Gat Heat (10 page)

Agatha Smellow was five-nine or so, with a figure approximately the contour of her bones, all that charm covered by a simple plain gray dress reaching well below where her knees might have been, which was probably fortunate; for, if the rest of her was the shade of her face, you could plant her and be reasonably sure she'd sprout in a fortnight.

“Do come in,” she said.

I sighed, and went in.

It was a nice house. That was the word which sprang automatically to mind. Nice. A little drab for me, but then I'm a guy who likes a bit of color. We went into the living room—from which she'd been fluttering the curtains—and sat in comfortable overstuffed chairs covered in a rough brown fabric, and on the chair arms were crocheted white doilies, or whatever they call those things which keep falling off chair arms.

There was a beige carpet on the floor, quite thick and with a good long nap. A large color-television set stared like blinded Cyclops from a corner. On the wall was a framed piece of cloth with green yarn spelling out, “Home, Sweet Home.” I read it twice to be sure.

“I gather you know of Mr. Halstead's death,” I began.

“Yes. I prayed for him, but it didn't do any good. I knew this would happen.”

“You knew he'd be killed?”

“Not that, not in so many words. I knew he'd come to no good end. I told him. Oh, you can bet I told him.”

I'll bet you did, I thought. We chatted inconsequentially for a minute or two. She said, yes, they had been married for several years. Fourteen and a half years. Divorced four years ago. Yes, she'd filed for divorce, and had been awarded the judgment. She had seen the signs long, long before then, long, long ago. She'd seen the signs. Satan was creeping up on him.

“Who?” I said.

“Satan.”

“Satan, huh? You mean, the old … the old Adam? No, not that one—the devil, you mean?”

“Yes, him, the Evil One.”

It seemed cooler in the house than when I'd first come inside. The curtains were drawn over the windows—not a lot of light in the room—and Mrs. Smellow gazed at me, gazed her glassy gaze at me.

“I knew,” she said. “I knew what was happening. I warned him. I did, you can bet I did.”

“Uh-huh.”

She fell silent. But she kept gazing her glassy gaze at me. I made some mild comment about the divorce, without specifically asking her what the grounds had been, but even without real encouragement she told me. It was as though she wanted to tell me about it, all about it.

“He committed the most heinous, the most awful, the most sinful thing a man can do.”

“He did? I suppose you …” I stopped. That covered a lot of territory. What did she mean?

She told me. “I mean he broke his sacred vows.”

“How?”

“You know.”

“No, I don't. Not precisely. There's lots of ways. I suppose. I'm not an expert, of course. How would I know?”

“You're a
man!
”

“Well, thank you, ma'am. That's nice of you … Wait. You mean—”

“Of course.”

I thought I had it. Or at least a piece of it. But I wasn't sure how to pin it down, how to get it clear as could be. “Ah, perhaps you mean that Mr. Halstead, during the course of your marriage, committed that most … um … heinous sin of …” It was pretty tough.

“He broke his marriage vows.”

“Yeah. I had it figured.”

“I caught him with her.”

“Her? Might as well come right out with it. Another woman, you mean.”

“What else would I have caught him with?”

“Beats me.”

“Under my own roof. Actually in the bedroom!”

“Oh. Well, that
is
foul. In your own bedroom—”

“Not mine. His. There they were—in his bedroom.” She made some mumbling sounds. It looked like she was going to get sicker than a dog, just remembering.

But she didn't get sick. Oddly, she appeared almost to get healthier there for a while, as she dwelled on it.

In fact, she dwelled audibly on it a bit more than I really cared to have her dwelling. So about a minute later I said, “I see. Then he had his bedroom, and you had your bedroom.”

Her eyes were quite wide, and I would have sworn her chest bones were rising and falling more rapidly than at any time since I'd entered the house. Her face had a bit more color in it, too, sort of a brighter green.

“Yes,” she said, the consonant drawn out in a soft hiss. “Yes—we had to have separate bedrooms. He was always wanting to … It was the only way I could keep him from …”

She didn't know how to finish it this time, herself. I tried to help her. “Like he was a regular wild animal, hey?”

“Yes, that's it. You do understand. A beast, a beast … I know I shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But he was a terrible, awful, fiendish,
immoral
man, may his soul rest in peace.”

