The Scarlet Letters (2 page)

“Hello, Dirk,” said Ellery heartily. “Where'd you come from?”

“Hell,” grinned Dirk. “And I'm looking for company.”

Ellery found himself on his feet. But Martha was already between him and her husband.

“Go home, Dirk,” she said in a shrill voice. “Please go home.”

“Hell of a home. See what I mean?”

“Now look here, Dirk,” said Ellery resentfully. “If that crack about lovers wasn't a gag, you're a bigger damn fool than I am. This is the first time I've seen Martha in months. She wanted to talk something over with me–”

“In the language of the eyes, no doubt,” said Dirk Lawrence dreamily. “My little Martha. My little nymph. You know something, Brother Q? You kid me not.”

“Martha,” said Ellery, “you'd better go.”

“Yes, Martha my love, you do that,” said Dirk. “On account of I'm going to teach this dirty feist to keep his paws off another man's wife–”

“Dirk, no!” screamed Martha.

Dirk stepped into a moonbeam. Ellery saw that some bubbles of foam had gathered in the twist of his mouth. His eyes seemed sober and sad. He backhanded Martha's face across the bench and she disappeared.

Involuntarily, Ellery stooped to look for her.

He never reached his knees. A bomb tore his head off and the back of it went
bong
! against the cement walk, followed by the rest of him.

The last thing he remembered was an outburst from the nearby benches as of many firecrackers.

It was applause.

“So now you know,” Martha was saying. “Better than I could have told you, Ellery. I tried my best to keep him from following me. But I guess I'm not very good at it, and he doesn't believe anything I say, anyway.”

“Have some more coffee, darling,” crooned Nikki.

Ellery wished that Nikki would show some appreciation of his performance. His jaw had a green and purple lump on it and the back of his head felt as if it had bounced around in a cement mixer.

He had come to in the park to find his head in Martha's lap and a crowd of admiring spectators encirling them. Dirk was gone. The theater-loving patrolman was remarking with heat that he'd sure as hell like to run that hambone in for getting so carried away by his part–if Mr. Lunt would tell him the scene-stealing slob's name, that is–and by the way, here he'd been under the impression that Mr. Lunt was getting gray, or was that one of them there now hair falsies? In the end, hiding his face with his hat, Ellery cajoled the patrolman into putting them in a cab at the 72nd Street entrance, the only address he could think to give in the mushy condition of his brain being that of the Queen apartment. And there was Nikki, who was supposed to have had a date with an obscure but paid-up member of the Authors League, waiting for his return. Martha had fallen into her arms, and the two women had disappeared in Inspector Queen's bathroom for a half-hour, leaving Ellery to administer his own first aid. Not even his father was home to cluck over him.

“But what's the matter with Dirk?” Nikki demanded. “Is he off his rocker?”

“I don't know,” Martha said in the same draggy way. “I don't know what's happened to him. I don't think he knows himself.”

“I felt no particular uncertainty,” said Ellery, trying to move his jaw sidewise.

“You're lucky to be alive.”

“Oh, come,” said Ellery. “The brute punches hard, but not that hard.”

“That's why I was so afraid,” Martha said to her coffee cup. “I was afraid he had a gun with him. He'd threatened to start carrying one.”

“Nikki threatens to quit every hour on the hour, Martha, but she's still affiliated with the firm.”

“You don't believe me. I suppose I couldn't expect you to. I tell you if Dirk had had a gun with him tonight, he'd have killed you.”

“And he'd have had a darned good case, too,” Ellery said. “See here, I don't want to seem unfeeling, but give the devil his due. Look at it from Dirk's viewpoint–”

“Suppose you look at it from Dirk's viewpoint,” said Nikki coldly.

“You told him a pretty feeble story, Martha, about meeting some female play scrivener at a woman's hotel. So he followed you. He saw you enter the park, pick out a nice dark bench. I came along, obviously by prearrangement. I sat down and the first thing Dirk knew you were cuddling against my manly breast and I had my arm around you. Your tears made it look even worse–as if you and I'd been having ourselves a thing, but I'd found a new chick to play around with and wanted out, and you were trying to hold on to me. What else could he have thought? After all, the man's only flesh and blood.”

