Guilty Parties

by Thomas Gifford

  I fastened my gaze on Harry standing at the foot of the stairway leading to the balcony where the little band had played. He looked dazed. He smiled faintly at me, hugged me. “Thanks for coming, Belle, you’re a sweetheart.”

  “Where’s Sally? How’s she holding up?”

  “Well, it hit her pretty hard, coming down and finding him, you know … dead. I don’t know when it happened, neither one of us heard anything—I fell asleep in the study with the door closed watching a replay of a ballgame on Sportschannel. She was upstairs in bed.” He caught sight of the body again, stared at it. Two men were kneeling beside the shroud of canvas and were about to transfer it to a bag. “Christ.” He looked away, not really focusing on anything. “Dr. Schein’s upstairs with her now. She’s done with the cops, I guess. Schein says he’s got to give her a tranquilizer or some damn thing. Cop by the name of Antonelli seems to be in charge here, he’s using my study. I think he’s got the medical guy in there with him … it’s just like watching Columbo.” He shrugged. “Funny, but I’m not exactly sure what I should be doing—I keep thinking I should be doing something, but what? Cops have interviewed Sal and me twice each. I told them you were on your way over and I guess they want to talk to you, too.”

  Dear old Harry, calm under siege, wondering what the proper drill was for Houseguest, Murder of. Had I expected more of a Ruffian breast-beating and wailing, more emotion? Well, maybe that just wasn’t Harry s way. They had gotten the remains of Peter Venables into the bag and we stood silently, watching them lug him out. Once you weren’t a human being anymore, you weren’t anything: Venables wasn’t threatening me, he wasn’t afraid of Jack, he wasn’t proud of his beautiful newlywed daughter. Not anymore.

  The detective looked like my high-school principal.

  “You must be Mrs. Stuart,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Sam Antonelli. I understand you were a friend of the deceased—I wonder, could you spare me a few moments? Just follow me.”

  He was a gray-haired man of medium height, stocky, with a gray mustache. His hair was long and combed back from his temples like a matinee idol of the thirties. His voice was soft and very smooth and his manner was deferential, almost courtly. I hadn’t seen anyone like him since I was a kid in another galaxy.

  He closed the door to Harry’s study and sat us down very casually at opposite ends of the leather couch. He had the manner of a school administrator embarking on a parent-teacher discussion.

  “Just a couple of things, Mrs. Stuart,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get a picture of the late Mr. Venables from the Grangers. Understandably they’re quite taken aback by this whole business—innocent bystanders, you might say, plunged into the unhappy conclusion of their old friend’s life. You might be able to help me flesh things out just a bit. For instance, what was your relationship with Mr. Venables?”

  “We went to college … well, not together, but several of us knew one another. Sally and I were at Mount Holyoke, the men were at Harvard. I hadn’t seen him since college days.”

  “And that would be how long, Mrs. Stuart?”

  “Almost twenty years. Eighteen, I guess.”

  “And the group of Harvard men—who made up this group?”

  “Harry Granger, Mike Pierce, Jack Stuart, Hacker Welles, Peter Venables … I think that’s it. I have a notoriously faulty memory, I’m afraid.”

  “Really? Why do you say that?”

  “I’d completely forgotten Peter Venables until he came back. That’s all.”

  “Well, I’ll bet you had far more important things to think about these past eighteen years. I understand you married one of this group—Ruffians? Very colorful. You married Jack Stuart, a novelist, I’m told. And you’re a painter. And you and your husband have been very close friends, intimate friends even, of the Grangers all these years. Have I got that right?” He smiled beneath the actorish mustache. He wasn’t taking any notes. We were just chatting.

  “Yes,” I said, “you’ve got that right.”

  “And was it a great pleasure to see your old friend Mr. Venables after all these years?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a great pleasure, no.”

  “Ah. Well, time changes people, doesn’t it? A friend of twenty years ago might not be our choice of friend now—we all grow in different ways. The fellow my sister married, for instance … But every family is full of such stories. Mr. Venables had changed, I take it.”

