Face to Face (14 page)

36

It was a long message, as Ellery had predicted, written for economy in minute calligraphy. It occupied the spaces between the lines on all but the bottom half of the last typewritten page.

“Dad, you read it.”

Ellery sat quietly down.

I am writing this

the Inspector read aloud

for reasons that will become clear soon enough. I had wanted for some time to get away from things, and I had planned to go up to Newtown, to the cottage. I asked Carlos to drive up with me, but he begged off, saying he was not feeling well. I fussed with his headache until he said he felt a bit better, so it was not until late afternoon that I left. (I wanted to call the trip off, but Carlos insisted that I go.)

When I got to the cottage I found that the electricity was not turned on, even though I had instructed Jeanne several days before to notify Connecticut Light & Power to restore service (I later found out that she'd simply forgotten, which was not like Jeanne at all). I would have made do with candles, except that the house was very damp and cold—the heating is electric, too. Rather than risk a virus (do singers ever get over their fear of colds?) I decided to turn right around and go back to the city.

I took the penthouse elevator up and I was about to put my key in the lock when I heard voices from the living room, Carlos's and a woman's. The woman's voice was that of a stranger. It was a shock. In my own home! He had no shame, no shame. I was furious, sick, and disgusted.

I went downstairs again and took the service elevator up, and I let myself in through the kitchen and pantry and listened from behind the dining room door. Carlos and the woman were still talking away. The door is a swinging door, and I pushed it open a crack and peeped in. I am not proud of myself about all this, but I could have strangled Carlos for having lied about not feeling well, and entertaining a woman in my home the moment I was out of the way, and I wanted to see what she looked like. She was young, and small, and fair, with red hair and tiny hands and feet (and I'm such a horse!—or rather “cow,” as I heard my dear husband refer to me to this girl, a cow “to be milked,” he told her).

Roberta West went blue-white. “That was me,” she breathed. “That must have been the night he … And she was listening at the door! What must she have thought of me!” Harry Burke took her hand and shushed her.

Inspector Queen read on, glaring at Roberta:

Carlos was doing most of the talking and the long and short of it is that
he was plotting against my life.
I am not imagining this; he spelled it out. My knees began to shake, and I remember thinking, “No, this is a joke, he can't be serious.” I almost walked in on them to tell him what a bad joke I thought it was. But I didn't. Something held me back. I continued to eavesdrop, hating myself and yet unable to tear myself away.

He told this girl that if he did it himself he would be the first to be suspected. So he had to have a real alibi. (By this time I wasn't so sure he was joking.) He then proposed to the girl that
she
do the actual killing while he established his alibi, and that after he inherited all my money he would marry her and they'd live happily ever after. So it was no joke after all. He meant it. He really meant it.

I couldn't take any more. I ran out through the kitchen, leaving them in the living room, and down the service elevator, and I walked and walked, not knowing what to do, where to go, whom to turn to. I walked most of the night. Then I took my car and drove back to Newtown and had the power turned on and stayed at the cottage for two whole days, thinking things out. And not getting anywhere, I might add. If I went to the police, what good would it do? It would be my word against his, with the girl's denial to back him up; it would get into the papers and create a horrid mess. Anyway, the most I could expect from the police would be somebody to guard me, but they couldn't do that indefinitely, even if they believed me.

I could divorce him. But by this time I was over the shock and most of the fears. I was fighting mad. I knew what Carlos was, of course, and I suspected that he was chasing other women, but murder! I never dreamed he would bloody his hands. There was an unreality about the whole thing, anyway. All I could think of was that I had to get back at him some way, some way that would badly hurt him. Divorce wouldn't do it the way I wanted it done. He had to think everything was going his way.

Of course, I was gambling with my life. Maybe in my heart of hearts I didn't really believe it. Anyway, I've lived the best part of my life, and if it's cut short by a few years … It will make no sense to anyone but another woman, who's grown old and ugly and fat and forgotten after having had everything, admiration and applause and fame and everything wonderful that goes with them.

I kept my eyes very wide open after that and soon found out that my suspicions about Carlos and other women were all too well-founded. He's even seduced Jeanne Temple, my secretary, poor thing; no wonder she's been so nervous. I don't blame the women, Carlos has something that women can't resist. Of course, I had
not
torn up our prenuptial agreement, because of my suspicions. I'd fooled him into thinking I had. Keeping it in force gives me another weapon against him, the hurtiest one of all.

