“Excuse me, Miss Rosemary, Mrs. Thatcher wants you to know lunch is served. She also wants to know whether Mr. Jordan would care to join you.”
“Thank Mrs. Thatcher,” said Andrew. “Some other time.”
“I’ll be there in a second,” said Rosemary.
The butler withdrew.
Rosemary, turning back to Andrew, took his hand in hers. “What are you going to do now? Go to Ned?”
“Yes.”
“And then to the police about the jewel box?”
“Probably.”
“Then … oh dear, I simply must dash. Mother loathes me being late sitting down.” She smiled up at him. “Give my love to Neddy. And, Andrew, in spite of being so selfish and horrible, I’m so sorry for you. Honestly I am. I shall think and think about you and pray.”
She hurried out of the room. Andrew stubbed his cigarette, went out into the hall for his coat and, leaving the house, hailed a taxi. He gave the driver Ned’s address.
As he sat in the taxi, he felt, for the first time since the disaster, almost at peace. The murderer could be someone who had wanted the jewel box, perhaps even hoodlums onto whose professional theft Ned had superimposed his amateurish effort of opened drawers and scattered clothes. Maureen’s death, after all, could have been a senseless act of brutality, diminishing in no way either her or his dignity and decency as human beings. The Maureen of Rosemary and Mrs. Thatcher could have been the real one.
Couldn’t she?
He took the letter out of his pocket and made himself read it through again. From that—to love? Was it possible? Wasn’t almost anything possible? As he folded the letter to return it to his pocket, he noticed something he’d never noticed before. On the back of the page was an address jotted down in pencil: 177 West 23rd Street. That had been Maureen’s address when he’d first met her. But was that Maureen’s handwriting? He looked at the sevens, each of which had a neat little European tick on its upright. No, Maureen had never written sevens like that.
Then who had written it? The murderer? But the address was almost two years out of date, far too far in the past for it to have any significance now. He slipped the letter back in his pocket, thinking about the jewel box. Put Lieutenant Mooney onto the jewel box. It would steer him away from Ned and, with any luck, toward the murderer. There was everything to gain and nothing to lose.
When the taxi left him at Ned’s house, an elderly janitor was struggling up the cellar steps with a trash can. Other cans from the apartment house were already ranged in a squalid row along the rusty iron railing. Andrew was making for the steps when in one of the cans something red, almost hidden beneath a paper sack of garbage, caught his eye. He stopped. Then he leaned forward and, spilling trash onto the sidewalk, pulled the red object out of the can.
It was broken and flattened as if it had been smashed with a hammer, but it was perfectly identifiable.
It was Maureen’s red-leather jewel box.
TEN
For one second, stunned by astonishment and anger, Andrew stood looking at the wrecked box in his hand. Then he glanced at the janitor. The old man’s back was turned to him as, panting, he dragged the can up the cellar stairs. Andrew pushed the broken jewel box into the top of his coat. He went up the steps to the front door and pressed Ned’s buzzer. The door clicked. He hurried up the stairs.
Ned was waiting on the landing of the fourth floor. He had shaved and changed into slacks and a T-shirt. He was holding a spoon and a cereal bowl full of baked beans. When he saw Andrew, his face broke into its vivid, welcoming grin.
“What a relief. I thought it was the cops.”
Andrew stood glaring at him.
“Well, Drew, how was it with Rosemary? What did she say?”
“She sent you her love.”
Andrew grabbed his brother’s arm, shoved him into the apartment and shut the door behind them. In the living room a vague effort had been made to restore order but the drapes were still drawn over the single window and the lamps were on. There was no sign of Keith. Andrew brought the jewel box out of his coat. He held it up for his brother to see. It had two drawers. The front of the bottom drawer was dangling down on a thread of fiber.
“Lying little bastard,” he said.
For a moment Ned’s sunny grin remained intact. He had dipped the spoon into the baked beans and was holding it suspended halfway toward his mouth. Then, the grin disappearing, he gave a little whistle.
“Where did you find it?”
“Right outside in a trash can on the sidewalk.”
“That old jerk of a janitor. He’s not meant to bring the garbage out until after dark.”
