The Night Before Murder Page 4

  Dorothy shared her phone with this man. She paid to have her name put in the book, but the number was the same under which his was listed. She and Sherry had managed to pay him a dollar a month for his trouble.

  "If my name's in the Manhattan book," she said, "can I help it if—"

  "Never mind," he said, "answer it." He was in his bare feet and wore only a robe.

  She stepped across the hall into his apartment. It occurred to her that Mrs. Davis might be calling to cancel the invitation. For a moment she looked at the telephone and didn't want to touch it. The man standing at the door behind her viewed the situation with disgust. Dorothy picked up the phone.

  "Miss Dorothy Noel?" It was a man's voice.

  "Yes."

  "This is a friend," the voice went on, "a very good friend. I feel it my duty to warn you not to accept Mrs. Rhea Davis' house party invitation."

  "But I—"

  "If you value your life," the voice continued, "you will stay away."

  "But I can't, I—"

  "Remember it is your life," said the voice. Then the line went dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She was trembling and just a little dazed when she came back into her own apartment. Sherry asked about the call, and she said: "It was a mistake. They wanted Noel spelled with a K, isn't that my luck?" But her back was turned when she said this, and sensing the change in her voice Sherry grew quiet. Dorothy wanted to comfort her, but she could arouse no emotion within herself. She was afraid to talk about the call. She was afraid that speaking of it could admit its reality, and that Sherry or Clifton would try and make her stay in New York. She couldn't do that. She couldn't go on marking time. It didn't matter what that call meant. It must have been a joke. Things like that didn't happen.

  She began to undress. Sherry was sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette, her legs crossed under her. Dorothy tried to smile, but the muscles in her face were frozen. When she turned out the lights Sherry was still sitting there smoking.

  Dorothy lay sleepless on the bed throughout the night, her arm under her head, and her throat dry with suffocation. When there was light she got up—before Sherry for once—and made the coffee. Sherry was drowsy and the skin seemed to be flat and dead on her face. She sat in her chemise in the old green chair, dipping her doughnut in the coffee and not smiling, but saying once: "So it's another day."

  Dorothy turned on the radio then while she packed and tried to be cheerful. But she had put her clothes in the suitcase last night and there was only her toothbrush and a few odds and ends left. She tried to make a job of it. But at last it was obvious she was quite ready: she had put on her hat and her purse was in her hand, and turning, she was startled to see Sherry standing at the door. Sherry stood very straight, but she seemed a little ridiculous, with her plump breasts and her plump stomach, wearing a white linen skirt and an organdy blouse, pinkish hair still matted and uncombed on her head.

  "So long, peanut," she said.

  Dorothy said: "But—" Then she embraced Sherry, crying a little, and telling her she didn't want to go and leave her here; and Sherry cried too, saying all the things you say when you're being a good sport and a martyr. Then Dorothy had moved out into the blinding sunshine on Christopher Street, and Sherry was just a figure at the door waving.

  Clifton was waiting at Grand Central. He was nervous and Dorothy thought he looked strange out of his element: needing a haircut and wearing an immaculate though wrinkled linen suit, and an old Panama straw hat which made him look as though he had just arrived on a South American fruit boat. Dorothy looked somewhat better in cool green and a leghorn bonnet that shaded her eyes, and green sandals, though she felt nothing like dressed up.

  "I thought you'd never get here," Clifton said, and they moved through the turnstiles and down to the platform.

  On the train she watched the soot of the tunnel as they pulled out, and she listened to the click of the steel wheels ion the rails.

  "Did you get a phone call last night?" Clifton asked.

  She stiffened.

  "So did I," he said. He looked as though he was going to say more about it, then instead he glanced into the aisles and up at the ads in the top of the car. He shoved his hands into his pockets and slouched in the seat.

  Dorothy had expected Clifton to laugh and scoff, and now she felt herself growing tense inside. The train swished from the tunnel into the open sunshine, in between the steep banks of tenements where women leaned on pillows and hung their heads out to escape the heat of the rooms behind them. Dorothy made herself watch, hearing the ever-increasing click of wheels, and suddenly, just as the train rumbled across the Harlem River Bridge and left the sweltering island of Manhattan behind it, she shuddered.

