Seducer

by Flora, Fletcher

  “Don’t be absurd,” Maggie declared. “There’s nothing at all that you need to do. After a while she will stop of her own accord. A phony bitch like her would never hurt herself to hurt someone else, which is what she would have to do. She’s only trying to frighten you as a kind of revenge, or to make you come back to her on her own terms. Can’t you see that? You mustn’t be a coward and permit it to spoil things for you and me. It’s not exactly pleasant to spend our time talking like this when we might be saying and doing things much more interesting and exciting.”

  “It’s easy enough for you to call me a coward and to say that nothing needs doing. In my position, it’s a little more difficult to be so assured where Cornelia’s concerned. I wish to God that she were dead, and that’s the truth.”

  His voice was petulant and his face in profile, touched by the weak light of the remote moon, was the face of a sulking boy.

  She began to laugh at him, the wicked little aspiration that seemed to come from some inner, inexplicable glee. Suddenly as if by compulsion, she took hold of his head and pulled it down against her naked breasts and held it there tightly, as if he were truly the injured boy he had seemed to be. Her voice had nearly the quality of a croon, the expression of a half-dream.

  “You’re such a child,” she said. “Truly you are. In spite of being important and intelligent and all that, you are much more a child now than I have ever been, even though I am not important at all and have practically no intelligence whatever. You’re a bad child, however. You are always doing bad things.

  “I imagine that you have been getting yourself into fixes like this for years. Somehow you have always survived and been forgiven for being bad. Now you are afraid and hurt and angry because you think you may have to face the consequences of what you are and can’t help being.

  “Don’t worry, darling. Cornelia’s a fraud. I promise you. She will do nothing but make threats, and pretty soon she will not even do that. It’s in no way necessary for her to die. If you are going to wish someone dead, you had much better wish it for Madelaine. She’s the real problem and the real danger, and has much more to contribute by dying than anyone else. Come, darling, let’s be sensible and wish that Madelaine were dead instead of Cornelia. There’s something to be gained from that.”

  He felt, indeed, absurdly young and comforted, his anxiety abated and senses lulled by the whisper of her voice and the exciting scent of her warmly naked flesh. The scent, so far as he could tell, was an odd and soporific combination of cinnamon and carbon monoxide. Its effect, at any rate, was strangely pleasant, for it left his mind floating free and unencumbered on the surface of a vast lethargy, at liberty to indulge in the most exciting play of speculation.

  “Madelaine’s strong as an ox,” he said. “She’ll live forever.”

  “No one lives forever. Some people, for one reason or another, die sooner than others. They have accidents or something.”

  “Not Madelaine. Nothing happens accidentally to Madelaine. Things happen to Madelaine because she makes them happen.”

  “Or someone else makes them. The capacity to make things happen isn’t limited to one person.” Maggie’s voice held a positive ring.

  “If something accidental happened to Madelaine, something unfortunate might happen to me. If something went wrong, I mean. Under the circumstances, I would certainly be the most logical suspect.”

  “That’s true.” Maggie stroked Brad’s hair, holding his head against her pink-nippled breasts. “Accidents are tricky and are better avoided. It would be very difficult, I should think, to plan one that wouldn’t go wrong in some way and turn out to look like something else. It would be much simpler and safer, in my opinion, to do directly what you wanted to do, and make it appear to have been done by someone else.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a dirty trick to play on someone else?” he asked with a strange sort of detachment.

  “I don’t mean someone else specifically. I mean someone else generally. It would be too bad to arrange for someone else specifically to pay your consequences.”

  “What kind of general person would you suggest?”

  “Oh, a burglar, maybe. I suspect that lots of unjust blame is put onto burglars.”

  “I can think of instances when it was tried and didn’t work.”

  “So can I, now that you mention it. Do you know what I would really do if I wanted something done to someone and did not wish to be associated with it? I’d have someone else do it, a third party, when I was somewhere else and couldn’t be reasonably suspected in the least. It’s what’s called having an alibi, isn’t it?”

  “What about the third party? Wouldn’t he run the risk of being suspected?”

  “Not if it were someone who would not be related to either of the other two,” Maggie replied. “It would be like taking a stranger off the street.”

  “And it would put you at the mercy of this third party for the rest of your life. It would be difficult to live in such constant jeopardy.”

  “It would put you at each other’s mercy, wouldn’t it? It seems to me it would. And if you were two people who were equally involved and did it for each other, for your own sakes and what you wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other.”

  “It’s all very interesting as a kind of abstraction, but actual circumstances are something else entirely,” Brad stated.

  “Abstractions? I know nothing about abstractions, darling. It’s merely a way something might be done to someone. Even to Madelaine, for instance. She frequently goes to bed early with a sick headache and takes a sedative. Isn’t that what you told me? Isn’t that what she did this very evening, as a matter of fact? One evening when she did, you would only have to arrange to go somewhere else where you would be seen and known and remembered, so that no one could possibly blame you for what happened at home. While you were gone someone else could simply walk in a door that you had left unlocked and do quickly what needed to be done.”

