“Then you’ll be right over?” she was saying.
“That’s fine,” I said.
As I hung up, I looked at my watch. Quarter to twelve. A drink with Hugo and Tanya—unbearable but it had to be bearable—and then wouldn’t it be almost time? Wall Street after midnight? This, then, was the beginning of the end.
Virginia had left the couch and was fixing her face at a mirror.
I said, “You can take having a drink with Hugo and Tanya, can’t you? He’s crazy to meet you and she’s crazy about you. They can’t wait, it seems, to welcome you into the bosom of the family.”
She turned with the lipstick in her hand.
“Go in for a drink? With the car just left there out in the street?”
“It’s as safe there as anywhere. It won’t be for long. Then we can go on to Wall Street.”
“You mean, right after that—without coming back here?”
“Isn’t that best?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I suppose so. Then we’ll have to take the gun.”
“Yes.”
We hurried into the bedroom. I went to the bedside table and slipped the gun into my pocket. We picked up our coats in the hall. When we walked out into the lobby from the elevator, the doorman was sitting by the revolving door. He jumped up.
“Hi, Mr. Denham, your uncle took your car. Did they tell you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Your aunt.” He shook his head. “Poor lady, she looked real bad. Not a coronary, was it? My old man had a coronary just last week-end.”
“No, she’ll be all right,” I said.
We walked to the corner and got a cab. As we climbed into it, panic dealt me a sudden blow. Hadn’t we forgotten something? Wasn’t there some obvious, damning overlooked thing that we’d left behind in the apartment?
“Where to, mister?”
I gave the address in Turtle Bay. That was where Hugo and Tanya lived.
As I settled myself next to Virginia, I could feel the hard bulk of the gun pressed against my hip. The gun in the river—the body to Wall Street. It would come. Eventually we’d be able to be just two ordinary people in a taxi again …
We arrived at Hugo’s. As I paid off the cab, I could see my car. It was parked directly outside Hugo’s house. There was a Mercedes in front of it and just behind it a Cadillac. Surely it was camouflaged; surely, in this unobtrusively opulent neighbourhood, there was nothing, absolutely nothing to …
Hugo was opening the door. Tanya was hovering behind him. We were ushered into the hall with chattered greetings.
“So this is Virginia. Come in, come in. I can call you Virginia, can’t I? Tanya girl, take Virginia up to the living-room.”
Virginia and Tanya were starting up the stairs. Hugo glanced a little anxiously after them and then, with his compulsive tidiness, fussed our coats away into the closet.
“Listen, Lew, I told Father everything at the Club. You said I should.”
“I know,” I said.
He didn’t take it too well. Boy, he pretty near hit the ceiling for a while. But can you believe it? Now he’s met her, he’s crazy about her, Tanya says. Real thoroughbred, he said. Just look at her and you can tell. I had to tell you. He’d have told you himself but, of course, he had to be a bit tricky with Mother there and all.”
He was guiding me up the stairs, still holding on to my arm, glancing at me out of the edges of his absurdly glamorous eyes.
“Listen, Lew, about that foolishness. The South American, Rome, all that. It’s just a lot of vicious gossip. Not a word of truth in it. Father’s sure and so am I. So … Lew, you will forget it, won’t you? I mean, you won’t be mad. I know I goofed at the Club. But it was all so sudden, wasn’t it? And with Beth and everything. Gosh, Lew, I wouldn’t want you to feel bad.”
Dimly, because Uncle Gene and Hugo were the last of my worries at that moment, I noted the inevitable Denham ostrich technique in operation. I was married; the matter was out of their hands. Okay. Make the best of it. Forget the facts. Invent new ones. Change by Denham metamorphosis the “Byword of Rome” into the “Real Thoroughbred”.
We got to the living-room on the second floor. Tanya had had all the décor changed again. She was almost as vague about the value of the American dollar as her grandparents. This time everything was cream and yellow. We had to admire it. Hugo fiddled with mint juleps. Then we all sat around being gracious and upper-upper-class and terribly fond of each other.
