Читать книгу False to Any Man - Leslie Ford - Страница 9

The next morning when Lilac brought my breakfast tray she put it down without a word, not even the sort of grunt that usually means that Shiela, my Irish setter, has been sick on the hall rug. She rattled up the Venetian, blind behind my dressing table, banged down the window and demanded darkly, “What’s they done to that chile?”

I shook my head. Lilac can’t fool me. She knows more about everything that goes on than I do, and long before. I poured a cup of coffee and took a sip of orange juice.

“She done cry herself to sleep in there all by herself, las’ night.”

She picked up my shoes and jammed them in the rack.

“Oh dear!” I thought. I’d somehow got the sentimental notion that Jerry would go to sleep happier than she’d been for ages.

“Mus’ is that devil Karen Lunt,” Lilac said.

“Why, Lilac!” I exclaimed.

“William, he say she’s a devil,” she retorted. “An’ he been livin’ there since he was bawn. He say the Judge, she got him wrapped up in her apron, with them blue bat eyes.”

She stressed the “blue” as if it were a strange unholy color for eyes to be.

“An’ her tongue sweet as butter. He say, ain’ no knowin’ what devilment she up to nex’.”

I don’t know why I always try to defend people that Lilac doesn’t like. “She seems to me a very attractive girl,” I said. “I’m going to supper there tonight.”

“Then you ought to be ’shamed,” Lilac replied. “—An’ that pore baby in there cryin’ her heart out.”

She went out, mumbling and muttering. I don’t know why I put up with her, except that I couldn’t live without her. She came before my older child was born, and he’ll be seventeen before long. Sometimes her loyalties that know no shading are pretty trying . . . especially if I happen to have at the same dinner party someone she calls a saint on earth seated next to somebody who’s a devil from hell. I opened my paper, wondering myself if I really ought to go to Karen’s party. Then I heard Lilac coming back from the stairs.

“Is that chile comin’ back tonight?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Ask her.”

“She’s went, to th’ office.—Her workin’ like common trash.”

“Don’t be stupid, Lilac,” I said sharply. “Working doesn’t make people common.”

“Then why don’ that Karen Lunt get herself a job, ’stead of layin’ in bed till noon every day?”

I realized I’d fallen headlong into a trap. She gave a kind of victorious grunt and closed the door, and I went back to my paper, thinking that after all it was a small price to pay for peace.

Then the telephone rang. If I’d really thought we were going to have any peace that day, I was wrong. I picked it up, heard the operator say “Five cents, please,” heard a nickel clang at the other end and the operator say “Go ahead, please.”

A man’s voice said, “Is Miss Candler there?”

I said, “No, she’s not. Is it you, Roger?” And before I’d got it out of my mouth I realized it wasn’t Roger. It was a quite oily voice, and it said “Who?” so quickly and in such a pouncing way that I was a little disturbed.

I said, “Miss Candler is not here.”

“Where can I get in touch with her?”

By this time, whether it was because Lilac had been so trying, or because I hadn’t had breakfast yet, or there actually was in that voice all I seemed to feel in it, I was really worried. I said, “Who’s calling, please?”

“A friend,” the man answered. “It’s important I get in touch with her.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Perhaps you’d better call her home.”

“She stayed all night at your place, didn’t she?” the voice demanded unpleasantly.

The nice thing about a telephone is that you can bang it down. Not that it did much good. An hour later he called again. Lilac answered. Not even my friends can get information out of her, so that was all right. He called again at eleven and twice during lunch. Some women came in to play bridge in the afternoon, and every half hour, it seemed to me, the phone would ring again, and Lilac would put her head—getting blacker each time—in the door and say, “That man callin’ up ’bout Miss Jerry again.” It got so I could almost hear that nickel clanging and hear that oily unpleasant voice.

