by Gore Vidal
“Oh, I’ll stay in the village,” said the young historian.
“Well, go in and say hello anyway. I’m sure she’ll ask you to dinner.”
Wiping sand off his trousers, the nephew disappeared into the house. Allie sighed, “I should’ve known Dick would show up. He loves disaster. I suppose it’s why he majored in history … all those awful wars and things.”
“Maybe he’ll cheer us up.”
“It’ll take more than Dick I’m afraid.”
“You’re not much older than he, are you?”
She smiled. “Now that’s what I call a nice thing to hear. Yes, I’m a good ten years older.” Which made her thirty one or two, I figured with one of those rapid mental computations which earned me the reputation of a mathematical failure in school.
Then we went in swimming, keeping close to shore.
IV
Miss Lung and I were the first to arrive for cocktails and I mixed us martinis. She was in an exotic Japanese kimono-type dress which made her look even more repellent than usual. She thought she was cute as a button though.
“Well, looks like we’re the first down. The vanguard.” I gave her a drink and agreed. I sat down opposite her though she’d done everything but pull me down beside her on the couch. I realize that, contrary to popular legend, old maids’ traditional lechery is largely an invention of the male but I can safely say that, in Miss Lung’s case, masculine irreverence was justified.
She sipped her martini; then, after spilling half of it on the rug, put it down and said, “I hope you’re recovered from your encounter with that unknown party.”
I said I was.
“I could hardly keep my mind on ‘Book-Chat.’ I was doing a piece on how strange it is that all the best penwomen with the possible exception of Taylor Caldwell possess three names.”
I let the novelty of this pass. I was saved from any further observations by the appearance of Claypoole. He was pale and preoccupied. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week.
He made conversation mechanically. “The whole town’s buzzing,” he said. “I was down at the theater seeing the pictures there … some good things, too, by the way, though of course Paul would say they’re trash.”
“What’s trash? What would I call trash?” Brexton appeared in the doorway; he was even smiling, some of his old geniality returning. I wondered why. At the moment his neck was half inside a noose.
Claypoole looked at him bleakly. “I was talking about the pictures down at the John Drew Theater.”
“Oh, they’re trash all right,” said Brexton cheerfully, mixing himself a drink. “You’re absolutely right, Fletcher.”
“I liked them. I said you’d say they were.…”
“What they are. Well, here’s to art!”
“Art? I love it!” Mrs. Veering and Dick Randan came in together; the former was her usual cheery self, high as a kite. She introduced the Claypoole connection to Miss Lung and Brexton neither of whom knew him. The penwoman shifted her affections abruptly from me to the young historian. “So you’re at Harvard?” she began to purr and the youth was placed beside her on the couch. That was the end of him for that evening.
Allie was the last to join us. She sat by me. “Well, here we all are,” she said irrelevantly.
The company was hectically gay that night. We were all infected by this general mood. Everyone drank too much. I was careful, though, to watch and listen, to observe. I knew that someone in that room had clubbed me with possible intent to kill. But who? and why?
I watched their faces. Brexton was unexpectedly cheerful. I wondered if he’d arranged himself an alibi that afternoon while locked in his room. On the other hand, Claypoole seemed to be suffering. He had taken the death of Mildred harder than anyone. Something about him bothered me. I didn’t like him but I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was the strange relationship with his sister … but that was no business of mine.
Miss Lung responded to whatever was the mood of any group. Her giggles now rose like pale echoes of Valkyrie shrieks over the dinner table while Mrs. Veering, in a mellow state, nodded drunkenly from time to time. Randan stared about him with wide eyes, obviously trying to spot the murderer, uninfected by the manic mood.
It was like the last night of the world.
Even I got a little drunk finally although I’d intended to keep a clear head, to study everyone. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what to study.
We had coffee in the drawing room. While I was sitting there, talking absently to the nephew about Harvard, I saw Greaves tiptoe quietly across the hall. I wondered what he was up to.
“Did the murderer really slug you?” asked Randan suddenly, interrupting me in the middle of a tearful story about the old days when Theodore Spencer was alive and Delmore Schwartz and other giants brooded over the university.
“Yes.” I was short with him; I was getting tired of describing what had happened to me.
“Then you must possess some sort of information which he wishes to destroy.”
“Me? or the information?” Randan had expressed himself about as clearly as most history majors do.
“Both, presumably.”
“Who knows?” I said. “Anyway he’s wasting his time because I don’t know a thing.”
“It’s really quite exciting.” His eyes glittered black behind the heavy spectacles. “It presents a psychological problem too. The relationships involved are.…” I got away as soon as was decently possible.
I told Mrs. Veering that I was tired and wanted to go to bed early; she agreed, adding it was a wonder I didn’t feel worse, considering the blow I’d received.
In the hall I found Greaves. He was sitting in a small upright chair beside the telephone table, a piece of paper in one hand and a thoughtful expression on his face.
“Ready to make an arrest?” I asked cheerfully.
“What? Oh … you plan to go out tonight again?”
“Yes, I was going to ask you if it was all right.”
