by Unknown
Although they solemnly promised not to speak of it, they were tempted constantly to find arguments to support their separate attitudes. He thought her unnecessarily vindictive about her cousin, while she considered him a credulous fool. For a while they managed to keep their opinions to themselves.
One night they met Phyllis at a dinner party. Afterward Gil and Phyllis were partners at bridge. They won quite a lot of money, and on the way home Gil boasted about his game and, to show sportsmanship, praised his partner. Nancy stiffened. Aware of her displeasure, he hastily changed the subject.
Although her marriage had increased Nancy’s self-confidence, she was still thin-skinned.
“You needn’t be afraid to talk about Phyllis,” she said coldly. “I know what a superior creature she is.”
Gil did not speak again until they were in their apartment. His nerves were on edge. “Look here,” he said when they were in the hall, taking off their coats; “this has gone far enough. Every time I mention Phyllis you act as if I’d insulted you. We’ve got to have this out once and for all.”
They quarreled bitterly, brought out buried grievances, and led each other to the subject of the poisoned pills. Later, when she was questioned about this quarrel, Nancy said that she could not remember precisely what each of them had said, but only that Gil’s gibes had so wounded her that she ran the length of the apartment into her bedroom and locked the door. For a while, she said, he had stayed in the corridor, shouting abuse.
The next day she could not force herself to speak to him. He addressed her politely, just as though they had not quarreled, but she seemed not to hear. It was Nancy’s habit, when she was hurt, to brood for days. She regretted her moodiness, but had never been able to cure it.
This, more than the quarrel, upset Gil, for the actor’s pride was fed by the response of his audience. Nancy’s passionate silence destroyed his self-confidence and led to the distrust of his charm. And when, lunching alone at a popular restaurant, he ran into Phyllis, in a turban made all of violets and a purple veil tied in a bow under her chin, he invited her to have a drink with him.
He told her, as she later reported to the police, of Nancy’s sulks. The news did not surprise Phyllis. She was well acquainted with this habit of Nancy’s; it had always made family history. She advised Gil to feed Nancy a bit of her own stew and to treat her with the same black indifference.
The idea delighted Gil. When he donned a mood he wore it like a wig and tights. In contrast with his brooding melancholy, Nancy’s sulks were a pale fog beside a storm cloud. She was utterly bewildered. All of her life, Nancy had been given her own way; when she sulked and refused to talk, her parents and the servants had waited tremulously for her mood to lighten. Now she had a taste of the bitter medicine.
Gil noted the effect of his performance and was as pleased as though he had heard a first-night audience shouting bravos. Perhaps he kept it up longer than necessary. Her nerves were frayed. Too proud to beg forgiveness, she waited shyly for him to offer the first word.
The triumphant actor sought a wider audience. One woman was not enough for him. Daily he made reports to Phyllis. One day, when they had been having tea together, he went off with her gloves in his pocket. They were fuchsia-colored and size five and three quarters. Nancy’s maid, going through Gil’s pockets before she sent his suit to the cleaner’s, found the gloves and brought them to her mistress with an air of sly innocence.
Nancy turned as pale as if a wound had drained the blood from her. That very day she had bought Gil a reconciliation gift, a costly morocco traveling case with gold fittings. It was in her closet, shrouded in tissue paper, ready to be presented after the first embrace. . . .
• • •
It was about four in the afternoon when the maid brought her the gloves. Gil came home at seven o’clock. When Nancy heard the door open she rushed at him, pallid, red-eyed, and screaming like a fishwife.
This was no time for sullen dignity. Gil used words he’d picked up backstage, filth which belonged to the riffraff of the theater, and which had never before soiled the lips of that dignified actor.
The two maids retired to the kitchen. According to their report, the quarrel lasted almost two hours. It thoroughly exhausted Nancy. Sobbing, she threw herself across her bed. The cook came out of the kitchen to ask cautiously if Mr. Jones wished dinner, but Gil turned and stalked out to the hall, put on his coat, and left the apartment.
According to the story which Phyllis told the police the next day, she was reading in her living-room, when the doorbell rang so furiously that her young Negro maid, who was washing dishes in the tiny kitchen, came out and begged Phyllis not to obey that nervous summons. Quite calmly Phyllis opened the door, and admitted Gil.
He walked to the center of the living-room and said quietly, “I’ve been through hell.”
“Sit down,” she said gently.
Gil strode up and down like a caged beast. Phyllis, not wishing the maid to overhear, bade her leave the dishes and go home.
“I’d rather die,” Gil said, “than have to look at my wife’s face again.”
“Why? What’s happened, Gil?”
“She’s an evil woman.” Gil shuddered. “Although I’m not a particularly virtuous man, wickedness in a woman horrifies me.”
“Gil dear, be reasonable. Nancy’s your wife and a fine, generous girl. She was spoiled at home, but she’s wonderfully goodhearted and she loves you desperately. Won’t you try to forgive her?”
