“Guess.”
“Oh, I can guess. But you’re much too intelligent to think you can get anywhere, because,” Annabelle Blair said, “you can t.
She left the mantel and walked toward him. A portion of Torrant’s attention noticed that the pale eyes were no longer blank; it was as though she had come out of hiding to fight. “Martin was ill. He bought the sleeping pills himself. He went back to an empty house and thought about what he was doing and swallowed them. And,” said Annabelle. meeting Torrant’s gaze levelly, “with all your talk, there isn’t a thing you can do about it,‘Mr. Torrant.”
CHAPTER 17
“THERE ARE A couple of things I can do about it,” Torrant said, calm against the pounding at his temples. “Not about Martin. About you.”
Annabelle gave him a waiting look. The pretenses were gone between them; she was openly pitting her wits against his. Torrant lit a cigarette deliberately. “I’m a free agent— and I can go where you go. I can see that your neighbors, or your apartment-house superintendent or the people you try to make your friends, know how you arrived at being a widow.”
“Nobody would believe you,” said Annabelle, but she seemed to have withered a little.
“Try it and see. People like to believe the worst, it livens things up for them. When there’s something more than rumor attached to it, and when three other people connected with you have died in short order, it’s really something to whisper about. And edge away from. Of course,” said Torrant invitingly, “you could always sue me.”
Annabelle’s lips tightened at the mocking air of that; her eyes with their new brilliance and rocus went narrow. “You don’t seriously think you could—”
“Or,” Torrant went on as though she hadn’t spoken, “I can go back to the doctor in Greenwich—‘what was his name? Davies.”
Annabelle relaxed a trifle; the glance she gave him was tinged with contempt. “Surely you know, Mr. Torrant, that doctors never allow themselves to be involved?”
“Well, hardly ever,” Torrant said, staying calm. “On the other hand, when Davies talked to me about Martin’s ‘traumatic experience’ at his father’s death, he was obviously riding a hobby-horse. There must have been some official queries. I’m certainly not the only person he explained to about the . . . what was it? ‘Effects of a parent’s suffering on an impressionable child’—a child of twenty-six, by the way. Davies might very well feel outraged if he saw a photostat of John Fennister’s death certificate, showing a coronary seizure. He didn’t look like a man who enjoys being made a fool of.”
He could almost see Annabelle’s brain exploring this, not quite convinced but not liking it, trying to twist it this way and that so it would take a different shape. She wet her lips; she said with triumph, “Martin was—irrational. The verdict said so, didn’t it? Suicide while of unsound mind. The shock of what the doctor told him confused him so that he—”
“He didn’t know what his own father died of, or when?” Torrant asked her softly. He bent to deaden his cigarette. “I’d stay away from that if I were you, Annabelle. It’s a very leaky boat.”
She made one last desperate try; she even managed the outlines of a smile. “Aren’t you weakening your own case, Mr. Torrant? After all, a proven suicide, a fatal car crash, an accidental drowning . . . Even Dr. Davies—or should I say especially Dr. Davies?—is going to suspect that you have an obsession.”
“I have,” Torrant said deliberately, and walked toward her. He watched one of her hands go up to grip the mantel edge; the other curled itself slowly and rigidly at her side. It reminded him of an innocent-looking weapon. He said, “You got away with Martin, at the time. And Mrs. Partridge went down without a ripple, didn’t she? Wouldn’t it be ironic if it were Gerald and Louise Mallow who caught up with you?” He thought back to the alert and waiting poise of Simeon’s head, the hard curiosity behind Mrs. Kirby’s affable blue gaze. He said, “They might, you know, any day now, and save me the trouble,”
Silence, except for the scrape of a bush at one of the gray windows. Nothing moved in the room except a strand of light that appeared briefly on the rug, stirred waterily as the willows stirred and vanished again. Annabelle Blair was in a corner at last, but after a single glance at the closed eyes in the white face, Torrant found that he didn’t want to examine the details.
Had some of Maria Rowan’s distaste for this rubbed off on him, or was it the utter blankness of the woman at the mantel that left him with a tired anger in place of exultation? He had expected her to defy him, he had hoped that she would plead with him; he hadn’t counted on this air of resignation. She might have been an animal, neither tame nor hostile, caught up with by the hunter and waiting simply to be destroyed.
Or was it less simply a trick, a disarming tactic by a master of tactics? The mind behind the closed eyelids might be up to almost anything. Torrant was suddenly and almost literally sick of Annabelle Blair; he walked away from her and put on his coat.
“Mr. Torrant . . .”
It wasn’t as though he had really trusted that cornered pose. Torrant stopped on his way to the door and gazed at her, grimly inquiring. Her eyes were brilliant and busy again, as if she had used that hidden instant to draw on an ace in the | hole. An offer to pay him? A deal of some kind, certainly; he could see as well as hear the deep breath she drew. He said harshly, “Whatever it is, no,” and walked past her.
Behind him, she said coolly, “What do you
