“And you attribute this change in Miss Ordway to some quarrel with Mr. Duluth? A sudden decision on his part, for example, not to ask his wife for a divorce, after all?”
“I do.”
“And you think this may have been the reason for her death the next day?”
“Of course it was. Of course that’s why Nanny killed herself.”
I opened my mouth to speak again, but Lieutenant Trant broke in.
“Thank you, Miss Amberley. That will be all, right now.”
Miss Amberley started for the door.
I called after her, “Hey, you. Wait a minute.”
But she opened the door, passed through it, and closed it behind her.
I spun around to Lieutenant Trant. “Get her back. You let her accuse me of seducing a young girl, making false promises to marry her, driving her to suicide. Even the Ogpu would give me a chance to come back at her. Let me talk to her. In five seconds, I’d have that story tumbling around her ears.”
“You would?” Lieutenant Trant looked up at me brisk, detached, the impersonal servant of the Law. He touched the buzzer again on his desk.
“She’s an obvious neurotic.” I was too furious and scared to be coherent. “One of those girls with a grudge against men. My God, you’re a policeman. You must have come across cases like that. You—”
“You’re a lightning analyst of character, aren’t you, Mr. Duluth? Too bad you weren’t as perceptive with Nanny Ordway.”
The cop was at the door again. Lieutenant Trant said, “Okay. Bring in Mrs. Coletti, Bill.”
“Mrs. Coletti?” I echoed. “Lucia Coletti, our maid?”
“You were the one who suggested her as a corroborative witness.”
“Of course I was.”
Lieutenant Trant was leafing through the typewritten sheets in front of him. “In your statement, you said that Nanny Ordway came every morning to your apartment after you’d left for your office. She came there merely because you had been generous enough to loan her the apartment to write in. That’s still your story, I imagine?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“She never, for example, spent the night?”
“If she had, I’d have told you.”
“Of course, Mr. Duluth, I haven’t forgotten your passion for the truth. You are on friendly terms with Lucia Coletti?”
“Very friendly.”
“She has no reason to bear a grudge against you, to wish you ill?”
“For heaven’s sake, no.”
“Then you won’t accuse her of being neurotic. Fine. At least we’ve got that settled.”
Lucia came in. She was plump and Italian and sixty-ish and normally as cheerful as a carnival. That morning in her black work coat with her black work hat jammed on her gray hair she looked thoroughly subdued. She threw me a quick, beseeching glance and then turned, oppressed and respectful, to Lieutenant Trant.
He had chosen several sheets from the pile of papers. Holding them, he looked up at her with bright friendliness.
“Good morning, Mrs. Coletti. Thank you for coming. I hope it hasn’t inconvenienced you?”
“My sister—she went in my place to Miss Marin’s.”
“I expect you know why I’ve asked you to drop in. You are Mrs. Lucia Coletti. You live with your sister, Mrs. Bruno, on West Tenth Street and you work as part-time maid for Mr. and Mrs. Duluth. You and your sister were interviewed last night by myself at your home. I just want you to repeat in front of Mr. Duluth what you told me last night.”
“I didn’t tell you nothing.” Lucia flung around to me, throwing a hand out. “Honest, Mr. Duluth, I swear it. When you give me that ten bucks not to tell Miss Marin, I promised I wouldn’t say nothing. And I didn’t. It was my sister. Gab, gab, gab all the time. She’s stupid. She don’t know from nothing. It was my sister—”
When she mentioned the ten dollars, Lieutenant Trant’s eyes flicked up and then down. He’d taken that in and interpreted it, all right. Now he interrupted.
“Your sister, Mrs. Coletti, only told me what you’d already told her. I’m sorry if this is painful to you. Perhaps it would be easier if I just read the significant part of your sister’s statement out loud.”
He looked down at the papers in his hand. “Mr. Duluth claims that Miss Ordway never spent the night in his apartment. He claims that she arrived every morning around ten after he himself had left. He mentioned you as someone who could back up that assertion.” He paused. “I will now read part of your sister’s statement. And, Mr. Duluth, I’d be obliged if you would keep quiet until I have finished.”
