Наташа Купер - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 1. Whole No. 767, July 2005

Beck joined us now, carrying a silver tray laden with four long-stemmed flutes and a bottle of Dom Perignon. “Let’s have that drink, shall we?” He glanced around, frowning. “Where has Leigh gotten to?”

“Leigh had to leave, dear.” Barbara still had her happy face on.

“Will she be back?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” she answered brightly.

“Too bad. Nice girl, that one. Still, can’t blame her. You’ll drink with us, won’t you, Timmy?”

“Mr. B-Beck,” I stammered. “L–Leigh’s... she’s...”

“What is it, Timmy? You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“He’s trying to tell you that she’s jumped,” Barbara explained on my behalf.

He shook his head at her. “Jumped where?”

“From the terrace, dear. She’s dead.”

He set the tray down on the table so clumsily that one of the flutes tipped over and broke. “Good God, you’re joking!”

“She’s not,” I said.

“She must have been distraught, poor girl,” Barbara said sympathetically. “She went over so fast that I couldn’t stop her. To be honest, I’m not even sure I could have. She was a big girl. And I’m such a wee little thing.” Barbara smiled at me again, waiting for me to contradict her, daring me to contradict her. Knowing I wouldn’t. Because she was Barbara Darrow. And because no one would ever believe me. After all, I hadn’t actually seen anything.

I had looked away and Leigh was gone.

So I stood there in silence, shaken. In the distance, I could hear a siren now.

Anthony Beck studied her for a long moment, his mouth tightening. I wondered what was running through his mind. I will always wonder that.

Barbara reached for one of the empty champagne flutes and held it out to him. He poured. She took a dainty sip. Under the circumstances, her steady cool was beyond remarkable. It was sheer madness. “You mustn’t blame yourself, Tony,” she said gently. “Promise me you won’t.”

He didn’t promise her anything, or say anything. Just poured himself some champagne and took a long, slow drink of it.

Me, I found the kitchen and used the phone in there to wake up my editor. “She pushed her,” I told Al Posner after I’d filled him in on Leigh’s death plunge. “Barbara Darrow pushed her. She can’t get away with this, Al.”

“They’ve arrested her for it?” he wheezed at me, yawning.

“The police aren’t even here yet.”

“Then how do you know she did it?”

“I was right here when it happened, that’s how.”

“You witnessed it?”

“Not exactly,” I had to concede. “But I know what happened. Leigh didn’t jump. She wouldn’t jump.”

“In your opinion,” he pointed out. “Which, as you know, is worth bupkis. We go by what the police say. An official source goes on the record, fine. Otherwise, it’s libel. This is a major star we’re talking about.”

“Barbara Darrow is a murderer.”

“In... your... opinion,” he repeated sharply. “It’s out of our hands now anyway, Opie. Metro will take over. But, hey, I might be able to wangle you a sidebar about this Grayson girl — how she gets her big break with Darrow and Beck in Private Lives and ends up, splat, all over the pavement.”

“I can’t write that, Al.”

“Then go home, Opie,” he growled at me. “Go home and forget about it.”

I walked all the way home that night but I didn’t forget about it. I couldn’t. I had fallen for someone, and now she was lying dead under a tarp on the sidewalk, and I felt partly to blame. After all, I was the one who’d rejected Barbara’s advances in her dressing room. Barbara Darrow was a proud, ageing beauty whose husband had been sleeping with a much younger woman. Instead of showering her with affection and reassurance, I’d dumped her onto the floor. Would Leigh still be alive if I hadn’t done that? By doing the right thing — saying no to Barbara — had I driven her to such an act of savagery?

I’ve asked myself this a million times over the years. I don’t have any answers. I never do.

And I never forget. Whenever I bump into one of Barbara’s old movies on TV, it comes to me. When I’m walking down the street and catch sight of a tall, young brunette with good legs, it comes to me. When I fall asleep at night, I see Leigh Grayson in my dreams. It’s always the same dream. She’s going off that terrace to her death and I’m standing there not helping her. She’s always wide-eyed with fright. Always wondering, wordlessly, why I’m not saving her. In my dream, Leigh never gets any older. She’s always young. I’m not anymore. In fact, my wife and I have two daughters who are both older than Leigh was that night Barbara pushed her to her death. I am no longer gangly. I am no longer someone who barrels around corners certain that something exciting and wonderful is waiting there for me. Mostly, I see darkness and fear around that next corner.

I can’t remember the last time anyone called me Timmy.

I never heard from Barbara Darrow or Anthony Beck again, not that I expected to. But after my first novel came out, and got some attention, I did wonder if she’d seen it and recognized my name. He had already died by then. Barbara was by his side when he passed. She later remarried, twice, most recently to a physician who was fourteen years her junior. Barbara Darrow died this past weekend in Palm Desert at the age of seventy-five after a long battle with cancer. A valiant battle, all of the obituaries said.

That’s why I can finally tell this story. Because you can’t libel the dead. You can say anything you damned please about them.

You can even tell the truth.

Copyright (c); 2005 by David Handler.

Like the owners of Les Roseaux in this story, Neil Schofield is a Brit who decided to settle in France. He once worked in the corporate world scripting and producing corporate videos, but for the past several years he has devoted himself primarily to fiction writing. One of his many stories is included in the anthology Small Crimes , edited by Michael Bracken and reviewed in this month’s Jury Box.

Walker came back to the café table where his wife was waiting, threading his way through the summer Deauville crowds. She watched his tall, rather too fleshy figure coming through the tables and thought, Diet for you, my lad, when we get home. He settled in his seat next to her. “Right,” he said. “George is expecting us for lunch.”

“Is that a good idea?” Fiona said, “getting all cosy with him.”

“Couldn’t get out of it.”

He signalled to the waiter.

In the car, Walker began to thread his way through the Deauville traffic, peering at the road signs.

“The A13, I think, that takes us to the Normandy Bridge and then north.”

She was examining her makeup in the vanity mirror and running a comb through her straight blond hair.

“Didn’t he ask how you’d managed to find him?”

“No.”

“I would have.”

“half-expecting me or someone like me to turn up. Or at least he wasn’t entirely astonished.

“What I don’t understand is why it is you and not someone else.”

“We’ve been through all that. There’s nobody else to do it. Gordon’s in hospital, Bernie’s in America, and the others — well, I wouldn’t trust them with this.”

“You could have — well, hired somebody. I bet Gordon knows lots of people like that. Quick people. Efficient.”

He took a deep breath. “There wasn’t time. And that sort of thing would have made too much noise. This way, it might just look completely natural.”