Murder At the Flea Club

by Matthew Head

  Dr. Finney said very gently, “Marie Louise, I’m asking you a lot of personal questions and you’re being very sweet about it. I’ll tell you something I didn’t intend to. Nicole didn’t have an ‘accident’ the way Hoopy told you. She was murdered—she died early this morning. And I’m not just curious about your personal life. I’m hoping that if I talk to enough people I’ll pick up some thread that will help to show us why this happened to Nicole.”

  Marie Louise listened to this with the life and colour draining out of her face, and started to cry. “She was so sweet to us!” she said, choking on it, and Dr. Finney let her cry into her napkin for a couple of minutes before she said, “This all has to be done quickly, Marie Louise. Try to remember the happiness it gave Nicole to help you and Luigi, and stop crying and let me ask you some more questions.”

  Marie Louise sat there for a minute hiding her face, then she wiped her eyes and looked up uncertainly and said, “But I don’t see what possible connection—”

  “There may not be any connection. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “But it happened so long ago, two years ago, in America. I just don’t see how it could possibly—”

  “Do you know anyone who knows The Flea Club?”

  “No. Except Hoop, of course.”

  “Does Audrey?”

  “Know The Flea Club? Audrey? I don’t know why she would,” said Marie Louise, which told Dr. Finney what she wanted to know.

  “What about a character named René Velerin-Pel?” she persisted.

  “Oh, him!” said Marie Louise. “I know him all right. You mean the big handsome one. Audrey met him somewhere, I think we had an introduction to him or something when we first came over. He’s an aristocrat or something. She made me go out with him a couple of times. She was always trying to get me to go out with men—like you, Hoop, but of course she always wanted to pick them out for me, the way she did you. I hated this René. He was supposed to be irresistible or something. And all the time, there I was, really married to Luigi.”

  “Did Audrey like René?”

  “I think she sort of did. But I said I just wouldn’t go out with him any more, I said I’d jump out the window first, so we haven’t seen him any more.”

  “Indeed?” said Dr. Finney. “Well, let’s not get off the track,” she said, although it was obvious to me that she was going right down the track at full speed.

  “You haven’t told me the real reason why you wouldn’t tell Audrey about Luigi, and I want to know. Trust me that there might be a connection.”

  Marie Louise was silent for a long few moments, and then said in a subdued and very serious voice, “Is there any chance I’d be getting Audrey in trouble?”

  “There’s not a chance that you’ll get anybody in trouble except the person who killed Nicole.”

  Marie Louise laughed in real relief. “But that’s perfectly silly!” she said. “Sometimes I think there isn’t anything in the world Audrey wouldn’t do to get her own way, but of course I don’t mean she’d kill anybody.” The last syllables trailed off a little bit as if, now that she had said it, she thought maybe Audrey could do even that, but then she brought herself up again and said with decision, “—and anyway, how could she possibly be connected with Nicole? So I’ll tell you, but it’s perfectly silly.”

  She spoke now with an effort at being casual, but there was plenty of strain involved, and still a lot more hurt than she was letting on. And by the time she had finished I knew why she had asked me, that first night, how much Audrey had paid me to tell her she was pretty, and why she had a profound lack of confidence in her own attraction, and why she thought (although she never said so) that she might not even be able to hold Luigi, although it was obvious to anyone who had seen them together that Luigi was hers for keeps.

  “There was this other boy,” she said, “two years ago. I met him on the train coming home from school; he knew one of the other girls. I was really young then, only sixteen, but I guess you can fall in love pretty hard at sixteen. Anyway, I did. He was a junior in college and we kept writing to each other. Then I visited this girl’s family for a week-end and he came to see me, and he gave me his fraternity pin, and I honestly, I honestly don’t think it was just—what Audrey said later. So we kept writing, but this school that Audrey had sent me to was terrible, and they told Audrey I was getting all these letters and specials and I had a fraternity pin. And that was awful, because I never wore it, except underneath my coat or something, and somebody must have tattled, or else they snooped at that school. Then Audrey acted as if she was being awfully sweet and everything and told me she wanted to meet the boy. And I don’t know to this day what she said to him, but he began to be funny about things, and stand-offish. But what she said to me was that he was the most obvious kind of fortune-hunter and that I was crazy if I thought he would be interested in me when I was only sixteen and not very pretty or anything. Then I guess it was my fault, because I wrote him this long crazy letter about how he had to marry me right away or not at all, and, how I didn’t have any money until I was nineteen, but if we loved each other we could get along. And do you know what happened? Nothing. Nothing at all. I never heard from him again, from then to this day. And I don’t know what happened, unless it was really what Audrey said, fortune-hunting. But whatever it was, Audrey did it.”

  She stopped talking, compressing her lips tightly, whether out of anger, or to keep from crying, was hard to say. We all sat there a little embarrassed, until Mary Finney reached across the table and patted Marie Louise’s hand where it lay on the table, clutching her napkin. Then Marie Louise said, “It used to hurt so much I would lie in bed and cry about it. So naturally when Luigi happened, I wasn’t going to tell Audrey about it. I was just going to be horrid and wait until I was nineteen and had the money and then tell Audrey, because there’s one thing you can do anything with Audrey with if you’ve got it, and it’s money.”

