The Essential Noir Bundle, page 75
He laid the receiver on the table and stood up, staggered to the door, got it open after the second attempt, and fell out into the hallway, where the wall kept him from tumbling down on the floor.
The red-faced man came hurrying to him. “Just lean on me, brother, and I’ll make you comfortable. I got a blanket spread over the davenport so we won’t have to worry about the mud and—”
Ned Beaumont said: “I want to borrow a car. I’ve got to go back to Mathews’s.”
“Is it him that’s dead?”
“Yes.”
The red-faced man raised his eyebrows and made a squeaky whistling sound.
“Will you lend me the car?” Ned Beaumont demanded.
“My God, brother, be reasonable! How could you drive a car?”
Ned Beaumont backed away from the other, unsteadily. “I’ll walk,” he said.
The red-faced man glared at him. “You won’t neither. If you’ll keep your hair on till I get my pants I’ll drive you back, though likely enough you’ll die on me on the way.”
Opal Madvig and Eloise Mathews were together in the large ground-floor room when Ned Beaumont was carried rather than led into it by the red-faced man. The men had come in without knocking. The two girls were standing close together, wide-eyed, startled.
Ned Beaumont pulled himself out of his companion’s arms and looked dully around the room. “Where’s Shad?” he mumbled.
Opal answered him: “He’s gone. All of them have gone.”
“All right,” he said, speaking difficultly. “I want to talk to you alone.”
Eloise Mathews ran over to him. “You killed him!” she cried.
He giggled idiotically and tried to put his arms around her.
She screamed, struck him in the face with an open hand.
He fell straight back without bending. The red-faced man tried to catch him, but could not. He did not move at all after he struck the floor.
CHAPTER 7: THE HENCHMEN
I
Senator Henry put his napkin on the table and stood up. Rising, he seemed taller than he was and younger. His somewhat small head, under its thin covering of grey hair, was remarkably symmetrical. Aging muscles sagged in his patrician face, accentuating its vertical lines, but slackness had not yet reached his lips, nor was it apparent that the years had in any way touched his eyes: they were a greenish grey, deep-set, not large but brilliant, and their lids were firm. He spoke with studied grave courtesy: “You’ll forgive me if I carry Paul off upstairs for a little while?”
His daughter replied: “Yes, if you’ll leave me Mr. Beaumont and if you’ll promise not to stay up there all evening.”
Ned Beaumont smiled politely, inclining his head.
He and Janet Henry went into a white-walled room where coal burned sluggishly in a grate under a white mantelpiece and put somber red gleams on the mahogany furniture.
She turned on a lamp beside the piano and sat down there with her back to the keyboard, her head between Ned Beaumont and the lamp. Her blond hair caught lamplight and held it in a nimbus around her head. Her black gown was of some suede-like material that reflected no light and she wore no jewelry.
Ned Beaumont leaned over to knock ash from his cigar down on the burning coal. A dark pearl in his shirt-bosom, twinkling in the fire’s glow as he moved, was like a red eye winking. When he straightened, he asked: “You’ll play something?”
“Yes, if you wish—though I don’t play exceptionally well—but later. I’d like to talk to you now while I’ve an opportunity.” Her hands were together in her lap. Her arms, held straight, forced her shoulders up and in towards her neck.
Ned Beaumont nodded politely, but did not say anything. He left the fireplace and sat not far from her on a sofa with lyre ends. Though he was attentive, there was no curiosity in his mien.
Turning on the piano-bench to face him directly, she asked: “How is Opal?” Her voice was low, intimate.
His voice was casual: “Perfectly all right as far as I know, though I haven’t seen her since last week.” He lifted his cigar half a foot towards his mouth, lowered it, and as if the question had just come to his mind asked: “Why?”
She opened her brown eyes wide. “Isn’t she in bed with a nervous break-down?”
“Oh, that!” he said carelessly, smiling. “Didn’t Paul tell you?”
