Black Widow

by Patrick Quentin

  She kissed Iris. “You must be beat from the plane and everything. You’re both coming to my place to sleep. There’s no point in spending a Charles Addams night here, and Lottie would grab you for upstairs, anyway, which is a fate worse than et cetera.”

  I don’t know how Miss Mills always seemed able to strike the right note in the least likely manner.

  “I’ve packed an overnight thing for you, Peter. Iris’s bags hadn’t been unpacked. Thank God for small mercies. Stinking little bitch, hanging herself in your apartment. Shall we go right away? Or have a drink first? A drink, maybe?”

  The phone rang. She went to answer it. “Sorry, no comment.” She slammed down the receiver. “Goddam newspapermen. That’s the fifteenth time.”

  She crossed to the bar and started mixing drinks, the pince-nez wabbling on the end of her nose. The atmosphere was warm and relaxed. It was phony, of course, but she’d managed to make us feel everything was all right.

  Before she’d finished mixing the drinks, the phone rang again. She took the receiver off the stand and threw it down on the table.

  “Here.”

  She brought us our drinks. Miss Mills would be wonderful on a sinking ship, I thought. She’d have the orchestra playing, false noses handed around, and sandwiches sent up from the kitchen.

  The door buzzer rang. Miss Mills went to answer it. Lottie burst in. She was still wearing the black dress and the pearls. She looked like a cocktail guest absurdly late for a party.

  “Darlings—” She saw Miss Mills and broke off. Lottie didn’t like Miss Mills. She thought she was too possessive of Iris and me and she also thought of her as an Underling.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Helping,” said Miss Mills.

  “Well!” Brushing past her, Lottie hurried toward Iris and me, her arms outstretched. “My poor darlings. Where are the police?”

  “They’ve gone,” I said.

  “Already?” She looked disappointed. But only for a moment. There was enough excitement without the police. She reached me and kissed me, smiling a smile of infinite tenderness. “Peter, darling, you should have been at the theater tonight. You really should. It would have warmed your heart to know what real friends you have. All of them—every one of them in the cast—agreed with me. It’s terrible for you. Shocking. That dreadful, twisted little girl doing this ghastly thing to you. So inconsiderate. Such a martyrdom. All of them, Peter, all those people, who hadn’t even known her the way I had, agreed. They’re sure there was nothing between you, that you did nothing you could blame yourself for. Just terrible, terrible bad luck. They’re all with you, Peter, all with you one hundred per cent. Hello, Iris.”

  She kissed Iris perfunctorily. At the moment Iris was the less interesting of the two of us.

  “Peter, you really should have been there. Phyllis Hatcher almost passed out. And the old man—the one who plays the porter in the last act—never can remember his name—he was terribly broken up. And Gordon Ling dried up twice in the first act. Oh, but we got through it all right. Don’t worry. Jammed house. Wonderful audience. And now—”

  She swooped to the phone. “Why have you got the receiver off?” She picked it up and started to dial.

  “Who are you calling, Lottie?” I asked.

  “Brian, of course. To see if he’s got the beds ready for you. You don’t imagine I’d let you sleep here.”

  “We’re going to Miss Mills’s, Lottie.”

  “What?… Hello, Brian, dear… What did you say, Peter?”

  “We’re sleeping at Miss Mills’s.”

  Lottie glared from above the receiver. “But that’s ridiculous. Of course you’re spending the night with us.”

  “Sorry, Lottie, but it’s all arranged.”

  “But you can’t. Miss Mills’s tiny flat? There isn’t enough room for a stray cat… What, Brian?” She’d picked up a pencil and was making her angry doodles all over the back of a playscript. “No, hold on a minute.” She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Peter—Iris.”

  “I’m sorry, Lottie dear,” said Iris, “but it was all arranged before you came.”

  “Well, really!” Lottie’s hand came off the mouthpiece. “No, Brian, never mind. It’s all right. Never mind. I’ll be up in a minute.”

  She slammed down the receiver. The phone started to ring. She picked the receiver up again.

  “Yes? Oh, yes, of course, just a minute.” She cupped the mouthpiece again. “Peter, it’s the News.”

  “Tell them I’m not here.”

