Black money (8 page)

"I can tell people with money from people without, and people who have had it for a while from people who haven't. If you want my opinion, Mr. Martel is nouveau riche, and more nouveau than riche. He's felt out of place here, and he's been spending his money like a drunken sailor, and it hasn't helped much."

"Except that it's got him Ginny. They were married over the weekend."

"Poor girl."

"Why do you say that?"

"On general principles. Mr. Jamieson is having a long wait. Is he the one you're working for?"

"Yes."

"And you're a private detective, aren't you?"

"I am. What do you think of my client?"

"He reminds me of something I read once, that inside every fat man is a thin man crying to get out. Only Peter's just a boy, and that makes it worse." She added meditatively: "I suppose he has the makings of a man."

"We'll see."

I jerked a thumb toward the bulletin board. "You have some pictures on the board. Does this club have a regular photographer?"

"A part time one. Why?"

"I was wondering if he took a picture of Martel."

"I doubt it. I could check with the photographer. Eric isn't on tonight though."

"Get him on. Tell him I'll pay him for his time."

"I'll try."

"You can do better than try," I said. "There's a question about Martel's identity, and we need a picture if there is one."

"I said I'd try."

She directed me to the dining room. It was actually two adjoining rooms, one of which had a polished dance floor. A small orchestra was on the stand, momentarily silent. The other room contained about thirty tables, brilliant with flowers and silver. Peter was sitting at a table by the windows, staring out gloomily at the dark beach.

He got up eagerly when he saw me, but his eagerness had more to do with dinner than with me. It was served buffet style by men in white hats. At the sight of food Peter underwent a transformation, as if his melancholy passion for Ginny had been switched to another channel. He loaded two plates for himself, one with five kinds of salad, cold ham, shrimp, crabmeat: the other with roast beef and potatoes and gravy and small green peas.

He gobbled the food with such eager straining gluttony that he made me feel like a voyeur. His eyes were fixed and mindless as he chewed. Sweat stood out on his forehead.

He wiped his plate with a piece of bread, which he ate. Then he went into contemplation, leaning his chin on his hand. "I can't decide what to have for dessert."

"You don't need dessert."

He looked at me as if I'd threatened to put him on bread and water for a month. I felt like telling him to go to hell. Watching him eat, I'd asked myself if I'd be doing Ginny a favor by bringing her back to my client. Martel at least was a man. Maybe Peter had the `makings of a man, as Ella said, but when he sat down at the table he turned into something less, an appetite that only walked like a man.

"I don't know whether to have a chocolate eclair or a hot fudge sundae," he said seriously. .

"Have both."

"That isn't funny. My body needs fuel."

"You've already stoked it with enough fuel to run a Matson liner to Honolulu."

He flushed. "You seem to forget that I'm your employer, and you're my guest here."

"I do, don't I? But let's get off the subject of personalities and food, and talk about something real. Tell me about Ginny."

"After I get my dessert."

"Before. Before you eat yourself stupid."

"You can't talk like that to me."

"Somebody should. But we won't argue about it. I want to know if Ginny is the kind of girl who goes off half-cocked about men."

"She never did before."

"Has she had much to do with men?."

"Very little," he said. "Mainly me, in fact."

He flushed again, avoiding my eyes. "I wasn't always so fat, if you want to know. Ginny and I sort of went steady in high school. But after that for a long time she wasn't interested in - well, sex, necking and stuff: We were still friends, and I used to take her places sometimes, but we weren't going steady in the true sense anymore."

"What changed her?"

"She was hitting the books, for one thing. She did well at college. I didn't."

The fact seemed to nag him. "But it was mainly what happened to her father."

"His suicide?"

Peter nodded. "Ginny was very much attached to her father. Actually it took her until just about now to get over his death."

"How long ago did it happen?"

"Nearly seven years. Seven years this fall. He came down to the beach one night and walked into the water with all his clothes on."

"This beach?"

I gestured towards the window. The tide was out: the surf was far down the beach and visible only as a recurring whiteness.

"Not right here, no. He went in about half a mile from here."

Peter pointed towards a headland which loomed dark against the more distant harbor lights. "But there's a current in this direction and when his body came up it was right offshore here. I didn't go in the ocean for quite a while. I don't think Ginny ever went in again. She uses - she used the pool.