Martha shut her eyes.

“Like you?” said Nikki horridly. “Wives like Martha exist only in Victorian novels, and a husband who doesn't know it ought to be altered.”

“Will you stop interrupting? Besides, Martha, Dirk was tight. Probably if he'd been sober–”

Martha opened her eyes. “When he's sober it's worse.”

“Worse? How do you mean?”

“When he's sober, I can't keep telling myself that he's saying those horrible things because he's drunk.”

“You mean Dirk actually believes you're sleeping around?”

“He tries not to. But it's become an obsession, something he can't control.”

“May I say nuts?” inquired Nikki.

“Nikki, you aren't in love with him. I am.”

“If he were my husband, I'd give him something to have an obsession about!”

“He's sick …”

“This is going to hurt,” said Ellery. “Either he's sick, Martha–or he's right.”

Nikki leaped. “Martha, I'm taking you over to my place this minute. This
minute.”

“Sit down, Nikki, and shut up. Or go into the next room. If Martha wants my help, I've got to know what the problem is. I'm not going to deliver a sermon–I've seen worse crimes than adultery. So first, Martha, tell me: Are you what Dirk called you tonight–a nymph?”

“If I am, he hasn't caught me at it yet.” Martha's face continued to show nothing. “Look, boys and girls, I'm a gal who's trying to save her marriage. If I weren't, I shouldn't be here.”

“Touché,”
said Ellery. “Now tell me everything you know about Dirk that might explain this jealousy complex of his.”

About Dirk's childhood Martha was largely in the dark. He also had been an only child. The Lawrences were East Shore Marylanders, Southern sympathizers during the Civil War. Dirk's mother's family were South Carolina Fairleighs, with a distinguished history of slaveholding and aristocratic poverty.

Whatever Dirk had lacked as a boy, it was not material. The Lawrence wealth was inherited from his Great-grandfather Lawrence, who had gone West after Appomattox, made millions in mines and railroads, and returned to Maryland to restock the family coffers.

“Dirk's father never did a lick of work in his life,” Martha said. “And neither did Dirk till he put on a uniform. His father sent him to VMI, but he was kicked out after a year for chronic insubordination. He decided he wanted to be a writer. Pearl Harbor caught him living in Greenwich Village, wearing a beard and trying to make like a poor man's Hemingway on an allowance of a mere ten thousand a year. He enlisted–in relief, I think–and he was an officer with the paratroopers in Belgium when he got the news that his parents had both been killed in an automobile accident.

“It wasn't till he got home after the war that Dirk learned two things: One, that the police suspected Mr. Lawrence of having deliberately run the car, with himself and Mrs. Lawrence in it, off the road–”

“Why?” asked Ellery.

“I don't know, unless it had something to do with the other thing Dirk found out when he got back. His father had run through every penny of the Lawrence fortune and had left nothing but debts.

“Dirk went back to New York, broke except for what he had on his back. He tried writing again, but after a few months of starvation he looked for a job. A publishing house took him on in the editorial department, and he was with the firm over two years. The job lasted till 1948, when he was twenty-eight years old.

“I've met some of the people he worked with there,” said Martha, “and they all paint the same picture. Dirk was skinny and intellectual-looking–from not getting enough to eat–and he'd developed a black Russian attitude towards life. His long suit was irony, and of course he's brilliant. But he didn't get along with the other people in the office, women especially.”

“Any particular reason?” asked Ellery.

“It might be this: Shortly after he landed the job, he began going out with a girl in the office. All I know about her is that her name was Gwladys, which she spelled with a
w.
She fell head over heels in love with him, they had an affair, and she soon became a nuisance. They quarreled and he stopped seeing her. And then she committed suicide. Of course, she was a hopeless neurotic, and it wasn't Dirk's fault, but from that time on he had nothing to do with women.”

Dirk's editorial job had required him to read a great many mystery stories. They stirred his imagination, so he began to write again, this time attempting a detective novel. To his surprise, his own firm accepted it for publication. It sold just under four thousand copies, but the notices were good.

