The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  “I still can’t believe it,” Davey said now. “You remember him, don’t you, Nora?”

  “He was awful, but I wouldn’t have imagined he was that awful.”

  “His father is having a little trouble with that one, too.” Fenn proceeded around to the front of his desk, thumped down the notebook, and sat to face them. “Leland sent over Leo Morris as soon as he heard what happened, and Leo has been in our face since two A.M. He’s still back in the holding cell with your friend.” Though Leo Morris, the Chancel family lawyer who had hired the QE2 for his daughter’s sweet-sixteen party, was one of the most powerful attorneys in Connecticut, he was not usually thought of as a criminal lawyer, and Davey expressed his surprise at this choice.

  “Leo won’t argue the case in court, they have a sharp young guy for that, but he’ll stage-manage the defense. We’ll have a fight on our hands.”

  “You’re sure he’s the guy,” Davey said.

  “He is the guy,” said Fenn. “When we booked him, he had a silver cigarette case of Sally Michaelman’s in his jacket pocket. She stopped smoking ten, twelve years ago, but her husband gave her the case a couple of years before they divorced. And when we searched Dart’s apartment, we found lots of goodies. Jewelry, watches, little things that belonged to the victims. Some of this stuff was engraved, and we’re checking the rest, but I’d bet you anything you could name we’ll find that most of it came from the women’s houses. Hell, he even took a book about Ted Bundy from Annabelle Austin’s house—she wrote her name in it. Guess he wanted to pick up some pointers. Besides that, Dart had a scrapbook of articles about the killings, clippings from every newspaper for fifty miles around. And on top of that, while Popsie was threatening his manhood, he coughed up a detail we never told the press.”

  Davey, who had looked a little alarmed at the mention of the book, asked, “What detail?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” said Fenn.

  “What made Popsie suspicious in the first place?” asked Nora.

  “Dart had no real reason for showing up at her house. He called to say he had to discuss something, but once he got there he just rattled off some gobbledygook about the inventory at the dress shop—stuff he didn’t have anything to do with. Then he says it would be useful to have a look at the paintings in her bedroom, maybe she could will them to a museum for a tax deduction. He wants to look over the paintings before they go any further. Popsie tells him he’s full of it, no tours of the bedroom tonight, junior, go home, but really what she thinks is, This guy is lonely, he just wants to talk. Popsie has been around enough men to understand that this guy isn’t on the normal wavelength, it isn’t about sex after all, so she figures she’ll give him one more drink and throw him out. So she gets up, walks around him, and realizes that he’s not just making her nervous, he’s making her really nervous. She’s standing next to the fireplace. And then she realized something that made her pick up the andiron and clout him in the head.”

  “What was that?” Nora asked.

  “All the murdered women were Dart, Morris clients. Popsie referred Brewer, Austin, and Humphrey to Dart herself, and Sally Michaelman had referred her. They weren’t on Dick’s luncheon list, but they all knew him. She had what you could call a brainstorm, and because she’s Popsie, instead of falling apart she got mad and brained him.”

  “Was Natalie a client of Dart’s?” Nora asked.

  Fenn tilted his head back and contemplated the ceiling for a couple of seconds. When he looked back at them he seemed almost embarrassed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mrs. Chancel. I must be getting too old for this screwball job. Got so caught up in the excitement around here, I forgot the reason you came in.” He slid the thick notebook closer to him and opened it to read the last page. From the other side of the desk, Nora saw that instead of the scrawl she might have expected, Fenn’s notes were written in a small, almost calligraphic hand. He looked up at Nora, then back down at the page. “Let me tell you about this woman. Officer LeDonne was reporting to the station early, at my request. He was coming up the South Post Road when he noticed a woman behaving oddly on the sidewalk in front of the empty building that used to house the Jack and Jill Nursery, in the 1300 block there, just south of the old furniture factory?” He looked up at her.

  “Yes.” She felt a faint stirring of alarm.

  “Officer LeDonne pulled over and approached the woman. She appeared to be in considerable distress.”

  “Did she look like Natalie?” Nora asked.

