Into The Night (12 page)

Dell's voice asked who it was, from the other side of the door. She sounded guarded, cautious, as though apprehensive about what the answer might be.

"Mad," Madeline said.

The door opened immediately. A look of strain was just leaving Dell's face and a look of relief coming on in its place. Nevertheless she lowered her voice conspiratorially. "I can't ask you in right now. Got one of my Big Moments in here with me. You understand, don't you?"

"Oh, sure. Perfectly all right. I'll drop around tomorrow instead."

"Do that."

Suddenly a man's voice cut in: "Who you talking to out there?"

"Just a friend," Dell answered without turning her head.

A larger hand than hers took hold of the door edge above where her own was resting, and pulled the door a little wider open. Then a man's face peered out at Madeline, a little to one side of Dell's and about a foot higher up.

Sometimes you see a face a dozen and one times, and then later on forget it. Sometimes you see a face just once, and then see it over and over to the end of your days in retrospect. This bodiless face looking out at her now from a doorway was to be like an eyeless mask, one of those twin masks representing comedy and tragedy in the theater, pinned to the curtain of her memory from then on.

It was a face that had been handsome once. Its handsomeness had worn thin now, but the configuration of it could still be detected beneath the layer of the years and the experiences. Dark, lustrous Mediterranean hair, and dark, lustrous Mediterranean eyes. A cleft in the chin that years of shaving seemed to have ground into a blue-tinged, marbleized, scooped-out hollow.

But the eyes showed no recognition whatever of Madeline as a person. Just the fact that she was a woman, and not a rival, not a trespasser. They didn't care if she was ugly or fair, tall or short, wide or narrow. They were the eyes of jealousy, of sheer possessiveness alone.

The face withdrew without having said a word to either of the two women. But its silence was a surly, not an appeased, one.

Then a moment after, from back within the apartment, his voice sounded in a growled order. "Well, come on back in here, whenever you get through exchanging cake recipes or whatever it is you're doing out there."

Dell said in a harassed whisper, "Never comes around in the afternoon like this. But never. Today's the first time."

Then she added hastily, "Well, I better get back in there before he cracks the whip over me some more."

Madeline went away. There's dynamite in it somewhere, she thought.

She got things piecemeal, but she kept getting them.

"What a beautiful bracelet."

"Ange gave me that."

Dell was already so lit she couldn't fasten the thing without resting her whole elbow on the dresser top and leaning on it to try to steady it.

"That the broker?"

"No, the broker's Walter. C'mere, see if you can do this for me."

Then another time, answering the phone she said, "Hello, Jack."

When she came back she gave Madeline a knowing smirk and pitched her thumb back over her shoulder in derision. "Ange, checking up on me. He didn't have anything to say, just wanted to see if he could catch me at anything."

"But I thought I heard you say Jack."

"That's his first name." Dell was too busy prodding ice into a glass to keep much of a guard on her tongue. "In the old outfit days they called him 'Little Angie."

"Oh, that's why you call him Ange sometimes. Does he like it when you call him that?"

"Why shouldn't he like it? That's his name." Dell sampled her new drink. Or rather, left the sample behind in the glass, and took the drink itself. "Jack d'Angelo."

Now she knew one of them.

During another of these matinee sessions she got "confidential" with Dell. That is to say, confidential on the subject of her finances.

"Dell, I was wondering. I have a little money put aside. Not as much as you get from some of the pieces of jewelry you sell. But I hate to leave it lying around in a savings bank. You only get a measly three and three-quarters. Would you advise me to put it into some of those stocks like you were telling me about?"

"Honey." Dell made a pass of dissuasion with the flat of her hand. "You can't touch them unless you've got a big wad of dough backing you up. The market's sky-high right now."

Madeline let her face droop disconsolately, as though she saw all hopes of ever attaining financial independence fading from view. "But are they all high? Aren't there some that are a little lower than others?"

Dell had that warm glow, of friend toward friend. And there was a touch of show-off in it too. Besides, love wasn't involved, so there was no danger.

