Death Before Bedtime

by Gore Vidal

  4

  I returned to the house shortly after five, and went straight to my room. As I bathed and dressed for dinner, I had a vague feeling that a pattern was beginning to evolve but precisely what I could not tell. It was definite that there were a number of charades being performed by a number of people for a number of reasons … figure out the meanings of the charades and the identity of the murderer would become clear.

  I combed my hair and began to construct a plan of attack. First, the Pomeroys. It was necessary that I discover what her game was, why she had come to me with that story about her husband. I should also find out why he had been, all in all, so calm about his arrest: had he been so sure of vindication? And, if he had, why?

  Second, I should like to investigate Mrs. Rhodes’ whole mysterious performance, her reference to the paper chase, her possible authorship of the anonymous letters, the fact of her revolver’s use as a murder weapon. What had her relationship been, truly, to Senator Rhodes? I found Mrs. Goldmountain’s assertion difficult to believe. Yet she had, Heaven knew, no reason to be dishonest and if Mrs. Rhodes had detested her husband.… I thought of that firm old mouth, the controlled voice and gestures: I could imagine her quite easily killing her husband. But how could I find out? Ellen was much too casual about her family to know. Verbena Pruitt seemed the likeliest source, the old family friend … except it would not be easy to get anything out of her; she was too used to the world of politics, of secrecy and deals to be caught in an indiscretion. Still I decided to give her a try that evening.

  The third charade concerned my erstwhile ally Lieutenant Winters; as a matter of curiosity I wanted to know just what game he was playing, what was the reason for his apparent desertion of the case.

  And, finally, there was always Langdon; the idea that he might have committed a political murder appealed to me enormously: it was all very romantic and Graustarkian … unfortunately he hardly seemed the type to do in poor Hollister, but then murder knoweth no type as the detectives’ Hand Manual would say, if there was such a thing.

  Verbena Pruitt could undoubtedly have done the murders, but there was no motive as far as I could tell. Ellen was quite capable of murdering her father, me, Langdon and the President of the United States, but she had been at the Chevy Chase Club when Hollister was murdered, as had Langdon, ruling them both out.

  This left Verbena Pruitt and Mrs. Rhodes as the only two who were in the house at the time of Hollister’s death (the Pomeroys had been at the police station). The murderer then, barring the intervention of an outsider, was either Verbena or Mrs. Rhodes and, of the two, only Mrs. Rhodes had had the motive.

  The result of all this deductive reasoning left me a little cold. I sat down heavily on the bed, hairbrush in hand and wondered why I hadn’t worked all this out before. My next thought concerned Winters. He had obviously worked it out for himself. He must’ve known for some hours what the situation was; he had studied all the statements, had known where each of us was. He must know then that Mrs. Rhodes was, very likely, the murderer and yet he had seemed ready to give up the case. Why? Had he been bought off? This was altogether too possible, knowing the ways of the police, in my own city of New York anyway. Or had he, out of a sense of chivalry, not chosen to arrest her, preferring to rest on the laurels provided him by Hollister’s apparent suicide?

  I began to think that it might be a good idea if I forgot about the whole thing. I had no desire to see justice done, either in the abstract or in this particular case. Let the tyrants go to their graves unavenged, such was my poetical thought.

  The telephone by my bed rang. I answered it. Ellen was on the line. “Come to my room like a good boy,” she commanded. “We can have a drink before dinner.”

  She was already dressed for dinner when I opened the door; she was buffing her nails at her dressing table. “There’s a drink over there on the table, by the bed.” And sure enough there was a Martini waiting for me. I saluted her and drank; then I sat in a chintzy chair, looking at her. I have always enjoyed watching women make themselves up, the one occupation to which they bring utter sincerity and complete dedication. Ellen was no exception.

  “When are you going back?” she asked, examining her nails in the light, a critical, distracted expression on her face.

  “I hope tomorrow,” I said. “It depends on Winters.”

