I almost leaped from the couch. “But I have to see her! Just one last time! Surely that’s not too much to ask....”
Sanderson seemed a bit agitated, even alarmed, at my outburst. That hand went up again.
“Very well, Mr. Vance. But I warn you that such an experience is usually very painful to the...survivors. Please take care.”
I nodded dumbly, and followed him through a door. There, on what appeared to be a wheeled hospital bed—the only object of furniture in the small room—was Katharine. A sheet covered everything but her face.
I went over to her. I wondered whether I should touch her—whether Sanderson would chide me, or even physically prevent me from so doing, or whether I could endure the horror of it. I gently reached out and brushed her cheek with my fingers. It was already cold.
With a strangled cry I wheeled around, no longer able to stand any of this—my dead wife, the placid Sanderson, the antiseptic surroundings, the bullet-headed factotum.... Then I turned back, gazed for what seemed to be minutes at Katharine’s face, hoping against hope to see some faint trace of animation—the flicker of an eyelid, the rise and fall of her chest, the return of color to her cheeks...but there was nothing.
Very quietly, very gently, I bent down and pressed my warm lips against her cold ones. They yielded, softly, as dough yields when pressed by a thumb. There was no response.
CHAPTER SIX
By this time Vance and I were almost finished with a meal at Delmonico’s. Evidently his lofty social status was a sufficient cover for my lack of proper evening dress. I’ll admit this was one of the better meals I’ve had lately. Vance didn’t eat much—was too busy talking—but I didn’t follow his example, either in the eating or in the talking.
He was scowling down at his dessert and coffee, as if one or the other contained some blemish that offended his sense of decorum. I saw no problem with what was in front of me. But when Vance continued silent, I felt I had to say something.
“If you want to rest a while and take up your story later….”
“No!” It could have been Bullet Head speaking. “No...just let me think a bit. I want to finish.”
For once I wished one of my clients actually did smoke—it might calm him. Instead, he shot a hand through his hair, swallowed a large mouthful of scalding coffee without apparently tasting it, and went on:
“You can’t imagine what sort of complications this whole business created. First of all, of course, there was the matter of what to do with...with the....”
“The body?” I supplied.
Vance glared at me. “Yes,” he said heavily, turning away from me. “Although I should have known that Sanderson had that all taken care of. When I asked him, all he said was, ‘I will deal with it,’ in that bland, toneless voice of his. I suppose he must have had some means....” The memory of it caused Vance’s face to writhe in pain. “God, I can’t even bear to think of it! Heaven only knows what he did....
“Anyway, that was by no means the end of it. Naturally, we hadn’t told our families what we were doing—and the explanations were... well, shall we say, they weren’t very convincing. It would positively have killed Katharine’s mother if she ever found out—a husband already dead by suicide, and now a daughter.... No, it would have been too much. She herself might have....”
Vance swallowed hard, put the thought out of his mind, and proceeded.
“All I said, when I got back to San Marino, was that Katharine and I had had a big fight and she had left me—gone off on her own. I also had to say that she felt some deep resentment against my family, and that’s why we shouldn’t expect her to write to any of us.... In a way that wasn’t much of a lie: I wouldn’t say she resented my family’s wealth and standing so much as that she was constantly having to face the fact that we still had wealth and standing whereas her own family didn’t. I think it made her feel rather like chattel when she married me.... Well, that’s of no importance now.
“How to explain why she didn’t write to her own mother was the difficulty. She had been very close to her father, and took his death hard, but she also loved her mother deeply; and it wounded Mrs. Hawley terribly that she wasn’t receiving any messages from her daughter. In fact, she spent quite a bit of money hiring some private eye here in New York to look for Katharine, but of course he found nothing—not the faintest trace of a lead.”
“Do you mind my asking,” I said, “how much Sanderson charged for his...services?”
Vance looked blankly at me and said: “One hundred thousand dollars.”
My coughing fit lasted for several minutes.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Vance continued after he was sure I had regained control of myself. “I was a sucker. But he was right about one thing: he really was taking a big risk doing what he was doing...assuming he actually did do it.... I mean, what he did was murder, isn’t it? Helping a person commit suicide is murder, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Legally, anyway.”
“What do you mean by that?” Vance said sharply.
“Nothing.... I only meant that the law regards it as murder, and Sanderson could conceivably be sent to the chair. My own views on the matter aren’t important.”
Vance continued to peer at me, as though he might ferret out some nugget of information from my face, but finally gave it up.
“Anyway, that’s what I gave him. That was the deal. And he made me sign that paper so that I wouldn’t go to the police—because then he could involve me in the matter.” Vance took another swig of coffee. It wasn’t hot any more.
I scratched my head. “Mr. Vance, your story is very peculiar, and very touching also.” I meant that honestly—wasn’t being snide. “But what exactly do you want me to do? You sounded pretty sure, when you saw your wife lying there on that bed in Sanderson’s office, or whatever it was, that she was...well, that she was dead.”
“I know that.” Vance looked around the room, for no apparent reason. “But maybe it was a trick! I’m sure now that it was a trick!”
“Why?”
That brought him up short. “What do you mean, why?”
“Why do you think it was a trick?”—patiently.
“Because of this!” And he brought out his clipping from the Herald-Tribune.
I glanced at it, then looked back at him. “You think this...this Elena Cavalieri...is your wife.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I don’t think so! I mean, I do, but I’m not the only one! Don’t you see?” He was almost enraged with frustration: by the way he was looking at me, I must have been the world’s prize moron. “This was sent to me by my friend, Gene Merriwether. He works on the Herald-Tribune. We go back a long way...our families know each other, and he and I went to Berkeley together...in fact, he must have met Katharine then also, although she was a freshman and we were seniors.... Anyway, he came east to pursue a career in journalism, but so far he’s been stuck doing the society columns. Since he’s California blue-blood, I guess his paper thinks he knows something about the Four Hundred....”
Vance seemed irritated, reflecting again on the world’s varied injustices to blue-bloods, then went on: “He was doing some background work on an article on the Greenways, and he came upon this six-month-old clipping in the paper’s ‘morgue.’ It was he who sent it to me. He himself said it was Katharine!”
I looked at Vance skeptically. “Merriwether said this was your wife?”
Vance backed off. “Well, not in so many words.... But he sent it to me because he felt there was a striking resemblance!”
“Okay, let’s say for the sake