  Fenn ignored the question. “The woman more or less begged to be taken to the police station. She was insistent on getting away from the old nursery. When LeDonne helped her into the patrol car, he saw a resemblance to the photographs he had seen of Mrs. Weil, and asked her if she was Natalie Weil. The woman responded that she was. He brought her here, and she was taken to the station commander’s office, where she almost instantly fell asleep. We called her doctor, but all we got was his service, which said that he’d call us back. We’ll take her to the hospital this morning, but in the meantime she’s still asleep on the station com-mander’s couch.”

  “She didn’t explain anything about what happened to her? She just passed out?”

  “She was asleep on her feet from the second she came into the station. I should mention this. LeDonne never met Mrs. Weil. I never met Mrs. Weil. Neither did the station commander. None of us knows what she looks like in person. So it seems as if the two of you can help us out again, if you don’t mind.”

  “I hope it is Natalie,” Nora said. “Can we see her?”

  Holly Fenn came around the side of his desk with a half smile visible beneath his mustache. “Let’s take a little walk.”

  “Hey, when Dick Dart was spilling his guts to Popsie and the policemen at her house, what did he say about Natalie?” Davey followed Nora and the detective toward the door.

  “Said he never went near her.”

  “He never went near her?” Nora still had not quite separated Natalie’s bloody disappearance from the fate of the other women.

  “You believe him?” Davey stopped moving and let Fenn walk past him to get to the door.

  “Sure.” Fenn opened the door and turned toward them. “Dart admitted everything else to Popsie. Why would he lie about one more victim? But the real reason I believe him is that Natalie Weil didn’t use Dart, Morris.”

  “He only killed his father’s clients,” said Davey, with a fresh recognition of this fact.

  “Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Fenn motioned them through the door.

  Out in the hall he led them past dull green walls, bulletin boards, doors open upon rooms crowded with desks. They were approaching a metal door which stood open behind a uniformed policeman. Through the door a row of barred cells was visible. It struck Nora that the cells looked exactly the way they did in movies, but until you actually saw them you would not guess that they were frightening. “Your friend Dart is back there,” said Fenn. “He’ll stay until we move him to the county lockup. Leo Morris is with him, so it might be a while. We still have to take his picture and print him.”

  Nora imagined the languid, smirking man from the bar at Gilhoolie’s penned up in one of these horrors. The image filled her with dread. Then she took another step, and the entire row of cells came into view. In the last of them, one man sat bowed over on the end of the cot and another, his face obscured by a row of bars, stood. They were not speaking. Nora could not look away.

  Davey and Holly Fenn moved past the open door. Nora looked at the man hunched at the end of the cot, then took in his curly gray hair and realized that he was Leo Morris. Involuntarily she glanced at the man standing beside the lawyer, and at that second the man moved sideways and became Dick Dart, his face brightening with recognition. She felt an electric shock in the pit of her stomach. Dick Dart remembered her.

  Dart looked relaxed and utterly unworried. His eyes locked on hers. He derived some unimaginable pleasure from the sight of her. He winked
, and she pushed herself forward, telling herself that it was ridiculous to be frightened by a wink.

  Farther down the hallway was a door marked station commander. Nora forced herself to stop seeing the mental picture of Dick Dart winking at her and took a long, deep breath.

  “Let’s see what’s happening.” Fenn cracked open the door and peered in. A wide young woman in a police uniform immediately slipped out. Fenn said, “Folks, this is Barbara Widdoes. She’s our station commander, and a good one, too. Barbara, these are the Chancels, friends of Mrs. Weil’s.”

  “Holly gave me this job.” Barbara Widdoes held out her hand and gave them each a firm shake. “He has to say I’m good at it. How do you do?” She was attractive in a hearty, well-scrubbed way, with friendly brown eyes and short, dark hair as fine as a baby’s. Nora had misjudged her age by at least five years. The woman before her was in her late thirties but looked younger because her face was almost completely unlined. “Actually, all I do is keep everybody else out of this old bear’s way. And rent my couch out to exhausted strays.”

