Widow's Web

  THE WIDOW WAS A KILLER . . . .

  MARTIN FENNISTER’S DEATH WAS OFFICIALLY LISTED AS A SUICIDE.

  ANNABELLE, HIS WIDOW, INHERITED A MERE THIRTY THOUSAND.

  THEN GERALD MALLOW DIED IN A MYSTERIOUS AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT.

  HE HAD A LOT OF MONEY AND HE LEFT IT ALL TO HIS BEAUTIFUL SECRETARY.

  THE SECRETARY WAS ANNABELLE!

  THIS IS THE STORY OF A MAN WHO SET OUT TO TRAP ANNABELLE.

  HE SWORE HE’D MAKE HER CONFESS TO DOUBLE MURDER.

  “IT HAS A SMASH ENDING THAT WILL TAKE EVEN THE MOST EXPERIENCED READER OF MYSTERY FICTION BY SURPRISE!”

  —BOSTON HERALD

  THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES . . . .

  SOME WOMEN HAVE A TALENT FOR ATTRACTING MEN. BUT ANNABELLE FENNISTER HAD AN ADDITIONAL FLAIR—A TALENT FOR MURDER.

  JIM TORRANT HAD NEVER MET ANNABELLE WHEN SHE WAS MARRIED TO MARTIN, HIS EX-PARTNER. AFTER MARTIN’S STRANGE DEATH JIM TRIED TO LOOK HER UP. BUT ANNABELLE AND HER HUSBAND’S MONEY HAD DISAPPEARED.

  HE FOLLOWED HER CLOUDY BACK TRAIL UNTIL HE CAUGHT UP WITH HER. BUT INSTEAD OF A GRIEVING WIDOW HE FOUND A WOMAN WHO WAS WAITING FOR ANOTHER INHERITANCE FROM ANOTHER MAN IN HER LIFE WHO HAD JUST DIED.

  IT WAS THEN JIM LEARNED ABOUT THE SECOND “ACCIDENT.”

  IT WAS THEN HE MET ANNABELLE’S SINISTER NEW BOY FRIEND.

  IT WAS THEN HE DISCOVERED A THIRD STIFF WHO HAD STUMBLED INTO THE WIDOW’S WEB.

  WIDOW’S WEB

  Copyright, ©, 1956, by Ursula Curtiss.

  All rights reserved.

  The characters, places, incidents and situations in this book are imaginary and have no relation to any person, place or actual happening.

  Cast of Characters

  JIM TORRANT—A writer and correspondent, he followed a macabre trail in search of his best friend, Martin Fennister

  MRS. POLLY STARK—A Greenwich matron who reluctantly revealed a few clues to Torrant

  MRS. JUDD—Thin, nervous and frantic, she took in roomers and dispensed gossip

  ANNABELLE BLAIR—Martin Fennister’s widow and the late Gerald Mallow’s secretary. She had an instinct for finding men whose deaths were near and profitable

  MARIA ROWAN—Who rented a garage apartment in Chauncy, Massachusetts, for her own very good reasons

  MR. SIMEON—His big, charming voice belied his appearance, and his business in Chauncy was just as challenging

  MRS. PAULETTE KIRBY—Ebullient real-estate agent, in a position to know. too many things about too many people

  MRS. SARAH PARTRIDGE—Housekeeper for Louise and Gerald Mallow, her tenure, like her employers’, did not last long

  CHAPTER 1

  IT DIDN’T LOOK like an afternoon to shake a man’s world. It was made up of February’s standard ingredients: piercing dampness, gray plush sky, country landscape frozen under glass. There seemed to be a threat of sleet or snow in the air; for Torrant, turning into Bolton Road at exactly four o’clock, there was nothing more than that.

  For some reason he didn’t want to analyze, he had left his taxi at the corner of this road on the outskirts of Greenwich, so that he could approach Number 37 on foot. Three years ago, before he had gone abroad as a correspondent, he would have been astonished at the notion of consciously planning an arrival at Martin Fennister’s house. You might be circumspect with other people; it didn’t occur to you with your best and oldest friend.

