by Gore Vidal
She asked for a cigarette and I gave her one. “Tell me,” she said, exhaling blue smoke, “how long do you think it’ll be before the police end this case?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“But you are working with Lieutenant Winters, aren’t you?”
This was shrewd. “How did you know?”
“It wasn’t hard to guess. As a matter of fact I caught the tail end of a telephone conversation you were having with some newspaper in New York.” She said this calmly.
“An eavesdropper!”
She chuckled. “No, it wasn’t on purpose, believe me; I was trying to call a lawyer I know in the District … you were on this extension, that’s all.”
“I haven’t any idea,” I said. “About the murder … about how long it’ll be before the police make an arrest.”
“I hope it’s soon,” she said with sudden vehemence.
“So do all of us.”
She was about to say something … then she stopped herself. Instead she asked me about the affair on the landing and I told her that I had seen no one. She looked disappointed. “I suppose it was too dark.”
I nodded. “Much too dark.”
She stood up then and arranged her hair in a mirror. I stood beside her, pretending to comb my own hair. I was aware of her reflection in the glass, very pale, with the dark eyes large and strange, staring at me. I shuddered. I thought of those stories about vampires which I had read as a child.
She turned around suddenly; her face close to mine … her eyes glittering in the light. “You must help me,” she said and her voice was strained.
“Help?”
“He’ll try to kill me … I’m sure of it. Just the way he killed my father.”
“Who? Who killed your father? Who’ll try to kill you?”
“My husband,” she whispered. Then she was gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
Before breakfast, I composed a communiqué for the readers of the New York Globe; then, just as the morning light began to stream lemon yellow across the room, I telephoned it to New York, consciencelessly allowing the Rhodes family to pay for it; I was aware that my conversation was being listened to by a plain-clothes man on an extension wire: I could hear his heavy breathing.
My story was hardly revelatory but it would, I knew, keep me in business a while longer, and it would also give the readers of the Globe the only inside account of how the bereaved family was taking their loss: “Mrs. Rhodes, pale but calm, was supported by her beautiful daughter Ellen Rhodes yesterday at the National Cathedral while thousands.…” It was the sort of thing which some people can turn out by the yard but which I find a little difficult to manage; a mastery of newspaper jargon is not easily come by: you have to have an instinct for the ready phrase, the familiar reference. But I managed to vibrate a little as I discussed, inaccurately, the behavior of the suspects at the funeral.
I smiled as I hung up the phone and put my notes in the night table drawer; I had thought of a fine sentence: “While your correspondent was attending the funeral services for the late U. S. Senator Leander Rhodes at the Washington Cathedral yesterday morning, a knee belonging to the attractive Camilla Pomeroy of Talisman City, wife of Roger Pomeroy, the munitions maker, was pressed against your correspondent’s knee …”
I lit a cigarette and thought idly of my session with Mrs. Pomeroy the night before. There had been a faint air of the preposterous about everything she’d said, if not done. The one thing she could do well was hardly preposterous: she was even better geared, as they say, than her half-sister … though Ellen would have been furious to know this. Ellen, like all ladies of love, thought there was something terribly special about her performances when, in fact, they were just about par. But I am not faintly interested in such things early in the morning and despite the vividness of Camilla’s production I was more concerned, at eight in the morning, with what she had said.
I have a theory that I think best shortly after I wake up in the morning. Since no very remarkable idea has ever come to me at any time, to prove or disprove my theory, I can happily believe that this is so and my usual plodding seems almost inspired to me in these hours between waking and the clutter and confusion of lunchtime.
I had a lot to think about. Lying on the bed in my bathrobe, arms crossed on my chest like a monument, I meditated. Camilla Pomeroy is the daughter of Leander Rhodes. She has inherited a million dollars from her father, despite the bar sinister. She married a man who disliked Rhodes. Rhodes disliked him … why? (The first new question that had occurred to me; jealous of his daughter? Not likely. Why then did Rhodes dislike his son-in-law to such an extent he would queer his chances of staying in business? Today’s problem.) And why did Pomeroy not like Rhodes? Political enemies … Senator uncoöperative about business matters … a deal, somewhere? a deal which fell through? Someone crossed up someone else? A profitable line of inquiry.
And Camilla Pomeroy? What was she trying to do? There was no doubt that she genuinely believed her husband killed her father, but why then had she come to me instead of to the police? Well, that was easily answered. She knew that I was in touch with Winters. That I was writing about the case for the Globe … anything she planted with me would get to the attention of the police, not to mention the public, very quickly. But she had asked me to help her. How? Help her do what? Now, there was a puzzle. The thought that she might not like her husband, might in fact like to see him come to grief for the murder of her father, occurred to me forcibly. If she did not care for Pomeroy and had cared for her father; if she believed Pomeroy killed the Senator, then the plot became crystal clear. She could not testify against her husband, either legally or morally (socially, that is), but she could take care of him in another way. She could spill the beans to someone who would then spill them to the police, saving her the humiliation and danger of going to the police herself. That was it, I decided.
