Puzzle for Wantons Read online

  Puzzle for Wantons

  A Peter Duluth Mystery

  Patrick Quentin

  PART ONE

  DOROTHY

  I

  “My third husband was no gentleman. I shall be glad to get rid of him.” Dorothy Flanders, big and gorgeous and blonde as champagne, slid a sixth shrimp canapé between bougainvillaea lips. “The night before I left for Reno, he chased me all over the apartment with a steak knife.”

  For the last fifteen minutes the luscious Mrs. Flanders had been giving us an uncensored and uncalled-for account of her sex life. My wife was watching her, fascinated. So was I. I had never seen anyone so beautiful who ate so much.

  “Yes, Lieutenant Duluth.” Dorothy Flanders’ swooning blue eyes contemplated space as if it was something delightful to eat. “In a way it was lucky he lost that leg at Saipan. Otherwise he’d have caught up with me. With the steak knife, I mean.”

  I gulped. Iris, whose dark loveliness was rather subordinated by so much massive blondeness, asked politely, “Just why did your third husband chase you with a steak knife, Mrs. Flanders?”

  “Oh, you know how men are, dear.” Mrs. Flanders shrugged shoulders bare and blatant enough to have wrecked the entire Barbary Coast. “I’ve always had trouble with men. Sometimes I wonder why I keep on marrying.”

  After fifteen minutes of her I was wondering how she’d managed to keep one lap ahead of a steak knife all these years.

  Our yellow patio chairs splashed colour on to the evening greyness of the interminable terrace. We were the first of Lorraine Pleygel’s house guests to have dressed for dinner, and the façade of our hostess’ impossible mansion, which was practically all plate glass, was having its own private sunset. Beneath us, beyond the lush gardens, the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe gleamed emerald, like something from Tiffany’s that Lorraine had become bored with and thrown away. The sleek noses of her speedboats were just visible at the dock.

  Less than forty-eight hours before, I had left my ship and eight months of fighting in the Pacific behind me in the mists of San Francisco. This was only the second of my fifteen-days shore leave. Civilian life hadn’t quite come into focus yet. I had forgotten that women like Dorothy Flanders were allowed to exist and that people could still be as idly and ideally rich as Lorraine.

  But even the Pleydel fortune, which had kept Lorraine solvent through the wildest escapades, couldn’t keep this landscape under control. There was too much sky. The barren peaks of the Sierras, indifferent to chic, scowled blackly across the lake. The rough scent of sage drifted in from the foothills, snuffing out the jasmine.

  Nevada had been Nevada long before Lorraine Pleygel had swooped down to woo it with her millions. Like a cowboy wooed by an heiress, it hadn’t bothered to change its denim shirt for her or to clean its nails.

  “Yes,” said Dorothy Flanders suddenly, managing to look voluptuous even as she shovelled ripe olives into a cupped hand. “He said he’d kill me if he ever set eyes on me again. Men are so depressingly jealous. But then women are jealous, too.” She gave me a look of immense candle power as if she had delivered herself of a rare profundity. “I’m frightfully hungry. Where’s Lorraine?”

  Iris said, “She drove to Reno with Chuck Dawson to pick up some other guests from the train.”

  “She’s always dashing off just before meals. What guests?”

  “She didn’t say. Just people from Frisco.”

  “They’ll probably be ghastly women.” Dorothy sighed and stirred inside what there was of her evening gown. “Lorraine has a genius for filling this house with the ghastliest women. I should have stayed on in Reno, had my divorce in peace, and not let her kidnap me. But you know how Lorraine is.”

  I knew exactly how our hostess was. With her pop eyes, her mad hair, and her intense charm, Lorraine Pleygel was not merely the most warmhearted and feather-pated multi-millionairess in existence. She was also an irresistible force.

  In the old days when we had first known Lorraine, I had made a living producing plays on Broadway while my wife was winning respectable critical acclaim as an actress. The War came. I joined the Navy and was transferred to the Pacific Fleet. Iris condescended to a Hollywood offer and came West to be near me. It had seemed the most sensible arrangement at the time. But during the eight months of my latest absence at sea, some studio magnate in a burst of hysterical inspiration had decided that my wife was something for which a war-torn world was hungering. When my ship finally docked for repairs at San Francisco and our long awaited chance for two quiet weeks together came, I found to my dismay that Iris had been ballyhooed into the most reluctant movie star in history.

