CHAPTER I

MRS. BREESE IS DIVORCED

I have just returned to New York and examined in the morgue of the New York Times all the stories written and cabled of the Murder in the Gilded Cage. It is now six months since the weird death of Mrs. Breese, and I have decided that it is to the public interest that I present an unbiased factual account of what actually occurred in her winter home. For it is high time that someone set at rest the malicious rumors that still buzz wherever her set gathers. It is certainly due three of the principal actors in the tragedy that the truth be known. Whatever their personal failings may be, they have done nothing to deserve the stigma attached to their names. I do not see eye to eye with Ben Smith on this matter, who is responsible for the hitherto impenetrable secrecy. Boris Sergeivitch Perutkin, that most fantastic of investigators, is now concerned with another and even more devious problem, and does not care.

Perhaps it would be best to set forth first my connection with the case. You may remember that Mrs. Breese, before her storied death, was the center of a divorce case that startled the country. There is no need here to rake the dead leaves of sensation. It was one of those cases that linger on to the profit of lawyers over a period of years and supply the tabloids with juicy drippings. When it was all over, Mrs. Breese won. Her husband, in disgusted settlement, gave her the Havana home, the yacht, _Mary Rose_, named for their daughter, a coöperative Park Avenue apartment, and a competence that came to some fifty thousand dollars a year. Mrs. Breese’s lawyers fared even better. I might mention that Mrs. Breese was independently wealthy in addition, although her legal representatives went to some pains to conceal the fact. In any case, the scandal drove her out of the enigmatic pages of the Social Register and made her for the time being one of the best known women in America.

You will remember, too, that the name of Guy Thomas was coupled with hers all during the tortuous trials and appeals. Mr. Breese named him as co-respondent, although all efforts to prove the accusation were unsuccessful. Mutual friends of the Breeses divided on this issue. Gordon Rice, for example, in characteristic hearty fashion, refused to believe a word of it and severed a relationship of thirty years’ standing with the husband. Mr. Rice said Guy Thomas was a pleasant young man and an excellent dancer, which Mr. Breese was not, and he’d be hanged if he’d stand by and see an innocent woman spattered with scandal because of an entirely harmless friendship with a personable young actor.

When I set forth as a reporter for the News Association to cover the trial, I flattered myself on a professional lack of opinion in the matter. I did not know then that I would be thrown bodily into the maze of Mrs. Breese’s post-divorce life; and her perplexing death. Why I ever entered the service of Mrs. Breese I do not know. Ben Smith thinks it was sheer laziness and the inability to refuse. Perhaps it was because the woman fascinated me as a creature of incredibility. Yet she was real enough. But let me tell the story from the beginning. You shall judge for yourself.

With the aid of a newspaper clipping, I establish April 17, 1928 as the date of my first meeting with Mrs. Breese. I had come up from Richmond several weeks before, and finally found a berth with a local news agency. The case was totally unfamiliar to me when I set out to interview Mrs. Breese a day before her trial was scheduled to begin.

It was a glorious afternoon, a rare April day, and even the ornate lobby of the Park Avenue apartment house permitted an occasional beam of sun to enter. After preliminary negotiations with the doorman, the telephone operator, and the elevator guards, I was permitted to ascend to the fourteenth story, where a butler conducted me from the reception-hall to the high-ceilinged drawing-room. There were five enormous windows, and every shade was drawn, so that you had the impression of sitting in one of those softly-carpeted motion picture palaces. Later I was to discover that Mrs. Breese flowered only in dim rooms, with shades and curtains drawn, and her idea of human habitation was in harmony with that of the designers of the motion picture temples. She carried this atmosphere wherever she went, as people will.

She made a dramatic entrance into the room after keeping me waiting fully fifteen minutes, and I could hear her voice behind the grilled door, a peculiarly harsh voice that trilled, curiously enough, and chattered.

“_SO_ sorry to keep you waiting,” the voice said before I saw her, and then a tall and full-bosomed figure in jade green swept before me. Even in the faint light I could see she was a blonde, with somewhat faded blue eyes. It took no discerning observer to note that the masseur and the hairdresser had preceded me, and that the ladies’ maid had done her daily stint. The air filled not unpleasantly with a rare perfume, and then, with a gracious gesture to me, the lady seated herself, poised for the ordeal.

