Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense Read online

  Caspary, born and raised in Chicago, is likely best known for her 1943 novel Laura, about a private detective’s obsession with a portrait of the titular missing woman. The film adaptation was released the following year starring Gene Tierney as Laura and Clifton Webb as her sinister nemesis Waldo Lydecker. (A stage version premiered in 1946.) The book marked a turning point for Caspary, who previously published more mainstream fiction; from then on she devoted her fiction to suspense tales like Bedelia (1945), The Murder in the Stork Club (1946), and The Weeping and the Laughter (1950), a national bestseller when published in 1950. After Goldsmith’s death in 1964, Caspary kept publishing, though she never quite reached the heights of her pre- and postwar heyday.

  Though she didn’t write many short stories, the majority of those, too, dealt with the highs and lows of women reaching for independence. “Sugar and Spice,” first published in 1943 by The American magazine, is an inverted detective story. Though it follows the trajectory of a police procedural, as the detective in question looks into the murder of a young actress, the story is told from the perspective of his wife, and delves into the relationship between the actress and her close friend and sometimes rival. Caspary evokes the theatrical milieu as one wise and well-versed in its ways, and applies great psychological depth to the thorny relationship between friends, which may be decidedly more sinister.

  SUGAR AND SPICE

  ___________________

  I HAVE never known a murderer, a murder victim, nor anyone involved in a murder case. I admit that I am a snob, but to my mind crime is sordid and inevitably associated with gangsters, frustrated choir singers in dusty suburban towns, and starving old ladies supposed to have hidden vast fortunes in the bedsprings. I once remarked to a friend that people of our sort were not in the homicide set, and three weeks later heard that her brother-in-law had been arrested as a suspect in the shooting of his rich uncle. It was proved, however, that this was a hunting accident and the brother-in-law exonerated. But it gave me quite a jolt.

  Jolt number two came when Mike Jordan, sitting on my patio on a Sunday afternoon, told me a story which proved that well-bred, middle-class girls can commit murder as calmly as I knit a sock, and with fewer lumps in the finished product. Mike had arrived that morning for an eleven o’clock breakfast, and after the briefest greeting had sat silent until the bells of San Miguel started tolling twelve.

  This was unusual. Mike was not the taciturn type. But he was independent almost to a point of arrogance and disliked asking favors. This I learned was the cause of the brooding silence. There is no greater favor you can ask a California hostess than the use of her telephone for a New York call.

  I sat without speaking until the bells were still. Mike pulled out a roll of bills that reminded me of the old movie gangsters.

  “Let me pay you now, Lissa. I don’t want to make this call from the Officers Club. It may take two or three hours to get through, and there are always too many fellows waiting to use the phones. Believe me, this is a case of life and death.”

  When he put the call through I disappeared. A few minutes later Mike found me on the patio with the watering can in my discreet hands. It was a brilliant day, the wind high, the air sweet with the scent of sage and mimosa. Bees floated above the geraniums, and the cactus was coated with a film of silver dust. Loathing sunshine, Mike pulled a canopied chair into the shade of the pepper tree. He had the light skin that burns easily and a thick crop of flaming hair.

  “Would you like to know who killed Gilbert Jones?”

  My watering can clattered on the flagged floor of the patio. According to the latest reports, Gilbert Jones’s death was still baffling the New York police. It was one of those conspicuous murders that take up front-page space usually reserved for the biggest war news. Gilbert Jones had been a leading New York actor who had also played in a few pictures, and there were two women involved in the case, one beautiful, the other a millionaire. They were cousins, and had both been in love with Gilbert Jones.

  “How do you know who killed him?”

  We were alone that Sunday afternoon. My husband was on duty at the Post and an eighth of a mile separated us from the nearest neighbor. Although there was no one closer than the passengers in the pygmy cars on the highway below our hill, Mike spoke softly. This story was close to his heart. . . .