  Our first day had been a hell of autograph hounds and cameras and telephone pleas for benefits and canteens. Iris had only one piece of war work on her mind—me. But we were beaten before we started.

  After the sixth fan-magazine female had collected material from us for an article to be entitled, “Look to Your Laurels, Brunette-Bombshells,” Iris collapsed.

  “It’s not my fault, darling. I swear it isn’t,” she had moaned. “It just crept up on me after Mr. Finkelstein saw me in a sweater. What a thing to come home to. You married a woman and what are you stuck with? A brunette-bombshell.”

  We were clinging forlornly to each other in the hotel suite, with the receiver off the hook, when Lorraine burst in, both hands outstretched, carolling, “Darling, I hear you’re being mobbed. You poor lamb-pies. Something has got to be done.”

  She lured us with talk of the Nevada moon, the peace of the mountains, the glories of Lake Tahoe, and a private suite of our own.

  “If you want to be alone, pets, you can be alone. If you want fun, there’ll be gay people there. It’s a simply divine idea. The car’s outside.”

  At that particular moment Lorraine seemed sent direct from heaven. Before we really knew what had hit us, we had been shanghaied to this insane Shangri-La which a Wild Western whim had made her build some forty miles from Reno.

  We hadn’t been left alone, of course. We might have known that Lorraine was incapable of leaving anyone alone for a second. Fortunately the other house guests were so obsessed with their own problems that none of them gave a hoot whether Iris was a brunette-bombshell or not.

  Lorraine gathered “gay” people with the indiscriminate abandon of a squirrel gathering nuts. Dorothy Flanders was another victim of our hostess’ passion for having people live at her expense. The week before, in one of her periodic commando raids, Lorraine had descended upon Reno, scoured all the hotels, and returned triumphant with the toothsome Dorothy and the two other divorcee-to-be house guests, Janet Laguno and Fleur Wyckoff. She hadn’t seen any of the girls for ten years, but they had all been at school together in San Francisco. Lorraine had thought it was a divine idea to have them sit out their various divorces under her wing.

  And when Lorraine thought anything was a divine idea, you might as well think it, too, because you’d find yourself doing it.

  “Of course,” said Dorothy Flanders, “I’m devoted to Lorraine and delighted to see her again after all these years. She was a hideous child at school, I remember—all teeth and neck.” She was reduced to eating the olive out of her Martini now. I half expected her to chew up the toothpick, too. “But I must admit I would never have dreamed of coming here if I’d known Janet and Fleur were staying with her.”

  She paused significantly.

  Iris was tapping rather formidably on her chair arm. “Don’t you like the Countess Laguno and Mrs. Wyckoff, Mrs. Flanders?”

  “Oh, yes, I like them. After all, we move in the same set in San Francisco. But—” Dorothy rustled her weight over on to her sheathed left hip, looking like something out of Esquire that you pin up in an army c
amp. “It’s just rather embarrassing, dear. That’s all.”

  I was struggling with the implications of that cryptic utterance when clicking female footsteps sounded behind me. I turned to see the two women in question coming towards us down the flagged terrace.

  Janet Laguno—or the Countess Laguno or whatever she currently called herself—walked several paces in front of little Mrs. Wyckoff. That was her way. She was an angry woman with the wrong figure and a face that looked as if it had defeated the most expensive beauty parlours. She had made a small fortune with an exclusive woman’s dress shop, but she was her own worst advertisement. Clothes hung on her as if they hated her.

  She flopped into a chair and grumbled a greeting. Dorothy, without turning her head, said, “Hello, Janet. That’s a sweet dress.”

  “Phoo. I know I look a mess.” Janet Laguno plucked up a cigarette and scowled at it. “I despise this so-called gown. It makes me feel like a life belt. And my hair’s repulsive. It’s all Stefano’s fault. I saw my lawyer this morning and I’ve been brooding about Stefano all afternoon. Thinking about my husband ages me sixty years. I feel ill.”

  “Nonsense, dear,” drawled Dorothy. “Stefano’s terribly attractive even if you are going to divorce him.”