  “Mr. Duluth isn’t here.” Lottie put down the phone again. “Really, this going to Miss Mills’s is all too absolutely preposterous.”

  Miss Mills had picked up one of Iris’s suitcases and my overnight bag. She was standing by the door.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go before she carries you bodily upstairs like Medea and her two dead infants.”

  Miss Mills’s apartment on East 64th Street was small, but its very smallness and spinsterish chintzy quality encouraged a mood, of coziness and safety. Miss Mills scrambled some eggs and made us eat them with glasses of milk. Then she sent us to bed. She’d made up a bed for herself on the studio couch in the living-room. Iris and I had the bedroom.

  We undressed and got together into Miss Mills’s bed. I took my wife in my arms. The warmth and comfort of her was something I had almost forgotten, something to which, obscurely, I felt I had no right. I felt shy with her and very unhappy.

  I said because I had to, “You do believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Peter, I believe you.”

  “If there had been anything between Nanny and—”

  “Don’t talk about it, darling. There’s no need.”

  Her head was on my shoulder. Her hair was soft against my cheek. It was almost all right. But part of my mind was still grinding on, obsessed by Nanny Ordway. Could she, after all, have been in love with me? Could she fantastically have misconstrued everything I had said and done—my telephone calls, my invitations to dinner, the giving of the key? Had all her talk about friendship been just a front? Could I have been that clumsy and blind?

  Tomorrow there would be Lieutenant Trant again. Tomorrow there would be the newspapers. Would it all make any difference with Let Live? Would any of the backers take out their money? Maybe reporters had called the apartment after we’d left and Lottie had gabbed some of her bushwah to them. Iris would have to write to her mother in Jamaica. Her mother would send back a blast. Probably she would advise Iris to leave me. Probably—

  My wife’s hand slid down my thigh and slipped into my hand.

  “Peter, stop thinking.”

  “But, baby—”

  “It’s all right. I love you and I believe you. It’s all right, Peter. Go to sleep.”

  But she was as wide awake as I.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WHEN IRIS AND I got up next morning, Miss Mills was cooking breakfast in the kitchenette, and all the morning newspapers were piled on a coffee table in the living-room.

  “Might as well read your reviews and get them over with,” she called.

  The coverage of Nanny Ordway’s death was more or less what I’d expected it to be. The Times had the episode buried where it belonged in a short column on a middle page. But the less sedate publications had gone to town. One of them displayed the photograph of Iris and me, kissing at the airport, blown up on the front page under a banner headline: Iris Duluth Finds Dead Girl in Husband’s Bedroom. I glanced through several of the accounts. There was no photograph of Nanny. I suppose they hadn’t been able to get hold of one. They had nothing except the basic fact of her death and discovery, but they played it to the hilt with as many unsavory innuendos as their legal departments had okayed.

  I didn’t feel quite as bad about them as I had thought I would. The exaggeration took everything out of the realm of reality where it had power to hurt. Their “brilliant” Nanny Ordway, their “beautiful” Iris Duluth, their “debonair”
Peter Duluth seemed to have no connection with ourselves. They were just glamorized puppets, fabricated by journalists to make the subway ride from 125th Street to Canal a little less drab.

  I wasn’t hungry. But Miss Mills made us eat. In her way she was as bossy as Lottie. She was wearing a startlingly exotic red housecoat which looked odd with the pince-nez. She was just friendly enough and sarcastic enough and levelheaded enough to keep us on an even keel.

  Iris was determined that we should move back to the apartment. We’d have to sooner or later. Sooner was better, she thought, like getting back on a horse after it had thrown you. I agreed with her. Once we’d eaten and dressed, we all went our separate ways—Iris back to face the apartment alone, Miss Mills to hold down the office, I to the station house and Lieutenant Trant.

  As I walked down Madison Avenue through the crisp November sunshine, I was surprised at my relative serenity. No one recognized me as the monster of the headlines. Nothing in the familiar sights around me indicated change. I had conquered my night fears. Of course Nanny Ordway had not been in love with me, and I had nothing for which to blame myself.

