Death Before Bedtime (7 page)

“I … I thought I did. I guess I turned the key over in the lock.” He was blushing furiously and I could see that my ex-fiancé had aroused him. Embarrassed he trotted into the bathroom and slammed the door behind him.

“A cooling-off period at this point in an affair is often considered very sound,” I said smoothly. “It gives both parties an opportunity to determine whether or not their needs can be served only through sin.”

“Oh, shut up! Where do you think you are? in a railroad station? We were just talking, that’s all … and now look what you’ve done.”

“What have I done?”

“Embarrassed the poor little thing to death. It may take me days to get him back to where I had him before you came in.”

“He’s not that much of a baby,” I said. “And your methods are foolproof anyway.”

“Hell!” said Ellen, in a mood of complete disgust and dejection.

“Anyway I want to talk to you.”

“What about?”

Before I could answer, Langdon came back into the bedroom noticeably soothed. “I’ll see you later,” he said calmly and left the room.

“
Now
look what you’ve done!”

“You can finish your dirty work tonight,” I said. “I want to talk to you about the murder.”

“Well, what about it?” She was still angry. She went over to her dressing table and sat down, repairing her blurred make-up. I ambled about the room, looking at the bookcase
full of girls’ stories and passionate adult novels, at the rather unfeminine décor.

“Was this always your room?”

She nodded. “Up until I got married it was.”

“Where did you go after the marriage was annulled?”

“To a finishing school in New York. When I was thrown out of that, I stayed in New York.…”

“On a liberal allowance.”

“Depends on your idea of liberal; now what about the murder?”

“They think, the police think, Pomeroy did it?”

“So?”

“Did he?”

“How should I know? Why don’t you ask him?”

“I thought you said you knew who did it.”

She laughed, “Did I say that? I must’ve been lit … or maybe
you
were lit … which reminds me will you push that bell over there. It’s getting near teatime and I’m developing that funny parched feeling.” I pushed the mother-of-pearl button.

“Who do you think did it?”

“My darling Peter, I’m not sure that even if I did know I would tell you. I realize that’s an unnatural way to feel about the murderer of your own father but I’m not a very natural girl, as you well know … or maybe
too
natural, which is about the same thing. If somebody disliked Father enough to kill him I’m not at all sure that I would interfere. I have no feeling at all about him, about my father I mean. I never forgave him for that annulment … not that I was so much in love, though I thought I was, being young and silly, but rather because he had tried to interfere with me and that’s one thing I can’t stand. Anyway he was not very lovable, as you probably gathered, and when I could get
away from home I did. I still don’t know what on earth prompted me to come down here with you. I guess I was awfully high at Cambridge and it seemed like a fun idea. I regretted the whole thing the second I woke up on that train but it was too late to go back.” The butler interrupted the first serious talk I had ever had with Ellen and, by the time half a Scotch mist had given her strength to face the afternoon, she was herself again and our serious moment was over.

“What do you know about the Pomeroys?” I asked when the butler had disappeared.

“What everybody knows. They’re not that mysterious. He came to Talisman City in the late Thirties and set up a factory … I suppose he had some capital to start with … he manufactured explosives. When the war came along he made a lot of money and the factory grew very big and he grew with it, got to be quite a power politically. Then the war ended, business fell off and he lost his contract with the government, or so I was told yesterday.”

“By whom?”

“By my father.” She paused thoughtfully; then she swallowed the rest of the Scotch.

“Did he … did your father seem nervous to you?”

“You know, Peter, you’re beginning to sound like that police Lieutenant … only not as pretty.”

“I’ve got a job to do,” I said, and I explained to her about the
Globe
, told her that she had to help me, that I needed someone who could give me the necessary facts about the people involved.

“You’re an awfully fast operator,” she said.

“That makes two of us.”

She laughed; then she sat down beside me on the couch. “I’m afraid I’ve been away too long to be much help … 
besides, you know what I think or rather what I
don’t
think about politics.”

