The Traces of Merrilee

by Herbert Brean

  Contents

  Copyright Information

  Also by Herbert Brean

  Prologue

  The Early Traces

  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

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  The Ultimate Traces

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © 1966 by Herbert Brean.

  *

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  Also by Herbert Brean

  IN THE SAME SERIES

  The Traces of Brillhart

  OTHER TITLES

  The Clock Strikes Thirteen

  The Darker the Night

  Hardly a Man Is Now Alive

  Incident at Mardi’s

  A Matter of Fact

  Prowler at Nightfall

  Then They Came Running

  Wilders Walk Away

  For Lyd Morrison, with love.

  Prologue

  I guess you could say it began this way, but it’s a hell of a prosaic beginning.

  We were having dinner at Twit-Twit’s.

  There had been smoked salmon, soft as butter and sprinkled with capers and finely chopped onion. Then stuffed chicken breasts, the stuffing touched with dill and fresh parsley. Pouilly Fumé with that, in well-chilled glasses. Endive salad, and then a kind of tangy Scandinavian cheese that I can’t remember the name of, but Twit-Twit likes, and that tastes wonderful with crusty French bread. Then espresso and Armagnac.

  The four of us were out on Twit-Twit’s terrace. It was April, and the New York night was warm and soft and lovely. And you thought of Paris.

  Naturally.

  Twit-Twit looked fantastically, inhumanly beautiful. In her vixenish way.

  Tom Dolan said, “God damn everything.”

  His wife Betsy, who has blue eyes if ever there were blue eyes, said, “Here we go again,” and splashed a little Armagnac in everyone’s glass.

  I was holding Twit-Twit’s hand and looking up at the night sky. There was no moon, and thank heaven for that; it would have been too theatrical. But you could see stars. I thought how nice it was to have everything go right occasionally and the dice throw a seven at the right time, by themselves.

  I sipped the brandy, chuckled at Tom’s remark, and said, “Of course. Nuts to the universe.”

  But Tom can be moody. He’s Irish, of course. Who isn’t?

  He said, “I mean it. Betsy and I are all loused up.”

  That’s the kind of remark that could disturb you, coming from most people when they have had a couple of drinks. Not the Dolans. They seem to fight all the time, they really never do, and they’re awfully nice. Also, they are deeply in love. After many years.

  I said, “Now what? But why don’t you tell us about it somewhere else? We’ve had a wonderful dinner. So let Twit-Twit and I take you out. Like to the belly dancers.”

  “Which belly dancers?”

  “Any belly dancers. Any anything. There are the joints at Twenty-eighth Street. There are other joints nearby, in midtown.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I’m serious. For a moment.”

  Suddenly I knew he was. Tom is a tall, serious-looking guy who is seldom serious. So when he is, it is really impressive.

  He said, “I had lunch today with a man who made me think.”

  “Beginner’s luck,” said Betsy. But she looked at him appraisingly. We all know Tom.

  “We got talking,” Tom said. “And after a while this guy raised an interesting question. He said to me, ‘If you had only one day left to live, but you could arrange it so that you could spend the day doing anything you wanted—anything—what would you choose to do? How would you arrange that day?’”

  “Well, how would you?” I said.

  Tom looked up at the darkly glowing Manhattan sky. “You could do or have anything you want. Anything. Your last day on earth.” He fell silent.

  “I can tell you how I’d spend it,” said Twit-Twit. “Paris. I’d spend the morning at Dior, buying clothes. And I’d spend the afternoon wearing them.”

  “And the evening?” Betsy said.

  “Cocktails at the Ritz bar. Dinner at Lapérouse, at one of the tables on the second floor, overlooking the river. Then a walk up the river to see Notre Dame lighted at night.”

  Tom was studying her. “And then?”

  “Then—I don’t know.” She looked at me and blushed a little, which is a lot for Twit-Twit, because she doesn’t blush easily, and it was nice to notice that she had looked at me before she did.

  “So your choice would be Paris,” said Betsy. “What’s yours, Deac?” She was still worried about Tom.

  “It’s an interesting idea. It tells you something about yourself, doesn’t it? Like a Rorschach test. I’d spend the day working on a story I liked a lot, preferably a murder. Then I’d pick up Twit-Twit and take her for a little stroll around the Place Vendôme to the Ritz bar and buy her all the Martinis she wanted. Then the Left Bank, as she said. Then—”

  Betsy laughed; she has a nice laugh. “Okay, your choice would be just to be with Twit-Twit. Tom?”

  “God damn it,” said Tom. “But I said that before.”

  “You certainly did,” his wife told him.

  “Here’s what’s bugging me,” and I knew that whatever was coming, he would mean it. “Today we filmed the last show for the season. I’m free until August—no more TV shows, stars, cameramen, or anything to worry about. So suddenly Bets and I decided we’d blow ourselves to a little holiday. France. Paris. Le Cote d’Or. And we would sail on the Montmartre. So we call up and discover we can’t get on the Montmartre. She’s booked solid for the sailing the day after tomorrow, and she’s also booked solid for the next sailing, two weeks from now.”

