Murder At the Flea Club

by Matthew Head

  When the final curtain came down I said, “I know some of the ballerinas. Would you like to go backstage?” I don’t know any ballerinas, but I knew I was safe. By this time I was playing all by myself. “No, I don’t think so,” Marie Louise said. “I guess I’d better go back home.” “Home” made her think of something, and she changed it to “back to the hotel.”

  So we went back to the hotel, and that would have been that, and I’d never have seen her again, if I hadn’t got mad. I have an MG, and most people enjoy riding in it, but Marie Louise took it for granted, and sat there lovely and indifferent as she was driven through the most beautiful city in the world, after seeing one of the most beautiful spectacles ever staged, in just about as engaging a little car as there is, with a perfectly acceptable man as chauffeur. I drove her up to the marquee of the hotel and almost stopped, and then I got mad. She was already leaning forward to get out when I gunned the little car so that it snapped her right back into her seat when it shot forward. I took it fast until I saw a vacant place at the kerb, then I jammed on the brakes and swerved in. I am not ordinarily a fancy driver but this was a good clean job.

  I turned off the ignition and the lights and turned to Marie Louise and said, “Now listen, you. Goddamn it, come to life.”

  She looked at me with her face wide open and made a little sound like “ooooooo” and I said, “For God’s sake, cry or scream or hit me or something,” and she did. She burst into tears. Really burst into them, like something breaking. She wedged herself into the corner against the door as far as she could get from me and made all those terrible sounds people make when they cry out loud.

  I sat, letting it go on and wear itself out. When she began to calm down she sounded a lot like the subsiding passages after the storm sequence in the William Tell Overture. Finally she partially disengaged herself from the corner, sat up a little straighter, managed to say “Oh, dear,” gave a large hiccup, blew her nose hard, looked up at me, and smiled. It was wet and it was feeble and it seemed to call into play a set of muscles that had begun to atrophy from lack of use, and it faded out pretty quick, but it had been there, and it had been something that without question you could call a smile.

  “Feel better?”

  The smile came back. “I guess I do.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  She shook her head. “Why should I? It couldn’t possibly interest you,” she said wearily enough.

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t know me. I don’t know you, either. It’s all so silly and pointless, even trying to be polite or anything. Don’t try to be sympathetic. Thanks all the same. May I get out now?”

  “Just a minute. Look, I’m really getting curious. What is it? Love?”

  She opened her eyes a little wider, in surprise, not that I had asked, but only that I even found it necessary to ask. “Why naturally!” she said. “Whatever else could anyone feel so bad about?” And then, “Now stop it. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to go back to the hotel.”

  Ordinarily I don’t believe in trying to pick up the scraps and patch them together, but Marie Louise looked prettier all the time. “Not the hotel,” I said. “Let’s give us another chance. Let’s go somewhere.”

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t.”

  “Yes, you could.”

  “I just couldn’t.”

  “Ever hear of The Flea Club?”

  “The what?”

  “Flea Club.”

  “Goodness no. If I’d ever heard of anything called The Flea Club I’d have remembered it.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t take you there anyway. It’s not a place for young girls.” This was partly true, but only mildly, and was supposed to stir her up a little. Anyway, I wouldn’t have taken her down into the cellar, where things really did get pretty relaxed sometimes, but only to the bar upstairs, where things were conventional, as bars go.

  But she said, “I can’t go anywhere at all. I just can’t.”

  “You’re leaving me with an awfully soggy impression.”

  “Soggy! Well I like that! I’ve never been called soggy before!”

  “You’ve been soggy tonight, child.”

  “I’m afraid I have.” She gave a final blow to her nose and said, “Well, I can’t do anything about it now. Take me back. I’ve had a perfectly dreadful time but it isn’t your fault. I want to go back to the hotel.”

  “Then that’s that.” I swung the car round and proceeded at normal speed back to the hotel. At the elevator I said to Marie Louise, “I’m sorry the evening was such a failure.”

  “You needn’t feel bad about it,” she said. “I was just awful, but I—oh, let’s drop it. I’m sorry. Thanks anyway.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Good night then.”

