I was cold myself. I hadn’t even taken my trenchcoat off, but it had protected me from the freezing rain. I went over to the bed and scooped her up, covers and all, and carried her over to the fire. I set her down, brought a couple of pillows over and made her comfortable right in front of the blazing fire. Then I lit a cigarette and put it between her lips.
“I wish there was something for you to drink.”
“In the dresser.”
It was a pint of rum, half full.
“Rum was his favorite,” she said, slipping one bare arm out of the blanket and taking the uncapped bottle. Gooseflesh covered her arm. She tilted the bottle and drank. The rum gurgled in the bottle. She had plenty of it.
“What did you mean before?” she said at last.
“Hold your horses. Feeling better?”
“Rum really warms you up. I’m all right now.”
“The ankle?”
“I just turned it. It only throbs now.”
“Let’s have a look, huh?”
She stuck it out of the blanket. Her calf was golden in the firelight and beautifully curved.
“Move it,” I said.
She did. She had a trim ankle and apparently it wasn’t swollen.
“Comfortable, Bobby?” I asked.
“Umm, and drowsy.” Things had happened so fast, she hadn’t remembered her anger yet. Then it came back to her. She repeated, in a different tone, “What did you mean before, if I gave Duncan Lord a reason to kill himself?”
“You could have decided to blackmail him.”
“Oh, sure,” she said with bitter sarcasm. “First I let him make love to me, then blackmail him for committing adultery with a call-girl. That’s the way I operate.”
“I didn’t say so. But it’s happened before.”
“And especially,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “with Duncan Lord. I—I’ve been on weekends with men who could buy and sell college professors—and private detectives—fifty times over with their pocket money. So that’s why I decided to blackmail a history teacher who half the time couldn’t even scrape together the going rates.”
“Stop trying to talk tough. You’re not tough and you know it.”
“No? I suppose you think I’m lily-white? I suppose now you’re going to ask me how I got into this sordid business and I’m going to cry on your shoulder and tell all.”
“I don’t want you to tell me anything, except about Duncan Lord. That’s why we’re here.”
First she glared at me. Then her eyes filled and she swallowed a couple of times before she said: “There isn’t much to tell. I don’t know why he thought he—needed me. You never know why. You never bother about it, I guess. I met him at a party in Washington. I’d been invited for the usual reasons. He seemed so out of place among all those wheeler-dealers. Did you know him?”
“No.”
“He was so alone and shy. We got to talking. Once I got through his shyness, he was the most interesting man I’d ever met. Intellectually interesting, I mean. He knew so much about so many things. But also in a lot of ways he was like a babe in the woods. You know what I mean?”
I said I knew what she meant.
“He took me out of the party and we just went for a drive. He said—blushing and very timidly—that he wanted to see me again. He must have been unhappily married. They usually are. I saw him. I—we were together. Here. Six or maybe seven times in all. It really broke him up when he found out I was a call-girl. He wanted to take me out of all this, he said. That’s just the way he put it. Said he’d divorce his wife and marry me if I’d have it. I had to explain the facts of life to him, why it couldn’t be done and why he shouldn’t break up his home. You know. He said he was in love with me.” She paused. “Maybe he was. I guess maybe he was. He was at that dangerous age and he must have been missing something at home. Did you ever meet his wife?”
“No, I never met her.”
“I thought you said you were working for her?”
“A guy who works for me saw her. Go on.”
“There isn’t anything else. I said we’d have to stop seeing each other if he couldn’t get that idea of marrying me out of his head. I tried to be frank. I told him I didn’t love him.”
“How’d he take it?”
“Kind of with a sad smile. Then we were together once more. Then he killed himself.” Her hand moved to her lips. Her eyes got round. “I never thought of it like that before,” she said softly.
“You mean he killed himself because you said no to his proposal?”
She nodded, and sat up. The blanket fell to her shoulders. Firelight danced on them. “I wouldn’t want to think it happened that way. I’m going to tell myself it didn’t. But it won’t work.”
