Stranger Than Truth Read online

  White hands fluttered. “Anything I can do for you, Mr. Ansell, will give me the most profound pleasure.”

  “Would you have the courage to approach Mr. Barclay and ask him a favor for me?” I gave her my most soulful glance. “I need a sight-unseen release on the Unsolved Mystery. We’re using the Dot King story…”

  “I know all about it, Mr. Ansell,” she put in quickly, so I should know that no detail of office business escaped her.

  I handed her the release form. “Tell Mr. Barclay I promise to make the story exactly like all the other stories we’ve ever run. And I positively guarantee, Miss Eccles, not to use any dirty words.”

  “Oh, Mr. Ansell, what a sense of humor! You must teach me to laugh.” Miss Eccles trilled her pleasure like an intoxicated canary. Sighing, she settled down to business again.“I’ll bring this in to him myself, just as soon as he’s off the wire. He’s on the phone now. Washington, you know.”

  While I waited I wandered around the reception room, looking at pictures of Barclay and his family. One of the old photographs showed him, magnificent in bathing trunks, displaying his muscles to an adoring little girl. She was skinny and soft-boned with the long legs and puny arms of early adolescence.

  “Someone certainly enjoyed his luncheon,” cooed Miss Eccles.

  I kept my face toward the wall.

  “I congratulate you on your taste, Mr. Ansell. What a lovely human being! So sane, so healthy, so democratic. And not afraid of life, is she? His influence, don’t you think? As the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”

  “Look, Miss Eccles,” I said, turning from the picture and hurrying toward her desk. “You can help me a lot if you will.”

  “Anything for you, Mr. Ansell. There may be obstacles and handicaps in the way of our desires, but what is achievement without struggle? Let me offer you my hand over the rough places.”

  She held out her hand, letting it droop gracefully at the wrist. I needed a few seconds to recover. Waiting, Miss Eccles performed a few more Delsarte exercises with her hands.

  “Miss Eccles,” I began slowly, “can you tell me why Mr. Barclay rejected the Warren G. Wilson story?”

  Miss Eccles’ hands fell like rocks. Her chest was as flat as a washboard and in action it looked even duller.

  “The Warren G. Wilson story,” I repeated.

  The washboard continued its rise and fall. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Ansell.”

  “Come, come. Nothing in this office escapes your vigilant notice. The Wilson story, the Unsolved Mystery of the Month, the story the boss rejected…”

  A buzzer sounded. Miss Eccles picked up the release form and started toward Mr. Barclay’s office. “He’s off the wire. I’ll see about your release. You needn’t wait, Mr. Ansell. I’ll send it over by boy.”

  I went back to my office. The Dot King files were waiting on my desk. I had a lot of work to finish that day. Four thousand words before I had dinner with Eleanor. I decided to leave at six, so that I could change and shave before I called for her. If the story was not ready, I’d return late that night after I had taken Eleanor home.

  The red-haired office boy brought me the release form signed by Noble Barclay. I tried to concentrate on Dot King, but it was a tired story, long unsolved, and who cared?

  “Miss Kaufman, what do you think of the murder of Warren G. Wilson?”

  “It’s an Unsolved Mystery. Unsolved Mysteries stay unsolved. The murderers are never discovered.”

  “Am I crazy or could there be some personal reason for Mr. Barclay’s not wanting the story printed?”

  Miss Kaufman’s cheeks grew fruitier. “I’ve seen five editors leave with nervous breakdowns. They’re always the nice ones.” She marched out of the office carrying a towel and her soapbox.

  In two minutes she was back. “Something’s going on around here. The Ladies’ Room has been locked for twenty minutes.”

  “Must be hard on the ladies,” I remarked, and started typing noisily to show that I had settled down to work.

  I wrote two sentences. Rain beat against the windows. It had been pouring for two days and everything felt soggy. Wind shrieked through the airshaft: I jerked the paper out of my typewriter, crushed it and threw it in the wastebasket. It was then twenty past four and more than two hours since I had seen Eleanor.

