“And why did you agree to stop at Migler’s?”
“The storm, of course, and Milton was so weary, and—wait a minute! You can’t do this to me, really. I’d just as soon have it out with the police. They’ll have sense enough to know that Milton Smalnick of Smalnick Productions wouldn’t be mixed up in any way with a fifth-rate M.C. from a cheap Jersey night club. Why, it’s absurd! It comes of being nice to that poor Ruth Shanley, I suppose. Let me tell you for your own good, Mr. Brendan, that you can get yourself into a lot of trouble trying to dream up a murder out of an accident and pin it on us. Milton won’t pay you hush money—he’ll sue you for libel, quick as a flash. He’s got a temper, I warn you.”
She had told them a thing or two. She pulled her arrogance about herself, and even Katheren will admit that a woman’s arrogance makes the most impenetrable defense ever confronted by a man.
Woar gave it up for the present.
4
Aside from not liking the woman on general principles, Katheren particularly did not like the hand on George’s knee.
West of St. Charles they came upon placid farmland and rolling wooded hills, with a fine clear highway between. Katheren could let the car out.
The plume in Cicely’s hat writhed like a drunken hen, the marvelously perfect waves in her blonde hair whipped out in long moppy strings. The faster Katheren drove, the stronger the wind blew, and she drove as fast as she felt justified by that hand on George’s knee.
After five and a half hours of this treatment, Cicely might be expected to thank the Woars and take herself off. They were in Kansas City, it was dark, and George stood at the desk of the Muhlebach with pen poised over the hotel register.
“Milton has rooms at the Phillips, the clerk says. You’ll be stopping there, I suppose?”
“No, get me a room here. He cahn’t see me looking like this!”
George asked for a double and a single.
Katheren looked dismally resigned. On the way to the elevator, he detained her to leeward of a ripe cluster of clubwomen and kissed her.
“My dear, I love you. Relax, and trust me, will you?”
“Till further notice,” she said. Cicely waggled her willowy hips. If the woman weren’t so flagrant...
They were lovely rooms, Katheren thought when the bellboy flourished the open door; but adjoining, and with a communal sitting room between. Where was her honeymoon now? Where the quaint country inns, where the leisurely westward exploration she had promised herself?
“I don’t suppose anybody in this dump,” said Cicely, “can make a champagne cocktail?”
The bellboy, cooking under Cicely’s sultry smile, thought the bartender was one of the best.
“Good,” said Katheren briskly. “Three double Scotches and soda and some ice in a bowl.”
“Yes, mam.”
“And my champagne cocktail?”
“We’re impressed,” said Katheren. “You must try one, some other time.”
More than that, Cicely undulated about with her drink in her hand when it came, and had to be ejected from Katheren’s bedroom by means little short of physical. Katheren wished to be alone to call the telegraph office.
IMPORTANT YOU WIRE WASHINGTON CONSUL [said the telegram] FULL NAMES BOTH MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS WITH AGES OR DATES OF DECEASE. MARY HAS SEVERE HEADACHE. I TOO.
GAILLARD
Maternal grandparents? Woar would have to take care of that himself.
To insure her privacy, Katheren had shut and locked the door into the sitting room. When she threw it open, she discovered George in shirt-sleeves with his hands on Cicely’s shoulders, gently shaking her.
He was saying, ..tell you what an idiot you are.”
She was the kind of woman who could turn even an impersonal shaking into a caress. She smiled the seductive smile and murmured, “Oh, Mr. Brendan, youah hurting me!”
More than that, George looked as if he had wide experience dealing this way with this kind of woman, and Katheren regarded the idea with distaste.
She said, “I should have knocked.”
She gave Woar the transcribed telegram. She picked up his coat, vest and mackintosh, tidied them and retreated into the bedroom again.
Cicely, with a tinkling laugh, sauntered into her own room. She said, “For a detective, maybe you aren’t as dumb as you ought to be!”
On that cryptic recommendation Katheren shut her own door again, isolating George in the sitting room.
He said, “Damn all,” and tried his wife’s door. It was locked.
