Death Is Her Bridegroom

Chapter I

Parked in the curved drive under the shadow of the huge portico, Jefferson Pitt’s modest jalopy assumed an appearance of weary decadence, as if it were about to collapse in a sad heap of defeated parts. And Jeff felt that he himself was in something the same shape. As he went up wide steps, his serviceable worsted seemed suddenly to become shrunken and shabby.

However, being the type of guy who could laugh at himself, he laughed silently and with wry humor. By the time the door chimes were answered by an ancient servant, he regained assurance, and was even feeling a little superior. After all, his services were in demand — he was needed and had been asked to come.

“My name’s Pitt,” he said. “Mr. Roman expects me.”

The servant nodded and stepped back.

Jeff moved past him into the hall that could have done service as a railroad terminal. Standing there with his hat in his hand, he felt the subtle depression which descends upon one in a place which has too much of everything.

From his position, he could detect in the half-light the dark faces of old paintings. Any one of them would have been worth a small fortune, and there were a dozen. Down the hall near the foot of the stairs that had more breadth than most rooms, there was, somewhat incongruously, a bright yellow splash of Van Gogh.

The servant moved around Jeff with cautious decrepitude. Jeff followed him down the hall, past the Van Gogh, and up the broad flight of stairs. On the second floor, the old man knocked discreetly upon the heavy walnut paneling of an immense door, and pushed the door inward without waiting for a response.

“Mr. Pitt has arrived, sir,” he said in a cracked, squeaky voice.

Obeying the servant’s gesture of invitation, Jeff entered the room, and immediately his whole attention was taken up with the initial shock of seeing the man who sat in a massive, high-backed chair awaiting him.

When Jeff had last seen Reed Roman, three years before, the fabulous millionaire had been a powerful, dominating block of man. Old, even then, but with the drive and aggression of youth still in him.

Jeff had read about his illness, the stroke, in the papers, but he hadn’t realized the extent of its ravishment. The old man sat twisted in his chair, his body betraying, even in repose, its partial impairment.

Only the eyes retained some of their former force, burning under craggy brows. His voice sounded, now, with an angry tremor, driven upward from its afflicted mechanism by a fierce exertion of will.

“Come in, Pitt. Come in and sit down.”

Jeff found a chair and sat with his hat on his knees, wondering if he should comment on the old man’s condition, deciding he’d better not. In the burning eyes there was suddenly a glint of cold humor.

“That’s right, boy. Be discreet. Sit there and act as if nothing had changed. They all do it. They all think the old man’s dying, and their fingers are itching like the devil for his money all the time the damned pious expressions are on their faces.”

He broke into a gusty wheeze of laughter, maliciousness gathering to bright, sharp points under bony overhang.

“I’ve got news for them. I’ve got news for the whole damned crew. The old man will be here like a lump in this chair for a long time yet. I’ll be right here watching them stew in their juice while they wait for me to die. Maybe I’ll even outlive a few of them.”

The aspirate laughter exploded again.

“You know why I called you here?”

“Not exactly, of course. I assume you have a job for me.”

“Brenda’s gone. Kidnapped,” the old man said abruptly.

Jeff’s rather amiable face hardened, taking on a rugged angularity that was not usually apparent.

“Snatched? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Naturally. I’ve kept it quiet. Get a lot of noisy police mixed up in it, anything might happen.”

“Sure. Anything. They might even get Brenda back for you.”

The old man’s stricken body jerked angrily. “The note said she’d be killed if the police were notified.”

“You’ve had a note, then?”

“Of course. Fifty thousand ransom. It’s here, if you want to see it.”

Slowly, with laborious effort that set his moving hand to trembling, he reached into the pocket of his robe and extended a folded piece of paper.

Taking the paper, Jeff turned it in his fingers, discovering that it was the cheap stuff for typewriters that can be bought in packets in any dime store. The kind that could never be traced. This piece had added stiffness, the result of paper pasted to the side folded in. Opening it, he found the expected — the crude newsprint pasted to form the message. Reading, he felt a certain incredulity, an inner urge to jeer at himself for taking seriously the hocus-pocus of a bad movie.