  For the first time, I felt an almost affectionate pity for her. The poor kid must have had something bad in her life about which she’d told me nothing. Perhaps, if our friendship had been a little less abortive, I might have been able to help her. But the police would discover the truth and I would be exonerated. How could I not be when I was so convinced of my freedom from guilt?

  Yes, this was just a seven days’ wonder. On the eighth day, another crop of juicy scandals would have obliterated ours from the public mind.

  At that time I was an amateur in disaster. Because I felt steadier than the night before, I imagined I was over the hump. I never reminded myself that there are cores of calm in the center of the most raging hurricanes.

  I went into the station house, if not cheerfully, at least with a feeling of detachment, as if I were only a temporary interloper in its world of distress and doom.

  I was taken upstairs through the Detectives’ Room to the same office of the night before. It was empty, and I was left there. A couple of newspapers were strewn on the desk. I saw my own name in a headline. I wondered if Lieutenant Trant had left the papers there on purpose to intimidate me. Probably that was just what he had done. It struck me as a pointlessly devious device. I felt a healthy indignation.

  He came in soon. He was carrying a sheaf of papers, and I was surprised at the strength of my antagonism to him. He was so quiet, so polite. Even the way he held himself seemed to me that morning to have an affected modesty. His not to puff himself up! Oh, no—what was he but a humble acolyte of the Great Goddess Justice?

  “Good morning, Mr. Duluth. Here are the typescripts of the statements you made last night. Care to look them over? Excuse me a moment. I’ll be right with you.”

  He went away, leaving the typewritten sheets on the desk with the open newspapers. He was gone quite a long time. With the door shut, the little boxlike office took on once again its atmosphere of insulation. I read the two statements through three times to make sure they were correct. There it was, all neatly typed up for the files—the sum total of my anomalous acquaintance with Nanny Ordway. There was nothing I could add, nothing I could subtract.

  Eventually Lieutenant Trant came back with some more papers. He sat down behind the desk opposite me. “Statements all right, Mr. Duluth?”

  “They’re all right.”

  “Nothing new occurred to you during the night?”

  He said that with a veiled irony that riled me, and I snapped, “During the night I slept.”

  It was a foolish, irritable thing to have said. Lieutenant Trant glanced at me quickly.

  “I’m glad you slept, Mr. Duluth. Nanny Ordway didn’t. She was up at the morgue in Bellevue having her heart cut out.”

  His voice, for Lieutenant Trant, was extraordinarily harsh. It was very plain what he thought of me. Suddenly our antagonism had come to the surface.

  “You are prepared to sign those statements, Mr. Duluth?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “They represent the truth and the whole truth of your association with Nanny Ordway?”

  “They do.”

  “There had been nothing between you—no love passages—nothing of that sort which could have caused her to kill herself? In your apartment?”

  “So we’re back to that again.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “There was nothing between us—no love passages—nothing of that sort which could have caused her to kill herself in my apartment.”

  Lieutenant Trant pressed a buzzer on his desk. A cop put his head around the door.

  “Ask Miss Amberley to step in, will you?”

  The cop went away and came back with a girl, letting her through the door and closing it behind her. She was a tall girl about twenty-eight years old. She was dowdily dressed with an old tweed coat like Nanny’s and black ballet slippers. She wasn’t attractive. She had the eccentric look of a girl from a social family who was making it her life work to live down her background.

  “Miss Amberley,” said Lieutenant Trant, “this is Mr. Duluth.”

  The girl barely inclined her head. Her rather prominent green eyes, shifting to me for a second, were filled with disgust. There is no other, less violent word to describe their expression. It was rather shocking.

  “I don’t believe you have met Mr. Duluth, Miss Amberley.”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve been living with Miss Ordway at Thirty-One Charlton Street, haven’t you?”

  “I have.”

  “And last night you made a statement to me.”

  “I did.”

  “You don’t mind going over some of the same ground again?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Lieutenant Trant didn’t look at me. Neither did the girl. In this quiet colloquy between these two quiet, polite people, I had no more share than my name in the newspaper headlines on the desk.

  “You were on friendly terms with Miss Ordway, weren’t you, Miss Amberley?”

  “She was my best friend.”

  “And, naturally, she confided in you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did she ever, in the last five weeks, mention Mr. Duluth to you?”

