Seducer (11 page)

W
ANDA, THE CANNON MAID
, found Madelaine in the library, where she had gone to write checks for the monthly accounts.

“There’s a young man asking to see you,” Wanda said. “He says his name is Jensen.”

“Jensen?” Madelaine tapped her front teeth with the capped end of her pen and considered the name. “Am I supposed to know him?”

“He says not, but he says he’s got something important to tell you that you’ll be interested in hearing.”

“How odd. I can’t imagine what it could be.”

“Shall I send him away? To tell the truth, I don’t much like his looks. He’s not very clean, and he kept glaring at me as if I’d done something to make him angry.”

“Lots of young men nowadays are not very clean, Wanda, and lots of them are angry. Send him in here, please. I’ll see what he wants.”

Wanda left, registering disapproval, and a minute or two later Buddy Jensen, a stranger to Madelaine, came three steps into the room and stopped, looking around in turn at the shelves of books, an opaque projector on a table in a corner, a world globe that was also a lamp, and finally at Madelaine herself, who had turned sidewise to her desk in order to face him.

A slanting shaft of sunlight touched him where he stood, lighting his face and tousled hair and verifying Wanda’s observations that he was not very clean and looked angry. Madelaine thought, watching him, that he was surely deeply disturbed about something, and that he was, perhaps, not quite rational.
Touched by madness
, she thought, aware of uneasiness and pity as the hackneyed phrased passed through her mind.

“Are you Mr. Jensen?” she said politely.

“That’s right,” he replied. “I am.”

“You wanted to see me about something?”

“That’s right. I do.”

But he seemed to be in no hurry about it, now that he had been admitted. His dark eyes traveled again around the room, from books to projector to globe to Madelaine. The second excursion had the effect of increasing his anger and the ferocity of his expression. There was something besides anger in his eyes, however, and she thought that it was pain.

“Won’t you sit down?” she said.

“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I’d better.”

“Why not?”

“Because I won’t be welcome here when you’ve heard what I’ve got to say.”

“We won’t know that until you’ve said it, will we?”

“You’ll see. You won’t like it. You’ll throw me out.”

“Nonsense. I don’t believe I could manage it even if I wanted to. You appear to be quite a strong young man.”

“I didn’t mean literally. I meant you’ll make me go.”

“Well, I assume that you didn’t come with the intention of staying forever. Please tell me whatever it is you want to tell. And please sit down. It makes me uncomfortable to see you standing there like that.”

He moved slowly, in a kind of sequence of jerks, to the chair she indicated and sat down, conveying in doing so the impression of a sullen boy obeying a command reluctantly under threat of punishment.

Once seated, he did not know what to do with his hands, which were for a moment a disturbing problem. Finally he disposed of them by folding them into fists and laying them on his knees.

“It’s about Professor Cannon and Maggie McCall,” he said.

“Maggie McCall?”

“That’s her name. She’s a girl goes to school here. She’s in the professor’s trig class.”

“I don’t believe I know her.” Madelaine’s manner turned stiff and wary.

“Well, it isn’t likely he’d have introduced you. They’re having an affair.”

“My husband and one of his students? Are you quite sure?”

She did not appear to be shocked or angry, and he was shrewd enough to observe that the information was not something she immediately discounted as absurd, or even unlikely.

Buddy deduced from this that the professor was not a first offender, which was no surprise, for the slick bastard was exactly the kind of guy who would have women lying down for him all over the place. Not that Buddy resented this on moral grounds. He had, indeed, no more morals himself than a Tom cat. What he resented with despair and fury was that Maggie had been his girl and had been stolen from him. And he wanted her back.

He missed her and wanted her, and there was nothing he would not do, however shameful, to make her return to him or to make her sorry if she didn’t

“Are you sure you’re not imagining this?” Madelaine queried, watching him sharply.

“Sure enough. She was my girl, and now she’s not, and he’s to blame.”

“Are you the one who fought with him and gave him a beating?”

“Yes, I am.”

“For this reason?”

“That’s right.”

“I wondered what had happened. He refused to say.”

“Now you know. I beat him up, but it didn’t do any good. It only made things worse. That’s why I’m here.”

“You’re obviously disturbed. People often exaggerate things when they are in such a state.”

“Look. Don’t treat me like a damn kid or some kind of nut. I know what’s been going on between them. I thought maybe you’d like to know, too, so you could do something about it before somebody gets hurt. I guess you don’t though. I guess you don’t care what he does or whose girl he steals. Excuse me for bothering you. I’d better get the hell out of here.”

