Black money (3 page)

Mrs. Fablon stayed at the table, looking quite composed. "Who on earth are you?"

"My name is Archer. I'm a private detective."

"Does Dr Sylvester know you?"

"If he does, I don't know him. Why?"

"He rushed off in such a hurry when he saw you."

"I'm sorry about that."

"You needn't be. The luncheon was no great success. Don't tell me Audrey Sylvester is having him followed."

"Possibly. Not by me. Should she have?"

"Certainly not to my doorstep. George Sylvester has been my family doctor for ten years, and the relationship between us is about as highly seasoned as a tongue-depressor."

She smiled at her own elaborate wit. "Do you follow people, Mr. Archer?"

I looked at her eyes to see if she was kidding. If she was, they didn't show it. They were pale blue, with a kind of pastel imperviousness. I was interested in her eyes, because I hadn't seen her daughter's.

They were innocent eyes, not youthful but innocent, as if they perceived only pre-selected facts. Such eyes went with the carefully dyed blonde hair whipped like cream on her pretty skull, with the impossibly good figure under her too youthful dress, and with the guileless way she let me look at her. But under her serenity she was tense.

"I must be wanted for something," she said with a half smile. "Am I wanted for something?"

I didn't reply. I was trying to think of a tactful way to broach the subject of Ginny and Martel.

"I keep asking you questions," she said, "and you don't say anything. Is that the way detectives operate?"

"I have my own ways of working."

"Mysterious ways your wonders to perform? I was beginning to suspect as much. Now tell me what wonders you're bent on performing."

"It has to do with your daughter Ginny."

"I see."

But her eyes didn't change. "Sit down if you like."

She indicated the metal chair across from her. "Is Virginia in some kind of trouble? She never has been."

"That's the question I'm trying to answer."

"Who put you up to it?" she said rather sharply. "It wasn't George Sylvester?"

"What makes you think it was?"

"The way he ran off just now."

She was watching me carefully. "But it wasn't George, was it? He's quite infatuated with Virginia - all the men are - but he wouldn't expose himself-" She paused.

"Expose himself" She frowned with her meager out-of-place eyebrows. "You're drawing me out and making me say things I don't want to." She caught her breath. "I know, it must have been Peter. Was it?"

"I can't go into that."

"If it was Peter, he's even more helpless than I supposed. It was Peter, wasn't it? He's been threatening to hire detectives for some time. Peter is mad with jealousy, but I had no idea he'd go this far."

"This isn't very far. He asked me to look into the background of the man she's planning to marry. I suppose you know Francis Martel."

"I've met him, naturally. He's a fascinating person."

"No doubt. But something happened in the last hour, which makes it seem worthwhile to investigate him. I saw it happen, in the road below his house. A man tried to take a picture of him. Martel scared him off with a gun. He threatened to kill him."

She nodded calmly. "I don't blame him at all."

"Does he make a habit of threatening to murder people?"

"It wouldn't be a murder, it would be self-protection."

She sounded as if she was quoting somebody else. "There are reasons for what you saw, I'm sure. He doesn't want his identity to be known."

"Do you know who he is?"

"I'm pledged to secrecy."

She touched her red lips with a finger tipped with the same red.

"Who is he," I said, "the lost Dauphin of France?"

Without trying, I had succeeded in startling her. She stared at me with her mouth open. Then she remembered that it looked better closed, and closed it.

"I can't tell you who he is," she said after a while. "There could be very serious international repercussions if Francis were discovered here."

Once again she seemed to be reciting. "I'm sure you mean well in what you're doing - I'm not so sure about Peter - but I'm going to ask you to cease and desist, Mr. Archer."

She wasn't kidding me now. Her voice was grave.

"Are you trying to tell me Martel is a political figure?"

"He was. He will be again, when the conditions are ripe. Right now he's an exile from his native country," she said dramatically.

"France?"

"He's a Frenchman, yes, he makes no secret of that."

"But his name isn't Francis Martel?"

