She didn’t know how to finish it this time, herself. I tried to help her. “Like he was a regular wild animal, hey?”
“Yes, that’s it. You do understand. A beast, a beast … I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But he was a terrible, awful, fiendish, immoral man, may his soul rest in peace.”
“Well, you’ve certainly helped me get an insight into his character, Mrs. Smellow. I was, of course, hoping you might be able to give me a lead to something I’ve been unable to dig up as yet. That is, an indication of who might have hated him enough to kill him …” I let it trail off. So far, Mrs. Smellow was the only person who appeared to fit the description.
But I shrugged that wild idea off and continued, “A motive for the murder, or—”
“Sex.”
“Hmm?”
“Sex, something to do with sex, that’s the motive. You’ll find out. Mr. Halstead was obsessed, sexually obsessed. He was enmeshed, mired, in the carnal life, a slave to Satan. That’s why he died.”
“I see what you mean. I guess. I was thinking of something more specific, like revenge from some egg he ruined in a business deal, or a guy who hated him because Halstead had exposed his evil machinations—”
She interrupted me again, which was probably just as well since I was on the verge of talking like Mrs. Smellow. But I was glad she’d interrupted me for another reason. By the time she finished, anyhow.
“There was bound to be violence, the way they all carried on. Mr. Halstead and his evil friends and those terrible parties. Sex and nakedness, evil, evil. All of them sinning, caught up in the grasp of Satan, sinning and naked. Naked, naked, naked!”
I leaned back away from her a little.
The juice was really pouring into her, and for a moment I thought she was going to light up like a Go signal. “You know about the party, then? Did you say those parties?”
“Yes, of course I know about them.” She paused, and let her eyes glitter at me, then said slowly, “And you do, too, don’t you?”
“Well, I sort of stumbled into one. But I assumed maybe it was just, well, one of those things. A sudden kind of casual, ah, flirtation with Satan.”
“Nothing casual about it. It was like a—a ritual. A habit. They did it all the time.”
“They didn’t.”
“They did. It was a regular club, a sex club. Every two weeks they went to somebody’s house and … you know.”
I did know. In fact her rather vehement comment didn’t exactly come at me like a bolt from the blue, considering what had met my eyes and ears when the case had barely begun. Still, it was a bit of a shock to hear the thought so bluntly expressed.
I said, “Wait a moment, Mrs. Smellow. That’s quite an accusation. It may well be true, but it isn’t the sort of thing we should guess about.”
“I’m not guessing. I’ve seen them. More than once.”
“Oh?”
Maybe she’d got a bit carried away, because she rolled her orbs around for a few seconds, then said, “Purely by accident. By accident. There’s one place on a hill behind Mr. Halstead’s home where you can look down and see part of the pool. And garden. I just happened to drive there one night. By acci—anyway, I saw.”
“Uh-huh. I guess it didn’t look like, well, just a pool party.”
“I guess it didn’t. Besides, I told Mr. Halstead about it when I saw him again, I warned him. You can bet I did. And he laughed.” She let her tongue roam around inside her mouth, as though probing live nerve ends. “He just laughed. He admitted it, came right out and told me about it. He had the meanness to say he was making up for years of—”
She broke it off and chewed on her lips for a few moments. “You don’t have to wonder if I’m guessing. I’m not. I know. They had a regular club. Haven’t you heard about that sort of thing?”
“Well, yes, I have. But I just never got this close to the fact of the matter before.”
“It’s the times. It’s nigh onto Armageddon. Just look around you, see, read, listen. Degeneracy, depravity, robbery, thieving, murder. It’s all sex.”
“Well, Mrs. Smellow, sex has been around quite a while—”
“Yes, it has,” she said, as if wishing it hadn’t.
“—even the little old atoms swinging around the nucleus; and the birds and bees—”
She had the floor, and I guess she intended to keep it. “The television,” she said. “You can see it just watching the television. Naked women taking showers right out in the open.”
