The Hellfire Club (32 page)

“Outsider drinks,” Nora said, jolted by another reference to Paddi Mann.

“Creeley learned about them from the musicians who used to come to the family bar. But he also meant that the two of them were outsiders at Shorelands. The joke about Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer took care of
her
, and Georgina wasn’t completely obtuse, she at least
sensed
that Creeley thought she was absurd, so he was on the outs, too. Which meant we have this little situation here.”

“What did Driver steal?” Nora asked.

Two loud thumps came from the other side of the door. Andrew Martindale walked in, tapping the face of his watch with a satisfied expression on his face. “Thirty-three minutes, a world record. How are we doing?”

“As usual, I’ve been talking too much,” said Foil. He pulled up his sleeve to glance at his own wristwatch. “We still have plenty of time if we don’t dawdle on the way.”

Martindale went to a wing chair on the far side of the room, where he crossed his legs and composed himself.

“Where were we?” Foil asked.

“Stealing,” Nora said.

“We were stealing something?” said Martindale.

“Hugo Driver was stealing something.” Foil opened the red diary and turned pages. “This was a few days before Lincoln Chancel’s arrival, and all sorts of trunks and boxes, even furniture, had been delivered to Rapunzel and set up in the tower. Chancel insisted on his own bed, so it came on a truck and was carried up into the tower, and the old one went into the Main House basement. He had a ticker tape machine put in, so he could keep up with the stock market. A big carton of cigars arrived from Dunhill. A catering company installed a mahogany bar in one room and stocked it with bottles.”

Foil examined a page. “Here we are, the day before Chancel’s arrival. Like good outsiders, Creeley and Katherine Mannheim had been indulging in Top-and-Bottoms, and in the middle of dinner he had to leave the table to visit the bathroom. Who should he spot acting fishy in the lounge but good old D&D, Hugo Driver, who had left the dining room without anyone’s noticing.

“I did not even see him at first, and I might not have seen him at all if he hadn’t sucked in enough air to fill a balloon and followed that by kicking one of the legs of the sofa. When I looked toward the source of these noises, I observed KM’s embroidered bag sliding down the back of the sofa and coming to rest on the seat with a distinct rattle. D&D, whom I had thought wrapped in his usual nervous gloom back at the table, emerged around the side of the sofa and slid something into the right pocket of his shabby houndstooth jacket. He twitched the flap over the pocket and tried to face me down. What a pathetic creature it is. I stopped moving and smiled at it and in a very quiet voice asked it what it was doing. I believe it all but fainted. I said that if it replaced the stolen object at once, I would keep silent. The nasty sneak bared its teeth and informed me that Miss Mannheim had requested that it bring her a pillbox from an inner compartment of the bag, and that had I not been fixated on Rick Favor, I would have overheard the exchange. I had observed KM whispering to D&D, and its dank desperate glee at having been so favored, but that had been all. It produced the proof of its innocence, a small silver pillbox. Soon after my return from the bathroom, another laborious dinner and its hymns to Nietzsche and Wagner happily in the past, I inserted myself into the scented region between ‘Rick’ (!!) and KM and described what I had seen and said. KM brandished the pillbox, and 2 unsubtly implied I had imagined the theft. I implored her to look through the bag, and when she complied I saw, though 2 did not, an amused expression cross her features. ‘Who steals my purse steals trash,’ she said. Excited now, dear 2 prepared himself to assault D&D, but was stayed by KM’s saying that no, nothing was missing, certainly nothing of value, and he had after all produced the invaluable box, from which she then extracted a minute ivory pill and lodged it like a sweet beneath her pointed tongue.

“But two weeks later,” Foil said, “while everyone else paid court to Lincoln Chancel, Driver slipped a pair of Georgina’s silver sugar tongs into his pocket, and Creeley saw him do it. The first person he told was Merrick Favor, and Favor called him a degenerate and said that if he didn’t stop slandering Hugo Driver, he’d punch him in the face.”

“Speaking of degenerates,” Andrew Martindale said from his distant chair, “the lunatic who escaped from jail in Connecticut is on the loose in Springfield, what about that? Dick Dirt?”

