If A Body

by George Worthing Yates

  “How jolly,” agreed George, somewhat darkly, Katheren thought. But he went off obediently towards the bar.

  “He’ll be surprised,” Mae whispered in dampened tones suitable to the elevator cage. They were on their way up with Ruth. “I’ve got news to tell you, my dear—but not in front of Ruth. Wait’ll you hear!”

  Woar was surprised on schedule.

  He found Alden Beardsley at the bar, nursing the remains of an old-fashioned. Nick Leeds, in a new brown suit, nursed another. A strained solemnity, not the result of the drinks, hung over them like a canopy.

  “Scotch, no ice,” Woar told the bartender. “You haven’t your minds on your drinking. I thought you were on your way to Baltimore, Nick.”

  “Sure. I was. I called up and got a week off. I’m on my way to the coast now.”

  “Really?”

  “My mother lives out there,” and he barked this, not at Woar so much as at Beardsley.

  “Two more of the same,” said Beardsley. “Honestly, Nick, I don’t know what to say. Think it over, my boy, think it over! Easy got into, hard got out of.”

  Beardsley looked extremely pontifical, Nick hunched his massive shoulders over the bar, and the canopy became stifling.

  Woar refreshed himself with his drink, brought out his pipe and asked, “What’s up?”

  “I’m going to see Ruth out to the coast. She’s going to live with my mother,” Nick announced. Did George Brendan want to make anything of it?

  “Good of you,” said George Brendan.

  Beardsley gulped half his fresh drink, which left his voice hoarse and remote:

  “That’s half of it. Tell him the rest!”

  “I’m going to marry Ruth, if you want to know,” Nick said slowly. He flattened his great hands on the bar, let them express unshakable determination. “Some things hit you, and you’ve got to do them. I’m going to marry Ruth.”

  “What does she say about it? Scotch, no ice, if you please.”

  “That’s still got to be worked out. She’s upset. She’s scared. She said no, but—she likes me, she’s got no husband now, not a friend or relation in the world. What’s to stop her?”

  Beardsley threw his hands up in despair. He uttered a strangling sound in the back of his throat.

  “All right, what’s to stop us, Beardsley?”

  “Ask George. He’ll tell you the same thing I told you.”

  George, when pressed, told Nick:

  “In a word, murder. Beardsley probably means that Ruth may have killed her nasty sot of a husband for his insurance. With or without help. Eh, Beardsley?”

  “That hits the nail on the head,” said Beardsley, and beckoned for another drink.

  “She doesn’t want the forty thousand.”

  “Disarming.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you? Give me credit for a little sense. Look at this—she’s going to sign it tonight.”

  He took an envelope from his pocket and passed it to Woar.

  It was stamped and addressed to the Connecticut Casualty and Assurance Company, Ltd. It contained a letter waiving in legal terms all claim to the insurance of Rex Shanley of New York City, late deceased.

  4

  After the bath, an orgy of witch-hazel, then bath powder and fresh clothes—and there stood Katheren Meynard Woar herself, a new woman, moderately content with her reflection in the mirror and able to face anything. Even Gaillard Brady’s worst about poor Mary.

  Katheren called the telegraph office about a wire in the name of H. A. Zlitt, which was Gaillard’s idea of being funny.

  MARY’S HEALTH [she copied down] MAY PERMIT JOINING YOU ON WEST COAST. EXPECT WIRE GOOD NEWS ST LOUIS WITHIN DAY. CHEERS.

  GAILLARD

  Into George’s hand, as she met him outside the bar, she managed to crumple the message without being noticed. He stopped, read it, and incautiously decided aloud, “We’ll have to have champagne.”

  “Somebody,” asked Beardsley, “die and leave you money?”

  Katheren took her husband aside and told him, “No champagne, George. I think you’ve had enough already.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Alden’s wobbly, if you aren’t.”

  “Oh, very well,” and he looked discouraged.

  “We’ve got to eat dinner with these people. Will you remember you’re not a detective, George?”

  “Oh, hang it all, Katheren—“ and he looked crestfallen as well. Her admonition, or something else on his mind, plunged him into one of the blackest of his wide range of moods.

