Jolt number two came when Mike Jordan, sitting on my patio on a Sunday afternoon, told me a story which proved that well-bred, middle-class girls can commit murder as calmly as I knit a sock, and with fewer lumps in the finished product. Mike had arrived that morning for an eleven o’clock breakfast, and after the briefest greeting had sat silent until the bells of San Miguel started tolling twelve.
This was unusual. Mike was not the taciturn type. But he was independent almost to a point of arrogance and disliked asking favors. This I learned was the cause of the brooding silence. There is no greater favor you can ask a California hostess than the use of her telephone for a New York call.
I sat without speaking until the bells were still. Mike pulled out a roll of bills that reminded me of the old movie gangsters.
“Let me pay you now, Lissa. I don’t want to make this call from the Officers Club. It may take two or three hours to get through, and there are always too many fellows waiting to use the phones. Believe me, this is a case of life and death.”
When he put the call through I disappeared. A few minutes later Mike found me on the patio with the watering can in my discreet hands. It was a brilliant day, the wind high, the air sweet with the scent of sage and mimosa. Bees floated above the geraniums, and the cactus was coated with a film of silver dust. Loathing sunshine, Mike pulled a canopied chair into the shade of the pepper tree. He had the light skin that burns easily and a thick crop of flaming hair.
“Would you like to know who killed Gilbert Jones?”
My watering can clattered on the flagged floor of the patio. According to the latest reports, Gilbert Jones’s death was still baffling the New York police. It was one of those conspicuous murders that take up front-page space usually reserved for the biggest war news. Gilbert Jones had been a leading New York actor who had also played in a few pictures, and there were two women involved in the case, one beautiful, the other a millionaire. They were cousins, and had both been in love with Gilbert Jones.
“How do you know who killed him?”
We were alone that Sunday afternoon. My husband was on duty at the Post and an eighth of a mile separated us from the nearest neighbor. Although there was no one closer than the passengers in the pygmy cars on the highway below our hill, Mike spoke softly. This story was close to his heart...
Mike Jordan’s mother was the sort of woman who, when she learned she was to have a child, looked at beautiful pictures and listened to great music. As a result, Mike grew up to make family gatherings more than usually hideous by his renditions of The Melody in F and Rachmaninoff’s Prelude. His first music teacher had been a German, the local professor; when he died Mike took lessons from Mrs. Coles, a faded blonde with brown eyes, crimped hair, and a pair of pearl-button earrings which Mike was certain she wore when she bathed and slept.
Everybody in town felt sorry for Mrs. Coles because her husband had deserted her, and admired her because she supported herself when she might easily have depended upon rich relations. To Mike her independence seemed a bit rueful. At every lesson the piano students were made aware that she had been bred for better things than the career of music teacher. She had a lovely daughter to whom her gallant laments must have been as much part of the daily routine as the students’ finger exercises.
One day — Mike was about sixteen at the time — Mrs. Coles interrupted a Chopin Nocturne by announcing, “Phyllis is so fond of you, Michael. She looks up to you with the greatest respect.”
Mike’s fingers crashed down upon the keyboard as though he were working on Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. He had always admired the piano teacher’s daughter. She was very fair, with great, glowing dark eyes.
“She has something to ask you,” Mrs. Coles continued. “But she’s shy and has asked me to approach you first. I reminded her of the Courtship of Miles Standish and said, ‘Why don’t you speak for yourself, Phyllis?’ but she said the tables were turned because John Alden was a man. A clever child, don’t you think? So I wonder, Michael” — Mrs. Coles hesitated, adjusting a pearl earring — “if you’d like to escort Phyllis to Nancy Miller’s party. It’s to be at the club, a bit ostentatious, in my opinion, for such young people, but Nancy’s mother, although she is my own sister, likes show. Perhaps you will enjoy it.”
The invitation flattered and puzzled him. Nancy Miller was almost a legend in the town, a girl who went to fashionable boarding schools and spent her summers in Europe or at seashore resorts. There was hardly a profitable industry in the town that did not belong in some fashion to her father. They had a big place — an estate, the town called it — a couple of miles out on the river.
Mike’s mother suggested that he might have been invited because he had won an interstate essay contest, and had his picture in a Chicago newspaper. Mike laughed scornfully. Phyllis Coles might have had as her escort the senior class president or the captain of the football team. The prize essay had provided him with a sporty new outfit, white ducks and a blue Norfolk jacket. He was reading Schnitzler at the time, fancied himself a man of the world, and wondered if he dared appear with a carnation in his buttonhole.
On the day of the party he got as far as the door of Nick Scarpas’s flower store on Main Street, but there his courage failed. He arrived at the Coles house just as if he had come for a music lesson and, as the door was always open, walked in. Through yellow silk portieres he heard shrillness and sobbing. What, he asked himself, would a man of the world do in the circumstances? He trifled with the idea of sneaking away, returning, and announcing himself with a dignified knock. Then an inspiration visited him. He struck a pose beside the piano and began playing with one hand carelessly. No man of the world could have done it better.
The yellow drapes parted, Mrs. Coles skipped into the room, adjusted an earring. “How prompt, Michael! Phyllis isn’t quite ready. Will you wait?”
Presently Phyllis came out. Her nostrils and the edges of her eyes, Mike noticed, were faintly pink. As they walked to the club she seemed more remote than ever. The month was June, the twilight fragrant. In every yard roses and iris bloomed, and bushes were garlanded with bridal wreath. Phyllis seemed as frail as a flower in a cloudy blue dress embroidered all over with small pink nosegays.
They walked timidly up the path that led to the club’s great door and entered slowly. As they crossed the lobby a swarthy crone seized Phyllis and shouted, “Isn’t she lovely?” Mike saw a witch’s face rouged to the eyes, which were as black and hard as the jet pendants that dangled from her ears. “Pity,” she muttered, “pity the party isn’t given for her.”
Another woman, ruffled and jeweled, peered at Phyllis through a rimless pince-nez. “Sweet child, I’m so glad you’ve come. How well you look in that dress.”
Phyllis turned away. Her enchanting pallor was lost in a rose-pink blush. Mike rubbed his left shoe against his right leg, embarrassed because Phyllis had neglected to present him to the ladies, who he knew must be old Mrs. Hulbert and her daughter, Mrs. Ulysses S. Miller.
It was a grand party. Sophisticated, the local paper called it. The ballroom was decorated in silver and black velvet, its tall columns twined with silver-leaved garlands, the bandstand draped with velvet and dripping with tinsel. Mike was about to express awe when he became aware of scorn in the tilt of Phyllis’s nose and the slight smile curving her lips.