“Forget it, then. You can’t do anything to change it now. Assuming it did Happen that way. Which it probably didn’t.” I looked at her beautiful blue eyes. They, were full of grief and uncertainty. She’d carry the idea with her a long time, unless I could learn the real reason Duncan Lord had jumped. At the moment it didn’t seem like a good bet. I thought of how we worked on each other, like electricity, like magic. And we were almost back where we’d been at the Ante-Bellum. Bobby wasn’t sore at me now. I weighed that against the grief in her eyes and I knew I had to make her hate me again.
I said off-handedly, “Hell, you don’t think a grown man would kill himself over a—” I stopped dramatically, as if I’d caught myself in a blunder.
Her eyes changed, going darker and narrower. “Well, why don’t you say it?” she demanded angrily. “Say what you’re thinking. A grown man wouldn’t kill himself over a whore. Go ahead and say it.”
She stood up and took the pint and finished the rest of it. The blanket looked like a tent on her. She lurched over to the dresser and put the bottle down. “Because that’s what I am,” she said, her voice thick. “Oh, a fancy-name goes with it, and the party trimmings, and weekend trips to the country, and a cockeyed surface respectability.” The hatred was turning inward again. The rum wasn’t helping any. She was in a mood to hate herself and all at once she was more than a little drunk.
“But strip off all the respectability,” she said, “and what have you got? I’ll tell you what you’ve got. Strip off …”
She smiled. Or maybe it was a leer. She was going to show me. She was going to show me, all right. She spun around toward me from the dresser and the smile which I had seen in the mirror had fled her face. Whirling like that, she flung the blanket off.
We stood. I heard the rain on the roof. It was dry in there. She tried out a saucy smile and flaunted her body. For a moment it worked. She saw my face and what she saw on it gave her some satisfaction. She had a glorious body. She made a lewd suggestive movement, digging the knife deeper into both of us. Her breasts were firm inverted tawny cups in the fire’s glow. The phony smile drained slowly from her face. My arms moved out toward her. I remember it was suddenly hard to breathe.
“Well, it’s what I do,” she said in a very small voice. A hurt little defensive voice, because everything had failed now, including her play-acting. “I’m free, white and twenty-one,” she said defiantly. Then her voice broke. She came rushing over to me with a little whimper. The fire rose, and then magically was gone. The rain drummed on the roof, and was swallowed. I carried her to the bed and her face swam immensely before my eyes.
“Chet,” she whispered. “Chet, be good to me. Please be good to me.”
CHAPTER SIX
TUESDAY morning I really rolled up the mileage on my car. Bobby’s breath blowing in my ear woke me. “Hey, sleepyhead, come on.”
I rolled over and unglued my eyelids. She was up and dressed, and looked as fresh as a May morning. She was also shy, and it was no act. We kissed, and she waited in the car while I dressed. Then we drove west on Route 60, taking half an hour at a truckstop for breakfast. We didn’t talk much. Bobby said she had to find out what really happened to Duncan Lord. I said I would try to find out and that
seemed to satisfy her. We didn’t talk about ourselves at all. You always have to start from a little way back the morning after.
I drove her to her apartment hotel through the Washington rush-hour traffic.
“Call me soon, Chet.”
“I will.”
“I’ll come running.”
She blew me a kiss and went inside.
Then I drove over to the office on F Street and picked up the typed copy of the Lord case report from the public steno who has an office down the hall. Jerry wasn’t in yet. The steno, whose name was Sally, did a lot of work for the lawyers in the building, had been bonded by the Lawyers’ Association, and could be trusted. We smoked together and made some small talk, and then I took the report in its crisp Manila envelope, went down to the car and drove south out of Washington again.…
I reached College Station just before eleven o’clock. It was a crisp fall morning which put color in the faces of the co-eds on the old Georgian campus. Groups of students were gathered during the eleven o’clock class break in front of the Social Sciences Building, still talking about it. In the daylight, it was a red-brick five-story building with a Georgian portico out front. I went inside and up three flights of stairs to the fourth floor. His office was the third door on the left up there. It had been the window of that office he had stepped out of to reach the ledge Friday night. The sign on the door said, Duncan Hadley Lord, Ph.D., Chairman, Department of History. They hadn’t scraped Professor Lord’s name off the door yet. I heard voices inside. They stopped when I knocked.
