Family Skeletons

by Patrick Quentin

  It was terrible for me then, for the more her ability to lie dazzled me, the harder it was to suppress the inevitable question: If this sounds so true and I know it’s a lie, then what about …? From somewhere I found the strength to choke off a train of thought which could lead only to chaos.

  She was glancing at Trant now as if she expected some sort of reaction. There was none.

  “So, Lieutenant, to come to the cigarette-case which, after all, is the point, isn’t it? When we were talking together, it so happened that I took out my case. The moment I brought it out, of course, he recognised it because he’d given it to me when we were married. Heaven knows where he’d found the money from. It was the only really expensive thing that either of us had ever owned. That was when I got the idea. You see, I’d always felt a little guilty anyway about having kept it when we broke up and just when he’d been complaining about what a poor financial winter he’d had. So … I blush to admit this, Lieutenant, but obviously I’ve got to.”

  She broke off and for a moment her hand, lying on the couch, touched mine. That small contact, revealing her fear, indicating her great need for me, made it all right again. She was taking this desperate chance not only for herself but for us. I was sure of it.

  “I suppose you’d call it a deal, wouldn’t you, Lieutenant? Quentin was very sweet really, not at all the sort of person to have his feelings hurt. I offered him a cigarette and when he took the case I just pressed it into his hand and said, ‘There. That’s far more sensible than buying Lew a drink, isn’t it?’ Neither of us said anything else. There was no need. He put the case in his pocket, gave a little bow and blew me a kiss and that, I thought, was the end of Quentin Olsen for me.”

  She gave a little self-mocking shrug. “So you can understand, Lieutenant, how I felt this morning when you came and told me he was dead. I’m also hoping that both you and Lew can understand why I didn’t tell you about the marriage. Of course I would have if you’d actually asked. But … well, you made it so easy just not to mention it. Not, of course, that it got me anywhere. In fact, it’s only made it worse, hasn’t it? I suppose I should accept the whole thing as a healthy lesson in the wages of cowardice.”

  For a moment she sat in silence. Behind the brightness of her eyes I could trace for the first time a hint of the desperation from which that long and intricate lie had been born. I hoped and prayed that Trant wasn’t noticing it too. She made a tentative gesture with her hand.

  “There’s only one thing more to say, Lieutenant. I never saw Quentin again after those few minutes at the bar. I don’t know how valid my word is to you any more—not very, I imagine—but I swear to you that is the truth and if there’s anything I can tell you about Quentin that might help, I’m more than ready to co-operate.” Her eyes turned back to me. “I’m sorry, Lew. That’s all I can say, isn’t it? I’m humiliated and ashamed of myself—and very sorry.”

  Now it was over I could do nothing but marvel at the sheer nerve of her gamble and at its effectiveness. Not only had she accounted for the presence of her cigarette-case in Olsen’s pocket; by deftly playing the embarrassed wife, she had made her earlier failure to mention the marriage nothing more than the result of an awkward domestic dilemma and, furthermore, she had managed to turn me into a completely innocent by-stander. Hadn’t she, improbably, saved the day? However suspicious Trant might still be, hadn’t she neutralised the only evidence he had against us? Wasn’t it possible that, so long as our alibi held up, there was nothing drastic he could do?

  The silence had gone on just long enough to make me realise it was up to me to act out the part she had assigned to me.

  Still holding her hand, I said, “Well, darling, this is quite a surprise. But let’s get one thing straight. So far as I’m concerned, there wasn’t the slightest reason why you should have told me you’d been married before. It’s none of my business and, if I’d bothered to ask, you’d have told me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Why yes,” she said, “I’m sure I would.”

