Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 12, No. 59, November 1948

Sugar and Spice by Vera Caspary

Vera Caspary... in the mystery field the name of Vera Caspary evokes another name — LAURA, the title of Miss Caspary’s first detective novel and one of the major successes of this decade, LAURA began as a magazine serial, was then published in book form, later became a sensational motion picture, and finally toured as a play. Indeed, LAURA was so popular in all its processings that one is tempted to think of the author as Laura Caspary... In the course of her varied writing career — advertising copy-miter, editor, novelist, playwright, screen-play miter, even correspondence-school teacher — Vera Caspary has proved herself an explorer of the “aberrations of society.” Her early work was ambitiously serious. In her first book, THE WHITE GIRL (1929), she dealt vividly, harshly, and realistically with the problem of a Negress who left the South for Chicago and posed as white. At that period in her literary growth Vera Caspary mote “in the hard, materialistic style of Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber.” Subsequent novels showed her still probing social backgrounds, and in 1932 her novel, THICKER THAN WATER, depicted the family life of Portuguese Jews in Chicago, describing “the subtle alterations... and the slow fading of orthodox observances.”

After an interval of scripting for the films Miss Caspary created LAURA — “Something different from the run-of-the-mill detective story” and “done with a novel twist and much shill,” according to Will Cuppy’s review. BEDELIA followed — a “curious and clever” tale in which Miss Caspary “ably presented a pathological case history without so much as once finding it necessary to indulge in the special terminology of the psychiatric clinic.” Completing a trio of so-called “psycho-thrillers,” her next book, STRANGER THAN THE TRUTH, was compared by some critics with Kenneth Fearing’s THE BIG CLOCK.

But now, Vera Caspary is “through with it.” She will mite no more detective stories. Perhaps that is why Miss Caspary feels so strongly that she is “not properly a mystery story miter at all.” She has always maintained that murder is only “a dramatic device which heightens the emotion and action, and sharpens character drawing.” Does Miss Caspary really mean that? Merely a dramatic device? What else does Miss Caspary think of the writing craft? Well, she believes that “to be a miter you must have a point of view in what you experience. You need to keep an ear and an eye always at the keyhole, without malice. After you have observed, and listened at keyholes, all you need is a will of iron to ride the beam.”

Taking Miss Caspary at her own word, let us now watch her peeping through the keyhole, looking into the lives of two women and a man, hearing what they say, imagining what they think, observing what they do; let us pin down, throughout the story, Miss Caspary’s own point of view, using that as the catalyst (without malice, remember) which reveals the dissolution of a human soul — for surely that is precisely what the act of murder is...

I have never known a murderer, a murder victim, nor anyone involved in a murder case. I admit that I am a snob, but to my mind crime is sordid and inevitably associated with gangsters, frustrated choir singers in dusty suburban towns, and starving old ladies supposed to have hidden vast fortunes in the bedsprings. I once remarked to a friend that people of our sort were not in the homicide set, and three weeks later heard that her brother-in-law had been arrested as a suspect in the shooting of his rich uncle. It was proved, however, that this was a hunting accident and the brother-in-law exonerated. But it gave me quite a jolt.

Jolt number two came when Mike Jordan, sitting on my patio on a Sunday afternoon, told me a story which proved that well-bred, middle-class girls can commit murder as calmly as I knit a sock, and with fewer lumps in the finished product. Mike had arrived that morning for an eleven o’clock breakfast, and after the briefest greeting had sat silent until the bells of San Miguel started tolling twelve.

This was unusual. Mike was not the taciturn type. But he was independent almost to a point of arrogance and disliked asking favors. This I learned was the cause of the brooding silence. There is no greater favor you can ask a California hostess than the use of her telephone for a New York call.

I sat without speaking until the bells were still. Mike pulled out a roll of bills that reminded me of the old movie gangsters.

“Let me pay you now, Lissa. I don’t want to make this call from the Officers Club. It may take two or three hours to get through, and there are always too many fellows waiting to use the phones. Believe me, this is a case of life and death.”

When he put the call through I disappeared. A few minutes later Mike found me on the patio with the watering can in my discreet hands. It was a brilliant day, the wind high, the air sweet with the scent of sage and mimosa. Bees floated above the geraniums, and the cactus was coated with a film of silver dust. Loathing sunshine, Mike pulled a canopied chair into the shade of the pepper tree. He had the light skin that burns easily and a thick crop of flaming hair.

“Would you like to know who killed Gilbert Jones?”

My watering can clattered on the flagged floor of the patio. According to the latest reports, Gilbert Jones’s death was still baffling the New York police. It was one of those conspicuous murders that take up front-page space usually reserved for the biggest war news. Gilbert Jones had been a leading New York actor who had also played in a few pictures, and there were two women involved in the case, one beautiful, the other a millionaire. They were cousins, and had both been in love with Gilbert Jones.

“How do you know who killed him?”

We were alone that Sunday afternoon. My husband was on duty at the Post and an eighth of a mile separated us from the nearest neighbor. Although there was no one closer than the passengers in the pygmy cars on the highway below our hill, Mike spoke softly. This story was close to his heart...

Mike Jordan’s mother was the sort of woman who, when she learned she was to have a child, looked at beautiful pictures and listened to great music. As a result, Mike grew up to make family gatherings more than usually hideous by his renditions of The Melody in F and Rachmaninoff’s Prelude. His first music teacher had been a German, the local professor; when he died Mike took lessons from Mrs. Coles, a faded blonde with brown eyes, crimped hair, and a pair of pearl-button earrings which Mike was certain she wore when she bathed and slept.

Everybody in town felt sorry for Mrs. Coles because her husband had deserted her, and admired her because she supported herself when she might easily have depended upon rich relations. To Mike her independence seemed a bit rueful. At every lesson the piano students were made aware that she had been bred for better things than the career of music teacher. She had a lovely daughter to whom her gallant laments must have been as much part of the daily routine as the students’ finger exercises.

One day — Mike was about sixteen at the time — Mrs. Coles interrupted a Chopin Nocturne by announcing, “Phyllis is so fond of you, Michael. She looks up to you with the greatest respect.”

Mike’s fingers crashed down upon the keyboard as though he were working on Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. He had always admired the piano teacher’s daughter. She was very fair, with great, glowing dark eyes.

“She has something to ask you,” Mrs. Coles continued. “But she’s shy and has asked me to approach you first. I reminded her of the Courtship of Miles Standish and said, ‘Why don’t you speak for yourself, Phyllis?’ but she said the tables were turned because John Alden was a man. A clever child, don’t you think? So I wonder, Michael” — Mrs. Coles hesitated, adjusting a pearl earring — “if you’d like to escort Phyllis to Nancy Miller’s party. It’s to be at the club, a bit ostentatious, in my opinion, for such young people, but Nancy’s mother, although she is my own sister, likes show. Perhaps you will enjoy it.”

The invitation flattered and puzzled him. Nancy Miller was almost a legend in the town, a girl who went to fashionable boarding schools and spent her summers in Europe or at seashore resorts. There was hardly a profitable industry in the town that did not belong in some fashion to her father. They had a big place — an estate, the town called it — a couple of miles out on the river.

Mike’s mother suggested that he might have been invited because he had won an interstate essay contest, and had his picture in a Chicago newspaper. Mike laughed scornfully. Phyllis Coles might have had as her escort the senior class president or the captain of the football team. The prize essay had provided him with a sporty new outfit, white ducks and a blue Norfolk jacket. He was reading Schnitzler at the time, fancied himself a man of the world, and wondered if he dared appear with a carnation in his buttonhole.

On the day of the party he got as far as the door of Nick Scarpas’s flower store on Main Street, but there his courage failed. He arrived at the Coles house just as if he had come for a music lesson and, as the door was always open, walked in. Through yellow silk portieres he heard shrillness and sobbing. What, he asked himself, would a man of the world do in the circumstances? He trifled with the idea of sneaking away, returning, and announcing himself with a dignified knock. Then an inspiration visited him. He struck a pose beside the piano and began playing with one hand carelessly. No man of the world could have done it better.

The yellow drapes parted, Mrs. Coles skipped into the room, adjusted an earring. “How prompt, Michael! Phyllis isn’t quite ready. Will you wait?”

Presently Phyllis came out. Her nostrils and the edges of her eyes, Mike noticed, were faintly pink. As they walked to the club she seemed more remote than ever. The month was June, the twilight fragrant. In every yard roses and iris bloomed, and bushes were garlanded with bridal wreath. Phyllis seemed as frail as a flower in a cloudy blue dress embroidered all over with small pink nosegays.

They walked timidly up the path that led to the club’s great door and entered slowly. As they crossed the lobby a swarthy crone seized Phyllis and shouted, “Isn’t she lovely?” Mike saw a witch’s face rouged to the eyes, which were as black and hard as the jet pendants that dangled from her ears. “Pity,” she muttered, “pity the party isn’t given for her.”

Another woman, ruffled and jeweled, peered at Phyllis through a rimless pince-nez. “Sweet child, I’m so glad you’ve come. How well you look in that dress.”

Phyllis turned away. Her enchanting pallor was lost in a rose-pink blush. Mike rubbed his left shoe against his right leg, embarrassed because Phyllis had neglected to present him to the ladies, who he knew must be old Mrs. Hulbert and her daughter, Mrs. Ulysses S. Miller.

It was a grand party. Sophisticated, the local paper called it. The ballroom was decorated in silver and black velvet, its tall columns twined with silver-leaved garlands, the bandstand draped with velvet and dripping with tinsel. Mike was about to express awe when he became aware of scorn in the tilt of Phyllis’s nose and the slight smile curving her lips.

“Come along, Mike; Nancy will want to meet you.”

He had last seen Nancy Miller when she was a fat little girl riding in a wicker basket behind a fat pony. Now that she was fifteen years old, he had imagined that she would have come to look like an heiress. If she had been merely homely, he would have been less disappointed than in this commonplace girl, still fat, and as lumpy as back-yard soil.

“Is this the famous Mike Jordan?” She had one of those insincere, heavily inflected, finishing-school voices, hideously unbecoming to a fleshy girl with big bones. Her enthusiasm, her synthetic charm, her schooled graces contrasted painfully with her cousin’s pretty reticence. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“I guess you mean a couple of other fellows,” he replied wittily. “I’m just the Mike Jordan nobody knows.”

She smiled coyly. “A famous man shouldn’t be so modest.”

As Mike danced with Phyllis he noticed that Nancy’s dark eyes were following them. Phyllis noticed, too, and smiled. Later, of course, Mike had to dance with his hostess. She was too heavy for him, too self-assertive, the sort of girl who had to control her instinct to lead.

