Family Skeletons

by Patrick Quentin

  At last the way was clear for me. I felt no sense of victory, no satisfaction even. I merely knew that the time had come.

  “Do you want to know what I’m going to tell Trant?” I said.

  In the intensity of their concern for each other, they seemed almost to have forgotten me. Now they both turned to face me.

  I said, not to Uncle Gene but to Sheila, “You and Ray Callender had given Olsen twenty-four hours to get out of the country. You thought you had him licked. Oh, don’t worry. I believe every word you told me. Of course you didn’t kill him, because you had him where you wanted him. But Uncle Gene didn’t know that. He didn’t know a thing about any of it—as Olsen would have been the first to realise.”

  I turned to Uncle Gene. I was feeling curiously disembodied.

  “Olsen wasn’t going to leave the country empty-handed. Why the hell should he when he had such a golden opportunity in Sutton Place. Two days ago he came here, didn’t he? You didn’t know him from Adam. He was just a man who barged in out of the blue. He told you he knew about you and Sheila. He threatened to go to the papers unless you gave him a blank cheque. You were sensible enough to know you were helpless but sensible enough to play for time too. You promised him the money. You told him to meet you …” Watch out! Don’t mention the key or my apartment. To admit that I knew Olsen had been there would be to betray our removal of the body. “… to meet you at a given place at five-thirty to deliver the money. You did that. You showed up at five-thirty—and you killed him.”

  “Killed him!” gasped Sheila.

  “Yes,” I said. “Because of you, but more, I think, because of Aunt Peggy. He’d have killed anyone before he’d run the risk of Aunt Peggy finding out about you.”

  I hadn’t expected the newly restored Uncle Gene to crack, so the confusion of astonishment and outrage on his face didn’t impress me. For a moment there was complete silence. Then there sounded a small but grotesquely audible hiccup. One of the double doors wobbled open and Aunt Peggy loomed.

  “Well,” she said with a giggle, “well, well, well. This seems to be the appropriate moment for my entrance.”

  Uncle Gene and Sheila jumped apart, although in fact they had not been touching each other. It was a situation quite beyond all of us. And what made it even more unlikely was the fact that in her hand Aunt Peggy held a tooth glass of gin. Never through the long years of Denham pretence had Aunt Peggy any more than the rest of us admitted the true cause of her “seediness”. Never had liquor been seen to pass her lips.

  Now she tilted her glass to her mouth and gulped. She radiated her plastic doll’s smile like a rather erratic lighthouse beam, letting it settle on me.

  “Lewis,” she said, “Lewis dear, what a fuss! Jabber, jabber, jabber. I mean to say! Sheila and Gene. What a bore. Sheila and Gene. That old, old boring thing? I mean, when things go on and on, they’re so boring. Who wants to bother?”

  Ignoring me then, she started towards Sheila.

  “Sheila darling, I heard your voice in the hall and you’re just the person I want to see. You remember Adelaide Himmelford? Of course you remember her.” She had reached Sheila then and leaned forward to kiss her. The kiss made contact with Sheila’s cheek but something was happening to her legs. “You’ll never believe what Adelaide Himmelford said to me. I mean, it was outrageous, quite outrageous.” She was clinging to Sheila for support now, and as she spoke, she slowly slid down the length of her, one hand managing somehow to keep the tooth glass from spilling. “Darling Sheila, you’ll understand. I know you will. You’re such a comfort. Always such a …”

  She reached the floor and the drink did spill then. It made a little dark piddle across the Aubusson.

  It was hardly the moment for wry psychological reflections, but as we all stood gazing down at her, the irony of the situation almost managed to shoo out the farce and the horror. Sheila and Uncle Gene had spent interminable, guilt-ridden years trying to shield Aunt Peggy from “that old, old thing, that boring thing” which she had known from the start and which was infinitely less important to her than Adelaide Himmelford’s criticism of her pink hat.

  Drunks, I thought. They were more mysterious than the Near, the Middle and the Far East combined.

  Both Sheila and Uncle Gene had dropped to their knees and were bending distractedly over her.

