The Traces of Merrilee

by Herbert Brean

  I picked the little cat up. She looked about three months old. I sat down and began to stroke her. She liked it and began to purr.

  We sat that way for a while, and it was somehow restful and made me forget my worries momentarily. I wondered where she came from. I suspected she was a real stowaway. A passenger’s pet would be lodged in the ship’s elaborate pet facility.

  “Pussy cat, pussy cat,” I said aloud just as the door opened. “Where have you been?”

  “Getting my hair done,” Twit-Twit swept into the room. “Not that it’s any of your God-damned—oh, where did you get that divine little kitten?”

  “I bought it for you,” I said. “At great expense. A present. Her name is Stowaway.”

  “Let me hold her—please.”

  I gave her the cat and told her the truth. I didn’t mention how or why the kitten had frightened me. I like to put on a pretense of having average courage.

  “Deac, is she really ours? She’s so cute.”

  “I think she’s hungry. I’ll order some milk.”

  “Cream. And sardines.”

  “Why not caviar?”

  But I felt better, punching the steward’s button. Twit-Twit was coming out of whatever she had been in.

  She took the cat into her room while I gave the steward the order. He was a handsome man with a face out of Raphael, but his fine soft eyes popped as I told him what I wanted. He came back with remarkable speed however, and I warmed the cream in hot water in the washbowl, while I cleaned an ashtray. I poured cream in it and knocked on Twit-Twit’s door.

  She had changed into a rather filmy housecoat that was decidedly eye-catching. She was cuddling the purring cat in her arms, and I put the cream on the floor and cuddled Twit-Twit a little. She didn’t mind. Neither did I. It was the first good thing that had happened today.

  “You’d better stop that. You’ll give this little thing bad ideas.”

  “Well, you give them to me.”

  “We’re going to let her eat.”

  She put the kitten on the floor, and it stopped purring, but it didn’t immediately run to the ashtray of cream. Instead, it saw the edge of the housecoat and began pawing at it playfully.

  “Look how she loves to play with the hem of my negligee.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Don’t get sexy. Go drink the nice cream, dear.” She picked the kitten up and put it in front of the ashtray. “By the way, how do you know this is a girl cat? Why couldn’t it be a boy?”

  “Don’t get sexy.”

  The cat lapped milk. I nuzzled Twit-Twit’s neck.

  I said, “Does it make you feel kind of domestic?”

  “That?”

  “I meant the cat.”

  “Oh. The cat. What you were doing made me feel domestic. Or something like that.”

  “That’s good.”

  The door in the living room burst open. Tom rushed in, and he was excited.

  “Hey, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Where’s Bets?”

  “Still getting her hair done,” Twit-Twit said.

  “Did you win the ship’s pool so soon?” I said.

  “Pool, nothing! Have I got—”

  “Do you notice anything new around the room?” said Twit-Twit. “Like something drinking cream?”

  “What are you talking about? Look! Do you know who’s aboard this ship?”

  I got a sinking feeling.

  Twit-Twit said, “No. Who?”

  “You remember that sort of old lady with white hair who sat near us in the sun this morning? With a sort of maid?”

  “Yes.” But she was now looking not at Tom but me.

  “Well,” said Tom, “I’m damned if it’s not Merrilee Moore. In disguise—so to speak. But that’s who it really is. The news is all over the ship.”

  And the little moment of respite was over, and fears and anxieties came flooding back, redoubled. Along with something else.

  I could feel the chill from five feet away. Twit-Twit was surveying me as she never has before, not even the night I spilled red Burgundy on her new white evening dress.

  She said, “So that’s who it was, eh? And what do you hear from ABC, pal?”

  THE DEFINITE TRACES

  “Now, Watson, the fair sex is your department,” said Holmes, with a smile, when the dwindling frou-frou of skirts had ended in the slam of the front door. “What was the fair lady’s game? What did she really want?”

  “Surely her own statement is clear and her anxiety very natural.”

  “Hum! Think of her appearance, Watson, her manner, her suppressed excitement, her restlessness, her tenacity in asking questions.”

  Conan Doyle

  The Adventure of the Second Stain

  Chapter 10

  The Entrance

  Dinner that night was a glittering affair.

  Bright jewels glittered against soft flesh, of which a pleasant plenty was in view. The complementary champagne flowed glitteringly and often—to the delight of Tom Dolan, who persistently maintains that he hates champagne. The caviar glittered blackly and the male contingent, without glittering, was black-tied to a man.

  Perhaps because a few decks down in the dining salon the ship’s plunging was less noticeable, everyone was in a gala mood; even Twit-Twit seemed to have declared a truce, momentarily anyway. She looked pretty wonderful, incidentally, speaking of soft flesh.

  Pennypacker—the cotton-haired one, that is, next to us—was beaming. “You boys care for a few hands of bridge after dinner?” he called over.

  Tom gestured toward Betsy. “I’ve got to take her to the jig,” he said, openly regretful.

  “You don’t ‘gotta’ at all, you ape,” Betsy told him. “There are half a dozen men in the room dying to dance with me. Mostly ship’s officers. Handsome.”

