The Oxford Book of American Det (81 page)

Someone presumably introduced Tristan to Iseult and Paolo to Francesca. No one introduced Petrarch to Laura, so no one wrote a tragedy on the subject culminating in murder. Someone introduced Harvey Hawley Crippen to Ethel LeNeve and someone introduced Judd Gray to Ruth Snyder.

And Lieutenant Donald MacDonald, Homicide, LAPD, said, “Lynn Dvorak, may I present Steve Harnett?”

So for once, MacDonald was later to reflect, Nick Noble had been in on a murder even before it happened. It was in October, that first and fatal interview, and throughout that winter the lieutenant kept running into Steve and Lynn, at the Philharmonic, at Musso and Frank’s, at the Biltmore Theater, until he began thinking of them as SteveandLynn in one word, and automatically looking for one if he saw the other.

“I started something,” he would muse ruefully as he had a drink with them after a concert. It was not only that they were physically in love (even to the hand-holding-in-public stage, which was embarrassing in a man of Steve’s thirty-six years); but they obviously fitted together so well in so many non-physical respects. Their ears heard the same music; their mouths laughed the same laughter.

But with Steve at least there was something under the laughter, something that caused moments when the successful writer, the man happily in love, gave way for an instant to a small boy, terrified of some incalculable but certain retribution.

It was one of those moments that seized Steve as the three of them were drinking after an unusually interesting production of one-acts at the Actors’ Lab. He had said nothing for five minutes, and there was supplication in the glance Lynn cast to MacDonald as she gave up her single-handed attempt at brightness and retired to the ladies’ room.

MacDonald could think of nothing to do but emit that wordless questioning noise and assume that sympathetic half-smile which had caused the Pengcraft murderer to reveal where he had hidden the other half of the body.

Steve Harnett roused himself from his brooding. “I’ve got to talk to you, Don,” he said abruptly. “It’s getting me down. I can’t think straight.”

“Any time,” said MacDonald. “Unless a crime wave takes priority.”

“Dinner next Thursday?” Steve said eagerly. “I’m in Brentwood; it’s in the phone book. Say around seven for drinks?”

MacDonald made a note and tried to smile reassuringly at Lynn when she came back.

“That couple you introduced here?” Nick Noble asked two nights later, when MacDonald had dropped in with a report on the death-cell confession of a man in whose career Noble had taken a certain decisive interest. “They all right?”

“Sure. I guess so.”

“Liked the girl. Alive—like Martha... Trouble for her. Sorry...”

“Why should there be trouble?” MacDonald asked uneasily.

Nick Noble paused and deliberately brushed away the fly which always perched invisibly on his sharp nose. “Call it... the Unspeckled Band,” he said.

There were times, MacDonald reflected as he beckoned to Rosario, when Nick Noble’s cryptic impulses seemed to spring from pure malice.

The Harnett home was small, comfortable, unpretentious, and therefore probably only mildly fabulous in cost. Steve Harnett, MacDonald had learned from a few questions of other friends in radio, was well in the charge-account-at-the-Brown-Derby class but somewhat short of the swimming pool level. His questions should have prepared him for his first surprise; but there was one question he hadn’t thought to ask.

The woman who answered the door was in her early thirties—slender, a trifle pale, and more than a trifle attractive, again in a comfortable, unpretentious, and mildly expensive manner. She held out a hand and said, “Good evening. Lieutenant MacDonald? I’m Harriet—Steve’s wife.”

Abruptly MacDonald understood the Unspeckled Band—the colourless strip on Steve’s third finger, left hand. He was still trying to mask his angry amazement with polite conversation when Steve came in, followed by a plain heavy-set girl with a handful of papers. Here in Brentwood domesticity, MacDonald observed, Steve wore a plain gold wedding ring.

“Glad you could make it, Don. You and Harriet getting yourselves acquainted? This is Pat McVeagh, my secretary—Lieutenant MacDonald.” And he was suddenly very busy with ice and gin and vermouth and lemon peel and the careful avoidance of MacDonald’s eyes.

The secretary left after one drink, without having opened her mouth for any non-alcoholic purpose. Then, just as MacDonald was trying to get the feel of the Harriet-Steve relationship, the elder Mrs. Harnett slipped in and there were more introductions.