After he had finished reading it, he said, “It’s a queer setup. It has a phony ring.”

“All these things have a phony ring. Something that just doesn’t happen — until it does. You’re a detective. You ought to know that.”

Jeff shrugged. “You’re right, of course. There’s always an air of incredible melodrama about real evil. That doesn’t make it any less real. What do you intend to do?”

“I’ll pay the ransom, naturally. Not that she’s worth it. Brenda, I mean. She’s beautiful. She’s more beautiful than you’d imagine a woman could be, and she’s rotten as a stump full of termites. But that’s not a good analogy. It makes her sound soft, and she’s not soft at all. She’s hard as a diamond and filled with the same kind of fire. Cold as ice sometimes, sometimes hot as an inferno. And for me, no love. No love at all for the old man.”

The petulance in his voice was suddenly in danger of degenerating into self-pity, and becoming aware of it, he shook himself out of the mood impatiently.

“But maybe I’ve got it coming,” he said. “If so, all right. I’ve been hard myself. No pity or love in me when maybe there should have been. You don’t build up a fortune of millions with love and pity. Anyhow, it’s too late now for regrets. It was too late long ago. I’ll pay the ransom because she’s my son’s daughter. It’s pride. It’s the thick, sticky hold of blood. At any rate, it’s the last she’ll have from me, and maybe it’s cheap enough. Not another penny will she have.”

“You mean she’s out of the will?”

“That’s right. Out cold. She looks like an angel, but she’s got the instincts of a hellion, and she’ll have nothing of mine to dissipate on the frequenters of garbage heaps.” The explosive laughter burst past his bloodless lips again, but there was grudging admiration in the harsh lines of his face. “Not that she gives a damn. She’s got more guts than all the others put together. That much you can say of her. She told me I could take every cent I had to hell with me.”

“The note instructs you to get a man named Constance to act as contact. Cleo Constance. You been in touch with him?”

“Yes. He was here earlier today.”

“Will he act?”

“Yes.”

“Why him, I wonder. Why a particular man named Cleo Constance?”

“Probably it was Brenda’s suggestion. Constance is a private detective, like you. Brenda used him once. A matter of some stolen jewelry. He seemed efficient. Got the stuff back in a hurry.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know exactly. Not long ago. At the time, I was flat on my back with hell’s emissaries sitting on my chest.”

“There’s another thing. Constance must be known to the kidnapper. By sight, I mean. There’s no instruction, in the note, about identification. No special article of clothing to wear. No gesture or sign to make at a certain place or time. Nothing to point him out.”

“I thought of that. It isn’t unlikely that a private detective would be known. I should think you’d know him yourself, being in the same business.”

“It’s a big city. Private detectives aren’t like millionaires. They get lost in the crowd.”

“All right. What’s more important, does he know you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“There’s a chance he might, but we’ll have to take it.” The old man paused, his chin sinking onto his chest, lids lowering over his smoldering eyes. He remained that way so long that Jeff wondered if he had sunk suddenly into a coma, but after a while, eyes still shut, he began to speak again. “Fifty thousand is a lot of money. To a lot of people, it’s a fortune. It might be quite a temptation to a private detective.”

“I can testify to that,” Jeff said, and he sat quietly, waiting for the old man to continue, thinking that they had come to the point at last.

“You read the note,” Roman said. “Constance is to get on the seven-thirty bus for Darrowville tomorrow night. He’s to have the fifty thousand with him in unmarked bills. It’s a local bus. One of these little lines that hang on for peanuts. It’s about seventy-five miles to Darrowville, and the bus makes a couple of stops between here and there. Somewhere along the way, the contact will be made. I want you to be sure the money is handed over.”

“You mean be sure that Constance doesn’t take a powder with it?”

The old man lifter his shoulders very slightly. “As I said, fifty thousand’s a lot of money.”

“What does Constance look like?”

“He’s tall. Broad shoulders and a thin, handsome face. There’s a feeling of coldness about him. Dresses like a banker. Homburg. Blues and grays. Good stuff, cut by a tailor who knows how. You’d never pick him for a detective.”

