Confidentially Yours (3 page)

“You bet he’ll be interested,” I said. “So I’ll tell you what you do. Go down to the sheriff’s office right now and tell him about it. I’ll meet you there, and when you get through I’ll file charges against you for slander and defamation of character.”

“Don’t bet on it. I just might have proof.”

“Well, don’t forget to bring it when you come out from under your rock, because you’re sure as hell going to need it.”

“I’m talking about a cigarette lighter. Or didn’t you know that’s where she lost it?”

“I don’t know why it’s any of your business,” I said, “but she hasn’t lost it.”

“Are you sure, now? A thin gold lighter with a couple of fancy initials that look like F.W.? It’s a—hummm—Dunhill. Sweet dreams, Mr. Warren.” This time she hung up.

I sat there for a moment, feeling vaguely uneasy; that was Frances’ lighter she’d described. And now that I thought of it, she
had
said something about it, two or three weeks ago. Then I remembered. It had needed repairs, a new spark wheel or something, so she’d sent it back to the store in New York where I’d bought it for her. As a matter of fact, it was probably here now. I jumped up and went out to the living room; unless I was mistaken, a small parcel had come for her since she’d been in New Orleans. I yanked open the drawer of the table where I’d put her mail, and was conscious of relief and, at the same time, a faint twinge of guilt that I’d even felt it necessary to check. It was a small, flat package, insured parcel post, and it was from Dunhill’s in New York.

As I dropped it back in the drawer, I noticed the letter under it was from her brokerage firm in New Orleans, and wondered idly if she’d been switching stocks without asking my advice. Not that it mattered particularly; it was only a small account, around six thousand dollars, and hers personally, the money she’d received from the stock and fixtures of the dress shop when we were married.

I sat down with my drink, still trying to clean the telephone call out of my mind. Who was the girl, and what was her object in a thing like that? Some nut with a grudge against the whole human race, or did she have some specific reason to hate Frances, or me? She must have known Roberts pretty well; once she’d referred to him by his first name. The voice had been tantalizingly familiar, but I still couldn’t place her. And how had she described the lighter so well? Of course, she could have seen Frances using it somewhere, but why the odd phrasing?
It’s a
—
hmmm
—
Dunhill.
If that was deliberate, it was damned clever; it gave the impression she was holding it in her hand as she spoke.

She
wasn’t
that clever, I thought, beginning to feel a chill between my shoulder blades. Cursing, I strode back to the table, and yanked open the drawer again. Tearing off the wrappings, I flipped up the lid of the velvet-covered box. It was the same gold-plated lighter, with the same ornate monogram, but it was a brand-new one.

For what must have been a full minute I stood looking stupidly down at it, and then around the room, trying to re-orient myself the way you do after being hit hard at football. There must be some mistake. Maybe they’d given her this one to replace the old one, on a guarantee, or something. No, the receipted sales slip was under it, with a refund voucher for overpayment. She’d sent a check. I turned and grabbed the telephone, and it wasn’t until the long-distance operator was putting through the call that I wondered what I was going to say to her. This had to be done face to face. Well, I could tell her to come home. The hotel switchboard answered.

“Mrs. Warren, please,” I said.

“I believe she’s checked out,” the girl replied. “One moment, please; I’ll give you the desk.”

She’d said she was going to stay over till Sunday. What had changed her mind so suddenly? “Desk,” a man’s voice said.

“This is John Warren. I’m trying to reach my wife on a very urgent matter. Could you tell me how long ago she checked out?”

“Yes, sir. It was shortly before seven this evening.”

“Do you know whether she received a long-distance call? Or made one?”

“Hmmm—I think there was a call for her from Carthage, Alabama, but she didn’t get it—”

“How’s that?” I interrupted.

“It was before she came in. Around five-thirty.”

“Was there any message, or a number to call back?”

“No, sir. There was no information at all, so we didn’t make out a slip on it. I just happened to remember it because Mrs. Warren asked when she came in if there’d been any calls, and I checked with the board and told her about it. She made no calls herself, though; we have no toll charges on the bill.”

“Wait—you mean besides the one at 1:30 this afternoon?”

“No. There were none at all, Mr. Warren.”