“Well, you've certainly helped me get an insight into his character, Mrs. Smellow. I was, of course, hoping you might be able to give me a lead to something I've been unable to dig up as yet. That is, an indication of who might have hated him enough to kill him …” I let it trail off. So far, Mrs. Smellow was the only person who appeared to fit the description.

But I shrugged that wild idea off and continued, “A motive for the murder, or—”

“Sex.”

“Hmm?”

“Sex, something to do with sex, that's the motive. You'll find out. Mr. Halstead was obsessed, sexually obsessed. He was enmeshed, mired, in the carnal life, a slave to Satan. That's why he died.”

“I see what you mean. I guess. I was thinking of something more specific, like revenge from some egg he ruined in a business deal, or a guy who hated him because Halstead had exposed his evil machinations—”

She interrupted me again, which was probably just as well since I was on the verge of talking like Mrs. Smellow. But I was glad she'd interrupted me for another reason. By the time she finished, anyhow.

“There was bound to be violence, the way they all carried on. Mr. Halstead and his evil friends and those terrible parties. Sex and nakedness, evil,
evil
. All of them sinning, caught up in the grasp of Satan, sinning and naked. Naked, naked, naked!”

I leaned back away from her a little.

The juice was really pouring into her, and for a moment I thought she was going to light up like a Go signal. “You know about the party, then? Did you say
those
parties?”

“Yes, of course I know about them.” She paused, and let her eyes glitter at me, then said slowly, “And you do, too, don't you?”

“Well, I sort of stumbled into one. But I assumed maybe it was just, well, one of those things. A sudden kind of casual, ah, flirtation with Satan.”

“Nothing casual about it. It was like a—a ritual. A
habit
. They did it all the
time
.”

“They didn't.”

“They did. It was a regular club, a sex club. Every two weeks they went to somebody's house and … you know.”

I did know. In fact her rather vehement comment didn't exactly come at me like a bolt from the blue, considering what had met my eyes and ears when the case had barely begun. Still, it was a bit of a shock to hear the thought so bluntly expressed.

I said, “Wait a moment, Mrs. Smellow. That's quite an accusation. It may well be true, but it isn't the sort of thing we should guess about.”

“I'm not guessing. I've seen them. More than once.”

“Oh?”

Maybe she'd got a bit carried away, because she rolled her orbs around for a few seconds, then said, “Purely by accident. By accident. There's one place on a hill behind Mr. Halstead's home where you can look down and see part of the pool. And garden. I just happened to drive there one night. By acci—anyway, I saw.”

“Uh-huh. I guess it didn't look like, well, just a pool party.”

“I guess it didn't. Besides, I told Mr. Halstead about it when I saw him again, I warned him. You can bet I did. And he laughed.” She let her tongue roam around inside her mouth, as though probing live nerve ends. “He just laughed. He admitted it, came right out and told me about it. He had the meanness to say he was making up for years of—”

She broke it off and chewed on her lips for a few moments. “You don't have to wonder if I'm guessing. I'm not. I
know
. They had a regular club. Haven't you heard about that sort of thing?”

“Well, yes, I have. But I just never got this close to the fact of the matter before.”

“It's the times. It's nigh onto Armageddon. Just look around you, see, read, listen. Degeneracy, depravity, robbery, thieving, murder. It's all sex.”

“Well, Mrs. Smellow, sex has been around quite a while—”

“Yes, it has,” she said, as if wishing it hadn't.

“—even the little old atoms swinging around the nucleus; and the birds and bees—”

She had the floor, and I guess she intended to keep it. “The television,” she said. “You can see it just watching the television. Naked women taking showers right out in the open.”

“Oh, I don't think they're really naked. I think they wear pink overalls or something. Damn clever. You can't really tell—”

“Naked. Toothpaste, hair oil, automobiles, razor blades, toilet paper—”

“Oh, come on, not—”

“—soap, white tornadoes, wild men on horses, big lunging horses, deodorants, depilatories, debauches, cigarettes, pipe tobacco, toothpaste, hair oil—”

She was starting over again. So I tried to turn my mind off a bit, reached for a cigarette and flipped my lighter.

