Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1957 (British Edition)

Papa Knows Best by Robert E. Byrum

Liz had shot the husband she didn’t love and lost the man who loved her. So what was a widow to do?

Liz butler was a young woman who took deep inner pride in her ability to co-ordinate her thoughts and feelings toward an intelligent goal, even under extraordinary circumstances. It was an integral part of her heritage as a daughter, on both sides of her family, of long lines of hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-loving Virginia aristocrats.

Therefore, as she looked at the body of her husband, stretched out in the flower-blanketed bronze coffin, in front of the white-panelled altar in the lovely little eighteenth-century chapel, she was dismayed by the vagrant irrelevancies of mind and emotion that prevented her from feeling grief.

Looking at him, dead, it was incredible to her that she had ever loved Len Butler sufficiently to have married him and borne him three children. There he lay, a waxen-faced stranger, a man she had lived with for over seven years — even since she was nineteen.

Carruthers, the undertaker, had done a good job, she thought. The folded white napkin draped with meticulous casualness across his forehead, effectively concealed the hideous mash the full charge of buckshot, from her prized silver-mounted Belgian under-and-over shotgun, had made of his upper skull.

It reminded her of Papa when he had one of his bad hangovers, and insisted on having Parmalee his bodyservant, put ice on his head. Trust Papa not to use a regular ice-bag — Carter Lansdowne, her sire, had a phobia against permitting rubber to come in direct contact with his skin.

“Rubber cuts off the air from the pores,” he liked to say, usually moving his right fist slowly back and forth to obtain a gentle clink from the ice in the glass it held. “Thunderation! The skin’s got to breathe!”

Liz glanced at her father, tall, thickset, ruddy of face and still fair of hair, blue-eyed, more than handsome. Beside him, in order of their years, were the three children — his three grandchildren — Penny, who was six, Margo, four, and little Toby, two. With their round, uncomprehending blue eyes, they reminded Liz of the three bears.

She looked once more, for the last time, on the unfamiliar face of the man who had been her husband, who had fathered her children, the stranger she had killed, only three days before, while out on the quail shoot.

“Damn it!” she said to him silently. “Why did you have to stick your head right in my line of fire?”

Poor Len had tried, with all the whole-souled earnestness of his Yankee ancestry, to convert himself into a Virginia sportsman — but it simply wasn’t in him. He had paid for his effort with his life. Curiously, as she turned away, what Liz felt was relief — and hatred of herself for feeling so.

There was still the burial service, in the ancient, green-sodded little churchyard behind the chapel. There was the gathering at Tivoli, the red-bricked white-pillared Lansdowne ancestral mansion poor Len's Yankee money had done so much to restore. There was Len’s mother, the hurt of losing him in her fine eyes, putting an arm around Liz’ shoulders in the seclusion of a bedroom upstairs, saying, “It’s you I feel sorry for, Liz — losing Len like this. You mustn’t let it keep you from living.”

And Liz, unable to say the dreadful thing in her heart — that now, perhaps, she was going to begin living for the first time — and mouthing, “No, Mother Butler, it’s your son — my husband — we must pity. And the children we must care for.”

Then there was Rick Hopkins, tall, grave, bronzed and handsome. Rick had roomed with Len at college, had been best man at the wedding, had flown from the West Coast as soon as he learned of the tragedy, and brought Mother Butler down from New York. His eyes were enigmatic as he held Liz’s hand in farewell.

He said, softly. “You ought to get away for a while, Liz. I’m going to stay on East a few months. Maybe I’ll see you in New York.”

“Maybe,” Liz said, deliberately vague. Even at such a time, she was woman enough to sense the invitation underlying his casualness. She had suspected — ever since her first meeting with Rick on the eve of her marriage to Len — and now she knew. She added, “There’s such an awful lot to be done with Len gone — the children...”

Then they were all gone, and the children were in bed, and it was just Papa and herself, sitting alone in the gracious, dignified, white-panelled living room, with its fine Georgian furniture and oddly primitive old portraits of Lansdownes and Hoopers and Killing-worths and Metcalfs, and all the rest that had made Liz whatever she was.

