Family Skeletons
Page 23
I’d expected almost any reaction except what came. Amazement was showing on his face, but it was purely Denham amazement that I, poor infatuated Lewis, could have got things so preposterously muddled.
“But, Lewis.” I always became “Lewis” when the unfortunate non-Denham side of me had gone too far. “Fair’s fair. I mean … Of course, if they’ve arrested Virginia, you’ve got to try to stand up for her. I mean, any red-blooded man would have to do that. But to turn on your own family. Sheila yesterday and today—Tanya!”
I said, “If you don’t believe me, call Princess Natasha. She’s already admitted it.”
“Admitted it!” Hugo got up. He was gazing at me, still a little peeved but not really mad. Of course not. One didn’t get mad with lunatics. “Now, Lewis, you’re standing there trying to tell me Princess Natasha admitted that Tanya killed …?”
He broke off. Tautly I turned to the door because voices and laughter were sounding from the stairs. For a moment the two of us froze into quite arbitrary positions. Then the door opened and Tanya, turning back to call over her shoulder to someone behind her, swept into the room in a long white dress with a sable cape.
She saw me and smiled her bright, friendly, immaculately tooled social smile.
“Lew darling, how lovely! Hugo, you idiot, you missed a marvellous Violetta, didn’t he, Sue?”
The Gardiners had come in behind her, the young Gardiners, the glossiest, most well-connected and wealthiest of the Denhams’ coterie. Suddenly the room was shimmering with social animation. Tanya, passing me, kissed me on the ear, leaving a subtle whiff of carnation. Sue Gardiner was saying, “Lew, why on earth do we never see you?” Hugo, a flawlessly unruffled host, was at the bar with Harry Gardiner. “What’s Sue’s poison these days? I hope you’ve got her off that Fernet-Branca kick.”
Tanya was coming back to me. “Darling, what are you doing with your coat on? You can’t be leaving. I won’t have it. Sue … Sue come and seduce Lew.”
But it was Hugo who came up to me. He threw his arm over my shoulder.
“Hey, folks, listen. Lewis and I have been playing a game. It’s Lew’s idea. His theory is that half the time we don’t know what we’re doing. If someone asked us where we were at any given time, even a couple of days ago, most of us, he says, wouldn’t have the slightest idea.” He turned to Sue Gardiner. “Okay, Sue. Where were you—let’s say—three days ago between four P.M. and seven P.M.?”
That, of course, was the time when Olsen had been killed. Dimly anxiety stirred but only very dimly, because it was inconceivable that now when everything …
“Three days ago between four P.M. and seven P.M.” Sue Gardiner grimaced over her drink. “Oh, darling, make it a little harder than that. Three days ago between four P.M. and practically eight P.M., Tanya and I were at the Plaza at that goddam committee tea for the Black and White Ball. You should see my photograph in yesterday’s Tribune. I looked like a camel on the verge of a nervous breakdown, while Tanya, of course, as always, looks divine.”
Hugo, passing Harry a drink, shot me a quick sidelong glance. There was no malice in it. It was merely amiable, a little sadly corrective.
“You see, Lew, you’ll have to revise that theory. Most people do know where they were and when and they can testify to it in a court of law. I think you’d better do a little facing up to reality, don’t you?”
Sue Gardiner and Tanya were mocking the dress of some woman they had run into at the opera. Harry Gardiner had got on to golf. Their voices came in and out of focus as if I were going to faint. It couldn’t be true. Somehow they were all conspiring. Conspiring? Wasn’t that what I’d tried to make myself believe about Uncle Gene’s alibi? That the entire Board of Directors at the bank had been conspiring? Sue Gardiner conspiring—when there was a picture in yesterday’s Herald Tribune? Of all my defeats, this was by far the most disastrous because I was left with—nothing. Nothing but Princess Natasha’s insidious voice: What is this about sisters? I do not give Esmeralda my ring to speak of sisters. If she says Virginia is her sister … Think, Lewis. Be true …
Don’t give in to it. Fight. Princess Natasha hadn’t told Esmeralda to invent that lie, then somebody else told her. Somebody else? Who? The chattering was echoing around me. Sue Gardiner laughed. As if this room were the nightmare rather than what was inside me. I had to get away.
I said, “Sorry, Tanya. I’ve got to go. Good night all.”
I started for the door.
Hugo’s voice called, “Hey, wait a minute. I’ll see you out.”
He was with me on the stairs. His hand on my elbow, squeezing it slightly, offering clumsy comfort.
“Now, Lew, don’t get me wrong. I’m not mad. Of course I’m not. I understand how you feel. God knows what you did to old Princess Natasha, God knows what you rattled her into admitting. But that’s okay, too. When a guy’s in as tough a spot as you …”
We were halfway down the stairs now. The hand on my elbow manoeuvred me around so that we were facing each other.
“Listen, Lew, I wasn’t going to tell you this. After all, one doesn’t go around just wantonly hurting people. But now, under the circumstances, I think you’d better know. That day at the Club, I only told you part of what Father found out about Virginia. There was more, much more. Why, last year it seems, she was jailed in Italy. Remember that yacht? She swiped all the women’s jewels and tried to make a getaway on Elba. Why, Lewis, if you’d just shape up to this …”
That wasn’t true. Virginia was not what they said she was. To concede that now was to die. I wanted to yell at him. I wanted to destroy through him all the filthy gossip-mongering of Uncle Gene’s cronies, all the sarcastic insinuations of Lieutenant Trant, all the pitying, condescending sympathies of the Sheilas, the Uncle Genes, the Princess Natashas. But all that was left was exhaustion. Here it was—the end of my tether.
