Some one definite person—possibly someone he actually knew—had killed Maureen. He made the statement to himself and confronted it. Then, because he had to, he thought of Ned and the paper dart.
Lieutenant Mooney was still watching him. He had pulled a piece of tissue out of a box and almost daintily transferred into it the gum from his mouth. He crushed the tissue into a ball and flicked it into a metal scrap basket.
“Well, Mr. Jordan, any idea? Did your wife have any enemies?”
Ned an enemy? You’ve got to stop Maureen. For a second Andrew was assaulted by a thought of Ned pleading with Maureen, hysterically threatening, grabbing the gun. Almost immediately he rejected it. Didn’t Rosemary have money of her own? Hadn’t she made it plain that they were planning to go ahead with the marriage whatever Maureen had decided to do? Then Maureen had represented no serious threat to Ned at all. He had been there in the apartment, yes, but he would be able to explain. To go beyond that point would be to plunge into chaos.
“So far as I know,” he said, “my wife had no enemies.”
He realized that by holding back any reference to the paper dart he had, as it were, taken one step away from Maureen. He had changed his relationship with the lieutenant too, and for the worse. But he had made his decision and was prepared to accept the consequences.
“No enemies at all, Mr. Jordan? Nothing from her past?”
“Her past?”
“Nothing before she married you, no trouble?”
“None that I know of.”
“You got on well together?”
“We loved each other.”
“How long you been married?”
“Eighteen months.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“No trouble between you and her? No other woman?”
“No.”
“No other man?”
As vividly as if he were actually seeing it, memory came to Andrew of the letter. YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE IN NEW YORK WHO DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT YOUR WIFE. But that had been a mere piece of psychopathic filth as removed from reality as his own sick suspicions. Lying in bed in his arms Maureen had told him so and he had believed her. To doubt her now would be as irresponsible and masochistic as to have jumped to conclusions about Ned. To doubt her, also, would be to betray the only thing that was left to him from his marriage—his belief in his wife’s love.
“No,” he said, removing himself that much further from the lieutenant. “No other man.”
“You don’t have a kid?”
“No.”
“Planning on one?”
“My wife wasn’t able to have children unless she had a difficult and dangerous operation which her doctor didn’t recommend.”
“But you were happy?”
“Yes.”
“And no enemies?”
“No.”
“No trouble?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t help me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you’d co-operate if you could? You want us to find out who killed your wife, don’t you?”
Andrew glared at him contemptuously across the desk.
“Okay, okay, Mr. Jordan. No offense intended.” The lieutenant flicked back some of the pages on the yellow block. “You know a Mr. Stanton—Mr. William Stanton?”
“Yes,” said Andrew.
“You went to a party at his house day before yesterday. We found an invitation stuck in your bedroom mirror. I called this Mr. Stanton. He said, yes, you were there. You and your wife.”
“We were there.”
“People gossip,” said the lieutenant. “You know how people gossip. You know a Mr. and Mrs. Ben Adams?”
Ben Adams? The name floated, faintly familiar, through Andrew’s mind.
“It seems that this Mr. and Mrs. Ben Adams gossiped with Mr. Stanton. They called him up to thank him for the party, he said, and they gossiped. They had to leave the party early, they told him, and they went to get their coats in the bedroom where the coats were kept.”
Andrew knew then. The Adamses, friends of Bill Stanton’s—the man and his wife. Ooops. Pardon us. We’ve just come to get our coats.
“And they said,” went on Lieutenant Mooney, “I hope it turned out all right with the Jordans. They were at it in the bedroom, fighting like cat and dog. What about that, Mr. Jordan?”
Andrew had been waiting for something like this. He had realized that this plodding, unimaginative policeman would be bound to suggest that he had killed his wife because husbands were classically the first suspects. But now that it had happened, his control completely deserted him and he felt rage surging through him, rage at Lieutenant Mooney and his thick-witted cop’s insensitivity, rage against Bill Stanton, against the Adamses, against a frivolous, malicious, misconstruing world in which at that very minute thousands of empty-headed sensation-seeking Daily News readers were titillating themselves with the slaying of “Mrs. Pryde’s daughter-in-law.”
“That’s absurd,” he said. “The Adamses were only in that room a couple of seconds. My wife and I were discussing something absolutely trivial.”
“Like what?”
“It wasn’t anything. Some friend of my wife’s thought she’d lost a brooch. My wife had told her to go home and make sure she hadn’t left it there. She had, of course. My wife had just been calling her to check.”
Lieutenant Mooney kept the pencil poised over the block of yellow paper. “What was the name of this friend of your wife’s?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know her. Gloria—something. Gloria Leyden, I think.”
He scribbled. “I guess Mr. Stanton will know where to get in touch with her?”
“I imagine so.”
The phone rang. The lieutenant picked up the receiver, listened and talked into it practically inaudibly out of the corner of his mouth. Then he put the receiver down and got up.
“The lab,” he said. “The M.E. wants to see me right away. Something’s come up. So I guess that breaks this for the time being. You going back to the apartment?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then I’ll come see you this afternoon. Around four o’clock okay?”
