Death’s Old Sweet Song

by Jonathan Stagge

  “If it’s all dried out, don’t blame me. That’s all,” said Rebecca.

  She bustled around the range and soon produced a large and luscious-looking plate of dinner. I wasn’t hungry, but, under the steely glance of two pairs of eyes, I made a pretense of enthusiasm. As soon as possible, I banished Dawn, the stuffed owl, and the harmonica to her room and told Rebecca exactly what had happened. Of all the women I know, Rebecca is the most satisfactory in time of crisis. She listened in complete silence. When I had finished, her eyes gleamed determinedly in her dark, plump face and she announced:

  “Ain’t nothing to it, Doctor. We’re packing right up and we goin’ back to Kenmore first thing tomorrow morning.”

  I explained how it was impossible for me to leave.

  “Then me and Dawn leaves. We … No.” She shrugged resignedly. “Guess that ain’t no use, not knowing that child the way we knows her. If I was to watch her twenty-four hours out of a day, she’d be slipping away like an eel, running back to her dad. Okay. So we stay?”

  “We stay.”

  I explained my anxiety for Dawn and begged Rebecca to be doubly careful of her. The warning was quite unnecessary. Rebecca had picked up the knife with which she had carved the goose. She fingered its blade.

  “You don’t have to worry none about that child. I’ll be right there beside her night and day, and if anyone tries any monkey business with her—” She finished her speech with a terrifying brandish of her knife.

  I felt much easier in my mind then. In fact, I felt vaguely sorry for any maniac who might happen to try any monkey business around our house.

  I telephoned Ray Simpson and told him Cobb’s instructions. His flat New England voice was encouragingly unemotional. Sure, he said, he’d get every able-bodied man—except maybe Charlie Heath, who was expecting a cow to drop a calf that night—gathered together at the Bray house by ten-thirty. I called Lorie then. As I suspected, Love had already broken the news. Phoebe and Caleb were up there with her, she said, and would stay there until ten. Then she was going to spend the night at Phoebe’s. She sounded frightened but unexpectedly steady. Skipton, it seemed, was at its best under disaster.

  I called Renton Forbes to tell him I was coming around and drove the half mile down the pale, moonlit valley to the Forbes mansion. Renton’s mother had been a famous hostess, and in her day the Forbes mansion had been one of the show houses in the Berkshires. Since her death, however, and the dwindling of the Forbes fortune, the house was slowly settling into decay. And Renton, who concerned himself vaguely with Wall Street when he felt in the mood, spent only his summers in Skipton, leading an amiable hand-to-mouth existence with an old couple, inherited from his mother, to take care of him. In spite of its unwieldy size and its gradual disintegration the house was Renton’s major passion in life. It was frequently rumored around the village that he was marrying this or that wealthy widow in order to restore the mansion to its past glories. But, so far, Renton seemed to have preferred a life of rakish and haphazard bachelordom.

  I drove up the untidy drive and parked in front of the columned porch. The moment Mrs. Moore, the housekeeper, opened the door I could tell from her pale, uneasy face that the news of George’s death had preceded me. Mrs. Moore led me into the huge living room, which still had a shabby splendor of its own. Renton Forbes, very spruce in riding breeches and Harris tweed jacket, came toward me.

  “Phoebe just called and told me,” he said. “I rode over to spend the afternoon in Beldon Falls with the Rosses, and they invited me to dinner. I just got back five minutes ago, and Phoebe was on the wire. Sit down. Mary, be an angel and bring us something to drink—if there is anything.”

  We sat down on a slightly tarnished gold brocade sofa. Mrs. Moore bustled out and returned with a tray, glasses, and a half-empty bottle of rye. Renton poured drinks for both of us.

  His lean, handsome face was grim. “What can you say? You can say it’s bad, terrible, ghastly. But that doesn’t mean anything. There’s only one thing I really feel. I just don’t honestly believe it. I’ve known Skipton all my life—a poky little place stuck away in a corner of Massachusetts where nothing ever happens except maybe the woodchucks mess up old Lily Steele’s truck patch.” He handed me a drink. “And George of all people, that poor, harmless guy broken on the butterfly’s wheel.” He smiled faintly, then the smile went. “Phoebe says the policeman wants us all up at the Bray house at ten and that they’re going to organize a patrol in the village.”