“Don't do that!” she cried.

“Huh?”

“Don't light a cigarette. You can't smoke in here. I don't allow smoking in here.”

“Oh, sorry. I guess I wasn't thinking. I won't do it again.” I put my cigarette back in the pack and said, “So, Mr. and Mrs. Halstead and a number of their friends had a club. That does explain quite a lot of things. Except who killed him. And maybe even why somebody killed him.”

“Why? I've been telling you.”

“I know, but it's barely possible—”

“There'll be more, hundreds, thousands. It was marked in the skies when the papers first wrote it up about wife-swapping. You read it; everybody read it. Nothing had ever been heard like it on the earth, not in trillions of years. I read it; I read all the papers on those days. And books. I know, I've kept my eye on it all. And I pray; I pray for the sinners.” She paused and gasped a little and clasped her bony hands. “It's there, all there, the story of the world going to hell in the clutches of Satan.” She unclasped her hands and waved one of them.

She was waving at something in the corner of the room. I followed her wave and spotted a three-shelf bookcase, seven or eight feet wide, against the wall. Probably a hundred hardbound books and several paperbacks there, not a bad little library.

“Mind if I take a look?” I asked. Hell, I had to do something; couldn't smoke.

“Do,” she said. “Do.”

So I did. I got up and walked to the bookcase, ran an eye over the titles. She had a number of recent bestsellers, volumes of the excellent Readers' Digest Condensed Books, even some paperback mystery novels with horribly stimulating art leering from their covers.

Then I noticed one segment of a shelf on which were a number of books, both hardbound and paperback, with titles more than a little reminiscent of what Mrs. Smellow had—either so lovingly or so hatingly, I couldn't be absolutely sure—been describing.

As I ran a finger over their spines Mrs. Smellow said, “That's it, they're the ones, that's it.”

And she didn't even pause, just went on, “It's all around us, all around; it's in the air, choking, killing the land, the land and the people, killing,” and her voice seemed to rise and fall, rise and fall, as if she were beginning to croon a song she had crooned before. Maybe not to men, or even to women, maybe not to anybody but herself, but a song she had crooned before.

And as she crooned softly behind me, I looked at the books on the shelf.

The titles alone were something of an education:
The Erotic Revolution
by Lawrence Lipton;
Sexual Rebellion in the Sixties
by W. D. Sprague, Ph.D:
Swap Clubs
and
The Swinging Set
by William and Jerrye Breedlove;
The Velvet Underground
by Michael Leigh. Between a very large hardcover book,
The Kama Kala,
and the not quite as large
Eros and Evil
by Masters, was a paperback,
Sex in America
edited by Grunwald. Then the
Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, Koka Shastra,
and
Ananga Ranga
. Another paperback,
Lord Denning's Report—The Christine Keeler and John Profumo Affair,
and at least a dozen more.

“Hair oil and razor blades,” crooned Mrs. Smellow.

I picked one of the books from the shelf, a thick volume bound in red buckram; picked it perhaps because it looked well-thumbed and worn, or perhaps because the author was an M.D. named Scott—Richard, Not Sheldon. Its title was
The Sexual Sixties: Extrapolation of the Prognosis,
a forbidding thing if ever I saw one.

It opened automatically to page 47 as I held it in my hands.

Several lines, I noted, had been underscored in lead pencil. I glanced at a few. “… in the Sexy Sixties, the decade of the Sexual Revolution, the old and long-cherished mores became the citadel under attack and soon the ramparts were crumbling. The fixed folkways were becoming the flexible …” I skipped a few lines. “… there was a ferment in the land, seething in the endocrines, the gonads, and ovaries of the twanging peoples.”

The guy wrote like a nut, I thought. But I was interested, so I pursued the subject for a few more lines. “Concurrent with this—preceding it, of course, in the beginning—were innumerable sensory stimuli nearly as prevalent in the atmosphere as oxygen: advertisements in newspapers, magazines, on radio and especially on television, all either overtly or covertly Pavloved to produce sexual salivation. Products first named, and later designed, produced, and publicized to produce the maximum of erection in the male and hotsy-totsy tumescence in the female. Hair cremes for men were alleged to be more exciting …”