Markham: The Case of the Pornographic Photos

Thirteen

It ended at the Tafts’, at dinner.

Dinner was sandwiches and beer this time, and none of us were very hungry. Jill Lincoln was in jail in New Hampshire, charged with the murder of Gwen Davison. Alan Marsten was in a hospital recuperating. Hank Sutton was in a morgue, decomposing. Barbara Taft was dead and buried.

During dinner I did the talking and Edgar and Marianne listened in silence. Painful silence. I said the things I had to say and they listened, because they had to listen, certainly not because they wanted to.

Edgar Taft stood up, finally.

“Then she really did kill herself, Roy.”

“I’m afraid she did,” I said.

“It doesn’t play any other way, does it?”

“No.”

He nodded heavily. “You’ll excuse me,” he said. “I’d like to be alone for a few moments.”

Marianne and I sat there awkwardly while he left the room and went to his study. She looked at me and I looked back at her. I waited.

“I’m sorry you had to tell him,” she said.

“That it was suicide?”

“The rest of it, Roy. Those... those pictures. That filth. All of it.”

“It would come out in Jill’s trial anyway.”

“I know. But it seems so—”

She let the sentence trail off unfinished. I took a cigarette from my pack, lighted it, offered her one. She shook her head I and I blew out the match and dropped it into an ashtray.

“You didn’t want me to tell him about the pictures,” I said. “Is that it?”

“It’s just that—”

“But you knew about them all along,” I said, interrupting her. “Didn’t you, Marianne?”

Her hands shook. “You knew,” she said. “You knew—”

“Yes,” I said. “I knew. I knew that you knew, if that’s what you mean. There was a reason for Barbara coming to New York to commit suicide, Marianne. Because that’s not why she came here. She came to see her mother.”

She had closed her eyes. Her face was very pale.

“Blackmail bothered her,” I continued. “She didn’t like being bleeded even if she could afford the money. She didn’t like letting some filthy crook hold a filthy picture over her head like a sword. They say you cannot blackmail a truly brave person, Marianne. I suspect there’s quite a good deal of truth in that statement. And I suspect that Barbara was a very brave girl.”

“Brave but foolish, Roy.”

“Maybe.” I sighed. “She was brave enough to want to call a blackmailer’s bluff. She was confused as hell — she left school, dropped out of sight for awhile, then came home. She came to you, Marianne. Didn’t she.”

She said: “Yes.” The word was barely audible. It was more a breath than a word.

“She wanted support,” I went on. “She told you about the pictures and the blackmail. She told you she was going to tell the man to go to hell, then tell the police what he was doing. She knew there was going to be publicity, and that it would be the worst kind — she would be asked to leave school, perhaps, and there would be nasty rumors.”

“It would have been bad for her, Roy. A reputation around her neck for life. It—”

“So you told her to go on paying. You probably were harsh with her, although that hardly matters. What mattered to Barbara was that her mother wouldn’t back her up, that her mother seemed to be more interested in appearances than in reality. That ruined her, Marianne. Her own mother wouldn’t support her. Her own mother let her down.”

“I never thought she would kill herself, Roy.”

“I know that.”

“I never thought... I was horrible with her, Roy. But it seemed more sensible to pay the money than to risk the publicity. I didn’t take anything else into consideration. I—”

She broke off. We sat there, awkward again. I finished my cigarette.

“That’s why you didn’t want me to work too hard on the case,” I said. “That’s why you told me on the phone to drop it as quickly as I could. You thought I might turn up the pictures, and you didn’t want that.”

“It would have hurt Edgar.”

“It’s hurting him now,” I said. “But Barbara’s death hurt him a great deal more.”

She said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Marianne.”

“Roy—”

I looked at her.

“You won’t... tell Edgar, will you?”

Appearances were everything. She still lived in a little world of What Other People Think, and reality was not rearing its ugly head, not if she could help it. She was poised and polished as a figurine. And as substantial.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

The train transported me to Grand Central Station. I walked to the Commodore, reclaimed my key from the clerk, picked up bills and messages. I took an elevator to my room and put the bills and messages into a drawer without looking at them.

I took off my coat, my jacket, my tie. I could hear Christmas carols coming from somewhere. I wished they would stop. Christmas was coming any day now and I didn’t care.

I picked up the telephone, called Room Service. I asked the answering voice to send up some scotch. I told him to forget about the ice and the soda, and to make it a fifth, not a pint.

I sat down to wait for the liquor. The Christmas carols were still going on and I tried not to listen to them.

It was the wrong night for them.