Murder for the Bride (3 page)

“Why?”

I glared at him. “Why does anybody fall for a girl? Even the way she looks now, you can tell how pretty she was.”

“So you ditched the Townsend girl and leeched onto the Rentane woman?”

“No. A group of us went to dinner together. And then to the Bayton. While I was dancing with Laura we made a date for the next day. She told me she was living at the Bayton. After I got back to my room at the Willow House about three in the morning, I called her up. We met and went for a walk. We walked until dawn. Everything seemed to click. We got married on the eighteenth.”

“Ever notice the scars on her face?”

“Yes. The little ones at her temples. She was in an accident once.”

“I guess you could call age an accident. She put her age on the marriage-certificate application as twenty-four, Bryant. The doctor says thirty-five would be a better guess.”

“You’re crazy!”

“You were suckered. Somebody went through all her stuff with a comb, Bryant. There aren’t any personal papers of any description left in that apartment. Nothing. All we’ve had to go on is what she put on that application. She wrote that she was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. We got the teletype back a while ago. No record.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“We’ll be the judge of that. She had a funny accent. It didn’t come from Williamsport.”

“She lived abroad most of her life. That’s why. She was as American as you are, Paris.”

He pulled on his lip. “I was born in Toronto. Now we got another thing. Everything she owned is fairly new. A good bit of it was bought here. Everything else was purchased in Buenos Aires. Everything else.”

I stood up. “I think you’re wasting your time and mine too, Captain. Maybe it’s too hot for you. Maybe you’re bored. But I don’t get the point in building a big mystery about some maniac who broke into the apartment and killed my wife.”

“Maniac?” he said. “We happen to know that she has been scared green for the last week. Something scared her. We don’t know what. We’ve got the word of a reliable
person for that. She had a chain put on the door of her apartment. The door wasn’t forced. Whoever did it, she let him in. She knew him. And no thief made that search. Thieves don’t dig around in jars of face cream and take the backs off pictures.”

I sat down. Zeck said tiredly, “Somebody was after her, son. And she knew it. And they got her. It’s that simple. So we got to know everything so we can find some motive. What do you know about her? Where did she go to school?”

“A private school in Switzerland,” I said dully. “She never told me the name of it. Her parents died in a French airline crash three years ago. They left her a lot of money. She traveled for the last three years. She said that she hadn’t had a very happy time until she met and married me, and that she didn’t want to talk about the past because it made her sad. I should make out like nothing ever happened to her until she walked into Tram’s house with Bill French.”

“What did she tell you about the scar along her ribs?”

“She said she was a tomboy when she was little. She was climbing a tree and fell and hit a stub of a broken limb.”

“The doctor says that scar is somewhere between one and three years old, Bryant. It’s a knife wound. Somebody tried hard, but hit a rib and skidded off.”

“How do you know it’s a knife wound?”

“From an X-ray plate I was looking at at eight o’clock this morning. The point of the knife is still in the rib where it broke off.”

I cupped my hands over my eyes. “It’s all … so crazy!”

He leaned toward me. His face was suddenly intent. “We’re waiting for word from the State Department, Bryant. She had to have a passport. It had to be in the name she was using—Laura Rentane. I’ve got a hunch there won’t be any passport on record, that she came in on forged papers.”

“Why do you think that?”

“She was awful anxious to get married, Bryant. Married to a nice sound local guy with a good reputation. Tossing
her out of the country would be ten times as easy if she were single. Can you imagine what kind of an unholy stink you would make if they tried to deport her?”

“But that alone …”

“And did she have any good reason for refusing to go to Mexico with you? She might have had trouble getting a tourist card. Maybe whoever built her a passport didn’t build a birth certificate to go with it.”

“She wanted to get married because she was in love with me!”

“Because you’re so pretty?” he asked mildly. “We want to find out who she was. Finding out will maybe lead to who killed her and why. So you think of any little personal habits she had that might be recognized by somebody. There was no picture of her in the apartment. You got a picture?”

I frowned. “No, there wasn’t time. She promised to have one taken and mail it to me, but she didn’t.”

“Did she write you?”

I flushed. “Twice.”

Paris leaned back and put his pudgy fingertips together. “A doll like that not owning a picture of herself. Enough creams and lotions to stock a department store, and no picture of herself. The hair was one of the best dye jobs I’ve ever seen.”

