“You really care about Harriet, Mrs. Blackwell.”
“I care about all three of us. It isn’t good for her to live in her father’s shadow. It isn’t good for me to sit and watch it – I’m not the sitting and watching type – and it will become less good if it goes on. Harriet is so vulnerable, really, and Mark is such a powerful personality.”
As if to illustrate this remark, a large masculine voice was raised in the outer room. I recognized it from Blackwell’s telephone call. He said through the translucent glass door: “Isobel, are you in there?”
She jumped as if lightning had struck her, not for the first time. Then she tried to make herself small.
“Is there a back way out?” she whispered.
“I’m afraid not. Shall I get rid of him?”
“No. It would only lead to further trouble.”
Her husband was fumbling at the door, his featureless shadow moving on the glass. “I wondered what you were up to when I saw your car in the parking lot. Isobel?”
She didn’t answer him. She moved to the window and looked out through the slatted blind over Sunset Boulevard. She was very slim and tense against the striated light. I suppose my protective instinct was aroused. I opened the door a foot or so and slid out into the waiting room and closed the door behind me.
It was my first meeting with Colonel Blackwell. His phone call the day before had been our only contact. I’d looked him up afterward and learned that he was a Regular Army officer who had retired soon after the war from an undistinguished career.
He was a fairly big man who had begun to lose his battle with age. His brown outdoorsman’s face made his white hair seem premature. He held himself with ramrod dignity. But his body had started to dwindle. His Shetland jacket hung loose around the shoulders; the collar of his shirt was noticeably large for his corded neck.
His eyebrows were his most conspicuous feature, and they gave him the air of an early Roman emperor. Black in contrast with his hair, they merged in a single eyebrow which edged his forehead like an iron rim. Under it, his eyes were unexpectedly confused.
He tried to shout down his own confusion: “I want to know what’s going on in there. My wife is in there, isn’t she?”
I gave him a vacant stare. “Your wife? Do I know you?”
“I’m Colonel Blackwell. We spoke on the telephone yesterday.”
“I see. Do you have any identification?”
“I don’t need identification! I vouch for myself!”
He sounded as though a yelling demon, perhaps the tormented ghost of a master sergeant, had taken possession of him. His tanned face turned red, then lavender.
I said at the purple end of the yelclass="underline" “Are you really Colonel Blackwell? The way you came bulling in here, I thought you were a crank. We get a lot of cranks.”
A woman with very tall pink hair looked in from the corridor, knotting her imitation pearls in her fist. It was Miss Ditmar, who ran the modeling agency: “Is it all right?”
“Everything’s under control,” I said. “We were just having a yelling contest. This gentleman won.”
Colonel Blackwell couldn’t bear to be talked about in this fashion. He turned his back on me and stood with his face to the wall, like a plebe being braced. Miss Ditmar waved her hand benevolently and departed under her hive of hair, trailing a smog of perfume.
The door to the inner office was open now. Mrs. Blackwell had recovered her composure, which was mainly what I’d had in mind.
“Was that a mirage?” she said.
“That was Miss Ditmar in the next office. She was alarmed by the noise. She’s very nervous about me all the time.”
“I really must apologize,” Mrs. Blackwell said with a glance at her husband, “for both of us. I shouldn’t have come here. It’s put you very much in the middle.”
“I’ve been in the middle before. I rather enjoy it.”
“You’re very nice.”
Like a man being rotated by invisible torque, Blackwell turned and let us see his face. The anger had drained out of it and left it open. His eyes had a hurt expression, as though his young wife had rejected him by complimenting me. He tried to cover this with a wide painful smile.
“Shall we start over, in a lower key?”
“A lower key would suit me, Colonel.”
“Fine.”
It did something for him to be called by his rank. He made an abrupt horizontal gesture which implied that he was in charge of himself and the situation. He cast an appraising glance around my waiting room as if he was thinking of having it redecorated. With a similar glance at me, he said: “I’ll join you shortly in your office. First I’ll put Mrs. Blackwell in her car.”
“It isn’t necessary, Mark. I can find my way–”
“I insist.”
He offered her his elbow. She trudged out holding onto it. Though he was the big one and the loud one, I had the impression that she was supporting him.
Through the Venetian blind I watched them emerge from the street entrance onto the sidewalk. They walked very formally together, like people on their way to a funeral.
I liked Isobel Blackwell, but I was sort of hoping her husband wouldn’t come back.
2
HE CAME BACK, though, wearing a purged expression which failed to tell me what had been purged, or who. I took the hand he offered me across my desk, but I went on disliking him.
He was sensitive to this – a surprising thing in a man of his temper and background – and made an oblique attempt to get around it: “You don’t know the pressures I live under. The combined forces of the females in my life–” He paused, and decided not to finish the sentence.
“Mrs. Blackwell was telling me about some of the pressures.”
“So she said. I suppose she meant no harm in coming here. But dammit, if a man’s wife won’t go through channels,” he said obscurely, “who will?”
“I understand the two of you disagree about your prospective son-in-law.”
“Burke Damis is not my prospective son-in-law. I have no intention of letting the marriage go through.”
“Why not?”
He glared down at me, moving his tongue around under his lips as if he had foreign objects between his teeth. “My wife has the standard female illusion that all marriages are made in heaven. Apparently she’s infected you with it.”
“I asked a simple question, about this particular marriage. Won’t you sit down, Colonel?”
He sat stiffly in the chair his wife had occupied. “The man’s a fortune-hunter, or worse. I suspect he’s one of those confidence men who make a career of marrying silly women.”
“Do you have any evidence along those lines?”
“The evidence is on his face, in his manner, in the nature of his relationship with my daughter. He’s the kind of man who would make her miserable, and that’s putting it gently.”
Concern for her had broken through into his voice and changed its self-conscious tone. He wasn’t the stuffed shirt I had taken him for, or at least the stuffing had its human elements.
“What about their relationship?”
He hitched his chair forward. “It’s completely unilateral. Harriet is offering him everything – her money, her love, her not inconsiderable attractions. Damis offers nothing. He is nothing – a man from nowhere, a man from Mars. He pretends to be a serious painter, but I know something about painting and I wouldn’t hire him to paint the side of a barn. Nobody’s ever heard of him, and I’ve made inquiries.”
“How extensive?”
“I asked a fellow at the art museum. He’s an authority on contemporary American painters. The name Burke Damis meant nothing to him.”