“Finished is right,” drawled Dorothy, smoothing her white gloves and tucking her silver pocketbook under her arm. “I lost your all, I’m afraid. No elevens.”
“That’s wonderful.” Lorraine, fitful as the wind, was already bored sick with roulette and hot on the trail of new “fun.” She was naïve enough to be flattered that a professional dancer wanted to rhumba with her. That was Lorraine. It never occurred to her that there wasn’t a gigolo in the world who wouldn’t murder his mother for the chance of a crack at Lorraine Pleygel.
One arm through the dancer’s, one through Chuck’s, she started towards the door. Her party, sunk now in a mood of sullen resignation, trooped after her. In a few minutes “divine” roulette was a thing of the past, and we were all spaced stolidly around the best table on the best side of the dance floor in the Del Monte, while waiters, headwaiters, and even the manager hovered around to make sure that Miss Pleygel and Iris Duluth were getting the best of service.
The Del Monte was one of the very few places in Reno which made a stab at elegance and class distinction. With its subtle lights, its dark mirrors, its fancy rhumba orchestra, it aped New York with a shrewd eye on the pocketbooks of nostalgic Eastern divorcees. Even so, the brash exuberance of Reno had not been entirely excluded. Here and there among the evening gowns and the tuxedos, a cowboy’s pink satin shirt or a rancher’s denims showed up to take some of the chic out of the chi-chi.
Lorraine, who was doubtless as fed-up with her guests as they were with each other, was already on the dance floor, weaving her small hips around the South American’s in blissful contentment. Ill luck had jammed me in a corner of the table, with Dorothy as a buttress between me and Iris, who was still clutching her piggy bank and talking animatedly to Lover. Before I could think out a reasonably polite way of leaning across Dorothy’s bosom to ask my wife to dance, the Count Laguno sidled up with much bowing from the waist and whisked Iris onto the floor.
That definitely stuck me with Dorothy.
Drinks came, and with them a large chicken sandwich for Mrs. Flanders. Her eyes gloating at the sight of it, Dorothy peeled off her long white gloves and opened her large silver pocketbook to put them away. As the silver clasps broke, my eyes almost unconsciously glanced at the bag’s interior. Instantiy Dorothy jammed the gloves in, jerked her hand out as if it had been bitten, and, snapping the clasps shut, bundled the bag down onto the seat at the far side of her.
She had been quick, but not quick enough to keep me from seeing the henna chips, stuffed in edgewise between her compact and her handkerchief.
Dorothy did not improve with acquaintance. Expert in all the major vices, she was not above practising the minor ones, too. She had lied to Lorraine about having lost everything at the roulette table. She had salted away a fistful of her hostess’ five-dollar chips to be redeemed on a later, rainier day.
Since Dorothy knew I had seen and I knew she knew I had seen, the social situation between us was very strained. After a few moments of sick silence in which she took flustered snaps at the sandwich, I asked her to dance. It seemed the only thing to do.
With a smile that was meant to shatter the very soul of me, she rose in sinuous coils. Squeezing her rather too voluptuous hips through the narrow space between the table and the wall, she followed me out onto the dance floor. The orchestra was pouring forth its torrid South American noises. Dorothy Flanders extended her bare arms and engulfed me.
We moved in among the other couples without speaking, giving our all to the rhumba. Lorraine and her South American danced closer and then away again, Lorraine waving gaily. Mimi and Chuck, that unlikely partnership, also writhed near to us. I could just see Iris and Laguno at the other side of the floor. The softness and the heavy warmth of Dorothy Flanders in my arms would have sent most men into a tizzy of orchid and jungle fancies. But to me, as it happened, the only South American thing that reared its ugly head was the poison dart which either was or was not missing from the trophy room.
I glanced back at the table. I could see Janet Laguno flopped in her yellow dress, looking like a soufflé that had fallen. Lover was peering anxiously over Iris’ piggy bank, searching the floor for Mimi. The Wyckoffs and Bill Flanders, his face strangely alight, were watching the dancers.
