Odor of Violets Read online

  “Late sleeping is to be excused on such a day,” said Pierce with his slow, half-quizzical smile. “More coffee, madam?”

  Norma shook her head. Thad’s typical note had left her with a glow. “I love you, my dear! You are life to me and all its possessions—yet today I must go! Forgive me if I do not return until tomorrow. You can reach me at the Waldorf-Astoria. Thad.”

  Cheli resumed the conversation as Pierce went into the dining room. Sometimes her frankness was disconcerting. “You don’t like Gilbert’s wife, do you?”

  “Helena?” Norma gave an embarrassed laugh. “Perhaps it would be nearer the truth if you said she doesn’t like me.”

  “I wonder if she likes anyone except herself.” Cheli spread the manuscript over the arm of her chair. “That includes Gil. What nationality is she, Norma? She’s a mystery to me.”

  “French, I believe. It’s hard to say. She speaks so many languages fluently. The only thing I know is that Gil met her in Washington at the French Embassy.”

  Norma left her place on the rug and picked up a morning paper from the settee. The conversation was becoming difficult. She disliked discussing the members of Thad’s family. Quick to take a hint, Cheli turned to her manuscript again.

  The paper was opened to the theatrical page, telling her that Thad had read it over his early morning coffee. She glanced idly at a syndicated column headed, “Rialto Rumors.” For a brief instant the room became unbearably warm. She sat down on the settee and smoothed the paper out over her knees.

  “A familiar figure, too long absent from Broadway, was seen at Ronni’s 41 Club,” the column stated. “He was accompanied by an exquisite creature whom your correspondent identified as the daughter of a grand old master of productions. It would be interesting if Paul Gerente resumed his interrupted stage career by marrying into his ex-wife’s family.”

  Norma sat quietly for a long time staring into the flames. Finally she said, “I hate to leave you alone here today, but I think I’ll go into Hartford, Cheli.”

  “Don’t mind me. I’m up to my ears in work.”

  Norma stood up. There was a train to New York from Hartford at three-thirty. She could catch another one back during the evening. It would give her a few hours in New York—all she needed.

  “I may have dinner with friends in Hartford,” she said. A cold lump was pressing her throat inside, making it difficult to speak or breathe. If Thad had seen that item—! “He can’t have seen it,” she assured herself silently. “He’d have spoken about it to me.” She dismissed as foolish a quick idea that she might talk with Babs. The girl was too young, too self-centered, to see anything but Paul’s charm—to know what such gossip would do to Thad. There was only one course open. It was dangerous to a point where it might wreck her marriage, but she had to take it. She must talk with Paul Gerente.

  CHAPTER II

  THE NEW York train was twenty-five minutes late. Norma purchased her ticket with a feeling of apprehension which finally drove her from the warmth of the waiting room to pace the platform upstairs. There, she kept gazing searchingly up the track as though she might hasten the approach of the train through the snow.

  The apprehension stayed with her even when she was settled in the parlor car. At New Haven she thought she saw a familiar face on the platform. She hurriedly picked up her coat and handbag and quit her comfortable seat for the steamy confines of the crowded day coach. Hiding herself behind the unmeaning pages of an open magazine, she had time to reflect on the impulse which had started her on such an arduous trip through the storm.

  It was anger, she knew; consuming, almost unreasonable resentment against the smooth suave technique which made amorous conquests so easy for Paul. Her first thought had been that he had deliberately sought out Babs Tredwill to show Norma that his attractiveness still held sway. It was the sort of thing which might amuse Paul Gerente, make him narrow his slightly slanting eyes and lift his thin-line eyebrows in an expression of unholy joy.

  That crooked mocking smile had made him famous on the stage. Norma found she was clenching the magazine between her hands and put it down. She had lived close to that smile for a year. She knew the hopelessness of trying to convince Babs Tredwill that across a breakfast table it might become most unpleasant to see.

  “Why can’t I win Babs over? Why won’t she be friends?” Norma wondered unhappily, and suddenly felt very much alone. Babs would see nothing but unwarranted interference if she ever learned that Norma had called on Paul.

