The Dishonest Murderer (2 page)

“Nothing,” the admiral said. “I'm—I'm fond of you, Freddie. Know that, don't you? You know what you're doing?”

“Of course,” Freddie said. “We've been over it, Dad.”

“Well,” the admiral said, “he's a politician, you know.”

“Darling,” Freddie said. “Please, Dad. We
have
been over it. Bruce is a senator—a United States senator.”

The admiral said “Wumph,” doubtfully.

“And,” Freddie said, “you like him. You know you do.”

The admiral briefly raised square shoulders.

“Nothing against him,” he said. “As a man. Seems all right. Good war record.” He smiled, with his lips only. “Set in my ways, Freddie,” he said. “Probably there's nothing to it.”

She was puzzled by that. She looked an enquiry. She thought, surprised, that her father had not meant to say the last—not out loud, not to her.

“Nothing to what?” she said. “What is it, Dad?”

The admiral said “eruh,” as one word, which he did on those few occasions when he was uncertain. He resumed command at once.

“Prejudice against politicians,” he said, with finality. “What do you people say? An allergy.”

She said, “Oh.”

“And I'm fond of you,” he said. “Don't want you to make a mistake. Damn those monkeys.”

She knew what he meant by that. Damn the “monkey,” the hideously courageous, horribly skillful “monkey” who had crashed his plane against the bridge of a destroyer off Okinawa; against the bridge of Commander John Haven's destroyer.

“That was another day,” Freddie said. “A fine day. It won't come back, Dad. There's no use.”

She looked up at him.

“This isn't a mistake, Dad,” she said.

The admiral said “Wumph” once more. He patted her bare shoulder. She thought, for a moment, that he was about to say something further; she had a feeling, not easy to explain, that he had more to say about Bruce, was hesitating to say it. But there was nothing tangible to indicate this, and when the admiral spoke again it was merely to ask her if she were coming down. She shook her head, said there were finishing touches.

“Can't see where,” her father said, looking at her with approval. “I'll go down, then.” He patted her shoulder once more. He was more demonstrative than usual, she thought; more anxious that she should know his fondness for her. It was as if he were, secretly, uneasy about her. She watched him turn, go out the door, and felt her own previous uneasiness returning. She tried to shake it off, to persuade herself to accept the obvious. Fancied resemblance; fancied implication in a sentence; imagined note of concern in her father's voice. One led to the other; one heightened the other. If she had not imagined Bruce in a big man walking somewhere on the lower east side, glimpsed briefly, with a shabby overcoat open on a cold night, she would not have gone on imagining. “Probably there's nothing to it,” her father had said, and seemed to hesitate when she asked an explanation, but then had given her an explanation entirely reasonable. There was nothing to any of it.

She returned to her dressing table and the finishing touches. For several minutes she was able to occupy her mind with them. But then the slight feeling of uneasiness, the ridiculous feeling of anxiety, came creeping back. She could not keep it from creeping back.

Well, she thought, if I'm going to be this way, I may as well call Bruce and—and know he's all right. He would, she thought, be at the Waldorf by now; he would not yet have left to come to the apartment.

She went across the room to her desk near the bed and took up the telephone of her extension. Then she heard her father's voice, speaking on one of the other extensions, and instinctively started to replace the receiver.

“—as of tonight,” she heard her father say. “Circumstances have changed. Send me your bill and—”

She had replaced the receiver by then. But she stood looking at it. “As of tonight.” For no reason, no explicable reason, the words entered into, became part of, her anxiety. She lifted the receiver again.

A man's voice she did not think she had ever heard before was speaking.

“—to you,” she heard the voice say. “What we've got begins to make it look like there was something to it. But it's up to you, Admiral. He's going to be your son—”

“That's all,” her father cut in. “That's enough. I've told you what I want. I'll expect your bill.”

“Sure,” the other voice said. “Sure, Admiral. Whatever you say.”

“Goodbye,” the admiral said. She heard the click of his replaced receiver.

