Dark Nantucket Noon (28 page)

“Parts? Parts? Oh, I see. You mean shares. You want to know the names of the shareholders. Is that right?”

“Oh, yes, yes, miss or madam, I want this names. Mr. Dankbinkel, he is a trustee.”

“But, Mr. Kelly, I cannot give you information on the telephone. I am sorry. I must ask Mr. Dankbinkel first.”

“Where is Mr. Dankbinkel? When comes he at home?”

“I don't know. Mr. Dankbinkel will call you when he comes in. Good day.”

“No, no! Halt, please, miss! It is a matter of live or die! I must have this names! Now! These minutes!”

“No, no, I cannot.”

“What is it with you, miss? Don't you have a head on top of your neck? Don't you stand on your own two foot?”

“How dare you speak to me like that? You are rude and insulting!”

“Oh, no, no, my good loveliness young lady! How beautiful you are! I love you! I blossom you a kiss! Only give me please the name of the shareholders of the Boatwright Trust! Now, most beautifuls young lady! These minutes!”

“I will not speak with you any longer. Good day!”

“Halt! No, no!”

The phone went dead. Homer stared at the receiver, his chest heaving, shouted
“Schweinhund! Dummkopf!”
into it, and kicked the telephone table across the room. Then he picked up the phone, which had lost a few chips here and there, and called his friend Jerry on the mainland.

“Well, you might try Interpol,” suggested Jerry. “Aren't you an old friend of the district attorney of Middlesex County? Maybe he knows somebody over there who knows somebody.”

It was true that the district attorney was an old friend and colleague of Homer Kelly's. A man of modest talents, he had once been Homer's superior in the East Cambridge Courthouse, and Homer had worked long and loyally for him. Now Homer called up his old friend and told him about his problem with Dankbinkel.

“Well, I might be able to work something out,” said the D.A. “You know, Homer, I think the Swiss police chief who buddied with me in Paris at the convention last fall was from Zurich. Or maybe it was Geneva. He showed me around gay Paree while everybody else was taking a tour of the French countryside. Saved my life. You know how I feel about the country. I'll see what I can do. You've really got something on this Donkbingle? I mean, no kidding, this is something really rotten? Okay, I'll just get in touch with the
Polizeikommissar
in Zurich and ask him to serve a paper on Donkbingle. He'll do it. That is, if he's the one I remember. The Geneva fella wouldn't do you any good, right? Well, I'm pretty sure this chap was from Zurich.”

(Here follows an English translation of the transatlantic conversation between Homer Kelly of Nantucket and Herr Hermann Dankbinkel of Zurich.)

“Hello?”

“Mr. Dankbinkel?”

“This is Hermann Dankbinkel. Is this Inspector Kelly?”

“Mr. Dankbinkel! Mr. Dankbinkel! Thank God! Good morning, Mr. Dankbinkel!”

“Good morning. Police Commissioner Haessler has requested me to tell you something about the Boatwright Trust, Inspector.”

“Yes, yes, that is truly, yes, indeed!”

“Good. I have here the names of the shareholders. Do you have a pencil?”

“Yes, yes! I have the pen of my aunt!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“No, no, never mind. I have a pencil!”

“Good. Hmm. There is only one shareholder listed here. Her name is Green. Helen Boatwright Green.”

“Helen Green? She was the only shareholder? But she is dead! Helen Green is die dead!”

“Oh? When did she die? This document is only good for a year. I have another document. The Boatwright Trust was to have been taken over by another trust.”

“Halt! I cannot understand you! Another document? What is this other document?”

“Mr. Kelly? Vy do vee not spake in English?”

“Ja, ja—I mean, yes, indeed, by all means. Go to it. Go right ahead. I'm all ears.”

“I haff not zuh English perfected. I spake vrongly, no doubet.”

“No, no, beautifully! You speak beautifully, Herr Dankbinkel! But please tell me about that other document! The Boatwright Trust was to last for one year only? And then it was to be superseded by another trust?”

“Yes. Zuh uzzer trust vas to haff taken over zuh assets of zuh Boatwright Trust on a certain date. I haff a letter of intent to zat effect. It vas to be a landed property trust—how do you call it?—a real estate trust. I vass no longer to be zuh trustee. I vas to be replaced by a Mr. James Harmon. Zuh trust is named for him. Zuh Harmony Real Estate Trust.”