  “Peggy!” exclaimed Uncle Gene. “Peggy dear.”

  And Sheila was gently lifting up her head.

  For a moment the two of them were totally concerned with her. I might not have existed for them. Then Uncle Gene remembered me.

  He got up. His knee joints creaked, which somehow was pathetic in the patriarch of the Denhams, the intrepid captain of the Arabella. He glanced down once again to make certain that Sheila was ministering. Then, reassured, he turned his attention to me. I had no idea what was coming, no idea even what I felt about him any more. All I knew was that what had happened was probably the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to him.

  “Lewis,” he said, “you will, I’m sure, do what you think is right. Nothing I say can stop you. But will you take my word for it that the accusation you have just made is entirely unfounded in fact? Until the lieutenant mentioned his name to me, I had never heard of Olsen in my life. I knew nothing of his persecution of Sheila. He never came to this house. I have had no connection with him whatsoever. And, incidentally, if you’d bothered to check your facts before making this melodramatic charge, you would have found out that between four and six-thirty on the day of the murder, I was in a board meeting at the bank.”

  A board meeting at the bank. Could he be inventing that? Was it possible he imagined himself influential enough to persuade a whole board meeting of cronies to give him a false alibi? No. Of course not. Then—not Sheila. Not Uncle Gene. This trail, too, had led me absolutely nowhere.

  As the whole jerrybuilt structure of my theory started to topple around me, Uncle Gene’s voice came through to me once again, the voice which from childhood had represented the ultimate authority.

  “Therefore, Lewis, if you insist on going to the police, on ruining my life and Sheila’s, you have the power to do so. But before you make an irrevocable decision, I feel you should ask yourself whether there is any justification for sacrificing the happiness of your own family—quite meaninglessly—through some infatuated loyalty to a woman who is certainly a liar, certainly a whore and almost certainly a murderess.”

  There it was again. Wherever I turned, it always came back to the same thing. I longed for the rage and bitterness with which to blast him. But they didn’t come. All I felt was a paralysing exhaustion.

  Not Sheila … not Uncle Gene.

  Satisfied that he had taken care of me, Uncle Gene had turned away. Once again he was on his knees beside Sheila, bending over Aunt Peggy.

  Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere in the world but there.

  As I left the room, I heard Uncle Gene’s voice, soft, solicitous.

  “Peggy, my dear. Can you hear me, my dear?”

  And Sheila’s voice, equally solicitous, sounded too. “Peggy darling, it’s all going to be all right.”

  They were fussing over her as if she were the most important thing in their lives.

  Maybe she was.

  I was out on the street again but I was afraid to go home. Thanks to Uncle Gene, what I had dreaded would happen had happened. In my mind, Virginia was once again coming into the living room in her green coat, gazing down at the body with its great, red-haired outthrust hand—pretending she didn’t know her own husband.

  Liar?

  The candles on the dining-room table were flickering. “If I wasn’t working and some man asked me out to Maxim’s …”

  Whore?

  “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” My address scribbled on the scrap of paper in Olsen’s pocket. The door opened with a key, the overcoat in the closet, the gun in the drawer of the bedside table …

  I knew it was vital to get home and find out what m
ight have happened. But I couldn’t possibly because of the fear that if I went to Virginia now, I would see what Uncle Gene saw, what Sheila saw, what Hugo saw—what Lieutenant Trant saw.

  I went back to the office. I could think of nothing else to do. I had a two-thirty appointment anyway. I sat through it and through another. Gradually things got better. It had been Uncle Gene. That was all. Part of me was still immature enough to confuse his voice with the voice of God. In recognizing this weakness, I could conquer it. Uncle Gene wasn’t my life, Virginia was my life. Was I crazy to have left her alone and unprotected all this time?

  I told Miss Lindsay I would be gone for the rest of the day. As I went up in the apartment elevator, the feeling of home was there. Home because of Virginia. The home which I could and would protect against every enemy—Uncle Gene, Sheila, all of them, even against the Denham in myself.

  Lieutenant Trant’s overcoat was neatly folded on a chair in the hall.

