Shadow of Guilt (4 page)

“Yes, but—”

“Then go. What good can you do hanging around here? How would you get out of it, anyway? Call Lew and tell him you’ve been encouraging Ala to take off for the weekend with a… a…?” She put her cup down on its saucer. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to go on like this. I… just go. That’s all. Go to Idlewild. If you want coffee, there’s some in the kitchen. You can get me some more, too.”

She held out her cup. I took it and went out with it into the hall. As I started toward the kitchen, I heard a key in the lock of the front door behind me. Ala came in, carrying a little suitcase.

She looked maddeningly pretty, fresh and springlike as a hyacinth. I could have strangled her.

“You little fool,” I said. “What in God’s name have you been up to?”

“But George…”

“Chuck came back from Chicago. Connie was going to call Rosemary, so I had to tell her everything. About you and Chuck, too. Everything. She called the Greens. They told her you and Don had gone off on your own.”

Ala remained totally undisturbed. “So she knows. That’s fine. It makes it a lot easier.” She smiled at me. It was a smile of brilliant self-assurance, it was almost smug. “George, dear, you were wonderful. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have had the nerve. Now it’s all perfect. It’s just the most incredible, marvelous thing that ever happened. I told Don I wasn’t sure about marrying Chuck, the way you suggested, and right away he let me know how he felt. He loves me. He’s loved me from the first moment he set eyes on me. We’re going to be married. Oh, George, I’m so grateful to you…”

She threw herself exuberantly against me. Connie’s coffee cup got dislodged from its saucer and fell, smashing against the parquet floor. Immediately Connie came hurrying out of the dining room.

She stood in the doorway, looking diamond-hard and supercilious. Normally that expression on her face would have quailed Ala, but now, keeping close to me, with her hand on my arm, Ala returned Connie’s gaze with an equally deadly composure.

She said, “George tells me you know. So there’s nothing to argue about, is there? I’ve talked it all out with George and he understands. I’m not going to marry Chuck. I’m going to marry Don Saxby.”

I knew I deserved this, but it didn’t make it any easier.

Connie said, “Where were you and Mr. Saxby after you left the Greens’?”

Ala gazed straight back at her. “We—we just drove around talking and then we went to a motel. We registered as Mr. and Mrs. Don Saxby, but don’t worry. We stayed up all the time, talking. It was my idea, anyway. It seemed the best way to make you realize there was nothing you could do about it.” Ala still had her hand on my arm, still blissfully assuming we were allies, but her eyes never faltered from their challenge of Connie’s face. “Don feels as bad about it as I do. And we finally agreed what to do. We decided I should come back right away and explain it all to you and to Chuck. Don hopes just as much as I do that you’ll be sensible and let us be married in a civilized way. But I warn you. If you’re not, there’s nothing you can do. I’m of age. Besides, George is as much of a parent as you—more because he’s a real uncle—and he isn’t going to stand in our way…”

“Wait a minute—” I began.

But Connie interrupted. “Since you and George seem suddenly so close, has he had time to tell you, among other items, what your Uncle Mal found out about Mr. Saxby? Do you know that last spring Don Saxby tried to elope with the eighteen-year-old daughter of some rich people in Toronto?”

I’d expected that to throw Ala, but she merely laughed.

“That!” she said. “A neurotic little girl who was crazy about him, who tried to trick him into running off with her. You think Don didn’t tell me about that?”

“So he told you, did he?” said Connie. “Did he also tell you that he was only using the girl to get money out of the parents, that he let the father buy him off with ten thousand dollars?”

Ala glared defiantly. “That’s a lie.”

“Do you want to call your Uncle Mal? He’ll tell you whether it’s a lie or not.”

“Uncle Mal! You think I’d pay any attention to him or any of his stuffy old cronies, doddering around, spreading malicious gossip?”

“That’s enough, Ala,” I said. “It looks as if it’s true.”

She spun around to me, the defiance ready for me, too. “How do you know whether it’s true or not? Have you called these friends of Uncle Mal’s? Or the people with the crazy daughter?”

“No, I haven’t, but…”

“My God, you too!” She turned back to Connie, her eyes gleaming savagely. “I might have known you’d cook up something phony like this. You and the Rysons.”

“Ala!” I said. “Stop that.”

