Talmage Powell
The Impossible Godiva

Brother, it was fine. I’d been in love with Ellicia Hunter a long time. I’d even run around with her crowd a little. I made dough as ranking chemical engineer in her father’s outfit and took her out when I could spare the sleep. But I had never asked her to marry me. You know why. She was a rich gal, and, comparatively, the dough I had earned was so much peanuts.

But don’t think I’m sounding noble. All the time I’d had ace in the hole, a honey of a new process I’d been working on. Then came the day that I sold the process to old man Hunter for a quarter-of-a-million dollars, plus royalties, plus a few hundred shares in the corporation. I held out for those shares right to the very last. It was sort of the finishing touch.

When the meeting of the board of directors broke up in the walnut-panelled room with its long conference table, the well-fed members of the board let their eyes soften and pounded me on the back. They said as how my process was going to revolutionize the manufacture of plastics and how the corporation was going to make millions out of it.

It was after that I followed old man Hunter into his private office.

He was a gimlet-eyed little guy who’d started in life with nothing flat. If he was born with any kind of spoon in his mouth, it was brass. I marched up to his desk, which looked half an acre big, and said: “Mr. Hunter, I’d like to have your permission to marry Ellicia.”

He blinked his eyes fast, a dozen times maybe and said, “Well, well, well. When did you pop the question?”

“I haven’t, yet.”

He grinned. “If you need any help, phone me. She still obeys her old man.”

“Thanks, Mr…”

“But one thing,” he broke in. “Once you marry her, she’s your problem. Never let her get the best of you, Rick. I know, I know. You think you know Ellicia like you… like you know your chemistry. But all the qualitative and quantitative analyses in the world wouldn’t reveal every ingredient contained in Ellicia.”

“That’s what I like about her, sir. You always discover something new, every time you see her. You…”

“Son-in-law, you don’t know the half of it! She’s spoiled rotten!” He chuckled fondly. There was nothing to be said at the moment, so I left his office. I chuckled a little fondly, too. Nice old guy- But he certainly didn’t know his daughter. Why, there wasn’t a self-centered bone in her lovely body!

The wedding came off okay. The church very solemn, the banked flowers filling the air with a heady perfume, the soprano singing O, Perfect Love. Well, it was perfect. Ellicia was small and precious in her white veil with her soft, dark hair tumbling to her shoulders. Oh, so demure!

There I was, hard-working young man who’d made good and married the boss’s daughter. We made our wedding trip short, two weeks in the majesty of the Smoky Mountains, because I was needed to get the new process going.

At first the only acid in the equation that was going to produce murder eventually was Perry Lance. You know Perry. Yale and Oxford; a background of ancestors whose blood was so blue they could have sliced a vein and gone in the ink business.

Perry was always so veddy, veddy correct; but when the wedding was over, he marched up to Ellicia in his cut-away and striped trousers, every shaggy blond hair so nicely in place, and said, “May I wish you many happy returns of the day?”

“Hell, no,” I said in no uncertain tones. I wanted Perry to get things straight right from the start. “She’s married for keeps, so there’ll be no returns of this day for Ellicia.”

He murdered me a couple hundred times with his pale blue eyes under their shaggy brows. Ellicia yanked the fuse from the dynamite keg with a laugh. “You boys mustn’t fight over me. Ever!” I didn’t like the little trill in her laugh. A trill is too closely related to a thrill.

Anyway, I let Perry ride for the moment. When Ellicia and I got in the groove of living, I began to see what J. P., as I now called him, had meant about his daughter.

She was sweet, choice, grand. She was worth a couple of right arms. But you direct a person’s life in certain channels for twenty-one years and its hard for him or her to reach port. J. P. had spoiled her, all right. In some ways, he had damn near ruined her.

The Jean Darlan incident, for example. Jean was one of the crowd, chattering and sipping cocktails, that always seemed to be underfoot no matter how much I wanted to put my arms about my wife and ruin her lipstick. Jean had ancestors of her own. They were on the Mayflower — so Jean said — and I secretly suspected she was still living on their reputation. Nothing definite, just idle gossip Ellicia would drop to me in private about how certain of the better stores and shops had sent those well known account-badly-overdue notices to Jean.

Anyway, I felt a subconscious faint chill around Jean. You looked at her and she was tall, blonde and lovely. But you looked at her eyes and sometimes you’d catch something cold and calculating in them before she’d smile. Or maybe she was just so sophisticated, it scared me.

