Meet Me at the Morgue

chapter 12

His office contrasted rather spectacularly with mine. We ascended into it in a small private hydraulic elevator whose door was finely lettered in gold with the firm name: Sturtevant and Seifel. Sturtevant, now semiretired, had been the town’s leading estate-lawyer.

The reception room was carpeted with wine-dark broadloom and furnished with chartreuse leather. Reproduced Rouault heads looked out of the paneled walls in tragic resignation. There was nothing Rouault about the secretary at the telephone desk. She had wine-dark eyes and chartreuse hair, as if the room had given birth to her.

“Mrs. Seifel has been trying to get you, Mr. Seifel. Three times.” She gave the words a sardonic intonation.

“What does Mother want now?”

“She says you promised to take her to a party at the beach club. You were to pick her up at four thirty.”

“If she says that, it’s probably true.” There was an undertone of resentment in his voice. “Call her back please, will you, Linda? Tell her I’ll be a little late.”

“She won’t like that.”

He raised his bent arm in a violent, harried movement, and looked at his watch. “Tell her I’ll be fifteen minutes late, no more. I don’t see why she has to start so early.”

“Yes, Mr. Seifel. Can I go then, Mr. Seifel? I have a beauty appointment.”

“I have a beauty appointment!” he repeated in savage mimicry.

She stuck out her tongue at his back, caught me watching her, and substituted a feline smile. I followed Seifel into his private office, where the carpet and the leather were dove-gray, the paneling blanched oak. I remarked that law seemed to be paying well these days. He grunted unhappily that he supposed it was.

On the wall behind the black glass-topped desk, a bad oil-painting of a beautiful dark-haired woman in a 1920 cloche hat dominated the room. I guessed that it was Mrs. Seifel keeping an eye on her son. He opened a small bar-cabinet built into a corner and held up a bottle of Scotch:

“Join me?”

“Not just now, thanks.”

“I think I will.” He added unnecessarily: “Though I very seldom drink in the daytime. Today is a special occasion. A kidnapping in the morning, a cocktail party with Mother in the afternoon. I couldn’t face it without a little assistance. Not that she isn’t a wonderful woman, of course.”

He half-filled a glass with Scotch, and held it up to the painted face on the wall:

“Here’s to you, Mother-Wother, in your home in the Sudan. You’re a poor benighted heathen but a first-class fighting man.”

There was something weirdly pathetic about the scene. Strangely, it was Ann I was sorry for. He tossed the whisky down.

“Now to find that card, wherever it is. Tom Swift and His X-ray Eye to the Rescue. Sequel to Tom Swift and His Electronic Mother-Wother.”

He disturbed me. His wit was ranging on the borders of despair, and I regretted the crack I had made about split personality. He went on talking, more or less to himself, about the pleasures of the day and the delightful prospects of the evening, while his hands went through his files.

He slammed the metal drawer and turned with a card in his hand. “Just as I thought, old man. It was with the Miner papers. Little old Tom Swift has a memory like a steel trap, which is why the world has beaten a path to his door.”

“Thank him for me.”

The card was soiled and bent, as if it had been offered and rejected a number of times. It said:

Seifel said: “I wish I could remember his name. Will this help, do you think?”

“It should. Mind if I use your phone for a long-distance call?”

“Any other time, no. Right now I’m in rather a hurry.”

“It won’t take long.”

He hovered anxiously around the desk, like a large bird with clipped wings, while I put through a call to the Tucker number. The phone at the other end rang twenty times.

“Your party does not answer, sir,” the operator said. “Shall I try again in half an hour?”

“Don’t bother.”

Seifel accompanied me to the elevator. Just as we reached it, a metal door slid back and a woman emerged. At first glance, it was as if the portrait in Seifel’s office had stepped down out of the frame. The dark aquiline head had remained unchanged for thirty years or more, and the body on which the head was balanced birdlike was as slim as a girl’s.

At second glance I noticed the leathery patches loose under the jaw, the marks of old knowledge around the painted mouth and in the black, shining eyes. Her ringed hand took hold of Seifel’s sleeve and gave it a violent jerk.

“What on earth has been keeping you, Lawrence?”

“I was just coming, Mother. This is Mr. Cross.”

She disregarded me. Her eyes were on her son, like wet, black leeches. “It’s mean and selfish of you to keep me waiting like this. I didn’t devote my life to you in order to be cast aside whenever you feel the whim.”

“I’m sorry, Mother.”

“Indeed you should be sorry. You forced me to take a public bus down here.”

“You could have taken a taxi.”

“I can’t afford to pay taxi-fare every day. You never think of my sacrifices, of course, but it has cost me an enormous amount of money to set you up in practice with Mr. Sturtevant.”

“I realize that.” He looked at me miserably. His body seemed to have shrunk, and taken on an adolescent awkwardness. “Can’t we drop the subject for now, Mother? I’m ready to drive you anywhere you like.”

She said with icy boredom: “Finish your business, Lawrence. I’m in no hurry. In fact I’ve lost any interest I had in the party. I believe I feel a headache coming on.”

“Please, Mother, don’t be like that.”

He fumbled awkwardly, reaching for her hand. She turned away from him in a movement of disdainful coquetry, and walked to the window on high sharp heels. I stepped into the elevator. The last I saw of his face, it looked bruised and shapeless, as if her Cuban heels had been hammering it.