“It was natural!”

“With those eyebrows and eyelashes? Don’t be a stupe any more than you can help, Bryant. How about her habits?”

“I don’t know what sort of thing you mean.”

“Food, sleep, reading, likes and dislikes. Anything.”

I flushed again. “It was a honeymoon, and a short one at that. We … ate at crazy hours. She liked to go for walks. She avoided fattening foods. I never saw her read anything. She laughed a lot.”

“Nothing yet. Keep going.”

“She could take cat naps at any time of day. She took a lot of baths and showers. Three and four a day. She said she always did that whenever she could. She could speak French and Spanish. She liked movies, but we only went to one. She said she’d see a lot of movies while I was
away. She adored the color yellow. She wanted to keep up the tan she got on the ship. She used to spend hours on herself. Hair, nails, that sort of thing. She did exercises, twisting and bending and turning. She didn’t like …” I paused as I felt myself go red again.

“Keep talking. What didn’t she like?”

“Clothes. She liked to have the rooms warm enough so she could go without clothes. It was sort of … hard to get used to.”

“None of this is going to help much, Bryant. Can you think of anything she said that sounded funny, that possibly you didn’t understand at the moment and it makes better sense now?”

“Only one thing,” I said dubiously, “and maybe it’s nothing. She had a nightmare. She was moaning. I woke her up. She said something in a language I couldn’t understand, then switched to English. I asked her about it. She told me it must have been me doing the dreaming. We had a sort of spat about it. It sounded to me like German. She said that was silly because she couldn’t speak German.”

J
ill was sitting on a bench in the hall when I came out of Paris’ office with Zeck. She wore a pale green cotton dress and carried a big white purse. She was hatless, as usual. She jumped up and came to me, quick concern on her face.

She slung the bag on her shoulder and folded her fingers around my wrists tightly. “Dil, I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly sorry.”

I tried to smile at her. My eyes were stinging. She knew I couldn’t speak and so she turned to Barney and said, “Let me take him off your hands for a while, Barney. The man needs food.”

“We don’t need him any more right now, Miss Townsend. Where’ll you be staying, Bryant? They’ll be through with the apartment by late afternoon, but I guess you wouldn’t want to …”

“The apartment will be fine,” I said.

“You can leave your bag right here. I’ll drop it off. I got to go back there anyhow.”

“Thanks.”

He looked at me with those colorless eyes for a few seconds. “Take care, son,” he said softly and ambled down the hall.

We walked a block to a restaurant and took a booth in the back. “Better have a drink, Dil,” she said.

The waiter brought the bourbon. It went down and felt good. I reached over and lit her cigarette. “It seems funny,” I said. “Like a dream. Like it isn’t happening. I keep thinking she’ll be in the apartment waiting for me, Jill.”

“I know,” she said softly.

“Like a wave. It flattens out and then comes back in a big crest and hits me. We had so little time together.”

She put her small warm hand over mine. “Order another drink, Dil,” she said.

I held my hands out, palms opposed, fingers spread. “I want the man who did it, Jill. He’s mine. He’s my baby. My hands want him so bad they burn.”

“Don’t think that way, Dil. Don’t!”

“How can I help thinking that way? Yesterday I got your letter. Tell me how you came to write it, Jill. Tell me everything about that letter.”

“After you eat. There’s time. Eat first. Don’t try to talk if you don’t feel like it.”

I ate three hungry forkfuls and then my throat seemed to close. I couldn’t touch any more. I smoked and watched her eat. A little girl with a good healthy appetite. Now and then she’d smile at me. Just a smile that said we were friends. Paul was wrong. It had never been any other way between Jill and me. In her mind or mine.

The coffee came. We both took it sugarless and black.

“All right, Dil. Let me go all the way through it. Laura
didn’t like me. You knew that. I don’t think she liked any woman, or was liked by any woman. I didn’t want you to marry her. I thought she was cheap—not good enough for you. And I thought her frightening in a way. A suggestion of ruthlessness. Plus that look of petulance and discontent. Plus the way she looked at any man.”