“And the police can’t see in the dark?”
Andrew put the jewel box down on a table next to a half-drunk glass of milk. Baked beans and milk. Ned’s lunch. He thought of the countless times Ned must have lunched off caviar and champagne on yachts, in villas, in fashionable restaurants. Ned, the glamour boy. Ned, the slob.
“Okay,” he said. “This time—the truth. T-R-U-T-H.”
“But, Drew …” Ned had moved around him and had squatted down on the daybed in front of him so he could be seen, so the frank, blue-eyed, loving-little-brother expression would show. “I told you the truth. Everything I said was true. It’s just that I didn’t mention the jewel box.”
“That’s all.”
“That’s all. I should have. I almost did, and after you’d gone, I realized what a dope I was. But …” Ned made a gesture with the cereal bowl. It was chipped, Andrew noticed. “Drew, can’t you see? There were Maureen’s jewels. Everyone thought they’d been stolen. You’d get the insurance. It seemed silly just to waste them. I know a guy. Of course, he wouldn’t have given a big price, but it would have been something … and with me so broke …”
He let the hair fall over his forehead. The dazzling smile came, which was, no doubt, the smile which disarmed all the celebrities and millionaires, the smile which got him reinvited to the “amusing Moorish villa just north of Malaga.”
“Gosh, Drew, you know the financial jam I’m in. I didn’t want to come to you for a handout again, not after Las Vegas. And Mother hadn’t come across. And my friends—you try borrowing a nickel from the rich sometime.”
He was watching Andrew’s face, waiting confidently for the capitulation which had always come in the past. Andrew looked at him, the muscles in his jaw stiffening.
“So,” said Ned. “I guess it was a pretty crazy idea, wasn’t it? It was dumb to throw the jewel box in the trash, too. I didn’t know what else to do with it. But you’ve found it. It’s okay now. So let’s just forget about it. I’ve got all the stuff here. What are you going to do with them? Put them down another drain?”
Andrew went to the window and tugged back the drapes. Daylight flooded the room, making its squalor almost grotesque. Moving back to his brother, he tripped over a pair of large suede shoes. Keith’s?
He said, “Did you kill her?”
“My God—for the jewels?”
“For the jewels—and to stop her going to the Thatchers.”
“But, Drew, I told you. Rosemary’s got her own money. There wasn’t anything the Thatchers could do.”
“They could have disinherited her. Rosemary having money of her own and you being son-in-law of a multimillionaire are two different things.”
Ned jumped up from the daybed. “But you don’t understand. Money, running around in the stinking-rich crowd—all that’s what we want to get away from. We’ve got it all fixed. Rosemary’s crazy about Mexico. We’re going to get a little place. She’s going to paint and I’m going to try to write. Okay, cheating the insurance company was a lousy idea. I only thought of it this morning anyway. I probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. I … Drew, all I told you’s the truth. The whole truth, I swear it.”
The spoon was standing almost straight up in the congealing beans. He put the cereal bowl down on the table by the broken jewel box.
Ned! th
ought Andrew wearily. “Okay, get the jewels.”
Ned’s face was radiant again. “Sure, sure. I’ve got them all together in the bedroom.”
He ran into the bedroom. Andrew sat down on the day-bed. Ned came out of the bedroom with a manila envelope.
“Here they are. All of them.”
The envelope was open. He tilted it and slid the jewels into Andrew’s lap. As he did so, there was an explosive sound from the kitchenette.
“Christ,” he said, “the coffee pot’s blown up again.”
He hurried into the kitchenette. Andrew sat looking down at the jewels in his lap. He seemed to have reached a point beyond pain. The pearl necklace, the ruby brooch he’d given his wife evoked no memory of her at all. The ambiguity which once again was surrounding her—she loved me, she loved me not—had somehow made her unreal. The jewels were merely objects which, if they had been the motive for a murder by hoodlums, would have made it easier but which now, thanks to Ned’s idiocy, were just something to be got rid of.
