Death Before Bedtime Read Online Free

talking as though nothing had happened. I dressed more slowly.
    “Then there’s an old buddy of Father’s staying here, Roger Pomeroy and his wife, a poisonous creature. I don’t know what
they’re
doing here. He’s an industrialist back in Talisman City, makes gunpowder or something like that.…”
    “Sounds like a chummy gathering.”
    “Grim … awfully grim. That tiresome Rufus Hollister,Father’s secretary, also lives in. I have often said that he was the reason I left home. Did you ever feel his hands? like an uncooked filet of sole … which reminds me I’m hungry, which also reminds me I desperately need a drink. Do hurry … here, let me tie your tie … I love tying a man’s tie: gives me such a sense of power when I think with just the slightest pressure I could choke him to death.”
    “Darling, have you ever been analyzed?”
    “Of course. Hasn’t everyone? I went every day for three years after my annulment … Mother insisted. When it was over I was completely normal; I had passed my course with flying colors: no more inhibitions, no frustrations, an easy conscience about alcohol as well as the slightly decrepit body of a middle-aged analyst named Breitbach added to my gallery of conquests.” She finished tying my tie with a flourish which made me jump. “There! You look such a lamb.”
4
    The drawing room was a large draughty affair with French windows which looked out on a bleak garden of formal boxwood hedges and empty flower beds, black with winter. Several people were seated about the fire. Two men rose at our entrance. A woman in black lace rose, too, and approached us. It was Mrs. Leander Rhodes.
    “Mother, I want you to meet my fiancé, Peter Sargeant.”
    “I’m so happy to see you, Mr. Sargeant. I’ve heard such a great deal about you … such a coincidence, too … the Senator engaging you without knowing about you and Ellen.” She was an amiable-looking woman of fifty, thin and rather bent with, as far as I could tell through the swatches of black lace, no bosom and no waist. At her throat old-fashionedyellow diamonds gleamed. Her eyes were black; only her wide full mouth was like her daughter’s. “Let me introduce you around,” she said; and she did.
    Verbena Pruitt was worse than I’d expected: a massive woman in mauve satin with henna-dyed hair, bobbed short over a red fat neck, large features, small pig eyes and a complexion not unlike the craters of the moon as seen through a telescope. She gave my hand a vigorous squeeze. So did Roger Pomeroy, a tall silver-haired man of distinction. His wife, Camilla, a fairly pretty dark woman, smiled at me winningly, one heavily veined hand at her smooth neck, fondling pearls. Ellen’s lovely boy Walter Langdon, a red-haired youth, mumbled something incoherent as we shook hands. He was obviously uncomfortable. And well he should be, I thought righteously, coming into a man’s house like this with every intention of axing him later in a magazine.
    “The Senator and Rufus should be along soon,” said Mrs. Rhodes, as a maid brought Martinis. Ellen gulped one quickly, like a conjurer; then she took another off the tray and held it in one hand, occasionally sipping it in a most ladylike way. Whom was she trying to impress, I wondered. The lovely boy? or her mother? or the assorted politicos?
    At first, I thought that possibly I was the one who was ill at ease but, by the time dinner was over and we were all seated in the drawing room having coffee beneath a virile painting of Senator Rhodes, I decided that something was obviously going all wrong and I surmised that it had to do with Ellen’s unexpected visit to Washington. Yet she was a perfect lady all evening. She was a trifle high by the time dinner was over but she spoke hardly at all … in fact, I’d never before seen her so restrained. The Senator was in good form but I had a feeling that the funny stories he told,and his loud rasping laughter were