The Dishonest Murderer Page 3

  “Curt,” Freddie said then, glad of the chance, to a tall young man who came to stand beside Celia Kirkhill, to whom, as Freddie spoke, Celia turned instinctively, her face lighting. “You haven’t got a drink! I’ll get Watkins.”

  She looked for Watkins, saw a maid with a tray of champagne glasses. It was almost time, then. Her head summoned the maid. “What time is it, Curt?” she said.

  “Tu-twenty minutes of,” Curtis Grainger said. He was tall and thin, his hair, blond as Celia’s, was short, upstanding on his long head. “Almost t-t-time.”

  It was not exactly a stutter; it was a kind of hesitating, uneasily, on the brink of a word. Once, she supposed, Curtis Grainger must have stammered rather badly. He had grown stern with himself. The sternness was evident on his young face when the face was quiet. It vanished when he looked at Celia.

  “Y-your father’s going to miss the year,” he said, and his smile was the youngest thing about him as he looked down at Celia Kirkhill, reached out to put an arm around her shoulders. He looked over her head at Freddie Haven. “The baby’s worried,” he told her. (He said, “The bu-baby’s wh-worried.” After he had hesitated on the brink of a word he said it rapidly, clipping it.)

  Freddie said she knew. She said it wasn’t anything.

  “Of course not,” Curtis Grainger said. “I’ve been telling Ce. As my father says, the senator’s indestructible.” He grinned, disarmingly. “My father ornaments it,” he said.

  “I’ll bet,” Freddie said.

  The buzzer had sounded in the foyer. She was conscious she was listening; that she had frozen in listening. She heard one of the maids move to the door, heard the door open, her ears straining.

  “Good evening, miss,” Freddie heard Marta say, and heard a voice she knew, speaking quickly, accenting the words. “So late,” the voice said. “Has everybody—?”

  Breese Burnley came into the living room quickly. She wore a white dress, her shoulders bare, a thin, flat circle of diamonds about her lovely throat. As always, now in spite of her disappointment, Freddie Haven was conscious of surprise when she looked at Breese. It was difficult to grow accustomed to such perfection—such perfect perfection. Surely, coming out of a snowstorm, one strand of all the black, artfully arranged hair, would be at odds with art; surely one of the long eyelashes over deep blue eyes would have lost its curl.

  “Darlings!” Breese said. “I’m so late. So sorry.”

  Breese Burnley looked at Freddie with a perfect smile, at Celia, at Curtis Grainger. Then, almost without hesitating, only slowing a little as for a grade crossing, she looked on beyond them, her smile still perfect, still ready. It was sometimes difficult to speak to Breese Burnley, so rapidly did she pass you, go on to the person beyond.

  “Hello, Breese,” Freddie Haven said, feeling that she was calling the words after Breese, although Breese herself had not moved. Celia said, “Hello,” and there was little expression in her young voice. Curtis Grainger said, “Hello, Bee-Bee,” making himself utter the difficult nickname, the obvious nickname, without trace of stammer. He wants, Freddie thought, to give her no hold on him, not even the hold of this tiny weakness, this meaningless vocal uncertainty.

  “So late, darlings,” Breese said again, looking beyond them, still smiling at them. “And I did hurry.”

  “Still time for a drink, darling,” Freddie promised her. “I’ll—”

  “Darling,” Breese said. “As if you didn’t have enough! I do it myseps.” It was a catch word of hers, “myseps.” It stemmed from baby-hood. “Breese will do it herseps,” Fay Burnley said of her daughter, admiringly. Credit where it was due, Freddie had thought. Breese did it herseps, all right. (“B-B indeed,” Bruce had said of Breese. “A five-inch shell.”)

  Now Breese, patting Curt’s arm in passing, patting it with almost no trace of lingering, went on—went on, slim and perfect, infinitely provocative to the male, very beautiful, very certain because of her beauty. The three of them watched her go. There was a faint smile on Freddie Haven’s lips. “Our only Bee-Bee,” Curt said, not bothering, now, to enunciate with precision the difficult nickname.

  The smile was insecure on Freddie’s lips. It faded away. She was conscious that Celia was looking at her again. The girl’s eyes were demanding something.