“That was the one he called
Dead Is My Love
,” Martha said. “Ellery, what did you really think of it?”

“For the work of a new hand, it was surprising. The plotting was amateurish in spots, and the story had a wry quality, but it was different. I questioned Dirk about the morbidity of his writing when I first met him at a meeting of the Mystery Writers of America. His only comment was that murder is a morbid subject. That's when he quit his job and devoted all his time to the typewriter, isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Martha. “He turned out three more detective stories in the next twelve months.”

“I remember,” Ellery nodded, “that Dirk would open up to me in that period when at MWA gatherings he'd utter hardly a word to anyone else. He was hurt at the small sales of his books while what he felt to be inferior products earned two and three times as much. He covered up by being defiant. When I suggested a brighter, less Gothic, approach, some compromise with popular taste, Dirk replied that that was the kind of stuff he wanted to write, and if people didn't like if they didn't have to buy his books. I thought at the time it wasn't a very grown-up reaction. I wasn't surprised when he stopped writing detective stories.”

“That was my doing, I'm afraid,” Martha said with a slight tightness. “You know, I chased Dirk. I decided to marry him three days after we met.”

“You never told me that,” said Nikki accusingly.

“There's lots I've never told you, Nikki. I used to write him daily mash-notes. I was perfectly shameless about it. I was the one who encouraged him, after we were married, to try a serious novel.

“And maybe that was my big mistake,” Martha said. “He was so happy, he worked so hard. And when the book came out and got an even smaller sale than his detective stories, and most of the critics panned it brutally …”

“The Sound of Silence
was a bad book, Martha,” said Ellery gently. “Souped-up realism that only succeeded in being slick melodrama.”

Martha was silent. Then she said: “We had a time of it for a few weeks, but I finally loved some self-confidence back into him and he started on the next novel. And that turned out even worse …

“After the second book there wasn't a thing I could do to snap Dirk out of his depression. The harder I tried, the more I seemed to irritate him. When he went to work on his third novel, he locked himself in the study. And that was when I suppose I made my second mistake. Instead of hammering the lock off and pounding some sense into his thick head, I … well, I looked around for something to do. That's when I produced
All Around the Mulberry Bush.
The flop it took taught me a lot, and I knew I'd found the spot in the theater I'd been groping for before I met Dirk.

“I also thought,” continued Martha in that dreadful calm, “that my fiasco would bring Dirk and me together again, on the theory of the sociability of misery. It only seemed to shove us farther apart. He accused me of going the route of all rich dilettantes, and we had a really bang-up row. I suppose I was terribly hurt for the second time … Anyway, back he went to his typewriter to sulk, and I bought my second play. And that's when this jealousy business showed up.”

“Exactly how,” asked Ellery, “did Dirk first manifest it?”

“You've met Alex Conn. It was my second production and Alex's first. There's never been an author more respectful of his producer. Poor Alex wouldn't dream of making love to me; he'd sooner try to embrace the Sphinx. Besides, he has a broad streak of lavender.

“Alex's play had to be rewritten before we went into rehearsal. I had definite ideas about how I wanted certain scenes to run, and I got into the habit of dropping into the hotel where Alex was working, a dirty flytrap off Times Square. Alex works best in his undershirt, with his shoes off, and one night Dirk burst in on us and, to my absolute amazement–and Alex's–accused us of having an affair. We thought he was joking. But the beating he gave poor Alex in that horrible hotel room was no joke …

“Nothing Alex or I said to assure Dirk he was imagining things had the least effect. He was–he looked–well, you saw him tonight, Ellery. Only that night he wasn't tight.”

“I hope you told him off!” said Nikki.

“Well, I told him I wasn't going to act as if I'd committed a crime, because I hadn't, and I said a lot of other things, too, about mutual trust and faith and love, and the result was we wound up with our arms around each other and what seemed like the dawn of a new understanding. But the very next week, when I was talking over the role of Michael in Alex's play with Rory Burke, who eventually played it, Dirk made another scene–and that one got into the columns. And that's the way it's been ever since, and I don't know why, why,
why
!”