Face to Face (2 page)

3

Roberta West's story came out episodic and random, a mosaic tumbled to fragments that had to be put together by the bit. As Ellery reconstructed it, it began with a sketch of Glory Guild, her life and works.

She had been born Gloria Guldenstern in 1914, in Sinclair Lewis country; and in the 30s she had come out of the Midwest with Lewisite fidelity to take New York by storm and, inevitably, the wide country. She had never had a music lesson in her life; she was completely self-taught—voice, musicology, piano. She played her own accompaniments.

It was said of Glory Guild that she also played her voice. Certainly her singing technique was as calculated as the notes on her music paper. There was a throb of passion, almost of grief, in her projection that swayed audiences like the fakir's reed—faint and faraway, something not quite lost. In nightclubs it silenced even drunks. The critics called it an
intime
voice, fit for bistros; and yet, so pervasive was her magic, it affected multitudes. By the end of the 30s she was singing weekly on her own radio show to tens of millions of listeners. She was America's radio darling.

She came on the air to the strains of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a signature played sweet and slow by her 42-piece orchestra; in the nature of things in those simpler days, a columnist nicknamed her Glory-Glory. Glory-Glory was otherwise a shrewd, practical woman. Her smartest act was to place her fortunes in the stringy hands of Selma Pilter, the theatrical agent, who quickly became her business manager as well as booker. Mrs. Pilter (there had been a Mr. Pilter, but he had vanished in the mists of some antique divorce court) managed Glory's affairs so astutely that, at the time of her loss of voice and retirement in 1949, the singer was said to be a millionaire.

In her limited way Glory had a questing mind; retirement threw her back not merely upon music but on puzzles, her other passion. She was a hifi fanatic long before the pursuit of the perfect tweeter became a national aberration; her library of contemporary music was a collector's dream. The motivation for her absorption in puzzles was less clear. She had come from a rural Minnesota family whose interest in such pastimes had never risen above the ancient copy of Sam Lloyd in the farmhouse parlor. Nevertheless, Glory spent many hours with crosswords, Double-Crostics, anagrams, and detective stories (the classic bafflers of the field—she had no use for the sex-and-violence or psychological mysteries that began to clog the paperback racks after World War II). Both her New York apartment and her hideaway cottage—nestled in a stand of packed pines on a lakefront near Newtown, Connecticut—were cluttered with players, discs, FM radios, electronic recording equipment (she could not bear to part with it), musical instruments, mountains of mystery stories and puzzle books and gadgets; and on her open terrace such gimmickry as a set of
buinho
chairs, handwoven in Portugal of wet reeds, whose marvelous secret was that each time they were rained on their weave tightened.

Glory had remained single during her singing career, although she was a deep-breasted, handsome blonde much (if gingerly) pursued. When her voice went back on her at the age of 35, the senseless trick of fate sent her into Garbo-like seclusion, and (as in Garbo's case) it was assumed, in the media where such speculations are of earth-shaking concern, that she would never marry. And she did hold out for nine years. But then in 1958, when she was 44 and he was 33, she met Count Carlos Armando. Within three months they were man and wife.

The “Count” Armando was a self-conferred title which no one, least of all Carlos, took seriously. His origin had a floating base; not even his name could be taken for granted. He was altogether charming about it. He claimed Spanish, Roman, Portuguese, and mixed Greek-and-Romanian descent as the fancy took him; once he even said his mother had been an Egyptian. One of his friends of the international set (a real count) laughed, “In direct descent from Cleopatra, obviously,” and Carlos, showing his brilliant teeth, laughed back, “Of course,
caro.
By way of Romeo.” Those who claimed the worthiest information asserted that his parents had been gypsies and that he had been born in a caravan by the side of some squalid Albanian road. It might well have been so.

None of this seemed to make any difference to the women in his life. Like obedient tin soldiers, they fell to his amorous fire in ranks. He kept his ammunition dry as a matter of working principle, careful not to allow it to sputter away because of an honest emotion. Women were his profession. He had never worked an otherwise gainful day in his life.

