“Lew, I say, Lew, what is all this?”
“All what?” I said.
“This police lieutenant. He just barged in here. Lew, it’s something way outside of my experience. I mean, a police lieutenant just barging in and asking about you. About you, goddamn it, asking if we came to your house last night, and if you came back here later on … No explanations, nothing. Just asking and walking out. A police lieutenant, Lew. Surely, there isn’t anything …”
As his voice, registering outrage at this totally un-Denham occurrence, yakked on, I thought: Of course! Hugo and Tanya. They could establish that Olsen had been in St. John just as well as the manager. There was also a chance that they might remember something, some little fact, however meaningless to them, which might give actual substance to my wildly theoretical suspicions of Sheila.
“Hugo,” I said, “is it all right if I come over?”
“Why, of course, Lew. Of course. In fact I think you owe it to us.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
I hung up. I said to Virginia, “There’s just a chance. They were on the yacht.”
“You mean they might have heard or seen something?”
“They might.”
She got up. “Oh, Lew, but do be careful. I mean, they’re Denhams. They’ll never be on my side—not against Sheila.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said. “And if the manager calls before I get back, just get the dates when Olsen was there.”
I got my overcoat from the hall closet and went back to kiss her. Her lips stayed lingeringly on mine. It was wonderful, the feeling of trust restored.
“If anyone rings the doorbell,” I said, “don’t answer. It’ll be Trant and the only way he’s going to get in here again is with a search warrant.”
Hugo let me in himself. He was wearing a ridiculous maroon smoking jacket which Aunt Peggy had given him for Christmas. Hundreds of people, I imagine, are given maroon smoking jackets as presents by female relatives, but Hugo was the only person I knew who would actually wear one, on the theory, of course, that a Denham, being a Denham, could wear anything and automatically make it okay.
In fact, he looked astonishingly handsome in it, although his expression, as he shut the door behind him, was as fussily disapproving as an old nanny’s.
“Is it Virginia?” he asked. “Tanya thinks so. From something the lieutenant said. Surely … I mean, surely nothing’s come up about all that nonsense at the Club?”
The Club? The Byword of Rome?
“Not exactly,” I said.
“We’re both tremendously worried,” said Hugo. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to hold out for a while. You see, we happen to have people.”
As he spoke, I could hear the hum of voices from the upstairs living room. I might have known. There was hardly an evening when Hugo and Tanya were not either entertaining or being entertained in a perpetual cycle of parties far too exclusive or far too boring—or both—to appear in the Society columns. Even so, my heart sank. If ever there was a moment when I could have done without “people”!
“You can imagine,” said Hugo, emerging from the coat closet and prodding me up the stairs. “A policeman barging in—right at dinnertime too. The waitress actually announced him at the table: ‘A gentleman from the police department to see you, Mr. Denham.’ It was like the Gestapo. You know. Policemen arresting people at the dinner table and all that.”
It didn’t seem especially like the Gestapo to me, but then Hugo’s similes like his jokes were not his strong point. Once when I was fourteen and he was ten, just after Uncle Gene had adopted me, he’d practically slain himself with merriment trying to tell me a joke about a travelling salesman and a farmer’s daughter. I don’t know why I remembered it then, but I did, and the memory of it brought back so many teen-age associations and affections. I wish it hadn’t because Virginia was right. This thing was becoming a battle between Denham and non-Denham and I didn’t want my loyalties to be blurred in any way.
The “people” turned out to be four married couples of about my cousin’s age, all of them extremely cordial and extremely well connected and, even though I actually knew most of them, totally indistinguishable one from another.
Tanya, managing by some effort of will to look one thousand per cent American in a long orange sheath from Paris, drifted over to me and kissed me, saying, “Darling”. She gestured with a bare arm, calling, “Hi, everyone, you know Lewis.” Then, as her lips brushed my cheek again, she hissed, “Don’t worry. I’ll get rid of them in a minute.”
