Meat for Murder

CHAPTER 1-2

It was the little man in the doorway who explained his presence, rather than they theirs. “I came down for the sunken cathedral,” he said.

Laurel found her eyes roving the room a little wildly. His glance toward the shelves of records put an end to her brief confusion.

“There aren’t any needles,” said Jeff.

“Not down here,” said the little man. “But up in my room I have some. I play the music up there always. This room is not good for listening to music.” He looked about him. “I think the colors take your mind out of your ears,” he added thoughtfully. And then, as though conscious of having said too much, he dropped one hand into the pocket of his absurdly small coat, hunched up that shoulder in a compulsory jerk, and then went with quick neat steps to the shelves of records.

“But the staircase I saw leads only down!” Woody Cornell remarked emptily.

The little man continued to scan the shelves of records. “I live up in the tower,” he said. “There are some stairs just across from the kitchen door. I imagine the tower was intended to be one of the servants’ rooms.”

Woody Cornell went to the little man standing small and a trifle shabby with the bindings of the albums bright beyond his black and rumpled head. He put out his hand. “My name’s Cornell.”

They shook hands briefly, and Laurel saw that the small man’s hand was like a child’s. “My name is André Viaud,” he said, and the way in which his tongue gave the name the sound it had in his own country was sad and nice and quite unconsciously so.

“We’re waiting for your friend Falkoner,” Woody explained.

Laurel was sure she saw a scarcely perceptible tightening of André Viaud’s mouth, as though to hold back certain words which second thought had told him had better not be spoken. “You’re the writers,” he said, instead. “You’re going to work on his play with him. That will be an experience.”

“He hasn’t hired us yet,” Jeff said, as he lighted a cigarette and looked about for a place to put the match.

“He will.” André Viaud’s eyes were obscurely amused.

Before Laurel had time to search her mind for a possible reason for that inward laughter, they heard the powerful roar of a car stopping in front of the house. The sound was choked off almost at once; the silence was followed by the powerful chunk of a car door closing. André Viaud quickly turned and took a purple album from the second shelf; he carried it to the archway under one arm as a schoolboy carries his books. He turned in the archway long enough to say, “I am very happy to have met you,” and then his narrow checked shoulders crossed the dim round entrance hall to the corridor leading back toward the kitchen. They heard the muffled patter of feet ascending the flight of stairs.

At the same time someone crossed the bridge outside with a heavy, rapid, solid tread. There was a faint creak as the front door was opened, and then the heavy tread was in the round entrance hall. The wide arch which had just framed André Vaud’s retreating figure now held a new figure, in an excellently tailored gray flannel suit, coming toward them.

The man’s square face was deeply tanned. The lower lip was square too, and against the deep color of the face it looked bloodless. He was not massive enough to make Laurel think immediately of a Viking, but his blond hair and eyebrows, and his predatory cold eyes, and especially the vitality of the sure, heavy tread forced Laurel’s brain to frame the word Viking as a second thought. And then her mind said, No! No! Anglo-Saxon. The helmet with the two curved horns.

He reached Woody and put out a hand. It was very tan below the gray sleeve and the narrow strip of white cuff. “How are you, Mr. Cornell?” he said. His voice was brusque and businesslike, and flat and strained, and his perfunctory smile showed square teeth which had been preserved by an expensive dentist. Laurel noticed that his hair was gray at the temples. And then those chill eyes were on hers. The look he gave her was disturbing because it seemed to classify her on the basis of externals only. She found her hand in his. “Miss Byrd,” he said. For a moment their eyes locked as their hands had, and she absurdly wanted to say, You’re wrong! I’m not a nice little thing in a green suit! But his hand was gone as suddenly as it had clasped hers, and he was looking at Jeff, who was taking an extremely nonchalant puff of his cigarette. “Out!” he said. “Either the cigarette or you.” He gave a short hard laugh, meant to be conciliatory, and added, “A very bad habit. Every habit should serve a purpose. Smoking dims your wits and rots your lungs.” Firmly, he pinched Jeff’s cigarette between his fingers, carried it at arm’s length to the Tudor fireplace, and tossed it into the logs.

Jeff’s face was a deep pink.

Woody said, “I’ve heard that people who have none of the small vices always have one of the big ones.”

Falkoner’s icy eyes went to his face. Falkoner showed his porcelain-white front teeth. Then he jammed his hands into his pockets and strode toward the fireplace. Laurel noticed for the first time that he was wearing tan huaraches instead of shoes. They were defiantly out of place with the neat gray suit.

