“God, no. I never touched her. But I was the sucker she’d picked for the father. Paternity suit.”
Anne nodded. For a moment she sat on the bed in silence, beautiful, magnificent—the emperor’s daughter who had put on the lunch-counter uniform as a whimsical disguise. Suddenly she said, “So that’s why you killed her?”
There had been no censure in her voice, not the faintest trace of anything but the obvious need of stating an obvious fact. I thought of all the other accusations which had been hurled at me during the last days. Seducer, from Lottie. Coward, from Miss Amberley. Liar, from Iris. None of them had accused me of being a murderer. This should have been the final humiliation. But it wasn’t. Not from Anne.
I said, “I didn’t kill her.”
She accepted my word just as simply as she had offered the accusation.
“But the cops think you did?”
“They’re going to arrest me any minute. They have all the evidence in the world. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“She had a key. She could have taken anyone to my apartment. That’s what she must have done. She must have taken someone there. And it must have been the father of the child. That’s who killed her. The father. And I thought—”
“I might know someone?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “That was six months ago she was working at the club, honey.”
“I know, but—”
“And me the hat-check girl? I wasn’t grand enough to meet her friends.”
I had forgotten some of the urgency. The tour into Nanny’s past had blurred it. But now it came rushing back. Was my luck with the news vendor, my luck at the lunch counter going to lead, after all, to a blind alley?
“You don’t know any man in her life?”
“Mr. Amberley.”
“No one else?” Clutching at straws, I remembered part of the Amberleys’ touching saga of Nanny’s life. She was rooming with another girl. It was all very inconvenient for her. “What about the girl she was living with before she moved in with the Amberleys?”
“Girl!” Anne echoed. “That wasn’t a girl. It was a man.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. She made like it was a girl. At the club she was always talking about her roommate. But one payday she was sick. She called down, asked me to pick up her pay envelope for her. She needed it, she said. She told me the address. I took the pay up. There was a man’s name on the buzzer and a man came to the door and took the money. Later Nanny said not to tell the others. It was her uncle, she said. But it didn’t look good, living with a man in such a small place. That’s what she said.” Was this a lead, or just another instance of Nanny’s duplicity? I asked, “And the man? Who was he?”
“Gee, I don’t remember the name. It was like a year ago, maybe. But he was kind of older. Good-looking, but older with whole lots of hair.”
“And the apartment?”
“On East Thirty-Eighth Street. Number Thirty-Eight, was it? Yes, that’s it. I remember. Thirty-Eight East Thirty-Eighth Street. Second floor.”
That wasn’t much, but it was something. “That’s all?”
“Yes, I guess that’s all.”
I got up from the bed.
“You’re going to try it?”
“Sure.”
She got up, too. She came around the bed and stood close to me.
“Well, good luck.”
She smiled. It was the first time she had smiled. And I thought: Of all the people I know, here’s the only one who’s trusted me.
“Thanks, Anne. Thanks a lot.”
I glanced around the dreary little room, at the red paper shade on the bulb, at the radio on the chipped window sill.
I said, “I wish there was something—”
“There!” Her voice broke in, soft, soothing, a mother’s voice. “You got enough trouble, honey. Don’t you start to worry about me. I got my room. I got my job. Isn’t anyone can push me around. I’m okay. Good-by, Mr. Duluth.”
“Good night, Anne.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A TAXI DROPPED ME at 38th Street and Madison. I had bought a paper. I had half expected a headline: Ordway Case Cracked. Peter Duluth Sought. But there was nothing in the news about Nanny at all. That was Trant, of course. The theatrical flourish was not for him. He would always get his man before he broke his story.
It was about seven o’clock. My self-assurance was still intact, although I did not have much hope from an address casually remembered by a girl who had only visited it once. A man Nanny had been living with a year ago! An older man! An “uncle”! That didn’t sound like the lover for whom I was searching. It sounded more like just another victim—an earlier host on whom the parasite had battened before she had discovered the Amberleys. The street was deserted. A large vacant lot on the corner helped to bring an atmosphere of desolation. I found the house and walked up steps into the little entrance hall.