  • • •

  Mike Jordan’s mother was the sort of woman who, when she learned she was to have a child, looked at beautiful pictures and listened to great music. As a result, Mike grew up to make family gatherings more than usually hideous by his renditions of The Melody in F and Rachmaninoff’s Prelude. His first music teacher had been a German, the local professor; when he died Mike took lessons from Mrs. Coles, a faded blonde with brown eyes, crimped hair, and a pair of pearl-button earrings which Mike was certain she wore when she bathed and slept.

  Everybody in town felt sorry for Mrs. Coles because her husband had deserted her, and admired her because she supported herself when she might easily have depended upon rich relations. To Mike her independence seemed a bit rueful. At every lesson the piano students were made aware that she had been bred for better things than the career of music teacher. She had a lovely daughter to whom her gallant laments must have been as much part of the daily routine as the students’ finger exercises.

  One day—Mike was about sixteen at the time—Mrs. Coles interrupted a Chopin Nocturne by announcing, “Phyllis is so fond of you, Michael. She looks up to you with the greatest respect.”

  Mike’s fingers crashed down upon the keyboard as though he were working on Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. He had always admired the piano teacher’s daughter. She was very fair, with great, glowing dark eyes.

  “She has something to ask you,” Mrs. Coles continued. “But she’s shy and has asked me to approach you first. I reminded her of the Courtship of Miles Standish and said, ‘Why don’t you speak for yourself, Phyllis?’ but she said the tables were turned because John Alden was a man. A clever child, don’t you think? So I wonder, Michael”—Mrs. Coles hesitated, adjusting a pearl earring—“if you’d like to escort Phyllis to Nancy Miller’s party. It’s to be at the club, a bit ostentatious, in my opinion, for such young people, but Nancy’s mother, although she is my own sister, likes show. Perhaps you will enjoy it.”

  The invitation flattered and puzzled him. Nancy Miller was almost a legend in the town, a girl who went to fashionable boarding schools and spent her summers in Europe or at seashore resorts. There was hardly a profitable industry in the town that did not belong in some fashion to her father. They had a big place—an estate, the town called it—a couple of miles out on the river.

  Mike’s mother suggested that he might have been invited because he had won an interstate essay contest and had his picture in a Chicago newspaper. Mike laughed scornfully. Phyllis Coles might have had as her escort the senior class president or the captain of the football team. The prize essay had provided him with a sporty new outfit, white ducks and a blue Norfolk jacket. He was reading Schnitzler at the time, fancied himself a man of the world, and wondered if he dared appear with a carnation in his buttonhole.

  On the day of the party he got as far as the door of Nick Scarpas’s flower store on Main Street, but there his courage failed. He arrived at the Coles house just as if he had come for a music lesson and, as the door was always open, walked in. Through yellow silk portieres he heard shrillness and sobbing. What, he asked himself, would a man of the world do in the circumstances? He trifled with the idea of sneaking away, returning, and announcing himself with a dignified knock. Then an inspiration visited him. He struck a pose beside the piano and began playing with one hand carelessly. No man of the world could have done it better.

  The yellow drapes parted, Mrs. Coles skipped into the room, adjusted an earring. “How prompt, Michael! Phyllis isn’t quite ready. Will you wait?”

  Presently Phyllis came out.
Her nostrils and the edges of her eyes, Mike noticed, were faintly pink. As they walked to the club she seemed more remote than ever. The month was June, the twilight fragrant. In every yard roses and iris bloomed, and bushes were garlanded with bridal wreath. Phyllis seemed as frail as a flower in a cloudy blue dress embroidered all over with small pink nosegays.

  They walked timidly up the path that led to the club’s great door and entered slowly. As they crossed the lobby a swarthy crone seized Phyllis and shouted, “Isn’t she lovely?” Mike saw a witch’s face rouged to the eyes, which were as black and hard as the jet pendants that dangled from her ears. “Pity,” she muttered, “pity the party isn’t given for her.”

  Another woman, ruffled and jeweled, peered at Phyllis through a rimless pince-nez. “Sweet child, I’m so glad you’ve come. How well you look in that dress.”