  “I’m going to go tomorrow, too,” she said flatly. “I’m tired of all this. I’m sick of the reporters and the police, even though that Winters is something of a dear … and on top of all that I have, ever since I can remember, loathed Washington. I wonder if we could get out of here tonight?” She put down her piece of chamois or whatever it was she was polishing her nails with and looked at me.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “For one thing Winters will be here.”

  “Oh damn!”

  “And for another thing I don’t think those detectives would let us go without permission from him.”

  “We could duck them; there’s a side door off the small drawing room nobody ever uses. We could get out there; there’s no guard on that side of the house.…” As she spoke she sounded, for the first time since I’d known her, nervous and upset.

  “Why do you want to leave so badly?”

  “Peter, I’m scared to death.” And she was, too; her face was drawn beneath the skillful make-up and her hands shook as she drank her Martini.

  “Why? There’s nothing to be afraid of, is there?”

  “I.…” Then she stopped, as though changing her mind about something. “Peter, let’s go back tonight, after Winters leaves.”

  “It wouldn’t look right; on top of that we might be in contempt of court or something.” I was very curious, but it was up to her to tell me why she wanted, so suddenly, to get out of Washington.

  She lit her cigarette with that abrupt masculine gesture of hers, quite unlike any other girls I had known. This seemed to soothe her. “I suppose I’m just getting jittery, that’s all, delayed reaction.”

  “I will say you’ve been unnaturally calm through everything; in fact I’ve never seen anything like the way you and your mother both managed to be so clear-headed and unemotional about everything.” This was a direct shot and it hit home; a flicker of emotion went across her face, like a bird’s shadow in the sun. But she told me nothing.

  “We’re a cold-blooded family, I guess.”

  “I can understand you,” I said. “I mean you’d lived away from home so long and you didn’t care much about your father, but Mrs. Rhodes … well, it’s quite something the way she’s taken all this.”

  “Ah,” said Ellen distractedly. She stood up. “I think I’ll go mix us another Martini. I keep the stuff in the bathroom … force of habit. In the old days I always had a mouthwash bottle full of gin.” She disappeared. I stood up and stretched. I could hear Ellen rattling around in the bathroom … somewhere in the house a door slammed, a toilet was flushed: life went on, regardless of crisis. In a pleasantly elegiac mood, brought on by the first Martini and increased by the knowledge that soon there would be a second, I wandered about the room, examining the girlhood books of my one-time fiancée. It was an odd group. The Bobbsie Twins were next to Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley nestled the Rover Boys, as she might well have done in life. It was obvious that Ellen’s girlhood interests had changed abruptly with puberty. Only a bound volume of the Congressional Record attested to her birth and position in life, and it looked unopened.

  “Here you are, love.” She looked somewhat rosier and I decided that she had very likely had herself a large dividend, if not a capital gain, while she was preparing my drink. I toasted her again and we discussed the merits of Fanny Hill until dinnertime.

  For the first time since I had arrived in Washington nearly a week before, the company at table could have been described as hearty. It was not clever nor amusing, the guests were too solid for that, but it was at least not gloomy and everyone drank Burgundy with the roast and even Mrs. Rhodes smiled over her b
lack lace and jet, like the moon in its last quarter.

  I watched her carefully for some sign of guilt, some bloody ensign like Lady Macbeth’s spotted hand, but she was as serene as ever and if she were a murderess she wore her crimes with an easy air.

  I sat beside Roger Pomeroy and we talked to one another for the first time in some days; he was most cheery. “Had a most profitable visit with the Defense Department today,” he said, drying his lips after a mouthful of wine, staining the napkin dark red … I was full of blood-images that night.

  “About your new explosive?”

  “That’s right. I gather it’s been checked out favorably by their engineers and chemists and it looks as though they’ll be placing an order with us soon.”

  “All this without the Senator’s help?”

  Pomeroy smiled grimly. “There’s a new Senator … as of tomorrow anyway. We made it very clear that Talisman City was a pretty important place come next November and that the Administration would do well to keep us happy.”