  “You sound as if you’ve had experience,” Brad said drily.

  “No, darling. It’s only a game we’re playing. It’s only a way of thinking out how something might be done.”

  “Yes. Of course. We’re only playing a game.”

  But it was a game, he knew, that needed only a word or a sign in exactly the right desperate moment to become a plan. And he knew, also, that Maggie had offered herself obliquely in a crooning voice as the instrument of murder.

  Brad’s mind, free-floating on the vast surface of the drowsy half-dream, was wonderfully receptive and immune from guilt. He could accept without wonder the enormity of his own dark potential and he could sense for the first time without fear and without shame the fullness of his submission to the ageless and lawless woman-child who held his head against her warm breasts and stroked his hair.

  “Darling,” she said, “I’ve heard that Madelaine is quite wealthy. Is that so?”

  “Yes. It’s so.”

  “How much money does she have altogether, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. About a million, I’d say.”

  “A million dollars is quite a lot,” Maggie said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I wonder what it would be like to have a million dollars all your own.”

  “I couldn’t say. I’ve never had a million.”

  “You have some of the use of it, though. That’s almost as good.”

  “Is it? I suppose it is.”

  “It would be too bad to lose it after having it,” Maggie murmured, pressing his face firmly against her bare skin.

  “Yes. It would.”

  “I’d like very much to have some of the use of a million dollars. Do you think I may ever have? It seems almost too good to be possible.”

  He didn’t answer. His senses were acute in the sustained half-dream. He could hear with stethoscopic clearness beneath flesh and bone the sure and steady beating of her heart. Her breasts rose and fell at last on a sigh.

 
“Darling,” she said, “we must go back now. The clock on the dash says almost twelve, and we must not become careless and indiscreet.”

  13

  WANDA, THE CANNON MAID, found Madelaine in the library, where she had gone to write checks for the monthly accounts.

  “There’s a young man asking to see you,” Wanda said. “He says his name is Jensen.”

  “Jensen?” Madelaine tapped her front teeth with the capped end of her pen and considered the name. “Am I supposed to know him?”

  “He says not, but he says he’s got something important to tell you that you’ll be interested in hearing.”

  “How odd. I can’t imagine what it could be.”

  “Shall I send him away? To tell the truth, I don’t much like his looks. He’s not very clean, and he kept glaring at me as if I’d done something to make him angry.”

  “Lots of young men nowadays are not very clean, Wanda, and lots of them are angry. Send him in here, please. I’ll see what he wants.”

  Wanda left, registering disapproval, and a minute or two later Buddy Jensen, a stranger to Madelaine, came three steps into the room and stopped, looking around in turn at the shelves of books, an opaque projector on a table in a corner, a world globe that was also a lamp, and finally at Madelaine herself, who had turned sidewise to her desk in order to face him.

  A slanting shaft of sunlight touched him where he stood, lighting his face and tousled hair and verifying Wanda’s observations that he was not very clean and looked angry. Madelaine thought, watching him, that he was surely deeply disturbed about something, and that he was, perhaps, not quite rational.Touched by madness, she thought, aware of uneasiness and pity as the hackneyed phrased passed through her mind.

  “Are you Mr. Jensen?” she said politely.

  “That’s right,” he replied. “I am.”

  “You wanted to see me about something?”

  “That’s right. I do.”

  But he seemed to be in no hurry about it, now that he had been admitted. His dark eyes traveled again around the room, from books to projector to globe to Madelaine. The second excursion had the effect of increasing his anger and the ferocity of his expression. There was something besides anger in his eyes, however, and she thought that it was pain.

  “Won’t you sit down?” she said.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I’d better.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I won’t be welcome here when you’ve heard what I’ve got to say.”

  “We won’t know that until you’ve said it, will we?”

  “You’ll see. You won’t like it. You’ll throw me out.”

  “Nonsense. I don’t believe I could manage it even if I wanted to. You appear to be quite a strong young man.”

  “I didn’t mean literally. I meant you’ll make me go.”

  “Well, I assume that you didn’t come with the intention of staying forever. Please tell me whatever it is you want to tell. And please sit down. It makes me uncomfortable to see you standing there like that.”

  He moved slowly, in a kind of sequence of jerks, to the chair she indicated and sat down, conveying in doing so the impression of a sullen boy obeying a command reluctantly under threat of punishment.

  Once seated, he did not know what to do with his hands, which were for a moment a disturbing problem. Finally he disposed of them by folding them into fists and laying them on his knees.

  “It’s about Professor Cannon and Maggie McCall,” he said.

  “Maggie McCall?”

  “That’s her name. She’s a girl goes to school here. She’s in the professor’s trig class.”

  “I don’t believe I know her.” Madelaine’s manner turned stiff and wary.

  “Well, it isn’t likely he’d have introduced you. They’re having an affair.”

  “My husband and one of his students? Are you quite sure?”

  She did not appear to be shocked or angry, and he was shrewd enough to observe that the information was not something she immediately discounted as absurd, or even unlikely.

