She stopped in front of me, sitting down on the edge of the table, her hips bulging out, the cigarette drooping from her mouth.
“And I didn’t lose. That was the laugh. I stumbled into the office, tottering on high heels, brandishing the cigarette holder —and there he was—The Dream Boat. My novel was man’s greatest peak. Praise sprayed out of him like beer from a hot can. Oh, he was going to publish it, to boost it, to launch a new Gwendolyn Sneighley. All that—and more. He was obviously charmed by me as a woman. He took me out to lunch. We were soul-mates, every known type mate. You’d never seen the like! And, by the time I’d staggered home, slightly tight on Martinis, I realized that he’d invited me to dinner tête-a-tête and I’d accepted. I ran to the mirror. It was cracked, the mirror, I mean. I caroled at myself through a ginny grin: He loves me! The Great Ronnie Sheldon loves me!”
I was listening now. I wasn’t just submitting myself to words. But there was nothing in this. Ronnie’s enthusiasm for genius had always taken that exaggerated form. In a way, perhaps, it was pitiful that a twenty-one-year-old hick had mistaken Ronnie’s calculating pounce on talent for Romance. But it wasn’t very pitiful. I knew, of course, how the story was going to end. Sylvia Rymer had expected a declaration of love. All she had got was a discussion of contractual clauses, rather unfavorable to her.
She went on: “So I went to my famous tête-a-tête in a black evening gown borrowed from fourth floor rear, the same cigarette holder, the same absence of glasses. I even took a cab to the restaurant. My, what glamor! And what a dinner, and what correct wines, and what correct heavy-lidded glances of admiration. (I had to peer through the floral decorations to catch them, but they were there.) And then, inevitably, the final: Let’s go back to my place for a drink. I didn’t mind that, of course. Mind it? I was in seventh heaven. Seduction à la Manhattan was Pocatello’s idea of Life. Doormen bowed us into a cab and off we went to Ronnie’s apartment.”
“Apartment?” I broke in. “Ronnie had a house.”
“Of course he had a house. But this was Romance. The house was full of his sister and old, loyal servants. We went to the apartment. And there it was—The Works. Dim lights, dim gramophone music, the bottle of champagne dimly lurking in the silver ice-bucket. You should have seen me dropping back into the luxurious cushions on the couch; you should have seen me toying with my champagne glass; you should have seen him, sliding down next to me, lip hungry for lip. But you wouldn’t have seen him because it didn’t happen that way. No. Not at first. Instead, he looked at his watch. Don’t ask me how I could see it, but I did. And I thought: My God, he isn’t expecting someone, is he? But I didn’t really worry because, just as I was beginning to feel the chill of young love rebuffed, he did slide on to the couch, he did put his arms round me, he did prattle pretty sweetnesses. And, just as he was full on, the clock struck eleven— and just as the clock struck eleven, I heard a movement out in the hall.”
Her hand, pulling the cigarette from her lips, was still shaking.
“I said very quickly: ‘Someone’s here.’ I started to get away from him. But instead of letting me go, his arm went tighter round me and he kissed me clunk on the lips. And it was then, exactly then, that the woman’s voice came from the hall. It was the most terrible sound I had ever heard. As if she were being choked to death. ‘Ronnie,’ she said. ‘Ronnie, Ronnie…’ ”
Sylvia Rymer crushed the cigarette out on the side of a wineglass.
“That was the moment when Ronnie chose to start, to jump up as if he had been caught by surprise. I just sat there on the couch, the woman’s voice ringing in my ears like a death knell. And Ronnie—he turned. He’d never been so innocent, so the man of distinction. ‘Oh, hello, dear,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten this was our night’. The woman still stood there, way out of my range of vision, just stood there, a dark shape by the door from the hall. ‘Ronnie,’ she said again. And he said: ‘My dear, I realize this is rather embarrassing. But you’re a woman of the world. You understand that, even in the most satisfactory liaison, a man needs a little change once in a while— the freshness of youth…’ And the woman just turned and she ran and I heard the front door slam shut. And Ronnie dropped back again on the couch. He gave a terribly blasé sigh. He said: ‘That’ll teach her a lesson. She was getting far too uxorious for a transient, that one.’ And he—he started right back into the groove, the hand sliding over my shoulder, the fingers on the hair…”
Her lips were a thin, remorseless line. “I sprang away from him as if he was a leper. I said: ‘You knew she was coming. That’s why you brought me here.’ And he said: ‘That was only part of the reason, my dear. I think you’re quite a dish, too, a delectable product of Pocatello, Idaho—a community which, oddly enough, hasn’t figured very largely in my life until tonight.’ And he got up to pull me back on to the couch. And I said … Oh, who knows what I said? Who cares? I ran out of the apartment. I ran half the way home, tripping over the black skirt, sobbing, wanting to be sick.”