  But there wasn’t only Martin now, there was Martin’s wife, and he had to keep reminding himself of that. Wives, it was widely recognized, held strong opinions on the subject of old friendships. They went through them briskly, like socks in a basket: this one would do, this one wouldn’t, this one might possibly be made presentable . . .

  Was this it? Torrant, trying moodily to attach a face to Martin’s wife, stopped on the asphalt road, gazing at a house set back on a lawn under leafless trees. But it was in modernistic red cedar, so low that it could only be inhabited by flat-headed dwarfs, and in any case it was Number 33. Torrant left Martin’s wife’s face blank, because she looked better that way, and walked on.

  Photographs by Fennister, text by Torrant: before Korea and the separate offers that neither of them could turn down, and in spite of the friendship that usually made such arrangements impracticable, they had made a trademark out of that in the country’s leading magazines. They went wherever there was something for Martin’s cameras or Tarrant’s typewriter—to a hospital waiting room, a comer on Broadway, a Florida fruit grove on the first night of frost. What they covered wasn’t news, but they made it news.

  Like the twenty years they had known each other, it had been much more than satisfactory.

  At Number 35 a chow on a chain gave Torrant a meaning look. The chain was heavy and Torrant gave him an equally cold stare back as he walked past and turned in, twenty yards farther along, at an opening in a thick tall privet hedge.

  The Fennister house sat well back from the road on a slight rise of lawn. It was gray, shuttered in white, and there were tubs of something green and glossy flanking the white door above a stone stair railed in black iron. It wasn’t a big house, but it had a look of grace and space under the trees at its back. The lights were on against this bleak afternoon, and with any luck there would be an open fire.

  Torrant went up the flagged path, mounted the stone steps and used the knocker, suddenly aghast at the notion that his wire might not have gotten here after all. The knocker fell with a shattering sound in the icy graying afternoon. From the depths of the house, someone began to approach.

  Martin—or Martin’s wife?

  The white door swung in, and a woman in a red wool dress stood there. Torrant rearranged all his ideas in a twinkling; he had tried a number of faces on Martin’s wife, but he hadn’t tried one like a cheerful rosy child’s, plump and round-eyed under glossy dark bangs. She was staring at him in equal surprise. She said in a tone of amiable reproach, “Oh dear, I thought you were Greg.”

  There must be a party, then, which was the last thing he had expected. Torrant told her his name and saw her face change. He said, sharply uncomfortable because she stood just inside the house and he stood just outside it, “I sent a wire this morning but it must have gone astray. Is—”

  He got no further, because the woman in the doorway said eagerly, “Oh, but we did get your wire—or rather, it came to this address. We didn’t know what to do about it, there didn’t seem to be any way to let you know . . . Our name is Westing, you see, and we’ve lived here about a year now. Ever since Mr. Fennister died.”

  She couldn’t, or after a startled glance at his face wouldn’t, tell him much more than that. Torrant walked past her and into the little hall, curiously blank with shock but unable to thank her politely and go. He still thought there had been some fantastic mistake, some gruesome error that they would all laugh about later; he went on thinking that until the woman said sympathetically, “It must be such a shock, finding out like this.”

  “Martin Fennister?” said Torrant, knowing in the bottom of his mind that Fennister was not a name like Smith. “A photographer, about my age?”

  “And very thin, with glasses,” Mrs. Westing said; she was nodding, with an expression that he didn’t understand. “We didn’t know him personally, but we’d had our eye on this house for some time. After he—after it happened, my husband said we oughtn’t to let it make any difference, just simply forget it and rise above—”

  Torrant turned a savagely pale face to her, and she stopped. In that tiny interval he absorbed details that would be a long time in the washing out: flowered wallpaper, a bowl full of green glossy leaves at the foot of a stairway, a brass ashtray shaped like a fish on the table beside it. Then Mrs. Westing was saying defensively and a little angrily, “Well, af
ter all, he did do away with himself.”

  Do away with himself. Could you, wondered Torrant in the bleak silence of his own mind, find an uglier little phrase? But he couldn’t fight with it, couldn’t give way to the explosive denial inside him, because this woman was obviously repeating what she believed. She couldn’t know how alive Martin Fennister had been behind that shy nearsighted look, how sardonically amused at the people who took him so often for an earnest and bumbling scholar, or how these same people let their guards down, usefully, before a camera with Martin behind it . . .

