The Valentine Estate

by Stanley Ellin

  ‘Chris, it was for your sake.’

  ‘I know. Everything you’ve done since you walked into my life is for my sake, baby. That’s why I’m in such a happy spot right now.’

  ‘I know the spot you’re in. That’s what I want to do something about. Anything. I’m coming into a lot of money. A million dollars and more. I’m going to tell Prendergast he can have what he wants to leave you alone.’

  ‘Up to the whole million and more? Including my share?’

  ‘God almighty, what possible difference would any of that money make if you’re dead?’

  ‘Plenty to me. Fifty thousand dollars’ worth. And you may as well know the worst. Prendergast had an interest in me before there was any Valentine estate, and I don’t think trying to buy him off now will settle things between us. So don’t try. And don’t make any more phone calls.’ He pulled out the wad of press clippings from his pocket and thrust them at her. ‘These were in his drawer along with the cards. I know why Dom kept a scrapbook on me. Now you tell me why Prendergast did.’

  He watched her defiance change to bewilderment as she examined the clippings.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ she said at last.

  He had a feeling that about that much at least she was telling the truth.

  10

  It took him less than an hour, all told, to buy his airline ticket for the London flight next evening, wire Dom fifty dollars care of Augie Bloom at Cobia, and look up Dr Francis Degan in the phone book. There were two addresses listed under the name, one home, one office. Both, as Beth had told him, were in Dorchester. When he called the home number and got Mrs Degan on the line he learned, as Miss Jones’ devoted cousin just in from the Coast, that, yes, Elizabeth had spent the night there but wasn’t there now, having left for the city late in the morning.

  He hung up with a sense of relief. His wife was a great one for self-deception, but apparently she wasn’t straining herself to deceive him. From the evidence so far, it was Prendergast who had been doing all the outright lying.

  Back at the hotel, he stopped at the news-stand in the lobby to pick up the late Boston papers. Up in the room he found Beth seated cross-legged on the bed, the index cards arrayed on the coverlet before her. She gave him a quick look as if to make sure he was still all in one piece, then focused on the cards again.

  ‘Make any sense out of them?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much.’ It was hard to tell whether her shrug was dismissing him or the cards. ‘A lot of the action seems to have been in Washington if you go by the number of times it’s listed here, but I have no idea what action. There are about a dozen Miamis, too. That might be where you come in.’

  ‘It might be.’ Sullen or not, she really looked good sitting there like that, a chrysalis that had become a butterfly with a bang. He dropped the newspapers down beside her. ‘Now you can go to work on these. If what’s left of Prendergast’s two buddies turned up somewhere, there’s probably something about it here.’

  ‘Probably.’ She couldn’t resist looking up at him again as he stood there over her, then pulled off the glasses and studied his face searchingly. Her eyes clouded with concern. ‘Chris, you look awful. You look completely beat.’

  ‘I am. Boiling hot water’ll fix it up. Applied externally.’

  When he peeled off his clothes, Beth came to her feet in a flurry.

  ‘Look at that shoulder! It’s all black and blue.’

  ‘Better than the fractured skull the man was looking to hand me. It’ll soak out.’

  She followed him into the bathroom and watched as he ran scalding water into the tub and slowly, painfully, settled into it. Then she perched herself on the edge of the tub, hands clasped in her lap, eyes fixed on him.

  ‘You know what?’ she said at last.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I am a real case. I must be.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you look like a total wreck right now, and you’ve been absolutely rotten to me all afternoon, and yet I am perfectly happy just sitting here and looking at you. It’s obscene. I finally discover my real identity, and what am I? A squaw, God help me.’

  Chris found it harder and harder to focus on her. He closed his eyes and let himself slide deeper into the water.

  ‘One thing, Pocahontas,’ he said drowsily. ‘If I fall asleep like this, don’t wake me up. Tub’s not big enough to drown in anyhow.’

  He did fall asleep and she did wake him up.