  “Good night.”

  And then I said, “Marie Louise, do you know you’re pretty?”

  For a moment I thought she was going to look pleased, but inexplicably her expression changed to one which, of all things, was more like contempt.

  “Pretty? Me? Don’t be silly.”

  “But you are. Everything about you is just right. You’ve got lovely hair and skin—” and I was going to go on and tell her the rest, including maybe that if only she would act like a pretty girl it would be noticeable that she was one, but she interrupted me with a voice that wasn’t pretty at all.

  “How much did she pay you to say that?” she asked.

  “Pay me to—who?”

  “Audrey. Who do you think?”

  “I don’t think anybody. I certainly don’t think Audrey. And I sure as hell don’t know exactly what you’re aiming at.”

  “I’m aiming at not being taken in by anybody,” Marie Louise said.

  I could have got good and mad then, but I looked at her and saw a pretty girl with a profound distrust of her own attraction and I thought, ‘Audrey, you unholy bitch,’ but what I said to Marie Louise was, “Audrey didn’t pay me anything or suggest that I say anything, with or without pay. If you want to know, she offered to pay the dinner check, which was within the bounds of acceptability under the circumstances although I didn’t accept it. I took you out because I wanted to see Les Indes Galantes and when you walked into the lobby I thought it was going to be a good evening. I’m still ready to take you to The Flea Club.”

  “I don’t want to go to The Flea Club,” she said, “and I don’t want ever to see you again. I’m sorry, and thanks, but this has been even worse than usual. Any time you want to see Audrey I’m sure she’ll be glad to oblige. So good night.”

  “And a good, good night to you,” I said, and shut her into the elevator and walked away. “And a great big hug for Audrey when she tucks you in,” I thought, and then I decided that whatever went on between the two of them wasn’t anything for me to worry about, and I set out for The Flea Club, because I had missed it during the past couple of weeks and because it was always one of the most restful places I knew. Although whenever I have said to other people that I found The Flea Club restful, they have always said that I was stark, raving mad.

  I told all this to Mary Finney and waited for her comment.

  “Apparently not pregnant,” Dr. Finney said.

  “Not in that dress.”

  “Crazy?”

  “Just because a girl doesn’t respond to me, it doesn’t mean she’s irrational.”

  “Odd, though. Pretty, rich, apparently healthy, attractive to men, which usually means attracted to men. Ought to have enough resilience to have recovered from any busted love match, at that age. She didn’t like you at all? No response at all? Just nothing?”

  “Just nothing. Of course I’m older than she is.”

  “Pooh,” said Dr. Finney. “Girls that age are thrilled by that.”

  “I thought at first maybe she was manic-depressive and I’d hit her in the bottom of the cycle.”

  “Possible.”

  “No, it isn’t. I’ve seen her since then, and she’s all ri
ght.”

  “You have? How many times?”

  “Couple.”

  “Don’t tell me about it now,” said Dr. Finney. “I want to hear about The Flea Club. You did go there? See any of the regulars?”

  “Several of them.”

  “Good. Tell me about it. ‘A Night at The Flea Club’.”

  “It’s going to take a little while,” I warned her hopefully. My voice was already beginning to feel the strain. “Don’t you want a recess?”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Dr. Finney considerately. “Don’t mind me. Just go right ahead.”

  I went ahead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I INSIST THAT even the private cellar of The Flea Club was essentially a quiet and orderly place, dedicated to the principle of live and let live, and I have taken many a visitor down there who came out saying he could have found more excitement in the lounge of his local Y.M.C.A. A lot depended on the kind of night you hit. I have taken people there who had hinted they would love to go, and have looked upon me coldly afterwards and said there hadn’t been a person in the place they would have admitted to their drawing-room back home. It is useless to point out to them that they hadn’t been asking to be taken somewhere where they could find somebody to take back home to their drawing-room, and there you are, left with that uncomfortable feeling that there must be something wrong with you because you were a member and enjoyed being there.