She turned back to me. “And you—you’re just as bad as Connie after all. If you knew how ridiculous you both look standing there like characters with a ruined daughter out of
True Confessions.
All right. I did my best. I was prepared to come back, to get down on my knees, if need be, and grovel over what a fool I’ve been about poor Chuck. But if this is the way you’re going to act, if you’re going to make up stinking lies about Don—okay, fine. I’ve had enough. God knows, I’ve been having enough for years.”

Without looking at either of us, she swept past us and up the stairs.

I started after her.

“No,” said Connie. “You’ve done enough damage as it is.” The front doorbell rang. I was so close to it that I jumped. I turned and opened the door.

Chuck came in. He looked haggard and disheveled, so utterly unlike the up-and-coming young banker that for a moment I hardly recognized him.

“She’s come back, hasn’t she?” he said. “I saw her. I’ve been waiting across the street in a doorway since six.”

The way he looked reminded me of something. Then I remembered. His mother had looked at us like that, wild-eyed and remote, when Connie and I had visited her at the sanitarium just before one of her more violent attacks. “Where is she?” he demanded.

“She’s just gone upstairs,” said Connie.

“Can I go to her?”

“She’s in quite a state, Chuck. I don’t know…”

“Whether she’ll see me? Why wouldn’t she see me? She’s engaged to me, isn’t she?”

“But…”

“Okay, Chuck,” I said. “Why don’t you try?”

Connie turned sharply to me, but that was all Chuck needed. He dashed up the stairs.

I said, “Look, Connie, Ala could be right about that girl, you know. Vivien did say Mrs. Fostwick was a gossip. She could have got it all wrong or invented the bit about the money—anything. At least we’ve got to make sure.”

“And just how do you propose to do that?”

“Call the Fostwicks, get the name of these people and talk to them. There can’t be more than one Reginald Fostwick in Toronto.”

I went to the telephone. I got Mrs. Fostwick almost at once and, after she’d squawked a while like a panicked hen, she told me the name of the people. It was Duvreux. In five minutes I was telling Mr. Duvreux our problem. He was clearly a weighty and responsible citizen. It was quite impossible to doubt his word. With a feeling of dull depression, I put down the phone.

“Well?” asked Connie crisply.

“It’s true,” I said. “Saxby did take the ten thousand dollars. And that’s not all. Duvreux checked up on him through private detectives. There was another earlier episode in Quebec.”

“So,” said Connie. “There it is. A very pretty situation, isn’t it? I congratulate you.”

As we stood assessing each other like enemies, Chuck came down the stairs. He was walking unsteadily, almost as if he were drunk.

He didn’t look at either of us. He was gazing straight in front of him.

“She’s locked herself in her room. She wouldn’t let me in. She just talked through the door.”

“But what did she say?” Connie asked gently.

“She says it’s no good. She says she’s never going to marry me. She’s sorry, she says. She’ll explain it all later, but now…”

Suddenly he sat down on the stairs and put his hands over his face. The light from the hall chandelier played on his blond hair and the smooth youthful skin at the back of his neck. He seemed to be in a state bordering on shock. To me Chuck had always been the very symbol of all that was stolid and unimaginative in good young boys. Seeing him like this, I felt disgusted at myself for my careless meddling, and the disgust brought with it a deep rage against Don Saxby.

Connie dropped down at Chuck’s side. She put her hand on his shoulder. She was all maternal warmth and tenderness, as if he were a very little child who’d fallen and scraped his knee.

“Chuckie dear, you mustn’t worry. Please. She’s in a silly, confused stage, but she’s only nineteen. She…”

The phone rang shrilly. My wife glanced up at me, blazingeyed, as if it were my fault it had rung.

“Don’t take it here. Take it upstairs.”

I squeezed past them and hurried up the stairs to our bedroom.

It was Eve. Her voice, coming so unexpectedly from a totally different world, was like sunshine suddenly splashing across the room.

“Eve, Eve baby.”

“George, I’m sorry, but I had to call. Is it all right?”

“All right? Of course it’s all right.”

“Don Saxby’s just been here.”

“At your apartment?” I said.

“I don’t quite know why. I suppose it was because he knows about you and me. He was terribly sweet. He seems absolutely crazy about Ala and he knows Connie’s going to fight it. Apparently Ala’s told him you’ll be on his side, but he begged me to call you right away and let you know how much it means to him that you…”

I had been listening in growing outrage. Now I exploded. “What gall, dragging you into this!”

