Death Before Bedtime

CHAPTER ONE

1

“You know, I’ve never gone to bed with a man on a train before,” she said, taking off her blouse.

“Neither have I,” I said, and I made sure that the door to the compartment was securely locked.

“What innocents we are,” she sighed, then: “I wish I had a drink.”

“I think you’re an alcoholic.” I was very severe because Ellen Rhodes is an alcoholic, or at least well on her way to becoming one: but of course her habits are no concern of mine; we are just playmates of the most casual sort.

“I wish you’d call the porter … he could get us something from the club car.”

“And have him see us like this? a young man and a young woman enjoying an intimacy without the sanction of either church or state. You’re out of your mind.”

Ellen sighed as she unsnapped her brassière. “There are times, Peter, when I suspect you of becoming a solemn bore.”

I enjoyed, with my usual misgivings, the sight of her slim nude body. She was a lovely girl, not yet twenty-five, with only one marriage (annulled at seventeen) to her credit. Her hair was a dirty blond, worn long, and her eyebrows and eyelashes were black, naturally black, and the brows arched. Her skin was like ivory, to worry a cliché … and her breasts were small and jiggled pleasantly from the vibration of the train as she arranged her clothes in the closet of our compartment. I watched her back with some pleasure. I like backs … only aesthetically: I mean I don’t make a thing of it, being old-fashioned; yet I must say there is nothing that gives me quite such a charge as a female back, especially the double dimple at the base of the spine, the center of balance a dancer friend of mine once assured me; although in her case the center was a trifle off since she was usually horizontal when not dancing.

“Darling, will you get my bag out from under the bed? the small one. I seem to recall having hidden the better part of a fifth in there just before we left Boston.”

“Very provident,” I said, disapprovingly, but I got the bottle for her and we both had a drink, sitting side by side on the bunk, my bare leg touching hers.

“I feel better,” she said, after gulping a shot. And indeed she even looked better … her eyes shining now, and her face wonderfully rosy. “I love blondes,” she said, looking at me with embarrassing intensity. “I wish I were a real one like you … a strawberry blond exactly.…” But then we rolled back onto the bunk. From far away a conductor shouted: “New Haven!”

“Ellen.”

She moaned softly, her face entirely covered by hair.

“We’re almost there. The train’s just leaving Baltimore.”

“Oh.” She sat up and pushed the hair out of her eyes and blinked sleepily at me.

“I hate men,” she said simply.

“Why?”

“I just do.” She frowned. “I feel awful. I hate the morning.”

“ ‘Morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone which put the stars to flight.…’ ” I quoted sonorously as we dressed.

“Is that poetry?”

“Indeed it is,” I said, pushing up the shade and letting in the cold white light of a December morning. “Picturesque Baltimore,” I remarked, as the train passed slowly through that city of small shabby houses with white doorsteps.

“Coffee,” said Ellen, sitting down with a thump; she is a miraculously fast dresser for a woman … a quality I find both rare and admirable in the opposite sex.

If the waiter thought anything amiss when he served us breakfast in the compartment, he did not betray it; not that I minded particularly, nor for that manner did Ellen … rather, I had a job at stake and I didn’t want to be caught in a compromising position with the daughter of my new client, the incomparable, the reactionary Senator Leander Rhodes, the only adult American male to be called Rhodes without the inevitable nickname Dusty.

“Now I feel better,” said Ellen, after she’d finished two cups of black coffee, the alcoholic fumes of the night before dispelled.

In the year that I had known her she was either just coming out from under a hangover or else going into one, with a moment or two, I suppose, of utter delight when she was in between, when she was high. In spite of the drinking, however, I liked her. For several years she had been living in New York, traveling with a very fast set of post-debutantes and pre-alcoholics, a group I occasionally saw at night clubs or the theater but nowhere else.

I am a hard-working public relations man with very little time for that kind of living. I would never have met Ellen if she hadn’t been engaged for eight weeks last year to a classmate of mine from Harvard. When the eight blissful weeks of engagement to this youth were up, she was engaged to me for nearly a month; I was succeeded then, variously, by a sleek creature from the Argentine, by a middle-aged novelist, and by a platoon of college boys to each of whom she was affianced at one time or another and, occasionally, in several instances, at the same time. Not that she is a nymph. Far from it. She just likes a good time and numerous engagements seem to her the surest way of having one.

“Won’t Father be surprised to see us together!” she said at last.

“Yes.” I was a little worried. I had never met Senator Rhodes. I had been hired by his secretary who had, I was quite sure, known nothing about my acquaintance with Ellen. My contract with the Senator was to run three months with an option in March and then another after that … by which time, if I were still on the job, the National Convention would be meeting and the Midwest’s favorite son Lee Rhodes would go before the convention as the people’s choice for President of the United States, or so I figured it, or rather so I figured Senator Rhodes figured it. Well, it was a wonderful break for the public relations firm of Peter Cutler Sargeant II, which is me.