  “Can we look in on her?” Fenn asked.

  Barbara Widdoes glanced inside. She nodded and allowed Nora, Davey, and Holly Fenn to enter her office.

  Covered to her neck by a blanket, a small old woman lay on a short, functional couch against the side wall of the dark office. Her eyes were deep in their sockets, and her cheeks were sunken. Nora turned to Holly Fenn and shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s someone else.”

  “Move a little closer,” Fenn whispered.

  When Davey and Nora took two steps nearer the woman on the couch, her face came into sharper focus. Now Nora could see why LeDonne had mistaken her for Natalie. There was a slight resemblance in the shape of the forehead, the cut of the nose, even the set of the mouth. Nora shook her head again. “Too bad.”

  Davey said, “It’s Natalie.”

  Nora shook her head. He was blind.

  “Look,” Davey said, and instantly the woman opened her eyes and sat up, as if she had trained herself to spring out of sleep. She wore a filthy blue suit, and her bare feet were black with grime. Nora saw that this old woman was Natalie Weil after all, staring directly at her, her eyes wide with terror.

  “No!” Natalie shrieked. “Get her away!”

  Appalled, Nora stepped back.

  Natalie screeched, and Nora turned openmouthed to Holly Fenn. Davey was already backing toward the door. Natalie pulled up her legs, wrapped her arms around them, and lowered her head, as if trying to roll herself up into a ball.

  Fenn said, “Barbara?”

  “I’ll deal with her,” said the policewoman, and moved across the room to put her arms around Natalie. Nora followed Fenn through the door.

  “Sorry you had to go through that,” said Fenn. “Do you both agree that she’s Natalie Weil?”

  “That’s Natalie, but what happened to her?” Nora said. “She’s so—”

  “Why would Natalie react to you like that?” Davey asked.

  “You think I know?”

  “We’ll get Mrs. Weil to the hospital,” said Fenn, “and I’ll be in touch with you as soon as I can make some sense out of all this. Can you think of any reason Mrs. Weil might be afraid of you?”

  “No, none at all. We were friends.”

  Looking as perplexed as Nora felt, Fenn took them down the corridor, not back toward the entrance but in the same direction they had been going. “Can I ask you to stay home most of the afternoon? I might want to chew the fat later.”

  “Sure,” Davey said.

  Fenn opened a door at the back of the station, and the Chancels stepped outside into bright, hot light.

  Davey said nothing on the way to the car and did not speak as he got in and turned on the ignition. “Davey?” she said.

  He sped behind the station and into the little road that curved away from the empty field and the river. It would take them longer to get home this way, but Nora supposed that he wanted to avoid the crowds and reporters at the front of the station. “Davey, come on.”

  “What?”

  Something unexpected leaped into her mind, and she heard herself ask, “Don’t you ever wonder what happened to all those people from Shorelands? Merrick Favor and the others, the ones that girl told you about?”

  He shook his head, almost too angry to speak, but too contemptuous to be silent. “Do you think I care about what happened in 1938? I don’t think you should start bugging me or anybody else about stupid Shorelands in stupid 1938. In fact, I don’t think you should have done anything you did. Whatever you did.”

  “Whatever I did?” This was really beyond her.

  But Davey refused to say anything more on the ride home, and when they returned to Crooked Mile Road, he jumped out of the car, hurried into the house, disappeared into the family room, and slammed the door.

  30

  AT TIMES LIKE this, Nora wished that her father were still alive to give her advice about the male mind. Men were capable of behavior explicable only to other men. Most conventional wisdom on the subject was not only wrong but backwards, at least in Nora’s experience. Would Matt Curlew tell her to confront her husband, or would he advise her to give him the temporary privacy he wanted? Some furious part of herself suggested that Matt Curlew would remind her that these days even Catholics were known to get out of bad marriages. Certainly Matt Curlew would not have regarded Davey Chancel as a suitable son-in-law. In any case, she could hear him advocating both courses with equal clarity: Get in there and make him open his yap and Back off and give the moody bastard a little time.