But if I expected a reticent, an embarrassment quite natural under the circumstances, I was quickly disillusioned. Despite newspaper training, I was bred in the school that regards one’s private life as unfit for public discussion. I expected to sympathize with her on the unfortunate circumstances that compelled me to intrude. But she made that quite unnecessary, in the harsh trilling voice that I shall never forget.

“My husband,” she said, “has a Napoleonic complex. He thinks he can dominate me.” She paused. “He can’t.” I readily believed that, although I had never met Mr. Breese. I might explain that Mrs. Breese had but recently discovered psychoanalysts, and the jargon of their trade was always on the tip of her tongue.

She then plunged into a detailed résumé of her grievances, which were many. She spoke with a cold vindictiveness that was repellent, and yet with a certain relish. I was to discover soon that Mrs. Breese, instead of shrinking from the publicity of the scandal, gloried in it. Who can forget the first day of her trial when the decrepit State Court Building was mobbed by the curious? For that event she had seated herself beside her chauffeur in the baby-blue limousine. She wore a bright plaid skirt, a Russian blouse, and about her head she had bound a bright bandanna handkerchief. “It is the gypsy in me,” she confided later. But if you were to dismiss her as a silly woman, you must ignore the occasional gleam of intelligence that shone from the fog of her chatter. And the occasionally generous impulses that made you think of her as a fine and noble-minded woman who had somehow let her life literally fall to pieces.

Mrs. Breese on the witness stand was meat and drink for the newspapers. She thought in headlines, and just about the time you had decided she was exhausted as a subject, she dragged out something else to feed the flames. Poor Mr. Breese hid from the reporters and smashed photographers’ cameras, and although he had been guilty of only a meaningless affair with a Follies beauty of uncertain reputation, lost the case with a resounding thud. And got himself thrown out of clubs, and snubbed by righteous individuals who knew the value of discretion.

Guy Thomas took the stand and absolved Mrs. Breese and himself from all wrong-doing. He was thirty-two then, dark, with that sleek look of a man who gives a good deal of attention to his clothes and his barber. He was singularly handsome, and had once been a model for commercial photographers. That was when he could not find work as an actor. Which was frequently. He was not a good actor. He had met Mrs. Breese at one of those Bohemian parties where social distinctions are wiped out for the evening, and she had taken what I believed at the time to have been a casual interest in him.

He did dance very well. He had a classic regularity of feature, and an excellent chin, and was one of the weakest men I ever met. I cannot explain his actions otherwise. As a type you associate him with Fifth Avenue tailors and Park Avenue restaurants, cheap cigarettes in gold cases, and an extremely limited knowledge of anything transpiring beyond his own immediate world.

Readily enough he admitted that occasionally Mrs. Breese had been good enough to entertain him in certain restaurants in return for his services as cavalier and dancing partner.

“I didn’t have the money to take her to such places,” he explained with a frank smile and a gleam of white teeth. “We discussed that, and rather than lose the pleasure of taking her out, I agreed she could pay the bills.”

There was a titter and some giggles in the courtroom, at which the young man flushed.

“I couldn’t take her to the type of restaurants I am forced to dine in occasionally,” he added in justification.

On the whole, his testimony did her no harm. If he did not cut a swagger figure, it was the opinion of jury and spectators that entertaining Mrs. Breese was Mr. Breese’s task, and in this the husband had obviously been negligent.

The two Breese children, Henry Jr. and the Countess Giering-Trelovitch, testified for their mother. Henry Jr. was twenty and the Countess twenty-five. Henry Jr. swallowed visibly as counsel wrenched from him incidents of bad temper and cruelty of which his father had been guilty. Mrs. Breese cried, rather effectively, while he was on the stand. His father covered his eyes with his hand.

Then the Countess, rather pale, rather bored, and yet curiously lovely, added the necessary confirmation. She seemed a slim edition of her mother, without her mother’s enormous energy.

