Songs in the Key of Death (14 page)

Corliss raised her eyes. They met his. The glance asked many questions as it seemed to supply some answers. No heroine, Corliss Wingbeat solved the risky problem simply. “Get in here,” she snapped. And her husband obediently took a long stride forward onto the window ledge and allowed himself to be dragged inside.

The super’s testimony backed up the story of the surviving couple. It was embarrassing for the Wingbeats, but there was no case against them. Fleeing husband, angry wife. Brave mistress accidentally falls to her death. Misadventure.

The Wingbeat case could not be dismissed so easily at the office, however. Norman Imrie was a bit of a prude. Such goings-on between employees of his ad agency were not acceptable. So the offending department head had to be retired early. But the liquor tycoon was nothing if not fair. The man ought not to be penalized financially. Imrie let it be known that Wingbeat should receive his full pension. And it was done.

For the first time in his life, Walter Wingbeat had nothing to be afraid of. His income was guaranteed, his pension linked to the inflation rate. He had nothing to do these days but work around the garden and spend some time handicapping the thoroughbreds at Blue Bonnets. A few days later, Corliss came to where he was sitting on a bench by the garden shed. She had a cup of coffee for him and a suspicious frown on her face. She sat down.

“Spill it, Walter. You were up to something. A philanderer you’re not.”

He decided to level with her. “She was about to take over my job. I wanted to get rid of her. I put weed-killer in a bottle of Yucca liqueur and gave it to her. The poison could never be tasted in that horrible stuff. The reason I went to her apartment was so that nobody else would drink some accidentally. But it had no effect, the powder must have lost its potency.”

“Fortunately for you. You must have been crazy.” She showed him affection over his foolish behavior. “Had she died like that, there would have been an autopsy. They’d have discovered the poison. You gave her the bottle, you’d have been hauled up in court.”

Wingbeat shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking straight. Anyway, it didn’t happen.”

Corliss Wingbeat’s fond mood lasted for the rest of the day. She decided to make her husband a bowl of his favorite vanilla pudding. Nobody else liked it, he could have what was left of the nearly full box of pudding powder she had found inside the pedalbin a few days ago. She asked Pip if he’d thrown it out and he said no, but who else would have done it? Maybe he was afraid he’d be given the hated pudding for dessert one day.

The boy fled that confrontation wondering if he should have spread the weed-killer around the garden instead of substituting it for something harmless. But somebody would have noticed the powder on the ground and he might have been observed had he tried to dig it in. Trust his mother to inspect the trash. Never mind—as long as the stuff was thrown out, it didn’t matter that she suspected him of putting it there. Thus Philip Wingbeat worried the matter round and round. He had noticed that as he got older, he was more frightened of things.

In the kitchen, Corliss got out the pudding powder and the milk and a bowl and a whisk and gave herself a few minutes’ exercise whipping up the mixture. When it was set, she brought it into the garden, where Walter was resting on the lounge swing with a pen and a pad and the daily racing form. “Here,” she said, handing him the bowl and a spoon. “Just to let you know how I feel about you.”

“Hey!” Wingbeat said. He scooped up a spoonful and swallowed it. It tasted odd—milky and bitter—but he was afraid to say anything that might destroy Corliss’s friendly mood. So, with appropriate noises, he wolfed down the entire nasty mess while his wife watched and wondered how much longer she could survive, shackled to this irritating man.

The Last Act was
Deadly

Originally published in
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine,
June 1978.

THE ROOMING HOUSE STUCK AWAY ON A BACK STREET in Brighton had nothing going for it, not even a view of the sea. But it served meals all day, something rare for English eating places, and the front door had a homely appeal, so Eric Tennyson walked under the enamelled sign advertising “Bed and Breakfast,” pushed open the lace-curtained door, and went inside.

He knew it was a good choice the minute he entered the vestibule. The cooking smells, the fringe of tattered carpet meeting a crust of worn linoleum, the thickly overpainted woodwork, and the patterned wallpaper populated with framed faded photographs all reminded him of the house he had grown up in back in Vermont. He chose a table in the empty dining room and sat down on a hard caneback chair. The table, covered with a flowered cloth, teetered under his elbows.