He started to read in a flat, official voice:
LIEUTENANT TRANT: Mrs. Bruno, when your sister comes back from work in the evenings, does she, in a perfectly normal way, chat with you about the people she works for?
MRS. BRUNO: Oh, sure, sure. All the time.
LIEUTENANT TRANT: And, amongst others, has she chatted with you about Mr. and Mrs. Duluth?
MRS. BRUNO: Sure. All the time. She’s crazy about Mr. and Mrs. Duluth.
LIEUTENANT TRANT: Recently did she tell you that Mrs. Duluth was away in Jamaica?
MRS. BRUNO: With her momma that was sick.
LIEUTENANT TRANT: That’s it. So she told you that Mrs. Duluth was away.
MRS. BRUNO: Sure.
LIEUTENANT TRANT: After Mrs. Duluth was away, did your sister mention a girl, a young girl, a friend of Mr. Duluth’s, called Ordway? Miss Nanny Ordway?
MRS. BRUNO: The little girl? My God, I should say. That one. That was a shameless one. My God, lying there in the bed sound asleep in a pair of Mrs. Duluth’s pajamas, lying there with Lucia coming right in.
LIEUTENANT TRANT: DO I understand you to say that your sister found Miss Ordway asleep in Mr. Duluth’s bed, wearing a pair of his wife’s pajamas?
MRS. BRUNO: Sure. Lucia, she was up in the air about it. Never seen nothing like it. And Mr. and Mrs. Duluth always getting on so good with each other.
LIEUTENANT TRANT: And Mr. Duluth was with her?
MRS. BRUNO: Him? Oh, no. Mr. Duluth wouldn’t do nothing like that. He has lots of respect for Lucia. He’d gone off then. He’d left her alone.
Lieutenant Trant stopped reading and put the papers down on his desk, studiously ignoring me.
“Well, Mrs. Coletti, does that sound correct?”
Lucia had flushed a deep crimson. She stammered, “Yes, I—I guess that’s what my sister said.”
“And it was true, of course?”
“I guess so. Sure. It’s true. I—” Lucia turned miserably to me. “Mr. Duluth, honest, I didn’t mean to make trouble. Talking with my sister—ain’t nothing wrong in that. I didn’t—”
“All right, Mrs. Coletti.” Lieutenant Trant’s voice was firm and final. “That’ll be all at the moment. Thank you again for dropping by.”
He got up, took Lucia’s elbow, and guided her out of the office. He came back. He stood by the door, looking at me with complete absence of triumph on his face. That was his way of rubbing in the fact of his total victory.
“So much for your determination to tell the truth at all costs, Mr. Duluth. I’m glad you slept last night. It was, of course, the sleep of the pure and the just.”
CHAPTER NINE
I WAS DEATHLY AFRAID OF Nanny Ordway then. There were other emotions, of course—anger at Lieutenant Trant’s unjustified contempt of me, understanding of it, rebellious incredulity that I should have been chosen for so fantastic a dilemma, and a dim awareness that horror could lurk around the corner for everybody. But it was the fear of Nanny Ordway that predominated. She was dead. That unobtrusive, earnest little girl—“a girl and a man can be friends”—had checked out on a red scarf tied to my chandelier. But already that morning, she had arisen twice from the dead and spoken through the lips of Miss Amberley and Lucia Coletti’s sister.
She had spoken and she had become terrible as a Gorgon’s head.
Lieutenant Trant was still looking at me. I looked
back. I was pulled in too many directions to have any adequate defense. How could the Nanny Ordway whom I had foolishly and pointlessly allowed to slip into my life be the same girl who had been found by Lucia asleep in my bed, who had talked of passion and divorce to Miss Amberley and who had sat like a ghost in front of her typewriter on the night before she died?
She had been mad, of course. Mad as the four winds of heaven. And worse than merely mad. She had been maliciously mad. For the world, for me, too, she had hidden behind a plausible façade of sanity, but in secret she had been insanely plotting to destroy me along with herself. What other explanation could there be?