He sat hunched over in silence for a moment. "Mr. Archer, can't we do something about Martel? Find out if they're married legally or something?"

"I'm sure they are. Ginny would have no reason to lie, would she?"

"No. But she's very much under his spell. You could see for yourself that it isn't a natural situation."

"She seems to be in love with him."

"She can't be! We've got to prevent him from taking her away."

"With what? It's still a free country."

Peter leaned across the table. "Have you considered the possibility that he's in this country illegally? He admitted he had no passport."

"It might be worth looking into. But the worst they'd do is deport him. And Ginny would probably go along."

"I see what you mean. It would only make matters worse."

He lowered his cushioned chin onto his fist and became thoughtful. Our side of the dining room was filling up as people came in from outside or from the bar. A few of them wore dress clothes, and occasional diamonds and rubies sparkled on hands and throats like drippings from the past. The low sound of the ocean was lost in the rise and fall of conversation and music.

The people seemed to be talking against the darkness that pressed at the window. Fablon and his death were still on my mind. "You say that Ginny was very fond of her father?"

Peter came out of his thoughts with a start. "Yes. She was."

"What sort of man was he?"

"He was what they call a sportsman, I guess. He went in for big-game hunting and fishing and yachting and polo and sports cars and planes."

"All those?"

"At various times. He'd lose interest in one sport and try another. He couldn't seem to find the one thing that would absorb his mind. For a while, when I was a kid in high school, he let me follow him around. He even used to take me up in his plane."

Peter's eyes blurred reminiscently. "He was in the Air Force at one time, until they invalided him out."

"What was the matter with him?"

"I don't know exactly. He crashed his plane in a training flight and so he never got into the war. That was a big disappointment to him. He walked with a bit of a limp. Which is one reason I think he went in for all those sports."

"What did he look like?"

"I suppose you'd say that he was good-looking. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, and he always had a deep tan. Ginny got her coloring from her mother. But I don't know why you're so interested in her family. What's the point?"

"I'm trying to understand her, and understand why she fell so hard and suddenly for Martel. Does he resemble her father?"

"Some," he admitted reluctantly. "But Mr. Fablon was better looking."

"You said he was partly French. Did he speak French?"

"I guess he could when he wanted to. He lived in France at one time, he told me."

"Where?"

"Paris. That was when he was studying painting."

I was beginning to get some idea of Fablon. In these circles he was a fairly common type: the man who tried everything and succeeded at nothing.

"Where did he get the money for all his hobbies? Was he in business?"

"He tried various businesses. Right after the war he started 58 an air-freight business. The trouble was, he was in competition with airlines like the Flying Tiger. He told me once he lost fifty thousand dollars in six months. But he had a lot of-fun with it, he said."

Peter's tone was elegiac, nostalgic. At another time, in another body, he might have liked to live as the dead man had.

"Who paid for the fun?"

"Mrs. Fablon did, I guess. She was a Proctor."

He paused, frowning slightly. "I just remembered something. It's nothing to do with anything, but it's interesting."

He turned to the window, indicating the dark headland again. "That beach where Mr. Fablon walked into the water used to belong to the Proctors. It was part of their estate. Ginny's mother had to sell the estate about ten years ago."

"Three years before Fablon died."

"That's right. If she could have waited until now, she'd have got at least a million. But I heard it went for peanuts to pay Mr. Fablon's debts."

"Who bought it?"

"A cemetery company. They haven't put in the cemetery yet.

"I can hardly wait," I said.

Peter frowned at my levity. A minute later he left the table and ducked out of the room. I saw him a few minutes after that talking at the entrance with a tall man in a tuxedo. The tall man moved his head, and I noticed the hard line of his jaw. It was Dr Sylvester, whose lunch with Mrs. Fablon I had interrupted.

He went into the bar. Peter trudged to the end of the line that had formed at the dessert table. He stood like an earnest communicant, his eyes dreaming over the pies and cakes and pastries.

10

I FOLLOWED DR SYLVESTER into the bar. A bartender whose eyes moved like black quicksilver poured him a double scotch without being asked to. Sylvester called the bartender Marco. Marco wore a red waistcoat, a white shirt with long collar-points, and a flowing black silk tie.

I waited until the doctor had knocked back about half of his drink. Then I sat on the bar stool beside him and watched Marco making a daiquiri.