  Pennypacker laughed. “I’d like that myself. But I’m too old for that sort of thing.”

  I said, “You won’t be too old until your grandchildren present you with grandchildren.”

  He laughed again and waved his thanks.

  “Sometimes you can be nice,” Twit-Twit told me. “Sometimes.”

  * * * *

  I wondered what she would have said had she known that an hour ago, after dressing, I’d slipped out of the suite for a moment and around to Merrilee’s cabin. I’d wanted to ask about her letting me search it.

  But I found her in the throes of having the maid do something quite odd-smelling to her hair; now that she had been recognized, it was being changed back from the old-woman white of her disguise to the goddess-like gold that shone nightly on movie screens from Bangor to Bangkok.

  So I said I’d see her at the dinner, and she smiled and said that would be fine and told the maid to let me in to do anything I wanted. I got back into the suite undetected.

  Then we went to our favorite bar for a drink before the dinner, and the bartender asked me, “Would you like to try our new spécialité?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a cocktail. The MM.”

  “What’s an MM?” said Twit-Twit.

  “Just this afternoon we learn Merrilee Moore is aboard. So I have the privilege of make a new drink in her honor. It is really a very sec Martini, madam, with a little drops of Irish whiskey in it. Would you care to try it?”

  Twit-Twit gave me a look. She knows I love Martinis and also Irish whiskey.

  When she spoke, her voice held a grindstone’s warmth. “Surely you are going to have one, Deac.” Her eyes were blue pebbles.

  I gave her my warmest smile. “Not tonight. I think tonight I’ll stick to my usual blackberry brandy and Coke, with banana slices floated on top and a sprinkle of cinnamon.” Being French, the bartender had been genuinely shocked. I felt ashamed
at having outraged him. I winked.

  “A regular Martini,” I said. “With an olive.”

  So I got over that hurdle.

  * * * *

  Now people were beginning to leave the dining room. The college girls and their chaperone went out chattering and looking like a walking bouquet of different-colored dresses. One of them had snagged a young ship’s officer, and it was hard to tell whether he or she looked the more pleased. The old Indian also went by us. He wore a turban instead of a handkerchief, and his hot, wide eyes were fixed intently on something high above everyone else.

  Tom said, “I’ll bet he can do the Indian rope trick. Even without a rope.”

  I looked around. The dining salon was mostly emptying, but the other Pennypacker, the industrial-spy Pennypacker whose room I had burglarized, so to speak, was still lingering over his demitasse, stiffly correct, impeccable in dinner jacket, sitting at a small table by himself. Which, I guessed, was how he liked it.

  The old-grandfather Pennypackers at the table near us were gone, but their dining partners were still at table. The man had had words with the steward because he had insisted on rare sirloin steak, even though everyone else had a special dinner on which the chefs had done themselves marvelously proud with lobster, tournedos, and crepes. So the troublesome couple had finally received their steaks and were grumping and chomping their way through them.

  We got up. “Cognac?” asked Tom.

  “Like a hole in the head,” said Twit-Twit.

  “I want no holes in your head,” said Tom. “It’s too pretty.”

  He patted her, and I chuckled. It wasn’t the back of her head he patted.

  Twit smiled.

  “Maybe a little cognac.”

  “But let’s grab a table,” said Betsy.

  We went to the grand salon, and managed to get a pretty good table near the dance floor and fairly far away from both the bandstand and the little stairway down which you could make your entrance if you wanted to make an entrance. I wondered how soon I could excuse myself for half an hour and make my search.

  When the liqueurs had been ordered, Tom leaned back in his chair. “That was a good dinner,” he said. “In fact, more than that.”

  “You can’t beat the French Line,” I said.

  “Damn right you can’t beat the French Line. It reminds me of my undergraduate days in Paris.”

  Betsy said, “He’s going to tell us about his undergraduate days in Paris. Just you wait and see.”

  Twit-Twit said, “Did he have undergraduate days in Paris?”

  “I think he went to high school there. At the age of twenty-eight. He was backward. Never graduated, of course.”

  Tom told her what she could do, in a pleasant low voice. That was a good thing, because the salon now was filled up. They were beginning to set up extra tables.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I lived for a year with a French family. That is how I learned about good food.”

  “Tell us about it,” said Twit-Twit. She smiled.

  Tom had had quite a lot of hateful champagne. “I will,” he said. “And he did.”

  He looked at her. “The girls are getting prettier,” he said. “And I am getting older. And I don’t seem to be doing a hell of a lot about either.”

  “Drink your brandy and sober up,” his wife told him.

  “I will now tell you about my days in gay Paree,” said Tom. “The truth is I worked like hell at the Sorbonne. But this family I lived with, it was honestly a gourmet’s paradise.”

  “Really?” said Twit-Twit.

  “Of course, really,” Tom said. “To begin with, they always kept my room at a temperature that was perfect for chilling white wine. Then there was the lighting. It was ideal for growing mushrooms.” Twit-Twit laughed. “And finally there was the landlady herself. She was a real charmer. She snuffled constantly, like a truffles pig, and she had the nose to go with it.”

  They kept bringing in more extra tables. “Besides that,” Tom began. Then it happened.