He started to say something mollifying through it, to explain things into better shape—but how?
Unable to think of a decent approach, he sighed wearily and went out for a long walk instead.
5
That day marked the entrance of Woar’s finger into the pie. He had abstained a remarkably long time, as long as his patience would stand.
Katheren was fixing her hair in front of the bathroom mirror when the bellboy knocked with a telegram. It was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. George Brendan, dated from Kansas City twenty minutes earlier.
YOUR PRESENCE REQUESTED [it Said] GRILL ROOM HOTEL MUHLEBACH TONIGHT AT EIGHT
REX SHANLEY
When the first shock of surprise had worn off, Katheren took it for a grotesquely unpleasant joke.
She called the hotel office. Yes, they had been instructed to arrange for a party of fifteen. By whom? A Mr. Shanley had telephoned for reservations.
Had it been the same flat, unearthly voice that had talked to her in Indianapolis? Katheren shuddered. She had tried to put it out of her mind, but she still heard it saying, “I’m watching you all the time...”
In a state of indefinable alarm, she had yet to decide what to do about it when a key turned in the hall door and George came in. He trailed a faint smell of fresh night air.
His coming raised another problem. Were they, after all, on speaking terms?
Married life had become terribly complicated.
She might have capitulated to the hesitant, imploring smile he gave her, if he hadn’t read the telegram over her shoulder and said, “We’re invited to a party! What fun!”
That was the most maddening thing about the man—his total incapacity for surprise. He only does it to annoy, she reflected; because he knows it teases.
She went into the bathroom to be aloof.
He tapped on the bathroom door:
“Are we going, my dear?”
“I don’t care. If you like.”
Perhaps she really didn’t care; perhaps he was a beast and a lout and so on. Hazlitt Woar couldn’t feel quite sure about it, and he wondered if they were spinning down the chute of one of those conjugal misunderstandings which, as a police inspector, he had always considered stupid.
The Shanley case was coming between them.
He cursed it, and turned out his suitcase for a suit of what he called his “Gents’ Natties.”
Eight
“RAHTHER like Old Home Week,” Cicely called it.
The table for fifteen was gay with flowers and the beaming faces of Mae and Alden Beardsley, the Winter twins and Ray Kemp—early arrivals.
“Well, well, well, how are you, and how’s the little woman?” Beardsley heartily demanded of the Woars when they came. “Great dance band playing here, great! We went ahead and ordered a drink. Say, who’s idea was this party, anyway?”
The Woars didn’t know; the Winter twins and Kemp didn’t know; and during the evening all the other guests asked that question in one way or another, including Nick Leeds, who came striding in close on Cicely’s heels.
“Ruth not here yet, eh?”
Obviously not.
He reserved a place for her next himself, and sat. The Woars too, and Cicely. Katheren established herself between the twins, and was bright and chatty. To George, the brightness seemed if anything more ominous than silence. It was in his heart that night to resent Woman...
“Mr. Brendan?” inquired a wa
iter, sprouting up at his elbow like a magician’s tree. “Mr. Smalnick wants to see you in the bar. Mr. Milton Smalnick.”
Even in Kansas City the great names of Hollywood are uttered in a breathless hush.
George excused himself, and found Milton in a spectacular plaid suit leaning his stocky chest against the bar, scowling at a bottle of Bourbon. Milton poured a whisky glassful, held it in one hand along with a stout cigar, and tossed the liquid neat down his open throat.
He scowled at Woar then, inspecting him from head to foot with undisguised contempt: “Have a drink, Brendan. I got somethin’ to ask you.”
His thick fingers spread two telegrams open on the bar. One was addressed to Milton Smalnick, the other to Ruth Shanley, both at the Phillips: otherwise both were copies of Woar’s.
“Who’s the smart guy around here? Who’s trying to get this gang together? Not Ruth, because she ain’t stayin’ at the Phillips. Who sent ‘em—you?”
He curled his lips round the cigar. It gave a cynical, sneering look to his swarthy face.
“Where is Ruth?”
“I got her a room, but she ups with her suitcase and leaves. Some other hotel in town, for all I know.”