The minute stretched endlessly. Hugo kept giving me drinks and adding one for himself. In fact, he became quite tipsy in his staid way, which manifested itself merely in his excessive gallantry to a rather dumpy millionairess whose dress he kept describing as being “as heavenly blue as your eyes.” Since he was colour-blind and the dress in fact was an unattractive arsenic green, it didn’t seem to be much of a compliment, but she ate it up, exclaiming: “Oh, Hugo!” repeatedly. That was about par for conversation at the Denhams’ parties and I did my best to adapt myself, registering great enthusiasm for sulky racing with a Main Line ex-debutante and listening enthralled to somebody’s trip to Portofino. Then, to my dismay, a black dress with pearls sashayed over and started gushing over my “new wife”. Tanya had told her at dinner. How thrilling! Why wasn’t she with me? When would I bring her to dine? Think of it! Who would have dreamed it could happen—after poor darling Beth and all?
The party, which had seemed nothing more than a momentary stumbling block, became a nightmare. It was like being smothered in feathers. I could feel the energy I so desperately needed ebbing away in exhaustion. Why not—with only three hours’ sleep the night before?
The night before? Was it possible that it had only been twenty-four hours ago that we’d been struggling with the body and the mop in the service elevator?
They did go eventually. And, thank God, they were sufficiently herd-minded to leave in a group. Tanya and Hugo shepherded them down the stairs, and “Lovely, darling,” “See you next Thursday,” “How extraordinary that cousin of yours marrying again so soon” drifted up to me from the hall.
It was Tanya who came back to me first. She sat down next to me on the couch, kissing me, running her hand over my hair.
“Oh God, darling. People! Lew, what is it? It’s Virginia, isn’t it? Something bad for Virginia.”
Hugo came in then. One of the anonymous ladies had left an Orange Sunset or Flaming Dawn lipstick smudge on his cheek. He was quite drunk then, but of course he was, because being quite drunk at eleven-fifteen P.M. was almost a must in the In Set.
Now that I had them to myself at last, I found I hadn’t the remotest idea of what to say to them. A pianist had been murdered at a nightclub? Virginia was under suspicion of having killed him? But there again, the pianist had been blackmailing Sheila and it seemed to me that …? Because it was so impossible, I merely plunged in. I told them of Olsen’s death, I told them with the minimum of details of Virginia’s predicament, I also told them in full of my session with Sheila and Ray Callender.
It was, as I might have known, the information about Sheila that jolted them the most. They were bug-eyed enough about Virginia, but after all, with due respect to their cousinly regard for me, she wasn’t One of Them. Sheila, however! Sheila being blackmailed?
“But, darling!” It was Tanya. It always took Hugo a long time to get wound up. “Darling, are you sure?”
“Of course,” I said. “She admitted it.”
“And—and the night before the murder she went to some nightclub?” said Hugo. “She was seen with this—this Olsen?”
“Yes,” I said. “She could have killed him all right. And I think she did.”
Perhaps it was the very outlandishness of my suggestion that made it acceptable to them. It could fascinate them without seeming real, like one of those foolish parlour games about wondering what would have happened in World War II if Eleanor Roosevelt had p
oisoned Franklin D. and deserted to the Nazis. In any case, neither Hugo nor Tanya expressed the appalled indignation that I had half expected. They both merely gazed at me as if I were a particularly enthralling Cinerama screen, and Hugo—it was the liquor, of course-said, “Wow!”
Pressing my advantage, knowing that this atypical reaction couldn’t last for long, I said, “First. There’s one thing you can clear up. I’ll tell you why later. That January, when you all went down to Antigua, Olsen was at the Beach Club, wasn’t he?”
“Olsen?” echoed Hugo. “The blackmailer?”
“As a cocktail pianist,” I said. “A big, red-faced man who played in the Beach Club. Surely you remember.”
“Remember a cocktail pianist!” For a moment Hugo lapsed into his normal Denhamese. “Really, Lewis, does one remember cocktail pianists?”
I managed to keep my exasperation in check. “But you went to the Beach Club the night before you sailed for Guadeloupe, didn’t you? That dinner to celebrate my arrival when I didn’t show up?”
“Why yes,” said Hugo. “We were there.”
