Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 49, No. 6. Whole No. 283, June 1967

Divorce — New York Style by Cornell Woolrich [Part 1 of 2]

Before the divorce laws were changed in New York State there was only one legally accepted grounds for ending a marriage. Stephen Duane didn’t like it — in fact, he dreaded and abhorred it — but he had no alternative. And the whole nasty, distasteful business turned out to be a worse mess than he and his lawyer, or his wife and her lawyer, ever dreamed it could be... One of Cornell Woolrich’s most interesting story situations...

One wore glasses and carried a brief case; he looked like a lawyer. The other didn’t wear glasses and carried an overnight case; all he looked was ill at ease. They were together.

“I’d like a room,” the one with the overnight case said a little self-consciously to the registration clerk.

“For both you gentlemen?”

“No, not him,” corrected the applicant. “For myself and my wife. She’ll be along later.”

“Very well. Will you sign here, please?”

The registrant took the desk pen and then turned to look inquiringly at his companion, as though waiting to be told what he should do next.

“Put down your own,” the other said in a carefully guarded undertone. “It simplifies things.”

The check-in bent over and wrote:

Stephen Duane and wife, New York City. Then he handed back the pen and the registry card.

“For how long?” the desk clerk asked, to complete the details.

The man who looked like a lawyer answered this, speaking aloud for the first time. “Couple of hours,” he said. “No more.”

The desk clerk who knew all about such things, or thought he did, winked an understanding eye at him.

The man who looked like a lawyer opened a wallet. “I’ll lay it out for you, Steve. It goes with my retainer.”

“You coming up with me?” his client asked, with the woebegone expression of a small boy being forced to enter a dentist’s office.

“Just for a few minutes, if you want me to. I can’t stay too long.”

As they turned to enter the elevator, he gave the desk clerk a final instruction. “As soon as the gentleman’s wife gets here, send her right up, please.”

When they had arrived in the room, the lawyer got on the phone. “Room service, please. Send up a pint of rye, a split of White Rock, some cracked ice, and two glasses.” “No, not for me,” moaned the other with a grimace. “Not the way I feel.”

“It’s got to be here in the room,” his companion told him inflexibily. “You don’t have to touch any of it. But it’s got to be here for looks.”

Duane slumped into a chair. “I feel terrible. Arnold, have you got an aspirin on you?”

“I always bring some along.” The lawyer went into the bathroom, came back with a glass of water, and handed a thumb-sized bottle to Duane.

“Don’t feel that way,” Arnold said. “There’s nothing to feel that way about. You’re a grown-up man, not a high school boy on his first hotel-room date.”

“I know, but there’s something so upside down about all this.”

“Forget it,” said Arnold, and slapped him encouragingly between the shoulders. He took the glass back from him, set it aside, then took the little bottle and pocketed it.

“Better start taking your things off,” he suggested. “I’ll have to be going soon.”

“Ugh,” said Duane.

“Oh, come on,” said Arnold impatiently. “Don’t be such a baby.”

“How far do I have to go?” Duane asked fearfully, slipping the knot of his necktie.

Arnold gestured sketchily, once across Duane’s frame and once up and down it. “Just enough to make it look convincing.”

Duane creased his brow plaintively. “How much is convincing?” he wanted to know. Arnold accepted the question as rhetorical and let it go unanswered.

Duane unbuttoned his shirt, withdrew it from inside his trousers, and took it off. Then he stopped. “Far enough?” he questioned.

“Oh, for the love of Mike!” Arnold protested irritably. “Stop playacting, will you? You don’t have to be told these things. You’re a full-grown man.”

“I feel like a full-grown damn fool,” Duane murmured, painstakingly folding and refolding his shirt. “Far enough, I take it.”

He opened the overnight case, removed a pajama top, a lounging robe, and cloth slippers. He put the pajama top on over his undershirt and buttoned it. Then he put the robe on over that and belted it. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed, removed his shoes, and thrust his feet into the slippers.

Meanwhile Arnold was at the phone, waiting to get some number he had unobtrusively asked for. He turned and studied his client, then nodded pontifical approval.

“Tou’ en deshabille,” said Duane nervously, trying to remember his high-school French in order to take his mind off present things. “Or is it tout? I think you swing the ‘t’ when there’s a vowel coming up next.” He kept fidgeting with the belt of his robe, tightening it far more than was necessary.