  “Then so much for that.” I turned to Trant and his blank, unwavering stare. “All right, Lieutenant. What are you going to do? I’m not a complete idiot. I realise this is a murder case. I can see why you were suspicious of me this morning when you found my address on Olsen. And I can see why you must have been even more suspicious of my wife when you identified that cigarette-case as hers. But it seems to me that she’s given you a perfectly good explanation for what her case was doing in his pocket and, incidentally, she’s cleared up the reason for my address being there too, hasn’t she? Since Olsen had been married to her, it was perfectly natural for him to jot down her address. So, surely, now that everything’s out in the open, there’s no point in suspecting Virginia of any complicity in the crime. Especially—now I come to think of it—since it was a physical impossibility for her to be involved. Didn’t you say Olsen was killed around six-thirty, that he’d been kept somewhere and finally dropped off downtown? As you may remember, Virginia was with me alone or with me and some member of my family from five until around two-thirty or three or whenever we got back from the Trinidad Room.”

  Had I been too glib? It was, of course, impossible to tell with Trant. At any moment during Virginia’s disingenuous monologue and my equally disingenuous epilogue to it, he could have interrupted us, but he hadn’t. Even now he took his time. For a long moment he just sat looking first at Virginia, then at me.

  At last he said, “Well, well, what a very full explanation of everything.”

  Then as he sat there, he smiled. It was a broad, white, almost affectionate smile. Without any warning, he got up and held out his hand to Virginia.

  She rose hesitantly, taking the hand.

  “But you’re not going! I mean, there must be all sorts of questions.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve answered all the questions I brought with me, Mrs. Denham. I’ll have to think up some more, won’t I? And that takes time.” He turned then, extending the hand to me. “Time, Mr. Denham, is something we agree about, isn’t it? We neither of us like to waste it.”

  He was, quite unbelievably, moving towards the door. I followed him. At the door he turned back to Virginia. He was still holding the case. He stretched it out towards her.

  “Look at me! I was almost walking away with your valuable case. I … But then, of course, it isn’t yours any more, is it? You gave it to Olsen before he was murdered, so now it’s officially part of his estate. How stupid of me to have got it muddled.”

  He glanced down at the cigarette-case in his hand and then, slipping it into his pocket, moved out into the hall.

  I went with him to the elevator.

  When it came, he said, “Good-bye, Mr. Denham. Thank you very much, both of you—for the drink.”

  I might have known he would play it that way. When had he failed to use to its full nerve-racking value his technique for leaving everything up in the air? But understanding his method didn’t lessen my fear of him or the frustrating anger that was seething through me. Thanks to Virginia, we were one up for the moment. But how long would that moment last? How long did one remain one up on Lieutenant Trant?

  I went back into the living-room. Virginia was standing exactly where I had left her.

  “He’s gone?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you were wonderful.”

  “No.” Her face, unguarded now, showed panic. “I had to invent something and that was all I could think of. But it won’t work—not with Trant. I realised just as he was leaving. It’ll all fall apart because of Sheila.”

  “Sheila?”

  “Don’t you see? I told him I met Quentin at the bar and gave him the case before I came back to join you at the table. But it was only after I came back that I offered Sheila the case. Trant’s so clever and he didn’t believe me, you know he didn’t. All he has to do is to go back to Sheila—and he will. He’ll go to her and she’ll tell him.”

  She was right, of course. Trant would do exactly that. Once a
gain, when something at least seemed to have been rescued, lurking to betray us was the small, single, overlooked detail.

  “Oh, Lew.” She came to me then. “We can’t go on like this. We just can’t. Please, please, let’s give up, let’s tell everything. It can’t be worse than this.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, because I realised then that it still could be. “Let him go to Sheila. She won’t tell him anything because I’ll be there before him—and I can stop Sheila.”

  I took her in my arms. I told her what I’d learned from Esmeralda.

  “I could tell Trant right now. It’d be more than enough to keep him from arresting you, even if he wanted to. But I’m not going to let him know yet—not till I have to. Right now it’s Sheila.”

  I called her.

  “Listen, I’m coming right over. If Lieutenant Trant gets there before I do, say you’re out, say you can’t see him. Whatever you do, don’t talk to him.”