Ellen had been more cynical about it when I told her the news in Cambridge where we had been attending a Harvard function. In spite of her cynicism, however, we had both decided, late at night, that it would be a wonderful idea if we went straight to Washington from Boston, together, and surprised the Senator. It had all seemed like a marvelous idea after eight Martinis but now, in the cold light of a Maryland morning, I was doubtful. For all I knew the Senator loathed his daughter, paid her liberally to keep out of Washington … nervously, I recalled some of Ellen’s exploits: the time last spring when she undressed beneath a full moon and went swimming in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York, shouting, “I’m coming, Scottie … Zelda’s coming!” in imitation of that season’s revival Scott Fitzgerald … imposing on the decorous 1950’s the studied madness of the 1920’s. Fortunately, two sober youths got her out of there before the police or the reporters discovered her.

“What do you think your father’s up to?” I asked, resigned to my fate: it was too late now to worry about the Senator’s reaction to this combination.

“Darling, you know I hate politics,” she said, straightening one eyebrow in the window as frame houses and evergreens flashed by.

“Well, he must be planning something. I mean, why hire a press agent like me?”

“I suppose he’s going to run for the Senate again.”

“He was re-elected last year.”

“I suppose he was. Do let’s send George and Alice a wire, something funny … they’ll die laughing when they hear we’re on a train together.”

“You know I think it’s quite wonderful your father’s done as well as he has considering the handicap a daughter like you must be to him.”

Ellen chuckled. “Now that’s unkind. As a matter of fact he simply adores me. I even campaigned for him when I was fifteen years old. Made speeches to the Girl Scouts from one end of the state to the other.… I even spoke to the Boy Scouts, lovely young creatures. There was one in Talisman City, an Eagle Scout with more …”

“I don’t want to hear any of your obscene reminiscences.”

She laughed. “You are evil, Peter. I was just going to say that he had more Merit Badges than any other scout in the Midwest.”

“I wonder if he’s running for President.”

“I don’t think he’s old enough. You have to be thirty-five, don’t you? That was ten years ago and he was seventeen then which would make him … how old now? I could never add.”

“I was referring to your father, not that Eagle Scout of infamous memory.”

“Oh, Daddy. Well, I don’t know.” Ellen was vague. “I hope not.”

“Why not?”

“It’s such a bore. Look at the time poor Margaret Truman had, trailed by detectives and guards everywhere.”

“If you were a nice girl like Miss Truman you wouldn’t mind.”

“Oh … !” And Ellen Rhodes said a bad word.

“There would be all sorts of compensations, though,” I said, trying to look on the bright side. “I think it would be very pleasant having a father who was President.”

“Well, I don’t. Besides, I don’t think Mother will let him run. She’s always wanted to go back to Talisman City where we came from originally.”

“That would be nice for you.”

Ellen snorted. “I’m a free spirit,” she said, and, all things considered, she was, too.

2

We parted at the Union Station. Ellen went home in a cab and I walked across the square to the Senate Office Building, a white cake of a building in the shadow of the Capitol.

Senator Rhodes’ office was in a corner on the first floor, attesting to his seniority and power since he was, among other things, Chairman of the Spoils and Patronage Committee.

I opened the door of his office and walked into a high-ceilinged waiting room with a desk and receptionist at one end. Several petitioners were seated on the black leather couches by the door. I told the woman at the desk who I was and she immediately told me to go into the Senator’s office, a room on the left.

The room was empty. It was a fascinating place, and while I waited I examined everything: the vast mahogany desk covered with party symbols, the hundreds of photographs in black frames on the wall: every important political figure since 1912, the year Leander Rhodes came to the Senate, was represented. Leather chairs were placed around a fireplace on whose mantel were arranged trophies and plaques, recording political victories … while above the mantel was a large political cartoon of the Senator, handsomely framed. It showed him, his shock of gray unruly hair streaming in the wind of Public Opinion, mounted upon a spavined horse called Political Principle.

“That was done in 1925,” said a voice behind me.

I turned around quickly, expecting to find the Senator. Instead, however, a small fat man in gray tweed, wearing owl-like spectacles, stood with hand outstretched, beaming at me. “I’m Rufus Hollister,” he said as we shook hands. “Senator Rhodes’ secretary.”

“We’ve had some correspondence,” I said.

“Yes sir, I should say so. The Senator’s over in the Capitol right now … important vote coming up this morning. But sit down for a minute before we join him and let’s get acquainted.”

We sat down in the deep armchairs. Mr. Hollister smiled, revealing a handsome upper plate. “I suspect,” he said, “that you’re wondering exactly why I engaged you.”

“I thought Senator Rhodes engaged me.”

“He did, he did, of course … I was speaking only as his … proxy, as it were.” He smiled again, plumply. I decided that I disliked him but then I usually dislike all men on first meeting: something to do, I suppose, with the natural killer instinct of the male. I tried to imagine Mr. Hollister and myself covered with the skins of wild beasts, doing battle in the jungle, but my imagination faltered: after all we were two Americans living in rooms centrally heated and eating hygienically prepared food got out of cans … the jungle was remote.

“In any case,” Hollister was saying, “I thought I should brief you a little before you meet the Senator.” He paused. Then he asked: “What, by the way, are your politics?”

Being venal, I said that I belonged to the same party as my employer; as a matter of fact, I have never voted so even if I did not entirely admire the party of Senator Rhodes I hadn’t perjured myself.

Mr. Hollister looked relieved. “I don’t suppose, in your business, that you’re much interested in politics.”

I said that, aside from my subscription to Time magazine, I was indeed cut off from the great world.

