The Green-Eyed Monster

by Patrick Quentin

  “You see? I did all I could. I even scratched the front-door lock and tried to beat up the wood around it. If I’d had the right equipment, I would have busted the lock. Remember how I used to fool around with burglar alarms and skeleton keys as a kid? But I didn’t have anything with me and I guess … oh, well, I did my best but the cops have experience. They can tell the real thing from the phony.”

  Andrew looked at him as he stood in front of him, naïvely earnest, his suntanned hand cupped to hold the aquamarine ring and Maureen’s wedding ring.

  “And the jewel box?”

  “Jewel box?” Ned blinked. “What jewel box?”

  “Maureen’s jewel box. That was gone too. What did you do with it?”

  “I didn’t take any jewel box. I didn’t even think about her having one. Just the money from her pocketbook—about eleven dollars—and the rings. Here—take them. They’re yours. I’ll give you the eleven bucks too if you like.”

  Andrew took the rings. Was this the truth? Couldn’t it be? Didn’t it fit with Ned: Ned muddling, Ned making a fool of himself, Ned trying to lie about it as long as he could get away with it—but that was all?

  He said, “Why did you think you had to fake it to look like a burglary?”

  “Anyone can see that. It was much better to have the cops believe it was hoodlums who did it than … than …”

  “You?” suggested Andrew.

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Or Rosemary?”

  “Rosemary!” Ned looked thunderstruck. “Why in heaven’s name would the cops think Rosemary wanted to kill her?”

  “To stop her from telling her parents about you.”

  “When she’s of age? When she has her own money? When it didn’t make any difference one way or the other? Cops wouldn’t be as dumb as that.”

  “Then—why?”

  Ned looked awkward. “Does it matter? I mean, if it’s better you didn’t know?”

  “Ned, for God’s sake.”

  Ned picked up the crumpled cigarette pack from the bed and felt in it. It was empty. He crushed it and tossed it on the floor.

  “After all, it was your gun. And then, Maureen being the way she was …”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Oh, you know. It wasn’t any of my business. I wasn’t married to her. And, of course, you were crazy about her, I realized that. If you hadn’t been crazy about her, you’d never have put up with her bossing you, dragging you out every night to those crummy parties, off half the day doing God knows what. Surely you can see, with Maureen being the way she was and you … God, Drew, I know you always let people play you for a sucker, Mother and me I guess, too. But I thought …”

  Andrew looked at him, astounded. “Are you saying you faked that burglary because you thought I killed Maureen?”

  Instantly Ned was all concern. He put his hands on his brother’s arms. His face was a picture of dogged affection and trust. “Gosh, Drew, I don’t think so now. I swear I don’t. But right then, with the shock of it and all, when I saw her lying there with your gun beside her and—and the letter …”

  “What letter?”

  “The letter she wrote to Rosemary, lying there on the bed beside her, right there by the gun.”

  He put his hand in the pocket of his robe and brought out a piece of paper.

  “I kept it. I thought I’d better. Rosemary must have given it to her at lunch. It was right there beside her. I picked it up. I read it and I thought … Drew, I wouldn’t have blamed you. Honestly. You know that, don’t you? I wouldn’t have blamed you for a second.”

  He was holding the letter. Andrew took it from him. It was typewritten on a single sheet of paper and dated nearly two years ago, just before his marriage. At the bottom, he saw his wife’s familiar, boldly scrawled signature.

  The letter said:

  Darling Rosemary,

  I’m sure you didn’t expect to hear from me and I imagine this little breeze from the past will cause only a ripple in the splendors of Miss Pratt’s establishment for the education of the daughters of the plutocracy. But since you’re my only cousin—and such a good friend—I do feel you would like to be brought up to date on what’s happened to me. When your dear mother threw me out of the Thatcher mansion—you did know I was thrown out, didn’t you?—I expect you were terribly worried for me and had dire visions of my slipping back into the wrong-side-of-the-track oblivion from which I had sprung. Well, I’m delighted to be able to set your mind at rest. It’s extraordinary how welcoming Manhattan can be to a penniless girl if she’s a little charming, a little ingenious. You must try the experiment some day and find out how the Big City welcomes a rich girl. I’m sure you’ll have nothing to worry about because surely Miss P. works her magic not only on the minds of her girls but on their figures, too. And you’d be amazed at the attractive eyeglasses they make these days—even bifocals.