“I have a hunch that the murder doesn’t have anything to do with politics.”

“Your guess is as good as anybody’s,” said Ellen and she helped herself to another drink.

“What about Mrs. Pomeroy?”

“What about her?”

“What’s her relationship to your family … I gather she knew the Senator before she married Pomeroy.”

“That’s right. I remember her as a child … when I was a child, that is. She’s about twenty years older than I am, though I’m sure she’d never admit that, even to her plastic surgeon.”

“Plastic surgeon?”

“Yes, darling; she’s had her face lifted … don’t you know about those things? There are two little scars near her ears, under the hair.…”

“How was I supposed to see those?”

“
I
noticed them; I know all about those things. But that’s beside the point. She’s been around ever since I can remember. Her family were very close to ours … used to live right down the street, as a matter of fact: she was always coming over for dinner and things like that … usually alone. Her father was an undertaker and not very agreeable. Her mother didn’t get on very well with my mother so we seldom saw much of her.…”

“Just the daughter?”

“Yes, just Camilla. She was always organizing the Young People’s Voter Association for Father, things like that. She used to be quite a bug on politics, until she married Roger. After that we saw less of her … I suppose because Roger didn’t get on with Father.”

“I’ve got a theory that Mrs. Pomeroy and the Senator were having an affair.”

Ellen looked quite startled; then she laughed. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. “Now that
is
an idea.”

“Well, what’s wrong with it?” I don’t like my intuitions to be discredited so scornfully.

“Well, I don’t know … it just seems terribly unlikely. Father was never interested in women … as far as I know.
She
might have had a crush on him: that often happened when he was younger. There was always some dedicated young woman around the house doing odd jobs, but I’m sure nothing ever happened. Mother always kept a sharp eye on Father.”

“I still think something might have happened.”

“Well, what if it did?”

“It would give Pomeroy another reason for wanting to kill your father.”

“So, after fifteen years, he decides to be a jealous husband because of something which happened before he met Camilla? Not very likely, darling. Besides, he had just about all the motive he needed without dragging that sheep in. You know, Peter, I think you’re probably very romantic at heart: you think love is at the root of everything.”

“Go shove it,” I said lapsing into military talk; I was very put out with her … also with myself: the Pomeroy business didn’t make sense … it almost did but not quite. There was something a little off. The motive was there but the situation itself was all wrong. You just don’t kill a man in his own house with your own weapon right after having a perfectly open quarrel with him over business matters. I was sure that Mrs. Pomeroy was involved but, for the life of me, I couldn’t fit her in. I began, rather reluctantly, to consider other possibilities, other suspects.

“But I love it,” said Ellen cozily. “It shows the side of you I like the best.” And we tussled for a few minutes; then, recalling that in the next few hours I would have to have some sort of a story for the
Globe
, I disentangled myself and left Ellen to her Scotch.

As I walked down the hall, the door to Langdon’s room opened and he motioned for me to come in. The presence of the plain-clothes man at the other end of the hall, guarding the study, made me nervous: he could see everything that happened on the second floor.

Langdon’s room was like my own, only larger, American maple and chintz, that sort of thing. On the desk his typewriter was open and crumpled pieces of paper littered the floor about it: he had been composing, not too successfully.

“Say, I hope I didn’t bother you … my being in Miss Rhodes’ room like that.” He was very nervous.

“Bother me?” I laughed. “Why should it?”

“Well, your being engaged to her and all that.”

“I’m no more engaged to her than you are. She’s engaged to the whole male sex.”

“Oh.” He looked surprised; I decided he wasn’t a very worldly young man … I knew the type: serious, earnest, idealistic … the sort who have wonderful memories and who pass college examinations with great ease.

“No, I should probably apologize to you for barging in like that just as you were getting along so nicely.” He blushed. I pointed to the typewriter, to change the subject. “Are you writing your piece?”

