Call After Midnight (10 page)

She wanted never to enter that house again either. For a year it had drawn her like a magnet so she would wake up fancying that she was walking down those stairs, sliding her hand along the banister, aware of the house, solid and old, protecting her. Now it had changed in an intangible way, a far greater change than an array of architects and decorators could achieve. It would never recover; it had altered past bearing; it was already a sad and haunted house.

She tried to shake herself out of the dismal fancy but she couldn’t get away from the house fast enough. She went downstairs. Cal was standing in the hall looking as chilly and remote as a New England rock. Peter came down the stairs behind Jenny. “Cal, Blanche is going back to town with you. Can you wait a minute while she gets her things?”

Cal lifted an eyebrow. “How did you get rid of her?”

There were times when Peter could be stiffly conventional as if some long ago, formal and very deliberate Dutch ancestor suddenly took possession of him. His eyes and face went chilly. “She can’t stay here alone with me. Think how it would look!”

A flicker of curiosity came into Cal’s face. “You wanted Jenny to stay.”

“That’s quite different,” Peter said with dignity.

Cal eyed him for a moment. “How?”

“Jenny,” Peter said steadily, “was once my wife. Marriage makes a bond. Something that never really changes. It’s as if she is my only relative. That, I suppose, is why I asked Jenny to come when I needed her.”

Cal said after a moment, “The funny thing is that I believe you’re telling the truth. Okay, Peter, we’ll try to see you through this.”

Blanche came down the stairs. She put her gloved hands on Peter’s shoulders, looked into his eyes, said “Dear Peter,” kissed him lightly on the cheek and turned to the door.

It was a completely perfect exit, marred by nothing.

Jenny felt clumsy and was in fact troubled. She said, “Peter, if you need—if you want us—”

“I’ve told you,” Peter said.

Cal took Jenny’s arm. “I’ll be in touch. Take things easy, Peter.”

They were out on the steps; they crossed the narrow strip of terrace and started down more steps. There was a little polite demur on Blanche’s part about sitting in the front seat of Cal’s car, which ended in Blanche’s sitting in the front seat. Jenny glanced back and Peter was standing in the doorway. He looked forlorn.

She didn’t like to leave him in that now changed and haunted house. She wavered; Cal opened the door to the back seat and thrust her into it. In another moment Cal was at the wheel, they circled rapidly around the great clumps of trees and shrubbery and out the entrance with the huge pillars. Once on the highway it seemed to Jenny that, oddly, she had had a very narrow escape. Left to herself she would certainly have gone back to Peter.

“I feel like a rat,” she said aloud and miserably.

She wasn’t sure that either Blanche or Cal heard her. Blanche pulled her coat collar up more closely around her throat; Her blue-black hair really did shine like a raven’s wing. Cal seemed to drive faster.

It was by then late afternoon and chilly. The gray sky lowered over them. It was growing foggy again, so most of the cars they met had dim lights turned on and the lights flared above the toll stations.

It was an almost silent drive, and it was an oppressive silence, haunted as the house. Jenny was thankful when the lights of the city came up brightly around them and looked normal and unchanged.

Because Jenny’s apartment was in the eighties and Blanche’s apartment in the fifties, Cal took Jenny to her door first. Blanche turned her head then, examined the unpretentious façade of the building and said that it was a charming place. “So quiet.”

It was in fact an old-fashioned and rather ugly apartment house, stained with city grime and weather. Blanche would never have settled for anything so lacking in elegance but Blanche had earned her right to elegance and luxury.

Cal took Jenny and her bag to the elevator, said briefly, as he had said to Peter, that he’d be in touch, and left. It seemed a year, it seemed an age since she had stood there in the little foyer the night before and argued with Cal, and it was not twenty-four hours.

The elevator came into view and the door silently opened. She pressed the third-floor button, went smoothly upward, and the door opened again with the magical independence which rather unnerved Jenny in any automatic elevator. She went down the narrow corridor to her own door and had no keys.

She groped around in her handbag; she opened her dressing case and searched through its little silk pockets and then through her clothes. The telephone inside her apartment began to ring and increased her sense of flurried impatience.