  I nodded.

  He glanced at me then, his eyebrows tilted ironically upward. “Phoebe says you’re the policeman’s kind of unofficial Boswell?”

  “I’m glad you didn’t say Watson. They usually do.”

  “I’m a suspicious man, Westlake. I’ve been figuring out why you picked me for your social visit. This couldn’t be police business, could it?”

  Renton wasn’t the sort of man with whom it paid to be cagey. I told him exactly why I had come, neither magnifying nor minimizing Cobb’s degree of suspicion. The whole thing, I explained, was really based on Avril’s theatrical utterance when she saw the body.

  I had expected him to be amused, but he wasn’t. If anything, he looked rather angry.

  “Jealous lover kills husband of inamorata? Is that what the inspector thinks?”

  “He has to toy with the idea anyway.”

  “What about you?” His shrewd eyes fixed my face. “You know me. Do you think I’d bump off George—and, I suppose, those poor little White kids too—so that I could settle down to solid married bliss with Avril?”

  “Frankly,” I said, “no.”

  He grinned, a quick, infectious grin. But his face sobered again and he gave a resigned sigh.

  “Well, I suppose it’s all got to come out. I brought it on myself anyway. Even in my youth, my mother used to say I was an irresponsible, loose-living profligate and that I would end up biting the dust. I suppose the inspector will want a clear, accurate account of my relations with Mabel. Do you mind if I call her Mabel instead of Avril, by the way? It’s her real name, you know, and somehow I think it’s much more suitable.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Looking back, I don’t really understand how I got into it. Sometimes I even frighten myself. But last summer I did drift into a sordid and quite unattractive dalliance with Mabel. She was so preposterous she must have appealed to some perverted nerve end or other. Besides, she’s quite a neat little piece carnally. And, of course, the relationship was strictly carnal. Mabel tried to tie little pink bows all over it, but then Mabel’s a pink-bow girl.”

  He was staring down at his glass reminiscently. “By the way, I’m delighted to be telling you this rather than a policeman with a notebook. I’m sure the notebook would be outraged and scream ‘Cad!’ But then, I guess I was quite a cad about the whole thing. By last September the very name Mabel gave me the mild shudders, but Mabel’s pink ribbons can turn into tentacles, and she clung on through the winter. I’d even get little notes on violet paper with quotations from the works of Shakespeare and Avril Lane lavishly sprinkled around. I don’t think poor George was a particularly torrid husband, and Mabel’s hot-blooded enough to know a good thing when she sees it and to cling on like mad.”

  He grinned up at me. “That’s about all there is to that unsavory little item. This year, we still had an occasional tête-à-tête, usually in extreme discomfort up at the sawmill, but I’ve been trying to taper her off. Matter of fact, I’ve been rather hopeful recently that she’s transferring to young Caleb. In any case, I imagine you’ve heard enough to see that there’s a lot of things I’d rather do than kill off her husband and have her on my hands.” He paused. “I suppose the inspector will want to know about my movements too. He can check with the Rosses. I started off for Beldon Falls right after we left the Raynors’ together. I imagine that gives me some sort of alibi.”

  “I imagine it does,” I said.

  His face suddenly darkened. “One thin
g more. And it’s quite important. Don’t twist what I told you around into figuring that Mabel was crazy to marry me and bumped George off herself. She didn’t want to marry me. I was her idea of the perfect quote lover unquote. And George was her idea of the perfect husband to have, to hold, and to double-cross. He did all the work around the house; he thought she was a genius, which was nice too. And, what was nicest of all, he suffered and had a pain behind his eyes. There’s nothing Mabel favors more than a husband who suffers with a pain behind his eyes because his irresistible wife is pestered by men, men, men.”

  Though not exactly friendly, that seemed to be a fairly exact word picture of Avril Lane.

  Renton got up and started to pace the faded rose carpet.

