Tales of the Black Widowers

  The members can't be women," said Thomas Trum-bull, glowering out of his perpetually tanned face. "Where does it say that a guest can't be a woman?"

  "No," said Rubin sharply, his sparse beard quivering. "Any guest is a member ex officio for the meal and must abide by all the rules, including not being a woman."

  "What does ex officio mean, anyway?" asked Mario Gonzalo. "I always wondered."

  But Henry was already presenting the first course, which seemed to be a long roll of pasta, stuffed with spiced cheese, broiled, and sauce-covered.

  At last Rubin, looking pained, said, "As near as I can make out this seems to be a roll of pasta, stuffed-"

  But by that time, the conversation had grown general and Halsted seized a break to announce that he had his limerick for the third book of the Iliad.

  Trumbull said, "Damn it to hell, Roger, are you going to inflict one of those on us at every meeting?"

  "Yes," said Halsted thoughtfully. "I was planning just that. It keeps me working at it. Besides, you have to have some item of intellectual worth at the dinner. . . . Say, Henry, don't forget that if it's steak tonight, I want mine rare."

  "Trout tonight, Mr. Halsted," said Henry, refilling the water glasses.

  "Good," said Halsted. "Now here it is:

  "Menelaus, though not very mighty,

  Was stronger than Paris, the flighty.

  Menelaus did well in

  The duel over Helen,

  But was foiled by divine Aphrodite."

  Gonzalo said, "But what does it mean?"

  Avalon interposed, "Oh, well, in the third book, the Greeks and Trojans decide to settle the matter by means of a duel between Menelaus and Paris. The latter had eloped with the former's wife, Helen, and that was what caused the war. Menelaus won, but Aphrodite snatched Paris away just in time to save his life. . . . I'm glad you didn't use Venus in place of Aphrodite, Roger. There's too much of the use of Roman analogues."

  Halsted, through a full mouth, said, "I wanted to avoid the temptation of obvious rhyming."

  "Didn't you ever read the Iliad, Mario?" asked James Drake.

  "Listen," said Gonzalo, "I'm an artist. I have to save my eyes."

  It was with dessert on the table that Halsted said, "Okay, let me explain what I have in mind. The last four times we met, there's been some sort of crime that's come up every discussion, and in the course of that discussion, it's been solved."

  "By Henry," interrupted Drake, stubbing out his cigarette.

  "All right, by Henry. But what kind of crimes? Rotten crimes. The first time I wasn't here, but I gather the crime was a robbery, and not much of one either, from what I understand. The second time, it was worse. It was a case of cheating on an examination, for heaven's sake."

  "That's not such a minor thing," muttered Drake.

  "Well, it's not exactly a major thing. The third time- and I was here then-it was theft again, but a better one. And the fourth time it was a case of espionage of some sort."

  "Believe me," said Trumbull, "that wasn't minor."

  "Yes," said Halsted in his mild voice, "but there was no violence anywhere. Murder, gentlemen, murder!"

  "What do you mean, murder?" asked Rubin.

  "I mean that every time we bring a guest, something minor turns up because we take it as it comes. We don't deliberately invite guests who can offer us interesting crimes. In fact, they're not even supposed to offer us crimes at all. They're just guests."

  "So?"

  "So there are now six of us present, no guests, and there must be one of us who knows of some killing that's a mystery and-"

  "Hell!" said Rubin in disgust. "You've been reading Agatha Christie. We'll each tell a puzzling mystery in turn and Miss Marple will solve it for us. ... Or Henry will."

  Halsted looked abashed. "You mean they do things like that-"

  "Oh, God," said Rubin emotionally.

  "Well, you're the writer," said Halsted. "I don't read murder mysteries."

  "That's your loss," said Rubin, "and it shows what an idiot you are. You call yourself a mathematician. A proper mystery is as mathematical a puzzle as anything you can prepare and it has to be constructed out of much more intractable material."

  "Now wait a while," said Trumbull. "As long as we're here, why don't we see if we can dig up a murder?"

  "Can you present one?" said Halsted hopefully. "You're with the government, working on codes or whatever. You must have been involved with murder, and you don't have to name names. You know that nothing gets repeated outside these walls."

