He said, “They’re going to arrest me tomorrow unless …”
“Unless you can show good reason why they shouldn’t?”
“Exactly.”
Bill Stanton took a cigarette out of a silver box. “While we’re on the subject—did you kill her? I would be fascinated to know. I’ve thought of many colorful ends for Maureen. The most probable, I felt, was death at the hands of her outraged husband.”
“I’m sorry to be unfascinating,” said Andrew. “I didn’t kill her.”
“So you’re merely trying to find out who did?”
“Yes.”
Bill Stanton lit the cigarette. “I hope you haven’t been pinning too much faith on me as the Killer. Yesterday morning I had to fly to Chicago. I only got back early this morning. This the police already know, this the police have already checked, this once and for all lets me out. So if you do have a list of killers and I’m on it, cross me off and move on to the next name. Is there another name?”
“No.”
“But there is some—idea?”
Andrew took a gulp of his drink. “Were you one of her lovers?”
“One of her lovers? So you know that much about her?”
“I know that much.”
“Well, yes, before you married her I suppose I could be called one of her lovers. For a while I came dangerously near to becoming one of her husbands, too. There was quite a nasty scene once when she threatened to tell people quote about me unquote unless I made an honest woman of her. Then luckily she found out how little I had in the bank and I was perfectly safe. From that moment we understood each other, which meant, since she did happen to know about some rather tricky little adulteries of mine, that I was always available for her in any capacity she happened to need me. Dear Maureen! As I said, I admired her in many ways. But I’m afraid she never quite qualified as a truly glorious bitch. For example, it was idiotic of her to feel she had to extort co-operation from me. I would always have been delighted to give her aid and comfort just for the privilege of seeing those nasty little wheels go around. Not that she wasn’t frank, of course. That’s one area in which I give her full marks. She kept few secrets from me. Some, but few and only the big ones.”
“Then you knew her motives for marrying me, for example?”
“My poor Andrew, I knew them all too well. I imagine I was the very first person to hear the great news. I shall never forget her bursting in here one day, beside herself with joy, announcing, ‘Congratulate me, I’m going to marry Andy Jordan. The dear sweet man’s going to be very eligible indeed because his mother can’t possibly last out for more than a couple of years. She’s dying of leukemia.’ ”
He stopped with a little fake gasp of contrition. “Oh dear, you didn’t know about that, did you?”
Andrew sat gripping his drink, feeling a strange, incomprehensible panic.
“I should have realized,” said Bill Stanton. “In fact, I did realize. I had just moronically forgotten. You know Maureen shared the same doctor as your mother. That was far too good an opportunity for her to pass up. One day she managed to get at the doctor’s files, and there it all was, the diagnosis, the prognosis, all the medical mumbo jumbo. It seems there was also a little note from your mother. I gathered it was a very dignified and touching human document, demanding that the doctor should never tell a soul that she was dying, not her children and particularly not her husband. Your wife’s relish as she told me about it, her total insensitivity to the implications from your mother’s point of view, was one of the examples of Maureen at her highest pitch of Maureenness.”
The soft voice, so repellent in its motiveless spite, was cooing on. The panic was still in him and with it a sudden, corroding sense of guilt as he remembered the times, the dozens of times, in his childhood and later, much later, almost up to that very day, when his bitter resentment of his mother had brought vindictive daydreams of her “comeuppance.” And now she was dying, tightly insulated by pride and courage, while a shabby bigamist was living off her, and her jewels had been swindled out of her by a cheap little bitch who hadn’t deserved to breathe the same air she breathed.
The hatred he felt for Maureen, far transcending any reaction to Bill Stanton, was so violent that it frightened him.
