Black Widow

by Patrick Quentin

  “Peter, she’s killed herself! The poor little creature! You played around with her just because you were lonely. You turned her head. You—”

  “Shut up, Lottie,” said Iris.

  A knock sounded again at the front door. I went back to answer it. Dr. Norris came hurrying in. He was a tall, tactful young man with an expensive suit and the assurance that comes from a large, fashionable practice.

  He went with me into the bedroom. He looked down at Nanny and then at the rest of us.

  “Yes.” he said. “I think, if you please, you should all go into the other room.”

  We trooped back into the living-room. Dr. Norris shut the door on us. Iris’s suitcases still stood by the threshold where I had dropped them. They were symbols of a home-coming. I expected Lottie to gesture at them flamboyantly. Look! Poor Iris’s suitcases! And she had to come home to this! But she didn’t. She was too busy, probably, checking with that trigger mind of hers. He met her at my party. He took her out that first night. And then Brian told me how he caught them together in the hall. A tawdry little affair. Plain as a pikestaff. To all intents and purposes—a murderer.

  In a few minutes, Dr. Norris put his head around the door. Coming through the crack, it looked disembodied—the head of a suave, clean-shaven John the Baptist who’d struck it rich with a Messianic cult in Southern California.

  “I’m afraid she’s dead. I recommend that one of you call the police immediately.”

  He said that with a kind of tactful lowness of voice as if he were recommending a sitz bath. I suppose it wasn’t much more important than that to him. The announcement wasn’t very important to me, either. I’d already resigned myself to the fact of Nanny’s death—suicide, police, everything.

  But the news galvanized Lottie. Instantly she hurried toward the phone, eager to start things, to have the disaster go on. I couldn’t dislike her for it. Why shouldn’t she feel that way? A whacking great scandal—everybody’s crazy about them.

  Brian went after her. “Better let me do it, Lottie.” Lottie picked up the receiver. I crossed and took it from her. At least I had that much pride.

  “Get me the police.”

  When I was connected, I said, “This is Peter Duluth.” I gave the address. “You’d better send someone over right away. A girl’s killed herself.”

  My voice sounded all right, but when I dropped the receiver back onto the stand, my hand was shaking. I crossed to the bar.

  Lottie cried, “Iris, stop him. He mustn’t drink. Not now.”

  The absurdity, the typical Lottieness of that remark, made everything a little less awful, somehow. Comedy always helps, I suppose. It also helped that Iris went straight to the bar and mixed me a Scotch and water. She mixed one for herself and one for Brian, too.

  “Lottie,” she said, “it’s after seven-thirty. You’ve got to go to the theater.”

  “The theater. My God, the theater!” Lottie had plunged into one of her “My God” routines. “How can I? How can I go to the theater?”

  “Troupers,” I said. “They go bravely on with the show, hissing through stiff upper lips, remember?”

  She swung around to me. “But, Peter, how can I leave you in this ghastly situation? How can I do it?” I wasn’t the pariah any more. Suddenly I had become the Best Friend in Distress, the to-be-supported, championed, protected one. She clutched me and kissed me with extravagant affection. “Darling, you mustn’t worry. Promise me not to worry. I won’t say a word to the police. You can depend on that. Oh, God, how could you have done it? How could you have let this happen? I warned you. Didn’t I warn you? A little girl, a mere child—”

  “Lottie dear,” said Iris, “please go.”

  “Oh, I’m going.” Of course she was going. She was beginning to realize how she could knock them all dead at the theater with the great news. I wasn’t anxious about her performance, either. She had the sensitivity of a rhinoceros. “Peter, darling, don’t worry about the play. I’ll manage somehow. And don’t do anything foolish with the police. Leave it all to me. I’ll be back right after the show. Oh, my dears, my poor darlings!”

  She started in a hawklike swoop for the door. Brian gulped down his drink.

  “I’d better see she gets there okay.” He looked pale and shaken but he patted my arm. “That’s my boy, Peter. I’ll come right back from the theater. If you want me, I’ll be upstairs.”