Gradually, with such argument, she managed to calm him. He asked for a drink, and she brought out the whisky and soda. She did not count the drinks he poured for himself, but thought he must have taken four or five. Toward the end of the evening he became quite garrulous, and told her why he had married Nancy. During rehearsals and the out-of-town tryouts of the play, they had been thrown together constantly. Nancy had been such a good sport about the money she lost on the play that Gil had tried to make it up as much as possible in offering her his friendship. She had interpreted his kindness as love, and showed her passion for him with shocking frankness. The marriage had been impulsive.
He now realized how grave had been the mistake. As sternly as he tried he could not reject his need for Phyllis. Her image was engraved indelibly, he had said, upon his heart.
“I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I can’t work,” Gil said, rising and crossing the room to the wide Victorian armchair where Phyllis sat. “I can’t live with that woman another day. I’m going to tell her so . . . tonight.”
“No, Gil. Think it over. Your marriage was an impulse, and this may be another. You know your own nature; you’re too flexible, you allow yourself to be carried away too easily. Tomorrow you may feel differently about her.”
“No. I’ll never love her. And I’m too upset to let this thing go on any longer. I’ll tell her, darling, that I love you.”
“No, Gil. That you must never tell her. If it were any other woman —” Phyllis shrugged off the rest of the thought. “But you must never tell Nancy that.”
“I’m going home. Tomorrow I’ll let you know what I’ve done.” He kissed her on the forehead tenderly like a fond uncle.
Phyllis put the whisky into a walnut cabinet which had once been a Victorian commode. She carried the soda water to the refrigerator and the glass to the sink. The dinner dishes had not been dried and put away. Phyllis ran hot water over them, dried them and tidied the kitchen. This was a habit developed by early training. All the women in the family, even when they had servants, were fussy housekeepers.
She barely slept that night, and at dawn fell into a fitful slumber made hideous by nightmares. She spent most of the day waiting for Gil to telephone.
When, at last, the doorbell rang, she hurried to it eagerly and, even before she had it open, said, “Gil, dear!”
There stood two detectives who had come to inform her of G
il’s death, and when she had sufficiently recovered from the shock, to ask a number of questions. . . .
Nancy told a quite different story.
After Gil had left her sobbing on the bed, Nancy said, she was exhausted. The quarrel had been preceded by two hours of emotion and several days of tension. She fell asleep. When she awoke the clock was striking eleven. The maids had gone home, and she was alone. She had slept heavily and felt curiously light and fresh.
She bathed, put on a becoming new negligee, and awaited Gil’s homecoming eagerly, because she felt that the noisy quarrel had released hidden resentments and it would be possible for them to make peace. She had eaten no dinner and was very hungry. There was cold chicken and applesauce in the icebox, and she sliced a couple of tomatoes. She had just poured boiling water into the drip coffeepot when she heard Gil’s key in the lock.
He looked cold. His cheeks were almost blue. He had walked, he told her, from Seventy-ninth Street to Sixty-fifth. His mentioning Seventy-ninth Street, Nancy thought, was his way of confessing that he had been with Phyllis. She did not remark upon it, but asked if he would like a drink.
“I’ve had enough. My head’s clear now; I want it to stay that way.”
Nancy felt sturdy, calm, and capable of facing any situation. Her tears had washed away grief and anger, and her nap had erased all bitterness.
Of one thing she was certain. She must know the truth, however painful.
“I’ve been a heel,” Gil said.
Since he was so clearly remorseful Nancy did not wish to rebuke him. “I’ve been pretty difficult myself.”
“The worst thing I’ve done is to have gone to Phyllis with my troubles. It was stupid and selfish of me and unfair to you.”
He offered contrition humbly, and she could afford to be magnanimous. “I’m hurt that you went to her, but probably it was my own fault. I’m spoiled and egocentric and willful. A vipress, Mike Jordan used to call me. If I ever let go with one of those moods again, I wish you’d horsewhip me.”
“It’d be healthier,” Gil said.
“Might even cure me.” Nancy felt better. She laughed aloud. “My whole trouble is that we never used horsewhips at home. Even our horses were given their heads.”
Gil wrapped his arms about himself and shivered.
“You did get a chill,” Nancy said. “If you won’t have a drink, let me give you some coffee. Have you had dinner?”
She heated the coffee and made a nice little cold supper. They ate at their regular places at the dining-room table. As she poured his coffee Nancy said steadily, “There is one thing I must know, Gil. Are you in love with her?”
He set his cup down hard. Some of the coffee spilled into the saucer. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“You were in love with her before you met me.”
“Did she tell you so?”
Nancy hesitated. “What about the suicide? There was no other reason why she should have tried to kill herself.”
“Someone tried to murder her.”
Nancy did not wish to renew the argument. Instead she said, “It’s the way she acts about you. There’s a sort of possessive righteousness about her, as if you’d been hers and I snatched you away.”
“Great God!” he shouted. “You women act as if a man were a thing to be handed around on a platter. Phyllis couldn’t possess me any more than you do. I loved you and asked you to marry me. Isn’t that enough?”
Nancy’s eyes filled. She tried to hide her emotion by eating, but she could not. As she sipped coffee, she looked at him over the cup and asked, “Do you love me, Gil?”
“I wouldn’t live in a house with a woman I didn’t love. I should think my past history would make that apparent.”