Second floor, Anne had said. It was dark, and the names under the buzzers were old and blurred. I lit my lighter and moved the flame along the printed cards. First floor front—First floor rear—Second floor rear—
I looked at the name under the buzzer, and excitement shot through me.
The name on the card was:
Gordon Ling.
Although Gordon had been working in Star Rising, I hadn’t had the faintest idea of where he lived. Now I thought of Anne’s description—older, good-looking, with lots of hair. It fitted exactly. And Gordon, right there in my play, was no shadowy figure from Nanny’s past. He was as immediate as I.
I remembered almost the first words Nanny had ever spoken to me. I came with some people. They’ve gone off being glamorous. Gordon had been at that party. Of course! Gordon had brought her to Lottie’s. The flashy, near-failure actor, the little girl on the make—an ideally suited couple—going together to the grand party. Why? For Nanny to pick up a suitable victim for a planned paternity suit?
Gordon Ling.
My luck was sticking with me, after all.
I pressed the buzzer. An answering click sounded in the front door. I pushed the door inward and almost ran up the stairs.
Before I could knock at the apartment, Gordon, Ling opened the door. He was wearing a bright silk robe over his pants and shirt. When he saw me, his professional smile of welcome faded, giving way to a look of acute uneasiness.
“Peter!”
“Yes,” I said. “Me.”
I pushed past him into the little living-room. It was all aggressively masculine with leather and pewter and pipe racks, as if he was hoping to be photographed in front of it and called “distinguished” by Harper’s Bazaar.
The walls were plastered with theatrical photographs. Bankhead, Hayes—A picture of Iris caught my eye. To Gordon. Good luck. Iris Duluth. Had Iris worked in a play with Gordon? I couldn’t remember. The sight of her calm, familiar face, interjected at that moment, was disturbing.
Gordon came hurrying after me. “Peter, what is it you want?”
“What do you think I want? I’ve come about Nanny Ordway.”
He scurried around a chair until he was in front of me. He was fluttery almost like an old woman. It didn’t go with the handsome chiseled features and the pipe racks.
“But you shouldn’t be here. The police—they’ve only just left.”
“The police?”
“Lieutenant Trant. He was here—ten minutes ago.”
“Why?” I asked.
He ran a hand through his thick black hair. It was a typical, hammy gesture. I’d tried to cure him of it a hundred times at rehearsals. “About Nanny, of course. He’d found out, too. The way you have, I guess. From Sylvia in California.”
“Found out what?”
“About Nanny and me. That Nanny was my niece.”
His niece! Then Nanny hadn’t lied to Anne after all. So much for my “brilliant” theory. Depression took hold of me.
“You were her uncle?”
“Isn’t that what you came about?”
I sat down on one of the red leather chairs. “No. But it’ll have to do. Tell me.”
“But, Peter—”
“Tell me.”
He moistened his lips. “You mean—what? What I know about Nanny?”
“Of course.”
“Peter, you mustn’t be mad at me. I tried to do the right thing.” He was twisting the tasseled ends of his bathrobe cord—like Lottie twisting her pearls. Actors, I thought. They’re all the same. Without direction, they stink. “Honest, Peter, I didn’t mean—”
“Just tell me, Gordon.”
He picked up a highball glass which still had some liquor in it. I guess he felt easier with a prop.
“Well, it isn’t much, really. I mean—I’d always known she was around. I mean, she was my sister’s child and when my sister and her husband died a couple of years ago—well, there was Nanny. But she was in Virginia and she was living with some friends of the family and—maybe I should have helped out a bit. But I wasn’t doing so good at the time and I figured she’d be okay. And she was, I guess. Until about a year ago, when the people got broke or something. That’s when she came here. She didn’t even write. Just one morning, here she was. She’d come to New York, she said, to get a job.”
The glass was helping him. It made him feel like a man of distinction again. He started pacing up and down the room. This was not what I’d come for. But, in spite of the urgency which grew more extreme every minute, it had its own fascination. Here, at last, I was learning about Nanny Ordway’s initial step onto the scene—her first entrance, the little girl from Virginia, slipping into Gordon Ling’s apartment with her suitcase. Uncle, I’ve come to get a job.
