When, at last, the doorbell rang, she hurried to it eagerly and, even before she had it open, said, “Gil, dear!”
There stood two detectives who had come to inform her of Gil’s death, and when she had sufficiently recovered from the shock, to ask a number of questions...
Nancy told a quite different story.
After Gil had left her sobbing on the bed, Nancy said, she was exhausted. The quarrel had been preceded by two hours of emotion and several days of tension. She fell asleep. When she awoke the clock was striking eleven. The maids had gone home, and she was alone. She had slept heavily and felt curiously light and fresh.
She bathed, put on a becoming new negligee, and awaited Gil’s homecoming eagerly, because she felt that the noisy quarrel had released hidden resentments and it would be possible for them to make peace. She had eaten no dinner and was very hungry. There was cold chicken and applesauce in the icebox, and she sliced a couple of tomatoes. She had just poured boiling water into the drip coffeepot when she heard Gil’s key in the lock.
He looked cold. His cheeks were almost blue. He had walked, he told her, from Seventy-ninth Street to Sixty-fifth. His mentioning Seventy-ninth Street, Nancy thought, was his way of confessing that he had been with Phyllis. She did not remark upon it, but asked if he would like a drink.
“I’ve had enough. My head’s clear now; I want it to stay that way.”
Nancy felt sturdy, calm, and capable of facing any situation. Her tears had washed away grief and anger, and her nap had erased all bitterness.
Of one thing she was certain. She must know the truth, however painful.
“I’ve been a heel,” Gil said.
Since he was so clearly remorseful Nancy did not wish to rebuke him. “I’ve been pretty difficult myself.”
“The worst thing I’ve done is to have gone to Phyllis with my troubles. It was stupid and selfish of me and unfair to you.”
He offered contrition humbly, and she could afford to be magnanimous. “I’m hurt that you went to her, but probably it was my own fault. I’m spoiled and egocentric and willful. A vipress, Mike Jordan used to call me. If I ever let go with one of those moods again, I wish you’d horsewhip me.”
“It’d be healthier,” Gil said.
“Might even cure me.” Nancy felt better. She laughed aloud. “My whole trouble is that we never used horsewhips at home. Even our horses were given their heads.”
Gil wrapped his arms about himself and shivered.
“You did get a chill,” Nancy said. “If you won’t have a drink, let me give you some coffee. Have you had dinner?”
She heated the coffee and made a nice little cold supper. They ate at their regular places at the dining-room table. As she poured his coffee Nancy said steadily, “There is one thing I must know, Gil. Are you in love with her?”
He set his cup down hard. Some of the coffee spilled into the saucer. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“You were in love with her before you met me.”
“Did she tell you so?”
Nancy hesitated. “What about the suicide? There was no other reason why she should have tried to kill herself.”
“Someone tried to murder her.”
Nancy did not wish to renew the argument. Instead she said, “It’s the way she acts about you. There’s a sort of possessive righteousness about her, as if you’d been hers and I snatched you away.”
“Great God!” he shouted. “You women act as if a man were a thing to be handed around on a platter. Phyllis couldn’t possess me any more than you do. I loved you and asked you to marry me. Isn’t that enough?”
Nancy’s eyes filled. She tried to hide her emotion by eating, but she could not. As she sipped coffee, she looked at him over the cup and asked, “Do you love me, Gil?”
“I wouldn’t live in a house with a woman I didn’t love. I should think my past history would make that apparent.”
“But I’ve been so nasty. A vipress.”
“A man’s unfortunate to love a vipress, but what can he do about it?”
“Come here and kiss me.”
After the kiss he went back to his place and ate heartily. They seemed a pleasantly domestic couple again. Tremulously she asked her final question: “Did you tell Phyllis that you love me?”
He nodded. “I told her that I’d made up my mind not to see any more of her.”
When they had finished eating, Nancy put the remaining food back into the icebox and washed the few dishes. Although she had been brought up in a house tended by servants, her grandmother had instilled in her a horror of sloppiness. She’d have been ashamed if the servants found the kitchen dirty when they came in the morning.
Her apartment had been designed originally as two penthouses, so that her bedroom and bath were at the opposite end from Gil’s. This arrangement had amused them in the early days of their marriage, and they had enjoyed the adventure of traveling the length of the apartment when they visited each other at night.
When Nancy finished in the kitchen she went into Gil’s quarters. He shouted from the bathroom that she should go to bed, and that he would come in and say good night. She had only her nightgown under the negligee and it took her but a couple of seconds to prepare for bed. She fell asleep almost immediately. The short nap had restored but a portion of the energy she had exhausted during the quarrel.
Gil had the actor’s habit of sleeping late. But when, at one o’clock the next afternoon, he had not yet rung for his breakfast, Nancy opened the door of his bedroom softly. She found his body on the floor close to the bed. He had apparently tried to summon help before he died. Blood and dried vomit stained his pajamas and the light tan carpet. His protruding eyes were like glazed porcelain balls.
Nancy was shaken but remarkably self-possessed. The maids were amazed by her ability to withstand shock. It was’ she who telephoned for the doctor who had an office on the first floor of the apartment house.
There was no doubt that Gil had been poisoned. The doctor asked Nancy what he had eaten the night before, and she told him about the coffee, showed him the remnants of chicken, the half-used loaf, and what remained of the applesauce in a white china bowl. And there were four tomatoes in the cooler instead of the half-dozen which the cook had put there the day before.
Nancy told the doctor and, later, the detectives that she had eaten the same food, drunk coffee brewed in the same pot. She remembered that when she had asked Gil if he wanted a drink, he had answered that he had had enough. According to his own story, he had spent part of the evening on Seventy-ninth Street, which led her to think that he had been with her cousin, Phyllis Miller.
Analysis showed that the poison which had killed Gilbert Jones (and Mike Jordan made a special point of withholding its name) worked slowly. If its presence is known in time and an antidote administered, the victim can be saved. But no one had heard Gil’s cries. Nancy had slept soundly at her end of the apartment.
By the time Gil’s body was examined he had been dead for a few hours, but medical authorities could not say whether he had died at five in the morning or at seven-thirty. And the time element was further complicated by the fact that the poison might have killed him in six hours or nine. He had been a healthy man with a rugged heart. Experts could not name precisely the hour at which he had been given the poison, whether at ten o’clock at night or at one the next morning. And time was the determining factor.
From nine o’clock the night before, or a few minutes after, until approximately ten-forty, he had been with Phyllis. In this detail the girls’ stories agreed. If he had left Phyllis around ten-forty, it was reasonable to believe Nancy’s statement that the clock had been striking eleven when he opened the front door. He had sat up with her talking and eating, until somewhere around twelve-thirty.