“You don’t do that when you’ve been what we have to each other. If he ever finds out I called a girlfriend, he’d find it easy enough to forgive that. But if he ever finds out I called the police, he’d never forgive that. You don’t know the ropes, dear.”
No, Madeline thought morosely. I guess I’ve never gone down for the count as often as you have.
She had triggered the whole thing, it was developing into what promised to be a perfectly beautiful mess, and now she was being asked to step in a second time and screen the potential victim’s hide.
“You’ve got to come! You’ve got to! You’re the one friend I have in this world. Look at all I’ve done for you. My door was always open to you. Drinks on the house. I let you use my piano.”
Oh, shove your piano, Madeline thought parenthetically. An expression she had acquired from the very person she was now returning it to.
“I even got market tips from him for you. Are you going to go back on me now, when I need you?”
“Al-l-l right,” Madeline drawled reluctantly. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll call you in about an hour’s time. If he’s acting ugly and you’re finding him hard to handle, I’ll hustle on over and bring you my moral support. If everything’s under control, then you don’t need me. How’ll that be?”
She thought: Even if I get her out of it tonight, it’ll catch up with her some other night, now that the seeds of suspicion have been planted, and the second time I won’t be on hand to bail her out.
Dell almost yelped her gratitude. “Thanks, baby-honey! Oh, thanks! I knew I could count on you, I knew you wouldn’t let me down. I’ll do the same for you someday.”
Who needs you? thought Madeline scornfully. I don’t play men by the carload.
“Better than that. Y’know that stone-marten jaquette you admired, the one Ange gave me? It’s yours, I’m giving it to you right now.”
Madeline made a sound down within her throat that might have been taken for gratitude, but was actually ridicule.
“All right, I’ll take a quick tub and get dressed. Call me in an hour. Well, make it quarter past, that’ll give me more time to turn around.”
“Don’t get loaded,” Madeline warned her bluntly. “It’s important that you keep your head clear, and know what you’re doing.”
“Check,” Dell said obediently. In two months flat, Madeline had gotten the upper hand on her. And by sheer personality impact alone. For she hadn’t tried in any way, either actively or passively, to dominate her.
Six o’clock came. Now’s when I promised I’d call her, Madeline thought, and I’m not doing it.
Half past, and she still hadn’t called her. Why don’t I just let it ride? Let her take her own medicine.
At quarter of seven she finally gave in, picked up the phone. “Emerson eight, eighteen hundred.” Then when the downstairs switchboard answered, “Eighteen-A, please.”
He came back and said, “There isn’t any answer.”
At seven the same routine. “Emerson eight, eighteen hundred... Eighteen-A, please.”
“There isn’t any answer.”
At seven-fifteen, for the third time, “There isn’t any answer.”
After a moment or two of indecision, she went downstairs, outside to the street, got in a cab, and went over there to find out for herself what kind of a turn this had taken.
Dell’s doorman was busy shepherding two tailcoats, a broad-tail and an ermine, into a cab. He had his back to her, so Madeline found her way in unaided. She punched the eighteen button in the self-service elevator, the door glided closed with the softness of a purr, and she rode up.
She got out and rang the doorbell. Nobody came to the door.
She rang again, with a jab of irritation sharpening the gesture. Still nobody came. First she wets me up with her tears for help, she thought resentfully, then she clams up and ignores me. Probably they’ve reconciled, and he took her out to dinner.
She took out the key Dell had given her and opened the door. She figured maybe Dell had left some sort of a note of explanation for her on the piano, like they’d used to do so often in the old songwriting days.
“Dell?” she called out.
There was no answer. There was no one in the place. There was no note either, on the piano or anywhere else.
Dell had had a rye on the rocks, or possibly five or possibly ten, at some indeterminate point between her getting-up time and her leaving the place. Only one glass had been used. She never changed glasses when drinking alone, why should she? Her own mouth germs couldn’t affect her. But this seemed to prove he’d never shown up.
On the piano was a song sheet. Probably the last thing she’d looked at before going out. For some inscrutable reason, to the end of her days, for as long as she remembered having met and having known Dell Nelson, whenever she thought of her, this song title would flicker across the eyes of her mind. “Heaven Drops Its Curtain Down upon My Heart.”
Madeline took a cursory look into the bedroom before leaving. The bra that Dell must have changed out of before her bath lay looped around one of the footposts of the bed. From where she stood she could glimpse a narrow triangular wedge of the bathroom, and in this a sliver of green-blue showed up, just above the rim of the tub. Dell had left in such a hurry she’d even forgotten to let her bathwater run out of the tub.
Madeline went over closer and looked inside. It lay there blue-green, smooth and motionless as ice, the warmth gradually going out of it into the air around.
She leaned forward and looked closer still.
Dell was still in it. Dead in it.
A cigarette, the last cigarette she had smoked, a woman’s cigarette with a dab of red at the tip, still lay on the edge of the washbasin where she had parked it as she got in. A drop of water on the washbasin rim had stopped it from consuming itself past the quarter mark.
Her head was at the bottom, face upward. It could have fallen there, or it could have been pushed there, held down there. It could have been a heart attack, a skidding fall against the bottom of the tub, a dizzy spell from the combination of alcohol and hot water, resulting in self-drowning, or — a homicide. Madeline couldn’t tell which it was.
She looked closely at the hands. They were still looped loosely over the edge of the tub; they hadn’t gone down with the rest of her. They were caught on the turn of the rim by the wrists. Alongside of them were two small flecks of red on the enamel, about as much as a mosquito makes if you squeeze it, and a thin trickle of much paler red that had gone down into the water. The water itself showed no traces. Not enough blood had been spilled to stain it.
That told the story. It had been a murder. She’d been held under until she drowned.
Madeline got down on her heels and examined the hands exhaustively, from an inch away, without touching them. There were no marks on them anywhere, no scratches or nicks. She even looked at the undersides, the palms, by stretching out full length on the floor and putting her face up under them.
The blood was not Dell’s. But underneath the tips of all ten nails, where a smidgin of white should have showed past the point where the nail enamel ended, there was instead a caked hairline of red. She’d clawed someone, either on the face or forearms or hands, in fighting for her life.
Madeline got to her feet and stood looking down at her. At the startled blue eyes, colder than ever now, staring up through the blue-green water. Adelaide Nelson had played the game her own way and lost it.
And yet which one of us ever yet won it? philosophized Madeline. It’s a game you can’t beat. If death doesn’t take away your chips, as in this case, then old age comes along and cleans out your table stakes just as surely. Maybe she’d had the best of it at that. At least she’d gone out looking good. Still desirable enough to be killed for it.