Magician's Wife (20 page)

“That's right—thanks for reminding me.”

“
Get rid of that bed you have!
”

The rasp in her voice startled him, and it was a moment before he realized what she meant. Then: “O.K.,” he said, “Tuesday it goes out.”

“In the meantime you're staying here.”

But his real reason for blocking the call to Sally was his concern for what it could mean, the explosion it might cause. He pictured her, when she heard of the wedding plans, as going into a panic at what he might tell, the revelations he might make, the full confession to Grace, as a suitable prelude to marriage. In that, as he learned, he badly misgauged her, but it was what he feared, and he racked his brains for a way to reach her, and reach her before Grace did, to give her reassurance that no such disclosure would come. But how he had no idea. He dared not call her at Bunny's place in Cape May, as he had no way of knowing if she would be free to talk. And he dared not send her a wire asking her to call him, as she might misunderstand it and go off on some tear that he couldn't anticipate. But on Labor Day he had thought well to visit the shop, make one last holiday check, and see how things were going now that his back was turned. He arrived in late afternoon and spent some time there, not leaving until dusk to keep his dinner date with Grace. His way led up Kennedy Drive, and almost mechanically, passing Elm Street, he glanced toward Sally's house, catching his breath when he saw a light up on the second floor. Circling the block, he parked near the Harlow Theater, walked down, and rang the bell. Nobody came, and then his ear caught the sound of a child's laughter. He rang again, and from an upstairs window Sally called down: “I'll be down in a minute—I can't come just yet. Please wait.”

He waited, and then a downstairs light came on, and the door opened. Sally, in black, stiffened when she saw him, and her eyes turned to stones. “What do you want?” she snarled.

“Sally,” he said, trying to sound agreeable, “we have business—fairly important business—that should not be discussed out here on the street.”

Uneasily, still coldly hostile, she stood aside for him to enter and he stepped first into the hall, then into the room where she had put on the light. By its location, it was a living room but by its furnishings, it was what she had said it was the first evening she visited him, a “storehouse for junk.” Against one wall were three cabinets of pink brocade with gold fringe, against another a row of great baskets that crowded against a sofa and two upholstered chairs. Derisively, as he glanced uncomfortably around, she asked: “What's the matter? Afraid something'll jump out at you?”

“Well, it might at that,” he said grimly.

“Not at me, it won't.”

“Nice when your conscience is clear.”

“I asked what you want!” she snapped, pointedly not asking him to sit. “Get at it, if you don't mind. What is this business we have?”

“First: I'm going to marry your mother.”

Her eyes dilated, and she stared for some moments. Then: “Are you being funny?” she whispered.

“No, not at all.”

“You don't even know my mother.”

“On the contrary, I know her very well.” He recounted briefly his relations with Grace, especially how they had met, “through that number you gave her each night—my number, you'll recall. She got curious about it and looked it up, finally coming to see me. She approved of me and spent some time promoting the match. With some success, I may add—until, as you know, it somehow fell apart. All that time I was falling for her, and she was, for me. So when she felt, as she said, that you were as cold on me as I seemed to be on you, she felt free to follow her heart, and so, the wedding is going to take place. Don't try to attend—I won't have you there. It would make her happy, though, if you called her up.” He waited, studying her, and when he saw she believed him at last, he went on: “However, that's not what I came about. I just wanted to say I've told her nothing, that I'm going to tell her nothing, of what happened a week ago—of your part in it or mine. So you can rest easy and—”

“I had no part in anything.”

“Then—O.K. The case is closed.”

“Oh, no. Not quite.”

“... There's something I don't know?”

“There's that girl that I'm going to get.”

“Are you talking about Buster?”

“Who do you think I'm talking about? She tried to put it on me, she told those lies about me—and for that I mean to get her.”

“Sally, I think you're out of your mind!”

“Am I? Maybe not. The old man played me tricks and choked to death, so it seems. Alec played me tricks and drowned, so it seems. She played me tricks and she'll burn, as it will seem.”

“For something we did?”

“ ‘We?' Who is we?”