She put the telephone back in its cradle and stood for a moment without moving. She stood erect, as her father had taught her, her square shoulders high, her slim body motionless in the moulding golden dress. She looked at nothing; saw nothing. She could feel a kind of tightening in her mind. Her mind seemed to be tightening, almost quivering, under repeated, inexplicable, tiny blows. It was as if something were flicking at her mind, something invisible were stinging it.

“Going to be your son—” Son-in-law, the man must have been going to say when her father, his voice firm with authority, sharp with impatience, cut him off. Bruce—it was, again, something about Bruce. “Probably there's nothing to it,” her father had said. That had been something about Bruce. The shambling man seen from the car window—but that could not have been Bruce Kirkhill.

Something was happening to the day, the last day of the year; something was happening to her, to the order of things, to tranquility. It had been a day like any other day, with the difference that it, more than most, had slanted upward toward the evening, toward the party and the drinking in of a New Year; toward the party which was, tacitly only, for her and Bruce. It was to be the first party for both of them, for them as a unit.

There had been the not arduous responsibilities of a hostess with an adequate staff, in an apartment more than adequate to any probable party. There had been lunch at the Colony with Celia, and Celia's young, happy excitement about almost everything, and Celia's admiring eyes. Remembering the way Celia looked at her, Freddie smiled faintly, her shapeless anxiety momentarily lessened. Anyway, it was going to be fine with Celia; Celia's admiration of this not too much older woman who was to be her step-mother was evident and undisguised. Celia might have been eight, instead of eighteen, when she looked at Freddie Haven. Sometimes it was almost embarrassing. No one, Freddie thought, and least of all I, can be what Celia thinks I am.

There had been the luncheon, which was pleasant, and the tea at Aunt Flo's, which was not unpleasant. Tea had meant sherry, with an alternative of scotch, and The Benefit had been rather thoroughly discussed, according to democratic procedures. (This meant that Aunt Flo, and the Dowager Admiral, had been duly authorized to do what they would have done anyway: take matters into their firm and capable hands. The meeting had, as was inevitable, been less that of a committee than of a staff. That it even so much as authorized was a pleasant, gently absurd, fiction.)

And then this slow disintegration of the day had set in; this uneasiness had begun. It was, Freddie thought, like one of those morning moments when you awakened, lay contentedly for a little time and then became conscious of a vague dissatisfaction, as if you were already in the shadow of some impending disappointment. Such things meant nothing. The feeling vanished when you remembered some tiny thing—you were committed to an engagement which promised badly; you had undertaken to do something which, now, you did not want to do. This anxiety was hardly sharper than that passing premonition of disappointment, but this, for all its shapelessness, had a center—Bruce. Bruce whom she could not have seen shabby on the lower East Side; Bruce about whom her father's half formed hint, half finished sentences, could mean nothing.

Freddie Haven took the telephone up, found the telephone number of the Waldorf-Astoria in her memory, and dialed. She asked for Senator Bruce Kirkhill and waited.

“Senator Kirkhill is not registered, modom,” a young woman's voice said.

That was wrong; that was merely inefficiency. Freddie said as much, courteously, without emphasis. There was a mistake; Senator Kirkhill was unquestionably registered.

She was passed along. A man's voice was less detached. The man recognized the possibility of error. He went and, after a minute or two, returned. He was sorry; Senator Kirkhill was not registered. A suite was reserved for him, however. He was expected. A message for him would be happily accepted.

“No,” Freddie said. “Thank you. Is there a Mr. Phipps? Howard Phipps?”

The assistant manager checked again. A Mr. Phipps there was. She was asked to wait. A young woman's voice said, “I'm ringing Mr. Phipps.” There was the sound of ringing, continued over-long.

“I'm sorry, modom,” the girl said. “Mr. Phipps's room does not answer. Would you wish—”

“Thanks,” Freddie said. “Don't bother.” She hung up.

What it all amounts to is that he took a later train, she assured herself. There's nothing strange about it. There can't be anything strange.

Her desk clock told her it was almost ten. “Tennish” would not mean ten o'clock to anyone, except possibly Aunt Flo. Still—She looked at herself in a long mirror, nodded, and went out of the room and down the stairs to the lower floor of the duplex. Marta and the new maid were in the foyer, sitting side by side on straight chairs. They stood up as Freddie came down and she grinned at them.