  He followed Lottie out of the apartment and closed the door. I had been dreading the moment when I’d be alone with Iris. Not because I was afraid she’d judge me. She wasn’t a bit like Lottie. She didn’t jump before she knew. And she was my wife, which was as important to her as to me. But, so long as Lottie had been there making a fool of herself, the time for explaining had been postponed. Now, I would have to explain. And how could I—when I couldn’t understand it myself, when all that I felt was bafflement and panic and an obscure guilt sense which nagged that I deserved whatever punishment was coming to me.

  I tried to remember Nanny Ordway, how she had looked, how it had been like with her, what our encounter had really amounted to, but all that came up in my mind was that purple-faced corpse in the next room.

  Iris lit a cigarette. She hadn’t looked tired when she got off the plane. But now she did—tired and almost her age, which was thirty-four. Seeing her suffer and knowing it was my doing made me suddenly, unreasonably angry.

  “Okay, she’s dead,” I said. “She’s killed herself. There it is. We’re stuck with it. Lottie thinks it’s my fault. The police will say it’s my fault. To hell with it—who cares?”

  Iris looked at me. “Peter, don’t be stupid. Who do you think you’re talking to? Just tell me the truth.”

  “The truth? I saw her a couple of times. I thought she was a nice-enough kid. She amused me. She was someone to be with. I guess I was sorry for her. I gave her the key. I let her bring her work here. Okay. I suppose I was going paternal and senile in my old age. But there it is. That was the setup. Now she’s killed herself. Who’s going to believe me? The blue-bottomed baboon with the lowest intelligence quotient at the Bronx Zoo?”

  Iris came to me, still holding her glass. “I’ll believe you.”

  Saying that so quickly and simply, she took me off my guard. My anger fizzled out. Without it, I felt rudderless. “You—you—”

  “You wouldn’t lie to me.” She paused. “But she fell in love with you?”

  Suddenly I found I didn’t have to be affected about it. I could talk naturally. That was what she’d done for me.

  “My God, I don’t think so. She never showed the slightest sign. Why should she have fallen in love with me? It wasn’t ever on that level. She made a fetish of friendship. We were friends. She kept on saying it. Friends. Besides, from the beginning she knew all about you, that I was in love with you. We were always talking about you.”

  “Which doesn’t prevent a twenty-year-old girl falling in love, does it?”

  “But she didn’t. You’ve got to take my word for it. Baby, I’m not Peter Pan. I’ve had women in love with me before. I can’t have been that much of a fool.”

  “You didn’t even kiss her?”

  “Yes. I kissed her—once, because—Hell, I can’t remember why. But it wasn’t anything.”

  “It wasn’t? Not for a young impressionable girl who—”

  I put my hand on her arm. “Baby, can’t you tell? Isn’t there some way? Can’t you see, feel that there’s nothing changed, that I love you, that I couldn’t be making things up?”

  Her dark, steady eyes watched me. “I believe you. And if you say so, I believe she wasn’t in love with you, either.” She crossed to the desk and picked up Nanny’s sketch of the hanging girl. I could tell she was making a great effort to be calm—to help me. “And this?”

  “She always made little drawings. I told you. It was a kind of running gag. When I saw it, I thought it just meant that her writing hadn’t been going well today. I—”

  “‘The secret
of love is greater than the secret of death.’”

  “Okay. I know what it sounds like, but it’s a quote from Salomé. She was using it for the title of a story. That was a kind of running gag, too. We seemed to go in gags, didn’t we? Laugh? Never laughed so much in our lives!”

  Iris dropped the drawing and leafed through a pile of manuscript pages which Nanny must have left.

  “What about her parents? We’ll have to phone them or something, won’t we?”

  “I don’t know anything about them. I just know that she lived in the Village with another girl.”

  Iris turned from the desk. Very quietly, she said, “I don’t think the police are going to believe all this, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll just have to hope for the best.”

