Give Up the Body (3 page)

Finally someone answered. A silky, trained voice said, “Mr. Delhart’s residence.”

“This is Miss O’Hara,” I said. “You called?”

“Oh, yes,” the voice said. “This is Mr. Hilton. Mr. Delhart’s secretary. I understand you wish an interview with Mr. Delhart.”

“We discussed it,” I said, hedging.

“Ah, um. Yes. Mr. Delhart asked me to suggest that you drop out here this evening, Miss O’Hara.”

“He was to come here,” I said.

“At nine o’clock, Miss O’Hara. Here.” The silky voice had become steel plated. Mr. Delhart’s orders were not to be questioned. Especially by an upstart female.

I said, “All right,” and hung up. I glanced toward Jud just as the front door banged open. I was in the process of saying something to him and I couldn’t hold it back in time. I said:

“Delhart is begging for an interview.” And I was wishing I had not said it.

Both Jud and I were swivelled toward the door. Before he could say anything, a furious voice announced:

“I’ll give you the interview you want!”

T
HE WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY
was one of those silver and ice blondes. Very slender, but very well constructed. She wore her tall slimness with arrogance. She had vivid red lips and bright greenish eyes, a shade or so deeper than mine. She wore a black slack suit, black blouse and black sandals. She carried a huge black purse slung over her shoulder by a strap.

She looked at me and I looked at her, and both of us were being grateful that
we
didn’t look like
that!
I knew her. So did Jud.

“Come in, Miss Martin,” he said mildly. “Close the door.”

Glory Martin, of the Delhart menage, shut the door and took a step forward. There was a chair near Jud’s desk and she sat down. She did it with the same studied grace she used in every motion. She lit a cigaret in the same way, blew her smoke in the same way.

She seemed quite at ease in the uncomfortable straight-backed chair. She paid no attention to us but looked about the office as if she had never seen it before, and as if it were all very absorbing.

I followed the movements of her eyes. From the filing cases by the fly-specked front window, along the side wall with its newspaper-littered tables, to the door leading into the shop at the rear, back along the other side wall where Jud’s desk and mine leaned wearily against the spotted and cracked and colorless plaster, and finally to the glass-faced front door through which she had just come. The office looked no different from the first time I had seen it, and certainly no different from the last time she had seen it.

I said, “Well?” sharply. I wasn’t feeling up to kow-towing to Carson Delhart’s rumored mistress.

Glory Martin had been showing her profile as she gazed at the front door. Now she gave me a full face view. Her features were very nice, a little on the hard side when she wasn’t being careful, and naturally voluptuous.

“I just got in from the ranch,” she said. That was what Delhart called his acres of timber. She said it indifferently, using her nice voice. It was well modulated except when she forgot herself and let it go. Then it sounded as it had when she first came in. A refined screech owl would have made the same sound. I had heard her talk that way when she was drunk; she was drunk quite a lot. Now, though, she was acting very restrained. As if she had never burst in on us, shouting.

“Then,” I said, “you have all the news.” I smiled pleasantly at her.

Whatever reaction I expected of her, it was not the one I got. I saw the same fear come into her eyes as I had seen displayed by Titus Willow. It lasted only a brief second, but long enough for me to make sure I had seen it. I was reminded of Willow and his unconcealed shock back there by the bridge when I had stumbled into the scene on the river bank. And I wondered if it enveloped everyone concerned with Carson Delhart. I could feel it myself, thinking back to the firm hard way in which he had manipulated me from the river to my car. His cold manner began to take on a new meaning to me.

Glory Martin was acting strangely, not at all the usual arrogant woman we had come to know. When she put her cigaret to her lips her hand shook a little. But her features hardened until I thought her make-up might crack. When she spoke, her voice was raspy; she was getting control of herself.

“Jud,” I said, glancing his way, “don’t you think you might make sure of the drugstore’s ad copy? And I promised Bosco an ice cream cone.”

Jud glared at me, but he got up and went out, taking Bosco and going through the shop at the back. When I heard the alley door close I looked again at Glory Martin. “Now,” I said, “we can take down our hair.”