  The orchestra had just finished “C’Est Magnifique,” and people left the floor. The drum gave a little preliminary warning roll. People looked up. A spotlight suddenly turned on from somewhere, hit the door at the head of the little staircase, and a girl entered, accompanied by a ship’s officer. He wore lots of braid. But no one really saw him.

  She wore a gown, shimmering white, that looked as if it had been enameled on her and made her fantastic body seem more tanned than it was. A single large star-sapphire glowed enthusiastically at her throat, as though it was overjoyed to be there, and its clear blue made her hair more precious than spun gold. But it was her face that made the entire room stop—suddenly.

  She was smiling, a poised, proud, but friendly smile that said I am glad to be here because I like you, and I think you like me, and embraced everyone in the enormous room and took command of them, promising the men a great deal, and yet endearing her to the women.

  She took the officer’s arm and came down the stairs demurely and unaffectedly, and moved gracefully. Even the ship’s creaking seemed to stop while she did.

  Then, across the empty dance floor, the orchestra quietly struck up the theme from her last motion picture; and as she neared the captain’s table, which was across the floor from where we were sitting, everyone suddenly, spontaneously, broke into warm applause; and she flushed a little and almost faltered, because she recognized its real meaning; I saw one woman’s mouth tremble, as though she was going to cry. It occurred to me that, at that moment, there was not a man present who would not have lain down his life for her, and no woman who would not have given the rest of her days to be Merrilee Moore for that one night.

  The captain himself—I recognized the oddly spaced stripes—seated her with a flourish, and everyone then tried to return to normal and look away. And failed, of course.

  “Well, well,” said Tom, “Anyone we know?”

  “It isn’t Marjorie Main,” said his wife.

  Someone tapped my shoulder. It was a waiter. “M’sieu Deacon?”

  I managed to recognize the French pronunciation of my name. “Oui?”

  “You are desired on the wireless telephone, m’sieu.”

  “Right. Thanks.” I said, “Sorry” to the others. “Back in a moment.”

  Leaving the table, I felt Twit-Twit’s eyes boring into my back, following me to see I didn’t double back to the captain’s table.

  I didn’t. I went to the radio shack, although I knew I could have taken the call in the suite. I sat down before the phone, pulled down the blind, and picked up the instrument. Newt’s voice said, “Hi. Hope I didn’t get you up.”

  “I’ll say you didn’t. We’re having a very fancy ball. And guess who’s there? As guest of honor.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Newt. “That’s why I called. It occurred to me—what’s that? What was that you said about a guest of honor?”

  “It seems Merrilee Moore is aboard,” I said innocently, for the benefit of eavesdroppers of any sort. “She was traveling incognito, but she has been recognized. So tonight she made an entrance. And it was an entrance.”

  There was a pregnant silence. “I’m glad I called,” he said. “This alters my thinking.”

  “Mine too.”

  “Is—is everything else the same way it was?”

  “Oh, yes. There’s nothing new in the papers.”

  “But there surely will be.”

  “Very possibly. But possibly not.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to flying to England. Now I’m sure I had better do it.”

  “Maybe so. There’s even another reason.”

  “What’s that?” He sounded alarmed.

  It was not easy to say it without mentioning things I did not want any
one else to hear. “Listen, Newt. Listen carefully.

  “I want you to call a girl at my office tomorrow morning. Her name is Madelyn, and she is a researcher. She and I once did a little preliminary work for a story on a man named Reginald Pennypacker. We never met him, and the story never came off. But I want you to ask her to get, as soon as possible, an exact description of what Pennypacker looks like—every possible detail and identifying mark—and cable it to me.”

  “I’ve got it. Will do.”

  “One other thing. Do you know of any way that—ah—my client could have learned about my telephone call to you that night, when I said I’d make this trip, while having dinner with some friends?”

  “Why—why, maybe. I don’t know.” He sounded stunned. “I think I mentioned to her how it happened when I talked to her before she sailed. You remember, I talked to her only on the phone, and I said you had changed your mind at the last minute. I think I mentioned how, but only in a casual way. Anyway, she was so distrait and confused at the time that I really question whether she heard what I was saying.”

  Then that was the answer to Merrilee’s ESP powers, at least as far as “knowing” I had had dinner with friends in some way that involved her. She had heard Newt virtually unconsciously, and then, when she met me and we talked, had consciously recalled what he’d said. As for the others that she described, she could have glimpsed us all together several times, once the ship had sailed. She wasn’t really faking, in this at least; she was just self-deluded.

  And right on some other things?

  “Okay,” I said. “That explains something. Thanks.”

  “Not at all.” He sounded puzzled. “See you in Southampton Friday. And keep me informed if—if any news breaks in the papers.”

  “Don’t think I won’t.”

  When I got back to our table, I found yet another small table had been set up partly in front of ours for yet another couple. It proved to be the man with the mesh gloves, who was apparently squiring a fantastically striking girl. She looked like a harem beauty, with black flowing hair, a café au lait complexion and burned-sugar eyelashes, and I noticed that Mesh Gloves ignored her rather deliberately, and that she seemed to expect it.