  “Attractive! He’s a black rat. Bogus, too. Count! Why I call myself a Countess I can’t imagine. If Stefano was ever anything in Italy, he was a swineherd.” Janet Laguno stared at the tall crystal cocktail shaker. “Martinis! I loathe every part of them, but I might as well drink.” She poured herself a cocktail and flourished the glass. “To the happiest day of my life, the day I caught my husband trying to hock my pigeon blood rubies. To Count Stefano Laguno—a sneak thief and a B-feature one to boot.”

  My experience of Reno women was slight, but I was getting on to the idea that husband-reviling was the only fashionable topic of conversation. That was one of the reasons why I liked and was curious about little Fleur Wyckoff. She was so completely atypical.

  She had sat down unobtrusively in a chair next to Iris. Fleur was pretty—just terribly, terribly pretty, like her name—with tawny hair, a spring-flower face and small still hands. She must have been almost thirty to be contemporary with the other divorcees-to-be, but she looked no more than nineteen. Since I had met her, she had never mentioned the husband she was about to dispose of; she had never mentioned much of anything. There was a kind of quiet dread in her eyes as if she was thinking about the same thing all the time and being frightened of it.

  Janet brandished the shaker. “Hi, Fleur, you’re a maladjusted female too. You might as well drink.”

  “Oh, no, thank you. David always makes Martinis a

  special way for me with practically no gin and—” Fleur Wyckoff broke off, a flush burning across the girlish skin of her cheeks. With a flutter of her hands, she stammered, “Oh, yes, I suppose I will have one, please.”

  “I pour liquor into myself,” muttered Janet. “I hang clothes on my back. I stuff food in my stomach. And where does it get me? You, Dorothy! You eat enough in five minutes to keep a good-sized horse alive for a decade. And you still keep the right curves. How do you do it? Pay protection to Satan?”

  A butler—miraculously, Lorraine still had one—came out with another unnecessary shaker of cocktails. Janet Laguno tugged at some refractory part of her dress and asked, “When are you expecting Miss Pleygel back, Bowles?”

  “I really couldn’t say, Madam. But I don’t think she’ll be long. I heard her tell Mr. French and Miss Burnett that dinner was to be at eight.”

  Walter French was Lorraine’s older half-brother. Mimi Burnett was his little horror of a fiancee he had picked up somewhere in Las Vegas.

  As the butler moved pontifically away, Janet said, “Thank heavens we’ve been spared the lovebirds this afternoon. How in the world did Lorraine manage to have such a dreary brother—half elk, half slug. Ugh!”

  “He’s only a half-brother, dear.” Dorothy Flanders yawned. She looked like a beautiful python settling down to a snooze after a nice snack of antelope. “He’s not so bad. He certainly doesn’t deserve to be stuck with Mimi Burnett.”

  “Nobody deserves to be stuck with Mimi,” said Janet. “I know those little elfin things. Stars in their eyes, ants in their pants.”

  Fleur Wyckoff leaned forward rather fiercely. “Janet, why are you two always so beastly about every one? Mr. French has been very kind to me. And I think, Mimi’s sweet.”

  “Sweet!” Janet laughed. “Fleur dear, you could grow up with Lizzie Borden and still say she was sweet to her parents.”

  Dorothy nodded and gave me an automatically seductive smile. “That Mimi Burnett’s a bad character, Lieutenant. A very bad character.”

  I was strongly tempted to say, “You should know,” but I managed to control myself. After several months on the high seas, you’re apt to build up a sentimental and dewy-eyed picture of the little women left behind. I wasn’t used to seeing real little women—in the raw.

  Iris was watching me anxiously. I knew she was worried sick that Lorraine’s house party was going to be as much of a fiasco as San Francisco. She leaned towards me and squeezed my hand. I could smell her perfume, the only perfume I’ve ever liked.

  “Can you bear it, Peter?” she breathed.

  I grinned encouragingly. As a matter of fact, I was rather fascinated by these preposterous women. They had a soothing effect. They were so completely removed from the world of Zeros and submarines in which I had been living.

  “If it gets too grim,” whispered my wife, “I’ll buy a red wig and bands for my teeth and we’ll go back to Frisco.”