Of course she could have killed her father to get the money and then, in an excess of Renaissance high spirits, implicated her husband. But that was too much like grand opera. I preferred not to become enmeshed in any new theory. I was perfectly willing to follow the party line that Pomeroy did it. After all, what I had learned from Camilla corroborated what everyone suspected. Yet why had absolutely no evidence turned up to cinch the case?
I was the first down to breakfast. Even before the ill-starred house party the family evidently breakfasted when they felt like it, not depressing one another with their early morning faces.
I whistled cheerily as I entered the dining room. Through the window I could just glimpse a plain-clothes man at the door. “An armed camp,” I murmured to myself, in Bold Roman. The butler, hearing my whistled version of “Cry” complete with a special cadenza guaranteed to make even the heartiest stomach uneasy, took my order for breakfast, placed a newspaper in front of me and stated the hope, somewhat formally, that the morning would be good for one and all.
The murder was on page two, moving slowly backwards until a Sudden Revelation or Murder Suspect Indicted brought it back to its proper place between the Korean war and the steel strike. There was a blurred photograph of the widow and daughter in their weeds at the cemetery … also a few hints that an arrest would presently be made. As yet there was no mention of the will … that would be the plum for the afternoon papers, and my own New York Globe would have the fullest story of them all (“pale but unshaken Camilla Pomeroy heard the extraordinary news in the dining room.…”). I was disagreeably struck, as I often am, with my elected role in life: official liar to our society. My lifework is making people who are one thing seem like something very different … manufacturers are jailed for adulterating products but press agents make fortunes doing the same thing to public characters. Then, to add to all this infamy, I was now using for my own advantage a number of people I knew more or less well … all for a story for the New York Globe, for money, for publicity. Mea Culpa!
Fortunately what promised to
be an orgy of guilt and self-loathing was cut short by the arrival of ham, eggs, coffee and Ellen, dashing in black.
“Oh, how good it smells! I could eat the whole hog,” said that dainty girl, dropping into the chair opposite me. She looked as though she could, too, ruddy and well-rested.
“Did you sleep well?” I asked maliciously.
“Don’t be a pry,” said Ellen, giving her order to the butler and grabbing the newspaper from me at the same time. I noticed with amusement that she only glanced at the story of the murder, that she quickly turned to society gossip and began to read, drinking coffee slowly, her eyes myopically narrowed. She would never wear glasses. “Oh, there’s going to be a big party tonight at Chevy Chase … for … oh, for Heaven’s sake, for Alma Edderdale! I wonder what she’s doing in Washington.”
I said that I didn’t know, adding, however, that whenever there was a great party Alma, Lady Edderdale—the meat-king’s daughter and a one-time Marchioness—was sure to be on hand. I had been to several of her parties in New York the preceding season, and very grand they were, too.
“Let’s go,” said Ellen suddenly.
“Go where?”
“To Chevy Chase, tonight.”
“If I remember my English literature Chevy Chase was the title of a celebrated poem by …”
“The Chevy Chase Club,” said Ellen, picking up the paper again and studying the Edderdale item. “Everyone goes there … ah, Mrs. Goldmountain is giving the party. We must go.”
“But we can’t.”
“And why not?” She arranged the newspaper on a silver rack to the right of her plate. “You know perfectly well why not.” I was irritated, not by her lack of feeling but by her want of good sense. “It would be a real scandal … murdered Senator’s daughter attends party.”
“Oh, I doubt that. Besides, people don’t go into mourning like they used to. Anyway I’m going.” And that was that. I agreed finally to escort her, if she wore black and didn’t make herself conspicuous. She promised.
Just as I was having my second cup of coffee, Walter Langdon appeared in the dining room, wearing a blazer and uncreased flannels, giving one the impression that he was very gently born … some time during the last century. His freckled face and red hair slicked down with water, provided an American country-boy look, however.
“Hi,” said the journalist of the Left Wing, taking his place beside Ellen. She smiled at him seraphically … how well I knew that expression: you are the one. Despite all the others, experienced and cynical as I am, my pilgrim soul has been touched at last … lover come back to me … this is it. That look which had appeared over more breakfast tables after more premières than I or any decent man could calculate. It, as Ellen euphemistically would say, had happened.
“Anything in the press?” said the Left Wing, glancing shyly at his seductress.
“A wonderful party, dear … we’re going … you and I and Peter. Mrs. Goldmountain is giving it for darling Alma Edderdale … you know the meatpacker bag who married old Edderdale.”
“But.…” Walter Langdon, like the well-brought-up youth he was, went through the same maze of demurs as had I, with the same result. He too would join us at the Chevy Chase Club that night … and Ellen would wear black, she vowed. She surrendered the paper to Langdon who read about the murder eagerly.
Ellen reminisced somewhat bawdily on the career of Alma Edderdale while I pretended to listen, my thoughts elsewhere, in the coffin there with Caesar … and I recalled again Walter Langdon’s quotation about the serpent’s egg. Could Walter Langdon have killed the Senator? Unlikely, yet stranger things had happened. He was very earnest, one might even say dedicated. He had had the opportunity … but then everyone had had an opportunity. This was not going to be a case of how but of why, and except for Pomeroy there weren’t too many strong whys around. I decided that during the day I would concentrate on motives.
