“Blankety blank little blank!” remarked Lady Parrish with a calm venom that made it totally unnecessary to be more explicit. “Look at Allan grinning at her like a blooming Cheshire cat! The poor lunatic actually looked me straight in the eye the other night and told me that he thought she had character as well as charm. Character! I’ll say she has character! Do you remember Hamilton’s crack at his beloved Emma? ‘Poor dear Emma! She has so much taste—and all of it bad.’”
Sheridan yielded to delighted mirth.
“How enchantingly articulate your sex is when it goes in for dislike—while all that we luckless men can do is to look gloomy and sinister, and mutter in our throats! … You have not yet told me, Freddy, what our hostess has done to the exquisite Mrs. Lindsay to incur your doubtless righteous indignation.”
“She’s got something on her,” said Freddy Parrish somberly. “She’s had something on her for months. I caught her hounding the life out of the poor kid at the Chevaliers’ the other night—and it wasn’t the first time, either.”
“You mean that it has gone so far that she makes scenes in public?”
“Oh, this wasn’t public, though the Lord knows that she wouldn’t stop at making one in the Union Station! But this particular rumpus was in the dressing room upstairs. We were the last ones, and I left Abby and Joan putting on their coats and started down when I remembered that I’d left my bag on the dressing table. I was almost back at the door when I heard Joan.”
“Heard her? She was crying, you mean?”
“No, she wasn’t crying. She was saying, ‘Oh, Abby, please don’t let him know! It would kill him if he knew, and I love him so dreadfully.’ And Abby said in that nasty little soft voice of hers, like icicles dipped in sugar, ‘You should have thought of that before, darling! If there isn’t a public announcement by Monday morning, I’ll see that there’s a private one Monday night.’ It didn’t sound to me as though it were any of my business, and I was afraid that I’d strangle Abby with my bare hands if I caught her then, so I simply folded up like an Arab and silently stole away.”
“Monday? But all this—when did it happen, Freddy?”
“Last Tuesday—no, Wednesday. Why?”
“And tonight is Sunday.… Does it not then strike you as a matter of great interest to hear just what public announcements are made on Monday? It is difficult to imagine just what such an announcement could be. Has the lovely Mrs. Lindsay been—shall we say—indiscreet?”
“I believe I’ve been misled about you,” said Lady Parrish gloomily. “Probably you aren’t bright at all. If you hadn’t a good streak of the loon in you somewhere you wouldn’t ask a fool question like that. Joan worships the ground that Allan walks on, and he thinks that the sun rises when she opens her eyes, and sets when she closes them. I suppose you mean the usual rotten nonsense when you talk about being ‘indiscreet’?”
“Alas, Freddy,” said the young man from Vienna humbly, his eyes fixed respectfully on Lady Parrish’s ember-red locks, “I fear that I did!”
“Well, of course you don’t know either of them,” conceded the lady grudgingly, but the gleam in her eye remained unsubdued. “Though how anyone who got as much as one good look at Joan—Ah, well, maybe you’re right at that. ‘Indiscreet’ is a miserable namby-pamby word for what that child’s been!”
“You reassure me.”
Karl Sheridan’s voice was still humble, but it was only by a distinct effort that his countenance retained its usual courteous imperturbability.
“You needn’t look smug about it,” she informed him severely. “If there’s one thing that I loathe more than another, it’s smugness—and Lord knows I loathe plenty of things.… Joan Lindsay was indiscreet about money, not about men.”
“Money?” Karl Sheridan did not like to sound as surprised as he occasionally felt, but this time he was taken off his guard. “But surely I gathered—no, I did more than gather—surely I was practically told that the Lindsays had everything that the world could give them. Pearls, and pedigreed puppies, and acres of roses—”
“‘Had’ is right,” remarked Freddy succinctly. “Pearls, huh? Now I wonder who told you about them?”
“Tess Stuart,” said Sheridan with dangerous promptness. “Fair play now, Freddy! A question for a question. Who told you that her possessions were to be counted in the past rather than the present tense?”