“That’s okay.”
The lieutenant gathered up the block of yellow paper and put the pencil in his breast pocket. Rather surprisingly he held out his big, red hand.
As Andrew took it, he said, “Take it easy, Mr. Jordan. I know it’s tough, but take it easy. See you at four. And don’t you worry. Whoever killed your wife, we’ll find them. Don’t you worry.”
He moved past Andrew’s chair, revealing large, sedentary buttocks and with a ponderous, measured gait moved out of the room.
With his departure Andrew’s anger had nothing to sustain it. For a moment he sat by the denuded desk. In his mind he was back in the coatroom at Bill Stanton’s party. He was feeling once again the tormenting suspicions which had seemed so difficult to bear then before the reconciliation, the restoration of understanding which, he had thought, was going to make his marriage fine again. You’ve found it? Thank God, I was going out of my mind. Gloria Leyden had found her sapphire clip. That was what it had been. That was all it had been, wasn’t it?
Like the descent of an almost unendurable weight on his shoulders, the realization came to Andrew that all through the interview he had been deceiving himself. Whatever he’d said to Lieutenant Mooney, whatever he’d pretended to believe, he still wasn’t sure that Maureen had been calling Gloria Leyden. That meant he wasn’t sure of anything. His marriage could have been a humiliating farce; his brother—logic or no—could have lost his head and killed Maureen. Wasn’t losing his head what Ned was noted for?
Andrew Jordan was not a reflective person. This was the first time it had occurred to him that it was perfectly possible for a man to be uncertain whether the wife he had loved had loved him or betrayed him, or whether the brother he loved could be a murderer or not.
&
nbsp; This realization seemed more terrible to him than the murder itself. He took the paper dart out of his pocket and smoothed it into shape. His tension was so extreme that he felt as if he were being split in two. He knew then that there was only one thing to do if he was to preserve his sanity. He would have to find out the truth, whatever it turned out to be, and face it.
And how did one find out the truth?
His hand, holding the dart, was unsteady. He put the dart back in his pocket, left the station house and took a taxi to his brother’s apartment.
SEVEN
Ned Jordan lived on the East Side in the Sixties between Second and Third. Andrew had never been invited there. So far as he knew his brother had never invited anyone. Ned, whose life was spent on other people’s yachts, in other people’s hotel suites, in other people’s Caribbean or Mediterranean villas, had no need for a home. All that was required was a hole in the ground into which he could creep when he was temporarily uninvited or when he was sick. When Ned was sick, he couldn’t stand anyone near him.
The taxi dropped Andrew outside a decrepit brownstone. It was a forlorn, obviously doomed block. Steps with a rusty iron handrail led up to a grimy hall. Andrew pressed the buzzer beside his brother’s name. The door clicked. He went three flights up peeling uncarpeted stairs.
Ned was on the landing of the fourth floor, looking down over the banisters. He was wearing a blue and white silk robe which was about as incongruous in that dump as a bullfighter’s costume. The moment he saw who it was, he came running barefoot down to Andrew, tossing the mussed straw-colored hair back from his forehead.
“Drew.” He grabbed his brother’s arms and gazed at him, his eyes stricken. “Drew baby, Mother called me and told me. My God—what can I say?”
With his arm around Andrew, he went with him up to the fourth floor. The door of his apartment was open. It led directly into a living room of indescribable confusion, where a body in pajamas, presumably male, was sprawled in a converted divan bed.
“Keith,” said Ned. “Hung over again. Come into the bedroom.”
He pulled Andrew through a minuscule passage into a bedroom where the chaos was even worse than in the living room. There was one tiny window, screened by a yellowing white shade. Fancy Mark Cross luggage was piled up beside a junky chest of drawers with one leg off. Through the open door of the midget bathroom, Andrew could see a shaving mirror and a whole horde of bottles—after-shave lotion, suntan lotion, God knew what. Ned pushed back the rumpled sheets and made Andrew sit down on the bed.
“Why the hell didn’t you call me last night? How could you stand it with Ma and Lem on top of everything else? I could have helped. At least I could have coped with Ma.”
He dropped down on the bed beside his brother. He was wearing nothing under the robe. He crossed bare, bronzed knees.
“Tell me, Drew. What are they doing? Have they caught the hoodlums?”
He was so exactly the way he always was that Andrew felt himself insidiously drawn into the familiar Ned atmosphere. In the shifting backgrounds of their childhood, Ned had always been his focal point, his “home,” and the feeling was still there. Now he was here sitting with him on the bed, the idea of Ned having killed Maureen was inconceivable to him. But that was a reaction of mere sentiment, wasn’t it? He mustn’t be trapped by sentiment.
Ned was reaching over him for a battered pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. He picked it up, dislodging a heap of engraved invitations, which slithered off onto the floor. He put two cigarettes in his mouth and lit them. Then he stuck one of them between Andrew’s lips.
“Don’t talk,” he said. “Not if you’re too beat. Just sit. Or take off your clothes if you want to. Get in the bed.”