“Yes, he told me she was in bed with a nervous break-down.” She stared at him, perplexed. “He told me that.”
Ned Beaumont’s smile became gentle. “I suppose he’s sensitive about it,” he said slowly, looking at his cigar. Then he looked up at her and moved his shoulders a little. “There’s nothing the matter with her that way. It’s simply that she got the foolish idea that he had killed your brother and—still more foolishly—was going around talking about it. Well, Paul couldn’t have his daughter running around accusing him of murder, so he had to keep her home till she gets the notion out of her head.”
“You mean she’s—” she hesitated: her eyes were bright “—she’s—well—a prisoner?”
“You make it sound melodramatic,” he protested carelessly. “She’s only a child. Isn’t making children stay in their rooms one of the usual ways of disciplining them?”
Janet Henry replied hastily: “Oh, yes! Only—” She looked at her hands in her lap, up at his face again. “But why did she think that?”
Ned Beaumont’s voice was tepid as his smile. “Who doesn’t?” he asked.
She put her hands on the edge of the piano-bench beside her and leaned forward. Her white face was earnestly set. “That’s what I wanted to ask you, Mr. Beaumont. Do people think that?”
He nodded. His face was placid.
Her knuckles were white over the bench-edge. Her voice was parched asking: “Why?”
He rose from the sofa and crossed to the fireplace to drop the remainder of his cigar into the fire. When he returned to his seat he crossed his long legs and leaned back at ease. “The other side thinks it’s good politics to make people think that,” he said. There was nothing in his voice, his face, his manner to show that he had any personal interest in what he was talking about.
She frowned. “But, Mr. Beaumont, why should people think it unless there’s some sort of evidence, or something that can be made to look like evidence?”
He looked curiously and amusedly at her. “There is, of course,” he said. “I thought you knew that.” He combed a side of his mustache with a thumb-nail. “Didn’t you get any of the anonymous letters that’ve been going around?”
She stood up quickly. Excitement distorted her face. “Yes, today!” she exclaimed. “I wanted to show it to you, to—”
He laughed softly and raised a hand, palm out in an arresting gesture. “Don’t bother. They all seem to be pretty much alike and I’ve seen plenty of them.”
She sat down again, slowly, reluctantly.
He said: “Well, those letters, the stuff the Observer was printing till we pulled it out of the fight, the talk the others have been circulating”—he shrugged his thin shoulders—“they’ve taken what facts there are and made a pretty swell case against Paul.”
She took her lower lip from between her teeth to ask: “Is—is he actually in danger?”
Ned Beaumont nodded and spoke with calm certainty: “If he loses the election, loses his hold on the city and state government, they’ll electrocute him.”
She shivered and asked in a voice that shook: “But he’s safe if he wins?”
Ned Beaumont nodded again. “Sure.”
She caught her breath. Her lips trembled so that her words came out jerkily: “Will he win?”
“I think so.”
“And it won’t make any difference then no matter how much evidence there is against him, he’ll—” her voice broke “—he’ll not be in danger?”
“He won’t be tried,” Ned Beaumont told her. Abruptly he sat up straight. He shut his eyes tight, opened them, and stared at her tense pale face. A glad light came into his eyes, gladness spread over his face. He laughed—not loud but in complete delight—and stood up exclaiming: “Judith herself!”
Janet Henry sat breathlessly still, looking at him with uncomprehending brown eyes in a blank white face.