Lorraine, undulating by, waved again, her pretty pug face sparkling with enjoyment. As I reviewed that memorable and ugly evening, it seemed incredible that even the giddy Lorraine could have brought this dynamite collection of people together without realizing the probability of explosion. Had she been as naïve as she seemed? Had her plan been just one of her typical muddle-headed gestures of kindliness? Or was it possible that there had been in it some well-concealed and sinister malice? I had never in my life known Lorraine to be malicious before.
Back and forth, I pushed the exotic heaviness of Dorothy. The music and the rhythmic swaying of her body were having an anaesthetic affect. The poison dart merged in my mind with an image of Iris as she said, “Darling, you don’t think Bill Flanders will try to kill her, do you?” Then there was Laguno’s voice, saying, “Curare has a certain nobility. It should be used with artistry to kill only the most legitimate murderees.”
Legitimate murderees! If ever there was a legitimate murderee, I reflected, I had one right there in my arms.
I was as embarrassed by this thought as if I had spoken it out loud. Quickly I said, “Nice music, Dorothy.”
The rhumba pounded on. Dorothy’s hand on my shoulder had tightened its grip. She did not answer.
“Dorothy—” I began.
Then I stopped because the grip of her fingers on my shoulder had become so tight that it was painful.
Although she was in my arms, I had been too abstracted to look at her. I turned to half profile so that my face was almost touching hers. Her eyes were staring straight ahead, like a doll’s, with no sense in them. Beneath the gorgeous blonde hair, her skin looked strangely blue in the dim light.
The hairs at the back of my neck stirred. My feet still went through the movements of the rhumba, but nothing seemed real any more.
“Dorothy—”
If I had leaned forward an inch or so, my lips would have been on hers.
And it was her lips that were so terrible now. Slowly, they were drawing backward, exposing her teeth like an ebb tide exposing white sand. It wasn’t a smile. It was as if every drop of moisture was being drained away from her skin.
“Dorothy—” I said it so loudly that people turned to look.
Someone in the band started to sing in high, throbbing Spanish. The painted gourds hissed out their rhythm like trained serpents. Dorothy had given up following me. We stumbled. She was shaking all over. Suddenly her whole body writhed against me in one savage convulsion. Her face knocked against my shirt front and then sprang back, trickles of foam spattering from between clenched teeth.
“Dorothy—”
Her back arched. Then she collapsed, sagging, half sprawling towards the floor in my weakening grasp.
The man was still singing. The couples were still dancing. I stared down at the limp, unhuman thing that had been my partner.
And cold sweat broke out on my forehead.
Because there was no doubt then—no doubt at all.
There I was in the middle of the dance floor with Dorothy Flanders dead in my arms.
PART TWO
JANET
IV
I tried to move her. I couldn’t. I just stood there with that blonde dead thing which had been Dorothy Flanders limp in my arms.
The rhumba rhythm of the orchestra seemed to be throbbing inside my head. The couples near me stopped dancing. A crackle of chatter, ominous as a prairie fire, began to sweep the floor.
Men and women, pressing close, stared down at Dorothy. Their faces were caricatures, stylizing shock, curiosity, and horror. They did nothing to help. The thing was too violent for them. They could not quite take in the fact that here, in this elegant night club dedicated to frivolity, a
woman could be sprawled unfrivolously and most inelegantly dead.
I was feeling that way myself. During two years of war in the Pacific, I had seen death in a dozen grim forms. But somehow this was worse. Dying belongs in battles. It didn’t belong here.
Chuck and Mimi Burnett broke the spell. They pushed in from the periphery of the dancers, arm in arm as if they were still rhumbaing. Mimi saw Dorothy. Her gaze sprang away from the dead woman to Chuck. I saw the sham-elfin prettiness flee from her face, leaving it a prune-creased monkey mass. Then she screamed—one shrill, tilting scream.
I said, “Help me, Chuck.”
Lorraine Pleygel’s fiancé was looking down at Dorothy, too. There was none of the general horror on his handsome face. He seemed to be thinking about something complicated and quite different.
“Okay, Lieutenant. You take her shoulders.”