For some temperaments, perhaps, it might have been soothing, but for me the contrast between Hugo’s secure little nest and our own reality made a persistent onslaught on my dwindling control. With every second, the idea of the car parked outside grew more and more ominous. I was sitting on a daffodil couch while Tanya, curled at the other end, was chattering away. I thought I was listening adequately, but suddenly she said, “Darling, what’s the matter? You’re looking at your watch all the time.”
Was I? I hadn’t even realised it. I glanced at Virginia. She was very deliberately not looking at me.
“I …” I said. “I …”
Then Hugo gave a dazzling smile and said with a daring and vulgarity which was quite unlike him, “Tanya girl, why not? Newlyweds, you know. Newlyweds don’t want to sit around all night nattering with the family.”
He had given us our cue to leave. At least I thought he had, but before I could take advantage of it, the thought of newlyweds had brought on a sentimental mood and he had started to narrate to Virginia the saga of how True Love had come to him. I had heard the story over and over again, and even the first time it had been tedious enough. Now it was excruciating. The pleasure steamer on Lac Leman. (It could only have been Lac Leman, the stodgiest lake in the world.) The girl in white leaning on the rail, the drunken Schweizer-Deutsch trying to get fresh with her, the noble Sir Galahad Hugo coming to the rescue, raising his hat gallantly, saying, “Let me introduce myself. I am Hugo Denham of New York City and, as for you—there’s no need to ask who you are. Anyone can tell you’re a princess.” And then the punch line: “I’d just said that, just to be continental, you know. And imagine! I’d hit it right on the button.”
I waited agonisedly for the familiar punch line. It came. On the word “button,” I jumped up, saying, “Okay, Hugo, thanks. Thanks for the drink.” In a few moments, Virginia and I were climbing into the car, while Hugo and Tanya, standing at the open front door, holding their mint juleps, stood watching us benignly.
I headed the car away from the kerb.
“Quick,” said Virginia, waving and smiling a fixed desperate smile out of the window. “For God’s sake, get out of here.”
The body first? Or the gun? I opened my mouth to put this question to Virginia, but a glimpse of Tanya and Hugo, still smiling and waving in the doorway like an upper-crust young host and hostess in a slick magazine ad, made the very idea of such a statement unimaginable.
I thought: The body first. Yes. Get rid of it. Dump it. Never think of it again—ever.
I started to drive downtown, with Virginia sitting straight and silent beside me. Where in Wall Street? With a sort of hysterical frivolity, I thought of Uncle Gene’s bank building. No. Not there, of course. But where? It didn’t matter. Drive down, drive around, find a place, any place….
I turned east in the Twenties. It was amazing how even here, the moment you left the main avenues, the streets were already almost deserted. It wasn’t going to be hard. The moment we found the right place, an alleyway or a delivery entrance …
Then, as my confidence soared, Virginia gave a strangled gasp.
“My God!”
I spun around to her. “What is it?”
“His overcoat.”
“His overcoat?”
“He wasn’t wearing an overcoat but he must have had one. He’d never have gone out in this cold without one.”
There was near-panic in her voice. Once again it infected me. Of course!
“It’s got to be in the apartme
nt, Lew. It’s … Yes, of course, in the hall cupboard. You came in with your overcoat. So did I. We never looked in the hall cupboard.”
The damning thing! The thing I’d known we had overlooked.
“Quick, Lew. Go back.”
It was only with a great effort of will that I cleared the mounting fumes from my brain.
“No.”
“But, Lew …”
“If it’s there, we can get it later. We can destroy it the way we destroyed my suit.”
“But when they find him without a coat, they’ll know he must have been driven there from somewhere else.”
“I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“But …”
“Go back to the apartment? Come out again with a coat over my arm? Or a suitcase?”
“Yes,” she said. She turned her head. Her pupils were dilated with fear. “Oh, Lew, it’s all impossible. It’s hopeless. We should never have tried. You should have called the police. You …”
“Shut up,” I said. “Shut up, baby.”
