A Key to Death

by Frances

  “Real!” Wyatt said. “The—the polo player!”

  It had not been necessary for Fitch to point out that Naomi would not, hereafter, need to earn a living. The salary (and percentage) which had so often caused Strothers’ hand to shake would need to be no drop in the Fitch bucket. They would, Fitch had said, see how it was. He had looked at Naomi fondly. “Want to have my girl around,” he said. “Need her to look after me.”

  “Yah!” Sam Wyatt said at this point in his narrative. “The overgrown prep-school boy!”

  “Of course,” Pam said, gently, “you can see, Sam. Looked at one way, it’s rather sweet.”

  Wyatt repeated this characterization as an expletive. Pam said, quickly, that she was sorry.

  Of course, they had argued. They had argued and waved their hands. They had pointed out the loss to everyone—the loss of jobs to actors, of money to investors, of profits to producers and royalties to authors. Strothers had gone further—he had talked of thousands, living drab lives, who had found, and might still find, bright escape in Around the Corner. They could not, selfishly, rob the world of laughter; they could not draw blackout curtains over this window on illusion; they could not—

  “Quite a speech Wes made,” Wyatt said, for the moment critical and detached. “Didn’t know he had it in him. Damned near had me in tears. He got all through and this polo player says, ‘Of course we’re sorry about that, Wes. But I don’t see what we can do.’”

  Wesley Strothers had suggested several things, postponement of marriage was chief among them. Postponement of a year—what was a year? Or, at the least, for six months. Or—a vacation first, then six months, then—?

  “Sorry,” Fitch said. “We’ve got it planned.”

  And then Fitch had made his suggestion. Couldn’t they just get themselves “another girl”?

  “That’s what Nay’s marrying,” Wyatt said, and now his voice was merely hopeless. “Nay’s just a girl. Girl he happens to have fallen for. Wouldn’t you think she’d see?”

  It appeared that she did not, or did not fully. She had, to be sure, widened her eyes somewhat at this suggestion from her beloved, and looked across the table at Strothers with the smallest of grimaces. But she had remained tender toward Fitch, in spite of the affront—and the palpable ignorance. He was, her smiling lips said, just a great big boy; a great big lovable boy. Wyatt put his head briefly in his hands.

  They had tried to explain that, when an actress has become a character, as Naomi Shaw had become the Lisa of Around the Corner, all illusion hangs on a single, silken thread. At the beginning it had not been so, of course. “The play’s all right,” Wyatt said. “It’s a nice little play. I know that, whatever I say.” At the beginning, they might, with luck, have found themselves another girl; opened with another girl. The results might not have been, as they had been with Naomi Shaw, phenomenal. But they might have been very pleasant. Somebody else might have become Lisa; not the same Lisa, but one of other charms. Pudgy might not have been so well remembered, but other qualities might have been found. Naomi Shaw had not been the only pretty young actress, with something a little fey in her playing—at the start she had not been.

  “It’s different with big shows,” Wyatt said to them, digressing into shop talk—talk still a little new to him, and therefore, the more to be prized. “Strong action show. Or a musical. Take The King and I and Gertrude Lawrence dies and that breaks everybody’s heart. And the show isn’t the same, God knows, but you can keep it running.”

  But it was not that way with Around the Corner. You took Naomi Shaw out of it now, and the pretty iridescent little thing went “pouff!” “Wouldn’t even leave a damp spot,” Wyatt said, and lifted his empty glass and looked gloomily at the circle of moisture it had left on the table.

  Failing with Fitch, they had turned to Naomi herself. “She’s in the profession.” Wyatt said. “She could understand what we were talking about.”

  Also, it was her career they were talking about. She had come a long way from Independence Avenue, in Kansas City, Missouri, from elocution lessons at Northeast High. There was every possibility that she might go further; even much further. Strothers had told her that, told all of it to her several times, urged her to think about what she was throwing away.

  “To hear him, you’d have thought she was going to be Helen Hayes,” Wyatt said. “Bernhardt, maybe. Duse. I think she’s pretty good, but if Strothers meant half of it, he thinks she could be pretty great. He talked and talked and she said, ‘I’m sorry, Wes. I’ve thought about all that. Don’t think I haven’t.’ And then she looked at this damned polo player and—” Wyatt spread his hands. He snapped his fingers on both hands, simultaneously.