"He has a right to use it, but it isn't his actual name."

"What is his name?"

"I don't know. But it's one of the great names of France."

"Do you have evidence to support all this?"

"Evidence?" She smiled at me as if she had superior knowledge piped in directly from the infinite. "You don't ask your friends for evidence."

"I do."

"Then you probably don't have many friends. I can see you have a suspicious nature. You and Peter Jamieson make a good pair."

"Have you known him long?"

I meant Martel, but she misunderstood my question, I think deliberately. "Peter has been underfoot in our house for twenty years."

She gestured toward the rambling one-story house behind her. "I swear I've been wiping his nose for at least that long. When Peter's mother died, I sort of took him over for a while. He was just a little boy. But little boys grow up, and when he did he fell in love with Ginny, which he had no right to do. She doesn't care for Peter in that way, doesn't and didn't. He simply wore down her resistance because there was nobody else."

She sounded fond of Peter in spite of herself. I said so.

"Of course, you get fond of anyone if you see him every day for twenty years. Also I detest him, especially at the moment. My daughter has a brilliant chance. She's a beautiful girl" she lifted her chin as if Ginny's beauty belonged to both of them, like a family heirloom "and she deserves her chance. I don't want Peter, or you, fouling it up."

"I don't intend to foul anything up."

She sighed. "Can't I persuade you simply to drop it?"

"Not without some further checking."

"Will you promise me one thing then? Will you try to handle yourself without spoiling matters for Ginny? The thing she has with Francis Martel is very bright and shining, and very new. Don't tarnish it."

"I won't if it's real."

"It's real, believe me. Francis Martel worships the ground she walks on. And Virginia's quite mad about him."

I thought I could hear a self-fulfilling wish in what she said, and I threw her a curve: "Is that why she went away for the weekend with him?"

Her blue eyes, impervious till now, winced away from mine. "You have no right to ask such questions. You're not a gentleman, are you?"

"But Martel is?"

"I've had about enough of you and your innuendoes, Mr. Archer."

She stood up. It was a dismissal.

4

I WENT NEXT DOOR to the Jamieson house. It was a great Spanish mansion, grimy white, which had the barren atmosphere of an institution.

The woman who answered the door, after repeated ringing, wore a striped gray dress which might have been a uniform but wasn't quite. She was handsome and dark, with the slightly imperious look of the only woman in a big house.

"You didn't have to keep ringing. I heard you the first time."

"Why didn't you answer the first time?"

"I've got better things to do than to answer the door," she said tartly. "I was putting a goose in the oven."

She looked down at her greasy hands, and wiped them on her apron.

"What did you want?"

"I'd like to see Peter Jamieson."

"Junior or senior?"

"Junior."

"He's probably still down at the Tennis Club. I'll ask his father."

"Maybe I could talk to Mr. Jamieson. My name is Archer."

"Maybe. I'll see."

I waited in the dim hallway on a high-backed Spanish chair, which Torquemada had made with his own hands. The housekeeper returned eventually, and said with some surprise that Mr. Jamieson would see me. She led me past closed oak doors to an oak-paneled library whose deeply embrasured windows looked out on the mountains.

A man was sunk in an armchair by the windows, reading a book. His hair was gray and his face was very nearly the same colorless color. When he took off his reading glasses and peered up at me, I could see that his look was faint and faraway.

Half of a highball stood on a low table beside him, and close at hand on a larger table were a bottle of bourbon and a pitcher of water. I caught the housekeeper glaring at the highball and the bottle as if they represented everything she hated. She had violent black eyes, and she looked like a good hater.

"Mr. Archer," she said.

"Thank you, Vera. Hello, Mr. Archer. Sit down, here."

He waved his hand at an armchair facing his. His hand was almost transparent against the light. "Would you like a drink before Vera goes?"

"Not so early in the day, thanks."

"I don't often drink so early myself."

I noticed that the book in his hands was upside down. He hadn't wanted to be found just drinking. He closed the book and laid it on the table. "The Book of the Dead," he said. "Egyptian stuff: You may go, Vera. I'm perfectly competent to entertain Mr. Archer myself."

