Black Widow

by Patrick Quentin

“Yes, Peter. I guess it is.”

  “He told you?”

  “Oh, no. He’s much too discreet for that.”

  She sat down on the arm of a chair and started fumbling ineffectually in her purse. I brought out cigarettes and lit one for her.

  She said, “I went into his office in a fluttery, spinster routine. I was worried, I said. So terribly worried with you unhappy and Lottie sick. Couldn’t something be done? Right away I saw some papers on his desk. I thought they might be something. I pretended to work myself into a vapor. I asked for a glass of water. He went out into the squad room to get it for me. I ran around the desk to look at the papers and—”

  “And?”

  “It was a report from a handwriting expert. About the drawings. Peter, the suicide note was a fake. The “secret of love”—all that—had just been torn off the title page of her story, the report said. And the drawing of the hanging girl—it hadn’t been made by Nanny Ordway. The expert had checked it with the first drawing she’d done and he was sure. Someone else had made it. And—and at the end of the report, he’d written, ‘So I guess you’re right, Trant. It’s murder.’”

  She was looking at me miserably, still only half believing I could take it. “I was back in my chair before he came in with the water. And then, while I was drinking it, the phone rang. He was smooth as he could be, but I got enough. It was a Doctor Schwartz from the morgue, and I could tell Trant was excited. He kept on saying, ‘Yes, yes, good.’ And then, at the end, he said, ‘So I’ll call you at four-thirty for the final word.’ It was obvious, Peter. It must have been something about the autopsy. Trant had put them on to something. They thought they’d proved it. But he’d have to wait for the final results.”

  She leaned forward on the chair arm. “Peter, darling, I left then. I rushed to the nearest telephone. I’ve been in the booth ever since. I hate to tell you this. But I’ve got to. It’s you he’s going to suspect. Of course it is. And once he’s got the dope from the morgue. Once—”

  He’ll arrest you. That was what she had been meaning to say, but at that moment her words choked off in a sob. I put my arms around her, dimly astonished at the shift in mood which had me comforting the indomitable Miss Mills.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I didn’t kill her.”

  “Of course you didn’t!” She looked up at me, her face passionately convinced. “Do you imagine there’s anything in the world that could make me believe that? But—”

  “It’s all right. I promise you.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter of four. The chips were down now. Trant had proved the drawing was a fake. At four-thirty he would get the dope—whatever it was—from the morgue. After that, what was to prevent him from coming around to arrest me?

  An hour or two hours, maybe. That was all. My shiny new calm was wonderful. I was in love with it. Francis Bacon was back again at my elbow, whispering, Knowledge is power. There was one way, at least, to gain some knowledge—a way I couldn’t try with Miss Mills there. I wasn’t going to have Miss Mills implicated any more deeply than she was already.

  I managed to get rid of her. She didn’t want to go. She clung to me, begging me to let her stand by me, all the mother in her resenting the fact that I had suddenly grown up. I told her to go home and relax. She refused. Then, to make her feel useful, I suggested that she go back to the office, call Thomas Wood, and tell him I wouldn’t be able to take him to the theater that evening.

  “There’s still the play, Miss Mills. You don’t want me to go penniless to jail.”

  That and a promise to call her whenever I needed her did the trick.

  It was four o’clock when she left. Immediately afterward, I called the morgue and asked for Dr. Schwartz. This was like a fiasco at dress rehearsal, I thought. When things got bad enough, you coped with them because you had to. I felt absolutely sure of myself and of my own faked voice when I said, “Schwartz? Trant here. Any news?”

  “Oh, Trant, I was just going to call you. You’re clear on the neck marks. Even Doctor Duntun agrees now. Once he heard you’d proved the suicide note was a fake, he came around to murder. It still could just have been suicide, but it’s much more likely she was garroted first and then strung up. Don’t worry about any defense tricks. We can make a case that’ll hold up in any court of law in the country.”

  “Fine.” I took a gamble. “And the other thing?”