  Phyllis turned away. Her enchanting pallor was lost in a rose-pink blush. Mike rubbed his left shoe against his right leg, embarrassed because Phyllis had neglected to present him to the ladies, who he knew must be old Mrs. Hulbert and her daughter, Mrs. Ulysses S. Miller.

  It was a grand party. Sophisticated, the local paper called it. The ballroom was decorated in silver and black velvet, its tall columns twined with silver-leaved garlands, the bandstand draped with velvet and dripping with tinsel. Mike was about to express awe when he became aware of scorn in the tilt of Phyllis’s nose and the slight smile curving her lips.

  “Come along, Mike; Nancy will want to meet you.”

  He had last seen Nancy Miller when she was a fat little girl riding in a wicker basket behind a fat pony. Now that she was fifteen years old, he had imagined that she would have come to look like an heiress. If she had been merely homely, he would have been less disappointed than in this commonplace girl, still fat, and as lumpy as back-yard soil.

  “Is this the famous Mike Jordan?” She had one of those insincere, heavily inflected, finishing-school voices, hideously unbecoming to a fleshy girl with big bones. Her enthusiasm, her synthetic charm, her schooled graces contrasted painfully with her cousin’s pretty reticence. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “I guess you mean a couple of other fellows,” he replied wittily. “I’m just the Mike Jordan nobody knows.”

  She smiled coyly. “A famous man shouldn’t be so modest.”

  As Mike danced with Phyllis he noticed that Nancy’s dark eyes were following them. Phyllis noticed, too, and smiled. Later, of course, Mike had to dance with his hostess. She was too heavy for him, too self-assertive, the sort of girl who had to control her instinct to lead.

  “I read your essay,” she said. “I think it was wonderful. It reminded me of Thomas Paine or Patrick Henry.”

  He accepted the tribute grudgingly.

  “I was curious to meet the man who wrote such inspired words,” Nancy added. And Mike actually felt himself blush as she went on, “That’s why I asked Phyllis to bring you tonight. And”—she looked into his face brazenly—“I’m not disappointed in the writer, either.”

  When the music stopped he tried to break away, but Nancy clung to him, accompanying him in his search for Phyllis.

  They found her on the porch, surrounded by boys. “Isn’t my cousin the most popular thing?” Nancy squealed. “Men are always wild about her.” She broke through the circle of Phyllis’s admirers, encircled her cousin’s waist with a strong, swarthy arm. “You’re absolutely bewitching in that dress.”

  Phyllis froze. Muttering a sullen thanks, she went off to dance with Johnnie Elder. Nancy giggled, and later, at supper, atempted again to flatter her cousin: “Isn’t Phyllis just too sweet in blue? That dress looks as if it were designed for her.”

  A couple of Nancy’s girl-friends giggled. The significance of the scene was lost upon Mike then, and it was not until years later, when Nancy, herself, explained its peculiar agony, that he understood that certain traits of character are called feminine because they are implanted early in girl-children.

  “Well, Mike, how did you like the party?” Phyllis asked, as they walked home in the moonlight.

  He dared not show how thin was his lacquer of sophistication, so he answered dryly, “It was all right.”

  “It was ghastly. All that silver and velvet; just showy ostentation.”

  Johnnie Elder honked past them, waving from his brother’s roadster.

  Phyllis watched the vanishing taillights. Abruptly gripping Mike’s arm, she whispered, “She hates me, Mike, she hates me desperately; she wishes I was dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Didn’t you notice anything? She’s hated me ever since we were little kids, because they could buy her everything except looks. Her hair’s as straight as an Indian’s. And Grandma always felt sorry for me because my mother was poor and had to support us, so she always made a fuss over me instead. Once my grandmother gave me a big doll”—Phyllis’s hands measured the height of this wondrous memory—“it was bigger than any doll Nancy got that Christmas. And it was only that I was poor and didn’t have so many toys that Grandma gave me this big doll. Nancy was so jealous that she grabbed the doll out of my arms and deliberately smashed it. There’s still a chip in the fireplace where she broke it. The head was in pieces. She hates me.”

