Death of an Angel Read online

  “If somebody doesn’t do something,” Phyllis Barnscott said, “he’ll just go away again, won’t he?” She raised her voice a little, projecting it a little. “Sammy,” she said. “It’s all right, son.”

  Samuel Wyatt appeared, at first, to blink. But then he smiled, and walked to them through deep carpet. “A friendly face,” Sam said. “Two friendly faces.” He said, “I—”

  A slender woman in her forties came from somewhere and said:

  “Mr. Wyatt. It must be Mr. Wyatt, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Wyatt said.

  “I’m Alicia Nelson,” she said, and to this Wyatt said, “Oh.” Then he said, “Oh, of course.”

  “You’ve never heard of me,” she said. “Why should you have?” She looked at Wyatt’s long face, which did not display any inclination to contradict. “I’m Brad’s cousin,” Alicia Nelson said. She smiled briefly. “Really his cousin. When I heard he was giving this”—she indicated this—“I said I simply had to come. I said I had to meet the man who wrote that perfectly wonderful play.”

  “Oh,” Wyatt said. “Well, I—”

  “Do you speak?” she said, then. She had an expression of great eagerness. Her short gray hair curled vigorously.

  There was no doubt, this time, that Samuel Wyatt blinked.

  “She means at things, don’t you, Mrs. Nelson?” Phyllis Barnscott said. “He’s easily baffled, Mrs. Nelson. Luncheons, Sammy. Women’s clubs. I’m Phyllis Barnscott. I’m in Mr. Wyatt’s play.”

  It was Alicia Nelson, this time, who said, “Oh”; who paused a moment and said, “I know, my dear.” She looked at Pamela North, who said, “I’m Pamela North. I don’t do anything, really.”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” Samuel Wyatt said, and snapped fingers of his right hand. “Why?”

  “The club,” Mrs. Nelson said. “It’s a country club but some of us feel—I mean, golf is wonderful, of course—and polo too. I don’t really mean. But sometimes one wants more. Don’t you think, Mr. Wyatt?”

  “I’m afraid,” Samuel Wyatt said, “that I’ve never played polo, Mrs. Nelson. I’m afraid of horses.”

  “Of horses?” she said. Then she laughed. “Oh,” she said. “I should have known.” She did not say what she should have known. “I—”

  But Jasper Tootle loomed, and now a small young woman, very pretty, very red of hair—and, Pam thought, smelling very wonderful—was with him. It was one of the other women in the play—oh, yes, the one who dropped her drink and then—Jane Lamont, that was who it was.

  “Sam, my boy,” Jasper said, and spoke heartily. “Wondered where you’d got to.”

  “Here,” Sam Wyatt said, and looked around him. “Just here, Jasper. This is Mrs. Nelson. Jasper Tootle.”

  Jasper Tootle was charmed. He said as much.

  “I’m Mr. Wyatt’s agent, Mrs. Nelson,” he said. “Have to keep an eye on him. It’s a delightful party, isn’t it? Your cousin’s quite a boy.”

  It was to be expected that Jasper Tootle would have informed himself. Why, Pam thought, don’t I, ever?

  “Tootle,” Mrs. Nelson said. “The Rye Tootles?”

  “Omaha,” Jasper said. “I know Henry, of course. No relation, I’m afraid.”

  There was, briefly, a pause.

  “Mrs. Nelson wants Sammy to talk,” Phyllis said. “To a group.”

  Jasper Tootle was seldom speechless. This seemed to leave him so. He looked at Wyatt, who, expression absent from his long face, was looking around the room. The room, large as it was, was now almost filled.

  “I don’t think Sammy likes to make speeches,” he said. “Do you, my boy?”

  “What?” Wyatt said. He focused on Alicia Nelson. “I’m afraid of speeches, too,” he said. “Where’s Nay, Jasper? Isn’t she coming?”

  “Sure she is,” Jasper Tootle said. “She’ll—”

  But Pam North saw Jerry, who was holding a glass in either hand, who was looking around.

  “An entrance, Sammy,” Phyllis said. “We actresses—”

  Pam made an exit. She joined Jerry; hoped the glass was for her, was assured it was. She was asked if she was having a good time.

  “Not terribly,” Pam said. “It’s all like the opening chorus, isn’t it? Except they don’t sing.”