And you can always count on your friends to be helpful, especially when they’re dummy. Dummy on the east said, “Jeremy Candler’s a frightfully nice girl, but I do wish she’d give that old brown velvet evening dress to the Salvation Army. By the way—have you heard! Sandy’s got a job, believe it or not, and they say he’s working like a beaver.”

She paused to fish inelegantly around in the silver dish for a chocolate that wouldn’t be too fattening.

“You know, I don’t see how anybody as ugly as Sandy can be so completely attractive. I suppose, though, if he’d been a Greek god he’d never have come through that crackup in the Bakers’ cornfield last spring without a scratch the way he did. Just think what a good plastic surgeon could have done with that face. I know Ben Adams, who did over Lucy Dawes, is dying to have a go at him. And so far he’s demolished at least three cars and the plane and nine telephone poles without so much as a sprained ankle . . .”

“I suppose now he’s got a job he’ll slip on the hall rug and break his neck,” my partner remarked. “It’s your deal, Grace.”

The phone rang once more just then, and I was so jittery I exposed the only king I’d had all afternoon and then had to watch it trump the only ace I’d had for years.

Dummy on the west took up the Candlers where dummy on the east had dropped them.

“I wonder what happened between Sandy and Karen Lunt. Maybe he took it too much for granted. Maybe it’s money. But in that case I can’t see why Karen’s wasting her time with Geoffrey McClure. He may be as handsome as sin, but the wife of one of the legation secretaries told me his family haven’t anything but a mouldy old country house with thirty bedrooms and one bath and six daughters to marry off.”

My partner, glowering mildly as my singleton ace dropped, said, “I should think Karen would concentrate on Roger Doyle. His father’s literally rolling.”

“He’s not handing any of it out,” Dummy said. “Do you know—I saw Miss Isabel Doyle at the auction of old Miss Fairweather’s things the other day. She bought three trunks of old clothes sight unseen! If she turns up in that purple feather boa Miss Fairweather used to wear to early service at the Cathedral, I’ll die—literally! That’s game and rubber for us, partner. You could have taken Grace’s jack if you’d finessed her eight. That’s eighty-three cents you owe me, Grace.”

She could have taken practically anything in my hand and I could have owed her eighty-three dollars and I wouldn’t have cared. Miss Isabel Doyle’s purple feather boa weighted me down like the albatross, for some reason. Lilac bringing in tea was all that got me through the rest of the afternoon. If the phone had rung again, I should have died—literally.

I almost did anyway when the last one of them had gone laughing down the snowy steps, and I’d gone back to the living room to collapse a moment and the doorbell suddenly jangled as if it were being yanked off its ancient springs. My heart sank.

“If it’s that man who’s been phoning, Lilac,” I said, “I wish you’d call Sergeant Buck.”

Then my heart sank even further. I’d never thought the day would come when I’d find myself thinking of that dead pan and those fishy eyes with anything like affection. I realized suddenly that from the third time the phone had rung I’d been thinking about him—him and not his Colonel, for Colonel Primrose believes generally in law and order and Sergeant Buck, in his grim way, knows there are some things the police can’t do.

I was considerably more relieved than I cared to admit, however, in spite of Sergeant Buck down the street, when it was Sandy Candler who bolted into the room, not the oily gent from some tavern pay station with a pocketful of nickels. Except that the relief didn’t last very long.

He tossed his hat on the chair by the door. “Where’s Jerry, Grace?” he demanded abruptly.

If my heart hadn’t already been exhausted from its various sinking spells, it would have gone down to my boots with one look at his red-headed ugly face. “It’s not handsome, Mrs. Latham, but it’s the kind any girl’s mother will trust,” he’d grinned the first time I ever saw him, and I know that in five minutes I would have trusted him anywhere—even behind the wheel of a car, which was little short of suicide from everything one heard.

Now, standing in the middle of the room, his brown eyes anxious, his long lank ungainly figure lurched forward, he was even uglier and oddly enough even more comforting than I’d ever thought him.

“Where is she, Grace?” he repeated urgently.