“Dart,” Nora croaked, and cleared her throat. “Dick Dart.”

“He was in a motel on the other side of town. When the police got there, all they found was a corpse cut to pieces in one of the rooms. No sign of Dart. The reporter said the body looked like an anatomy lesson.”

Nora’s face felt hot.

Foil was watching her. “Are you all right, Ms. Eliot?”

“You have to drive to Provincetown, and we’re keeping you.”

“Let me worry about getting us to Cape Cod in time. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes. It’s just . . .” She tried to invent a reasonable-sounding explanation for her distress. “I live in Connecticut, in Westerholm, actually, and I knew some of Dick Dart’s victims.”

Andrew Martindale looked sympathetic, Mark Foil concerned. “How terrible for you. Did you ever meet this Dart person?”

“Briefly,” she said, and tried to smile.

“Would you like to break for a couple of minutes?”

“No, thank you. I’d like to hear the rest.”

Foil looked down again at the book open in his hands. “Let’s see if I can boil this down. Lincoln Chancel arrived on schedule and almost immediately turned Hugo Driver into a kind of servant, sending him on errands, generally exploiting him in every way. Driver seems to have gloried in the role, as if he expected to keep the job when the month was over. Poor Creeley was left out in the cold. I gather that Merrick Favor mentioned his accusations to one or two people, and after that both he and Katherine Mannheim were out of favor with their hostess. She more than Creeley, actually, because she quickly became absorbed with her ‘unwriting,’ whatever that meant, and even skipped a few dinners to work on it. This put her in such disfavor that everybody began to feel that it was only a matter of time before Georgina booted her out, as she’d been known to do when a guest seriously disappointed her.

“One night they all took part in a ceremony called ‘the Ultimate,’ which took place in an area called Monty’s Glen. I don’t know any more about it, except that it was boring. All Creeley said in his diary was
’the Ultimate, yawn, glad that’s over.’
But the next day all the excitement began. After lunch, Creeley was out walking through the gardens. Merrick Favor came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder, and Creeley all but passed out. For a second, he thought Favor had boiled over and wanted to hit him, but instead he apologized to Creeley. Hugo Driver really
was
a thief, or so he strongly suspected. Then he explained himself.

“Favor had been trailing after Katherine Mannheim through the gardens, hoping to have a word alone with her, but every time she sat down for a moment, one of the other men popped through an opening in a hedge and sat down beside her. The last one had been Driver, and Favor had watched them say a few words to each other until Miss Mannheim got up and walked away through a gap in the hedges. Favor had started to go toward her when he saw Driver notice that she had left her bag lying half open on the bench, and he stopped to watch what would happen. Driver glanced around”—Foil imitated the quick movements of a man who wishes not to be observed—“and moved closer to the bag. From where he was standing, Favor couldn’t see Driver dip into the bag, and Driver was clever enough not to look at his hands. Favor was pretty sure what was going on, anyhow, and he was almost certain that he
did
see Driver slide some kind of object into his jacket pocket, so he came out of hiding and confronted the little weasel. Driver denied everything. He even said he’d had enough of these accusations and intended to complain to Georgina. Off he went. Favor took the bag to Miss Mannheim and told her what he’d seen. When she looked in the bag, she laughed and said, ‘Who steals my trash steals trash.’ That night she disappeared.”

“After Favor thought he saw Driver stealing something from her bag,” Nora said.

“Right. She didn’t show up for dinner. Georgina was irritated and foul to everyone, even Lincoln Chancel. Late at night, Creeley went out for a walk and came across Chancel and Driver near Bill Tidy’s cottage, and Chancel was extraordinarily rude to him. He told him to stop sneaking around. The next night, again no Katherine Mannheim, and after dinner, Georgina led the entire party to Gingerbread on the pretext of seeing whether Miss Mannheim was ill. Everybody could sense that unless they found Katherine Mannheim in a high fever and too weak to get out of bed, Georgina was going to throw her out on the spot. Instead, she was gone. She’d taken off sometime between the previous afternoon and that night. Georgina didn’t even seem surprised, Creeley wrote. She behaved as though she expected to find an unlocked door and empty cottage. ‘I am sorry to say,’ she said, ‘that Miss Mannheim appears to have jumped the wall.’ And that was that. She had a number for one of Miss Mannheim’s sisters and called her to ask her to remove the few things left behind in the bungalow, and the next day the sister arrived. She had no idea where Miss Mannheim could have gone. She wasn’t in her apartment in New York, and she hadn’t spoken to anyone in her family. She was unpredictable, and she’d previously disappeared from places where she’d felt uncomfortable. But her sister did have one huge worry.”