  ‘Official prerogative,’ she said. ‘It’s been almost two hours, and I’m entitled to my turn. How do you feel?’

  ‘Not bad.’ He was still groggy with sleep. Suddenly the grogginess was all gone. ‘Official prerogative,’ he whispered.

  ‘As your wife, Mr Monte. Say, that hot water worked fine. You’re looking at me as if I really dazzle you.’

  ‘You just did.’ He sat upright with a splash and clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, it fits. It adds up that way.’

  ‘Chris, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Big Brother. Those guys following me. All along I’ve been thinking of them as some kind of high-class mobsters. But maybe they’re not.’

  ‘Then what could they be?’

  ‘I know it sounds weird, but why not some kind of government agents? FBI people for all we know – no, I can’t see the FBI gunning down a couple of killers in self-defence and then hushing it up – but what about an outfit like the CIA? It’s got a name for playing by its own rules.’

  ‘But what makes you think an outfit like that would be following you?’

  ‘Everything, when you put it together. That night in Naples the cops were cooperating with some mystery man in their car, and who would they cooperate with more than some big league agency like that? And the first time I spotted a car following me it had Virginia plates on it; it was fresh from government territory. And look how my lockers at Miami airport were raided and blanks put in my gun. That job spelled something a lot fancier than mobsters like Zucker’s or McClure’s. Or even the kind Teodorescu might hire.’

  Beth looked doubtful. ‘I can’t see any government agency hushing up the way those two men were killed. I went through all those newspapers you bought, and there wasn’t a word about the killings. I refuse to believe –’

  ‘Well, don’t. Frenchy and I once did the international friendship bit. You know, tennis exhibitions the other side of the Iron Curtain – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia. Just before we took off, a couple of CIA men met with us very hush-hush and asked if we wouldn’t secretly contact some people over there who’d give us oral reports to bring back. So Frenchy asked what would happen if any of the opposition that side of the Curtain found out what we were up to, and this CIA character – I swear he looked like the new minister in town – slipped a knife out of his sleeve and said not to worry, anybody making trouble for us would be taken care of pronto. When he made believe to slice the knife across his throat, Frenchy turned green. He knew this cat wasn’t just putting him on, and that finished the deal then and there. Those CIA jokers play for keeps all right. And the way that team with the tommy-guns handled things last night spelled out that kind of joker.’

  ‘Which only makes it even more of a mystery,’ Beth argued. ‘What possible interest could CIA agents have in you?’

  ‘A big one. All this started only after Prendergast showed up at Cobia. They must think I’m tied in with him and Mookerjee, and whatever those two are up to is big enough and bad enough to bring in the CIA. And it’s something international for sure. Otherwise, it would be FBI business.’

  ‘Spying?’ Beth said.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. From what I’ve heard, spies use microfilm, microdots, stuff you could hide under a fingernail if you had to. But both times I was searched, nobody was looking for anything that small.’

  ‘Well, whatever size it is,’ Beth said impatiently, ‘why can’t you go straight to the CIA about it? Ask them if they’re the ones. Ask what it’s a
ll about.’

  ‘Because I can’t swear they are the ones, not for a dead certainty. And if they are, how do you think they’d take it, finding out I was wise to them? Look, we have to be let out of the country in time to make your deadline in London, or you blow a million dollars. I haven’t come this far and taken this much of a beating to wind up without my cut of it. Anyhow, whether they are the ones or not the one thing sure is that they aren’t out to get me the way Prendergast is.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Beth said wearily. ‘Let’s not forget to count our blessings. Even so –’

  ‘Even so, let’s do it my way.’

  He found, when he walked out into the bedroom, towel modestly draped around his middle, that during his nap she had gone in for being a housewife in a big way. The room had been neatly organized, beds turned down, drapes drawn across the windows against the gathering darkness, luggage unpacked and its contents hung in the closet or distributed through the dresser drawers.

  He had to hunt through the drawers before he could find a pair of pyjama pants.

  ‘All this just for overnight?’ he said.