“You don’t have, then, any particular choice for the nominating convention?”

“No, sir, I do not.”

“You realize that what I tell you now is in the strictest, the very strictest confidence?”

“I do.” I wondered whether or not I should cross my heart; Mr. Hollister had grown strangely solemn and mysterious.

“Then, Mr. Sargeant, as you may already have guessed, The Senator’s Hat Is In The Ring.”

“The what?”

“Senator Rhodes will announce his candidacy for the nomination for President on Friday at a speech before the National Margarine Council.”

I took this awesome news calmly. “And I am to handle the publicity?”

“That’s right.” He looked at me sharply but my Irish, piggish features were impassive: I saw myself already as Press Secretary to President Rhodes: “Boys, I’ve got a big story for you. One hour ago the President laid the biggest egg.…” But I recalled myself quickly to reality. Mr. Hollister wanted to know my opinion of Leander Rhodes.

“I hardly have one,” I said. “He’s just another Senator as far as I’m concerned.”

“We, here in the office, regard this as something of a crusade,” said Mr. Hollister softly.

“Then I will, too,” I said sincerely. Before he could tell me why the country needed Lee Rhodes, I remarked that I happened to know his daughter, that, by chance, I had come down on the train with her. Was it my imagination, as they used to say in Victorian novels, or did a cloud cross Mr. Hollister’s serene countenance? As a matter of fact, it was worse than a cloud: it was a scowl.

“Is Miss Rhodes in Washington?”

“I believe so. Unless she decided to go back to New York.”

“A charming young lady,” said Mr. Hollister, without conviction. “I’ve known her since she was a tiny tot.” The idea of Ellen Rhodes as a tiny tot was ludicrous but I was not allowed to meditate on it. Instead I was whisked out of the office and into the reception room; then into a further office filled with gray women answering the Senator’s voluminous mail. I was introduced to all of them; next, I was shown an empty desk which I could call my own, close by one of the tall windows which overlooked the Capitol. I noticed that none of the typists was under fifty, a tribute, I decided, to Mrs. Senator Rhodes.

“Now if you like we’ll go over to the Senate.”

I had never been inside either the Senate Office Building or the Capitol before and so I am afraid that I gaped like a visitor from Talisman City at the private subway which whisked the Senators in little cars from the basement of their building to that of the Capitol.

After we got off a crowded elevator, Mr. Hollister led me down a long marble corridor to a green frosted double glass door beside which stood a uniformed guard. “That’s the floor of the Chamber,” said my escort, in a low reverent voice. “Now I’ll see if I can get you into the cloakroom.”

As I later discovered, this was the holy of holies of the Senate, almost as inaccessible to a non-Senatorial visitor as the floor itself. Some quick talk got us in, however.

The cloakroom was a long room with desks, couches and a painted ceiling, very ornate, a little like Versailles; swinging glass doors communicated directly with the Senate Chamber from which could be heard a loud monotonous voice.

“Senator Rhodes,” whispered Mr. Hollister proudly, pushing me back against the wall, out of the way of the statesmen who wandered in and out, some chatting together in small groups, others reading newspapers or writing letters. It was like a club, I thought, trying to summon up a little awe, trying to remember that these were the men who governed the most powerful country in the world.

Mr. Hollister pointed out several landmarks: Senator O’Mahoney, Senator Douglas, Senator Byrd … I stared at them all. Then the swinging door opened and Leander Rhodes, the Great Bear of the West as he liked to hear himself referred to, appeared in the cloakroom, his face red from speechmaking, his gray hair tangled above his bloodshot eyes, eyes like his daughter’s I thought, recalling irreverently her face on the pillow beside me that morning. But no time for that.

“Ah, Sargeant. Glad to see you. Glad to see you. Prompt. I like promptness. Secret of success, punctuality.” Since neither of us could either prove or disprove this statement, I murmured agreement.

“Been to the office yet? Yes? Good scout. Let’s go to lunch.”

It took us quite awhile to get from the cloakroom to the Senate Dining Room. Every few yards or so, the Senator would pause to shake hands with some other Senator or with some tourist who wanted to meet him. He was obviously quite popular with the voters; the other Senators were a bit cool with him, or so I thought, since he was, after all, by reputation anyway, a near-idiot with a perfect Senate record of obstruction. He regarded the administration of Chester A. Arthur as the high point of American history and he felt it his duty to check as much as possible the subsequent national decline from that high level. He was a devout isolationist although, according to legend, at the time of the First World War he had campaigned furiously for our entry into that war, on the side of the Kaiser.

I suppose I shouldn’t, in actual fact, accept jobs from men for whom I have so little respect but since it never occurred to me that Lee Rhodes had a chance in the world of getting nominated, much less elected, President, I saw no harm in spending a few months at a considerable salary to see that his name appeared in the newspaper, often and favorably.

The lunch was excellent, served in an old-fashioned dining room with tile floor where the Senators eat … there is a Pre-Civil War feeling about the Senate Dining Room … especially the menu, the remarkable cornbread, the legendary bean soup which I wolfed hungrily, trying not to stare too hard at Senator Taft, who sat demurely at the next table reading a newspaper as he lunched.

“Suppose Rufus here has briefed you?” said Senator Rhodes, when coffee arrived and all around the room cigars were lit, like Roman candles.