“Of course I took her in, Peter. My only niece. Anyone’d do that. This place isn’t big at all and I hadn’t planned—but she seemed like a nice enough kid, quiet, helpful, didn’t want to be a drain on me financially. Getting her a job wasn’t easy. She didn’t know anything, wasn’t trained to anything. Wanted to be a writer, matter of fact. But I fixed it at last—with Sylvia. Sylvia and I had been buddies a long time. Played a whole winter with her once in a club in L.A. Sylvia took her in for my sake. And Nanny was fine about it—the job, I mean, bringing back her pay every week, helping out. But—well, a guy likes his own life, you know what I mean? Having a niece right there, it’s okay, but—She knew that. She was fine about that, too. After a couple of months, she met up with some friend—that Amberley girl, and moved in with her.”
Yes, all that was right. The quiet first act. The slow build-up. The mousy, good little niece. Here’s my pay envelope; Uncle. Can I do the dishes tonight, Uncle? Uncle, I don’t want to be a burden on you. I’m moving in with a girl friend. The Nanny-spider had still been in disguise. So far there were only glimpses of menace. Anne, darling, here’s two bucks. Let me give Errol Flynn his coat. Anne, dearest, that Miss Amberley, she’s in the Social Register. A grand family from Boston.
I watched Gordon. I thought: He isn’t lying. He’s not a good enough actor to deceive me. This is the way it happened between Nanny and him; and this is how he had thought of her—and probably still does. The good, quiet niece. Gordon had been another victim.
“That’s all?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s all of the beginning.”
I said, “Why didn’t you go to the police when you heard she was dead?”
He flushed—it was a bright, unnatural flush like rouge. “I had my reasons. I was only doing—Peter, it seemed the only way under the circumstances. And—and I didn’t know then that she’d been murdered.”
“But you know now?”
“Yes. Lieutenant Trant told me this evening.”
“And you know she was pregnant?”
“Yes, I knew that.”
I said, “It was her lover who killed her.”
“That’s what Trant thinks.”
“Do you know who her lover was?”
I had said that just to say it. I hadn’t had the slightest hope that it would get me anywhere. But Gordon stopped in his tracks. He stood in front of me, looking down at hands that seemed suddenly clumsier than ever.
“Yes, Peter, I know.”
I said, “Tell me.”
“Peter, do I have to?”
“Tell me.”
“But—”
“To hell with any buts.”
He looked up. His face was still flushed and miserable. “Honest, Peter, I wasn’t prying. When she left to live with Miss Amberley, I knew she still had a key to this place. That was okay with me. She even left some of her stuff here. After you’d given me the job in Star Rising, she came around backstage a couple of times to see me, but that was all. I was leading my life. I was letting her lead hers.”
“Did you take her to that party at Lottie’s?”
“What party? Oh, no. I just saw her there. Across the room. Didn’t even get a chance to speak to her. And it was after that, anyway, that I started noticing—I mean, about the matinee afternoons—”
He broke off.
“Matinee afternoons?”
“You know, I’d come back after the show tired. Wouldn’t notice much. Sometimes, maybe, I thought the place looked kind of different—too neat sometimes, not neat enough other times. But for quite a while I didn’t stumble to it at all. Then it started to dawn on me. Somebody’s been here, I thought. Someone’s coming here every matinee afternoon and then sometimes in the evenings, too. I thought right away of Nanny, of course. Who else could it be? I wasn’t going to make a fuss or anything. Hell, if Nanny needed a place away from the Amberley girl to be alone—it didn’t interfere with me. But I wanted to be sure.
“She’d told me not to call her at Miss Amberley’s. I guess she hadn’t told her she had an uncle in New York. Maybe she figured she’d be thrown out if Miss Amberley knew she had some place else to go. So I wrote her a note and asked her to come around. When she came, I asked point-blank, ‘Have you been coming here?’ She was just as frank with me. She had a boy friend, she said—and there were reasons why she couldn’t entertain him at Miss Amberley’s. She should have asked me, she said. But she hadn’t thought I would mind—and, Peter, I didn’t go into it, honest. God knows, I’m not the heavy uncle. If the kid had a lover—more power to her. I told her it was okay, to go right ahead. And that was that.”
