An Inconvenient Woman (49 page)

“No tears, I see,” said Jules, in a voice barely above a whisper.

“I’ve shed all my tears, Jules,” said Pauline.

He blinked his eyes.

“For whatever it’s worth to you, Pauline, flights of angels are not singing me to my rest.”

“If you’re thinking I want you to suffer, Jules, you’re wrong. I don’t,” said Pauline, looking away from him. She held her elbows in front of her, as if she were cold, although the room was not cold.

“I remember that night in Palm Beach years ago, when I first saw you at the Van Degans’ dance. You were everything I ever wanted. I’m sorry, Pauline. I really am.”

She shook her head. “Oh, Jules, please, please, let’s not go down memory lane.”

“Listen, Pauline.” There was an urgency to his weak voice. “She’s not a bad girl.”

“I’m not interested in hearing about her virtues.”

“Take care of her, Pauline.”

“You must be mad. How could you ask me such a thing?”

“I’m giving you good advice.”

“No. I don’t have to take care of her.”

“It will be terrible for you if you don’t, Pauline. There are things I know about in life. Money is one of them. Trust me in this.”

The exertion of talking had exhausted him. His head rolled back and fell to the side. Pauline looked to the door. She wanted to leave the room, but an instinct told her not to. She knew that he was about to die. She moved to the bell on his bedside table to call for Miss Toomey. She noticed from the light on the instrument that one of the telephone lines was being used. She wondered if Miss Toomey was calling Dr. Petrie.

“Don’t ring for Miss Toomey,” said Jules. “I don’t want another reprieve.”

She picked up the receiver and listened in. She heard Olaf’s voice, speaking rapidly. “I’m sorry, Flo. He can’t talk to you. Missus is in there with him. It’s almost at the end. I think Toomey suspects we were at your house today.” Pauline slammed down the telephone.

“There’s something you should know, Pauline,” said Jules.

She could not bear to hear one more word about Flo March. She had never hated anyone before in her life, but she hated Flo March. When she spoke, she sounded weary. “No. There’s nothing more I need to know, Jules. I know everything, about everything, and so does everyone we know.”

“Kippie killed Hector,” he said, in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible.

Pauline, stunned, gasped. Their eyes met. “No, no,” she whispered, shaking her head in denial at what her husband had told her, although she knew that what he said was true.

“Open the safe in the library,” he said. “There is a sealed manila envelope. Hector’s note is inside.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I took it from Hector’s house before the police got there.”

“What did it say?”

“He wrote down the name of his killer.”

Pauline began to cry, as things fell into place in her mind. Kippie. Kippie did it. Kippie needed money that night, and she had refused him. And Kippie had gone to Hector. And the suicide story that she had never understood was a cover-up by Jules to protect her from knowing that her son had killed her best friend.

Pauline knelt by Jules’s side, weeping. “Oh, Jules, I’m sorry. Oh, my God, Jules. You did this for me. Oh, Jules, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

She took hold of his hand and leaned over to kiss it. She felt a resurgence of love for him, but the feeling became overwhelmed by a dark thought that leapt into her mind. “Jules? Does anyone else know what you just told me? Please tell me. Does anyone else know what you just told me?”

Jules’s eyes had started to glaze over in preparation for death, but he was able to forestall that by-now-welcome event for the moment it took to meet Pauline’s gaze. He saw the panic in her eyes, and he could not bring himself to tell her that it was at Flo March’s house on Azelia Way that he had hidden Kippie for the six hours it took until all the arrangements had been made that changed Hector Paradiso’s death from a murder to a suicide. He could not, out of respect for his wife, have the last words he uttered be the name of his mistress.

“Who, Jules? Please tell me,” begged Pauline.

But Jules Mendelson was dead. Pauline, born Episcopalian,
could be devoutly Episcopalian when she felt inclined toward religion, and at that moment she felt so inclined. Still kneeling by Jules’s side, with her face in her hands, she said the prayers of her youth for her husband, the same prayers she had said for her mother when she knelt at her deathbed so many years before. Then she rose, still in the final stages of the Lord’s Prayer, as the overwhelming thoughts of what she had to do pushed the prayers from her mind. “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever,” she said in a churchlike whisper, but she was thinking of the obligations of her life. She caught sight of herself in the mirror over Jules’s fireplace. She wished she were not covered in jewels, which she had only worn for the benefit of Prince Friedrich of Hesse-Darmstadt, and which were too glittering by far for the circumstances at hand. But she could not remove them, as she had to return to her guests downstairs, and they would notice and tell afterward, after the story became public that Jules had died while she was giving a party for a prince who was no more than a jewelry salesman.

When she buzzed for Miss Toomey, the door opened immediately, as if she had been standing outside, and Miss Toomey entered and ran to the side of the bed.

“He’s gone,” said Pauline quietly.

“My God,” said Miss Toomey. “Why didn’t you call me?” She was distressed not to have been present at the moment of death.

“It was very peaceful,” said Pauline. “One moment he was here, and the next he was gone. I wasn’t even aware immediately that it had happened.”

“I’ll call Dr. Petrie,” said Miss Toomey.

“I don’t want anyone to know yet,” said Pauline.

“But I must call the doctor.”

“There’s not much the doctor can do now,” said Pauline. And then she repeated, with emphasis, “I don’t want anyone to know, Miss Toomey. Do you understand?”

“Until when, Mrs. Mendelson?”

“Until I get rid of my guests downstairs. A half hour at most. I don’t want them to know that my husband is dead. It is urgent that the press not find out. Urgent. Just stay here with him until I come back upstairs.” She started toward the door.

“I’ll call Olaf,” said Miss Toomey.