She stared at me and she began to cry! All at once. “Goddam,” she sobbed. “Goddam.” Louder. She dropped the cigaret on the floor and put her head down on her knees and let her shoulders shake.

I didn’t know her very well, but even our slight contact had given me little use for her. However, I’m like a man when it comes to a woman crying. I go all soft. I got up and put her cigaret in an ashtray and then touched her shoulder.

“Want a drink?”

She raised her head and her mascara was a mess. She would never have let a man see her this way. Not even Jud. But we were alone and she had her back to the street. I got a whiff of her breath. The last thing she needed was a drink.

“Yes,” she sobbed. “Goddam.”

She put her head down again. I went to Jud’s desk and opened the left-hand-side top drawer. There was a half-filled pint of cheap bourbon there. Jud’s smelling liquor was old bonded bourbon. This cheaper stuff he kept for visitors. He never even touched the bottle except to pour out a shot to further his advertising sales or help get a good story. I hoped it would do the same for me.

I poured a good stiff drink in a paper cup, filled another with water from the cooler in the rear corner, and took the cups to Glory Martin.

She was singing the same refrain: “Goddam.” Sob. “Goddam.” Sob. She stopped, raised her head, and took the whiskey. She drained it neat and pushed away the water I offered her. I drank it myself. Then I pulled my armchair closer and sat down.

When she had finished shuddering at the liquor she started on her face with a mirror and a handkerchief. She said, “That little bitch! I’m a mess.” She jerked her head at me. Her eyes were wet with liquorous self-pity. “It’s that damned Titwillow’s fault.”

She ran down and went back to work on her face. She had stopped crying as if she controlled that emotion with a button. She even acted as if she had forgotten her fear. She was simply half tight and speaking irrelevancies.

I prompted her. “Titwillow?”

“Titus J. Titwillow,” she said in her normal voice. She snapped her compact shut and stowed it in her bag. She kept the mascara-smeared handkerchief in her hand. “Bringing his tub of a wife and that—that bitch.”

Evidently Glory Martin had little use for Daisy Willow. I tried to bring the subject around to my major interest. “Meaning Daisy, the nymph of the Teneskium?” I asked.

Glory had good control of herself. She showed no reaction of fear now. She laughed harshly. “You saw that? Sure, Pansypuss Hilton is all upset about it.” She giggled like a school-girl. “Ee-magine,” she said, mimicking Delhart’s secretary, “ee-magine what
that
person will do. One should be very careful in dealing with the fourth estate, you know.” And she added a word I hadn’t heard since I left the army.

I understood that I was “that” person. All I could think of to say was, “I fell right into it. But I didn’t stay long.”

Glory looked hard again. And mean, and rather frighteningly vicious for a young and sometimes lovely woman. I did not know how to cope with her sudden drunken changes of appearance. They bewildered me and they scared me. I couldn’t know what she would do next. Looking at her expression just then I was almost afraid of what she might do.

“So you know,” she said. “All right. She is after Carson. Playing little Miss Innocent. Playing cute with that wet-eared kid, Arthur Frew. Him tagging after her like a chaperone, like an idiot dog. But she’s playing Carson. And isn’t he eating it up!”

I began to think I had wasted the whiskey. This sounded like a case of jealousy, with liquor pulling all the stops. Nothing more than that. I began to get over my bewilderment and that gnawing sensation of fright that I could not quite understand.

Glory said, “Here’s your story.” Her voice was as flat as last night’s gingerale. It was emotionless, but it sent those little electric shocks the length of my spine.

“Titwillow is going to give in too. He’s going to trade his daughter to Carson for that big charity donation.”

Certainly there was not much in the words. It could have been her jealousy building onto a rumor that was already current. Delhart’s planned donation was common enough gossip. It was not her voice, unless it could have been the very lack of tone in it. It was the entire set of circumstances that made the statement register so hard with me. What I had seen and what I had heard and what I was now seeing and hearing.

I said without meaning, “It sounds like the heroine tied to the railroad tracks touch to me.”

Glory ignored me. She said, “And the girl doesn’t want him. Biggest man in Portland and she doesn’t want him.” She seemed to be doing a fine exercise in irrelevancy.

“I thought you said she was after him.”