I nodded, holding my breath as a wreath of blue Senatorial smoke crossed the table and settled about my neck.

“Day after tomorrow, Friday, that’s the big day. Making announcement then. Want it well covered. Can you do that?”

I told him that all speeches by such a celebrated statesman were well-covered by the press. He took my remark quietly, adding that he wanted Life there, or else. I said that Life would be there.

“Get yourself located yet?” he asked, after we had exchanged a number of very businesslike remarks. I said that I hadn’t, that I’d only just arrived on the morning train.

“Stay with us then; for a few days,” said the Senator generously. “Got plenty of room. Give us a chance to talk strategy.”

“I’d appreciate that, sir. By the way I happen to know your daughter slightly. I came down on the train with her this morning.”

Was it my imagination … no, it wasn’t; the Senator sighed rather sadly. “A wonderful girl, Ellen,” he said mechanically.

“She seems very pleasant.”

“Like her mother … a wonderful woman.”

“So I’ve been told.”

The Senator rose. “I’ll see you this evening then, at the house. Got a committee meeting now. Rufus will show you around. Remember: this is a kind of crusade.”

3

A crusade was putting it lightly. It was an unscrupulous and desperate effort of one Leander Rhodes to organize the illiberal minority of the country into a party within his party … and, I suspect, if he’d been younger and a little more intelligent he might very well have got himself into the White House. As it was, from what little Rufus Hollister would tell me, the Senator had some impressive backing; he also had some very sinister backing. I disguised my alarm, though, and by the time I took a taxi to the Senator’s house on Massachusetts Avenue, Mr. Hollister was convinced that I too was a crusader for Good Government and True-Blue American Ideals.

The house on Massachusetts Avenue was an heroic imitation of an Italian villa, covered with yellow stucco and decorated with twisted columns and ironwork balconies. The Senator, I soon discovered, was a very wealthy man though the source of his income was not entirely clear to me. Mr. Hollister spoke vaguely of properties in Talisman City.

A butler showed me to my room on the third floor and, as I went up the marble staircase, I caught an occasional glimpse of ballrooms, of parquet floors, of potted palms, all very 1920 Grand Hotel chic. Dinner would be announced in an hour, I was told. Then I was left alone in a comfortable bedroom overlooking the Avenue.

I was dozing blissfully in a hot bath, when Ellen marched into the bathroom.

“I’ve come to scrub your back,” she said briskly.

“No, you don’t,” I said, modestly covering myself. “Go away.”

“That’s hardly the way for my fiancé to act,” she said, sitting down on the toilet seat.

“I haven’t been your fiancé for almost a year,” I said austerely. “Besides, the bride-to-be is not supposed to inspect her groom before the wedding.”

“You give me a pain,” said Ellen, lighting a cigarette. She wore a very dashing pair of evening pajamas, green with gold thread, quite oriental-looking … it made her look faintly exotic, not at all like a simple girl from Talisman City. “By the way, I told Mother we were engaged. I hope you don’t mind.”

I moaned. “What is this allergy you have to the truth?”

“Well, it was the truth a few months ago … I mean time’s relative and all that,” she beamed at me. “Anyway it should help you with my father.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said, recalling the Senator’s look of pain at the mention of his only daughter.

“The house is full, by the way,” said Ellen, exhaling smoke. “Some of the dreariest political creatures these old eyes have seen in many a moon.”

“Constituents?”

“I suppose so. One’s rather sweet … a lovely boy from New York, a newspaperman. He’s doing a profile of Father for some magazine, very Left Wing I gather, and of course poor Father doesn’t have the remotest notion that he’s being taken for a ride. Did you ever see the piece the Nation did on him?”

I said that I hadn’t; I asked her the name of the lovely boy who was doing the profile. “Walter Langdon … a real dream. I had a quick drink with him in the drawing room, before I dashed off to make violent love to my prospective groom.”

“I have a feeling that our engagement isn’t going to last very long.”

“You may be right. Oh, and you’ll never guess who’s here … Verbena Pruitt.”

“My God!” I was alarmed. Anyone would be alarmed at meeting the incomparable Verbena, the President of the Daughters of the War of 1812 as well as National Committeewoman for her party, one of the most powerful lady politicos in the country.

“She’s from Daddy’s state, you know. She has the hairiest legs I’ve seen since that football game at Cambridge last week.”

“I had better get myself a hotel room quick,” I said, letting the bathwater out and standing up, my back turned modestly toward Ellen as I dried myself.

“How do you keep so slim?” asked the insatiable Ellen.

“No exercise is the secret,” I said flexing a muscle or two in an excess of male spirits.

“You’re really not bad at all,” she said thoughtfully. “I wonder why we ever fell out.” She rose and came toward me, a resolute expression on her face.

“None of that,” I said, making a dash for the bedroom. I had my trousers on before she could violate me further. She relaxed and we went on talking as though nothing had happened. I dressed more slowly.

“Then there’s an old buddy of Father’s staying here, Roger Pomeroy and his wife, a poisonous creature. I don’t know what they’re doing here. He’s an industrialist back in Talisman City, makes gunpowder or something like that.…”

“Sounds like a chummy gathering.”

