Benjamin Black - The Black-Eyed Blonde

She had shut her book quickly, and now, more slowly, she fitted the cap to her fountain pen and laid it on the table with slow deliberation, like a statesman who has just finished signing a peace treaty, or a declaration of war. “Mr. Marlowe,” she said. “You startled me.”

“Sorry. I should have phoned.”

She stood up and took a step backward, as if to put the table between her and me. Her cheeks were a little flushed, as they had been yesterday when I’d asked her to tell me her first name. People who blush easily have it tough, always being liable to give themselves away at the drop of a brick. Once again I had trouble not looking at her legs, though somehow I saw that they were slim, shapely, and honey-hued. A crystal jug containing a tobacco-colored drink stood on the table, and now she touched a fingertip to the handle. “Some iced tea?” she asked. “I can ring for a glass.”

“No, thanks.”

“I’d offer you something stronger, only it seems a little early…” She glanced down and bit her lip, in just the same way Everett the Third had. “Have you made some progress in your inquiries?” she asked.

“Mrs. Cavendish, I think maybe you should sit down.”

She gave her head a tiny shake, smiling faintly. “I don’t—” she began. She was looking past my shoulder. “Oh, there you are, darling,” she said, her voice sounding a shade too loud, with too much forced warmth in it.

I turned. A man was standing in the open doorway, holding the curtain aside with a raised hand, and for a moment I thought that he, like Everett the Third, might be about to deliver a ringing line from some old play. Instead he dropped the curtain and ambled forward, smiling at nothing in particular. He was a well-built fellow, not tall, slightly bow-legged, with broad shoulders and large square hands. He was dressed in cream jodhpurs, calfskin boots, a shirt so white it glowed, and a yellow silk cravat. Another sporty type. It was beginning to look like they did nothing here but play games.

“Hot,” he said. “Damned hot.” As yet he had not so much as glanced in my direction. Clare Cavendish began to reach toward the jug of iced tea, but the man got there first, picked up the glass, half filled it from the jug, and emptied it in one swallow, his head thrown back. His hair was fine and straight and the color of pale oak. Scott Fitzgerald would have found a place for him in one of his bittersweet romances. Come to think of it, he looked a bit like Fitzgerald: handsome, boyish, with something in him that was fatally weak.

Clare Cavendish watched him. She was biting her lip again. That mouth of hers, it really was a thing of beauty. “This is Mr. Marlowe,” she said. The man gave a start of pretend surprise and looked this way and that, holding the empty glass in his hand. At last he fixed on me and frowned slightly, as if he hadn’t noticed me before, as if I had been indistinguishable from the palm leaves and the gleaming glass all around. “Mr. Marlowe,” Clare Cavendish went on, “this is my husband, Richard Cavendish.”

He beamed at me with a mixture of indifference and disdain. “Marlowe,” he said, turning the name over and examining it, as if it were a small coin of scant value. His smile became brighter still. “Why don’t you put down your hat.”

I had forgotten I was holding it. I glanced around. Mrs. Cavendish stepped forward and took the hat from me and laid it on the table beside the glass jug. Inside the triangle formed by the three of us, the air seemed to crackle soundlessly, as if a current of static electricity were passing back and forth in it. Yet Cavendish appeared to be entirely at ease. He turned to his wife. “Have you offered the man a drink?”

Before she could reply, I said, “She did, and I declined.”

“You declined, did you?” Cavendish chuckled. “You hear that, sweetheart? The gentleman declined.” He poured more tea into the glass and drank it off, then put the glass down, grimacing. I noticed he was an inch or two shorter than his wife. “What kind of business are you in, Mr. Marlowe?” he asked.

This time Clare got in ahead of me. “Mr. Marlowe finds things,” she said.

Cavendish ducked his head and gave her a sly, upward glance, thrusting his tongue hard into his cheek. Then he looked at me again. “What kind of things do you find, Mr. Marlowe?” he asked.

“Pearls,” his wife said quickly, again meaning to cut me off, though I hadn’t yet thought of a reply. “I lost that necklace you gave me — misplaced it, I mean.”

Cavendish considered this, looking at the floor now, smiling pensively. “What’s he going to do,” he asked, addressing his wife without looking at her, “crawl around the bedroom floor, peer under the bed, poke his finger into mouse holes?”

“Dick,” his wife said, and there was a pleading note in her voice, “it’s not important, really.”

He gave her an exaggerated stare. “Not important? If I weren’t a gentleman, like Mr. Marlowe here, I’d be tempted to tell you how much that little trinket cost. Of course”—he turned to me, his voice becoming a drawl—“if I did, she’d tell you it was her money I bought it with.” He glanced at his wife again. “Wouldn’t you, sweetie?”

There was nothing to say to that, and she just looked at him, her head lowered a little and the soft plump apex of her upper lip thrust out, and for a second I saw what she must have looked like when she was very young.

“It’s a matter of retracing your wife’s steps,” I said, in the plodding tone I’ve learned to mimic from all the years I’ve spent around cops. “Checking the places she went to over the past few days, the stores she was in, the restaurants she visited.” I could feel Clare’s eyes on me, but I kept mine on Cavendish, who was looking off through the open doorway and nodding slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.” He glanced about the place again, blinking distractedly, touched the rim of the empty glass on the table with a fingertip, then sauntered out, whistling to himself.

When he was gone, his wife and I just stood there for a while. I could hear her breathing. I imagined her lungs filling and emptying, the tender pinkness of them, in their frail cage of glistening white bone. She was the kind of woman to make a man think thoughts like that. “Thank you,” she said at last, the barest murmur.

“Don’t mention it.”

She laid her right hand lightly on the back of the wrought-iron chair, as if she were feeling a little weak. She wasn’t looking at me. “Tell me what you’ve found out,” she said.

I needed a cigarette but didn’t think I should light up in this lofty glass edifice. It would be like smoking in a cathedral. The urge reminded me of what I had brought with me. I took the ebony cigarette holder from my pocket and laid it on the table, next to my hat. “You left it at my office,” I said.

“Oh, yes, of course. I don’t use it much, only for effect. I was nervous, coming to see you.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“It was myself I needed to fool.” She was watching me intently. “Tell me what you’ve found out, Mr. Marlowe,” she said again.

“There’s no easy way to put this.” I looked at my hat on the table. “Nico Peterson is dead.”

“I know.”

“He died two months ago in a hit-and-run over on—” I stopped, and stared at her. “What did you say?”

“I said I know.” She smiled at me, holding her head to one side in that slightly sardonic way, just as she had done the previous day, when she had sat in my office with her gloves folded across her lap and the ebony holder held at an angle, without her husband there to give her the jitters. “Maybe you should sit down, Mr. Marlowe.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.