Jeff grinned. “Thanks,” he said. “You haven’t told how it happened. The kidnapping.”

The old man was slumped in his chair. Weariness covered him like a powdering of gray dust. He lifted his lids briefly and let them fall again of their own weight.

“Who knows? She left here two nights ago, going God knows where. She never told anyone where she was going, what she was doing. Never a damn word. She left here in a taxi, I’m told. The note is the only word I’ve had of her since she left.”

“Did she usually go out in a taxi? Why didn’t she drive?”

“Sometimes she drove. Sometimes she used a taxi. I guess it depended on where she was going. It doesn’t matter. All I want you to do is to see that the ransom is paid.”

“That may be a large order. The kidnapper’s no fool. You think he’ll approach your contact openly?”

The eyes flicked open again. Open and shut. “That’s your business, Pitt. You’ve done other jobs for me. You did them well, or you wouldn’t be here now. Do this one.”

The effrontery of wealth, Jeff thought. The damned bland presumption of millions. He stood up, waiting for the lids to lift again, waiting for an overt sign that he was free to walk away. When the sign failed to come, he left without it, letting himself out into the unperverted air. Breathing deeply, he stood for a moment in the drive beside his jalopy to think of a beautiful girl whose life depended on the delivery of fifty grand, and of a man in a homburg who was the delivery boy.

While Jeff stood beside his jalopy and thought about Brenda Roman and Cleo Constance, Cleo Constance drove across the city limit and thought about Brenda Roman and fifty grand. It was logical that he thought of Brenda and the fifty grand in association, since they came together. Either would have been a piece of loot a man would sweat for. Together they were almost incredible. Once-in-a-lifetime stuff.

He sat behind the wheel of his Olds with an odd, military stiffness that never left him. His gray homburg sat with conservative tilt the proper distance above his level brows. The eyes beneath the brows were pale blue, cold, and seemed to be covered by a thin film of ice. The nose and mouth were thin, rather patrician, conforming to the narrow oval face. As Reed Roman had said, handsome. A banker, he’d said. Actually, the face would have been more appropriate under a klieg light.

On the highway, out of traffic, he held the needle of the speedometer at fifty. Restraint was difficult to maintain. He felt a wracking inner compulsion to let himself go, to send the Olds booming down the highway as a symbol of the wild soaring of his imagination.

I knew it would come, he thought. The big break. The time that requires only guts and action to make it the beginning of the big life. Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Napoleon firing his cannon down a Paris street. It’s been worth waiting for, and I always knew it would come in time. I knew it even as a kid back home — that long ago — and even then it was a kind of compensation for an old man who was a pickled bum and an old woman who was a whining slattern. I’ve never lost sight of the big break. Not in reform school. Not during all the dreary, slimy leg-work for petty fees that goes with being a private eye. And now it’s here, and it’s only the beginning. With fifty grand to ride on and a sleek charmer like Brenda Roman to go along for the ride, the lid’s off for Cleo Constance. The sky’s the limit for Cleo.

Funny, how things begin. Just another caper, you think; a few grand in stolen jewels, and a servant begging for mercy. Just a few days to crack it. Then the note from Brenda asking me to call for my fee. I knew then that something was funny, because it would have been the normal thing just to mail it to the office. I knew the caper was taking a turn. Not that I objected. I was burning to see her again. Ever since the first interview, when she sat there in that suit with a skirt so tight that it showed all the long lines of her legs. Ever since I looked into that strange, beautiful face that makes you think of a fallen angel who has no regrets.

I’ll never forget the day I called for the fee. She had me come up to her room in that gloomy stack of old Roman’s, and the room was like another place entirely, with soft light coming out of nowhere and all the thick rugs and sleek furniture and the big bed in black silk. And there she was, in black silk like the bed, with her hair like a cloud of white fire.

“You’re a handsome guy, Constance,” she said. “You’re the handsomest, most aggravating species of male I’ve ever seen. What makes you nothing but a lousy private cop?”