“I’m sorry, Andrew, to have blurted all this out so tactlessly, but I still feel it may be an essential piece of information for you in your role as falsely accused husband. You see, that’s what Maureen married. She didn’t marry you. She married your mother’s leukemia. And I’m afraid to say the poor dear outwitted herself, didn’t she? I was the first to hear about that too. It was right after the honeymoon that she found out all the money was going to your brother. She came here in a rage. ‘I’ll get that will altered,’ she said, ‘if it’s the last thing I do.’ Splendidly Edwardian, she was. There should have been elbow-length gloves and Mrs. Tanqueray jet. And she tried, didn’t she? She worked out some scheme. I never quite knew what it was. It was rather too important for her to confide it to me. But I do know it didn’t succeed. That’s when she changed.”
The pale, bantering eyes were fixed on Andrew’s face, the eyes of—what?—an entomologist ready to stick his pin through the rarest of Brazilian butterflies?
“Changed?” repeated Andrew.
“Yes, changed. Every now and then after that she’d drop in to see me. For no particular reason. It was just, I think, that I relaxed her, that with me she could put her feet up. But, although she came, from then on she was always disappointingly secretive. She couldn’t control her aura, though, and it was a smug, canary-swallowing aura. I knew she’d got on to something that was making the marriage pay off after all.”
The jewels, thought Andrew; futile rage against a dead woman tearing him apart.
“Andrew, my dear fellow, you do appreciate my magnanimity in telling you all this, don’t you? It would be much more orthodox for me to be talking to the cops instead, but it appeals to my sense of sportsmanship to throw my weight behind the losing side. The point of the change—the point of Maureen’s smugness—was a man. A lover. I was perfectly sure of that even though she was admitting nothing. And then, one day just after you were back from that European trip, she called me in quite a flap and said that if ever you were to ask me I was to say she’d spent the whole afternoon with me. As it happened, you never mentioned anything, so that was that. But, well, she’d come out with it at last.”
Andrew looked up from his drink, but by now he was only dimly seeing Bill Stanton. As a human being, Bill Stanton no longer existed for him.
“There was another time too, Andrew, which you must remember. It was just two days ago, at my party, the day before she was killed. You said something about renting her out as a maid and she grabbed me away from you and sneaked me out into the kitchen. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘that almost tore it. I told him I’d spent the afternoon helping you get ready for this party. And I did, see? If he ever brings it up, you’re to swear I was here all afternoon from lunch until about six-thirty.’ ”
Bill Stanton’s mouth had twisted in a smile of delighted reminiscence. “She was really quite rattled and it was a big disappointment to me. Genuine adventuresses should never become rattled, and I felt that, for her own good, she needed a little turn of the screw. So I said, ‘Listen, sweetie, maybe all those tiny things you know about me aren’t so important after all. Why don’t you go ahead and announce them to an astounded world? And I’ll slip over to Andrew right this minute and let him know how you’ve been spending your afternoon.’ You should have seen her. I always thought that TV and its miracle deodorants had once and for all released American womanhood from offending. But she was sweating, literally sweating. ‘Bill,’ she said. ‘Bill dearest, darling Bill, do this for me. Please, just this once, and I swear I’ll never ask you to do anything else again ever.’ ”
He shrugged. “I knew she’d been with her lover, of course, and I was pretty sure that somehow it was all tied up with some crooked deal
she was pulling against your mother. So, whimsical old me, I said, ‘Okay, my angel, I’ll cover for you on one condition. Tell me the name of your boy friend.’ ”
He was leaning forward. His face, vague and looming, was a face which some day was going to be smashed by someone. But not by Andrew. It wasn’t worth the effort.
“When I said that, she squirmed, she hated it, but she knew I wasn’t bluffing. So finally she came out with it. She said, ‘You’ll swear never to tell anyone.’ And I said, ‘Yes, dear, scout’s honor.’ And she said, ‘Well, it’s a question of killing two birds with one stone!’ And she gave that sinister little Lucrezia Borgia giggle I was so fond of. ‘It’s always been my philosophy that love and loot should go together, and this time it’s working out fine. My boy friend, as you choose to call him, is in a very strategic position. He’s old Mrs. Pryde’s husband.’ ”
Astonishment came to Andrew like a blow in the solar plexus. But even in the first instant of shock, he saw how everything could fit this way. Lem and Maureen, not enemies, but allies. Two crooks mercilessly running roughshod over everyone—himself, his mother, Rowie, Ned. Two ghouls fighting against time to get all the jewels into their possession before Mrs. Pryde died.