  Dr. Schwartz laughed. “You hit it right on the nose. Final report’s just come down. So much for your friend’s innocent line about never having touched her! She was pregnant, all right. Between five and six weeks pregnant. That make you feel good? So far as we’re concerned, it’s all sewed up, Trant. Go grab your theatrical producer whenever you want to. And good hunting.”

  I put down the receiver. I was enough of a would-be actor still to feel for a few seconds that I actually was Lieutenant Trant. I was sitting in that little monk’s cell of an office, smiling my thin smile of Justice Triumphant. Here at last was the final piece of evidence. Peter Duluth, the seducer, who had killed his pregnant light-of-love before she could wreck his marriage!

  Of course that was what Trant would think. It was what the world would think. But for me, back being Peter Duluth again, this was the final defeat of Nanny Ordway. Gone forever was the innocent, pixie Gloria O’Dream. A man and a girl can be friends. All the tormenting bafflements of the case had dissolved, and the true Nanny Ordway was starting to emerge from the mists.

  She had been five or six weeks pregnant. She had suspected, then, what the situation might be almost from the beginning of our relationship. So much for her broken confession to Miss Amberley; so much for her terrible, quiet sleep in my bed; so much for her noble, soap-opera letter to Iris.

  Sure, I had been her victim, but not just the victim of a mad girl with a mad infatuation. I had been a far more humiliating kind of victim than that.

  She had decided she was pregnant and she had picked me for the father. Peter Duluth, the ideal sucker to be on the other end of a paternity suit efficiently supported by the evidence of her girl friend, the evidence of my maid, even the evidence of my own wife!

  Here at last was a plausible Nanny Ordway. Why had I never thought of her before? Had it been my vanity? Had I secretly preferred the picture of a moonstruck maiden dying for love of me to a portrait of myself as a middle-aged fool on the wrong side of a shakedown?

  In the fatuous excitement of having at last discovered the truth, I thought: So it’s all over. Trant doesn’t have to come for me. I’ll go to Trant. I’ll explain it all to him. I can explain it all to Iris, to Lottie. Suddenly, out of the blue, I had written a last act where Peter Duluth lived happily ever after with a loving wife, an adoring star in a smash hit, an abject, apologizing police detective—

  That was where the bubble burst. Just because I had realized at last that I’d been the victim of a plot, that did not automatically save me from being the victim. Of course I could go to Trant, to Iris, to all of them and yell, I’m not the father of her child. Goody, goody. But why should they believe me? It was ludicrous to suppose they would. Wasn’t I ever going to learn that the truth isn’t enough—that the truth needs as much evidence to support it as a lie?

  Why wasn’t I the father? How could I prove it—unless I found the father?

  And how was I to pick the father out of all the men in New York?

  Sylvia’s. Sylvia’s on West Tenth Street. It was the flimsiest of clues to Nanny Ordway’s past, but it was the only one I had. It was better to try Sylvia’s again than to sit here and wait for the cold, relentless servant of the Law.

  I put on my coat. I was a fugitive from justice. At least I would be one from the moment Trant called the morgue. But my exhilaration was still with me.

  It was because Nanny Ordway had gone. The spectral, accusing hand was no longer in mine. The suggestion of her grave little-girl profile was no longer there at the corner of my eye. I was free of my obsession.

  The
Nanny-spider was dead.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK when I reached Sylvia’s and it was still closed. There was no reason why a night club should be open that early in the evening, but the fact that it had been dark and locked the night before was ominous. A cop was chatting with a news vendor on the corner. Soon, I thought, all the cops in Manhattan would be after me. It amused me to ask a cop for help.

  I went up to him and said, “When does Sylvia’s open?”

  “Sylvia’s?” He glanced at me, amiably, without interest. “It shut down. Couple of weeks ago. Sylvia went off to California. Got a new place there.”

  I exploited my disappointment. “What am I going to do? I’m from out of town. Left a coat there about a month ago.”

  “If you left a coat, you’d better go around to the station house. Lost and Found. Maybe they sent it over there.”