  There was an even deeper problem to be faced with Thaddeus, whose love for her was blindly unreasoning. He had despised Paul Gerente for years. His methods with Barbara would be harsh and uncompromising. He would flatly forbid the girl to see Paul again or mention his name. Neither Norma nor anyone else could ever point out to Thad that such a course would play right into Paul’s clever hands. Whatever Paul Gerente wanted of Babs he would get quickly enough once Babs’s father knew. Babs would dutifully listen to Thad’s heated orders, then calmly and more determinedly go her own way.

  Norma needed weapons to fight Paul. He was a man of force and violence; not physical, but mental force and violence, which made it still more difficult. Nothing but pressure brought to bear would turn him out of his way; yet when she tried to recollect some weakness she might use against him, to find some vulnerable spot for her attack, she was forced to conclude that Paul Gerente had lived his life with a calculating prudence which left him in the clear. Open-handed and begging, she would have to go to him and ask for an understanding he had never shown. Her own good sense told her that her plea would be met with cynical laughter, but there was nothing else to do.

  Above the clacking of the train wheels she could almost hear him saying, “You’re jealous, Norma—and fading slightly, too. Or perhaps I’m the one who’s aging. I’ve heard that as men get older they prefer their women younger and more unsophisticated—even a trifle dumb.” He would pause there, and pull one corner of his mouth back into a deep indentation before he concluded, “Haven’t you?”

  Weary with battling her unseen foe, she finally dozed uncomfortably away. It was nearly seven when she arrived at Grand Central Station. Struck by a pang of hunger, she realized that she had eaten scarcely anything all day. Downstairs, perched on a stool at the Oyster Bar, she ordered a Manhattan cocktail, but it failed to bring her cheer. She ordered an oyster stew and found with the arrival of the food that her appetite had gone. She left her meal half finished and went upstairs to a row of phone booths where she searched through the book for Paul Gerente. He was back in an apartment in Greenwich Village on West Twelfth Street, where he had lived prior to their marriage ten years before.

  Afterwards, when she looked back on that evening, her verdict was that a sense of furtiveness governed her acts all the way. Instead of going to the taxi exit and getting a cab, which she normally would have done, she walked through the press of homeward-bound, package-laden commuters and dipped down into the East Side subway. She caught an express to Fourteenth Street, and stood uneasily on the short ride downtown, conscious that the tired faces of women were eyeing her enviously, estimating the value of her furs.

  When she came up into the neon-lighted garishness of Fourteenth Street she discovered that the snow had mixed slushily with rain. Reckless of the fact that the wet muddy streets were splashing her sheer stockings ruinously, she hurried along head down until she turned by Hearn’s department store into the comparative quiet of Fifth Avenue.

  She stopped by the churchyard on the corner of Twelfth Street and gazed up at Paul’s windows a short distance away. A light shone under drawn blinds. Sleet struck sharply against the back of her neck, bringing with it a sobering touch of cold reality. It was followed by a moment of indecision. After an entire day of inner turmoil she was facing the ordeal of meeting Paul Gerente again without an intelligent word to say.

  She forced herself to go on. Paul lived in a walk-up. A taxi, with its windshield wipers working busily, swerved int
o the curb and stopped in front of Paul’s apartment house when Norma was two doors away. Still motivated by a sense of doing something foolhardy and wrong, she stepped into the lighted vestibule of the house next to Paul’s. Ostensibly reading names on the polished-brass letter boxes, she watched the taxi through the slanting rain and snow.

  It may have been the familiar staccato click of high heels which told her that it was Babs descending the brownstone steps of the house next door. Possibly her overwrought senses were super-keen, and in the back of her mind she had expected all along to find Babs there. She huddled back as far as possible into a corner of the vestibule. She couldn’t catch the words, but the cadence of Babs’s voice was unmistakable as she hurriedly directed the driver where to go.

  Norma suffered a bad moment as the taxi went into gear and pulled on by. She had but a flash of the girl as the gleam of a near-by street light passed like a bright shadow across Babs’s golden hair. It stayed with Norma for years—that one brief glimpse of Barbara with her face buried in her slim white hands.

