Venomous Lady...

Chapter One Whisper From the Past

The city of Sayreton, Iowa — population 14,000 — steamed and sweltered on the relentless hotplate of an airless August day. Peter Hume, blissfully cool in the small restaurant, thought longingly of a tall collins, of several tall collinses, stood up with regret and walked with his check to the cashier by the door.

“Terrible hot day, Mr. Hume,” the girl said.

She dropped his change onto the green rubber mat and he picked it up. “I hate to go out into it, Helen.”

She smiled at him. “When’s the wedding, Mr. Hume?”

“Next Monday. Four days away.”

“Miss Owen is a lovely girl, Mr. Hume. Where you going on the honeymoon?”

“Lake Louise.”

Helen gave him a dreamy look. “Oh, baby!” she said softly.

Peter blushed and pushed the door open. The heat was like a steam bath. When he stepped off the curb, his heel seemed to sink into the asphalt. A day to fry eggs on the pavement. A day to sit in the tub.

He realized that if it weren’t for the wedding coming up, he would be tempted to quit for the day. But he wanted to leave a clean desk behind him and there was a lot to do.

In his office building, he got out at the fifth floor, walked down the corridor and paused for a moment to admire the discrete gilt lettering on the opaque glass panel of the door.

Whistling, he opened the door, threw his hat and grinned with satisfaction as it looped over the hook on the coat tree.

Robina Bray, seated at her desk in the outer office applauded languidly. “Hooray for dead-eye!”

She was a girl with rusty red hair and a spattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were sea green. Her face was too long for beauty, her mouth too wide and her teeth too big. When, after his discharge three years before, he had returned to Sayreton and let it be known that he needed a secretary for his law office, she was the first one to appear.

He had asked her a few times about what she had done during the years since he had last seen her. They had been in high school at the same time. She had been a sophomore when he had graduated and gone away to school.

She made a few vague comments about working in New York. He found out from other sources that the man she had intended to marry had been killed overseas. She was a top-notch girl, an excellent secretary. She never told him why she had come back to Sayreton. In fact, he wondered why he had come back. Annaly Owen, no doubt.

Robina Bray’s face was even a bit homely, but the rest of her was superb. Tall and broad shouldered, with long legs, a high slim waist, nice curves. She seemed continually and wryly amused by the combination of face and body, and wore clothes which accentuated her build.

After she had worked for him for eleven months, he had kissed her. He remembered it well. She had been getting ready to leave for the day. She had responded, warmly and quickly, and then moved away from him.

“No dice, Peter my lad. This is a small town. No dice at all. Once more and you get yourself a new secretary.”

And that had been all.

He might have been tempted to try again, had not Annaly Owen appeared on the scene, fresh from college, five years younger than Peter’s twenty-seven. Pale angel. Blonde hair like cobwebs in the moonlight, amethyst eyes. Soft gentle lips and a sweet gravity. Breathlessness in her voice.

Her father was a retired contractor. Her mother was dead. Annaly ran the house with a firm hand, which seemed strange in anyone so young, so soft, so melting...

Peter unbuttoned the seersucker jacket and pulled his soaked shirt away from his skin. “Phooo,” he said.

Robina Bray looked up at a lock of hair on her forehead. She stuck her lower lip out and blew it back. “Tomorrow I come in a swim suit. I warn you.”

“It ought to increase the clientele, Robby.”

“You say the sweetest things, boss. Robby has a surprise for you.” She took a small, pale blue envelope from her desk. She held the envelope up to her nose, inhaled deeply, closed her eyes and said, “Ahhhh!”

He snatched it out of her hand. On the front of the envelope in jet black, tiny feminine handwriting, it said, Peter Hume.

He frowned. “That’s not Annaly’s handwriting!”

“That’s what makes it so much fun! I found it under the door when I unlocked the joint after lunch.”

He too smelled the envelope. It had a sharp clear scent, oddly exotic.

“Essence of Malayan orchids,” Robina said.

It touched a half-forgotten memory. The room was suddenly cool. Peter Hume bit his lower lip, tore open the small envelope.