“Grim … awfully grim. That tiresome Rufus Hollister, Father’s secretary, also lives in. I have often said that he was the reason I left home. Did you ever feel his hands? like an uncooked filet of sole … which reminds me I’m hungry, which also reminds me I desperately need a drink. Do hurry … here, let me tie your tie … I love tying a man’s tie: gives me such a sense of power when I think with just the slightest pressure I could choke him to death.”

“Darling, have you ever been analyzed?”

“Of course. Hasn’t everyone? I went every day for three years after my annulment … Mother insisted. When it was over I was completely normal; I had passed my course with flying colors: no more inhibitions, no frustrations, an easy conscience about alcohol as well as the slightly decrepit body of a middle-aged analyst named Breitbach added to my gallery of conquests.” She finished tying my tie with a flourish which made me jump. “There! You look such a lamb.”

4

The drawing room was a large draughty affair with French windows which looked out on a bleak garden of formal boxwood hedges and empty flower beds, black with winter. Several people were seated about the fire. Two men rose at our entrance. A woman in black lace rose, too, and approached us. It was Mrs. Leander Rhodes.

“Mother, I want you to meet my fiancé, Peter Sargeant.”

“I’m so happy to see you, Mr. Sargeant. I’ve heard such a great deal about you … such a coincidence, too … the Senator engaging you without knowing about you and Ellen.” She was an amiable-looking woman of fifty, thin and rather bent with, as far as I could tell through the swatches of black lace, no bosom and no waist. At her throat old-fashioned yellow diamonds gleamed. Her eyes were black; only her wide full mouth was like her daughter’s. “Let me introduce you around,” she said; and she did.

Verbena Pruitt was worse than I’d expected: a massive woman in mauve satin with henna-dyed hair, bobbed short over a red fat neck, large features, small pig eyes and a complexion not unlike the craters of the moon as seen through a telescope. She gave my hand a vigorous squeeze. So did Roger Pomeroy, a tall silver-haired man of distinction. His wife, Camilla, a fairly pretty dark woman, smiled at me winningly, one heavily veined hand at her smooth neck, fondling pearls. Ellen’s lovely boy Walter Langdon, a red-haired youth, mumbled something incoherent as we shook hands. He was obviously uncomfortable. And well he should be, I thought righteously, coming into a man’s house like this with every intention of axing him later in a magazine.

“The Senator and Rufus should be along soon,” said Mrs. Rhodes, as a maid brought Martinis. Ellen gulped one quickly, like a conjurer; then she took another off the tray and held it in one hand, occasionally sipping it in a most ladylike way. Whom was she trying to impress, I wondered. The lovely boy? or her mother? or the assorted politicos?

At first, I thought that possibly I was the one who was ill at ease but, by the time dinner was over and we were all seated in the drawing room having coffee beneath a virile painting of Senator Rhodes, I decided that something was obviously going all wrong and I surmised that it had to do with Ellen’s unexpected visit to Washington. Yet she was a perfect lady all evening. She was a trifle high by the time dinner was over but she spoke hardly at all … in fact, I’d never before seen her so restrained. The Senator was in good form but I had a feeling that the funny stories he told, and his loud rasping laughter were mechanical, a part of the paraphernalia of public office rather than sincere good spirits. He eyed Ellen and myself suspiciously all evening and I began to wonder just how long my job was going to last. I cursed Ellen to myself, fervently, furiously … her announcement that we were engaged had messed up everything.

The other guests seemed uneasy, except for Verbena Pruitt who matched the Senator laugh for laugh, joke for joke in a booming political voice.

Brandy was served with coffee and Senator Rhodes, turning to Roger Pomeroy whom he had ignored most of the evening, said, “Got some good cigars in the study. Want one?”

“No thank you, Lee,” said the other. “I’ve had to give up the habit … heart.”

“None of us are getting any younger!” snorted Miss Pruitt over her brandy, a hairpin falling softly to the carpet.… His eye is on the hairpin, I thought irreverently.

“I’m sound as a bell,” said the Senator striking his chest a careful blow. He did not look very sound, though. I noticed how pale he was, how one eyelid twitched, how his hands shook as he lighted a cigar for himself. He was an old man.

“The Senator has the stamina of ten men,” said little Sir Echo, Rufus Hollister, smugly.

“He’ll need it, too, if he’s going after that nomination,” said Miss Pruitt with a wink. “Won’t you, Lee?”

“Now who told you I was interested in the nomination?” said Senator Rhodes with an attempt at roguishness, not much of an attempt at that; he was obviously paying very little attention to us. He seemed preoccupied with some perplexing problem. His gray eyes looked unfocused.

While Verbena Pruitt and the Senator sparred, I talked to Mrs. Pomeroy who sat beside me on the couch. “Such a marvelous man, the Senator,” she said, her eyes glowing. “Have you known him long?” I shook my head, explaining my presence in the house.

“We’ve known the Rhodeses for just years, back in Talisman City. Were you ever there? No? It’s a wonderful residential town, almost Southern in a way, if you know what I mean. Except we’re getting quite a bit of industry there … my husband is in industry.”

“That’s very nice,” I said.