Because it was only Ned’s idiocy, wasn’t it? Every moment seemed to involve a choice and, now he had got over his anger and bitter disappointment, he knew he had made that choice. Ned was Ned. He took advantage of amorous Brazilian widows, he got out of his depth with fancy Florida gangsters, he had crackbrained schemes for cheating insurance companies, he was naïve enough to believe in an earthly Mexican paradise with Rosemary painting and him writing (what?), all love and tamales.
But he hadn’t murdered Maureen.
Was that a foolish, sentiment-blurred older brother’s decision? Maybe. No. He didn’t think so. No Ned, no hoodlums. So he was back to the anonymous letter? Someone from her past? A threat? A struggle for the gun?
The diamond earrings he’d given Maureen as an engagement present were still in their little beige Cartier box. He opened it. The earrings did bring a pale flicker of sensation. Like photographs faded almost to invisibility, images came of Maureen when he’d presented them to her, Maureen just before Bill Stanton’s party, taking them out of the box, deliberately choosing them to establish a bond.
I love you even more now than when we were married. You’re the easiest person in the world to love.
Mrs. Thatcher—Rosemary. She loved you. You’d be mad to doubt it for a moment. The hope was back, the wild, destructive hope which, if it was proved justified, could bring nothing but despair.
He fingered one of the earrings. Automatically he tried to dislodge it from its bed. It was stuck. He tugged harder and the whole upper part of the lining came off with it. Lying beneath it was a folded piece of newspaper. He took it out and unfolded it. It was a photograph, neatly cut from a tabloid, of some sort of street accident. The rather blurred figure of a blond woman was being either supported or grabbed by a policeman. Jumping around them were three tiny dogs. One of the dogs seemed to be hanging by its teeth from the policeman’s pants’ leg. A caption beneath the picture read:
DOG BITES COP. Three chihuahuas, belonging to Miss Rowena La Marche, 215 West 61st Street, savagely attacked the cop who came to their mistress’ aid after her collapse on Central Park West. Miss La Marche was sent to Bellevue for observation. And for the three chihuahuas—a dog psychiatrist?
He looked at the picture blankly. Why on earth would Maureen have cut it out of the paper and hidden it in the earring case?
Rowena La Marche
215 West 61st Street
He heard Ned coming out of the kitchen and slipped the photograph into his pocket. Ned was grinning, completely at ease again.
“Christ, the mess. Coffee grounds on the ceiling. I’ll clean it up later.” He sat down on the daybed next to Andrew. “Drew, I’m sorry. I really am. What are you going to do?”
Go to Lieutenant Mooney? Admit Ned had faked the burglary and kept the jewels? What had seemed a solution before was quite out of the question now.
“When the lieutenant comes,” he said, “you don’t know anything.”
“Okay.” Ned looked down at the jewels. “And them?”
“I’ll keep them. Later, if I have to, I’ll get rid of them.”
Andrew glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. Two hours before Lieutenant Mooney. Rowena La Marche. The woman must have had some connection with Maureen. And with her death? It was a long shot, but what other leads did he have? 215 West 61st Street.
He put the jewels in his pocket and got up.
Ned said, “You’re not leaving?”
“I’m leaving. I’ll take the box. I’ll dump it somewhere.”
He went to the table and slipped the broken box into the manila envelope. Ned came across to join him.
“Drew, I know how you’re feeling. It’s bad, isn’t it? I mean, even though Maureen was a dirty, scheming little bitch, it’s …”
Andrew couldn’t face Ned on Maureen again—not then. He said, “Call me after the lieutenant’s been here.”
“Sure, okay.”
On leaving the house, Andrew walked across town to the Plaza, went up to his room and packed his overnight bag. He had vaguely expected his mother to take care of the bill but she hadn’t. He checked out and walked along the Park to Columbus Circle. When he reached West 61st Street, a sanitation truck was collecting trash. As he passed it, both men were up on the truck. There was still a half-empty garbage can on the sidewalk. He dropped the box out of the envelope into it and went on. He was quite sure that neither man had noticed him.