But who was going to believe it? Her martyred innocence had been established. There was nothing to cast doubt upon it—nothing at all except my own hopelessly discredited word.
The truth, I thought, the naked lady at the bottom of the well. Lieutenant Trant thought he had found her. He had never been wider from the mark.
Wearily, anticipating defeat, I said, “I deny it all.”
“That’s your privilege, Mr. Duluth.”
“I deny it all not because I’m a lunatic who’s determined to cling to a shipwrecked lie. I deny it because it’s not true. Don’t ask me what’s wrong with Miss Amberley. Don’t ask me what’s wrong with Lucia. For God’s sake, don’t ask me what was wrong with Nanny Ordway. What happened, happened, and it happened the way I told you in my statement.”
“You’re suggesting, then, that Miss Ordway deliberately over a period of weeks fabricated a false story for her roommate, that she deliberately got into your bed and pretended to be asleep there to deceive the maid?”
“She was mad,” I said.
“Last night you told me that she had seemed to you a perfectly normal girl.”
“Seemed!” I repeated. “Do detectives care about ‘seemed’? Do you always have to believe the obvious?”
“I seldom believe the obvious.”
“But in this case you do?”
“In this case with two witnesses, one of them friendly to yourself, backing up the plausible obvious against the implausible unobvious, I’ll settle for the obvious. Even you, Mr. Duluth, must agree that if Miss Ordway had been mad, Miss Amberley, who had roomed with her for months, would have been conscious of it. And yet—”
His voice ran on. I was exhausted by his stupid-clever persistence, his relentless Socratic deductions from a situation that had soared far beyond the borders of logic. I, of course, should be playing it his way. I should be demanding a cross-examination of Miss Amberley, swearing my innocence, seething with righteous indignation. But where would it get me? How, for example, could I explain away the fact that Lucia had seen Nanny Ordway in my bed? Lucia wouldn’t lie. She was fond of me.
Lieutenant Trant had stopped speaking. I had no idea what he had been talking about, but he was waiting for an answer.
I said, “Do we have to go on with this conversation? I know what you think of me. I know I’m never going to change your opinion. I’m not even interested in trying. After all, I’m not married to you. Just tell me the setup—the police setup. Are you going to arrest me? If not—for God’s sake, let me sign those statements and get out of here.”
His eyes widened slightly. I could see white all around his irises. “You still want to sign those statements?”
“Don’t you listen to a word I say?”
“Okay, Mr. Duluth.” He shrugged. It was the shrug of a man confronted with behavior beyond belief and beneath any further consideration. “You may sign the statements.”
“And I’m not under arrest?”
“Why should you be under arrest, Mr. Duluth?”
“As a wicked, wicked liar, a heartless seducer of innocent young girls, and a cynical devil-may-care.”
Lieutenant Trant flushed. I was vaguely surprised that his blood and skin were human enough to permit such a frailty. He gestured to the desk. “Sign your statements, Mr. Duluth.”
I went to the desk. I scrawled my signature at the end of the two documents. I went back and initialed each individual page. I took a savage delight in it as if I were throwing a gauntlet in Lieutenant Trant’s incorruptibly noble face and in the face of all insensitive jumpers at conclusions.
“Okay.” I got up. “Anything else?”
“Nothing at the moment, Mr. Duluth.” Lieutenant Trant picked up the statements, rustling through the papers, checking the signatures. “The full autopsy reports are not in yet. Those things take time, you know. Two or three days.”
He looked up from the papers. “But, for your information, Miss Ordway died between two-thirty and four—just about the time that you were alone at the movie house. If there should turn out to be a reason for continuing the investigation, that is where I would start—by checking on your alibi.”
“I’m sure you would.” I held out my hand, automatically, I suppose, because that’s what you do when you leave someone. “I’m delighted that Nanny Ordway has a champion, Lieutenant. Too bad she wasn’t your little friend instead of mine. You would have enjoyed the experience.”
