James Chase - Lay Her Among the Lilies

I set off towards it.

The verandah, when I got there, was deserted, and the swing lounging chair looked invitingly comfortable. I would have liked to have stretched out on it and taken a twelve-hour nap.

A standard lamp with a yellow and blue parchment shade was alight in the big lounge. The casement doors leading from the lounge to the verandah stood open.

I paused at the head of the verandah steps at the sound of a voice: a woman’s voice, out of tune with the still, summer night, the scent of flowers and the big yellow moon. The voice was loud and shrill. Maybe it was angry, too, and the edges of it were a little frayed with suppressed hysteria.

“Oh, shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” The voice was saying. “Come quickly. You’ve talked enough. Just shut up and come!”

I could see her in there, kneeling on one of the big settees, holding the telephone in a small, tight-clenched fist. Her back was turned to me. The light from the lamp fell directly on her beautifully-shaped head and picked out the tints in her raven-black hair. She was wearing a pair of high-waisted, bottle-green slacks and a silk shirt of the same colour, and made the kind of picture Varga likes to draw. She was his type: long legged, small hipped, high breasted, and as alive and as quick as mercury.

She said, “Do stop it! Why go on and on? Just come. That’s all you have to do,” and she slammed down the receiver.

I didn’t think the situation called for stealth or super-refined cunning, and I wasn’t in the mood to play pretty. I was leg-weary and bruised and still short of breath, and my temper was as touchy as the filed trigger of a heist man’s rod. So I moved into the room without bothering to tread quietly. My footfalls across the parquet floor sounded like miniature explosions.

I saw her back stiffen. Her head turned slowly. She looked over her shoulder at me. Her big black eyes opened wide. There was a pause in which you could have counted a slow ten. She didn’t recognize me. She saw what looked like an overgrown sailor in tattered white ducks with a rip in one trousers knee, a shirt any laundry would have returned with a note of complaint and a face that had more dirt on it than freckles.

“Hello,” I said quietly. “Remember me? Your pal, Malloy.”

She remembered me then. She drew in a deep breath, pushed herself off the settee and stood firmly on her small, well-shaped feet.

“How did you get here?” she asked, her face and voice were as expressionless as the ruffles on her shirt.

“I climbed the cliff. You should try it sometime when you run out of excitement,” I said, moving into the room. “It’s good for the figure, too; not that there’s anything wrong with yours.”

She bent her thumb and stared at it; then she bit it tentatively.

“You haven’t seen it yet,” she said.

“Is the operative word in that sentence ‘yet’?” I asked, looking at her.

“It could be. It depends on you.”

“Does it?” I sat down. “Shall we have a drink? I’m not quite the man I was. You’ll find my reflexes act better on whisky.”

She moved across the lounge to the cellaret.

“Is it true about the cliff?” she asked. “No one has ever climbed it before.”

“Leander swam the Hellespont, and Hero wasn’t half as good looking as you,” I said lightly.

“You mean you really climbed it?” She came back with a long tumbler full of whisky and ice. It looked a lot more tempting than she did; but I didn’t tell her so.

“I climbed it,” I said, and took the glass. “To your dark and lovely eyes, and the figure I haven’t seen—yet.”

She stood by and watched me drink a third of it. Then she lit a cigarette with a hand that was as steady as the cliff we were talking about, took it from her red, sensual mouth and gave it to me.

Our fingers touched. Her skin felt feverish.

“Is your sister here?” I asked, and set the whisky carefully on the coffee table at my side.

She inspected her thumb again thoughtfully, then looked at me out of the corners of her eyes.

“Janet’s dead. She died two years ago,” she said.

“I’ve made a lot of discoveries since you told me that,” I said. “I know the girl your mother kept a prisoner in the sanatorium for something like two years is your sister, Janet. Shall I tell you just how much I do know?”

She made a little grimace and sat down.

“You can if you want to,” she said.

“Some of it is guess-work. Perhaps you’ll help me as I go along?” I said, settling farther down in the chair. “Janet was your father’s favourite. Both you and your mother knew he was going to leave her the bulk of his money. Janet fell in love with Sherrill, who also knew she was coming into the money. Sherrill was quite a dashing type, and dashing types appeal to you. You and he had an affair on the side, but Janet found out and broke the engagement.

There was a quarrel between you two. One of you grabbed a shot-gun. Your father came in at the wrong moment. Did you shoot him or was it Janet?”

She lit a cigarette, dropped the match into an ashtray before saying, “Does it matter? I did if you must know.”

“There was a nurse staying in the house at the time: Anona Freedlander. Why was she there?”

“My mother wasn’t quite right in the head,” she said casually. “She didn’t think I was, either. She persuaded father I wanted looking after, and she sent Nurse Freedlander to spy on me.”

“Nurse Freedlander wanted to call the police when you shot your father?”

She nodded and smiled. The smile didn’t reach the expressionless, coal-black eyes.

“Mother said they would put me away in a home if it came out I had shot him. Nurse Freedlander made herself a nuisance. Mother got her back to the sanatorium and locked her up. It was the only way to keep her quiet. Then Janet insisted on me being locked up, too, and mother had to agree. She sent me here. This is her house. Janet thought I was in the sanatorium. She found out I wasn’t, but she didn’t know where I was. I think that’s why she wrote to you. She was going to ask you to find me. Then Nurse Freedlander had a heart attack and died. This was too good a chance to miss. Mother and Douglas carried her body to Crestways. Mother told Janet I wanted to see her, and she went over to the sanatorium. She was locked up in Nurse Freedlander’s room, and Nurse Freedlander was put in Janet’s bed. It was quite a bright idea, wasn’t it? I called Dr. Bewley who lived near by. It didn’t occur to him that the dead woman wasn’t Janet, and he signed the death certificate. It was easy after that. The Trustees didn’t suspect anything, and I came into all the money.” She leaned forward to tap cigarette-ash into the ashtray, went on in the same flat, disinterested voice, “It was true what I told you about Douglas. The little rat turned on me and tried to blackmail me and made me buy the Dream Skip. Janet’s maid blackmailed me, too. She knew Janet hadn’t died. Then you came along. I thought if I told you some of the story it might scare Douglas off, but it didn’t. He wanted to kill you, but I wouldn’t let him. It was my idea you should go to the sanatorium. I didn’t think you would get Janet away. As soon as I found out where she was I got Sherrill’s men to bring her here.”

“Was it your idea to shoot Nurse Freedlander’s father?”

She made a little grimace of disgust.

“What else could I do? If he told you she had a bad heart I knew you would guess what had happened. I got in a panic. I thought if we could silence him and get her papers from the police we might be able to carry on. But it does seem rather hopeless.”

“Janet’s here then?”

She shrugged.