215 turned out to be an old brownstone even more dilapidated, if possible, than Ned’s. In the stale-smelling hallway, Andrew consulted the buzzers. Apt. 3 rear. Rowena La Marche. He pressed the buzzer and, after quite a while, the front door clicked. He started up the sad stairs with their heavy Victorian mahogany rail. New York, he thought, the Wonder City of Tomorrow. Above him, dogs were barking, little shrill dogs yapping in a frenzied treble. The chihuahuas? When he reached Rowena La Marche’s door and rang the bell, there was a hysteria of yips inside and the crash of small bodies against the woodwork.
The door was opened by a woman. She was a big, fiftyish woman in a crumpled baby-blue housecoat. Three chihuahuas, still screaming, were leaping up and down around her, tugging at her skirt. Her hair was very untidy and dyed a glittering platinum. Make-up and lipstick, rather haphazardly applied, made the strange masklike effect of one face superimposed on another. She didn’t seem very steady on her feet but she was smiling the wide, hopeful grin of the gregarious and the lonely.
“Hi.” She had to shout it over the yapping of the dogs. “It’s all right, dears, all right. He’s a friend.” She beat vaguely in their direction with one arm and surprisingly they quieted down. “Hi,” she said again and the smile of welcome stretched even wider. “Come on in.”
It was only when she lumbered to let him pass that Andrew was sure she was drunk, not melodramatically drunk but sodden drunk, the sort of drunk which begins with a nip of gin on arising. Miss La Marche was sent to Bellevue for observation.
“It’s a mess,” she said. “What with the dogs peeing all over the place. Can’t blame ’em though. If your mother was too bone-lazy to take you for a walk in the park, you’d pee all over the place too, wouldn’t you? Sorry I can’t offer you a drink. Never keep it in the house. Never touch it.”
They were in the living room with the chihuahuas skimming about their legs like butterflies. Everything was pink and baby-blue and everything that could be was ruffled. It was the lovenest of an old Ziegfeld girl, which hadn’t been redecorated since the cornerstone of Radio City had been laid. Rowena La Marche, smiling, bemusedly affable, brandished a hand whose fingers were vivid with chipped tangerine nail polish toward the pink couch.
“Sit down, young man. Sit down.”
Cautiously she maneuvered herself into a chair. Andrew sat down on the couch, putting the overnight bag down on the floor at his side. The three chihuahuas gathered into an ominous line in front of him. One of them snarled.
“No, darlings,” said Rowena La Marche. “A frie
nd. I told you. A good friend.”
Instantly all three dogs leaped up into Andrew’s lap, scrabbling at his shirt front with their paws, trying to lick his face.
“Bores,” said Rowena La Marche. “They’re the bane of my existence. But everything’s got a right to live, hasn’t it?” She leaned toward him, peering, her heavily mascara-ed eyes narrowing to slits of myopic strain. “Pardon me,” she said. “But do I know you?”
“No,” said Andrew. “I’m Andrew Jordan.”
Instantly her expression changed, but it changed so many times and so quickly that, before he could decide whether she was registering shock, fear or delight, she was back smiling her muzzy, friendly smile.
“Gee,” she said, “not Maureen’s husband?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I read it in the papers. It’s terrible. It’s simply terrible. If you knew how I’ve been feeling.” The two faces started to crumble and disintegrate. She reached down beside her large behind and pulled a handkerchief out from under the chair pillow. “Maureen.” She started to dab at her eyes. “Poor, poor Maureen.”
She was sobbing then with the maudlin luxuriousness of the very drunk. The chihuahuas stopped trying to lick Andrew’s face. Aligned in a row on his lap they sat watching her indifferently.
“Maureen,” sobbed Rowena La Marche. “She was my friend. My only real friend in the world. There’ll never be another Maureen …”
ELEVEN
Incoherently, through the sobs, she went on and on. Andrew could follow the thread. She had worked as a sewing woman in the garment district. Maureen had modeled for the firm. Maureen, only Maureen, had been kind to her. She’d got sick. She’d had an operation. Maureen, only Maureen, had gone to see her in the hospital. After that she’d been too frail to work. Who cared about her then? Who had come regularly to see her, always bringing flowers and candy? Maureen had never let her feel she was an old unloved woman to be cast aside. Maureen, with nothing to gain …
The Green-Eyed Monster Page 9