  There was retributive rage in her heart when she ascended the brownstone steps and rang Paul Gerente’s bell.

  The automatic opener on the door buzzed loudly, twice, startling her with its vibrant sound. She pushed open the door and stepped inside of the once-familiar hall. It was little changed except that during the years it had been done over in blue. She had ascended four stairs when a voice called down from the second floor: —

  “Did you want Cameron?”

  “No,” said Norma weakly.

  “Sorry,” said the voice, and she heard the closing of a door.

  She went on up, tiring in the middle of the third flight as she’d done so many times before. On the top landing, she stopped to regain her breath. A line of light showed along the edge of Paul’s slightly open door. She walked hesitantly toward it, and with something approaching an effort raised the face of the tiny brass gargoyle which served as a knocker and let it fall.

  From inside the apartment, the same detestable clock which had startled her years before wound itself up with a whir and cuckooed eight times lustily.

  She pushed the door open and forced herself to laugh. “What’s the matter, Paul? Aren’t you receiving visitors tonight?”

  A man in a cherry-red dressing gown was stretched out face down in front of the fireplace. Burning logs crackled as though the fire might have been freshly tended. The light from the flames jumped erratically, endowing with unnatural life the polished-brass poker lying close to the man on the floor.

  The scene held her with the powerful magic of horror. From loudly ticking clock to embroidered Chinese robe, which covered the grand piano, nothing had changed in the room. She absorbed all that unconsciously, vaguely sensing that the familiar objects, books, pictures, and furniture, were keeping her from screaming. She fought a mad impulse to seat herself at the piano and play. The wild whirl of Tausig’s gypsy dances might do what humans could never do—bring the corpse with the battered head to life; force him to rise in a dance macabre. Anything was preferable to stillness. Madness lay in such finality. Already she was feeling it freeze her, press her back against the wall. She must move before she grew as rigid as the man before the fire; before she toppled down beside him, stretched inertly in that darkened place on the carpet where his blood had ebbed away.

  She began to play a frightful game. The man with the battered head was dead, but she had to pretend not to know. It was a game of deceptions and the stake was life, with an opponent she couldn’t see. She must keep her eyes away from the curtained doors which led to another room; must give no sign that her mind was strong, that she knew when she had rung downstairs—someone had answered Paul Gerente’s bell!

  Beyond the curtains to Paul’s bedroom, soft as the fall of a playing card, something fluttered to the floor. The sound brought Norma to life again, gave her the strength to flee. She never knew how she got away, or what stopped her flight downstairs long enough for her to pick up Babs’s fur-topped galoshes, which were dripping water in the hall outside Paul’s door.

  Once outside she wandered blindly down street after winding street, holding the galoshes in her hand, bucking against the storm. Deep in the maze of Greenwich Village she became aware that people were watching her. She was standing laughing hysterically into the plate-glass window of an Italian pâtisserie.

  CHAPTER III

  THERE WAS menace in the voice of the news commentator. It lurked behind his vivid descriptions of marching feet and rolling caissons, made doubly strong by words he couldn’t say. Subtly, with sharp, clean-cutting phrases, he pictured the forces of a nation on the move; told of women and children waiting for death in huddled groups; hinted at the terror which gripped the world when a country was wiped from the map of Europe in a day.

  Captain Duncan Maclain pressed the control button at the side of his desk. The voice from the Capehart radio stopped abruptly. The Captain touched sensitive fingers to his sightless eyes and sat very still. At his feet under the desk, Schnucke, his Seeing-Eye dog, was caught by the darkness of the usually bright penthouse office and the solemnity of her master’s mood. She whimpered slightly and comforted herself by resting her warm chin on the toe of the Captain’s shoe.

  “War, Schnucke!” said Duncan Maclain. “You’re lucky to be a dog in days like these. You’re living in a world gone mad with senseless slaughter—a world that’s blind. Blind, as the last war blinded me!”

  Schnucke answered the sound of her name by moving her head companionably. Maclain’s fine mobile mouth smiled into the gloom. It was satisfying to philosophize with Schnucke. She lived a life of such delightful fundamentals with never a word to say. He reached down and felt the wetness of her nose against his palm. Affectionately her tongue touched the back of his hand as he drew it away.