  “She’s in love,” Pam North said, and Wyatt looked at her without belief and, in the voice of the doomed, called on the Deity.

  “She’s out of her mind,” he said, then.

  “Of course,” Jerry said, “I don’t know Miss Shaw. But Fitch has got a lot of money.”

  Pam looked at him in disappointment. And Wyatt shook his head. He said he wished it were that simple. He said he didn’t think it was.

  “At bottom she’s a nice kid,” he said. “Oh, she’s been around. Been married before to some guy—can’t think of his name. That blew up. Knows how to act. Well enough, anyway. Knows how to call everybody ‘darling.’ All the same, she’s just a kid from the middle west. Where she picked up this special whatever-it-is she’s got—” He ended that with a shrug. “What I’m getting at, I’m pretty sure she’s not just working a gold mine.”

  “All right,” Jerry said. “But it’s a nice mine.” Pam, nevertheless, shook her head at him, still disapproving. She said that he always thought the worst of people, and that she wished he wouldn’t.

  “All is love,” Jerry said; and then, to Wyatt, “You got nowhere, then?”

  They had got nowhere. They had kept at it until well along in the afternoon, and Naomi and Fitch had been patient with them. “Just kept on listening and being sorry, Fitch did,” Wyatt told them. Late in the afternoon, they had been, unexpectedly, reinforced. Jasper Tootle had come in for a drink and, with him, G. K. Snaith. He appeared to assume the last name would have significance for the Norths. He found it did not.

  “Her agent,” he explained. “Flesh peddler. Artists’ representative. Little, dried-up geezer—and he and Tootle make a hell of a funny pair, incidentally. First either of them had heard about this.”

  Tootle and G. K. Snaith had paused by the table; had begun conventional congratulations before they were stopped, a little peremptorily, by Wesley Strothers—stopped with the news.

  “You’re nuts,” Snaith had told his client, and Tootle had said, “Now, children. We’ll have to get this straightened out.” The two agents had pulled up chairs, and everything already said had been said again, and still again. It had been after four when Fitch had stood, and pulled Naomi up beside him, and said, with a pleasant—or, as Wyatt called it, “that damned half-witted”—smile that he was sure they all understood one another. They did, by then. Strothers had gone one way, presumably to see that the closing notice was posted, in accordance with his contractual obligations. Snaith and Tootle had gone another, communing over lost percentages.

  “Jasper’s been getting a couple of hundred a week out of me, or damned near it,” Wyatt said. “God knows what Snaith’s been getting from Nay, with television appearances and all.”

  Wyatt had wandered, lonely and forlorn, thinking of six per cent of the gross (less ten), had thought of Jerry North and had applied for hand holding.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it looks like I’ll have to go back to work.”

  He had thought Jerry would like to know that, and now Jerry said that he did, indeed.

  “So let’s go some place and—” Wyatt began, and stopped, and said, in a lower tone, “Well, well,” and with a movement of his head, indicated a couple who were walking between tables, led by a waiter captain, toward a banquette.

>   The cocktail lounge was large and pleasant, cheerful and, for a cocktail lounge, well lighted. It was an amenity of a hotel on lower Fifth Avenue; it was, certainly, the reverse of surreptitious. And yet it was also, Pam North thought, one of the last places in which she would have expected to see Naomi Shaw—and, just possibly, one of the last places in which Naomi Shaw would expect to be seen.

  But Pam saw her—the three of them saw her. The man with her was squarely built, almost stocky, not tall. He was square of shoulder and, from the rear, somewhat square of head. He walked behind the slight and lovely girl methodically, with resolution. The waiter captain pulled a table out and Naomi slid behind it, quickly and with grace. The man followed her and sat firmly, and at once turned toward her and began to talk. She looked down at the table as she listened.

  The man’s face was square—all of the man was square. His face was deeply tanned—so deeply tanned that its darkness was apparent even across the room, even in the soft lights of the room.