“Oh, sit down. Please don’t be so belligerent. And I’d rather you didn’t swear at me. Of course I care. If you can convince me that you’re telling the truth, I’ll certainly do something about it.”

Buddy had begun to rise, but now he settled back into the chair, flexing his blunt fingers and folding them into fists again on his knees.

“Why should I try to convince you of anything? You can believe me or not, just as you please.”

“Why should I believe you, when it comes to that? I have no doubt that you would tell any lie that suited your purpose.”

“That’s right. I would.”

“Could you prove a single word of what you’ve told me?” she asked.

“He’s been picking her up in his car at different places, and I can tell you where and when exactly. He’s been in her apartment, and I can tell you when he went and when he left.”

“That’s not proof. Only your word again. But never mind. I believe you.”

“That’s good of you. Thanks.”

“Tell me something.” Madelaine looked at him curiously, sensing more strongly than ever his dark potential for violence. “If I should decide to do nothing about this, what would
you
do?”

“I don’t know. I might kill her. I might kill him, too.”

“Yes, I think you might.” She stood up and smiled at him in a friendly way, as if she were preparing to say good-by to the most ordinary visitor. “Thank you for coming to see me, Mr. Jensen. I’ll call Wanda to show you out.”

“Don’t bother. I can get out by myself.” He walked to the door, pausing there for several moments in a position of peculiar rigidity. Then he turned his head and looked back. “You’ve been good about it,” he said. “You didn’t throw a stinking fit or toss me out or anything like that. It’s too bad you have to be married to a son of a bitch like old Cannon.”

He went on out, and after waiting by the desk until she had heard the front door close after him, Madelaine walked into the hall and called for Wanda. She returned to the desk after that and sat down and waited for Wanda to come.

“When my husband gets home,” she said, “tell him that I would like to see him. I’ll still be here in the library.”

“Yes, Mrs. Cannon.”

Alone again, Madelaine picked up her pen and continued writing checks for the accounts. Then she wrote two letters that she had owed for some time to friends. She was just finishing the second letter when Brad entered the house and, seconds later, the library.

“Hello, Maddy,” he said. “Wanda told me you want to see me.”

“Yes.” She sealed the envelope of the second letter and placed it neatly on top of the first. “I had a visitor this afternoon.”

“Really, Maddy, what’s so urgent about telling me that? Visitors are certainly not unusual in this house.”

“This one was. He was very unusual.”

“That’s nice. Someone I know?”

“Possibly. I’m not sure. And it wasn’t nice. The visit wasn’t nice, and the visitor wasn’t nice. Both were exceptionally unpleasant.”

“What are you trying to say? Who was this mysterious visitor?”

“A young man.”

“What young man?” Brad asked, his curiosity aroused.

“I don’t think I’ll tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you might make things difficult for him if I did.”

“Oh, for God’s sake! Are you trying deliberately to be obscure?”

“On the contrary, I mean to be absolutely clear. Perhaps you should sit down.”

He did, laying on the floor beside his chair the briefcase he had carried into the room. He knew, of course, that something was wrong, and he had a notion, directed by guilt, of what it was. But he still couldn’t believe that she had learned about Maggie. They had been so careful, and possibly, after all, it would turn out in the next minute to be something else of less consequence.

“It’s apparent that I’m on trial,” he said. “Am I entitled to hear the charge?”

“Of course. The charge is the same one that I have made before, although not so bluntly as I’ll make it now. You are charged with being a liar and an adulterer. Is that clear enough?”

“Quite. Can you support the charge?”

“In court? Not in this instance. Not yet. I probably could if I worked at it. Would you like to have me try?”

“I’d like to know exactly what you mean by this instance.”

“Certainly. This instance is a girl named Maggie McCall. She’s a student of yours, I believe. A girl young enough to be your daughter.”

Brad was a fair actor, having had much practice, and he managed a creditable expression of surprise.

“She
is
a student of mine. A very bad one, I might add, and nothing more. Where on earth did you get the fantastic idea that there was something between us?”

“I was told, and it’s the truth. Don’t lie to me, Brad, for it will do you no good.”

“I suppose, then, that I’m not even going to be allowed to defend myself.”

“You could only defend yourself by lying. It’s no good.”

