The Theban Mysteries (21 page)

“Taxi drivers can be traced, you know,” Kate said.

“Sometimes, but it doesn’t prove a negative. I mean, if a driver says he took so-and-so from here to there, and has it on his sheet, he did, but if no driver can be found, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist, if you follow me.”

Kate let it go for the moment.

“Who was at the session when you arrived?” she asked.

Patrick shrugged his shoulders. “Haven’t a clue,” he said. “You know, the usual bunch of Angie’s friends, a bunch of creeps, really.” He smiled at Angie.

“One’s sister’s friends always are, I assume. Who was there, Angelica?”

Angelica stopped to consider. Poor kid, Kate thought. She is trying to fit her story in with Patrick’s, and to protect—whom?—and yet to tell as much of the truth as she safely can, since she is bright enough to know that the more you can stick to the truth, the easier it is to lie in a coherent and sustained way.

“Irene,” she said, “and Freemond and me, and Elizabeth. Elizabeth worked rather well in those sessions, though we never thought she would. There were only the four of us.”

“No one else from the drama group, or Betsy, or Alice Kirkland?”

“No, it really was a kind of private session, about me—well, all of us,” she hastily added. “Alice is kind of, well …”

“I know,” Kate said, “though I have hopes. Why not Betsy?”

“Well, for one thing, her father carries on like a raving maniac if she goes out at night, so …”

Kate nodded. She doubted that was the only reason. Betsy’s tongue was sharp, and, scorning tact, which she recognized as frequently more insulting than an insult, she also, like many sensitive people, had no concept of how cruel her own words could be. It was an irony Kate had noticed often. Still, all the girls had been present at most of the sessions, as the unwary revelations in the seminar indicated. It had been Alice, of course, who had given the show away.

“Did you decide to work out something special that night?” Kate asked.

“Well, yes,” Angelica said. “I was trying to express my feelings about my mother.…” Her voice trailed unhappily away.

“Wasn’t Mrs. Banister there?”

“No,” Angelica answered, with a forthrightness always recognizable in someone who has been lying and can at last tell the simple truth. “We didn’t tell her about it. For one thing, we’d been taking up an awful lot of her time, and then, it wasn’t a real session, you see, with only four of us.” She stopped talking, and her voice died away in the room.

Kate leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. She was not very good at this sort of thing and, as a result, she had got herself into exactly the sort of corner she had hoped to avoid. She believed that she had the truth about the session up until the arrival of Patrick and his mother. The four girls had been alone in the Rexton apartment having an encounter session. But Patrick, she was certain, had not gone with his mother to the school—not only was the mother’s agreeing to any such thing, let alone suggesting it, absolutely beyond the bounds of possibility, but Kate knew, as Patrick did not, that the mother could not have been killed by the dogs.

They still believed Kate to know more than she had revealed, but they weren’t giving anything away. Why should they? And what after all did Kate know? One fact, that was all she had left.

Mrs. Jablon had been dead when the dogs found her. It was the only conceivable explanation of the dogs’ not stopping when they came across her, of her body’s
being found next morning, in a state of rigor mortis. She had died—where?—and her body had been brought to the school and deposited there. The dogs do not stop for the dead. Reed had made a point of asking Mr. O’Hara.

How had Mrs. Jablon got to the school?

Suppose she had, as Patrick suggested, gone to school, whether for the reason he had offered or for others, had walked upstairs, and died from a heart attack there in the art room? Would such a fearful woman walk up to a floor where no one was, to die in a deserted art studio? Certainly she would not have taken the elevator alone, being scared of that sort of thing and, from what Kate could gather, unlikely to be able to operate any mechanical device, however simple. Suppose Mr. O’Hara had taken her up, thinking she was a parent, and she had walked down to the art room? But surely someone at the meeting, teacher or parent, would have seen her. All the inquiries the police had made established the fact that no one had seen her, and Mr. O’Hara, who had seen her dead body, swore he had never laid eyes on her before, certainly hadn’t taken her up in the elevator.

Without a doubt the blasted woman was dead when she was brought to the Theban.

Why was she brought to the Theban?

