The Lady and Her Doctor (30 page)

“I'm very sorry, sir. I will ask the man at the door. Lady Constant just went out, sir. The doorman saw her go.”

“Where did she go? Where can I reach her?”

“I am sorry, sir. Lady Constant didn't say.”

“Ask around, ask around, maybe somebody there knows!”

“Excuse me, sir. I have another call.”

Milton was suspended in space. He was hanging by his toes.

“Hello? Doctor? Are you there? I am sorry but nobody here knows. Can I ask Lady Constant to telephone you when she returns?”

“When will that be? When?”

“I have no idea, sir. What would you like me to do, Doctor?”

Go jump in the lake. Take a flying leap—But Milton was just too gone to say so; he leaned against the wall of the telephone booth with his eyes shut, the receiver still clamped to his ear. “Doctor?” he heard. “Sir? But, he's still on the line,” he heard. “No kidding, you'd think it was my fault she goes out!” He heard the hotel noises, the switchboard operator, then he heard a man's voice, a different man's voice, and it was only the deadly fatigue that kept him standing there like that with the telephone clamped to his ear because he didn't realize at first that the man's voice saying “Hello? Hello?” was Lady Constant's pet bloodhound, sent, he was explaining, to pick up the trail of one of her damned gloves which she had apparently dropped somewhere between the taxi and her room. Just in time, just as the fellow was telling the switchboard that there was no one on the line any more, and who had it been, anyhow, that Milton pulled himself together and said “Hello” to her guy, the sister's guy, “Hello, this is Dr. Krop.”

Chapter X

MONDAY 6:00 A.M.

Amory wondered why New York seemed a European city, why she had this persistent sensation of riding through a foreign city. Because death was a foreign city? “No,” she said, “that isn't it. I must stop thinking about it,” she thought, and, as if she were a schoolmaster, called herself to order and questioned herself. “Why does New York seem foreign?” Sitting on the low bucket-seat next to Day driving in his fire-engine-red MG, she kept her red-eyed swollen face turned away from him and tried to find the answer to her question at First Avenue, Second, Third, Lexington, as they drove up Fifty-ninth Street from the bridge. It was not that the early morning smells were reminiscent of London or Paris, the almost empty, somehow clean winter streets, the air as yet uncharged with the New York ozone generated by New York energy, but only that in Paris and in London and Venice and Rome she had often driven through the streets so early; in New York, she did not. When sightseeing, you often got off to an early start; in your home town, you didn't. Lady Constant turned to Day, to tell him this, to say something, to break the silence that was like the foreign city death, but it didn't come out and instead she heard herself repeating the only sentences she had been able to utter since Day drove out to Queens to pick her up and take her back to the hotel. She said, “He murdered Sloane. I know he murdered her.”

Day once more repeated his part of the dialogue. “You have no proof. For God's sake, Amory, drop it, you have no proof.”

Amory put her head down to hide the tears which started again.

“It's Monday morning, Amory. Last Friday evening, three days ago, you were given positive assurance—from the horse's mouth—that he did not murder your mother. You better drop it, Amory. If you start this with the police again, in the teeth of the sworn statement you just made to them which, according to you, you yourself, proved his innocence, and tell them that he murdered your sister you know what they'll do, don't you? Amory, for Christ's sake, don't you realize they'll send you to Bellevue psychopathic ward if you pull this sort of thing with the police?”

“Do you think I'm crazy, Day?”

“It was you who—You were his alibi, Amory! You were there!”

“He used me. He dared to make use of me as his alibi!”

“Amory!”

“I could kill him,” she said.

“Now, that's nice.”

“He killed my sister. I know it,” she said. “He murdered her, I know it! You think I'm insane. So now he has you believing I'm insane, too!”

“He hasn't got me thinking anything. If I think anything, you're the one who is making me think it.”

“He has you fooled. He has the police fooled.”

“Everyone but our Amory! The whole world is out of step but Amory!”

“Day, let's stop and have a cup of black coffee,” she said. “Day, pull up at that drugstore there and let's have a cup of hot black coffee.”

