A Kiss Before Dying (9 page)

Dean Welch was plump, with round grey eyes like buttons pressed into the shiny pink clay of his face. He favoured suits of clergy-black flannel, single-breasted so as to expose his Phi Beta Kappa key. His office was dim and chapel-like, with dark wood and draperies and, in its centre, a broad field of meticulously accoutred desktop.

After releasing the button on the inter-office speaker, the Dean rose and faced the door, his customary moist-lipped smile replaced by an expression of solemnity suitable for greeting a girl whose sister had taken her own life while nominally under his care. The ponderous notes of the noon-day carillon floated into chamber, muffled by distance and draperies. The door opened and Ellen Kingship entered.

By the time she had closed the door and approached his desk, the Dean of Students had measured and evaluated her with the complacent certainty of one who has dealt with younger people for many years. She was neat; he liked that. And quite pretty. Red-brown hair in thick bangs, brown eyes, a smile whose restraint acknowledged the unfortunate past. Determined looking. Probably not brilliant, but a plodder – second quarter of her class. Her coat and dress were shades of dark blue, a pleasant contrast to the usual student polychrome. She seemed a bit nervous, but then, weren’t they all?

‘Miss Kingship,’ he murmured with a nod, indicating the visitor’s chair. They sat. The Dean folded his pink hands. ‘Your father is well, I hope.’

‘Very well, thank you.’ Her voice was low-pitched and breathy.

The Dean said, ‘I had the pleasure of meeting him – last year.’ There was a moment of silence. ‘If there’s anything I can do for you—’

She shifted in the stiff-backed chair. ‘We – my father and I – are trying to locate a certain man, a student here.’ The Dean’s eyebrows lifted in polite curiosity. ‘He lent my sister a fairly large sum of money a few weeks before her death. She wrote me about it. I happened to come across her cheque-book last week and it reminded me of the incident. There’s nothing in the cheque-book to indicate that she ever repaid the debt, and we thought he might have felt awkward about claiming it.’

The Dean nodded.

‘The only trouble,’ Ellen said, ‘is that I don’t recall his name. But I do remember Dorothy mentioning that he was in her English class during the fall semester, and that he was blond. We thought perhaps you could help us locate him. It was a fairly large sum of money—’ She took a deep breath.

‘I see,’ said the Dean. He pressed his hands together as though comparing their size. His lips smiled at Ellen. ‘Can do,’ he snapped with military briskness. He held the pose for an instant, then jabbed one of the buttons on the inter-office speaker. ‘Miss Platt,’ he snapped, and released the button.

He brought his chair into more perfect alignment with the desk, as if he were preparing for a long campaign.

The door opened and a pale efficient-looking woman stepped into the room. The Dean nodded at her and then leaned back in his chair and stared at the wall beyond Ellen’s head, mapping his strategy. Several moments passed before he spoke. ‘Get the programme card of Kingship, Dorothy, fall semester, nineteen-forty-nine. See which English section she was in and get the enrolment list for that section. Bring me the folders of all the male students whose names appear on the list.’ He looked at the secretary. ‘Got that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He made her repeat the instructions.

‘Fine,’ he said. She went out. ‘On the double,’ he said to the closed door. He turned back to Ellen and smiled complacently. She returned the smile.

By degrees the air of military efficiency faded, giving way to one of avuncular solicitude. The Dean leaned forward, his fingers softly clustered on the desk. ‘Surely you haven’t come to Blue River solely for this purpose,’ he said.

‘I’m visiting friends.’

‘Ahh.’

Ellen opened her handbag. ‘May I smoke?’

‘By all means.’ He pushed a crystal ashtray to her side of the desk. ‘I smoke myself,’ he admitted graciously. Ellen offered him a cigarette, but he demurred. She lit hers with a match drawn from a white folder on which
Ellen Kingship
was printed in copper letters.

The Dean regarded the match-book thoughtfully. ‘Your conscientiousness in financial matters is admirable,’ he said, smiling. ‘If only everyone we dealt with were similarly conscientious.’ He examined a bronze letter-opener. ‘We are at present beginning the construction of a new gymnasium and fieldhouse. Several people who pledged contributions have failed to live up to their words.’

