Authors: Hugh Pentecost
“This was a new kind of man to me, Haskell, and a new kind of situation. ‘Dorothy Smith’ wasn’t the second-richest girl in the world. She was just ‘Dorothy Smith.’ I told Gary there was no one to worry about me. I didn’t have to get in touch with anyone.
“We talked for hours about his work, his philosophy of life, his values. He seemed to need to talk about himself. He’d been working out there in isolation too long. But—well, finally, it came around to my turn to talk about ‘Dorothy Smith.’ There wasn’t anything to tell about her unless I made it up on the spot. I, God knows, needed to talk out my problem. In the end I told him who I really was.”
She was silent for a moment. I glanced at my watch. It was already past eight o’clock and Shelda was probably fuming in the Grill Room. I’d promised her dinner at eight. But I couldn’t leave at that moment.
“I think Gary was a little stunned when he knew who I really was,” Doris said. “Of course he knew about me. Who doesn’t?” She allowed herself a little bitter laugh. “But for the first time somebody seemed to understand my problem. I had the feeling the money made no difference to him. It sounds funny to put it in words, but it didn’t make any difference to him that I was rich. He didn’t like me because of it, nor would he run away from me because of it. I—I can’t go into the detail of it with you, Haskell. That’s mine—my own to share with no one. But I stayed there in the cabin with Gary for three days. I was in love. For the first time in my life I had a relationship with a man that was based on nothing except what I had to give as a woman. Suddenly I felt strong, and sure of myself. We agreed to go back to Beverly Hills together, where I’d sign off with Emlyn and embark on a new and wonderful life.”
“It didn’t happen?” I asked.
“Oh, we went back to my house together. And I gave a party for Emlyn and the crowd. They were to meet Gary, and Gary would have it out with Emlyn. They had to let me go, because if they didn’t, then Gary and I would face them down—we’d agree to leave them untouched if they’d set me free.
“Emlyn, as usual, was one step ahead of me. Gary had gone into town on an errand, and the minute he left my house Emlyn appeared. It seemed to amuse him that the poor little rich girl was in love. And then, coldly and deliberately, he told me what he could do to me, and what he could do to destroy Gary, and, in the end, to make any relationship intolerable. If I went into it with you, you’d understand why I saw that the dream was impossible.
“When Gary came back I put on the act of a lifetime. I told him I’d changed my mind. That the beach cottage had been one thing, but now that I was back at home I realized the only thing I really wanted was to go on with my life as it had been. I remembered the stony look on his face.
“ ‘You’re a liar,’ he said.
“I laughed at him.”
“ ‘They’ve put the screws on you,’ he said. ‘I tell you, if you’ve got the guts we can outfight them.’
“I knew better. I knew that in the end his faith in me and love for me would be carefully destroyed—with surgical skill. And so I sent him away. That was two months ago. To the best of my knowledge I haven’t been in touch with him since. You say I phoned him—”
“He says you phoned him.”
“If I did, it’s part of what’s missing,” she said. “Tell him to go away, Haskell. Emlyn won’t let us win.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Teague threatens you with jail, but he was involved in everything you were involved in. He’d have to go with you. You don’t think he’d do that, do you, just to have his way with you?”
Her face was a white, tragic mask, the corners of the scarlet mouth were drawn down.
“If it simply meant facing punishment—” she said.
“What else?”
“If I told you the things I’ve done, Haskell, you’d walk out of here without giving me another thought. If Gary was told, I don’t think he could bear it either. He might think he could, but when he heard, it would be the beginning of the end. He could never hold me in his arms without remembering what he knew; never look at me across the breakfast table without feeling a slow revulsion. As far as rest of the world is concerned, I’d be a leper with a bell around my neck.”
“Surely it would be just as bad for Teague,” I said.
She shook her head, slowly. “That’s where the basic difference is between Emlyn and me,” she said. “I’m suddenly drowning in a sea of shame and remorse. He glories in it. It’s what makes him attractive to evil people like Jeremy and Oscar and Van and Bobby and Ivor. If I did the revealing, he would have a field day. He’d enjoy his role as the Prince of Darkness. There are always people who’d flock to him. He’d probably avoid legal punishment because he manipulated the rest of us so that we were the actors and he a delighted audience. He doesn’t want things changed, but if they were changed, he’d go on—with a new crew. And listen to me, Haskell. If Gary tries to fight Emlyn, he’ll lose what he’s fighting for. Even the memory of three magic days will be hopelessly tarnished, turned into something loathsome. Persuade him to go away, Haskell. Please, please!”