But undoubtedly the star witness was Gordon Rice, wealthy promoter, traveler, and one-time soldier of fortune. Rice was fifty, a few years older than Breese Sr., white-haired, red-faced, and with a downright heartiness of manner that soon won the jury. His was obviously a painful duty, and you felt that the quicker it was over with the better he would like it. He told of the sordid affair of the Follies beauty; how he had warned the elder Breese that it would wreck his marriage. He told of certain episodes that the law demands, and nothing could shake his testimony in the cross-examination.

Then the trial was over, and the verdict was read with great solemnity. After which it was appealed, and appealed again. And then the elder Breese, who refused to take the stand, denied himself to all interviewers, sulked in his hotel suite and instructed the lawyers to settle. They did. And the newspapers, even the tabloids, dropped Mrs. Breese as quickly as they had picked her up.

I had been keeping in touch with her after the trial, for news agencies must continue reporting even the most trivial items long after the newspapers have sent their reporters to greener fields. It was because of this that I was able to observe how unhappy Mrs. Breese had become as interest in her problems waned. Where once the color of a new gown was well-nigh sufficient to warrant a re-make of an edition, her spiciest pronunciamentos now found the waste-basket. Her lawyers advised her to go to Europe and rest. But Mrs. Breese did not want to rest. The dramatic excitement of the trial had only whetted her appetite for the public eye.

It was pathetic to watch her. One morning she telephoned me to come in post-haste. She had been struck with a brilliant idea; she would finance another of the trans-Atlantic flights. It mattered little to her that the movie queen who was to pilot the plane had just about two hours’ flying time to her credit. Mrs. Breese did get a paragraph or two on the event before its obvious impracticability was discovered, and she had the satisfaction of viewing her picture and that of the movie actress adorning a lurid half-page in one of the tabloids.

During the following few weeks she made the most startling observations on short skirts, necking, companionate marriage and life beyond the grave--the four staples of sob-sister interviews. But the editors were tired of Mrs. Breese. A certain staleness clung to the name. Even the crowds in the night clubs no longer turned to stare when she descended upon them for a few moments. So one morning she surrendered. I saw that surrender. Several days before, her social secretary had resigned. He--Mrs. Breese always employed male secretaries--said rather brusquely that his position had become ignominious. He was a rather effeminate young man, and had served several distinguished families.

Mrs. Breese, who was not without humor despite her weaknesses, said she really had no further use for a social secretary since society had dropped her. But she did need someone, to quote her words, “who can keep me in touch with public opinion. I’m so interested in what people are really thinking. I mean, the plain people.”

It was the most roundabout way of describing a press-agent that I had heard in some time. I said that there were young ladies who would undoubtedly suit her. But she shook her head vigorously. No. She had already made her choice. And that choice, I discovered to my amazement, was none other than myself. I was not flattered. There was something distinctly unpalatable in being Mrs. Breese’s amanuensis. I did not mind glorifying a milk company or a portrait painter or even an oil promoter, but press-agent to a divorcée was not yet officially recognized as altogether legitimate. So I declined with thanks.

But Mrs. Breese persisted. She named a salary which was double that I had been receiving. She sketched a tempting itinerary on the yacht _Mary Rose_ and, perhaps, knowing my weakness, she outlined a routine of labor that even for me would be child’s play. Still I refused.

But a week later circumstances altered my decision. A new city editor who had assigned me to travel as far as the subway penetrates discovered through some mischance that I had used the telephone instead and consumed the allotted time and some excellent Chianti in a neighborhood speakeasy. I received two weeks’ salary and a cold dismissal. I went searching for work on the papers without success and soon I could see that the manager of the minor hotel at which I was stopping was beginning to regard me as a problem.

One morning I did not leave my hotel room for breakfast. I had not the courage to face the thin-lipped manager. I sat facing the uninviting court yard, pondering my next move, when the telephone rang suddenly.

“Where in the world have you been?” the harsh, trilling voice of Mrs. Breese demanded, without any preliminary explanation. “I had the most awful time trying to get hold of you. They wouldn’t give me your address at your office. Are you in hiding?”

