The door was opened by a maid with a face like half a walnut. You may think it’s impossible for a face to look like half a walnut, and I suppose it is, if you want to be literal, but half a walnut is, nevertheless, all I can think of as a comparison when I think of the face of this maid. She wasn’t young, and she probably wasn’t old. She was, as they say, an indeterminate age. Her eyes smiled, but not her lips, and she nodded her head three times as if she had checked me swiftly on three salient points and was satisfied on every one. This gave me confidence.
“I’m Percy Hand,” I said. “I have an appointment with Miss Salem.”
“This way,” she said. Following her out of a vestibule, I waded through a couple acres of thick wood pile in crossing two wide rooms, and then I crossed, in a third room, another acre of black and white tile that made me feel, by contrast, as if I were taking steps a yard high, and finally I got out onto a terrace in the sunlight, and Faith Salem got up off her stomach and faced me. She had been lying on a soft pad covered with bright yellow material that might have been silk or nylon or something, and she was wearing in a couple of places a very little bit of more material that was just as shining and soft and might have been the same kind, except that it was white instead of yellow. Sunbathing was what she was doing, and I was glad. Her skin was firm and golden brown, and it gave the impression of consistency all over, and I was willing to bet that the little bit of white in a couple of places was only a concession to present company. Nine times out of ten, when someone tries to describe a woman who is fairly tall and has a slim and pliant and beautiful body, he will say that she is willowy, and that’s what I say. I say that Faith Salem was willowy. I also say that her hair was almost the identical color of the rest of her, and this seemed somehow too perfect to have been accomplished deliberately by design, but it may have been. You had to look at her face for a long time before you became aware that she was certainly a number of years older than you’d thought at first she was.
“Mr. Hand has arrived, Miss Faith,” the maid said.
“Thank you. Maria,” Faith Salem said.
I stepped twice, and she stepped twice, and we met and shook hands. Her grip was firm. I liked the way her fingers took hold of my fingers and held them and were in no hurry to drop them.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Hand,” she said. “You must excuse me for receiving you this way, but the sun is on this terrace for only a short while each afternoon, and I didn’t want to miss any of it.”
“I’d have been sorry to have missed it myself,” I said.
She smiled gravely, taking my meaning, and then released my fingers and walked over to a yellow chaise lounge on which a white hip-length coat had been left lying. She put on the coat and moved to a wrought iron and glass table where there was a single tall tumbler with alternating red and yellow stripes. The tumbler was empty. Holding it against the light, she stared through it wistfully as if she were regretting its emptiness, and I watched her do this with pleasure and no regrets whatever. There is a kind of legerdemain about a short coat over something shorter. It creates the illusion, even when you have evidence to the contrary, that it’s all there is, there isn’t any more.
“I like you, Mr. Hand,” she said. “I like your looks.”
“Thanks. I like yours too.”
“Would you care for a drink?”
“Why not? It’s a warm day.”
“I had a gin and tonic before you came. Do you drink gin and tonic?”
“When it’s offered. A gin and tonic would be fine.”
She set the red and yellow tumbler on the glass top of the table and turned slightly in the direction of the entrance to the black and white tiled room.
“Gin and tonic, Maria,” she said. I had thought that the indeterminate maid with a face like half a walnut had gone away, and I felt a slight shock of surprise to discover that she had been standing all the while behind me. Now she nodded three times exactly, a repetition of the gesture she had made at the door, and backed away into the apartment and out of sight. Faith Salem sat down in a low wicker chair and crossed her feet at the ankles and stared at her long golden legs. I stared at them too.
“Please sit down, Mr. Hand,” she said. “Maria will bring the gin and tonics in a moment. In the meanwhile, if you like, I can begin explaining why I asked you to come here.”
“I’d appreciate it.” I folded myself into her chair’s mate. “I’ve been wondering, of course.”
“Naturally.” The full lower lip protruded a little, giving to her face a suggestion of darkness and brooding. “Let me begin by asking a question. Do you know Graham Markley?”
“Not personally. Like everyone else who reads the papers, I know something about him. Quondam boy-wonder of finance. No boy any longer. If he’s still a wonder, he doesn’t work at it quite so hard. Works harder nowadays, from reports, at spending some of what he’s made. Unless, of course, there’s another Graham Markley.”
“He’s the one. Graham and I have an understanding.”
There was, before the last word, a barely perceptible hesitation that gave to her statement a subtle and significant shading. She had explained in a breath, or in the briefest holding of a breath, the acres of pile and tile in this lavish stone and steel tower with terraces that caught the afternoon sun for at least a little while. Delicately, she had told me who paid the rent.
“That’s nice,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“It’s entirely informal at present, but it may not remain so. He’s asked me to marry him. Not immediately, which is impossible, but eventually.”
“That’ll be even better. Or will it?”