“And you took the invitation up merely to find out who sent it?”
“Sure. That’s why I’m here.”
“That’s why I’m here too,” said Woar, “and I incline to the opinion you sent them, and the first round ends a draw. Your health, Mr. Smalnick!”
George raised his glass and drank. Smalnick drew in his horns, poured another whisky and also drank, this time in a spirit of commendable civility.
“While about it, your wife’s health too,” Woar added. “I brought her from St. Louis with me.”
“That’s nice. What did she have to say?”
“About the journey—or about you?”
The flat brown eyes of Milton Smalnick became veils, curiously expressionless. Behind them, George knew, the Smalnick brain worked fast.
“I ain’t interested in what she said about me, Brendan—“ he puffed his cigar—“because she ain’t my wife. I ain’t married.”
“I see,” said George into his Scotch.
“Maybe you don’t see, Mr. Brendan. I’m in a lousy spot. Next month some time it’ll come out in the papers that I’m engaged to Carole Adreon, a girl with a name for herself, a girl I’m paying half a million a year on contract. With a picture star like that, I can’t get mixed up in anything a little off. Get what I mean now?”
“I begin to.”
“Well, here’s the set-up. I run into Cicely in New York. She’s a cousin of mine she says, she wants to come out West and get into pictures, and it’s a long trip, so I tell her come along. I figure she’s company. I’m so kindhearted, Mr. Brendan, I’m simple-minded. How do I know she’s a cousin? She can’t prove it. Only I don’t think about that till we stop off to wait for the weather to clear at that auto camp—and the next thing I know there’s a drunk killed and we’re spending the night there and she’s registered us ‘Mr. and Mrs.’
“Well, we got to go through with it, naturally, and get out of there without the police raising hell with us, and that’s what we do. But when I tell Cicely, ‘Here’s your money, go take a train,’ she laughs. She’s got me right there, Mr. Brendan—and don’t she know it! Well, if I can’t use reason with her, I pull a fast one. I leave her flat in St. Louis. Now what happens! She follows me here, and next thing I know she’ll be asking for a check in five figures to keep quiet, and where does it end? Tell me that—where does it end?”
With a hand on Woar’s coat lapel and his head jutted forward, Smalnick breathed cigar smoke and suppressed passion into Woar’s face. Having dramatized his misfortunes to the highest point, he seemed to be waiting for the audience reaction—and Woar restrained an impulse to clap. There was something marvelous about the ageless youth and cynicism of Hollywood...
Milton reverted to the Bourbon bottle, and George said, “As far as I can see, it ends at the Shanley murder trial, with you dependent on Cicely for an alibi during the night in question, and Cicely dependent on you. A Smalnick Production, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.”
“I should trust that little tramp for an alibi?”
“Can’t you?”
“Cicely was in and out, in and out, all night. I got to think it over very careful, Brendan. I’m in a spot. Maybe she turns out to be the killer, and she tries to frame me for it, how can I tell?”
“Let me know what you decide. There’s another point—could you really identify Shanley’s body?”
“Listen, is it likely? Between a cheap entertainer in a Jersey beer hall and a man like me, Mr. Brendan, there is a distance you got to measure in light-years. I said to myself, I’ll go to the undertaker’s and identify the bum just to shut up the cops, so we don’t sit around that auto camp for the rest of my life. That you can understand, can’t you?”
“Easily.”
“But here’s the pay-off, which you don’t have to believe. When I look at him dead at the undertaker’s,
something hits me. I seen that face before. I think back. Shanley? Shanley? Like in a dream I remember when I was a kid playing in the streets in Brooklyn. I was a poor boy, I worked my way up from nothing, though you wouldn’t think so, Brendan. And it comes to me, I used to play with this fellow, I even went to school with him maybe. The name I don’t recognize, but that he could change to go into the show business, like so many do. Shanker it was then, I say to myself. Shanker? Shanley? Why, sure, it must be! My old play-mate, dead on a slab—and a lump comes in my throat. ‘He’s Shanley all right,’ I tell the cops. I tell them from the heart, too. And that’s the low-down, Brendan. That’s the low-down on Rex Shanley, believe it or not, just as you like.”