Arnold suddenly got his connection and spoke into the phone. “Nat? This is Arnold. You can send your young lady over now. My client’s all set.” He was asked something. “Just a minute. I’ll give it to you.” He lowered the phone, said to the still-fidgeting Duane, “Go over to the door and see what’s on it.”

Duane went over, opened it, and looked. Then he turned around blankly. “There’s nothing on it. What do you mean?”

“The number, for Pete’s sake!” Arnold barked.

“Oh, nine-two-three,” Duane called in, reading off the numerals at the top of the door.

Arnold repeated the number over the phone with the expressionless voice of a man giving a stock-market quotation.

A few moments later there was a knock on the door and the drinks and accessories had arrived. Duane backed away nervously as the room-service waiter swung the tray around in putting it down, as though afraid to let it even touch him.

Arnold paid for this, as he had for the room.

“I’ll bring your change right back, sir,” the waiter said, eying the rather large bill handed to him.

Arnold closed the door. “Sit down,” he brusquely ordered the trembling Duane. “Relax. I’m having more trouble with you than trying to mate a porcupine with an octopus.”

Duane obediently sat down, but in a very hunched posture, his knees touching.

“Is that the way you’re going to be?” Arnold said disapprovingly. “Maybe a drink would help you.”

Duane warded off the offer hectically, crossing his arms in and out as though he were semaphoring. “Not for love or money!” He rumpled his own hair distractedly. “I thought I was nervous the day I got married,” he groaned, “but that wasn’t in it compared to this. At least I knew the girl, then.”

“Ah, you’re jittery by nature,” Arnold told him unsympathetically. “There’s nothing to it, nothing to worry about.”

“That’s because it’s not you, it’s me.”

Arnold flexed his arm to look at the time. “Well, I’m sorry,” he announced decisively. “I’m going to leave you on your own now. I have to get back to the office.”

Duane made a pain-wreathed face.

“I can’t stick around here until they show up,” Arnold told him. “I’m not supposed to be in it at all, you know.” He picked up his brief case, held out his hand for a goodbye shake. “Good luck.”

“Good luck he says,” Duane sniffed morosely.

“You’ll be all right; you won’t die from it,” Arnold promised him heartlessly as he moved toward the door.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Duane agreed morbidly. “Not dying.”

Arnold had the door open now.

“’Bye, now,” he said briskly.

Duane raised a hand halfway, in a faltering acknowledgment, somewhat like a dying gladiator lying on the sands of the arena; then he let it fall down again, limp.

Arnold closed the door and left his client alone.

After about eight or ten awful minutes — hour-minutes to describe them more correctly — the telephone finally rang. Duane jumped to his feet, stood there a moment quivering all over, particularly at the nostrils like a colt scenting imminent danger, and then went over to it.

The desk clerk’s voice said, “Mr. Duane? Your wife’s on her way up.”

“Huh?” he said blankly, seeming to have forgotten for a moment why he was there.

“Is this Mr. Duane?”

Then he remembered that he was expecting her. Or was supposed to be. “Oh,” he said lamely. “Oh, all right. Thank you.”

He left the phone and nervously tightened the belt around his robe — almost as if he were trying to cut himself in half. He stood waiting in a cringing attitude, his shoulders defensively hunched, his neck bent, his forehead creased.

A light, unassuming knock came at the door. He swallowed, then slowly went to the door and opened it.

She was in her twenties. Her hair was a dusty blonde color, not the blonde of artifice but the slow, darkening afterglow of a bright childhood-yellow. Her eyes were extremely frightened — brown and frightened; like a pair of tiny brown birds fluttering in a couple of rounded crystalline cages. Her clothing gave no impression of color, or of fashion, or of fabric; it was undistinguished. It gave only one overall impression — that it had been worn quite a lot before, but was still clean and well-kept.

She too carried a small overnight case in her hand.

“How do you do?” she said awkwardly. “Are you the — the gentleman I was to meet here?”

“Yes, I am,” he answered with equal constraint. “Are you the — the young lady who was to meet me?”

“Yes, I am,” she murmured, her voice barely audible.

“Oh. Well, won’t you come in, please?”

He stood back and she came in, and then he closed the door.

“Thank you,” she said politely. She put down the case. “Did I keep you waiting long?” she asked, still self-consciously.

