The Man with Two Wives

by Patrick Quentin

  chapter 10

  I called Paul from a pay booth in the station. He’d just got back to the office.

  “I didn’t tell the Prop a thing at lunch,” he said. “I thought it was best not to overtax those gray cells.”

  “Fine.”

  “And the cop doesn’t seem to have done much damage. He was only with her for a couple of minutes. She didn’t even tell him she’d known Jaimie in California. I congratulated her on her acumen. But she just asked what acumen was and said she hadn’t told him because she’d forgotten. I think she thought acumen was a kind of fur—a very expensive fur which she should immediately have yards of. Everything’s fine, then?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good boy. Call me whenever you need me. Old Mother Fund operates on a twenty-four hour schedule.”

  “Thanks, Paul.”

  “Oh, by the way—the Slave Driver’s back. When I got in, there was a note that she’d called. Bill, be smooth with her.”

  “Of course.”

  “I love you, Bill. There’s something about you. You’re sexy.”

  “’Bye, Paul. I’ll send you a check for the money in the morning.”

  “You better had. Two hundred? That’d almost cover the Prop’s week-end perfume consumption.”

  I took a taxi home, feeling wonderful. As I opened the apartment door, I heard voices in the living room. I went in. Betsy and Helen Reed were there. With them was Lieutenant Trant, sitting, inevitably, on the arm of a chair, with a cocktail in his hand.

  He’d haunted my mind so much that for a moment I thought he was a guilt-engendered mirage. He wasn’t, of course.

  Betsy said, “Bill, you know Lieutenant Trant, don’t you? He just stopped by to see whether I could help at all about Jaimie.”

  Trant nodded. “They persuaded me to have a drink, Mr. Harding. But I’ll have to be getting along.”

  “Really!” said Helen Reed. “Murder in the Callingham circle. Wonders will never cease.”

  I told myself it was perfectly routine for Trant to be there. Of course he’d have to interview Betsy as another of his meager links to Jaimie. As usual, he’d got in ahead of me. But this time it didn’t matter. There was nothing he could trick out of Betsy.

  My wife looked worn out, but her happy, transfiguring smile delighted me and invalidated my fear of Trant. I went to her and kissed her.

  Helen said, “Bill, darling, for pity’s sake, make that wife of yours put her feet up for a while. Me, I’m going to put mine up for a year. If you knew how we knocked ourselves out! Gab, gab, gab, charm, charm, charm until last night we collapsed into stunned exhaustion at ten P.M. The Vichyssoise we’ve drunk! The monumental Main Line bosoms we’ve enchanted with our dazzling charitable smiles! If I ever see another simple black frock with pearls I’ll scream.”

  Betsy said, “Helen was wonderful, Bill.”

  “Wonderful?” Helen said. “I was celestial. But what are we doing, chattering about our triumphs? Bill, darling, Betsy’s told me the Great News. Many congratulations. I haven’t the faintest idea what Vice-President in Charge of Advertising is, but I know it’s something absolutely divine. Let’s drink to it.”

  Betsy was beaming her pride at me. “Yes, Bill, let’s drink to it.”

  They all toasted me solemnly—including Trant. Soon he left and Helen left a couple of minutes later. The moment we’d seen her off at the front door, I said: “What did Trant ask you, Betsy?”

  “Nothing, really. Just about Jaimie. There wasn’t much I could tell.”

  “You didn’t tell him about Jaimie beating up Daphne?”

  “Of course not. He wasn’t interested in Daphne anyway. Daphne was here last night with you.”

  I’d always been going to tell her about the Daphne “fix,” of course. There had never been any doubt about that.

  I said, “She wasn’t.”

  “She wasn’t? But the Lieutenant said…”

  “C. J. and I fixed it.”

  “But, Bill, whatever…?”

  The cook came in then and announced dinner. After she’d left, I said, “Let’s have our reunion dinner in peace. I’ll tell you it all afterward. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  She looked at me doubtingly. I put my arms around her and kissed her. She clung to me as if she had been away from me for months.

  “I missed you so much, Bill. Won’t I ever get over being stupid about you?”

  “I hope not,” I said.

  As I kissed her again, reveling in the calmness, the rightness of it, I found I was looking over her shoulder at the couch where I had been kissing Angelica the night before. Incredibly, it didn’t seem to matter. Angelica had no reality whatsoever.