I muttered some lie or other about having been ill. But she obviously was not interested in that.

“Don’t you know we’re sailing tomorrow? I’m sending Pierre down for your luggage.”

I tried to say something, but she continued relentlessly: “Now, it’s no use your saying you can’t come. You’ve simply got to! I need you. Now will you come up here at once? There are a million things I’ve got to talk to you about. And do have your luggage ready. Pierre has just started out.”

This woman who took things for granted hung up without waiting for further word from me.

I was in no situation to protest in any case. So I descended at once to the manager and informed him with an off-hand gesture that I had consented to accept a fabulous salary as publicity engineer to a wealthy lady, and consumed on credit a hearty breakfast. I must have been convincing for I left the hotel with five dollars borrowed from the manager and rode up to the Park Avenue ménage in one of those new and immaculate black and white taxis. After weeks of uncertainty the sense of well-being was rather pleasant.

And when I appeared before Mrs. Breese she smiled at me and said: “I knew I could rely on you. I haven’t much time, and neither have you. I want you to tell the newspapers that we’re sailing tomorrow on the _Mary Rose_.

“I’ll give you a list of the guests: Mrs. Henry Breese, Sr. and her two children, Henry Breese, Jr., and the Countess Giering-Trelovitch. Please don’t forget the hyphen. Newspapers are so careless. The children have been upset by all this trial and a rest will do them good. Then Mr. Rice--Mr. Gordon Rice--has consented to come along. Mr. Rice, you know, is managing my affairs. You’ve met him, but you don’t really know him. He’s a friend--a true friend. I don’t know what I should have done without him. You know he was Henry’s friend when I first met him. But he didn’t let that stand in the way of telling the truth. And now that I’ve got my affairs to manage he is taking them off my hands. Just think of it! A man whose time is so valuable giving up weeks and weeks just for me! That sort of friendship gives me strength to go on!”

She spoke as if the world had done her a great wrong, and Rice was her only bulwark. “Then I’ve asked Guy Thomas.” She paused for effect and I looked up at her.

“I can see by your face you don’t approve. But, my dear boy, I simply must. If anything can prove that ours is nothing but an ordinary friendship, this will. I want you to be particularly careful how you phrase it. Let me see--oh yes, put it this way: ‘Mrs. Henry Breese, Sr., announced that Mr. Guy Thomas had been invited to accompany her and her children to Havana. Mrs. Breese said that she refused to take seriously the gossip which had been proven false in court.’ Is that all right?”

I indicated that it wasn’t. I pointed out that the most dignified thing she could do would be to sail away in her yacht with no one but her two children as guests, and the less said about anyone else the better.

“But I’ve already invited Guy!” she wailed. “And I couldn’t leave him behind now. Anyway, I don’t want to. I like Guy. I’m very fond of Guy. Let them talk if they want to.”

It seemed to me then that Mrs. Breese wanted them to talk. If any explanation is necessary for her, it lies, I think, in the fact that by temperament if not by ability she belonged to the stage. Whatever public exhibition her social position afforded her had not satisfied her through the years. Her trial had given her the attention she hungered for, and now she would never be content unless she could remain the center of discussion.

So, despite my objections, Mr. Thomas was duly announced as one of the guests and the next morning the newspapers carried non-committal and carefully-worded stories of the fact. Before we sailed, at Mrs. Breese’s request, I summoned the photographers. Mrs. Breese posed alone. Then with her son, Henry Jr., then with the Countess von Giering-Trelovitch (Mrs. Breese said gaily: “Don’t forget the hyphen!”). Then another pose with both children. There was one with Gordon Rice, with my amazing employer looking up at him with an expression that was meant to convey faith and friendly affection.

Over-riding my guarded protests, she laughingly put her arm on Guy Thomas’ shoulder and posed with that vindicated co-respondent. There followed a picture with the Captain of her yacht, and for comic relief one with a picturesque sailor, displaying huge tattooed arms. I was the only one that escaped.

When the photographers had left, Mrs. Breese went immediately to her cabin. She was tired.

We sailed one hour later.