  She couldn’t know, but all at once she said the thing that made the fantasy believable. She said, “He—Mr. Fennister— was ill, you know. He’d been to a doctor and found out it was something incurable.”

  Not quite half an hour after he had entered it, Torrant walked back along Bolton Road. A flutter of snow was drinking up the dregs of the light. He had left his gloves behind him in the house where Martin had died; conscious of the cold after a while, he thrust his hands into his pockets.

  Everybody had a private nightmare. For some people it was poverty, for others old age. For Martin Fennister it had been the prospect of a long and hopeless illness—confinement to a bed, a growing helplessness, tiptoeing friends telling reassuring lies. In his more sombre moods, he would look upon being struck by lightning as the happiest thing that could happen to a man.

  If he had learned that death had already begun inside him, it was logical that he would have shortened the process.

  Torrant went back to his hotel, realizing from the fatigue that struck him in his room that it had been a three-mile walk through the snowy dark. He went down to the bar and had the drink he had expected to share with Martin and his wife, and then another drink, purely on his own, and a sandwich. He went through these processes blankly and so mechanically that he was even able to hold up one end of a sagging conversation with the bartender.

  He stayed blank until he remembered the factor that had loomed so large to him on his way to the house, and that had vanished from his mind so completely—Martin’s wife. He would get in touch with her, see if there was something he could do.

  Torrant was not a keeper of documents, and it was only after he lay in bed that her name came back to him, announced in a postcard from Martin—his usual brief means of communication—eighteen months ago. Annabelle. Annabelle Blair . . .

  At close to two o’clock in the morning he switched on the light, took a reprint from the collection in his suitcase and read grimly until his eyes burned. He slept then, but lightly; he kept walking up Bolton Road on his eager way to a dead man.

  The local newspapers of a year ago had covered Martin Fennister’s suicide amply. There was a photograph of Martin, a shy spectacled stranger, and there were the contents of two notes: the one for his wife, which said simply, “I’m sorry,” and the meticulous statement for the Medical Examiner, describing the kind and amount of sleeping pills he had swallowed “for reasons concerning my health.” There was the story of how Martin had taken his wife into New York that day for some shopping before a dinner date with friends, advising her to go on alone in case he were delayed by a business assignment, not leaving Grand Central himself but taking the next train back to Greenwich to do what he had decided to do.

  There was almost nothing about the former Annabelle Blair. She was referred to several times as the “attractive wife of six months,” but attractive in newspaper parlance could mean anything or nothing. There was certainly no clue as to her future plans.

  But, toward the end of the longest account, Torrant found the name he had been thinking about vaguely ever since he had learned of Martin’s illness: Dr. William L. Davies. People sometimes kept in touch with their doctors, for one reason or another, even after they had moved away. Torrant left the library files and went in search of a phone book.

  Dr. Davies, sixtyish with a tailored brown face and a sophisticated minimum of snow-white hair, apologized brusquely for making Torrant wait. Torrant explained himself and his errand, and Davies shook his head. He hadn’t heard from Mrs. Fennister since the inquest; he knew the house had been sold but he had no idea where she had moved. Very sad case, said Davies, already beginning to interest himself in various papers on his desk; very sad.

  Torrant was acutely aware that he himself was sitting where Martin had sat, hearing the diagnosis he couldn’t face. He said persistently, “The newspapers used a medical phrase, mostly Latin. What exactly was the matter with Martin Fennister?” and the brown face swung up again, startled.

  Davies seemed to hesitate. Then he said half to himself, “All a matter of public record . . . Mr. Fennister was suffering from a disease of the liver, hard to spot in the early stages and therefore somewhat—”

  “How long,” Torrant interrupted him in a voice that sounded shockingly bald in this well-carpeted office, “before it would have killed him?”

  “It wouldn’t have killed him,” said Davies.