  “I don’t really remember what he was like back then. I found him not much to my taste this time around.”

  “Perhaps you could elaborate just a bit, Mrs. Stuart. None of us likes to speak ill of the dead but, let’s face it, this is not an ordinary circumstance. Just fill me in …”

  He was smiling reassuringly, and it struck me that he knew the answers to the questions he was asking. I’d held off so long in telling Sal about my Venables horrors—if only I’d never told her at all! There was something about Antonelli that gave me a helpless feeling. He was leading me somewhere that I might not like much, but I didn’t know how to keep from going there.

  “The bottom line,” I said, “is that Venables made a very ugly pass at me one night. He was trading on my willingness to accept him as an old friend. It was a nasty scene but a brief one.” I sighed and decided to tell the rest of it. “He kept pestering me after that, but only on social occasions.”

  “Pestering?”

  “Threatening me, in a way. Saying that he wasn’t giving up, that it was his turn.”

  “His turn? What a peculiar remark.”

  “I suppose. I didn’t attach any importance to it. I certainly left him in no doubt as to my feelings.”

  “Which were?”

  “I thought he was despicable.”

  “A view that, I presume, was shared by your husband, Jack Stuart?”

  “My husband and I are no longer together. I don’t feel that I can reliably interpret his thoughts about much of anything.”

  “Very circumspect, I must say. Most husbands and wives seem so eager to put words and thoughts into each other’s mouths and heads.” He shifted comfortably, crossed his legs, folded his hands across his knee. “Still, I’m sure you’re right about your husband’s private reflections. Oh, my yes, husbands and wives. Tell me, did your husband strike you often?”

  I blinked at that one. Sally may have been upset, but she’d also been talkative. “No.”

  “But he did strike you last night? On the night of your gallery opening—that, of all nights?”

  “Yes. Jack hasn’t been himself lately. Our marriage being in trouble, his moving out …” I shrugged helplessly.

  “Oh, I do understand. My daughter and her husband.” He shook his head. “Sadly, it seems to be the way things go these days, doesn’t it? As I was saying, people change over twenty years. You, Mr. Venables, your husband—I daresay you’re all different people now. We all are. So, we say so-and-so’s not himself. When what we actually mean is, so-and-so has simply become someone else, a different person. It’s the process we call life. Why did your husband strike you, Mrs. Stuart?”

  “We had words, an argument. I was yelling at him—”

  “Do you recall what you were yelling at him about?”

  “His temper, I guess. He’d just broken a bottle of brandy, made an awful mess—”

  “Good Lord! Why would he do that?” He wore a mask of innocent amazement. Eyebrows raised, head cocked in curiosity.

  “Look, Sally must have told you all this—”

  “She mentioned something, yes, but I’d much rather hear it from you. She seems to have arrived late, missing the fireworks. Do go on, please.”

  “Peter Venables and Jack had an argument. They didn’t know I overheard them—then I walked in on them and Peter left and Jack and I argued. I just didn’t need him getting into the act with Venables. I could take care of him.”

  “They were arguing about you, then. What did Venables actually say?”

  “He didn’t say
much of anything.”

  He gave me a puzzled look. “How about Mr. Stuart?”

  “I … I don’t really remember very clearly. Jack was just giving him hell, wanted him to get lost …” I was lying and I thought I was being smart. I saw where Antonelli was heading and I’d been right: I didn’t much like it.

  “Ah. Well, you warned me about your notoriously bad memory, didn’t you? Tell me, do you have a clearer recollection of the party here at the Grangers’ home? Do you recall any fisticuffs breaking out in your presence?”

  “Of course,” I said wearily. “I suppose Sally and Harry have told you all about that, too.”

  “They could hardly do otherwise, Mrs. Stuart. I am inquiring into the murder of Mr. Venables. I have asked them to describe whatever they could of Mr. Venables’ activities while he was here. I expect they’ve done so to the best of their abilities. If you’ll think about it, it’s surprisingly difficult to ignore a physical attack made upon one of your party guests by another in full view of a hundred or more witnesses—”

  “All right, all right, I get the point.” I watched him smile at me, sorry that he’d had to reprimand me but letting me know he wasn’t going to hold it against me. I wouldn’t have to stay after school. Not this time, anyway. But I’d been warned. I told him about the party and the one-punch main event. “And Jack felt just terrible afterward. Really awful. He knew he’d made a fool of himself.”