As I left the office, I wondered who was the more pathetic, I with my brand of stupidity or Lieutenant Trant with his.
I hurried through the Detectives’ Room and down to the street. Immediately I was surrounded by reporters. There were about six of them and they were hot on the trail.
“Hey, Mr. Duluth, do you know a Miss Amberley?”
“Yes.”
“Want to hear a statement Miss Amberley just made to us?”
“No.”
“Heck, Mr. Duluth, aren’t you going to deny Miss Amberley’s statement?”
A taxi was cruising by. I flagged it and escaped. Maybe I should have said something to the reporters. But I couldn’t just then. I wanted a drink. Dimly I realized that I hadn’t wanted a drink that badly that early in the day for many years.
“Where to?” asked the driver.
I gave the office address. I had intended to go straight back to Iris, but I realized how much was now going to depend on what I said to her. Until then, she had believed me. But that had been before Miss Amberley and Lucia’s sister. I felt the need for Miss Mills’s bolstering sanity. If I could get Miss Mills to believe me, that would be something. It would help overcome the feeling that I was an outcast, that all the world was lined up against me along with Lieutenant Trant, Miss Amberley, and Mrs. Bruno.
The goldfish feeling was in the office. The girl at the reception desk had it in her eyes as she said, “Good morning, Mr. Duluth.” The other secretary, bustling around with papers, had it as well. It only dissolved in Miss Mills’s office. I found her leaning back in her chair with her legs up on the desk, reading her mail.
“Well, back from the wars.”
“Bloody,” I said, “and bowed.”
She looked at me a moment in silence. Then she reached down and pulled a bottle of rye from a drawer in the desk.
“Emergency.”
She poured two shots, one for me, one for herself. I told her my version of the story. Then I told her everything that Miss Amberley had said, everything that Mrs. Bruno had been quoted as saying—and all Lieutenant Trant’s moral and edifying comments.
I hated telling it, not so much because it made me sound like a futile, cowardly liar, but because it brought Nanny Ordway near again. I could almost hear the rustle of Miss Amberley’s blue satin evening gown, almost see the hair tumbling forward over the naïve, quiet little face. Nanny Ordway—the harmless water nymph who had died and become a fury, stalking my marriage, my career, and my peace of mind.
It was the marriage that mattered most, of course. Without Iris, the rest didn’t count.
I finished. I said, “You saw her once. Here in the office.”
“Sure. Miss O’Dream.”
“I know what that sounds like. Miss O’Dream—Daddy Duluth. I know what everything sounds like. But I never touched her. I swear it. All that about the bed, about protestations of marriage and divorce—she
was stark, staring mad. She—” I broke off. The drink was helping. “Is Iris going to believe me?”
Miss Mills didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “Lottie wouldn’t believe a story like that from Brian.”
“Of course she wouldn’t. But Iris—”
“Lottie just owns Brian, but Iris loves you. That helps, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Maybe it helps. Maybe it makes it harder. I wouldn’t know. I’m not up on the love department on account of looking like a pig. It’s a matter for Iris and you. Tell her, and pray that she’s about five-hundred per cent more trusting than most females.”
That wasn’t as encouraging as I had hoped. “And you, Miss Mills. Do you believe me?”
“I believe that men can be fools and women can be bitches. I also believe that women can be crazy.”
“Even when they seem to the world to be nice, well-intended little girls?”
Miss Mills smiled. “I believe the world can be a fool, too.”
I said, “Then you do believe me?”
She leaned across the desk and put her hand on mine. “It doesn’t matter one hoot in hell to you, darling, whether I believe you or not. But I probably do. I’m the greatest believer of all time. That’s one of my many assets. Now run along and tell Iris. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
CHAPTER TEN
I LEFT THE OFFICE and took a taxi home. I saw what a fool I had been to expect Miss Mills to work another miracle. I was out of diapers now. Nursey couldn’t help any more. I was on my own. As the taxi dropped me outside our door, I felt panicked. It seemed incredible that I could be afraid of Iris, that things could have changed that much.
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