Ellen shook her head sympathetically.

‘Perhaps your father would be interested in making a contribution,’ the Dean speculated. ‘A memorial to your sister—’

‘I’ll be glad to mention it to him.’

‘Would you? I would certainly appreciate that.’ He replaced the letter-opener. ‘Such contributions are tax-deductible,’ he added.

A few minutes later the secretary entered with a stack of manilla folders in her arm. She set them before the Dean. ‘English fifty-one,’ she said, ‘section six. Seventeen male students.’

‘Fine,’ said the Dean. As the secretary left he straightened his chair and rubbed his hands, the military man once more. He opened the top folder and leafed through its contents until he came to an application form. There was a photograph pasted in the corner of it. ‘Dark hair,’ he said, and put the folder on his left.

When he had gone through all of them, there were two uneven piles. ‘Twelve with dark hair and five with light,’ the Dean said.

Ellen leaned forward. ‘Dorothy once told me he was handsome—’

The Dean drew the pile of five folders to the centre of his desk blotter and opened the first one. ‘George Speiser,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I doubt if you’d call Mr Speiser handsome.’

He lifted out the application form and turned it towards Ellen. The face in the photograph was a chinless, gimlet-eyed teenager. She shook her head.

The second man was an emaciated young man with thick eye-glasses.

The third was fifty-three years old and his hair was white, not blond.

Ellen’s hands were damp on her purse.

The Dean opened the fourth folder. ‘Gordon Gant,’ he said. ‘Does that sound like the name?’ He turned the application form towards her.

He was blond and unarguably handsome; light eyes under full brows, a long firm jaw, and a cavalier grin. ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think he—’

‘Or could it be Dwight Powell?’ the Dean asked, displaying the fifth application form in his other hand.

The fifth photograph showed a square-jawed, serious-looking young man, with a cleft chin and pale-toned eyes. ‘Which name sounds familiar?’ the Dean asked.

Ellen looked impotently from one picture to the other. They were both blond; they were both blue-eyed; they were both handsome.

She came out of the Administration Building and stood at the head of the stone steps surveying the campus, dull grey under a clouded sky. Her purse was in one hand, a slip of paper from the Dean’s memo pad in the other.

Two … It would slow her up a little, that’s all. It should be simple to find out which was the one – and then she would watch him, even meet him perhaps – though not as Ellen Kingship. Watch for the darting eye, the guarded answer. Murder must leave marks. (It
was
murder. It
must
have been murder.)

She was getting ahead of herself. She looked at the paper in her hand:

Her lunch, eaten in a small restaurant across the street from the campus, was a hasty mechanical affair, her mind racing with swift thoughts. How to begin? Ask a few discreet questions of their friends? But where do you start? Follow each man, learn the identity of his friends, meet them, find the ones who had known him last year? Time, time, time … If she remained in Blue River too long, Bud might call her father. Her fingers tapped impatiently. Who would be
sure
to know about Gordon Gant and Dwight Powell? Their families. Or if they were from out of town, a landlady or a room-mate. It would be impetuous to go straight to the centre of things, to the people nearest them, but still, no time could be wasted … She bit her lower lip, her fingers still tapping.

After a minute she put down her half-finished cup of coffee, rose from the table and threaded her way to the phone booth. Hesitantly she ruffled the pages of the thin Blue River book. There was no Gant at all, no Powell on Thirty-fifth Street. That meant they either had no phones, which seemed unlikely, or they were living with families other than their own.

She called Information and obtained the number of the telephone at 1312 West Twenty-sixth Street: 2-2014.

‘Hello?’ The voice was a woman’s; dry, middle-aged.

‘Hello.’ Ellen swallowed. ‘Is Gordon Gant there?’

A pause. ‘Who’s calling?’

‘A friend of his. Is he there?’

‘No.’ Snapped out sharply.

‘Who is this?’

‘His landlady.’