  No ignominy compares to unsatisfactory behavior on the part of a husband. Katheren found that out.

  He stared flagrantly at Ruth all during dinner. He slumped down in his chair. He crumbled French rolls into something to throw the sparrows.

  Beardsley was also difficult. He ordered more cocktails in a thickish voice. He insisted they all eat steak. Mae strengthened his tie for him and winked at Katheren and Ruth. As if to say, boys will be boys.

  When Nick Leeds transparently took Ruth’s reluctant hand beneath the table, Alden unfortunately groped for her other hand. Boys didn’t have to be boys to that extent, and Mae let it be known.

  Alden dropped his glasses in the soup. Under cover of the subsequent fishing operations, Katheren whispered to her husband, “You’re staring at Ruth. It’s noticeable.”

  “Am I? I didn’t know.”

  “Eat your steak, before we’re all crumbed under.” She took his third roll from him, and he looked miserable.

  He continued to stare, however, in what Katheren considered an underhand sort of way. He suddenly asked, “Did you know Sadie?”

  Ruth lifted an eyebrow in what appeared to be sincere bewilderment.

  “Sadie? Sadie who?”

  “I hoped you’d know.”

  “Is she on the air, or something like that?”

  “More or less, I suppose.”

  “I don’t think I know any Sadie anywhere,” she said, frowning in concentration over times and places. “I guess I don’t know all the people I ought to...”

  She smiled apologetically, Woar stared, Nick bristled, and Katheren had a nightmarish feeling that there was about to be a scene.

  There was, but Beardsley brought it thumping down on the heads of that absurd dinner party by insisting over Mae’s protests on more drinks. Mae’s eyes left off their habitual twinkling, and flashed. Her husband was downright drunk. Like a field marshal quelling an incipient riot, she commanded black coffee and a walk in the night air for Alden’s unsteady legs.

  Would Nick lend a hand? Would Katheren see that Ruth took a sleeping pill and went right to bed?

  Mae managed people like a veteran. Katheren found herself leaving the grill with Ruth. She looked back over her shoulder at the husband who had, for the first time in their married life, made her angry as blazes.

  He stood over the untidy table, settling the bill. He was smiling his slightly one-sided smile of satisfaction. He made some observation to the waiter, who nodded and grinned appreciatively.

  Whatever the cause of his odd deportment, it hadn’t been alcohol. He was as cool and self-possessed as any man in the world...

  5

  Have a temper if you must, but never nurse it. That was Katheren’s rule to cover such emergencies.

  What, then, was she rankling about?

  George’s fascination with Ruth. Jealousy, in that case. Good Lord!

  Katheren saw that Ruth took the sedative tablets prescribed for her “nervous condition.” She waited while Ruth got into bed.

  George (he had long ago told her this) didn’t care for exotic women. With her oblique eyes, her strange, long, narrow face, her exquisitely slender throat, Ruth resembled those portraits painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poor man, in the years he was out of his head. Like Rossetti, Nick Leeds had every right to go silly about such a dreamlike creature. But Woar? Exotic, in any case, was the word for Ruth.

  On the other
hand, to hear her talk, even in the melodious and naturally husky voice that tinged what she said with mystery, pathos and poetry, was disillusioning. She talked of commonplaces: cooking, carfare, medicine cabinets. Her words came from an ordinary, docile and unassuming mind, conscious neither of her self or the stunning effect of her beauty.

  With an uncomplaining, dispassionate interest in her own tragedy, she was drowsily telling Katheren, “He never told me much about money. If he sent some out to California, he didn’t say so. You’d think he’d have a hundred dollars in his pocket, anyhow, wouldn’t you? He counted on selling the car out West. You can make a little money doing that, because they cost more there than in the East on account of freight...”

  She was a riddle in herself, thought Katheren. Possibly George was interested in her as a riddle. Very casually, very offhand, she would ask him.

  Katheren switched off the lights, leaving only the lamp beside Ruth’s bed. Her hand was on the knob of the door when the telephone rang.