"Wait a minute," she said generously. "I'm going to call Walter up and ask him. I'll let him think I want to know for myself."

The building had a downstairs switchboard, so she couldn't dial.

Madeline listened carefully.

"Cardinal seven, four two hundred."

Then, "Mr. Shiller, please."

Now she had the other one too.

She went back to her own place, asked for "Cardinal seven, four two hundred."

A voice answered, "Warren, Shiller, Davis and Norton, good afternoon."

She hung up. She cross-checked it with the directory, and that gave her his office address.

She sat down to write the letter. The letter of betrayal.

Why to him, why not to the other one? The other one would have seemed to be the likelier prospect, but in actuality was he? Maybe her psychology was turned inside out, but not the way she saw it.

He was insanely jealous. Right. He had lived by violence--or at least by illegality--at one time. Right. He had come up out of the underworld jungle, where punitive death was a commonplace. Right.

But when all this had been granted, that was when her reverse psychology entered into it. For these very reasons, he was the less likely candidate of the two. He had no influence, at least in respectable places, to see him through afterward. He had an unsavory past, there were all sorts of strikes against him. He wouldn't dare to jeopardize his hard-won legitimacy by stepping out of line.

Whereas the broker was secure, respected, had an impregnable background, probably had all sorts of powerful influence backing him up in high places, and because of this very immunity would be far the readier of the two to carry out whatever measures he felt this treachery to his ego and his love life demanded.

Or so believed Madeline, the theoretical but unpracticed.

So to him she wrote.

Letter number one: "Dear Mr. Shiller: This is not a poison-pen letter--" But it was. What else was it?

Letter number two: "Dear Mr. Shiller: I think as a friend you ought to be told--" But they weren't friends.

Letter number three: "Dear Mr. Shiller: I hate to see anyone sold out behind his back--" Sheer cant. What she was doing was sneakier than what Dell was doing.

Letter number last: "Dear Mr. Shiller: Some girls haven't even one man. Some girls, like Dell Nelson, have two going at the same time. It doesn't seem fair, does it?"

She went down to the stamp machine in the lobby, put a coin into it, and got out a stamp. She stuck it on the letter, she dropped the letter into the mail slot, and she even pounded all around the mail slot with the heels of her hands to make sure it settled down properly inside.

The getting-even was on the way.

Things started moving fast from that point on.

Dell called her up, and her voice was all unraveled with strain. This was around five in the afternoon, next day.

"I'm in a jam!" she said, as winded as though she'd run up and down a flight of stairs a half a dozen times.

"What's up?" Madeline asked, startled but not too startled. She hadn't expected it to start rolling quite this soon, that was all.

"I don't know. But I don't like the way he sounded. I guess I played both ends against the middle too long. That's where you come in. You've got to help me."

"-Me?- What can -I- do?"

"You've got to run interference for me."

"What does that mean?"

"You've got to come over here and stand by. There's no telling what he may do. He may bang me around unmercifully."

"Wait a minute," Madeline brought her up short. "This is your life. I can't come barging into it at the drop of a hat. You kept it pretty much to yourself all along. Now that you need help, suddenly it's an open book with a place mark left in it specially for me. Well, no thanks."

She couldn't resist asking at a tangent, "Which one of them was it?"

"Walter. Walter called me up. He was sore about something. I never heard him so sore before. Every time I tried to smooth his fur and say something nice to him, he'd come back at me and say, How many others do you tell that to?"

"Well, there was your out right there. Why didn't you just hang up and get rid of him that way?"

"I was afraid to. I didn't want to lose him altogether. Sometimes they never come back. There's a time to get huffy and hard-to-get, and there's a time to hold on tight."

"Well, what about the club, can't you duck him down there?"

"It's Monday. We don't have a show on Mondays."

"Oh, I forgot."

"He knows that, too."

"Well, maybe it won't be so bad," Madeline tried to console her.

She gave a wail of anticipatory misery. "It'll be plenty bad. He's one of these quiet ones. I know him."

"The surprising thing to me," Madeline philosophized, "isn't that it finally happened, but that it didn't happen long ago, the parlays you've been playing."