That was the point, of course. Well, what are you to do with a body? It’s the most difficult part of murders, as detective novelists are always pointing out. There had so recently been the case of Patrick and the dogs to stand as a suggestion. But who knew about Patrick and the dogs? Unlike the discovery of Mrs. Jablon’s body, this event had not become general news. Could it have
been someone within the Theban? It was unthinkable that Julia or Miss Tyringham would have involved the Theban. Surely their efforts, had they been there, would have been quite the opposite—to get the body as far from the school as possible, always supposing one could imagine either of them moving bodies in the first place.

Which, when you came to think of it, was the point. Why had the body been moved, and how?

To begin with, where had Mrs. Jablon died? She had not died at home—her second exit, carried or under her own steam, would have been observed in this lobby. But her exit, dead or alive, from the Rexton home would have been seen by no one, not even the guard outside the President’s house. He was more than likely inside; well, he at least could be questioned. And Morningside Drive was considered so dangerous that the streets were almost guaranteed to be deserted.

“I know,” Kate said, hoping she sounded as though she did, “that your mother died at the Rexton home. Was she frightened to death, or did she scream herself into the next world in a fit of temper?”

Angelica and Patrick looked at Kate, and then at each other. Her momentary silence—it had been little longer than that—as she sat with her eyes closed, had encouraged them. The worst perhaps was over, the last river safely forded. They, who had expected a truce, again girded themselves for battle.

Patrick shrugged and looked at his sister.

“It isn’t a bit probable, you know,” Kate said, “that the woman your mother has been pictured to be would want to see where you had been frightened—she would be likelier, from all reports, to avoid the place at all
costs—or would allow herself to be alone there for a single moment. Going to the school at night was at best unbelievable, but for her …”

“It’s no good, Patrick,” Angelica said. “You’re right, of course. Mother died at Irene’s. I was talking to her, pretending the pillow was her, when she came in. She and Patrick just stood there listening. It wasn’t Patrick’s fault—I guess he was as thunderstruck as Mother, though not in the same way.”

“But surely they rang the buzzer downstairs, not to mention the apartment door.”

“We didn’t,” Patrick said. “There was someone going in at the time with a key, and we went in with him.”

“That can be checked out, anyway,” Kate said. “There aren’t many tenants in the house—so that’s a step forward. I’ve been to the house, you see,” she added. “What sort of man was he?”

“Just a man, about your age. A professor, probably. He went to a higher floor. The apartment door was open, unlocked. My mother just sort of burst in—well, that
was
her way; she liked sudden confrontations with her children.”

“And she got one, beyond her wildest dreams. A confrontation with herself, too. You were telling the pillow exactly how you felt, had always felt, and felt now?” Angelica nodded. “She had no business to be there,” Kate said. “But why did Irene leave the door open, in such a neighborhood?”

“Irene said her parents could never remember their keys. Besides, there was usually someone staying there who didn’t have a key and would arrive at any moment. It’s that kind of household.”

“I see. So she heard you and dropped dead?”

“Not quite.” Angelica looked at Patrick.

“If I’d thought she was hysterical in my room,” he said, “I hadn’t known from hysterical. She started screeching about all she’d done for Angelica, given her her whole life, been so generous. She kicked the pillow out of the way and smacked Angie—it was gross.” Patrick lit another cigarette. “And then, well, she paused a second, to draw breath I guess, and Angie said, in a quiet voice, ‘What have you ever done for me?’ And Irene, who looks like an angel of the Lord anyway, said, ‘Mrs. Jablon, what have you ever done for Angelica except make her feel unwanted? Why don’t you …’ That was as far as Irene got, because Mother—well, she sort of fell back into a chair, and we rushed up and said, ‘Can we get anything?’ and someone went for water, and Irene said, ‘I better call a doctor,’ and she did go to the phone, but she got the doctor’s exchange, which said, ‘Hold on,’ and then went off the line, you know the way they always do, and then—well, she was dead. There wasn’t any question about that.”

“I see,” Kate said. It seemed to be her line for the day.