She stopped dead and then gave a shrug. “That was the end of Little Nell. That was the end of Shelley too. The next day the manuscript came back from Sheldon and Duluth with a printed rejection slip.”
She looked down at her pudgy, ink-stained hand and then up at me. “Now do you know what was wrong with Ronnie Sheldon?”
I had listened with an excruciating tension which was now as painful as an abscess about to burst. I would have given anything to be able not to believe her, to brand her in my mind as a neurotic, evil trouble-maker. But to hope that she had invented that sordid, frightening story was quite impossible. It had rung with a sincerity as genuine as her natural, healthy disgust. And if that story, with its advanced form of sadism, was true, there must be others like it. Jean’s revelations about Ronnie I had been able to absorb and, in a way, absolve. They had been Ronnie in anger, Ronnie acting at a fever pitch of hurt pride which I had thought I understood and pitied. But—this!
Was it possible then that I had been so obtuse, so gullible? Had I, who had prided myself on being Ronnie’s best friend and only real interpreter, been kept as insultingly far as this from the knowledge that a real intimacy should bring? I hadn’t even dreamed he owned an apartment—a love nest. I had even naively supposed that women played no part in his life. And yet, all the time he had treated me as his confidant, his arbiter, his second self. Countless times, he had “bared his soul” to me with that rueful smile, that unsure, boyish worry in his eyes. “Jake, if I couldn’t talk everything over with you, I’d be licked. Jake …”
I have never had much faculty for being shocked. People, it seems to me, are all about equally frail. But I was shocked then. Because he’d fooled me when there was no need to fool me. He’d charmed me into believing I was as essential to him as air, when all the time …Why? I couldn’t begin to understand why. But I felt wounded and humiliated and unclean as if by contagion I had contracted a disease.
And, as I looked at Sylvia Rymer, I saw that a whole part of my life had been rendered null and void.
So even Ronnie had been taken away from me.
Why do you blame yourself, Jake, for everything? You’re a good man. Angie Sheldon’s words returned to taunt me. A good man! Could a fool, a blind, sentimental stooge, be a good man? Why shouldn’t I blame myself? Why shouldn’t Sylvia Rymer despise me? And, above all, why should my son have had anything for me but contempt?
I said in a whisper: “And Bill knew all this?”
“Of course he did. He’d seen through Ronnie years ago anyway. But he knows the story. I told him the very first night we met.”
It seemed hardly possible that only a few minutes before I had felt hope, that I had glimpsed daylight at the end of the tunnel. Bill had known this about Ronnie. When he had tried to save Jean, he had known exactly what the life he had been trying to save her from would be. What were Barnes’s other murder motives—personal humiliation and an endangered inheritance—when compared with this?
Be
fore I could check myself, before I could even think about words, I had asked: “Do you think Bill killed him?”
She tossed back her hair. “My God, don’t ask me. How do I know? All I can say is that, if he did, he should be carried in triumph down Broadway.”
My head was aching. This was last night all over again.
I said: “And these days, these weeks, he’s known that about Ronnie, and he had to think of Jean …”
“Yes,” said Sylvia Rymer. “Yes. With a father that stayed home evenings darning Ronnie’s socks! That was one of the reasons why I loved him, the poor little devil. Don’t misunderstand me. I knew I could never get him. To him, I’m an old hag and I look like a pig’s behind. Illusions are in the past with Pocatello. I don’t even know that I’d want him anyway. But someone had to love him, someone had to make up for that criminal mother who jumped out of a window—and that crawling, craven sycophantic nonentity of a father.”
I was too far gone to feel the whip. I said:
“Why didn’t he ever tell me?”
“Tell you—what?”
“About Ronnie. That Ronnie was like that.”
Her mouth dropped open. “You mean you didn’t know? Wasn’t that part of your job? To procure fledglings for the imperial love-nest?”
I blurted: “I never even knew he had an apartment. I never even thought he was interested in women. I …”
Suddenly she was on the couch with me.