“Come in.”
There were three of them. The man was an old fellow, straight as a mountain ash, with rimless glasses, a brown herringbone suit and a vest. He’d call it a waistcoat. He had very fine white hair through which his pink scalp showed. He was Professor McQuade, and although I’d spoken to him on the phone I hadn’t seen him in ten years. He looked mad.
Both the women wore black. The older one would be Mrs. Lord, tall and leaning toward stoutness, with a stern and still handsome New England face which said she’d probably dominated her husband’s life, or tried her best to dominate it. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and neither was her daughter. The daughter was a pale brunette, smaller than her mother, and pretty. She had been crying and was holding it back with difficulty now. If Professor McQuade looked mad, Mrs. Lord looked ready to burst a blood vessel, in her stern New England way.
I got out, “How are you, Professor? I have our agency report on your late husband’s activities, Mrs. Lord. I’d still like to say that if you don’t—”
That was all I got out. Professor McQuade rushed over in front of me and shook his fist in my face. He was so mad, his lips trembled. “If I were a younger man,” he said, his voice unsteady with anger, “I would delight in punching you in the nose. How you have the gall to show up here after what we found I don’t understand. In my day—they’d have tarred-and-feathered you!”
Laurie Lord started to cry. Mrs. Lord stood in front of her husband’s desk, not saying anything.
“I taught you law,” Professor McQuade said. “Apparently I didn’t teach you enough of it. If it’s the last thing I do I’m going to see that you pay for this.” He was getting control of himself now, though a pulse throbbed in his temple and his lips were still trembling. “Duncan Lord was my best friend!” he shouted. “You good-for-nothing scoundrel, you did everything but push him off that ledge!”
“I did what?” I said. Laurie wailed. The report was forgotten in my hand.
“I ought to punch you in the nose,” Professor McQuade repeated, jabbing a bony finger at my chest.
“Look here,” I said. “I’m getting a little tired of this. I came to deliver a report. Here it is. If you’ve got some kind of accusation to make, make it.” I held out the report. McQuade didn’t take it.
“That was very clever of you,” McQuade said bitterly. “Offering to destroy your report. Were going to report that part of it to the authorities too.”
Mrs. Lord spoke for the first time. “Harold, please. Perhaps it was the girl.”
“It wasn’t the girl, I tell you. I know how these private detectives operate. I thought Drum was different. They’re slippery fellows, Mary. One foot outside the law every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He’s our man, all right. Make no mistake about that.”
“Come here, Mr. Drum,” Mrs. Lord said. I went over to the desk. McQuade followed after me, mumbling. Mrs. Lord picked up an envelope and thrust it at me. The letterhead bore the name of the government agency which employed Duncan Lord. Inside was a covering letter and several sheets of manifold paper covered with typing. The letter said:
Dear Duncan:
As a followup on our phone conversation yesterday, herewith is an extract of the report the agency received. I can only reiterate that I hope the report is a complete fabrication. If it is not, I am sure you can see the embarrassing position in which this places us.
Unless you can refute the report with documented evidence as to your whereabouts on the evenings indicated, we will be unable to reveal the source of this material. However, we can say that it is a source which is usually as reliable as it is infuriating. The writer of the report, with whose views this agency is not in sympathy, would like nothing better than to dictate policy to us. The demand is presented with more subtlety than I have indicated, but morally it is only a shade above blackmail. If the writer of the report were allowed to dictate policy to us, knowing his background, I can safely say that the whole purpose and function of the agency would be undermined. Yet if we refused—assuming the enclosed report is accurate—the writer would be in a position to smear us and possibly have our appropriations cut out from under us. I don’t have to tell you that moral indignation in Washington, when stirred, can be a pretty damning thing. Nor do I have to tell you that our current program, so vital to the interests of this country, is based in large measure on your book and your ideas.