  The room seemed uncomfortably warm. Maclain left the chair, back of his wide, flat-topped desk, and walked with quick sure steps to the terrace door. He moved with ease in the familiar surroundings, confident that each piece of furniture was in its accustomed place, firmly fixed to the floor.

  For an instant after he opened the latch, he stood holding the French door ajar against the push of the late December storm. Twenty-six stories above Seventy-second Street and Riverside Drive the wind had full sway. Stinging snow beat in through the two-inch crack, tearing smartingly at his face and hands. He shivered under the blast and closed the door. The wind moaned defeat and further wet the dripping diamond panes with a defiant splash of mingled rain and snow.

  A thermostat heat regulator was on the wall at the end of the bookcase filled with Braille. The Captain brushed the heavy volumes lightly in passing, located the small arrow at the base of the thermometer, and turned the heating lower. He selected a volume from the bookcase,—Van Loon’s Ships and How They Sailed the Seven Seas,—sat down at the desk, and began finger reading.

  Smoking and reading failed to quiet a feeling of restlessness. He was glad to be interrupted by the buzz of his private phone.

  There were two telephones on his desk. One was a unit of the regular apartment-house system connecting with the lobby switchboard twenty-six floors below; the other was smaller and operated by push buttons. It formed a link of seven phones in his apartment which gave communication from room to room. The Captain ignored both phones on the desk and turned to his left-hand top drawer. He opened it and took out a regular French type of dial phone. Not more than a dozen people knew the number. He mentally reviewed the short list before he lifted the receiver from its cradle and said, “Hello!”

  “Has your man arrived?” The crisp voice of Spud Savage, the Captain’s partner and closest friend, crackled over the wire.

  “He’s late,” said Maclain. “I’ll spend the night in town, Spud. He’ll certainly be here soon.”

  “That’s what I wanted to know.” There were a few seconds of silence at the other end. “Look, Dunc. I’ll be in within an hour and a half to spend the night there with you.”
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  “Has it occurred to you that we’re guests at a Long Island house party for Christmas?” Maclain asked brightly. No one but Spud Savage and his wife Rena, who had been Maclain’s secretary for years, could have detected the underlying annoyance in the Captain’s tone.

  “Yes, it’s occurred to me,” Spud mimicked. “And it’s occurred to Rena, too. She’s worried about Schnucke. Schnucke’s sensitive. We don’t like to have her staying in a closed-up apartment alone.”

  “Kindly go to hell, both of you,” suggested Maclain. “I’m certainly able to take care of myself for a night in my own home. You’re insane if you try to come in town through this storm.”

  “I’ll be there within two hours,” said Spud. “Anybody who’s been associated with you for twenty years is bound to be slightly fey.”

  “Perhaps you’ve affected me!” The Captain hung up the phone. The conversation with his partner left him with a comfortable feeling of well-being. Samuel Savage, whom Maclain called “Spud,” was the only person who could be solicitous about the Captain’s blindness in an open and aboveboard way. They had served together in the army. During the trying period when the Captain was driving himself to a point of collapse to perfect the senses of hearing, touch, and smell, Spud Savage had scarcely left his side for a day.

  Watching Maclain’s naturally keen faculties sharpen under rigorous dicipline, Spud had conceived a wild idea. Duncan Maclain was a wealthy man and inordinately proud. Slowly, and with infinite tact, Spud convinced Maclain that he could utilize the foundation of intelligence work mastered in the army. Together they would open a private detective agency. Captain Duncan Maclain would become unique. Blind, he would become the master of them all, greater than any detective who could see.

  It was Spud who had engaged Rena as Maclain’s secretary, and, as Rena put it, “married her so she would stay.” It was Spud who had taught the Captain to shoot at sound—a patient matter of six years’ practice, for two long hours each day. It was Spud who had arranged for Schnucke and Maclain’s training at the Seeing-Eye school. Happily, with the advent of Schnucke, Maclain found he was free.