“Mr. Duluth . .
I said: “Please …”
But her arms were awkwardly round me. The wool of her sweater tickled my nose.
“So you didn’t know! So it’s worse for you. For you it must be a nightmare. Having believed in Ronnie all these years, having put so much into it, having … And I thought and Bill thought …”
I couldn’t bear it. Not to have Sylvia Rymer mothering me on top of everything else. I pulled myself away from her.
I said: “You thought what? That I was a cynical collaborator? Isn’t that less contemptible than what I was?”
“Of course it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. Mr. Duluth, if you knew how I feel … You poor thing. You …”
Her hand was still clutching my arm. I got up. I looked down at her, feeling more of a clay man than I had ever felt.
“And I came here to accuse you of murder! ”
“Murder?”
“There’s a key. Oh, I can’t go into it, but I thought you’d taken it and …”
“Killed Ronnie?” She gave a sharp laugh. “That isn’t as funny as it sounds. I’d have killed Ronnie Sheldon years ago if I’d had enough civic spirit. But I didn’t, Mr. Duluth. I’m afraid we’ve both got to be reconciled to that … I had three friends here last night. They left only a few minutes before Bill came in. Lieutenant Barnes’s already checked with them. It’s the alibi to end all alibis.”
She got up. She had given up showing that she was sorry for me. She was perceptive enough to realize how humiliating that was.
Rather abashedly, she said: “Mr. Duluth, will you let me apologize? I’ve been a louse to you. I should have seen last night. I should have realized that you’re the only one who’s standing by BUI. Because I …”
“Because you—what?”
She gave a bleak, self-mocking shrug. “Last night I had a wonderful time insulting you. I had a wonderful time crying myself to sleep. This morning I got up, feeling like death. Bill, I thought. Poor darling Bill, if only I could save him! But what have I done? I had a little lunch—a tin of sardines. I smoked a packet of cigarettes. I even wrote a poem.”
She broke off. “It’s you,” she said. “You’re the one with the guts.”
I could feel the improbable bond of sympathy between us. And I thought: How I’ve messed this up! If I had been Barnes, I should coldly, evenly have stuck to my purpose of finding a murderess and trapping her. All I had done was to discover that Sylvia Rymer was a nice girl, nicely alibied— which was the last thing in the world I could afford to discover. I was back where I had started from. I should have to find a new murderer.
I asked wearily the same old threadbare question: “There’s nothing you can tell me that would help?”
She gave a pale smile. “No, Mr. Duluth, nothing. There’s his thing, of course.”
“His thing?”
“Yes, I don’t know what it was, but it was something he treasured very much. He kept it locked up in a little box by his bed. Yesterday, when he went off to Jean, I noticed the box. It was open and empty. I think it must have been …”
“What?”
“A memento of his mother, I think. He never talked about her to me, never said a word, but he thought about her all the time, I’m sure. And I imagined it was something like that— some memento maybe he was taking to Jean.”
Even now Felicia was ghostlily close at my side. I crossed to the door. Sylvia Rymer went with me. In the hall, she turned awkwardly.
“You haven’t changed? You still think Bill’s innocent, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
She held out her hand. “If you forgive me, I promise never to misjudge anyone again.”
I took her hand. “I forgive you,” I said.
She opened the door. She kicked an empty waste-bin aside.
“And save Bill,” she said. “Save him. You can do it. You’re worth ten of the rest of us.”
20
I walked down the street to the corner. I saw now that Sylvia Rymer, as a murderer, had always been a mirage. I had made her a murderer in my mind because I had so desperately needed a murderer and there had been no one else. This interview, which was to have been the first step up the ladder, had turned out to be an even huger drop down. Sylvia Rymer, who was tightly alibied, hadn’t taken the key. Then Bill had been lying after all? Bill, who had known so much more about Ronnie than I had known, Bill who had had so infinitely stronger a motive for murder than even Lieutenant Barnes had imagined.
Think all the time that maybe he did it.
I had imagined that, in my challenge to Peter and Iris, I had conquered despair. I hadn’t, of course. I could feel it sliding and curling round in me again like a worm. No, not a worm. Because it wasn’t just inside me. The whole exterior world seemed to be blighted by it; the children playing in the street, the women marketing, the very sunlight were all tainted. I knew I had to fight to the death. If I gave in for a moment, I should be licked. You can save him. You’re worth ten of the rest of us. I clung to Sylvia Rymer’s last words. They meant nothing. I realized that. Her new enthusiasm for me was as shallow as her earlier contempt. But it was a life-saver, though a fragile one, and I grasped it.