“Now, wait. I …”

“I’m not just maligning the de—criticizing Laura without a point, Dil. You asked me to keep an eye on her. I tried, Dil. I called on her twice. The first visit was pretty cool. The second time I went she wouldn’t let me in. I could smell cigar smoke. She told me she was fine and there was no need checking up on her. I wondered who the man might be. I’m a snoop—by profession and, I’m afraid, by instinct. They came out an hour or so later. He was a huge blond man, not fat, just terribly big. They seemed to know each other well. They went to a restaurant in the Quarter and ate in the patio. Then they went back to the apartment. I’ve given his description to the police. He shouldn’t be too hard to find if he’s still in the city. A nosy old lady lives in one of the ground-floor apartments. She sort of looks after the place. She lodged a complaint against Laura, charging her with entertaining that man in her apartment at all hours. The police investigated. There was nothing they could act on.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Please, Dil. Men have been blind before. It’s nothing against you. And we don’t really have any specific evidence against her. It just looks very bad, that’s all. We don’t know what her reasons were—or what their relationship was. Laura seemed too self-sufficient to need any help in anything. Six days ago she phoned me and said she wanted to see me. Her voice was strange. I went over there as soon as I could. She questioned me through the door before she opened it. Anyone could see that she was terribly frightened—and yet it was a … a calm fright. That doesn’t make much sense, does it? She was frightened in a way that indicated she was used to being frightened. The draperies were drawn across the windows.

“I sat down at her invitation and she paced back and
forth in front of me, smoking, her eyes looking out beyond the room. You know the sort of lazy way she talked? She didn’t talk that way any more. Sharp and hard and fast, and—older.

“She asked me if I had a place where I could put her up for a few weeks. Privately. She wasn’t asking. She was demanding. I said it could probably be arranged. She went and looked down into the street and stood for a long time absolutely still. I don’t even think she was breathing. She turned away abruptly. She told me she had changed her mind. She laughed in a very bitter way. I asked her if she was in some sort of trouble. She laughed again and said that you could say the world was in some sort of trouble. I told her I wanted to help her. She went to the door and held it open and thanked me for coming. She thanked me as though she were laughing at me. She said something funny. I can remember the exact words. She said it slowly and carefully, as though she wanted me to remember the exact words. ‘My dear, if my bargaining position is not as sound as I hope it is, you can tell Dillon for me that things are not always what they seem to be.’ ”

“That sounds as though …” I said. I didn’t want to finish the thought.

“I’ve been trying to make sense out of it, Dil. She was bargaining with somebody. Her life was at stake. She knew that. She had something to trade for her life, and the trade wasn’t good enough. But what?”

“Then you wrote me? I’m glad you did, Jill.”

“I was going purely on hunch in writing you. I went down to the street and I wanted to know what she saw out the window. There was a man across the street. Leaning against the side of that building painted pink. I don’t know if he was the one. It seemed odd he should stand in the sun when he could have crossed over and waited in the shade, if he were waiting for someone. He was just standing cleaning his fingernails with a broken match. A very ordinary-looking person. A rayon cord suit and a cocoa straw hat with a maroon band and one of those fair, sandy, tight, give-nothing faces. The end of his nose was sunburned. One of those men who can be a
car salesman or a tourist from Syracuse or a hired assassin. If it is the third choice, there was something dreadful about him, standing there in the sun—something dreadful and ordinary, like the villain in a Hitchcock film. He looked at me, and it could have been the way any man looks at a girl. I’ve given his description to Captain Paris, too.”

I thought of the man she saw, of the broken match paring grime from ridged nails, of those same hands twisting the wire tight around Laura’s throat, the face serious and intent and workmanlike.

I stood up, and Jill’s face, her eyes worried, drifted across my eyes and then I was out of the air-conditioning, walking blindly through the heart of New Orleans in July, the drugged, sodden heat that eddies up out of the swamplands and compounds itself by glinting off chrome and rebounding off stone. A man cursed me as I shouldered him aside. When some of the blindness went away I found myself walking down Canal toward the river. I crossed over and turned down Burgundy and went into a dim bar that was like a dark cave amid sun-blasted rocks. The bartender set my drink in front of me. As my eyes adjusted I saw a sallow girl fiddling with a piano so small it was like a child’s toy. She had a constant dry cough. A tremendous buff-colored cat sat in regal pose on the corner of the bar. It stared at me with leonine contempt.