The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife

Chapter 3

Jane Keller took a streetcar to South Omena Avenue, walked two blocks to a three story brick apartment house and pressed the bell marked “Manager.”

After some five seconds the electric buzzer threw back the latch and Jane Keller entered an ornamental lobby which was as stiff as a nurse’s starched uniform. She climbed half a dozen stairs to a corridor and stopped in front of the first door on the left, which was marked MANAGER, and below that in a little container a card bearing the words Mrs. Martha Stanhope.

Jane Keller tapped nervously on the door and Martha opened it.

Martha was Jane Keller’s older sister. In her early forties, she was inclined to put on weight but still had enough pride in her personal appearance to combat the tendency. Her husband had died fifteen years earlier and she had never remarried. The necessity of making a living for herself and her daughter Marjorie had kept her watchfully eager to grasp every opportunity which might come her way. This eager, objective selfishness had become a dominant trait in her character. Her eyes were bright, alert, and greedy. Even when she smiled, her eyes remained watchful.

“Oh, hello, Jane. I didn’t know it was you. I was dressing and thought it was someone looking for an apartment. You can put up a sign NO VACANCIES and still they come, asking questions about whether someone isn’t going to leave, or if you don’t know of some place... Come in and sit down. Margie will be in a minute.”

Jane followed Martha into the over-furnished apartment, sank down in a chair, placed her hands on her lap and smiled a wan, vague smile.

“What’s the matter? You look all in,” Martha said.

“Well, I... I’ve just had a jolt.”

Martha Stanhope’s eyes were hard and probing. “What sort of a jolt?” she asked, running the words together in a quick staccato of inquiry.

“I was at the bank.”

“Yes, go on.”

“A man tried to give me five hundred dollars.”

“Oh,” Martha said, and smiled. Relief relaxed the tension of her manner. She ceased to stand rigidly poised in front of her sister and moved easily over to a little locker, brought out a bottle of brandy and two glasses. “A little drink will do you good.”

“Yes, I... I suppose so... not much, Martha.”

Martha Stanhope poured out two stiff slugs of the brandy. “So you’re upset because someone paid you five hundred dollars?”

“It was on that oil lease.”

“What oil lease?”

“On the island.”

“Oh, that,” her sister said scornfully. “That was one of those deals Lawton promoted... I thought it was all over.”

“I thought so too but I guess it isn’t. The lease had some funny provision in it... that’s what the man told me.”

“Jane Keller, will you tell me what you’re talking about?”

“Well, Mr. Shelby seems to think he can reinstate the lease by paying five hundred dollars.”

“Go on,” Martha snapped. “What would happen then?”

“Well, that’s what I don’t know.”

Martha had been carrying the two glasses of brandy over toward Jane’s chair. Now she stopped, her alert eyes wide with apprehension. “You mean something may happen to the sale?”

“I don’t know.”

Martha inhaled audibly, walked over to hand Jane one of the glasses of brandy. “Drink that,” she said, and without waiting to sit down tossed off her own glass of brandy at a single gesture.

Jane Keller sipped the brandy, coughed, wiped her lips with the handkerchief she was holding in her left hand, and once more smiled that vague somewhat wan smile.

Martha rattled out swiftly indignant words. “Now you listen to me, Jane Keller. Don’t depend on Lawton Keller. He isn’t worth a fig when it comes to real business. He’s just a glib talker, who could never get to first base with a man. He makes his living out of impressing women. You know Gregory never had any use for him.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well, I would. Two years ago you had forty thousand dollars in insurance money. How much of it have you got left?”

“Well, you can’t blame the things that happened on Lawton. Good heavens, Martha, he isn’t running the world!”

“You’d think he was to hear him talk. I’ll bet he’s lost all of that money for you. The island’s all you have left.”

“I should have sold the island earlier,” Jane said. “The trouble with Lawton was he didn’t have enough capital to really back his judgment. We had to play things on kind of a shoe string basis...”

“A shoe string basis of forty thousand dollars!” Martha Stanhope snorted. “If he’d had more capital, he’d have been just that much farther in the red... Now I don’t know how Margie’s going to take this. You told her she could count on five thousand dollars when that sale went through. She’s marrying that discharged soldier and they’re going to buy that grocery business. The papers on that are all signed and...”

“I know,” Jane said wearily, “but don’t worry about it now, Martha. It won’t stop the sale.”

“What makes you think it won’t?”

“Lawton tells me they’re just about ready to close the escrow. He wouldn’t doubt but what the deal might go through tomorrow.”

Metal clicked against metal as a latchkey was fitted to the door of the apartment.

Martha Stanhope said hastily, “That’s Margie now.”

“We won’t say a word,” Jane warned.

“Yes we will. You’ve got to tell her,” Martha said.