“You and I, Sally, both of us.”

“I don't even know what you mean!”

“I mean I wonder if you're all there in the head.”

He studied her, trying to make up his mind whether this was just venomous talk or if something substantial lay back of it. He couldn't tell, but tried to sound reasonable as he said: “Sally, can't you see you're rocking the boat? That you're playing with TNT? You have the money! You—”

“Money's not all. Oh, no.”

“... Sally, if you're figuring this as a way to copper-rivet your innocence, it may not work out that way. It could explode in your face in a way to wreck your whole life.”

“That's my lookout.”

He stood for some moments, rocking back and forth in front of her, then sniffed. “Sally,” he said very solemnly, “if I were you, I'd get treatment for that gland. It not only makes you stink but, as
I
would say, leaves you a bit unbalanced.”

“Is there something else?”

“You have it straight? What I said?”

“Well, I'm losing no sleep!”

“Then, fine. Did Bunny come back, too?”

“Well, the season's over, isn't it?”

Grace was badly upset when he told her about his visit, and for a time it seemed that the marriage might break up before it even got started. But when Sally called she felt better. “I wouldn't call her effusive,” she remarked on hanging up, “but after all, she's involved in it too—as I mustn't forget. She was agreeable enough, though—so perhaps that was the way to handle it, and I'll say no more about it. ... Shall we eat at the club again? I'm beginning to feel it's ‘our place.' ”

“So O.K., but what can she do, what in the hell can she do? Get on with your life, get on with it!”

G
RANT'S, THOUGH HEADQUARTERED IN
the northern Middle West, mainly covered the Southeast, with branches in Richmond, Atlanta, Miami Beach, Mobile, New Orleans, and Memphis, and so the newlyweds toured Dixie at a time when Dixie was lovely, with autumn perfuming its days while touching its nights with a crisp chill. Pat's red carpet was 1,200 miles long and rolled ahead of them everywhere, so their wants were anticipated, even to their man, which was waiting at every stop. In Miami Beach, to their great amusement, they received the announcement of their own marriage and at once called Pat to thank him. “I thought it would give you a bang,” he said, evidently proud of himself. “How was that for all due deliberate speed?” Clay said it was “pure magic,” and then Grace took the phone, with appreciative comments on “that paper and the engraving— oh, my, how beautifully it was done.” Once more, when Clay took the phone again, Pat admired “that well-bred voice,” and Clay felt very proud. But at Mobile, Pat called them to acknowledge the picture's arrival, they having called Mr. Gumpertz, their last hectic day in Channel City, and had him take it over for forwarding. Pat, after complimenting Grace, told Clay: “Listen, my grandfather's picture, my father's, and mine all look as though painted by a friend of the mayor's, which of course they were. But this is a beautiful thing—a real work of art, which is something I know about even if I don't know meat. So I hope you're proud of who you're married to.”

She revealed much savvy at entertaining, not only its basic principles but also its special angles, at the hotel cocktail parties they gave for Grant's executives and their wives. “The trick,” she whispered, in a dark, conspiratorial way, “is in knowing where to splurge and where to pare the cheese. And the main thing, Clay, is champagne—it's the key to the big economies. So it costs, you say? Yes, but look what it saves. You try wetting their whistles with the standard line of mixed drinks, and you have to have a bartender, as well as an endless assortment of liquors he'll tell you he has to have—everything from quinine water to Cinzano. And once opened, that booze is all down the drain. We dare not take it with us, as we don't know the laws in these states, and even one bottle of Angostura could get your car confiscated. On top of which, you'll need an extra room where he can set up his bar. But with champagne you don't need him: the waiter we have can open, pour, and pass. You offer champagne at the start, and who turns it down? Everyone loves it, and if there is one nut who wants Scotch, O.K., you give it to him with your own lily-white hands. You have it stashed with a bowl of rocks under the buffet table—and that takes care of him. For the rest, the champagne is opened as we need it, and extra bottles go back—it's the standard procedure. So, if that's understood, we'll get to the fine points, like the kind of canapés we have.”