“Carry on,” she said. “As you were.”

Marta giggled without making a sound, her shoulders shaking slightly. The new maid looked politely puzzled.

“Yes'm,” Marta said, and sat down. She pulled at the sleeve of the other maid. “Carry on,” she said. She giggled again, soundlessly. “You're in the Navy now.”

Freddie went on into the living room. Marta, she suspected, would tell the new maid that it was all right to joke with Mrs. Haven; that Admiral Satterbee was another matter. “The admiral don't notice lessen it's wrong,” Freddie once had overheard Marta tell another new maid. It was true enough, Freddie had thought; it applied to the lower ranks, as well as to those who might be identified with the enlisted personnel.

She said good evening to Watkins, who was supervising a waitress, who was polishing already polished glasses. She went on into the kitchen and told cook that everything looked wonderful, and filched a shrimp from an iced plate of shrimps. “Now Miss Freddie,” cook said. “Leaves an empty space.” Freddie shuffled shrimps, filling in the space. Cook had been around a long time; she had been known to be stern, within reason, with the admiral himself. A buzzer sounded faintly.

“There's people, Miss Freddie,” the cook said, and Freddie went out to meet people. She went rather quickly, and only when she heard Aunt Flo's voice did she realize that she had hoped the voice would be Bruce's. She greeted Aunt Flo and Uncle William, not showing that she had wanted them to be Bruce Kirkhill. Tactfully, after the greeting, she enquired about the driver. Uncle William sometimes forgot. “The boy's all right,” Uncle William assured her. “Told him he could take in a movie.” He beamed at his niece by marriage. “You look fine, Freddie,” he said. “How's Johnny Jump-up?”

It was always odd to hear her father called that. The theory was that they had called him that in the Pacific: “Old Johnny Jump-up.” There had been a time when Admiral Satterbee's task force had jumped apparently out of nowhere, disconcerting the Japanese. Freddie, with the best will in the world, had never been able to believe that her father was, widely, known by so irreverent a nickname. As Uncle William used it, she noticed that the term was invisibly bracketed by marks of quotation.

Admiral Satterbee came out of the library, greeted his wife's sister and Admiral William Fensley and, firmly, led everybody to Watkins and the scotch. With glasses filled, Admiral Satterbee drew Admiral Fensley out of the feminine and into the professional circle.

“This new flat-top, Bill,” Freddie heard him say. “What d'y think?”

“Hell of a big target,” Bill, a battleship man to the end, assured him. “Wait till—”

“—of course,” Aunt Flo said, “there's always the question of the reviews. You remember, dear, when the League took over that play that looked so good before it opened, and then all those critics said—”

It was ten minutes before the buzzer sounded again and Freddie, still being invited to worry about the reviews of the play the League was planning to use as a benefit, brought back her wandering mind and—found she was listening again for, but again not hearing, the voice of Bruce Kirkhill.

They came with some rapidity, thereafter, since Navy people are habitually punctual and these were, for the most part, Navy people. They came, they took drinks; the Navy men tended to coagulate and were, by her as hostess, gently, not too obviously, redistributed. There was enough to do as the big living room filled slowly; there were enough small things to think about, details to keep an eye on. But now, as time passed, as tennish became elevenish, it was increasingly difficult to keep her mind on pleasant chat, to shape her lips into a welcoming smile, keep interest in her voice. Because, still, Bruce did not come.

It was a few minutes after eleven when a couple she did not know appeared at the door of the living room and paused there, with the slightly bewildered, rather anxiously amiable expressions of people who know no one present and wait to be, as it were, adopted. That was, at any rate, the expression on the face of the man, who wore glasses and who, as he stood there, absently ran the fingers of his right hand through short hair already faintly pawed. The expression on the face of the slight, trim woman beside him was more difficult to analyze. She appeared to be, above everything else, interested in the room—in the people, in all of the scene—and to have a bright intensity in her interest, as if it were all new, freshly seen and to be taken in gulps. There was nothing appraising about the slight young woman's expression. She merely seemed pleased to see so many things, so many of them alive.