MacDonald could not have told you, an hour after dinner, what he had eaten. He was too concentrated on trying to persuade himself that he was on a social and not a professional visit. He was too surrounded by all too tangible undercurrents.

Mrs. Harriett Sr., he decided, was the most obtrusively unobtrusive little old lady he had ever known. She effaced herself completely—a gray wraith in a corner, coming to life only with an occasional plaintive don’t-mind-me. But whatever topic was under discussion—another round of drinks, a proposed weekend at La Jolla, a new limerick of Steve’s composition—her quiet reminder of her own self-effacement had the power of a Security Council veto.

There were other undercurrents: a barb from Steve to Harriet about the cooking of the dinner, a barb from Harriet to Steve about his prospects in radio, some obscure reference to the absent secretary...

It was with great relief that MacDonald let Steve drag him off to the study as soon as decently possible after dinner. It was a good room, from the outmodedly comfortable chairs to the cases full of erratically and lovingly chosen books, from the battered standard typewriter to the miniature electric icebox, of the type usually employed for baby formula.

Steve Harnett took two cans of beer from the box, punctured them, handed one to his guest, kicked off his shoes, and began to pace around the room.

“Necessary adjunct to work, beer,” he muttered. “Always figure it takes me exactly a quart to a script.”

“You work on beer and Nick Noble on sherry,” MacDonald observed. “And I can’t drink on duty. There’s no justice in this world.” He waited, but Steve kept on pacing.

“You never mentioned Harriet,” he said expressionlessly. “I suppose I must’ve read about your marriage in an alumni bulletin, but I’d forgotten.”

“We’ve been married ten years.” Steve’s voice was more tenor than baritone now.

“Any children?”

“Last fall we were hoping... That’s when I met you. But in December Harriet had to go to the hospital. Now they say we won’t ever.”

“So it all started while Harriet was—“

Steve stopped pacing. “Don’t think I’m saying that to justify it, Don. I’m not. I can’t justify it, not even to myself. But it’s happened—hell, it happened that night down at your little Mex joint.
Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might...”

“...Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
MacDonald finished for him. “I remember, Steve. You always were a sucker for quotations. Lends authority, doesn’t it? Takes away your own responsibility for what you’re saying.”

“Does my radio-trained ear detect what we cliché-experts call a thinly-veiled edge of contempt in your voice, Don?”

“It’s no business of mine,” MacDonald said optimistically. “But you’re getting yourself into one sweet mess. Does Harriet know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“She’s bound to eventually. You haven’t been precisely discreet, and there’s always a helpful friend... Does Lynn know about Harriet?”

“Yes...” Steve’s eyes rested on the gold band on his left hand.

“In other words, now she does but she didn’t at first?” Steve didn’t answer that one. Instead he said, “But, Don, you don’t understand.

Maybe nobody can until it happens to him. But this... this isn’t just an affair.”

“Are they ever?”

“It isn’t just... fun in bed. It’s being together—being us.”

“So what did you want me for? Name of a good lawyer?” Steve drew back suddenly. “But I couldn’t divorce Harriet. I love her.”

“Let them eat cake,” MacDonald snorted, “and have it too!”

“Don’t you see, Don? They’re both so... so right. Both things. The thing with me and Harriet and the thing with me and Lynn. I can’t say: this I cleave to, this I discard. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them.”

“Which the present situation, of course, is.”

“Hell, Don, I’m not an adulterer.” Steve managed an odd sort of smile. “I’m a bigamist.” He added hesitantly, “There’s a quotation for that too:
How happy could I
be with either, were ‘tother fair charmer away...”
MacDonald could not swear why he shivered at that moment, but he had a rough idea.

“I still don’t see why you wanted to talk to me about it. I did introduce you, but...”

“I think it’s because I knew you pretty well a long time ago, but you’re not a part of my present life. I had to talk to somebody. I can’t talk to people who know me and Harriet now. I had to talk it out just to see if...” MacDonald knew very well why he was shivering as he replied, “You know, Steve, I don’t think that was the reason... underneath.”

“And it wasn’t, I’m sure,” MacDonald said later that night to Nick Noble. “You asked about trouble. Here it is, and your Unspeckled Band can prove as venomous as a swamp adder, if that’s what it was. And subconsciously, at least, Steve sees it too: that this is the buildup to a standard, cliché-expert murder situation. Each woman has a motive for killing the other; and if Steve ever gets out of the equipoise of his Beggars’

Opera how-happy-could-I-be-with-either, he’ll have a motive for getting rid of the girl left over. That subconscious fear of murder led him to expose the situation to a Homicide officer.”