But, though all this no doubt reflected her years abroad, in one respect, as she herself admitted, she was a “one-hundred-percent American hick”: she always, on Sunday morning, sent the boy out for the hometown paper and then stretched herself out “to see what's going on—especially what Fisher's is featuring.” In New Orleans, with brunch out of the way, she was comfortably flat on her stomach in their sitting room, with
The Pilot
strewn all around her, when she gave a sharp exclamation: “
Well!
” And then: “It's about time, it certainly is!”

She was in mules and crimson kimono, he in slippers and monogrammed robe, with a program about to be played in Washington tuned in on TV. “Yeah?” he inquired languidly. “What's about time, Grace?”

“They've arrested that girl, the one that killed poor Alec. That assistant he had in the act. That Buster.”

“... Grace, are you sure she killed Alexis?”

“Well, they know what they're doing, I think.”

“They've been known to make mistakes.”

“On ‘Perry Mason,' that's all.”

“Grace, what would she kill him for?”

“The insurance, for one thing.”

“She'd risk her own neck for that?”

“What neck? She jumped clear, didn't she? By a funny coincidence, after refusing to fasten her seat belt, as he begged her to.”

“Can I see the paper, please?”

Staring at Page 1, he felt himself go slack at the picture he saw, of Buster in ecdysiast attire, and at another picture too, a smaller inset of a woman in uniform cap. This, he learned, was Policewoman Elizabeth Galbraith, who had “broken the case” by getting the parking attendant to talk, the boy who had stood around while the quarrel went on between Buster and Mr. Alexis and who had heard her “make threats.” Until now, it appeared, the boy had refused to talk or admit he had heard anything, maintaining he had been “busy getting the car out.” There was quite a lot more, especially about Miss Galbraith and what she had done, and the boy, whose name was Norman (Bud) Jones. It appeared he had been held as a material witness in $2,000 bail, “which was furnished by a bondsman.”

Clay lay on the bed, one of the twin beds, in the bedroom, massaging his flaccid face, not quite sure how he got there. Then he put in a call to Nat Pender, getting a flash of the jitters at having to find his pen and take down the Pender home number, when Channel City Information looked it up for him. Then he put in the person-to-person, and when at last Mr. Pender came on, talking with a reasonable imitation of easy affability, “Nat,” he said, “Clay Lockwood—say, I owe you a million pardons for bothering you at home and on Sunday this way, but I more or less felt I had to.”

“You calling about Buster?” Mr. Pender interrupted.

“That's right. I just saw the paper.”

“Clay, that girl's in trouble, a lot worse than the paper says. Because what's back of it isn't Liz Galbraith, though count on her, of course, to get her mug printed any chance she gets. Actually it's the wife who got to Bud Jones, and in a way to make him dangerous. I mean, after she got through there's no way to call him off, make him get cold feet, or listen to reason.”

“You mean Mrs. Alexis.”

“Yeah—she'd be better off with a tiger.”

Quickly Mr. Pender sketched the background on the case. Bud, he said, had been soft on Buster himself, but for some reason hadn't minded her relationship with Mr. Alexis. So he had loyally “clammed,” as Mr. Pender put it, about the quarrel on the lot, realizing it could mean trouble. But then “Mrs. Alexis got in it, having long talks with him out on the parking lot at night, and in the daytime asking him down to visit her at the hotel. She's put the house on sale, given up her Portico job, and moved into the Chinquapin-Plaza, with a maid and children's nurse, and the boy was flattered when she invited him for long, intimate talks. Did you know he talks with a stammer? Little by little she began telling him of Buster's imitations of how he talks. Clay, I doubt if Buster did it—it doesn't sound like her, she's a good-hearted girl, though dumb. And it's Mrs. Alexis, it seems, that has a gift at such imitations—she's been in show business herself.
Anyway,
she did a snow job for real, and that jerk hates Buster now. That's why he can't be seen, by her or anyone. When she ripened it up and rang Liz Galbraith about it, the rest was a foregone conclusion.”