Small World (38 page)

She was sitting bolt upright in her bed and staring fiercely at him when he opened the right door at last. She had switched on a small, dim lamp by her bedside, and had the telephone in her hand. When she saw him, she dropped it. He heard the angry buzzing of the dialtone with relief. She slipped from the bed and seized a big leather-covered box from her nighttable. It was he who was startled by her quickness into a moment’s inaction.

‘You can’t have it,’ she cried in a high quaver, clutching the case, not as big as a breadbox but close to it, to her flat bosom. ‘I saw that wicked girl Dorothy staring at it. She sent you, didn’t she? Sent you to murder me and steal my necklace.’

‘Please,’ Roger said gently, ‘please.’

She backed away. Her thin bony hands worked at the clasp of her box. It fell open, the jewels falling out, cascading down the fold of her pink silk nightdress to the carpet. She caught at them, and dropped the case. Roger saw she had the necklace. She flung back her head and lifted it to her throat.

‘Please,’ he said, fumbling the minimizer sight to his eye. He saw her through it, saw the slow triumphant smile on her thin lips. Her hands dropped from her neck, and the necklace held.

‘You’ll have to kill me for it!’ she shouted at him. ‘Kill me for it! It’s mine! It’s all I have! It’s mine!’

He pressed the trigger mechanism.

There wasn’t much to the old woman. She weighed eighty pounds, down from her adult weight of ninety-five. She was mostly skull and the brains in it. Everything else was desiccated, dried as if by some predeath mummification. The shock blew her into death like a dandelion seed on the wind. The necklace, with a total weight of three pounds, was driven into her scanty flesh like a fossil fern into new-born stone.

She was very still. Roger knew before he picked her up that she was dead. He was queasy in his stomach, and wanted very badly to get out of this place, this antiquated bedroom in an obsolete palace. He wished he were home in L.A., breathing a good gray smog, and feeling warm again. But conscientiously, he zapped the jewels that were scattered on the floor and plucked them up. He dropped them into the same pocket with the boxes that held the remains of the old lady and her nurse, where they fell like clots of sod with faint thumps.

He walked out, careful to touch nothing, leaving the front door wide open. It was at least dry outside, though a little chilly for a summer night, and the air was fresher than the museum dusty air of the house. He felt better by the time he reached another pub, even though it was closed, and no particular refuge to him. There was a phone outside, and he called a cab. It carried him into Piccadilly Circus where he got out and found another. He changed cabs four times before exiting one a block from the hotel.

The most unsettling part of it was not over. It was necessary to spend a silent half hour in the bathroom of the suite, picking the necklace from its bed in the flesh of the old woman. Dolly, lending him a pair of her tweezers, watched the whole operation, now and again telling him how to go about it. He had a hard time concentrating.

In the predawn he left the hotel once again to walk a few blocks down the Embankment. The Thames was the right place, he was sure, to dispose of the pair of tiny corpses. Like in that Alfred Hitchcock movie,
Frenzy.
And all the other murder stories, all the other thrillers. His cold promised a renascence, making his chest full and heavy. His nose dripped and he felt feverish. Not enough food, he told himself, too much goddamn dieting, and as if to underline the thought, he leaned over the side of the bridge and sent his party supper after the little deaders, falling end over end into the river Thames.

They were not the first corpses to be washed onto the littoral of the river, only the tiniest. One tiny woman, stripped of her nightgown by the current but with her hairnet holding her hair firmly in place, washed relentlessly in the eddy of the shallow water. A slighter one, whose thin hands were moved by the water as if she were waving, or searching. A family of river rats carried them off.

The former president’s daughter and her companion, who talked willingly to investigators but apparently had little to report as well, secluded themselves in their suite at the Handsome Hotel before returning abruptly to the States three days after the crime was committed. ‘Dolly’ Douglas talked to reporters at Kennedy International Airport in New York briefly, stating the whole experience had been a ‘terrible shock.’