  Jerry shook his head at that. He edged them into a corner.

  “Before the star comes on,” Pam said. “When they’re all saying, ‘He comes, he comes.’ Or she, of course. And you get tired of waiting.”

  They could go, Jerry said. Nobody would mind.

  “It wouldn’t be right,” Pam said. “Not before Miss Shaw comes. She hasn’t, you know.”

  Jerry did not know. All he knew, at the moment, was that one of Jasper’s boys had a book manuscript that Jerry was going to be crazy about. Although Harper had not been, nor Doubleday. Nor, in fact, Simon and Schuster.

  “I do hope,” Pam said, “that nothing has happened to her.”

  She was invited not to be morbid.

  “It’s the champagne,” Pam said. “I never know why, because it’s supposed to be so gay. And all it makes me is sad.” She paused. “Not even tight,” she added.

  She had had one glass, Jerry pointed out. A glass and a sip, and otherwise since dinner only an enfeebled scotch. She expected too much. “Gaiety,” Pam said. “The fabulous life. The glitter of the world of the theater.” She looked around. “It’s just people, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Now,” Jerry said, “you’re really being morbid.”

  It was only, Pam said, that realism kept cropping up. She sipped. They were protected in their corner; they could watch the play. The cast of the play was large—there were fifty people in the oversize room, with the prismed chandelier sparkling discreetly in its center. There were men in business suits, and some in jackets and slacks; there were a few in dinner jackets, of which Bradley Fitch’s and those of one or two others were white. The women shone more; by and large the women glowed, and not a few of them were close enough to beauty—Phyllis Barnscott, the vividly red-haired Jane Lamont. “There’s Leonard Lyons,” Pam said, and there, indeed, was Mr. Lyons. And there was the handsome couple which put forward Hollywood’s best matrimonial feet, having been in step—now—for almost a year. There was—surely that was the man who wrote—And wasn’t she—but of course she was.

  And all the fifty—the more than fifty—talked. It was inconceivable, from the sound, that they did not all talk at once. The voices of the women were jagged above the heavier monotone of the men—it was as if serrated hills rose from a plain. Momentarily, there was the famous laugh—the laugh known to everyone who had entered a theater, watched a comedy program on television. Speaking of television, wasn’t that one of the ones Godfrey had fired?

  “I,” Pam North said, “feel like a tourist. Do you?”

  Jerry did, a little.

  “I wish,” Pam said, “the parade would come. Don’t you?”

  Because there was, about the now lively enough—and noisy enough—party, a curiously tentative air. It was as if, for all vivacity brought to bear (and in most cases vivacity most professionally designed) nobody’s heart was in it. No conversation (but this was only to be felt; could not be demonstrated) progressed with security, was in a real sense engaged in. People talked with the major portions of their minds elsewhere, waiting for something different. Pam said something to this effect.

  “People do, at parties,” Jerry said. “Especially people on display. You know that.”

  She did. But it was more than that. She was certain it was more than that.

  “Probably,” Jerry said. “It’s in your own mind.” He gestured; a waiter presented a tray; they exchanged empty glasses for glasses that bubbled. Bradley Fitch was passing; he stopped. “Making out all right, cousins?” he asked, and beamed at them. “Wonderfully,” Pam said. “It’s a wonderful party.” Fitch went on. He was a large man; he moved with remarkable grace. “Like a big cat,” Pam said. “They’ll all be very ann
oyed at us.”

  “They,” Jerry said, “will be asleep on all the chairs they are supposed to stay off of. Leaving cat hair.”

  That the Norths’ three cats would be doing precisely that was obvious; that they would, in time, arise to express the vociferous protest of abandoned Siamese equally went without saying.

  “Now,” Pam said, “we’re doing it. Where is Miss Shaw? Because that’s it, isn’t it? It’s her party, more than Mr. Strothers’. More even than Sammy’s. What is there about her?”

  “She’s good-looking,” Jerry said. “She’s a good actress. I don’t mean a Helen Hayes, but—”

  Pam was shaking her head. He stopped.

  “There’s more than that,” Pam said.

  “Sure,” Jerry said. “The indescribable something, and I quote from somebody.”