  “But, Lewis …” Sheila’s voice was plaintive, agitated. “I’ve been waiting to call you. I knew the Lieutenant was going straight to you and I didn’t dare call too soon. But he’s already been here. He …”

  “I know. But he’ll be back. Stall him, Sheila. I mean it. If you open your mouth to Trant, you’ll regret it to your dying day.”

  “But, Lewis …”

  I slammed down the receiver on Sheila’s astonished gasp. I turned back to Virginia. She had dropped into a chair. Her hands were up covering her face. My love for her, which was always there unblurred by all the other conflicting emotions, made my mouth dry. I dropped down beside her.

  “Baby, it’ll be all right. I swear it. If Sheila doesn’t work, then I’ll find something else, and if that doesn’t work, then I’ll find something else. It’s all right, Virginia. I’m going to make it all right.”

  She turned to me almost violently, pressing her face against my shoulder.

  “It’s the lying,” she said. “That’s what’s so frightening. Having to think all the time, never being off your guard for a second.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She looked up at me. Her face was so close to mine that I could feel her eyelashes flickering against my cheek.

  “It’s you,” she said. “That’s all that makes it possible. If I ever thought you’d stopped believing in me, I’d die …”

  PART FOUR

  Sheila continued to live in her apartment on 79th Street because she was a woman who didn’t change her habits. She’d been there ever since her marriage to Beth’s father, a banker almost as distinguished as Uncle Gene and even richer than Sheila herself. It must have been too big for them when Mr. Potter was alive. It was certainly too big for her now.

  The butler who had been with her ever since I could remember opened the door. He brought back all sorts of memories of previous visits—visits with Beth (and Maisie) as the model young married couple, even earlier visits when I had come as Beth’s suitor, almost convinced I was in love, carrying not quite the right corsages which I had bought at the most okay florists.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Lewis. Mrs. Potter is expecting you. And Cook says if you’re staying for dinner, there’s plenty.”

  He led me down long corridors hung with old-master-type paintings. It was that sort of apartment. Finally he brought me to one of the living-rooms, still known as the White Room although it had ceased to be white some years ago when Sheila had found a decorator who was boosting Chinese Chippendale.

  Sheila, rather elaborately dressed, it seemed, for someone who was presumably planning to eat at home, was seated on a scarlet couch which stood beneath a large Chinnery canvas of the eighteenth-century docks of Hong Kong. Expectedly, Ray Callender was standing beside her with a drink in his hand, very tweedy and manly, like a writer in a Broadway play.

  It is strange how, at the most unlikely moments, the past comes back to oppress you. Sheila Potter in her home was the Sheila Potter I had always known, a very different and far more formidable person than the Sheila Potter who in my mind I had glibly been branding as a blackmail victim and murderess. As the butler withdrew and I was left watching her across an enormous stretch of Iranian carpet, I found myself feeling as I had used to feel years ago, faintly intimidated by her quite unconscious display of inherited confidence and prestige.

  I thought: If she’s done what I think she’s done, she’s Virginia’s mortal enemy. Therefore she’s my mortal enemy, too. The thought helped as, without rising, she said, “Now, Lewis, what on earth is all this about?”

  And Ray Callender chimed in aggressively, “Yes, what’s the idea of yelling that way at Sheila over the phone?”

  I said, “Has Trant been here since I called?”

  “Why, no, dear,” said Sheila and that “dear” was as patronising as if she’d been addressing the rather cute daughter of the janitor.

  I would have liked a drink, but since one hadn’t been offered, I hesitated to ask.

  Meanwhile Sheila, patting at her hair which couldn’t have been more immaculate, said, “Dearest Lewis, I do wish you wouldn’t just stand there. What is all this? What, indeed, is the purpose of Lieutenant Trant? That pianist at the nightclub has apparently been murdered. It’s too bad, I’m sure, although it seems to me that people of that sort are incessantly getting themselves killed. But why was the lieutenant so interested in your Virginia’s cigarette-case? I must admit, now I come to think of it, that he was if possible even more uncommunicative than you.”