  I know half the members were monsters, but I didn’t mind. I know exactly the kind of person Freddy Fayerweather was, but I enjoyed listening to his confidences. I didn’t like René Velerin-Pel too much, but he was decorative. Also I enjoyed making pools with myself as to the age and approximate fortune of the next woman René would show up with and as to how long it would be before it became obvious that she was giving him what he wanted from her—money. And so on. And if all that indicates anything unsavoury about me, why, fine.

  On the night I’ve been talking about, when I took Marie Louise to Les Indes, we were followed to the Opera from the hotel. We were also followed back from the Opera. And after I had seen her to the elevator and had come back out, I was followed to The Flea Club. When I was recounting these events to Mary Finney, I didn’t know about this. I mention it here to fill things in.

  There was certainly no reason to suspect I might be followed. I hadn’t done anything unusual or so far as I knew been involved in anything unusual anyone else was doing. I had gone to see an ageing clotheshorse friend of a friend, and had taken her daughter to the theatre. I had never seen either of them before and I never expected to see either of them again. I was only conscious that I had had a disastrous evening with a pretty young girl, disastrous to my ego at any rate, since it had become obvious that she would just as soon be skinned alive as prolong the evening in my company beyond the period contracted for. But my conscience was clear as a bell.

  The first thing you saw when you came into The Flea Club by the boulevard entrance was likely to be Bibi. Bibi wasn’t a member, but she had the run of the place. It’s hard to say just what her position was. Certainly she was a great annoyance to Nicole, but the rest of us liked having her around. She was a kind of club mascot.

  She came to the club nearly every night and took up her station at the end of the bar nearest the entrance, where she could keep her eye out for free drinks. It would be difficult to be more explicit as to her age than to say that she was under twenty. Prophecy was easy, though. In ten years she was going to look forty, if she lived. By definition, I’m afraid she was a prostitute, since her only source of income was the largesse of the various people she slept with, but the definition somehow doesn’t fit. She was as soft and as wriggly and as affectionate as a pup. She wasn’t educated at all, and she probably wasn’t very bright. I doubt that it ever occurred to her that any question of right or wrong was involved in her life. She got hungry, she loved whisky, and she thought people were nice to be with. It was just the most fortunate thing in the world that they liked to give you things, drinks and dinners and such clothes as you needed (sweaters and skirts, it came down to) and, for all I know, she made only a tenuous connection between the pleasure and comfort of sharing somebody’s bed and the little bit of money in the morning.

  Sometimes I used to worry about Bibi, thinking that something ought to be done to straighten her out. But Nicole in her common-sense way would say, “Why? There is nothing in life for that little type. She is lucky to have what she is getting now. There is nothing to do for one like that.”

  And that was true. Bibi was a born stray. Certainly Nicole’s origins were as humble, but in the gene lottery Nicole had come by a sustaining shrewdness, while Bibi was marked from the beginning for the sore eye, the mange, the vermin, and the ultimate dog-catcher.

  “What should really be done,” Nicole would say, “is to get rid of that little one now, before she becomes an embarrassment.”

  “But you can’t do a thing like that to Bibi,” I objected.

  “Why not? One must be practical. It is bad for the club. For you others the club is only a place to amuse yourself. For me it is a living and a career. I don’t like having Bibi around.”

  “She doesn’t do any real harm.”

  “True. Not yet. I know it is all right just now. But some time she will make a terrible scandal, or worse. She is not a child of good sense. She picks up these visitors at the bar, she is very convenient for members who are lonesome for the night. All that I accept. That is the way things are. But she is not a child of good sense. Let us imagine that some day she steals the wallet of one of these pick-ups.”

  “Bibi never stole a thing in her life.”

  “She has never found it necessary. So far everyone gives her everything. But some time she will do something really foolish which requires real money to amend. At a place like this, everything is all right until someone makes a scandal to the police. Then it is finished.”

  But Bibi had already established herself as our pet. It was too late to drown her in a bucket of warm water, and none of us wanted the job of taking her out in the country and losing her. So we all patted her and played with her and enjoyed her cute ways.

  She was at her station near the door when I came in, her face already a little blurry with whisky, and she stopped me with her broad-mouthed, sweet and meaningless little smile and said, “Allô, ‘Oopee. You buy me a drink?”