  "I know that better than you," said Trumbull, "but I don't know about any murders. I can give you some interesting code items but that's not what you're after. . . . How about you, Roger? Since you bring this up, I suppose you have something up your sleeve. Some mathematical murder?"

  "No," said Halsted thoughtfully, "I don't think I can recall being involved in a single murder."

  "You don't think? You mean there's a doubt in your mind?" asked Avalon.

  "I guess I'm certain. How about you, Jeff? You're a lawyer."

  "Not the kind that gets murderers for clients," Avalon said, with an apparently regretful shake of his head. "Patent complications are my thing. You might ask Henry. He's more at home with crimes than we are, or he sounds it."

  "I'm sorry, sir," said Henry softly as he poured the coffee with practiced skill. "In my case, it is merely theory. I have been fortunate enough never to be involved with violent death."

  "You mean," said Halsted, "that with six of us here- seven, counting Henry-we can't scare up a single murder?"

  Drake shrugged. "In my game, there's always a good chance of death. I haven't witnessed one in the chem lab personally, but there've been poisonings, explosions, even electrocutions. At worst, though, it's murder through negligence. I can't tell you anything about any of them."

  Trumbull said, "How come you're so quiet, Manny? In all your colorful career, you mean you've never had occasion to kill a man?"

  "It would be a pleasure sometimes," said Rubin, "like now. But I don't really have to. I can handle them perfectly well at any size without having to lay a hand on them. Listen, I remember-"

  But Mario Gonzalo, who had been sitting there with his lips clamped tightly together, suddenly said, "I've been involved in a murder."

  "Oh? What kind?" asked Halsted.

  "My sister," he said broodingly, "about three years ago. That was before I joined the Black Widowers."

  "I'm sorry," said Halsted. "I guess you don't want to talk about it."

  "I wouldn't mind talking about it," said Mario, shrugging, his large and prominent eyes looking them all in the face, one by one, "but there's nothing to talk about. No mystery. It's just another one of those things that make this city the fun place it is. They broke into the apartment, tried to loot it, and killed her."

  "Who did?" asked Rubin.

  "Who knows? Addicts! It happens all the time in that neighborhood. In the apartment house she and her husband lived in, there'd been four burglaries since New Year's and it was only the end of April when it happened."

  "Were they all murders?"

  "They don't have to be. The smart looter picks a time when the apartment is empty. Or if someone's there, they just scare them or tie them up. Marge was stupid enough to try to resist, to fight back. There were plenty of signs of a struggle." Gonzalo shook his head.

  Halsted said, after a painful pause, "Did they ever get the ones who did it?"

  Gonzalo's eyes lifted and stared into Halsted's without any attempt at masking the contempt they held. "Do you think they even looked? That sort of thing goes on all day long. Nobody can do anything. Nobody even cares. And if they got them, so what? Would it bring back Marge?"

  "It might keep them from doing it to others."

  "There'd be plenty of other miserable creeps to do it." Gonzalo drew a deep breath, then said, "Well, maybe I'd better talk about it and get it out of my system. It's all my fault, you see, because I
wake up too early. If it weren't for that, maybe Marge would be alive and Alex wouldn't be the wreck he is now."

  "Who's Alex?" asked Avalon.

  "My brother-in-law. He was married to Marge, and I liked him. I think I liked him better than I ever did her, to be truthful. She never approved of me. She thought being an artist was just my way of goofing off. Of course, once I started making a decent living-no, she never really approved of me even then and most of the time she was, meaning no disrespect to the dead, one big pain. She liked Alex, though."

  "He wasn't an artist?" Avalon was carrying the burden of the questioning and the others seemed willing to leave it to him.

  "No. He wasn't much of anything when they married, just a drifter, but afterward he became exactly what she wanted. She was what he needed to get a little push into him. They needed each other. She had something to care for-"

  "No children?"

  "No. None. Unless you want to count one miscarriage. Poor Marge. Something biological, so she couldn't have kids. But it didn't matter. Alex was her kid, and he flourished. He got a job the month he was married, got promoted, did well. They were getting to the point where they were planning to move out of that damned death trap, and then it happened. Poor Alex. He was as much to blame as I was. More, in fact. Of all days, he had to leave the house on that one."

