Double, Double

Tuesday, May 2

Rima and Ken were married after Ken’s office hours Tuesday afternoon in Burleigh Pendleton’s parlor, with Ellery and a beaming Mis’ Pendleton to witness.

“It’s an omen,” chortled Ken as they walked back to his car. The homegoing Junction traffic was zipping joyously by. “Burleigh never has Mis’ Pendleton to witness except when she’s sober. Did you hear that extra zing in his delivery? We’ve got a mighty good start, Mrs. Winship.”

“Bless them. Bless everybody.” Rima was hanging on to her husband’s arm as if she were afraid he might vanish.

“Get in, Ellery.”

“Not this time,” said Mr. Queen hollowly. “There’s a limit to every man’s endurance, and this marks mine. You two go on about your business and let me get quietly potted. I’ll notify the Record, so don’t bother to stop in town.”

“Oh, Ellery...”

“Oh Ellery nothing. I don’t even want to know where you’re going.”

“Up to Durkee’s Falls.”

“Just for overnight, but we thought you’d at least have our wedding supper with us.”

“There is a dreadful noise of waters in mine ears, as the poet says, and they hear not. God speed and bless your union and may neither of you ever scab. Now get the hell out of here before I break down and blub.”

“We’ll be back first thing in the morning!” shouted Ken as they drove off.

Ellery stood at the justice of the peace’s gate until the exhaust of Hymen’s chariot mingled with the haze of the hills.

He began to trudge up Route 16 with his hands in his pockets, wondering what it must feel like to be happy. Rima was happy, so happy she was numb. Ken was happy, with a masculine exuberance he had tried decently to control. Mis’ Pendleton had been happy, perhaps in anticipation of the bottle she was reputed to keep stashed in her chicken coop. About dour Burleigh Pendleton Ellery was not sure; he was a Yankee of Scotch blood; but at least he dispensed happiness. Life went on in and about Wrightsville, working, drinking, quarreling, copulating; people died and people married, everybody exercised some function.

And here he was, about as useful as an extra appendix.

Ellery found himself before Gus Olesen’s Roadside Tavern. It was only a hundred yards or so up the road from Burleigh Pendleton’s, a juxtaposition both merchants had found profitable.

He went in.

Gus’s was crowded with people decently having a beer or a shot or two before going home from the mill or the office. Everybody seemed to be enjoying himself except one man alone in a booth, who was plainly suffering. Ellery walked over and said, “I’m a desperate man and there’s nowhere else to park. May I share this, or do I fight you for it?”

The man said belligerently, “Sit and be damned to you,” and when he looked up Ellery saw under the fedora — which looked as if an elephant had trampled on it — the once-precise red hair and countenance of Francis O’Bannon. “Haven’t we met? Don’t answer. I’m really not interested.”

“Why, O’Bannon.” Ellery sat down, pleased. O’Bannon crocked seemed another man. His pink plastic glasses hung from one ear and a splash of what was probably whisky debauched his chaste tie; but it was more than that. The glare in his eye reflected a fire from which the damper had been lifted. He gave out a fierce exhalation of manhood. “What’s happened? You and Malvina have a bit of a thing, old boy?”

“Look, sucker—”

“The name is Queen.”

“Queen, look. Have a drink.”

Ellery filled one of the numerous vessels strewn about the table from the incumbent bottle. “Cheers.”

“Just drink it. What did you say the name was?”

“Queen. How about you and Malvina—”

“Queen, when you bandy the name of that bitch about a bistro you insult an honorable profession. That silverplated houri. That svelterumped Hitler. The brass of a gold brick, the conscience of a bookie, the soul of a press agent, and the ambition of a body louse. And no more heart than a frozen fryer. She flicks her tail in your face and dares you to think of anything lower than last week’s paid advertising. There is a broad, Mr. Quinn, who defies analysis. She buys a ninety-five-thousand-dollar house on Skytop Road, fills it with fifty grand worth of decorators’ daydreams, and she sleeps in a whitewashed cubbyhole with nothing in it but a hospital bed and a straightbacked chair. She has a ten-thousand-dollar collection of classical recordings and a twenty-five-hundred-dollar machine and all she plays on it are Bozo, Babar, Christopher Robin, and Frank Luther singing Mother Goose. And she hates kids. Contradictory, see?”

“Maybe she once lost a child. Has she ever been married?”