  She crossed back to me. I put my arms around her. But I didn’t dare kiss her. I was afraid, if I did, I might break down and cry like a child.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DR. NORRIS EMERGED from the bedroom then. He was wearing a subdued version of his crisp, everything’s-going-to-be-all-right smile. Under the circumstances it was ludicrous.

  “Well, Peter, you called the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. I’m afraid she’d been dead for some time. No chance to have saved her. Most unfortunate for you both. No close friend, I hope?”

  “No.”

  “Some disappointed actress, perhaps, poor kid.”

  Dr. Norris was an amateur enthusiast of the stage and read all those stories about how heartbreaking it is to get established in the theater. I don’t know why he imagined that disappointed actresses committed suicide in the bedrooms of producers. Maybe he had only said it to be tactful, to minimize the degree of my responsibility.

  Iris said, “I suppose there are no complications?”

  “About the suicide? The pressure marks of the ligature seem a little atypical. But that’s hardly my line. Let’s leave that to the police, shall we?”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded ominous. Dr. Norris glanced at the gold watch on his neat wrist.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I should call the wife. A cocktail party we were going to.”

  I would have to get used to the fact that my tragedy was only a minor inconvenience to other people. I heard him being discreet and impersonal on the phone.

  “I’m sorry, dear… shall be detained… yes, of course, go alone if you like… explain to Madge and Billy…”

  He replaced the phone, came over, and sat with us while we waited for the police, polite and noncommittal, treating us delicately, like a surgeon handling a diseased appendix. He didn’t ask any questions. That wasn’t his business. He had to be professional at all costs. I’d never realized before that I didn’t like him.

  In about ten minutes, the police arrived—four of them, three plain-clothes detectives and a police officer. The chief of the detectives was tall and young with a very soft voice. He and the officer went almost immediately into the bedroom with Doctor Norris. The other two detectives started to prowl around the living-room. Iris showed one of them Nanny’s drawing. He took it, Nanny’s manuscript, and Nanny’s typewriter, retreating with them into the bedroom. Soon I was called after him. I had to describe how Nanny had been hanging, how the scarf had been before I cut it. Then I was sent back to the living-room.

  Another man was arriving, big and red-faced, with a black bag. I could tell he was an assistant medical examiner for the M. E.’s office. I’d been to the movies. I’d read books. I knew the things that had to happen. But they didn’t seem convincing in my own apartment. I hadn’t taken a second drink, but the shock and the first drink had managed now to give everything a patina of unreality and a kind of cynical humor—as if the whole thing were a terribly sour joke against myself.

  And against Iris, of course—that’s what made it so very sour.

  In a few minutes, the young, tall detective came out of the bedroom. He looked about thirty-five and he moved very quietly, giving an impression of calm. It wasn’t the laboriously rehearsed calm of Dr. Norris; it seemed natural to him, as if he’d given up being surprised by anything years ago. He was good-looking, with a certain ascetic quality to his unobtrusive features and gray eyes. He reminded me of a Jesuit priest who was a friend of mine—the cleverest man I knew.

  I wondered if it was going to make it better or worse that he was obviously not a straight tough cop. I wondered, too, whether it was he who was going to be my antagonist. Perhaps he was just a subsidiary character slipping in and out. Maybe the Real Enemy would come later.

  For I had resigned myself to the fact that the police would be The Enemy. I knew what my story sounded like. I knew where they were going to lay the moral blame.

  He came to us as if he were meeting us at a cocktail party. “My name is Trant—Lieutenant Trant of the Homicide Bureau. You’re Mr. Duluth, a producer and director in the theater.” His gaze, unsmiling but not hostile, shifted to Iris. “I’ve seen you, Mrs. Duluth, in the movies and on the stage. Often.”

  He ignored the two other detectives who were still milling around. He glanced at a chair, waiting for Iris’s permission to sit. She nodded. He drew the chair up close to us and sat down. I thought: It’s going to be worse with him than with a regular cop—much worse.

  He said, “Just a few questions. First, the girl’s name?”

  “Nanny Ordway,” I said.

  “Nanny Ordway. She was living here with you?”