  PART SIX

  I went into the living-room. Lieutenant Trant and Virginia were sitting together on the couch. For the first fraction of a second they looked quite ordinary—like friends chatting about somebody’s party. Then I saw their faces. Virginia’s was gaunt with apprehension. Trant, getting up to greet me, was completely different from the man in my office that morning. There was none of that phony blandness. His mouth was a thin, ominous line, the blue of his eyes had the texture of metal.

  “I’m glad you’ve come, Mr. Denham. I’ve only just arrived. I won’t have to repeat myself.”

  I went to Virginia. I longed to say or do something to let her know that it was all right, that, however narrowly, I had survived the worst test yet and that nothing could come between us now. But Trant made that impossible. All I could do was sit down beside her and put my hand on hers, hoping that some of the love and newly reforged trust would somehow convey itself to her.

  Lieutenant Trant was moving about the room now. At one moment he was standing on the exact spot where we had washed the blood from the carpet. It was strange how well I seemed to know him. It was as if we had been intimate from childhood, as if I could say to myself from years of experience, Yes, that’s exactly the way he always holds his head when he knows he has all the cards.

  He stopped his pacing. He was in front of us, only a few feet away. I thought of his conspiratorial session with Uncle Gene, and a sudden murderous vision came of myself jumping at him, pounding him to the floor, rolling around, my hands reaching for his throat.

  He said, “I’ve come, Mr. Denham, about two things which have been brought to my attention. Since you now have your wife’s full confidence, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with them both.”

  The mock-courtesy was still there, but it was only the thinnest of veneers now. I wasn’t meant to believe that he was being polite any more.

  “In the first place, Mr. Denham, you know, don’t you, that exactly a year ago this month your wife was arrested on the Island of Elba.”

  Virginia’s fingers dug into my palm. Trant paused, watching me, challenging me to be what I had claimed to be, the husband whose love for his wife was “civilised” enough to resist all shocks.

  “She was convicted of stealing a bracelet valued at three thousand dollars from a certain South American—a Senor Ricardo de los Fuentes.”

  A South American! Uncle Gene’s South American with the Mediterranean yacht?

  “The trial took place in Livorno, Mr. Denham. In spite of the efforts of the British Consulate, she served a six-month sentence there.” Trant’s eyes lingered on me just long enough, I was sure, to register that this was something entirely new to me. Then he turned to Virginia. “That is correct, isn’t it, Mrs. Denham?”

  As so many times before, it was anger that kept me steady. He had found his most effective technique and of course he was staying with it. Work on the husband, show him over and over again how little he knew about his wife, press—until he finally got wise to himself and to the woman he was protecting.

  This was going to be easy. There was nothing to worry about now. My hand on Virginia’s strengthened its pressure. I said, “And just what difference does that make? Who cares if she held up a yak caravan in Katmandu? You’re meant to be investigating a murder in New York City and …”

  “No,” said Virginia. “No, Lew. He has every right. Of course he does.”

  Her hand slipped out of mine. She took a cigarette from a box on the coffee table and lit it. She seemed quite serene. I had forgotten how resilent she could be under stress. She was looking straight at Trant now.

  “If I told you the true story, Lieutenant, you wouldn’t believe me. I know the police mentality. At least I know the Italian police mentality because I told them the truth often enough and they didn’t believe me. But then, of course, since they’d all been bribed by Ricardo de los Fuentes, that might have made a slight difference.”

  She half turned then, not looking at me, merely addressing me.

  “I told you what happened after—after Quentin. This was one of the less attractive episodes. Ricardo de los Fuentes was a very rich gentleman with a yacht. He was very charming and very attentive too. And I remember there was quite a lot of talk about divorces for both of us. I was even introduced as his fiancée to his sainted mother. I was delighted to accept his invitation for a Mediterranean cruise. I was also delighted to find in my cabin three little Cartier boxes—a diamond bracelet, an emerald pin, a pair of ruby earrings. I was less delighted when I discovered that I had been laid on not only as his fiancée but also as the fiancée of any of the other guests who happened to feel in the mood. I managed to get away in Elba. Rashly, as it turned out, I decided to keep, as part payment for the insult, one of the three little Cartier boxes. Ricardo de los Fuentes was a very vindictive man. I was arrested at the ferry, trying to get back to the mainland, by his buddy, the chief of police. Later, in Livorno, all his other buddies, driving back and forth from the courthouse in their brand-new Fiats, finished the job for him—just to prove once and for all that Ricardo de los Fuentes was not a man to have his whims tampered with.”