Once again my hopes were rising. Gordon wasn’t the man but he was leading directly toward him. This, then, had been the center of the Nanny-spider’s web. Here, secret from the Amberleys, secret from everyone, she had brought her lover and planned with him the scheme which eventually had taken form as the destruction of Peter Duluth.
Gordon Ling was looking at me earnestly, with an embarrassment I found both baffling and unsettling.
“I’d never have known, Peter, if it hadn’t been for that last time. Just—just the day before she died when she came here and—”
Once again he gave up. Infected by his uneasiness, I asked, “Came here—and what?”
“Well,” he blurted, “she told me everything. Poor kid, probably she was as much to blame as anyone, but you couldn’t help being sorry for her. She was in such a state, carrying on, half out of her mind, sobbing her heart out. She told me it all, how desperately in love she was, how she’d hoped for the divorce, how she’d realized it couldn’t ever be and the only thing was for her to give it up, how she’d tried to be brave but how it was hopeless now because she was almost sure she was going to have a baby. Could I help her? She begged it over and over again. Couldn’t I please do something?”
That was the sort of dramatic scene which normally Gordon thought he did well. But he was terrible at it now as if he’d played it out of town to disastrous notices and had lost his nerve.
“After all, Peter, I was her uncle. It was up to me to do something. I tried to calm her down. I tried to comfort her. I said, ‘You’ve got to tell me this guy’s name. If he’s responsib
le for all this, if you really love him, if you’re really going to have a baby, he’s got to get a divorce and marry you. Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to him. I’ll make him see he’s got to do it. Tell me his name.’”
Hope had made me slow-witted. I realized that then. With shocking clarity, the reason behind his excruciating embarrassment dawned on me.
“So she told you his name, Gordon?”
He was looking down sheepishly at the carpet. “That’s right.”
He came suddenly to me and gripped my hands. We were the two sophisticated men-about-town helping each other through a difficult scene.
“Honest, Peter, I’d never dreamed it was you. When she told me—God, you can imagine how I felt. I’d said I’d stand by her. I was her uncle. There she was crying, talking about suicide. I knew it was my duty. But—with Iris and you—I mean, when you’d been so good to me, giving me my first big part in years and—”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes, I know.”
And, of course, I knew. Why hadn’t I realized it from the beginning of his monologue? The Nanny-spider had woven an Amberley web to catch me, a Lucia web, an Iris web. Of course she would have woven a Gordon web, too. Almost laughably Gordon had been designed as the last and most convincing witness in the paternity suit—the indignant uncle storming in loco parentis. “You’ve seduced my niece. She’s pregnant. I demand recompense.”
“So you see.” Laughably, too, Gordon was trying to propitiate me. “I didn’t pry, Peter. It was all thrown at me. It—it was terribly awkward. I stalled, of course. I—well, I really didn’t do much of anything that night. And then the next evening, Lottie came to the theater and—and I heard.”
His vivid blue eyes, which were only a little faded, fixed my face with an “honest” desire for criticism, for castigation.
“Maybe you think I did wrong, Peter. I don’t know. Hell, I don’t know anything any more. I’m so mixed up. But I heard she was dead, that she was hanging there from your chandelier. It was dreadful, of course. But—well, it was done, wasn’t it? You see, I thought she’d committed suicide. We all did. And I thought: Poor kid—then she really did it. She’s killed herself for Peter. And I thought, too: Well, Peter’s in bad enough already. If I go to the police, I’d have to tell the whole story. What good would it do? I mean—it wouldn’t help Nanny. And with Peter always so considerate of me—” The honest eyes were still unwinkingly on my face. The voice broke off with a noble tremble. Poor Gordon, the actor to the end! He’d thought his niece had killed herself because a producer had seduced her, but he’d still been realistic enough to remember that a producer was a producer.
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