“In that case, I must ask you what you are going to do and what you expect me to do.”

“What I’m going to do is something I’ll decide. What you do is your business. I don’t care. I no longer care. Do you know what I used to hope? I used to hope that you would lose your hair or your teeth or become crippled and ugly, anything like that, because I thought that then you might be reconciled to me and what I had to give you, that I might be enough for the man you might become. But I don’t suppose it would really have made any difference, or that you could have changed for any reason from what you are and what you have to be. No matter now, because I don’t care. I no longer care. Liar. Cheat. Profligate.”

He retrieved his briefcase and stood up slowly, clutching the case tightly to control the trembling of his hands.

“Thank you very much for your opinion,” he said, angry and embittered and also uneasy.

“It’s not opinion. It’s truth.”

“Then I must leave the house.”

“Not unless you wish. I’ll leave myself in a few days. I’ll go away somewhere. Perhaps to Europe. In the spring I’ll return and sell the house and go away again for good. You are to be out by that time.”

“So it’s all cancelled out. You and me. Our life and my career in this place.”

“Yes. Cancelled out.” Madelaine’s tone was blunt and final.

“I’ve no doubt that you could ruin me completely if you choose.”

“I may choose. I’ll have to decide if the satisfaction would be worth the dirty publicity it would entail.” She stood up and walked without pausing to the library door. “Now I’m going upstairs to my room. I have a sick headache.” She pressed against her eyes with a thumb and finger, holding to the knob of the door and swaying a little on her feet. “I think I’ll take a sedative and go directly to bed. Wanda is leaving early this evening. You’ll have to manage dinner for yourself.”

She was gone then, the door closed behind her. Brad sagged into the chair from which he had risen as if his bones had suddenly dissolved and left him limp. His face was gray and his lips were bloodless. For the first time in his life he looked old. Old and sick.

AT SEVEN O’CLOCK
, Brad went upstairs and tried Madeline’s door. It was not locked, and he pushed it a few inches into darkness and stood listening intently to the sound of deep and languorous breathing.

It seemed to him, standing in the dimly lighted hall at the threshold of the black room, that it was the whole house breathing, not merely Madelaine, the walls swelling and contracting to the rhythm of quiet breath against a quicker and barely perceptible drumming of a giant pulse.

Pushing the door farther into the room, admitting a swath of light from the hall behind him, he stepped into the light and out of it into darkness and made his way silently, after standing still for a moment while the pupils of his eyes adjusted, to the bed where Madelaine lay.

There was a tiny night lamp on her bedside table, and he turned this on with a soft click of the switch, the light fanning out to fashion in the darkness a small perimeter that encompassed the face of the sleeping woman.

Madelaine did not stir. She lay on her back with her hair spread upon the pillow. Her mouth was slightly open. Her breasts rose and fell to the deep and languorous cadence of her breathing and the breathing of the house.

She was heavily sedated, drugged in sleep and defenseless against all device. She would sleep this way for hours, and she had made in the end a fatal error. Having known her husband for what he was, she had failed to understand what he could, when driven, become.

Switching off the night light, Brad turned and left the room, closing the door behind him and standing for a full minute leaning against it in the hall, his own pulse thundering in his heart and head now that a decision had been made.

There had been no decision minutes before, when he had ascended the stairs compulsively. But he had known instantly, standing beside the bed in the dark room behind him, that Madelaine must die for his sake. It was not, he felt, so much a decision which he had made himself in that instant as a decision that had been made long ago without his connivance, and which he must now accept as part of an order of things he could not change.

Pushing away from the door, he went downstairs and into the library, where he dialed a number that rang a bell in the littered little apartment where Maggie lived.

The bell rang three times, bringing no response. He was about to hang up with a feeling of reprieve, the order of things having been changed after all, when suddenly, just after its beginning, the fourth ring was cut off, and Maggie’s voice came on. It had the lazy, mutilated sound that a voice has when it is heard through a yawn.

“Hello.”

“Maggie? This is Brad. Are you alone?”

“Yes. All alone. I was lying and wondering what to do, and I went to sleep. Would you like to see me, darling? Do you want me to meet you?”

“Not tonight. I have a departmental faculty meeting to attend.”

“Couldn’t we meet afterward? I want so much to meet you.”

“No. Not tonight. Listen to me, Maggie. We’re in trouble.”

“Trouble? Did you say trouble? Why are you talking so softly? I can hardly hear you.”