We started carrying her. The dancers rustled a path for us, like dead leaves scattering before a wind. I caught a glimpse of my wife among them, her hand frozen on the Count Laguno’s arm. Black-coated and agitated, the manager was beckoning us towards a door in the red leather panelling of the wall. We headed towards it. The orchestra was still playing, but the music sounded infinitely desolate like music played on a sinking ship.
The manager was holding the door open. Chuck and I carried Dorothy into an office. There was a couch. We laid her down on it. The manager shut the door.
My mind was spinning. I could only think that Lorraine had tried to reconcile three husbands and three wives. And now, only a few hours later, one of the wives was dead.
That was enough to think about—quite enough.
I said to Chuck, “She’s dead. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But get a doctor. Get Wyckoff.” “Sure.” Chuck started for the door.
I called, “You’d better get her husband, too.”
Chuck left. The manager of the Del Monte came towards the couch on obsequious tiptoe. He looked at Dorothy. She wasn’t something anybody would have liked to look at. The low evening gown was the worst part. There was so much naked bluish-white bosom.
The hair up-do had half crumbled. That made it a bit better. The trailing yellow hair concealed part of what the convulsive agony had done to her face.
“A terrible, terrible thing,” the manager was moaning. “Dead. However did it happen?”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was true enough.
“And here in the Del Monte.” Manager-like, his thoughts were largely on his own cash register. “A dreadful thing, I only hope it wasn’t anything she was served. I hope—”
“You’re not in the habit of serving Borgia highballs, are you?” I wondered why I had said that. Why was something in me already assuming that Dorothy’s death had not been due to natural causes? After all, people do just—die.
Chuck came in again with Dr. David Wyckoff. Bill Flanders hobbled a little behind on his crutch.
Although I had been conscious of Dr. Wyckoff on more than one occasion that evening, his appearance had not particularly registered until then. He must have been around forty. Except for the stoop in his shoulders, he seemed younger. He was dark, with a nice, unassuming face, the sort of man’s face that went with the pretty-girl face of his estranged wife. He was trying to look cool and professional, but his eyes gave him away. The curious dread which had been lurking in them ever since his arrival at Lorraine’s was still there—only much closer now to the surface.
He passed me without saying anything and bent over the couch. The manager fluttered to Chuck. His deferential attitude made me realize what an important figure Chuck Dawson must be in local life. The manager was twittering to him about the Del Monte and what a wonderful reputation it had and could Chuck help stop a scandal. Most of my attention, however, was on Bill Flanders.
The ex-marine stood close to me, his boxer’s shoulders hunched sidewise, leaning their weight on his crutch. He was staring at what was visible of his wife behind Wyckoffs back. His face was tight and pinched. On the hand that gripped the crutch, the knuckles stood out bony and white. And yet it wasn’t grief that was bothering him. I was almost sure of that.
He looked like a man who knew a fuse had been lit that nobody could extinguish—a man waiting for an explosion.
I wished I hadn’t asked Chuck to get him. It is the conventional thing to summon a husband at a moment like that. But Bill Flanders was hardly a conventional husband, even an about-to-be-divorced one.
Conventional husbands do not, as he had done only that evening, publicly threaten to kill their wives.
Suddenly he swung to me. Through lips stiff as wood, he asked, “Is she dead?”
“That’s up to Wyckoff,” I said. “I think she’s dead.”
He laughed then. It was a bad laugh, so rasping that the manager stopped his garrulousness to shoot him a shocked glance.
I didn’t know what to do with him. I was afraid he might break down again the way he had broken down at dinner. And heaven alone knew what he might have to say this time. I certainly didn’t want to hear it.
“You’d better—” I began.
The door burst open and Lorraine Pleygel came in.
This was certainly no place or moment for a woman, but none of us tried to keep her out. That was the way with Lorraine. Maybe it was her immense wealth or maybe it was just the indomitable spirit behind her frivolous exterior.
Lorraine Pleygel always got where she wanted to go.
She hurried towards her fiancé, half running on absurd high heels. “Chuck, darling. She can’t be dead. It’s not possible.”
She saw Wyckoff at the couch and started towards him. Chuck grabbed her arm.
“No, Lorraine.”
“But, darling—”
“No.”