“I can’t stop you,” said Greaves sadly. “Do us a favor, though, and don’t mention anything about what’s been happening here.”
“I can’t see that it makes much difference. Papers are full of it.”
“They’re also full of something else. We have two men on duty tonight,” he added.
“I hope that’ll be enough.”
“If you remember to lock your door.”
“The murderer might have a key.”
“One of the men will be on the landing. His job is to watch your room.”
I chuckled. “You don’t really think anything will happen with two policemen in the house, do you?”
“Never can tell.”
“You don’t have any evidence, do you?”
“Not really.” The answer was surprisingly frank. “But we know what we’re doing.”
“As a bit of live bait and a correspondent for the Globe, what are you doing?”
“Wouldn’t tell you for the world, Mr. Sargeant.”
“When do you think you’ll make your arrest? There’ll be a grand jury soon won’t there?”
“Friday, yes. We hope to be ready … we call it Special Court, by the way.”
“Already drawn up your indictment?”
“Could be. Tell me, Mr. Sargeant, you don’t play with paper dolls, do you?”
This set me back on my heels. “Dolls?” I looked at him, at sea.
“Or keep a scrapbook?”
“My secretary keeps a scrapbook, a professional one …what’re you talking about?”
“Then this should amuse you, in the light of our earlier discussions.” He pushed the piece of paper at me.
It was an ordinary piece of typewriter paper on which had been glued a number of letters taken from headlines: they were all different sizes; they spelled out “Brecston is Ciller.”
“When did you get this?”
“I found it right here, this morning.” Greaves indicated the telephone table. “It wa
s under the book, turned face down. I don’t know how I happened to turn it over … looked like scratch paper.”
“Then it wasn’t sent to you?”
“Nor to anybody. Just put on that table where anyone might find it. Very strange.”
“Fingerprints?”
He looked at me pityingly. “Nobody’s left a set of fingerprints since Dillinger. Too many movies. Everybody wears gloves now.”
“I wonder why the words are misspelled?”
“No ‘X’ and not many ‘K’s’ in headlines … these were all taken from headlines apparently. Haven’t figured out which paper yet.”
“Who do you think left it there?”
“You.” He looked at me calmly.
I burst out laughing. “If I thought Brexton was the murderer I’d tell you so.”
Greaves shrugged. “Don’t tell me. It’s your neck, Mr. Sargeant.”
“Just why would I want to keep anything like that a secret?”
“I don’t know … yet.”
I was irritated. “I don’t know anything you don’t know.”
“That may be but I’m convinced the murderer thinks you know something. He wants you out of the way. Now, before it’s too late, tell me what you saw out there in the water.”
“Nobody can say you aren’t stubborn.” I sighed. “I’ll tell you again that I didn’t see anything. I can also tell you that, since I didn’t send you that note, somebody else must’ve … somebody who either does know what happened or else, for reasons of his or her own, wants to implicate Brexton anyway. If I were you, I’d go after the author of that note.” A trail which, I was fairly certain, would lead, for better or worse, to the vindictive Claypoole.
Greaves was deep in some theory of his own. I had no idea what it was. But he did seem concerned for my safety and I was touched. “I must warn you, Mr. Sargeant, that if you don’t tell me the whole truth, everything you know, I won’t be responsible for what happens.”
“My unexpected death?”
“Exactly.” I had the sensation of being written off. It was disagreeable.
CHAPTER FOUR
I
AT midnight I arrived at the party which was taking place in a rundown gray clapboard cottage near the railroad station, some distance from the ocean. The Bohemian elements of Easthampton were assembled here: thirty men and women all more or less connected through sex and an interest in the arts.
Nobody paid any attention to me as I walked in the open front door. The only light came from stumps of candles stuck in bottles: the whole thing was quaint as hell.
In the living room somebody was playing a guitar, concert style, while everybody else sat on the floor talking, not listening. I found Liz in the dining room, helping herself to some dangerous-looking red wine.
She threw her arms about me dramatically. “I was so terrified!” I murmured soothing words to her while a bearded fat man drifted by, playing with a yo-yo.
Then she looked at me carefully and I could see, under the play acting, that she was genuinely concerned. “You’re sure you feel all right?” she felt my head; her eyes growing round when she touched the bump which was now like a solid walnut.
“I feel just fine. Do you think you ought to drink that stuff?” I pointed to the wine which had come from an unlabeled gallon jug, like cider.
“I don’t drink it. I just hold it. Come on, let me introduce you to the host.”
The host was a burly man with an Indonesian mistress who stood two paces behind him all evening, dressed in a sari, wedgies and a pink snood. She didn’t know any English which was probably just as well. Our host, a sculptor, insisted on showing me his latest work which was out in a shed at the back of the house. With a storm lantern we surveyed his masterpiece in reverent silence: it was a lump of gray rock the size of a man with little places smoothed off, here and there.
“You get the feeling of the stone?” The sculptor looked at me eagerly; I wondered if Liz had told him I was an art critic.
“Very much so. Quite a bit of stone too. Heavy.”
“Exactly. You got it the first time. Not many people do. Heavy … the right word though you can’t describe sculpture in words … but it’s the effect I was after: heavy, like stone … it is stone.”