“It's closed. It's too early. It's six o'clock.”

“You want to get rid of me. Now you want to get rid of me.”

“Amory, stop it!” He pulled the car up to the curb. “We can talk here if you like. You don't need any coffee, anyhow. How many cups did you drink all night long? I think you're going on this way because you're jittery with coffee and the night up—what happened, and the police—Amory, darling.” He turned toward her, the reddened eyes, the swollen flesh of her face, then, in charity, looked instead at his hand in its yellow glove which was jiggling the gearshift. “I'm sorry, love, but it all seems perfectly straightforward to me and that lieutenant told me it seemed perfectly straightforward to the police. Your sister killed herself. No one killed her. Certainly the part I was in on was straightforward! When you called and told me, I wasn't surprised. Shocked, yes. Oh, Amory, darling, I am shocked at your sister's death, but not particularly surprised. It was in the cards.” His hand left the gearshift and touched Amory's thigh, but she jerked it away and kept her legs as far away from him as the limited space of the car would permit. (An MG was wrong for death!) “Amory, I'm sorry, but this sort of thing seemed in the cards after what he told us about her last night. It was bound to happen. She was for it, darling!”

Day remembered how gone the doctor had sounded on the telephone when by the merest accident he spoke to him. Washed up. At the end of his rope. Amory saw a killer, a murderer, but he had spoken to a worn-out, pathetic guy with an insane wife. Of course insane. A wife who wouldn't talk to her own sister. (Which Amory knew.) A woman who wouldn't let her husband see her sister, so Dr. Krop had to ask him to ask Amory to telephone at seven-fifteen exactly so that Dr. Krop might tell his insane wife that it wasn't Amory calling but his other sister-in-law whom Sloane did not mind him seeing. How could Amory believe that the man had planned an elaborate fool-proof murder with herself for the perfect alibi when it was just by the merest chance, just because Amory had lost her gloves en route, that she happened to be in on it at all? How could Amory believe that the man had planned to use her as his alibi for a planned murder when ten minutes before he spoke to Day, he had refused to have anything to do with Amory? (“One hundred per cent not interested,” Dr. Krop had told Amory, ten minutes before.) Day asked Amory how she could believe that she had been set up to be the doctor's alibi when his being there at all had been as chancy, as haphazard as it had been?

“I don't know,” she said.

“Unless you think he knows you well enough, darling, to be pretty damn sure you'd lose something or other en route to the Thomases' and send me back for it so that I'd happen to pass the desk while he was hanging on the other end of a wire?” Amory did not smile. Well, it was a feeble effort even at a happier time. “If you hadn't dropped your glove, angel, you would have been out of his reach and wouldn't have known about your sister's suicide until this morning.” Except for her lips which trembled, Amory's face was set and stubborn. No impression. “Darling, come on, try to be impersonal about this. What would you think if I came and told you this story about two strangers—about a murder in the newspapers—if you didn't have a down on the doctor-Dr. Fell?”

When Dr. Krop had begged him to ask Amory to telephone at seven-fifteen, he had said he would ask. Beg was more like it. Amory had been, Day thought, fanatically determined to cut off her nose to spite her face and had needed a heap of persuasion to put the call through, to give up the party at the Thomases', go back to her room and, at seven-fifteen, make the second call, the one to her old home, when Dr. Krop had addressed her as “Janey” and said he would be right over to attend to the child who had been taken ill. “Amory, last night when Dr. Krop finished telling us about it you certainly believed him.”

“No.”

“That's a downright lie, Amory! You did believe him last night! Come on, it was a perfectly straightforward story that no one could help believe. Didn't he come over to see you that first time to tell you the same story, didn't he say at the time that he wanted to tell you about your sister but what with me hiding in the bathroom, snatching those perfectly harmless seasickness pills, telling him to his face that you were having your mother exhumed, you can hardly blame him for not telling you. Nobody could have told you anything then and you know it. You told your lawyer, didn't you, you made
him
tell the medical examiner? You were hell-bent on your sister and her husband having murdered your mother between them and wouldn't have believed the angel Gabriel if he came down and told you that your mother hadn't been done in!