  “And it worked?”

  “Seems to’ve. Tomorrow Cam and I are flying back home. I’ll be glad to get out of this goddamned town, you may be sure.”

  “Do you think they’d really have been able to convict you?” It was the first time I had ever mentioned the murder directly to him, out of sympathy for a “murderer’s” feelings.

  “Hell no!” He set his glass down with a thump. “In the first place that young fool Winters went off half-cocked. He assumed that since the explosive was mine and I was angry at Lee for his behavior about the new contract and I knew that my wife stood to inherit a lot of money, that I went ahead and killed him. How dumb can you get? I was perfectly willing to kill Lee if I’d thought I could get away with it. But not in his own house and under suspicious circumstances; besides, in business you never kill anybody, as much as you’d like to.” He chuckled.

  “Even so, they felt they had enough evidence to convict you with.”

  “All circumstantial … every last bit of it.”

  “How did you plan to get out of it, though? A lot of people have been ruined on much less evidence than Winters had on you.”

  “Oh, I had a way.” He grinned craftily. He was a little tight and in an expansive mood.

  “An alibi?”

  “In a way.” He paused. “Now this is in absolute confidence … if you repeat it I’ll call you a liar.” He beamed at me, full of self-esteem. “I didn’t need Lee. Before I even got to Washington I had contacted someone else, someone very highly placed who promised to help me get the contract. That person was able to do it … had, in fact, told me that the contract would be forthcoming in the next ten days, told me in a letter sent the day before Lee was killed, special delivery, too, which I am pleased to say would have proven that I knew before I talked to Lee that the contract was set.”

  “Why did you talk to him then?”

  Pomeroy frowned. “Because Lee and I had been involved in a number of other deals before we quarreled. He was a vindictive man, like a devil when he thought that he was right about something, or rather that something was right for him … a bit of a difference, if you get what I mean. He was the boss of the state and it’s a good idea to clear anything which has to do with patronage and government contracts with the boss … that’s a simple rule of politics.”

  “Then you had to have his O.K.?”

  “No, but it would have helped. I was angry with him but that was all. I was a long way from being the ‘desperate and ruined man’ which the papers and the police thought I was.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police right off that you had already got the contract and that consequently there was no real motive for killing Lee Rhodes?”

  Pomeroy smiled at me pityingly, as though unaware anyone could have reached the age of twenty-nine in a state of ignorance of business and politics comparable to my own. He spoke slowly, as though to a child. “If I had told the police that I had already fixed the contract, they would have asked for proof. I would have had to show them the letter. They would have got in touch with the author of the letter who would have been embarrassed and possibly ruined by the publicity. This country is run on one set of principles while pretending to another. Contracts are supposed to go to the best and the most economical company. Pomeroy, Inc. is a perfectly good company but so are a hundred others; to get a contract I must use influence … if I had exposed my benefactor I would have lost the contract, the friendship of a powerful person, my business …”

  “But you would have saved your life.”

  “My life was never in any danger. If things had got bad I would have told the whole story but I knew damn well they wouldn’t be able to indict me … though I suppose they came pretty close.”

  One thing still bothered me. “Why did you and the Senator fall out in the first place? Why wouldn’t he back you up with the Defense Department?”

  Pomeroy chuckled. “Lee always got the best price possible for his services. I was outbid, after ten years. A rival company bought him and he stayed bought, like they say. A big outfit from the North which has been expanding all over the country started up in Talisman City a year ago and since they’re real professionals they went to Lee right off and underwrote his campaign for the nomination. You probably know who I mean if you were handling his publicity.”

  I knew indeed … one of the biggest cartels in the country. I had known they were contributors; I had no idea they were buyers as well.