"Yessir," she said in a dubious voice, and went out closing the door sharply.

"Vera is a powerful woman," Jamieson said. "She's the bane of my existence, but also the blessing. I don't know how this household would function without her. She's been like a mother to my poor boy. My wife has been dead for many years, you know."

The flesh around his eyes seemed to crumple, as if the blow of her death was about to fall again. He took a long sip of his highball to ward it off: "Sure you won't have a drink?"

"Not while I'm working."

"I understand you're working for my son. He asked my advice about hiring you. I told him to go ahead."

"I'm glad you know about it. I won't have to beat around the bush. Do you think Francis Martel is an impostor?"

"We all are, to some extent, wouldn't you say? Take me, for instance. I'm a solitary drinker, as you can see. The more I drink, the more sorely I am tempted to conceal it. The only way I can preserve any integrity at all is by drinking openly, and facing the music with Peter and of course with Vera."

"You got that off your chest," I said smiling, "but it doesn't tell me much about Martel."

"I don't know. Anything I've learned about people I've had to learn by examining myself. It's a slow painful process," he said with an inward look. "If Martel is an impostor, he's taking some big chances."

"Have you met him?"

"No. But sequestered as my life is, I do get bulletins from the world of men. Martel has aroused a good deal of local interest."

"What's the consensus?"

"There are two camps. There always are. That's the worst thing about democracy; there have to be two opinions about every issue."

He talked like a man who needed a listener. "Those who know Martel and like him, mainly the women, accept him at his face value as a distinguished young Frenchman of independent means. Others think he's more or less a fraud."

"A con man?"

He raised his transparent hand. "Hardly that. There's not much question that he's a cultivated European."

"And no question that he has independent means?"

"I'm afraid not. I happen to know that his initial deposit at the local bank was in six figures."

"I understand you're on the board of the bank."

"So you've investigated me," he said with some resentment. "You do me too much honor."

"I got it accidentally from Mr. McMinn, when I cashed a check. Can you find out where Martel's money came from?"

"I suppose I can try."

"It could be borrowed money," I said. "I've known con men who used borrowed money, sometimes borrowed from gangsters, to get local status quickly."

"For what possible purpose?"

"I know of one who bought a municipal bus system on terms, cannibalized it, then moved out and left it bankrupt. In the last few years they've even been buying banks."

"Martel hasn't been buying anything that I know of."

"Except Virginia Fablon."

Jamieson wrinkled his forehead. He picked up his highball, saw that it was nearly gone, and got up to make himself another. He was tall, but thin and frail. He moved like an old man, but I suspected he wasn't much older than I was - fifty at most.

When he'd made his fresh drink and comforted himself with part of it and resettled himself in his leather armchair, I said: "Does Ginny have money?"

"Hardly enough to interest a confidence man. She isn't a girl who needs money to interest any kind of a man - in fact she's probably turned down more advances that most young women dream of. Frankly, I was surprised when she accepted Peter, and not so very surprised when she broke the engagement. I tried to tell him that last night. It was safe enough when they were high school kids. But a beautiful young wife can be a curse to an ordinary man, especially if he loses her."

The flesh around his eyes was crumpling again. "It's dangerous to get what you want, you know. It sets you up for tragedy. But my poor son can't see that. Young people can't learn from the misfortunes of their elders."

He was becoming faintly garrulous. Looking past him at the mountains, I had a feeling of unreality, as if the sunlit world had moved back out of reach.

"We were talking about the Fablons and their money."

Jamieson visibly pulled himself together. "Yes, of course.

They can't have a great deal. The Fablons did have money at one time, but Roy gambled a lot of it away. The rumor was that that was one reason he committed suicide. Fortunately Marietta has her own small private income. They have enough to live comfortably, but as I said, certainly not enough to tempt a fortune-hunter. Let alone a fortune-hunter with a hundred thousand dollars in cash of his own."