“Oh, be fair, Amory—if you think back to that day you'll realize that he was hinting at the state of mind your sister was in. Didn't he ask me how long I knew you? Whether you were—tetched, too? He had to wait until it was proved that he had nothing to do with your mother's death.” Her lips had not relaxed their stubborn set at all. “You do agree now that your mother wasn't murdered—your mother, anyhow? Amory, you have to believe that much. It's a fact! Amory, love, anyone who believes that a woman was murdered after the medical examiner boys tell her she wasn't is out of her mind. I'm referring to your sister, I hope, and not to you, love!

“Amory, last night when Dr. Krop sat in your room and told you that Sloane insisted she had killed your mother when your mother died a natural death, you agreed she wasn't—quite sane. Dr. Krop, who is a physician, after all, and possibly has had more experience along these lines than you have, believed it. I believed it and so did you, last night. He came here to ask your help.”

“That I do believe!”

“Help for your sister, Amory, and you know it. He came hurrying here last night out of concern for your sister and for no other reason. Amory, remember what he looked like last night—the way he paced the room—how he sweated trying to get it across? He knew you wouldn't like hearing such a thing about Sloane—I've known a couple of instances myself where the family refused to believe in the insanity of a close relative. The family—you know, ducks, like husbands—they're the last to know. No, I'm serious, families often refuse to believe there's insanity until it's too late. He mentioned that, remember?”

“I remember everything,” she said with emphasis. “I remember he was bright enough to know you'd read Freud in the Modern Library and kept
consulting
you. A real psychiatric consultation. I remember!”

“He is bright enough to feel unsure of himself, that's true. He was kind of humble, Amory. I thought it was touching. Perhaps he'd done the wrong thing? Perhaps he should have forced her to go to a psychiatrist—twenty-five dollar edition, not Modern Library! And if you think it's easy to insist a patient see a psychiatrist—Well, it isn't.”

“Sloane was herself. Not insane.”

“I've heard that before. ‘Aunt Emily is eccentric, that's all!' Amory, how often have you spoken to your sister in the past couple of years? This man, this physician, lived with her, remember. Don't say you remember everything that way again! Don't be so damned stubborn, Amory. And don't be such a damned snob because that's what it comes down to.”

“No.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. And don't think because you had a crush on that fisherboy in Antibes—You're a snob about the middle classes, Amory, don't kid me. I like him.”

“Because he con
sulted
you. You're no psychiatrist.”

“And you're no detective.” He turned on the ignition and started the little car.

Now Amory laid her hand on his knee. “Day, I'm sorry. I hardly know what I'm saying, Day. He was convincing last night. I
almost
believed him when he told about Sloane being—
ill
—Oh, Day, certainly I believed him enough to trot along with him when he explained his sudden change of mind about not having anything to do with me for Sloane's sake. I did believe his change of heart about not telling Sloane about the exhumation. That first he believed it would send her over the edge if she found out I was so convinced that she and he between them had murdered Mother that I'd gone to the police, and that later—that night—decided that the other way round would be better for Sloane. It made sense.”

“Kindness! Certainly it was kinder to you not to tell your sister you had gone ahead and bullied the authorities into doing the examination. You can't tell me it would have made your sister fonder of you to know about it?”

“Fonder, Day, or—generous?” Amory's fingernails rasped on Day's trousers, drawn taut over his knee. “Never mind. It could not have made Sloane fonder of me to know I'd gone to the police. I agree. I agreed when he said so last night. I agreed that since—according to him—Sloane was in even a worse state than ever before, it was worth a try to go and tell her the truth. I agreed with him that Sloane being—fonder—of me or not didn't matter any longer and that perhaps finding out about the exhumation might act like—”

“Shock therapy, darling.”

“Shock therapy. I agreed last night that if I told her what I had done and then produced proof that the whole thing was in my imagination and in hers, it might shock her back to herself.”