Death by Association

by Frances Lockridge

  “You’ve been at work already,” he told her, accusingly. “You New Yorkers.”

  Mr. Grogan was, and happened to tell her the evening before, a New Yorker himself. At least, he passed through New York, and sometimes hesitated briefly, as the season of hotel management took him from Key West to New Hampshire, and back again.

  “Here’s another,” Grogan told her, as she prepared to take the offered chair. “Miss Wister, this is Captain Heimrich. Got in yesterday too. Captain, Miss Wister.”

  The solid man stood up. His eyes were open now, and extremely blue. He was agreeable to meeting Miss Wister, and proved it by keeping his eyes open for several minutes. He was on orange juice; Mr. Grogan was on coffee. Mary caught up with the captain. She heard her purpose there explained, her art extolled; learned that she was going to capture some of the unspoiled beauty, the leisurely charm, of The Coral Isles.

  “It must be very interesting,” Captain Heimrich said. “Getting things down as they look.”

  He said this, which was certainly commonplace enough, as if he had been thinking about the matter and had reached a conclusion. He looked at her through the very blue eyes and nodded slowly, confirming his assertion.

  For a moment, then, Mary felt again as if she were being grappled with; as if something she sought to maintain were being challenged. But the feeling now was only a flicker of uneasiness, of doubt, and not, as it had been the evening before, a compulsion. She smiled at Captain Heimrich, and said it was interesting enough, and difficult enough, and that it usually didn’t come out right. To which he said, “Naturally,” and nodded again, and finished his orange juice.

  “Navy?” Mary Wister asked, putting together Key West’s naval base, the captain’s age and air of authority and, perhaps, the very blue eyes, to make a guess.

  Heimrich repeated the word. Then he said, “Oh—no, not Navy, Miss Wister. Police.” He closed his eyes then, as if the subject tired him.

  “New York State police,” Mr. Grogan said. “Very well known man, the captain here.”

  Heimrich opened his eyes briefly to look at Mr. Grogan, and closed them again.

  “How interesting,” Mary Wister said, and felt like a schoolgirl. But what should she say? “My God?”

  “Now Miss Wister,” Heimrich said, and opened his eyes again. “Now Miss Wister. Why should it be? Your work is. No doubt Mr. Grogan’s is. I merely—follow people around. Wait for them to make mistakes.”

  “Nonsense,” Mr. Grogan said. “Don’t let him talk that way, Miss Wister. Murderers. He’s down here now convalescing. Shot it out with a murderer. Got his man. Right, captain?”

  Captain Heimrich looked rather tired.

  “A crazy kid,” he said, with his eyes closed. “I shouldn’t have let it come to that, naturally. Just a crazy kid.”

  “With a gun,” Grogan said, and Heimrich said, his voice tired, “Oh yes, with a gun, naturally.” It was clear that he regarded the subject as exhausted, and considered that, as a subject, it had started out very tired. He looked away, at the other tables, and the few people sitting at them, at the shelter beside the tennis court, where two couples had appeared. He was, Mary Wister thought, looking for another subject, for a distraction. Apparently he found it. There was a just perceptible change in his solid, not-mobile, face.

  “Well,” he said, “you have celebrities here, Mr. Grogan.”

  “Oh yes,” Grogan said, and was pleased. “Many.”

  He looked in the direction Heimrich had been looking.

  “Oh,” he said. “You mean Wells?”

  “Bronson Wells,” Heimrich said. “Yes.”

  Mary Wister was looking now—looking at a man who was facing them and talking to another man, whose back was to them. He was talking forcefully, and seemed to feel little need to listen. He was a tall man in a blue linen sports jacket, pale tan slacks. His hair was black and smooth. His face was long, tapering from a massive forehead, converging as it passed a formidable nose, ending in a pointed chin. He had a small mouth and narrow lips; he had dark eyes noticeably deep set and as he talked to the man who faced him it was evident that he was looking the other in the eyes—to, Mary thought, the point of transfixation. So that was Bronson Wells. She would have known him from his pictures; his many pictures. The man who—what was it Lee had said? The man who had “made a career out of an aberration.” Bronson Wells the lecturer, the author of books, the favorite of congressional committees. The man who could always, somewhere, find just one more subversive. The man who so often testified, so gravely testified, “I cannot say, of my own knowledge, that Mr. So-and-So was actually a member of the Communist Party,” and, so saying, left Mr. So-and-So mangled in the roadway. Mr. Bronson Wells, the Source.