“It will. A certain amount of security attaches to marriage. There are certain compensations if the marriage fails.” She smiled slowly, the smile beginning and growing and forcing from her face the dark and almost petulant expression of brooding, and in her eyes, which were brown, there was instantly a gleam of cynical good humor which was the effect, as it turned out, of a kind of casual compatibility she had developed with herself. “I haven’t always had the good things that money buys, Mr. Hand, but I’ve learned from experience to live with them naturally. I don’t think I would care now to live with less. With these good things that money buys, I’m perfectly willing to accept my share of the bad things that money seems invariably to entail. Is my position clear?”
“Yes, it is.” I said. “It couldn’t be clearer.”
At that moment, Maria returned with a pair of gin and tonics in red and yellow glasses on a tray. She served one of them to Faith Salem and the other to me, and then she completed the three nods routine and went away again. The three nods, I now realized, was not a gesture of approval but an involuntary reaction to any situation to be handled, as my arrival earlier, or any situation already handled, as the serving of the drinks. I drank some of my tonic and liked it. There was a kind of astringency in the faintly bitter taste of the quinine. There was also, I thought now that it had been suggested to me, a kind of astringency in Faith Salem. A faintly bitter quality. A clean and refreshing tautness in her lean and lovely body and in her uncompromised compatibility with herself.
“Did you know Graham’s wife?” she asked suddenly.
“Which one?” I said.
“The last one. Number three, I think.”
“It doesn’t matter. There was no purpose in my asking for the distinction. I didn’t know number three, or two, or one. Graham Markley’s wives and I didn’t move in the same circles.”
“I thought perhaps you might have met her professionally.”
“As an employer or subject of investigation?”
“Either way.”
“Neither, as a matter of fact. And if I had, I couldn’t tell you.”
“Ethics? I heard that about you. Someone told me you were honorable and discreet. I be
lieve it.”
“Thanks. Also thanks to someone.”
“That’s why I called you. I’m glad now that I did.”
“I know. You like my looks, and I like yours. We admire each other.”
“Are you always so flippant?”
“Scarcely ever. The truth is, I’m very serious, and I take my work seriously. Do you have some work for me to do?”
She swallowed some more of her tonic and held the glass in her lap with both hands. Her expression was again rather darkly brooding, and she seemed for a moment uncertain of herself.
“Perhaps you won’t want the job,” she said.
I nodded. “It’s possible.”
“We’ll see.” She swallowed more of the tonic and looked suddenly more decisive. “Do you remember what happened to Graham’s third wife?”
“I seem to remember that she left him, which wasn’t surprising. So did number one. So did number two. Excuse me if I’m being offensive.”
“Not at all. You’re not required to like Graham. Many people don’t. I confess that there are times when I don’t like him very much myself. I did like his third wife, however. We were in college together, as a matter of fact. We shared an apartment one year. Her name was Constance Vaughan then. I left school that year, the year we shared the apartment, and we never saw each other again.”
“You mean you never knew her as Mrs. Graham Markley?”
“Yes. I didn’t know she’d married. In college she didn’t seem, somehow, like the kind of girl who would ever marry anyone at all, let alone someone like Graham. That was a good many years ago, of course, and people change, I suppose. Anyhow, it was rather odd, wasn’t it? I came here about a year ago from Europe, where I had been living with my second husband, who is not my husband any longer, and I met Graham and after a while entered into our present arrangement, which is comfortable but not altogether satisfactory, and then I learned that he had been married to Constance, whom I had known all that time ago. Don’t you think that was quite odd?”
“It seems to meet the requirements of the term.”
“Yes. The truth is, it made me feel rather strange. Especially when I discovered that she had simply disappeared about a year before.”
“Disappeared?”
“Simply vanished. She hasn’t been seen since by anyone who knew her here. You’ll have to admit that it’s peculiar. Numbers one and two left Graham and divorced him and tapped him for alimony, which he probably deserved, and this was sensible. It was not sensible, however, simply to disappear without a trace and never sue for divorce and alimony, or even separate maintenance. Do you think so?”
“Off hand, I don’t. There may have been good reasons. Surely an attempt was made to locate her.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. Her disappearance was reported to the police, and they made an effort to find her, but it was kept pretty quiet, and I don’t think anyone tried very hard. Because of the circumstances, you see.”
“No, I don’t see. What circumstances?”
“Well, Constance had a baby. A little boy that got to be almost two years old and died. Constance loved him intensely. That’s the way she was about anyone or anything she loved. Very intense. It was rather frightening, in a way. Anyhow, when the little boy died, she seemed to be going right out of her mind with grief, and Graham was no consolation or comfort, of course, and then she met Regis Lawler. Psychologically, she was just ready for him, completely vulnerable, and she fell in love with him, and apparently they had an affair. To get to the point about circumstances, Regis Lawler disappeared the same night that Constance did, and that’s why no one got too excited or concerned. It was assumed that they’d gone away together.”
“Don’t you believe that they did?”
“I don’t know. I think I do. What do you think?”