He began to walk around the room in an irregular route, talking happily—not to her—though now and then he turned his head over his shoulder to smile at her. “That’s the game, of course,” he said. “She could put up with Paul—be polite to him—for the sake of the political backing her father needed, but that would have its limits. Or that’s all that would be necessary, Paul being so much in love with her. But when she decided Paul had killed her brother and was going to escape punishment unless she—That’s splendid! Paul’s daughter and his sweetheart both trying to steer him to the electric chair. He certainly has a lot of luck with women.” He had a slender pale-green-spotted cigar in one hand now. He halted in front of Janet Henry, clipped the end of the cigar, and said, not accusingly, but as if sharing a discovery with her: “You sent those anonymous letters around. Certainly you did. They were written on the typewriter in the room where your brother and Opal used to meet. He had a key and she had a key. She didn’t write them because she was stirred up by them. You did. You took his key when it was turned over to you and your father with the rest of his stuff by the police, sneaked into the room, and wrote them. That’s fine.” He began to walk again. He said: “Well, we’ll have to make the Senator get in a squad of good able-bodied nurses and lock you in your room with a nervous break-down. It’s getting to be epidemic among our politicians’ daughters, but we’ve got to make sure of the election even if every house in town has to have its patient.” He turned his head over his shoulder to smile amiably at her.
She put a hand to her throat. Otherwise she did not move. She did not speak.
He said: “The Senator won’t give us much trouble, luckily. He doesn’t care about anything—not you or his dead son—as much as he does about being re-elected and he knows he can’t do that without Paul.” He laughed. “That’s what drove you into the Judith rôle, huh? You knew your father wouldn’t split with Paul—even if he thought him guilty—till the election was won. Well, that’s a comforting thing to know—for us.”
When he stopped talking to light his cigar she spoke. She had taken her hand down from her throat. Her hands were in her lap. She sat erect without stiffness. Her voice was cool and composed. She said: “I am not good at lying. I know Paul killed Taylor. I wrote the letters.”
Ned Beaumont took the burning cigar from his mouth, came back to the lyre-end sofa, and sat down facing her. His face was grave, but without hostility. He said: “You hate Paul, don’t you? Even if I proved to you that he didn’t kill Taylor you’d still hate him, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” she replied, her light brown eyes steady on his darker ones, “I think I should.”
“That’s it,” he said. “You don’t hate him because you think he killed your brother. You think he killed your brother because you hate him.”
She moved her head slowly from side to side. “No,” she said.
He smiled skeptically. Then he asked: “Have you talked it over with your father?”
She bit her lip and her face flushed a little.
Ned Beaumont smiled again. “And he told you it was ridiculous,” he said.
Pink deepened in her cheeks. She started to say something, but did not.
He said: “If Paul killed your brother your father knows it.”
She looked down at her hands in her lap and said dully, miserably: “My father should know it, but he will not believe it.”
Ned Beaumont said: “He ought to know.” His eyes became narrower. “Did Paul say anything at all to him that night about Taylor and Opal?”
She raised her head, astonished. “Don’t you know what happened that night?” she asked.
“No.”
“It hadn’t anything to do with Taylor and Opal,” she said, word tumbling over word in her eagerness to get them spoken. “It—” She jerked her face towards the door and shut her mouth with a click. Deep-chested rumbling laughter had come through the door, and the sound of approaching steps. She faced Ned Beaumont again, hastily, lifting her hands in an appealing gesture. “I’ve got to tell you,” she whispered, desperately earnest. “Can I see you tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“My place?” he suggested.
She nodded quickly. He had time to mutter his address, she to whisper, “After ten?” and he to nod before Senator Henry and Paul Madvig came into the room.
II
Paul Madvig and Ned Beaumont said good-night to the Henrys at half past ten o’clock and got into a brown sedan which Madvig drove down Charles Street. When they had ridden a block and a half Madvig blew his breath out in a satisfied gust and said: “Jesus, Ned, you don’t know how tickled I am that you and Janet are hitting it off so nice.”
Ned Beaumont, looking obliquely at the blond man’s profile, said: “I can get along with anybody.”
Madvig chuckled. “Yes you can,” he said indulgently, “like hell.”
Ned Beaumont’s lips curved in a thin secretive smile. He said: “I’ve got something I want to talk to you about tomorrow. Where’ll you be, say, in the middle of the afternoon?”