Sweat was cold on the palm of his hand. He crumpled the note as though to throw it in the basket beside Robina, then shoved it into his coat pocket, turned and went into his office, slammed the door.

As in a dream, he walked around to the far side of his desk, slumped in the chair and looked at the far wall. It was incredible and unbelievable.

But it had happened. Oddly he felt that he had always known it would happen. He glanced at his watch. One twenty. One hour and forty minutes to go.

He sat and remembered the past. It came back with a rush of vividness that startled him.

Early 1944. He had been a service officer in the OSS detachment in Calcutta. Though he had volunteered for many missions, they thought too highly of him in a supply and administrative category to let him go. They had said many kind words to him, but in the end he was left in the midst of routine in Calcutta.

The worst of it was having nothing to do when the work was done.

Nothing until he found Lynda Stanley. He was twenty-three at the time. She was thirty. By now she’d be thirty-four. She was in Calcutta working as a civilian with one of the information agencies.

There had been something intriguingly foreign about her. She was a small woman with jet black hair, dark eyes, a sallow skin. She had private means over and above her substantial salary, and lived with three servants in a small bungalow in the Tollygunge area. He had met her in a large party at Firpo’s. She had been with a British major who had passed out early in the evening in a most dignified manner.

He had taken her home, had made a date for later in the week. They had gone to several movies together, more for the reason of taking advantage of the air conditioning than to see the pictures.

Her attitude toward him had been one of amusement. It had become a challenge to him to take that look of amusement out of her eyes and replace it with something more flattering. He had tried to kiss her several times, but she had laughed at him.

One night she had invited him to a dance at the Tollygunge Club. To his surprise she began to drink rather heavily. They stayed until the dance was over and the other guests had gone home. They sat alone on the terrace in the moonlight. The moonlight glinted on the dark water in the swimming pool.

Suddenly she leaned over and kissed him. She looked up at him with challenge in her dark eyes. “What’s the matter, big boy?” she asked softly. “You afraid of me?”

After that he saw her constantly. The faint look of amusement did not fade out of her eyes, but he was too far gone to care. Besides, when his mouth was pressed fiercely to hers, she could not laugh at him...

She would never talk of herself. His infatuation grew rather than diminished. At last, in spite of his efforts to avoid it, he was sent home on points for discharge. On the last night before he left she asked him, “Do you love me, Peter?”

“You know I do!”

“Here is a present for you, Peter. No, don’t turn on the light to look at it. It is a ring with a star sapphire. Does it fit?”

It fit perfectly.

She said, “The ring is in part for being sweet and in part for doing me a favor.”

“Anything, Lynda.”

“When you leave me I will give you a box of K ration. You will take it back with you. You will carry it with other boxes of ration, but you will mark it in some way so you can tell which is the one I gave you. When you get to the States, you will wrap it up and send it by parcel post to this address, which you will memorize. Say it after me: Gerald Rhine, P. O. Box 812, Jersey City, New Jersey.”

He repeated it after her and said, “But I don’t understand? What’s in—”

“Part of the favor is in not asking questions, my darling... It’s a full ten minutes since I’ve been kissed.”

Down the river from Calcutta to the sea and down to Trincomalee and over to Perth; then to Pearl and L.A. The box was with him. With every tossing mile of open sea that widened between the fantail of the APA and the Calcutta dock, the spell of Lynda Stanley grew less. And the curiosity about the package increased. Gems? Possibly.

Two days out of Los Angeles, he sat on the edge of his bunk and carefully undid the waxed ends of the package. It was filled with a fine, white, crystaline powder. He removed a pinch of it, heated the wax with his cigarette lighter and resealed the package.

He tasted one grain of the powder. It had no particular taste. He remembered stories he had read and, taking the slightest pinch on the back of his hand, sniffed it up his nostrils. After several minutes, a great warm wave of comfort and exhilaration swelled over him. He wanted to sing. He felt three times life size and capable of putting his naked fist through the steel hull next to his bunk.