  Torrant stared in complete silence. Davies said, “It called for an operation—not too complex, as it happens—and three or four weeks of bed rest at home. That’s all. The unfortunate part is that now and then a patient—like Mr. Fennister— starts looking up terms in a dictionary, takes to brooding until he thinks himself into a hopeless state. In his particular case, of course—” The voice went smoothly on.

  And Torrant very nearly missed it, the thing that undid all the logic and wiped out the resignation.

  He had risen, he was on his way to the door because suddenly he hated this and, close as he had been to Martin, it seemed unpleasantly like prying. Davies’ voice followed him, saying, . . understandable after Mrs. Fennister filled in the background for me. About his father. It leaves a frightful mark on a child, seeing someone he loves drag through a long and painful illness . .

  Partly because of his thunderclap reaction, Torrant was able to leave without laughing in the brown and faintly pompous face, without shouting that Martin Fennister’s father had died peacefully and obliviously of a heart attack on the eighteenth hole.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHAT HAD HE FOUND OUT?

  Torrant walked mechanically back through the snowy streets, sorting out facts and looking at them singly, trying not to add them up too soon.

  Annabelle Blair—his mind went on calling her that, refusing her Martin’s name—had told two flat and astonishing lies. John Fennister’s death had been an instant and not a lingering thing, and Martin, the “child” of Dr. Davies’ commiserating tones, had been twenty-six at the time.

  She had volunteered these lies in a private visit to the doctor’s office after he had told Martin his verdict. Filling in the background, Davies had called it—but filling it in with deliberate falsity. Because certainly telling a man’s doctor that his father had died of the same disease before him, when he had not, was something more than a slip of the tongue.

  Unless Annabelle Blair were a pathological liar, she had done this with a purpose of her own in mind. Torrant pulled his mind grimly away from conjecture and looked at the other side of the shield.

  Martin had been informed by Davies that he was suffering from a rare disease of the liver, that he would have to undergo surgery and a definite period of convalescence before it could be cured. The monster in Martin’s mind was a fear of something that could not be cured; he would never have killed himself rather than face an operation and a month’s enforced rest.

  But he had.

  Torrant lay stretched on his bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to match up his bleak little facts. It was, he thought, like trying to put together something you had dropped, that out of what had looked like two clean pieces there was a sliver missing.

  What was the sliver?

  ‘Background,’ Davies said in another echo. Background, in one sense, was used to set a scene, create a mood, provide a convincing frame for actions to take place within it. Had Annabelle Blair used it in that sense? Had she then . . .

  Torrant got up
off the bed abruptly, because all at once he wanted to be moving, to shake off the dark irrational thing he had glimpsed in Davies’ office. It wouldn’t be shaken off; by wondering, he had invited it into his own mind, and it grew.

  The two significant lies which Annabelle Blair had told Martin’s doctor were pointless unless she had lied to Martin too. To give her private visit any purpose at all, she would have to have returned home to tell Martin that Davies had kept the truth from him, that the operation was only a gesture and there was really no hope of a cure. Then, because Martin would have been fighting for his life without knowing it, she would have had to begin dropping hints about his probable future, the tiny seeds that would flower up so blackly in Martin’s mind.

  And when Martin finally killed himself, the scene would already have been set, the mood created. His doctor would shake his head ruefully at the routine investigation, and talk about the effect of a suffering parent on an impressionable child . . .

  Told to anybody else, it would have been the wildest kind of conjecture. Inside Torrant’s own brain, it was no longer a flashing thought or a slow deliberate marshalling of logic. It was a solid and sickening truth, or so close to the truth that the mechanics didn’t matter. Martin’s wife had brought about his death because she wanted it, by turning his weakness into a weapon of killing strength.

  Murder? Not in a legal sense perhaps, because Martin had made the ultimate decision and swallowed the sleeping pills. Annabelle Blair had withheld her hand, content to let the silences, the nights, perhaps a solicitous word here and there, do her work for her. But murder nevertheless, in a particularly terrifying shape.

  Hotel rooms were not built for pacing: bed and writing desk, armchair and waste-basket made a cunning obstacle course. Torrant was standing thwartedly still at the window, going through various depths of shock, when his telephone rang.