Black Money

14

There were lights in the Jamieson house as I passed, and a single light in Marietta Fablon’s. It was after midnight, a poor time for visiting. I went to see Marietta anyway. Her husband’s drowned body seemed to be floating just below the surface of the night.

She took a long time to answer my knock. When she did, she opened a Judas window set in the door, and peered at me through the grille. She said above the sound of the wind: “What do you want?”

“My name is Archer–”

She cut in on me sharply: “I remember you. What do you want?”

“A chance to talk seriously with you.”

“I couldn’t possibly talk tonight. Come back in the morning.”

“I think we should talk now. You’re worried about Ginny. So am I.”

“Who said I was worried?”

“Dr. Sylvester.”

“What else did he say about me?”

“I could tell you better inside.”

“Very well. This is rather Pyramus and Thisbe, isn’t it?”

It was a gallant effort to recover her style. I saw when she let me in to the lighted hallway that she was having a bad night. The barbiturates were still playing tricks with her eyes. Her body, uncorseted under a pink quilted robe, seemed to have slumped down on its fine bones. She had a pink silk cap on her head, and under it her face seemed thinner and older.

“Don’t look at me please, I’m not lookable tonight.”

She took me into her sitting room. Though she only turned on one lamp I could see that everything in the room, the print-covered chairs and settee and the gay rug and the drapes, was faintly shabby. The only new thing in the room was the pink telephone.

I started to sit on one of the fragile chairs. She made me sit on another, and took a third herself, by the telephone.

“Why did you suddenly get concerned about Ginny?” I said.

“She came home tonight. He was with her. I’m close to my daughter – at least I used to be – and I could sense that she didn’t want to go with him. But she was going anyway.”

“Why?”

“I don’t understand it.”

Her hands fluttered in her lap, like birds, and one of them pecked at the other. “She seems afraid to go, and afraid not to go with him.”

“Go where?”

“They wouldn’t say. Ginny promised to get in touch with me eventually.”

“What was his attitude?”

“Martel? He was very formal and distant. Aggressively polite. He regretted disturbing me at the late hour, but they’d made a sudden decision to leave.”

She paused, and turned her narrow probing face toward me. “Do you really think the French government is after him?”

“Somebody is.”

“But you don’t know who.”

“Not yet. I want to try a name on you, Mrs. Fablon. Ketchel.”

I spelled it. Her queer eyes widened. Her hands clenched knuckle to knuckle.

“Who gave you that name?”

“No one person. The name came up. I take it it’s familiar to you.”

“My husband knew a man named Ketchel,” she said. “He was a gambler.”

She leaned toward me. “Did Dr. Sylvester give you that name?”

“No, but I understand that Ketchel was one of Dr. Sylvester’s patients.”

“Yes. He was. He was more than that.”

I waited for her to explain what she meant. Finally I said: “Was Ketchel the gambler who took your husband’s money?”

“Yes, he was. He took everything we had left, and wanted more. When Roy couldn’t pay him–” She paused, as if she sensed that melodrama didn’t go with her style. “We won’t discuss it any more, Mr. Archer. I’m not at my best tonight. I should never have agreed to talk to you, under these conditions.”

“What was the date of your husband’s suicide?”

She rose, swaying a little, and moved towards me. I could smell her fatigue.

“You’ve really been digging into our lives, haven’t you? The date, if you must know, was September 29, 1959.”

Two days after Malkovsky was paid for his pictures. The coincidence underlined my feeling that Fablon’s death was part of the present case.

Mrs. Fablon peered up at me. “That date seems to mean a great deal to you.”

“It suggests some possibilities. It must mean a great deal more to you.”

“It was the end of my life.”

She took an unsteady step backwards and sat down again, as if she were falling back into the past, helplessly but not unwillingly. “Everything since has been going through the motions. It’s a strange thing. Roy and I fought like animals throughout our marriage. But we loved each other. At least I was in love with him, no matter what he did.”

“What did he do?”

“Everything a man can think of. Most of it cost money. My money.” She hesitated. “I’m not a money-oriented person, really. That was one of the troubles. In every marriage there should be one partner who cares about money more than other things. Neither of us cared. In the eighteen years of our marriage we went through nearly a million dollars. Please notice the first person plural pronoun. I share the blame. I didn’t learn to care about money until it was too late.”

She stirred, and jerked her shoulders as if the thought of money was a palpable weight on them. “You said the date of my husband’s death suggested possibilities. What do you mean?”