He got up. Bill Stanton got up too.
“Well, Andrew, that’s my small contribution to the Fund for Embattled American Widowers. I hope it may help to bring you out from the shadow of the electric chair. It makes it all more complex, of course, but nothing simple is ever stimulating, is it? Not even a murder.”
Lem. Lem—the lover? Lem—the father of her child? Lem—the murderer? Lem, who had an alibi? Lem, who knew the jewels were in the jewel box which hadn’t been taken by the killer? For a moment everything seemed to be disintegrating again. Then Andrew understood. Not about the alibi. Only his mother could explain the alibi. But he could see the rest. Lem, the killer, yes, but not the premeditating murderer. Lem, the petty crook, yes, but not the monster. There had been only one monster—Maureen, who had used Lem as she had used everyone else. Maureen, who, once the jewels were safely in her jewel box, had decided to shake off the lover who no longer had any usefulness. Okay. Good-bye. Go back to your wives now, like a good boy. These jewels are mine and there’s just nothing you can do about it. Maureen taking the gun out of the bedside drawer, Maureen threatening Lem, a struggle, two shots, Lem, “who fainted at the sight of blood,” rushing hysterically from the scene, completely forgetting the jewels in his panic.
Bill Stanton’s high, light, mosquito voice was saying, “I imagine the next step in your investigation involves a little trip to the Plaza, doesn’t it? When you leave, I suggest you turn left to Park. That’s your best bet for a taxi.”
SEVENTEEN
It was just after eleven. Whatever play the Prydes had been to see should be out by now. Andrew took a taxi to the Plaza. He called on the house phone from the lobby. His mother answered. Hearing her voice made the embarrassment worse. Cripplingly shy, he went up in the elevator. She opened the door of the suite for him. She was still wearing her elaborate, filmy, becoming gray evening dress. She looked tired but that was all. The blue eyes were as bright and handsome as ever, acknowledging his presence with the only just disguised indifference which had always been her greeting for him.
“Andrew, isn’t this a rather odd time for a call?”
He went past her into the living room. The drapes were not drawn. Beyond he could see the vast expanse of Central Park threaded with glittering street lights.
“We’ve just got back.” His mother had followed him. “It was an excessively dreary play. Lem’s gone out again for a little fresh air. He always needs a walk before he goes to bed.”
She sat down on her daffodil chair. He turned to her, tongue-tied. More than ever before with his mother, he felt like a little boy, a guilty little boy faced with the ordeal of explaining something which was quite beyond his powers.
Mrs. Pryde had produced her jade cigarette holder. Her hand, on which the false emerald gleamed, moved to take a cigarette out of a box. She looked up at him. He came over with his lighter. She inhaled and, as the cigarette glowed, watched his face critically.
“What on earth is the matter with you, Andrew? You look quite liverish.”
“Liverish.” That was one of his mother’s words. She’d picked it up in her English period with Mr. Mulhouse.
He sat down. He said, “Lieutenant Mooney’s going to arrest me tomorrow morning.”
“Arrest you?” she echoed. “For killing Maureen?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s absolutely ridiculous. We all know it was hoodlums.”
“It wasn’t hoodlums.”
She had arranged herself the way she wanted to be by then. The cigarette holder was poised at the correct angle, the skirt swooped around her in a graceful curve, the light from the lamp fell in just the right way to bring out the gleam in her taffy-colored hair.
Andrew looked at her, failing to catch even the slightest indication of sympathy or even surprise in her expression.
At length she said, “But you surely didn’t kill her, did you, Andrew?”
“No, Mother, I didn’t.”
Mrs. Pryde tapped ash off her cigarette. “Then there’s nothing to worry about. It’s most unfortunate, of course. But whatever one may say about this country, one still doesn’t get arrested here for a crime one didn’t commit.”