  "He wasn't in the apartment, then?"

  "Of course not. If he was, he might have scared them off."

  "Or he might have gotten killed himself."

  "In which case they would probably have run off and

  left Marge alive. Believe me, I've listened to him list the possibilities. No matter how he slices it, she'd still be alive if he hadn't left that day, and it bothers him. And let me tell you, he's gone to pot since it happened. He's just a drifter again now. I give him money when I can and he gets odd jobs now and then. Poor Alex. He had that five years of marriage when he was really making it. He was a go-getter. Now it's all for nothing. Nothing to show for it."

  Gonzalo shook his head. "What gets me is that the victim isn't the one who gets the worst of it. It's a senseless murder-hell, everything they got in the apartment amounted to no more than about ten, fifteen dollars in small bills-but at least Marge died quickly. The knife was right in the heart. But Alex suffers every day of his life now, and my mother took it hard. And it bothers me, too."

  "Listen," said Halsted, "if you don't want to talk about it-"

  "It's all right. ... I think of it nights sometimes. If I didn't wake up early that day-"

  "That's the second time you said that," said Trumbull. "What's your waking up early got to do with it?"

  "Because people who know me count on it. Look, I always wake up at eight a.m. sharp. It doesn't vary by as much as five minutes one way or the other. I don't even bother keeping the clock by my bed; it stays in the kitchen. It's got something to do with rhythms in the body."

  "The biological clock," muttered Drake. "I wish it worked that way with me. I hate getting up in the morning."

  "It works with me all the time," said Gonzalo, and even under the circumstances, there was a hint of complacence in his voice as he said so. "Even if I go to sleep late-three in the morning, four-I always wake up at exactly eight. I go back to sleep later in the day if I'm knocked out, but at eight I wake up. Even on Sunday. You'd think I'd have the right to sleep late on Sunday, but even then, damn it, I wake up."

  "You mean it happened on a Sunday?" asked Rubin.

  Gonzalo nodded. "That's right. I should have been asleep. I should have been the kind of person people would know better than to wake early Sunday morning- but they don't hesitate. They know I'll be awake, even on Sunday."

  "Nuts," said Drake, apparently still brooding over his difficulties in the morning. "You're an artist and make your own hours. Why do you have to get up in the morning?"

  "Well, I work best then. Besides, I'm time-conscious, too. I don't have to live by the clock, but I like to know what time it is at all times. That clock I have. It's trained, you know. After it happened, after Marge was killed, I wasn't home for three days and it just happened to stop either eight p.m. Sunday or eight a-.m. Monday. I don't know. Anyway, when I came back there it was with the hands pointing to eight as though rubbing it in that that was wake-up time."

  Gonzalo brooded for a while and no one spoke. Henry passed around the small brandy glasses with no expression on his face, unless you counted the merest tightening of his lips.

  Gonzalo finally said, "It's a funny thing but I had a rotten night, that night before, and there was no reason for it. That time of year, end of April, cherry-blossom time, is my favorite. I'm not exactly a landscape artist, but that's the one time I do like to get into the park and make some sketches. And the weather was good. I remember it was a nice mild Saturday, the first really beautiful weekend of the year, and my work was doing pretty well, too.

  "I had no reason to feel bad that day, but I got more and more restless. I remember I turned off my little television set just before the eleven-o'clock news. It was as though I felt that I didn't want to hear the news. It was as though I felt there would be bad news. I remember that. I didn't make it up afterward, and I'm not a mystic. But I had a premonition. I just did."

  Rubin said, "More likely you had a touch of indigestion."

  "All right," said Gonzalo, moving his hands as though to take in and welcome the suggestion. "Call it indigestion. All I know is that it was before eleven p.m. and I went into the kitchen and wound the clock-I always wind it at night-and said to myself, 'I can't go to bed this early,' but I did.

  "Maybe it was too early, because I couldn't sleep. I kept tossing and worrying-I don't remember about what. What I should have done was get up, do some work, read a book, watch some late movie-but I just didn't. I just made up my mind to stay in bed."

  "Why?" asked Avalon.