“Well, yes and no,” he sighed. “I called New York this morning and asked them what they wanted me to do now: they sounded awfully indefinite, I mean, we never write about murders … that’s hardly our line. On the other hand, there is probably some political significance in this, maybe a
great deal, and it would be quite a break for me if I could do something about it … a Huey Long kind of thing.”

“I used to work on the
Globe
,” I said helpfully. “But of course we handled crime differently. You’re right, I suspect, about the political angle but it won’t be easy to track down.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Langdon with sudden vehemence. “He was a dangerous man.”

“How long did it take you to figure that out?”

“One day, exactly. I’ve been here four days now … in that time I’ve found out things which, if you’d told me about them, I would never have believed possible, in this country anyway.”

“Such as?”

“Did you see the names of some of those people supporting Rhodes for President? Every fascist in the country was on that list … every witch hunter in public life was backing his candidacy.”

“You must have suspected all that when you came down here.”

Langdon sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette; I sat opposite him, at his desk. “Well, naturally, we were on to him in a way. He was a buffoon … you know what I mean: an old-fashioned, narrow-minded demagogue always talking about Americanism.… Now our specialty is doing satirical articles about reactionaries … the sort of piece that isn’t openly hostile, that allows the subject to hang himself in his own words. You have no idea how easy it is. Those people are usually well-protected, by secretaries … even by the press … people who straighten their grammar and their facts, make them seem more rational than they really are. So what I do is take down a verbatim account of some great man’s conversation, selected of course, and publish it with all the bad grammar and so on. I thought that’s what I’d be
doing here but I soon found that Rhodes wasn’t really a windbag, after all. He was a clever man and hard to trap.”

“Then you found out all about his candidacy?”

“It wasn’t hard.”

“Where did you see those names? the names of the supporters?” The memory of the indignant Rufus Hollister browbeating Lieutenant Winters was still fresh in my memory.

Langdon looked embarrassed. “I … happened to find them, see them, I mean … in the Senator’s study.”

“When he wasn’t there?”

“You make it sound dishonest. No, he asked me to meet him there day before yesterday; I got there before he did and I, well …”

“Looked around.”

“I was pretty shocked.”

“It’s all over now.”

He mashed his cigarette out nervously. “Yes, and I might as well admit that I’m glad. He could never have been elected in a straight election but you can never tell what might happen in a crisis.”

“You think that gang might have invented a crisis and tried to take over the country?”

He nodded, looking me straight in the eye. “That’s just what I mean. I know it sounds very strange and all that, like a South American republic, but it
could
happen here …”

“As Sinclair Lewis once said.” I glanced at the sheet of paper in the typewriter. A single sentence had been written across the top:
“And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg Which, hatch’d, would as his kind grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell.”
Langdon was suddenly embarrassed, aware that I was reading what he had written. “Don’t look at that!” He came over quickly pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter. “I was just fooling around,” he said,
crumpling the sheet into a tight ball and tossing it into the wastebasket.

“A quotation?” I asked.

He nodded and changed the subject. “Do you think Pomeroy did it?”

“Killed Rhodes? I suppose so. Yet if he was going to kill the Senator why would he have used his own 5-X, throwing suspicion on himself immediately?”

“Anybody could have got at the 5-X.”

“Yes but …” A new idea occurred to me, “Only Pomeroy knew how powerful one of those cartons of dynamite would be. Anybody else would be afraid of using something like that, if only because they might get blown up along with the Senator.”

Langdon frowned. “It’s a good point but …”

“But what?”

“But I’m not so sure that Pomeroy didn’t explain to us that afternoon about the 5-X, about the cartons.”

I groaned. “Are you sure he did?”

“No, not entirely … I
think
he did, though.”

“Yet isn’t
that
peculiar?” I was off on another tack. “Just why should he want to talk about his stuff in such detail?”

We talked for nearly an hour about the murder, about Ellen, about politics.… I found Langdon to be agreeable but elusive; there was something which I didn’t quite understand … he suggested an iceberg: he concealed more than he revealed and he was a very cool number besides. At last, when I had set his mind at ease about Ellen, I left him and went downstairs.