Falkoner stood brooding down at the logs for a moment. Then he turned and faced them. His eyes challenged each of their faces in turn, and he said, “Ideas are the most precious things in the world.” He turned to the fireplace and put out the round dying ember of Jeff’s cigarette with the toe of one sandal. He began to pace up and down the hearth, his eyes sometimes on the vast view window with the night pressing flat against it, and sometimes on one or the other of their faces. His strained voice seemed to hint of some inward pressure which was pushing him on from minute to minute to this place and that; some pressure that was with him even as he slept and had always been with him and always would be. A man in love with a wanton who was slowly killing him would have a voice like that. Or perhaps a man in love with success.

“My ideas are my ideas, your ideas are your ideas, Joe Doakes’s ideas are his ideas, and there is nothing I can think of that’s more lousy than stealing another man’s ideas. The ideas I discuss tonight are my ideas and if you work with me they will merge with your ideas and out of that will come a story, a big story, a story which will make us all a lot of money. I’m a busy man and writing takes time—all art takes time—art is long and life is short—a lot shorter if you smoke cigarettes, but short enough anyway. That’s why I need you. I’m an artist—an artist with color and line, I mean. But I learned this a long time ago: that the things that make a good stage set—I design stage sets—that’s my job, that’s what I do—will also make a good story.” He paused and said carefully, “I’ve never sold a story for less than $10,000.”

He let that sink in. His eyes fell on the carving knife which Jeff had laid on one of the small tables that held one of the white lamps which lighted the room. “What’s that doing here?” he asked.

“Your bodyguard was chasing the cook with it, so I took it away with me,” said Jeff smoothly, watching with disguised eagerness for Falkoner’s reaction.

Falkoner went over and picked up the knife. Holding it casually in one hand he went to the archway. “Tom!” he called.

He turned back toward them. “So if I don’t hire you I want you to understand that whatever we discuss tonight belongs to me and is not to be used by you in any way.”

Laurel felt a sense of profound indignity in her throat. “We are above plagiarism, Mr. Falkoner, believe me,” she heard herself say.

He met her eyes with his own cold ones. “Good,” he said.

Tom hulked large in the doorway. Falkoner handed him the knife, point first. “Don’t chase Mrs. Lovelace any more,” he commanded. “And tell her we’re ready to eat dinner now, and bring me the contracts.”

“O.K.,” said Tom, and hulked out again with the peculiar tight gait of the muscle-bound.

Falkoner turned back to them. “He has a helluva funny sense of humor,” he explained, his disinterested eyes on the black pane of the window with the night pressing against it. He again went to the fireplace and stood there very solidly on his ridiculous sandals, his hands jammed again into his pockets. The quality in the man that made it hard for him to stay in one place showed itself now in his eyes, which prowled about the room and across their faces while that strained voice struggled with every sentence.

“This play of mine,” he said, “is, I think, pretty different. There’s this woman, you see, and she’s not a type. Nothing chi-chi. Nothing—” He made a groping gesture with one of those dark square hands. “Nothing, well, chi-chi. Except maybe that she’s in love. Two men. One alive, one dead.”

He stopped talking and stared hard at each of them in turn. Laurel stifled a desire to say, I believe that’s been done, you know.

Falkoner went on: “The dead man’s her husband—financial wizard—money begets money—that kind of guy. The other guy is a protégé—” he gave them the word with a little touch of pride in his voice—“of her husband’s. Young doctor. And no Kildare stuff. He’s ten or even twelve years younger than she is, and that’s a new angle, because they’re the love affair. So in order to carry out her husband’s dying wishes, she continues to see that the doctor gets the money for his medical training, which is hard for him to take—not the money so much as the fact that she’s the one who’s giving it to him, because he’s in love with her in a perfectly nice way, but he doesn’t know that the wizard lost most of his fortune in the market crash—did I tell you that? We might open the story with a nice montage of Black Friday, a guy jumping out of a window.”

“Oh, then it’s going to be a movie script,” said Laurel.

Falkoner looked at her hard. “Of course,” he said, irritated and amazed. He looked at Woody and then at Jeff. “Finally, after a lot of things happen, the woman gets together with the doctor. The audience will want that from the start, and finally we give it to them, after a lot of things happen. . . .”

Tom came in with a long sheaf of papers in one hand, the hand that had held the carving knife. “Mrs. Lovelace says dinner gonna be ready in ten minutes. Boy, am I hungry!”

Ignoring him, Falkoner took the sheaf of papers. Tom ambled out. Falkoner dealt each of them a contract. “Read ’em over,” he said almost genially.

Laurel was a little astonished to see her name at the head of the contract, although it had been spelled Bird. She realized at once that he had got their names from the head of the English Department when he telephoned that morning.

“My name is spelled with a y,” she told him.

He came to her side drawing a thick gold fountain pen from his breast pocket. He changed the i to y. “Initial it,” he told her. She dutifully initialed the change, and went on reading.