“Thrice. Number one was a millionaire pork packer, around seventy, number two was a ballet dancer, number three was a society fungus who wore corsets and paraded around the ancestral keep in a Japanese kimono and a riding crop. Maybe you’ve got something there. But me, I’m a primitive soul. One of these days I’m going to beat her brains in with an eight-column head of pi.”

“Tell her off. It’s not so messy.”

“Mr. Green,” said O’Bannon morosely, “every man goes nuts in his own way.”

“Why not quit if it’s so unbearable?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I try to render service where it’s in obvious demand. O’Bannon, if you ever saw Harvard Square it was only to get a story on the mating habits of the Crimson undergraduate for the American Weekly. Why this flowering-of-New-England getup?”

“Yikes, the fellow undoes me. Would you really like to know?”

“We have the evening before us.”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“I’m a specialist in fantasy. Try me.”

“Then get a load of this — Breen, is it? I first spot this Prentiss calamity at one of the last presidential conventions. She irks me — you know what I mean? Right off the bat. Ever see a dame who the first time you saw her you wanted to make like you’re milking a cow with her neck? Gorgeous, knows all the shots, just the slightest curl around the edges, and don’t-touch-me-peasant-I’m-for-your-betters. Hell, for all I know she was there trying to get herself nominated; I wouldn’t put it past her. Anyway, I kind of follow her around like a dog. You can’t deny it, Feeney, she’s got racy lines. But a sort of instinct tells me, ‘O’Bannon, don’t let this hunk of frozen Chanel get her hooks in you.’ So I hang back, see? Well, I get back to New York where I’m wiping up after a city editor at the time and, Sweeney, the first thing I see is a Guild piece about this lady publisher in a jerk New England town who’s bought up an alleged newspaper and is making large motions in the direction of the national screwball prize. And what should her name be but Malvina Prentiss, my convention dream-girl! I make a few reckless inquiries among some unemployed beagles I know and I find out Malvina is hunting for an editorial assistant on this bumpkin bedsheet with bigtime, brass-knuckle newspaper experience. But there’s a catch. I discover a lot of guys are tripping over who would like to bury themselves in the hay for a couple of semesters for personal reasons, and otherwise qualify. And that is that the successful candidate must also be refined, of Pilgrim stock, and — I quote — ‘with a sound Harvard background.’ What she wants, apparently, is a sort of journalistic thug type who was baptized in the Charles River and cut his first incisors on the silver service of the Copley-Plaza. Well, my name isn’t O’Bannon by accident. Every Irishman in America has at least one cousin in Boston and mine is also named Francis O’Bannon. Cousin Francis has pale hands, Back Bay manners, a crampy look, and he got an M.A. from Harvard and is now running a suds parlor at Revere Beach. So after spending a couple of weeks with him getting the feel of my Back Bayground again and brushing up on my memories of the Common, the Yard, Copey, and Radcliffe, another week in Cambridge studying the lingo of the natives, their peculiar habits and customs and so forth, buying me these plate glass cheaters for twenty bucks, and finally visiting a Harvard Square funeral parlor at four in the morning to borrow the clothes from an old alumnus who had no further use for them, I entrained sedately for Wrightsville with Cousin Francis’s sheepskin under my arm and a letter of introduction from President Conant, which I forged, and I was in. Quickest thing you ever saw.

“The question is,” said O’Bannon, refilling his glass bitterly, “who took whom and who gets it in the end? Mr. Greeley, sex is the third leg of humanity. It ought to be abolished along with falsies, mint-flavored potato chips, and inherited wealth. Here’s blood in your eye.”

“And in Malvina’s,” said Ellery, “in case you’re interested.”

O’Bannon straightened up as if he had been shot in the back. “Where is she?” he asked cautiously.

“Standing in the doorway having herself a panoramic look.”

“The hell with her.”

“She’s advancing.”

“I’ll tell her off. That’s what I’ll do.”

“Uh-uh,” said Ellery. “She’s spotted me.”

O’Bannon turned toward the wall, shoulders high. “Decoy her, for God’s sake. Get off your fanny.” His fingers fumbled with his tie.

“Too late.”

O’Bannon sprang to his feet. “So! You thought you could get me intoxicated, did you?” he cried scornfully, leveling an indignant forefinger at Ellery. “You scoundrel, I’ll have you know most of this liquor you’ve been urging upon me has been secretly poured on the floor! Oh, hello there, Miss Prentiss. Miss Prentiss—”

“Spec.” The word dropped as softly as snow on a cake of ice. “Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you? You’re drunk.”

