“And I’m telling you I’m going to look for myself. Now don’t make me get rough. It’s the only place she could be, so you might as well face the fact that the jig’s up.” He reached behind Herb to grab the doorknob again, and; their hands clawed at each other for possession of it for a moment.
During that moment Llona’s mind raced furiously. Her eyes darted about for some escape, finally fastening hopefully on another door facing her from the opposite wall of the bathroom. She didn’t know it, but sometimes the room Herb was in and the one next door were rented as a suite with the bathroom between connecting them. This night they were rented as singles, the other room having its own bathroom on the other side, and so the door facing Llona was bolted.
She ran over to it and slid the bolt back. If it was bolted on the other side, she thought frantically, she was a gone goose. Behind her, the clicking of the lock on the other door made her aware of the tug-of-war going on in Herb’s room. Naked and panting with terror, she yanked at the doorknob . . .
The detective gave Herb a violent shove out of the way and plunged through the door into the bathroom. “I’ll be damned!” he said.
Herb came up behind him, visions of prison blurring his eyes. His jaw dropped, and he had to sit down weakly on the edge of the toilet. “See,” he said, unable to stop his voice from shaking, “I told you there was no woman here!” Perhaps it was just relief, but never in his life had Herbert Lansing been closer to fainting!
Chapter Four
AMOS TWEEDLEBERT was a Walter Mitty specializing in sex fantasies. He was a Caspar Milquetoast trapped in the children’s wading pool and asking futilely if anybody knew where the men’s room was. He was the most hen-pecked of husbands constantly seeking refuge in a fantasy world of Herculean lechery. He was a secret mental masturbator too afraid of his wife to even chance an occasional acting out of his imaginary and solitary lustings. The iron hand--a most apt simile—with which his wife Agatha ruled Amos Tweedlebert was cast into so solid a clench that it rendered all but his mind immobile. She was a true marital despot, tyrannical and asexual, to his cringing husbandliness. Yes, Agatha was ten times the man Amos would ever be—and she looked it.
She stood five feet eight to his five six, weighed 180 pounds to his 140, boasted broad shoulders to his narrow ones, sported a barrel chest (definitely more chest than bosom) in comparison to his caved-in ribcage, and had a voice like a foghorn where his tones were those of an asthmatic flute. Agatha was also an athletic type. She rode as if born to the saddle, played tennis with all the drive of her frustrated femininity, and exercised daily so that now, at the age of fifty-two, muscles stood out on her body like gnarled knots on a tough old oak tree. Connected as they were by prominent purple veins, they made of Agatha’s epiderm a contour map of the Rocky Mountains. Amos was afraid of horses, incapable of hitting the ball back across a tennis net, too easily winded for even the mildest exercise, and thoroughly intimidated by his wife’s boundless energy. Add that she had the sarcastic tongue of the born shrew, and that he was as slow to verbal warfare as he was to muscle coordination, and what emerges is a picture of the Tweedlebert marriage.
Why had Amos married her in the first place? It was so long ago—-more than twenty-five years--that it was a long time since he’d even had the gumption to brood about it. And, in the early days, he’d been too confused for brooding. It had all happened so fast. Amos had been like a feather caught up in the wind of determination that Agatha should have a husband.
The wind had originated not only with Agatha, but with her parents as well. Her mother was right out of Tennessee Williams, post~bellum and twittery feminine, an over-age belle who split her time between nostalgic recollections of the caresses bestowed on her by an exaggerated parade of gentlemen callers and worries over the fact that her daughter had this propensity for beating her own occasional beaus at Indian hand wrestling. As Agatha grew older, the mother became fixated with the idea of marrying her off before the dress-styles changed to reveal the incipient hair sprouting on Agatha’s chest.
In this determination, Agatha’s father backed her up. This, despite the fact that it was he whom Agatha took after and most resembled. Indeed, he was the only man able to hand-wrestle Agatha to a draw. Of course, for Ereudian reasons, it seems likely that she was particularly lenient with him.
In any case, dear old Dad slapped a dowry on his piano-legged daughter and the word went out that Agatha was up for grabs on the marital auction block. Alas, there were no takers. And this despite the fact that Pop had considerable assets in the form of the foundry he owned and ran which would someday be passed on to his only daughter. The lack of interest made Mom panicky, and the panic was passed on to Dad in the form of pressure to “for God’s sake do something”.
That’s how Amos 'I‘weedlebert was sucked into the picture. Amos worked for Agatha’s father. His position was lowly, but not without importance. He was the old man’s secretary. A male secretary had been Agatha’s mother’s idea—indeed, she had insisted upon it for wifely reasons following a hushed-up scandal involving her husband and his former secretary who had been all too feminine. But that's another story, and there's no reason to go into it here.
It's the courtship of Amos and Agatha which is of concern. That courtship really started with Agatha’s mother’s nagging Agatha’s father to bring home some suitable young men to meet their daughter. He ignored the nagging as long as he could, and finally, when he couldn’t ignore it any more, he grabbed at the handiest straw and came up with Amos. Thus Amos was plucked from his secretarial chair and plunked down at the dinner table one pot roast-y night.
The roast gave him heartburn. Agatha sprained his wrist at the very first hand-wrestle. Mom dulled his brain with talk of plantation days. And Pop shook him up with sly winks toward Agatha mingled with veiled threats about how much more secure his position at the foundry would be if he gained Agatha’s confidence since Pop set such great store by his daughter’s judgment. Amos went home in a quandary--and stayed in it.
Agatha, however, for her own perverse reasons, was smitten with this rabbit her father had brought home for dinner. Her normally sluggish heart went pitty-pat, and she confided to Pop that Amos was just the man for her. Probably it was his very weakness which most attracted her. At any rate, as of that moment his doom was sealed.
Pop courted him. He forced expensive cigars on him -- which made Amos sick—, dangled the carrot of the business under his nose with the assurance that it would someday belong to the man who married Agatha, intimidated Amos with deep grumblings and black scowls if Amos’ interest in Agatha showed the slightest signs of flagging, and found one business excuse after another to bring Amos home with him. Once there, the business reasons melted away and Amos and Agatha were thrown together to “have fun the way young people should”.
Amos had no recollection of ever proposing marriage to Agatha. All he could remember was that suddenly he found himself right smack in the middle of all those plans for a wedding. And so they were married.
The honeymoon was over before it began. After a wedding night devastated equally by Amos timidity and Agatha’s repugnance toward sex, Agatha dragged him out of bed at six the next morning to go horseback riding. His very first mount threw him, and Amos spent the next three months with his hip in a plaster cast.
Amos’ second accident set the pattern for their marriage. It occurred some three years later. Agatha had dragged him out on the tennis court despite his antipathy to all athletics. He slammed into the cement while chasing one of her choppier serves and broke his other hip. This time he was laid up for four months.