This Sweet Sickness (10 page)

“Oh, not drunk. But he'd had a few all right.”

David sensed her caution. She was waiting for him to say more. “And where did you tell him I was? Mrs. McCartney said you made up a place.”

“Well, I said—Oh, David, can I see you tonight? Can't you come over?”

He hesitated. “Not very well, Effie. I've got some work to do tonight.”

“Look at the paper, David. They've got a picture of the house. It belongs to William Neumeister.” She pronounced it “Newmester,” the way the Beck's Brook police had. “You know him, don't you?”

“No,” David said.

“You don't? In Ballard?”

“No,” David said with very genuine impatience.

“But I saw you going there once, David. You put your car in the garage.”

“
I
did?”

“Look at the picture in the paper. William Newmester. Maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong. I know it's the house. First on the right on County Road with the big chimney.”

“It must have been somebody else you saw there.”

“I guess I know your car, don't I?”

“I don't think I've ever been in Ballard,” David said stubbornly.

Now she was silent.

“But I'll take a look at the story, Effie.”

“Listen! If you recognize the man, would you let me know? Call me back. I'm kind of curious.”

“Sure, Effie.” He dropped the telephone on the hook. The last moments had exhausted him.

It was probably with Wes that she had seen him at the house, David thought. He had never seen Effie with anyone else who had a car. Even if she hadn't been with Wes, she would tell him all about this, because people always spilled out an exciting story, one with a mystery in it and the death of a man she had spoken to just before he was killed. David remembered Wes asking suspiciously, “She lives in a nursing home? Not in a house?”

David dreaded tomorrow and seeing Wes. And maybe, like Effie, he would telephone tonight.

He went back to the boardinghouse. He could not even start in his mind the letter to Annabelle.

14

W
es, however, was his usual self the next day. David met him at ten in the morning in a corridor, and Wes kept him a minute or two telling a long joke about an old maid and a burglar which David managed to laugh at, and then Wes slapped him on the back and walked on.

David began to feel easier. Maybe he could lie his way out with Effie. Maybe she had not been with Wes when she saw him at the Ballard house. If he kept insisting it hadn't been him she saw, what could she do about it? And by this weekend, he would be out of the house.

The vertical hands of his wristwatch that evening reminded him to report to the Beck's Brook police—but that had been last night at six, he realized. “Okay, we'll check again,” the police voice had said, but they hadn't said when they would check at the Barclay, and they hadn't told him when they wanted him to check with them again. Perhaps they didn't want him to call again. Perhaps he was overanxious. David remembered that quite by accident, when he spoke to the police, he had not said where he was calling from, but suppose they were calling the Barclay in New York at this moment and learning that William Neumeister was not there and never had been?

For a moment, David debated going to New York and staying overnight at the Barclay as William Neumeister. It would at least be on record. Or should he simply call the Beck's Brook police again, voluntarily? Appear to be cooperative? He put his overcoat on and left the house.

He called from the pharmacy near Main. A young voice answered.

“Hello,” David said. “This is William Neumeister again.”

“Oh-h, Mr. Newmester. Well—nothing to report from here, I guess. You're still in New York?”

“Yes. I may be here for—anyway, over next weekend, I think,” David said, and as he had last night, he lowered his voice somewhat, because he thought he had talked to the police officers on Sunday in a hypercautious growl in an effort to seem calm.

“I see,” said the young voice. “Well, thanks for calling us.” And there was even a smile in the words.

David walked back to the boardinghouse, had his supper, started to read a book that he had brought from the factory's library, and then decided to take a walk. Gerald was probably buried today, he thought, and it had been on his mind all day to write a letter to Annabelle. He wanted to write the letter before he settled down with his book, and he began to think about the letter as he left the house. Platitudes of sympathy came to his mind first, and he discarded them with disgust.
I want you with me now
. After all, that was all he wanted to say.

It took him until eleven to produce a ten-line letter that satisfied him. He did not say anything about wanting her. He was sympathetic.

The next day, Wednesday, just after the lunch hour, the intercom announced all over the building that David Kelsey was wanted on the telephone. David went back to his office to take it, knowing that his secretary was with Lewissohn that afternoon. David had a ghastly premonition that it was the Beck's Brook police wanting to see him. Annabelle had told them that Gerald had been trying to find him on Sunday. Or they had called Effie and asked her why she had sent Gerald to the house in Ballard and she blurted out that she had seen him there. “
You're
David Kelsey?” the plump, alert-faced young policeman would say. “Sunday you said your name was William Neumeister.”