I put my hand on her arm. It was quivering. “Darling, please listen to me. Everything’s going to be all right. I started this. I’m going to finish it.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Lew. I’m sorry.”
As I drove on, heading south, the city became progressively darker, quieter, until we were moving past the courthouse deeper into the shrouded, mysterious canyons of the financial district. Everything, it seemed, that I’d ever heard about Wall Street by night was true. It was a desert, a huge, sombre Gobi with vast skyscraper cactuses sprouting up from solitude.
The moment I saw the place, I knew. We were in a crosstown street behind the Prudential Building. A little alley ran off between a featureless block of offices and a wildly anachronistic Victorian warehouse. There wasn’t the remotest hint of a human being. I drove the car in. As once before, I found that the moments which should have been the most horrible had the least impact. In less than a minute we’d lugged the body out of the baggage compartment, slithered it along the cracked cement until it lay, hidden from the street, behind a cluttered collection of ashcans.
We were in the car again, driving uptown. Way over on the West Side, I threw the gun into the Hudson. I took a flashlight then and inspected the luggage compartment. So far as I could see, there was no trace of any blood. But to make sure, I pulled out the rubber floor covering and threw it behind a pile of broken orange crates on the dockside.
At last it was done. The long nightmare was over.
As we drove crosstown at random, with no other plan than to get away from the river, I waited for the reckless sense of relief that, surely, should come. There was no sign of it. In fact, now that the anaesthesia of extreme danger had passed, my new alertness of mind was almost painful. We’d got rid of the body and the gun, yes. But there was still the possibility that the police would eventually come to question Virginia. It might never happen. A marriage in Paris might easily be overlooked or, even if unearthed, considered irrelevant to the murder. But the time to take chances had gone for ever. We had to be sure of an alibi in case we should need it and right now was the moment to get our evening absolutely straight. Not what we had done, of course, but what we were going to say we’d done.
How did it shape up at the moment? Remember. Remember exactly. I’d got back from the office at six-thirty. Forget about the call from the false “Sheila Potter”. Obliterate that. It could hurt far more than it could help. Virginia had been waiting at home. No. Regardless of where the police might think the murder had taken place, the most crucial of all moments was still the actual time of its commission. Between five-thirty and six-thirty? Then—change it. Virginia hadn’t been at home alone. She’d been shopping. She’d picked me up at the office at five and we’d gone home together. That was better. We’d had drinks and something to eat. Then we’d taken the car out to go to a movie. (What movie? Decide that later on.) We hadn’t been able to get in so we’d driven home again. The doorman had seen Virginia entering the foyer. The garage man had seen me bring in the car. Okay. After that? Aunt Peggy had come, then Uncle Gene and Tanya. They’d taken the car. Both the doorman and the two garage men were witnesses. A short time later Virginia and I had taken a taxi to Hugo’s to pick up the car. We’d had our drinks with Hugo and Tanya. But what then? What had we been doing between the time we left Hugo and the time I’d have to check the car in to the garage man again?
I knew, of course. I’d already anticipated it with the garage man. After Hugo and Tanya, we’d gone to a night-club. That was it. What night-club? Any night-club except the Club Marocain.
I put my hand on Virginia’s arm. “We’re going to the Trinidad Room …”
I picked the Trinidad Room because its bar was always crowded and in almost total darkness. It was most improbable that anyone would notice exactly when we’d come in or how long we’d been there. We had a drink at the bar and then to be on the safe side sat through the final floor show, which, blurred by my weariness, passed in a kind of haze of noise and nudity. It was nearly three when finally I let Virginia out of the car at the front entrance of the apartment building. My exhaustion was comlete now and in a way it was an effective relief, for in my utter weariness there was no part of me left that cared. We would have to look for the overcoat in the apartment. If it was there, we’d have to destroy it. The last dregs of my energy would just about be up to that. But after that had been done—stagger to bed, obliterate everything until morning.
I drove the car up to the head of the garage ramp. Ben, the night man, was snoozing in his cubicle. He came out yawning and grinning.