  Buddy deduced from this that the professor was not a first offender, which was no surprise, for the slick bastard was exactly the kind of guy who would have women lying down for him all over the place. Not that Buddy resented this on moral grounds. He had, indeed, no more morals himself than a Tom cat. What he resented with despair and fury was that Maggie had been his girl and had been stolen from him. And he wanted her back.

  He missed her and wanted her, and there was nothing he would not do, however shameful, to make her return to him or to make her sorry if she didn’t

  “Are you sure you’re not imagining this?” Madelaine queried, watching him sharply.

  “Sure enough. She was my girl, and now she’s not, and he’s to blame.”

  “Are you the one who fought with him and gave him a beating?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “For this reason?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I wondered what had happened. He refused to say.”

  “Now you know. I beat him up, but it didn’t do any good. It only made things worse. That’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re obviously disturbed. People often exaggerate things when they are in such a state.”

  “Look. Don’t treat me like a damn kid or some kind of nut. I know what’s been going on between them. I thought maybe you’d like to know, too, so you could do something about it before somebody gets hurt. I guess you don’t though. I guess you don’t care what he does or whose girl he steals. Excuse me for bothering you. I’d better get the hell out of here.”

  “Oh, sit down. Please don’t be so belligerent. And I’d rather you didn’t swear at me. Of course I care. If you can convince me that you’re telling the truth, I’ll certainly do something about it.”

  Buddy had begun to rise, but now he settled back into the chair, flexing his blunt fingers and folding them into fists again on his knees.

  “Why should I try to convince you of anything? You can believe me or not, just as you please.”

  “Why should I believe you, when it comes to that? I have no doubt that you would tell any lie that suited your purpose.”

  “That’s right. I would.”

  “Could you prove a single word of what you’ve told me?” she asked.

  “He’s been picking her up in his car at different places, and I can tell you where and when exactly. He’s been in her apartment, and I can tell you when he went and when he left.”

  “That’s not proof. Only your word again. But never mind. I believe you.”

  “That’s good of you. Thanks.”

  “Tell me something.” Madelaine looked at him curiously, sensing more strongly than ever his dark potential for violence. “If I should decide to do nothing about this, what would you do?”

  “I don’t know. I might kill her. I might kill him, too.”

  “Yes, I think you might.” She stood up and smiled at him in a friendly way, as if she were preparing to say good-by to the most ordinary visitor. “Thank you for coming to see me, Mr. Jensen. I’ll call Wanda to show you out.”

  “Don’t bother. I can get out by myself.” He walked to the door, pausing there for several moments in a position of peculiar rigidity. Then he turned his head and looked back. “You’ve been good about it,” he said. “You didn’t throw a stinking fit or toss me out or anything like that. It’s too bad you have to be married to a son of a bitch like old Cannon.”

  He went on out, and after waiting by the desk until she had heard the front door close after him, Madelaine walked into the hall and called for Wanda. She returned to the desk after that and sat down and waited for Wanda to come.

  “When my husband gets home,” she said, “tell him that I would like to see him. I’ll still be here in the library.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Cannon.”

  Alone again, Madelaine picked up her pen and continued writing checks for the accounts. Then she wrote two l
etters that she had owed for some time to friends. She was just finishing the second letter when Brad entered the house and, seconds later, the library.

  “Hello, Maddy,” he said. “Wanda told me you want to see me.”

  “Yes.” She sealed the envelope of the second letter and placed it neatly on top of the first. “I had a visitor this afternoon.”

  “Really, Maddy, what’s so urgent about telling me that? Visitors are certainly not unusual in this house.”

  “This one was. He was very unusual.”

  “That’s nice. Someone I know?”

  “Possibly. I’m not sure. And it wasn’t nice. The visit wasn’t nice, and the visitor wasn’t nice. Both were exceptionally unpleasant.”

  “What are you trying to say? Who was this mysterious visitor?”

  “A young man.”

  “What young man?” Brad asked, his curiosity aroused.

  “I don’t think I’ll tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you might make things difficult for him if I did.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! Are you trying deliberately to be obscure?”

  “On the contrary, I mean to be absolutely clear. Perhaps you should sit down.”

  He did, laying on the floor beside his chair the briefcase he had carried into the room. He knew, of course, that something was wrong, and he had a notion, directed by guilt, of what it was. But he still couldn’t believe that she had learned about Maggie. They had been so careful, and possibly, after all, it would turn out in the next minute to be something else of less consequence.

  “It’s apparent that I’m on trial,” he said. “Am I entitled to hear the charge?”

  “Of course. The charge is the same one that I have made before, although not so bluntly as I’ll make it now. You are charged with being a liar and an adulterer. Is that clear enough?”

  “Quite. Can you support the charge?”

  “In court? Not in this instance. Not yet. I probably could if I worked at it. Would you like to have me try?”

  “I’d like to know exactly what you mean by this instance.”

  “Certainly. This instance is a girl named Maggie McCall. She’s a student of yours, I believe. A girl young enough to be your daughter.”