A deeper older voice said, “Mr. Kelsey? Sergeant Terry of Beck's Brook speaking. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“No.”

“Uh—you know a Mrs. Annabelle Delaney of Hartford, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“You know that her husband left Hartford to go to see you last Sunday?”

“I was told that.”

“Where were you Sunday, Mr. Kelsey?”

“I was visiting my mother—at a nursing home.”

“A nursing home where?”

“Hazelwood, it's called. Five miles north of Newburgh.” It was one of the two nursing homes that were approximately an hour's distance by car from Froudsburg.

“Newburgh,” the man repeated, as if he were taking notes.

The voice continued in an easy tone: “I take it you read about Delaney's death in the papers.”

“Yes—and I called Mrs. Delaney when I heard about it.”

“Do you know William Newmester?” he asked with a note of hope.

“No, sir, I don't.”

“But you know a Miss Elfrida Brennan.”

“Yes. I know her slightly.”

“You have any idea why she sent Delaney to his house in Ballard?”

“Well, I spoke to her on the phone. She said she didn't really know of a house there—that she just made up a place to tell Gerald to go to that day. He'd had a few drinks, I heard.”

“Yes. Do you have any doubts, Mr. Kelsey, that Miss Brennan's telling the truth? This is strictly confidential between us, so you can be honest with me.”

“No, sir. I have no reason to have any doubts. Why?”

“Well, we're trying to find Newmester. Mrs. Delaney wants to see him. Talk to him, y'know, and ask him what happened. Newmester's in New York and he won't be back till next week.” The voice sounded unbelievably casual.

“Oh,” David said.

“We don't think Newmester's got any reason to hide, and yet we don't know. He's not at the hotel he said he'd be at in New York, and we thought Miss Brennan might know him and might be trying to protect him.”

“Well, I don't know anything about that.”

“Uh-hm. When did you see Delaney last, Mr. Kelsey?” the lazy voice continued.

“I saw him three or four weeks ago when I went up to Hartford.”

“Did he seem hostile when you saw him then?”

David took a deep breath. “Frankly, I've never paid much attention to Delaney. I'm a friend of his wife's.”

“Just a friend, Mr. Kelsey?”

“Yes,” David replied, thinking the truth included friendship, after all. “Isn't that what she told you?”

“Ye-es, she did,” the man drawled, and he sounded as if he believed it. “Delaney wasn't by any chance jealous?”

“I don't know what his motivations were. Maybe his wife knows. You might ask her.”

“Hm-m. She said her husband had a bad temper.”

“Sergeant, I've seen Delaney only once in my life, and that was in Hartford three or four weeks ago.”

“I see. Well, thank you, Mr. Kelsey. One thing more. Can you give us the telephone number of your landlady?”

David gave it. A moment later, walking away from the telephone, he felt a sink of defeat: the Beck's Brook police would very likely remark to Annabelle that he had been visiting his mother over the weekend. Annabelle knew his mother was dead.

And there was the other little matter that Annabelle wanted to see William Neumeister.

Mrs. McCartney was waiting in the hall that evening, and she began to talk as soon as she saw him. The Beck's Brook police had called and asked her a lot of questions, and she was at great pains to tell David that she had given him the highest kind of “references.” Mrs. Starkie had been standing by, too, to corroborate everything that Mrs. McCartney had said to the police. Mrs. Starkie joined them in the hall. So did Mr. Muldaven. Mr. Muldaven had also been in the house when the police call came.

“I told them you were the finest young man who'd ever set foot in this house,” Mrs. McCartney averred to David.

David listened for Annabelle's name, but he did not hear it. The police had been interested only in his personal habits, and in where he had been that weekend, and Mrs. McCartney had told them he spent
every
weekend with his mother, and had for the two years she had known him.

“Who is this Newmester?” Mrs. McCartney asked.

“I don't know,” David said.

“Don't you worry about anything, David,” Mrs. Starkie put in.

“Thank you.” David had not known he had such a champion in Mrs. Starkie, whom he hardly so much as greeted when they encountered each other in the house. “Would you excuse me now?” David asked, ignoring a babble of questions. “I'd like to go upstairs.”

“Of course, you would, dear boy,” said Mrs. McCartney, patting his sleeve. “You go ahead. Everything's going to be all right.”

It was a pleasure to climb the stairs and leave their voices behind him, a pleasure to close his door and snap the lock under the knob and breathe again! Why hadn't they mentioned Gerald, David wondered. Why hadn't the police told Mrs. McCartney that he knew him? Were they saving that for something? If so, what? Had Annabelle really not told them he was in love with her? Maybe he was going to be saved by the very gun Gerald had carried. A drunken mistake with a flourish of a gun was disgrace enough, but if a story of jealousy of his wife's lover came out, that would make Gerald a premeditating killer.