‘When do you expect him back?’

‘Won’t be back till late tonight.’ The woman’s voice was quick with annoyance. There was a click as she hung up.

Ellen looked at the dead receiver and placed it on the hook. When she got back to her table the coffee was cold.

He would be gone all day. Go there? A single conversation with the landlady might establish that Gant was the one who had gone with Dorothy. Or, by elimination, it might prove that Powell was the one. Speak to the landlady – but under what pretext?

Why, any pretext! Provided the woman believed it, what harm could the wildest story do?–even if its falseness were completely obvious to Gant when the landlady reported it. Either he wasn’t the man, in which case let him puzzle over a mysterious questioner pretending to be a friend or a relative, or he
was
the man, in which case: (
a
) he had not killed Dorothy–again let him puzzle over a mysterious questioner; or(
b
)he
had
killed Dorothy – and the story of a girl seeking information about him would make him uneasy. Yet his uneasiness would not interfere with her plans, for should she later make his acquaintance, he would have no reason to associate her with the girl who had questioned his landlady. Uneasiness on his part might even be a help to her, making him tense, more likely to betray himself. Why, he might even decide to take no chances and leave town – and that would be all she’d need to convince the police that there was a sound basis to her suspicions. They would investigate, find the proof …

Go straight to the centre of things. Impetuous? When you thought about it, it was really the most logical thing to do.

She looked at her watch. Five past one. Her visit shouldn’t be made too soon after the telephone call or the landlady might connect the two and become suspicious. Forcing herself to sit back in the chair, Ellen caught the waitress’s eye and ordered another cup of coffee.

At a quarter to two she entered the 1300 block of West Twenty-sixth Street. It was a quiet, tired-looking street, with pallid two-storey frame houses sitting behind pocked brown lawns still hard from winter. A few old Fords and Chevvies stood immobile along the kerb, some ageing naturally, some trying to stay young with unprofessional paint jobs, bright coloured but lustreless. Ellen walked with the enforced slowness of attempted nonchalance, the sound of her heels the only sound in the still air.

The house where Gordon Gant lived, 1312, was the third one from the corner: mustard coloured, its brown trim the shade of stale chocolate. After looking at it for a moment, Ellen walked up the cracked concrete path that bisected the dead lawn and led to the porch. There she read the nameplate on the mailbox affixed to one of the posts:
Mrs Minna Arquette.
She stepped to the door. Its bell was of the old-fashioned kind; a fan-shaped metal tab protruded from the centre of the door. Drawing a deep initiatory breath, she gave the tab a quick twist. The bell within rang gratingly. Ellen waited.

Presently footsteps sounded inside, and then the door opened. The woman who stood in the doorway was tall and lank, with frizzy grey hair clustered above a long equine face. Her eyes were pink and rheumy. A busily printed housedress hung from her sharp shoulders. She looked Ellen up and down. ‘Yes?’ – the dry midwestern voice of the telephone.

‘You must be Mrs Arquette,’ Ellen declared.

‘That’s right.’ The woman twitched a sudden smile, displaying teeth of an unnatural perfection.

Ellen smiled back at her. ‘I’m Gordon’s cousin.’

Mrs Arquette arched thin eyebrows. ‘His cousin?’

‘Didn’t he mention that I’d be here today?’

‘Why, no. He didn’t say anything about a cousin. Not a word.’

‘That’s funny. I wrote him I’d be passing through. I’m on my way to Chicago and I purposely came this way so I could stop off and see him. He must have forgotten to—’

‘When did you write him?’

Ellen hesitated. ‘The day before yesterday. Saturday.’

‘Oh.’ The smile flashed again. ‘Gordon leaves the house early in the morning and the first mail don’t come till ten. Your letter is probably sitting in his room this minute.’

‘Ohh—’

‘He isn’t here right—’

‘Couldn’t I come in for a few minutes?’ Ellen cut in quickly. ‘I took the wrong tramcar from the station and I had to walk about ten blocks.’

Mrs Arquette took a step back into the house. ‘Of course. Come on in.’