“We have a government contract,” said Mrs. Pomeroy importantly. She chattered on about herself, about their hometown, about the gunpowder business, about the latest developments in gunpowder: the new process Pomeroy Inc. had developed. While she talked I watched Ellen making time with lovely boy Langford on the couch opposite us. She was talking to him in a low voice and I could tell by the gleam in her eyes and the flush of confusion on his youthful puppydog face that before this night was over he would be forced to revise his estimate of the Rhodes family since, I was quite confident, long before Aurora showed her rosy head in the east, he would be engaged to the daughter of the house. He was a gone goose … for a few weeks anyway. I wondered if Mrs. Rhodes was on to her daughter. If she was she hardly showed it. She completely ignored her, speaking for the most part to Mr. Pomeroy and Rufus Hollister who sat on either side of her, their voices pitched a register below those of Senator Rhodes and Miss Pruitt who were now speaking of various scandals attendant upon the Denver Convention of 1908.

Just before midnight, Mrs. Rhodes stood up and announced that she was going to bed but that the others should take no notice of her if they wanted to remain up. “Good nights” were said and the hour for breakfast set. I was wondering whether I should go straight up to bed or wait for some sign from Ellen, when the Senator beckoned to me. “Like to have a little chat with you,” he said. “We can go up to my study.” I said good night to everyone. Ellen hardly noticed us go; she was already beginning to unravel poor Langdon, right there on the couch … all very ladylike, though: only an experienced eye like mine could tell what she was up to.

The Senator’s study was a corner room on the second floor with windows on two sides, oak paneling and bookcases filled with law books (which looked unopened), bound copies of the Congressional Record (fairly worn), and thick scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, much used, dating from 1912. There were photographs on the walls … less political, however, than those in his office. Photographs of his family at various moments in their lives … even one of Ellen as a bride. This surprised me since, as I remembered the story, she had eloped with an undesirable and had been brought home before, in the eyes of the law at least, he had soiled her.

The Senator seated himself at a desk in front of the windows. I sat down in a leather armchair beside the unlit fireplace; the room was chilly, I thought. I remember shivering.

“I must tell you frankly,” said the Senator, looking at me severely, “that I didn’t anticipate this … situation.”

“What situation?” I acted innocent.

“This business with my daughter … this ‘engagement.’ ”

“Sir, there is no business with your daughter,” I said, sitting up very straight.

“What do you mean, sir?” He was obviously going to out-courtesy me; our manners became more and more antebellum. “My daughter gave me to understand that you and she were to be married.”

“She is mistaken,” I said; the job was over, I decided sadly.

“You mean that you refuse, sir, to marry my daughter?”

“I mean, Senator,” said I, suddenly weary of the whole farce, “that I have never in my one year’s acquaintance with your daughter thought of marrying her nor has she ever thought of marrying me.”

He looked at me as though I were Drew Pearson investigating the inner workings of the Senate Committee on Spoils and Patronage. He blustered. “Do you mean to imply my daughter is a liar?”

“You know perfectly well what she is,” I snapped.

Leander Rhodes sagged in his chair; he looked a hundred years old at that moment. “Young man,” he said huskily, “I have misjudged you. I apologize.”

“It’s nothing, sir,” I mumbled. I felt genuinely sorry for the old bastard. He sighed heavily; then he lit another cigar.

“I’ll tell you a little about the coming campaign,” he said. I was enormously relieved: I wasn’t fired after all. “On Friday I shall announce my candidacy. So far the only two candidates officially in the field are both conservatives … neither is quite so conservative as I am, however, and neither has my following in the Midwest, among the farmers and small business people. Now I have been in this game long enough to know that high ideals are not enough if you want high office: you have to compromise to win and I want to win and I am willing to compromise with both Labor and the Left Wing, two elements which have never supported me before. You follow me?”

I said that I did, perfectly. I was beginning to revise my estimate of him. He was not entirely a fool. Had he been in the fashionable liberal camp I should probably have thought well of him … there were men far less astute than he who enjoyed a good deal more esteem.

“Now I anticipate a deadlock at the convention.…” For the next few minutes I was told political secrets which any Washington journalist would have given an arm to know. I found out what the President was going to do and what was going on in the inner circles of both parties … it was all very grand. “I am taking you into my confidence, young man, because unless you are up on the facts you’ll be of no use to me, and you have a lot of work to do. Fortunately, we have money. I am backed in this by some of the richest men in America and we’ll spend all that the law’ll allow … and then some.” He smiled for the first time since I’d met him: long yellow teeth, like a dog’s.…

It was almost one-thirty when our conference ended. “I feel we understand each other,” said the Senator, shaking my hand as he led me to the door.

“I do, too, sir,” I said sincerely, not adding, however, that I understood Leander Rhodes so well that I was tempted to take the next train back to New York and start a crusade against him. I had not realized the extent of his cunning nor had I suspected he had so many large sinister interests behind him. It was a chilling interview, even for a political innocent like myself: I realized, as I walked down the hall, that Huey Long had been a ward heeler compared to Senator Rhodes.

In my confusion, I went downstairs to the drawing room instead of upstairs to my bedroom. The butler was still up, to my surprise, collecting the remains of the coffee cups and brandy glasses. He looked at me expectantly but I only smiled vaguely at him and then, seeing a package of cigarettes on the couch opposite me, I walked over and picked them up, determinedly, as though I had come downstairs for them. The butler and his tray vanished. I stood for a moment, looking into the coals of the fire. The phrase “Man on horseback” kept going through my head. What a terrible man he was! I thought impotently, and what should I do? just how far from virtue should self-interest propel one? It was very perplexing.