  Antonelli nodded slowly. “Yes, I’m sure he truly regretted it. After all, Mr. Venables was an old friend and there is a significant bond between these men. But”—he shrugged—“pressures get to us sometimes, and bang! We suddenly behave in uncharacteristic manners.” He smiled. “We’re only human. We’re jealous, we get angry. We handle the anger in different ways. Well, let me see … Oh, yes, where did you spend last night?”

  “After the show ended Harry walked me back to the loft. I didn’t go out again until Harry called me this morning.”

  “You were alone all night?”

  “I was.”

  “Well, Mrs. Stuart,” he said with the small-town smooth voice, running a thick hand back along his hair, tugging at a pink earlobe, “you’ve been very forthcoming, very helpful. You know, you really do remind me of my daughter.” He shook his head at the resemblance.

  “I hope she survives her divorce all right.”

  “Oh, no. I’m referring to Kate. She’s a nun, no need to worry about Katie.” He stood up. “If anything else comes up, may I get in touch with you? Just to fill in the picture?”

  “Of course.”

  “And I must take a look at your pictures in the Leverett Gallery. The Grangers are both great fans of yours, you know.”

  He opened the door into the hallway, held it for me.

  “Your husband,” he said, pinching his lower lip. He wore a little Rotary Club pin in the lapel of his gray suit coat. His gray-and-red tie was spectacularly unstylish: a thick, clotted material, which I’d have bet had a guide on the back letting you know what color suit to wear it with. He must have been a very reassuring, predictable, understanding father. I stared at him, waiting for him to go on. “I understand he owns a shotgun,” he said. “Do you know this to be true?”

  “Oh, good God,” I said impatiently. “It’s an old thing his father gave him years ago. I don’t know where it is.”

  “Oh, of course, you haven’t been to his new place of residence. Well, I’m told—”

  “By Harry Granger,” I said.

  “I’m told that he has this shotgun in his room. I suppose it’s important to him as a talisman, you might say. A reminder of his late father.”

  “And I suppose Venables was killed with a shotgun?” I couldn’t stop my voice from shaking.

  “My guess would be both barrels, frankly. Close range. Very close range.”

  He smiled sheepishly and I felt him watching me as I walked back down the hallway toward Harry. Mike Pierce had arrived and was listening to Harry. His face was pink-cheeked and his eyes round as silver dollars. Finally I heard the door click behind me.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “HELL DO YOU think you’re doing? You’ve got that man about ready to stick Jack in a solitary and throw away the key! Good God, are you positively nuts?”

  I must have been shouting because Mike started to say now, now and Harry took my arm, cast a quick glance at the cops still fascinated by the floor’s contents, and hustled me toward the stairway leading down to the kitchen and dining room. The maid in the kitchen was trying hard to be invisible, chopping and mincing intently. She didn’t look up as we swept through the dining room and out the French doors to the garden. “Now, just sit down, Belle, and get your breath and stop screaming at me and tell me what’s on your mind. Would either of you like iced tea? Coffee? A drink?”

  “Sit down, Harry,” Mike said. “You sound like a stewardess.”

  The garden was thick with trees and flowers and shrubs, sprinklers going, a fountain erupting rhythmically, birds flitting in the dark green shadows. The humidity made it all tropical. There should have been big snakes like the roots of trees. The air was so thick it was hard to catch my breath. Mike lit a cigarette, crossed his legs and straightened the crease. He was wearing a perfect fresh seersucker suit and a bow tie.

  “Now, Belle, what’s the problem? Other than Peter being shot and Sal poised on the edge of a nervous breakdown, that is.”

