Death Before Bedtime by Gore Vidal Page B

her negligee. “You don’t want that cold to get worse, do you?”
    Reluctantly she snaked into the blue silk. “I’m very very fond of Ellen,” she said with a brilliant insincere smile. “But you have to admit she’s a law unto herself.”
    I was about to make some crack about their being sisters under the skin when it occurred to me that this might be tactless since, as a matter of fact, they
were
sisters in a way.
    She asked for a cigarette and I gave her one. “Tell me,” she said, exhaling blue smoke, “how long do you think it’ll be before the police end this case?”
    “I haven’t any idea.”
    “But you
are
working with Lieutenant Winters, aren’t you?”
    This was shrewd. “How did you know?”
    “It wasn’t hard to guess. As a matter of fact I caught the tail end of a telephone conversation you were having with some newspaper in New York.” She said this calmly.
    “An eavesdropper!”
    She chuckled. “No, it wasn’t on purpose, believe me; I was trying to call a lawyer I know in the District … you were on this extension, that’s all.”
    “I haven’t any idea,” I said. “About the murder … about how long it’ll be before the police make an arrest.”
    “I hope it’s soon,” she said with sudden vehemence.
    “So do all of us.”
    She was about to say something … then she stopped herself. Instead she asked me about the affair on the landing and I told her that I had seen no one. She looked disappointed. “I suppose it was too dark.”
    I nodded. “Much too dark.”
    She stood up then and arranged her hair in a mirror. I stood beside her, pretending to comb my own hair. I was aware of her reflection in the glass, very pale, with the dark eyes large and strange, staring at me. I shuddered. I thought of those stories about vampires which I had read as a child.
    She turned around suddenly; her face close to mine … her eyes glittering in the light. “You must help me,” she said and her voice was strained.
    “Help?”
    “He’ll try to kill me … I’m sure of it. Just the way he killed my father.”
    “Who? Who killed your father? Who’ll try to kill you?”
    “My husband,” she whispered. Then she was gone.

CHAPTER FOUR
1
    Before breakfast, I composed a communiqué for the readers of the
New York Globe;
then, just as the morning light began to stream lemon yellow across the room, I telephoned it to New York, consciencelessly allowing the Rhodes family to pay for it; I was aware that my conversation was being listened to by a plain-clothes man on an extension wire: I could hear his heavy breathing.
    My story was hardly revelatory but it would, I knew, keep me in business a while longer, and it would also give the readers of the
Globe
the only inside account of how the bereaved family was taking their loss: “Mrs. Rhodes, pale but calm, was supported by her beautiful daughter Ellen Rhodes yesterday at the National Cathedral while thousands.…” It was the sort of thing which some people can turn out by the yard but which I find a little difficult to manage; a mastery of newspaper jargon is not easily come by: you have to have an instinct for the ready phrase, the familiar reference. But I managed to vibrate a little as I discussed, inaccurately, the behavior of the suspects at the funeral.
    I smiled as I hung up the phone and put my notes in the night table drawer; I had thought of a fine sentence: “While your correspondent was attending the funeral services for the late U. S. Senator Leander Rhodes at the Washington Cathedral yesterday morning, a knee belonging to the attractive Camilla Pomeroy of Talisman City, wife of Roger Pomeroy,the munitions maker, was pressed against your correspondent’s knee …”
    I lit a cigarette and thought idly of my session with Mrs. Pomeroy the night before. There had been a faint air of the preposterous about everything she’d said, if not done. The one thing she could do well was hardly preposterous: she was even