‘Thank you very much.’ Ellen crossed the threshold, entering a hallway that was stale-smelling and – once the front door was closed – dimly lighted. A flight of stairs rose along the right wall. On the left an archway opened on to a parlour which had the stiff look of seldom used rooms.

‘Miz Arquette?’ a voice called from the back of the house.

‘Coming!’ she answered. She turned to Ellen. ‘You mind sitting in the kitchen?’

‘Not at all,’ Ellen said. The Arquette teeth shone again, and then Ellen was following the tall figure down the hallway, wondering why the woman, so pleasant now, had been so irritable over the telephone.

The kitchen was painted the same mustard colour as the exterior of the house. There was a white porcelain-topped table in the middle of the room, with a set of anagrams laid out on it. An elderly bald-headed man with thick glasses sat at the table, pouring the last of a bottle of Dr Pepper into a flower jar that had once held cheese. ‘This is Mr Fishback from next door,’ said Mrs Arquette. ‘We play anagrams.’

‘Nickel a word,’ added the old man, raising his glasses to look at Ellen.

‘This is Miss—’ Mrs Arquette waited.

‘Gant,’ said Ellen.

‘Miss Gant, Gordon’s cousin.’

‘How do you do,’ said Mr Fishback. ‘Gordon’s a nice boy.’ He dropped his glasses back into place, his eyes swelling up behind them. ‘It’s your go,’ he said to Mrs Arquette.

She took the seat opposite to Mr Fishback. ‘Sit down,’ she said to Ellen, indicating one of the empty chairs. ‘You want some pop?’

‘No, thank you,’ Ellen said, sitting. She slipped her arms from the sleeves of her coat and dropped it back over the chair.

Mrs Arquette stared at the dozen turned-up letters in the ring of black-backed wooden squares. ‘Where you on your way from?’ she inquired.

‘California.’

‘I didn’t know Gordon had family in the west.’

‘No, I was just visiting there. I’m from the east.’

‘Oh.’ Mrs Arquette looked at Mr Fishback. ‘Go ahead, I give up. Can’t do anything with no vowels.’

‘It’s my turn?’ he asked. She nodded. With a grin Mr Fishback snatched at the turned-up letters. ‘You missed it, you missed it!’ he crowed. ‘c-r-y-p-t. Crypt. What they bury folks in.’ He pushed the letters together and added the word to the other ranged before him.

‘That’s not fair,’ Mrs Arquette protested. ‘You had all that time to think while I was at the door.’

‘Fair is fair,’ Mr Fishback declared. He turned up two more letters and placed them in the centre of the ring.

‘Oh, shoot,’ Mrs Arquette muttered, sitting back in her chair.

‘How is Gordon these days?’ Ellen asked.

‘Oh, fine,’ said Mrs Arquette. ‘Busy as a bee, what with school and the programme.’

‘The programme?’

‘You mean you don’t know about Gordon’s programme?’

‘Well, I haven’t heard from him in quite a while—’

‘Why, he’s had it for almost three months now!’ Mrs Arquette drew herself up grandly. ‘He plays records and talks. A disc jockey. “The Discus Thrower” he’s called. Every night except Sunday, from eight to ten over
KBRI.
’

‘That’s wonderful!’ Ellen exclaimed.

‘Why, he’s a real celebrity,’ the landlady continued, turning up a letter as Mr Fishback nodded to her. ‘They had an interview on him in the paper a couple of Sundays back. Reporter come here and everything. And girls he don’t even know calling him up at all hours. Stoddard girls. They get his number out of the Student Directory and call up just to hear his voice over the telephone. He don’t want anything to do with them, so I’m the one’s got to answer. It’s enough to drive a person crazy,’ Mrs Arquette frowned at the anagrams. ‘Go ahead, Mr Fishback,’ she said.

Ellen fingered the edge of the table. ‘Is Gordon still going out with that girl he wrote me about last year?’ she asked.

‘Which one’s that?’

‘A blonde girl, short, pretty. Gordon mentioned her in a few of his letters last year – October, November, all the way up through April. I thought he was really interested in her. But he stopped writing about her in April.’