  “Jack having a murder case made against him before the body’s stiff, that’s a problem! I mean, what are you, you and Sally, thinking of? You both must have spent the whole morning dredging up every damning detail you could remember—I mean, seriously, what are you thinking of? You seem to have told Antonelli enough to get him reaching for his handcuffs! And whatever possessed you to start babbling about that old shotgun? Talk about utterly gratuitous! You must have had to work like hell to get that into the story. Harry, I’m just dumbfounded!”

  Harry looked at me while I slumped, momentarily exhausted, in the wrought-iron chair. “Well, Belle, you’re certainly not speechless. And you’re not thinking very clearly.”

  “I suppose you are!”

  “Just listen to me and try to calm down. Antonelli asked me if I had a shotgun, if I knew anybody who had a shotgun, and I’d seen Jack’s the other day. You know how strongly that affected me, I told you about it that day at the theater. I told you how it worried me, the combination of Jack’s state of mind and the darn shotgun.”

  “That’s all well and good,” I said. “We were worried about Jack, we wanted to help him …”

  “I was worried about Jack using that gun, Belle. On anybody he thought you were getting close to. Hell, I even mentioned Mike here as a possible target, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, but you also said it was more likely that he’d use it on himself!” I said. “Did you tell Antonelli that? I mean, telling him wasn’t the same as just shooting the breeze with me. You should have heard him—everything you told him was coming back at me. He’s building a case against Jack and you’re handing him the hammer and nails! And Sally—she was at least in shock. What’s your excuse? What’s going on here, Harry? Is it a game? Let’s pin a murder on poor old Jack? Do you really think he’d do this to you?” I stopped talking because my voice was suddenly hoarse and my mouth was dry and I felt like keeling over.

  When Harry got angry he always got even quieter than usual. His mouth would tighten and his lips would get white. And all of that was happening. He looked distant and hurt, as if I’d slapped him. I concentrated on a bright yellow Baltimore oriole watching us from a safe distance. Mike leaned forward to hear, Harry’s voice was so soft.

  “Belinda, you’re getting all this second-hand. I didn’t hear what Antonelli said to you. You didn’t hear what Sally and I said to him. Or how we said it—”

  “But you said it!” I croaked. “You just damned Jack and didn’t look back!”

  “Think about what I said. Has it occurred to you that what we told Antonelli w
as true? That it might be important? That it might be relevant to what happened here?” The fountain splashed in the silence as if there were no city beyond the garden. Mike flicked his ash into a flowerbed. “He hit you, Belle. He punched you out last night. Do you want to wait for the next—”

  Mike said: “He what? Who hit you?”

  “—escalation? Don’t you see the pattern? Are you so blind that you can’t see the way Jack’s going? I tried to smooth over this thing with Peter at our party, sat you both down and tried to soft-pedal the whole thing, but when I heard Sally say he’d hit you last night—Jesus, Belle, why didn’t you tell me then?”

  Mike looked from Harry to me, his face flushing. “Jack? Jack hit you? Why, that’s … that’s … swinish!”

  I said: “Aha, I knew there was a word for it.”

  “That worried the hell out of me, Belle. First, he hits Venables, he’s acting weird as hell, anyway. Then he pops you one … and then someone uses a shotgun on poor Peter, poor goddamn Peter—”

  “Oh, do stop going on about poor Peter!” I felt myself exploding again and hoped it was for the best. “He was a sick, evil creep! He tried to rape me one night and he’s been hounding me ever since … he might not have deserved what happened to him, but he was a son of a bitch—”

  “He tried to rape you?” Mike looked goggle-eyed. “Not Peter! You must have misunderstood—”

  “Oh, shut up,” I said. “You’re so stupid and innocent. And blind. Both of you, you’re the blind ones. He was a Ruffian, ergo he was one swell guy.”

  “Did Jack know this? About what Peter tried with you?” Harry was still very quiet, very tight.

  “I don’t know, I don’t see how he could have. I didn’t tell anybody until Sal last night. No, Jack saw Peter hovering over me at the party …” Suddenly I was flashing back on something. I must have been sitting there with my mouth drooping open.