David was once more at a table with Mr. Harris and Mr. Muldaven, and they asked him for the fifth or sixth time at least if he was sure he had not known Gerald Delaney somehow, from somewhere. But when David, summoning all his patience, gave them a quiet “No, absolutely not,” the two men began to mull over the incident with an objectivity that David found quite comforting. What interested them and the rest of the people in the house was that Gerald Delaney had been in such a temper that Sunday morning, and that he had been carrying a gun pretty clearly intended to be used on David Kelsey. What amazed them all was David's calmness about it. If Mrs. McCartney and her boarders ever found out, David thought, through the Beck's Brook police or any other way, that he
had
known Gerald Delaney, he would say he had been told by the police not to discuss the situation with anyone. The Situation. It was all part of the one Situation, after all. He could not eat Mrs. McCartney's slimy boiled chicken with its soggy rice. He ate tasteless white bread with his pat of butter, and the two aging men at his table, though they relished their morsel of butter, always scraping the last bit of it from the little squares of cardboard it was served on, pressed their portions on him as if he deserved special treatment because of what he had been through.

He had a fear that someone in the house, perhaps Mrs. McCartney herself, might invade his room tonight to ask him more questions, so he went directly from the dining room to get his overcoat. It crossed his mind to kill two hours of the evening at a movie, but this seemed analogous to drinking alcohol, and he made an effort to collect himself. He decided to walk for precisely an hour, then go back to his room and read until he became sleepy, read all the night, if he couldn't sleep.

“Dave!”

Wes's voice had come from a car in the street. David walked toward it.

“I want to talk to you, Dave. Can we go to your place or what?”

David hesitated, but he thought of no way to get out of it. “Let's go to Michael's.”

“Fine.”

David got in. Wes said nothing more. The unpleasant silence lasted until Michael's Tavern was in sight. Then Wes said with his usual cheer, “I guess they're asking you all kinds of questions at the house. I mean about this Delaney thing.”

The bar was dimly lighted, and at this hour rather quiet. Wes motioned David to follow him to a back booth, greeted Adolf, the barman, and gave an order for two scotches with water as he walked past.

“If you don't want it, I'll drink it,” Wes said to David.

There was another silence, until Adolf brought the two drinks on a tray, served them, and left.

“Effie called me tonight,” Wes began, looking down at the table. “Seems the police called
her
and—” Wes held another match to his half-lighted cigarette. “They called her because she told that Delaney fellow to go to the house in Ballard, you know.”

“Yes,” David said.

“But you weren't at the house.”

It was half a question, half a statement. “No,” David said, frowning a little.

“But you know that house, don't you?”

“No, I don't.”

Now Wes frowned and smiled at the same time, as if he didn't believe him. “Do you know this fellow Newmester who lives there?”

“No, I don't.”

Wes rubbed his freckled forehead with his fingertips. “Well, Effie and I happened to see you go there once, Dave. That's why I asked. No other reason.”

“See me go there when?”

“Remember the Friday I went back home from Mrs. Mac's and I said I was going to stop by Effie's for a drink? I don't know why I did it, but I said, ‘Let's follow old Dave tonight and see where he really goes weekends.' I wasn't intending to snoop, Dave, I was just in the mood to do something a little nuts, I guess. So Effie got in the car and we spotted you crossing Main going north, and we followed you, that's all. It's none of my business, Dave, and I haven't thought of it since. I just thought, well, his mother stays in a house not a nursing home, or something like that. Or maybe the place was a nursing home, I didn't know.”

David looked at him. He could see that what was troubling Wes was not Delaney's death, or that the house didn't look like a nursing home, but that the whole story of his invalid mother might be a myth.

“I mean, I didn't think any more about it, Dave, until this business came up—with Effie. She thinks the house where the man was killed is the same one we saw you go to. She called me up to see if I didn't think so, too, and I do. I could see part of that big chimney in the photograph. And she gave the guy directions to it, after all.”

The bald-faced lie, David thought. There wasn't any other way, “I told Effie I didn't know that house,” David said. “If she thinks she saw my car going there, she's just mistaken.”

“Oh, no, Dave. Maybe you just dropped something by there that day, but we saw you get out of the car and open the garage door.
You
,” Wes said with a grin, pointing at him. “We were on that road before you turn into the driveway, but it was still close enough to see you.”