  “You’re worried, Freddie,” Celia said. “You’re worried too.”

  It was a statement, yet it demanded answer. The girl’s eyes demanded honesty.

  “Yes,” Freddie said. There was nothing to add to it.

  They could not stand there, so near the door from the foyer, so detached from the others. Freddie put an arm around Celia’s shoulders, drew her toward the party. Everyone seemed very contented, very full of conversation. Voices were lifted a little, to be heard over other lifted voices. Uncle William’s aide had found a pretty girl, and was looking beyond her toward Breese Burnley. Breese had found champagne. She had also, Freddie noticed, found Howard Phipps. She was talking to him and, so far as Freddie could tell, from a little distance, listening to what Phipps said in return. They must be talking about Breese, Freddie thought, and made a tiny mewing sound at herself for thinking it. Miaow, Freddie thought, without uttering the sound.

  “Bruce!” she thought then, smiling at people, walking toward her father with her almost full glass held carefully. She thought the name with a kind of explosive force, as if she could make Bruce hear by thinking his name hard. “Bruce! Where are you?” Almost, she found, she listened for an answer.

  Her father was talking to Uncle William, rank appropriately meeting rank, and she heard the words “damned Reds” and then Vice Admiral Satterbee interrupted himself and turned away from William Fensley. (Who was, after all, only a rear admiral, even if not yet “ret.”)

  “Haven’t seen Kirkhill,” Admiral Satterbee told his daughter. The accusation in his voice was, she was sure, only a token of concern. Her face must show her anxiety, then.

  “Stood me up,” she said, keeping it light. “May I toast the year with you, Dad?”

  Her father said, “Wumph.” He sounded angry.

  “No excuse,” he told her. “No excuse I can see. Where is he?”

  “Please, Dad,” Freddie said. “He’s tied up somewhere.”

  “No business being,” her father said. “Supposed to be here, isn’t he?” He drew his brows down. “Unless—” he said, and stopped, thinking better of it. He looked at his daughter’s face.

  “Sorry, Freddie,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  “It’s all right, Dad,” she said.

  “You’d have heard,” he said, meaning, clearly enough, that she would have heard if something had happened to Bruce. It didn’t follow, she thought; it was not sufficiently consoling. But she managed to smile and nod. Then she remembered.

  “You started to say something,” she told her father. “You said ‘unless,’ and stopped. And you were—” She had started to go on, to ask whether he had been talking about Bruce on the telephone to a man whose voice she had never heard, which was not a voice, in texture, in rhythm, like those of the people in the room. But this was not the time for that. Watkins was standing by a window, looking at his watch, ready to open the window, to let, as it would seem, the New Year in, to let the roar of the city carry it in.

  “Nothing,” her father said. “If—perhaps later, Winifred. It’s almost time.”

  He took out his watch to prove it. He showed her the watch. Its faint tick was a rattle in the throat of the dying year. What a thing to think! What a way to think!

  Then the roar started. The whistles started, the bells, the indescribable sound, underlying all identifiable sounds, which was the sound of people. Someone shouted on the street below; someone, farther away, fixed a gun—an automatic, she thought—rapidly. In the room there was a kind of quiver in the air, a sudden stirring.

  Her father, facing her, was raising his glass and she raised hers, to touch it. The tiny sound of touching glasses was, momentarily, clearer than an
y other sound.

  “Happy New Year, Winifred,” her father said.

  “Happy New Year,” she said. “Happy New Year, Dad.”

  Her voice did not falter; she did not let it falter. They drank as the bells sounded, as sirens mourned the old year in metal-throated lament, as the tiny sound of clinking glass was repeated.

  They drained their glasses, father and daughter, oddly alike in square shoulders, the way they stood, the way they moved, carrying on a custom which meant nothing. (“A toast’s to be drunk, Freddie,” her father had said, long ago, perhaps when first they had drunk together, as two Satterbees, her mother dead. “If you mean it, drink it.” She had never known where her father acquired this rule, or whether he invented it.) Now her glass was empty when she lowered it from her lips.

  Her father leaned down and kissed her, then. He kissed her lightly, on the check, and patted her bare shoulder.