Carter Lansdowne made the ice clink gently in his glass and regarded his daughter with an almost-amused glance. He said, “Liz-honey, I hope you realise you’re rich.”

She said, “Shut up, Papa — I know. You’ll never have to worry about anything again.”

He took a long sip, then said, “You know, Liz-honey, I’d been getting a feeling of late that poor Len was about ready to pull up and pull out of here — taking you and the children with him, of course. I never could have endured that — you belong here, just as I do.”

He paused to shake his head and add, “But Len Butler never did. He was just an outsider. I used to have to call, 'Covey!' so he’d know when to stand up and shoot. Not that he ever hit anything.”

At such moments — there had been a number of them in the course of Liz's life with her father — she hated Papa. She longed to say, “You think it’s a nice thing to be left a widow with three children at twenty-six, to be left with the knowledge you killed your husband?” She longed to say a number of other things, like, “If it weren’t for this ‘outsider’ you wouldn’t even be living in Tivoli,” or, “It was Len who made the sacrifices — he never really liked it here — so you could play the ancestral gentleman.”

Yet she didn’t say them — there was no sense. Papa wouldn’t have understood. His obtuseness infuriated Liz at times, just as his callous selfishness frightened her. But everyone adored Papa — the children, the neighbours, the servants, even the animals. Like herself, all were hopelessly trapped in the toils of his charm.

She rose, abruptly, and went alone into the gunroom. He knew better than to follow her there. Ever since she was a little girl, in jodhpurs and pigtails, whenever Liz was emotionally disturbed, she had turned to the things she loved and trusted the most — her guns. She found relief in oiling the beautifully machined steel barrels, in polishing the engraved silver mountings and fine wood stocks, in tending them and cleaning them until they shone spotless as jewels.

Liz was a Diana — by birth, by heritage, by her father’s training. In her middle teens, she had won a National junior title in skeet-shooting, and would have been women’s champion in due course had not marriage and the arrival of Penny kept her out of competition. For Liz, there was something fine in the patience of the long tramps behind the dogs, the long waits in cover, the sudden flurry of animal action, the shot itself, the clean kill. They left her cleansed of all inner aggressions.

So she polished her guns and thought about Papa, and about poor Len, and about the, to her, inexplicable awkwardness in the field that had caused him to blunder into the path of her shot. She thought about Papa some more, and then about the children, and then about Rick Hopkins and the invitation in his light brown eyes. Then she put the gleaming weapons back in their cases and went up to bed, alone.

She flew to New York a week later, refusing a number of invitations to visit from girls she had gone to school with at Fermata and Warrenton, and took rooms in a quiet, upper-East-Side hotel. For the time being, she wanted to feel free.

She had a good time — so good a time that her conscience bothered her a little when it had opportunity to take itself felt. There were theatres, luncheons, dinners, cocktail parties, week-ends in Connecticut or on Long Island. There was shopping — and there was Rick.

He was with her as often and as long as she would let him. He was, unexpectedly, as much of an outdoor sportsman as poor Len had been the reverse — with a casual, loose-leaf California approach that Liz found herself increasingly liking and responding to. After ten days, he asked her to marry him.

“Naturally,” he said over a cigarette, in a quiet little restaurant whose food was as softly palatable as its violin music, “I don’t want to rush you, Liz.”

“Then what would you call what you’ve been doing to me?” she asked him, feeling glowing and alive as she could not remember ever having felt.

He laughed softly, and one of his strong hands captured hers. “I wish I’d seen you first — I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

She withdrew her hand. “But the children, Rick — it wouldn’t be fair to ask you to take on such a load.”

“That’s easy,” was his reply. “We’ll just turn them loose on the beach at La Jolla and let them grow into water-babies. It’s the healthiest, happiest life for a child in the world. I know — I had it.”

“But not right away...” Thus she consented.

She was supposed to break the news to Papa when she got back to Tivoli. But Toby came down with German measles the day after her return, and then one thing seemed to follow another so that, somehow, she never quite got around to it. She tried to explain to Rick over the telephone.

“Okay, Honey,” he said, “then I’m coming down and break the news to Papa myself. After all, a man in love as I am with you has some rights.”