  “Matter of fact, Westlake, I’m holding out on you. I’m holding out on the most important thing of all.” He turned, watching me quizzically. “If I told you something, could you be discreet about it? Oh, tell your policeman. I don’t mind that. But think you could keep it from Love and all the other old quacking ducks?”

  “I should think so.”

  “Under the circumstances, it’s almost funny. I think it’ll amuse your policeman. You see, if he was a smart policeman, he might figure I was just putting on an act about Mabel—pretending I thought she was a horror while secretly I was mad for her and had murdered her wretched husband in a moment of overwhelming passion. Well, when he hears the truth about me, I don’t think he’s going to worry along those lines, because, you see”—he threw out his hands—“there’s a white rabbit in my top hat. Nothing on earth could ever induce me to marry Mabel, because I happen to have a perfectly good wife of my own.”

  I was enough of a Skiptonite to stare in astonishment.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am a husband. I might almost say I am a bridegroom. I have been married for about three months to a charming woman—a woman I’ve been devoted to for years.”

  “But where is she? Have you got her locked up in the West Wing like the mad wife in Jane Eyre?”

  He grinned. “I’d like to see anyone try and lock my wife up in anything. No, she’s in New York at the moment, doing a million and one things in her usual whirlwind way. She’s nuts about this house, for example, and she’s scurrying around after interior decorators to have it all fixed over. That’s one of the things she’s doing. But the most important thing is her visit to an obst—whatever you call a baby doctor. You see, I’m not only a husband and a bridegroom, I’m making headway toward being a father too.”

  The truth was beginning to come to me. “You don’t mean you’re …?”

  His grin broadened. “Exactly, Westlake. Three months ago in a simple ceremony in a charming Old World registry office in Hartford, Connecticut, I was married to Ernesta Bray.”

  CHAPTER X

  A marriage between Ernesta and Renton had been favored by the village gossips for some time, but the news that it had actually taken place was a shock.

  I asked: “Does anyone know?”

  “No one. Not even Lorie. We were planning to announce it next month and confront everyone with a fait accompli.”

  “But why the secrecy?”

  “We both had our reasons. With Ernesta it was Lorie. That’s all quite private, and it’s not my position to give details. But Ernesta felt very strongly that it was better for Lorie to keep her in the dark until we all leave Skipton next month. Ernesta has plans for a winter for the three of us in Mexico. She was banking on telling Lorie then. Heaven knows now, of course, what’s going to happen.”

  He paused with a rueful smile. “It was Ernesta’s original idea to keep the marriage quiet awhile, but it suited me fine too. Maybe you can guess why?”

  “Avril?” I hazarded.

  “Exactly. Ernesta’s quite old-fashioned about sex, you know. I don’t hold it against her. Thank God she is. But if she found out that I’d been intimate—as I believe the expression is—with Mabel Raynor during the period when I was supposed to have been the chaste suitor, Ernesta would have thrown several thousand fits. And I couldn’t trust Mabel, with her flair for the dramatic. She’s got as strong a possessive instinct as Ernesta, even for things she doesn’t legally possess. If the marriage had been announced ahead of time in Skipton, Heaven knows what Mabel wouldn’t have done. That’s why I’ve welcomed these three months. They’ve given me a chance to taper Mabel off. I’ve been hoping her eye would rove elsewhere, so that when the news of the marriage finally breaks, she’ll do nothing worse than put on a mild renunciation act and give us the collected works of Avril Lane in vellum for a wedding present.”

  He finished his drink in a gulp. “Now, with these murders, with Mabel a widow, God knows what I’m going to have on my hands, but as I said before, I brought it on myself.” He grinned at me. “I expect you’re thinking: What a heel! Right?”

  “Love Drummond might, I guess.” I grinned back. “What I’m thinking mostly is: What a jam!”

  “You can see why I’m not exactly eager to have the village know about the marriage?”

  “Definitely.”

  “And you’ll do what you can to keep it quiet? Keep both things quiet, I mean. The marriage to Ernesta and the carryings-on with Mabel?”

  “I’ll do what I can. I imagine Cobb will too, because one thing’s emerged quite clearly from this discussion.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Under the circumstances, you’d have to be crazier than ten lunatics to have killed Avril Lane’s husband. Cobb’ll see that, and he won’t have any interest in exposing the details of your love life. He’s only concerned with the murderer.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  I still had a little rye in my glass. I raised it to him. “Incidentally, let me be the first to congratulate the bridegroom.”