  The next hour or so meant nothing, could not afterwards be remembered. She became a hostess again, keeping the party alive after its climax; seeing that champagne was passed unhurriedly, without interruption, (“Never rush people,” her father’s rule was. “Never leave them with empty glasses.”) She seemed to remember, afterward, that Breese Burnley and Howard Phipps were together a good deal of the time; that they had been together at midnight, drunk the New Year in together. She knew that Celia Kirkhill and Curtis Grainger were always together; she remembered how often, being near them, she had seen Celia’s face turned toward hers, with a question in it; how often she had shaken her head. But, oddly, the tension of her own waiting had lessened after midnight. Apparently she had set that hour as an arbitrary one, the hour by which Bruce Kirkhill must appear. As the night had built toward that hour, her tension had built. But when the hour had passed, when nothing had happened, the unreasoning quality had gone out of her anxiety. She was still worried, but now she felt, more than worry, a kind of emptiness. It was as if she had been defrauded; as if she had reached out for something and, where this thing, this wanted thing, should have been there was merely nothing. With this emptiness not showing in her face, she moved from group to group; she went with Uncle William and Aunt Flo to the door, when they left half an hour after midnight; she had, with a fleeting expression, let Uncle William’s aide know she sympathized as he went along, dutifully, to see that the car was there, the bluejacket who drove it on hand and competent. (The aide came back, after about five minutes, looking very pleased. He rediscovered the girl he had discovered on arrival. They continued to drink to the New Year.)

  The party dwindled, eroding away. It re-formed as it dwindled; a halved group joined a group similarly depleted; the revived unit, again diminished, merged with another. Soon there would be only a single group, large at first, then growing smaller. Soon there was. A dozen people remained. Celia, who was staying at the apartment instead of returning to her hotel; Curtis Grainger, who remained very close to Celia, who looked at her so often, with protective concern; Breese Burnley and her mother, Fay; Phipps, who now, as the group shrank, left Breese to her mother and turned to Freddie herself; a scattering who did not wish the party to end as yet. Uncle William’s aide was one of the scattering, and the girl he had found. (The girl was the daughter of Captain Arrhhhh, on duty in BuPers in Washington, or of Commander Arummmm, assigned to the Third Naval District.)

  The scattering diminished. Uncle William’s aide, who was handsome, suave, very savvy, took the girl away, after casting one last, quick glance at the perfection of Breese Burnley. A civilian who had been in the Navy once, but only as a reserve, went suddenly, perhaps having had almost too much champagne. The dozen became nine; the nine became only what you might call “themselves.” “Now we’re by ourselves,” Freddie thought, instinctively, and then, momentarily, wondered why she so united them. The answer was instant. They were all people about Bruce Kirkhill. He was their center.

  They would not have made a group, save for Bruce Kirkhill, to whom all of them were something. It could be made to resemble a Shakespearian cast, she thought. Senator Bruce Kirkhill. Celia, daughter to the senator; Winifred Haven, called Freddie, fiancée to the senator; Vice Admiral Jonathan Satterbee, father to the senator’s fiancée. (She had them out of order; women last in the Shakespearian cast.) Mrs. Fay Burnley, housekeeper to Senator Kirkhill, cousin to the senator’s first wife, mother to Breese; Breese Burnley, photographers’ model, daughter to the senator’s housekeeper and—Freddie stopped herself. If there had once been a closer tie between Breese, “Bee-Bee,” and the senator, it did not any longer matter. What Bruce had done before they met, what, at any rate, he had done in that particular quarter was of no concern to her. They were not children, rushing inexperienced into each other’s unskillful arms. Breese Burnley, then, daughter to the senator’s housekeeper. Howard Phipps, secretary to the senator. Curtis Grainger, in love with the senator’s daughter.

  The last, Freddie thought, her hostessing done, piling up thoughts to fill emptiness, is inadequate. Curtis Grainger, in love with the senator’s daughter; also son of Julian Grainger, utilities man (“big” utilities man), who made no secret of the fact that he thought Senator Bruce Kirkhill a menace to the American system, to free enterprise, basically to democracy itself. (The free enterprise in question was very worried about a flood-control power production development which might, if not stopped somehow, become the most dreadful thing, “another T.V.A.” Senator Kirkhill, dangerous man that he was, vociferously did not share Mr. Grainger’s view. In the Senate he was the leading, and most efficient, advocate of this new “socialistic” development.) Curtis represented his father in New York; he did not, it appeared, share his father’s views. At least, ideology formed no barrier between Curt Grainger and the senator’s daughter.