  As she watched, Bronson Wells finished with the other man. He shook a finger at him and turned and strode away, dark head high, gaze no doubt still penetrating.

  “Is he looking for them here?” Mary said, and Mr. Grogan for a moment looked shocked and Captain Heimrich amused.

  “Oh,” Mr. Grogan said, “there wouldn’t be any of them here.” He spoke as a housewife might of insects of loathsome appearance and annoying habits. “He’s been on tour. Here for a rest.” He paused. “A very charming man,” he said. “Doing great good.”

  “Oh,” Captain Heimrich said. “Naturally.”

  The fact was, Mary Wister thought, Bronson Wells was doing good, perhaps even much good. He was a man of zeal; having himself sinned—by being, admittedly, a member of “the party”—he now was a scourge of sinners. It was not necessary that he recognize gradations of sin. He was relentless in exposing those presently active in the Communist cause; he was harsh also against those who had, like himself, repented, but who had done so less vociferously. It might be true, as Lee had once pointed out, that some of the men Bronson Wells denounced had been quicker than Wells himself to see that what they had once considered an ideal had been transformed into a degradation. It could only be assumed that Wells’s repentence had been more thorough, as it had cetainly been more profitable. It was possible that a few relatively innocent men had been left mangled behind Mr. Wells’s war chariot. But men who did not recognize human degradation when they worked for it had also been publicly liquidated. No doubt the balance was in Mr. Wells’s favor. All the same, Mary thought, I wish he had a kinder mouth.

  “A very interesting man,” Mr. Grogan told them. “You must meet him.” Mr. Grogan paused. “He is—“ Mr. Grogan said, and paused again. “Very impressive,” Mr. Grogan said, after thought. “Very—magnetic. I think that’s the word.”

  Captain Heimrich had closed his eyes, and made no reply to this beyond a slow nodding of the head.

  Breakfast came then—English muffins, very hot and very crisp; eggs very fresh, coffee obviously dripped through paper filters; marmalade with the flavor, both of orange and of lime. Somehow, the question whether they would meet Mr. Wells and be magnetized was lost in the waiter’s quick movements, the removal of covers from muffins, the pouring of coffee. Mr. Grogan himself seemed not to notice the disappearance of his suggestion. He told Mary that he hoped she would find time to get in a little tennis, or some swimming. Surely some swimming. He reminded her of the regrettable result of all work and no play.

  Nevertheless, she spent the day working, conscious as the day passed, as she sketched the hotel from the parapet, the sweep of lawn and palm trees from the hotel porch, the tennis courts and the dancing enclosure beyond them, that she was watched curiously by almost everyone. She was accustomed to this and, unless the back of her neck was breathed upon, unless comments were loud behind her, she did not mind. Long ago she had learned that next, as exhibits, after working steam shovels came working artists. It was four o’clock when, finally, she snapped her pad case closed—almost catching a nose in it—and walked from the pier along the walks, among the palm trees, to her room. Then, remembering Mr. Grogan’s warning, she changed into a white bathing suit, put a white robe over it, and walked back aga
in, climbed down a ladder from the pier and swam, for a quarter of an hour or so, not too energetically, in the bright water.

  When she walked back, the sun bathers were collecting themselves—and their hats and towels, their unguents, their dark glasses—and preparing to abandon the sun, as it was abandoning them. As she crossed the porch on the way back to her room, she passed the pale man, who now was appreciably less pale, who had continued to pinken in the sun. He was much where she had seen him in the morning; he was reading, but looked up as she passed. This time she smiled at him, but did not stop.

  It was a little after six when she went back down to the lounge, wearing this time a silk print of pale yellow, accented in black, and looked around again for a single chair. But as she looked, Heimrich and the pale man came up from behind her and the captain, who now had his eyes open, said, “Good evening,” in a deep, tranquil voice, and then, “Won’t you have a drink with us?”

  She hesitated for an instant.

  “This is Doctor MacDonald,” Heimrich said. “Miss Wister, doctor.”