  “From everybody,” Pam said. “She—” Pam stopped. She was looking toward the door from the foyer. There was a stir there. Bradley Fitch, tall enough to show above the others, seemed the center of the stir.

  But he was not. The stir moved into the room, and now most of those in the room were aware of it. And Fitch was not the center—or was, at best, a segment of the center, an adjunct of the center.

  The center was a small and beautifully arranged young woman in a gold evening dress which left perfect shoulders bare. The center was a young woman of twenty-five, born Mary Shaftlich on Independence Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri, daughter of the manager of a chain grocery store; graduate of Northeast High School, where she had “taken elocution” and of the Heart of America Business College, from which she had emerged as an only moderately competent stenographer. The center was, in other words, Naomi Shaw.

  “Why,” Pam North said, looking at Naomi across the room, “she’s really gay, isn’t she?”

  Sometimes one may toss a single match into a smoldering fire, and find that flame leaps up. Sometimes a party comes alight.…

  “It’s a wonderful party,” Pam North was saying, half an hour later, this time to a handsome young man named Sidney Castle—who danced perfectly—and this time meaning it. There had been another room behind the big room with the chandelier, and here the floor was bare and polished, and here there was a small orchestra. (And another bar. Mr. Fitch did things perfectly; that could no longer be denied.) Voices were generally somewhat louder by then, but they seemed (which was absurd) to have become more melodious.

  “Tops,” Sidney Castle said. “Absolutely tops.”

  It was, Pam thought absently, not so much what he said as the way he said it. He was a very expert dancer; she could look anywhere she liked. She could see Jerry dancing with—oh yes, that Mrs. Nelson. And there was dear old Jasper with—why, that was the girl with the famous laugh. She looked much smaller in real life, and much prettier, too. And Sam Wyatt—Sam of all people!—was dancing with Naomi Shaw, who was laughing at something he had said and looked, in that instant, as she must have looked at the Junior Prom at Northeast High (only rather differently dressed, of course) and seemed without pretense. And there was—

  The music stopped. Sidney Castle bowed. He was an expert bower, too. Jerry came toward them and he had the expression—but how could he have?—of a man who is beginning to think it’s about time to go home. And then—

  A horn in the little orchestra sounded “Attention!”—sounded it softly, almost tenderly. And now Naomi Shaw was standing beside, not Sam Wyatt, but Bradley Fitch, and they were—they certainly were—a most beautiful couple.

  “—says it’s all right,” Bradley Fitch said, and his face was a little flushed, and it appeared he had begun speaking before he planned. He stopped, and put an arm around Naomi’s perfect shoulders, and drew her closer.

  “Want everybody to know,” Bradley Fitch said. “Nay and I—we’re going to get married next week.” He looked around. “Going to steal your girl, cousins,” he said.

  There was a kind of tingle in the air.

  “Put her in my pocket,” Fitch said, and the delight was evident in his voice. He did, then, lift her off her feet. She laughed, her perfect arms around his neck.

  It was very young, Pam thought. It was very charming. It was—

  A stocky man in his middle thirties turned suddenly and walked out of the room. He did not dramatize the action. He merely went. A few noticed him, Pam North among them. But, by then, most were drinking to the health and happiness of Naomi Shaw and Bradley Fitch, who had more money than it was easy to think of, a seven-goal handicap in polo and now—and now the “delectable” star of Around the Corner.

  2

  Friday, 5:45 P.M. to 8:10 P.M.

  Jerry North, being trained, had given warning, although it was brief. He was bringing Sam Wyatt home with him for a drink. He had said, “Be with you in a minute, Sam,” from which Pam deduced that Wyatt was, politely, absenting himself from Jerry’s private office while Jerry spoke, privately, with his wife. “Needs his hand held,” Jerry said. “Although why he came to me. All right?”

  It was of course all right, although Pam made no promise of dinner to follow drinks. “Lamb chops,” Pam said, putting the matter in a nutshell. Lamb chops, as is known to all, cannot be stretched. Jerry said that they would see, which in domestic shorthand meant that they could go out to dinner, if it came to that, which meant that Martha, who cooked for the Norths, would be left somewhat in mid-air. To the smallest things, Pam told the cats, there are ramifications, and went to the kitchen to inform Martha of this new uncertainty. She returned, and decided to change her dress. The cats accompanied her and sat, two on a bed and one on the dressing table, staring with round blue eyes, as if never before had they seen any action so incomprehensible.