I was gripping the receiver so hard my fingers hurt, and I had to restrain an impulse to shout. “You’d better check again if your information’s no better than that. She called me at 1:30.”

“It must have been from outside the hotel, sir. We always clear with the switchboard when making up the bill, especially on unscheduled checkouts, and we have no record of it.”

“I’m still lying here in bed…”
Well, she hadn’t said whose. I traced a thoughtful doodle along the table top with my forefinger, said, “Thank you very much,” and dropped the receiver back on the cradle. As I was turning away I suddenly remembered the three or four trumpet notes I’d heard in the background when she was talking to me, and it struck me now there’d been something oddly familiar about them. God, had she been on a military reservation? No—I’d spent a good part of my life being ordered by buglers in the Army and in military schools when I was a boy, and even with my tin ear I could recognize any of the calls after the first few notes. It was something else. It must have been just music, which to me was always a more or less unintelligible jumble of sounds. I cursed. What difference did it make?

I went out to the kitchen, poured another big slug of bourbon—straight this time—and stood by the table looking down at the opened gift box containing the cigarette lighter. The whiskey helped, but it was still sickening as I began to probe through the mess with a stick, trying to classify the things that crawled out of it. Some were facts, some were assumptions, and some were mere guesses, but they all oozed off in the same direction. If the girl had been right about Roberts, you could at least assume she might be right about the rest of it.
You don’t think he was the only one, do you?
And it was a cinch. It wasn’t Roberts who tried to get her at the hotel in New Orleans. He was already dead.

I suddenly remembered trying to get her last night, with no success. Maybe the story about being out on Bourbon Street with the Dickinsons was as big a lie as the rest of it. And why had she checked out of the hotel so abruptly? According to the clerk, she still hadn’t come in at five-thirty, but she was checked out and gone before seven, while she’d told me she was going to stay till Sunday. She hadn’t received any phone call from here; she’d merely asked if there had been one, and when she learned there had, she’d packed and taken off.

I noticed again the letter from the broker’s office sticking out from under the box the lighter had come in, and without quite knowing why, I slipped it out, tore open the envelope, and then stared uncomprehendingly at the typed verification form it contained. She had liquidated the account three days ago. Why? What had she needed $6000 for? We had a joint checking-account here, and I never questioned the checks she cashed. I crushed it in my hand and threw it on the rug. It didn’t matter. Roberts was what we were going to have out, and we’d do it before she got through this living room.

I glanced at my watch. The way she drove, she’d be here in less than an hour. Dropping the cigarette lighter in my pocket, I switched off the light and sat down to wait, conscious of the cold weight of anger in my chest and of the whiskey mounting to my head.

F
ORTY MINUTES LATER GRAVEL CRUNCHED
in the driveway beyond the far wall of the living room. I heard the garage door bang as it came up. The door closed.

The weight in my chest was so heavy now I could hardly breathe. Her key turned in the kitchen door. Light came on in the kitchen, and I heard the old magic tapping of high heels as she came toward the front of the house. Then she was silhouetted in the doorway, suitcase in one hand and her purse under her arm as she groped for the switch. The lights came on.

“Hello,” I said. “Welcome home.”

She gasped. The suitcase fell to the floor, followed by her purse. Then her eyes blazed with anger. “What are you sitting there in the dark for? You scared me half to death!”

She was very beautiful in anger, I thought—or any time, for that matter. She wore a slim dark suit and a white blouse, but she didn’t have her coat. Maybe she’d left it in the car; she was as careless of mink as another woman might be of a housecoat.

“If this is your idea of a joke…” Her voice trailed off uncertainly as I still said nothing. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“I want to know why you suddenly decided to come home,” I said.

“Well, you wanted me to. But I must say, if this is the way you’re going to act…”

“I want to know why,” I repeated. She had come on into the room and started to peel off her gloves. She could make even that sexy and full of the promise of greater things to come. If she’d ever become a professional strip-teaser, I thought, she’d have the bald heads giving off wisps of steam by the time she started toying with the first zipper. It was obvious to her now that something was wrong, so I was about to get the good old laboratory-approved answer that answered everything. She gave me a sidelong glance. “Well! Do I have to have a reason?”

“I just wondered,” I said, playing along with it.

