Dream of Fair Woman

by Charlotte Armstrong

  ‘It would be about money, do you think?’ said Betty sweetly.

  ‘I would suppose so.’

  A silence fell.

  Then Leon opened his strange mouth and said, ‘The money belongs to Dorothy. It is not in trust, not waiting, say, on her twenty-fifth birthday. I manage it for her. I manage it well and am paid well to do it. The books are open. It is all there and it waits for nothing but Dorothy’s pleasure. If she should die, then I suppose I’ll get a good deal of it, but by no means all. Now, if anything but these facts are reported or insinuated—I’ll go to law.’

  He looked at Matt and said nastily, ‘I hope you realise that you are preventing me from calling in physicians of my choice. Your doctors had better be competent.’

  So Matt jumped in. ‘I realise all that, sir. So you can tell me, for her sake, whether she had had any surgery or an injury? Anything of the sort that might have left a mark or a scar?’

  The man frowned. He played with the sash of his robe. ‘I have been trying to remember,’ he said almost in a whine. ‘I don’t know. As a child, she—’

  The doorbell played a sequence of gong notes.

  ‘Excuse me.’ Leon Daw went to the window to move the drapery.

  Matt rolled his eyes at Betty and she put her teeth over her lower lip and shook a rueful head.

  Their host said, ‘Pardon me,’ and made for the foyer.

  ‘Nuts!’ said Matt softly.

  ‘Try, try again,’ Betty whispered.

  They heard a woman’s voice in the foyer begin to speak and then stop abruptly. Was there whispering? They couldn’t tell.

  Now Leon Daw appeared in the archway with his hand under the smart elbow of a woman. She was tall, and slim to the point of emaciation. Dressed in high fashion, she might have been a model, except that her definitely hawk-like face was time-worn. She must be in her forties. She moved with precision, in the perilously unbalanced gait of the model, and her voice affected a high drawl. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. I had no idea you were busy. Shall I go wait in the back room?’

  Betty knew instinctively that the man of this house must do his living in that back room, and not here.

  ‘No need,’ said Leon Daw. ‘They are leaving. Megan, dear, may I present Miss … uh …’

  ‘Betty Prentiss.’

  ‘And Mr Cuneen. This is Mrs Megan Royce.’

  ‘How do you do?’ the woman said. ‘Oh please, sit down.’ She seated herself with trained grace and did not cross her legs but sat erect, stripping off her gloves, holding her head tilted.

  Leon Daw said coldly, catching Matt still on his feet for his manners, ‘Is there anything else?’

  Betty said, ‘Yes. Will you tell us, please, why your niece did come here this time? If you know, Mr Daw?’

  Betty’s voice had taken on just a touch of an intention to charm. Matt sat down.

  ‘To renew her citizenship,’ said Daw glumly. ‘To more or less check in with me, on her affairs, which she does from time to time.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Megan Royce, ‘you are talking about poor Dorothy.’

  ‘I am trying to understand,’ said Betty, ‘how a very rich young woman could be travelling around in shabby clothes, carrying two hundred and fifty dollars, no more no less, in an old black handbag.’

  ‘Isn’t it simply incomprehensible!’ said Megan Royce cordially. Her eyes assessed Betty’s pink cotton shirt and skirt. ‘Of course, it may be that Dorothy was smart enough not to be smart.’ Megan relished her own mot. ‘Poor Leon. The publicity is miserable.’

  Leon said, ‘And if Dorothy is not lying unconscious in your hospital, will you tell me how she can possibly have missed the publicity? Or why she hasn’t been in touch with me?’

  ‘She hasn’t been?’ said Matt, rather stupidly.

  ‘Of course not.’ Leon Daw was turning sulky. ‘I fail to see the point of your questions. Especially when you don’t believe what I have already told you.’

  ‘Ah, don’t be cross, darling,’ cooed Megan Royce. ‘Aren’t we going right on down there now, where I can certainly settle the whole question?’

  Matt looked at her.