“Heavy stone,” I said, rallying.
He was in an ecstasy at this. “You have it. He has it, Liz. Heavy stone … I may call it that.”
“I thought you were calling it the ‘Diachotomy of St. Anne’?”
“Always use a subtitle. By God, but that’s good: heavy stone.”
In a mood of complete agreement and mutual admiration, we rejoined the party.
Liz and I joined a group of young literary men, all very sensitive and tender with sibilants like cloth tearing; they sat and gossiped knowingly about dissident writers, actors, figures all of the new decline.
While they hissed sharply at one another, Liz and I discussed my problems or, rather, the problems at the North Dunes.
I told her what I really thought about the morning’s adventure. “I don’t think anybody was trying to kill me. I think somebody was up to something in the house and they didn’t want to be observed. They saw me coming and they were afraid I might interfere so I was knocked over the head while they made their retreat. Anybody who wanted to kill me could’ve done so just as easy as not.”
“It’s awful! I never thought I’d know somebody mixed up in anything like this. How does it feel, living in a house with a murderer?”
“Uncomfortable … but kind of interesting.”
“You should hear the talk at the Club!”
“What’s the general theory?”
“That Brexton killed his wife. Everybody now claims to’ve been intimate friends of theirs and knew all along something horrible would happen.”
“They may have a surprise ahead of them.”
“You don’t think he did it, do you?”
“No, I don’t think so; he must’ve been tempted though.”
“Then what makes you think he didn’t do it?”
“A hunch … and my hunches are usually wrong.” I was getting tired of the whole subject. Every lead seemed to go nowhere and there weren’t many leads to begin with.
We tried to figure on possible places to go later on that evening but since I was tired and not feeling particularly hearty from my blow on the head and since we were both agreed that though sand was glamorous and all that for making love on in the moonlight it was still scratchy and uncomfortable: several sensitive areas of my body were, I noticed earlier that day, a little raw, as though caressed with sandpaper, it seemed best to put off until the next night our return engagement. But though we were both fairly blithe about the whole thing, I found her even more desirable than before we’d made love which is something that seldom happens to me: usually, after the first excitement of a new body, I find myself drifting away; this time it looked as if it might be different. I vowed, though, that there would be no serious moments if I could help it.
Along about one o’clock somebody began to denounce T.S. Eliot and a thick blond girl took off most of her clothes to the evident boredom of the young men who were recalling happy days on Ischia while two intense contributors to the Partisan Review began to belt each other verbally for derelictions which no one else could follow: it was a perfect Village party moved out to the beach.
Liz and I lay side by side on the floor, talking softly about nothing at all, everything forgotten but the moment and each other.
I was interrupted by Dick Randan. “Didn’t expect to find you here,” he said, looking at us curiously.
“Oh … what?” I sat up and blinked at him stupidly. I’d been so carried away I’d lost all track of everything. He was about the last person I’d expected to see in that place. I told him as much.
He sat down on the floor beside us, a little like a crane settling on a nest. “I’m an old friend of Evans’,” he said, indicating our host who was showing a sheaf of his d
rawings to the bearded man who’d put away his yo-yo and gone to sleep sitting bolt upright in the only armchair in the room.
“How were things back at the house?” I asked.
“All right, I guess. I left right after you did and went to the Club; there wasn’t much on there so I came over here … took a chance Evan might still be up. I handled his Boston show, you know.”
Then I introduced him to Liz. They nodded gravely at each other. Across the room the half-naked blond was sitting cross-legged like a Yogi and making her heavy white breasts move alternately. This had its desired effect. Even the sensitive young men stopped their cobra-hissing long enough to watch with wonder.
“Nothing like this will ever happen at the Ladyrock Yacht Club,” I said austerely.
“I’m not so sure,” said Liz, thoughtfully. “I wonder how she does that.”
“Muscle control,” said Randan and, to my surprise, he showed certain unmistakable signs of lust; for some reason I had automatically assigned him to the vast legions of Sodom … showing you never can tell.
“Somebody did something under the table once at the Club,” said Liz. “But it was one of the terrace tables and there wasn’t any light to speak of,” she added, making it all right.
The blond ecdysiast then rose and removed the rest of her apparel and stood before us in all her mother-earth splendor: she was, as they say with a leer in low fictions, a real blond.
The Indonesian mistress then decided that this was too much; she went out of the room, returning a moment later with a large pot of water which, with an apologetic oriental smile, she poured all over the exhibitionist who began to shriek.
“It’s time to go,” said Liz.
A brawl had just begun, when we slipped out a side door into the moonlight. Randan came with us, still exclaiming with awe over the blond’s remarkable control. “People study for years to learn that,” he said.
“It must be a great consolation on long winter evenings,” I said. Then I discovered that Liz had no car tonight and, though I much preferred getting a taxi or even walking home, Randan insisted on driving us in his car.
I gave Liz a long good-night kiss at the door to her house while the collegian looked the other way. Then with all sorts of plans half-projected, she went inside and Randan drove me back to the North Dunes.