Deep Water (2 page)

       "He wasn't a friend of mine."

       "Of your wife's."

       "A different matter, you'll admit."

       Mr. Nash managed a nod. Then a sidewise smile. "I still think it's a pretty poor joke." He stood up.

       "Sorry. Maybe I can do better next time. Oh, just a minute!" Joel Nash turned.

       "Melinda doesn't know anything about this," Vic said, still coolly leaning back against the newel post. "I'd just as soon you didn't tell her."

       Joel smiled and waved a hand as he walked away. The hand, was limp. Vic watched him walk to the other side of the living room, near Horace and Phil Cowan, who were talking together, but Joel did not try to join them. He stood by himself and took a cigarette. Mr. Nash would wake up in the morning still believing it was a joke, Vic thought, though he would be wondering a little, too, enough to ask a few people some questions as to what Vic Van Allen's attitude toward Malcolm McRae had been. And various people—Horace Meller, for instance, and even Melinda—would tell him that Vic and Mal had never hit it off very well. And the Cowans or Horace or Mary Meller, if pressed, would admit that they had noticed something between Mal and Melinda, nothing more than a little flirting, of course, but Malcolm McRae had been an advertising executive, not a very important one but there had been an obnoxious air of superiority and patronage about him. He had been the type women call fascinating and men generally loathe. Tall and lean and immaculate, with a long narrow face in which nothing stood out in Vic's memory except a large wart on his right cheek like Abraham Lincoln's, though his eyes were supposed to have been fascinating, too, Vic remembered. And he had been murdered, for no known reason, in his Manhattan apartment by an assailant the police had up to now failed to find. That was why Vic's story had made such an impression on Joel.

       Vic relaxed still more against the newel post and stretched his legs out in front of him, recalling with a peculiar relish now how Mal had stood behind Melinda on the golf course with his arms around her, showing her how to make a shot that she could have done better than he if she had wanted to. And that other time, around three in the morning, when Melinda had coyly retreated to her bed with a glass of milk and had asked Mal to come in to talk to her. Vic had stubbornly sat on in the living room, pretending to read, determined to stay there no matter what time it got to be, so long as Mal was in her room. There was no comparison in their intellects, Mal's and Melinda's, and Mal would have been bored stiff if he had ever had her for half a day to himself. But there had been the little lure of sex. There was always Melinda's little come-on that went something like "Oh, Vic? I love him, truly I do, but just not in that way. Oh, it's been like this for years. He doesn't care for me that way either, so—" with the upturned, expectant, green-brown eyes. Mal had come out of Melinda's room after twenty minutes or so. Vic was sure there hadn't been anything between them, ever. But he remembered a certain satisfaction when he had heard that Mal had been killed last December. Or had it been January? And his first thought had been that Mal might have had it from a jealous husband.

       For a few moments Vic imagined that Mal had come back to Melinda's room that night after he had gone to his room on the other side of the garage, that he had known about it, and that he had planned the murder meticulously, gone in to New York on some pretext, called on Mal with a sash weight under his coat (the murderer must have been a friend or an acquaintance, the papers had said, because Mal had evidently let him in quietly), and had battered Mal to death. Silently and efficiently, leaving no fingerprints—neither had the real murderer—then driving back to Little Wesley the same night, giving as an alibi, in case anybody had ever asked him for one, that he had been watching a movie in Grand Central at the time Mal had been murdered, a movie that he would actually have seen, of course, at some other time.

       "Victor-r?" Mary Meller bent' down toward him. "What're you pondering?"

       Vic slowly stood up, smiling. "Not a thing. You're looking very peachy tonight." He was referring to the color of her dress.

       "Thank you. Can't we go and sit down in some corner and you talk to me about something?" Mary asked him. "I want to see you change your seat. You've been there all evening."

       "The piano bench?" Vic suggested, because it was the only spot in sight where two people could sit next to each other. The dancing, for the moment, had stopped. He let Mary take him by the wrist and draw him toward the piano bench. He felt that Mary didn't particularly want to talk to him, that she was trying to be a good hostess and chat with everybody, and that she had left him to the last because he was rather difficult at parties. Vic didn't care. 'I have no pride', he thought proudly. He often said it to Melinda because it irritated her.