You can save him.
I hailed a taxi. I was going to go home, then I remembered Maggie and her “There’s something I want you to know”. Any objective was better than none. I directed the cab to the office.
I hadn’t thought of Sheldon and Duluth as being an ordeal, but it was. The telephone operator, the girls in the front office, looked at me as if I were a ghost. Passing through them was running the gauntlet. I hoped and prayed I shouldn’t run into any of the assistant editors with their articulate sympathy. Luckily, I got into my office unnoticed. Maggie was there.
Maggie was almost the only person in the world I could have endured at that moment. I knew she was feeling for me. I knew, too, that she would keep her feelings to herself.
She got up. “I’m glad you came, Jake.”
“I’m here.”
“I had to tell the police officer about the Laceys. It’s too bad, but it just happened that way at the theater. There’s no getting round it.”
“No,” I said.
“Jake, dear, what I’ve got to tell you isn’t easy. I mean, from Sheldon and Duluth’s point of view, but you’ve got to know.”
I sat down behind my desk. Was I always going to be as physically exhausted as this? I felt about eighty.
Maggie said: “It’s about Gwendolyn Sneighley.”
“Gwend
olyn?”
“You know when Ronnie came in from Georgia yesterday he told us not to let on to Gwendolyn Sneighley that he was married?”
Yesterday! That was only yesterday.
“Yes,” I said.
“I thought that was just Ronnie-ish of him, that Gwendolyn Sneighley thought she was so important that the idea of his marrying in the middle of her new book would have ruffled her feathers. That’s all I thought it was. Ronnie being diplomatic again.” She was looking at me solemnly. “But it wasn’t that at all, Jake. It’s much more than that. It was Arlene who told me.” Arlene was Ronnie’s secretary who had been with him forever. “This morning we’d heard the news, of course. Arlene and I were sure Bill hadn’t done it. And Arlene said … I’d better bring her in, hadn’t I? It’s better coming from her?”
I looked at her dubiously. Was help coming at last? And from the least likely source?
I said: “Sure, bring Arlene in.”
Maggie went out and came back with Arlene. Arlene was the office sourpuss. She had no respect for anyone, not even Ronnie. But she was discreet and dependable as a doctor. She had a sheaf of papers in her hand. She just stood there, deadpan, as if I were about to dictate a letter.
“Tell him, Arlene,” said Maggie.
Arlene said: “Now Mr. Sheldon’s dead, now your son’s in a jam, it’s okay to tell, I guess. Mr. Sheldon had promised to marry Gwendolyn Sneighley.”
I stared in complete astonishment. Arlene went on: “He’d been writing her love letters for years. Leastways, he hadn’t been writing them. He’d been dictating them to me. I’ve got them all on file. He didn’t mean it, of course. He was too dam wily for that. It was his way of keeping her working. ‘The mother hen’s costive again, Arlene’, he’d say to me. ‘I think the time’s ripe for another little laxative, don’t you? What shall we say this time? That there’s an affinity between our souls? That’s always good, isn’t it? We haven’t dug the soul-vein for some time.’ She’d always write back, purring, mad for it, carrying on like crazy about him being The Man. And then, on this last book, just before he left for Europe, she really got stuck. Terrible letters there were, all about committing suicide and talent drying up and heaven knows what, and he saw he was in a real spot. And he said to me. ‘This is war, Arlene. If we want that book for the Autumn List, we’ll have to resort to desperate measures. Let’s ask her to marry us.’ And he did. He wrote the letter. Real smooth it was. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett wasn’t in it. He was off to Europe, he said. They’d have to be separated for a while. But his confidence in her great talent was undying. Of course she could finish the book. All that was wrong was that she was lonesome. She’d lived too exclusively for her art. Surely the time had come when she should share her life with her greatest admirer. When he came back, why shouldn’t wedding bells ring all through the State of Georgia? After he’d dictated it, he said, ‘You don’t think we’ve gone too far, Arlene?’ And I said: ‘Yes’. And he said: ‘Oh, we’ll weasel out of it somehow. Just so we get Old Broody laying again’. And … Well, you can read the letter if you want to.”
My Son, the Murderer Page 17