Authors: Colleen McCullough
The Prodigal Son (22 page)
“No. I knew you were coming this morning, and I thought it wiser to wait and tell you first. But I didn’t know — I swear I didn’t know!” Max cried. “How could I?”
“I’ll have to talk to Mr. Zucker myself,” said Abe, “but may I offer a word of advice? Don’t mention this bequest to anyone for the moment. Your family, including you, is suspect in a murder investigation.”
“I’ll try, but I won’t promise,” said Max wretchedly. “I lose my son, then I find my son, now I lose him again. It’s too cruel!”
“Just try. How did your family feel when the proof said John really was your son?”
“Davina was glad for me. That’s one wonderful woman! She was delighted to think Alexis had a brother, she really was. It wasn’t about inheritances to Vina, it was about having another strong arm to help. Val was glad for me too. He’s a true brother — the best brother.”
“What does Val do for Tunbull Printing?” Abe asked.
“Looks after the actual printing process. I do all the overseeing and planning — layout, bookbinding — Davina has been a tower of strength to me. A university press is extremely specialized, even has a look. C.U.P. is purple calf with gold print, and some volumes are still exquisitely tooled. Now we do a line of textbooks for undergraduates in subjects as disparate as physics and English, we put them out cheaply, but they still look like purple calf — imitation. We keep the price right down and the look right up.” Max shrugged.
“Gold-edged pages? We hardly do that any more, it’s a sop for snobs.”
“Snobs like Dr. Tinkerman?”
Max sneered. “He was going back to all gilt edges.”
“What does Ivan do?” Abe asked.
“Ivan’s our traveler. Visits the great university bookstores from coast to coast, as well as other stores catering for the university press market. He monitors competing prices, and also attends all the wholesale shows where we might find new materials, paper, advances in ink and typesetting. Though the wholesale shows are more important, he also mans our booth at the A.B.A. each year.”
“A.B.A.?”
“American Booksellers’ Association convention. That and the Frankfurt Book Fair in West Germany are the two major trade publication shows each year, but they’re important for us too.”
“Did you like John as a person, sir?”
“I think I would have, had we had more time together. He was so like Martita! We’re comfortable, Lieutenant, the money is no compensation for losing a son twice over.”
“How did Mrs. Emily Tunbull regard him?”
“Actually she never met him, but I guess she hadn’t been enthusiastic about his reappearance. She was convinced John would cut Ivan out, and that she didn’t like.” Max frowned. “I heard a weird story from Davina — that Emily told her she knew about some suspicious events that had been going on for a year. When Davina tried to pin her down, she shied away. That’s Em!”
“How do you mean, ‘that’s Em!’?”
“Always full of mysterious accusations. When Martita was my wife, Em was so new to us that we didn’t wake up to what kind of mischief-maker she was, so we tended to believe her stories. Well, not any more, Lieutenant, not any more!”
“Mrs. Davina Tunbull told Sergeant Carstairs that John Hall had physically attacked her during the dinner party.”
“Oh, Vina, Vina!” Max cried, clenching his hands into fists and raising them heavenward. “That,” he said grimly, “is typical Davina. She fantasizes that every personable man who meets her tries to make love to her.” Suddenly his exasperation vanished; he grinned. “Stick around, Lieutenant, and she’ll do it to you.”
“I wasn’t aware you were aware of her failings, sir.”
“By the time Davina and I married in May of 1967, I had her summed up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m nuts about her, but I know all her tricks too. For instance, she had the hots for Jim Hunter, who never so much as noticed her on that level. That only made her try harder, until I told her what a fool she was making of herself. Vina is my wife, and I have very good reason to be sure that she’s faithful to me. But at the same time, she has to throw out lures to other men.”
“You’re remarkably perceptive, Mr. Tunbull.”
“That’s why our marriage will last. I’m an ideal husband for Davina — authority figure as well as lover and father.”
Abe changed the subject. “How do you think C.U.P. will go with Dr. Geoffrey Chaucer Millstone as Head Scholar?”
Max’s face lit up. “Fantastic! Better than Don Carter, in many ways. I envision more and more titles in the sciences,
though he won’t forget the humanities. Moving with the times is the hardest task an academic publisher faces, especially the concept of cheap, soft cover texts for undergraduates. I predict a wonderful and fruitful collaboration,” said Max. “I mean, Chauce understood why we did that twenty-thousand print run.”
“What did he understand about it?” Abe asked, curious for a new slant on an old conundrum.
“Bestsellers move like lightning,” said Max, “and we’re not geared to producing them at Tunbull Printing. To have twenty-thousand in reserve ready to go is what gives us a fighting chance to keep supply up to demand.”
“That,” said Abe, relieved, “makes perfect sense.”
“Publication Day will be upon us in no time,” Max said.
“And when is Publication Day?”
“Undecided, but I’m guessing around the beginning of April.”
By the time everyone met in Carmine’s office at four that afternoon, the atmosphere had changed. Somehow, and absolutely indefinably, people knew that things had happened to knock cop theories down like pins in a bowling alley.
“John Hall’s will is legal and extant,” said Abe, “and it appears that both baby Alexis and Ivan Tunbull are now the richer by several millions each. Which wasn’t known at the time he was killed — we
think
. But bear in mind that John might have told someone who isn’t owning up, or told the poisoner, who killed him anyway. Mr. Zucker the Portland
lawyer has acted for John and Wendover Hall for many years, and could tell me what John’s old will said. Namely, it left everything to a halfway house for recovering psychiatric patients in San Francisco because John had spent almost two years in and out of it during his late teens and early twenties.”