  ‘Oh, but don’t you see?’ she said, leaning forward with a straight back. ‘Leon took both of us to lunch last Tuesday. Not to let kitties out of bags …’ She looked, insofar as she was able, coy. ‘Dorothy was to be my niece, too. It was the occasion for me to get to know her. And don’t you think’—her glance went to Betty; she seemed gay and amused and very sure of herself—‘that a woman observes another woman, rather intently?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Betty, who was observing this woman very intently indeed. Everything about her, including the shrieking violet of her narrow dress, the purple hat that clung to the side of her head, the great roll of black hair that balanced it on the other side and was stabbed by an odd silver pin, everything shouted ‘Look at me!’

  ‘So now,’ said Megan to Leon, ‘let’s us just go, darling. I am ready.’

  Matt said, ‘Will you wait until two o’clock, please? The hospital has had to set up rules.’

  ‘What rules?’ snapped Leon.

  ‘No one may see her outside of visiting hours.’

  ‘You are excluding me!’

  ‘No more than all the others.’

  ‘All? What others?’

  ‘Several,’ Matt said, not without relish.

  Leon was popping his eyes. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he cried. ‘Impossible! Criminal! I won’t have it!’

  ‘But there are so many poor poor souls,’ said Megan, ‘living in dream worlds. I suppose they have no drama in their own poor little lives. This dreadful mother? Or whoever she is?’

  ‘The Hopkins woman is not being admitted?’ Leon roared.

  ‘No, sir, she is not. Except during hours. I am responsible.’

  ‘Then you had better expect my lawyer.’

  Matt got up. He put out his hand to Betty and she rose.

  Leon Daw turned as if to lead them to the foyer, but Matt wrinkled his brow and spoke. ‘I can’t remember. Did you say that your niece had an old injury or a scar?’

  Both he and Betty knew, at once, that he hadn’t pulled it off very well. Silence fell thick.

  Then Leon said, petulantly, ‘I told you that I couldn’t be sure.’

  The woman said brightly, ‘I saw no scar.’

  Leon Daw said, ‘I haven’t seen Dorothy in nearly three years.’

  ‘But I wonder,’ said Megan Royce. ‘Would she have confessed it, if she had crashed a car? And broken a bone, or something? You know, darling, you say you’ve scolded. Dorothy was a reckless driver.’

  Matt pounced. ‘She had a California driver’s licence?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Leon said. He was withdrawn and suspicious now. ‘She has never really lived out here on the Coast.’

  ‘She did seem to adore this out-of-the-way place in Uganda,’ burbled Megan. ‘Oddly enough, I had the impression she intended to go back there. Didn’t you, darling? Poor Dorothy. Well, perhaps she can—once she gets over this strange illness. As she will, won’t she?’ Her bold eyes were inquiring of Matt and at the same time fawning on him. She was announcing that she found him an attractive male.

  ‘I can’t say,’ he answered. ‘Thank you and we’ll go, now.’

  Megan said, ‘Shall I see you again, at the hospital? At two, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll be there, Mrs Royce.’

  ‘How nice!’ she drawled. ‘Leon, darling, I can very well go alone, then. You know that if you step out of here, the goblins will get you. Whereas nobody will pay the slightest attention to me.’

  She didn’t believe a word of this. She was a woman who behaved as if she were beautiful and dressed to attract all eyes. ‘Mr Cuneen will take me to see her. Won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Anytime between two and four.’

  Matt and Betty left the house.

  A familiar car was parked out at the curb. In the front seat of Betty’s car sat Tony Severson
with his feet up on the dash. ‘Hey! Hey!’ he cried. ‘How did you make out? Did he tell you anything?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Matt gloomily.

  ‘Hey, who was the dame in the purple hat?’

  ‘Name of Megan Royce,’ said Betty. ‘They are engaged, or so she said.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ Tony whistled. ‘Old Leon is supposed to have been playing the field for a hundred years. I wonder what she’s got on him.’

  ‘Tony, would you get out of there?’ said Matt impatiently. ‘We’ve got places to go.’

  ‘Goody, goody,’ said Tony, getting out. ‘Where? Where? I’ll be right behind you.’

  ‘Why?’ said Matt belligerently.

  ‘Because, old friend and buddy, the hospital says you are official. You can get in. So wither thou goest, I goest.…’

  Matt said, ‘Oh, shut up.’