  She crushed out the cigarette in a tray and once again looked up at Trant.

  “I honestly don’t care whether you believe me or not, but that—for the record—is what happened on and around the Island of Elba. It had one good effect. It made me realise that something was a little unsatisfactory about my choice of friends. When I came out of jail, as soon as I could get the money together, I went to Mexico, I got my divorce and I started to lead a life a little more in keeping with reality.”

  She did look at me then. It was a quick, almost defiant glance, the opposite of any bid for my sympathy. Trant, on the other hand, was gazing directly at me, the faint trace of a smirk on his face. He was saying as plainly as if he’d put it into words: You see? Now you’re beginning to find out what she really is.

  Even if the demons of doubt had stirred again, that smirk would have defeated them and Trant. To hell with him, to hell with Uncle Gene, to hell with all decriers. Hadn’t Virginia told me of those squalid years? What difference could the pinpointing of one sordid episode make? I put my hand back on hers. At the touch of my fingers, she turned to me. Slowly her face lit up with a smile of warm, scarcely credulous gratitude. I smiled back.

  I said, “Okay, Lieutenant. That’s the first thing. What about the second?”

  Trant was looking down at the backs of his hands. He was studying them as if something of great moment could be deduced from the lines on his knuckles. When he looked up, it was at Virginia.

  “I’m sorry to hear you were the victim of such a very vindictive and such a very influential man, Mrs. Denham. I’m glad, though, that the unfortunate incident taught you to steer clear of the wealthy yacht-owning set.” Just to make sure that the sarcasm went home, he added, “I should have said, the wealthy yacht-owning, non-North American set. By the way, do you have a sister?”

  There was something wrong with the casualness of that qu
estion.

  “A sister?” Virginia looked bewildered. “Why, no. I don’t have any sister.”

  “You don’t?” said Trant. “That’s rather odd. I know we’re all always forgetting things, but it isn’t often we forget we have a sister.” He took a sheet of paper out of his pocket. He looked at it. “Your mother, I believe, was a certain Wanda Kolinski, a Polish actress who got out of Warsaw and came to London, where she married your father, just before the Nazi invasion. The record states that she left behind her in Poland a divorced husband, Stepan Gregorieff—and a daughter, Maria.” He dropped the paper on his knee. “A half sister is still a sister, isn’t she, Mrs. Denham?”

  I hadn’t the slightest idea what Trant was leading up to now, but with a skittering of dismay I saw that Virginia was blushing.

  “But … but,” she stammered. “But … of course … but I never thought about Maria. Why should I? I never even met her. And she’s dead anyway. She died as a child in a prison camp.”

  “The Polish authorities have no record of any death, Mrs. Denham. In fact, there was a rumour that at one time quite recently she was living in Paris. The rumour cannot be substantiated, but that’s beside the point at the moment. The only reason I draw your sister to your attention is …”

  He let the sentence drop and turned to me. “I think I told you on the phone, Mr. Denham, that Quentin Olsen, under his alias of Oliver Michaels, was wanted for questioning in a death in the South of France. It happened two years ago. An American woman was found drowned in her swimming pool. All the evidence points to the fact that Olsen-Michaels killed her. But the woman led a very secluded life. She had no friends in the neighbourhood and there was no one who could throw much light. However, there was an old servant who confirmed that Oliver Michaels had stayed at the villa for several days before the death—accompanied by two girls. The servant testified that the girls were sisters and that one of them had told him they were Polish although her sister was English-speaking. He also testified that the English sister was Olsen’s wife. Now, for all I know, Mr. Denham, your wife may have told you that she’d separated from Olsen before that time. However, there is nothing to substantiate such a claim, nothing at all.”