Time of Terror by Hugh Pentecost Page A

were are what I can’t talk about, Mark, beyond saying that Cleaves found enough money to save himself from a public bankruptcy and a scandal. Where it came from is what concerns me. I think I can tell you that I’m certain he sold information which came his way as a trusted public servant to foreign interests. I think, in short, he is guilty of treason. I don’t yet have the proof that would hang him.”
    “Connie is my concern,” I reminded him.
    “It was in this time when he had to cover up a theft or be exposed that the marriage fell apart,” Andrews said. “My guess is that Cleaves went to Buck Ames and was turned down flat. The old buccaneer had always been openly unfriendly to his son-in-law. I don’t know the reasons for that, except that Ames is a man of passionate likes and dislikes, passionate pleasures, passionate grudges and animosities. Cleaves was on his enemy list, and I think he refused flatly to help, even to save Connie from going down with the ship. It was after that Cleaves began, discreetly enough as far as the public was concerned, to enjoy the company of other women, all kinds of women. I know for certain that he flaunted them in front of Connie. He actually brought them home to his own house and made love to them with Connie and the children there on another floor.”
    “And Connie put up with it?” I asked, hardly believing.
    “She put up with it for a long time,” Andrews said. He was frowning at the ash on his cigarette. “I got to talk to a maid in the household who left because Cleaves found her conveniently attractive. She didn’t understand why or how Connie could take it. She did tell me that she overheard a breakfast table conversation at which Connie protested on account of the children and Cleaves told her she would damn well take it and like it or she knew what he would do to her.”
    “What?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” Andrews said. “But he has some hold on her that is something a good deal more than custody of the children. And at that time, Mark, take notice that there wasn’t the slightest hint from any source that Connie was anything but a faithful and dutiful wife.”
    “At that time? So there was a later time?”
    Andrews nodded slowly. “How much can a woman take, laughed at, degraded in front of a collection of cheap trollops? There was a man, an attractive young fellow in the Foreign Secretary’s office. He’d come to parties at the Cleaves house in the days before all these horrors started. Connie ran into him somewhere, broke down and told him her troubles, and needing love and sympathy, wound up in his bed. For some reason Cleaves must have had his wife watched. He broke into the young man’s house, gave him an unmerciful beating that hospitalized him for months, and dragged Connie, wrapped only in a sheet, out onto the street and into his car. Right after that Connie began to be seen everywhere with a collection of men, different ones every night, making something of a public display of herself.” Andrews put out his cigarette. “I dug into this as far as I could, Mark, and I came to the conclusion that this was all window dressing. I couldn’t find a shred of evidence that she was ever seriously involved with any of these men. The gossip Priest reported to you was very real. But I’d bet my last shilling that Connie was putting on a show and not sleeping with half the young males in London.”
    “Why would she put on such a show?” Martha asked.
    “Punishment,” Andrews said. “When an attractive woman like Connie belongs to a man and starts running around in public with dozens of others—” He shrugged. “People certainly must have wondered what was wrong with Cleaves. Great athlete, national hero, why couldn’t he satisfy his wife?”
    “But none of these boy friends come to mind as someone she might turn to in trouble? What about the first one, the one Cleaves clobbered?” I asked.
    “Poor fellow got one of the ghastly far-out