  They sat there, these people who, in this one aspect of their lives, were linked together, and waited. They were members of a cast waiting for the star; they were the people about Hamlet, with Hamlet missing. They drank very little; they said very little. They were, Freddie thought, waiting for the door buzzer. The maids had been sent to bed; Watkins, a little gray, waited, standing. “Go to bed, Watkins,” the admiral said. “Thank you, sir,” Watkins said, and went.

  “But where is he?” Fay Burnley said, her voice aggrieved, as if the others were keeping something from her; as if all of them knew but she.

  Fay Burnley spoke a little as her daughter spoke, with words heavily emphasized, darting at words. She had not always done that, Freddie thought. She had picked it up from her daughter, probably. She had decided that that was the way people spoke, the way the best people, the most knowledgeable people, spoke. She was in several respects a little like her daughter, only not so perfect, not capable, as Breese was when she chose, of posed quiet. One felt of Mrs. Burnley that she was, always, trying not to flutter.

  She was in her forties. She had been Bruce Kirkhill’s housekeeper—or was hostess better?—for a good many years. Ever since her husband died, Bruce told Freddie once. Her husband had been, long ago, Bruce Kirkhill’s closest friend. And Fay was a cousin of Bruce’s first wife. “It seemed like a good idea,” Bruce had told Freddie. “On the whole, I guess it was. Of course, Bee-Bee was a little thing then. So high.” Freddie could remember Bruce showing how high.

  “Where is he?” Mrs. Burnley repeated, with emphasis. Long earrings swayed; blue eyes—so like her daughter’s, yet so unlike—were almost violently alive, almost improbably bright.

  “We don’t know, darling,” Breese said. She was relaxed, leaning back in a deep chair, each line of her perfect body ready for the camera. (Miaow, Freddie thought. Miaow, Winifred Haven.) “Really we don’t know.”

  “He’s all right, Mrs. Burnley,” Howard Phipps said. “Nothing happens to the chief. Something’s held him up is all. Something’s come up.”

  “You don’t know,” Mrs. Burnley told him. Her voice was suddenly sharp. It was intended, Freddie thought, to put Howard Phipps in his place, whatever his place was. Phipps shrugged; he
shrugged for the benefit of the others, at this unreasonable attack.

  Then, very suddenly, Celia began to cry. She did not cry loudly, she did not cry for others to notice. She had a small face, and it crumpled suddenly. Although she was not crying for others to notice, they all noticed her.

  “Celia. Darling,” Fay Burnley said. “Of course he’s all right.”

  “Phipps,” the admiral said. “Call the Waldorf again. Perhaps he’s there.”

  Phipps took the order. He went to the library and left the door open behind him. They could hear his voice and they listened; they all looked at the open door and listened. The words were not distinct, but the tone was enough.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I may call later. Hold the rooms.”

  Phipps came back, shaking his head. His face, darkened by a heavy beard which the closest shaving could not wholly eradicate, was very serious.

  “Hasn’t checked in yet,” he said. The “yet” was the saving word; the “yet” was supposed to make it casual, to imply, somehow, that the delay was small, calculable. Not yet; in five minutes or so, in half an hour, the word said.

  “Wumph!” Admiral Satterbee said. “Where is the man?”

  Nobody answered; nobody had an answer. The admiral looked at his daughter, looked at her with concern, searchingly.

  “I’m all right, Dad,” she said.

  Celia was crying again. Curtis Grainger put an arm about her, held her close. He looked at the others, his glance insistent, demanding.

  “We’ve got to d-do something,” he said. “T-try to find him.”

  “Darling,” Breese Burnley said. “How?”

  Admiral Satterbee did not, Freddie knew, much approve of Bee-Bee. But now he nodded.

  “Quite,” he said. “What, Grainger?”

  He waited, gave Curtis Grainger an opportunity.