  After that she tried to put it out of her mind. She connected the movement of the train with thoughts about her father whom a train had killed. She had been only seven when her mother died and all she remembered about her was what her father had told her: how she had run away from a home life that had been unbearable, and how she had been in a circus, a great, beautiful woman who could make tigers perform; and later when one of the tigers had scratched her how her father had married her and taken her out of the life to settle down as the wife of a lawyer. But she had never been really happy, her father said, she was too vital for a small town and she was restless. She had dreamed always of being on the road again, training the tigers, for the circus was in her blood even until the day she died.

  It was strange that although it was her father she had known, it was actually her mother she remembered when she thought of him. Her mother, and Henry Myers after her father's death. There had been nowhere for her to go and because Henry Myers was her godfather he had taken her in. Henry with his round, flabby face, and his dark, shining eyes: Henry, the widower, watching her when she rehearsed for local amateur theatricals, staring at her while she ate her breakfasts in the mornings, questioning her when she returned from a date with a boy, and then kissing her for the first time, taking her into his arms while she fought him and kissing her. Dorothy remembered running up the stairs and into her room and locking the door. But there had been nowhere she could go and when Henry apologized, she tried to overlook it. She tried to forget. He was being kind to keep her and she wanted to like him. But it was useless. The very sight of her put fever in his cheeks. The end had come that Sunday morning when he had grabbed at her and she had picked up a book end and hit him with it. She had watched as he fell soundlessly at her feet; then she saw the blood trickling from his head and she backed away with her hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. After that hysteria… packing and running.

  Somehow she had gotten to New York. Somehow when she collapsed in Sheridan Square a girl with round cheeks and strawberry hair had picked her up and said: "Look, kid, my name's Sherry Moore and I was just going to go across the street to Stewart's to have a cup of coffee…"

  Dorothy sat very still with her hands folded in her lap, thinking of this, and suddenly the train was pulling out of a station marked Larchmont, and Clifton was saying:

  "Next stop is ours."

  "Is it?" she said. "So soon?"

  Rhea Davis had managed to calm herself during the three-hour conference with her lawyer, but now that the attorney was gone she felt the old rising hysteria which she had first experienced last night. She sat propped up in the bed, and her doctor was at her side, indeed she had forbade him to leave her side even for a minute; she had intended saying, the moment the attorney walked out, "This is bosh, I'm going to get up," and now sitting there, she felt as though her tongue was wooden, and from the feeling that ached through her body she knew that it was physically impossible for her to stand.

  This both infuriated and frightened her. She looked out the window at the trees blossoming and green and she fought against the feeling of panic that beat from somewhere deep inside her. She deliberately refused to let her mind imagine things which were quite possible and quite awful. The morbid thoughts surrounded
her and plunged at her brain, but she fended them off. She looked at the doctor who was an immense, gray-haired man, easily ten years older than herself, and perfectly robust. She thought he looked even young and she suddenly resented this. Yet it seemed living proof that he was capable of taking care of himself, and his experience at least should render him competent in his profession. She had been unable to think of anyone else with whom she would entrust herself.

  "How long must this go on?" she said.

  He looked up slowly. "If it is indigestion," he said tonelessly, for he had said these things a great many times, "or if it was a slight reaction of your heart, even a slight case of poison—"

  "Don't you know?"

  He said: "There is no way of being sure. You say you feel an ache through your body. It is perhaps that you were overly tired and—"

  "—Or it could be hardening of the arteries," Rhea Davis said bitterly.

  "It could be that," he said.

  "But it isn't!"

  "No," he said, "it isn't."

  She said shrilly: "Are you a parrot or a doctor? When am I going to be able to get up?"

  "You should be able to get up this afternoon," he replied.