“Evil” is a kind of Biblical word that I don’t use in my everyday vocabulary. It may mean something precise to some people, like a direct violation of one or all of the ten commandments. To me it means something over-all, something that permeates a situation or a society, an atmosphere. I was reminded of a statement in one of Rebecca West’s articles on modern treason. She said, in effect, that in our highly sophisticated age there is almost no man who doesn’t know the difference between good and evil; that the frightening thing about this is the general preference for evil.
I came out of Suite 9F that evening with the uncomfortable feeling that I’d been walking along the edge of some slimy, contaminated area. I felt pity for Doris Standing, but I was reluctant to reach out to help her for fear I might become infected. If she’d meant to convince me that she couldn’t be rescued from her entanglement with Teague, she’d been pretty successful.
I went to my quarters where Gary Craig was waiting for me. I telephoned down to the grill to tell Shelda I’d be there in about ten minutes. Then, while I was putting studs into a clean dress shirt, I gave Craig a brief rundown on my meeting with Doris. He listened, a cold pipe gripped between his teeth.
“I’m not running out on her,” he said, when I’d finished.
“She desperately wants you to,” I said.
“She’s sick,” Craig said. “You don’t ran out on a sick person even if you can’t stand the smell of festering wounds. Maybe I couldn’t make a life with her if I knew the whole truth. Maybe I’m that weak. But I can pry her loose from Teague, and, by God, that’s what I’m going to do. She won’t see me?”
“No.”
“Can I get by the watchdog outside her door?”
“Not without Hardy’s permission.”
“Where’s Hardy?”
“I don’t know at the moment.”
“I see you’re not really on my side, Haskell. You want me out of here?”
“Hell, no,” I said. “I’m just reporting facts to you.” I glanced at the stack of newspapers I’d left with him. “Find anything in those back issues?”
He shook his head gloomily. Then he seemed to make up his mind about something. “You say Teague has reserved a table in your night club for eleven o’clock?”
“Yes.”
“So I can arrange for a head-on collision,” he said.
“It sounds silly, but you’ll need a dinner jacket and some pull with Cardoza, the captain, to get into the Blue Lagoon.”
“I’m going home now for clothes,” he said. “You can provide the pull with Cardoza, can’t you?”
“I suppose so. But what good will a public brawl do you?”
“Teague will have to start the brawl,” Craig said. “I’ll just supply him with the impulse.”
M
Y GIRL, SHELDA, IS
a delightfully unpredictable person. When she has complete justification for flipping her wig—like my being forty minutes late for a dinner date—she can be mild as a lamb. If I’m over polite to the eighty-year-old dowager who lives in the south penthouse, she can be as unreasonably jealous as if I’d sneaked a date with Sophia Loren. I expected to be shellacked when I joined her in the grill. Instead, she smiled contentedly at me from a corner table. Mr. Quiller, the new captain in the grill, was bending over her, solicitously. I could see she had a martini and a plate of hors d’oeuvres.
Mr. Quiller gave me an exemplary bow and held my chair for me. Before I could look at the menu, Fred, the waiter at that station, appeared with a martini in a little carafe and a chilled glass.
“Well, did she sell you?” Shelda asked, with a suspicious sweetness, when we were alone. “Ruysdale told me you were visiting her in her bedroom.”
“Her suite,” I said.
Shelda looked very lovely in a low-cut black dinner dress. When I’m close to her, I stop thinking how attractive other women are. There’s no need to think about them; only the need to offer a silent prayer of thanks that I am, at least for now, Shelda’s guy.
“I humble myself with regrets,” I said. “But she got talking and it seemed it might be valuable to listen.”
Mr. Quiller was with us again, bending over Shelda to refill her martini glass.
“He seems very nice,” she said, when Quiller had gone.
“And lucky,” I said. “He’s the only man in the room who can bend over you like that and not have everyone in the room know that he’s looking down the front of your dress.”