  After dinner, I told her about C. J.’s manufactured alibi for Daphne. I knew she would hate the fakery of it. Miraculously for a child of C. J.’s, she had a passion for straightforwardness. But I also knew that, unlike Angelica, she would see that it had had to be done. She was Callingham enough for that. Conscious of how much I was holding back from her, that part of the story seemed innocuous, almost dull, and I was surprised when she took it anxiously.

  “But what did Daphne do last night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But she was with Jaimie, you say?”

  “That’s what C. J. said. Part of the time she was with him, part of the time she was alone.”

  “Then at least Father knows what she was doing?”

  “I don’t even know that. Daphne said something about having to tell him most of the truth.”

  “Then she only told him what she wanted to tell him. You know that.” My wife got up. “How can you and Father be so calm about it? Making that alibi’s one thing, but if Daphne was with Jaimie, if somebody saw them together… You know her. She could have done something completely crazy and if we don’t know what it was…”

  Her anxiety was infecting me. She was right, of course. There had been no time to think about Daphne. But now I could see a dozen ways in which Trant might be able to break the alibi.

  Betsy was saying, “We’ll have to make her tell us what happened.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Please, Bill, you call her. You know how she is with me. Ask her to come around here—or we’ll go there.”

  “All right,” I said.

  I called C. J.’s apartment. Henry answered and said, “Oh, yes, sir, Miss Daphne’s in her room. I’ll put you through.”

  Soon I heard Daphne. “Bill? How divine of you to call. I’m under house arrest. Really, Daddy’s being too dreary for words. I’ve never been so bored in my life.”

  I said, “Betsy’s back.”

  “Heaven forfend. I suppose she’s up to her ears in righteous indignation?”

  “She thinks we ought to talk more about last night—so do I.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, dear. Oh, dear.” And then, “Well, why not? Anything’s better than this boredom.”

  “So we’ll come right over?”

  “You can’t leave her behind, I suppose?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Okay, then. Bring her. Let her get it out of her system. But, Bill, darling…”

  “Yes.”

  “For pity’s sake, avoid the library. Daddy’s in there alone—brooding. If he sees anyone—but anyone—he’ll maul them like… like… Oh, what are those dogs?”

  “Police dogs.”

  “No, Bill. Don’t be a moron. Those other ones—the ones with bow-legs and fangs and…”

  “Bulldogs,” I said.

  “Yes, of course. Bulldogs. How divine of you.”

  She rang off. I put down the receiver. Betsy said, “We go there?”

  “Yes. C. J.’s ordered her to stay in her room. She says he’s in a fighting mood and we’d better avoid him.”

  “How did she sound?”

  “Oh—like Daphne.”

  “She didn’t sound…” Betsy was watching me steadily and the anxiety on her face was alm
ost fear. It startled me.

  “Sound like—what?”

  Suddenly she said, “What if she’d killed him!”

  I suppose that thought must have crossed my mind, but it had made no impression. There had been so many, many other things that had frightened me more. But now it had been said and it had to be faced.

  Daphne could have killed him, of course. I doubted whether there was any extravagance of which she was incapable if she felt an imperial Callingham whim. I remembered the look on C. J.’s face that morning—the look of mingled love and despair, and the thought of him, shut up, brooding, in the library, took on a new, ominous significance. But, because Betsy looked so worried and it was Betsy I cared about, I tried to minimize.

  I said, “I asked her. She said she didn’t.” That sounded silly even to me. I put my arms around her and kissed her. “You mustn’t get ideas like that in your head. It’ll be all right. I promise. Go get your coat. We’ve got to be going.”

  For a moment she stayed there in the circle of my arm. I could see the worry fading out of her face, and I felt a stirring of guilt. She’d been perfectly sensibly afraid that Daphne might have killed Jaimie and now, just because I’d said she hadn’t, without the slightest reason to back me up, she wasn’t afraid any more.

  That was how much she trusted me.

  She went off to the bedroom for her coat. I got mine in the hall and waited for her. I might have known that getting rid of Angelica wouldn’t be enough. There was always going to be some little thing like this to remind me of how double-faced I had become. Nothing’s the end for you because it can always be fixed. Angelica’s voice, hard with contempt, echoed in my ear. I thought of her on that train. What was she doing? Reading the magazines? Sitting? Just sitting and pompously thinking what a hollow man I was?