  “I think I’ll have a cup of tea,” I said guiltily. There was no reason why I had to offer excuses to my secretary, but I was ashamed because I should have stayed at my desk until I had done a little work on the Dot King story.

  As I crossed the general office I noticed the silence. No typewriters clicked. The stenographers had left their desks to crowd in the narrow corridor that led to the Ladies’ Room. I crossed to the Truth and Love office.

  The door was open. Lola Manfred was there, smoking and reading a manuscript, her feet on the desk. She looked at me through a haze of smoke and asked, “Would you want your wife to confess her pre-marital experiences?”

  “I have no wife and she’s had no pre-marital experiences.”

  “You can never tell,” Lola said. “In Truth and Love the man always thinks the girl is undefiled and then she’s neurotic or ill and has to dig out the truth, confess to him in a dim room, otherwise their marriage has no chance. Secrets are a festering sore, Johnnie. You’ve worked for Truth Publications long enough to…”

  “Where’s Eleanor?”

  Lola looked around the office as if I had asked for a paper clip. “I don’t know. She’s been gone for a long time. Are you in love with her? I hope…”

  I escaped. The crowd around the Ladies’ Room had been increased by office boys, advertising solicitors, bookkeepers from the offices on the floor below. The superintendent of the building passed me. He carried a giant ring from which hung a single small key. I thought of the key ring that Mr. Semple, the hotel manager, had carried on the day Warren G. Wilson’s body was discovered.

  The superintendent pushed through the crowd and thrust his key into the lock of the Ladies’ Room door. Somebody cried, “Oh!” as Grace Eccles came out. She stood in the door, startled by the glances and exclamations of curiosity. Then she raised her head and swept through like a queen of tragedy while humble stenographers and bookkeepers’ assistants cleared a path.

  A few seconds later Eleanor appeared in the door. Her face was like marble and her painted mouth looked black. I spoke to her, but she passed without a sign of recognition. She had grown taller and more brunette. I tried to catch hold of her arm, but she curved through the crowd and disappeared.

  The girls whispered and chattered. Some went into the Ladies’ Room. Others returned to their desks. Typewriters began their clatter. The door of Truth and Lave was closed tight.

  I went back to my desk. The storm had lightened, but raindrops still trickled down the window. I put a fresh page in my typewriter, but I could not work. I was thinking about murder. Between college and the Army I had earned my living by writing crime stories, but murder has always been a remote horror, no more terrifying than ghost stories told in a lighted room. Warren G. Wilson’s story had moved closer. He had been no criminal whose way of life called for violence, but a man of my own sort, bookish, fond of music and good food. I could no more imagine an enemy plotting his death than I could believe that someone should want to murder me.

  At last I started to work. At five-fifteen, when other Barclay employees were washing their hands and covering their typewriters, I had written exactly one page. Miss Kaufman offered to stay and work with me.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’m not staying. I have a dinner date and I’ll come back later. Leave word for the night man that I’ll want to get in.”

  An office boy dropped an envelope in my basket. It was a manila office envelope with a blue memo form inside. This is what it said:

  Memorandum

  From the office of:

  To:

  Date:

  Dearest J.A.

  Please forgive
me but I can’t possibly make it tonight. Give me a rain check, please, and don’t be angry. I know you’ll understand.

  E.B.

  P.S. Don’t ask why. Don’t ever.

  I was stunned. Why should I understand? What did Eleanor think? I’m not psychic. It was our first date and I had been stood up. Why? She had seemed enthusiastic, as if our first date were important to her, too. Now I was to understand a crazy, incoherent note. Mine not to reason why, mine not to make reply. Hell, I wasn’t the brave six hundred.

  “I’m going to find out. No woman can do that to me. Understand, my neck! What does she think?”

  In this mood I stormed into the Truth and Love office. It was empty. Neither Eleanor’s plaid coat nor Lola Manfred’s frowsy fur cape hung on the costumer. Both desks were neat, both typewriters covered.

  Miss Eccles was at the telephone when I rushed into her office. She held one hand over the mouthpiece while she said, “This is an important call. Long distance. Could you wait outside, Mr. Ansell?”