  “You’re not nineteen yet, and the cat’s out of the bag,” Dr. Finney reminded her.

  “I don’t care, though,” Marie Louise answered. “I just don’t care. I didn’t know it then, but I know now that I can fight Audrey if I have to. And if Luigi wants my money, he won’t have to wait long. Isn’t that awful to say? But just because I can say it, I guess it means that I want him under just any circumstances.”

  I said, “Don’t worry about Luigi. You’ve got him under any and all circumstances. Uncle Hoopy knows.”

  Dr. Finney said, “We can all take that for granted. You said you and Luigi were getting married, right in New York, all open and above board, except you weren’t telling anybody.”

  “Yes,” Marie Louise said, “but we had to tell just one little lie. We had it all arranged to get married on a Saturday morning, and when this friend of Audrey’s in the Village called and asked me for the week-end, I said it was already arranged for me to stay with somebody else, and she said that was funny, because Audrey had explicitly asked her to jail me that week-end, although of course she didn’t say jail, she said visit. But I said Audrey must have got her wires crossed because I was supposed to go somewhere else and I named the person. So Luigi and I got married Saturday morning and took a hotel room up-town, and I went back to classes Monday morning.”

  “You didn’t even leave town? Suppose somebody had seen you in a compromising situation?”

  “We thought of that. We decided not to worry about that, because if it happened it just meant that we weren’t supposed to keep it a secret. It would be Fate. Anyway,” she added, in perfect innocence, “we hardly went out of the hotel room.”

  I avoided any comment, but I caught Dr. Finney’s eyes and she gave me a delighted glance in return. Marie Louise went on, “So we did the same thing the next week-end, and I told the same fib to this other friend of Audrey’s, but then things really broke wide open because in the middle of the week Audrey showed up in New York and confronted me with those two week-ends. The first one she hadn’t kn
own about until she got wind of the second, and when she called that Village woman to check, and when she discovered I hadn’t been there either, she nearly ripped things to pieces. She came to the school looking just as icy and calm as anything and she never raised her voice even once when she was talking to me. I suppose that’s when I should have told her the truth, but I didn’t. It was funny, but I didn’t want to share Luigi with her, not even that much. I was scared of her too, but part of it was wanting Luigi all for my own secret. And so I just didn’t tell her anything at all.”

  Dr. Finney said, “It isn’t one of those freak wills, is it? There isn’t anything in the will about your marrying or not marrying before nineteen, is there? Because I’m told those freak clauses don’t hold water.”

  “No, nothing. It’s just that I was so scared of Audrey. I’ll be a little scared of her until I’ve got that money. I hate to put it like that, but that’s the way it is. Money’s the only thing that makes sense to Audrey—clothes and all that, it’s all she really cares about. So all I could do was keep telling myself that I had to hang on because when Audrey was really dependent on me I’d have the whip hand. Doesn’t that sound awful?”

  “It sounds practical,” Dr. Finney said. “I suppose Audrey yanked you out of school right away.”

  “She had me packed up and out of there in less than two hours. And when we got back home, it was terrible. Sometimes I would sit and look at the clock, just sit and stare at it, and think how many times the hands had to go around before five months would be up. I cried all the time.”

  “No wonder Audrey had psychiatrists in to observe you.”

  “She did not!”

  “She told me she did. She said they came as guests.”

  “She had some awfully funny people around, but I didn’t know they were psychiatrists. I bet they weren’t very good ones.”

  “I’m sure they weren’t. It is a noble profession, not given to sub-rosa investigations.”

  “Then we came over here. I still wouldn’t tell Audrey anything, and she said there was only one reasonable explanation of what I had been doing those week-ends, that I must have been with a man or I’d be willing to say what it was all about. And she said to me, ‘I’m taking you out of the country, Marie Louise, and if you’ve gone and got yourself pregnant, at least it won’t show while we’re at home, and whoever the man is,’ she said, and then she said something I’ll never forgive her for, never, not if I live to be a million years old; whoever he was, she said, and then she said if I knew his name at all, and that’s what I’ll never forgive, never—whoever he was, she said, I was to forget all about him and she was personally going to see that I met the kind of man who was an advantage for me to marry, and then she said we would just forget the whole unfortunate business, if I was lucky enough not to get pregnant, and we just wouldn’t mention it again. She never once said anything that showed there was any possibility that if I had been with a man it was anything but vicious and nasty.”

  Marie Louise looked good and mad, and more grown up than I had ever seen her yet. “If she hadn’t said that, I might have broken down and told her all about it. But then all this began. She whisked me over here and we had all these introductions and everything. I think I’ve been thrown at the head of every unmarried man in Europe who owns a set of evening clothes and has five dollars in the bank.”

  I said, “I’m flattered but puzzled to have been included. Audrey was doubtful whether I owned a tuxedo, and she didn’t have any way of knowing whether I had five bucks in the bank or not.”

  Marie Louise said simply, “She was getting desperate. She was ready to try anything half-way presentable.”

  Dr. Finney let out one loud snort. I said to her coldly, “Did you want to add something?”