“Miss Prentiss, the cur phoned me. He had me meet him in this low saloon on a very plausible excuse that escapes me at the moment. He’s been plying me with bourbon and asking insidious questions, Miss Prentiss, a great many insidious questions. Oh, he’ll deny it — what’s your name, again?—”

“Queen,” said Ellery. “Won’t you join us, Miss Prentiss?”

“Thank you.” She sat down beside Francis O’Bannon, eying him curiously. “Sit down, Spec, you look ridiculous. And fix your hat. I didn’t know you were human.” O’Bannon sat down, muttering. “But why Spec, Queen? Not very sporting of you. Where I come from we throw those back.”

Ellery’s heart bled for O’Bannon. “I think you underestimate O’Bannon, Miss Prentiss. He didn’t give a thing away.”

“What would there be to give? You must be desperate if you’re looking for clues in the Record’s direction.”

“Exactly what I told the fellow, Miss Prentiss!”

“Shut up, Spec.” Malvina laughed. “I’ve been looking you up, Ellery. This is your fourth crack at Wrightsville and your score is perfect. A string of... what do they call them in the sports department, Spec?”

“Skunk eggs,” said O’Bannon.

“Skunk eggs, Ellery. And from the look of things, you’re preparing to set on still another striped pussy.”

“I don’t think,” said Ellery with a secretive smile, “that that’s quite what I’m hatching this time, Miss Prentiss.” Her laughter had recalled Otis Holderfield’s, and it had occurred to him that Holderfield was Wrightsville, which endows the printed word with a magic that transforms hearsay into fact. To read it in the Record might stop Holderfield’s hilarity.

Malvina Prentiss frowned; O’Bannon blinked and looked interested.

“You’ve found out something.”

“The name of the next candidate.”

“Oh, come!”

“You talk like his campaign manager,” said O’Bannon in an angry tone.

“You flatter me,” said Ellery. “However, I’ve begun to detect some of the strings. Number one, MacCaby, was a rich man, for instance. Number two, Hart, turned out to be a poor man. Rich man, poor man. Tom Anderson was known as The Town Beggar. Beggar-man. Nick Jacquard, number four to leave us, was The Town Thief—”

“Rich man, poor man, beggar-man... thief?” mumbled O’Bannon. He started. “Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief; doctor... Dr. Dodd!”

“Lawyer,” said Malvina Prentiss swiftly. “Spec—”

“Oh, no,” groaned O’Bannon. “No, Miss Prentiss.”

“You chanted it yourself. What else could it mean?”

“You can’t print a thing like that!”

“Why not?”

“They’d be howling from the lobster beds of Maine to the perfumed strand of Baja California!”

“Queen isn’t howling.”

“He made it up.”

“Not I,” said Ellery. “You needn’t squirm so, O’Bannon. Think of it in terms of lunacy and it at once becomes reasonable.”

“You’re a fiction writer!”

“I didn’t write this fiction.”

Malvina Prentiss was tapping the table with her silver fingernails. “Are you through, Spec? This is the tieup we’ve been looking for. Whether it makes sense or not. For all I know, it does. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’ll handle it from the editorial end. You run over to Boston first thing in the morning — no, make it tonight; take my Caddy — and track down the source of that rhyme, or game, or whatever it is. Bring back every book you can find that gives anything on it. Are you in condition to drive tonight?”

“Please, Miss Prentiss,” said O’Bannon, offended.

The woman in silver rose. “That was sharp, Queen. Your spotting that. My offer of a column is still open. At your own figure.”

Ellery shook his head. “I’m allergic to millstones, Miss Prentiss. By the way, Rima Anderson and Kenneth Winship were married this afternoon by Justice of the Peace Burleigh Pendleton. They’re on a one-night honeymoon and don’t ask me where.”

Malvina seemed surprised. But all she said was, “Our bird-girl does all right, doesn’t she? Spec, get a move on,” and she strode off.

O’Bannon muttered, “Thanks for not crabbing my act, chum,” pushing himself to his feet. His hand collided with the bottle and he looked around furtively. But then he called, “Coming, coming, Miss Prentiss!” and hurried after her.

Ellery stared at O’Bannon’s bottle.

Dark brown secrets guaranteed.

Besides, what else was there to do?

Ellery reached for the bottle.