“That she was dead,” Nora said.

“You’ve heard about her weak heart. The sister was afraid that she might have wandered into the woods and suffered heart failure, so she insisted on calling in the police. Georgina was furious but gave in. For a couple of days, the Lenox police questioned the guests and staff at Shorelands. They searched the grounds and the woods. In the end, it seemed pretty clear that she had run off, and a week later, the summer was over.”

“And then all these deaths,” Nora said.

“Like a plague. Georgina must have felt some sort of renewal was called for, because she immediately paid for a lot of extensive renovations, but all those deaths cast a long shadow over the place.”

“There’s going to be a long shadow over
us
,” Andrew Martindale said.

“One more minute.” Foil consulted his watch and skipped over a thick wad of pages. “I want you to hear something from the end, so you’ll know as much as I do about Creeley’s death.” He looked up again. “If you learn anything at all that might shed light on this, I’d appreciate being let in on it. I know it isn’t likely, but I do want to ask.”

“I’ll tell you about anything I find,” Nora said.

“It’s so enigmatic. Here’s what Creeley wrote in his journal three days before he killed himself.

“All at once, a beam of light pierces the depression I’ve been in since leaving Shorelands. It seems there is hope after all, and from a most Unexpected Quarter. Interest in high places! What a blessed turn, if all goes as it should.

“Then this, the next day.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Done. Finished. I should have known. At least I did not babble to MF. How cruel, to be written only to be unwritten.

“And that’s it, that’s all, that’s the last entry. I didn’t hear from him on either of those days. When I tried to call, the operator told me his phone was off the hook, and I assumed he was working. I knew he’d been unhappy for a long time, so it was good to think he was working hard. But he never let three days go by without at least talking to me, and the next day, when I still couldn’t get through to him, I drove to his apartment after my last patient.”

Foil paused for a moment. “It was a dark, miserable day. Freezing. We’d had a terrible winter. I don’t think we’d seen sunlight for a month. I got to his building. Creeley had the top floor of a duplex, with a separate entrance to his part of the house. After I got out of the car, I climbed over a snowbank and looked up at his windows. All his lights were on. I went up the steps to the porch and rang his bell. His downstairs neighbors, the owners, were both out, and I could hear their dog barking. They had a collie named Lady—high-strung, like all collies. That’s a desolate sound, you know, a dog barking in an empty house. Creeley didn’t answer. I thought he’d turned up his radio to drown out the sound of the dog, which he had to do off and on during the day. He didn’t mind, Creeley played music all the time when he was writing, and the only problem with turning it up was that sometimes he couldn’t hear the bell. I rang it a few more times. When I still didn’t hear him coming down the stairs, I took out my key and let myself in, just like a hundred times before.

“As soon as I got in, I heard his radio going full blast. ‘Let’s Dance,’ Benny Goodman’s theme song. It was one of the remote broadcasts they used to do in those days. I went up the stairs calling out his name. Lady was going crazy. Before I got to the top of the stairs, I started smelling something. I should have recognized the smell right away. I opened his living room door, but he wasn’t there. I hollered his name and turned the radio down. That blasted collie got even louder. I knocked on the bathroom door and looked in the kitchen. Then I tried the bedroom.

“Creeley was lying on his bed. Blood everywhere. Everywhere. He’d used the shotgun his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday, when he still had hopes of normal male hobbies for his son. I went into shock. I just
shut down.
It seemed like I stood there for a long time, but it could only have been a couple of minutes. After a little while, I called the police and waited like a robot until they came. And that was that. Try as I might—and I tried, all right—I never understood why he did it.”