  ‘You mean the unpacking? Don’t thank me. The maid did it all.’

  ‘The maid?’

  ‘Uh huh. She insisted on it, so I finally said all right. Cute little dynamo, too. I’m just as glad you weren’t around while she was bending over those –’

  But he was already in the walk-in closet, feverishly going through the pockets of his jacket. Passport, papers, wallet. Everything was still there. So it had just been a case of verifying Frederick Walker’s true identity. And then there were those index cards. He came out of the closet and saw the packet of cards on the dresser.

  His wife was watching him open-mouthed.

  ‘What is it, Chris? What’s wrong?’

  He struggled to control his anger and made it with an effort.

  ‘Beth,’ he said gently, ‘even in a hotel as good as this the maids don’t do your unpacking. And they don’t figure you’ll go to bed before dinner, so they usually wait until after it to turn down the beds.’

  It took a couple of seconds for that to penetrate. Then she sat down helplessly on the edge of her bed.

  ‘Oh, Chris, I am such a damn fool. It never even entered my mind –’

  ‘That’s all right. I should have realized Big Brother might have a little sister and warned you. I figured I probably shook them off for a while, ducking out of the house the way I did, so I got careless. Did she see these cards? Is this where you left them?’

  ‘I left them all over the bed. She took care of them along with everything else. Chris, she seemed so plausible. Are you sure she was an agent?’

  ‘Ninety per cent sure. If someone else knocks on the door in a little while and asks to turn down the beds, it’ll be a hundred per cent. I don’t think the hotel had any part of the gag.’

  They were at the sandwiches and coffee brought in by room service when it happened, and it was Beth who thanked the chambermaid, told her not to bother, and sent her on her way. Back at the table, she said bitterly, ‘So now it’s a hundred per cent.’

  ‘Don’t let it bug you. It doesn’t make things any worse than they already were.’

  ‘It didn’t make them any better either. You really should belt me one, Chris. Who else do you know would be dumb enough to invite a cute little spy in to search your stuff? I even tipped her a dollar for doing it.’

  ‘From the way the room looks, she earned it.’

  ‘It’s not funny. It scares me, knowing you’re being watched like this and not knowing why. Chris,’ she said fiercely in a sudden change of tone, ‘nothing had better happen to you. You hear me?’

  It reminded him of Dom. Tie someone up hand and foot with the bonds of misguided affection and then dare him to get loose. And most interesting was how quickly she had dropped her idea of buying off Prendergast, if interesting was the word.

  That was at eight o’clock. At midnight, just before he switched off his bedlamp, he looked at his watch and was startled at how fast time had flown without bottle, book, or television speeding it along. For four solid hours, he realized, he had talked his head off to this girl cruelly digging layers deep into himself, telling it as it was. He couldn’t even recall what had set him off like that, but for the first time in his life he had really uncorked and spilled the works. Not in any chronology, not always as coherent as he wanted it to be, but everything. All the way from when he first started pounding a ball against the shed on Fifth Street, through life on the circuit and how it felt to be washed up at twenty-one, right up to Cobia and the set-ups there, and why you had to hit the bottle so hard sometimes or run away on the Harley-Davidson and make the scene with a different breed of cat.

  Everything.

  She had had comments to make about it, too, some unbelievably ingenuous, some even more unbelievably caustic, but most of the time she had just listened intently, her quiet absorption in what he had to say making it that much easier to say.

  When, all talked out, he said good night and switched his light off she left hers on. Looking at her as she lay stretched out on her bed, paperback mystery in one hand and cigarette in the other, he recalled what Dom had said during their heated passage Sunday morning. ‘She communicates. I mean, she really communicates.’ What the kid had meant was that she listens. But maybe he had something there. Maybe the listening was the important part of communication. Not ordinary listening, he thought sleepily, miserably aware of every ache and pain as he shifted position in the bed, but the kind of listening she did –

  He had no idea what time it was when he was awakened by her weight bearing down one side of his bed, her voice softly addressing him.