  Nora turned away from the door, remembering that her father had sometimes retreated to his basement workshop in a manner which indicated that he was to be disturbed only in case of emergencies on the order of fire or death. Davey was doing pretty much the same thing.

  Nora went back upstairs to read about Richard Dart in the Times. On the bottom half of the front page, the headline SOCIALITE ALLEGED FAIRFIELD COUNTY SERIAL KILLER above a face-forward photograph of a barely recognizable grinning boy with shadowy eyes. Nora thought it must have been his law school graduation photo. According to the article, Dart was thirty-seven, a graduate of the Mount Avenue Academy of Westerholm, Connecticut, Yale University, and the University of Connecticut Law School. Since graduation, Dart had worked for the firm of Dart, Morris, founded by his father, Leland Dart, a significant figure in Republican politics in the state of Connecticut and a failed candidate for state governor in 1962. Richard Dart’s specialty within the firm was estate planning. He had been brought in for questioning after Mrs. Ophelia Jennings, 62, widow of the yachtsman and racehorse owner Sterling “Breezy” Jennings, had rendered the suspect unconscious after becoming convinced of his guilt during a late-night legal consultation. Westerholm’s chief of police expressed confidence in the identification of Richard Dart as the murderer of four local women, saying, “We have our man, and are fully prepared to offer conclusive evidence at the appropriate time.” Did policemen ever really talk like that, or did reporters just pretend they did?

  Leland Dart declined to speak to the press but said through a spokesman that the charges made against his son were completely without foundation.

  Two long columns on page 21 gave the limited information the Times reporters had been able to unearth during the night. Mr. Dart’s brother, Peter, a lawyer with a Madison Avenue firm, expressed conviction in his brother’s innocence, as did several neighbors of the accused’s parents. Roger Struggles, a currently unemployed boatmaker and close friend of the accused, told a reporter, “Dick Dart is a loose, witty kind of guy with a great sense of humor. He couldn’t do anything like this in a million years.” A bartender named Thomas Lowe described him as “laid-back and real charming, a sophisticated type.” Mr. Saxe Coburg, his retired former English teacher, remembered a boy who “seemed remarkably comfortable with the idea of completing every assignment with the least possible effort.” In his yearbook entry, Dart had expressed the sur
prising desire to become a doctor and chosen as his motto As for living, our servants do that for us.

  At Yale, which both his grandfather and his father had attended before him, Dart was suspended during the second semester of his freshman year for causes undisclosed, but he managed to graduate with a C average. Out of the two hundred and twenty-four graduates in his law school class, Dart placed one hundred and sixty-first. He had passed his bar examinations on the second try and immediately joined Dart, Morris. The firm’s spokesman described him as “a unique and invaluable member of our team whose special gifts have contributed to our effort to provide outstanding legal service to all of our clients.”

  The uniquely gifted lawyer lived in a three-room apartment in the Harbor Arms, Westerholm’s only apartment building, located beside the Westerholm Yacht Club on Sequonset Bay in the Blue Hill area. His neighbors in the building described him as a loner who played loud music on the frequent nights when he returned home at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M.

  This lazy, self-important pig had managed to slide through life, not to mention three good schools, on the basis of his father’s connections. He had chosen to live in three rooms in the Harbor Arms. Blue Hill was one of the best sections of Westerholm, and the Yacht Club admitted only people like Alden Chancel and Leland Dart. But the Harbor Arms, which had been built in the twenties as a casino, was an ugly brick eyesore tolerated only because it provided convenient housing for the bartenders, waitresses, and other lower-level staff of the Yacht Club. What was Dick Dart doing in this dump? Maybe he lived there in order to irritate his father. Dick Dart’s relationship with his father, it came to her, was even worse than Davey’s with his.

  She had a vivid, instantaneous flash of Dick Dart stepping sideways in his cell to freeze her with a gleaming wink. Nora folded the newspaper, sorry that she had met Dart even once and happy that she would never have to see him again. When the stories got worse, when the trial produced the torrent of ink and paper which Alden had cheerfully predicted, she promised herself to pay as little attention as possible.