  She folded her hands in her lap and sat staring straight ahead of her. She knew that she would never be able to get up this afternoon and the realization came with somewhat of a jolt. He didn't know what was the matter with her! He was guessing. She turned to him, her voice a little desperate, for he had already done everything he knew to do.

  "Call one of your doctor friends," she said. "Call two or three of them. Get me a New York specialist."

  "But my dear Mrs. Davis, there is nothing seriously wrong with you—"

  "Do as I say!" she demanded.

  He moved to the telephone and she was still, catching for her breath because she had raised her voice to him and the excitement upset her. She felt weak. She wanted to lie down and yet she would not because lying down would be an admission of her defeat. She was in the midst of this turmoil when Grant came loping into the room.

  "I say, old girl, the house is beginning to fill with people. Don't you think we should put them off for a few days? I mean, damn it all, considering the circumstances—"

  "What circumstances?"

  "Oh, come, Mater. You aren't well. You are scarcely fit to entertain."

  "What makes you think I won't get well?"

  "Oh, I say now, aren't you being just a bit ugly?" Grant was vexed.

  She stared at and through him. "How many guests have arrived?"

  He looked toward the ceiling and counted them on his fingers. "Mike Wiggam makes one, Sam Tulley, two, and there is a quaint-looking young couple who just now came in. A Mr. Clifton Dell and a Miss Dorothy Noel. Really, Ducky, I do think—"

  "Where are the others?"

  "Others?" Grant echoed. "You mean—there's more coming?"

  "I invited at least five others," Rhea Davis said. "Never mind. Bring those who are here up to see me."

  "I say, you mean—like this? With you in bed? Dash it all, Mater, I—"

  "And quit trying to do my thinking," she said harshly.

  A little confused, Grant took his leave, and Rhea Davis sat waiting for the guests. She had a sudden desire to see a lot of people. It was perhaps part of her fear. She wanted to gather company about her so that she could take her mind from herself. She didn't want to think about the sickness which she had felt first last night upon her arrival home, and even though she felt that all four of the people who were coming in were inferior to her she could transfer her thoughts to them. The doctor was still on the telephone, but he spoke in a voice so low that she scarcely noticed him. She attempted to sit up a little straighter and bit her lip with the pain that shot through her.

  Dorothy Noel and Clifton Dell came in first and she greeted them effusively as though they were old friends, apologizing for her temporary illness, and telling them that she wanted them to enjoy the grounds and the waters of the Sound that adjoined them. Mike Wiggam came in then, lean and gaunt, wearing his same unpressed gray tweed suit, and said, "Hello, Rhea," and following him was Sam Tulley, fat, roly-poly, dry washing his hands.

  "Rhea, my dear, don't tell me you are sick."

  She told him that she was, just a little, and then she looked at him, concentrating her gaze on Sam Tulley as she proceeded almost mechanically with banal conversation about the sunshine, and yes it was nice out here in the country all right, away from the intense heat of the city streets; but she didn't even listen to what she was saying, let alone think about it. Instead she was thinking that it was very like Sam Tulley to come in dry washing his chubby little hands and looking at her with his rubbery little black eyes. She was thinking that it was very like him to say: "Rhea, my dear, don't tell me you are sick?" because that was the most over-used and inane cliche that would fit the occasion, and Sam Tulley could be depended on for a triteness that eventually made you want to scream.

  "And a cool dip in the morning," Sam was saying. "Ah, how I like a cool dip in the morning."

  Sam, she thought, was himself a cliche. He was one little round pot-bellied cliche with the cigar in his mouth, and the gold tooth visible every time he smiled, and the shiny blue suit, and the tiny diamond cuff links, and the ridiculous pearl in his tie pin. She had met him sometime during the past ten years, first when he had been ignorant enough to bring her a play he wanted to back and asking if she would honor him by taking the lead, just as though she were accustomed to playing in the shows written by unknown authors and backed by shoestring producers. For in those days he had possessed little more than a shoestring. During the ten years she had known him, and met him oft and on, he had prospered with two hits, both comedies, and had had eight failures. The failures, however, always lost money for Sam Tulley's angels, so that he himself was never actually burned. In spite of the money he had made he was a Broadway hanger-on more than a producer, interested in actors' charities, and full of talk about building theaters for posterity. She had interested herself in some of this talk, but her reason for inviting him here was that she had known he was the one producer out of all those in New York who would have nothing better to do than to sponge on somebody for the summer.