“I read your essay,” she said. “I think it was wonderful. It reminded me of Thomas Paine or Patrick Henry.”

He accepted the tribute grudgingly.

“I was curious to meet the man who wrote such inspired words,” Nancy added. And Mike actually felt himself blush as she went on, “That’s why I asked Phyllis to bring you tonight. And” — she looked into his face brazenly — “I’m not disappointed in the writer, either.”

When the music stopped he tried to break away, but Nancy clung to him, accompanying him in his search for Phyllis.

They found her on the porch, surrounded by boys. “Isn’t my cousin the most popular thing?” Nancy squealed. “Men are always wild about her.” She broke through the circle of Phyllis’s admirers, encircled her cousin’s waist with a strong, swarthy arm. “You’re absolutely bewitching in that dress.”

Phyllis froze. Muttering a sullen thanks, she went off to dance with Johnnie Elder. Nancy giggled, and later, at supper, attempted again to flatter her cousin: “Isn’t Phyllis just too sweet in blue? That dress looks as if it were designed for her.”

A couple of Nancy’s girl-friends giggled. The significance of the scene was lost upon Mike then, and it was not until years later, when Nancy, herself, explained its peculiar agony, that he understood that certain traits of character are called feminine because they are implanted early in girl-children.

“Well, Mike, how did you like the party?” Phyllis asked, as they walked home in the moonlight.

He dared not show how thin was his lacquer of sophistication, so he answered dryly, “It was all right.”

“It was ghastly. All that silver and velvet; just showy ostentation.”

Johnnie Elder honked past them, waving from his brother’s roadster.

Phyllis watched the vanishing tail-lights. Abruptly gripping Mike’s arm, she whispered, “She hates me, Mike, she hates me desperately; she wishes I was dead.”

“Who?”

“Don’t be stupid. Didn’t you notice anything? She’s hated me ever since we were little kids, because they could buy her everything except looks. Her hair’s as straight as an Indian’s. And Grandma always felt sorry for me because my mother was poor and had to support us, so she always made a fuss over me instead. Once my grandmother gave me a big doll” — Phyllis’s hands measured the height of this wondrous memory — “it was bigger than any doll Nancy got that Christmas. And it was only that I was poor and didn’t have so many toys that Grandma gave me this big doll. Nancy was so jealous that she grabbed the doll out of my arms and deliberately smashed it. There’s still a chip in the fireplace where she broke it. The head was in pieces. She hates me.”

She stood quite still. Moonlight, shining through the catalpa tree, fell upon her so that half of her face, lighted in silver, was clear-cut and exquisite, while the other half was scarred by a shadow as jagged and irregular as a birthmark. Mike took her arm and jerked her out of the shadows.

As they walked through the shabbier streets to her mother’s house, Phyllis told him of her ambitions: “I’m going to be an actress. I mean to be very successful and rich, and then I’ll laugh at everyone.”

The gate creaked as they walked up the untidy path. Phyllis looked at the moon and laughed...

The next season she joined the Dramatic Club. Mike Jordan thought her the best actress in the high school, and when, in his senior year, he became a member of the club’s executive board, he promoted Phyllis at every opportunity, just as though he were a silly old manager in love with a pretty actress.

Every year the club gave a show. Mike was then trying to write like O’Neill, and he wanted them to do The Straw, with Phyllis as the tubercular heroine. But Nancy had come to the high school that year. Her mother was ill and she was spending the winter in town. She had the whole school imitating her, fawning upon her, copying her attitudes. No elderly opportunist is ever so slavish as a youngster who finds that he can skate on a private pond, play tennis on fine courts, and be treated to quantities of pop and ice cream.

Nancy’s word was law, her whims undisputed fashion, and when she said Romance was her favorite play, more than half the club board was willing to vote her ticket. Mike was too much the politician to tell them he thought it a bad play, so he argued that they could never afford the elaborate costumes and sets. He was voted down.

At the next board meeting he heard the proposal that they give Nancy the part so that her father would pay for their props and scenery.

Phyllis was her mother’s gallant child. She uttered not a word of self-pity. Mike took her to the show, and as he sat beside her, studying her fine profile, he admired the dignity with which she hid her disappointment. After the final curtain she asked him to go backstage with her. Nancy’s dressing-room was filled with extravagant floral offerings, tribute from her father’s business associates.

Phyllis broke through the crowd of chattering girl-friends, kissed Nancy’s rouged cheek, and cried sincerely, “You were wonderful, darling, simply wonderful.”

That swarthy old lady whom Mike had seen at the party rose from a small chair beside Nancy’s dressing table. She was dressed in rich, musty black silk. “You could have done it better,” she told Phyllis.

“But Nancy has real talent and temperament, Grandma.”

“You have beauty.”

This was in May. At the end of June, Mike finished high school. He spent the summer as a counselor in a boys’ camp, and in September went to New Haven. Mike’s father was the editor of a small newspaper, and it was enough of a struggle to send his son to Yale without providing money for holiday trips.

During the next two summers Mike worked in Connecticut, but he never lost touch with the home town. His father sent him the newspaper, and he was still sufficiently interested in his old friends to read the society columns. Nancy Miller, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Miller, “came out” and was thereafter entitled to silver tinsel and black velvet decorations at her parties. Shortly afterward Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Miller announced the engagement of their daughter to John Price Elder II.

The Roman numerals amused Mike. Johnnie Elder’s father had come to the town as a laborer, had worked himself up to foreman and then to plant manager in one of the mills. During a strike he had done the dirty work for the owners, dealing with scabs and gunmen brought to town to break the strike. Mike’s father had nicknamed him “Judas Elder” and made him the butt of scathing editorials which were never noticed by the people who elected J. P. Elder to the City Council. The son Johnnie was a big, thick-skinned fellow, ruddy and good-looking, fullback on his college football team, and a god to the town girls.

To Mike he seemed a natural mate for Nancy.

Mrs. Coles died that same October. She had lived only a few hours after an emergency operation. Phyllis was nineteen years old and quite alone in the world. Her aunt persuaded her to sell her mother’s furniture and come to live at their house until she decided what she wanted to do with her life.

Mike sold a story to a small magazine that year, and he had enough money to travel home for Christmas. On his first afternoon in the town, he borrowed his father’s old car and drove it through the massive gates of the Miller place. A Negro butler opened the door and led him to the library, where Phyllis greeted him.

The room was staid, and Phyllis’s black dress and pale hair, worn in a knot, seemed part of the dignified atmosphere.

Phyllis gave Mike her cold hand. They talked for a while about his work and his ambitions, and then he asked about her plans.

“I’m taking a secretarial course.”

“What! You said in your letter that you wanted to come to New York and study dramatic art. I’ve looked up some schools for you.”

She dismissed the notion with a weary gesture. “Uncle Ulie’s had enough of my mother’s family.”

“He’s got plenty of money.”

“I can’t take any more.” Her hands were like carved ivory hands clasping the oaken apples carved into the arm of the chair.

The telephone rang. Phyllis answered it, and when she had learned who was calling, her voice betrayed her. What she said, however, was quite casual: “She’s not here... I think she went to have some fittings, lingerie and things... I don’t know when she’ll be back... Oh, do!... Yes, Yes!”

She hung up the receiver and, without a word of excuse, hurried out of the room.

When she returned, Mike saw that that she had rouged her lips and combed her hair. The smell of burning coal and the flat odor of steam were drowned by her perfume. She kneeled on the cushioned window seat that overlooked the drive. Wheels sounded on the gravel. A car door slammed; the bell rang; the butler walked slowly down the hall. Phyllis’s cheeks had become rosy and her eyes were dancing.

Johnnie Elder came in. “Hello—” He tossed the greeting at Phyllis smoothly. His big fist crushed Mike’s hand. The enthusiasm of his greeting was all out of proportion to his regard for Mike. While they talked of colleges and football teams, Johnnie’s eyes were fixed on Phyllis. Mike felt like a man who has wandered by mistake into a peep show. He muttered something about having to leave. Just as Johnnie was crushing his hand for a second time, the door opened, and there was Nancy.

“Sorry to be late, dear. I didn’t know you were coming over.” She offered Johnnie her cheek.

“It’s good to see you again, Mike.” Nancy’s face was flushed and wet with snow, and snowflakes glistened in her dark hair. She had grown slimmer, but she was still a big girl. “You can’t leave now, Mike. Stay and have a drink with us.”

The butler wheeled in a cart filled with glasses and bottles. Johnnie made Martinis, and Mike proposed a toast to the engaged couple. Phyllis merely touched her lips to the glass.

“Will you do me a favor, Mike?” Nancy asked.

“Anything I can.”

“You’ve always had a lot of influence with Phyllis. Make her come to my New Year’s Eve party.”

“But I don’t think I’d Want to,” Phyllis said. “After all, it’s not two months since my mother...”

“Don’t be so old-fashioned. Mourning’s an obsolete custom.”

“I knew your mother well, Phyllis.” This was Mike’s contribution to the argument, and later, when he saw the results, he was sorry he hadn’t kept his opinion to himself. “There was nothing she liked better than your having a good time. She wouldn’t want you to sit and mope on New Year’s Eve.”

“Do you really think so?” Phyllis brightened.

Because Mike felt sorry for her he embroidered on the idea.

Presently Phyllis said, “If you really think Mother would want me to, Mike...”

“Attaboy, Mike!” Nancy clapped him on the shoulder. To Phyllis she said, “I’ll call Fred tonight.”

Phyllis frowned. “So that’s why you were so anxious?”

“Who’s Fred?” Mike asked.

“Nancy’s cousin on the other side. Fred Miller. Maybe you don’t remember him, Mike; he was out of school before we got in. He went with an older crowd.”

“They’re in insurance,” Johnnie said.

“I wouldn’t have used my influence quite so freely if I’d known I was fixing it up for another fellow,” Mike said.

“Don’t worry, Mike. You’re invited to my party, too, and we’ll all dance with you,” Nancy promised.

Johnnie, Nancy, and Mike drank another round of cocktails. Phyllis sat on the window seat, self-contained and aloof from their banter and their plans. Johnnie and Nancy chattered about the wedding, the ushers, the honeymoon, the bicycling in Bermuda, and tackle for deep-sea fishing. They seemed less like lovers than a pair of kids planning a holiday. Later Mike’s father told him that the elder Elder had lost almost everything during the depression, and that a union with the Ulysses Miller interests would probably save him from bankruptcy...

Nancy’s party was, as usual, lavish. She wore a dress of some stiff gold material which made her look rather like a statue of Civic Virtue. Phyllis had left off her mourning, but showed, by fastening those same pearl buttons in her ears, that her mother had not been forgotten.