  Katheren said, “Stay in bed. I’ll get it.”

  Ruth waved a sleepy hand, assenting. Katheren lifted the instrument and uttered a soft, “Hello.”

  “Been out, huh?”

  The voice was a man’s, hollow, contemptuous and coarse. It whispered intimately out of some inconceivable void resounding with the shuffle of passing feet, the whirr of wheels and the mutter of many tongues.

  Katheren said, “Yes.”

  “I’m watching you all the time.”

  “Oh.”

  “This is Rex, kid. I’m still your husband. Don’t forget. You know what can happen if you do. See you tomorrow, huh, Ruth?”

  Katheren, when she caught her breath, asked, “Where are you now?”

  Her voice gave her away. Wheels whirred louder, tongues muttered and a bell began to clang. Then the line clicked—dead.

  Ruth asked no questions. Her eyes were closed, her lips faintly smiling, her coppery hair pouring over the edge of the white pillow.

  “Asleep?”

  “Um.”

  Katheren turned out the bed light, slipped from the darkened room into the hall, and made sure Ruth’s door had locked behind her.

  She shuddered. Tell Ruth in the morning? It would give her a hideous fright. Tell George? He would want to investigate, even if it led into the spirit world. He found it hard enough resisting the temptation of this Shanley case as it was. Why else had he stared at Ruth?

  Better not mention it at all, then.

  As she slipped the key into the lock of her own door, she committed herself to a policy of minding her own business about Ruth, as before; and of cool aloofness towards George, at least for the time being. If he had gone to sleep, she wouldn’t wake him...

  The room was lighted, but empty.

  A voice came from the bath, calling, “Katheren, my angel?”

  “Yes, it’s Katheren.”

  “Come to the Fair.”

  He sat smiling happily in a tub full of water, and he waved a dripping hand at a cooling bucket, from which projected a bottle of champagne, unopened.

  “Strew on me roses, roses,” he said, and splashed in glee. “I waited for you. Bring in a glass.”

  “George, stop!”

  “Why?”

  “You’re such an ass, George.”

  “Don’t glower at me. Give me the bottle. We’ll drink to Ruth Shanley, and her future happiness. You don’t mind?”

  “Who is Sadie? What was the idea of asking her that—”

  “My hat! You’re not jealous?”

  “No, of course I’m not jealous. But no woman likes being made a fool of in public.”

  “Old proverb. My dear, Sadie was the name tattooed on Rex Shanley’s fore-arm, under hearts entwined. Happy, happy ignorance. Bliss. Give me the glasses. Quick, it’s popping....”

  When they were in bed, his arm insinuated itself beneath her head. She turned her cheek against it.

  “Darling,” she said, “I admire you tremendously.”

  “Very proper, that.”

  “But I’m going to lose my temper occasionally. Will you mind?”

  “Definitely.”

  “I shall probably leave you once in a while forever.”

  He said, “I know, my dear. I’ll always be the first to understand.”

  Six

  DAWN out of a misty sky, the smell of smoke from bitter factory chimneys freshly stoked, the clang of the first trolleys and the echo of early motors and feet in the street below; Indianapolis, waking up, notified Katheren through the open window.

  She was startled at first not to be alone. Fresh and woozy from a soft sleep, she resented this man who had no business to be snoring at her shoulder.

  This man, moreover, was the same dubious tourist guide and peddler of postcards, the same rakish ne’er-do-well who took on shady commissions and investigations for foreigners in a Spanish seaside resort, and of whom she never approved in the first place. And here she was, married to him. What could she expect?

  When you came down to it, it had been a marriage of convenience, only meant to get both of them out of a scrape, a framed-up prosecution under the Mann Act. Imagine—a respectable authors’ agent and a discredited Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard!

  The dark head on the pillow beside her was childlike in sleep. Black hair rumpled, mustache pressed against the pillow, wry smiles and lines of care eased into deceptive innocence; and it really looked like a head you could do something with, mold, form, manage. Letting herself be thoroughly feminine while about it, Katheren fancied him as a poet, or a sea-captain or aviator, or even a very talented modern composer.