  “There wasn’t much I could do against them. Lee wanted to help me, you know, but he couldn’t. At least not until after the nominating convention was over, by which time I’d have been out of business. So I managed the deal without him. I only came to see him to find out about the future, to find out how long they had him tied up. I never did find that out. Lee was a devil, never think he wasn’t. He was cold and shrewd and he would’ve sacrificed his own mother for his career. He didn’t care about anybody except my wife. I don’t know why, but Cam and he were awfully close and he liked her better than Ellen, better than his wife, too. If only because of that, we could’ve proven that I’d not’ve been likely to kill him … in spite of the inheritance. He never liked me much but he would never have hurt her if he could have helped it. In time he would’ve made it up to us. I’m sure of that. Anyway, I was never in much danger.”

  The pieces fell gradually into place. It was like a picture puzzle. I was now at the point where I had filled in the sky, got the frame of the picture all put together: now all that I had to do was fit the central pieces in, numerous tiny pieces, many of them the color of blood.

  Winters had attended the dinner but not once did he speak to me or look in my direction. He spoke mostly to Camilla Pomeroy and Walter Langdon. After dinner we went into the drawing room. By the time I was seated, coffee in hand, the minion of the law had disappeared. His departure was noticed by no one, as far as I could tell.

  I tried to maneuver toward Mrs. Rhodes but she, as though divining my plot, excused herself and went off to bed.

  Langdon and Ellen played backgammon at the far end of the room; I noticed they no longer seemed to enjoy one another’s company as much as formerly and it looked as though Ellen would soon be in the market again for another fiancé. This shouldn’t be difficult, I thought, recalling that not only was she a handsome uninhibited piece but that she was now worth close to a million dollars, before taxes.

  The Pomeroys conversed contentedly by the fire and Verbena Pruitt and I, the couple left over, fell into conversation.

  “You have had quite an introduction to Washington,” said the lady of state, her face creasing amiably.

  “It’s not what I’d expected.”

  “I should think not. It’s lucky for all of us that everything worked out as neatly as it did. It could’ve been one of those cases where nothing was ever proved and everyone would have remained under suspicion for years … and that, young man, is grist for political enemies.”

  “Grist,” I
repeated sagely.

  “Rufus didn’t use his head,” said Miss Pruitt thoughtfully, fondling a cluster of wax red cherries which a malicious dress designer had sewed in strategic places to her coffee-colored gown. “If I’d been he I wouldn’t have given up that easy. Suppose those papers had come to light and he was involved in a business scandal … who could have proven that he killed Lee? The worst that would’ve happened was a jail sentence for larceny, or whatever the crime was. Besides, how did he know that all this was going to come to light anyway?”

  “I suppose that someone had threatened to expose him … someone who knew about the plot, the business deals, and also knew about the murder …” Miss Pruitt had obviously thought about this more carefully than one might have suspected.

  “Piffle!” said Miss Pruitt in a voice which made the others start. Then, lowering her voice and looking at me significantly, she said, “Why would anyone want to do that?”

  “Revenge?”

  “Not very likely … to avenge Lee? Perhaps, but it seems far-fetched.”

  “On the other hand, assuming Hollister was murdered by the Senator’s murderer, that would make no sense either since Pomeroy was obviously going to be indicted for the murder and since he was to take the rap there was hardly any reason to confuse matters further by killing Hollister and making him seem like the murderer.”

  “I have not of course allowed myself to think that Rufus was killed. Yet, if he had been it might’ve been by someone who wanted to get Pomeroy off.”

  “The only two people who were interested in that were both at the police station when Rufus was shot.”

  “Who can tell?” said Miss Pruitt mysteriously, detaching a wax cherry by mistake; she looked at it unhappily for a moment; then she plunged it between her melonish breasts.

  “It could be,” I said, trying to divert my morbid attention from her well-packed bodice, “that we are being much too subtle about all this. Hollister might have been remorseful; he might have known that his business dealings were going to be found out anyway and he might’ve thought: what the hell, I’m going to jail anyway, I might as well confess, save Pomeroy and get out of this mess ‘with a bare bodkin.’ ”