Whenever he looked at her, Fred Miller panted. He was the most unprepossessing man Mike had ever seen in tails and white tie. Sandy hair parted in the center tended to elongate his narrow head. He had a heavy cold, and every five minutes, or so it seemed to Mike Jordan, he drew out a miraculously clean handkerchief (he must have had dozens of them in his pockets) and blew a trumpeting note. “Sorry,” he’d say each time.

Johnnie Elder tried to make Phyllis drink champagne.

“You know I never drink.”

“You will tonight.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Don’t be a fool.” Nancy’s voice was rough. Their persiflage, commonplace as it was, annoyed her. “After all, this is New Year’s Eve and you’ve been feeling sort of low lately. Champagne’s just what you need. Tell her, Mike; you’ve got a lot of influence.”

“If she doesn’t want to drink, you can’t make her.” This was Johnnie Elder, suddenly belligerent.

Nancy sniffed. “Who was just trying to make her drink, Mr. Elder?”

“I can manage my women without your help,” Johnnie snapped.

Evidently he had been celebrating with a few early cocktails, otherwise he could not have been so careless. The lids dropped over Nancy’s dark eyes and her mouth was a narrow line.

Phyllis asked for a taste of the champagne. “If my refusing to drink makes people quarrel, I’d better have one.”

Johnnie watched her from under his long lashes.

She sipped it, cried, “Why, it’s not bad at all,” and drained her glass.

“Phyllis can take it,” Johnnie boasted.

“She’s remarkable,” Nancy said coldly.

Mike took her arm. “Come on, Nancy, let’s dance.”

Nancy and Mike were better partners than they had been at the other party, for Nancy had learned to follow a man. But there was no life in her dancing. She tried not to stare too obviously through the arched doorway that led to the bar, but whenever they approached that end of the ballroom, her eyes were drawn to the table where Fred Miller and Johnnie were competing for Phyllis’s attention.

When the dance was over, Mike said, “Let’s go up to the balcony and have a cigarette.”

By the time he finished the sentence Nancy was at the bar. Johnnie pulled out a chair for her, the waiter brought another bottle of champagne, and Phyllis said, “The orchestra’s good, isn’t it?”

“Have a drink and catch up with Phyllis,” Johnnie said. “She’s going to town tonight. Here’s to a girl who can take her liquor.”

“I’m glad Phyllis is having such a good time.”

Phyllis smiled. Her decorum was like a thin curtain before a flame. When the music began again she was off like a streak of lightning with Johnnie. Nancy danced dutifully with Fred Miller.

At midnight bells rang, the dancers flung serpentines and filled the air with the multi-colored rain of confetti. They sang, drank toasts, kissed their friends. Mike felt the heat of Nancy’s bruised mouth against his cheek and the sweet quivering of Phyllis’s lips.

When she came to Johnnie Elder, Phyllis flung herself into his arms, buried her mouth in his lips, then cried, “Let’s have a happy year. Please let it be a good one, Johnnie, please!”

Dance music started again. The party grew wilder. Only a conventional crowd can become so thoroughly abandoned.

Phyllis caught the fever. Unless he had seen her that night Mike would never have believed that a girl so decorous as she could so completely abandon herself to a mood and a man. She and Johnnie danced like a pair of Siamese twins, joined for life.

Evidently the electrician had taken one too many, for in the middle of a fox trot the lights went out. Nobody cared. Lights from the bar and balconies fell in stripes across sections of the writhing crowd. The music was hot, slow, and sensual, with a rolling, savage beat. Mike had gone up to the balcony for a cigarette. There he found Nancy bent over the rail, squinting down into the darkness.

A roll of drums announced supper. Nancy ran down the stairs, holding her golden skirt high above her ankles. The brilliant lights of the dining-room, after the dusk of the ball-room, was like a cold shock. At flower-decked tables men and women in paper caps blew horns and whirled steel-tongued clappers. A man blew a whistle in Nancy’s ear and another tickled her with a feather-tipped wand.

She neither heard nor saw these antic attempts to capture her attention. Friends invited her to eat at their tables. She was as deaf to kindness as to jests.

“Drunk,” someone said, “drunk as a lady.”

She was unhappily sober.

To Mike Jordan the party had become unendurable. He knew then that he hated the town and its smug best people. Since Fred Miller was there to look out for Nancy, he left. As he walked down the ash-strewn icy path, he saw the glint of a gold gown among the automobiles. There was Nancy, her shoulders bare, peeking into parked cars.

He hurried after her, begged her to go in, warned her of the danger of catching cold. He even offered her his coat, thinking, as he peeled it off, of Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth. All he got for his gallantry was a sullen glance.

The next day he felt it was his duty to telephone Nick Scarpas, and order flowers to be sent with a note of thanks to Miss Miller. At ten o’clock that night his father and mother took Mike to the railroad station. He was not displeased at leaving the town and did not think he would soon return.

The train whistled and rushed through darkness. The sleeping car was quiet, berths made up, passengers hidden behind swaying green curtains. The porter, groaning aloud, carried heavy bags toward the drawing-room at the end of the car. As Mike came from the men’s room, drawing his flannel robe tight about him and clutching at his leather toilet case, he saw the conductor and the Pullman man tap at the drawing-room door. It opened, and for a moment, in the greenish sleeping-car light, he caught a glimpse of Nancy Miller’s sullen face and her dark, fierce eyes...

The telephone rang with that insistent clamor which announces a long-distance call. Mike went to answer it, and I sat on the retaining wall, watching a parade of army trucks on the highway. In a few minutes Mike came out again. The operator had reported an hour’s delay in his New York call.

“Your story doesn’t sound like a mystery,” I said. “It sounds like something that might have happened in my own crowd at college. I can’t believe that people of their sort, girls like Phyllis and Nancy, could commit murder.”

“I daresay any crime story, if you told it biographically, would sound normal. Except in cases of insanity and early criminal tendencies.”

“Did Phyllis marry Johnnie Elder?”

Mike Jordan settled himself in the canopied chair, polished his dark glasses, and went on in his own deliberate way with the story...

It was impossible for Phyllis to go on living with her aunt and uncle. Even her grandmother’s efforts could not win back their affection. The poor girl sat patiently on the window seat, waiting for Johnnie Elder’s car to roll through the iron gates. But Johnnie was in no position to marry a penniless girl.

For Phyllis there was only one refuge. She had not been trained to earn a living. In spite of her own sorry experience, Cinderella’s mother had gone to her death believing that marriage is a girl’s only way of security. For a girl with Phyllis’s beauty a good marriage seemed almost guaranteed. But Phyllis was not able to wait. She had to get out of that gloomy castle.

She and Fred Miller eloped.

Mike Jordan found the news distasteful. Fred was only eight years older than Phyllis, but he seemed of another generation and was as dull as an insurance policy. He worked in his father’s office on Main Street.

Theirs was a Sunday-dinner household — grapefruit before the soup, two kinds of dessert, and everybody falling asleep afterward. They furnished Phyllis’s house in solid walnut, hung drapes of satin damask at her windows, and covered her bed with filet lace.

Once a week, when Phyllis’s grandmother was driven to their house by Ulysses S. Miller’s chauffeur, they heard about Nancy, who had gone to live in France. Her grandmother’s reports were catalogs of glamour, lush with descriptions of Paris openings, week-end parties at historic châteaux, holidays at Biarritz and Monte Carlo.

Black, jet eyes peered at Fred Miller from under a scowling forehead thick with rice powder. “That’s the life Phyllis ought to be having. She’s wasted in this town.”

“I’m going to take her abroad some day,” Fred promised. “Just as soon as we’ve put away a little money, we’re going to take that trip.”

Phyllis took no part in these conversations. While her grandmother insulted her husband and poor Fred tried to defend himself, she was wrapped in a dream of glory wherein celebrated heads turned and noble hearts beat swiftly as Lady Phyllis, in a Paris creation which had been photographed for the fifty-cent fashion magazines, entered The Casino...

Mike finished college and went to New York, where he worked as copywriter in an advertising agency until he was able to get a job at half the salary on a morning newspaper. Then he became assistant dramatic critic on the Globe-Telegram.

His boss had chronic indigestion, and when he was laid up Mike covered the openings. On a first night, while he was gossiping in the lobby during intermission, he was confronted by a stranger who called him by his first name.

“So you don’t remember me, Mike?”

Mike was puzzled. He had met a great many people in New York, but he remembered names and faces, and it seemed unlikely that he should have forgotten this vivid, cadaverous girl.

“The last time you saw me I was hunting bones in a graveyard. You were gallant and offered me your coat.” Even her voice had changed. The finishing-school shrillness had been replaced by a pleasant huskiness.

A gong announced the rising of the curtain. The crowd pushed them back into the theater. “Come up for cocktails,” she called across several heads and shoulders. “I’ll leave my phone number at your office.”

Her place was magnificent, two penthouses made into a single apartment with a four-way view of Manhattan. It was modern in the best sense, simple, and without excess decoration.

It was a warm evening. They sat on the terrace, Nancy perched on the ledge, her back against the iron rail. The scene had the quality of an Italian primitive, in which foreground figures are large and solid, and in the background every minute object sharply outlined. Nancy had become so thin that her bones showed. This was not unbecoming, for she was well constructed and her face cut into interesting planes. She wore blue trousers and a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up, and on her right hand an enormous star sapphire.

“How handsome you are,” Mike said.

Nancy’s smile was cynical. “Don’t kid me.”

“Who’s kidding? You’re a handsome wench.”

She flipped her cigarette stub over the iron rail. “I don’t kid myself, Mike. I’ve survived so far without being beautiful and I guess I can get along for the rest of my life.” He was about to remonstrate, when she said, “Have you seen Phyllis lately?”

There was a sudden crash of thunder.

“She’s all right,” Mike said. “Happily married to your cousin.”

“Grandma thinks she’s wasting her life. Fred isn’t half good enough for her, Grandma says. He’s a stick, according to Grandma.”

“I disapprove of your grandmother,” Mike said.

“She’s always been mad about Phyllis. When I was a little girl, a horrid, fat child with bushy eyebrows, I’d get dressed up in a starched dress and sash, and Grandma would look at me and say, ‘You’ll have to be good, Nancy; you’ll never be beautiful.’ Mamma bought me the most exquisite things, handmade, imported, designed by children’s couturiers, but Grandma would never forgive me for having these things while Phyllis, who was so lovely, was poor. Even when we were tiny children she made Phyllis hate me.”

“Phyllis hate you?” Mike remembered how Phyllis’s face had been scarred by the catalpa tree’s shadow.

“I don’t blame her. It was Grandma’s fault; she instigated it and kept it alive. Even today she’s resentful because Phyl’s beauty deserves the luxury and I, who am homely and unworthy, get it all. I do think Phyllis hates me so much that she’s often wished me dead.”