This night I am talking about, she was a trifle toxic from too many parts of alcohol to so many parts of blood. She got me over in a corner and told me all about how she admired me, and next thing I knew she’d kissed me.

Maybe I looked silly when I wiped her lipstick from my lips. She giggled. That didn’t bother me. Across the room, Archie Satler, the orchestra leader, who was very much that way about Jean, glared daggers. That didn’t bother me, either. Ellicia, leaning on the concert grand with a little group about her, saw me wiping Jean’s lipstick off. She just smiled, sweetly, demurely. She’d never been really touched by the ugliness of life, and she simply took this for granted. I was her husband, wasn’t I? Sure, dear Rick, the devoted Rick. Dammit, she wasn’t even jealous. That bothered me a hell of a lot.

Archie Satler strolled over. He was sleek and dark, with a thin mustache that would have suffered if wax had been rationed. His black, glittering eyes made dire threats against me as he offered Jean his arm. To hell with him. He was just a phony who made a living drooling sweet music six nights a week — every night except Monday — at Club Mananita. If this hadn’t been a Monday night, he’d have been working right then, and Jean Darlan would have been at Club Mananita at a ringside table, drooling at him while he played his sweet music. No kidding, everybody said she was nuts about him and was even going to open a club for him one of these days; I knew Jean wouldn’t have risked arousing his ire by kissing me, even in fun, if she hadn’t been tight.

Ellicia never mentioned the Jean Darlan incident, it meant so little to her. That jarred me, and in the next few days I woke up. Ellicia, as I say, loved me. I never doubted that. But she’d always lived on the surface of plush and velvet, never feeling anything deeply, and it was impossible for her to start feeling deeply now, even love. She was still living her own life, engrossed in her own activities; I wasn’t one hundred per cent essential, but I wanted to be.

So I dragged out Godiva Hoffman. Back in my college days, some fellows were sprawled in my room one night and to pass a minute they began kidding about the woman they didn’t want to marry. They named all sorts of bad traits and worse items of appearance, and my roommate, who wasn’t a bad hand at a sketch, drew us a rough portrait of this imaginary creature who repulsed all men, snag-toothed, half bald, with a crooked nose. Somebody labelled the drawing “Godiva Hoffman” and after that a particularly sour date caused us to say “I was out with Godiva last night.”

I changed Godiva all around when I rented the frilly three-room apartment, however. I gave her new teeth like pearls, flowing blonde tresses, a tip-tilted nose.

It was a screwball idea from the very first, but I saw no reason why it shouldn’t work. Anyway, I definitely did not care for an affair with anyone other than Godiva. I had Ellicia — or part of her — and I had to be one hundred per cent essential.

You see what I was driving at. I would quietly establish Godiva’s presence in the apartment by little gestures such as rumpling the bed and tossing a few feminine things about for the house maid to see. The fact that no one ever actually saw Godiva coming and going would lend. I thought, spice to the affair.

I would write a few notes, and at the proper time place them where Ellicia would find them. I would come home from work that day and when she confronted me with the notes, I would tell her that there was nothing serious, as yet, between Godiva and myself, that Godiva was just an understanding creature who would listen to my small talk of the office, drink coffee with only the kitchen table between us, all alone. I would say that I was sorry Ellicia had found out but that Godiva’s place never contained a crowd of magpies swizzling champagne while I’d just come from a nerve-wracking day.

I knew that Ellicia, thinking Godiva a flesh and blood female, would recognize the danger of that sort of affair and chase the crowd away and threaten to tear my eyes out if I ever saw Godiva again.

So I rented the apartment, sneaked in a few feminine things, skipped dinner at home four or five times with the old, suspicious excuse of working late, and saw four or five shows to keep me out longer than any sort of dinner should have taken. When I considered the time ripe, I disguised my handwriting well enough, penned a few mush notes, one of which thanked me profusely for the Wardmore Arms apartment, and slipped the notes in the pocket of a suit which I asked Ellicia to send to the cleaners for me when I phoned her that afternoon.

I sat back and waited — and went through the unpleasant process of having my stomach turn over a sixteenth of an inch at a time. Ellicia didn’t phone. I knew she’d found those notes where I had apparently forgotten them. But all afternoon she didn’t phone.