62

“WELL, I UNDERSTAND
why he did it.” Harwich turned out of the driveway onto Oak Street and rotated his shoulders several times, as if trying to shake off the atmosphere of the past thirty minutes. He leaned sideways to see himself in the rearview mirror and ruffled the tight gray curls on the side of his head. “Mark is an okay guy, but he doesn’t want to see the truth.”

Nora pointed at a driveway a little way ahead of them on the other side of the street. “Pull in there.”

He stared at her. “What?”

“I want to see them leave.”

“You want—oh, I get it.” He pulled up slightly ahead of the driveway between two wings of a stone wall, and backed in. “See? You think I don’t know what this is about, but I do.”

“Good,” Nora said.

“You want to make sure they get away safely.”

“I’m glad you don’t mind.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t mind. I’m just a very agreeable person.”

“So tell me why Creeley Monk killed himself.”

“It’s obvious. This guy reached the end of his rope. First of all, he was a working-class kid who pretended to be high society. From the second he got into that school, his whole life was an act. On top of that, he couldn’t sustain his initial success. Shorelands was supposed to raise him to a new level, but no one wanted to publish his next book. One flutter of interest sends him into ecstasies, and when it doesn’t pan out, he’s devastated. He takes the shotgun out of his closet and ends it all. Simple.”

This clever, rapid-fire dissection, as of a corpse under a scalpel, irritated Nora unreasonably” Harwich had reduced Mark Foil’s account to the empty diagram of a case history.

“Anyhow, you did a good job in there,” Harwich told her. “But there is this little issue about that editor who turns out to be part of the Homintern. Did you get that?
We’ve
met him a couple of times? Pretty soon Mark is going to know this book is just a smoke screen, and then he’s going to have a lot of questions for me.”

“It’s no big deal. I said I had a book contract, and it turns out I don’t. I’m writing the book before I take it to a publisher.”

“I’m still in a tricky position. Anyhow, there they are, safe and sound.” He nodded toward a long, graceful-looking gray car moving down Oak Street in front of them. “Not a care in the world, as usual.”

“You don’t like them, do you?”

“What’s to like?” he burst out. “These two guys live in a world where everything’s taken care of for them. They’re so smug, so lovey-dovey, so pleased with themselves, tooling off to Cape Cod in Martindale’s new Jaguar while his patients climb the walls.”

“I thought he was retired.”

“
Mark’s
retired, except from all the important stuff, the state boards and the national committees. Andrew has about six jobs, as far as I can make out. Head of psychiatry here, professor of psychiatry there, chief of this and that, a great private practice full of famous painters and writers, plus his books.
The Borderland of the Borderline Patient. The Text of Psychoanalysis. William James, Religious Experience, and Freud.
I forget the others.” He pulled out of the drive, enjoying her amazement.

“I thought . . .” Nora did not want to admit what she had thought. “How can he take a month off? Oh, I forgot. It’s August, when all the shrinks go to Cape Cod.”

“That’s right, but Andrew spends
his
month off running a clinic in Falmouth. And writing. He’s a busy lad.” He gave her a sidelong, appraising look. “Hey, why don’t you take some time off yourself? You shouldn’t run around on your own while your madman is on the loose. And there’s no point in trying to find this Tidy character.”

“What do you think happened to Katherine Mannheim?”

“Easy. Everybody thought either she ran away or died in the woods, so they couldn’t see that both things were true. She’s carrying her suitcase through the woods at night, the weight is too much for her, an owl scares her, blooey. A couple of nitwit cops pretend to search the woods, and surprise, surprise, they don’t find her. I’ve never been inside Shorelands, but I’ve seen it, and even now we’re talking about two square miles of wilderness. An army couldn’t have found her.”

“You’re probably right,” she said, idly watching suburban houses grow closer together as the lots shrank and sprouted the swing sets, wading pools, and bicycles in the driveway she had seen while Dick Dart drove them into Fairfield in Ernest Forrest Ernest’s car. “Oh, my God.”

Harwich gave her a look of concern.

“I know why Lincoln Chancel went to Shorelands.”

“Money, I told you.”

“Not for the reason you think. He was trying to recruit Georgina Weatherall for his Fascist cause, the Americanism Movement. Lincoln Chancel secretly supported the Nazis. He got together a bunch of sympathetic millionaires, but they had to keep quiet during the war. In the fifties, Joe McCarthy roped them into anti-Communism, I guess, and they had to go along.”