“Hi, Mr. Denham, so you hit the bright lights after all.”
“That’s right.”
“Got the Chevy back too. I knew it was okay about your uncle, still I figured I should check.”
I gave him the second set of keys which I’d retrieved from Hugo, and still yawning he climbed into the car.
“Okay, Mr. Denham. Get your rest now. There’s work to be done tomorrow.”
When I let myself into the apartment, Virginia was sitting in the living-room in the chair where Aunt Peggy had sat. There was a large black chesterfield with a velvet collar spread on her lap. Her hair falling across her forehead, she was savagely attacking a sleeve with the pair of kitchen scissors.
She glanced up. Her eyes seemed huge in the taut-skinned hollows of their sockets. Dimly, concentrating on the coat, I thought: Poor kid, she’s more exhausted than I am.
“It was there in the hall cupboard, Lew. I found it right away.”
I struggled bemusedly to cope with the implications of that fact. His coat had been hung up in the closet. Why? Why not dropped on a chair? He’d come in with a key? He’d hung his coat up in the closet? Who hung their coats up in other people’s closets? No one. Then he had been let in? He had been greeted by someone who had taken the coat, who had hung it up …?
“I even recognised it.” Virginia’s voice cut into my muzzy reflections and shattered them. “He bought it three years ago when we were living in Paris.”
That was, I knew, the most innocent of remarks. She had been living with him in Paris three years ago. Why wouldn’t she remember his coat? But as I stood watching her slashing to and fro with the scissors at the coat which she had seen three years ago in Paris, she became once again an ambiguous stranger, not my wife but the wife of—what was his name?—Mr. Olsen, pianist, deceased. Love bred trust? That was the decision I’d made. But what did I know about her? What did I know about my wife?
My head was aching. I’d hardly noticed it before. I sat down on the arm of a chair. Virginia went on destroying the coat, adding to a little pile of buttons on the table beside her.
You love her, I said stubbornly to myself. Remember. You love her.
At last she was finished.
“There.”
She came to me quite unself-consciously. How could she sense the perverted, perverting ideas that were
sprouting in my mind? She put her hands on my arms, smiling with a little bleak smile.
“We’ve done it, haven’t we? It ought to be all right, oughtn’t it?”
I tried to remember everything we’d done, everything we’d planned, every precaution we’d taken. Even in my exhaustion I knew that, in a way, this was our last chance. But the effort was simply beyond me. What we’d done, we’d done. We’d just have to hope for the best.
“I guess so,” I said. “I suppose so.”
One cigarette, maybe. One last cigarette. I brought out my pack. I offered it to her. She shook her head. I took one.
As I lit it, she said, “That reminds me. I’d better get my case. I left it by the telephone in the hall when that call came.”
She started away from me to the hall. The call made by someone pretending to be Sheila! That had happened, hadn’t it? At five the phone had rung? Virginia had gone to answer it? A voice, imitating Sheila, had said: I’ve something important to tell you?
Virginia was hurrying back into the room.
“Lew, did you take my case?”
“Isn’t it there?”
“No. But I distinctly remember putting it down by the phone when the call came. I’m absolutely sure. I … My God!”
The look on her face brought the full horror of the evening rushing back.
“Lew, you don’t think … I mean, it’s just the sort of thing Quentin would do, particularly since he gave it to me.”
“Quentin?” I said.
“Him. Quentin Olsen.”
So that had been his name! Quentin. From Q. to V. Gibraltar may tumble. Forgetting everything else, I could only think then of the pianist greeting our table from the stage, sitting down at the piano and playing “Our Love Is Here to Stay”. Why? Why would he have played that song, which obviously had been the symbol of their marriage, unless he had known she was there? And yet he hadn’t known. She had sworn she hadn’t spoken to him when she left the table. For a terrible moment, before I could suppress it, suspicion took full possession of me again. She had lied about that? Then she had lied about everything? Every impossible act I had performed that evening I had performed as a dupe?
Family Skeletons Page 7