  His fingers rapped the table.

  “That’s why I got going on how to spend a day perfectly. Suddenly Bets and I want to have a nice relaxing trip on a nice ship. That would be my idea of how to spend your last day perfectly. We have the time and for once we have the money, which is always a sometime thing. But we can’t get on the only ship we really want at the moment. So God damn it. What else can I say?”

  “That’s a shame,” said Twit-Twit. “I know how you feel. Because I’m free for the next two weeks, and I was thinking only this morning of a fast trip to Paris. I was dreaming of a plane. But the Montmartre would be even better.”

  I began to consider something. I suppose what Tom had said about spending the last day of your life happily had a little to do with it, even though I’m not exactly at the three-score-and-ten stage. I’m only about halfway there, as a matter of fact. Nevertheless—

  Twit-Twit said, “Betsy, how about you? What would your perfect day be like?”

  Betsy took a cigarette, accepted Tom’s light, inhaled deeply, and leaned back.

  “Let me see,” she said thoughtfully. “I’ve never planned this kind of thing before. But I’d wake up about te
n in the morning and have breakfast in bed. The breakfast would be brought to me by Cary Grant. In slacks and baby-blue sports jacket. Then, after a tub and clothes, I’d go out in my Rolls—”

  “Driven by Gregory Peck,” said Tom.

  “And Richard Burton. One would drive and one would be footman. I don’t care which is which. I’d drive to Harry Winston’s and shop for diamonds. Then—”

  Betsy went on. But I didn’t listen, amusing as it was.

  Like Tom, I’d, had lunch that day with a guy, and he had said some things that had made me think, too. Quite different kinds of things. And sometimes you go a little nutty.

  Maybe it was just the Armagnac. Anyway, I got quietly up and went to the phone, which is in the bedroom, well out of earshot. I called the guy I’d had lunch with. We spoke a few minutes.

  I came back.

  “...night flight to Copenhagen,” Betsy was saying. “I might be a little tired at this point, so they would have put a tub aboard the plane for me. Filled with perfume, of course. No water. Then I’d read a first folio of Hamlet while my maid spoon-fed me a little caviar. And just outside, a string quartet would be playing...”

  I sat down and found Twit-Twit’s hand.

  “Do you really want to go to Paris’?” I asked her.

  “Do you know anyone who doesn’t want to go to Paris?”

  “I said ‘really.’” Her eyes gave me one of their blue-green looks.

  “What the hell do you mean really? You stumble-tongued Irish bum?”

  “Because if you want, I think we’re all going. In a good suite in the Montmartre. All together. You and I and the Dolans here. They’ll chaperone us, of course. Everything will be very proper.”

  “You had too many Negronis before dinner.” But Tom knew I meant it. We understand each other.

  “I always have too many. But I’ll know for sure in a minute.”

  “You’re really beginning to worry me.”

  The phone rang.

  I answered it.

  The answer was the right answer. I came back.

  “I hope your passports are in order,” I said, “because we’re all sailing the day after tomorrow on the Montmartre. For Le Havre. And in case you care, we have the biggest suite on the boat deck”

  Tom said, “How the hell did you do that?”

  “I won’t explain until we’re all sitting at one of those sidewalk places on the Champs-Élysées, preferably Fouquet’s. The truth is, I can’t explain right now. But this is all on the level. We’re booked. Start packing.”

  Twit-Twit said, “He’s as nutty as a fruitcake. He can’t get time off from the magazine like that.”

  “Of course he can’t,” said Betsy. “But just in case he can, I’m going to start packing.”

  “On the level,” said Tom. “Who did you call?”

  “On the level,” I said, “I can’t tell you. I don’t have influence like this, usually. But right now I do. And so we sail the day after tomorrow. After that, nothing but fun and frolic—and Dior and Balenciaga, and Maxim’s.”

  That is how it started. Nothing but fun and frolic.

  Oh, brother!

  The Early Traces

  “Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill.”

  —Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  Chapter 1

  The Last Arrival

  As you will have gathered, the Montmartre was, at the time, the newest and most beautiful and most desirable and hardest-to-get-on ship in the fleet of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. She had, in fact, been in commission only five weeks.

  But, two days later, we were standing on her promenade deck, looking down on the faces of those who were massed on the pier below to wave and smile or weep farewell to the fewer and luckier ones gathered on the decks above.

  The final gongs had sounded moments before, and the last of the people who were going ashore were going ashore. We’d had some guests in the suite who’d come down to see us off, and after the usual toasts and handshakes and cheek-kissing they had left, and now the four of us were by ourselves. The trip was about to start.

  Ostensibly, it was an ordinary departure of four people sailing to Europe, and for three of us it was. Twit-Twit was standing next to me with slightly moist eyes (why do women always get emotional at sailings and weddings?); Betsy and Tom would shortly begin the pleasurable process of slowing down, of realizing they were to be on shipboard for the next five days with nothing to do but enjoy themselves.