       "What were you talking to Mrs. Podnansky so long about?" Mary asked him when they had sat down.

       "Lawn mowers. Hers needs sharpening, and she's not satisfied with the job Clarke's did for her the last time."

       "So you offered to do it, I'll bet. I don't know what the widows of the community would do without you, Victor Van Allen! I wonder how you have 'time' for all your good deeds!"

       "Plenty of time," Vic said, smiling with appreciation in spite of himself. "I can find time for anything. It's a wonderful feeling."

       "Time to read all those books the rest of us keep postponing!" She laughed. "Oh, Vic, I hate you!" She looked around at her merrymaking guests, then back at Vic. "I hope your friend Mr. Nash is having a good time tonight. Is he going to settle in Little Wesley or is he just here for a while?"

       Mr. Nash was no longer having such a good time, Vic saw. He was still standing by himself, brooding at a figure in the rolled-up carpet near his feet. "No, he's just here for a week or so, I think," Vic said in an offhand tone. "Some kind of business trip."

       "So you don't know him very well."

       "No. We've just met him." Vic hated to share the responsibility with Melinda. Melinda had met him one afternoon in the bar of the Lord Chesterfield Inn, where she went nearly every afternoon around five-thirty more or less for the express purpose of meeting people like Joel Nash.

       "May I say, Vic darling, that I think you're extremely patient?"

       Vic glanced at her and saw from her straining, slightly moistening eyes that she was feeling her drinks. "Oh, I don't know"

       "You are. You're like somebody waiting very patiently and one day—you'll do something. Not explode exactly, but just—well, speak your mind."

       It was such a quiet finish that Vic smiled. Slowly he rubbed at an itch on the side of his hand with his thumb.

       "I'd also like to say, since I've had three drinks and I may not have such an opportunity again, that I think you're pretty wonderful. You're 'good, Vic'," Mary said in a tone that meant he was good in a biblical sense, a tone that betrayed a little embarrassment at having used such a word in such a sense, and Vic knew she was going to ruin it by laughing at herself in another few seconds. "If I weren't married and you weren't, I think I'd propose to you right now!" Then came the laugh that was supposed to erase it all.

       Why did women think, Vic wondered, even women who had married for love and had had a child and a fairly happy married life, that they would prefer a man who demanded nothing of them sexually? It was a kind of sentimental harking back to virginity, a silly, vain fantasy that had no factual validity whatsoever. They'd be the first ones to feel affronted if their husbands neglected them in that respect. "Unfortunately, I am married," Vic said.

       "Unfortunately!" Mary scoffed. "You adore her, and I know it! You worship the ground she walks on. And she loves you, too, Vic, and don't forget it!"

       "I don't want you to think," Vic said, almost interrupting her, "that I'm so good as you put it. I have a little evil side, too. I just keep it well hidden."

       "You certainly do!" Mary said, laughing. She leaned toward him and he smelled her perfume which struck him as a combination of lilac and cinnamon. "How's your drink, Vic?"

       "This'll do for the moment, thanks."

       "You see? You're even good about drinking! What bit your hand?"

       "A bedbug."

       "A bedbug! Good lord! Where'd you get it?"

       "At the Green Mountain Hotel."

       Mary's mouth opened incredulously; then she shrieked with laughter. "What were you doing there?"

       "Oh, I put in an order weeks in advance. I said if any bedbugs turned up, I wanted them, and finally collected six. Cost me five dollars in tips. They're living in my garage now in a glass case with a piece of mattress inside for them to sleep on. Now and then I let one bite me, because I want them to go through their normal life cycle. I've got two batches of eggs now."

       "But why?" Mary demanded, giggling.

       "Because I think a certain entomologist who wrote a piece for an entomologist journal is wrong about a certain point in their reproductive cycle," Vic answered, smiling.

       "What point?" asked Mary, fascinated.

       "Oh, it's a small point about the period of incubation. I doubt if it has any value at all to anybody, though as a matter of fact insecticide manufacturers ought to—"

       "Vi-ic?" Melinda's husky voice slurred, "Do you mind?"