  The pale man held out a long pale hand. She accepted it, and discovered it was not limp as she had thought it would be, but thinly strong. Dr. MacDonald smiled at her over their joined hands, and released hers and said, “You’ve had a busy day.” He looked at her. “You’ve burned the back of your neck,” he added. There was, she realized, easiness about Dr. MacDonald—doctor of what, she wondered? He demanded nothing, insisted on nothing; his interest in her neck was detached, but friendly.

  “The sun’s unexpected,” she said. “I mean—”

  But he nodded, and she did not need to finish. A very easy man, she thought, if still a long drink of water. She said, to Heimrich, that a drink would be fine, and went with the tall, pale Dr. MacDonald and the solid captain of police toward a corner made by a sofa and chairs.

  She sat in one of the chairs while they waited, and watched as Dr. MacDonald lowered himself into a chair beside her with a kind of caution, as if he considered himself breakable. She watched as Captain Heimrich put a hand on the arm of the sofa as he prepared to sit and then, rather awkwardly, withdraw the hand and sit slowly and a little awkwardly without steadying himself.

  “We both,” Dr. MacDonald said, “seem about to fall apart, don’t we, Miss Wister?”

  His voice was amused.

  “Well—” Mary said.

  “The captain here,” Dr. MacDonald told her, “is recovering from a bullet through the right shoulder, earned in line of duty. I, on the other hand, merely turned my car over, with internal—” he paused. “Dislocations,” he finished. He regarded Mary Wister. “I like to avoid mysteries,“ he told her. “You’ll have a martini?” He looked reflectively at, apparently, the ceiling. “Very dry, very cold, lemon peel,” he told her. “As yesterday?” He looked down from the ceiling. “I listened,” he said.

  She said, “Please.”

  It was Dr. MacDonald who repeated her order to the waiter, added, “Scotch and soda,” and looked at Captain Heimrich. Heimrich had closed his eyes, which apparently did not affect his vision. “Bourbon,” Heimrich said. “Plain water.” He paused and added, “Naturally.”

  “Why?” Dr. MacDonald said, with evident interest. “Why ‘naturally’?”

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “Now doctor. I really don’t know, nat—” He stopped. He opened his eyes. Then he laughed.

  “Now this is very comfortable,” Mr. Grogan said, over the back of Heimrich’s sofa. “Mind if we join you?”

  The three of them looked up—looked at Grogan, red faced, white haired, at Bronson Wells, whose dark face seemed untouched by sun, whose hair was very black. (And whose mouth, Mary Wister noted, was still very small.)

  “By all means,” MacDonald said, and stood up. After a moment, Heimrich also stood up. Bronson Wells was passed to the doctor, passed to Mary Wister. They partook of Mr. Wells, who regarded them intently from dark eyes and spoke to them in a voice trained for the platform. It was hardly possible, indeed, to realize that a voice so modulated, so impressive, was being used for no greater purpose than to acknowledge, and conventionally to approve, the existence of Miss Mary Wister, Dr. Barclay MacDonald and Captain Heimrich.

  Mr. Grogan and Mr. Wells sat, Grogan on the sofa—and a little on the edge of the sofa; Wells in a chair half facing Mary’s. Mr. Grogan sat as he did, Mary thought, so that he might better keep an eye on things, which he resolutely did. A waiter approached at just under a dead run and said, “Yes sir,” hurriedly, with a slight gasp. “As usual, Jimmy,” Grogan said. “Mr. Wells?”

  “Ginger ale,” Mr. Wells said, as if in benediction, and Mary was conscious of looking at him with some surprise, and that Dr. MacDonald looked at the scourge of the unrighteous with something which might have been almost consternation. Captain Heimrich looked at nothing, being again engaged in resting his eyes.

  “Yes sir,” the waiter said, in a tone of gratification. He went off at a trot.

  “Are you the Bronson Wells?” Dr. MacDonald enquired.

  “Yes,” Bronson Wells said, with no hesitation. Well, Mary Wister thought, he is, of course. What should he say?

  “Oh,” Dr. MacDonald said. He paused, considering. “It must be interesting,” he said. “You have revealed a great deal, Mr. Wells.”

  “Termites,” Bronson Wells said. “Yes. You—that is to say, of course, we—in this country have been living in a fool’s paradise, unaware of the force against us—of the deviousness, of the danger.”

  He fixed his eyes sternly on Dr. MacDonald, who nodded acceptance of the statement or who, at any rate, nodded.