  “He didn’t tell you?” I asked.

  Sheila Potter reached for a cigarette from a jade box. Ray Callender, solicitous, jumped to light it.

  “All the lieutenant did,” she said, sending a frail tendril of smoke down her nostrils, “was to tell me that Mr. Olsen was dead—and to ask me if I could identify a cigarette-case. I recognised it at once, of course. It was a most distinctive case.” The cigarette stopped dead on its way from her lips. “Oh dear, I didn’t do anything wrong, did I? I haven’t got your nice Virginia into trouble? I mean, we can’t conceivably suppose that she is in any way implicated, can we?”

  Knowing what I knew about her and Callender, that Society airiness was maddening in the extreme, and anger gave me the needed impetus.

  I said, “When Trant comes back—and he will—you’ll tell him that Virginia offered you the cigarette-case before she left the table.”

  Her delicate eyebrows flickered up and down. “Before she what, Lewis?”

  “Before she left the table. I introduced you, she offered you the case, she left the table. After she came back, you never saw the cigarette-case again.”

  “But, Lewis, that just isn’t true. I remember distinctly. She left the table before we arrived. It was only much later, after …”

  “I’ve told you what to say,” I said “All you have to do is say it.”

  “Well,” said Sheila. “Well, all I can say to that is—well.”

  It was then and only then that I first became aware of the undercurrent of tension between her and Callender. There had been no signal, no surface indication whatsoever. They weren’t even looking at each other. In fact, Ray Callender was staring belligerently at me. But I could sense it quite plainly, and I was sure then that in spite of their elaborate façade, they were afraid. That was something.

  Ray Callender was saying, “Are you crazy thinking you can come here and threaten Sheila into telling a bare-faced lie to the police? I don’t know a thing about your wife—and I understand, by the way, that she is your wife. But if she’s in any kind of trouble, it’s hardly a matter that concerns Sheila, is it?”

  “Why, Lewis,” put in Sheila, “if Virginia is in trouble, then of course I’m most unhappy for you. But why be so dictatorial? Wouldn’t it be friendlier to explain the situation to us and then ask us if we’re in a position to help?”

  The nerve of it!

  I said, “I know the position you’re in a little better than you do, it seems. Olsen was blackmailing you. He was threatening to let the Denh
ams know you’re having an affair. So you murdered him and you’re hoping to pin the blame on Virginia.”

  I had meant that to be like a hurled hand grenade which not only would smash their smug assurance but would destroy once and for all the atmosphere of the White Room, with its overwhelming evidence of wealth and position and a respectability far beyond the reach of any vulgar aspersions. The effect was all I could have wished. For an instant they both remained absolutely stiff, as rigid and artificial as the Chinnery coolies on the wall. Then Ray Callender swung around and, hurrying to the couch, sat down next to Sheila, putting his hand on her bare arm. In shock, Sheila looked suddenly homely but oddly enough much younger too. There was an improbable resemblance to Beth of all people. For a moment it distracted me.

  Then, very softly, she said, “Lewis, are you mad?”

  “You deny he was blackmailing you?”

  “Us killing that man? Us trying to put the blame on Virginia?”

  “Don’t bother to answer him.” Ray Callender’s voice cut in. He glared at me. “It’s fantastic. What is this? You pull accusations out of the air.”

  “The air backstage at the Club Marocain, for example?”

  “The Club Marocain? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The night we, met you there, you both left the club with Quentin Olsen.”

  “I deny that emphatically.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you, because that’ll mean we’ll have to fight the cross-town traffic to the Hotel Crystal and catch Esmeralda before she leaves for the club. I don’t think any of us are in the mood for that.”

  “Esmeralda?” said Sheila. “The dancer?”

  “If that woman told you she saw us …” began Ray.