Carlos's first marriage, when he was 19, had been to an oil dowager from Oklahoma. She was exactly three times his age, with a greed for male youth that amused him. She cast him adrift well within two years, having barged into a beautiful boy from Athens. His severance pay was considerable, and Carlos spent a mad year throwing it away.

His second wife was a wealthy Danish baroness, with the features of a cathedral gargoyle, whose chief delight was to dress his curly black hair as if he were a doll. Four months of lying on couches with those terrible fingers creeping about his head were enough for Carlos; he seduced his wife's bedazzled secretary, contrived to be caught at it, and gallantly insisted on being paid off.

Another year of high life, and Carlos began to look around again.

He discovered a United States senator's juicy little 16-year-old daughter summering in the Alps; the resulting scandal involved a highly paid Swiss abortionist (from whom Carlos collected 15 percent) and a very large senatorial check, conditional upon his silence, with the threat of prosecution to enforce it.

The years marched by, and with them a grand parade of wives, all rich and silly and old enough to be his mother: a New York socialite who divorced her banker husband in order to marry him (this union broke up after a $100,000 brawl at an all-night party in his wife's Newport villa that made tabloid history); an alcoholic Back Bay spinster whose simple escutcheon was first plotted at Plymouth Rock; a Hungarian countess dying of tuberculosis (she left him nothing but a castle surrounded by a stagnant moat and debts—with easy foresight he had run through her fortune before her death); an aging Eurasian ex-beauty he quite literally sold to a rich Turk whose real objective was her nubile daughter (as she had been Carlos's); a Chicago meatpacker's widow who, accompanied by a photographer, surprised him in her maid's bed and booted him out without a penny's salve, even producing the photographs in court—to Carlos's smarting surprise—with unsporting disdain for the press.

This debacle left him in financial extremis. He was in great need when he met GeeGee Guild.

Not that Glory was so hard to take; she was still attractive, and younger at their meeting than any of his ex-wives had been. Still, to Carlos the prime question was: Is she rich enough? He had led a cowboy's life herding idleness, and it was beginning to leave its brand on his dark athletic flesh, or so he fancied from increasing self-study in his mirror. The middle-aged and old ones who, like his first wife, sought to lap thirstily from the waterhole of male youth might soon notice the flattening taste of Count Armando. When that day came, the bogus count assured himself glumly, the bellowing kine would turn to greener pastures.

So at this stage of his life, Armando decided, he could not afford to make a mistake. Undercover he made a financial survey of Glory Guild that would not have shamed an ace credit agent. What he found out heartened him, and he stripped down for the conquest.

It was not easy, even though Glory was receptive. She had become lonely and restless, and what she was seeing daily in
her
mirror dismayed her. Between her need for companionship and attention and the hurrying truths revealed by her glass, a young man like Carlos Armando was inevitable. Because she had heard stories about him and glimpsed him for what he was, she hired a reliable agency to check his background. It confirmed what she suspected, and she was determined not to go the way of all the female fools in his life.

“I like having you around,” she told Carlos at his proposal of marriage, “and you want my money, or as much of it as you can lay your hands on. Right? Well, I'll marry you on one condition.”

“Must we speak of technicalities at a time like this, my darling?” asked Carlos, kissing her hands.

“The condition is this: You will sign a premarital agreement renouncing in advance any share of my estate.”

“Ah,” said Carlos.

“Even the one-third dower share ordinarily guaranteed by law,” said Glory dryly, “the gleam of which I can see in your eye. I've consulted my attorney and, properly drawn up, such a contract would be perfectly legal in this state—I mean in case you have an idea you could break it later.”

“What you must think of me,
bonita
,” mourned Carlos, “to make such an unfair condition. I am proposing to give you all of myself.”

“And quite a hunk it is,” said Glory Guild fondly, ruffling his hair (he caught himself in time to keep from flinching). “So I've worked out what the lawyers call a
quid pro quo.”

“And what is that, my enchantment?” asked Carlos, as if he did not know what a
quid pro quo
was.

“A tit for my tat.”

“I see … Time?” Carlos said suddenly. He was intuitive in all matters relating to women.

“That's it, baby. Give me a minimum of five happy years of married life and I'll tear up the contract. I've had you investigated, Carlos, and the longest you've ever stuck to one woman was less than two years. Five are my terms, then zip! goes the contract, and you come into your normal legal rights as my husband.”