       Vic looked up at her with a subtly insulting astonishment, and then got up from the bench and gestured graciously toward the piano. "It's all yours."

       "You're going to play? Good!" Mary said in a delighted tone. A quintet of men was ranging itself around the piano. Melinda swooped onto the bench, a sheaf of shining hair swinging down like a curtain and concealing her face from anyone standing on her right, as Vic was. Oh, well, Vic thought, who knew her face better than he did? And he didn't want to see it anyway, because it didn't improve when she drank. Vic strolled away. The whole sofa was free now. To his distaste, he heard Melinda's wildly trilling introduction to "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue," which she played abominably. Her playing was florid, inaccurate, and one would think embarrassing, yet people listened, and after they listened they liked her neither more nor less for it. It seemed to be neither a liability nor an asset to her socially. When she floundered and gave up a song with a laugh and a childish, frustrated flutter of hands, her current admirers admired her just the same. She wasn't going to flounder on "Slaughter," however, because if she did she could always switch to the "Three Blind Mice" theme and recover herself. Vic sat down in a corner of the sofa. Everybody was around the piano except Mrs. Podnansky, Evelyn Cowan, and Horace. Melinda's swingeing attack on the main theme was evoking grunts of delight from her male listeners. Vic looked at Joel Nash's back, hunched over the piano, and closed his eyes. In a sense he closed his ears also, and thought of his bedbugs.

       Finally, there was applause which rapidly died down as Melinda began "Dancing in the Dark," one of her better numbers. Vic opened his eyes and saw Joel Nash staring at him in an absent, yet intense and rather frightened way. Vic closed his eyes again. His head was back as if he were listening, enraptured, to the music. Actually, he was thinking of what might be going on now in Joel Nash's liquor-fuddled mind. Vic saw his own rather pudgy figure on the sofa, his hands peacefully clasped on his abdomen, his round face smiling a relaxed smile that by now would have become enigmatic to Joel Nash. Nash would be thinking, maybe he 'did'. Maybe that's why he's so nonchalant about Melinda and me. Maybe that's why he's so strange. He's a 'murderer'.

       Melinda played for about half an hour, until she had to repeat "Dancing in the Dark" again. When she got up from the piano, people were still pressing her to play some more, Mary Meller and Joel loudest of all.

       "We've got to be going home. It's late," Melinda said. She often left immediately after a session at the piano. On a note of triumph. "Vic?" She snapped a finger in his direction.

       Vic got up obediently from the sofa. He saw Horace beckoning to him. Horace had heard, Vic supposed. Vic went over. "What's this you told your friend, Mr. Nash?" Horace asked, his dark eyes shining with amusement.

       "My friend?"

       Horace's narrow shoulders shook with his constrained laughter. "I don't blame you a bit. I just hope he doesn't spread it around!" "It was a joke. Didn't he take it as a joke?" Vic asked, pretending to be serious. He and Horace knew each other well. Horace had often told him to "put his foot down about Melinda," and Horace was the only person Vic knew who had ever dared say that to him.

       "Seems to me he took it pretty seriously," Horace said. "Well, let him. Let him spread it around."

       Horace laughed and slapped Vic's shoulder. "Just don't get yourself in jail, old man!"

       Melinda tottered slightly as they walked out to the car, and Vic took her elbow gently to steady her. She was almost as tall as he, and she always wore flat sandals or ballet slippers, but less for his sake, Vic thought, than because they were more comfortable and because her height in flat shoes better matched the height of the average man. Even though she was a bit unsteady, Vic could feel the Amazonian strength in her tall, firm body, the animal vitality that pulled him along with her. She was heading for the car with the undeterrable thrust of a horse getting back to stable.

       "What'd you say to Joel tonight?" Melinda asked when they were in the car.

       "Nothing."

       "You must have said something."

       "When?"

       "Well, I 'saw' you talking to him," she persisted sleepily. "What were you talking about?"

       "Bedbugs, I think. Or was it Mary I was talking about bedbugs to?"

       "Oh!" Melinda said impatiently, and snuggled her head against his shoulder as impersonally as if he had been a sofa pillow. "Must've said something, because he acted different after he talked to you."