Madvig turned the sedan into China Street. “At the office,” he said. “It’s the first of the month. Why don’t you do your talking now? There’s a lot of night left yet.”
“I don’t know it all now. How’s Opal?”
“She’s all right,” Madvig said gloomily, then exclaimed: “Christ! I wish I could be sore at the kid. It’d make it a lot easier.” They passed a street-light. He blurted out: “She’s not pregnant.”
Ned Beaumont did not say anything. His face was expressionless.
Madvig reduced the sedan’s speed as they approached the Log Cabin Club. His face was red. He asked huskily: “What do you think, Ned? Was she”—he cleared his throat noisily—“his mistress? Or was it just boy and girl stuff?”
Ned Beaumont said: “I don’t know. I don’t care. Don’t ask her, Paul.”
Madvig stopped the sedan and sat for a moment at the wheel staring straight ahead. Then he cleared his throat again and spoke in a low hoarse voice: “You’re not the worst guy in the world, Ned.”
“Uh-uh,” Ned Beaumont agreed as they got out of the sedan.
They entered the Club, separating casually under the Governor’s portrait at the head of the stairs on the second floor.
Ned Beaumont went into a rather small room in the rear where five men were playing stud poker and three were watching them play. The players made a place for him at the table and by three o’clock, when the game broke up, he had won some four hundred dollars.
III
It was nearly noon when Janet Henry arrived at Ned Beaumont’s rooms. He had been pacing the floor, alternately biting his finger-nails and puffing at cigars, for more than an hour. He went without haste to the door when she rang, opened it, and, smiling with an air of slight but pleasant surprise, said: “Good morning.”
“I’m awfully sorry to be late,” she began, “but—”
“But you’re not,” he assured her. “It was to have been any time after ten.”
He ushered her into his living-room.
“I like this,” she said, turning around slowly, examining the old-fashioned room, the height of its ceiling, the width of its windows, the tremendous mirror over the fireplace, the red plush of the furniture. “It’s delightful.” She turned her brown eyes towards a half-open door. “Is that your bedroom?”
“Yes. Would you like to see it?”
“I’d love to.”
He showed her the bedroom, then the kitchen and bathroom.
“It’s perfect,” she said as they returned to the living-room. “I didn’t know there could be any more of these left in a city as horribly up to date as ours has become.”
He made a little bow to acknowledge her approval. “I think it’s rather nice and, as you can see, there’s no one here to eavesdrop on us unless they’re stowed away in a closet, which isn’t likely.”
She drew herself up and looked straight into his eyes. “I did not think of that. We may not agree, may even become—or now be—enemies, but I know you’re a gentleman, or I shouldn’t be here.”
He asked in an amused tone: “You mean I’ve learned not to wear tan shoes with blue suits? Things like that?”
“I don’t mean things like that.”
He smiled. “Then you’re wrong. I’m a gambler and a politician’s hanger-on.”
“I’m not wrong.” A pleading expression came into her eyes. “Please don’t let us quarrel, at least not until we must.”
“I’m sorry.” His smile was apologetic now. “Won’t you sit down?”
She sat down. He sat in another wide red chair facing her. He said: “Now you were going to tell me what happened at your house the night your brother was killed.”
“Yes,” issuing from her mouth, was barely audible. Her face became pink and she transferred her gaze to the floor. When she raised her eyes again they were shy. Embarrassment clogged her voice: “I wanted you to know. You are Paul’s friend and that—that may make you my enemy, but—I think when you know what happened—when you know the truth—you’ll not be—at least not be my enemy. I don’t know. Perhaps you’ll—But you ought to know. Then you can decide. And he hasn’t told you.” She looked intently at him so that shyness went out of her eyes. “Has he?”
“I don’t know what happened at your house that night,” he said. “He didn’t tell me.”
She leaned towards him quickly to ask: “Doesn’t that show it’s something he wants to conceal, something he has to conceal?”
He moved his shoulders. “Suppose it does?” His voice was unexcited, uneager.