“She left here for the office at half-past eight,” I said. “Have you tried there?”

“She hasn’t been there all day. They said she called up from a pay station first thing this morning. Said she wasn’t feeling very well, but she’d be in after lunch. She didn’t come in, and didn’t phone.”

He started to stick his hand in his pocket, and reached down instead to the silver box on the mantel for a cigarette. I noticed that the knuckles of his big red hairy hands were crisscrossed with fresh clean adhesive tape. I took a deep breath and counted ten. After all, Jerry was a pretty intelligent young person and there was no sense getting alarmed. There are lots of times, I told myself, when one wants to get off alone. But I could have counted ten hundred without stilling the sickening dread in the pit of my stomach. Jerry might be intelligent, but she certainly wasn’t herself, and one look at Sandy and no one would have called him an alarmist—especially about his own sister.

“If she’s out driving around the country in that collapsible crate she’s probably lying in a ditch somewhere,” he groaned. “The roads are like glass, and those tires of hers should have been boiled down for erasers fifteen thousand miles ago.”

“There are worse places than ditches,” I said. “Especially nice snow-filled ones.”

He threw the half-smoked cigarette into the fire. “Look, Grace—did she say whether she was going to show up for Karen’s party?”

“So that’s what you’re chucking your weight about for?” I asked. I was a little annoyed that it was Karen he was thinking about, not Jerry at all.

“And it’s plenty,” he said shortly.

“I suppose what really matters is her getting home in time to sign the papers your father’s——” I remarked, and stopped as Sandy jerked up as if I’d struck him full in his ungainly face. “Oh, Lord,” I thought; “you complete idiot!”

“You mean, he’s——”

He picked up another cigarette, turned his back to me and lighted it. “So that’s it,” he said after a moment. “The poor little devil.”

“Look,” I said. “I don’t know what all this is about, and very likely it’s none of my business. But why is it Jerry that’s on this spot?”

“Because she was twenty-one three weeks ago,” he said. His big elastic mouth twitched ironically. “Up to that time she wouldn’t have mattered. Dad and Mr. Doyle could have done it instead.”

It still didn’t make sense to me.

“Does she have to give Karen this stock everybody’s jittering about?”

Sandy bit his lips. “I guess she does. Unless she wants to sink the ship with all hands aboard.”

“Legally?”

“Not legally.”

“Morally?”

“Nor morally either.”

“Then why——” I began.

“To keep Dad’s name out of the headlines, in case this . . . business in Washington goes through,” he answered quietly. “That’s why. Don’t try to make it make sense. It doesn’t, and it didn’t, and it never will.”

“Sandy—do you want her to give it back?” I asked.

“I didn’t, this noon.” He looked down rather grimly at his plastered knuckles. “My guess now is it’ll be the . . . well, the easy way out.”

I nodded at his hand. “What happened?”

He shrugged his big angular shoulders.

“I don’t exactly know. A cop was picking the rat up out of the gutter in front of the Treasury Building, the last I saw. I was running like hell.”

“To keep ‘Judge’s Son Arrested in Street Brawl’ out of the headlines?”

“Something of the sort. The guy collared me as I was coming out of the office. Said he was an attorney looking into the management of Miss Lunt’s estate, and we’d better do something about a certain stock, or else. I didn’t catch the rest of it—a fireman’s parade was going by.”

My hand against my cheek was as cold as ice. Sandy looked at me.

“What’s the matter, Grace?”

His brown eyes—all brown, not flecked with sun like his sister’s—tightened apprehensively.

“Just that I’m wondering if that’s the man who’s been calling here for Jerry all day—sort of oily-voiced.”

His face went a shade grimmer. “The dirty bastard,” he said softly. He got up. Somehow I had the idea that it would take more than a telephone pole to stop him when he got going. He picked up his hat from the chair. “I’ll see you at Karen’s,” he said.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“You’ve got to,” he said quietly. “The family may need a friend.”