James Chase: Lay Her Among the Lilies

Nothing happened. The sun beat down on me. The temperature hoisted itself up another knotch. It was too hot even for such a simple exercise as pulling a bell chain. Instead, I pushed on the gate, which swung creakily open under my touch. I looked at the stretch of lawn before me that was big enough for tank manoeuvres. The grass hadn’t been cut this month, nor for that matter the month before. Nor had the two long herbaceous borders on either side of the broad carriageway received any attention this spring, nor for that matter last autumn either. The daffodils and tulips made brown patterns of untidiness among the dead heads of the peonies. Shrivelled sweet william plants mingled with unstaked and matted delphiniums. A fringe of straggling grass disgraced the edges of the lawn. The tarmac carriageway sprouted weeds. A neglected rose rambler napped hysterically in the lazy breeze that came off the desert. An unloved, uncared-for garden, and looking at it I seemed to hear old man Crosby fidgeting in his coffin.

At the far end of the carriageway I could see the house: a two-storey, coquina-built mansion with a red tile roof, green shutters and an overhanging balcony. Sunblinds screened the windows. No one moved on the green tile patio. I decided to walk up there rather than wrestle with the gates to bring in the Buick.

Halfway up the weed-strewn tarmac I came upon one of those arbor things covered with a flowering vine. Squatting on their heels in the shade were three chinamen shooting craps. They didn’t bother to look up as I paused to stare, just as they hadn’t bothered for a long, long time to look after the garden: three dirty, mindless men, smoking yellow-papered cigarettes with not a care in the world.

I tramped on.

The next bend in the tarmac brought me to the swimming-pool. There had to be a swimming-pool, but not necessarily one like this one. There was no water in it, and weeds grew out of the cracked tile floor. The concrete surround was covered with a brownish, burned-up moss. The white awning which must have looked pretty smart in its day had come loose from its moorings and flapped querulously at me.

At right angles to the house was a row of garages, their double doors closed. A little guy in a pair of dirty flannel trousers, a singlet and a chauffeur’s cap sat on an oil drum in the sun, whittling wood. He looked up to scowl at me.

“Anyone at home?” I asked, searching for a cigarette and lighting it when I found one. It took all that time before he worked up enough strength to say: “Don’t bother me, Jack. I’m busy.”

“I can see that,” I said, blowing smoke at him. “I’d love to sneak up on you when you’re relaxing.”

He spat accurately at a tub of last summer’s pelargoniums from which no one had bothered to take cuttings, and went on with his whittling. As far as he was concerned I was now just part of the uncared-for landscape.

I didn’t think I would get anything useful out of him, and besides, it was too hot to bother, so I went on to the house, climbed the broad steps and leaned my weight on the bell-push.

A funereal hush hung over the house. I had to wait a long time before anyone answered my ring. I didn’t mind waiting. I was now in the shade, and the drowsy, next-year-will-do atmosphere of the place had a kind of hypnotic influence on me. If I had stayed there much longer I would have begun whittling wood myself.

The door opened, and what might have passed for a butler looked me over the way you look someone over who’s wakened you up from a nice quiet nap. He was a tall, lean bird, lantern-jawed, grey-haired, with close-set, yellowish eyes. He wore one of those waspcoloured vests and black trousers that looked as if he had slept in them, and probably had, no coat, and his shirt sleeves suggested they wanted to go to the laundry, but just couldn’t be bothered.

“Yes?” he said distantly, and raised his eyebrows.

“Miss Crosby.”

I noticed he was holding a lighted cigarette, half-concealed in his cupped hand.

“Miss Crosby doesn’t receive now,” he said, and began to close the door.

“I’m an old friend. She’ll see me,” I said, and shifted my foot forward to jam the door.

“The name’s Malloy. Tell her and watch her reaction. It’s my bet she’ll bring out the champagne.”

“Miss Crosby is not well,” he said in a flat voice, as if he were reading a ham part in a hammier play. “She doesn’t receive any more.”

“Like Miss Otis?”

That one went past him without stirring the air.

“I will tell her you have called.” The door was closing. He didn’t notice my foot. It startled him when he found the door wouldn’t shut.

“Who’s looking after her?” I asked, smiling at him.

A bewildered expression came into his eyes. For him life had been so quiet and gentle for so long he wasn’t in training to cope with anything out of the way.

“Nurse Gurney.”

“Then I’d like to see Nurse Gurney,” I told him, and leaned some of my weight on the door.

No exercise, too much sleep, cigarettes and the run of the cellar had sapped whatever iron he had had in his muscles. He gave way before my pressure like a sapling tree before a bulldozer.

I found myself in an over-large hall, facing a broad flight of stairs which led in a wide, half-circular sweep to the upper rooms. On the stairs, halfway up, was a white-clad figure: a nurse.

“All right, Benskin,” she said. “I’ll see to it.”

The tall, lean bird seemed relieved to go. He gave me a brief, puzzled stare, and then cat-footed across the hall, along a passage and through a baize-covered door.

The nurse came slowly down the stairs as if she knew she was good to look at, and liked you to look at her. I was looking all right. She was a nurse right out of a musical comedy; the kind of nurse who sends your temperature chart haywire every time you see her. A blonde, her lips scarlet, her eyes blue-shaded: a very nifty number: a symphony of curves and sensuality; as exciting and as alive and as hot as the flame of an acetylene torch. If ever she had to nurse me I would be bed-ridden for the rest of my days.

By now she was within reaching distance, and I had to make a conscious effort not to reach. I could tell by the expression in her eyes that she was aware of the impression she was making on me, and I had an idea I interested her as much as she interested me. A long, tapering finger pushed up a stray curl under the nurse’s cap. A carefully plucked eyebrow climbed an inch. The red painted mouth curved into a smile. Behind the mascara the green-blue eyes were alert and hopeful.

“I was hoping to see Miss Crosby,” I said. “I hear she’s not well.”

“She isn’t. I’m afraid she isn’t even well enough to receive visitors.” She had a deep, contralto voice that vibrated my vertebrae.

“That’s too bad,” I said, and took a swift look at her legs. Betty Grable’s might have been better, but there couldn’t have been much in it. “I’ve only just hit town. I’m an old friend of hers. I had no idea she was ill.”

“She hasn’t been well for some months.”

I had the impression that as a topic of conversation Maureen Crosby’s illness wasn’t Nurse Gurney’s idea of fun. It was just an impression. I could have been wrong, but I didn’t think so.

“Nothing serious, I hope?”

“Well, not serious. She needs plenty of rest and quiet.”

If she had had any encouragement this would have been her cue for a yawn.

“Well, it’s quiet enough here,” I said, and smiled. “Quiet for you, too, I guess?”

That was all she needed. You could see her getting ready to unpin her hair.

“Quiet? I’d as soon be buried in Tutankhamen’s tomb,” she exclaimed, and then remembering she was supposed to be a nurse in the best Florence Nightingale tradition, had the grace to blush. “But I guess I shouldn’t have said that, should I? It isn’t very refined.”