I hope and pray you will be able to refute these allegations categorically.
The letter was signed by the chief of the United States News Agency.
I read through the sheets of manifold paper, and felt my jaw hanging. The facts were incredibly accurate. They even had the location of Lord’s farm, and the dates of his meetings with Bobby Hayst jibed perfectly with Jerry’s own report.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, putting the papers in the envelope and the envelope on the desk. “You found this on Professor Lord’s desk? You think I supplied the information?”
“We found it right there where you just put it,” Mrs. Lord said. “It must have been there Friday. He must have read it and put it there. As you know, he took his life Friday night. You and your man Trowbridge had access to that information. You were gathering it. You—”
“Jerry had nothing to do with it!” Laurie Lord wailed.
“Please, my dear, keep out of this. Well, Mr. Drum? Can you deny it?” Her composure was amazing. “In my heart, Mr. Drum, I have already forgiven my husband his sins. He was an extremely talented man. A genius, almost. I know God will forgive him too. Like all extremely talented men, he had a flaw. It is the penalty they pay for their genius. In so many ways he was like a little boy. A bewildered little boy. Well, can you deny it?”
Before I could answer, Professor McQuade said, “There are laws in this state. The violation of a client’s confidence by a private detective is a crime. You’ll pay, Drum. I’ll see that you pay!”
“Because if you and your man Trowbridge didn’t do it, Mr. Drum, then the girl did. And in her profession that doesn’t make sense. Does it?” Mrs. Lord paused only long enough to take a breath. “How much did they pay you, Mr. Drum, for my husband’s life?”
I picked up the envelope again and looked at it. Like a leopard, it hadn’t changed its spots. Laurie Lord came over to me. She said through her tears, “Please, Mr. Drum. I beg you. If you … if you did this terrible thing, admit it. But don’t let them drag Jerry into it too. Because Jerry
never …” She was crying so much, she couldn’t go on.
Jerry, or Bobby Hayst? It had to be one of them. Except for the dead man, only one of them could have given the as-yet unidentified informant all the information he had. A weary voice, beyond cynicism, beyond disillusionment, said: “If you haven’t reported this to the police, don’t. I want to get to the bottom of this myself. But if they get the wrong kind of publicity—if they get any kind of publicity—the agency will clam up. And if the cops see this the way you did, they won’t give me the chance to dig into it.” The voice was my own; I hardly recognized it.
Mrs. Lord didn’t answer me. McQuade shouted, “How dare you make such a proposition, after what you did! The only reason, we haven’t notified the authorities yet is because Mrs. Lord insisted we give you a chance to explain. Apparently you’re not even going to try.”
“There’s nothing to explain. I didn’t do it. But that doesn’t matter. You already have me tried and convicted.”
“I’m calling the police right now,” McQuade said. “And I’m placing you under citizen’s arrest until they get here.”
He picked up the phone on the desk. He was shaking again. I took a step toward the door. He dropped the phone and ran across the room, barring the door with his frail back.
“You’re under arrest! You’re under citizen’s arrest!”
I looked at him. “Don’t be a fool,” I said. “You’d need a cannon.”
He got out of the way. As I opened the door he was at the phone again, asking for the police.
I stayed in College Station long enough to make a phone call of my own from a pay booth, long distance to Washington.
“Hello?”
“Jerry, this is Chet. We’re in trouble.”
“Wha—”
“Don’t talk, just listen. Close up the office. Don’t go back to your apartment. Meet me—make it Hamling’s Bar and Grill on Sixteenth Street. I ought to be there in three hours on the nose.”
“But what—”
I hung up.
Violence Is My Business Page 4