  As she spoke, I saw Walter French and Mimi Burnett strolling up through the darkening garden. Lorraine’s half-brother and his fiancée always made an entrance. Mimi saw to that. Tonight they walked with their arms amorously entwined around each other’s waists. Mimi dangled a solitary white rose in her free hand. I was pretty sure she was thinking that we were thinking how fragile she looked—like Mélisande, maybe, or something wispy out of Sir James Barrie.

  Walter French had been unfortunate enough to have been born to Lorraine’s mother by an earlier husband, before she struck it rich with old man Pleygel. He had also been unfortunate enough recently to have lost his slender all in some Hollywood promotion scheme. But life, he seemed to feel, had compensated him for everything by giving him Mimi. Mimi, who was a pain in the neck to everyone else, was the very air he breathed. He had thrown himself body and soul into playing Romeo to her Juliet—a plump Romeo with owlish spectacles and at least forty-five years under his tightening belt.

  They reached the porch, still lovingly interlocked. Mimi stretched out the white rose.

  “Lover and I have been reading W. B. Yeats out loud in the summerhouse, and Lover picked me this rose, didn’t you, Lover?”

  Walter French seemed to thrive on her nauseous habit of calling him “Lover.” He beamed adoringly and said, “Why, sure, Mimi.”

  Mimi drifted from one woman to the other, kissing them with butterfly kisses. She reached me and extended the rose.

  “Smell, Lieutenant Duluth.”

  I smelt. She pirouetted away, clutching the rose intensely against her thin breast and half singing, “Oh, you nice people.”

  She was dressed in some floating pink thing which was meant to look childish and appealing and probably a tiny bit tubercular. It didn’t. She wasn’t quite young enough. And, although her oval face had a certain dark prettiness, its whimsey wasn’t plausible. The trouble, I think, was her eyes. There was something knowing about them—knowing and sly.

  She had perched lightly on the edge of Dorothy’s chaise longue, flapping the rose around. Dorothy stared at her with steely contempt and drawled, “For Pete’s sake, take that revolting rose away or I’ll eat it. Isn’t Lorraine ever coming?”

  “Haven’t she and Chuck come back yet?”

  “No. They’re foraging for more guests.”

  “Oh, I do hope they’re men.” M
imi laid a light hand on Dorothy’s arm and her eyes glinted. “For you, dear.” She tossed back the page bob curls and gazed starrily at her fiancé. “I don’t need men because I have my lover, don’t I, Lover?”

  Janet Laguno made a hawking noise in her throat. Lover beamed again.

  “Why, sure, Mimi.”

  Janet Laguno lit a match with a spurt and snapped, “Lover, why don’t you marry the girl? Then you can get yourself a nice clean divorce like us—and relax. I’ve never read a line of W. B. Yeats, but I should imagine he comes under the general category of extreme mental cruelty.”

  Lover looked shocked. Mimi swung on Janet, the pink skirt swirling around her thin legs. For a split second her face was positively vicious. Then she laughed her high, tinkling laugh and stooped to kiss Janet’s forehead.

  “Cute one,” she said, “you say such amusing things.”

  Somebody might well have scratched out somebody’s else’s eyes if Iris hadn’t said at that moment, “Listen! Isn’t that Lorraine’s car?”

  It was. The throb of its engine, coming up the long drive suddenly made the countryside more important than the people. I was conscious again of the dark, brooding Sierras, the tang of the sage, and the vast blackening dome of the sky above us. I hadn’t realized just how much tension had been engendered on the terrace. We all sat in silence, listening to Lorraine’s automobile coming closer and closer. For some queer reason it sounded ominous. It linked up in my mind with the drone of an approaching enemy plane. It was as if the car were bringing to each of us our individual doom.

  The car stopped at the far side of the great house. Even then, none of us spoke. Soon there were sounds in the living-room, footsteps and the high chattering of Lorraine’s voice. The plate glass things, which were some modernistic variations of French windows, burst open, and Lorraine Pleygel was upon us, the huge swaggering figure of Chuck Dawson behind her.

  Lorraine was wearing a scarlet man’s shirt, denims that might have been four generations old, high leather boots. A ten-gallon hat flopped on a cord behind her wild, cropped curls. She probably wanted to look like a cowhand, but she didn’t. She looked exactly what she was—one of the richest and most publicized women in the country. She swooped towards us.