And there it was, asking for nothing but guts and action to make something of it, and that was not the end at all, but only the beginning, and now it won’t ever end until we’re old, or burned out, or dead, and by that time we’ll have had all, the full, strong flavor of life, and it won’t matter.

Fifteen miles out the highway, he turned off in a northerly direction, following the course of a narrow gravel road. The tilt of the earth was generally upward, rising to the foothills of a sprawling range worn low by the action of geologic ages. Rock outcroppings and scrub oak were everywhere. The oaks, stripped of leaves, presented a gnarled and twisted hardiness, grim yet somehow exhilarating, that reinforced his soaring mood.

There was hunting here. Hunting and good fishing, with speckled and rainbow trout fighting the currents of clear streams. He had a cabin in the low hills, a two-room thing of logs, where he came now and again. It was a good place to come, he’d found, when the city closed in and the big dream seemed buried forever in steel and asphalt. It was a good place to come, too, when one had a girl to hide for the little while it would take to make the dream come alive at last.

Turning again, steering the Olds along hard ruts that ascended precipitately, he felt the automatic transmission shift down for its increased labor and saw ahead of him among the scrub oaks the brown bulk of the cabin against its side of hill. He pulled around the cabin and into a rough shed. Retracing his way afoot around the cabin, he crossed the small front porch and pushed open the door.

The attack was swift, without warning, as if a mountain cat had crouched waiting within the room. But it was an attack without fangs or talons, precipitated by a hunger that wanted to devour but not to destroy. Her arms were locked around his neck, and her body was straining against his. He was drowning, he felt, in the astringent scent of her pale hair. Her lips moved against his.

“Two days, Connie. Only two days, and it seems like two years.”

He tangled his long fingers in the pale silk of her hair and drew her head back until her throat arched back at the tension. His mouth was hard against hers, until suddenly he released her and spun away, walking into the room with the precise military bearing that survived, rather ludicrously, even the swift, flaming attack. When he turned abruptly to face her, his pale eyes were still aflame, contradicting the effect of his conditioned reserve. It was this more than anything, he knew, that explained his strange and overwhelming fascination for her. This deep flame that broke through his chill restraint with the intensity and swiftness of heat lightning. She had the capacity to make it flare, and the knowledge, he realized, filled her with a shattering sense of excitement.

“It’s on the way, baby. Our way. The way you’ve got it planned.”

“You’ve seen grandfather?”

“I’ve seen him, and I’m in.”

“He’s a crafty old hellion, Connie. You don’t make millions by being stupid. You think he suspects anything?”

“Nothing. I’ll swear he suspects nothing.”

“He’s following the instructions? Even about the police?”

“Yes. He hates your guts, baby, but he admires you, just the same. With him, that’s probably better than love. He wouldn’t leave you a dime if he scorched in hell for it, but he’ll pay a fat ransom to keep anyone else from trying to hurt you.”

“I know. I told you it’d be like that. I’ve known the old devil for a long time, Connie. Is it going through tomorrow night?”

“On schedule. I’ll pick up the fifty grand at the old man’s place at six-thirty. From there. I’ll go to the bus terminal and catch the seven-thirty Darrowville bus. It’ll be a dry run to make the ride, of course, but I’d better make it for looks, just in case someone’s looking. When I get to Darrowville, I turn around and come back on the first bus. That’ll be next morning. I’ll still have the fifty grand. As far as anyone will ever know, the contact was made. Either somewhere along the way or in Darrowville itself.”

“When do I show up?”

“The next night. It’ll be a little rough. You’ll leave here after dark and walk to the highway. It’s a long way and tough going. You show up on the highway. Get yourself picked up. You’re in bad shape. You’ve been taken to a spot near the highway and released. You don’t know just where, because you were blindfolded. Say there were two men involved. Use your imagination when you describe them. Think you can do it? I’d pick you up here and drive you down near the highway, but it’d be too risky.”

She moved toward him and stopped, laughing.

“I can do it, all right,” she said. “Oil, I can do it.”

She stood there looking at him with her hands on her hips and her breasts rising against her blouse. The blood was burning in her cheeks.