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13

THE LADY VANISHES

In a mystery worthy of the invention of an Agatha Christie or Sir Alfred Hitchcock, octagenarian Lady Maggie Weiler, widow of Lord Blaise Weiler, and once-mistress of painter Leighton Sartoris, and her nurse of twelve years, Constance Mullins, disappeared from Lady Weiler’s home in Hampstead following a party the aged socialite gave in honor of Dorothy Hardesty Douglas, the former president's daughter, and an old friend.

The puzzle began when a neighbor noticed the front door of the Weiler mansion, The Mazes, was standing open, summoned police, who found an emptied jewel box on her ladyship’s bedroom floor, and the receiver of her bedside telephone dangling off the hook, the only signs of a struggle. Police could only theorize that the two women, awakened after retiring, had been abducted or killed during a robbery or kidnapping attempt. The investigation, stalled by the dearth of clues, came to a hopeless halt when no ransom demands could be authenticated within the week.

The dinner guests at the party, the first Lady Maggie had given in many months, couldn’t report anything unusual about the gathering or their hostess. She wore, as always, the fabulous Lalique necklace and earrings that were a wedding gift from her late husband, and which were missing after the apparent robbery.

Leighton Sartoris, himself advanced in years and something of a hermit, was restrained from leaving his island sanctuary in Maine only by the telephoned advice of natural son, Nicholas Weiler, director of the Dalton Institute in Washington, D.C., who assured his father that there was nothing to be done. Weiler, now heir to the other half of his stepfather’s estate (he received half of it after Lord Weiler’s death) that had supported his mother, himself flew to London immediately only to find the police stymied. He reported that when he visited his mother only a few weeks before her disappearance that she appeared in good health, considering her age, and seemed unworried.

Pity there’s
no one to wear it,’ said Dolly, gloating over the heap of glittering gems in her hand. ‘Not yet.’

Roger’s mouth tightened. Dolly didn’t see. She was admiring her new necklace, wrapped like a weighty ring around her finger. Roger went on with his unpacking. He had at last beaten his cold, though it lingered long enough to impress the British police with his invalid state. If he had become glum and dull, Dolly failed to notice. She was busy, and when not in public, wearing her distraught face, smugly happy over her new possessions.

Before returning to Manhattan, Roger purchased a pair of salt and pepper shakers with the likeness of the Queen on their sides, tor his mother. He declared them, and the German camera he had purchased. Dolly had a shitload of stuff to declare: sweaters, clothes, china, snob food in little jars from Fortnum and Mason’s. She paid a stiff duty on them. What she did not declare was the acquisition of either miniatures or jewelry. As she predicted, her bags received the most casual once-over, and her person went unsearched.

She ignored the redecoration of the apartment that she had ordered and went directly to the dollhouse room. The first sight of the Doll’s White House made her catch her breath and moan. She turned in despair to Roger, who stood blankly watching her. No sympathy there. She sulked past him to her bedroom, threw herself on the bed and kicked off her shoes.

Roger followed her like a small lap dog. If she were going to cry, he thought he might flee to his bedroom. But she didn’t, so he tried to be social.’

‘Nice to be home, isn’t it?’

She threw her hat at him. ‘Shit! Look at my dollhouse!’

He did so, looking through the door.

‘So? It looks the same as when we left.’

‘It’s a fucking mess, Roger!’ she cried.

‘I know.’

What was he supposed to do? Did she think the bloody stinking ark was going to heal itself magically in their absence?

‘Stop staring at me. Do something,’ she sulked.

The pattern for the next few days was set. She was alternately rude, or at best, indifferent, or else so sexually demanding that he felt like a chocolate box at the mercy of a compulsive fattie. While she haunted the dollhouse room, sporadically cleaning up water and fire damage, or more often, just wandering around it, building up a head of steam, Roger avoided it and her. The health club became his refuge. There, he was beyond her reach. Its sweaty hollow spaces were doors and doors from the dollhouse room with its grisly centerpiece. In the gym he could think and punish himself.