“No, hardly at all,” he protested.

“I couldn’t get a taxi right away,” she said. “The traffic’s quite bad.”

“I know,” he said.

Then they were both at a loss, unable to think of anything else to say.

Finally, almost with a jerk, as if forcing it out, she said, “Should I start in to get ready?”

“I guess so,” he said haltingly. “Shall I go outside and wait in the hall?”

She glanced around at the bathroom door. “No, you don’t have to do that. I can go in there.” She picked up the case and went in. The lock turned on the inside of the door.

He felt less nervous, now that the thing had actually started, was under way. He sat waiting and reflecting. Reflecting that you always had to wait for women, whether they were dressing or undressing. Reflecting on someone else he had waited for like this, not once but many times; but he wouldn’t be waiting for her any more.

When she came back he rose. He had been taught to do that. For any woman.

She was quite transformed. She carried her street clothing over one arm, the case in the same hand. She wore a negligee of opalescent gray. It was two-ply, the under one pink, the upper one this gray stuff. It was transparent only to the extent that it allowed the under one to peer through. Actually it was a modest negligee.

Below it she wore a nightgown with a yoke of opaque lace from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. Her free hand, interlocking the negligee, allowed a minimum of the nightgown to be seen. He dropped his eyes, embarrassed. She dropped hers too.

“That’s real nice,” he said presently, trying to be complimentary.

“It belongs to one of my neighbors,” she said. “She lends it to me whenever I go out like this.”

She took out a brush and stroked her hair with it in front of the mirror. Then she took one last item out of the case — a magazine devoted to motion pictures and movie stars.

She sat down with this in a chair on the opposite side of the bed and opened it at random across her lap. Almost at once someone tapped at the door and they both gave a nervous start.

“Is it them air—?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re supposed to break in suddenly, aren’t they, not wait like that.”

A voice outside settled their uncertainty. “I have your change, sir.”

“Oh, it’s only the waiter.” He went over to the door. At the same time she raised the magazine and covered her face with it.

The waiter came into the room and methodically started to count out bills and coins on the table on which the drinks were standing. The girl kept the magazine in front of her face through the whole laborious transaction.

The waiter got his tip, mumbled his thanks, and left.

They were now alone again.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked, trying to be hospitable.

“I never drink,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “But you go ahead, if you wish.”

“I only drink when I’m happy.”

That left them about where they had started.

A silence fell. She kept her eyes on the magazine. There was a full-page photograph on the page she had open.

“Is that Sophia Loren you’re looking at?” he asked.

This time she looked up with unfeigned interest. “Yes. How could you tell that from all the way over there?”

Even in the upside-down position in which she was holding it, he could identify the actress. But he only shrugged and said, “Would it make you nervous if I talked to you while we’re waiting?”

“Oh, no, not at all.” She closed the magazine. “Do you have the right time?” she asked.

He told her the time.

“Do you mind if I use the telephone from here? I won’t be long.”

“Go right ahead,” he said.

She went over to it and asked for a local number.

She was turned the other way, and he watched her while she stood there.

“Hello. Mrs. D?” she said. She used the capital letter for a name. “Yes, this is me. How is he?... Oh, good! I’m so relieved to hear that... I’ll try to get back as early as I can. About an hour, an hour and a half. It shouldn’t take any longer... Is there anything you want me to bring on the way home?... All right, I will. I have to hang up now. Goodbye... No, I won’t worry any more, now that I’ve talked to you. Goodbye.”

She returned smiling to her own chair. He didn’t ask her anything, but after a while she saw him looking at her quizzically and she came out with it of her own accord. “My little boy. He has a cold and a sore throat, and I’ve been afraid it might have got worse. But she says he seems to be fighting it off; she has him sleeping now. She’s the neighbor I spoke to you about. She’s been wonderful to me. She has a telephone in her apartment. I don’t have any.”

“Does she know what you wanted the outfit for?”

“I think so. But she’s never said a word to me. She’s very understanding.”

“Has it been very long — that you’ve been—?’” He stopped, tactfully.

“No. This is only the third time.” She looked at her nails. “I don’t exactly enjoy keeping score.”

“You don’t seem at all like—” he ventured, and then lost courage.