“On the surface, it seems a reasonable assumption, but it leaves a lot of loose ends.”
“That’s it. That’s what disturbs me. Too many loose ends. I don’t like loose ends, Mr. Hand. Will you try to tie them up for me?”
“Find out where Constance Markley went?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You mean you won’t?”
“I mean I probably couldn’t. Look at it this way. The police have far greater facilities for this kind of thing than any private detective, and they’ve tried without success. Or if they did find out where Constance Markley went, it was obviously not police business and was quietly dropped. Either way, I’d be wasting my time and your money to try to find her now.”
“Don’t worry about wasting my money.”
“All right. I’ll just worry about wasting my time.”
“Is it wasted if it’s paid for?”
“That’s a good point. If you want to buy my time for a fee, why should I drag my heels? Maybe I’m too ethical.”
“Does that mean you accept?”
“No. Not yet. Be reasonable, Miss Salem. If Constance Markley and Regis Lawler went off together, they might be anywhere in the country or out of it. The West Coast. South America. Europe. Just about anywhere on earth.”
She finished her tonic, lit a cigarette, and let her head fall slowly against the back of the wicker chair as if she were suddenly very tired. With her eyes closed, the shadows of her lashes on her cheeks, she seemed to be asleep in an instant, except for the thin blue plume of smoke expelled slowly from her lungs. After a few moments, her eyes still closed, she spoke again.
“Why should they do that? Why disappear? Why run away at all? Women are leaving husbands every day. Men are leaving wives. They simply leave. Why didn’t Constance?”
“People do queer things sometimes. Usually there are reasons that seem good to the people. You said Mrs. Markley was an intense sort of person. You said she’d suffered a tragedy that nearly unbalanced her mentally. You implied that she hadn’t been happy with Graham Markley. Maybe she just wanted to go away clean—no connections, no repercussions, nothing at all left of the old life but a man she loved and the few things she’d have to remember because she couldn’t forget.”
“I know. I’ve thought of that, and it’s something that Constance might possibly have done, as I remember her.”
“How do you remember her?”
“Well, as I said, she was intense. She was always excited or depressed, and I could never quite understand what she was excited or depressed about. Ideas that occurred to her or were passed on to her by someone. Impressions and suggestions. Things like that. Little things that would never have influenced most people in the least. She was pretty, in a way, but it took quite a while before you realized it. She had a kind of delicacy or fragility about her, but I don’t believe that she was actually fragile physically. It was just an impression. She didn’t appeal to men, and I never thought that men appealed to her. In the year we lived together, she never went out with a man that I can recall. Her parents had money. That’s why I lived with her. I had practically no money at all then, and she took a fancy to me and wanted to rent an apartment for us, and so she did, and I stayed with her until near the end of the school year. I married a boy who also had money. Never mind me, though. The point is, we went away from school, and I didn’t see Constance again. She was angry with me and refused to say good-by, I’ve always been sorry.”
“How did she happen to meet and marry Graham Markley?”
“I don’t know. Graham is susceptible to variety in women. Probably her particular kind of intangible prettiness, her fragility, something happened to appeal to him at the time they met. I imagine their marriage was one of those sudden, impulsive things that usually should never happen.”
“I see. How did you learn so much about her? Not back there in the beginning. I mean after she married Markley. About her baby, her affair with Lawler, those thing
s.”
“Oh, I picked up bits from various sources, but most of it I learned from Maria. She was maid to Constance, you see, when Constance and Graham were living together. When I came along and moved into this apartment, I sort of acquired her. Graham still had her and didn’t know what to do with her, so he sent her over to me. Isn’t that strange?”
“Convenient, I’d say. Did Maria see Constance Markley the night of her disappearance?”
“Yes. She helped Constance dress. Apparently she was the last person that Constance spoke to.”
“May I speak with her for a moment?”
“If you wish. I’ll get her.”
CHAPTER 2.
She got up and walked barefooted off the terrace into the black and white tiled room, and I drank the last of my gin and tonic and wished for another, and in about three minutes, not longer, she returned with Maria. She sat down again and told Maria that she could also sit down if she pleased, but Maria preferred to stand. Her small brown face was perfectly composed, and expressionless.
“What do you want me to tell you?” she said.
“I want you to answer a few questions about Mrs. Markley,” I said. “Constance Markley, that is. Will you do that?”
“If I can.”
“Miss Salem says that you saw Mrs. Markley the night she disappeared. Is that so?”
“It’s so. I helped her dress for the evening.”
“Did she go out alone?”
“Yes. Alone.”
“Do you know where she was going?”
“I assumed that she was going to see Mr. Lawler. She didn’t tell me.”
“Did she go to see Mr. Lawler often?”
“Twice a week, maybe. Sometimes more.”
“How do you know? Did she confide in you?”
“More in me than anyone else. She had to talk to someone.”
“I see. Were you devoted to Mrs. Markley?”
The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK Page 15