He could remember the funniest stories he had ever heard, and could make up even funnier ones. He could write a great novel, or a wonderful song. Then all things swam away from him, and he seemed to be growing to an enormous size. He stretched out in the bunk and he could not tell when thought stopped and dreams started.

He didn’t awaken until the next morning. He felt washed out and jaded. There was a cottony taste in his mouth.

He did a lot of thinking the rest of the trip. He thought of Lynda and how she had led him on, and he thought of the stuff he was supposed to smuggle in. He lay awake cursing her for the way she had used him.

After debarkation he asked to talk to the Port Commander. He annoyed a lieutenant, a captain and an elderly major by refusing to discuss his business with them. After a six hour wait, he was permitted to see the colonel.

After listening to the first three sentences, the colonel stopped him and made two phone calls. Twenty minutes later, two brisk young men in well-tailored suits showed up and Peter Hume was permitted to tell the entire story. A stenotype was brought in and finally, at midnight, the complete statement was ready for Peter’s sworn signature.

They took the box and took his fingerprints. They put him up at a good hotel and assigned a man to stay with him. The next morning they told him that he could rejoin his shipment for discharge.

No, it will not be necessary for you to appear at the trial, Captain. We appreciate your informing us. You have done a very fine thing, Captain. Yes, we will keep your name out of it if possible. Thank you very much. Yes, we have mailed the box. Good-by and good luck, Captain.

During the three years since his discharge, memories of Lynda had faded. He forgot exactly what she looked like. But he could remember her smile and the smell of her dark, shoulder-length hair.

And he could remember the perfume with which the blue note had been scented.

Your Lynda!

His office door opened and Robina stood in the doorway. “Trouble, boss?”

He nodded. She pursed her lips. “The past is rearing its ugly head?”

“Something like that.”

“From the smell of the billy doo, chum, she is something spectacular. And, as I told you some time ago, thees Fon du Lac, she ver’ small town, Musseer. Better stick the fair Annaly’s head in a sack until the ex does a dust.”

Peter smiled grimly. “It’s not so simple, Robby.”

“Then, my boy, you’ve had it.”

“I wish I could tell somebody about it.”

Robina walked in, sat down in the visitor’s chair, crossed very lovely legs and said, “Try me.”

“I can put it in one sentence: While I was overseas I made an ass of myself over an American gal seven years older than me who, when we parted, gave me this ring and a box to smuggle into the states — but I opened the box, found narcotics and turned her in when I arrived in L.A.”

Robina Bray’s sea green eyes widened and her eyebrows climbed up toward her rusty hair. “And this is the dish? The note came from her?”

He nodded. Robina whistled softly. “She wants to see you, no doubt.”

“At three. At the Sayreton House.”

Robina tilted her head on one side and stared at Peter with a speculative look. “She has a legitimate gripe, you know.”

“How so?”

“If you didn’t want to get your little fingers all dirtied up with smuggling, you could have dropped the nasty old box over the side.”

Peter nodded. “I thought of that. Then I remembered how I thought all the time I knew her that she was laughing at me. And I thought of all the other suckers who would be used to bring the stuff in...

“I’ve seen snowbirds, you know. I’ve seen them when they couldn’t stop yawning and when they batted at the empty air in front of their noses, trying to chase away flies that weren’t there. I’ve seen them sweat and moan and shake when they’re off the stuff. Not pretty, Robby. Not pretty at all, at all. And if I had chucked the box over the side, she would have angled somebody else into bringing the next package.”

“So you turned her in,” Robby said.

Peter stood up, flushed and angry. “Damn it, Robby, she was playing me for a sucker! Depending on her charm to keep me from messing with that box she gave me.”

“And especially you didn’t like being laughed at?”

His anger faded. He managed to grin at her. “Maybe that’s closer, lady.”

Robina stood up. “I still love you, Peter my lad. Be on your guard. One would suspect that she means you no good.”

She closed the door behind her and Peter put his head on the desk, his cheek on the back of his right hand. The light came through the blinds, and the six points of the perfect star in the sapphire ring sparkled. He yanked the ring off and dropped it into his desk drawer.