She let him hold her, but her gaze went to me. “Peter angel, she was dancing with you. I saw her. People don’t dance—and die.”
All her life she had been insulated from unpleasantness by money. It seemed almost impossible for her to realize then that something distinctly unpleasant had happened and happened very close to home. She found a cigarette in her fantastic grey purse and lit it with a touch of bravado as if by lighting a cigarette she could get things back to being divine and fun.
“It’s absurd,” she said, “that’s all. Just absurd.” And then, “Oh, dear, if only Mr. Throckmorton were here.”
Mr. Throckmorton had a way of popping up at the oddest moments. I still had only the dimmest notion of his function in Lorraine’s life. Presumably he was some sort of guardian.
Lorraine’s voice trailed away. Even the manager had stopped chattering. The silence was charged with the tension that radiated from Bill Flanders. I was watching Dr. Wyckoff’s back as if it were the only thing in the world.
So were the others.
Any minute now Wyckoff would speak, would let us know how Dorothy had died. My own suspicions, built on so many little things which had happened on that impossible evening, made the period of waiting a jangle of nerves. As we stood, still as hypnotized birds watching a snake, David Wyckoff turned from the couch. His face was gaunt but he had a kind of artificial control that was compelling.
Lorraine jerked the cigarette from her lips. “Well—?”
Wyckoff looked down at his delicate, doctor’s hands. “Mrs. Flanders was a regular patient of mine in San Francisco.” His voice was so low it was hard to hear him. “For some time I have been treating her for a serious heart condition. I repeatedly warned her against any unnecessary excitement or undue physical exertion—such as dancing.”
He paused. The silence dropped down on us again like a collapsed pup-tent. I could scarcely believe that was what he had said. Dorothy Flanders, the healthiest looking hunk of woman I had ever met, a regular patient of his suffering from heart disease!
Dr. Wyckoff moistened his lips. “I told her that unless she was willing to take a long rest her condition might assume very serious proportions.” He turned then so that his
dark gaze was fixed steadily on Bill Flanders. “Her husband will confirm that. I told him the same thing some weeks ago. Didn’t I, Flanders?”
As I looked at Bill Flanders, it seemed to me that for one instant his face showed dazed incomprehension. But the expression vanished—if indeed it had ever been there—so quickly that I felt I must have been imagining things. He gave a shrug.
“Why, sure, doc,” he said. “Sure. That’s what you told me.”
The tension in the room should have relaxed then. It didn’t Everyone seemed even more strung up, except the manager who was having difficulty keeping a smug smile of relief from showing.
He said, “You mean, doctor, that this lady died from a heart attack?”
“Knowing her history,” said Doctor Wyckoff, “it is my opinion that certain—er—excitements of the day, combined with over-indulgence and the exertion of dancing, brought on a cardiac attack which proved fatal.”
The manager’s fingers were fluttering all over his black tie. “Then there won’t be any need for—for publicity, the police—?”
“I am a Californian,” said Wyckoff. “I don’t know the correct procedure in this State, but I’m prepared to—”
Chuck Dawson broke in. Looking very big and tough and alert, he said, “You were her regular physician, Wyckoff. You’ve been treating her. As far as I’ve got it figured, it’s perfectly okay for you to sign the death certificate, and that’s all there is to it. You’re ready to sign the certificate, I guess?”
“Why, yes, naturally.”
Chuck glanced at the body on the couch. “We’d better make sure though. I’ve got a lot of friends down in the police department”
He went to the phone on the manager’s desk and dialed a number. Soon he was telling the receiver what had happened. Put in the way he put it, the whole thing sounded as innocent as a lamb chop. A lady in the party of Miss Lorraine Pleygel had just died at the Del Monte. The physician who had been treating her for a heart condition was present and, after an examination, was ready to sign a certificate of death from heart failure. Chuck sprinkled his account lavishly with the Pleygel name, which was enough in itself to intimidate a police official; he threw in Iris for full measure, adding that the manager of the Del Monte was eager to avoid any unpleasant notoriety for his establishment. He listened and then put down the receiver.
Puzzle for Wantons Page 4