“I’m wondering if he really killed himself.”

“Of course he did.”

The statement sounded perfunctory, empty of feeling.

“Did he leave a suicide note?”

“He didn’t have to. He announced his intention to me and Ginny a day or two before. God knows what it’s done to my daughter’s emotional life. I encouraged this Martel business because he was the only real man she’s shown any interest in. If I’ve made a dreadful mistake–”

She dropped the end of the sentence, and returned to her first subject. Her mind was running in swift repetitious circles like a squirrel in a cage. “Can you imagine a man saying such a thing to his wife and his seventeen-year-old daughter? And then doing it? He was angry with me, of course, for running out of money. He didn’t believe it could happen. There had always been another bequest coming in from some relative, or another house or piece of land we could sell. But we were down to a rented house and there were no more relatives to die. Roy died instead, by his own hand.”

She kept insisting on this, almost as if she was trying to convince me, or persuade herself. I suspected that she was a little out of control, and I had no desire to ask her any more questions. But she went on answering unspoken questions, painfully and obsessively, as if the past had stirred and was talking through her in its sleep: “That doesn’t cover the situation, of course. There are always secret motivations in life – urges and revenges and desires that people don’t admit even to themselves. I discovered the real source of my husband’s death, quite by accident, just the other day. I’m planning to give up this house and I’ve been going through my things, sorting and throwing away. I came across a batch of old papers in Roy’s desk, and among them was a letter to Roy from– a woman. It absolutely astonished me. It had never occurred to me that, in addition to all his other failings as a husband and father, Roy had been unfaithful. But the letter went into explicit detail on that point.”

“May I see it?”

“No. You may not. It was humiliating enough for me to read it by myself.”

“Who wrote it?”

“Audrey Sylvester. She didn’t sign it but I happen to know her handwriting.”

“Was it still in its envelope?”

“Yes, and the postmark was clean. It was postmarked June 30, 1959, three months before Roy died. After seven years I understood why George Sylvester introduced Ketchel to Roy and stood by smiling while Ketchel cheated Roy out of thirty thousand dollars which he didn’t have.”

She struck herself with her fist on her quilted thigh: “He may even have planned it all. He was Roy’s doctor. He may have sensed that Roy was close to suicide, and conspired with Ketchel to push him over the edge.”

“Isn’t that stretching it a bit, Mrs. Fablon?”

“You don’t know George Sylvester. He’s a ruthless man. And you don’t know Mr. Ketchel. I met him once at the club.”

“I’d like to meet him myself. You don’t know where he is, do you?”

“No, I do not. Ketchel left Montevista a day or so after Roy disappeared – long before his body was found.”

“Are you implying he knew your husband was dead?”

She bit her mouth, as if to punish it for saying too much. From her eyes I got the swift impression that my guess was accurate, and she knew it, but for some obscure reason she was covering it up.

“Did Ketchel murder your husband?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t suggest that. But he and George Sylvester were responsible for Roy’s death.”

In the midst of her old grief and rage, she looked at me cautiously. I had the strange feeling that she was sitting apart from herself, playing on her own emotions the way another woman might play on an organ, but leaving one end of the keyboard wholly untouched. “It’s indiscreet of me to tell you all this. I’ll ask you not to pass it on to anyone, including – especially including – Peter and his father.”

I was weary of her elaborate reconstructions and evasions. I said bluntly: “I won’t pass your story on, and I’ll tell you why, Mrs. Fablon. I don’t entirely believe it. I don’t think you believe it yourself.”

She rose shakily. “How dare you speak to me in that way?”

“Because I’m really concerned about your daughter’s safety. Aren’t you?”

“You know I am. I’m terribly concerned.”

“Then why won’t you tell me the truth as you see it? Was your husband murdered?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more. I had a real earthquake shock tonight. The ground was jerked right out from under me. It still isn’t holding still.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Something was said.”

“By your daughter?”

“If I told you any more,” she said, “I’d be telling you too much. I’m going to have to get more information before I speak out.”

“Getting information is my business.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I have to handle this my own way.”

Another of her silences began, she sat perfectly still with her opposing fists pressed fiercely against each other, her eyes absorbing light.

Under the sound of the wind I heard a noise like rats chewing in the wall. I didn’t connect it right away with Marietta Fablon. Then I realized that she was grinding her teeth.

It was time I left her in peace. I got my car out from under her groaning oak tree and drove next door to the Jamieson house. The lights were still on there.