“You mean, James Harmon of Harmony Hotels? Aaahhh.” Understanding flooded in upon Homer. Helen Green had indeed been duped, she had been gulled, she had been swindled. It was just as he had thought. The slender hand of Wilhelmina Magee had slipped in her little card. Somehow or other Mrs. Magee had jumped into the action through a loophole, or a defect in the wording, or through some even more sinister opportunity, some threat of reprisal, perhaps even murder. She had inserted herself between the beneficence and generosity of Helen Green's intent and its object, she had perverted it to her own ends. “This is not merely a substitution of one free gift for another, is it, Herr Dankbinkel? It is not a gift to Mr. Harmon? Surely there is money involved, a sum of money?”

“Oh, yes, of course, a great deal of money. Fife and a half million dollars, Mr. Kelly, vas to be paid by zuh Harmon Corporation to zuh vooman who signed zuh letter of intent, on completion of zuh exchange of assets from zuh one trust to zuh uzzer. But zuh exchange never took place.”

The woman. Wilhelmina Magee!
“Who signed it, Herr Dankbinkel? Can you tell me if the name Wilhelmina Magee is on that letter of intent?”

“Vilhelmina who?”

“Magee, Wilhelmina Magee. M-a-g-e-e.”

“Vilhelmina Magee.” There was a pause. “No, zere is no such name here anyvere,” said Herr Dankbinkel.

“Well, then, who signed the letter?”

“Vy, of course it vas zuh shareholder, Helen Green. She vas zuh only vun who
could
sign it.”

“Helen Green?
”

“Inspector Kelly? Are you still zere?”

“Yes, yes, I'm still here.”

“Tell me, did zhu reeng bevore?”

“Before? Yes, of course. I've been calling since yesterday.”

“No, no, I mean a vile ago. Lahst spreeng? Lahst veenter? You spoke to my assistant, Frau Kranzli?”

“No, not I. Did someone call last winter?”

“Ja. You see, Frau Kranzli did not know she was supposed to be—how you say it
auf englisch?
—
umsichtig.
Discreet! She was—how you say it?—
eingeschüchtert
, frightened, by being called oop on zuh transatlantic telephone. It vas likevise a call from Nantucket. And she vas answering hiss qvestions ven I came into zuh room, and zen of course I cut him off short and hung oop qvickly, and reproved my assistant. She cried tears down her face. I don't remember zuh man's name.
Frau Kranzli, erinnern Sie sich auf den Namen des Mannes der letzten Februar telephoniert hat? Nein?
No, Inspector Kelly, she does not remember eezer.”

“It was a man who called? From Nantucket?”

“Yes. He belonged to some Conwerzational Committee, for making conwerzation.”

“Conwerzation?” Homer rolled his eyes to the ceiling and tried to think of something else to say to Herr Dankbinkel, whose voice was beginning to crackle and snap, to wane and wax and wane. The connection was failing. “What did they conwerse about?” he said idiotically. “The Dialogues of Plato? Truth? Goodness? Beauty?”

“Vot? Vot?” The telephone squealed and buzzed. Herr Dankbinkel's voice was growing fainter and fainter. “Conwerse about? Conwerse about? Vy, zuh trees, of course, zuh green trees and zuh flowers, zuh booshes, zuh green grass …”

And then Herr Dankbinkel's voice faded away altogether, and as it faded it seemed to Homer that Herr Dankbinkel was drifting back into his childhood. A miniature Herr Dankbinkel in a tiny sailor suit was skipping through a childlike little park in a little toy city in Switzerland, with giant plastic flowers blossoming under trees as round as green balloons. Then Homer understood. He dropped the receiver and threw up his hands and shouted at Herr Dankbinkel across the entire expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and all of southern France and up and up into the foothills of the Alps. “Conser
wation,
Herr Dankbinkel! You got the
ess
and the
wee
in the wrong places! You meant a Conser
wation
Committee, Herr Dankbinkel! God bless you!”

35

To you, Arch Principals, I rear

My quarrel, for this quarrel is with gods.

MELVILLE
,
Timoleon

So it was Helen Green herself, the bitch, the dirty little hypocrite. It wasn't Min Magee or Samuel Flakeley or James Holworthy or any of those other fine upstanding realtors and commercial developers who was about to lay violent hands on Nantucket's sacred soil and dump hotels and parking lots all over it. It was Helen Green herself. That Boatwright Trust of hers was a fraud, a swindle, a dummy organization for a deal with Harmony Hotels. Helen Green, damn her, the leader of the forces of virtue, who was self-righteously demanding that everyone else give up the profit on his acreage for the sake of a bunch of varying hares and a few bucketfuls of blueberries—it was Helen Green who was betraying them all while she was pretending to set them such a noble example. Well, her noble example was a filthy lie.