There was a water glass full of sherry in front of Nick Noble. He took what seemed like a casual swig, and the glass was half full. Then he muttered “Beggars’ Opera?” and shook his head. “Groucho Marx,” he said decisively.

Even after long years of inoculation Lieutenant MacDonald could still occasionally be taken aback in the Chula Negra. “And how did Groucho Marx get into this?”

“Didn’t ever see
Animal Crackers?”
Noble murmured regretfully. “Long time ago.’Way back when...”

His voice trailed away. MacDonald understood. ‘Way back when Lieutenant Nicholas Noble, the pride of Homicide, took his beautiful wife Martha to the pictures...

“But what can I do?” MacDonald insisted. “What can any officer do when he sees a murder building up in front of him—cast and motives complete and nothing to do but wait until it happens?”

For once Nick Noble had not even a cryptic answer.

That was in March. The murder did not come until late April. In the interval MacDonald steered away from any contact with Steve and Lynn; a meeting now could prove too embarrassing. But he heard enough gossip to know that Harriet, if still ignorant, must have no friends and no telephone. And he heard other gossip, too, to the effect that Steve Harnett was cracking up as a radio writer, that his option wouldn’t be picked up at the end of this thirteen on
Pursuit,
which with the free-lance market shot to pieces...

MacDonald had tried to avoid embarrassment in seeing Steve again. But it was not embarrassment that he felt now in April as he faced Steve Harnett, beside the pink-ruffled bed which held Harriet’s curiously arched body. There was no emotion save cold rage in MacDonald’s voice as he roared, “So you finally made up your mind!” Steve had his shoes off and a tumbler of straight whiskey in his hand. He looked up helplessly and said, “You won’t believe me, Don. Why should you? But you don’t understand...”

MacDonald controlled his voice. “Look, Steve. There’s only one way to play this. I’m just any cop and you’re just any... husband of the deceased. All right, we know its strychnine; even a layman could tell that. Now tell me how.” Steve’s vitality and charm had yielded to bewildered chaos. “As I was saying, it must have been the candy. I was working late and Harriet took the candy to bed with her. I worked so late I slept on the couch in the study. This morning Mother.... found her.”

“Nobody heard anything? She must’ve gone through hell.”

“Mother’s not well; she usually takes phenobarbital at night. And when a script’s going hot, the house could fall down and I wouldn’t know it.”

“Now this candy...?”

“I was telling you, it just came in the mail and we thought whoever forgot to put in a card would phone about it. It’s a kind Harriet likes, so—“

“And you write mystery shows!” MacDonald gasped. “One of the oldest clichés—in fact and fiction—and you let your wife...! I suppose there’s independent evidence that the candy actually did come in the mail?”

“Mother was with us when Harriet opened the package. She didn’t want any; sweets upset her. And I was drinking beer, so Harriet took them to bed later on. I think the wrapper’s still in the waste-basket...”

A brand-new machine had replaced the battered standard in Steve’s study. MacDonald found a label in the drawer of the desk and inserted it in the typewriter. When he had finished typing, he set it beside the label on the wrapper from the wastebasket. There was no telling the two labels apart.

Steve’s mouth opened wide. “But does that prove...?”

“No,” MacDonald grunted. “It doesn’t. It’s a new machine. It hasn’t had time to develop obvious idiosyncrasies. Any new typewriter of the same model would have approximately the same result. But it does indicate—“ The phone rang. MacDonald picked it up.

An impersonal voice announced, “I have a call from New York for Mr. Stephen Harnett.”

“New York for you,” said MacDonald.

“Sponsor trouble,” Steve groaned. “Or the network on that last script—I was afraid it was a little too... Blast it! I can’t handle things like that now. I can’t...”

“Try,” said MacDonald. “Occupy your mind while I see Lynn Dvorak.” Steve had started to reach a shaky hand toward the phone. Now he snatched it back.

“Lynn! You can’t drag her into this!”

“Can’t I? You say you’re innocent. OK. Who else has a motive? Go talk to your sponsor.”

“Lynn...” There was horror in Steve’s eyes. “She couldn’t have...”