  “No. I don’t think so. You see, I left it on purpose. With the hat-check girl.” Hat-check girls know everything there is to know about the place they work in. “She was a pal of mine. I suppose you don’t know—”

  “Anne?” cut in the news vendor. “Good-looking girl? Colored?”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “Well, that’s a cinch. Anne’s working just around the corner, now. Short-order lunch counter. Halfway down the block. Can’t miss it. You’re in luck, mister.”

  “Yes,” I said, sincerely returning his grin. “I’m in luck. Thank you. Thanks, officer.”

  I hurried around the block. The light was fading. Kids were playing ball against a blind wall. There was only one short-order lunch counter. Joe’s Quick Lunch. I dodged a woman with a perambulator and went into it. Three girls in white uniforms waited behind a long tiled counter. Only one was colored. She was on the end of the counter near the door. As I entered, she glanced up from washing dirty glasses.

  The news vendor had been right. She was astonishingly beautiful. It was a face suggesting jungle leaves, waterfalls in forest pools, exotic flowers drooping from vines, a face Gauguin would have painted if he had gone to Leopoldville instead of Tahiti. Her eyes, green behind thick black lashes, watched me with a weary passivity as if dirty glasses, Danish pastry, men, and women were all things of equal and equally transitory unimportance. “Yes, sir?” she asked.

  I said, “Your name’s Anne, isn’t it? You worked at Sylvia’s?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you know Nanny Ordway?”

  There was no change in the dazed, dreamy eyes. “Are you a cop?”

  “No.”

  Her gaze, studying my face, kindled to faint interest. “You’re Peter Duluth. I saw your picture in the paper.”

  “You did know Nanny?”

  “Sure, I knew her.”

  “Then will you help me—please?”

  Her dark-red lips parted, showing a glimpse of white teeth. It wasn’t exactly a smile, but it removed the barrier of detachment. It was as if I weren’t a dirty glass or a piece of Danish pastry any more. “I guess you’re in a jam, Mr. Duluth.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll talk to you.” She glanced toward the other girls. “But not here. The old man’s death on talking with customers. I’m through at eight.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s got to be now.”

  I took out my wallet. She glanced across the counter at it indifferently. “Save your money,” she said. And then: “Okay. Make like you’re a cop and come with me.” She emerged from behind the counter and led me past the few spindly tables to a back room where an old Italian with a thick mat of white hair was moving crates of Coca-Cola around.

  He glanced up at us sharply. “Yes?” he said. “Yes, yes, yes?”

  “Pop,” said Anne. “I got to go out awhile. It’s the cops. They want to talk to me.”

  I imitated Lieutenant Trant’s brisk severity. The old man peered at me uneasily.

  “Cops?”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “Anne,” he said. “She’s a good girl. She ain’t done nothing wrong.”

  “No,” I said. “We just need her help.”

  “She’s a good girl,” he repeated. He turned to Anne, his old face glossed with anxious affection. “Don’t you let ’em do anything bad, Anne.”

  “No, Pop.”

  “You want I should go with you—tell ’em what a good girl you are?”

  “No, Pop. It’s okay.”

  He shook his head mournfully. “Okay, then. Okay.” He swung back to me. “But you treat her right, mister, and you bring her back quick.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Get your coat, Anne.”

  I went out of the place and waited on the sidewalk. Soon Anne came out wearing over her uniform an old brown coat with a fur collar that would have made any other girl look drab.

  “Let’s go to my place,” she said. “It’s just across West a bit.”

  We crossed the darkening Seventh Avenue, turned into a little cul-de-sac, and stopped in front of an old brownstone house with a dirty glass door. Anne opened the door with a key. A dim light revealed a dingy hall and a naked, even dingier staircase. An old woman with a mutt on a tartan leash came out of a side room. She blinked at us disinterestedly as we went up the stairs. There was a sour smell of poverty.

  On the second floor Anne opened a door.

  “Come on in.”

  She turned on a light to combat the twilight. The room was just about as small as a room could be. A bed took up almost all the space. A little dresser was jammed in a corner. There was a red paper shade over the ceiling bulb. A small radio stood on the window sill.