It was not much of a surprise when Dolly announced that Lucy Douglas was the only one who could fix her dollhouse. When Roger expressed doubts that Lucy would be so gracious and that, moreover, Dolly had no cover story to explain the damage, Dolly only mocked his caution, warning him solemnly that nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Lucy was startled to look up from her workbench to see not her father or one of her children casting their shadow over her work, but her former mother-in-law. Dolly simply barged in and embraced her.

Lucy submitted stiffly and silently, though how she could have protested over Dolly’s relentless babble, she couldn’t think. All she could do was look over Dolly’s shoulder and meet the uneasy gaze of Roger Tinker, who was standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, like a small boy dragged into an adult reunion. Suddenly, Lucy was certain he had taken the missing blade from her workshop, the one she had ransacked the place looking for, worried that one of the kids had kited it. It was irrational; she shook her head at herself.

The children, alerted by the sight of Dolly’s Mercedes in the drive, arrived on her heels, and the chaos increased geometrically. Grandmother, it seemed, had a few little things in the car for her darlings. Promiscuous gift-giving had been forbidden by Lucy when the children were infants and had been the occasion of several minor wars between the two women. And here was Dolly, doing it again, knowing that Lucy would never blow up in front of the kids, and was thus neatly trapped between two of her own principles.

Adjourning the noise and confusion to the back porch, Lucy served iced tea, admired Zach’s new airplane and Laurie’s new doll, the matching T-shirts that announced each child was 'Grandma’s little angel,’ and a new record player accompanied by an assortment of children’s music. Dolly, seeing the set of Lucy’s jaw as she told the kids to thank their grandmother, had the nerve to wink. Lucy’s hands itched briefly on her iced tea glass as she contemplated dumping the contents on Dolly’s perfectly coiffed crown of platinum hair, but willpower won out in the end.

It was Roger, when Dolly allowed herself to be led off to admire Zach’s zinnia patch and Laurie’s sunflowers, who made the actual rapprochement. Accepting a second glass of iced tea, he munched a Ritz cracker with a slice of banana on it, a delicacy whipped up by Lucy’s father for the occasion, and smiled genially around his cracker crumbs.

Clearing his mouth with a swig of tea, he said, ‘She’s embarrassed to death and doesn’t know how to go about apologizing.’

Lucy sipped her iced tea and cast a glance at her father, who winked at her from his old wicker rocking chair. She said nothing.

’This trip to England was supposed to be recuperative, to get her act together. She’s been drinking a lot. Having a hard time. She’s messed up about a lot of things. Getting older, scared about it. I think that’s why she picked up with me.’ Roger smiled modestly. ‘And the fascination with dollhouses. Some kind of need to fill her life. I don’t think she means to hurt people. She doesn’t deal with her feelings, gets herself into trouble.’

‘Horseshit,’ Lucy said. ‘Dolly knows just what she wants. I’m sure she’s having a hard time. But if she hasn’t learned to make her own apologies by now, it’s time she did.’

Roger suddenly found his iced tea very interesting. His armpits began to stain his shirt. Dolly had instructed him to play on Lucy’s feelings for the underdog, her need to be fair. She was being fair all right, and he wasn’t enjoying the lying one bit.

‘Whatever,’ he muttered. ‘The thing is, she wants you to work on the Doll’s White House again. There was an accident, a fire, and the damage is such that only you can repair it.’

That made Lucy sit up straight. After a brief internal struggle, curiosity got the better of her. Her father was going to ask it anyway.

‘What happened?’

‘She was drunk and smoking, something I watch, especially around the dollhouse room. I was away, visiting my mother.’ Roger looked hopefully for signs that Lucy was crediting him, at least, with mother love. There were none. She sat listening impassively. He plunged on. ‘She dropped a butt into the dollhouse without realizing it. I found the filter later. The smoke alarms went off but she’d passed out, so the sprinklers went off too, and put the fire out. But the fire damage was already extensive, and the water made it worse.’ Roger caught a deep breath. It had been a long lie.

‘It doesn’t sound like her,’ Lucy observed carefully, ‘to be careless around something that means so much to her.’