The Pomeroys arrived for breakfast and I avoided Mr. Pomeroy’s gaze somewhat guiltily, expecting to see the cuckold’s horns, like the noble antlers of some aboriginal moose, sprouting from his brow. But if he had any suspicions he did not show them, while she was a model for the adulterous wife: calm, casual, competent for any crisis … the four Cs. I decided that it was time someone wrote a handbook for adulterers, a nicely printed brochure containing the names of roadhouses and hotels catering to illegal vice, as well as the names of those elusive figures who specialize in operations of a crucial and private nature … operations known as appendectomies in Hollywood and café society. I remembered the time one of the great ladies of the Silver Screen was rushed to the hospital with what an inept member of my profession, her press agent, called a ruptured appendix, unaware that his predecessor of six months before had also announced the removal of her appendix … there were repercussions all the way from Chasen’s to “21”: and of course the lady was in even greater demand afterwards, such being the love of romance in our seedy world.
While I pondered these serious topics, there was a good deal of desultory talk at the table on sleep: who had slept how well the preceding night, and why. It seemed that Mr. Pomeroy always slept like a top, in his own words, because of a special brew of warm milk, malt and phenobarbital.
“I’m so lucky,” said Camilla, “I don’t need a thing to make me sleep.” Nothing but a good hot … water bottle, I murmured to myself, behind my coffee cup.
Verbena Pruitt swung into the room like a sailboat coming about in a regatta. She boomed heartily at us. “Clear morning, clear as a bell,” she tolled, taking her place at the head of the table where the Senator had always sat. Cross-conversations began and before I knew it I found myself staring into the dark dreamy eyes of Camilla Pomeroy. We talked quietly to one another, unnoticed by all the others … except Ellen who noticed everything and smirked broadly at me.
“I … I’m so sorry,” said Camilla, looking down at her plate shyly … as though expecting to find two-fifty there.
“Sorry?” I made a number of barking noises, very manly and gallant.
“About last night. I don’t know what came over me.” She glanced sharply across the table to see if her husband was listening; he was engrossed in an argument with Verbena Pruitt about the coming Nominating Conventions. “I’ve never done anything like that before,” she said softly, spacing the words with care so that I would get the full impact. I thought for some reason of a marvelous army expression: it was like undressing in a warm room. I was in a ribald mood, considering the earliness of the hour.
“I guess,” I whispered, “that it was just one of those things.”
“You see I’m not like that really.”
I barked encouragingly.
“It’s this tension,” she said, and the dark eyes grew wide. “This horrible tension. First, Lee’s death … then the will, that dreadful will.” She shut her eyes a moment as though trying to forget a million dollars … since this is not easily done, she opened them again. “There … there’s nothing in the papers about it, is there?”
“Not yet. This afternoon.”
“I don’t know how I shall live through it. I didn’t tell you last night but the reporters have been after me … I don’t know how they find out about such things, but they knew immediately. This morning one of them actually got through to me on the phone and asked for an interview, on how it felt to be … in a position like this.” She was obviously excited by all the attention; at the same time, under the mechanical expressions of woe, I sensed a real disturbance: if ever a woman was near hysteria it was Camilla Pomeroy, but why?
I told her that the next few days would have to be lived through, the sort of reassurance which irritates me but seems to do other people good, especially those who do not listen to what you say … and she never listened to anyone.
“I also wish,” she said slowly, “that you would forget everything I said last night.”
Before I could comment on this unusual turn of affairs, Mrs. Rhodes, a sad figure in black, ent
ered the room and we all rose respectfully until she was seated. Conversation became general and very formal.
When breakfast was over, I went into the drawing room to see if I had any mail. The mail was always placed on a silver tray near the fireplace … a good place for it: you could toss the bills directly on the fire without opening them. Needless to say, there was a pile of letters: the guests were all busy people involved in busy affairs. I glanced at all the letters, from force of habit: condolences seemed the order of the day for Mrs. Rhodes. There were no letters for Ellen, or Miss Pruitt whose office was at Party Headquarters.
There were a half-dozen letters for me, three of which went into the fireplace unopened. Of the others, one was from Miss Flynn, suggesting that my presence in New York at my office would be advisable considering the fact that the dog I had produced for my dog-food concern had been sick on television while being interviewed and it looked as if I would lose the account. This was serious but at the moment there was nothing I could do about it.
The other letter was a chatty one from the editor at the Globe, commenting on the two pieces I had done for them and suggesting that I jazz my pieces up a little, that unless I produced some leads, the public would cease to read the Globe for news of this particular murder, in which case, I might not get the handsome sum we had decided upon earlier for my services. This was not good news at all. Somehow or other we would have to keep the case on fire, and there was no fire: a lot of smoke and a real blaze hidden somewhere, but where? Three days had passed. Pomeroy was thought to be the murderer yet the police were unable to arrest him. There was no evidence. Despite the hints by several columnists, the public was in the dark about everything and, not wanting to risk a libel suit, I could hardly take the plunge and inform the constituents of the Globe that Pomeroy was the likeliest candidate for the electric chair.