“And then,” Patrick concluded, “we saw we had a problem. I realize now the sensible thing would have been to call a doctor and let it go at that. But it
did
seem that Angie had killed her, and there would be all sorts of terrible questions, and we couldn’t just leave her there with Irene, and once an ambulance came it would all be investigated, so …”

“Someone remembered Patrick’s experience at the Theban,” Angelica said, “well, it was me, actually, so Patrick carried her there.”

“That’s it,” Patrick said in a final sort of way. “That’s the whole story.”

“You carried a dead woman through the streets from way uptown on Morningside Drive to the East Seventies?”

“No. I stole a car.”

“You did?”

“Yes. I simply broke into a car in front of the house and took it. Later I returned it. The parking space was gone, of course, but I left it double parked. I guess the owner found it all right.”

“How do you steal a car?”

“Oh, you reach underneath the hood and connect some wires; it’s done all the time. I read somewhere that the automobile companies are working on a device to prevent it.”

Kate wanted to ask him for more details about the wires, but she simply could not find the brutal energy to pursue the point.

“She just sort of sat up on the seat next to me,” Patrick said.

There was a silence, to which they all listened for a time.

“Well, Angelica,” Kate said. “I see why you didn’t want to talk about it, but all those reasons, or most of them, are finished now. I think the thing to do is to talk it out. Will you tell Miss Tyringham about it? Between you, you have caused her school a good deal of trouble, and it seems only fair that she should know the truth. Besides, I think she’ll understand. Apart from everything else, she has met your mother. And your grandfather; I think you should tell him too. What he now suspects is probably not too far from the truth, but
the truth is always preferable to an unhappy fantasy. Will you talk to them?”

“Could you tell them? Miss Tyringham, anyway?”

“I could. Will you settle for some minor blackmail? I’ll speak to Miss Tyringham, if you’ll return to school and try to take up your life again. As to Patrick, who acted the best way he could, under the circumstances, his major problems are still with his draft board.”

“Angie stood by me. It wasn’t her fault the dogs were there. Only those damn dogs nearly scared the hell out of me when I didn’t expect them, and failed when we were counting on them—ungrateful beasts. I think she’s right, Angie. Finish up at the Theban, and try to work it out now. After all, we are free of her, however unfilial it sounds to say so.”

“I’ll expect you in class Monday,” Kate said. “You might let Irene and Freemond and Elizabeth know it’s all right, and—no more encounter sessions without a qualified leader. Will you agree to that?”

They got up, nodding eagerly. They would have agreed to anything.

Kate was soaking in a hot tub with her eyes closed when Reed came in.

“You would have been proud of me,” she said. “I walked miles and miles and solved the mystery. Only I don’t know what to do next.”

“There’s always nothing,” Reed said hopefully. “Do you want a martini in here, or can you make it to the living room?”

“Actually, I’ve been having Scotch and tea all afternoon. Are you busy this evening?”

“You mean, after my martini? I’m at your command—no,
I retract that, but I’ll admit, cautiously, to being free if you promise that you aren’t making plans.”

“All right,” Kate said. “I’ll go alone. You faced the dogs alone.”

Reed, who had been leaving the bathroom, returned. “Where are you going?” he asked. “I don’t want to know but tell me anyway.”

“Oh, get your martini. I’ll be there in a minute. Why does my generation always admire loyalty?”

“What kind of ‘tea’ was it?” Reed asked. Kate noisily turned on the water.

But when they called her, she said she would come to see them. Her husband had to get somewhere, and would drop her off. “Don’t worry,” she said on the phone, “I shan’t funk it or run out on you. I’m glad it’s come out, actually. I despise deception.”

“Don’t say anything to anyone before you talk to us,” Kate said. “Because, you see, it hasn’t yet come out at all.”

“All right. Keep cool.”

She arrived shortly, somewhat breathless, and shook Reed’s hand vigorously on being introduced. She had that enormous energy frequently found in small women, and the downright opinions more usually found in large ones.

“Did you come on the motorcycle?” Kate asked.

“Oh, yes. Do you think it unfeeling of me? I regard all superstitions and shibboleths as greatly dangerous; besides, I hardly knew the woman and disliked intensely what I’d heard of her. Who talked?”

“About you, no one. Everybody was a positive monument of discretion about protecting everybody else.”