Call After Midnight (19 page)

“No—not lately,” Jenny said, snatching at a straw.

“Why did he ever phone to you? Divorced—”

“Because he wanted to know how I was. We were friendly—”

Captain Parenti didn’t actually say anything but his lips puffed out skeptically. He turned and trudged back toward the house. Peter was coming toward them. He stopped as he met Parenti but Parenti plowed on. Peter gazed after him, then came on across the lawn.

His eyes were icy blue. His chin was hard. “That man is going to charge me with murder. He said so. Made no bones about it. Murder.”

A
GULL SQUEALED AND
whirled near them. It seemed to Jenny that the mist settled lower. Cal said at last, “He can’t.”

“He can. Motive. Jenny.”

“Keep your shirt on, Peter. You’ve got an alibi.”

“But that’s Jenny again. He says, of course, she’ll swear to my alibi. He says he believes you’re an accessory after the fact, Cal. So you needn’t be so cool about it. There’s a penalty for that, too. I don’t know just what, but something.”

“There’s no evidence,” Cal said, “unless he has something new—”

“He said that he was going to break down that alibi and he was going to get evidence. He talked about a trial—good God, a trial. Suppose a jury finds me guilty.”

“He can’t even bring you to trial as things stand now,” Cal said slowly.

“He’s going to try. You never know what a jury will do.”

Cal walked over to the sea wall, absently picked up a pebble from the path and tossed it out toward the water. Peter watched him. Finally he said, “Well, what are we going to do? I tell you he’s going to arrest me.”

“I don’t know,” Cal said. “But I think Parenti may be trying to stir up evidence. Scaring the pants off us, hoping one of us will do or say something, implicate somebody else perhaps to save his own neck. Something like that.” He picked up another pebble. “If he had any evidence at all he’d arrest somebody this minute.”

“Me,” Peter said. “Now he’s got sleeping pills on his mind. Asked me if Fiora ever took them. Sure, she took them sometimes. I didn’t like it. Told her to throw them out. I don’t think she did. I think she hid them. But what’s sleeping pills got to do with it?”

Jenny opened her mouth to reply, remembered Cal’s advice not to tell Peter anything of the messenger, the pills, the voice speaking to Henry over the telephone, and Cal said, “Didn’t he explain why he asked you?”

“Explain! Not Parenti. Likes to be mysterious, if you ask me. Makes him seem smarter. Or something,” Peter said glumly.

Cal had advised against telling Peter the whole story because Peter would make a great stir about it and it would be better to let Parenti and only Parenti investigate. It had seemed sound enough reasoning at the time but it now struck Jenny that Cal might have had some other reason. This puzzled her: Cal was usually almost too direct. She resolved to question him the first chance she had and heard Cal say to Peter, “Did he ask you anything else that’s new?”

“Nothing. Oh, yes, he did. Where was I night before last? I said here at home. Doesn’t make sense. Where would I be but here? What difference does it make?”

“You never know what the police get into their heads,” Cal said and tossed out the pebble which fell with a tiny clatter upon a heap of black mussel shells below the wall. “I think the only point is to keep our heads. All of us. Stick to what we know and let Parenti stew.”

“I’m doing the stewing,” Peter said after a moment. He gave Jenny his suddenly warm and attractive smile. “Okay, Cal, I’ll do my best. Jenny, you were wonderful this morning. You said flatly that I was with you, both before we heard the shots and at the time when we heard the shots.”

“But that was true.”

“As Cal says, just stick to it, no matter what happens.” Still smiling, he looked at Cal. “As soon as this is over, Jenny and I are going to remarry. Of course it’s not news to you.”

“Peter—” Jenny began and stopped for she had an odd feeling that Cal or Peter or something was about to explode.

Nothing did. Cal said coolly, “It’s no news to me. But I’d advise you not to let the police get hold of it …Oh, Blanche. Anything wrong?”

Jenny hadn’t heard Blanche’s approach across the grass. She stood just behind Peter, her green eyes clear as water. “What a question,” she said. “Everything’s wrong. That policeman is perfectly sure that we’re all lying. I saw you from the house. Waldo Dodson says he’ll take us back to town, Jenny, if you’re ready to go.”

“I’ll take you,” Cal said.