She knew what had happened; she had been so excited after Peter’s telephone call of the previous night that she had simply forgotten her keyring. She could almost see it, lying on the dressing table. The telephone kept on ringing.

She looked up and down the hall at the ranks of closed doors. She knew none of the tenants in the building, beyond a polite good evening if she happened to encounter a vaguely familiar face in the foyer or the elevator. She had no idea who her next-door neighbors were. The house was unpretentious but it had been solidly built; the walls were thick and the rooms were old-fashioned and large, and actually, because the ceilings were high and there were fireplaces and deep windows, the apartments were attractive—at least her own apartment had seemed attractive; she had seen no others.

Besides, none of the tenants could help her get into her own apartment. There was nothing for it but to journey down to the first-floor apartment where the superintendent and his wife lived.

The telephone stopped ringing.

She went to the first floor, borrowed the superintendent’s key, promised to return it when he spoke sternly of the fire laws, and went back to open her own door.

She had forgotten, too, in her haste the night before, to turn off lights; it was pleasant, for some obscure reason, to walk into a lighted apartment. But when she went into the bedroom her keys were not on the dressing table.

She stared at the shining expanse of wood. She searched the top, searched even the drawers. She emptied her bag on the bed and searched the contents thoroughly. She had been in such an emotional turmoil after Peter’s telephone call that she might have done anything at all with her keyring and have no memory of it.

So the keyring would turn up sooner or later. In any event it didn’t matter because she kept an extra key in her locker at Henri et Cie for emergency. She’d get it the next day—no, no, on Monday.

The telephone rang again so sharply that it startled her. Peter? She did feel like a rat, deserting him. He had looked desolate and forsaken, standing alone in the doorway of that big and altered house. She snatched the telephone. It was Cal.

“All right?” he said.

“All right? Why, of course.”

“How about dinner?”

Somehow during that long ride into town with its silent accompaniment of the fact of murder which they couldn’t leave behind them as they had left Peter and the house on the Sound, her flare of anger at Cal had dwindled away. She was only thankful to hear the steadiness and friendliness of his voice. She was thankful, too, to escape her own troublesome thoughts that night.

“Oh yes,” she said. “When?”

“I’ll pick you up say at eight?”

“Good. I’ll be at the door so you needn’t ring.”

Unexpectedly Cal laughed, naturally and easily, like himself. “That’s a nice obliging girl. You ought to have seen Her Highness arriving at her palatial abode. Doormen. Elevator men. Damn near carried Blanche along with her luggage. At eight then.”

“Cal, did you phone to me a while ago—oh, no! It couldn’t have been you. You had just left me to take Blanche home and I was trying to find my key and couldn’t answer the phone.”

“I didn’t phone. I just got home. What’s that about a key?”

“Oh, I lost my keys. A nuisance. The superintendent lent me one. Thanks, I’ll be ready at eight—”

“Wait a minute,” Cal said. “What happened to your keys?”

“I put them somewhere and can’t remember where. It’s not important. See you at eight.”

There was a little pause, then Cal said, “Good,” and hung up.

She cleared the heap of clothing off the bed and put it away. Cal’s voice had been friendly and perhaps a little apologetic. The fact was that all of them had been, and still were, under such a great and unnatural strain that unnatural behavior was a logical result. He must, now, see Peter’s appeal to her, and her response, in a clearer light.

But just what was that clear light? She pushed the question forcefully back from wherever it had come. She wouldn’t think of what Peter had said to her. Not yet. Something required time and a slow settlement of churned-up emotion.

She went into the living room and looked at the windows which, three floors up, she bolted. Now why did I do that? she thought to herself, surprised. What am I afraid of? Nothing.

Her apartment was of course exactly as she had left it. It was charming because she had picked up one or two good pieces of furniture and arranged good reading lamps. But it now rather strangely struck her as the setting for a prolonged illness, one she didn’t want to remember.

She made sure the superintendent’s key was in her handbag. When she reached the foyer Cal was standing at the elevator door. “I was coming up to get you,” he said. “Did you find your keys?”

“No. It doesn’t matter. I’ve an extra.”