A tall grey woman in a black-and-white uniform under a thin cardigan came into the room and stood over him with tiny fists clenched against her chest. She looked at him fondly and Tennyson was ready to be asked if he had done his homework and to get his skates off the kitchen floor. He glanced at the menu and ordered cod and chips.

“Do you want that with bread and butter and a cup to tea? You get cod-and-chips-and-bread-and-butter-and-a-cup-of-tea, 85 pence.”

“Lovely,” Tennyson said. “I’ll have that.” He had been long enough in London to learn to say “lovely.”

The food came and the crisp brown slabs of breaded fish were quite simply the most delicious he had ever tasted. He soaked on the vinegar and salt, took a bite from a triangle of buttered bread, slurped a swallow of strong tea, and began really to enjoy himself.

It was a perfect example of the rewards that can come from obeying an impulse. The idea of taking this day-trip to Brighton had only occurred to him at breakfast. The sky was clear, Capital Radio said no rain all day, and his writing schedule was up to date, so he was free to walk to Wimbledon Station, take a train to Clapham Junction, and transfer there to the Brighton express. One hour later he was at the seaside—in June, before the main press of tourists.

Tennyson could hardly stop congratulating himself. His main venture during the afternoon had been a walk along the cliffs to the village of Rottingdean, three miles away. Here he drank lager in a couple of pubs, wandered the tidy streets, and spent an hour in and around a church that dated back to the Saxons.

Then he bussed back to Brighton and roamed the Palace Pier, dropping pennies into the sweeper machines, hoping to cause a penny avalanche over one of the ledges, eating licorice allsorts from a bag in his pocket, lying in a deck chair with his face to the sun.

He even entered the little toy house of Eva Montenegro, the famous Romany clairvoyant, and paid £3 to have his fortune told. She sat opposite him, grainy-faced and clear-eyed, warning him not to put his hands where she had just spilled her tea. Then she nattered on with a stream of consciousness that could have been about him, reading his reactions he supposed, shaping her talk according to the way his shrugs or eyebrows guided her.

One thing she said surprised and pleased him. “You do some writing—you are a clerk?”

“Not a clerk. I do write.”

“Ah. You will write a good story. A big story will be a big success.”

Tennyson wandered on the seafront afterwards with eyes half closed, his mind floating on her prediction. The dramatic society in Wimbledon had agreed to perform his play in the fall. It was only an amateur group, to be sure, and there would be no money in it. But he didn’t require money. What he craved was success and here was the gypsy telling him he would have it.

Empty plates were taken away, the woman brought him a dish of apple pie with hot custard, and the delightful supper went on.

Then everything crashed as Tennyson looked up through the doorway into the vestibule and saw Meredith Morgan. He wanted to hide beneath the table. Of all people—the one member of the Hartfield Dramatic Society who really put him off—and here she was, not ten feet away. Fortunately, she had not seen him yet.

And what was this? She set a large suitcase at her feet and, raising her voice, she called straight ahead into the body of the house, “Hello? Anybody is at home, yes?”

Tennyson stopped tasting what he was eating. The accent was pure German, strong and true. Could it be Meredith Morgan’s continental double? No, it was herself—it had to be. He had seen her only last week at a cast reading.

An invisible landlord made terms for a single room and Tennyson could hear Meredith hissing her stagey German as she signed the book. Then she reappeared beyond the dining-room doorway to claim her suitcase and Tennyson turned his head hard away. When he looked again, she was gone and he heard footsteps on a stairway.

There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that this was the Morgan girl and here she was in Brighton pretending to be a German tourist. Tennyson was intrigued now that the immediate danger of having to spend time with her was past. Not that there was much chance of her trapping and boring him; she was surely less anxious to meet him than he was to meet her.

But what was she up to? Tennyson finished his pie, scraping the last of the yellow custard from the dish, and considered the possibilities. The most preposterous occurred to him first. She was some sort of a spy. But that made no sense at all. If she did some work for M15 or whoever, she might end up in Berlin playing the part of a German. But in Brighton?

