I felt like a heel.
At two o’clock Bertha Cool picked me up, and the Jap kneaded me as though I’d been a batch of bread dough. When I got away from those stubby fingers I felt like a shirt that had been put through a washing machine, run through a wringer, and dried on a mangle.
I staggered in to supper. It was the same as the previous night, only Alta looked as though she’d been crying. She hardly spoke to me. After dinner I hung around, giving her a chance to talk with me in case there was anything she wanted to confide.
Alta didn’t make any secret about how she felt about Bernard Carter. She said he was supposed to be working on a business deal with her stepmother. She didn’t know just what it was... No one seemed to know just what it was. Alta said both of them hated her, that she thought her stepmother was afraid of some woman whom Carter knew, that one time she’d walked into the library just as her stepmother was saying, “Go ahead and get some action. I’m tired of all this dillydallying. You can imagine how much mercy she’d show me if our positions were reversed. I want you to—” Carter had noticed she’d come into the room and had coughed significantly. Mrs. Ashbury had looked up, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and started talking about something else with the swift garrulity of one who is trying to cover up.
Alta was silent for a while after she told me that, and then said moodily she supposed she was telling me things she had no right to, but for some reason or other I inspired confidence, that she felt I was loyal to her father, and that if I was going in business with him, I’d have to watch her stepmother, Bob, and Bernard Carter. Then she added a few words about Dr. Parkerdale. He was, it seemed, one of the fashionable boys with a good bedside manner. Every time Mrs. Ashbury had a dizzy spell from eating too much, Dr. Parkerdale became as gravely concerned as though it were the first symptom of a world-wide epidemic of infantile paralysis.
She told me that much, then clamped her lips shut lightly.
I said, “Go ahead.”
“With what?” she asked.
“The rest of it.”
“The rest of what?”
“The rest of the things I should know.”
“I’ve told you too much already.”
“Not enough,” I said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m going in business with your father. He’s going to invest a bunch of money. I’ve got to see that he gets a fair return for his investment. I’ve got to get along with Mrs. Ashbury. I want to know how to do it.”
She said hastily, “You leave her alone. Keep out of her way, and listen... Don’t — don’t ever—”
“Don’t ever what?” I asked.
“Don’t ever trust yourself alone with her,” she said. “If she wants to take exercise in the gymnasium, be sure to have someone else there all the time she’s there.”
I made the mistake of laughing and said, “Oh, surely she wouldn’t—”
She turned on me furiously. “I tell you,” she said, “I know her. She’s a creature of physical appetites and animal cunning. She simply can’t control herself. All this high blood pressure business is simply the result of overeating and overindulgence. She’s put on twenty pounds since Dad married her.”
“Your father,” I said, “is nobody’s fool.”
“Of course he isn’t, but she’s worked out a technique that no man can fight against. Whenever she wants anything and anyone balks her, she starts working herself up to a high pitch of excitement, then she telephones for Dr. Parkerdale. He comes rushing out as though it were a matter of life and death, takes her blood pressure, and starts tiptoeing around the house until he’s created the proper impression. Then he takes whoever is responsible off to one side and says very gently and with his best professional manner that Mrs. Ashbury really isn’t herself, that she simply mustn’t become excited, that if he can only keep her perfectly calm for a period of several months, he can cure her blood pressure, that then she can start taking exercise and reduce her weight and be her normal self, but that whenever there’s an argument and she becomes excited, all the good that he’s done is wiped out, and he has to go back and begin all over again.”
I laughed and said, “That seems to be a hard game to beat.”
She was furious at me because I’d laughed. “Of course it’s a hard game to beat,” she said. “You can’t beat it. Dr. Parkerdale says that it doesn’t make any difference whether she’s right or wrong, that one mustn’t argue with her. That means you have to give in to her all the time. That means she’s becoming more selfish and spoiled every minute of the time. Her temper is getting more ungovernable. She’s getting more selfish, more—”
“How about Bernard Carter?” I asked. “Does he get along with her?”
“Bernard Carter,” she snorted. “Bernard Carter and his business deal! He’s the man who comes around when Father goes away. She may fool Dad with that business talk, but she doesn’t fool me a darn bit. I–I hate her.”
I observed that I thought Henry Ashbury was quite capable of handling the situation.
“He isn’t,” Alta said. “No man is. She has him hamstrung and hogtied before he starts. If he accuses her of anything, she’ll throw one of her fits and Dr. Parkerdale will come rushing out with the rubber tube he puts around her arm and take her blood pressure... Oh, can’t you see what she’s doing is simply laying the foundation for filing a suit for divorce on the ground of mental cruelty, claiming that Father was so unreasonable and unjust with her that it ran up her blood pressure and ruined her health and kept Dr. Parkerdale from curing her. And she has the doctor all primed to give his testimony. The only thing Father can do is efface himself as much as possible and wait for something to break. That means he has to give in to her... Look here, Donald. Are you pumping me or am I just making a fool out of myself talking too damn much?”
I felt like a heel again, only worse.
She didn’t talk much after that.
Someone called her on the telephone, and she didn’t like the conversation. I could see that much from the expression on her face. After her party had hung up, she telephoned and broke a date.
I went out finally and sat on the sun porch. I felt more like a heel than ever.
After a while she came out and stood looking down at me. I could feel her scorn, even though it was too dark to see the expression in her eyes. “So,” she said, “that’s it, is it?”
“What?” I asked.
She said, “Don’t think I’m entirely a nitwit... You, a physical instructor... I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you I’d take the licence number of the car that calls for you every afternoon, and look up the registration... B. Cool, Confidential Investigations. I suppose your real name is Cool.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “It’s Donald Lam.”
“Well, the next time Dad tries to get a detective who’s going to pose as a physical instructor, tell him to get someone who looks the part.”
She stormed out of the room.
There was an extension phone down in the basement. I went down and called Bertha Cool. “All right,” I said, “you’ve spilled the beans.”
“What do you mean, I’ve spilled the beans?”
“She wondered who was calling for me afternoons, waited around the corner, got the licence number of your car, and looked it up... It’s registered in the name of the agency, you know.”
I could hear Bertha Cool’s gasp over the telephone.
“A hundred bucks a day thrown out of the window just so that you could chisel a taxi fare,” I said.
“Now listen, lover,” she implored, “you’ve got to find some way out of this. You can do it, if you’ll put your mind on it. That’s what Bertha has you for, to think for her.”