“But I’ve been so nasty. A vipress.”
“A man’s unfortunate to love a vipress, but what can he do about it?”
“Come here and kiss me.”
After the kiss he went back to his place and ate heartily. They seemed a pleasantly domestic couple again. Tremulously she asked her final question: “Did you tell Phyllis that you love me?”
He nodded. “I told her that I’d made up my mind not to see any more of her.”
When they had finished eating, Nancy put the remaining food back into the icebox and washed the few dishes. Although she had been brought up in a house tended by servants, her grandmother had instilled in her a horror of sloppiness. She’d have been ashamed if the servants found the kitchen dirty when they came in the morning.
Her apartment had been designed originally as two penthouses, so that her bedroom and bath were at the opposite end from Gil’s. This arrangement had amused them in the early days of their marriage, and they had enjoyed the adventure of traveling the length of the apartment when they visited each other at night.
When Nancy finished in the kitchen she went into Gil’s quarters. He shouted from the bathroom that she should go to bed, and that he would come in and say good night. She had only her nightgown under the negligee and it took her but a couple of seconds to prepare for bed. She fell asleep almost immediately. The short nap had restored but a portion of the energy she had exhausted during the quarrel.
Gil had the actor’s habit of sleeping late. But when, at one o’clock the next afternoon, he had not yet rung for his breakfast, Nancy opened the door of his bedroom softly. She found his body on the floor close to the bed. He had apparently tried to summon help before he died. Blood and dried vomit stained his pajamas and the light tan carpet. His protruding eyes were like glazed porcelain balls.
Nancy was shaken but remarkably self-possessed. The maids were amazed by her ability to withstand shock. It was she who telephoned for the doctor who had an office on the first floor of the apartment house.
There was no doubt that Gil had been poisoned. The doctor asked Nancy what he had eaten the night before, and she told him about the coffee, showed him the remnants of chicken, the half-used loaf, and what remained of the applesauce in a white china bowl. And there were four tomatoes in the cooler instead of the half-dozen which the cook had put there the day before.
Nancy told the doctor and, later, the detectives that she had eaten the same food, drunk coffee brewed in the same pot. She remembered that when she had asked Gil if he wanted a drink, he had answered that he had had enough. According to his own story, he had spent part of the evening on Seventy-ninth Street, which led her to think that he had been with her cousin, Phyllis Miller.
Analysis showed that the poison which had killed Gilbert Jones (and Mike Jordan made a special point of withholding its name) worked slowly. If its presence is known in time and an antidote administered, the victim can be saved. But no one had heard Gil’s cries. Nancy had slept soundly at her end of the apartment.
By the time Gil’s body was examined he had been dead for a few hours, but medical authorities could not say whether he had died at five in the morning or at seven-thirty. And the time element was further complicated by the fact that the poison might have killed him in six hours or nine. He had been a healthy man with a rugged heart. Experts could not name precisely the hour at which he had been given the poison, whether at ten o’clock at night or at one the next morning. And time was the determining factor.
From nine o’clock the night before, or a few minutes after, until approximately ten-forty, he had been with Phyllis. In this detail the girls’ stories agreed. If he had left Phyllis around ten-forty, it was reasonable to believe Nancy’s statement that the clock had been striking eleven when he opened the front door. He had sat up with her talking and eating, until somewhere around twelve-thirty.
There was a possibility, of course, that he had stopped on his way home at a bar or restaurant. Detectives questioned bartenders and waiters in the Third and Lexington Avenue places between Sixty-fifth and Seventy-ninth Street, but none of them remembered having served him. And if he had b
een accidentally poisoned in any of these places, there would certainly have been other victims.
There was one other possibility, suicide. This was not likely. He was not of a morbid nature, and since he had been married to Nancy he had no financial problems. His play had failed, but if actors committed suicide after every flop, there’d be none left to keep the theater going. And the day before he had been interviewed about a good part by an important manager. There was no reason for Gilbert Jones to have been suicidally unhappy. Two women had loved him, but that was more or less what he expected. In his way he had probably cared for both, which is to say that he loved neither, since he had room in his heart only for love of himself.
It must have been one of the women. They had both played emotional scenes with him, had both given him drinks. Their stories were in direct conflict. Each said that he had promised her to give up the other, and had gone so far as to play a farewell scene with the unhappy one. Although neither of them accused the other, each implied that the other was guilty. No poison was discovered in either apartment. But when a murderer washes the dishes, she might easily get rid of deadlier evidence. If there had been poison left in either apartment, the guilty woman could easily get rid of it. Modern plumbing provides a quick and easy way to dispose of such evidence. . . .
• • •
While Mike was summing up the points on both sides and adding to my suspense, the telephone rang. We were silent for a moment. All the color had left Mike’s face. Into the phone he said, “This is Jordan. . . . All right; I’ll hold on.”
Although I was crazy to hear the conversation, I had been brought up to believe that there is no sin more despicable than eavesdropping. Virtuously I walked on tiptoe toward the patio.
“You heard the rest, you might as well hear this,” Mike said, and I flew into the living-room.