Nancy walked to the opposite end of the terrace and stared down at the toy boats and bridges on the East River.

Thunder rolled above their heads and a bright arrow of lightning pierced the sky.

“Don’t you hate Phyllis?” Mike asked.

Nancy wheeled around. “Why should I? She’s always seemed a poor, pathetic little thing. If she didn’t hate me so horribly, I’d be fond of her. But she’s always been so resentful, I could feel her bitterness. She’d look at me with those big, soft eyes as if I were a monstrosity. Once at a party — it was my first big party and I had a beautiful silver dress, but whenever Phyllis looked at me, I felt like a big, ugly pig and my dress seemed hideous, and the evening was ruined.”

“Do you remember what Phyllis wore that night?”

Nancy shook her head.

“It was blue, I think. Blue thin stuff with flowers on it.”

Nancy stiffened. “Yes, of course I remember now. It was a dress of mine. Mother had given it to her.”

“Phyllis cried before the party. I always wondered why.”

Nancy came across the terrace slowly, looking down at her tanned feet in rope sandals. “I teased her about the dress. Most of the girls knew it had been mine. We giggled.”

Drops of rain, as big as pennies, spattered the terrace. Mike and Nancy gathered up the cocktail things and went inside. Nancy threw herself upon the yellow couch.

“She paid me out with Johnnie Elder.” Nancy rolled over, picked up her glass, drank, and rolled on her back again.

“Were you in love with him?”

“He was the handsomest boy in town, all the girls were mad about his eyelashes, and I felt that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t pretty if he loved me. When a man proposes, you think he’s in love with you.” Nancy shuddered. “Women often call their own feelings love, Mike, when it’s just balm for sore pride. Or fear that they’ll be left behind. Probably I ought to be grateful to Phyllis, because Johnnie and I’d never have gotten along. But it was hell while it lasted.”

Mike lit the fire. The room was cozy. And that was the last time, for many months, that they spoke of Phyllis.

They became close friends. Mike went with the sleek Broadway and prosperous Greenwich Village crowds. These people, after her life in France, were the sort Nancy liked. She had no talent of her own, but an enormous appreciation and excellent taste. Along with the boarding-school inflection had gone her admiration for romance and rococo. She was a realist, a product of the period, yet sufficiently independent to disagree, when it pleased her, with popular taste.

Mike soon fell into the habit of bringing her his short stories, asking for criticism and, more often than not, accepting it. They quarreled a lot, but these clashes were tonic to their friendship.

They had other quarrels which were not so healthy. Nancy pretended to be tough, but she was actually as thin-skinned as an adolescent. The old wounds had never healed. The scar tissue was frail. Some careless word, forgotten as soon as Mike had spoken it, would cause her to turn upon him cruelly.

Often Mike vowed never to see her again. But as suddenly as she had begun to brood, she relaxed, was herself again, tough, critical, merry, and tireless when there was any chance for fun.

When Nancy was called away by her grandmother’s last illness, Mike realized that he had begun to depend upon her companionship. He wrote long letters, confessed that he found New York dull without her, outlined the plots of his new stories.

The day her grandmother was buried, she called Mike and told him she’d arrive at Grand Central the next afternoon. She promised a surprise. Knowing Nancy, he thought she’d bought a Great Dane or dyed her hair. He bought himself a new suit, filled her apartment with flowers, and decided that he’d bury the hard boiled act and tell her sentimentally how much he had missed her.

The surprise was Phyllis. Arm in arm, the girls confronted Mike. “She thought I ought to warn you,” Nancy told him, “but I wanted a glimpse of your face when you saw us together.”

Both kissed him.

Phyllis said, “I’m so happy, Mike. It’s like old times again, almost as if we were kids.”

“It’s new times,” Nancy laughed. “Grandma always set us against each other, but, now she’s gone, the spell’s broken and we can be friends.”

Mike felt that he did not understand women at all. He could not believe that their grandmother’s death had turned the girls’ lifelong loathing into love. “Whence springs this sudden affection for your dear cousin?” he asked Nancy when they arrived at the apartment and Phyllis had gone off to change her clothes.

“Oh, Mike! If you only realized how deadly life is in that town. Fred and Fred’s family would drive me to arsenic if I had to dine with them more than once every five years, and poor Phyllis has to have dinner there every Sunday.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t because you want to show her how much better your life is than if you’d married Johnnie Elder?”

Nancy turned scarlet. Mike was immediately remorseful. During her absence he had resolved to guard his tongue and her sensitivity. Instead of sulking, Nancy slapped his face.

For the rest of that season there was little emotion in their relationship. They fell back into an easygoing camaraderie, and gave themselves to the pleasure of entertaining Phyllis.

Mike used his newspaper connections so that she could meet people whose names she had read in magazines about New York life.

It was never difficult to find an extra man for Phyllis, and it was inevitable that she made conquests. But she never forgot that she was a married woman. That remote, untouchable quality, more than her beauty, was Phyllis’s greatest charm. Men felt that she was a prize almost beyond reach, that her favors were few, but, if given, would lead to ecstasy beyond imagining.

To Mike Jordan the happiest nights were those when they dined at Nancy’s, sipped liqueurs or brandy, and he read aloud from the works of Jordan. He was at the dreary stage then, writing morbid little pieces about unpleasant people involved in sordid conflicts. Nancy listened attentively, a pencil and notebook beside her.

Much of his later success, Mike admitted, he owed to her frankness and clarity. Phyllis never uttered a word except praise. Mike was an author, his work sacred.

Phyllis had planned to stay in New York for two weeks. Her holiday stretched on and on, until Mike quit asking when she intended to go home. Fred Miller wrote and wired, and went so far in extravagance as to telephone twice a week. Phyllis had always a new excuse — the opening of a play, a fitting, a concert the like of which she would never have another chance to hear; and, finally, the Beaux Arts Ball.

Phyllis was going with Mike, and his friend, Horace Tate, was taking Nancy. They had planned to go as characters out of Greek mythology. When Mike and Horace rang the bell of Nancy’s apartment that night, they were admitted by a masked Diana.

Mike looked Nancy over critically, “You’re too skinny to be classical. Zeus would have exiled you.”

Phyllis came in, unmasked, but dressed in a white tunic, bound in gold and with a bunch of golden grapes in her hair. Fred Miller followed, blowing his nose lustily.

He grasped Mike’s hand. “Glad to see you again, Jordan. A lot of water’s flowed under the bridge since the last time we met. Getting to be quite famous, aren’t you?”

“Fred surprised us,” Phyllis explained to him. “We were totally unprepared. I’m terribly sorry, Mike, that I can’t go with you.”

“Haven’t time,” said Fred. “One of my clients has moved up to Boston but I’m still handling his business. Want to show him that I appreciate his loyalty.”

Mike did not particularly like Fred nor care to see more of him, but he could not believe that anyone who lived in a dull, small town could be so indifferent to New York. He tried to persuade Fred to postpone his Boston engagement and let Phyllis go to the ball.

“A businessman can’t do just as he pleases. You artists and Bohemians don’t seem to understand that we’ve got responsibilities. Sure, I could get a kick out of the city, too, but I’ve got to think of others, not just myself.”

“Think of Phyllis,” Nancy said sulkily. “She’s been planning on this party for weeks.”

Phyllis took Fred’s arm. “I’m going with my husband. But it won’t be for long. I’m coming back; I’m going to live in New York some day.”

And she did. The following September Fred drove their sedan, filled with suitcases and hatboxes, to New York. Phyllis must have worked hard to uproot a man whose life was woven so deeply into the life of his home town. What emotion she must have spent, what tears, artifices, pleadings, and reproaches it must have cost her. Fred tried to make a brave show, as though the move had been forced upon him by the insurance company for which he worked. Since his father had represented the company for thirty-two years, they decently gave Fred a job in their New York office.

At Phyllis’s cocktail parties Fred was always busy, filling glasses, passing hors d’oeuvres, fetching ice from the kitchen. Whenever he had a moment between duties, he would corner some unfortunate guest and try to prove that an insurance man was no less interesting than a second-string dramatic critic. His body seemed never to fit comfortably into Phyllis’s Victorian chairs. For she, knowing she could never afford anything like Nancy’s penthouse, had done wonders with a three-room suite in a remodeled house. Fred suffered shame because she had bought furniture secondhand.

Mike had started to write his play, and since Phyllis knew the home-town background so well, he consulted her nearly every day. Out of her resentment of the townspeople who had pitied and patronized the music teacher’s daughter grew Mike’s most vivid characterizations. She had a gift for mimicry, and when she had the chance to strip others of their emotional veils she shed completely the pretty reticence with which she guarded her own secrets.

They saw less and less of Nancy. In the beginning she had been splendid, generous in helping Phyllis furnish her apartment, never appearing at their door without gifts and gadgets, and putting on an apron to help with the serving when Phyllis gave her first party. No one could name the day when they had ceased to interest her. Perhaps it was Fred’s conversation. Mike was too self-absorbed to worry about anyone’s moods but his own. He did not see Nancy nor bother to telephone her until the play was finished.

“I thought you were dead,” she said, when he finally called.

“This is the resurrection. I’ve written a play.” As she did not hail this with a bravo, Mike’s heart sank. “I’d like to read it to you,” he said timidly.

“Come up tonight,” she said. “How about dinner?”

That was in the morning, and the rest of the day passed like a century in a mortuary. To pass the time he took a long walk, and since a blizzard was beginning to blow up, he arrived with a purple nose and frostbitten fingers.

At dinner they chatted like long-separated school chums who had been living in different hemispheres.

They had their coffee and Courvoisier in the living-room. Then Nancy stretched on the couch and said, “Let’s hear the play.”

She seemed to accept his genius indolently, but he was as pleased as though she had compared him to Shakespeare. Now the writing of his play seemed a man’s job rather than a gesture of unholy impudence. While he read she lay quiet, her face expressionless, and only once, when he made a particularly neat point, caught his eye. Finally it was over. They heard the hiss of burning wood, the wind in the airshaft, the distant hum of the traffic.

After a time Nancy said, “It’s good, Mike. Some of it is very good.”

He skipped to the couch, leaned over to kiss her. “Do you really think so?”

She turned away, unwilling to accept the kiss until she had finished telling him what she thought of his work. He might not, after all had been said, still want to kiss her.

“Take a drink first.” She gave him three fingers of brandy. “It’s a good play, Mike, except for two things. Two very important things. One is the way you solve the problem for your characters. You make it too easy.”

“But the tragedy demands—”

“Tragedy, my eye,” she interrupted. “You’ve given it a happy ending. No one wanted that woman to go on living. You killed her because it was convenient. You were afraid to face the bigger problem of keeping her alive.”