Homer stretched and scratched his chest and yawned and got up and sought out his wife. “She was double-crossing them,” he said.

“Who was?”

“Helen Green.”

“Oh, no!”

“She was going to get five and a half million dollars from Harmony Hotels for her chunk of land. And there's another thing. Somebody else got wind of this deal last February. Somebody in the Nantucket Protection Society. Somebody discovered that Helen was going to sell her land to James Harmon of Harmony Hotels. And it was last February that the first of Helen's accidents began. I'll try to track down the transatlantic phone call from Nantucket to Zurich last February, but it was probably made from a public phone. You see what this means, don't you? It means Helen Green was killed by somebody
on her own side.
I mean the side we used to think she was on. Somebody who was in favor of birds and bees and trees and so forth was trying to kill her, beginning last February. It wasn't one of those real estate types after all. They've all got hearts of gold.”

“Homer, you haven't got much time. This is Saturday. Doesn't the trial begin on Monday? Can you get it postponed?”

“Yes, it begins Monday. No, I can't get it postponed.”

“Well, let me help.” Mary got up out of her chair at the dining room table, took a picture off its nail on the wall and turned it over. “There, I've turned Mrs. Pankhurst back to front. I'm all yours. Let me do something.”

“Good. Make me a list of six reasons why I can't introduce all this new stuff into Kitty's case. You know, all the ways it might be called irrelevant and immaterial. See what you can think up. Then I'll call Jake O'Donnell in Cambridge and ask him how I should argue back.”

“Who's Jake O'Donnell?”

“You know. Trial lawyer, hopeless cases. Snatches them out of the fire.”

“Hopeless! But Kitty's case isn't hopeless! Homer!”

“It is if we can't get all this stuff about Helen into it. Right now I want to call up Bob Fern and see what he makes of what Dankbinkel told me.”

Bob was shocked. “Why, I'm absolutely disgusted,” he said. “To think Mrs. Green would do a thing like that! What did she think would happen when the bulldozers went in there and they started to build the hotel? Everybody would know she'd been a traitor to her cause.”

“Well, she would have cried all the way to the bank, as they say,” said Homer. “But I think the reason for the dummy conservation organization and all this secrecy was that she was planning to be an innocent victim. After all, everyone assumed that she had given up all claim to that land. Nobody knew she was still the sole shareholder in the conservation trust. So when the time came for the hotel chain to buy the land from some transatlantic bank, she would pretend she had been betrayed, and she would sue the Swiss bank and the hotel people, only of course she would sue very gently and ineffectually, and the upshot would be that the hotel company would be in legal possession. And then she could quietly deposit her five and a half million in the Swiss bank and nobody would be the wiser. She would just be one more poor victimized idealist.”

“Oh, I see now,” said Bob. “But what does all this mean for Kitty?”

“Well, I think it helps. I've got a motive now for all those earlier attempts on Helen's life. Somebody knew what she was trying to do, and was doing his damnedest to stop her. And of course all of it has nothing to do with Kitty—that's what's so good about it. It was all very much a Nantucket Island matter. So if I can just focus enough attention on Helen's perfidious arrangements, maybe I can take the heat off Kitty. I wish to hell I had more time. Here I've been concentrating on Min Magee and all her friends and relations and I should have been nosing around the members of the Nantucket Protection Society. The only ones I know even by name are Alden and Alice and Mr. Tillinghast. Who else is there? Just a lot of respectable folks. Is Joe Green a member?”

“Yes, he is. So am I. Don't forget me,” said Bob Fern.

“I won't, I promise. Now, in order to have killed Helen Green during the total eclipse of the sun on March seventh of this year, this respectable person in the Nantucket Protection Society would have to have been floating around Great Point somehow. Maybe it was somebody in that goddamned red cabin cruiser I haven't been able to track down. You see, Fern, I should have been finding out which of those people have motorboats or sailboats or rowboats or whatever. There's Alden, of course, he was out scalloping that morning, but he was hard at work in the harbor hauling up bag after bag, and he never went outside the harbor mouth, where Charley Piper was keeping track.”