“Gall? Why? I know it was rather odd coming to me when he hardly knows me, but…”

“He’s a crook.”

I told her about the Duvreuxs. She gave a little gasp. “No. George, are you sure?”

“Of course we’re sure. I’ve just been talking to the Duvreux family in Toronto.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

I hadn’t really thought until then, but now I knew exactly what I was going to do.

“It’s simple,” I said. “If he thinks he’s ever going to see Ala again, he’s out of his mind. And if he tries to hold us up for money, like the Duvreuxs, I’ll go to the police. Once they hear his Canadian record, they’ll get him out of town by tomorrow morning.”

“I can still hardly believe it. He seemed so nice and so—so understanding about us. He said he knew how you must feel about me. That’s why you’d be sympathetic with him, he said. That’s why…”

I heard Connie’s heels clicking up the stairs. “Connie’s coming,” I said. “I’ll have to hang up. Listen, darling, somehow I’ll get to your place. I’ve got to. If I don’t see you, I’ll be a gibbering maniac.”

I dropped the receiver. Connie’s footsteps clicked past the door down the corridor. She was going to Ala. For a moment I stood there, thinking of Don Saxby with hatred. Then the fat pink roses on the wallpaper in front of me seemed to be wabbling slightly, because suddenly I understood why he had gone to Eve.
He said he knew how you must feel about me. That’s why you’d be sympathetic
… Eve hadn’t known enough of the situation to see what he had meant by that, but I saw. What he’d been saying to her was: Get George Hadley to okay the marriage or I’ll tell his wife—and anyone else who’s interested—that you and he are having a sordid little boss-stenographer affair.

I should have realized, long before, that there was a trap. But it was only then that it came to me—then when the trap was almost closing around me.

For a moment I felt queasy. I saw it all in the papers. Connie—the Consuelo Corliss—made wonderful copy. Readers of salacious gossip would gawp in delight to learn, not only that Consuelo Corliss’s daughter had spent the night in a motel with a man less than a month before her wedding, but that Consuelo Corliss’s husband was also having an affair, with his secretary. If he wanted to, Saxby could spatter mud over all of us. And what was to stop him unless I played it his way? Everyone would know. Lew Parker would know. The whole Hadley family could explode into a scandal far worse than anything I had dreaded in my lowest moments.

Wouldn’t I have to make some sort of a deal with him? Pay him off after all—the way Duvreux had paid him off?

Connie came bustling in from the corridor. She said, “George, it’s almost ten. You’ve got to leave for Idlewild.”

“I’m not going to Idlewild. I can’t. Not possibly. Not now.”

“Why not? It’s far too late for Lew to send anyone else, isn’t it?”

“I’ve got to see Don Saxby.”

“Why? For what possible reason? We don’t have to bother about him any more. Ala’s back. The moment she’s calmed down, I’ll make her see what a fool she’s been. There’s nothing she can do any more anyway, and if he tries to get in touch with her again, we’ll just call the police. That’s all.”

She gave a little shrug. There it was. She’d got it all doped out. Everything was okay. There was nothing to worry about.

She went to the phone, called the garage and asked them to have the car around in five minutes.

I drove to Idlewild. Under the circumstances, there was nothing else to do. I picked up the Brazilian; I took him to his hotel; I took him to Lew’s. Cynthia Parker made some terrible rum cocktails she’d learned about in the Virgin Islands. They were, I suppose, as near to Brazil as she could get. We sat around interminably drinking them; then we sat down to an interminable lunch.

After lunch we had brandies. The Brazilian got jovial, but it didn’t affect his shrewdness. Lew already had a contract drawn up; it was favorable for the Brazilian and he knew it, but he was taking his time. It was a quarter to three before he finally came across and, beaming, announced he thought he should go back to his hotel for a little nap.

I drove him to his hotel in the Sixties, then looked up Saxby’s address in the phone book. He lived just east of Fifth Avenue on Fifty-Fourth Street. I went back to the car and started driving. Fifty-Eighth… Fifty-Sixth… Nothing seemed resolved. What was I going to say? What was I going to do? When I reached Fifty-Fourth Street I didn’t make the turn. I went on driving. Somewhere at random way downtown I crossed to First Avenue and started uptown again.