  I was glad I’d been able to arrange that, especially since I am normally anything but a big arranger, and I knew that what I had done meant a lot to them.

  I looked around. Tom looked healthier already. The TV show he produces had had a good year and was ending the season with fine ratings, whatever ratings mean. But it had taken a lot out of him, and that had showed.

  Now he looked happy under the implausible Tirolean hat which he has worn ever since I’ve known him, which is fourteen years. But the white brush was missing from it, lost perhaps in the crush on the dock as we came through. Or perhaps in the crush in our suite, for there had been quite a few people, most of them armed with champagne.

  “I’ll be damned. I guess I’ve been kicked out of the Alpine Mountain Climbers’ Club.”

  “I always knew you would be. But what for?”

  “It must be because of that day I was supposed to climb a mountain, and goofed. I climbed a valley instead.” Tom likes champagne.

  “That could happen to anyone.”

  “Of course. But it was pretty dumb of me. I should have realized much sooner why the blood was rushing to my head.”

  We all chuckled.

  The stewards came around again with their trays of paper streamers and bags of confetti, and we all took some and began throwing them down on the pier, and calling to people we spotted, and getting that feeling of imminence that seizes you at a sailing. Only one gangplank remained in place, and only two lines—at bow and stern—bound us to the North American continent. Those, and the hundreds of little paper streamers, still being flung downward with enthusiasm.

  I suppose they symbolize something, the knowledge that you are going a long way away, and leaving a lot of people and relationships—ties that will soon be broken.

  It’s not such a bad feeling.

  But Twit-Twit’s eyes still were moist. So were Betsy’s.

  I looked to my left. Next to me was a little group of college girls—maybe I should call them a murmuration—obviously on their way to the long summer-educational tour of Europe. They were apparently under the chaperonage of a tall, dark young woman who looked like she might need a chaperone herself in due time. The girls had the well-combed, well-scrubbed look that American kids have and which you never appreciate for what it is until you’ve been abroad awhile and run into it in places that aren’t well scrubbed.

  But they weren’t murmuring now or saying much at all. Some of them were dabbing their eyes, and again I thought, what in hell goes with women that they get so emotional when they leave land to go on water? But it happens, and it doesn’t happen when they take planes.

  Down below some blue-clad dock-workers came forward to lower the last gangplank. Only two lines and the paper streamers now held us to land.

  I wondered if my assignment, if I may use the expression, was aboard. I’d been watching the gangplanks as best I could and had seen no sign of her. Maybe she’d gotten on early, of course. Or would arrive at the last minute; it would probably be one or the other.

  I had checked the tentative passenger list when we first came aboard, and of course she was not listed. But she would not be traveling under her own name.

  Maybe it would turn out she wa
sn’t on board at all. In which case this would be an unalloyed pleasure trip for me. Otherwise I would have work to do.

  The gongs were whanging their final warning. I spotted one of our friends in the throng below and waved to him. He waved an empty champagne glass back at me; he’d walked off the ship with it full. The dockmen began pulling the gangplank back.

  Either she was aboard or she wasn’t. I sort of hoped she wasn’t.

  One of the college girls was crying openly; probably her parents were down there in the crowd. Or a boyfriend.

  Then I got my answer.

  From behind us came a sudden wild explosion of sound. Everybody jumped. The ship’s band had assembled behind us and, without even a warning roll on the snare drum, now broke loudly into “The Poor People of Paris.” And even while the trumpet and trombone blared, and the clarinet and violin squealed and squeaked, and the cymbals clashed, a little black-coated figure came scooting out of the crowd below toward the lowering gangplank and said something to the dock-workers who were handling it.

  You could see their exasperation even from where I was. But they reversed the motion, and the gangplank moved back into position. The lady in the black coat, sunglasses, dark hat and all, ran up into the ship, and the gangplank again receded.

  She looked like somebody’s frightened maid.

  But she wasn’t. There was no mistaking that figure and those legs.

  My assignment was aboard. Oh, well. In a way, I felt relieved. At least our presence on the ship was justified to the guy who had arranged the transportation.

  The ship’s whistle sounded its farewell blasts. The band swung into “Anchors Away.” The first of the remaining two lines was twitched aboard. I got an idea.

  Without saying anything, I turned, ducked past the band, and headed topside to the boat deck. That’s where her cabin was to be. I got to the stairwell just as she did, preceded by a steward carrying a small bag for her. I turned aside for them to pass and followed up the stairway.

  In a long black coat she seemed a small, almost slight figure. Certainly not the most famous female body in the world. She wore small, thin-rimmed, tinted glasses, not the usual Hollywood-type of big frame sunglasses. Little tufts of homely, grayish-white hair wisped out from under the pulled-down black slouch hat. With no lipstick or other make-up, she looked more and more like somebody’s old nanny, breathlessly making the boat at the last minute.