  “No, no,” she said. “You and Marie Louise are doing just fine. Go on.”

  “But then the worst part began,” Marie Louise said, “because all this time I never did get to see Luigi. Audrey stood right over me in the dormitory while I packed my things to come home. I didn’t get a chance until on the train the next morning, while Audrey was putting on her face. That takes all the work space there is in a compartment, so I told her I’d get out and wait for her in the diner. In the diner I wrote this note to Luigi and gave the steward a dollar to mail it. All I told Luigi was that we had to hang on somehow until my birthday and that Audrey was perfectly capable of reading my mail, so I said go out to the store at Sarah Lawrence and buy some notepaper with the school name on it like the girls use, and sign his name Mary but be careful not to really say anything.”

  For a minute there, Marie Louise had one of those split reactions where you couldn’t tell whether she was about to laugh or cry. “Oh, his letters were so funny! I would know he was trying to say he loved me and missed me but they didn’t make much sense, and once at breakfast I was reading one that had come special delivery and Audrey said who was it from, and what was so important that it had to come special delivery? So I said it wasn’t important at all, and was from a friend of mine at school named Mary, who just sent it special delivery for no reason. I read it aloud to her, and all Audrey said was, “Well, your friend Mary sounds simple-minded to me, and you’re too old for these schoolgirl crushes.” But I left the letter lying open on my dressing-table because I knew she was going to poke around for it and read it to see whether I had really read it the way it was. It must have sounded perfectly pointless to her. And she never did catch on to anything at all.

  “Then whenever I got a chance I would send these postcards from a drug store or something, to Luigi, and sign it Mario, and that’s how I told him the name of the Paris hotel, I never thought he would follow me! And here I was all the time in the hotel, just crying and crying all the time, because I hadn’t even had any letters signed Mary for two whole weeks, and poor darling Luigi was hanging around outside the hotel for days waiting for a chance to see me. Because when he called the hotel they would always ask who was calling, and anyway Audrey always took all the calls if she was in, and had the desk clerk take any messages and give them to her, instead of giving the calls to me if she was out.”

  I said, “I don’t see quite what the advantage was to Audrey. She could keep you from getting married to somebody she hadn’t picked out, but she couldn’t keep you from getting to be nineteen, so what’s the difference?”

  “You’ll have to ask Audrey about that,” Marie Louise said. “What she does is beyond me half the time. She has her own way of figuring things out. The only thing she seems sure of is that the most complicated way is the best way.”

  “Go ahead,” Dr. Finney said. “I’m dying for the part where you and Luigi get together.”

  “Well, I’d literally hardly put my nose out of the hotel for a week, and then only with Audrey, before that night when Hoop took me to the Opera. It’s a wonder Luigi didn’t die of pneumonia. He’s awfully tough, though,” she said with satisfaction. “Then when I finally came out of the hotel with. Hoop he followed us to the opera and followed us back, and then he followed Hoop to The Flea Club. And when you came out, he was waiting for you, and asked you about what kind of place it was. He didn’t use that card you gave him, though. He followed you to where you live. But it was the next morning everything broke. You called me, and Mama told me I had to go out with you, and I said I wouldn’t—that was when you heard me saying I wouldn’t, I’m sorry—and she took the phone and began giving you all that goo-goo talk. I went over to the window and looked down into the street for no reason at all and what should I see but Luigi! There he was. I got out of that hotel so fast, I didn’t even wait for the elevator. And when I said that I just went to a café and had a cup of chocolate, that was the truth, except that I had it with Luigi. And that sweet old thing had taken his law school money and followed me over, and he had told his family all about it and they had said for him to come get me, and he said all he wanted us to do was to go up to the hotel that minute and tell Audrey all about it.”
/>   “You should have.”

  “Maybe. But we had held out this long, and anyway now that he was here it was exciting, having it secret. We figured if you took me to The Flea Club and introduced me to Luigi there, maybe we could work it some way so Luigi could take me out, somehow.”

  “Audrey said you came back to the hotel after that cup of chocolate looking like death itself.”

  “That’s what she told me too. She’s always talking like that. I was so excited I had to hold myself in, and I had to go in and lie down before I could trust myself to talk to her at all. Then everything began working fine. Except that when we did meet at The Flea Club we knew we just couldn’t wait. You know when Nicole met us and said was it our honeymoon? She was so nice.”

  “You really did know her singing?”

  “And I really had her records. I didn’t read about her in any paper, though. Luigi told me there was a singer named Nicole at The Flea Club you thought was good, and right away there was a reason to say I wanted to go there. And when you went down in the basement to look for Tony, Nicole said to Luigi and me that no matter what we said, she was a Frenchwoman and she knew better. She knew we had a secret of what she called a certain kind. And we told her the truth. It seemed perfectly easy and natural to tell her, because she had guessed it anyway just by looking at us, and she was so sweet about it, as if she was all happy for us even if she hadn’t known us before. Then Luigi said this was the end. He said I wasn’t going to go home that night, that I was his wife and I was going to stay with him, and I could go call Audrey if I wanted to. So I did. I was going to tell her. But she wasn’t there.