Perhaps it was a romantic involvement. She had a boy friend who, for some reason, thought she was from Germany and she was here for a liaison, carrying on the charade. But Meredith with a boyfriend, secret of otherwise, was hard to swallow. She was the least-liked individual in the Hartfield, by both men and women, and she took no pains to make herself more appealing.

Then Tennyson thought of a far-fetched notion that might explain her behavior. Somewhere down the road the Society was going to do a play in which there was a female part demanding a German accent. Meredith wanted the role so she had come here to live for a few days as a German, getting dialect practice all day long. Possible but, on second thought, doubtful. She could do this in London—no need to come to Brighton.

Tennyson paid for his supper and went outside. He had gone a dozen paces down the cobbled lane when the impulse hit him and he returned, entering a pub opposite the rooming house, ordering a pint at the bar, and taking it to a table near the front window. He sat down and began watching the painted doorway. It had become very important for him to learn why Meredith Morgan was in Brighton, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich.

As he drank his beer, Tennyson remembered his early days in England, over a year ago. He had settled in Wimbledon simply because the name of the place meant something to him from years of following tennis. And it had lots of Underground and British Rail trains to and from London. Since his aim in life was to become a successful playwright, now that he was financially independent for a few years thanks to a state lottery win, it made sense for Tennyson to become involved with a theatrical group. The West End was beyond him at present, so it had to be an amateur society.

That was how he came to seek out the Hartfield. They were a friendly group and apparently happy to accept a good-looking, 28-year-old American, although his accent certainly did not blend with theirs onstage. Now, after playing small parts in three productions, Tennyson had made the breakthrough he was seeking; they were going to do his play, Call It Love, as their September production. It was a romantic comedy, set in Wimbledon, with a tennis background.

As a group, the Hartfield could only be called jovial. They kidded Tennyson about some of his pronunciations, praised his forceful acting style, and waved to him on the street. He was on a cheek-kissing basis with most of the girls. But not with Meredith Morgan. At first, he took the conversational initiative with her and attributed her monosyllabic replies to shyness but after a while he tired of it and stopped speaking to her—let her make the effort.

Onstage, at the close of one play, he found himself placed next to her in the curtain-call lineup. Automatically, as they bowed, he took the hand of the person on either side of him. Meredith’s hand, cold and claw-like, tore itself free and he did not touch her again.

There was movement in the doorway across the street. Meredith emerged dressed in shades of blue—a tight T-shirt, short skirt, and plastic boots. This was nothing like what she wore back in Wimbledon and Tennyson felt a quickening of his heartbeat as he finished his beer and left the pub.

She turned left at the main road and wandered down the hill towards the seafront. It was becoming dark and strings of lights sparkled along the broad walk. Beyond, the English Channel, flat on this calm night, was fading to black. Tennyson was not surprised to see pedestrians, men and women, turning to look at the attractive girl in blue as they passed her.

This new style of hers puzzled Tennyson as much as anything, because at rehearsals Meredith was a mouse. His impression of her there, whenever he bothered to look, was of furtive brown eyes, unwashed short brown hair, hungry cheeks, and sloping posture, usually with an inch or two of unstitched hem at the bottom of her skirts.

Now she swaggered ahead of him, swinging a red plastic handbag, trailing her fingertips on building fronts—arrogant, provocative. Tennyson worked to control his breathing as he followed her into a pub called The Cutlass. He used his head and came in right after her, reasoning that given time she would be seated and possibly watching the door.

He was able to watch her order a gin and tonic and carry it to a table in an alcove. Tennyson brought his beer with him and sat on the other side of the upholstered parapet where he could see and hear the girl without being seen, unless she turned fully around.

The action was not long in starting. Meredith finished her drink quickly and set down the empty glass. A middle-aged man, heavy-set and grey-headed, took his own glass and reached for hers. “Same again, love?” he said. His accent was from somewhere up north.

“Thank you, you are very kind. It is gin and tonic.”

He returned with the refills and hers looked like a double. “Cheers, love,” he said, and after they drank he went on, “Well then, how do you like our country?”