  “Now Mr. Wells,” Captain Heimrich said, “we are being warned, aren’t we? Have been, wouldn’t you say?”

  Wells turned a stern gaze on Heimrich, who responded by opening his eyes briefly and then closing them again.

  “I am surprised to hear you say that, sir,” Wells said, his voice vibrating. “You—a police officer. You who should know the danger.” He shook his head. “The conspiracy is vast,” he said. “Our whole society is honeycombed.”

  Mr. Grogan looked uneasily around the lounge of his hotel, bright with people at their ease, with waiters darting among them; the waiters conscious of Mr. Grogan’s managerially roving eye, unaware that, at that moment, he was speculating about honeycombers rather than the efficiency of the staff.

  “I have no doubt,” Dr. MacDonald said, “that you know a great deal of which the rest of us are ignorant.”

  “I do,” said Bronson Wells. “I do indeed.”

  Mr. Wells turned back toward Heimrich and seemed about to continue. But then his dark gaze fixed itself on something more distant. He stood up. He said, his voice not raised but carrying with practiced ease, “Oh—Shepard!”

  They all looked, dutifully. They looked at a thin, wiry man. Probably in his late thirties. He had neatly parted blond hair, which lay quietly on his head; he should, Mary Wister instantly thought, be wearing a neat blue suit, probably double-breasted, with a white handkerchief neatly pointing from the breast pocket. (Or had she read somewhere that handkerchiefs no longer appeared in peaks, but in a mere piping of white?) He was, however, wearing a yellow shirt and a tie of deeper yellow, above gray slacks, to be sure, but under a sports jacket which seemed, although profusely colored, to be, by majority vote, dark green. Mr. Shepard (or Shepard Something?) looked like a New Yorker who had, resolutely, gone native.

  He had stopped at Wells’s call. Now he turned and came toward them, smiling. When he was close enough he said, “Oh, here you are, Wells.”

  “I,” said Bronson Wells, “expected you yesterday.”

  There was nothing precisely in Bronson Well’s voice to justify Mary’s feeling that the gayly costumed man was undergoing rebuke. Wells’s voice was modulated; he was polite and even gracious. Mary Wister was nevertheless left feeling that Shepard would have been advised to have arrived the day before.

  Shepard—Paul Shepard, as it turned out—did not a
ppear to be a man rebuked, so, Mary decided, she had been imagining things. A habit of mine, she told herself; oh, certainly, a habit of mine. Shepard merely said, as he shook hands with Bronson Wells, that things had held him up in New York; shaking hands around with the others, giving each of the men a precise handshake, measured out; giving Mary herself the smallest, most complimentary, of dividends, he expressed his pleasure crisply and with confidence. He had, Mary discovered, gray eyes set wide apart. Mary changed her half-reached opinion of him. The rather flamboyant clothes he wore were not, as she had at first assumed, compensation for an inner feeling of inadequacy. Watching the wiry blond man, so unassertively competent in movement through the social ordeal (as it always was to her, at any rate) of multiple introduction, she thought the unmodulated vigor of his costume might, more accurately than the blue suit she still was sure he commonly wore, express what Mr. Paul Shepard was all about. He wore plumage when he could, and it was not a disguise. Perhaps it was a revelation.

  But she was guessing, of course, and guessing on no evidence. Shepard sat by Grogan on the long sofa and talked to both, and more drinks came. Also, more people came. A dark-haired girl with deep blue eyes, wearing a summer evening frock, quite young and reasonably beautiful, appeared out of nowhere, and was Mrs. Paul Shepard. It was easy to understand, of course, what had brought her there, but it was not so easy to get clearly in the mind the relationship to the rest of another couple, both man and woman tall and middle-aged, both revealing the South in speech, but with accent overlaid, modified by less regional idioms. Mary had been talking to Barclay MacDonald, very pleasantly, about nothing in particular, sipping a second drink, and Judge and Mrs. Robert Sibley were part of the expanding group. But who had brought them into it was not apparent.

  They widened the circle; a waiter moved chairs into the circle; he found another table and further ash trays, and took orders for further drinks. “My round,” Paul Shepard told everybody, and raised a firm, commanding hand against the murmur. “My round,” he repeated, and made a circle with his hand, which included everyone. The waiter checked glasses, trotted off.