  He settled into Betty’s car and said between his teeth, ‘I can’t stand that kind of woman.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘That clotheshorse,’ he said, surprising her with the term. ‘What makes old Megan so sure her testimony is going to settle everything? She’d as soon lie as look at you, for my money.’

  ‘There’s not going to be a fingerprint on a driver’s licence,’ said Betty. ‘We didn’t get too far with the scar bit.’

  ‘We’ll have to try it on Bobbie-girl. Um boy—and there’s a female for you.’

  ‘Misogynist?’ Betty said lightly.

  ‘They’ve got a curious conviction of power,’ gloomed Matt. ‘A very curious idea about how to win friends and influence men.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked in a moment.

  ‘To that restaurant. That’s our trail.’ He was feeling very grim.

  Betty said, ‘Hey, Matt, even if I happen to be female—’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ He thought she was going to resent his crack about the opposite sex.

  ‘It struck me,’ she said, ‘there was one little point, Watson—’

  ‘The dog in the night-time?’

  ‘More or less,’ said Betty. ‘Didn’t Megan refer to poor Dorothy, at least twice, in the past tense?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Matt again. ‘That proves something?’

  Betty didn’t answer. She was examining, with curiosity, her own sensation of a cauld grue.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The maître d’ at Nickey’s was called Arnoldi. He held a sheaf of menus before him as if he would feel naked without them, and spoke in a soft rapid voice. His eyes kept wavering from Matt to Betty and, now and then, to Tony Severson who stood behind them, keeping quiet, listening hard.

  He remembered the young lady who had lunched here with Mr Daw, on Tuesday, very well. Mr Daw had arrived first, worried lest Miss Daw had come before him. But she had arrived in a cab, a few minutes later. Mr Arnoldi had pricked up his ears when she had called Mr Daw ‘Uncle Leon.’ It was his business to know who people were. The cabby had carried in her suitcase and it had been placed in the checkroom. There had been a little discussion, Mr Daw wanting to have it put in his car, proposing to drive her on to the airport, the young lady insisting that this wasn’t necessary. Mrs Megan Royce had then arrived. Arnoldi knew her very well. She ran a smart shop about a block away. She had, in fact, managed a few fashion shows in the private dining-room, for some ladies’ groups. A clever woman. She often lunched here with Mr Daw. There had been a discussion of plane time. Arnoldi himself had volunteered to be helpful and have a cab ready for Miss Dorothy Daw, at the right moment.

  The three of them had then taken lunch at that corner table. Oh yes, the girl in the hospital was definitely the same girl. Arnoldi had studied Miss Dorothy Daw’s face, since she was a celebrity and he must call her by name the next time she appeared. He had taken Russ Hanson, their waiter, with him to the hospital this morning, since he, too, had been able to study her face. No, Hanson wasn’t in yet. Too early. Nor was the hatcheck girl in yet. Mr Arnoldi was sorry—always glad to do what he could, of course, but it was nearing the restaurant’s busiest hours and he did hope his subordinates need not be diverted from their tasks.

  Miss Daw had been wearing, he told Betty when she asked, a brown suit and had carried a brown coat which had been checked. A blouse of some bright colour, not quite orange, not quite red. He had told this to newsmen only this morning. Here he gave Tony a special nod. Always glad to cooperate with the press. When the cab had come—

  Matt interrupted with a question.

  Yes, Arnoldi had called the Yellow Cab Co., as usual. Yes, he did happen to know the name of the driver. It was Willson. Chuck Willson, he believed. The man was more or less regularly on call for Nickey’s. Now he had told all this, in a spirit of helpfulness, not only to the press but to the police, and now, as he understood it, to a representative of the hospital itself, and he begged—

  But Tony had come to startled life. ‘Hey! Why did you tell it to the police?’

  ‘Because they asked me,’ said Arnoldi with a pained smile.

  ‘They came around?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘When? Who came?’

  Arnoldi put on elaborate patience. ‘An hour ago,’ He fished up a card and read from it. ‘A Lieutenant Clarence Tate.’