I wanted to get away early that afternoon and see what was giving. I was low with the thought that Ellicia had found the notes and simply laughed at them. But some cluck in the control lab let a tanker of sulphuric acid slip past him loaded with nitrogen. I decided to see to it myself, and early darkness had come before I finally left the plant.

Ellicia was at her dressing table, brushing her tumbling dark hair, when I opened the door. “Hello, Rick.” I heard the cracking of icicles. Well, well, so she had seen the notes and the chemical reaction was bubbling to a head.

I put my hands on her shoulders, our gazes met in the mirror, and her mouth twisted up. I watched a tear gather in the corner of each eye. “Rick! How could you do such a thing? That Godiva creature…!”

I went into my song and dance. Nonchalant, you know. “Well, as vet, there is nothing between…”

“Nothing between! Rick! To think you’ve been seeing such a horrid woman. Why, I… I…”

“Easy now, hon. Godiva isn’t so bad. She’s…”

“…She’s a witch! She’s an old crone. I know. I went to her apartment and saw her!”

The hush was so deep my voice sounded like the squeaking of a mouse in the Grand Canyon. “You did which?”

“I saw her, talked to her — the tramp! Those notes in your pocket — in one of them she thanked you for the Wardmore Arms apartment. It wasn’t hard to locate her.”

Somebody was nuts. Sure, I bad mentioned the apartment house in one of the mush notes I’d written. I had done that so Ellicia could get a sort of intangible verification of the existence of Godiva Hoffman by calling the Wardmore Arms and learning that a woman by that name had — supposedly — rented an apartment there. But not a verification of this sort. I had tried to manufacture putty and somehow it had turned into dynamite.

I didn’t know I was gripping Ellicia’s shoulders so hard until she wiggled out of my grasp. I said, “Ellicia, you’ve got to believe me. This thing was a joke. I… It… Godiva Hoffman is a nonesuch.”

“It’s not a joke, Rick Hershey! But she is a nonesuch! There’s not another such creature like her in all the world. Rick, where are you going?”

“I’m going to get acquainted with a hallucination,” I said. I turned quickly, kissed her hard. “This is important, hon. I’ll explain everything when I get back. Everything, so help me!”

“Rick!” The word almost floored me at the door. “If you ever see that Godiva creature again… If you so much as…” There it was, the fierce, possessive love of womankind that’s echoed through the ages from mother Eve. I had it, I was one hundred per cent. But before I could enjoy it I had to see about this hallucination.

I opened the door of the apartment in the Wardmore Arms and slipped inside. The place looked just as I had left it. But my nose tingled. There was the odor, faintly, of cooking, the ranker odor of cigar smoke.

I stood in the small living room, gulping. I looked all around the cozy room with its big chair. Nothing. No movement anywhere. I tiptoed to the door of the bedroom, intending to go on through to the kitchenette to see what had been cooked. But Godiva Hoffman was on the bed, eyes closed, one arm behind her head.

She was a crone, all right. Big flabby face that shrieked a tale of acute alcoholism, pouchy eyes that were probably bleary when open, matted, dead-looking, mouse-colored hair. Her soiled print dress was twisted, as if she’d staggered into the bedroom and passed out. But she hadn’t passed out. She’d been shot half an inch above the ear and had bled a lot. Her head and the side of her face were a mess.

On the floor near the bed was a thirty-eight revolver. Beside it lay a powder-blackened rended pillow. Somebody had wrapped the gun in the pillow, pointed it at Godiva’s head and pulled the trigger, all nice and silent and messy.

I picked up the gun. It felt too familiar. It had come from the desk in my study at home.

On top of all that a flat voice said behind me, “You’re covered, bud,” and for a second I thought I was going to die right then and there.

I turned around. A paunchy man with a cigar in his face was in the doorway. He held a gun on me without a tremor. He flipped back his lapel, and I got an eyeful of policeman’s badge. “Drop the gun,” he said. I dropped the gun.

“Well, well,” he said. “A ducky little love nest killing, eh? You get tired of the bag, let her pass out on the bed and shoot her.” He clucked his tongue. “Bub, you ain’t the killer type. Or you wouldn’t have got panicky, left the gun and then tried to come back. Your hands wouldn’t have rattled the key in the lock so long and hard when you were letting yourself in just a minute ago.”

“How did you get here?”

“How do we ever get here? Somebody phoned headquarters and said they thought they’d heard a smothered shot in this apartment. Now let’s me and you get chummy. What’s your history?”