  I waited, pacing the corridor. People were leaving the office. Their coats and raincoats were damp from the morning’s downpour. Everything smelled musty. Tony Shaw stopped to tell me that he was hurrying to meet an actress for cocktails at the Plaza.

  The light in Miss Eccles’ office was switched off. I left Tony and ran in, turned on the light and caught Miss Eccles with her coat and hat in her hands.

  “Trying to sneak out on me, Miss Eccles?”

  “No, indeed. I completely forgot about your wanting to see me. I usually take this at night,” she nodded toward the door of the private elevator. “The other’s so crowded, you know.”

  “What did you tell Eleanor in the Ladies’ Room?”

  Her pale eyes blinked and the washboard chest began to rise and fall.

  “What did you tell Eleanor, Miss Eccles?”

  Barclay’s door opened. He had on the camel’s hair coat, the pigskin gloves, and in his right arm he carried an expensive briefcase.

  “I’m leaving now, Miss Eccles. How’s it coming, Ansell? You got my release, didn’t you?”

  Miss Eccles’ eyes followed hopefully as he crossed the office. But he had no more duties for her that day, and did not think of asking if she wanted to ride with him in the private elevator. As the automatic doors slid open he called, “Good night,” and the doors closed.

  Miss Eccles chattered, struggling for breath. “A great man, a wonderful human being, absolutely devoted to his work. It’s a privilege to work with him, to be so intimate with one of the great figures of our day, a man whose name will live in history and whose philosophy…”

  “Look, Miss Eccles, I don’t care about his greatness. I want to know what you told Eleanor in the Ladies’ Room and why it happened just after I’d asked you about the Wilson story.”

  She gave me the look of a stricken doe. I was ruthless. Grabbing bony shoulders I shook her until her teeth chattered. Her face was stricken, and I remembered Lillian Gish’s face in an old movie, Broken Blossoms.

  “Tell me.”

  “The secret is not my own.”

  Her body remained rigid, but her head turned on the thin stalk of her neck. She looked at the wall that was broken by the copper and chromium door of Noble Barclay’s private elevator. This door opened.

  “I think I’ll leave this,” Barclay said, gesturing with the hand that held the briefcase. “Can’t work tonight. Wife’s just home from California, you know.” For emphasis he set the briefcase upon his secretary’s desk. “Going home, Grace? I’m driving uptown, can I give you a lift?”

  He waited at the elevator door. She glanced at me over her shoulder, and it was as if the angels had swooped down and rescued her at the very portals of hell. This time the elevator door closed with a bang.

  I worked until seven o’clock, went downstairs and had two Martinis and two lamb chops at the Grille. When I returned to the office there was no sign of life in the place. All the lights had been turned out and the darkness was like something solid. I switched on a small light and hurried to the Truth and Crime office.

  Noble Barclay did not ask his editors to work in sordid surroundings. “One incentive for joining us,” he had said when I came to talk to him about the job, “is the cheerful atmosphere of our offices. We believe that creative people are more productive under harmonious influences. All of our private offices have been done over recently by one of the best interior decorators in the business, under Mrs. Barclay’s personal supervision.”

  My office represented the decorator’s blue period. The walls were gray but the chairs had been upholstered in some shaggy blue material, the picture frames and lampshades matched, and even the Thermos jug and drinking glass were of a harmonizing blue plastic. The effect under artificial light was melancholy.

  On my blue desk blotter lay the first page of the new Unsolved Mystery. For a practiced hack like me it should not have been hard to finish the story. I had only to paraphrase one of the old versions, dress the skeleton lushly with descriptions of the kept woman’s apartment, jewels, wardrobe and pantry, add some hot passages about her lover’s caresses, and then take the joy out of the titillating paragraphs by emphasizing the wages of sin. Our readers were always happy to ponder virtuously the joys of evil.

  I was bored but conscientious and managed twelve pages of the drivel. As I paused to rest and smoke a cigarette, I found myself thinking of Miss Eccles and how her pale lips had worked and her stricken eyes had narrowed as she told me that she was guarding a secret. It was Barclay’s secret, I was sure, and I was positive, too, that he had not returned to leave his briefcase but had been listening behind the elevator door while I questioned his secretary. For a man like Noble Barclay, the millionaire, the famous author and publisher, the Messiah in the camel’s hair overcoat, the whole thing seemed absurd.