"Preaching isn't what I need now," Dell told her. "I need somebody here with me, I need somebody standing by me."

"Why don't you call the police, if you're that afraid of him," Madeline said with an edge of contempt in her voice.

"You don't do that when you've been what we have to each other. If he ever finds out I called a girlfriend, he'd find it easy enough to forgive that. But if he ever finds out I called the police, he'd never forgive that. You don't know the ropes, dear."

No, Madeline thought morosely. I guess I've never gone down for the count as often as you have.

She had triggered the whole thing, it was developing into what promised to be a perfectly beautiful mess, and now she was being asked to step in a second time and screen the potential victim's hide.

"You've got to come! You've got to! You're the one friend I have in this world. Look at all I've done for you. My door was always open to you. Drinks on the house. I let you use my piano."

Oh, shove your piano, Madeline thought parenthetically. An expression she had acquired from the very person she was now returning it to.

"I even got market tips from him for you. Are you going to go back on me now, when I need you?"

"Al-l-l right," Madeline drawled reluctantly. "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll call you in about an hour's time. If he's acting ugly and you're finding him hard to handle, I'll hustle on over and bring you my moral support. If everything's under control, then you don't need me. How'll that be?"

She thought: Even if I get her out of it tonight, it'll catch up with her some other night, now that the seeds of suspicion have been planted, and the second time I won't be on hand to bail her out.

Dell almost yelped her gratitude. "Thanks, baby-honey! Oh, thanks! I knew I could count on you, I knew you wouldn't let me down. I'll do the same for you someday."

Who needs you? thought Madeline scornfully. I don't play men by the carload.

"Better than that. Y'know that stone-marten jaquette you admired, the one Ange gave me? It's yours, I'm giving it to you right now."

Madeline made a sound down within her throat that might have been taken for gratitude, but was actually ridicule.

"All right, I'll take a quick tub and get dressed. Call me in an hour. Well, make it quarter past, that'll give me more time to turn around."

"Don't get loaded," Madeline warned her bluntly. "It's important that you keep your head clear and know what you're doing."

"Check," Dell said obediently. In two months flat, Madeline had gotten the upper hand on her. And by sheer personality impact alone. For she hadn't tried in any way, either actively or passively, to dominate her.

Six o'clock came. Now's when I promised I'd call her, Madeline thought, and I'm not doing it.

Half past, and she still hadn't called her. Why don't I just let it ride? Let her take her own medicine.

At quarter of seven she finally gave in, picked up the phone. "Emerson eight, eighteen hundred." Then when the downstairs switchboard answered, "Eighteen-A, please."

He came back and said, "There isn't any answer."

At seven, the same routine. "Emerson eight, eighteen hundred... Eighteen-A, please."

"There isn't any answer."

At seven-fifteen, for the third time, "There isn't any answer."

After a moment or two of indecision, she went downstairs, outside to the street, got in a cab, and went over there to find out for herself what kind of a turn this had taken.

Dell's doorman was busy shepherding two tailcoats, a broadtail and an ermine, into a cab. He had his back to her, so Madeline found her way in unaided. She punched the eighteen button in the self-service elevator, the door glided closed with the softness of a purr, and she rode up.

She got out and rang the doorbell. Nobody came to the door.

She rang again, with a jab of irritation sharpening the gesture. Still nobody came. First she wets me up with her tears for help, she thought resentfully, then she clams up and ignores me. Probably they've reconciled, and he took her out to dinner.

She took out the key Dell had given her and opened the door. She figured maybe Dell had left some sort of a note of explanation for her on the piano, like they'd used to do so often in the old songwriting days.

"Dell?" she called out.

There was no answer. There was no one in the place. There was no note either, on the piano or anywhere else.

Dell had had a rye on the rocks, or possibly five or possibly ten, at some indeterminate point between her getting-up time and her leaving the place. Only one glass had been used. She never changed glasses when drinking alone, why should she? Her own mouth germs couldn't affect her. But this seemed to prove he'd never shown up.