“Don’t worry, darling. Cornelia’s a fraud. I promise you. She will do nothing but make threats, and pretty soon she will not even do that. It’s in no way necessary for her to die. If you are going to wish someone dead, you had much better wish it for Madelaine. She’s the real problem and the real danger, and has much more to contribute by dying than anyone else. Come, darling, let’s be sensible and wish that Madelaine were dead instead of Cornelia. There’s something to be gained from that.”
He felt, indeed, absurdly young and comforted, his anxiety abated and senses lulled by the whisper of her voice and the exciting scent of her warmly naked flesh. The scent, so far as he could tell, was an odd and soporific combination of cinnamon and carbon monoxide. Its effect, at any rate, was strangely pleasant, for it left his mind floating free and unencumbered on the surface of a vast lethargy, at liberty to indulge in the most exciting play of speculation.
“Madelaine’s strong as an ox,” he said. “She’ll live forever.”
“No one lives forever. Some people, for one reason or another, die sooner than others. They have accidents or something.”
“Not Madelaine. Nothing happens accidentally to Madelaine. Things happen to Madelaine because she makes them happen.”
“Or someone else makes them. The capacity to make things happen isn’t limited to one person.” Maggie’s voice held a positive ring.
“If something accidental happened to Madelaine, something unfortunate might happen to me. If something went wrong, I mean. Under the circumstances, I would certainly be the most logical suspect.”
“That’s true.” Maggie stroked Brad’s hair, holding his head against her pink-nippled breasts. “Accidents are tricky and are better avoided. It would be very difficult, I should think, to plan one that wouldn’t go wrong in some way and turn out to look like something else. It would be much simpler and safer, in my opinion, to do directly what you wanted to do, and make it appear to have been done by someone else.”
“Wouldn’t that be a dirty trick to play on someone else?” he asked with a strange sort of detachment.
“I don’t mean someone else specifically. I mean someone else generally. It would be too bad to arrange for someone else specifically to pay your consequences.”
“What kind of general person would you suggest?”
“Oh, a burglar, maybe. I suspect that lots of unjust blame is put onto burglars.”
“I can think of instances when it was tried and didn’t work.”
“So can I, now that you mention it. Do you know what I would really do if I wanted something done to someone and did not wish to be associated with it? I’d have someone else do it, a third party, when I was somewhere else and couldn’t be reasonably suspected in the least. It’s what’s called having an alibi, isn’t it?”
“What about the third party? Wouldn’t he run the risk of being suspected?”
“Not if it were someone who would not be related to either of the other two,” Maggie replied. “It would be like taking a stranger off the street.”
“And it would put you at the mercy of this third party for the rest of your life. It would be difficult to live in such constant jeopardy.”
“It would put you at each other’s mercy, wouldn’t it? It seems to me it would. And if you were two people who were equally involved and did it for each other, for your own sakes and what you wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other.”
“It’s all very interesting as a kind of abstraction, but actual circumstances are something else entirely,” Brad stated.
“Abstractions? I know nothing about abstractions, darling. It’s merely a way something might be done to someone. Even to Madelaine, for instance. She frequently goes to bed early with a sick headache and takes a sedative. Isn’t that what you told me? Isn’t that what she did this very evening, as a matter of fact? One evening when she did, you would only have to arrange to go somewhere else where you would be seen and known and remembered, so that no one could possibly blame you for what happened at home. While you were gone someone else could simply walk in a door that you had left unlocked and do quickly what needed to be done.”
“You sound as if you’ve had experience,” Brad said drily.
“No, darling. It’s only a game we’re playing. It’s only a way of thinking out how something might be done.”
“Yes. Of course. We’re only playing a game.”
But it was a game, he knew, that needed only a word or a sign in exactly the right desperate moment to become a plan. And he knew, also, that Maggie had offered herself obliquely in a crooning voice as the instrument of murder.
Brad’s mind, free-floating on the vast surface of the drowsy half-dream, was wonderfully receptive and immune from guilt. He could accept without wonder the enormity of his own dark potential and he could sense for the first time without fear and without shame the fullness of his submission to the ageless and lawless woman-child who held his head against her warm breasts and stroked his hair.
“Darling,” she said, “I’ve heard that Madelaine is quite wealthy. Is that so?”
“Yes. It’s so.”
“How much money does she have altogether, do you think?”
“I don’t know. About a million, I’d say.”
“A million dollars is quite a lot,” Maggie said.
“Yes, it is.”
“I wonder what it would be like to have a million dollars all your own.”
“I couldn’t say. I’ve never had a million.”
“You have some of the use of it, though. That’s almost as good.”
“Is it? I suppose it is.”
“It would be too bad to lose it after having it,” Maggie murmured, pressing his face firmly against her bare skin.
“Yes. It would.”
“I’d like very much to have some of the use of a million dollars. Do you think I may ever have? It seems almost too good to be possible.”
He didn’t answer. His senses were acute in the sustained half-dream. He could hear with stethoscopic clearness beneath flesh and bone the sure and steady beating of her heart. Her breasts rose and fell at last on a sigh.
“Darling,” she said, “we must go back now. The clock on the dash says almost twelve, and we must not become careless and indiscreet.”
13
Wanda, the Cannon maid, found Madelaine in the library, where she had gone to write checks for the monthly accounts.
“There’s a young man asking to see you,” Wanda said. “He says his name is Jensen.”
“Jensen?” Madelaine tapped her front teeth with the capped end of her pen and considered the name. “Am I supposed to know him?”
“He says not, but he says he’s got something important to tell you that you’ll be interested in hearing.”
“How odd. I can’t imagine what it could be.”
“Shall I send him away? To tell the truth, I don’t much like his looks. He’s not very clean, and he kept glaring at me as if I’d done something to make him angry.”
“Lots of young men nowadays are not very clean, Wanda, and lots of them are angry. Send him in here, please. I’ll see what he wants.”
Wanda left, registering disapproval, and a minute or two later Buddy Jensen, a stranger to Madelaine, came three steps into the room and stopped, looking around in turn at the shelves of books, an opaque projector on a table in a corner, a world globe that was also a lamp, and finally at Madelaine herself, who had turned sidewise to her desk in order to face him.
A slanting shaft of sunlight touched him where he stood, lighting his face and tousled hair and verifying Wanda’s observations that he was not very clean and looked angry. Madelaine thought, watching him, that he was surely deeply disturbed about something, and that he was, perhaps, not quite rational.Touched by madness, she thought, aware of uneasiness and pity as the hackneyed phrased passed through her mind.