  I had tried to understand Barclay; I had read his book and considered his philosophy. But to me he was a caricature philosopher, Superman combined with Freud, Dale Carnegie selling Buchman’s Moral Rearmament according to the methods of Bernarr MacFadden. Barclay’s creed was like Buchmanism without God; like MacFadden minus muscles. Instead of prayer he used auto-suggestion and self-hypnotism.

  I finished my cigarette and automatically lighted another. The storm was over, the night air clear. A high, angry wind whined through the airshaft. My tongue was heavy, my throat dry and I felt as if I had just awakened with a bad hangover.

  The water in the blue Thermos was cool and refreshing. I lit a fresh cigarette and read the page in my typewriter. It seemed remarkably good. Suddenly my typewriter began to move away. The wall behind it retreated, too. My desk had begun to rock, the floor to tip, the whole building to pitch like a small ship on a furious sea. Clinging to the arms of my chair I lifted myself like a cripple. At the first step my legs unhinged and I slid along a glazed surface.

  After centuries of darkness I lay in a berth on an express train headed for a rock cliff at the rate of ninety thousand miles a second. We hit the cliff; I was not crushed to death but lifted, gently, out of the berth and carried on clouds through unending space. A siren clanged. Fire engines, I thought, and then I was the siren, the fire engine, the rubber-tired hack. My body was moldy from years in the grave, but I was not dead because my eyes discovered streaks of moving light. My siren clanged again; the blue streak changed to a white radiance and the radiance was shattered into a million trillion slivers.

  A weight lay upon my chest and the thing that clasped my wrist was a human hand. Remote and pontifical a voice sounded.

  “We can’t be sure until we’ve got the analysis but I saw one just like this when I was interning. Bichloride of mercury. The patient died.”

  Part Two

  TESTIMONIAL

  BY GRACE ECCLES

  “Truth should not be hoarded like miser’s gold but shared as freely as the warmth of the summer sun. But the only Truth that is yours to spend and share is the Truth About Yourself. The secrets of another pers
on’s life are his own, and while you may be aware of the harm he is doing himself and others by hoarding them, his secrets are no more yours to give away than his home, his money and his personal possessions.”

  My Life Is Truth

  NOBLE BARCLAY

  WHEN THE HISTORY of this generation is written there will appear high upon the roll call of contemporary immortals the name of Noble Barclay. I have had the singular honor of associating for seven years with this great man, five of which were spent in such close intimacy that I have often wondered if his wife knew him as well as his secretary.[1]

  Others have worshipped the genius of Noble Barclay. I have constantly and consistently adored the human being. Not only had he formulated and originated a new creed for living, but he practiced what he preached to the final word. Cynics there are who doubt his sincerity, but I, who had better opportunity than any other to observe his smallest actions, have never seen him deviate from a rigid interpretation of his philosophy.

  Let me first introduce myself, Grace Jacqueline Eccles, forty-seven years of age (in this as in everything else, I am completely truthful), independent, self-sustaining, mentally and morally free. What a contrast to that Grace Eccles of a decade ago! Not only was I inhibited and narrow-minded, but also unemployed. The latter was not wholly my fault. Our country was in the midst of the so-called Depression. Few positions were available and those were usually bestowed upon younger girls of obvious charms who looked as if they would perform other than the conventional duties of a private secretary.

  At this time, depressed, melancholy, unsure of myself, and devoid of feminine sex pride, I was indeed a sorry-looking individual. I did not make the most of myself. Instead of drawing attention to my best features (many friends have told me my hands are a fit subject for a painter), I thought only of my deficiencies, foremost among which was a poor complexion. At that time it was pallid and marred by acne due to a malady from which I constantly suffered. I was too modest then to admit that I was victim to the commonest of Nature’s tricks, but now today, free and without guilt or shame, I can say aloud that I endured the tortures of constipation.