“She told me herself. She came to see whether I could—Hey, what is this anyway?” She straightened abruptly, scowling at him over the rim of the half-empty glass. “Will you kindly tell me what I’m doing sitting here gabbing my head off to you about Joan Lindsay and half the rest of the world? I’ll bet it’s because I haven’t had anything to drink but this combination of devil’s brew and gargle.” She scowled even more fiercely at the half-empty glass in her hand and took three large swallows, her animated countenance expressing an almost convulsive repugnance on each occasion. “Abstinence goes straight to my head—Noll says se himself. When I’ve had half a dozen drinks you wouldn’t know me, I’m that cautious and canny. At any rate, just forget anything I’ve said about Joan, will you? She has troubles enough without getting anyone else mixed up in her affairs, God knows!”
“I will make it my most ardent endeavor to do so,” Sheridan informed her with regrettably prompt mendacity. “But even you will forgive me if I look twice in the papers tomorrow for that public announcement? I suppose that it is surely in the papers that we will find it—or does Washington still cling to the custom of the town crier and his bell?”
“You’d think so,” said Freddy Parrish grimly, “if you’d heard the news of Fay Stuart’s death spread from one end of the city to the other without benefit of a single line of newsprint.”
“I can indeed imagine it,” he said gravely. “You knew Faith Stuart well?”
“Too well, thanks. Anyone who knew her at all knew her too well, in my far from humble opinion. But to think of that ravishing little demon getting so balled up in her ugly games that this was the only way out—”
“You are quite right; that is not good to think of.”
“You never saw her, did you? You missed something! There was never anything like her outside a fairy tale.”
“Oh, but I did see her—and more than once. She must have been all of three years old then—a little golden dream with eyes like blue flowers. When I learned of her death, I too thought how terrible it was that she could not always remain in her fairy book, where the small princesses were as good as they were beautiful, and lived happy ever after.”
“I keep forgetting that you were in Washington before.… Oh, great suffering saints, that woman’s heard us! I’ll bet she could hear a fly slip on a windowpane. She called every last one of us up today and said she’d call off the party unless we swore that we wouldn’t even mention Fay’s—Hello, Abby! What have you been doing at this shindig?”
“Enjoying myself,” replied the lady in the lacquer-red pajamas equably. “How about you, darling? Not quite up to your mark, I’m afraid! Cheer up, though; I’m the bearer of glad tidings. It’s stuffy in here, shouldn’t you say? Mind if I open these doors?”
It was obviously a matter of supreme indifference to her whether her titled guest minded or not. She stepped calmly over Lady Freddy’s semiprostrate form, gave the folding doors a vigorous and competent push, cocked her ear critically in the direction of the burst of music that came through them, and sank neatly to rest on the floor beside the two culprits.… He had been right last night, thought Sheridan—that small, colorless face, bland and inscrutable, with its disconcerting eyes and sleekly brushed hair: Alice in Wonderland to the life.
“Good-evening,” she said politely, and Sheridan realized with a slight start that he had not yet met her. “You’re the nice person that Dion Mallory was telling me about, aren’t you? Mr. Sheridan, didn’t he say? O great Godfrey, there they go again!”
The voices from the group rose in mournful frenzy:
“
When the coster’s not a-jumping on his mother—”
“On his mother!”
echoed the long-suffering chorus plaintively.
“He loves to lie a-basking in the sun—”
“Did someone start a rumor that Gilbert and Sullivan were dead?” inquired Abby Stirling dispassionately. “Well, I’ll bet you ten cents to a chinchilla coat that they’re both there at the piano this minute.”
“Is that your idea of glad tidings?” remarked Lady Parrish acidly.
“No, Your Ladyship. This is the real thing. Jack Byrd’s going to be here any minute.”
The singers chanted fervently:
“Oh, taking one consideration with another,
A policeman’s lot is not a happy one!”
“Well, that ties it!” said Freddy Parrish, uncoiling leisurely from her cushion and rising to her feet with an energy surprising in one so long and languid. “In a lengthy and varied career I’ve come across a good many last straws, but Jack Byrd’s my idea of the ultimate one.” She raised her voice in imperious summons. “Noll Parrish, are you in that gang of choir boys? ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are I’”
The choir boys, completely undaunted by this onslaught, drowned her outraged clamor by the simple process of lifting their voices both in pitch and volume:
“When constabulary duty’s to be done,
A policeman’s lot—is—not—a—happy—one!”