  Jerry North looked at Wyatt and raised his eyebrows, and Sam Wyatt shook his head. “Never saw him before,” Wyatt said. “Wonder what she did with the polo player?” He brightened. “Say!” he said. “You don’t suppose—” But he dimmed in midsentence. “Not a prayer,” he said. “Probably a cousin from Kansas. Getting a fill-in on romance.”

  But he did not seem to be, Pam North thought. It was he who talked and the girl who listened. She listened with little change of expression, and the expression unchanged was serious.

  “I’ve got a feeling—” Pam began and Jerry, speaking quickly, said, “Yes, dear.”

  Pam was undeterred.

  “—that I’ve seen him before,” she said. “Recently. Just the—oh!” They waited. “Last night,” Pam said. “This morning, really. At Mr. Fitch’s party. He was—” She paused. “I remember now,” she said. “Mr. Fitch made his announcement and that man”—she indicated with a movement of her head—“that man turned around and walked out.” She nodded, confirming her own memory. “Stalked,” she said. “If I ever saw a man stalk.”

  They all looked at the stocky man and Naomi Shaw. The two remained intent.

  “I could have stalked myself,” Wyatt said, abandoning the two across the room. “Are you going to have dinner with me?”

  It appeared they were. They rode uptown to the Plaza and Wyatt—rather unexpectedly, to Pam—was known there. Of course, with six per cent of such a pleasant weekly gross, one might become known anywhere. All the same—the Plaza and Sam Wyatt. However—

  They were at coffee when Sam Wyatt said, after snapping his fingers, “This damned thing follows us around,” and indicated a couple just coming into the room, being led toward a side table. Bradley Fitch was starting dinner late with his cousin Alicia Nelson.

  That, Pam said, explained everything. When people were about to get married, there were always family things, cousins and the like. Naomi Shaw with hers, and now Fitch with his. It was—

  She stopped, since she was not being listened to. Jerry was looking at Sam Wyatt, and Wyatt was looking across the room at Fitch. He was staring at Fitch, and seemed to have forgotten the presence of the Norths; his long face was set, and his eyes were narrowed.

  “I wish to God,” Sam Wyatt said, and spoke in a low tone, without inflection, “I wish to God she’d put poison in his soup.”

  Of course, Pam North thought, he doesn’t mean it. He just looks as if he does.

  3

  Saturday, 10:45 A.M. to 6:45 P.M.

  Mrs. Hemmins said, “Here, Toby. Here, Toby,” and opened another door. She called with no great optimism, and opened the door with little hope. Once the big black long-hair got beyond the sitting room door, there was no telling where he would get to. Upstairs, likely as not. How was he to know that this wasn’t an ordinary summer? Cats expect things to go on as they have gone on in the past, and certain matters cannot be made clear to them. Mrs. Hemmins had explained the whole situation to Toby a number of times, not really expecting him to understand—although he certainly looked as if he were understanding—but getting it out of her own system, in a manner of speaking. About changes in routine she felt a good deal as Toby did, and was at the further disadvantage of knowing how she felt, which presumably Toby did not.

  If he was in the big kitchen, where he was not supposed to be, he was saying nothing about it. “Here, Toby,” Mrs. Hemmins said. “Nice Toby. Come here, boy.” Nothing came. Mrs. Hemmins sighed and continued to look under things.

  You could not reasonably blame Toby. This was the first June he could remember (Mrs. Hemmins supposed) when the two of them had not had the run of the apartment, if they wanted it. Toby usually did; Mrs. Hemmins was somewhat past the age for running. She, except for going out and coming in, and the weekly light cleaning which is all a place needs when it is shut up, stayed for the most part in her own sitting room, or bedroom, and did such cooking as she needed to do in the kitchenette. Where Toby went, in his somewhat formalized search for (she presumed) mice, was Toby’s concern, so long as he did not get out of the apartment entirely, and did show up for meals. The chairs wore dust covers, so he could sleep where he chose—leaving long, silky hair to mark the places of his choice. If the mister decided to spend a day or two in town, there was ample warning. Usually he didn’t, from late in May until October. And then he was in and out only a little more frequently, before he went to Florida, or Europe, or wherever he thought was a good place to go. All the staff except Mrs. Hemmins went back to the country house.

