Death Before Bedtime (11 page)

“No, I mean in declaring to all the world my … shame.”

To which I replied, “Ah.”

“I can’t think why he chose to do it like this, so publicly.”

“Probably because there wasn’t any other way of leaving you his money.”

There was no real answer to this so she exclaimed again how terrible it all was.

“What does your husband think about it?”

She sighed.

“Did he know all along that … about the Senator and you?”

“Oh yes. He’s known for a year.”

“And the will … did he know about that, too?”

She closed her eyes, as though in pain. “Yes,” she said softly, “I think he knew about the will, too. I think the Governor told him.”

“But they never told you?”

She hesitated. “No,” she said. “Not exactly. I suppose I knew, in a way, but they never actually told me.” This was a bit of news, I thought. The outline of a plot suggested itself to me. “My husband never liked to talk about it … neither did I. It was just one of those things. What was that?” She started, and looked toward the door.

Nervously, expecting an angry husband, I opened the door and looked out. The hall was empty. “It was the wind,” I said, turning around. She was standing directly behind me … I could smell the musk and rose of her perfume.

“I’m frightened,” she said and this time she was not play-acting. I moved back into the room, expecting her to move too but she did not. Then I had my arms around her and we edged toward the bed. She wore nothing under the blue silk negligee and her body was voluptuous and had a young feel to it, smooth and taut with wide firm hips and her nipples pressed hard against my chest, burning through the pajama top. We kissed. She was no novice at this sort of thing, I thought as she gave the cord of my pajama trousers a deft tug and they fell to the floor beside her crumpled dressing gown. She pulled me against her violently and for a moment we stood swaying back and forth in one another’s arms. Then we fell across the bed.

An hour passed.

I sat up and looked down at her white body sprawled upon the bed; the eyes shut and her breathing regular and deep. “It’s late,” I said in a low voice.

She smiled drowsily and opened her eyes. “I haven’t been so relaxed in a long time,” she said.

“Neither have I,” I lied nervously; I didn’t like the idea of being treated like some kind of sedative.

She sat up on one elbow and pushed her hair back out of her eyes. She was obviously proud of her body; she arranged it to look like the Duchess of Alba. “What on earth would my husband say.”

“I hope I never know,” I said devoutly.

She smiled languorously. “He’ll never know.”

“Great thing sleeping pills.”

“I don’t make a habit of this,” she said sharply.

“I didn’t say you did.”

“I mean … well, I’m not promiscuous, that’s all … not the way Ellen is.”

I was a little irritated by this. Somehow, I felt she had no
business talking about Ellen like that since, for all she knew, we might really have been engaged. “Ellen’s not that bad,” I said pulling on my pajamas. Then I handed her her negligee. “You don’t want that cold to get worse, do you?”

Reluctantly she snaked into the blue silk. “I’m very very fond of Ellen,” she said with a brilliant insincere smile. “But you have to admit she’s a law unto herself.”

I was about to make some crack about their being sisters under the skin when it occurred to me that this might be tactless since, as a matter of fact, they
were
sisters in a way.

She asked for a cigarette and I gave her one. “Tell me,” she said, exhaling blue smoke, “how long do you think it’ll be before the police end this case?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“But you
are
working with Lieutenant Winters, aren’t you?”

This was shrewd. “How did you know?”

“It wasn’t hard to guess. As a matter of fact I caught the tail end of a telephone conversation you were having with some newspaper in New York.” She said this calmly.

“An eavesdropper!”

She chuckled. “No, it wasn’t on purpose, believe me; I was trying to call a lawyer I know in the District … you were on this extension, that’s all.”

“I haven’t any idea,” I said. “About the murder … about how long it’ll be before the police make an arrest.”

“I hope it’s soon,” she said with sudden vehemence.

“So do all of us.”

She was about to say something … then she stopped herself. Instead she asked me about the affair on the landing and I told her that I had seen no one. She looked disappointed. “I suppose it was too dark.”

I nodded. “Much too dark.”