  “Hello, Bibi. No. You’ve already got a drink.”

  She also had a plump middle-aged pink-faced companion who looked at me belligerently. He needn’t have worried. It was only an habitual proposition. Bibi knew three English phrases and she liked to use all three of them on me, in tribute. Bibi especially liked Americans. She kept on smiling, eager to go on with the rest of her repertoire. “Okay, meester,” she said, which was number two, and then wound up to her finale: “You teekleesh?” She reached inside my coat and wiggled her fingers along my ribs. Her hand was like a baby rabbit in there.

  “Not ticklish tonight. So long, Bibi,” and as I left I heard the plump pink-faced man say hopefully, “I’m ticklish.”

  Across the room I caught a glimpse of René, his handsome face in my direction as he leaned forward towards his companion at the table, whose thin, expensive silhouette I recognised as his Mrs. Jones’s, as usual, and I wondered how much per month, or per performance, René was hitting her for, while he looked round for his jackpot.

  Most of us who followed René’s affairs took it for granted that Mrs. Jones herself was being lined up as the jackpot. God knows she was susceptible enough. She had already been married and divorced from four dyed-in-the-wool sons-of-bitches. There was a beautiful consistency about Mrs. Jones’s marriages and affairs. A man had to be only two things, and she was overboard: he had to be handsome, and he had to be a son-of-a-bitch.

  None of her four husbands had been named Jones, nor had she, and although she took the name Jones around the club, her identity could be no secret to anybody who had followed the t
abloids during the past twenty-five years. She had been married, in order of appearance, to an Italian count, a Georgian prince, an English jockey, and an American prize fighter. They had all left their marks on her, each in his own fashion. The Italian count had taken a good healthy naïve rich bouncing ignorant American girl and had trained her in couture and toilette, reduced her weight by thirty pounds, and made her an international party-goer with an insatiable appetite for the bed. The Georgian prince had added a brief fling at heroin. The English jockey had given her a taste for gambling, and the American prize fighter a two-inch scar along her right temple. But she still had a good half of her original fortune left, thanks to the diligence of her lawyers and brokers, and she even had a suggestion of her original good looks, and it was hard to understand why René hadn’t yet cabbaged on to these remainders via holy matrimony. She gave every sign of being ready, and it was time René settled down.

  Near-by, Freddy Fayerweather was leaning across another table in very much the same eager manner that Mrs. Jones was leaning towards René, and opposite Freddy I recognised the neat flare-shouldered back of Nicole’s accompanist, Tony Crew—changed from Croute for professional reasons, at Freddy’s suggestion. For that matter, Freddy had changed his own name—not legally, yet, which he had to wait to go back to the States to do, but he used Fayerweather for everything except signing. His real name was Frederick all right, but his last name was Gratzhaufer. Frederick Gratzhaufer is quite a name, but it certainly doesn’t suggest the sort of fluttering chappy that Freddy Fayerweather was.

  “And I do think a person’s name ought to suggest them, don’t you think?” Freddy said. “Imagine Tony and me—‘Croute and Gratzhaufer.’ So I say, why not? Why not change? Don’t you think so? I mean I think it’s imperative, don’t you? And there’s this simply wonderful building at the University of Virginia—I’m a Virginia man, did you know? Yes, my dear, three whole months, three whole months of absolute hell, then I simply couldn’t bear it and left—but there’s this Fayerweather Hall there, and at first I thought I’d take over the whole name, be Mr. Hall, you know, which isn’t bad, really—Fayerweather Hall, Esquire. Nice? But then I do think there’s something of the Freddy in me, much as I hate to admit it, so…Anyway, I think Crew is perfect for Tony, don’t you? Tony Crew. Just like him. Antoine Croute—no. But Tony—well, he’s really a natural for that, and then Crew—you know, crew cuts, crew shirts, all that neat, lean muscled masculine association. So I really think—” and then he would stop all this babbling, as he frequently did, by a phrase he was fond of using as a period. “Well, anyway,” he would say.