“I know — not the type,” she supplied. “That’s what seems so peculiar about it. Even to me, at times. Sometimes I can’t quite figure it out.” She began to recite the catalogue of her credits. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t doll up. I use very little make-up. Sometimes I don’t even put on nail polish.”

“I noticed that,” he said approvingly. “They’re the first natural nails I’ve seen on any woman in years.”

“When a man looks at me on the street I look the other way. In all the little things like that. I’m so — so irreproachable,” she said discontentedly. “And then I go out and do this!”

“It’s not so—” But he didn’t finish it.

She picked up the meaning for him. “Yes, it is. To me it is, anyway, and my point of view is the only one that counts, because I’m the one who’s doing it.”

“How did it come about in the first place?” he asked, as though the question had been on his mind for some time and he couldn’t hold it back any longer.

“Yes, how did it?” she agreed with a bleak smile. “I’ve asked myself that too. It came about quite simply, really. I ran into Harry’s lawyer on the street one day. Harry was my husband. He had died, and there was very little money. The lawyer had helped me collect the little insurance I had coming to me, and he’d given me some part-time typing to do in his office. I couldn’t take a full-time job — the baby was too young then. The relief checks helped a little, but not too much.

“Well, when I met him that day he said one of his clients was looking for a girl to—” she dropped her eyes “—to do this. Just pretend to be caught with someone in a hotel room, because the New York State laws won’t allow any other grounds for divorce. He said it paid a fee of one hundred dollars.”

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Not a word. I gave him a look, and then I walked away with my back up. I remember he tried to apologize, but I didn’t stand there long enough to listen to him. I walked about a block and a half to the bus stop, and I stopped there and waited. I took out my fare ahead of time, and I found I had only seventy-five cents left after paying it. Three quarters. All of a sudden I started to run as fast as my legs could carry me.”

“Away?” he suggested.

“No. Back.”

“Oh,” he said.

“I ran the whole block and a half. People turned and stared at me. I caught up with him. I grabbed him by the arm. I couldn’t talk, I was so out of breath. I just shook my head, yes, like this. Fast and willing.”

He was toying with an unlit cigarette. “It’s just a job,” he said. “It’s no different from modeling, really, if you look at it one way.”

“Yes, it is,” she insisted. “It’s even worse than the real thing.”

He looked at her startled. “In what way?”

“It’s not even as honest. If you do the real thing, you’re doing it and you admit to yourself you’re doing it. But when you do this, the way I am, you’re not doing it and yet you’re pretending you are.”

He broke the cigarette in half between his fingers and threw it away.

“Oh, I suppose after a few more times I won’t care any more,” she said resignedly. “So that’ll solve the problem for me, in a way.”

He gave her a quietly perceptive look. “I don’t think you’ll ever change,” he told her. “You don’t strike me as the kind who will.”

“You have to. You can’t keep it up and not have it do something to you. It’s like drops of water falling steadily on the ground. There’s bound to be mud after a while.”

The steadfast way he kept looking at her had a sort of unspoken respect in it: the way you admire someone who carries herself well in a difficult situation.

He started to say to her warmly, “You know, somehow I can’t help telling you this—”

There was a sudden, demanding, almost theatrical pounding on the door — too heavy to be the work of just one person.

They shared a moment of consternation — as if the situation they found themselves in was real, not a pretense.

“They’re here!” she gasped. “That’s them now!”

She darted toward the uplidded case, exclaiming, “Handkerchief to cover my face with! They’re going to take pictures!”

Somebody outside called in, “Open the door!” The voice was loud and yet somehow it managed to be matter-of-fact, as if it was used to this routine.

She raced back to the bed, a large cotton handkerchief in her hand. The negligee streamed out behind her, carried on the air current her swiftness created.

She threw back the covers on her side, rolled herself in under them, and flung them back over her.

“What do I do?” he asked, stage-frightened, and made a tentative move to get in alongside her.

“You don’t have to get in with me,” she said. “Just sit on the edge, that’s enough.”

He sat down stiffly on the outermost edge of the bed, his back ramrod-straight.

“Open this door — we want to come in!” The voice was louder now.

She dipped the handkerchief in the ice-cube bucket, soaked it, then plastered it across her eyes and the bridge of her nose like a sleeping mask.

A passkey nagged at the lock, the door opened, and four people came in and fanned themselves around. A woman and three men. One man carried photographic equipment. The second palmed his hand in an Indian-type salute. “House detective,” he announced. The third just stood there. He resembled Arnold a little, not personally so much as professionally.