He looked at her suspiciously. “I have to say, you do liven things up. Let me take you out for dinner tonight, I know a great French place out near Amherst—a little bit of a drive, but it’s worth it. Amazing food, candlelight, the best wines. Nobody’ll see us, and we’ll be able to have a good long talk.”

“Are you worried about somebody seeing us?”

“We have to keep you under wraps. In the meantime, I’ll order a pizza. There’s not much food in the house. You can get a nap, and I’ll go to the hospital. Don’t answer the phones or open the door for anyone, okay? We’ll keep the world at arm’s length for a while and get reacquainted all over again.”

Nora leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. Instantly, she was standing in a forest clearing ringed by tall standing stones. Counting money into neat stacks at a carved mahogany desk placed between two upright stones, Lincoln Chancel glanced up and glared at her. Misery and sorrow overflowed from this scene, and Nora stirred and awakened without at first recognizing that she had fallen asleep. Longfellow Lane rolled past the windows like a painted screen.

“Right now you need to be taken care of,” Harwich said.

He pressed a button clipped to his visor to swing up the garage door and drove inside to park beside Sheldon Dolkis’s green Ford. As soon as he got out of the car, he moved to the wall and flipped a switch to bring the heavy door rattling down. A bare overhead light automatically turned off, and the door clanked against the concrete. Nora felt almost too tired to move. Harwich’s dim form moved past the front of the car toward the right side of the garage. “You okay?” he said, and opened an interior door. A panel of gray light erased the front of his body and turned his hair to silver fuzz.

“Guess I didn’t know how tired I was.” She dragged herself out of the remarkably comfortable seat and noticed that a small figure like a white sparrow had perched atop the car’s hood. No, not a bird, a winged woman, poised for flight. This had a meaning, but what meaning? Oh yes, what do you know, Dan Harwich numbered among his possessions a Rolls-Royce. How odd” the deeper into the world she descended, the further up she went. The car door closed with a bank vault’s serious thunk, and Nora went past the waiting Harwich into the house.

“Everything caught up with you,” he said from behind her. He put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder and squeezed past in the narrow space of the rear entry, lightly kissed her, and took her with him through the kitchen to the living room, where she stood embarrassed in the midst of a yawn while he darted forward and drew down on a cord which advanced dark curtains across the bow window. “Let’s get you settled,” he said, and ushered her gently up the stairs, past the linen closet, and into the guest room, where he conducted her toward the bed and removed her shoes once she had stretched out. She yawned again, hugely.

“You fell asleep in the car for about ten minutes.”

“I did not.” The protest sounded childish.

“You did,” Harwich said in an amused echo of her tone. “Not very peacefully, though. You made a lot of unhappy noises.” He began massaging the sole of her right foot.

“That feels wonderful.”

“Why don’t you take off that T-shirt and unbutton your jeans? I’ll help you slide them off.”

“No.” She shook her head back and forth on the pillow.

“You’ll be more comfortable. Then you can slide under the covers. Hey, I’m a doctor, I know what’s best for you.”

Obediently she sat up and yanked off the white V-necked shirt, turning it inside out in the process, and flipped it toward him.

“Cute bra,” he said. “Do the top of those jeans.”

Protesting, she flattened out and undid the button, pulled down the zip, and wiggled the jeans over her hips. Harwich yanked them down, and in one quick movement they whispered over her thighs, knees, feet. “Matching panties! You’re a fashion plate.” He raised the sheet and the cover so that she could wriggle under and then lowered them over her, not without a little tucking and patting. “There you are, sweetie.”

“What a guy,” she heard herself say, and roused herself to add, “Give me about an hour, okay?” The words sounded distant in her ears, and soft, slow-moving bands of color began to spill from the few objects visible through the slits of her eyes, one of them being Dan Harwich as he drifted toward the door.

The broad circle of grass within the tall stones looked like a stage. Nora moved forward as Lincoln Chancel wrapped bands around the stacks of bills before him and one by one placed them in a satchel as carefully as if they were raw eggs. He gave Nora a sharp, disgruntled look and returned to his task. “You don’t belong here,” he said, seeming to address the satchel.