  She was bending over an elbow to kiss the head and bind the one-sided bargain when someone knocked at the door.

  “Who the devil?” growled the modern composer without opening his eyes.

  “I’ll see,” said Katheren. “Go back to sleep. You’re much prettier that way.”

  She threw on a dressing gown, hoped for the best as far as her hair was concerned, and opened the door. It was Alden Beardsley, his wavy gray hair neatly brushed as a special reproach to her.

  “How’s George? Is he awake?”

  “Oh, come in, Beardsley,” said Woar, rubbing his eyes and clearing out of his mind the last delicious traces of a dream. “I don’t want to talk to you, but I can’t avoid it, I suppose. Shoot.”

  Alden hesitated in the doorway and leaned a shaky hand against the jamb:

  “We were just getting ready to leave. I wasn’t going to bother you—but we can’t find Ruth.”

  “What do you mean, can’t find her?”

  “Her room’s empty, her suitcase is gone and she’s—gone too.”

  Woar leaped out of bed, then, and into his clothes. Buttoning his shirt, he had the desk clerk on the phone, asking when Ruth had gone out. Almost an hour ago. Alone? Yes. After receiving any telephone calls? Yes, there had been one, about fifteen minutes before she came downstairs—but her room hadn’t answered.

  “That’s queer,” said Beardsley. “I don’t know what to do now.”

  Woar knew. He was doing it, with the telephone in his lap as he tied his shoes. He called the railway station and the bus terminal.

  “Not much in the way of satisfaction,” he told them. Mae had come into the room too. She looked old and haggard, without her twinkle. “Beardsley, is your car here? Good. We’ll have to go ourselves. Katheren, you’d better eat breakfast...”

  No luck at the railway station.

  At the bus terminal, he found her standing where the buses came in. With her suitcase at her knee and the ticket to New York in her hand, she was waiting with her usual placid patience.

  “Let me speak to her first,” said Woar to the Beardsleys, and came up to Ruth’s elbow before she noticed him.

  “Where did you get the money?” he asked her, and took the ticket from her.

  “The taxi driver hocked my bracelet.”

  “That bad? Is New York safer than California?”<
br />
  She wept, barely puckering her great eyes, ignoring the tears on her face. She wept like a little girl.

  “You aren’t afraid of me, are you? Here’s my handkerchief.”

  She shook her head and took the handkerchief.

  “I’m going to help you, Ruth. Do you understand?”

  A nod.

  “You can’t go alone. Things are rotten enough as they are. Do you want to get away from the Beardsleys?”

  No answer.

  “I’ll take you in my car, or the Smalnicks will take you in theirs. You’ll be looked after. For your own sake tell us what you’re afraid of, won’t you?”

  She cried, “What’s the use? Oh, what’s the use?” and nothing more could be got out of her.

  When Nick Leeds, summoned by a phone call from Alden, burst into the station and seized her in his arms, she let herself cling gratefully to his shoulder. Mae induced her to take some hot coffee from a paper cup. The sobbing stopped, she fished out a mirror and straightened her hat. In the end, dully resigned, she agreed to go with the Beardsleys in their Chrysler.

  “If you aren’t afraid to take me.”

  The ticket had to be returned and the bracelet redeemed. Nick took care of that, and Mae of Ruth. Beardsley waited to ask George privately, “What does she mean by ‘afraid to take her’?”

  “You don’t happen to carry a revolver, do you, Beardsley?”

  The bluff, genial Alden Beardsley was astonishing. He winked and drew out a .38 caliber Colt’s automatic from a shoulder holster. He tossed it up and down in his hand, and put it back under his tweed jacket.

  “Wouldn’t be without one, not on a long trip like this.”

  “You’re better off than I am,” said Woar. “Let’s hope you won’t have to use it.”

  2

  Katheren had the Buick packed and ready at the door of the hotel when George returned.

  “What did you find out?”

  “Nothing, my dear. Not even a lie.”

  “Ruth?”

  “She bolted. Nerves drawn too thin. Now in the Beardsley fold again, however. Katheren, I’d give anything if I—”