“No,” Peter said. “No! You’ll have to stay, Cal. I can’t cope with all of this alone. I really can’t.”

“Mrs. Brown is here with you,” Cal said.

“That’s another problem,” Peter said. “I don’t know what to do with her. She’s planted herself down here as if she’s going to spend the rest of her life.”

Jenny said impulsively, “Give her an allowance, Peter. I think she could use it. Tell her you’re going to give it to her and relieve her mind.”

Peter’s underlip stuck out rather dubiously.

Cal said, “It won’t hurt you, Peter,” and turned as Art Furby approached. Art looked as discreet as if all the secrets in the world were locked up in his smooth, graying head but said only that Dodson was waiting to take Jenny and Blanche to town.

All of them walked quietly back to the house. Blanche was ready. Jenny had only to gather up her coat. Mrs. Brown was in the hall. “So you’re really leaving,” she said and gave one of her disconcerting titters. “I thought you’d come back to stay, Jenny. Now that Fiora—”

Blanche cut in. “Good-bye, Mrs. Brown.”

“You certainly look fine,” Mrs. Brown said, eyeing Blanche’s perfectly cut suit. “So different. I can remember when—”

Blanche went out. Peter took Jenny’s arm and pressed it against his side secretly, but Cal, standing on the steps, saw the gesture. There wasn’t any chance to tell Cal that Peter had spoken too soon and said too much—not, Jenny thought meeting Cal’s remote glance, that it now mattered to Cal. He’d made that clear, in a perfectly cool and friendly way, the night before.

She got into the car. She wished she had had a chance to talk to Cal alone, at least long enough to ask why he refused to tell Peter of Parenti’s reason for inquiring about sleeping pills. It was futile to speculate upon Parenti’s reticence.

Blanche this time sat in the back seat beside Jenny; Dodson was sulkier if possible than before. He wore a sports shirt and a black leather jacket and looked vaguely tough. He didn’t even ask for Jenny’s address but turned into the cross street and stopped before her apartment. Blanche said, “Well—”

There seemed to be nothing else to say, Jenny thanked Dodson who grunted, and got out of the car. She waited until Dodson’s, or rather Art’s sports car had turned the corner, then trudged over to Third Avenue and found a locksmith who promised to come in a couple of hours and change the lock of her apartment. She then remembered that she had had no lunch, stopped at a coffee shop and had coffee and a hamburger. The anonymity of the little coffee shop with its few patrons at that time of day was obscurely comforting. On the way back to her apartment, though, she passed a newsstand and bought a paper.

A late afternoon hush lay over the apartment house. Most of its tenants were probably working people. She didn’t exactly like opening the door of her own apartment and entering it but it was just as she had left it with Cal, and had the intangible air of having remained in utter stillness and desertion.

She looked over the whole place though, quickly; closets, bathroom, tiny kitchen. Just as well to err on the safe side, Cal had said. Nothing was disarranged, there was no sense of an alien footstep, and there were fine layers of dust over everything.

She put up the windows and aired the rooms while she read the paper. While Peter’s name had its importance it was not sufficiently important to usurp headlines or space for very long. In the middle pages there was a short reference to the murder of Mrs. Peter Vleedam and the inquest. The result of the inquest had obviously come in too late to find its way to the early editions.

She was starting to dust and clean when the locksmith came.

“All safe and sound,” he said cheerfully when he finished. “Here’s your keys.”

“I’ll not lose these.” Jenny paid him.

“More keys you lose the better our business.”

“Thank you.”

The apartment seemed very empty after he had gone. The lock, though, was reassuringly bright and new. Nobody would try the key she had lost on that lock. Except she hadn’t lost the keys, someone had stolen them. Peter, Blanche, Cal—or Fiora’s murderer; it was too short a list.

She dusted, she put the place in order, and the telephone was still like a magnet. But Cal wouldn’t telephone her. He’d washed his hands of her at Peter’s very premature announcement. Peter wouldn’t telephone to her. He knew the danger of that.

She herself telephoned for groceries to be delivered. When the doorbell rang she asked who it was before she let in the delivery boy, who plunked down boxes and sacks in a hurry and departed. She put on the bolt again. Again the apartment seemed emptier after he had gone. The telephone did not ring.