  And I’d felt paternal and guilty at Nanny Ordway’s having to rough it in the Amberley apartment!

  Anne took off her coat and hung it on a peg behind the door.

  “Sit down on the bed. It’s okay.”

  I sat down. She crossed to the other side of the bed and sat by the radio. She wasn’t embarrassed about the room or the poverty. I suppose she accepted it just the way she accepted everything else.

  She picked up her purse and brought out a pack of cigarettes. I offered her mine, but she said, “That’s okay. Save them.”

  I took out my lighter. She leaned toward it, inhaling. The flame from the lighter made a little circle of brightness on her chin. It was a chin for a Pharaoh’s daughter. I wondered how it felt to be as beautiful as that and to live in this room.

  She was looking at me with a kind of impersonal compassion as if I was just another member of the great army of the distressed.

  “Well, honey, just how bad’s the trouble?”

  “Bad. You read about it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Nanny didn’t kill herself. She was murdered.”

  There was no flicker in the quiet green eyes. “Sure she was murdered. That’s the first thing I thought when I read it in the papers.”

  I felt a flurry of excitement. “Why?”

  “Nanny kill herself? Not that one. Not in a million years. She was too busy.”

  “Busy?”

  “Busy to get on, to get up, to get some place. First day she came to work at the club I got her number—making up to Sylvia, acting so folksy with the other girls, even with me. Anne, dear, this. Anne, darling, that. The sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Look at her with those Amberleys.”

  “What about the Amberleys?”

  She shrugged. “Just to show how she operated. One evening she came in early. She always came in early. Sylvia liked that. And she stopped off at the checkroom. Most times she always did that, too, to prove how democratic she was. And this day she said, ‘You know that Miss Amberley who’s always come in, Anne, darling? I’ve just been reading the Social Register in a bookstore and she’s in it. The Amberleys. A big, grand family in Boston.’ And I said, ‘So what?’ And she said, ‘Probably they’re rich, and there’s an unmarried brother, too.’ She laughed, made like she was kidding. But right after that Miss Amberley and her brother were in. No sooner you c
ould turn around, Nanny was waiting on them and it not even her table. Next day she’d moved in on them.”

  Fascinated, I said, “That’s how it happened with the Amberleys?”

  “Sure.” Anne’s golden fingers were moving up and down on the bedspread as if she were playing some imaginary tune. “Nanny didn’t have to keep up a front with me. I was just the hat-check girl. All the time it was that way. ‘Who’s that one, Anne? Is there anything there, Anne?’ Once Errol Flynn was in. You should have seen her. Almost bust a gut wiggling her hips. Offered me two bucks to let her give him his coat when he left. Celebrities. Anything with a bank account. Get on the gravy train. That was Nanny.”

  There she was at last. The real Nanny Ordway—the Nanny who had hidden so cunningly behind Miss Amberley’s “best friend,” John Amberley’s “Henry James lover,” my “Gloria O’Dream.” The real Nanny. The Nanny-spider.

  I said, “The Amberleys were crazy about her.”

  “So was Sylvia. So were all of them.”

  “John Amberley even asked her to marry him. She stalled him off.”

  “Why not? Keep him on ice. If no one bigger and better comes along, okay. If someone bigger and better does come along—”

  “Me, for example?”

  She looked up again gravely from her fingers on the bedspread. “That’s the way it went, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was she after with you, anyway? To hook you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “That’s what I thought first thing. A big producer. A celebrity. If you’d ever come in the club, you’d have got an Errol Flynn routine. Who cares you were married to a glamorous movie star? That wouldn’t have fazed Nanny. Nanny was a pushover for Nanny. Thought she was Garbo and Rita Hayworth rolled into one. Miss Irresistible.” She paused. “And then what?”

  It was all as clear now as if it had been recorded on film.

  “I suppose she figured she couldn’t hook me, after all. So she switched.”

  “To a shakedown?”

  “That’s it. She was pregnant.”

  The dreamy, unjoltable green eyes studied my face. “By you?”