  His handsome face flushed with almost boyish pleasure. “Thanks, Westlake. I never thought an old tired roué like me would settle down with a wife, but I have, and I’m damn proud of her. The village will say I married her for her money, of course. I’m resigned to that. Matter of fact, it’s much closer the truth that Ernesta married me for this house. She’s batty about it. She has the most grandiose schemes of restoring its former glories and being the hostess to end all hostesses. She’s deeding her own house to Lorie. That’s something else she’s attending to in New York right now. Another dark secret, incidentally. She made out to Lorie and Phoebe that the trip was purely for shopping and picking up her jade from Tiffany’s.”

  He hesitated. “By the way, while we’re on the subject of Ernesta’s doings in New York, how about this baby?”

  “What do you mean, how about it?”

  “Well, you’re a doctor. I’m kind of scared. I mean, isn’t Ernesta a little on the old side?”

  “How old is she?”

  “Forty-seven. You know her. She takes everything in her stride. She just laughs at me and says that women her age often have babies with no more effort than falling off a log, but I mean—can it be dangerous?”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “I can’t imagine a little thing like a baby fazing Ernesta anyway. She’s quite sure it’s true, is she?”

  “Well, I guess so. She saw the doctor yesterday; and I got a letter this morning. Here.” He pulled an envelope out of his pocket, produced a letter, and sat down next to me, holding the letter out for me to read. “Is he a good man? I want to be sure she’s doing the right thing. Here, this paragraph in the middle.”

  I read in Ernesta’s bold, familiar writing:

  “Went to Dr. Delacroix this morning and he took an Ascheim-Zondek among a million other things. He’ll let me know the results as soon as possible. My physical condition is perfect and he says there’s no real danger in spite of my advanced age! Isn’t that wonderful, darling? Of course I’ll have to be careful. You’ll have to see to that. By the way, much more exciting, I found the most divine material for the dining-room drapes. At least, I think it is. I’m sending up swatches. Be sure to tell me what you think. And if
you don’t like them, be frank, because after all it is your house. …”

  I said: “Not much to worry about, I’d say. Delacroix’s one of the best obstetricians in New York. The Ascheim-Zondek’s the routine pregnancy test. If he says it’s okay, it’s okay.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve had in days.” He poured himself a little straight rye and raised his glass. “How about drinking to the coming Forbes?”

  I did.

  He glanced at his watch. “My God, Westlake, here we’ve been yammering about my sex life and it’s almost ten. We’d better get going.”

  “I can drive you down in my car.”

  “About the murders,” Renton’s face was grave again. “There’s nothing like woman trouble to keep your mind off the business in hand. Does the inspector have any lead?”

  “Only to you.”

  “Seriously. I mean, that crazy link-up with Lorie’s song—does he really think there may be something in that?”

  Oddly enough that interview, exposing as it had so many unflattering sidelights on Renton’s moral character, had made me like and trust him more than I had before. But it wasn’t up to me to tell anybody what Inspector Cobb was thinking.

  I said: “You’ll be seeing him. Ask him yourself.”

  “A cagey Boswell, eh?”

  “Or a dumb one.”

  Renton called Mrs. Moore and gave her a short spiel on the need for keeping the house locked and the inadvisability of either her or her husband going wandering out into the night. Mrs. Moore’s face told me that the warning was quite superfluous. Telling her to expect him when she saw him, Renton followed me out to my car.

  As we drove through the moonlit valley to the Bray house, he said: “Matter of fact, I’m still worried about Ernesta, Westlake. She’s due back tomorrow. This is hardly the atmosphere for an expectant mother, is it? I was wondering if maybe I could send her a wire, cook up some story to keep her in New York awhile.”

  “You could try,” I said, “but I doubt whether you’d get anywhere with it. After the second murder, you can be sure the New York newspapers will pick this up and, if I know Ernesta, nothing’s going to keep her away when she hears there’s a maniac running hog-wild in her Skipton.”