Sylvester's square hairy-backed hands fiddled with his lowball glass. The hairs were slightly grizzled, like the hair on his head. The bones of his face were prominent, and accentuated by harsh lines running from the base of his nose to his mouth. He didn't look like an easy man to strike up a conversation with.

To have something to do with my hands, I ordered a bar bourbon. The bartender wouldn't accept my dollar.

"Sorry, no cash. Are you a member, sir?"

"I'm Peter Jamieson's guest."

"I'll put it on his bill, sir."

Dr Sylvester turned and raised his black eyebrows at me. He used them so conspicuously that they seemed to be his main sense organs, distracting attention from his hard bright eyes.

"Jamieson senior or junior?"

"I know them both. I noticed you were talking to the young one."

"Yes?"

I told him my name and trade. "Peter hired me to look into this business of his ex-fiancée."

"I was wondering how you got in here."

He wasn't trying to insult me, exactly, just letting me know my place in his scheme of things. "Didn't I see you at the Fablon's house this noon?"

"Yes. I understand you were Virginia Fablon's employer at one time."

"That's true."

"What do you think about her marriage?"

I had succeeded in interesting him. "Good Lord, did she marry the fellow?"

"So she told me. They were married on Saturday."

"You've talked to her?"

"An hour or so ago. I couldn't figure out what was going on in her mind. Of course the circumstances weren't normal, either. But she seemed to be living out some kind of romantic dream."

"Most women are," he said dryly. "Did you see him?"

"I talked to them together at his house."

"I've never met him myself," Sylvester said. "I've seen him around here, of course, at a distance. What did you make of him?"

"He's a very intelligent man, highly educated, with a good deal of force He seems to have Virginia pretty well dominated."

"It won't last," Sylvester said. "You don't know the young lady. She has a lot of personal force of her own."

He added wryly: "I've served in loco parentis to her since her father died, and it hasn't always been easy. Virginia likes to make up her own mind."

"About men?"

"There haven't been any men in her life, not lately. That's one of the problems she's had. Ever since her father's death she's done nothing but work and study French. You'd think her life was nothing but a memorial to Roy. Then a few weeks ago, as you might expect, the whole thing broke down. She dropped her studies, when she was within easy shooting distance of her degree, and went hog-wild for this Martel."

He sipped his drink. "It's a disturbing picture."

"Are you her doctor?"

"I was until quite recently. Frankly, we had a disagreement about the - the wisdom of her course. I thought it best to refer her to another doctor. Why do you ask?"

"I don't like the emotional risk she's taking. She's managed to convince herself that she's crazy about Martel, and she's perched way out on a limb. It could be brutal for her if the limb gets sawed off."

"I tried to tell her that," Sylvester said. "You think he's a phony, eh?"

"He has to be at least partly phony. I've had one Washington reference checked, and it didn't pan out. There were other things I won't go into."

The rat, the blood on his heel, the gun peering out of his hand at Harry Hendricks.

"What can I do about it? She's got the bit in her teeth, and she running with it."

Sylvester paused, and finished his drink.

"You want another, doctor?" the bartender asked.

"No thanks, Marco. One thing I've learned in twenty years of practicing medicine," he said to me: "you have to let people make their own mistakes. Sooner or later they come around to reason. The men with emphysema will eventually give up smoking. The women with chronic alcoholism will go on the wagon. And the girls with bad cases of romanticism turn into realists. Like my dear wife here."

A big woman in a kind of mantilla had come up behind us. Her chest gleamed like mother-of-pearl through black lace. She had bouffant yellow hair which made her as tall as I was when I stood up. Her mouth was discontented.

"What about me?" she said. "I love to be talked about by men."

"I was saying that you were a realist, Audrey. That women start out being romantic and end up realistic every time."

"Men force us into it," she said. "Is this my daiquiri?"

"Yes, and this is Mr. Archer. He's a detective."

"How fascinating," she said. "You must tell me the story of your life."

"I started out as a romantic and ended up as a realist."

She laughed and drank her drink, and they went in to dinner. Some other people followed them.

For a moment I was the only one at the bar. Marco asked me if I wanted another drink. He was staring at me intensely as if he had something on his mind. His mouth was sort of wreathed with unspoken language. I said that I would like another drink.