They looked each other in the eye, and both smiled.

“I love you madly,” murmured Carlos, “but love is not all. Agreed.”

“Love, shove,” said Glory.

And so it was arranged; and he signed the prenuptial agreement, and they were bound in not so holy matrimony.

4

“I met Carlos in Easthampton,” continued Roberta West, “while I was doing summer stock. It was at the tail end of the season, and he and Glory came backstage. The director was an old man who made a great to-do over Glory, but she was no more than a name to me—I was a little girl when she retired—and all I could see was an overweight woman with stupidly dyed hair looking like some aging Brünnehilde out of a second-rate opera company and clinging to the arm of a man who seemed young enough to be her son.

“But I thought Carlos was cute, and I suppose I was flattered by the fuss he made over my performance. There's something in Carlos's voice,” she added gloomily, “that gets through to women. You know he's a fake, but it doesn't matter. It's not so much what he says as how he says it … I suppose I sound like a gullible idiot.”

Neither man, being a man, said anything.

“When the stock engagement was over, I hadn't been back in town twenty-four hours—I don't know how he got my phone number, because it was a new one and still wasn't in the book—before he called me. He handed me some transparent story about being awfully impressed by my talent, and how he knew he could pull some strings for me, and wouldn't I like to talk it over? And I fell for it—the oldest line in show business!—knowing all the time that I was letting myself in for trouble … The funny part of it was that he did manage to get me an audition—and the part—in an off-Broadway play. To this day I don't know how, except that the producer was a woman. Men have nothing but contempt for him—or jealousy—but women can't seem to resist his charm. I suppose this producer was one of them, although she's an old bag with a personality like a buzz saw. Anyway, he sweet-talked her into it. The way he did me.”

The girl with the sorrel hair half shut her eyes. Then she picked a cigaret out of her bag, and Harry Burke leaped with a lighter. She smiled up at him over the flame, but not as if she saw him.

“He kept turning up … Carlos has a persistence that batters you down. No matter how careful you are … I fell in love with him. In a raunchy sort of way he's beautiful. Certainly when he pays attention to a woman she feels that she's the only woman in the world. It becomes total involvement—I don't know—as if you're the absolute center of the universe. And all the time you know he hasn't an honest bone in his body, that he's pulled the same line on hundreds of women. And you don't care. You just
don't …
I fell in love with him, and he told me the only thing in the world that would make him happy was to marry me.”

Ellery stirred. “How well-heeled are you, Miss West?”

She laughed. “I have a small income from a trust, and with what I can earn here and there I just manage to get by. That's what fooled me,” said the girl bitterly. “He's never married except for money. Being poor, I began to think that in my case his protestations of love might be, for once in his life, the real thing. How naive can you get! I didn't know what he really had in mind. Until one night, a little more than seven months ago …”

For some reason Glory had gone up to her Newtown cottage, and Carlos had seized the opportunity to see Roberta. It was on this occasion that he had finally shown his hand.

Roberta had known about his premarital agreement with his wife, and that the five-year mark had been passed—by that date he and Glory had been married five and a half years. According to Carlos, Glory had torn up their agreement at the expiration of the five years, as she had promised; so that now, if anything were to happen to her, he would inherit at least one-third of her estate under his ordinary dower rights; more, if she had named him in her will, about which he seemed uncertain.

At first, the West girl said, she had not seen what he was driving at. “How could it occur to any normal person? I told him truthfully that I had no idea what he was talking about.” Was there something wrong with his wife? Was she incurably ill? Cancer? What?

Carlos had said easily, “She is as healthy as a cow.
Dios
! She will outlive both of us.”

“Then do you mean a divorce settlement?” Roberta had asked, confused.

“Settlement? She would not give me a lira if I were to suggest a divorce.”

“Carlos, I don't understand.”

“Of course you do not,
palomilla mía.
So like a child! But you will listen to me, and I shall tell you how we can be rid of this cow, and marry and enjoy the milk from her udders.”

