would.”
“Then-” He swallowed it. What had started for his tongue was probably, “Then you persist in this pigheaded perversity,” or something stronger, but he knew darned well he had asked for it, and there was company present. You may be thinking that the bundle of bills was also present, but I doubt if that was a factor. I have heard him turn down more than a few husbands, and more than a few wives, who had offered bigger bundles than that one if he would get them out of bliss that had gone sour. No. He knew he had lost the round, and knew that I knew it, but he wasn’t going to admit it in front of a stranger.
“Very well,” he said. He pushed his chair back, got up, and told Jarrell, “You will excuse me. Mr. Goodwin will know what information he needs.” He circled around the red leather chair and marched out.
I sat at my desk, got notebook and pen, and swiveled to the client. “First,” I said, “all the names, please.”
Chapter 2
I CAN’T UNDERTAKE TO make you feel at home in that Fifth Avenue duplex penthouse because I never completely got the hang of it myself. By the third day I decided that two different architects had worked on it simultaneously and hadn’t been on speaking terms. Jarrell had said it had twenty rooms, but I think it had seventeen or nineteen or twenty-one or twenty-three. I never made it twenty. And it wasn’t duplex, it was triplex. The butler, Steck, the housekeeper, Mrs. Latham, and the two maids, Rose and Freda, slept on the floor below, which didn’t count. The cook and the chauffeur slept out.
Having got it in my notebook, along with ten pages of other items, that Wyman, the son, and Lois, the daughter, were Jarrell’s children by his first wife, who had died long ago, I had supposed that there were so many variations in taste among the rooms because Jarrell and the first wife and the current marital affliction, Trella, had all had a hand at it, but was set right on that the second day by Roger Foote, Trella’s brother. It was decorators. At least eight decorators had been involved. Whenever Jarrell decided he didn’t like the way a room looked he called in a decorator, never one he had used before, to try something else. That added to the confusion the architects had contributed. The living room, about the right size for badminton, which they called the lounge because some decorator had told them to, was blacksmith modern-black iron frames for chairs and sofas and mirrors, black iron and white tile around the fireplace, black iron and glass tables; and the dining room, on the other side of an arch, was Moorish or something. The arch itself was in a hell of a fix, a very bad case of split personality. The side terrace outside the dining room was also Moorish, I guess, with mosaic tubs and boxes and table tops. It was on the first floor, which was ten stories up. The big front terrace, with access from both the reception hall and the lounge, was Du Pont frontier. The tables were redwood slabs and the chairs were chromium with webbed plastic seats. A dozen pink dogwoods in bloom, in big wooden tubs, were scattered around on Monday, the day I arrived, but when I went to the lounge at cocktail time on Wednesday they had disappeared and been replaced by rhododendrons covered with buds. I was reminded of the crack George Kaufman made once to Moss Hart-“That just shows what God could do if only he had money.”
Jarrell’s office, which was called the library, was also on the first floor, in the rear. When I arrived with him, Monday afternoon, he took me straight there after turning my luggage over to Steck, the butler. It was a big square room with windows in only one wall, and no decorator had had a go at it. There were three desks, big, medium, and small. The big desk had four phones, red, yellow, white, and black; the medium one had three, red, white and black; and the small one had two, white and black. All of one wall was occupied by a battery of steel filing cabinets as tall as me. Another was covered by shelves to the ceiling, crammed with books and magazines; I found later that they were all strictly business, everything from
Jarrell led me across to the small desk, which was the size of mine at home, and said, “Nora, this is Alan Green, my secretary. You’ll have to help me show him the ropes.”
Nora Kent, seated at the desk, tilted her head back to aim a pair of gray eyes at me. Her age, forty- seven, was recorded in my notebook, but she didn’t look it, even with the gray showing in her soft brown hair. But the notebook also said that she was competent, trustworthy, and nobody’s fool, and she looked that. She had been with Jarrell twenty-two years. There was something about the way she offered a hand that gave me the feeling it would be more appropriate to kiss it than to grip it, but she reciprocated the clasp firmly though briefly.
She spoke. “Consider me at your service, Mr. Green.” The gray eyes went to Jarrell. “Mr. Clay has called three times. Toledo operator seven-nineteen wants you, a Mr. William R. Bowen. From Mrs. Jarrell there will be three guests at dinner; the names are on your desk, also a telegram. Where do you want me to start with Mr. Green?”
“There’s no hurry. Let him get his breath.” Jarrell pointed to the medium-sized desk, off to the right. “That’s yours, Green. Now you know your way here, and I’ll be busy with Nora for a while. I told Steck-here he is.” The door had opened and the butler was there. “Steck, before you show Mr. Green to his room take him around. We don’t want him getting lost. Have you told Mrs. Jarrell he’s here?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jarrell was at his desk. “Don’t come back, Green. I’ll be busy. Get your bearings. Cocktails in the lounge at six-thirty.”
Steck moved aside for me to pass, pulled the door shut as he backed out, said, “This way, sir,” and started down the corridor a mile a minute.
I called to him, “Hold it, Steck,” and he braked and turned.
“You look harassed,” I told him. He did. He was an inch taller than me, but thinner. His pale sad face was so long and narrow that he looked taller than he was. His black tie was a little crooked. I added, “You must have things to do.”
“Yes, sir, certainly, I have duties.”
“Sure. Just show me my room.”