I have other weapons, too—this new will, on which I'm writing in disappearing ink. I've also left a clue in invisible ink on my diary page for December first. This is all in case I am murdered. I don't know what Carlos is waiting for, maybe just the right opportunity—I haven't given him many! But something tells me the time is drawing near, something about the way he's been acting. If I'm right about his intentions, and I am convinced I am, he'll get what he deserves, and where it will hurt the most. One of the things I have done is start a search for my sister's only child, Lorette Spanier. I've left the bulk of my estate to her. That ought to wipe the charm off Carlos's face! I'd love to be able to be there when this will is read to him.

To whoever reads this: If I should die a violent death, my husband is the one who arranged it. Even though he will have some alibi, he's as guilty as if he did it with his own hands. The woman will be just his tool.

I have been trying to find out who the girl is who was in my apartment the night I overheard him plan my murder, but Carlos has been very coy about her. As far as I can tell he hasn't seen her again, unless it's been on the sly. So I do not know her name, although I have the oddest feeling I have seen her somewhere before. Here is her description: Late twenties, very fair skin, red hair, height about five feet three, cute figure, pretty eyes (I couldn't tell the color), speaks with a stagy diction (could I have seen her somewhere around Broadway, or on tour?), and she dresses sort of Greenwich Villagey. She has a prominent birthmark on her right cheek, high up, shaped like an almost perfect butterfly, that ought to make her easy to identify. This girl is Carlos's accomplice. She is the one who, if I am murdered, will have done the murder for him.

Signed—Glory Guild

Inspector Queen looked up from the last page. He squinted at Roberta's birthmark and shrugged. Then the old man set the will down on Wasser's desk and turned away.

“Butterfly birthmark,” Harry Burke exclaimed. “That's why she thought Roberta looked familiar. Didn't you say, Bertie, you'd met her with Armando that time in summer stock? It must have stuck in her mind.”

“But she got it all wrong,” Roberta said in a quavery voice. “She must have run out of the apartment that night in May before she heard me turn Carlos down cold and leave. If she'd stayed another few minutes, she'd have known that I told him I wanted no part of it or him. She'd never have written this. Not about me, anyway.”

Burke cradled her hand. “Of course not, Bertie.”

“And she wasn't able to track me down because I never saw Carlos again until the night of the murder, when he turned up at my apartment to use me as his alibi!” The pink butterfly on her cheek was fluttering in distress. “God, how did I ever get into this?”

Burke was glaring at Ellery, as if he expected words of wisdom or at least of comfort. But Ellery was low in his chair, nuzzling his knuckles, sucking on them and getting no sustenance.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

“So,” Inspector Queen ultimately muttered, “we're all the way back to where we were. Further back. The one clue we had is a dud. Gets us not an inch closer to the woman Armando had pull the job.”

“But this is evidence against him, Inspector,” Wasser protested. “Now you have not only Miss West's testimony, but Glory Guild's documented corroboration of Armando's proposal to Miss West as well.”

But the Inspector shook his head. “To put Armando away, Mr. Wasser, we need the woman. I notice,” he added with a sour glance at his son, “that you're not saying anything.”

“What's there to say?” Ellery mumbled. “You've said it all, dad. We'll have to start from scratch again.”

37

Start again they did, and scratch they did, and what they garnered for their pains was a wealth of hindsight that told them nothing they had not known before. In addition to which Armando was being shrewdly difficult.

He was no longer seeing Mrs. Ardene (Piggyback) Vlietland, the lady of the Newport $100,000 brawl. Mrs. Gertie Hodge Huppenkleimer of Chicago and Beekman Place was no longer seeing him; apparently her taste for used toys had turned toward newer and safer amusements, and Armando was making no attempts visible to the probing eye to resume their play. Horsewoman and alcoholic Daffy Dingle was still drying out up around Boston way. Armando had also dropped Jeanne Temple, who was reported mooning about the East 49th Street apartment she shared with Virginia Whiting and going out on an occasional part-time secretarial job, her brief amour no doubt nursed to her impressive chest. Dr. Susan Merckell seemed too busy with ailing larynges at large to fiddle with Armando's, or his throat was suddenly in perfect health. Marta Bellina was off again, in Europe somewhere, on another singing tour. They did not even bother with Selma Pilter; Armando had younger fish to fry. And there was nothing, utterly nothing, on the mysterious woman in the violet veil, or any veil at all. It was as if she had been something out of a gothic romance, drifting about in limbo, the creation of someone's overheated imagination.

Armando was concentrating on Lorette Spanier, playing the role of avuncular confessor and nurseryman of a tender talent. He attended her rehearsals regularly, sitting in the empty orchestra of the Roman Theater while she tried out a new Billy Gaudens number or worked on a classic; appearing like magic backstage when she was through for the day; taking her home or to some hideaway restaurant if she was not too exhausted; soothing her when she was in a mopy mood over the way things were going. He was seen with her everywhere.

“The little fool,” Harry Burke snorted. “Doesn't she have the most elementary sense of caution?”