“Well then, wasn’t someone playing the piano in the dining room?”
“Well, I guess so. I—yes.” Hugo’s eyes brightened. The Sherlock Holmes was coming out in him. “Of course. I danced with Tanya.” He turned to Tanya. “Don’t you remember, girl?”
“Yes,” said Tanya, “of course I remember.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s good enough. So let’s assume—just for the sake of argument—that he’d tried to blackmail Sheila, let’s assume she’s refused to pay, let’s assume he had threatened to expose her and she’d still defied him.”
I paused. Was this the moment to let them hear my Denham-shattering theory about Sheila and Beth? No. Not yet. It was better to get from them first a complete record of that time in Antigua before the trip to Guadeloupe, that period which, after the shock of Beth’s drowning, had never been more to me than a jumble of unco-ordinated details learned at the airport when they’d returned or in the days of confusion before the memorial service in St. Thomas’s.
Although they couldn’t have known what I was driving at, they were still agog enough to be quite biddable. Between them they pieced together the salient facts. With Uncle Gene, Sheila and the Prince and Princess, they had flown down to St. John on the eighth of January. (One thing about Hugo was that he invariably remembered dates.) They had pottered around, swimming, sailing, occasionally going to the Beach Club for cocktails. On January 15, Beth and Aunt Peggy had joined them and a typical Denham vacation had continued on its course of aristocratic boredom until the twenty-second, the day I’d been due to arrive. The prospect of seeing me apparently had stirred them up. It had been Beth’s idea to stage a celebration dinner for me at the Beach Club and Uncle Gene’s that we should start out immediately afterwards on the sail to Guadeloupe.
“When you called to say you weren’t coming, darling,” said Tanya, “we almost gave up the dinner, but we didn’t. We all went up there in a body quite early, around six-thirty.”
It was, I knew, wildly optimistic to hope that anything significant could emerge from memories fifteen months old, but what else was there now between us and the encirclement of Lieutenant Trant’s net?
I said, “Can either of you remember if there’d been any time at the club when Olsen could have spoken in private to Beth?”
“Beth,” echoed Hugo. “Whatever has this got to do with Beth?”
“Just try to remember,” I said.
Hugo blinked. That was a bad sign. I was sure then that any minute now the astonishment and the liquor would wear off and there would be an explosion of outraged Denhamism. Tanya, however, was a woman and women can be tantalised by curiosity longer than men.
“Beth!” she said, and the nearest thing to a furrow without actually being one, showed in the petal-smooth skin between her eyes. “Well, I do remember one thing. I don’t know whether it’s what you mean. Beth came into the powder room when I was there. We were just leaving. She said not to wait for her because she wanted to call you again. She said she’d been so casual with you when she’d talked to you before. She wanted to let you know how disappointed she really was that you weren’t going to join us.”
Couldn’t it have happened then? Why not? In spite of the occasional lapses in which she seemed to confuse me with Maisie, Beth had not been a sentimental person. Surely she wouldn’t have held up the whole party just for an affectionate impulse.
Controlling my excitement, I said, “Did she seem upset in any way?”
“I don’t think so,” said Tanya. “Not particularly. But, Lewis darling, I’m dying. Tell me. What on earth is all this about?”
“Not even later?” I said. “On the yacht. Didn’t she seem at all upset on the yacht?”
“On the yacht? That’s something you’ll have to ask Hugo,” she said. “I didn’t go on the yacht.”
“You didn’t?” That showed how little I knew about the night that had widowed me. Surely, if I had been any kind of a husband, I would have questioned them all minutely until the smallest detail had been branded on my heart. Even then, when there was so much that was immediate to plague me, I felt a stirring of shame and guilt.
“No,” Tanya was saying. “You see, at the club, Mother became—well, a little under the weather. And you know how Grandma and Grandpa are. They hardly knew her then anyway and they didn’t want the responsibility of being left with her. So, at the last minute, I stayed behind.” She turned to Hugo. “Did you notice anything on the yacht, darling?”
I’d been right about Hugo reverting. He was glaring at me now owlishly—if anyone as handsome as Hugo could look like an owl.