Glory opened her purse, put the handkerchief in, and stood up. “Got another drink? A little one?” She snapped the purse shut and then used her fingers to suggest the size of the drink she wanted.

I gave it to her, as ordered, and she took it neat, turned around and walked out on me. I half yelled, “Hey!” but she closed the door on my voice. Just like that! Before I had the door all the way open she went whizzing away in her fancy cream and chromium coupe.

I left the door open to air out her perfume which was more noticeable with the disappearance of her breath. I put the bottle in Jud’s desk. Then I stood by the door and thought of the worst words I could and applied them to Glory Martin.

Jud came in and interrupted me. He was carrying Bosco under one arm. In his other hand he held an ice cream cone. She was licking the ice cream and purring, and doing both so fast she threatened to choke. Jud dropped her and put the ice cream on a paper on the floor. She went happily to work.

“Blasted beast,” he said.

“Bosco saved my honor,” I said virtuously. “Respect her.”

Jud sat down. “All right,” he said. “Fire away.”

I pulled my chair back to my desk, made myself comfortable, and told him the whole story up to and including Glory Martin. I did not mention my sensation of being afraid. With Glory gone, with all traces of Delhart and his guests away from me it somehow seemed silly and inconsequential. The sun was still shining brightly outside. It was warm and soft and secure in here with Jud’s cigar smoke bluing the air and the familiar sounds of flies buzzing against the big front window. I could talk of it with detachment; it was only a part of a slightly unusual day. I could laugh at myself. At the moment it was nothing. Later, I learned to trust my instincts more.

I said, “So it looks as if I wasted the liquor.”

Jud did not seem amused. He said, “Keep your eyes open tonight, Addy. You may have a good time scooping the big papers on Delhart’s next wife.”

I
T WAS NEARLY
nine o’clock when Nellie and I galloped over the bridge. Twilight was just giving way to full dark so that Nellie’s wobbly headlights made a respectable looking yellow tunnel along the tree lined road.

I was glad for the comforting sounds from my old car. I was afraid of the forest at night; I knew many normal people to whom it gave a claustrophobic feeling. The formlessness of the thick-trunked trees and the endless tangle of underbrush was terribly oppressive. I thought about it particularly tonight. The way the long, dark branches of the big firs reached out over the road gave me a shivery feeling.

It was a relief to turn from the road onto the very smoothly gravelled driveway that wound around, looped back on itself, and finally ended in a floodlighted area way before Carson Delhart’s “cabin.”

He called it that but it was really a two-story log house complete with balconies overlooking two lovely ponds, and a big veranda that offered a view of the forest and his prize flower beds, filled with almost every rose ever invented.

I had visited here before, to see Mrs. Larson who was the cook when Delhart stayed in the country. Her husband, whom everyone called Big Swede, was the gardner and watchdog of the estate. And their son, Tim, improperly called Little Swede despite his six-feet three inches, acted as Delhart’s chauffeur. I had gone to school with Little Swede and we had enlisted in the service together. The Larsons were particular friends of mine but they could be of no help now. This was the first time I had entered the lion’s den when the lion was in residence. And despite my cocksureness of the afternoon, I was not feeling too good about it.

Delhart was smart and he was not giving me this interview simply to help me forget the scene of the afternoon. I did not like the man, remembering his firm grip on my arm and the way he had looked down at me.

The floodlight was very harsh and bright, throwing a cold, chiselled glare over the flower beds and the trees that lined the driveway and, in some cases, pressed almost against the second story of the house. I parked Nellie directly in front of the veranda steps, hopped out, and hurried to the front door. I could hear nothing from inside, no muted talking, no sounds from a radio, none of the normal noises one expects from a houseful of guests. I rapped hard on the door, using a fancy brass knocker that had been cast in the shape of a crouching bear.

In less than a minute I heard footsteps. Then the door opened. The man who faced me gave the impression of shortness of stature and complete lack of color. He was quite young, in his early thirties, I judged, with sleekly plastered and dull brown hair, very thin and precise-looking lips, and brown eyes as dull as his hair. I had seen him before at a distance. This was Potter Hilton, Delhart’s secretary. He was the owner of the trained voice I had heard over the telephone.