‘Well I’ll tell you,’ Mrs Arquette said, ‘I don’t ever get to see the girls Gordon goes out with. Before he got the programme he used to go out three – four times a week, but he never brought any of the girls here. Not that I’d expect him to. I’m only his landlady. He never talks about them neither. Other boys I had here before him used to tell me all about their girls, but college boys were younger then. Nowadays they’re mostly veterans and I guess they get a little older, they don’t chatter so much. Least Gordon don’t. Not that I’d want to pry, but I’m interested in people.’ She turned over a letter. ‘What was the girl’s name? You tell me her name I can probably tell you if he’s still going out with her, because sometimes when he’s using the phone over by the stairs there, I’m in the parlour and can’t help hearing part of the conversation.’

‘I don’t remember her name,’ Ellen said, ‘but he was going with her last year, so maybe if
you
remember the names of some of the girls he spoke to then, I’ll be able to recognize it.’

‘Let’s see,’ Mrs Arquette pondered, mechanically arranging anagrams in search of a word. ‘There was a Louella. I remember that one because I had a sister-in-law by that name. And then there was a’ – her watery eyes closed in concentration – ‘a Barbara. No, that was the year before, his first year. Let’s see, Louella.’ She shook her head. ‘There was others, but I’m hanged if I can remember them.’

The game of anagrams went on in silence for a minute. Finally Ellen said, ‘I think this girl’s name was Dorothy.’

Mrs Arquette waved a go-ahead at Mr Fishback. ‘Dorothy.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘No – if the name’s Dorothy, I don’t think he’s going out with her. I haven’t heard him talking to any Dorothy lately. I’m sure of that. Of course he goes down to the corner sometimes to make a real personal call or a long distance.’

‘But he
was
going with a Dorothy last year?’

Mrs Arquette looked up at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know. I don’t
remember
a Dorothy, but I don’t
not remember
one either, if you know what I mean.’

‘Dottie?’ Ellen tried.

Mrs Arquette considered for a moment and then gave a noncommittal shrug.

‘Your go,’ Mr Fishback said petulantly.

The wooden squares clicked softly as Mrs Arquette manoeuvred them about. ‘I think,’ said Ellen, ‘that he must have broken up with this Dorothy in April when he stopped writing about her. He must have been in a bad mood around the end of April. Worried, nervous—’ She looked at Mrs Arquette questioningly.

‘Not Gordon,’ she said. ‘He had a real spring fever last year. Going around humming. I joshed him about it.’ Mr Fishback fidgeted impatiently. ‘Oh, go ahead,’ Mrs Arquette said.

Choking over his Dr Pepper, Mr Fishback pounced on the anagrams. ‘You missed one again!’ he cried, clawing up letters. ‘
F-A-N-E.
Fane!’

‘What’re you talking about, fane? No such word!’ Mrs Arquette turned to Ellen. ‘You ever hear of a word “fane”?’

‘You should know better’n to argue with me!’ Mr Fishback shrilled. ‘I don’t know what it means, but I know it’s a word. I seen it!’ He turned to Ellen. ‘I read three books a week, regular as clockwork.’

‘Fane,’ snorted Mrs Arquette.

‘Well look it up in the dictionary!’

‘That little pocket one with nothing in it? Every time I look up one of your words and it ain’t there you blame it on the dictionary!’

Ellen looked at the two glaring figures. ‘Gordon must have a dictionary,’ she said. She stood up. ‘I’ll be glad to get it if you’ll tell me which room is his.’

‘That’s right,’ Mrs Arquette said decisively. ‘He
does
have one.’ She rose. ‘You sit down, dear. I know just where it is.’

‘May I come along then? I’d like to see Gordon’s room. He’s told me what a nice place—’

‘Come on,’ said Mrs Arquette, stalking out of the kitchen. Ellen hurried after her.

‘You’ll see,’ Mr Fishback’s voice chased them, ‘I know more words than you’ll
ever
know, even if you live to be a hundred!’