“I’m okay,” said Andrew.
“You’ve been with the cops. Mother said so.”
“Yes.”
“Drew, this doesn’t help. God knows. But—well, it could happen to anyone. Whatever you’re doing, however happy you are, you’ve always got to keep that in mind. It can happen. In a second everything can get wiped out. That’s how you get through life, being ready for it, not letting it throw you when it comes.”
Could he have said that if he’d killed Maureen? Yes. Andrew got up. It made it easier.
“Like losing ten thousand at Hialeah,” he said.
Ned grinned. It hadn’t occurred to him that his brother was being ironic. Ned had no bitterness in his make-up and had no way of recognizing it in others.
“Sure,” he said. “Like that. Flip the ash on the floor. It’s okay.”
For a moment Andrew stood dragging on the cigarette, thinking: “Maureen is dead.” The pain which came with the thought made him impregnable even against Ned.
He said, “Maureen wasn’t killed by hoodlums. There weren’t any hoodlums. Somebody murdered her and faked it to look like a robbery.”
He made himself look down at his brother. Ned was pushing his lower lip up until it covered the upper one. It was a kid’s grimace he’d never grown out of—Ned pensive, Ned perplexed, Ned giving a remarkable piece of information his fullest attention. Ned, almost certainly, stalling for time until he could think up a lie.
But that didn’t mean anything. Ned had been in the apartment. He would lie about that anyway.
Andrew said, “What were you doing at my place yesterday?”
“At your place?” Ned opened the blue eyes so wide that they seemed almost completely round. “At your place—me?”
“Are you going to say you weren’t there?”
“Yes. I mean … no, I wasn’t there.”
“Rosemary called you, didn’t she, after lunch with Maureen, after she’d come yelling into my office?”
“Sure Rosemary called me.”
“And she told you Maureen was going to give her parents the full low-down on Las Vegas, Hialeah and that blonde?”
“Yes, of course she did.”
“And after that,” said Andrew, not as a question but as a statement, “you went around to my place to try to talk Maureen out of it.”
“But, Drew …” Ned’s voice cracked. “Drew, you’re crazy. I swear …”
“Cross your bloody heart?”
Andrew took the paper dart out of his pocket and arranged it. He held it up between finger and thumb.
“I found this behind a chair. It’s made from a club circular which came through the mail yesterday morning. When I left for the office, it was on the coffee table. I could have given it to the cops. I didn’t because I don’t think you killed her. I could be wrong. That’s what I’m going to find out.”
Ned, lying back on the bed, the blue and white bathrobe dropping away from him, was gazing up at the dart with a sort of dazed wonder. Then, very gradually, his mouth moved into a sheepish grin.
“Gee,” he said. “Imagine. Making that goddam dart and not even remembering.”
“That’s better.”
“But, Drew, I … I hated having to lie to you. I swear I wanted to tell you, but …”
“When were you there?”
“It was exactly five when I got there.”
“After I’d talked to Rosemary?”
“I thought about what she’d told me and finally I figured I’d better go see Maureen. Not that it mattered. We’re going to get married anyway. Rosemary has money of her own, more than enough to tide us over until I get my income back. She explained that to you, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ve got to see. Whether Maureen talked to the Thatchers or not wasn’t important except that it’d have made them upset. It was just that I figured, well, Rosemary’s so fond of her parents, she’d have felt much better if I could have talked Maureen out of it.”
“You told Rosemary you were going?”
“No. I didn’t tell anybody. I got there at five, as I said. I rang the buzzer downstairs. No one answered. I figured she hadn’t come back yet. I went upstairs. I remembered the night before, how mad you’d both been
about that blonde. I thought if I hung around outside the apartment, maybe when she came back she wouldn’t let me in. I had the key you gave me. You know that. So I went in to wait. I sat on the couch in the living room. I must have sat there maybe twenty minutes. I got kind of restless. That’s when I made that dart, I guess. The circular must have been there on the table and I must have … Anyway, after a while I figured, ‘This is funny. Rosemary said Maureen was going straight home. Maybe she’s back and asleep,’ I thought. The bedroom door was shut. I opened it and went in and … there she was lying on the bed, shot with the gun beside her.”
He’d drawn his legs up under him. He leaned a little closer, putting his hand on Andrew’s knee.
“Drew, I don’t have to tell you what I felt. My God—lying there dead. It was your gun. That little German job with the engraved butt. I was with you when you bought it. Remember? There she was and everything was so like normal. I mean the lights were on, it was all so neat, everything as if she’d just tidied it all up. I stood there. I didn’t know what to do.”
“So you faked it to look like a burglary?”
“Yes. That’s what I did. I opened a lot of drawers, threw a lot of dresses and suits around, tore up the couch in the living room, took the money out of her pocketbook and then … Drew, I had to—to make it look convincing. I took the rings off her fingers, that aquamarine she had—and the wedding ring. I’ve got them. They’re right here.”
He jumped off the bed and rummaged through the clutter on top of the chest of drawers. He turned back to Andrew, holding out the two rings.
The Green-Eyed Monster Page 6