“It’s not Jack’s arrival that struck me as being particularly heaven-sent,” remarked Abby Stirling mildly. “It was the fact that he was arriving accompanied by about eighteen bottles of choice and assorted vintages.… He telephoned a few minutes ago saying that he was just in from Baltimore, and asking if it was too late to bring them over.… You aren’t leaving us, are you, Freddy?”
Freddy, who up to that moment had been obviously wavering, came to an abrupt decision.
“Thanks, yes. If Jack Byrd’s bringing it, it’s probably needled or doped! Noll Parrish! I want to go home!”
“Oh, Freddy, you awful liar!” cried a woman’s gay voice from the next room, and a man’s deep one boomed incredulously:
“Woman, do my ears deceive me? Has it, or has it not, been forty years since you wanted to go home any time, anywhere, anyhow? Explain, explain!”
The choristers chanted hopefully:
“Home, home on the range,
Where the deer and the antelope roam,
Where seldom is heard
A discouraging word—”
Freddy, clutched at by several pairs of anonymous hands, disappeared into the adjacent maelstrom with a final shriek of protest, and Mrs. Stirling indulged in a cryptic smile.
“She would!” she murmured serenely. “What’ll you bet that she isn’t here when the milk bottles arrive? … I don’t think that the room is stuffy, after all. Close the doors again, will you? … Dion Mallory and Tess Stuart said some extremely nice things about you last night. I’m glad that you were able to make the party.”
“I, too, am glad,” he assured her. “You were more than kind to have me. It strikes me as being a most excellent party. My only regret is that so far I have met none of the members of the fourth estate. From all that I gather I have missed a great deal! I had no idea that they were so operatic.”
“You’d be surprised,” murmured Mrs. Stirling. “Don’t worry: not being as absorbent as the Parrish woman, I’ll see that you’ll meet plenty of them before the night’s over! … Have you any idea how Tess is today? Someone said that you took her home last night.”
“Then someone was quite right. We left the Temples’ fairly early—she was a little tired.”
Abby Stirling, sitting back as comfortably on her heels as the most accomplished of geishas, murmured reflectively:
“Extraordinary, isn’t it? Tragedy right there a few yards from your elbow, and it might have been a thousand miles away! If you’d gone up to the sitting room as Tess usually does—”
“You will be relieved to hear that we parted in the hall. Tess was a little tired, as I told you.” He met her eyes with an expression even more blandly inscrutable than her own, and then suddenly yielded to a broadly diverted smile. “I may not have had the privilege of meeting any of the gentlemen of the press this evening, but at least I have had the pleasure of meeting one of the ladies. Am I being interviewed, Mrs. Stirling?”
“Oh, in a manner of speaking! My interest in Tess Stuart isn’t entirely professional-, however. Nor in Fay, if it comes to that.”
“I’m quite sure it isn’t,” the young man from Vienna assured her pleasantly. “I have quite obviously been misinformed, however! Lady Parrish was just telling me that you had ruled that no mention was to be made of the Stuart affair this evening.”
“Yes—I heard her telling you.” Abby Stirling also indulged in the relaxation of a smile. “Oh, well, rules are made for slaves—and guests.” She rose lightly, still smiling. “Speaking of guests, how about meeting some of them before Byrd gets here and pandemonium starts in? There’s an awfully good guy from the Boston Planet, and I think that you’ll find the two Baltimore correspondents right up your alley.”
“You are very kind.” Sheridan was on his feet, too. “And it will broaden my journalistic associations considerably. To date, I have only one feather in my cap as far as the press is concerned.”
“Me, you mean? But I’m not really a professional newspaper woman, you know; just married into the family.”
“You,” said Sheridan, with that slight, courteous gesture that came so close to being a bow that Abby Stirling, too, heard the invisible clicking of heels, “are undoubtedly capable of being precisely what you please to be, including the most charming of hostesses. But it was X that I was speaking of having met.”
“X?” The small, tranquil face did not change by a flicker of an eyelash; only the eyes seemed a trifle rounder. “You say that you’ve met X here tonight?”