  “No. She lives at Thirty-One Charlton Street in the Village.”

  He took out an old envelope, scribbled the name and address on its back, and returned it to his pocket.

  “Who discovered her?”

  “We both did. My wife’s just back from Jamaica. I’d been to the airport to meet her. When we got here just after seven, we found her.”

  “I see. And how did she happen to be in your apartment?”

  “She had a key. She came every day—to write.”

  “Something for you—a play?”

  “No. Just writing. She was only beginning. Hadn’t had anything published.”

  “I see.” He said that again in his quiet, pleasant, unassuming voice. “And why did she have a key and do her writing here, Mr. Duluth?”

  “I gave her the key. She was living down there in the Village with another girl. The conditions weren’t any too good for writing. This place was empty all day. It was more convenient for her to come here.”

  It was sounding even weaker than I had expected. I could hear it all through Lieutenant Trant’s ears, the way you can hear something you’ve written objectively by reading it to someone else. I was still hoping, though, that he was intelligent enough to accept it at its face value—because, after all, it was true.

  He said, “When did you give Miss Ordway the key, Mr. Duluth?”

  “About a week, ten days ago.”

  “You have known her a long time?”

  “Just about four or five weeks.”

  Iris put in, “He met her the day I left for Jamaica. He wrote me about it.”

  Lieutenant Trant’s courteous gaze shifted to her and then came back to me. I was so attuned to him by then that I could read his thoughts. He was already thinking: So. This is one of those setups where the noble wife sticks by the erring husband. He was missing the point. I felt angry as if he had insulted Iris out loud. It was a help to feel angry with him. It put me on the offensive.

  “Where did you meet her, Mr. Duluth?”

  “Upstairs at a party at Charlotte Marin’s.”

  “Charlotte Marin, the actress?”

  “That’s right. She and her husband live in the apartment above. They asked me up to a party—the day my wife left for Jamaica. I met Nanny Ordway there.”

  “She was a friend of Charlotte Marin and her husband?”

  “No. Some other people had brought her to the party. They didn’t know her.”

  “What people?”

  “I don’t
know.”

  The other detectives were taking fingerprints from the desk. They acted as if we weren’t there, utterly indifferent to our quiet colloquy. It was like talking late at night in an office with scrubwomen sweeping around you.

  Lieutenant Trant said, “And after you’d met her, you saw a great deal of her?”

  “No. That night I took her out to Hamburger Heaven because she was hungry. I walked her to the subway. After that, I had dinner once at her place. She came once to the office. I took her to dinner once—no, twice. Those were the only times I saw her.”

  “I see.” Lieutenant Trant watched me. “Are you in the habit of giving keys to young girls whom you hardly know?”

  He hadn’t said that as a taunt. He had asked it quietly as a question to which the answer might be mildly interesting. But its implications were plain. He’d summed me up as a routine Park Avenue libertine with an itch for change and a complaisant wife. He was too intelligent to be running around pigeonholing people that quickly. He was being a lousy detective. My anger broke through the surface.

  “For God’s sake, you don’t have to be clever and try to trip me up. If there’d been anything physical or romantic between Nanny Ordway and myself, I’d have told you. Why not? It isn’t a criminal offense to have slept with a girl who killed herself. Everyone’s going to believe I did, anyway. It’s going to be yelled out by the newspapers tomorrow. What have I got to win by lying? There was nothing between Nanny Ordway and me. I was trying to be kind to her. It didn’t work. That’s all. I’m only interested in telling you the truth because finding the truth is supposed to be your job. And I’m damned if I’ll have motives attributed to me that don’t exist.”

  “And while we’re on the subject, Lieutenant,” put in Iris, “you might as well know that my husband and I are not giddy members of the International Set. We don’t run around having affairs with all and sundry. We happen to be an ordinary, fairly solid married couple who love each other.”

  I felt a warm rush of gratitude to Iris, but Lieutenant Trant’s only reaction was a sudden, rather mechanical smile. I don’t think he was liking either of us any more. But he couldn’t have been more unruffled—or more unimpressed.