  "Don't know. It seemed important at the time. God, how I remember that night, because I kept thinking, maybe I'll sleep late because I'm not sleeping now and I knew I wouldn't. I must have dropped off at about four a.m., but at eight I was up and crawled out of bed to get myself breakfast.

  "It was another sunny day. Pleasant and cool, but you knew it was going to have all the warmth of spring with none of the heat of summer. Another nice day! You know it hurts me, now and then, that I didn't tike Marge better than I did. I mean, we got along all right, but we weren't close. I swear I visited them more to be with Alex than to be with her. And then I got a call."

  Halsted said, "You mean a telephone call?"

  "Yes. Eight o'clock of a Sunday morning. Who would make a call at that time to anyone unless they knew the jerk always got up at eight. If I had been asleep and had been awakened, and growled into the mouthpiece, the whole thing would have been different."

  "Who was it?" asked Drake.

  "Alex. He asked if he woke me. He knew he didn't, but he felt guilty calling that early, I suppose. He asked what time it was. I looked at the clock and said, 'It's eight-oh-nine a.m. Of course I'm awake.' I was sort of proud of it, you see.

  "And then he asked if he could come over, because he had had an argument with Marge and had stamped out of the house and didn't want to go back till she had cooled down. ... I tell you, I'm glad I never married.

  "Anyway, if I'd only said no. If I'd only told him I'd had a bad night and I needed my sleep and I didn't want company, he'd have gone back to his apartment. He had no place else to go. And then it all wouldn't have happened. But no, big-hearted Mario was so proud of being an early riser that he said, 'Come on over and I'll fix you coffee and eggs,' because I knew Marge wasn't one for early Sunday breakfasts, and I knew Alex hadn't eaten.

  "So he was over in ten minutes and by eight-thirty I had the scrambled eggs and bacon in front of him, and Marge was alone in the apartment, waiting for murderers."

  Trumbull said, "Did your brother-in-law tell his wife where he was going?"

  Gonzalo said, "I don't think so. I assumed he didn't
. I figure what happened was he stamped out in a fit of rage without even knowing where he was going himself. Then he thought of me. Even if he knew he was going to visit me, he might not have told her. He would figure: Let her worry."

  "All right," said Trumbull, "and then when the junkies came to the door and maybe tried the lock, she figured it was Alex coming back and she opened the door to them. I'll bet the lock wasn't broken."

  "No, it wasn't," said Gonzalo.

  "Isn't Sunday morning a queer time for junkies to make the rounds?" asked Drake.

  "Listen," said Rubin, "they'll do it any time. The craving for drugs knows no season."

  "What was the fight about?" asked Avalon suddenly. "I mean, between Alex and Marge?"

  "Oh, I don't know. A little thing. Alex had done something at work that must have looked bad and that was one thing that Marge couldn't stand. I don't even know what it was, but whatever it was, it must have been a blow at her pride in him and she was sore.

  "The trouble was that Alex never learned to just let her run down. When we were kids, I always did that. I would say, 'Yes, Marge; yes, Marge,' and then she'd run down. But Alex would always try to defend himself and then things would just get worse. That time, most of the night was filled with argument. ... Of course, he says now that if he only hadn't made a federal case out of it, he wouldn't have left, and then none of it would have happened."

  "The moving finger writes,' " said Avalon. "Brooding on these ifs does no good."

  "Sure, but how do you stop, Jeff? Anyway, they had a bad night and I had a bad night. It was as though there were some kind of telepathic communication." "Oh, bull," said Rubin. "We were twins," said Gonzalo defensively. "Only fraternal twins," said Rubin, "unless you're a girl underneath all those clothes." "So what?"

  "So it's only identical twins that are supposed to have this telepathic sympathy, but that's bull, too."

  "Anyway," said Gonzalo, "Alex was with me and I ate and he didn't eat much, and he cried on my shoulder about how hard Marge was on him sometimes, and I sympathized and said, 'Listen, why do you pay so much attention to her? She's a good kid if you'll only not take her seriously.' You know all the consoling things people say. I figured in a couple of hours he'd be talked out and he'd go home and make it up and I'd go out to the park or maybe back to bed. Only in a couple of hours the telephone rang again, and it was the police."