  Whereupon Tony hit himself on the head with his palm, cried, ‘Oh, wow!’ and darted off.

  Arnoldi said, more rapidly than ever, that there really wasn’t any more to tell. The cab had come. She had taken her coat on her arm. Mr Daw had carried her suitcase out. As to its colour, Arnoldi was not prepared to say. Mr Daw had come back and rejoined Mrs Royce at the table for five more minutes. And that was all, really.

  By the time Matt and Betty had thanked the man and gone out into the parking lot, Tony’s car had vanished.

  ‘A fine old friend and buddy he turned out to be!’ said Betty. ‘What did he mean “Oh, wow”?’ She was feeling a little frightened. Why the police? Something must have happened. Something must have changed.

  Matt said he didn’t know. He stood on the sidewalk, gazing up to the line of far hills. Then he said abruptly, ‘I’m going back in and make a couple of phone calls. Wait for me.’

  He called the hospital and spoke to Atwood, who knew nothing about the police, had no news, knew of no developments. The girl slept.

  Matt hung up and stood still, watching the mark of moist fingers fade from the place where he had been holding hard. Then he called the Yellow Cab Co. and asked for a cab, to be driven by a certain driver, to be sent to Nickey’s. He was willing to wait until the right driver could appear.

  When he came out and told Betty that Chuck Willson would be along, although it might take a while, he scarcely heard her say that this was clever of him.

  He was turning in his mind the piling up of probabilities. He was afraid the girl was Dorothy Daw, after all. Why afraid? Who was she? A poor little rich girl? A young woman running away? From what, he wondered? A refugee from the limelight? That didn’t seem frightening enough. What about Alison Hopkins, a poor little poor girl, running away from another ‘lousy deal’ that her looks and her mother were pressing her toward, to her dismay? No, there would have to be something more … well … urgent, from which to run away. Something dangerous?

  And if so (whoever she was) had they, in their very concern, made her vulnerable to her enemies?

  Betty Prentiss, waiting silently beside him, thought to herself that Betty Prentiss was a rather remarkable-woman, not to be chattering. She thought to herself, No, just smart enough to realise that he wouldn’t hear me, he doesn’t see me. Old Betts is a kind of nothing-shadow, a kindly blob, whose virtue, at the moment, may be that she owns a car.

  When the cab came, Matt gestured Betty into it, got in himself, and said to the driver, ‘I represent Cooper Memorial Hospital. I want to talk to you about the girl you picked up here last Tuesday. Go down the block and park.’

  ‘Oh, nuts,’ the driver said. ‘Listen, I just been talking to the cops about this
chick. I can’t waste all day.’

  ‘We’ll pay your meter,’ said Betty sharply.

  Matt blinked at her and then grinned. (Watch it, buddy, thought Betty grimly, I might be real.)

  When the cab swooped down upon a kerb, two blocks farther along, the cabby turned around, took off his cap, and wiped his forehead. He was a middle-aged man with a grainy skin and hard intelligent eyes. ‘Yah, yah,’ he said, ‘I knew I’d get it sooner or later, when I seen the morning papers. O.K., I pick up this girl. One-thirty, Tuesday. You want to know what she was wearing. So I’ll tell you what I told the cop. A little bitty flame-coloured hat. That I remember. So the fella who comes out with her, he tells me to take her to International. Western Airlines Terminal, he says. They kiss bye-bye. But we get about six blocks from here and she says to me, “Driver, I want to go to the Union Railroad Station.” Where she gets out, she pays and she tips me good. And she goes inside and that’s that. Now, you wanna run up my meter any more or what?’

  Matt was frowning.

  ‘She had a suitcase?’ asked Betty, finding nothing better to ask in her bewilderment.

  ‘That’s right. One of those classy white jobs. I run around and haul it out. There’s a pack of redcaps. But this Miss Dorothy Daw—the tenth richest girl in the world, eh?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘She don’t hire no redcap. Last I seen of her, she was picking up that suitcase with her own lily-white glove. Now, what anybody wants to make out of it, let them make. Where to, friends?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Matt said. ‘Why did the police want to know about her?’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Chuck Willson. ‘Not me, brother.’

  ‘You told them all this?’