“I laid it on the line to him. My fist looked like a head of cabbage, the way bunched greenbacks were coming out between all the fingers. No wonder they’ve got that nickname for it, cabbage.
“I told him the grubby industrial town she was born in. I said, I want you to go there, and I want you to stay there, until you’ve dug up something on her. Something that’ll make her as sooty as the town is. If you can dig up something big, all the better. If you can only dig up something little, never mind, we’ll blow it up into something big. Don’t leave a stone unturned—”
Just like I did, Madeline thought parenthetically, only in reverse. Mine was benevolent, hers was malevolent.
“It’s on me, I said to him. The whole thing’s on me. I’m footing the bill. I don’t care if you stay there six months. I don’t care how you pad your expense account. I’ll pay for it. I don’t care if you have a broad in your room every night, a case of Carstairs in your room every night. I’ll pay for it. It’s worth it to me. Just so long as you come up with something on her. I’ve never enjoyed spending my money half as much as I’ll enjoy spending it now. Ask around. Dig up the kids she went to school with. Look up doctors. Maybe she had a miss once. Maybe there was syph in her family. In the old days, when it presented a problem. Or insanity, or a criminal record. Check on her birth certificate, they must have it on file there, find out what that can tell you.
“Get something on her. I don’t care what it is, but get something on her.”
And even in the repetition, her voice was a terrible thing, a thing such as Madeline had never heard before. It wasn’t a voice, it was hate incarnate.
She spoke more quietly again. “About three months after he went there, he rang me up one night long-distance. Reversed charges, of course. When I heard what he had to tell me, I was in ecstasy. I’d never expected anything like it in a million years. All I’d hoped for was to find a little mud that I could sling at her. Instead, he’d dug up an entire tar pit. I rolled over and over on the bed, carrying the phone with me up to my ear. Then when the wire started to pull up short, I rolled over and over back again the other way until it was freed again.
“It was like dropping some kind of a bomb in between them. It blew them so far apart they could never get back together again, not in this lifetime. I bet from then on if either one of them ever saw the other, they’d start running for dear life, they couldn’t get away fast enough.”
“But what?” Madeline asked. “What was it?”
Dell dropped her eyes, with self-satisfaction but also with guile. “That’s as far as it goes,” she said inflexibly. “Beyond that, we don’t talk about it in this house.”
One day the phone rang while Madeline was there. Dell got up and went inside to it. It was just past the doorway. Madeline went ahead tapping single notes and writing them down on the score sheet.
After a few intimately indistinct phrases, she heard Dell say, “A friend.”
Then she added, “Of course a girl. What do you think I do, entertain men here behind your back? I wouldn’t last long that way.”
Then she went on, “What do you mean, how do you know it is?”
Then she concluded, “Because I say so, isn’t that enough?”
Suddenly she called, “Mad, come here a minute.” Madeline got up and went in there. Dell thrust the phone out toward her, but without relinquishing it. “Say hello into this,” she instructed.
“Hello?” Madeline said uncertainly.
Dell immediately took it away again, so that Madeline had no chance to hear what was said in return. Madeline went back to the piano. “Satisfied?” Dell was saying. “You sure take a lot of convincing.”
She rejoined Madeline a few moments later, poking her thumb resentfully over her shoulder. “That guy!” she steamed. “He sure gives me trouble. It’s getting so I’m afraid to go out on the street with him anymore, for fear my agent might pass and tip his hat to me, or the club manager might go by and give me a hello, or I might get a nod from somebody who once worked the same spot with me ten years ago. That’s all it takes, and I find myself explaining and trying to square myself all the rest of the evening. And then when I get all through he still doesn’t believe me, anyway.” She held one hand to the side of her face as though it hurt her there and took a few short steps this way and that. “I’d have to be quadruplets, and all four of us working on a double shift, to be able to crowd in all the cheating he gives me credit for.”
Madeline just looked at her solemnly, taking the tirade in. She didn’t ask who he was, and Dell didn’t say. She had a fairly good idea Dell wouldn’t have told her even if she had asked, and that was one of the principal reasons she hadn’t.
A few weeks after that, just as she was about to put the key Dell had given her into the outside door of the apartment, she held back, thinking she heard a voice somewhere on the inside. She inclined her head toward the door, but the sound didn’t repeat itself. But some cautious instinct made her put the key away and ring instead. She didn’t want any possible third party to know she had a key to the apartment in her possession, although she couldn’t have said why. In the final analysis it was no one’s business but Dell’s and her own.
Dell’s voice asked who it was, from the other side of the door. She sounded guarded, cautious, as though apprehensive about what the answer might be.
“Mad,” Madeline said.
The door opened immediately. A look of strain was just leaving Dell’s face and a look of relief coming on in its place. Nevertheless she lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I can’t ask you in right now. Got one of my Big Moments in here with me. You understand, don’t you?”
“Oh, sure. Perfectly all right. I’ll drop around tomorrow instead.”
“Do that.”
Suddenly a man’s voice cut in: “Who you talking to out there?”
“Just a friend,” Dell answered without turning her head.
A larger hand than hers took hold of the door edge above where her own was resting, and pulled the door a little wider open. Then a man’s face peered out at Madeline, a little to one side of Dell’s and about a foot higher up.
Sometimes you see a face a dozen and one times, and then later on forget it. Sometimes you see a face just once, and then see it over and over to the end of your days in retrospect. This bodiless face looking out at her now from a doorway was to be like an eyeless mask, one of those twin masks representing comedy and tragedy in the theater, pinned to the curtain of her memory from then on.
It was a face that had been handsome once. Its handsomeness had worn thin now, but the configuration of it could still be detected beneath the layer of the years and the experiences. Dark, lustrous Mediterranean hair, and dark, lustrous Mediterranean eyes. A cleft in the chin that years of shaving seemed to have ground into a blue-tinged, marbleized, scooped-out hollow.
But the eyes showed no recognition whatever of Madeline as a person. Just the fact that she was a woman, and not a rival, not a trespasser. They didn’t care if she was ugly or fair, tall or short, wide or narrow. They were the eyes of jealousy, of sheer possessiveness alone.
The face withdrew without having said a word to either of the two women. But its silence was a surly, not an appeased, one.
Then a moment after, from back within the apartment, his voice sounded in a growled order. “Well, come on back in here, whenever you get through exchanging cake recipes or whatever it is you’re doing out there.”