“Maybe it was talking to you this afternoon,” she murmured.

There was just enough pause for me to pick up my cue and join the act. All I had to do was stand up, take two steps toward her, and we’d be in bed in ninety seconds flat. And the hell of it was that once I started there’d be no more possibility of turning back than of changing my mind halfway down about going over Niagara Falls. Maybe she was a liar, and a cheat, and capable of using sex with the precise calculation of a tournament bridge player executing a squeeze play, but she was good at it. I reached in my pocket for the cigarette lighter and began tossing it in my hand.

She was still talking, probably to cover her bewilderment at this lack of response. “…Get so darned rumpled in a car.” She twitched at the skirt, which was only slightly rump-sprung—and that by one of the shapeliest behinds this side of a barbershop calendar—and checked the stocking seams. The stockings, it appeared then, had to be pulled up. This might have seemed rather pointless in view of the fact that as soon as it penetrated my thick skull her delights were available now on a help-yourself basis; rather than having to wait while she rubbed cold cream on her face and had a sandwich and a glass of milk, the stockings were supposed to wind up on the bedroom floor along with assorted slips, garter belts, and panties—except of course that the act itself involved a great deal of unconscious skirt-raising and the revelation of rounded and satiny expanses of thigh above the tops of them. For her, this was admittedly crude, but maybe desperate situations called for desperate measures; when you had to probe the enemy across this type of terrain, you used only the battle-proven troops. She straightened, still talking, and gave me that half-pixie, half-inscrutable smile she does so well. “Does it seem awfully warm in here, or is it —is—?” Her voice faltered and trailed off to a stop. She’d seen the fighter.

“Is it what?” I asked politely.

She swallowed, licked her lips, and tried to go on, while her eyes grew wider and wider as they followed its course—up—down—up— “—is it just—just—?”

“Just you?” I asked. “I never thought of that, but I’ll bet it is. And it’s damned flattering too. It isn’t often a husband gets this kind of testimonial.”

She gasped. Her mouth dropped open, and a hand came up in front of it as if I were going to hit her from ten feet away. She backed up a step, her legs hit the sofa at the left of the dining room door, and she sat down. “I don’t know—don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean it’s heart-warming as hell when a girl who’s shopped around over the neighborhood still feels an urge to come home for a good time. Unless, of course, you just dropped in to cash a check!” I began to break up in rage then. I stood up and started toward her.

She tried to get off the sofa and run. I threw her back, and pinned her there with a handful of blouse and bra. “What’s the matter?” I asked thickly. “Don’t you want to hear the news? Your boy friend is dead.”

She twisted and beat at my wrist, her eyes crawling with fear. “Have you gone crazy? Let me go!”

I leaned down in her face and shouted: “How long has this been going on?”

She drew up both feet, put them in my stomach, and kicked out like an uncoiling spring. There was the strength of desperation in it. The blouse tore. I lurched backward to keep my balance, hit the coffee table with the backs of my legs, and sprawled on the floor just past the end of it. She shot past me into the hall. I scrambled to my feet and tore after her. In the darkness I miscalculated the turn beyond the den and crashed into the wall. She had too much lead on me now, and just before I reached the bedroom door I heard it slam and then the click as she threw the night latch.

I crashed into it with my shoulder. It held. I hit it again, heard something start to give way, and the third time it flew open as the bolt tore off part of the door facing. I regained my balance, spun around, and groped for the light switch. She was nowhere in sight. Over to the left the door to the bath was closed. Just as I reached it, I heard the doorbell ringing in the front of the house. I twisted at the knob; it was locked. I backed up and hit it the way I had the other one, but nothing gave. I tried again; a throw rug skidded under my feet and I fell against the door with the point of my shoulder. My breath was whistling in my throat from rage and frustration. I kicked the rug out of the way and lunged at it again. She screamed. I was backing up to hit it once more when I finally became conscious that the doorbell was ringing continuously now. Some vestige of sanity returned. Whoever was out there would hear the uproar and call the police. “I’ll be back!” I shouted through the door, and strode down the hall. When I switched on the porch light and yanked open the front door, I saw it was Mulholland, the beefy, handsome face looking mean under the shadow of his hat.