She stood up then and arranged her hair in a mirror. I stood beside her, pretending to comb my own hair. I was aware of her reflection in the glass, very pale, with the dark eyes large and strange, staring at me. I shuddered. I thought of those stories about vampires which I had read as a child.

She turned around suddenly; her face close to mine … her eyes glittering in the light. “You must help me,” she said and her voice was strained.

“Help?”

“He’ll try to kill me … I’m sure of it. Just the way he killed my father.”

“Who? Who killed your father? Who’ll try to kill you?”

“My husband,” she whispered. Then she was gone.

Before breakfast, I composed a communiqué for the readers of the
New York Globe;
then, just as the morning light began to stream lemon yellow across the room, I telephoned it to New York, consciencelessly allowing the Rhodes family to pay for it; I was aware that my conversation was being listened to by a plain-clothes man on an extension wire: I could hear his heavy breathing.

My story was hardly revelatory but it would, I knew, keep me in business a while longer, and it would also give the readers of the
Globe
the only inside account of how the bereaved family was taking their loss: “Mrs. Rhodes, pale but calm, was supported by her beautiful daughter Ellen Rhodes yesterday at the National Cathedral while thousands.…” It was the sort of thing which some people can turn out by the yard but which I find a little difficult to manage; a mastery of newspaper jargon is not easily come by: you have to have an instinct for the ready phrase, the familiar reference. But I managed to vibrate a little as I discussed, inaccurately, the behavior of the suspects at the funeral.

I smiled as I hung up the phone and put my notes in the night table drawer; I had thought of a fine sentence: “While your correspondent was attending the funeral services for the late U. S. Senator Leander Rhodes at the Washington Cathedral yesterday morning, a knee belonging to the attractive Camilla Pomeroy of Talisman City, wife of Roger Pomeroy,
the munitions maker, was pressed against your correspondent’s knee …”

I lit a cigarette and thought idly of my session with Mrs. Pomeroy the night before. There had been a faint air of the preposterous about everything she’d said, if not done. The one thing she could do well was hardly preposterous: she was even better geared, as they say, than her half-sister … though Ellen would have been furious to know this. Ellen, like all ladies of love, thought there was something terribly special about her performances when, in fact, they were just about par. But I am not faintly interested in such things early in the morning and despite the vividness of Camilla’s production I was more concerned, at eight in the morning, with what she had said.

I have a theory that I think best shortly after I wake up in the morning. Since no very remarkable idea has ever come to me at
any
time, to prove or disprove my theory, I can happily believe that this is so and my usual plodding seems almost inspired to me in these hours between waking and the clutter and confusion of lunchtime.

I had a lot to think about. Lying on the bed in my bathrobe, arms crossed on my chest like a monument, I meditated. Camilla Pomeroy is the daughter of Leander Rhodes. She has inherited a million dollars from her father, despite the bar sinister. She married a man who disliked Rhodes. Rhodes disliked
him …
why? (The first new question that had occurred to me; jealous of his daughter? Not likely. Why then did Rhodes dislike his son-in-law to such an extent he would queer his chances of staying in business? Today’s problem.) And why did Pomeroy not like Rhodes? Political enemies … Senator uncoöperative about business matters … a deal, somewhere? a deal which fell through?
Someone crossed up someone else? A profitable line of inquiry.

And Camilla Pomeroy? What was she trying to do? There was no doubt that she genuinely believed her husband killed her father, but why then had she come to me instead of to the police? Well, that was easily answered. She knew that I was in touch with Winters. That I was writing about the case for the
Globe …
anything she planted with me would get to the attention of the police, not to mention the public, very quickly. But she had asked me to help her. How? Help her do what? Now, there was a puzzle. The thought that she might not like her husband, might in fact like to see him come to grief for the murder of her father, occurred to me forcibly. If she did not care for Pomeroy and
had
cared for her father; if she believed Pomeroy killed the Senator, then the plot became crystal clear. She could not testify against her husband, either legally or morally (socially, that is), but she could take care of him in another way. She could spill the beans to someone who would then spill them to the police, saving her the humiliation and danger of going to the police herself. That was it, I decided.