Mike’s silence seemed significant. Actually he had nothing to say. Presently he became solemn and remarked, “It’s a good point. I’ll think about it. What else?”

“The girl.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t believe her. She’s always right, always the victim. She hasn’t enough guts and evil to make her human.”

“Perhaps you don’t understand that sort of woman. There are females without evil in their hearts.”

“Down in their secret souls,” Nancy retorted, “all women are vipresses.”

“Apparently you judge every other woman by your own limitations.”

“Thanks for telling me what you really think of me, Mike.”

“Listen; I know this woman. A small-town woman, pretty and poor, surrounded by snobs.”

“I know that woman, too. We come from the same town, Mike.”

“You never knew the people. You were shut away, protected from the problems of the sordid citizens, the rich girl living in your castle behind the stone wall.”

Nancy stared into the fire. “Perhaps I can’t judge this play at all, Mike. Perhaps it’s too personal. I’m all tied up in prejudices. You ought to get someone else to read it.”

It was then that Mike made a grotesque mistake: “Phyllis has read it and she thinks it’s absolutely true to life.”

“She would.”

“Don’t be a vipress, Nancy.”

She neither spoke nor stirred. In her greens and reds and golds, with the big hoops in her ears, she was like one of those haughty, rebellious duchesses that Goya loved to paint. Mike lost his temper, screamed, called her an egotist and a snob. Furious because his anger seemed trivial beside her aloofness, he gathered up his things, thrust the play back into his brief case, stamped out into the hall for his hat, coat, scarf, and rubbers. As he let himself out he looked back at her. She sat in the same position, hunched before the fire, staring as if in a trance into the flames.

Three days later she left for Florida. When the season was over, she drove to Mexico. Through Phyllis, who got the news from her aunt, he learned that Nancy had taken a year’s lease on a house in Taxco.

She had been right about the play. Mike heard the same criticism from his wisest friends, and in April he began to rewrite it. While he was working he thought constantly of Nancy. He felt that some measure of gratitude was due her, but he could never humble himself before Nancy nor beg her forgiveness.

In June he sold the play, and spent the summer making further changes. It opened on the thirteenth of September and was immediately a hit.

Gilbert Jones headed the cast, and at the party after the opening Mike introduced him to Phyllis.

When Mike saw them together on the dance floor, he was reminded of that New Year’s Eve when she had danced so recklessly with Johnnie Elder. Excitement colored her cheeks. Above the flimsy black stuff that veiled her shoulders she was like a painting on ivory. She wore black jet earrings, fine old ones set in gold, an inheritance from her grandmother.

She and Gilbert Jones danced together, drank together, laughed, teased, flirted, and forgot that there were other people at the party. Behind them, like a shadow, hovered Fred Miller. He had caught his annual cold earlier than usual, and he blew his nose constantly.

Every woman at the party envied Phyllis. Gilbert wore his good looks like an advertisement of superior masculinity.

He was not a fine actor. He was too handsome to play any part as well as he played Gilbert Jones. In Mike’s play he was cast admirably as a vain and selfish bachelor who had been for years the lover of the heroine’s mother. Gil loathed the part and the play, but it was a distinguished production and he could not have afforded to turn it down. He fancied himself a romantic rogue and believed that he would come into his own if he ever found a lush, heroic, swashbuckling part. He had a theory which he argued tirelessly whenever he found a listener. This weary and cynical world, Gil said, longed for escape into romance; the great play of the century would be three acts of capes and boots, duels and balconies.

While Mike’s play was in rehearsal, its press agent, needing copy, sent out a paragraph about Gilbert Jones’s quest for the perfect romantic role. It was a typical press-agent blunder, for Mike’s play, which he had been paid to exploit, was anything but romantic escapism. The paragraph, printed by dramatic editors too bored to be careful, bore fruit. Gil received a flood of manuscripts by writers who agreed that the theater would be saved by swashbuckling romance. Most of the plays were too amateurish to bear reading, but finally one came in that fitted all of Gil’s requirements. It was about the Cavaliers who settled in Maryland. A schoolteacher in Moline, Illinois, had written it.

Not long after Mike’s play had opened and royalties were pouring in, Gil asked Mike to read the swashbuckling script. Mike read it and laughed. He had better use for his money than investment in that rose-garlanded tripe.

One day Phyllis came to see Mike. She said that Mike was shortsighted and stubborn, and that in refusing to put money in Gil’s play he was losing the chance of his life.

“It’s kind of you to be so interested in my career,” Mike teased, “but I happen to be making as much money as I need, and I’m not interested in the financial end of show business.”

“But you love the theater,” she said with pretty reproach. “I’ve often heard you say it needs a shot in the arm. Here’s your chance, Mike, not only to make a fortune for yourself, but to do something really important for the theater.”

“Since when have you become a patroness of the drama, Mrs. Miller?”

Suddenly angry, she cried, “Why do you always call me Mrs. Miller? You know me well enough to use my first name.”

“I know why you’re out procuring for the drama, Phyllis.”

“But it’s a great play. People are so tired of realism. Life is hard enough nowadays, with war and taxes and all; nobody wants to be reminded of it in the theater. They want escape.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Mike said. “From the source.”

She shrank into a corner of the chair. Her love for Gil had influenced her taste in clothes. She had begun to seek picturesque, old-fashioned effects, which on her were charming. She had on a black velvet suit with white ruffles at wrist and neck, and a little black tricorne tilted over one eye and tied on with a black veil. As she sat in the wing chair, touching her nostrils with a lace handkerchief, she was appealing and beautiful.

“Mike,” she murmured, “don’t laugh at me. You know what my life’s been. Can I help it if I’ve fallen in love? He’s everything I’ve dreamed about all my life.”

Mike’s heart was affected, but not his pocketbook. He tried to make Phyllis understand that there was no hope for Gil’s cumbersome, dated play. She listened politely, but Mike’s arguments failed to move her. At the end he felt that he had grown as tiresome to her as Fred Miller.

She had become a woman with a mission. All of her energy was devoted to a single end. Loving Gil, she sought a means of proving herself worthy. She tried, in every way she knew, to find a backer for Gil’s show.

One morning her telephone rang, and there was Nancy, just arrived by plane from Mexico City. She had also called Mike, and suggested that they all meet for lunch. It was like Nancy to have forgotten that she had departed in anger.

Mike and Phyllis hurried to Nancy’s apartment. It was crowded with open trunks and packing cases, woven baskets, painted furniture, wooden plates, painted trays, serapes, and such an assortment of tin and silverware that it looked as if she were planning to open a shop. She crushed them both in enthusiastic embraces, kissed Mike’s mouth and Phyllis’s cheek, gave them extravagant presents, declared that she had always prophesied Mike’s success, and called to her maid for tequila so they might drink to his career.

She looked serene and healthy. The cadaverous hollows were gone, the angles softened by a few becoming pounds of flesh...

That night Phyllis proved she was the better woman by showing that she possessed something even more dazzling than Nancy’s jewels and furs. The love of Gilbert Jones, his splendid masculinity, gave Phyllis such glamour that Nancy’s sables might have been muskrat. There was no doubt that Nancy was impressed. As was his habit, Gil flirted with a new woman. Phyllis watched as an author might watch actors rehearse the scenes he has written. Her temper was so good that she laughed at Fred Miller’s poor attempts at humor.

It was Mike Jordan’s party. He had given it to celebrate Nancy’s return. Mike had not asked Gil to join these home-town friends, but Phyllis had managed to bring him along without embarrassing either Gil or his host.

Nancy had just seen Mike’s play. “It’s great,” she said. “It’s honest and beautiful, and it’s you, Mike; I can see you in every line.”

“It’s you, too, Nancy. Didn’t you notice that I took all your advice?”

“Nancy helped you with the play?” asked Gil.

“She saved it from being a dreary and morbid little phony. And a flop.”

“Nancy has a great sense of theater, real intuition,” Phyllis added. “She might have been a great actress.”

Nancy laughed. She knew it was cheap flattery but she enjoyed being the center of attention.

Fred Miller pulled out his watch. “I don’t like to break up this party, but—”

“Must we?” Phyllis interrupted. “Nancy’s just come home and we’re having such a good time.”

“I can’t help it if I’m tired, dear. Your friends must understand that a businessman can’t burn the midnight oil like Bohemians.”

Phyllis glanced quickly at Gil. He turned to Fred Miller. “Why don’t you go on and let me bring Phyllis home?”

“That’s kind of you, Jones. Thanks so much. Good night, everyone.”

Farewells were curt. No one bothered to watch Fred go. Gil leaned toward Nancy, whispering some compliment that made her laugh. Phyllis approved.

Presently Gil turned to Mike Jordan: “I know you don’t like my new play, but, frankly, I’m quite mad about it, and so is Phyllis. I’m sure that if Nancy’s critical sense is as sound as you say, she might be able to suggest whatever changes our play needs.”

“Now, Gil,” Phyllis pouted, “we mustn’t be selfish. Nancy’s only just got home and she wouldn’t have time to read it now.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Nancy said. “Bring the manuscript around, will you?”

Mike Jordan sulked. It was contrary of him to be annoyed with Nancy, when his bad temper should have been visited upon Phyllis and Gil. Mike was less distressed by their opportunism than by Nancy’s failure to see through their clumsy ruses. He meant to chide her.

As they rode uptown in a taxi Nancy said, “Did you ever see such an attractive man as Gil Jones?”

“He’s a heel.”

Nancy laughed. “How you loathe handsome men, Mike.”

Mike retreated sullenly to his corner of the cab, deciding that if Nancy was so dull as to let a good-looking ham pull the wool over her eyes, she deserved a lesson. Nancy, enjoying his jealousy, continued to tease him. He lost his temper and reminded her of her faults and the mistakes she had made with other men. The evening was a failure.

The next morning Mike’s agent called and told him that his Hollywood deal had been settled. Mike could get the salary he asked if he would leave immediately for California. The studio wanted him to rewrite a play which had been rewritten only eight times.

Naturally, he spent a frantic day between his agent’s office and the bank and department stores. He closed his apartment and refurnished his wardrobe as though California were a desert island. But he did not intend to desert Nancy. At half-past five he rang her doorbell. The apartment was still cluttered with the woven baskets, silverware, and serapes. The maid, who knew him well, told him to go straight to the living-room.

Gilbert and Phyllis were there. Gil was reading the play. They resented the interruption and were not at all cordial.

“I’m going to Hollywood tomorrow,” Mike announced.

“How nice for you,” Nancy said.

Mike felt that she was glad to have him out of the way...

A few weeks later Gil handed in his resignation to the manager of Mike’s play, and announced that he was appearing in Jackstraw, A Romance of Cavalier Maryland. A new producer had come to Broadway; her name was Nancy Miller.