  She stood quite still. Moonlight, shining through the catalpa tree, fell upon her so that half of her face, lighted in silver, was clear-cut and exquisite, while the other half was scarred by a shadow as jagged and irregular as a birthmark. Mike took her arm and jerked her out of the shadows.

  As they walked through the shabbier streets to her mother’s house, Phyllis told him of her ambitions: “I’m going to be an actress. I mean to be very successful and rich, and then I’ll laugh at everyone.”

  The gate creaked as they walked up the untidy path. Phyllis looked at the moon and laughed. . . .

  The next season she joined the Dramatic Club. Mike Jordan thought her the best actress in the high school, and when, in his senior year, he became a member of the club’s executive board, he promoted Phyllis at every opportunity, just as though he were a silly old manager in love with a pretty actress.

  Every year the club gave a show. Mike was then trying to write like O’Neill, and he wanted them to do The Straw, with Phyllis as the tubercular heroine. But Nancy had come to the high school that year. Her mother was ill and she was spending the winter in town. She had the whole school imitating her, fawning upon her, copying her attitudes. No elderly opportunist is ever so slavish as a youngster who finds that he can skate on a private pond, play tennis on fine courts, and be treated to quantities of pop and ice cream.

  Nancy’s word was law, her whims undisputed fashion, and when she said Romance was her favorite play, more than half the club board was willing to vote her ticket. Mike was too much the politician to tell them he thought it a bad play, so he argued that they could never afford the elaborate costumes and sets. He was voted down.

  At the next board meeting he heard the proposal that they give Nancy the part so that her father would pay for their props and scenery.

  Phyllis was her mother’s gallant child. She uttered not a word of self-pity. Mike took her to the show, and as he sat beside her, studying her fine profile, he admired the dignity with which she hid her disappointment. After the final curtain she asked him to go backstage with her. Nancy’s dressing-room was filled with extravagant floral offerings, tributes from her father’s business associates.

  Phyllis broke through the crowd of chattering girl-friends, kissed Nancy’s rouged cheek, and cried sincerely, “You were wonderful, darling, simply wonderful.”

  That swarthy old lady whom Mike had seen at the party rose from a small chair beside Nancy’s dressing table. She was dressed in rich, musty black silk. “You could have done it better,” she told Phyllis.

  “But Nancy has real talent and temperament, Grandma.”

  “
You have beauty.”

  • • •

  This was in May. At the end of June, Mike finished high school. He spent the summer as a counselor in a boys’ camp, and in September went to New Haven. Mike’s father was the editor of a small newspaper, and it was enough of a struggle to send his son to Yale without providing money for holiday trips.

  During the next two summers Mike worked in Connecticut, but he never lost touch with the home town. His father sent him the newspaper, and he was still sufficiently interested in his old friends to read the society columns. Nancy Miller, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Miller, “came out” and was thereafter entitled to silver tinsel and black velvet decorations at her parties. Shortly afterward, Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Miller announced the engagement of their daughter to John Price Elder II.

  The Roman numerals amused Mike. Johnnie Elder’s father had come to the town as a laborer, had worked himself up to foreman and then to plant manager in one of the mills. During a strike he had done the dirty work for the owners, dealing with scabs and gunmen brought to town to break the strike. Mike’s father had nicknamed him “Judas Elder” and made him the butt of scathing editorials which were never noticed by the people who elected J. P. Elder to the City Council. The son Johnnie was a big, thick-skinned fellow, ruddy and good-looking, fullback on his college football team, and a god to the town girls.

  To Mike he seemed a natural mate for Nancy.

  Mrs. Coles died that same October. She had lived only a few hours after an emergency operation. Phyllis was nineteen years old and quite alone in the world. Her aunt persuaded her to sell her mother’s furniture and come to live at their house until she decided what she wanted to do with her life.