Of course she could have killed her father to get the money and then, in an excess of Renaissance high spirits, implicated her husband. But that was too much like grand opera. I preferred not to become enmeshed in any new theory. I was perfectly willing to follow the party line that Pomeroy did it. After all, what I had learned from Camilla corroborated what everyone suspected. Yet why had absolutely no evidence turned up to cinch the case?

I was the first down to breakfast. Even before the ill-starred house party the family evidently breakfasted when they felt like it, not depressing one another with their early morning faces.

I whistled cheerily as I entered the dining room. Through the window I could just glimpse a plain-clothes man at the door. “An armed camp,” I murmured to myself, in Bold Roman. The butler, hearing my whistled version of “Cry” complete with a special cadenza guaranteed to make even the heartiest stomach uneasy, took my order for breakfast, placed a newspaper in front of me and stated the hope, somewhat formally, that the morning would be good for one and all.

The murder was on page two, moving slowly backwards until a
Sudden Revelation
or
Murder Suspect Indicted
brought it back to its proper place between the Korean war and the steel strike. There was a blurred photograph of the widow and daughter in their weeds at the cemetery … also a few hints that an arrest would presently be made. As yet there was no mention of the will … that would be the plum for the afternoon papers, and my own
New York Globe
would have the fullest story of them all (“pale but unshaken Camilla Pomeroy heard the extraordinary news in the dining room.…”). I was disagreeably struck, as I often am, with my elected role in life: official liar to our society. My lifework is making people who are one thing seem like something very different … manufacturers are jailed for adulterating products but press agents make fortunes doing the same thing to public characters. Then, to add to all this infamy, I was now using for my own advantage a number of people I knew more or less well … all for a story for the
New York Globe
, for money, for publicity.
Mea Culpa!

Fortunately what promised to be an orgy of guilt and self-loathing was cut short by the arrival of ham, eggs, coffee and Ellen, dashing in black.

“Oh, how good it smells! I could eat the whole hog,” said
that dainty girl, dropping into the chair opposite me. She looked as though she could, too, ruddy and well-rested.

“Did you sleep well?” I asked maliciously.

“Don’t be a pry,” said Ellen, giving her order to the butler and grabbing the newspaper from me at the same time. I noticed with amusement that she only glanced at the story of the murder, that she quickly turned to society gossip and began to read, drinking coffee slowly, her eyes myopically narrowed. She would never wear glasses. “Oh, there’s going to be a big party tonight at Chevy Chase … for … oh, for Heaven’s sake, for Alma Edderdale! I wonder what
she’s
doing in Washington.”

I said that I didn’t know, adding, however, that whenever there was a great party Alma, Lady Edderdale—the meat-king’s daughter and a one-time Marchioness—was sure to be on hand. I had been to several of her parties in New York the preceding season, and very grand they were, too.

“Let’s go,” said Ellen suddenly.

“Go where?”

“To Chevy Chase, tonight.”

“If I remember my English literature Chevy Chase was the title of a celebrated poem by …”

“The Chevy Chase
Club
,” said Ellen, picking up the paper again and studying the Edderdale item. “Everyone goes there … ah, Mrs. Goldmountain is giving the party. We must go.”

“But we can’t.”

“And why not?” She arranged the newspaper on a silver rack to the right of her plate. “You know perfectly well why not.” I was irritated, not by her lack of feeling but by her want of good sense. “It would be a real scandal … murdered Senator’s daughter attends party.”

“Oh, I doubt that. Besides, people don’t go into mourning
like they used to. Anyway
I’m
going.” And that was that. I agreed finally to escort her,
if
she wore black and didn’t make herself conspicuous. She promised.

Just as I was having my second cup of coffee, Walter Langdon appeared in the dining room, wearing a blazer and uncreased flannels, giving one the impression that he was very gently born … some time during the last century. His freckled face and red hair slicked down with water, provided an American country-boy look, however.