“Where?”

“Two extras really. One belongs to the superintendent. Another is in my locker at Henri et Cie.”

They went to a small French restaurant in the fifties. “Good food,” Cal said, “and quiet.” There were small tables, lighted with rosy lamps. Cal sat opposite her, ordered cocktails, lighted her cigarette, and said, “I’ll have to come straight out with this, Jenny. You already know it, though. The police really do believe that Peter had a motive for killing Fiora.”

The pleasant little table seemed to waver under her hands. She knew what was coming.

“No, Cal! No—”

“Yes,” he said. “You.”

S
HE BRACED HERSELF AGAINST
the table. “Well, it isn’t true.”

“If a policeman had happened to be in the hall this afternoon, Peter would very likely be under arrest on suspicion alone by now.”

“But it wasn’t like that! You know it wasn’t like that.”

Cocktails were put down. Cal took his absently. “Yes—well, I think it likely that Peter sent for you when Fiora was first hurt for exactly the reasons he gave. He still feels that in a way you belong to him and if he’s in trouble—yes, he’d turn to you and to me. He’s got the habit of talking things over with me. To a certain extent he relies upon my judgment. I suppose in his—oh, personal life, he relied upon you.”

“He said he was human.”

Cal shot her a swift glance. “Meaning he’s one man in business and another man in his private life. Well, there’s some truth in that. Every man is actually two men. One man is shown to the world. The other man to a woman he—” He broke off some bread crisply and said, “The woman he loves. I understand that. I also understand why you went out there.”

“You don’t—”

“You went because you decided that you now might have a chance to get Peter back. Drink your cocktail.”

She took up the glass. “How did you guess?”

“Easy.”

“I don’t know whether or not I’d have stuck to it. But I was going to try.”

He sipped his martini thoughtfully. Finally he looked at her. “I shouldn’t have said the things I said to you this afternoon. What you and Peter do—later on—is your business, not mine. I want you both to see the danger of Peter’s position just now.”

“Oh, I see it,” Jenny said with grim truth, “so does Peter. But he does have an alibi.”

“You,” Cal said dryly. “Suppose the police don’t believe you.”

“It’s true.” There was nothing else to say but it seemed to her that it began to carry less and less authority.

“Two fine alibis, yours and Peter’s, together when the shots were fired,” Cal said. “I think I knew that Blanche came out of her room behind me, but I didn’t turn around and actually see her—”

“I did,” Jenny said. “She fainted. That is, she didn’t exactly faint but she collapsed.”

“Blanche didn’t actually see me, but apparently she told the police that she heard me running down the hall to Fiora’s room. I don’t see how Blanche could have shot Fiora and got back along the hall without my seeing her. I’d have met her full tilt.” Cal signaled the waiter for another cocktail. “Parenti says there’s something fishy about this whole setup. To tell you the truth it strikes me as fishy, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well—first there’s this attack on Fiora, a shot which couldn’t, or at any rate didn’t, seriously hurt her. Then Peter phones for you, phones for me, we must come. We get there and everything is under control except they haven’t sent for a doctor or the police.”

“But she
wasn’t
seriously hurt!”

“Then there’s a second attack and she’s killed. Peter has an alibi: you. Blanche and I don’t have firm alibis but I know I didn’t shoot Fiora and I don’t see how Blanche could have and got away. Yet somebody killed Fiora. There were only four of us in the house.”

“What did you mean, fishy?”

“Cut and dried. The stage all set. You and I were witnesses or—Oh, I don’t know what I mean.”

She stared at him in horror. “Peter sent for us! Are you saying that Peter—
Peter
—arranged Fiora’s murder and got us there to give him an alibi, friendly witnesses?”

“Good God, I’m only trying to prove he didn’t! The police notion is that you and Peter were in cahoots on this thing and that I’m the willing friend, helping you both. Blanche is in Peter’s employ, if you want to put it like that, so they might feel that she is another friend ready to help Peter. I don’t think the police believe a word any of us say and I can’t say that I blame them,” he finished morosely and drank half the cocktail the waiter put down. He then glanced at her own glass, said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Another—”