The woman was a metallic blonde, almost a platinum one. She carried a fur stole over her shoulders.

The hotel detective turned to the blonde woman standing just inside the door. “Is this your husband, Mrs. Duane?”

“It is,” she said in a clear but completely unemotional voice. It was almost like the “I do” of a witness being sworn in. Just as mechanical.

The detective turned next to the man on the edge of the bed.

“Are you Stephen Duane?”

“I am,” Steve Duane said.

“You admit the lady beside you in the bed is not your wife?”

“I admit it,” Steve said.

The detective took out a pocket notebook, made a slashing mark in it, something like a vindictive pothook, then said to the man who obviously represented Mrs. Duane legally, “Just call on me whenever you’re ready for my testimony,” and left, with an antiquated tipping of his hatbrim to Mrs. Duane.

The wife stared after him, almost in awe, as if she hadn’t seen that done in years.

The man with the camera equipment now went into action, focusing from the clear side of the bed, crouching low, as though he were going to spring bodily into it. There was a vivid flash, and the self-confessed adulterer jumped. His “companion in sin” shuddered under the covers.

The lawyer had moved in closer to supervise.

“Pull down your nightgown a little off the shoulder,” he instructed, while the photographer was busy shifting the camera angle.

The girl in the bed did not respond.

The lawyer stretched his hand out and did it for her. As he did so, the girl’s head turned to that side, as if to watch what he was doing; but oddly enough the wet handkerchief stayed in place, pasted to her face.

The flash this time was cometlike in its brilliance. Steve jumped again. The girl in bed was motionless.

“What’re you trying to do, broil us!” Steve shouted belligerently.

“Now one around on this side,” the attorney said, stage-managing from the opposite side of the bed. “Put your arms around each other, you two.”

“I will like hell!” Steve yelled. He raised his arm threateningly at the two of them. “Get out of here or I’ll bust the both of you!” he snarled with unexpected vehemence. “You’ve taken all the pictures you’re going to get!”

They both backed away apprehensively. “I guess that’ll have to do,” the lawyer conceded reluctantly to his photographer.

The photographer turned and made for the door. He nodded affably to Mrs. Duane as he passed her.

“My that was quick!” she complimented him. “You sure know your job.” She was always very well-mannered to people she wasn’t married to.

“I try my best,” he said casually.

“Okay,” the lawyer said, closing the door. “I guess that leaves only the principals in the matter.” He turned toward the photogenic bed. “You can take off the handkerchief now, young lady. We’re all just one big happy family.”

Steve’s wife blew a cynical stream of smoke. “Well, big anyway,” she amended with a look at her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s discontented face, “if not happy.”

The girl in the bed kept the handkerchief on. In fact, she didn’t seem to have heard the attorney’s instruction.

“Is she asleep?” the lawyer asked, his voice puzzled.

“Probably likes the bed so much she doesn’t want to leave it,” Steve’s wife suggested nastily. “Intends to spend the rest of the night in it.”

The lawyer went over to peer at the girl more closely. Then he leaned over and tapped her lightly on the shoulder. The tap became a touch. The touch became a tightened grip. The grip became an urgent shake. The girl rolled with the shake, but not of her own volition. When he turned back to look at the Duanes his face was ashen.

“She’s out,” he quavered. “Out cold. It even looks to me like she might—”

He took a metal-barreled pencil out of his inside pocket and using the tip of it with infinite finesse, lifted an edge of the handkerchief and folded it back. One eye was exposed. Open and staring.

“I’d better get hold of my lawyer,” Steve said shakily, making a move toward the phone. “He was the one who sent her here.”

“You don’t need a lawyer,” the other man told him bluntly. “You need the police. This girl is dead.”

“Oh, no!” protested Steve’s wife in dismay. “Let me out of here. That’s all I need!” And with a flurry of her fur stole she whirled and ran out.

The lawyer lingered only a moment more. “She must have been dead through the whole show,” he said with a sickened look. “Her body temperature’s already down considerably.”

“And me next to her,” Steve moaned. “I thought I didn’t feel her move.”

And the next thing Steve knew, the door slammed shut and he was alone and half dressed in a hotel room, with a dead stranger on the bed to explain away.

(to be concluded next month)