“Oh, I don’t think they’re really naked. I think they wear pink overalls or something. Damn clever. You can’t really tell—”
“Naked. Toothpaste, hair oil, automobiles, razor blades, toilet paper—”
“Oh, come on, not—”
“—soap, white tornadoes, wild men on horses, big lunging horses, deodorants, depilatories, debauches, cigarettes, pipe tobacco, toothpaste, hair oil—”
She was starting over again. So I tried to turn my mind off a bit, reached for a cigarette and flipped my lighter.
“Don’t do that!” she cried.
“Huh?”
“Don’t light a cigarette. You can’t smoke in here. I don’t allow smoking in here.”
“Oh, sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking. I won’t do it again.” I put my cigarette back in the pack and said, “So, Mr. and Mrs. Halstead and a number of their friends had a club. That does explain quite a lot of things. Except who killed him. And maybe even why somebody killed him.”
“Why? I’ve been telling you.”
“I know, but it’s barely possible—”
“There’ll be more, hundreds, thousands. It was marked in the skies when the papers first wrote it up about wife-swapping. You read it; everybody read it. Nothing had ever been heard like it on the earth, not in trillions of years. I read it; I read all the papers on those days. And books. I know, I’ve kept my eye on it all. And I pray; I pray for the sinners.” She paused and gasped a little and clasped her bony hands. “It’s there, all there, the story of the world going to hell in the clutches of Satan.” She unclasped her hands and waved one of them.
She was waving at something in the corner of the room. I followed her wave and spotted a three-shelf bookcase, seven or eight feet wide, against the wall. Probably a hundred hardbound books and several paperbacks there, not a bad little library.
“Mind if I take a look?” I asked. Hell, I had to do something; couldn’t smoke.
“Do,” she said. “Do.”
So I did. I got up and walked to the bookcase, ran an eye over the titles. She had a number of recent bestsellers, volumes of the excellent Readers’ Digest Condensed Books, even some paperback mystery novels with horribly stimulating art leering from their covers.
Then I noticed one segment of a shelf on which were a number of books, both hardbound and paperback, with titles more than a little reminiscent of what Mrs. Smellow had—either so lovingly or so hatingly, I couldn’t be absolutely sure—been describing.
As I ran a finger over their spines Mrs. Smellow said, “That’s it, they’re the ones, that’s it.”
And she didn’t even pause, just went on, “It’s all around us, all around; it’s in the air, choking, killing the land, the land and the people, killing,” and her voice seemed to rise and fall, rise and fall, as if she were beginning to croon a song she had crooned before. Maybe not to men, or even to women, maybe not to anybody but herself, but a song she had crooned before.
And as she crooned softly behind me, I looked at the books on the shelf.
The titles alone were something of an education: The Erotic Revolution by Lawrence Lipton; Sexual Rebellion in the Sixties by W. D. Sprague, Ph.D: Swap Clubs and The Swinging Set by William and Jerrye Breedlove; The Velvet Underground by Michael Leigh. Between a very large hardcover book, The Kama Kala, and the not quite as large Eros and Evil by Masters, was a paperback, Sex in America edited by Grunwald. Then the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, Koka Shastra, and Ananga Ranga. Anoth
er paperback, Lord Denning’s Report—The Christine Keeler and John Profumo Affair, and at least a dozen more.
“Hair oil and razor blades,” crooned Mrs. Smellow.
I picked one of the books from the shelf, a thick volume bound in red buckram; picked it perhaps because it looked well-thumbed and worn, or perhaps because the author was an M.D. named Scott—Richard, Not Sheldon. Its title was The Sexual Sixties: Extrapolation of the Prognosis, a forbidding thing if ever I saw one.
It opened automatically to page 47 as I held it in my hands.
Several lines, I noted, had been underscored in lead pencil. I glanced at a few. “… in the Sexy Sixties, the decade of the Sexual Revolution, the old and long-cherished mores became the citadel under attack and soon the ramparts were crumbling. The fixed folkways were becoming the flexible …” I skipped a few lines. “… there was a ferment in the land, seething in the endocrines, the gonads, and ovaries of the twanging peoples.”