“Oh, you gave me a start,” said a female voice.

I jumped myself; it was Verbena Pruitt in a dressing gown of flesh-colored silk, a vast tent-like affair which made her seem more than ever like a mountain of festering flesh; her thin gray hair was done in paper curlers and I noticed that she had a bald spot the size of a Cardinal’s cap on the back of her head.

“I was looking for my cigarettes,” said the apparition. “I thought I left them on the couch over there.”

I felt like a thief: the lady’s cigarettes in my coat pocket. Had I been of strong character, I should have admitted guilt and handed them over to her. But, as usual, I took the easy way. “Perhaps they fell down behind the cushions,” I said and I began to search for them with great stage gestures, scrutinizing the backs of cushions with an idiot stare.

“It’s unimportant,” said Verbena Pruitt. “The butler probably took them. They always do. Anything they can get their hands on.” She glanced thoughtfully at the row of bottles on a tray near the fireplace.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked eagerly.

“Perhaps a mouthful of that brandy,” said Miss Pruitt smiling; I noticed with alarm that her upper teeth had been removed for the night … so richly fat was her face, though, that it made hardly any difference. Only her speech was somewhat impaired. I wondered if I should attempt some pleasantry or not about the mouthful … did she want me to carry it to her in my mouth? I let it go. The Verbena Pruitts of the world were, as far as I was concerned, an unknown and dangerous quantity, capable of any madness. I brought her a stiff shot of brandy, and one for myself.

“That is nice,” she said, tossing off half of it in such haste that a bit of the essence trickled down her tier of chins, like Victoria Falls.

We sat down on one of the couches. I could hardly believe it. Here I was alone at night in an empty drawing room with the First Lady of her Party seated beside me, wearing an intimate garment of the night, her hair in curlers and her teeth waiting for her upstairs in one of the bedrooms. It was the sort of moment every boy dreams of, in nightmares.

“Tell me, my dear young man, what your function is … in relation to Senator Rhodes.”

“I am to handle his publicity.”

“Not an easy job,” said Miss Pruitt cryptically, touching her bald spot bemusedly with a hand like a bloated starfish.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Lee has many enemies.”

“I can see why.”

“You what?”

“I mean I can see why … considering the principles he stands for and so on,” I extemporized hastily.

“Of course. Still most of the press is against him … I can’t think why except you know what smart alecks those newspaper people are … just between you and me and the lamp post.… I hope you won’t quote me.” She smiled, terribly.

“I know what you mean,” I said, averting my eyes.

“Lee has such courage,” she added irrelevantly, sniffing her brandy like a terrier at a rat’s hole. “Take tonight. He actually thinks he can win over that young Communist from New York who’s writing a piece about him. He is fearless … but he should keep people like that at a distance.”

“Perhaps the Senator needs someone to save him from himself,” I suggested.

“How right you are, Mr. Schroeder.”

“Sargeant.”

“I mean Mr. Sargeant. Then you must remember that I’m not exactly pro-Rhodes.” This last information was said with a shrewd wink which struck me as being oddly unpleasant.

“I thought you were on his committee.” Rhodes had given me to understand that Miss Pruitt would deliver the women of America on Election Day.

“Wheels within wheels,” said Verbena Pruitt rising to her feet. “But now I must be off to my beauty sleep.” And, like Lady Macbeth, she sailed out of the room.

I finished off my brandy slowly. Then, wondering whether or not I should look in on Ellen, I walked up the dimly lit staircase. I was just recalling that I had no idea where her bedroom was when a figure stepped out of the shadows on the first landing. I gave a jump.

“Hope I didn’t startle you,” said Rufus Hollister smoothly, emerging from the darkened doorway, where he had been standing, into the faint lamplight. He was still dressed.

“Not at all,” I said.

“The Senator just phoned me … on the house phone. He’s working late … never lets up … secret of his success … nose to the grindstone.” I was pelted with saws.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” I said, edging away. I didn’t get very far, though. The next thing I knew I was on the floor, in Mr. Hollister’s arms, an enormous gold-framed mirror in fragments about us as the whole house rocked back and forth while a sound like thunder or the atomic bomb deafened us and put out all the lights.

They picked a fine moment to bomb Washington was my first conscious thought. My second thought was to check myself in the dark for broken bones. I was all in one piece, I decided, though my cheek was bleeding … from the broken glass. Then the shouts and shrieks began. I heard Mr. Hollister cursing in the dark near me, heard the tinkle of glass as he got to his feet and brushed himself off. Then, from all directions, candles appeared, held by servants, by Mrs. Rhodes, by Miss Pruitt, who was standing in the corridor with the Pomeroys. No one knew what had happened. Not until an hour later did we find out, when a police official addressed us in the drawing room.

It was a curious scene.

A dozen candelabras cast a cool yellow light over the room, making long shadows on the floor. The house party and the servants, in various states of dress and undress, sat in a circle about the police lieutenant, a young man named Winters who stood sternly between two uniformed policemen and surveyed his audience.