Apparently the radiance of Gil’s personality so dazzled her that she had lost all critical judgment. It was a very bad play, and the author, who had come from Moline for rehearsals, refused to rewrite a line. They got Alexandra Hartman for the feminine lead and, while she gave the play some distinction, she was a hellcat at rehearsals. Gil was so busy appeasing his leading lady, convincing Nancy that they needed more money, and wheedling the author to change a line, that he hadn’t a moment for Phyllis.

She was not allowed in the theater during rehearsals. That was Miss Hartman’s unbreakable rule. Although Phyllis had worked so hard to get the show produced, found a backer, and listened to all the early discussions, she was now an outsider, brushed aside with a mechanical smile and polite promise when she waited in the lobby for Gil. She consoled herself with the hope of his gratitude in the happy future, after the show was on and a hit. Some day, she fancied, Gil would take her in his arms and whisper gratefully, “How can I repay you, darling Phyllis, for all that I owe you?”

They were opening in Baltimore, the historical scene of the play’s action. Phyllis bought herself a new outfit, and was about to reserve a seat on the train, when Fred Miller put his foot down. They had the worst fight of their marriage, and Fred finally said, “The trouble with you is that you think you’re Nancy, who can spend a thousand dollars on every whim.”

The rebuke defeated Phyllis. It was like an echo of her grandmother’s lament. As long as she could remember, Phyllis had been reminded that she could not expect the privileges which Nancy took as her right. She had no money of her own. Fred supported her. When he said, “I won’t have you spending money on trains and hotels to see a show you can see here in a couple of weeks,” she had to submit.

After the Baltimore opening Fred read the reviews and said, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t spend the money? They say it’s the worst show in twenty years.”

Anyone but Nancy would have been discouraged by the reviews. Instead of closing, she put more money into the production, extended the road tour, made drastic revisions in the script, and recast several parts. The author, frightened by the critics, agreed to revisions, but was not able to rewrite, and a play doctor was hired. They took the show on a nine-week tour. Gil was too busy to write a post card to Phyllis.

Fred Miller died suddenly of pneumonia. Phyllis had warned him against going to the office with a severe cold, but Fred always had colds, and if he’d quit work every time he sniffled he would never have held a job. He tried to nurse it at night with hot whisky, aspirin, and all the home remedies which he thought as effective as anything a doctor could prescribe. Phyllis was sleeping on a cot in the living-room. One morning she went into the bedroom and found him unconscious. He died at the hospital twenty hours later.

She was very brave, managed everything, took the body home to his parents and the family plot. Half the town attended the funeral, and they said that Phyllis, pale and touching in her black garments, was the prettiest widow they had ever seen. Fred had left her quite a lot of money. She had no idea that the big insurance premiums which she had always resented would bring her a small fortune.

Jackstraw had meanwhile come to New York. Poor Phyllis, cheated of rehearsals and the out-of-town opening, missed the first night, too. She was determined to see it on the night of her return to New York. Mourning or no mourning, she had her duty to her cousin Nancy and to her friend Gil. She still felt close to the play and cherished the memory that she had been Gil’s first audience for it. This thought gave her strength and hope, and as she sat beside the window of the dining car she decided that she would not telephone Gil that day, but would see the play alone and afterward surprise him in his dressing-room.

With her coffee the waiter brought the morning paper. She turned at once to the dramatic section, thinking that she might read Gil’s name in some press agent’s notice. And thus-she learned that Jackstraw had closed on the previous Saturday night.

It was the final irony. After all she had given to it, she had not seen a single performance of Gil’s play.

Forlornly she followed a porter through the cold station, and rode to her apartment alone in a drafty cab. The day was miserable. Rain streaked the taxi windows so that she could not even enjoy Fifth Avenue’s brilliance. As soon as she got into her apartment, while the shades were still drawn and the radiators cold, she telephoned Gil. A switchboard operator’s nasal voice informed her that Mr. Jones had given up his apartment.

She called Nancy. Her cousin uttered condolences on the death of Phyllis’s husband, and Phyllis consoled Nancy on the death of her play.

Phyllis said, “How’s Gil taking it?”

“Bearing up bravely, looking for a new part.”

“I must let him know I’m back.”

There was a long silence. A happy thought entered Phyllis’s mind. Should Gil want to put on another show, there need be no long, agonizing search for a backer. Fred was no longer alive to remind Phyllis that she could not expect the privileges that Nancy enjoyed; the money Fred had put into insurance would back Gil’s new play. She was so eager to speak to Gil, to console him with her golden promise, that she paid little attention to Nancy’s unnatural silence.

She did not like to confess to Nancy that she was ignorant of Gil’s whereabouts, and she decided to call his agent instead. She was very fortunate, for Gil had just come into the office. He also expressed sympathy, but he could not say much else as his agent was with him. He promised to come and see her that afternoon.

She dressed carefully; used her best perfume. The failure of Jackstraw did not seem so dismal now. She was almost grateful for it, knowing that as a result of disappointment Gil would be in a soft, self-pitying mood. She sent out for a bottle of his favorite whisky, arranged it on a tray with seltzer and glasses. When there was nothing else to be done, she watched raindrops roll down the windowpane.

The doorbell rang. She sat quiet for a moment lest she betray too large a measure of eagerness, then drew a deep breath and ran to the door.

Gil was not alone. There was Nancy, too. No woman who was not a millionaire would have appeared in public in such an old, streaked raincoat. She had on galoshes and had a green scarf tied around her head.

Gil took both of Phyllis’s hands, gazed deep into her eyes. “Well, dear,” he said, in a thick voice. They held hands until Nancy spoke sharply. “I wish you’d help me with these boots, Gil.”

He turned to help Nancy. “We were sorry to hear about Fred.”

“Thank you,” said Phyllis.

Nancy took her wet things into the bathroom. For a couple of minutes Phyllis and Gil were alone. Neither spoke. They were aware of rain dripping against the window and the sizzling of steam in the radiator.

When Nancy came back, she asked, “Have you told her, Gil?”

He shook his head.

“You might as well know, Phyllis. Gil and I are married.”

Phyllis handed around drinks, then raised her own. “To your happiness,” she said, and finished the highball before she put down the glass. She saw the look of triumph in Nancy’s eyes.

Gil and Nancy soon left; but on Saturday of that week Nancy happened to be in the neighborhood of Phyllis’s apartment and stopped in. Phyllis was not at home, and Nancy said that she would wait. She read a magazine, washed her face, and used the telephone, which was in Phyllis’s room between the twin beds. Before she went, she wrote a note begging Phyllis to dine with them the following Tuesday. Phyllis found it on the bed table, tore it into small pieces, and threw it into the wastebasket.

“No use being a hypocrite about it,” Phyllis remarked several weeks later when she told the story to Mike Jordan.

On the Tuesday of Nancy’s dinner party Gil was called to the telephone by Phyllis’s maid, who told them that Mrs. Miller had been taken to the hospital. When she came to work that morning, the maid said, she had found Mrs. Miller unconscious in her bed. The doctor thought at first that she had taken an overdose of sleeping medicine, but an analysis showed that she had been poisoned. It was a poison that worked slowly and the dose had been insufficient.

Gil suffered extravagant remorse. It was only natural for him to blame himself for the poor girl’s attempt at suicide. As soon as she was allowed visitors he visited her at the hospital. She was sitting up in bed, looking very frail and gentle in a white maribou jacket with enormous sleeves.

She held out both hands. He took them. They were cold and so soft that there seemed no bones under the thin flesh. His eyes filled as he bent over to kiss her.

She looked up at him with burning eyes and whispered, “Someone tried to kill me, Gil.”

His hands dropped. He moved away and stared as though he were looking at a ghost. She shook her head and repeated the astonishing statement. “You don’t believe I’d have done such a thing myself?” she asked. “You know me so well, Gil, you know I’m not brave enough for that.”

It was discovered later that five or six poisoned capsules had been placed in the box with her sleeping pills...

The telephone rang again. New York Operator Forty assured Mr. Jordan that she was still working on his call. When he came back to the patio, he said, “I’m thirsty, Lissa; may I have a drink?”

We went into the kitchen, which was on the east side of the house, and about twelve degrees cooler than the patio. I got out some cheese and crackers, and we sat with our drinks in the breakfast nook.

“Had someone tried to murder Phyllis, or was that merely an excuse because she was ashamed to admit that she had tried suicide?” I asked.

“Wait,” Mike said. He was a playwright, and as keenly as he felt this story, he was still too much of a technician to give away the climax before recounting the events that led to it.

He finished his drink and held out his empty glass to me. While I squeezed a lemon, he began the final chapter...

A few months later Mike Jordan came to New York on a Hollywood writer’s holiday. He had a suite in an expensive hotel and went to night clubs at which he would never before have dreamed of spending money. He saw both Phyllis and Nancy, and each told him in precise detail her separate story.

Phyllis was being frightfully gay at this time, spending Fred Miller’s money wildly and surrounding herself with good-looking young men. She had become extremely chic. This Mike thought was an affectation. Like so many bored women, she was seeking compensation for the dullness of her nights by exhibiting herself in costumes whose extravagance advertised her loneliness.

Frequently at parties or the theater she met Gil and Nancy. They and all of their friends dutifully appeared at all the smart places and saw the same people over and over again. To show that she bore them no malice, she invited Mr. and Mrs. Jones to a couple of her big parties, and Nancy returned the hospitality by inviting Phyllis to dine... with seven other guests, four of them male and attractive.

For a few months Gil and Nancy considered themselves the happiest couple in town. Nancy thought her husband the handsomest man in the world and herself an extremely fortunate woman. Gil was good-natured and disinclined to quarrel, and as long as his wife admired him, he was indulgent of her moods. The one subject on which they could not agree was the story Phyllis had told him about the poisoned sleeping pills. Gil still believed that someone had tried to murder Phyllis, and Nancy held to her theory that this was an excuse to cover an unsuccessful attempt at suicide.

Although they solemnly promised not to speak of it, they were tempted constantly to find arguments to support their separate attitudes. He thought her unnecessarily vindictive about her cousin, while she considered him a credulous fool. For a while they managed to keep their opinions to themselves.

One night they met Phyllis at a dinner party. Afterward Gil and Phyllis were partners at bridge. They won quite a lot of money, and on the way home Gil boasted about his game and, to show sportsmanship, praised his partner. Nancy stiffened. Aware of her displeasure, he hastily changed the subject.

Although her marriage had increased Nancy’s self-confidence, she was still thin-skinned.

“You needn’t be afraid to talk about Phyllis,” she said coldly. “I know what a superior creature she is.”