  Just before Pam heard Jerry’s key in the lock, the three cats turned their heads simultaneously toward the hallway which led to the living room, which was where the door was. This meant that they had heard footsteps in the outside hall. But they did not leap from perches and gambol down the hallway, which meant that they had heard alien footsteps, along with those of Jerry, and chose to bide their time. The cat called Gin had been ill, and visited by a veterinarian, so that now any unaccounted-for arrival might presage a hypodermic needle in the rump. To all things, there are ramifications.

  Pam went down the hallway, and went quickly, although she did not gambol. Sam Wyatt’s face seemed to have increased in length. To her greeting he slightly shook his head and said, “’Lo, Pam,” in a tone of gloom. “Man needs a drink,” Jerry said, from behind Sam Wyatt. “And how,” Sam Wyatt said, with a falling inflection. He snapped the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, soundlessly. “Can’t think why I keep doing that,” he said, and looked at the hand with reproach. “Compulsion, probably. Means something, I shouldn’t wonder.” He paused. “Something dire, no doubt,” he added. He looked at Pam and shook his head again.

  “It’s all gone down the drain,” he said.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Pam said. “What?”

  “Everything,” Sam said. “Can I have a scotch on the rocks?”

  He could. He did. They sat, the Norths with martinis.

  “Six per cent of thirty thousand dollars,” Sam Wyatt said. “Thirty-two, one week. Less the ten, of course. A week. And then—”

  And then, quite unexpectedly, he sniffled. He sniffled again. His eyes filled with tears and Pam, keeping a bright, and she hoped sympathetic, smile, thought, well, really.

  The wife of a publisher meets writers from time to time, and this is inescapable. Writers often need their hands held and publishers occasionally oblige. Publishers must attend literary cocktail parties, and take their wives, and at such festivals writers are every now and then encountered. So for the breed, Pamela North, of all human idiosyncrasy tolerant, had acquired a special tolerance. But this—this carried it far. Even if things went down drains, did grown men weep into their scotch? It appeared, lamentably, that they did.

  Sam Wyatt drew out a handkerchief, and dabbed his eyes. He sniffled further, and dabb
ed his nose. And then he stood up, and looked around. And then, a little wildly, he pointed toward the door which opened on the hallway to the bedroom, and said, in a choked voice, “Damn. Oh, damn.” And then he sneezed.

  Martini, the older of the cats, the mother of the others, had come to scout. It might not be the vet; it had not sounded like the vet. It might be—At the sneeze, which was convulsive, Martini flattened pointed, dark brown ears. She spoke once, with emphasis. She turned, and stalked away, no doubt to warn her offspring. And Sam Wyatt turned to Jerry and said, still in a choking voice, “You’ve got them!”

  The Norths merely looked at him.

  “Cats!” Sam Wyatt said. His eyes were streaming, now. “Of all things—cats! Don’t you know they’re worse than horses?”

  “Than—” Pam said. “Than horses, Mr. Wyatt? I mean—horses in an apartment? I mean—”

  She stopped, being unable, at the moment, to mean anything at all.

  But Jerry said, “Damn. You’ve told me. I’d forgotten.” He turned to Pam. “Got to get him out of here,” he said. “Dandruff, you know.”

  “Dan—” Pam began, and said, “Oh! How dreadful! And we’re simply swarming with them. I’m so—”

  “Wah-ugh,” Sam Wyatt said.

  “—should have remembered,” Pam said, to Sam Wyatt with sympathy, to Gerald North with reproach. She raised her voice. “We have to go, Martha,” she called. “The chops tomorrow or something. Will you feed the—” She stopped. Perhaps even the word. “Martini and you know,” she said. “We—”

  But by then Jerry had led Sam Wyatt to the door, and Pam followed. Wyatt sneezed briskly, now, and it was doubtful whether he could see. It was almost half an hour, in the dry coolness of a cocktail lounge, before Sam Wyatt could finally blink away the tears. By then he had, in what voice he could manage, apologized, had assured them that he liked cats, that it was he who should have remembered.

  “Is it only cats?” Pam asked, then, and Wyatt shook his head sadly.