-rooms.” Iris grabbed Lorraine’s arm. “Come on. Let’s find out.”

  They ran around the pool, disappearing into the cottages on the far side. The rest of us stood in growing uneasiness while the two women’s voices trailed eerily through the moonlight.

  “Janet … Janet….”

  Suddenly Chuck dived into the pool. That was the signal. One by one we tumbled after him. No one said anything. That was what made it so ominous. Mimi swam past me. Laguno, his eyes very bright, paddled by. Even Bill Flanders was in again, thrashing the water with his powerful arms.

  The moonlight seemed unbearably bright now. Some one muttered close to me. There was a splashing. I could still hear Lorraine and Iris calling.

  Then, at the far end of the pool, a woman screamed. It was Fleur Wyckoff. I recognized her voice.

  “Janet—she’s here. I can see her—she’s under the water—she’s drowned—”

  PART THREE

  FLEUR

  VIII

  Fleur Wyckoff stopped screaming. There was a fragment of silence, then babel broke out. Everyone in the pool started splashing and thrashing towards Fleur. I had the farthest to go. The dark heads in front were converging into a circle. They looked grotesque in the moonlight—bodyless heads floating on the black, traylike surface of the water.

  I reached them. The water was deep at this end, at least ten feet. Everyone was milling, twittering, not doing anything. In the centre of the circle, Fleur was whimpering softly. I swam to join her. Chuck Dawson, big and easy in the water as a seal, rolled at my side.

  I said, “What is it, Fleur? Where did you see it?”

  Her little hand clutched my arm. “Look. Look down. You can see her suit—see it gleaming.”

  I peered down. She was right. Something was there under the water, silver, quivering like a reflection of the moon.

  Chuck said, “You and me, Lieutenant. Dive.”

  He arched forward in the water, his athlete’s legs flailing up and then sliding down out of sight. I went after him.

  It was weird sinking through the warm water towards that glimmering something which seemed to have no shape, no meaning, but which I knew must be Janet Laguno. I kept my eyes open. The sulphur in the water made them smart. My arms were stretched ahead of me. M
y hand made contact with a thing that was smooth, solid—an arm.

  I grabbed with both hands until I had some sort of grip on a shoulder. Chuck was at the other side. Kicking with our legs, we started to lift that reluctant shape to the surface. The hot water felt cloying as glue. But at last I was free of it, able to breathe again.

  I shook the wet hair out of my sore eyes. Chuck’s face was only a little way from mine. I found myself staring straight at him. Then my gaze shifted to what lay between us.

  Under the water, it hadn’t been so bad. There had been something to do. But now, as I looked at that floating thing, the horror of what had happened beat in on me. Janet Laguno’s face was greyish green in the moonlight. Her open mouth was a shadowy, foolish hole. Her hair, which had always been so unmanageable, trailed along the surface of the water in writhing tentacles.

  Chuck, gasping air into his lungs, mumbled, “The steps. Behind you. Get her to the steps.”

  The others were scattering like clumsy, frightened ducks. Chuck and I towed Janet to the steps, tugged her up them, and laid her down on the chill stone border.

  Lorraine and Iris were running towards us from the dressing-rooms. Iris called, “Peter, what is it?” Then Lorraine saw and screamed. Everyone was swarming around, bodies hot and wet from the pool.

  I shouted, “Keep back.”

  One of the men, in black swimming trunks, pushed to my side. It was David Wyckoff. “Let me look at her, Lieutenant.” He called, “Lorraine, get some blankets, anything, from the dressingrooms. Something to keep her warm.”

  There was a scurrying. Wyckoff dropped to his knees and eased Janet over on to her front. Lorraine, Iris, and Lover came dashing back, carrying slipcovers, cushions, a random assortment of warm things. Wyckoff slid some under Janet, spread some over her, and started artificial respiration.