  But I’m straying from the point, aren’t I? The point is that I’ve become a model and I’ve really got quite a horde of attractive men at my feet. I could have taken my pick from a round dozen, but—to put your mind at rest—I’ve finally settled for one. Doesn’t it make your bosom swell with pride for me to hear that I’m engaged to Andrew Jordan, the oldest son of that very grand woman with all the husbands (and all the money) who impressed your father so much, remember? He’s no great brain, of course, and no great beauty, and just between you and me I must admit he’s a tiny bit of a bore. But what intelligent person puts romance before security in matrimony? Certainly not your mother, who, as you know, has always been my model and ideal of womanhood and who, in marrying Uncle Jim, must have resigned herself to a life of boredom quite as undiluted as any Andrew Jordan can provide.

  Well, darling, I do hope this news brings you as much pleasure as I think it will. And I do hope, by the way, that this letter gets to you. It’d break my heart if it didn’t burst like a guided missile into Miss P.’s genteel academy, which is so well known that no one seems to have the proper address. Good-bye, Rosemary darling. Think what a weight this will take off your mind. Now you don’t have to worry any more financially or socially about that sad little poor relation of yours.

  Loads of love,

  Maureen

  Andrew read the letter slowly and carefully. He took in every malicious phrase, every overtone of diseased spite and envy. He could feel the effect of them seeping through him as if some poisonous vapor were exhaling from the paper. But, against all probability, there was no sense of surprise or shock, nothing but a feeling of recognition.

  He had wanted, among other things, to find the truth about his marriage. He had found it.

  “Drew.” Ned’s voice came through to him. “When I realized you hadn’t seen it, I didn’t want to show it to you. But—well, you asked, didn’t you?”

  “I asked,” said Andrew.

  “That’s why I faked the burglary and took the letter. It was for you. My God, if the cops had read that letter … You see, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Andrew. “I see.”

  Ned’s arm was around his shoulder. “You mustn’t let it get you down, Drew. It’s tough, I know it is, but face it. She was a scheming little bitch. All right. Lots of guys marry scheming little bitches. Accept it. She was a bitch and now someone’s killed her. That makes it easier. Don’t you see? She’s been killed, but who cares?”

  “Who cared?” thought Andrew. Lieutenant Mooney cared. That was his job.

  He’s no great brain … and no great beauty … between you and me he’s a tiny bit of a bore …

  He wasn’t merely looking at those phrases, he was hearing them spoken in Maureen’s soft, clear voice which had—hadn’t it?—seemed to him like the voice that would come from a white rose if a white rose could talk.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed. Still holding the letter, he put his hands up to cover his face.

  EIGHT

  There were confused noises from the living room, grunts and thumps. A young
man in pajamas, with black tousled hair and a sleep-crumpled face, strode into the room.

  “Christ,” he said, “all this yakking. How can a guy get a little sleep around here?”

  He barged into the bathroom and slammed the door. Andrew brought the hands down from his face. He heard the hiss of the turned-on shower.

  He said to Ned, “You knew Maureen felt this way about me?”

  “Gosh, Drew, I didn’t know, of course I didn’t, but I always had her pretty well doped out. Maybe I should have said something to you. I thought of it, but you were so nuts about her and after all those years of giving the babes the brush-off, you seemed so happy, so changed. I figured, Who am I to judge? Maybe that’s what he wants, maybe it isn’t like I think anyway.”

  Ned had known. Mother had known. Everybody had known? Bill Stanton? The Adamses?

  The boy in the shower—Keith?—had started to sing. In a big sour baritone he was booming “From the Halls of Montezuma.” Andrew felt the self-destructive rage gnawing at him again. He fought it. Rage wasn’t going to help. What was going to help?

  YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE IN NEW YORK

  WHO DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT YOUR WIFE.

  Wasn’t it obvious now that the anonymous letter had been written not by an enemy of his, as he had supposed, but by someone who had known Maureen for what she had been? An enemy of Maureen’s? Then …

  “Drew, I’m so terribly sorry. If only there was something I could do.”

  Ned hadn’t shaved. In the drab light seeping in through the yellowing shade, the stubble on his chin was golden. As Andrew looked at him, all his old love for his brother flooded through him, filling the vacuum left by Maureen.

  “You stuck around and faked that burglary, when you could have scrammed out and saved your own skin. That was something, wasn’t it?”

  Ned looked awkward. “Maybe it was dumb of me. I was so scared, mixed-up, but I figured …”

  Andrew got up and put his hand on his brother’s arm. “Thanks,” he said.

  “To hell with that. It wasn’t anything. It’s you that matters. Drew, you’re not going to let the cops see that letter, are you?”

  He wasn’t, of course. He’d already decided that, already accepted the fact that from now on Lieutenant Mooney could no longer be any kind of ally.

  He said, “I’m not going to let the lieutenant see the letter—or the rings. They’ve been reported missing.”

  “Then—then what are you going to do with them?”

  Andrew looked down at his wife’s wedding ring. “Get rid of them. Down a drain into the sewage system. Anywhere.”

  “Drew, if it makes it any easier for you, I’ll tell them everything I did. Honest.”

  “It wouldn’t make it any easier for me, would it?”

  “I guess it wouldn’t. Drew, I imagine the cops will be here soon, won’t they? After they’ve interviewed Ma, they’re bound to come here. Interviewing Ma! For God’s sake, she’ll louse it all up if she’s given half a chance. Does Ma know anything—I mean about Maureen being what she was?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Never took to her, did she? Little what’s-her-name.” Ned gave a small, uncertain laugh. “When the cops come here, I’ll just clam up. I’ll know nothing from nothing. You too. We just do nothing—just sit this out.”

  The boy in the shower had stopped singing. Sit it out? To Andrew a memory came of Lieutenant Mooney, large, impassive, leaning over his desk. Any trouble between you and your wife, Mr. Jordan? … You know a Mr. and Mrs. Ben Adams, Mr. Jordan? With a little chill, he realized what almost certainly would happen if he “sat it out.” The only thing to do still was to find out the truth—not for Maureen any more, not for the woman who had married him in contempt and lived with him in ridicule, but because, until he found out the truth, he would be in mortal danger.

  He still had the letter in his hand. He could feel its dry, smooth texture between his fingers. The letter, like the anonymous letter, was a fact, something about which the truth could be found.

  He said, “This was on the bed beside her?”

  “Yes. I told you. At lunch when Maureen was threatening to tell her parents, Rosemary must have brought it out as a sort of counter weapon against her. ‘If you tell my parents about Ned, I’ll tell your husband about you.’ Something like that. It must have been. And then, somehow, Maureen must have got it away from her, tricked her out of it.”

  “What did Rosemary say when you told her?”

  “I haven’t told her. I haven’t said a word to anyone. Gosh, Drew, you know I wouldn’t—not until I’d talked to you.”

  “Where is she? Is she staying with her parents?”

  Ned’s lips parted. “Yes, but what are you going to do?”

  “This letter belongs to her.”

  “You’re going to ask how Maureen got it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you’re not going to drag Rosemary …”

  The door of the bathroom burst open. A towel twisted around his waist, the black-haired man gave a leap onto the bed.

  “Hi,” he said. “Top of the morning to you both. What’s new? How is the world treating you? Hey, Neddy, how’s about a sweet little, bonded little nip of bourbon for Keithy boy?”

  Andrew said, “I’m going, Ned.”

  “But after you’ve seen her you’ll be back. Drew, please, until I know what she says I’ll be out of my mind.”