That made him just angry enough to loosen his tongue. “Listen, Mother, I’m in this up to my neck. I’ve got to use any weapon that comes my way. That’s the only reason why I’m bringing this up. You’ve got to believe that. Mother, I know about you and Dr. Williams.”
“Dr. Williams?” Mrs. Pryde sat up, poker-backed.
“The leukemia, Mother. I know.”
For a moment she seemed turned to metal. The bare arm balancing the cigarette holder, the slightly tilted head were rigid. The blue eyes, glaring at him, were steel eyes. In a voice like a knife, she said, “If that wretched little Dr. Williams …”
“It wasn’t Dr. Williams, Mother.” How to say it? “It was Maureen.”
“Maureen?”
“She looked at your file one day in Dr. Williams’ office. You’ve known for almost two years, haven’t you? You already knew when you married Lem.”
Mrs. Pryde put the jade holder down on an ashtray. She found a tiny handkerchief in her evening bag and lifted it to her face. There was no suggestion of blowing her nose. It was merely a stylized gesture exploiting the prettiness of fluttered linen.
“Well,” she said, “you wouldn’t bring it up unless you had to. Wasn’t that what you said? Just why do you have to bring it up? Are you implying it was unsuitable of me to marry Lem under the circumstances?”
“Of course I’m not. It’s …”
“I see nothing unsuitable about it at all. You know I have never enjoyed living alone. Certainly I didn’t look forward to dying alone. I found Lem very charming, very endearing. And from his point of view you can hardly call it a bad bargain. He’d had a miserable life, hounded by poverty and failure. He adores luxury and I have been able to provide it for him. Even if it turns out to be only for a few years, I’m sure he’ll be grateful and I fully intend to leave him a little something in my will.”
It had always been like this with his mother. They might have been conversing in different languages.
He said, “You know I’m not worrying about whether it’s a good thing for Lem or not.”
“Then what are you worrying about?”
Floundering, he said, “I’m wondering whether he’s worthy of you.”
“Worthy!” Mrs. Pryde gave a little tinkling laugh and picked up the cigarette holder again. “Really, Andrew, you talk just like your father. Do you imagine I care whether Lem is worthy of me or not—whatever ‘worthy’ means? All I want from Lem is for him to be loving and attentive and there when I need him.”
“But if there was something about him, if there was something I kne
w …”
“Andrew!” His mother’s exclamation stopped the sentence dead. She sat watching him, the blue eyes showing for the first time a faint gleam of interest. “You’re not trying to tell me about Rowena La Marche, are you?”
Andrew’s mouth dropped open. Mrs. Pryde leaned forward and put one finger on his knee.
“My poor dear Andrew, have you been tormenting yourself with the supposition that I didn’t know about Miss La Marche? Really, I can’t understand my children. Why do they always seem to think I’m some sort of helpless, scatter-brained butterfly? A few days after I met Lem in California I had a private detective agency investigate him. One can never be too careful about things like that. I must admit when I found out he was married and had failed to mention it, I was a little disappointed. But, after all, my circumstances were rather unusual, weren’t they? I thought it over and decided it was very improbable that I’d find anyone more suitable and very foolish to waste time on a divorce.”
Her shoulders, by the faintest ripple, suggested a shrug. “So I did what seemed to be best and it’s all turned out very well. My detective agency assured me there would be no trouble from Miss La Marche and they’ve been right. As I understand it, she’s rather a pathetic old thing. I expect Lem takes her a little gift every now and then, and that is as it should be.”
She was still looking at him. The smile was almost affectionate now. “Poor Andrew, you and I have never understood each other particularly well, have we? I can’t believe that it matters a great deal. It’s always seemed most unrealistic to me to imagine that parents and children should have anything in common at all.”
Andrew thought of her only a few hours before, being the absurdly correct grande dame making the funeral arrangements, and he knew that he would never even begin to grasp what his mother was. He knew, too, that till the day she died he would never be able to change the pattern between them.
The Green-Eyed Monster Page 15