His ugliness outdid the famous photograph, in which it had seemed a by-product of rage. It was an entire ugliness, domineering in its force.

“No sand in your craw. A few setbacks and you’re on your knees, whimpering
Daddy, help me, I can’t do it on my own.
Pathetic. When people talk to you, all you hear is what you already know.”

“I understood why you went to Shorelands,” she said, doing her best to mask the fear and impotence she felt.

“Consider yourself fired.” He sent her a cold, ferocious glance of triumph and pulled a thick cigar from his top pocket, bit off the end, and lit it with a match which had appeared between his fingers. “Go home. It’s not a job for a little girl.”

“Screw you,” Nora said.

“Gladly.” He grinned at her like a dragon through a flag of smoke. “Even though you’re too scrawny for my taste. In my day we liked our women ample—womanly, we used to say. Tits like bolsters, buttocks you could sink your hands into. Women to make your pole stand up and beg for it. One other kind I liked, too—small ones. Every big man wants to roger a little thing. Get on top, you feel like you’ll either snap their bones or split ’em in half. But you’re not that type, either.”

“The Katherine Mannheim type.”

He drew on the cigar and blew out a quivering ring of smoke that smelled like rotting leaves. “The runaway.” Instead of losing its shape and drifting upward, the trembling smoke ring widened and began shuddering toward Nora. “Little bitch didn’t have the manners of a whore.”

The smoke ring floated into the middle of the grassy circle, paused, and twisted into nothingness. Pretending that she had already followed orders and left, Chancel snapped the lock of the satchel over the last wad of bills, and her question spoke itself in her head.
What did she say . . .

“What did she say to you while the photograph was being taken?”

He looked over at her and mouthed the cigar. “Who?”

“Katherine Mannheim.”

“I graciously invited her to sit on my lap, and she said, ‘I’ve already seen your warts, I don’t have to feel one, too.’ Tidy and that blockhead Favor both laughed. Even the pansy smiled, and so did that poser with the funny name. Austryn Fain. What kind of a handle is Austryn Fain?” He aimed the astonishing nose at her like a gun. “You don’t know anything. You don’t even read the right books. Get out of here. Lose yourself in the woods.”

She cried out and found Harwich’s shadowy, reassuring face inclining toward her. “Ow, that hurt,” he said, maintaining his smile. “You walloped me!”

“Sorry. Bad dream.” A long leg brushed hers, and she squinted at his face.

“Do you always make so much noise in your sleep?”

“Get out of this bed. What are you
doing
here?”

“I’m trying to calm you down. Come on. There’s nobody here but me.”

Nora dropped her head back on the pillow.

“Nobody’s going to hurt you. Dr. Dan is right here to make sure of that.” He slid closer to her and inserted an arm between her head and the pillow. A smooth cotton shirt encased the arm. “In my medical opinion, you need a hug.”

“Yeah.” She was grateful for this simple kindness.

“Close your eyes. I’ll get out of here when you fall asleep again.”

She turned into his arms and tugged a corner of the pillow between her head and his shoulder. He caressed the side of her head and began stroking her bare arm. “Your operation,” she murmured.

“Long way off.”

“I never sleep during the day,” Nora said, and in seconds proved herself a liar.

When she opened her eyes again, Harwich passed a warm hand up her arm and tugged the sheet over her shoulder. Various, not entirely subjective internal dials and gauges informed her that she had spent a significant time asleep. What time was it? Then she wondered if Dick Dart had been arrested since they had left Mark Foil’s house. Harwich circled her waist with an arm.

“Don’t you have an operation pretty soon?” she asked.

“Took less time than I thought it would.”

“It went all right?”

“Except for the demise of the patient.”

She whirled around to face him and found him propping his head on one hand, smiling down. “Joke. Barney Hodge will live to tear another thousand divots from the country club greens.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Most of the day. It’s about five-thirty.”

“Five-thirty?”

“When I got back, I checked on you, and there you were, out cold, even quiet. I was getting the feeling that you refought the war every time you fell asleep.”