“You really think he was?” she said, pretending to be pleased. I mean, I hope she was pretending. At any rate I didn’t bite.
“It’s quite a story if you care to hear it,” I said, “and we seem to be building up to something later this evening. Shall we order? God knows when I may get yanked away again.”
“Don’t you think I should have a second man who would take up the slack when you’re late—or walk out on me in the middle of a date?” Shelda asked.
“Come on, baby!” I said.
So then we ordered dinner. Quiller recommended the roast venison with artichoke hearts in a purée of chestnuts. Shelda ordered it. I ordered a mutton chop, in an effort to keep the captain from being a 100 per cent correct about everything.
Then I gave Shelda condensed versions of Gary Craig’s story and Doris’.
“They make me feel horribly normal,” Shelda said, when I’d finished. Her little frown made her look like a child puzzling over an arithmetic problem. “You sound as though you believe them both, Mark.”
“It would be so elaborate if it wasn’t true,” I said.
“Mr. Chambrun told you they specialize in fancy embroidery,” she said.
“I’d swear those two are in love,” I said, “each trying to protect the other.”
“If the Teagues were threatening to expose Doris, she’d have had a motive for doing away with Slade,” Shelda said. “And so would Craig. How do you know he wasn’t in the hotel today long before he told you he was?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Are you going to tell all this to Lieutenant Hardy?
“Of course. When he gets back from dinner, or wherever he is.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Shelda said, still frowning.
“Now wait a minute. Whose side are you on? You’ve been measuring Doris for the guillotine up to now.”
“I’m on your side, Mark,” she said. She reached out and touched my hand with cool fingers. “If these people are as monstrous as Doris says they are, you could get into bad trouble taking part in any of it. Why don’t you just do your job and let Chambrun handle the extracurricular department?”
“I’ll do what Chambrun asks, no more, no less,” I said. “Did you get a chance to go through the newspapers?”
She nodded. “There wasn’t anything relating to Doris or Teague or any of the others,” she said.
“Chambrun and Miss Ruysdale didn’t find anything either,” I said. “Doris seems to have been telling the truth about that.”
“There was something unrelated to all this that was interesting, though,” she said. “You got the word that Veronica Trask is arriving tomorrow?”
“Now there’s something for you to worry about,” I said. “I’ve been in love with her for twenty-five years.”
She ignored the joke. “You remember about two weeks ago Norman Terry committed suicide? There was a big Hollywood funeral with everyone who is anyone in pictures there. The
Examiner
made a special note of the fact that Veronica Trask was present. It was the first time she’d made a public appearance in twenty years. She and Terry played in a lot of pictures together.”
“And the funeral cheered her up, so she decided to make a public trip to New York,” I said. “I didn’t read about it at the time. Why did Norman Terry kill himself? No more work for him?”
“He was only a little older than Cary Grant!” Shelda said. “Sixty-five! He hadn’t made a picture for a couple of years, but according to the paper he was very well fixed. And he was still very attractive.”
“How did he do it?” I asked.
I saw a little shudder move over Shelda. “Put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger,” she said. “He didn’t leave a note or any kind of explanation. You think of cancer or something, but the local authorities said he was apparently in excellent physical condition.”
Mr. Quiller arrived again to oversee the serving of our dinner. I secretly wished I’d ordered the venison when I saw it. He bent low over Shelda again to serve her, and I noticed that, having been alerted, she had the decency to blush a little.
“Now that we’ve covered the general horror scene,” I said, when Quiller had reluctantly removed himself, “could we talk about important things, like how much I love you?”
She seemed not to have heard me. The little frown was still with her. “It’s just a coincidence,” she said, “but Norman Terry shot himself on the twenty-eighth of February.”
“What’s coincidental about it?”
“Wasn’t it on the twenty-eighth of February that Gary Craig says Doris called him and said she was in trouble?”
I stared at her for a second and then I laughed. Too far-fetched. “And by coincidence, on the twenty-eighth of February, I was sweating out the arrival of the March-first bills, and, as I recall it, you were spending the weekend with your aunt in Morristown.”
And then neither of us said anything because it was a coincidence of sorts.