  Sam was saying now: "I do hope, Rhea, you'll be able to join us for supper. Good old supper in the country."

  "I'm afraid not," she said, and thought: good old cliche in a blue suit; and almost at once she turned her attention to Mike Wiggam. Mike was different. She had more feeling for him. Back in the days when she was first beginning to realize that forty was too old for an ingenue, even if her name was Rhea Davis, and had been forced to make the drastic change to vehicles which starred the character woman (was that twenty years ago, was it as long ago as that?) Mike Wiggam had come along with just the right play, the first he had ever written, and the last. The play and she were both a hit. (It was new success, being a hit as a character woman.) She was delighted with Mike Wiggam and asked him to do another play. He became her press agent instead. He had been a newspaperman all of his life and the play had been something he wanted to get out of his system.

  She looked at him. His hair had turned gray, though his long, sallow face still maintained a look of youth. Yet he must be fifty, she told herself; the dull, dilated look of his eyes, the bitterness that had made lines up from the corners of his mouth to his nose, the network of blood veins barely discernible at the tips of his cheeks. Once the cheeks had merely been rosy. Yes, he was fifty. A pity that alter twelve years of handling her press she had flown into a rage and fired him. Since then, these last eight years, he had rapidly gone to seed. Seedy seed. For two years a dipsomaniac. For one year an asylum where they took him to cure him from drinking. He had written a book about the asylum and made money on it, and he had done a few magazine articles since, but he had never been able to get back on a paper, and because he never married, he wandered around, lonely, like a man out of jail, not knowing what to do with himself. He no longer drank, and
it might have been better if he did. If he drank and died. Rhea Davis had invited him because she felt sorry for him. She knew that he still hated her for firing him eight years ago, yet she felt it was a quiet and subdued hatred, and that his bitterness must have made him see the futility of it.

  Mike was saying: "It'll be a rest; anyway. A good many of us have needed that."

  Mike Wiggam said that, but he didn't say much more. He put his hands in his pockets and stood by the window, disinterested in the conversation going on about him. His shoulder blades are bony, Rhea Davis thought, you can see them through that old tweed coat.

  Grant and Betty came in now so that the party was complete. Clifford Dell and Dorothy Noel were shy, and Rhea Davis was amused that they probably thought they were among celebrities. Sam Tulley kept rubbing his hands, as though he were a butcher, and it was he who did most of the talking.

  "Nothing like summer sunshine and God's birds singing in the trees, I always say."

  Mike Wiggam said: "And beer."

  "Ah, yes, beer," said Sam. "Grant and I stood at the corner bar yesterday drinking it until we thought we'd bust, didn't we, old man?"

  "Rath-are," chirped Grant.

  Betty came to the bedside. "Mother, aren't all these people just a little too much—?"

  Rhea Davis nodded wearily. "I'm afraid so. Have Frances show them to their rooms." Betty looked blank.

  Rhea Davis raised her voice. "I say—have Frances show them to their rooms."

  * * *

  She had the doctor help her lie down the moment the last person had gone. Her feet and her legs seemed to be tied up in knots of pain that made her want to scream. Her stomach and chest ached. The doctor put his hand on her forehead, then he put a thermometer in her mouth. He moved around a little faster after that, and lying there on the pillow she grew gravely apprehensive. She saw him go into the bathroom and come out. He returned to the telephone, spoke rather urgently. Rhea Davis' fingers curled in, then straightened. She felt blinding pain between her eyes, but this was from worry and fright. She could not help but think of herself as a sick old woman aching in every limb, and trembling in the fear that every moment would be her last. The doctor crossed the room.