“She's lonely, Harry,” Roberta said. “You just don't understand women.”

“I understand the Armandos of this world!”

“So,” said Roberta grimly, “do I. But don't judge Lorette by your great big masculine standards, my love. She'll find a way to take care of herself. Most of us do; it's an instinct women are born with. Right now she needs somebody to lean on and talk to. Carlos makes that kind of thing awfully easy.”

Burke snorted.

“He'll take her the way he took her aunt.”

“He didn't really take Glory Guild, did he? Not according to that secret message of hers.”

“Then why is she lying in a copper-lined box, not breathing?”

“He isn't going to harm Lorette. He wants her money.”

“And he'll get it, too!”

“Not for a long time, darling. Don't sell little Lorette short. She may be making a fool of herself with Carlos right now, but she'll let it go only just so far. To get the money he's got to marry her, and I have the feeling he's not going to find Lorette that gullible.”

“He talked her aunt into it!”

“Her aunt was practically an old woman. Lorette's not only loaded, she's young and beautiful. This is just a phase. Anyway, why spend all this time talking about
them?
I've got to get up early tomorrow morning.”

So they turned to other things, which left them both breathing hard.

Roberta had been accepted for an off-Broadway play, in which she had not a line to say; she was to appear for three interminable acts, upstage right, in a flesh-colored bikini, doing the frug. “The author tells me he wrote it while under the influence of LSD,” she told Burke. “And you know what? I believe him.” She crept home each night battered in every muscle and sinew.

They were consequently hard times for the Scot. While Roberta rehearsed, he spent most of his days with Ellery, hanging uselessly about police headquarters. They came to resemble a pair out of low tragedy, detesting the sight of each other, but bound together by an unseverable bond, like Siamese twins.

Their dialogue was dreary.

“Are you as sick of me as I am of you?” Ellery demanded.

“Righto,” Burke snapped.

“Then why don't you cut out?”

“I can't, Ellery. Why don't you?”

“I can't, either.”

“My pal.”

“Put it there, pal.”

Burke put his hands into his pockets.

Inspector Queen went pathetically to see the district attorney.

“How about hauling Armando before the grand jury without the woman, Herman?”

The D.A. shook his head.

“But we've got Glory's story between those lines,” the Inspector argued. “We've got Roberta West's testimony.” He was really arguing with himself, using the D.A. as a sounding board.

“So what, Dick? All they prove is possible intention on his part seven months before the fact. Even if I could get a grand jury to indict, which I doubt, can you imagine what a good defense lawyer would do to my case? And you know Armando would hire the best. If you ask me, Dick, the bastard would enjoy the publicity. I'm damned if I'm going to give it to him without a fighting chance to put him away. The only chance we've got is that woman.”

“What woman?” the Inspector whined. “I'm beginning to think she never existed.”

Pathetic or not, the Inspector refused to give up. He summoned Carlos Armando to headquarters with cunning regularity—to keep his teeth on edge, the old warrior told Ellery and Harry Burke. But if the summonses to Centre Street were designed to fray Armando's nerves, they frayed only the Inspector's. The man seemed to thrive on the visits. He no longer howled harassment or threatened legal action. He was charming, his negative answers were oiled with courtesy, his blunt teeth grinned, and once he even offered the old man a cigar. (“I don't smoke cigars,” the Inspector rasped, “and if I did I wouldn't smoke one from Havana, and if I did I wouldn't accept it from you, Armando, and if I did I'd choke on it.” Armando thereupon offered the cigar to Ellery, who thoughtfully took it. “I'll pass it along to some rat I want to poison,” he said to Armando with equal courtesy. Armando smiled.)

“He's got me by the short hairs,” yelled the Inspector, “and he's loving every minute of it. Keeps asking me why I don't arrest him! I've never hated anyone so much in my life. I wish I'd gone in for a career in the Sanitation Department.” At their puzzled looks he added, “At least I'd be equipped to handle this garbage.”

The old man stopped calling Armando down to Centre Street.

Burke asked: “Then it's going into the unsolved file?”

“Not on your tintype,” the Inspector snapped; he always fell back on the slang of his youth when he was upset. “I'll stick with this case till they shovel me under. But these sessions are giving me ulcers, not him. We'll lie low for a while and hope he gets too pleased with himself. Maybe he'll make a mistake. Maybe one of these days he'll contact the woman. Or she'll contact him. I've got him under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”

And not only by Inspector Queen's squad. Ellery, who was losing weight he could not afford, took to trailing along with the trailers, or independently, lightening the burden on his bathroom scale still further. He saw a great deal of the Playboy Club and the Gaslight Club and Danny's Hideaway and Dinty Moore's and Sardi's and Lindy's, and even more of the musty interior of the Roman Theater, and had nothing to show for it but acid stomach and an occasional hangover.