  I forced my mind to something else—to Daphne. There was danger there, but it wasn’t personal danger for me. There was nothing about Daphne that could compromise me.

  And then, as I heard Betsy coming down the hall toward me, a thought hit me like a blow between the eyes. What if Daphne knew about Angelica? At eleven Jaimie had gone to Angelica and thrown her out of the apartment. What if Daphne had still been with him then and he had told her what he was going to do? “You know—Angelica, Bill’s ex-wife… Hasn’t he told you she was in New York? He sees her all the time.”

  I turned toward Betsy. It was horrible because, although I loved her and needed her as I had never needed her before, she wasn’t my ark of security any more; she, like Angelica, had become a menace—the woman I had to deceive, the woman whom the merest chance remark from Daphne might undeceive.

  I said, hating my sneaky diplomacy, “Darling, you look all in. Remember what Helen said. Why don’t you go to bed and let me do this alone?”

  “Oh, no, I’m all right.”

  “But—you know how Daphne is about you. Maybe it’d be smarter if I handled her without you.”

  She smiled at me, sure of her duty, defeating me. “Of course not, darling. I annoy her. I know that. But in the long run, if she’s difficult, I’m the only one in the family who can beat her down.” She slipped her hand through my arm. “Come on.”

  Betsy’s car, in which she’d driven Helen Reed up from Philadelphia, was still outside the apartment house. We took it and I drove to C. J.’s. Betsy sat up very straight.

  “We mustn’t let her squirm out of it. We’ve got to find out the whole truth.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She put her hand on my knee. “Darling, you’ve been wonderful. It must have been a nightmare for Father. I don’t know what he would have done without you…”

  chapter 11

  Henry let us in and led us straight to Daphne’s room. Daphne was lying on a pink chaise longue with her shoes kicked off. She twisted around to look at us, blinking petulantly.

  “I hope you’ve brought a file in a loaf of bread. Really, Daddy’s a monster. Larry Morton showed up to take me to the Lisdons’ party. Daddy knows I wanted to go, but he made me say I was sick. Sick! I shall be sick soon—mortally sick with whatever it is you get in prisons. Scurvy.”

  She didn’t move. Betsy went to her and kissed her. Daphne eyed her scrutinizingly.

  “Darling, you look terrible. What on earth have you been doing in Philadelphia?”

  Betsy sat down on the edge of the chaise longue. Her lips were rather tight, but I could tell that she was determined not to let Daphne irritate her. She said, “We’ve got to know what happened last night. There’s a million and one reasons. Even you must see.”

  Daphne continued to look at her for a moment and then turned the pretty frog eyes on me. I was feeling less uneasy now. In the car I had remembered a conversation I’d had with Jaimie at the party. Jaimie had asked me not to mention Daphne to Angelica and had made it quite plain that he was keeping his women departmentalized. There was, therefore, a good gamble that Daphne wouldn’t know anything to undermine me. But I was still wary. I smiled at her, backing up my wife.

  “Yes. Tell us. We’ve got to be sure Trant can’t break the alibi.”

  “Oh, that Lieutenant.” Daphne shrugged. “My dear, he couldn’t break a date.” She reached down from the chaise longue with one of her stockinged feet and tried to wriggle it into a shoe. “Oh, well, what difference does it make? If you’re so nosy, I might as well tell you. But, for pity’s sake, don’t get holy. Really, after Daddy, I couldn’t stand it.”

  “We won’t get holy, dear,” said Betsy. “Just tell us.”

  Daphne abandoned the shoe and tucked her legs up under her. “It’s all your fault anyway. If it hadn’t been for you, it wouldn’t have happened. I’d have got bored with Jaimie the way anyone gets bored with anything after a while. But, oh, no, you had to butt in—screaming like lunatics just because he got drunk that one time and tried to maul me, rallying around with bludgeons when I decided, out of sheer Christian charity, to forgive him, trying to bully me out of seeing him, threatening to tell Daddy…” She tossed the mane of red hair. “If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s people who butt in.” She darted a glance at Betsy. “It was that divine sister-to-sister talk before you went to Philadelphia that did it, darling. After all that good, sound, solid admonishment from Little Mother Betsy, I said: To hell with them. They say I won’t marry Jaimie. I say I will. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? That’s how any girl with self-respect would react.”