The guy wrote like a nut, I thought. But I was interested, so I pursued the subject for a few more lines. “Concurrent with this—preceding it, of course, in the beginning—were innumerable sensory stimuli nearly as prevalent in the atmosphere as oxygen: advertisements in newspapers, magazines, on radio and especially on television, all either overtly or covertly Pavloved to produce sexual salivation. Products first named, and later designed, produced, and publicized to produce the maximum of erection in the male and hotsy-totsy tumescence in the female. Hair cremes for men were alleged to be more exciting …”
“Toothpaste!” cried Mrs. Smellow. She wasn’t really crooning so much by this time as giving out with something rather like a battle cry. “Huge lunging horses!” she yelled.
I read on, choosing more of the underlined passages. “… lotions and salves and stickums and pretties with such suggestive names as: Seduction … Surrender … Take Me … Do It … Rape … Makeout … Orgy … Aphrodisia …”
“Stallions!” bellowed Mrs Smellow. “Anvils! Horseshoes! Soap and soup and cigarettes—”
“In this atmosphere, a sizable proportion of still zesty marrieds heeded the siren song of Madison Avenue, the coo of a mammary Mammon, the panting of Big Business, and, with the urgent, repeated and again-and-again-repeated ‘Get with it … Swing!… Join the horny generation … Do it now!-now!-now!’ reverberating in their ears, mumbled. ‘Why not?’”
“Naked! Naked horses!”
She really had a thing about horses, she did.
But I wanted to see what the hell this guy was working up to, if anything, so I perused the page a bit more.
“A predictable consequence was the burgeoning of tribal groups which gathered privately for orgiastic conniptions tending toward libidinal unshackling eventuating in casual and part-time polyandry and polygamy, i.e., community fornication.”
I shook my head. Yep, a true and legitimate nut. Worse, he wasn’t clear. You couldn’t tell if he was for it or against it. Probably had to publish the stinking book himself. I thumbed to the front of the book. Sure enough. “The Doctor Scott Medical Press.” Well, you can fool some of the people some of the time, and all of the people—no, that wasn’t it.
“All over the place! Everywhere. In your eyes, ears, noses—”
I mentally turned her off again. She was worse than Dr. Scott. Who, I noted, had produced this prize: “… subconscious banners emblazoned right and left with libidinous slogans, the dexter ‘Give Me A Libertine Or Give Me Death!’ and the sinister ‘Better Copulate Than Never.’ It began with whispers, with small reports in the tabloids of what was called with a titter, wife-swapping, then rumors of special groups, clubs, sex clubs, and swap clubs, a new breed of emancipated dizzies …”
“Everywhere, all over the place, here—there—”
I couldn’t take much more of this without flipping. So I flipped clear to the back pages of the book.
“Thus, as one result of this revulsion against asceticism and denial, the pendulum had swung perhaps too far to the opposite extreme, to unbridled hedonism and voluptuous non-denial. No longer heeding the whisperings of virtue and admonishments of the chaste, they listened—and danced—to the song the senses sang …”
I closed the book.
Mrs. Agatha Smellow fell silent.
I went over and sat down in the rough brown chair again.
“You see, Mr. Scott?” she said.
“I see,” I sighed. “Well, you’ve—helped a great deal, Mrs. Smellow.”
“Have I? I hope so. Have I?”
“Yes, you have. So I’d better be on my way—”
“Oh, don’t go.”
“But I must—”
“I so seldom get to talk to—I mean, discuss important things. I … will you stay a little while longer?”
I peeked at my watch. “O.K., just a little.”
“I know you must drink.” She smiled, sort of. “I smelled it on your breath.”
She had a great smeller. She could smell all kinds of things. But I said, “Yeah, I had a belt earlier.”
“Once in a while I have a little sip, myself. Because it’s so lonely.” She didn’t hit it hard, didn’t dwell on it. In fact she went right on, saying. “And I’m so disturbed I think I’d like one right now.” But, still, a coolness rippled up my spine.
“It’s so lonely,” she’d said, very casually, matter-of-fact. It was, I guess. Yes, I guess it was lonely for Mrs. Smellow.
“I know how to mix a martini,” she said.
“You do, huh?” I said, without much enthusiasm.
“Would that be all right, Mr. Scott?”