They had to pause to drink to the memory of the departed Shanker. Not tight yet, but a bit wanky, Smalnick had appealed to the Bourbon bottle four times. Woar felt justified therefore in getting down to business:
“Why tell me all this?”
“You’re a smart guy, Brendan. I want you on my side, where you can help me.”
“How?”
“Fix it up so I don’t figure in your report. Fix it up so Cicely don’t figure either. I don’t ask who you’re acting for in this schlemozzle, I only say Smalnick Productions could use a man like you at a good figure and come and see me any time in Hollywood. When it’s a question of money, Milton Smalnick always pays the most.”
He made a gesture of washing his hands of an unsavory mess and strode away.
H. G. B. Woar was stuck for the drinks.
2
Pushing back chairs and leaving dinners to cool, the crowd made one of its periodic migrations to the dance floor. George threaded a devious way in its wake.
It wasn’t the music that exhilarated him; a tuning fork peculiar to himself hummed in his head, as usual when he expected developments in a case. He meant them to be final developments, too; a quick, tidy cleaning up of the mystery while its components were at hand to be questioned and fitted into place.
First he must somehow get in touch with Ruth, the key piece to the puzzle.
Presiding alone at the Shanley table over stale drinks and smoldering cigarettes and ladies’ compacts sat the hulking Nick Leeds. He was reading the future in the ice-cubes of an untasted highball. The others had gone off to dance.
“Funny Ruth isn’t here,” he observed.
Woar said, “She wasn’t asked. Her invitation strayed.”
“That so?”
“If I were you, I’d find her. There’s a list of hotels in the classified telephone directory. She ought to be at one of them. Nickels?”
“I’ve got change,” said Nick, and charged like a knight at arms through a thicket of chairs.
Woar remained standing above the great noisy room, the white tables and the seething dancers, gay faces and bored faces and fatuous faces swimming into view like fish in a bait tank; and enjoyed the singular detachment meant onl
y for night-club waiters and gods.
This intention of his had been born during the afternoon, out of a growing impatience. Have done with the case, get on with the honeymoon before it is smashed altogether on the rocks. Detectives make poor husbands; there Katheren was right.
Fresh as a flower, Katheren danced by in Boyd Winter’s arms. That particular blue serge thing with the gold-braid whatnots, and that trick of doing her hair, made George slightly giddy. He had an impulse to cut in—but she vanished.
Henry and Agatha Tozer fought into the clear. They halted, grimly waited for the music to catch up with them, then were at it again, dancing an uncompromising pump-handle style.
Protected from all the world in Ray Kemp’s embrace, Connie glided through the thickest of the crowd, oblivious of everything but Ray.
Burnet Winter’s partner was Mae Beardsley, and Alden seemed to have escaped. Possibly to the bar.
By craning his neck, Woar could catch glimpses of Milton Smalnick and his wife—the degraded Cicely, rather. Her new status had yet to be named. Whatever it was, they danced with professional ease and arrogance in a far corner which they had made their own, and talked earnestly, lips close to each other’s ears. Milton, Woar guessed, had taken the bull by the horns.
Round and round, fox-trot and rhumba, treading the devil’s own measure, there stirred the brew that killed the late Rex Shanley.
“‘The more we are together,’” Woar quoted wryly for his own benefit, “‘the merrier we’ll be.’”
3
“Whoever’s putting on the show,” Cicely said as she pulled up a chair after the dance, “knows I go for breast of pheasant in a large way. Thanks, Mr. Shanley.”
She waved a hand at the empty chair which the waiter kept tilted against the head of the table. She was first to take the practical view that a party is a party, no matter who gives it.
The others thawed out their stiffness and suspicion gradually, as the warmth of drinks and food and conversation took effect. By nine o’clock the empty chair had been forgotten.
“Last time,” said Mae, “we took the southern route—you know, New Orleans and the Old South. Nobody should miss Savannah and Charleston...”
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