“About what?” he said. “About Beth? What is all this, Lew. You’re not going crazy are you?”
It had to be said then and I said it.
“When Sheila refused to pay up, I think Olsen spilled the dirt on her to Beth. I think Beth confronted her with it on the yacht and …”
The explosion came even before I had expected it. Not only from Hugo, either. Both of them jumped to their feet. I was confronted by a stare of appalled hostility from two pairs of eyes. Hugo’s voice, when it came, was somewhere between a croak and a squeak.
“You’re suggesting …? Lew, let me get this right. You’re suggesting that Sheila … that Sheila pushed …”
He couldn’t even finish the sentence. I knew why, of course. Until that moment we’d been in fantastic but permitted territory. Sheila tied up with a blackmailer? Some obscure pianist? Sheila even killing him? That was tolerable because, after all, in the world outside the world of the Denhams were shady characters, crooks, all sorts of riffraff who might just conceivably for a moment impinge. But Sheila and Beth!
“No,” Hugo was sputtering. “No, Lew, just let me get this straight. Are you suggesting that Sheila …”
I hadn’t meant to get angry. So much was at stake that to lose Hugo and Tanya now would be to lose our only hope. But in spite of myself the indignation seethed up in me and I said, “Why not? I’ve told you she was being blackmailed, I’ve told you it started in Antigua, I’ve told you she could have refused to pay at first. She practically said so herself. Why couldn’t Olsen have decided to try another member of the family? Why wouldn’t he have gone to Beth? Why wouldn’t Beth have confronted Sheila with it? Why couldn’t there have been a struggle on deck …?” and his voice was icy.
“And Sheila pushed her overboard?” Hugo could say it now
“Yes,” I said.
“On the deck? Beth was taking the watch? Sheila came up from her cabin? They had this—this confrontation you talk about and Sheila …?”
“That’s it,” I said. “For God’s sake, Hugo, do you think I’d be suggesting it if it wasn’t for Virginia?”
“Virginia!” Hugo dismissed my wife by repeating her name as if he were passing judgment on a particularly unattractive insect held wriggling in the grip of a pair of forceps. “Is that wha
t you’re saying, Lewis? Is that what you expect me to believe?”
“Yes,” I said. “If you saw anything, if you noticed anything that could confirm it, yes. If Sheila had killed Beth, Olsen would have suspected her. He’d have been practically certain. With that to hold over her, he could have made her life unbearable.”
Hugo had sat down again. Carefully, he was hitching up his pants to preserve the crease, something he’d been taught by an English governess imported in his kindergarten days to keep his accent undefiled by indiscriminate playmates.
“An interesting theory,” he said; relishing his sarcasm as if sarcasm were an indescribably delicate weapon which only a Denham could use to its fullest effect. “A very interesting theory indeed. That I must admit. But unfortunately, most unfortunately …”
He broke off. He was looking right at me. Already; even before he said it, I could feel the oppressive weight of failure.
“I am under no obligation to tell you this, Lewis. No obligation at all. Anyone deranged enough to have imagined such a thing deserves nothing but contemptuous silence. But just to make sure you’ll stop spreading this dirty little rumour any further, I will let you know that all through Beth’s watch, Sheila was with me. She couldn’t sleep. We were playing gin rummy in her cabin. She never left the cabin for a second. She was there when the squall came. She was there when I ran up on deck. I’m sorry if it disappoints you to learn that your mother-in-law did not murder your wife. But there it is and now you’ll kindly get the hell out of my house.”
What made it worse was the fact that once he had destroyed the theory, I realised that it had never completely convinced me, either. Sheila murdering Beth? How could anyone with a drop of Denham blood honestly bring himself to believe that? I had manufactured the whole thing out of desperation, hadn’t I? Just because, without some sort of theory which didn’t involve Virginia, my life would be unendurable. That was all.
Well, there it was. Life was unendurable again.
Dimly I was conscious of Tanya’s voice. She had moved over to Hugo and was standing behind his chair, her hands on his shoulders.
Family Skeletons Page 14