“Sure. Fine, Mrs. Smellow.”
“Oh, don’t call me Mrs. Smellow. Call me Aggie. What’s your first name? Sheldon?”
“Shell, Just Shell.”
“You call me Aggie, and I’ll call you Shell. All right? If we’re going to have a sip of martini, it seems—”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, Aggie.”
“It’s almost like a party—” Apparently she realized the possible connotation of that comment, and gasped. “Oh, I didn’t mean—”
“I know.” I grinned stiffly. “Well, up and at ’em; let’s stir those jazzy martinis. Uh, not too much, of course.” I paused. “Would you like for me to fix them?”
“No, no. I have a prescription.”
As she got up and reeled across the room, I raised my eyes toward Heaven and groaned a little. Well, I could get one gagger down, I supposed. Had to get on my horse—into my Cad, that is—and zip to the Hamilton Building pretty quick. Two o’clock appointment, and I was cutting it thin already. Maybe you’re not supposed to drink and run, but that’s what I was going to do.
She doddered back with the drinks. We sat, and conversed delicately a bit more, and a time or two we clinked glasses.
This one was, sure enough, quite a horrendous babe.
But, oddly, there came a point when, for some reason undiscovered, Aggie for a moment looked different. Not much, but some. It wasn’t the martini—and, strange to relate, it was a splendid martini. Apparently a wise doctor had written the prescription. No, it was simply that maybe for a second or two her expression was not that of one chewing cavities, but quite relaxed, almost pleasant.
She was still a horrendous babe. But I could almost imagine what once she’d been, or could have been. The eyes weren’t really bad. It was just that very little life flickered in them; there seemed not fire but ashes there, and deep frown lines were heavily creased between them. Those cuckoo curly locks could have looked halfway presentable if fixed or put up or coiffed properly, whatever babes do to their hair. And it could have been a quite presentable mouth if not so pinched, not so twisted and almost torn with bitterness. Her smile was very stiff, too, as if she’d forgotten how to smile.
Well, maybe she had. Maybe life had kicked her in the teeth too many times. Of course, maybe she’d stuck out her chops and asked for it. Who knows? How would I know? I know from nothing.
Neither did Aggie. She�
��d been telling me if it weren’t for sex, carnality, lecherousness, and all that, the world wouldn’t be sliding downhill to Satan. And Mr. Halstead would still be alive. And everything would be as lovely as love. Once in a while she said things like that.
“Even the birds would sing more sweetly,” she said. I believe she was half plastered on that one martini.
“Well, now, Aggie,” I said, “those birds sing a lot in spring, you know. Don’t forget that. Sing like crazy in the mati—nesting season. Can’t be all bad. Got to have nests. Little beggars would fall out of the trees.”
There had been so much sexy talk—rather, talk of sex—that the subject was naturally in the forefront of my mind. Which was not, with me, a circumstance as rare as elephant feathers. Consequently, it could not be doubted that my thoughts on the subject were somewhat different from Aggie’s thoughts on the subject.
Thus, the dialogue went:
“Sex.”
“Yep.”
“Sex. That’s what.”
“That’s what, all right. You hit it that time. Couldn’t have said it better myself.”
“Sex …” she repeated, lingering over the word as one might linger over the olive in one’s first martini. As though savoring it, trying to decide whether she really liked it or not.
But, that’s the way it often is with olives. Especially your first few. They’re like chocolate bonbons.
Some people take to them right off the bat, go through bottle after bottle saying “Yum-yum” all the time. Others just put up with them, maybe because they come with the martinis. And some people never do learn to like them.
I didn’t like the way my thoughts were going.
Here we were talking about sex, and I was mentally maundering about olives. I knew I’d hate it if every time I looked at an olive I thought about sex. It could even work the other way—every time I looked at sex I’d think of an olive. Then where would I be? I might have to give up martinis.
It was time to go, sure enough. Even my watch told me it was time to go. In fact, I was late.
Aggie went with me to the door. After a parting comment or two she said, “I’ve enjoyed our talk, Shell. I hope you can come back sometime. And bring your wife next time.”
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