  Why he had kept the place at all since the old lady died was more than Mrs. Hemmins could figure out. (She looked behind the range, where there was just room for Toby, but where Toby was not.) Sixteen rooms on two floors was ridiculous—why, it was bigger than any house ought to be, and it was only an apartment. (There is an essential absurdity in an apartment’s being bigger than a house.) Even when the old lady was alive, and before that when they were both alive, it had been too big for any real use, and they’d never used more than half of it—the family and the help. It was a white elephant now. No mistake about that.

  But, until this happened, Mrs. Hemmins had had no reason to complain, and so had complained only moderately. She had a roof over her head, and a place to have friends into. She had wages; she had an air-conditioning unit in her bedroom and another in the sitting room. All she really had to do was be there. She was, in a sense, a light left burning, an almost symbolic occupancy. She was bothered by no one.

  And now he’d met this girl. This actress. Pretty enough, if you liked them skinny, and it seemed to Mrs. Hemmins—from what she read in the newspapers, saw pictured in the magazines—that nowadays men did. Nothing to do with her, in any case. But it did keep him in town, since the girl was in this play. (Mrs. Hemmins had seen the play; she, for one, didn’t see why everybody made such a fuss about it.) Even on Saturdays, and she didn’t suppose he’d been in New York on a Saturday more than once or twice in his life, until this came up.

  Apparently, Toby was not in the kitchen, or if in the kitchen had found a new hiding place. She wouldn’t put it past him. Well, if he were in the kitchen he’d eventually be yelling to get out. The only thing that mattered was that he hadn’t gone upstairs. Not that that mattered too much. It was certainly time Mr. Fitch waked up, if he was going to. Out till all hours, of course, but here it was almost eleven.

  Mrs. Hemmins went to the foot of the service stairs which led to the second floor of Bradley Fitch’s duplex on Park Avenue, and called up them. “Toby,” she called. “Come down here, Toby.” Nothing came down there.

  But then she heard, distantly, the upstairs doorbell and, waiting, heard footsteps. There was enough interval between the two to lead Mrs. Hemmins to the assumption that the doorbell had waked him up. And that meant that, before long, he would ring to have her bring breakfast up. (Not that there wasn’t a perfectly good serving pantry up there, and all anybody would need to make breakfast for himself. But, when you had as much money as
he had, she supposed you’d never think of that. Unless somebody stayed the night with you and got the breakfast for you.)

  But, as she grumbled her way to the servants’ sitting room, where the bell indicator was, Mrs. Hemmins was without animus toward Bradley Fitch. Employer or not, rich young man or not, nuisance or not, you couldn’t help liking Mr. Bradley. Nobody could, so far as she’d ever noticed.…

  The bell had awakened Bradley Fitch, in his large, and air-conditioned, bedroom on the second floor. Fitch groaned. Then he opened his eyes. Sitting on him, looking at him fixedly, was that Toby. Awake, Fitch discovered Toby was a heavy cat. He had supposed he was mostly fur. Fitch closed his eyes and groaned again, and opened them, and there was Toby.

  Fitch was a horse and dog man. He had no fixed objection to cats, who were all right in their place. Their place was not on the abdomen of a human with a hangover. “Scat,” Fitch said, and the effort amplified his headache. The word did not greatly interest Toby, since he considered it merely a word of greeting. (“Cat” was, of course, one of the several words Toby knew well. The slight hiss which this time preceded it could be ignored, and was.) The doorbell rang again.

  “Oh, God,” Fitch said, and started to get up. This Toby could not ignore. He protested, in a word, and got up himself. He was both quicker and more graceful than the man at getting up. “Who the hell?” Fitch said, dully, and found a robe, and went from his air-conditioned bedroom into an air-conditioned room, pleasantly furnished, which was called a “study” for want of a more appropriate word. The doorbell rang once more as, having crossed the study, Fitch went into the small foyer. Fitch opened the door. He blinked. He said, “Hello, cousin.”

  “Hope I’m not too early,” his visitor said. “You said around eleven. It’s a little after that.”