“There’s nothing you can do about it now,” I said soothingly.
“If only there were!” She still held one hand close to her throat, the way bad actresses do in moments of crisis on stage.
“People forget so quickly,” I said.
“Not in Talisman City,” she snapped. Then, recollecting herself, she added more softly, “The world is so unkind.”
I allowed that, all things considered, this was so.
“It was unfair of Lee … of my father to act the way he did.”
“You mean in … being your father?” I was dense.
“No, I mean in declaring to all the world my … shame.”
To which I replied, “Ah.”
“I can’t think why he chose to do it like this, so publicly.”
“Probably because there wasn’t any other way of leaving you his money.”
There was no real answer to this so she exclaimed again how terrible it all was.
“What does your husband think about it?”
She sighed.
“Did he know all along that … about the Senator and you?”
“Oh yes. He’s known for a year.”
“And the will … did he know about that, too?”
She closed her eyes, as though in pain. “Yes,” she said softly, “I think he knew about the will, too. I think the Governor told him.”
“But they never told you?”
She hesitated. “No,” she said. “Not exactly. I suppose I knew, in a way, but they never actually told me.” This was a bit of news, I thought. The outline of a plot suggested itself to me. “My husband never liked to talk about it … neither did I. It was just one of those things. What was that?” She started, and looked toward the door.
Nervously, expecting an angry husband, I opened the door and looked out. The hall was empty. “It was the wind,” I said, turning around. She was standing directly behind me … I could smell the musk and rose of her perfume.
“I’m frightened,” she said and this time she was not play-acting. I moved back into the room, expecting her to move too but she did not. Then I had my arms around her and we edged toward the bed. She wore nothing under the blue silk negligee and her body was voluptuous and had a young feel to it, smooth and taut with wide firm hips and her nipples pressed hard against my chest, burning through the pajama top. We kissed. She was no novice at this sort of thing, I thought as she gave the cord of my pajama trousers a deft tug and they fell to the floor beside her crumpled dressing gown. She pulled me against her violently and for a moment we stood swaying back and forth in one another’s arms. Then we fell across the bed.
An hour passed.
I sat up and looked down at her white body sprawled upon the bed; the eyes shut and her breathing regular and deep. “It’s late,” I said in a low voice.
She smiled drowsily and opened her eyes. “I haven’t been so relaxed in a long time,” she said.
“Neither have I,” I lied nervously; I didn’t like the idea of being treated like some kind of sedative.
She sat up on one elbow and pushed her hair back out of her eyes. She was obviously proud of her body; she arranged it to look like the Duchess of Alba. “What on earth would my husband say.”
“I hope I never know,” I said devoutly.
She smiled languorously. “He’ll never know.”
“Great thing sleeping pills.”
“I don’t make a habit of this,” she said sharply.
“I didn’t say you did.”
“I mean … well, I’m not promiscuous, that’s all … not the way Ellen is.”
I was a little irritated by this. Somehow, I felt she had no business talking about Ellen like that since, for all she knew, we might really have been engaged. “Ellen’s not that bad,” I said pulling on my pajamas. Then I handed her her negligee. “You don’t want that cold to get worse, do you?”
Reluctantly she snaked into the blue silk. “I’m very very fond of Ellen,” she said with a brilliant insincere smile. “But you have to admit she’s a law unto herself.”
I was about to make some crack about their being sisters under the skin when it occurred to me that this might be tactless since, as a matter of fact, they were sisters in a way.
She asked for a cigarette and I gave her one. “Tell me,” she said, exhaling blue smoke, “how long do you think it’ll be before the police end this case?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“But you are working with Lieutenant Winters, aren’t you?”
This was shrewd. “How did you know?”
“It wasn’t hard to guess. As a matter of fact I caught the tail end of a telephone conversation you were having with some newspaper in New York.” She said this calmly.
“An eavesdropper!”
She chuckled. “No, it wasn’t on purpose, believe me; I was trying to call a lawyer I know in the District … you were on this extension, that’s all.”
“I haven’t any idea,” I said. “About the murder … about how long it’ll be before the police make an arrest.”
“I hope it’s soon,” she said with sudden vehemence.
“So do all of us.”
She was about to say something … then she stopped herself. Instead she asked me about the affair on the landing and I told her that I had seen no one. She looked disappointed. “I suppose it was too dark.”
I nodded. “Much too dark.”
She stood up then and arranged her hair in a mirror. I stood beside her, pretending to comb my own hair. I was aware of her reflection in the glass, very pale, with the dark eyes large and strange, staring at me. I shuddered. I thought of those stories about vampires which I had read as a child.
She turned around suddenly; her face close to mine … her eyes glittering in the light. “You must help me,” she said and her voice was strained.
“Help?”
“He’ll try to kill me … I’m sure of it. Just the way he killed my father.”
“Who? Who killed your father? Who’ll try to kill you?”
“My husband,” she whispered. Then she was gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
Before breakfast, I composed a communiqué for the readers of the New York Globe; then, just as the morning light began to stream lemon yellow across the room, I telephoned it to New York, consciencelessly allowing the Rhodes family to pay for it; I was aware that my conversation was being listened to by a plain-clothes man on an extension wire: I could hear his heavy breathing.
My story was hardly revelatory but it would, I knew, keep me in business a while longer, and it would also give the readers of the Globe the only inside account of how the bereaved family was taking their loss: “Mrs. Rhodes, pale but calm, was supported by her beautiful daughter Ellen Rhodes yesterday at the National Cathedral while thousands.…” It was the sort of thing which some people can turn out by the yard but which I find a little difficult to manage; a mastery of newspaper jargon is not easily come by: you have to have an instinct for the ready phrase, the familiar reference. But I managed to vibrate a little as I discussed, inaccurately, the behavior of the suspects at the funeral.
I smiled as I hung up the phone and put my notes in the night table drawer; I had thought of a fine sentence: “While your correspondent was attending the funeral services for the late U. S. Senator Leander Rhodes at the Washington Cathedral yesterday morning, a knee belonging to the attractive Camilla Pomeroy of Talisman City, wife of Roger Pomeroy, the munitions maker, was pressed against your correspondent’s knee …”