He became aware then that he had been whispering into the mouthpiece, not because it was a necessary precaution in a house that was empty, except for himself and the sleeping Madelaine, but only because he was reacting instinctively to the abortive influence of guilt. This struck him as being a dangerous sign, and he made a conscious effort to speak normally. His voice, however, in spite of the effort, was still conspiratorially low.

“Madelaine knows about me. Someone told her.”

“Knows? Did you say she knows? How could that be, darling, when we’ve been so careful and clever?”

“As I said, someone told her. She had a visitor this afternoon.”

She was silent, the open wire singing softly between them. There was in the singing sound of the wire a kind of incongruous deadliness, like a murderer humming in the midst of his work. She was apparently thinking at the other end of the wire, drawing a conclusion from what he had said. Finally, after almost half a minute, she expressed the conclusion succinctly.

“That God-damn Buddy!” she said.

“Just how much does Buddy know? Have you told him anything?”

“Certainly not. Buddy doesn’t need to be told things. He finds them out by being a sneak and a spy.”

“Well, he has put us in a vulnerable position. What are we going to do about him?”

“Don’t worry about Buddy. I know how to handle
him
. What’s more important is what we’re going to do about Madelaine.”

“Whatever it is, it will have to be done quickly. She’s going away in a few days.”

“For good?” Maggie queried.

“Until spring. She intends to have a divorce when she returns.”

“Really? That would be too bad.”

“Yes, it would. It would be disastrous.”

“Are you calling from home? Is she there now?”

“She’s upstairs asleep,” Brad informed her. “She’s under sedation.”

“You mean she’s taken something to make her sleep?”

“That’s right.”

“Will she sleep soundly for quite a long time?” Maggie asked, sudden eagerness in her voice.

“For hours. Until morning at least.”

The wire sang softly again between them, the murderer humming, and each of them knew what was in the other’s mind, although neither expressed it directly — the understanding of what must be done now or never, thanks to Buddy, the necessary disposition of Madelaine which might, even tomorrow, be too late to be any longer necessary or beneficial.

“Did you say you’re going to some kind of meeting?” Maggie asked.

“Yes. A departmental faculty meeting.”

“When are you going?”

“The meeting’s for eight. I’ll leave here a little earlier.”

“Will you be late returning?”

“Some of us will stop off somewhere for coffee and a snack,” Brad told her. “It’s routine. I’d guess that I won’t be home before eleven. Possibly after.”

“Maybe it would be helpful if I were to call on Madelaine while you’re gone. Do you think so?”

“I did think so, but now I’m not sure. What about Buddy?”

“Nothing about him. He’ll be sorry for the trouble he’s caused, and I know how to prevent him from causing any more.” Maggie’s voice was grim and controlled.

“He’ll certainly suspect the truth,” Brad warned.

“I doubt it. He’s too stupid. I keep telling you not to worry about him.”

“Nevertheless, perhaps we’d better wait a while.”

“Perhaps. If you want to lose everything that you might otherwise have. After you have given her time to make different arrangements about her money, there will be little purpose, as I see it, in doing anything whatever.”

“Are you sure you can manage it?” Brad asked nervously, a cold sweat starting from the skin of his forehead.

“Of course I’m sure. I can manage practically anything I set my mind to. There’s simply no use in talking about it. You do as I say, and I’ll do the rest.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Simply leave the house dark and the back door unlocked. You had also better leave something for me to use. Leave it just inside on the floor. A hammer or something. It will be necessary to avoid making noise. Besides I don’t believe I’m strong enough to manage without using something.

“Good God!” Brad exclaimed. “It sounds horrible when you put it like that.”

“Well, it isn’t exactly pleasant when you face up to it, but I don’t see why you should be so squeamish when I’m the one who will do all the work,” Maggie told him with a terrible and frightening practicality.

“All right. I suppose it must be done. I’ll do as you say.”

“Good. As you see, there’s hardly anything for you to do. You must try very hard, however, not to seem nervous or disturbed at your meeting. It might be recalled as odd in view of what will be known later.”

“I’ll do my part all right.”

“Of course you will. I’m sure you’ll behave admirably. But now we must stop talking. You will need to leave soon to get to your meeting. Good-by, darling.”

Brad said good-by and hung up. His hands were shaking again, and he laced the fingers together to stop the shaking. It was almost seven-thirty-five, and he would have to hurry.