“I am undoubtedly heading straight into senility,” lamented Sheridan. “What has happened to my poor memory? I have not the faintest, not the vaguest recollection of saying that it was either here or tonight.”
“I shouldn’t worry about senility, if I were you,” she reassured him. “You strike me as being quite a bright, promising young man with a real career ahead of you. You’re a detective or a policeman of some kind, aren’t you? I’d almost forgotten.”
“Of some kind, as you say. I had almost forgotten it myself.… This Jack Byrd of whom you spoke—he is the one that I met last night? The one with the sanitarium near Baltimore?”
“The very one. ‘Sanitarium’ is one way of putting it, I suppose.”
“One way?” He glanced down at her swiftly. “I understood that it was a sanitarium for nervous cases.”
“Yes? Well, that’s one way of putting that, too.”
“I also understood that Jerry Hardy was there for that specific reason.”
“You understand practically everything, don’t you?” said Abby Stirling sunnily. “You’re undoubtedly going to go a long, long way before you’re through! … Come here, Goggles, darling—I’ve got someone that I want you to know. Mr. Malone, meet Mr. Sheridan—the gentleman who is going to make Sherlock Holmes look like Dr. Watson. Oh, Jerusalem, here’s Byrd!”
There, undeniably, he was—still too blue-eyed, still too glossily curly-headed, still too brazenly and blatantly handsome for his own or any other person’s good. He carried a large brown suitcase in one hand and obviously radiated good will to all mankind.
“As nice a full-length portrait of a full-grown bounder as you’ll lay eyes on between here and Cambodia!” commented the gentleman known as Goggles genially. “Not a particular friend of yours, I trust?”
“No,” replied Sheridan mechanically. “Not a particular friend of mine, as you are good enough to suggest.”
His thoughts raced on ahead of his words, so swift, so reckless, so headlong that suddenly he pulled them in sharply, the lines between his eyes fu
rrowed deep. That way they might be headed straight over the line that led to victory; that way, too, led over a precipice to destruction.
“Do you, by any chance, know why—” He paused, watchful and smiling, his shoulders lifted in a shrug of tolerant amusement. “Too late for research work, I fear! The gentleman who is not our particular friend obviously has the center of the stage.”
“Surprise! Surprise!” shouted Dr. Byrd, the pleased center of an enchanted uproar. “Stand back, stand back, boys and girls, and take a long, piercing look at Santa Claus, Bacchus, and the N.R.A. all rolled into one. Abby, where’s the best place to put this stuff so that it won’t get smashed in the gold rush?”
“The mantel’s as good as any,” said Abby Stirling, moving leisurely forward, her small, clear voice carrying easily over the howls of surprised delight. “Here, I’ll help—Raoul, you and Kippy stand guard at the ends until we get them’ lined up. Let’s go!”
“Sheridan, is this luck or good management?” K turned quickly at the warm, gay voice, the friendly hand on his shoulder. “My dear fellow, I’m worn and weary trying to track you down! What do you say to celebrating our reunion with something out of this magnificent array?”
“Step up, good folks, step up and name your poison,” shouted the jovial bartender. “What’ll it be, lady? One stinger for the little girl in blue? One stinger it is! Next? Bourbon straight? One bourbon straight for the old bald-headed gentleman who is dying on his feet.”
A magnificent array indeed! Sheridan, at the forefront of the van under Mallory’s skilled guidance, mechanically checked the impressive ranks, diverted in spite of himself.… Scotch, bonded rye, Bacardi, House of Lords gin—
“What’s yours, then? Shall we start with the rye and then work straight down the line? After all, the night’s still young—”
Sheridan smiled at the persuasive gayety of the voice, his eyes still on the mantel.
Bourbon, white mint, vermouth, half a bottle of curaçao …
He stood staring, transfixed. Half a bottle of curaçao … The room wheeled and receded before his blank, incredulous eyes. It was another room that he saw—a room where flowers bloomed in little crystal pots, and a tall girl leaned, white and disdainful, against a mantel tiled in jeweled blue and green, looking at another shelf with its rows of bottles. White mint, bonded rye, bourbon, Bacardi … half a bottle of curaçao …
The Crooked Lane Page 15