And, calmly, as if he were relating the plot of a novel, Carlos had disclosed his plan to Roberta. Glory stood in the way; she had to be knocked aside. But as her husband he would be the first to be suspected. Unless he had what was called an alibi. But for an alibi to stand up, it had to be unshakable; that is, he, Carlos, truly had to be elsewhere when the thing was done. This was simply arranged, in any of a thousand ways. Who, then, was to do it? Who but she, Roberta, the co-beneficiary of Glory's death? Did she now see?

“I now saw,” Roberta told the two silent men. “Oh, how I now saw! In that mocking voice of his, as if he were talking about taking a walk in the park, he was actually proposing that I murder his wife so that he and I could get married and live on the blood money. I was so stunned, so horrified, that for a minute I couldn't get a word out. I guess he took my silence for consent, because he slithered over and tried to make love to me. It broke the spell with a bang. I pushed him away so hard he staggered. This lovely conversation took place in Glory's and Carlos's apartment, and I ran out of there as if the devil were after me. For all I know, he was—he has the devil's own gall. How could I have thought I loved that monster! My skin was crawling. All I could think of was getting away from him. I cabbed home and walked the floor all night, shaking like a leaf.”

Carlos had telephoned her the next day, the girl went on, and she had told him never to call or try to see her again, and hung up on him.

“The bloody bastard,” muttered Harry Burke. He looked as if he could cheerfully have committed murder himself at that moment.

“You were lucky to get out of it without a beating,” Ellery commented. “Sometimes these types, when they're balked, can be awfully rough. But, Miss West, I don't get it. If all this happened more than seven months ago—back in May?—why have you waited so long to tell the story? And, in any event, why the urgency now?”

The girl looked puzzled. “The urgency? What do you mean, Mr. Queen? I would have thought—”

“We obviously have our wires crossed,” Ellery said with a smile. “There's more to your story?”

“Of course.” She glanced from him to Burke and back again, shaking her head. “Or don't you believe me? I don't understand … As for why I didn't tell anyone all this time—I don't know. It was such a shocking experience, as if I'd dreamed it all. The thought of going to the police, or to someone like you, never entered my mind. For one thing, I kept telling myself he couldn't really have meant it. For another”—her delicate skin colored—”it would have meant getting my relationship with him smeared all over the papers. You know the bit. Anyway, I didn't. And when he didn't call or try to see me again, I put the whole thing out of my head, or tried to. Until it was forcibly recalled to me two nights ago. What's today? Yes, the night before last, Wednesday night.”

“The night of December thirtieth?” Harry Burke asked sharply. It made Ellery look at him.

“Yes. Carlos phoned me. I hadn't heard from him, as I said, since late spring. Of course I hung up on him—”

“What did the beggar want?” snapped Burke.

“He had to see me, he said. I told him that what I'd said months ago still went, and banged the receiver. Not a half hour later my apartment bell rang, and when I opened the door, there he was. I tried to shut it in his face, but he stuck his foot in the way. He made such a fuss, in such a loud voice, that I was afraid the neighbors might come running out. So I let him in.”

“What
did
he want?” Ellery asked.

“At the time I couldn't imagine. He made no attempt to bring up that fantastic proposition again, just talked about trivial things—me, the plays on Broadway, what he and Glory had been doing recently, and so on. I kept asking him to go, and he kept making conversation. He wasn't drunk, or anything like that—Carlos never drinks enough to lose his head; at least I've never seen him sozzled. I kept getting the feeling he was stalling for time, because he would glance at his watch every once in a while.”

“Oh,” said Ellery in an odd voice. And “Oh,” said Harry Burke, in an even odder voice. But while Ellery's “Oh” had a speculative quality, Burke's was deep with foreboding; and again Ellery wondered.

Roberta West leaned forward in an attitude of tense appeal. “I finally got rid of him at midnight. Or rather at midnight, without warning, he suddenly decided to leave. I remember he looked at his watch again and actually said aloud, ‘It's midnight, Roberta, I'll have to go.' As if he had a deadline or something. I didn't understand any of it. Until later. That's really why I'm here, Mr. Queen. He used me!”

“It sounds like it,” Ellery agreed. “But for what?”

“Don't you
know?”

“Don't I know what, Miss West?”

“That Glory Guild Armando was murdered Wednesday night?”