She thought of going to Cal’s house and getting the few clothes and toilet articles which she had left in one of his sisters’ rooms. She wondered how Henry was getting along with his new braces and his puppy.

She didn’t need the few dresses she had taken to Cal’s house. She had enough cosmetics from Henri et Cie to last the rest of her life. That was part of her job if she still had a job. She had no excuse for failing to turn up again that day. How could she tell Henri that she’d had to attend an inquest on the death of her successful rival and hadn’t even thought of her job until that moment?

At dusk she defiantly poured herself a generous drink. Henri would have disapproved of that as strongly as he had certainly disapproved of her failure to turn up for work. He didn’t like late hours for his models but made allowances if those late hours included a visit to a fashionable restaurant where they might be seen in one of his creations. Anything with a vestige of alcohol in it was anathema to Henri; he threatened his models with lines on their faces and flabby figures. He didn’t like their smoking either but had had to yield to that. He didn’t at all object to working them like Diesel engines.

The drink she had poured was so unexpectedly strong that it went slightly to her head and she allowed herself to think of Peter and remarriage. Sometime. It might be possible, mightn’t it, to recapture happiness? Sometime, she added hurriedly in her thoughts, again. Sometime. Suppose she took Peter at his word and said yes, certainly they would be remarried—as soon as it was safe. Safe? she thought with a kind of jolt.

There was a thud outside the door, which, so somber were her thoughts, startled her for an instant before she recognized it as the thud of the evening newspapers being delivered. She waited though at the door, making sure that there were repeated little thuds all along the corridor outside the other doors. She opened the door then, scooped up the papers and rebolted the door. The news of the inquest had slightly more prominence than the earlier story. Murder by a person or persons unknown. Investigation by the police.

She prepared herself dinner, made herself eat it, and listened for the telephone all the time. She looked all over her dressing table and bedside table that night. There was not another empty bottle. Even if Fiora had customarily taken sleeping pills, the supply of empty bottles must run out. She wondered why Fiora hadn’t thrown out the bottles as she emptied them; yet some people, merely careless, did keep old, empty or nearly empty medicine bottles.

She went to sleep at last and on the very rim of sleep could see the house on the Sound with its long terrace and its thick shrubbery and the sea wall. A haunted house. She couldn’t go back there to live, she thought, suddenly wide awake. But there were other houses.

Nothing happened that night. No strange voice announced a telegram that didn’t exist. The next day the weather turned freakishly warm—up to seventy, up to eighty. It was already warm when Jenny dressed to go to work so she got out a last summer’s cotton suit. She put her new keys carefully in a zipper compartment of her handbag. She might as well have stayed at home, however, for she was fired promptly and definitely.

“I can get a hundred girls who’ll come to work and glad for the chance. Waiting list this long.”

She was rather thankful that Henri had not after all read the newspapers. She said, “It was unavoidable. I’m sorry—”

“No, no. I’ve already called the agency for somebody to take your place.” As usual, when he wanted to, Henri could speak perfectly clear and idiomatic English. He was painfully clear that morning. “Frankly I’ve not been too satisfied with your work. Oh, you go through the paces. You photograph well but so do a million other girls. I’ve never felt you had your heart in it. No ambition. A model’s got to have ambition.”

“Why did you keep me on?” she said dryly.

He shrugged and became all French. “A certain somzing. A leetle
je ne sais quoi.
But no. You’ll find your check at the cashier’s desk.”

She went back to her locker; there was nothing there but a few stockings, a raincoat and the extra key. She threw the key away, put her few possessions in an Henri box of gold and purple, and was rather thankful that none of the other models had yet arrived. She said good-bye to the cashier, and Henri quite good-humoredly shook hands with her and wished her well. “When you marry a millionaire come back,” he said, “I’ll give you good prices.”

So she had no job. She didn’t care very much; yet at the same time it gave her a troubled sense of failure. It was true, though, that her heart hadn’t been in her work.

The unseasonable heat of the day was increasing. The sensible thing to do was to go to the agency and put herself on the list for another job. Henri was good-natured enough to recommend her.

Instead she strolled up Fifth Avenue, checked her Henri box at the Plaza and walked along the park.

She wouldn’t think about the telephone ringing perhaps while she was out. She wouldn’t make herself a prisoner in her own apartment either.