  Andrew looked at his brother’s young, bedeviled face, thinking: “There’s still Ned.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  He went down the unsavory stairs to the street. He walked two blocks. He stopped at a drain. He took the two rings out of his pocket—the aquamarine ring and Maureen’s wedding ring. He dropped them through the grating. The act brought improbable relief from pressure, a sensation that was almost comfort. He had symbolically rejected his wife forever. He walked another block, hailed a cab and gave the driver the Thatchers’ address.

  He and Maureen had been at the Thatcher house several times for large parties, list-B parties. They lived on Sutton Place. The house wasn’t big. They were so rich they could get away with not trying to impress. A butler opened the door to him. From the flicker of his eyes, Andrew could tell he’d become an oddity. To the butler, he was “the husband of that one who got herself murdered.”

  “Is Miss Thatcher in?”

  “Miss Rosemary, sir? I don’t think she is, Mr. Jordan. But come in, sir, please.”

  He took Andrew to an upstairs sitting room. A fire was burning in the hearth. There were impressionists, French Provincial furniture and over the mantel—a relic perhaps from Los Angeles—a large Portrait’s Inc. type picture of Mrs. Thatcher in an evening gown wearing a tiara which looked heavy enough to break her neck.

  It was Mrs. Thatcher who came in to him. The “graciousness” which usually antagonized him wasn’t there at all. She looked tired and unhappy and kind.

  “I’m sorry, Andrew. It seems rather absurd at a time like this but Rosemary’s gone to the dentist. She’ll be back soon for lunch. You must wait. I know how desperately unhappy she is and how much she’ll want to see you and give you her sympathy—as do I.”

  She took his hand in hers. He thought of the venom and hate against the Thatchers in Maureen’s letter. Sympathy. Could Mrs. Thatcher be genuinely offering him sympathy?

  “I just want to see her,” he said.

  “Of course, Andrew. I feel so terribly inadequate. What can one say?”

  She sat down, quiet and unobtrusive on an unobtrusive collector’s-item chair. Andrew sat down opposite her.

  “I do hope,” she said, “that in these terrible days, you’ll think of us as family. After all, we are Maureen’s only relations and if there’s anything we can do—anything at all …”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “You must bring your brother too. We still haven’t met him, but I’m sure he’ll be everything Rose
mary says he is.”

  He could tell she was straining to think of things which would make it less uncomfortable for both of them, things that might distract him from his “grief.” He liked her for it, but he mustn’t just sit there. He must use whatever there was to be used in this unexpected moment of intimacy with Maureen’s aunt.

  He said, “I’ll bring Ned.” Then, steering her back, “Maureen lived with you for several years in Los Angeles, didn’t she?”

  “In Pasadena, yes. For almost three years.”

  “Then in a way you probably knew her better than I did.”

  A faint flush spread over Mrs. Thatcher’s cheeks. “I suppose I knew her as well as an older woman can know a very young girl.”

  “It must have been a shock to her losing her parents so young.”

  “Of course. It would be a shock for anyone. But her life hadn’t been particularly happy. Her father … well, I don’t know how much she told you about her childhood.”

  “Not too much.”

  “She probably preferred not to think about it. Her father, my brother-in-law, was one of those men who seem to want to destroy not only themselves but also the people who love them. He lost job after job. There was an alcoholic problem. My sister couldn’t cope with him at all. She let herself be dragged down. Perhaps the accident wasn’t such a tragedy for Maureen after all.”

  There was a Regency sideboard converted into a bar in a corner of the room. Mrs. Thatcher went to it, poured two glasses of sherry from a decanter and brought one to Andrew.

  “Perhaps you’ll think this impertinent of me, Andrew, but I’d like you to know how grateful I am to you. When Maureen left us to go to New York, I was very worried about her. I wasn’t at all sure we’d been able to help her much. It was a great joy to me and my husband when we knew she’d found you, someone good and kind and, well, someone to love her.”

  She had gone back to her chair. She raised her glass to him. “I hope you didn’t mind my saying that. I hope it may even help a little to be told that you were able to give her the only real happiness she’d ever known.”