  ‘Dope,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said dope. Like marijuana or LSD or heroin. Chris, aren’t you awake? You just told me you were.’

  ‘I am now.’ He opened his eyes on what seemed to be total darkness, then was able to make out her silhouette against the pale background of the window drapes. A nice silhouette, the way she was kneeling there like September Morn. ‘What about dope?’

  ‘That’s why they’re following you. To grab you with it. It must be.’

  ‘No, I already thought of that. The T-men don’t operate like this bunch and neither does the local law. Just as well. If Big Brother wanted to have me nailed for possession, all he’d have to do is plant the stuff on me. When I was making the scene on the Coast a couple of years back I saw it done like that.’

  ‘Oh.’ She hesitated, then nerved herself to say it. ‘Is that why you went to jail there? And in New York? For possession?’

  ‘Baby, booze is my ticket on the trip, not grass or acid. And I wasn’t sentenced to jail like you put it, I was just held overnight for disorderly conduct both times. Fighting. McClure’s lawyers got me off next day with no trouble at all.’

  ‘Not the way Prendergast told it. I should have known.’ She shivered convulsively. ‘Chris, do you think Mrs Prendergast and Hilary know about him? What’s going to happen to them? Where do you think he is now?’

  ‘Lying low, figuring how to get another crack at me. And his family is his business, not mine. Say, aren’t you cold like that?’

  ‘Yes.’ The next instant she was between the sheets and against him, a leg thrown across his. ‘Now I’m not.’

  ‘A sex maniac, by God.’

  ‘Only yours.’

  It was his chance, he saw, to bring up something that had been in the back of his mind like a small irritation there.

  ‘But there were others before this, weren’t there?’ he said. ‘Seems to me you mentioned that a couple of times.’

  ‘There was only one other, but thanks for the compliment anyhow. Just one. My boss when I took my first office job. You’ll be surprised when I tell you who he was.’

  ‘You mean I know him?’

  ‘You know about him. It was Bobby Talbot.’

  ‘Talbot?’ he said blankly, and then was s
urprised. Unpleasantly so. ‘Hilary’s husband?’

  ‘It’s not the way you think. She picked him up after I dropped him.’

  He felt better about it, but not completely.

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘The All-American boy. Keen as mustard, homey as mom’s apple pie.’

  ‘Seriously,’ Chris said.

  ‘It’s a little hard to think of him seriously now. Inside, there wasn’t very much. Outside, he was very big and good-looking, with those grey eyes and long black lashes any girl would love to be born with. Crazy about sports cars and athletics. He was the first one tried to teach me tennis. And skiing. I was real sold on him for a while even though I always felt kind of gauche around him, if you know what I mean. We had a very nice thing going for almost a whole year.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then it turned out he had Playboy magazine syndrome. That’s a feeling that women aren’t really people, they’re playmates. Sort of animated gatefolds. And when I said I didn’t want to be just an animated gatefold to him he told me I was quaint. I guess that was my big appeal for him, being quaint. Anyhow, he already knew Hilary through me, and when I finally dropped him he headed straight for her. Only she wouldn’t play without a wedding ring.’

  ‘The one you were hoping to get from him?’

  ‘That one. So it didn’t matter very much to me when he told me they were getting married. He was just too chrome-plated smooth, inside and out. I suppose I always knew that if he ever did make the jump, it would be with somebody even more chrome-plated. When you came along I realized how lucky I was things turned out that way. You might as well know I regard you as practically perfect. Hardbitten outside, and all tangled-up and suffering inside. What more could any Humphrey Bogart fan hope to find herself in bed with?’

  He didn’t know whether to laugh or be outraged. His snort combined both.

  ‘Damned if you weren’t right,’ he said. ‘You are a real case, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not as much as you are. That’s the truth, Chris, and it all came out tonight. At least I’ll take my chances on loving and being loved no matter how it turns out. You want to, but you’re afraid to. Well, it’s time you stopped being afraid to. Just let yourself go, man. You’re in good hands.’