“Then why do you do it?” Harry Burke asked him.

“You know what they say about hope,” Ellery shrugged. “It's a cinch I can't do any work.”

“The old game,” Burke sighed. “See who has more patience, the fox or the hounds. Nothing?”

“Nothing. Want to join me in this exercise in futility?”

“No, thank you. I haven't the stomach for it, Ellery. Sooner or later I'd throttle him. Anyway, there's Roberta.”

There was Roberta, and Burke suddenly had better things to do than fume in Ellery's presence, being fumed back at. One night, when Roberta crawled into her hole-in-the-wall from the Village hole-in-the-wall where she had frugged onstage all day, and consequently was in no condition to resist a decent human emotion, the Scot took his courage in both brawny hands, like one of his forebears' claymores, and swung wildly.

“Bertie. Bert. Roberta. I can't stand this any longer. I mean, you can say what you like about police dogs, but they lead a damned dullish life. I'm going out of my mind, Roberta. Hanging about. I mean …”

“You mean you want to go
home
,” Roberta said with a little cry.

“Definitely! You understand, don't you?”

“Oh, yes,” Roberta said, with the thinnest layer of ice on her voice. It was her best stage voice, the one she had always yearned to employ in an interpretation of Lady Macbeth. “I certainly do.”

Burke beamed. “Then it's all settled.” Then he said anxiously, “Isn't it?”

“What's settled?”

“I thought—”

To his horror, Roberta began to blub. “Oh, I don't blame you, Harry …”

“Bertie! What on earth's the matter?”

“N-nothing.”

“There
is.
Or you wouldn't be crying, for the love of God.”

“I'm
not
crying! Why should I cry, for the love of God? Of course you want to go home. You're in a land of aliens. No dart games in the pubs, no Rockers or Mods, no changing of the Guard … Harry, please. I have a headache. Good night.”

“But.” Burke's transparent eyes let some honest bewilderment through. “But I thought …” He stopped.

“Yes. You're always thinking. You're so cerebral, Harry.” Roberta suddenly turned over on the couch cover she was blubbing into. “You thought what?”

“I thought you'd realize that I didn't mean—”

“You
didn't
mean? You're so exasperating sometimes, Harry. Can't you talk simple, understandable English?”

“I'm Scots,” Burke said stiffishly. “We don't speak the same language, perhaps, but what I have in mind is supposed to be universal. What I didn't mean—I mean, what I meant was …”

“Yes, Harry?”

“Damn it all to hell!” Burke's wrestler's neck was purple with strain. “I want you to go home with me!”

Roberta was sitting up by this time, frowning a little at the mess she found her hair in. “That would be nice, Harry. I mean under different circumstances. I mean you're not very clever about propositioning girls, you don't have the
savoir-faire
of men like Carlos, or even Ellery Queen, but I suppose I ought to take it as a compliment, considering the source. You
are
a darling in your own way. Are you actually proposing to unclasp your purse to finance a trip to England for me in return for my illegal embraces? I couldn't afford it on my own, of course, though I'd love to see England; I've always dreamed of going there—Stratford-on-Avon and all that. But, darling, I'm afraid I can't take you up on it. I see I've given you the wrong impression of myself. Just because circumstances forced me to confess that I'd once had an affair with that monster Carlos doesn't give you the right to think I'm that kind of girl generally. But you are sweet, Harry; thank you at least for wanting a few nights of love with me. And now, really, I
am
tired and I'd like to go to bed—alone. Good night, Harry.”

“Will—you—be—quiet!”
the Scot roared. “You don't understand at all! I want to marry you!”

“Oh, Harry,” Roberta cried. “If I'd only known!”

Whatever other mendacity she was about to utter was never uttered. The rest was smothered in powerful arms and lips.

“Well, old chap,” Burke told Ellery the next day with bashful jubilance, “I finally popped the old question.”

Ellery grunted. “How did Roberta get it out of you?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“The poor girl's been waiting for you to pop it for weeks. Maybe months for all I know. Anyone but a lovesick Scot would have seen it. Congratulations.” Ellery shook Burke's hand limply.

They were planning to be married as soon as the avant-garde turkey Roberta was rehearsing for opened and closed, which Miss West predicted would be in nothing flat. “And we're going to bow our necks to the yoke in Merrie Olde,” Burke cried. “Can't wait for that BOAC flight, chappie. To tell you the truth, I've had a bellyful of your lovely country.”

“Sometimes,” Ellery nodded wistfully, “I wish you'd licked us at Yorktown.”

And he cursed Carlos Armando and all his gypsy ancestors, and went back to his novel.