Pauline stopped at the mention of Olaf’s name. The tone
of her voice hardened. “No, don’t call Olaf. I don’t want Olaf in this house another minute. I do not wish him to see my husband’s body. I blame him for my husband’s death. Get rid of him.”

Miss Toomey, startled, looked at Pauline. “Yes, Mrs. Mendelson.”

Pauline walked out of the room where her husband lay dead and up the hallway to the stairs. She stopped to look in a mirror hanging over a chest in the upstairs hall and checked her appearance in the manner she had of looking at herself in the mirror of her dressing table, her face to the left and then her face to the right. Extremely pale, she pinched her cheeks very hard to bring color to them. She opened a drawer and took out a lipstick that Blondell always placed there for her and applied it to her lips. Then she adjusted her hair with her hands.

Grasping the red velvet banister, she walked down the stairs. She could hear that her guests had moved inside from the atrium to the drawing room. She could tell from the conversational voices that Rose Cliveden was now very drunk and that Friedrich of Hesse-Darmstadt was annoyed by her constant interruptions of his anecdotes. The rest of her guests seemed not to be talking at all. Being a born hostess, she knew that she had been gone from her party for too long a time, and was needed to restore the room to harmony, but when she reached the bottom of the stairs, she turned in the direction of her library rather than her drawing room. She entered the library and closed the door behind her. For an instant it occurred to her that she should lock the door, but she thought it might look suspicious to Dudley if he came looking for her.

She went quickly over to van Gogh’s
White Roses
, hanging over the fireplace mantel. Taking hold of the famous treasure by its frame, she unlatched a hook behind the picture and swung it outward to reveal a wall safe behind. She pulled up a footstool, stood on it, and leaned closely into the combination lock. With great dexterity she turned the lock to the left, then to the right, then to the left again, then around twice, ending up at zero. The door lifted back. Within was a small light which she switched on. Inside were all her velvet and leather jewelry boxes for her necklaces and bracelets and rings. She shifted through some papers and envelopes in the back of the safe and brought forth a five-inch-by-seven-inch manila envelope.

It was taped shut. On it, in Jules’s handwriting, was written the word
Private
.

Still standing on the footstool, she tore open the manila envelope. From inside, she pulled out a sheet of blue stationery, which she recognized as the stationery from Smythsons on Bond Street in London that she had given Hector Paradiso for Christmas the year before, with his name engraved in a darker blue across the top of each page. It was folded in half. With shaking hands, she opened the sheet of paper. There were stains of dried blood on the page. In blue ink, running downhill, in the shaky penmanship of a dying man, each letter becoming more indecipherable, were written the words “Kippie Petworth did this.”

Pauline felt weak and dizzy. She covered her mouth with her hand and breathed great heaving sounds, as if she were going to be sick. Overlapping thoughts of Jules and Hector and Kippie filled her mind.

The library door opened, and Philip Quennell walked in. They looked at each other.

“Pauline, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were in here,” he said.

She was standing on the stool. Hector’s stationery was in her hand. With extraordinary calmness, she said, “Yes, I was looking for my ring, Philip. I forgot to take it out of the safe tonight before the party, and, wouldn’t you know, Friedrich would notice I wasn’t wearing it the first thing when he came into the house.” She turned back to the safe, pushed the piece of paper inside, and took out a leather ring box, which she opened. She put the de Lamballe diamond on her finger, shut the door of the safe, swung around the dial, and closed the painting of van Gogh’s
White Roses
over it, latching it in the back. She stepped down off the footstool. “Now you know where the safe is,” she said.

Philip, fascinated, watched her. “I came in to use the men’s room,” he said.

“It’s there,” said Pauline.

“I know,” he answered. “I feel like we’ve played this scene before.”

“We did,” she replied. “The first night you ever came here.” As she said the words to him, she remembered that she had been on the telephone with Kippie at the time. He had called asking for money. She had not known then that the call was the beginning of her life falling apart.

“Oh, I remember. Are you all right, Pauline?”

“Of course. Why do you ask?”

“You’ve been gone such a long time.”

“There was a long-distance call I had to take. My father has not been well in Maine. The party’s moved inside. I could hear the voices. Or rather, I could hear Rose’s voice annoying poor Friedrich.”

Philip did not want to get into a social conversation. “Is Jules all right, Pauline?”

“Yes. Fine. Why?”

“Would you like me to get rid of your guests?”

“Heavens, no. I must get back to the party. Poor Friedrich will think I’ve deserted him.”

When Philip returned to the drawing room, he looked around for Pauline. She had rejoined the group and was seated on a sofa between Camilla and Madge White. She sat silently, smiling, looking very beautiful, but content to listen while Rose Cliveden talked and talked, repeating the same story. Philip felt that Pauline had abdicated her authority, that her mind was elsewhere, that although she knew her guests were bored with Rose, she was making no attempt to salvage her failed party. When she smiled or laughed, he noticed that there was no merriment in her eyes to match the laughter on her lips. He thought she might not even know what she was laughing at.

Finally, when the hall clock struck ten-thirty, Faye Converse said, “This movie star has got to go home.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Pauline, jumping to her feet. “Let me ring for Dudley to get your coat. Darling, could you take Rose home? I don’t think it’s safe for her to drive down the mountain.”

It was apparent to all that she wanted them to leave, but would not have asked them to if Faye Converse had not made the first move. She stood in the hallway, taking the furs from Dudley as he took them off hangers in the closet. “This is yours, isn’t it, Madge?”

Outside, in the courtyard, Ralph White said to Madge, “Do you think Pauline was rushing us out?”

Flo’s Tape #21

“I got the sexual part of Jules, but I never had the feeling of living together with him. I never saw him shave, for instance. The kind of things that wives see. I never had his shoes in my closet. I like to see a man’s shoes in my closet.