The doorbell rang. Vaguely I heard Hugo.
“Now, what …?” He ran down the rest of the stairs to the door and I heard the voice saying what I knew it would say, “Why, Lieutenant. Come in, come in. It’s Lew you want, isn’t it? He told me. He—well, I guess he isn’t bearing up too well.”
There were two of them now—both of them standing below me, looking up at me. But Hugo had faded out. It was Lieutenant Trant, spruce in his neat coat and discreetly jaunty young-minister hat, who was the real enemy.
“I got your message, Mr. Denham. They tell me you know who killed Quentin Olsen.”
The bright, merciless eyes seemed to be boring into me.
“Perhaps you’d like me to catch you up on your wife first. Although she has admitted in detail your disposal of the body, she still denies she killed him. She claims she was called away by a phone call purporting to come from Sheila Potter. There is nothing to prove this. There are no witnesses. It is merely her word. But if she is telling the truth, the only possible alternative murderer is someone who had a key to your apartment, someone who knew you kept a gun in the drawer, someone, presumably, to whom Olsen was a threat, and someone who knew of your wife’s former connection with him and had decided to frame her for the killing. All I can hope, Mr. Denham, for your wife’s sake and your own, is that the person whom you are about to accuse to me fulfills all these specifications. And, needless to say, that you have enough evidence to back your accusation up.”
I was longing for a cigarette. I had been reduced so low that I had no feeling, no thought beyond the craving for a smoke. Did I have any cigarettes with me? I felt in the right-hand pocket of my Burberry. Nothing. I tried the other pocket. My hand touched somethmg quite unfamiliar. It was smallish and yielding and yet oddly bristly like … like …
With my hand still in my pocket, I looked down at my coat. I was terrified of the excitement that was stirring in me. Be careful. Go slow. Think. The day of my lunch with the Denhams had been unseasonably warm. Until tonight, when I had grabbed any coat from the hall closet at random, I hadn’t worn my topcoat since … Yes, of cours
e …
Should I take the thing out of my pocket? Should I brandish it at them? No, no. Hold it.
Meeting the challenge in Trant’s eyes, struggling with the excitement, I said, “Lieutenant, would you go to that coat closet and take out a Burberry like the one I’m wearing?”
With no change of expression at all, Trant moved to the closet. Little bits and pieces of memory were clicking together in my mind, making the pattern, at last making the pattern. The hat-check girl in the restaurant helping Hugo into his Burberry, which was identical with mine except a couple of shades darker. Hugo, at his deadly social party, praising the woman’s green dress for being as blue as her eyes—revealing his colour-blindness. Hugo with Beth’s key letting himself into my apartment, putting his coat away in the closet, Hugo getting the gun from the drawer, waiting for Olsen, and when he came, ushering him in, compulsively going through his little ritual of putting the “guest’s’’ coat away in the closet too, Hugo killing Olsen, Hugo making his getaway, snatching his coat out of the closet. His coat? Colour blindness … My coat.
Hugo was standing quite still. Lieutenant Trant was back at the bottom of the stairs, holding up a topcoat to me.
“This, Mr. Denham?”
“Yes,” I said. “Look at the label. You’ll see my name. The coat I’m wearing I took out of my own closet when I left the apartment and I haven’t taken it off since I got here. In case you want any more evidence, I have never in my life smoked a pipe.”
I took the thing out of my pocket then and held it up—a package of badger-bristle pipe cleaners, especially imported from England.
Was there anything else? The call from “Sheila,” of course. Hugo’s choirboy alto had easily taken care of that. But there was one thing more—one thing so improbably Denham that until that moment it would never have occurred even to me.
That Olsen should have gone to Hugo after the Lerchikovs was reasonable enough from Olsen’s point of view. He had been forced to leave the country, his days for exploiting the Lerchikovs and Tanya were over. But why not try for one last windfall? Wouldn’t that “civilised” arbiter of the young married set, Hugo Denham, pay quite a lot for information which could once and for all enable him to dispose of the whore who had tricked him into marriage under false pretences?
But Olsen hadn’t known his Denhams. He hadn’t known their magnificent ability to ignore the realities which did not suit their purposes. He hadn’t known that Hugo was going to continue to have a princess for a wife whether she was a real princess or not. He hadn’t known that to preserve that illusion, Uncle Gene’s son was more than ready to kill the person who dared to threaten it.
I looked down at my cousin. He was gazing up at me with owlish bewilderment. I thought of all his little comforting squeezes, all his clucking “Now, Lewises.” Had they all been a complete sham or had he—the arch Denham—already forgotten that he killed Olsen and framed Virginia, with Esmeralda’s help, just because they were things which, of course, had had to be done but were much better put out of the mind?
“Lewis!” he said. “Now, Lewis.”
“Just a moment, please.” Trant was looking with professional briskness from me to the coat in his hand. “Mr. Denham, are you ready to swear you found the coat you’re wearing in your own closet this evening?”
“Yes,” I said. “And Hugo hasn’t been to my apartment since the murder. There’s only one way it could have got there. After he’d met Olsen there and killed him, he grabbed my coat by mistake.”
Trant would see that. He couldn’t fail to, once I’d told him the rest. I let the excitement take over then. Virginia would be back with me tonight. Surely in time she could forget my moment of betrayal. Perhaps in time I could forget it too.
Perhaps I was still Denham enough for that.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick, and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912–1987), Richard Wilson Webb (1901–1966), Martha Mott Kelley (1906–2005), and Mary Louise White Aswell (1902–1984) wrote detective fiction. Most of the stories were written together by Webb and Wheeler, or by Wheeler alone. Their best-known creation is amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1965 by Patrick Quentin
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5143-9
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