Gil did not speak again until they were in their apartment. His nerves were on edge. “Look here,” he said when they were in the hall, taking off their coats; “this has gone far enough. Every time I mention Phyllis you act as if I’d insulted you. We’ve got to have this out once and for all.”

They quarreled bitterly, brought out buried grievances, and led each other to the subject of the poisoned pills. Later, when she was questioned about this quarrel, Nancy said that she could not remember precisely what each of them had said, but only that Gil’s gibes had so wounded her that she ran the length of the apartment into her bedroom and locked the door. For a while, she said, he had stayed in the corridor, shouting abuse.

The next day she could not force herself to speak to him. He addressed her politely, just as though they had not quarreled, but she seemed not to hear. It was Nancy’s habit, when she was hurt, to brood for days. She regretted her moodiness, but had never been able to cure it.

This, more than the quarrel, upset Gil, for the actor’s pride was fed by the response of his audience. Nancy’s passionate silence destroyed his self-confidence and led to the distrust of his charm. And when, lunching alone at a popular restaurant, he ran into Phyllis, in a turban made all of violets and a purple veil tied in a bow under her chin, he invited her to have a drink with him.

He told her, as she later reported to the police, of Nancy’s sulks. The news did not surprise Phyllis. She was well acquainted with this habit of Nancy’s; it had always made family history. She advised Gil to feed Nancy a bit of her own stew and to treat her with the same black indifference.

The idea delighted Gil. When he donned a mood he wore it like a wig and tights. In contrast with his brooding melancholy, Nancy’s sulks were a pale fog beside a storm cloud. She was utterly bewildered. All of her life, Nancy had been given her own way; when she sulked and refused to talk, her parents and the servants had waited tremulously for her mood to lighten. Now she had a taste of the bitter medicine.

Gil noted the effect of his performance and was as pleased as though he had heard a first-night audience shouting bravos. Perhaps he kept it up longer than necessary. Her nerves were frayed. Too proud to beg forgiveness, she waited shyly for him to offer the first word.

The triumphant actor sought a wider audience. One woman was not enough for him. Daily he made reports to Phyllis. One day, when they had been having tea together, he went off with her gloves in his pocket. They were fuchsia-colored and size five and three quarters. Nancy’s maid, going through Gil’s pockets before she sent his suit to the cleaner’s, found the gloves and brought them to her mistress with an air of sly innocence.

Nancy turned as pale as if a wound had drained the blood from her. That very day she had bought Gil a reconciliation gift, a costly morocco traveling case with gold fittings. It was in her closet, shrouded in tissue paper, ready to be presented after the first embrace...

It was about four in the afternoon when the maid brought her the gloves. Gil came home at seven o’clock. When Nancy heard the door open she rushed at him, pallid, red-eyed, and screaming like a fishwife.

This was no time for sullen dignity. Gil used words he’d picked up back-stage, filth which belonged to the riff-raff of the theater, and which had never before soiled the lips of that dignified actor.

The two maids retired to the kitchen. According to their report, the quarrel lasted almost two hours. It thoroughly exhausted Nancy. Sobbing, she threw herself across her bed. The cook came out of the kitchen to ask cautiously if Mr. Jones wished dinner, but Gil turned and stalked out to the hall, put on his coat, and left the apartment.

According to the story which Phyllis told the police the next day, she was reading in her living-room, when the doorbell rang so furiously that her young Negro maid, who was washing dishes in the tiny kitchen, came out and begged Phyllis not to obey that nervous summons. Quite calmly Phyllis opened the door, and admitted Gil.

He walked to the center of the living-room and said quietly, “I’ve been through hell.”

“Sit down,” she said gently.

Gil strode up and down like a caged beast. Phyllis, not wishing the maid to overhear, bade her leave the dishes and go home.

“I’d rather die,” Gil said, “than have to look at my wife’s face again.”

“Why? What’s happened, Gil?”

“She’s an evil woman.” Gil shuddered. “Although I’m not a particularly virtuous man, wickedness in a woman horrifies me.”

“Gil dear, be reasonable. Nancy’s your wife and a fine, generous girl. She was spoiled at home, but she’s wonderfully goodhearted and she loves you desperately. Won’t you try to forgive her?”

Gradually, with such argument, she managed to calm him. He asked for a drink, and she brought out the whisky and soda. She did not count the drinks he poured for himself, but thought he must have taken four or five. Toward the end of the evening he became quite garrulous, and told her why he had married Nancy. During rehearsals and the out-of-town tryouts of the play, they had been thrown together constantly. Nancy had been such a good sport about the money she lost on the play that Gil had tried to make it up as much as possible in offering her his friendship. She had interpreted his kindness as love, and showed her passion for him with shocking frankness. The marriage had been impulsive.

He now realized how grave had been the mistake. As sternly as he tried he could not reject his need for Phyllis. Her image was engraved indelibly, he had said, upon his heart.

“I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I can’t work,” Gil said, rising and crossing the room to the wide Victorian armchair where Phyllis sat. “I can’t live with that woman another day. I’m going to tell her so... tonight.”

“No, Gil. Think it over. Your marriage was an impulse, and this may be another. You know your own nature; you’re too flexible, you allow yourself to be carried away too easily. Tomorrow you may feel differently about her.”

“No. I’ll never love her. And I’m too upset to let this thing go on any longer. I’ll tell her, darling, that I love you.”

“No, Gil. That you must never tell her. If it were any other woman—” Phyllis shrugged off the rest of the thought. “But you must never tell Nancy that.”

“I’m going home. Tomorrow I’ll let you know what I’ve done.” He kissed her on the forehead tenderly like a fond uncle.

Phyllis put the whisky into a walnut cabinet which had once been a Victorian commode. She carried the soda water to the refrigerator and the glass to the sink. The dinner dishes had not been dried and put away. Phyllis ran hot water over them, dried them and tidied the kitchen. This was a habit developed by early training. All the women in the family, even when they had servants, were fussy housekeepers.

She barely slept that night, and at dawn fell into a fitful slumber made hideous by nightmares. She spent most of the day waiting for Gil to telephone.

When, at last, the doorbell rang, she hurried to it eagerly and, even before she had it open, said, “Gil, dear!”

There stood two detectives who had come to inform her of Gil’s death, and when she had sufficiently recovered from the shock, to ask a number of questions...

Nancy told a quite different story.

After Gil had left her sobbing on the bed, Nancy said, she was exhausted. The quarrel had been preceded by two hours of emotion and several days of tension. She fell asleep. When she awoke the clock was striking eleven. The maids had gone home, and she was alone. She had slept heavily and felt curiously light and fresh.

She bathed, put on a becoming new negligee, and awaited Gil’s homecoming eagerly, because she felt that the noisy quarrel had released hidden resentments and it would be possible for them to make peace. She had eaten no dinner and was very hungry. There was cold chicken and applesauce in the icebox, and she sliced a couple of tomatoes. She had just poured boiling water into the drip coffeepot when she heard Gil’s key in the lock.

He looked cold. His cheeks were almost blue. He had walked, he told her, from Seventy-ninth Street to Sixty-fifth. His mentioning Seventy-ninth Street, Nancy thought, was his way of confessing that he had been with Phyllis. She did not remark upon it, but asked if he would like a drink.

“I’ve had enough. My head’s clear now; I want it to stay that way.”

Nancy felt sturdy, calm, and capable of facing any situation. Her tears had washed away grief and anger, and her nap had erased all bitterness.

Of one thing she was certain. She must know the truth, however painful.

“I’ve been a heel,” Gil said.

Since he was so clearly remorseful Nancy did not wish to rebuke him. “I’ve been pretty difficult myself.”

“The worst thing I’ve done is to have gone to Phyllis with my troubles. It was stupid and selfish of me and unfair to you.”

He offered contrition humbly, and she could afford to be magnanimous. “I’m hurt that you went to her, but probably it was my own fault. I’m spoiled and egocentric and willful. A vipress, Mike Jordan used to call me. If I ever let go with one of those moods again, I wish you’d horsewhip me.”

“It’d be healthier,” Gil said.

“Might even cure me.” Nancy felt better. She laughed aloud. “My whole trouble is that we never used horsewhips at home. Even our horses were given their heads.”

Gil wrapped his arms about himself and shivered.

“You did get a chill,” Nancy said. “If you won’t have a drink, let me give you some coffee. Have you had dinner?”

She heated the coffee and made a nice little cold supper. They ate at their regular places at the dining-room table. As she poured his coffee Nancy said steadily, “There is one thing I must know, Gil. Are you in love with her?”

He set his cup down hard. Some of the coffee spilled into the saucer. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“You were in love with her before you met me.”

“Did she tell you so?”

Nancy hesitated. “What about the suicide? There was no other reason why she should have tried to kill herself.”

“Someone tried to murder her.”

Nancy did not wish to renew the argument. Instead she said, “It’s the way she acts about you. There’s a sort of possessive righteousness about her, as if you’d been hers and I snatched you away.”

“Great God!” he shouted. “You women act as if a man were a thing to be handed around on a platter. Phyllis couldn’t possess me any more than you do. I loved you and asked you to marry me. Isn’t that enough?”

Nancy’s eyes filled. She tried to hide her emotion by eating, but she could not. As she sipped coffee, she looked at him over the cup and asked, “Do you love me, Gil?”

“I wouldn’t live in a house with a woman I didn’t love. I should think my past history would make that apparent.”

“But I’ve been so nasty. A vipress.”

“A man’s unfortunate to love a vipress, but what can he do about it?”

“Come here and kiss me.”

After the kiss he went back to his place and ate heartily. They seemed a pleasantly domestic couple again. Tremulously she asked her final question: “Did you tell Phyllis that you love me?”

He nodded. “I told her that I’d made up my mind not to see any more of her.”

When they had finished eating, Nancy put the remaining food back into the icebox and washed the few dishes. Although she had been brought up in a house tended by servants, her grandmother had instilled in her a horror of sloppiness. She’d have been ashamed if the servants found the kitchen dirty when they came in the morning.

Her apartment had been designed originally as two penthouses, so that her bedroom and bath were at the opposite end from Gil’s. This arrangement had amused them in the early days of their marriage, and they had enjoyed the adventure of traveling the length of the apartment when they visited each other at night.

When Nancy finished in the kitchen she went into Gil’s quarters. He shouted from the bathroom that she should go to bed, and that he would come in and say good night. She had only her nightgown under the negligee and it took her but a couple of seconds to prepare for bed. She fell asleep almost immediately. The short nap had restored but a portion of the energy she had exhausted during the quarrel.