“Well,” Jane observed, taking a hasty sip of her brandy, “I don’t know what there is to tell.”

The door opened. Marjorie Stanhope included her mother and her aunt in her greeting, said, “What isn’t there to tell?”

She was twenty-one and not particularly good-looking. Her figure had never curved out. There was a sallow appearance about her skin, and her black hair became stringy whenever she neglected weekly finger waves. Her eyes, wide and dark, could have made the face beautiful if there had been any animation in the girl’s manner. There was none. The face seldom had expression, and when it did change there was an utter lack of spontaneity about it. As Martha had complained on occasion, “She sits and looks at you and just looks and looks, and you haven’t the faintest idea of what she’s thinking.”

“Well,” Marjorie asked, walking with characteristic, loose-jointed ease toward the closet, “what isn’t there to tell?”

She let her soft tweed coat slide back down her arms, sniffed, and said, “Who has the alcoholic halitosis?”

“We both have, dear,” her mother said. “There’s the brandy over there on the sideboard. Have a drink.”

Margie took off her hat, ran her fingers around the edges of her hair, poured herself a drink, and said, “What gives?”

“Your Aunt Jane’s in trouble, dear.”

“Lawton?” Margie asked, raising the brandy glass to the light.

“No, dear. It’s trouble over an oil lease. It may affect the sale of the island property.”

Margie had started to drink. Abruptly her hand became motionless. Then she lowered the glass, but looked neither at her mother nor at her Aunt Jane.

After a moment of strained silence she said, “All right, go on.”

It was Jane Keller who started speaking rapidly. “It won’t make any difference, Margie. Things are going to be all right; it’s just a technicality that’s bobbed up. I don’t even know there’s going to be any trouble about the sale. Lawton thinks the deal will go through escrow within the next day or two.”

Margie paid no attention to the rapid words of reassurance. She said over her shoulder, “I suppose that means the loan’s off. I’ll tell Frank.”

Both her mother and Aunt Jane started talking at once. “Don’t do anything like that,” Jane said almost sharply.

“It isn’t that serious, dear,” Martha Stanhope soothed.

Margie turned then to look at her mother. “Not that serious? Here’s Frank Bomar, one leg shot away. He’s not looking for charity, but wanting to build up a business. He’s proud. He wouldn’t marry me unless he had some way of making a living. We’ve signed the papers on this grocery store and put up our money. The rest was promised for next week. We’re going to get married Saturday. Everything is contingent on this loan from Aunt Jane. I didn’t ask for it; she volunteered it. Okay, suppose something happens to it. We lose the store. We lose Frank’s two thousand. What does it do to Frank? I guess you people don’t know what it means to be changed overnight from a perfect specimen of physical manhood to a cripple. I guess you don’t know what it means to come back to a country that you’ve been fighting for that takes it all as matter-of-course where...”

She broke off abruptly, twisted her somewhat thin shoulders, raised the brandy glass to her lips, tilted her head back, and took the brandy neat in one swift gulp, put the empty glass down on the table, said to her mother, “Okay, where do we go from here?” and walked out of the room.

There was nothing sulky, nothing dramatic in her manner; she walked with calm, loose-jointed deliberation, closed the door softly behind her.

Jane glanced helplessly at her sister. “I’m so sorry.”

Martha said nothing.

“I presume she’s gone to her bedroom to have a good cry,” Jane said.

Martha Stanhope said, “She won’t be crying. She’ll sit down in a chair, fasten her eyes on the wall and simply sit there.”

“Thinking?” Jane asked.

“I suppose so... But you’ll never know what she’s thinking about. Speak to her and she’ll answer just as calmly and patiently as though there wasn’t a thing wrong. Honestly, Jane. I just don’t-know what goes on in that girl’s mind. I wish she’d cry or scream or have a tantrum or get angry or something. But she just shuts herself up inside of herself and you don’t have the faintest idea what she’s thinking.”

“Well, Lawton wants me to get over there right away. He...”

Martha Stanhope walked over to the coat closet, took out her hat and coat.

“Where are you going, Martha?”

“I’m going with you.”

“To Lawton? He...”

“Lawton nothing,” Martha Stanhope said sarcastically, “he’s the one who got you into this, signing that oil lease... That’s when you should have seen a lawyer, before you signed it. I’m going to tell Margie where we’re going.”

“Where are we going?” Jane asked.

Martha said, “We’re going to see Perry Mason... Wait a second. I’ll tell Margie.”

She tapped at the door of Marjorie’s bedroom, hesitated a moment, stepped inside, then softly closed the door.

It was nearly a minute later that she emerged, closed the door and said, “All right, Jane, let’s go.”

“What was she doing?” Jane Keller asked.

“Sitting in a chair, looking out the window,” Martha Stanhope said in a flat, expressionless voice.