That evening, for the first time since the funeral, she polished the guns. When she came out, Papa was sitting in his big chair, holding his big drink, in the living room. Regarding her with amusement and a flash of keenness, he said, “Something I’ve done, Liz-honey?”

Impulsively, she kissed him, almost causing him to spill his drink. “You’ve been darling,” she told him. “No — it’s Rick.”

“If he’s been dealing off the bottom of the deck, I’ll horsewhip him.” Papa’s frown was ferocious.

“Oh no, Papa!” Liz said quickly. “It’s nothing like that — he wants me to marry him.”

“A little quick, isn’t it?” Carter Lansdowne asked. Then, cocking his handsome, Roman head slightly on one side, “Still, he’s been waiting a long time, Liz-honey. He’s a bachelor, and a gentleman — at least he has the earmarks. I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“But you don’t understand, Papa!” Liz almost wailed. “It’s, oh — anyway, he’s coming down here for a visit.”

“Glad to welcome him,” said Papa. “Nice to have another man around the house for a change.”

Rick arrived the next afternoon. He brought presents for the children, some very special whisky for Papa, a seven-carat diamond ring for Liz, hung on a gold chain. “So you can wear it around your neck, out of sight, until we make this properly official,” he told her.

He fitted into the Virginia life as if he had been born to it. He shot almost as well as Liz, rode almost as well as Papa. The children adored him.

One afternoon, when Liz returned from a household shopping drive to Warrenton, he said, “What are we waiting for, Darling? I’ve been talking to your father about it. I know some people who’ll be delighted to take the place off your hands. They’ll pay a good price, too. Then we can all go out to La Jolla. Your father is all for it — says he’s been needing a change for years.”

“He is?” Liz couldn’t believe it. “He does?” Then she embraced Rick passionately and said, “Oh, Darling!”

The next afternoon, when she got back from a visit to one of the neighbouring houses whose owner’s wife was trying to start a local PTA movement, Rick was gone. Papa was enigmatic, apparently as puzzled as she.

“The damned cad didn’t so such as say good-bye,” he said, frowning.

“But I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand at all.”

She waited three days for word from him, but none came. Then she packed up the seven-carat diamond and chain and mailed them to his address in La Jolla, with a stiff little note.

His answer came a week later. He wrote—

There was more — but she didn’t need to read it. She folded it neatly, thrust it away in her saddle-stitched handbag, went into the gun room. She understood all too clearly now — and with understanding came horror. Papa! It was he who had manoeuvred her into marriage with poor Len. It was Len’s money that had restored Tivoli, and Papa had no intention of giving it up.

What was it that he had said, the evening of the funeral, when he was well into his cups? At that time, the words had meant nothing to her. Now they returned to haunt her.

“...getting a feeling of late that poor Len was about ready to pull up and pull out of here — taking you and the children with him, of course. I never could have endured that... just an outsider. I used to have to call, ‘Covey!’ so he’d know when to stand up and shoot...”

She recalled Papa, that ghastly afternoon, standing to one side, watching her closely, as he always did when she shot — watching her, she had thought until now, with pride. She could hear his cry of, ‘Covey!’ — just before Len came blundering up from cover into the path of her double-charge. The memory remained vividly the same, but the pattern was altered — horribly, unbelievably altered.

She rubbed harder on the gun in her hand, wondering what she should do. There was no sense going to Rick — Papa had fixed that, as he had fixed every threat to his beloved way of life. No matter what she did, the monstrous lie would be always between Rick and herself. Besides, she could hardly call Papa a murderer when she, herself, had fired the fatal shells.

She hefted the gun she had polished until it gleamed and sighted it through the French windows overlooking the lawn. Papa was out there, playing some game with the children, who clustered around him, their golden little faces bright with interest and love. Cooly, Liz lifted the gun, felt the reassuring smoothness of the stock on her cheek.

She calculated the distance — less than fifty feet — and made allowance for the wind, which was high. She brought the ruddy flesh of his face in alignment with the sights. Then she squeezed the double trigger.

She heard the click-click of the hammers falling on empty chambers. Then she put the gun away, as carefully as ever, lit a cigarette and went out to join the others on the lawn.