“In the first place,” he said, glaring for some inexplicable reason at Verbena Pruitt, “Senator Rhodes is dead.” Mrs. Rhodes, who had already been informed, sat very straight in her chair, her face expressionless. Ellen sat beside her, her eyes shut. The others looked stunned by what had happened. And what had happened?

“Some time between nine o’clock yesterday morning and one-thirty-six this morning, a small container of a special new explosive, Pomeroy 5X, was hidden behind some logs in the fireplace of the Senator’s study.” There was a gasp. Ellen opened her eyes very wide. Mr. Pomeroy stirred uneasily; his wife chewed her lip nervously. Verbena Pruitt was nearly as impassive as Mrs. Rhodes: she had been through too many political battles to be unnerved by such a small thing as murder, and it was murder in the eyes of Lieutenant Winters.

“It is our belief that someone who was closely acquainted with the Senator’s habits knew that he usually went to his study alone after dinner to work, and that he always lit his own fire on cold nights. In fact, according to Mrs. Rhodes and the butler here, he was very particular about this fire, insisting that it be made like an Indian tepee of ash logs and strips of pine kindling. It was never lighted by anyone except himself and, in the morning, the coals were always taken out by one of the maids. Yesterday morning they were removed at nine o’clock by …” Lieutenant Winters squinted in the candlelight at a sheet of paper he was holding in his hand, “by Madge Peabody, a maid. Fifteen minutes later the butler, Herman Howells, laid the fire. From that moment until Senator Rhodes retired to his study the library was visited by no one … except the murderer.” Lieutenant Winters paused damatically and peered through the gloom of candles at his captive audience, unconscious of his errors. I wondered if he’d ever thought of television for a career; with that handsome dull profile, that hypnotic voice he could write his own ticket. I was suddenly very tired; I wanted to go to bed.

Mr. Hollister provided a mild diversion. “And myself,” he said calmly. “I was in the study shortly before dinner, at the Senator’s request.” I held my fire.

“I will get your testimony later,” said the Lieutenant, a little sharply I thought. His great moment robbed of some of its drama. He then told us that we were, none of us, to leave the house without police permission. Then, beginning with the ladies, the interviews began. They were held in the dining room. The rest of us remained in the drawing room, talking in hushed voices of what had happened, and drinking nervously. Mrs. Rhodes was the first to be interviewed; which was fortunate since her presence embarrassed us all. When she was gone, I was surprised at how calmly the guests took this sudden, extraordinary turn in their affairs … especially Ellen who was the coolest of the lot.

“Do fix me a Scotch,” she said, while I was standing by the bar getting more brandy for Miss Pruitt. When I had finished my bar duties, I sat beside Ellen on an uncomfortable love seat. Across the room Miss Pruitt and Mr. Hollister were talking animatedly to Walter Langdon. Close to the fire the Pomeroys, man and wife, conferred in low voices while the servants hovered on the outskirts, silent in the shadows.

“This is awful,” I said inadequately, conventionally.

“I should hope to hell it is,” said Ellen, guzzling Scotch like a baby at its mother’s breast. “It’s going to tie us all in knots for the next few months.”

This was cold-blooded but I saw her point and, after all, it was her honesty which has always appealed to me. She had obviously not liked her father and I was oddly pleased that she had not, despite the crisis, acted out of character. It would have been such a temptation to weep and carry on. “What a funny way to kill someone,” I said, not knowing quite what to say.

“Dynamite in the fireplace!” Ellen shook her head; then she put her drink down and looked at me. “It’s the most impossible thing I’ve ever heard of.”

“How do you feel?” I asked, suddenly solicitous.

“Numb,” she said softly, shaking her head. “Did you ever find yourself not knowing what to think? Well, that’s the way I am now. I keep waiting for an alarm or something to go off inside me and show me how to act, what to feel.”

“Your mother’s taking it pretty well,” I said.

“She’s numb, too.”

“Where were you when it happened?”

Ellen chuckled; for a moment she was like her old self. “That would be telling!”

“With that boy?” I motioned to Langdon who was still talking to the politicos.

Ellen nodded, with a wicked smile. “We were just talking, in his room. He wanted to hear some stories … you know, life with father kind of things.…”

“I can imagine what you told him.”

“Well, we really hardly had time. He had just told me he was being divorced from his wife, a Bennington girl, when the lights went out and …” She stopped abruptly, took a long drink; then: “Did you ever know any girls from Bennington? They’re so terribly earnest. They know everything. I pity a boy like that being married to one of them.”

“I suppose your compassion will very soon take a more positive turn,” I said pompously; it was unseemly, I felt, to be talking about Ellen’s sex life when her father, at this moment, lay dead in his study, guarded by the police, a blanket hung over the doorway to keep the cold air out of the rest of the house: part of one wall had been blown off while the furniture and the door, as well as the Senator, had all been shattered in the explosion.

“Oh, who cares,” she said, without much interest. “How long do you think they’ll take to figure all this out?”

“Who? The police? I haven’t any idea.”

“Well, I hope they’re quick about it. It shouldn’t take long, God knows.”

“You sound as though you know who killed him?”

The blue eyes flickered almost humorously in the wavering candlelight. “Of course I know, darling … but, for one reason and another, I’m not opening my mouth … wouldn’t interfere for the world.”

I felt very cold then … as though a blast of December air from that ruined study had penetrated the drawing room and chilled me to the bone.