  It was, in any case, how one would expect Daphne Callingham to react. The little puzzled frown had come between my wife’s eyes. “So you really were in love with him?”

  “In love? Who knows about love? He was pretty and I wanted him. Even lovely social girls with lovely social backgrounds can be inflamed, you know, with desire. If it wasn’t love, at least it was a challenge.”

  She was watching Betsy behind half-closed lashes, hoping she’d managed to shock her.

  “Really, it all seems absurd now, but it didn’t seem silly then. It was the Cause. After you—thank God—had left for Philadelphia, I saw him all the time. I told him I wanted to marry him and was going to marry him and we’d better do something about it. Looking back, he was terribly dumb. I guess that’s because he was so stuck on himself. He said there wasn’t anything to worry about. Everything would be all right. In a couple of weeks, he’d have you crazy about him again and Daddy crazy about him and you’d all come to the wedding crawling on your hands and knees with orange blossoms in your teeth. Vanity, my dears. That’s all it was. Appalling vanity. He thought he could charm the fangs out of a shark, that one.”

  She turned to me and held out her hand imperiously. That was always her C. J.-ish method of asking for a cigarette. I gave her one and lit it for her. Through the smoke, she said:

  “I told him he was a jerk, of course. I told him he didn’t know you and he didn’t know Daddy. Particularly he didn’t know Daddy. For example, I said, if you ever told Daddy that he’d beaten me up, Daddy wouldn’t only forbid the banns or whatever you do to b
anns; he would run him out of the Eastern Seaboard, tarred and feathered, on a rail personally wrenched from around the Public Library. But he just smirked and looked beautiful and charming. Honestly, you could have eaten him. And that’s where the matter stood—until last night.” She looked down at the cigarette. “Ugh, this is one of those revolting things with a filter. Give me a real cigarette. I’m a grownup girl.”

  I didn’t have any other cigarettes. Betsy felt in her pocketbook and produced a pack. I went through the ritual of lighting Daphne’s new cigarette.

  “Last night,” she was saying, “I was here at home. Daddy—thank God, too—had gone to Boston. I didn’t have a date with Jaimie. As a matter of fact, I’d got the days mixed up on the Lisdon party and I was waiting for Larry to pick me up. He didn’t come, of course, because it was the wrong day, but that made me mad. So I had a couple of drinks. I’ve got a smooth system of drinking without Henry reporting it to Daddy. I keep a bottle of gin and a bottle of vermouth hidden behind the books in the library and I get Henry to bring me ice and a coke. Then I furtively—But am I out of my mind, revealing my innermost secrets to you? Anyway, I had a couple of drinks and I was mad at Larry for standing me up, mad, of course, at you, and even madder at Jaimie for being so feeble. Then, suddenly, like a vision, the plan came to me. It all centered around Daddy’s character. You know how he is. Heavens, we don’t have to go into Daddy at this late date. He’s the wickedest old crook since they opened up the Yukon, but to him he’s Queen Victoria. There was a way to fix it. I saw it, as I said, in a vision. What would Daddy hate more than an undesirable son-in-law? There was, of course, only one answer. I haven’t suffered years of agony as a child listening to him reading Dickens out loud for nothing. The thing that Daddy would hate more than an undesirable son-in-law was…” She leaned forward dramatically, curling her lips back from the small, white teeth “… was a ruined daughter!”

  She giggled again. “It was a great idea. Even now I have to admit it. It was the most glorious conception of the twentieth century. I would rush to Jaimie’s arms, spend the night in his apartment, hopelessly compromise myself and then confront Daddy with it dead-on. Listen! I’d say. Take your pick. Let me marry Jaimie or I’ll tip off all the columnists of those rival newspaper magnates who love you so dearly that C. J.’s cherished baby daughter was ruined last night in a one-room apartment in a most unfashionable section of Lower Manhattan. Wouldn’t it have been divine? It would have been straight out of David Copperfield and it would have worked.” She clasped her hands together in mock ecstasy. “Of course it would have worked. And how rapturous it would have been just to see his face!”