Gil had the actor’s habit of sleeping late. But when, at one o’clock the next afternoon, he had not yet rung for his breakfast, Nancy opened the door of his bedroom softly. She found his body on the floor close to the bed. He had apparently tried to summon help before he died. Blood and dried vomit stained his pajamas and the light tan carpet. His protruding eyes were like glazed porcelain balls.

Nancy was shaken but remarkably self-possessed. The maids were amazed by her ability to withstand shock. It was’ she who telephoned for the doctor who had an office on the first floor of the apartment house.

There was no doubt that Gil had been poisoned. The doctor asked Nancy what he had eaten the night before, and she told him about the coffee, showed him the remnants of chicken, the half-used loaf, and what remained of the applesauce in a white china bowl. And there were four tomatoes in the cooler instead of the half-dozen which the cook had put there the day before.

Nancy told the doctor and, later, the detectives that she had eaten the same food, drunk coffee brewed in the same pot. She remembered that when she had asked Gil if he wanted a drink, he had answered that he had had enough. According to his own story, he had spent part of the evening on Seventy-ninth Street, which led her to think that he had been with her cousin, Phyllis Miller.

Analysis showed that the poison which had killed Gilbert Jones (and Mike Jordan made a special point of withholding its name) worked slowly. If its presence is known in time and an antidote administered, the victim can be saved. But no one had heard Gil’s cries. Nancy had slept soundly at her end of the apartment.

By the time Gil’s body was examined he had been dead for a few hours, but medical authorities could not say whether he had died at five in the morning or at seven-thirty. And the time element was further complicated by the fact that the poison might have killed him in six hours or nine. He had been a healthy man with a rugged heart. Experts could not name precisely the hour at which he had been given the poison, whether at ten o’clock at night or at one the next morning. And time was the determining factor.

From nine o’clock the night before, or a few minutes after, until approximately ten-forty, he had been with Phyllis. In this detail the girls’ stories agreed. If he had left Phyllis around ten-forty, it was reasonable to believe Nancy’s statement that the clock had been striking eleven when he opened the front door. He had sat up with her talking and eating, until somewhere around twelve-thirty.

There was a possibility, of course, that he had stopped on his way home at a bar or restaurant. Detectives questioned bartenders and waiters in the Third and Lexington Avenue places between Sixty-fifth and Seventy-ninth Street, but none of them remembered having served him. And if he had been accidentally poisoned in any of these places, there would certainly have been other victims.

There was one other possibility, suicide. This was not likely. He was not of a morbid nature, and since he had been married to Nancy he had no financial problems. His play had failed, but if actors committed suicide after every flop, there’d be none left to keep the theater going. And the day before he had been interviewed about a good part by an important manager. There was no reason for Gilbert Jones to have been suicidally unhappy. Two women had loved him, but that was more or less what he expected. In his way he had probably cared for both, which is to say that he loved neither, since he had room in his heart only for love of himself.

It must have been one of the women. They had both played emotional scenes with him, had both given him drinks. Their stories were in direct conflict. Each said that he had promised her to give up the other, and had gone so far as to play a farewell scene with the unhappy one. Although neither of them accused the other, each implied that the other was guilty. No poison was discovered in either apartment. But when a murderer washes the dishes, she might easily get rid of deadlier evidence. If there had been poison left in either apartment, the guilty woman could easily get rid of it. Modern plumbing provides a quick and easy way to dispose of such evidence...

While Mike was summing up the points on both sides and adding to my suspense, the telephone rang. We were silent for a moment. All the color had left Mike’s face. Into the phone he said, “This is Jordan... All right; I’ll hold on.”

Although I was crazy to hear the conversation, I had been brought up to believe that there is no sin more despicable than eavesdropping. Virtuously I walked on tiptoe toward the patio.

“You heard the rest, you might as well hear this,” Mike said, and I flew into the living-room.

It was on the west side of the house, and although the curtains had been drawn, the sun filtered light through the patterned green cloth. I sat on the couch as I used to sit in the dentist’s waiting-room, my hands at my sides pressed hard against the seat.

After a seemingly endless interval I heard Mike say, “Hello, dear.” He was silent for a few minutes, and then he turned to me and said, “She’s crying.”

“Who?”

He spoke into the telephone: “I know you wouldn’t do such a thing, my dear. I know who did it... Yes! If you do as I say, she’ll have to confess.” After another interval he said to her, “Because I know. Of course it’s hard for you, but not half so hard as being accused, yourself.”

Apparently she asked Mike to come to New York, for he told her that he was not free to leave, since he was in the Army. “I can’t get away, you know, unless they subpoena me, which isn’t probable, since I was three thousand miles away when the murder was committed. But I do know positively.” His voice became gentler: “You’ll have to handle this yourself. Tell her that you must talk to her privately, and get her to come to your apartment. She’ll come if you tell her you’ve talked to Mike Jordan. I’m sure that she knows I know. You must let her think you’re alone; but have someone there. If you’re constantly under surveillance by the Homicide Squad, so much the better. Have your lawyer there, too, but concealed.”

Again there was argument. Mike almost lost his temper. “Of course it’s a horrid thing to do, but, my dear girl, you are suspected of murder.”

She must finally have agreed, because Mike turned to me and nodded. Then he spoke again into the telephone: “Tell her that you know about her first murder.”

I gasped. Probably there was as much astonishment at the other end of the wire, for Mike hastened to reassure her by saying, “Yes, indeed. I do know it. Tell her you know what caused Fred Miller’s death.”

Silence must have followed this revelation. Mike turned to see the effect upon me.

“Then it was Phyllis?” I muttered.

Mike said it into the telephone, “It wasn’t jealousy that caused her to poison Gil. She was jealous, no doubt, and afraid of losing him. This made her hysterical, and you know how completely she’d abandon herself once she unlocked that shell of restraint. She probably pleaded with Gil, told him that he dared not desert her after what she’d done for him. I can’t tell you exactly what her words were, but I’m sure she disclosed theatrically that she’d been driven to murder for Gil’s sake.

“Knowing Gil, I feel that he was shocked at the thought before he quite believed her. Instead of exciting him and increasing his passion, it turned him against her. You knew Gil better than I. He was vain enough to enjoy the spectacle of the two of you weeping and fighting over him, but he didn’t want corpses as tribute on the altar of love. I know Gil’s faults, too. He was vain and opportunistic, but there wasn’t a malicious bone in his body. Think of his naïveté over that suicide business. As soon as she had confessed, whether he fully believed it or not, he began to loathe her. This cooled her considerably, I’m sure. When the hysteria died, she saw that he was dangerous to her, and put poison in his highball.”

“She had the poison, you know,” Mike continued. “It was the same stuff she’d put into the sleeping pills. After she discovered that Gil had married you and she’d killed poor Fred in vain, she tried to kill herself. She probably thought she was sincere about it, but the sincerity wasn’t deep enough to make her go through with it. If she had died, Nancy, you would have been punished and your marriage with Gil haunted by her ghost. And since she recovered, she found it less embarrassing to appear the victim of a murder attempt than a frustrated suicide.

“That looked bad for you, too, you know. She probably tried to make believe that you’d poisoned her sleeping pills. Yes, she inferred it when she told me the story. Naturally, I never believed it, Nancy; I knew you too well, and I also knew how Fred Miller died.”

I did not hear the rest of the conversation, for there came into my mind then the image of a psychology professor, a pompous little man he was, who once said to our class that suicide and murder are not far removed from each other; both, he told us, were born of the desire for revenge upon an individual or upon society. Suddenly, as Mike finished the long-distance call, I saw the pattern of the story. There was only one point which I did not understand.

“How did you know, Mike, that Phyllis had killed Fred Miller? I thought you said he’d died of pneumonia.”

We were on the patio when I asked that question. The pepper tree’s shadow had shifted and Mike sat upright in a metal chair under the striped umbrella. Sunlight and the brilliant hues of the geraniums hinted mockingly at the pleasure of being alive. The blossoms of the mimosa were fat yellow balls.

“There’s no doubt that Fred died of pneumonia. In a hospital with a physician in attendance.”

“But you said that Phyllis killed him.”

“It’s easy, Lissa, when a person has a bad cold, to give him pneumonia, particularly if you’re his loving wife.” In the hot light Mike shivered. “Don’t ask me how she did it. That, Lissa, is something I’ll never tell anyone again.”

“You told her how to do it, Mike? Why? Why did you tell her how to kill her husband?”

Mike rose and walked to the edge of the patio, stood at the wall looking down on the valley and the highway. His fists were clenched so tightly that the bones shone through the skin.

“I gave her the recipe for murder.”

“How, Mike?”

Mike did not immediately answer. He stood beside the wall, looking down at the shadows on the hillside and the lively road. “Long ago, Lissa, when I was trying my hand at fiction, I wrote a story. It was a young man’s story, bitter and sordid, all about an unhappy wife who brought about her husband’s death by a series of acts which caused a bad cold to develop into pneumonia.

“Each of these acts was described in the most minute detail, Lissa.

“I read the story to Phyllis and Nancy. They were the only ones who ever heard it, for after Nancy’d got through telling me what she thought of my little masterpiece, I burned the manuscript. She was pretty tough with me that night, asked if I was crazy enough to suppose that anyone would ever publish a story that gave such precise instructions to potential murderers.

“After Nancy had attacked the story so violently, Phyllis could not very well praise it. She listened quietly and neither praised nor criticized the tale. But she must have remembered. I knew—” Mike turned abruptly and raised his voice at me as though I were guilty. “I knew as soon as I heard of Fred Miller’s death. In a way I feel as if I had committed murder.”

How blind men are. When he told me how heavily his conscience was burdened, I told Mike Jordan that this was not his first sin against the cousins. He took off his dark glasses and glared at me. “A sin of omission,” I said. “Are you so stupid, Mike, that you’ve never realized how Nancy loved you?”

After a moment he said quietly, “That’s very female of you, Lissa.”

“Since she was fifteen and made such an odious exhibition of herself in the silver and black dress at her party. Every time she succeeded in getting close to you, Phyllis came along and dazzled you with her beauty and that mystery which was only a disguise for her coldness and jealousy. Her sole purpose in life was revenge against Nancy, and you were her victim as well as Gilbert and Fred.”

“But Nancy fell in love with other men, with Gil and Johnnie Elder. She flirted quite a lot in Europe and almost got engaged while she was in Mexico.”

“She tried to make herself fall in love with them, Mike. Partly because she was trying to get you out of her system, and partly because it was only natural for her to want to take something away from Phyllis. She had shared hope and failure with Gil, which softened her toward him. And, besides, he was not exactly repulsive to women.”

Mike’s hands fumbled in his pocket. He brought out the roll of bills again, hurried across the patio, and thrust them into my hands. When he spoke his voice was humble:

“Would you mind, Lissa, if I used your phone again? I’d like to call New York.”