  “She did.” Miss Amberley moistened her lips. That was when I noticed that she, like Nanny Ordway, was wearing no lipstick at all. “Many, many times.”

  “From what she said, what was your impression of the relations between them?”

  “It wasn’t just my impression. Nanny said it over and over again in the most specific terms.”

  “Said what, Miss Amberley?”

  “That she was in love with him.” Miss Amberley’s voice quavered slightly. “And he was in love with her.” I looked at that tall, dowdy girl whom I had never seen in my life before, whom I had heard only once for one moment on a phone and, as I looked at her and the implacable chill on her face, I felt the beginnings of horror.

  “For God’s sake—” I began.

  “Please, Mr. Duluth, I’d rather you didn’t interrupt.” Lieutenant Trant’s gray gaze was fixed on Miss Amberley. “Miss Ordway told you, of course, that Mr. Duluth was a married man?”

  “Of course she did. It upset her terribly. Nanny wasn’t the sort that enjoyed stealing another woman’s husband. To begin with, she struggled against it, but it was too strong, she said. He convinced her he needed her and, because she loved him and he came first, she decided that his wife would have to be the one to suffer.”

  “And Mr. Duluth had spoken about divorcing his wife?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Miss Amberley. “Mr. Duluth had promised to get a divorce.”

  I got up. I said, “Listen to me.”

  “Please, Mr. Duluth—”

  “I said—listen to me.” I shouted it at them. “I don’t know Miss Amberley. I don’t know how malicious she is. I don’t know how gullible she is. But every
word she’s said has been a lie. Maybe they’re her own lies; maybe they’re Nanny Ordway’s lies. I don’t give a damn whose lies they are. But they are lies.”

  The girl stood absolutely still, ignoring me. Lieutenant Trant’s eyes rested on me for a moment. Then he turned them abruptly back to Miss Amberley.

  “From your many talks with your friend, Miss Amberley, did you gather whether this passion between Miss Ordway and Mr. Duluth had been of an entirely Platonic order?”

  “Platonic!” Miss Amberley echoed the word explosively. “Of course it wasn’t Platonic. Nanny was only a child. She pretended to be worldly, wise, but she was innocent as a babe. Do you think she was any match for a professional seducer? ‘This is love; this isn’t just sex. Love has to be fulfilled. It’s a sin not to fulfill it.’ All that hogwash! Do you suppose Nanny could have stood up against it? Of course they slept together right up to the end.”

  The conviction in her voice, the contempt, the female fear and loathing of the male were ugly as a drawing scrawled on a wall. I felt as if a garbage truck had been spilled on me.

  “I warned her.” Miss Amberley’s low, cultured, terrible voice was running on. “Time and time again I tried to make her see what she was letting herself in for. He’d never divorce his wife, I told her. Why should he when he was getting all he wanted on the side? We had terrible fights. She was alone in the world. I was her only friend. I was older. I knew it was up to me to help her even to the extent of losing her friendship. But what could I do?”

  She swung around to glare at me and spat out, “How can a mere girl compete with a great hulk of male flesh?”

  I turned to Trant and said, “This girl’s a lunatic. Can’t you see that? She’s making all this up out of some dirty, diseased—”

  “I asked you not to interrupt, Mr. Duluth,” cut in Lieutenant Trant’s soft, utterly undisturbed voice. “Miss Amberley, last night we also discussed, didn’t we, Miss Ordway’s behavior on the night before her death?”

  “We did.” Miss Amberley’s voice was almost a whisper now. “That night she came home late. I’d been away for a week, visiting my family in Boston. I’d gone to bed early right off the train and I was asleep when she got back. But her typewriter woke me. I looked up from the bed and she was sitting at the desk, typing. It’s just one room there. We live and sleep there in the same room. I looked up from the bed and there she was, like a ghost, like a girl who’d just been given a death sentence. I got up. I said, ‘Nanny, what is it? What’s happened?’ She didn’t answer. She just sat there, typing. She wouldn’t speak, not a word. She didn’t cry or anything. She was just sitting there numb. Finally she undressed and went to bed. The next morning she got up before I did. I never saw her again.”