“So his old will left nothing to the Hunters?” asked Delia.
“Nothing. However, he didn’t have much to leave. Wendover Hall’s endowment is very recent — last December, more or less synchronously with John’s new will, which is prudent.”
“But both Hunters maintained he was rich,” Buzz objected.
“He was, but an allowance kind of wealth. Whatever he needed or asked for he was given, and not grudgingly, Zucker says. Nor apparently did the old man ever contemplate disinheriting him. Wendover Hall wanted to see what John decided about his real family before making the major endowment. He was very pleased by John’s decision to have two families.”
“Does he know how John disposed of his gift in the will?” Buzz asked.
“Zucker says no. He does now, of course, but has no wish to fight it. The money was John’s to do with as he willed.”
“It doesn’t take the heat off Ivan,” Donny said.
Abe sat silent for a moment, recollecting his interview with Ivan and Lily Tunbull following on his seeing Max.
“Ivan looks great for the murder of John Hall,” he said now, “but I don’t buy it. He’s a man of Hall’s own age, very settled and domestically happy. That stuck out like a sore thumb. His mind-set is his work, which he really enjoys, and he’s not really
hurting financially. I suspect his mother’s ambitions for him were just that — his mother’s. If I had to sum him up, I’d describe him as an intelligent, hardworking, modestly ambitious man who can’t get over his luck at finding Lily for a wife. Ivan wallows in his family, and, having met Lily, I quite see why he’s crazy about her. She’s adorable, and it’s not a facade. The kids are great, his job’s secure no matter who inherits, and he’s too good at it to be replaced, even for spite.”
Strong words coming from Abe Goldberg. Carmine took over, feeling irritable and curiously foiled. “What kind of killer goes to the trouble of making a device he — or she — has no intention of using? Because it screams to me that if Edith Tinkerman was tricked into vectoring the poison to her husband, then John Hall was also killed by injection with a proper syringe and hypodermic. The device wasn’t used at the Tunbull dinner party either. Somehow, by a feat of legerdemain we don’t suspect, John Hall was injected while a room full of men enjoyed their port, cognac and cigars. No one made a bathroom run, Dr. Markoff swears to it, and he’s the one outside constant I can’t overlook or dismiss. The guy’s as nosy as Pinocchio and has a better memory than a quiz show king, and he says no one left the room. The men were in it for about thirty minutes when John’s symptoms began to appear. Too long for the shot to have been administered before they went in.”
“Then it had to have been the device,” Donny said.
But Carmine shook his head. “It’s too risky. Too many factors might have prevented the poison from leaving its
reservoir. Look at the junction of the hypodermic and the metal saucer, Donny! Solder? A 25-gauge needle? That’s so small.”
“What’s left, no matter how improbable, has to be the answer,” Delia said, on Donny’s side.
“It presents too many dangers to its operator,” Carmine said. “That’s how I know he didn’t use it.”
“What about Emily?” Liam asked, tired of going in circles.
“The water carafe. Paul found a trace of tetrodotoxin in it, so that at least is certain,” Carmine said.
“Have we enough on Dr. Jim to make an arrest?” Buzz asked.
“What evidence we have is completely circumstantial, so I’d have to say, no.”
“How about we arrest Uda Savovich on suspicion and see what eventuates?” Tony asked. “I just feel that until we can arrest someone, there’s a chance another death might happen.”
“For what reason?” Carmine asked.
“None, but it’s something to
do
, sir.”
“Have you a strategy, Deels?” Carmine asked.
“It’s been thumping in my head that I should have one, yet I don’t. Oh, I detest poison cases!” she burst out.
“John Hall’s inquest is next Monday,” Carmine said. “We wait until after that, then reconsider.”
“And Tinkerman’s inquest?”
“Wednesday. I’m afraid Mrs. Tinkerman is going to have to testify that she gave her husband a shot of vitamin B-12 at the banquet, but I’ll make sure that Paul testifies how well the poison was disguised. When does Wendover Hall arrive?”
“Sunday. He’ll be on a red-eye out of Seattle and should be at Max Tunbull’s house by noon,” said Abe. “He’s staying there.”
“Be waiting for him, Abe. He’s the answer to our problems with John Hall. In the meantime, have a good weekend.”
W
hen Millie came out of the bedroom, still blinking sleep from her eyes, she was astonished to see Jim sitting at the table over coffee, with a box of bagels and a bar of Philadelphia cream cheese sitting by her own place.
She came around the table to stand behind him, her cheek on his hair, inhaling the scent of his skin. “Not in the lab?”
“No,” he said, smiling and putting down his sheaf of papers. “It occurred to me that it’s Saturday, the rest of the world isn’t working, and when I took a walk, the smell of fresh bagels hit me like a truck.” He reached up and pulled her onto his knees. “I don’t know why, but I realized that it’s about two years since we last had toasted bagels and cream cheese for our breakfast. I couldn’t afford the lox, but I got you the rest.”
She pressed kisses against his lips, which always ravished her: silky-soft, yet muscular. “Jim, how thoughtful!” She began to scramble off his lap. “I’ll start the toasting.”
But he rose, picked her up and put her on her chair. “No, this is my treat, I do the toasting. You can watch.”
Head spinning slightly, she followed his movements — he was so efficient! Within ten minutes she was spreading Philly on a hot, brown bagel and chewing in bliss.
“I should have taken you out for breakfast,” he said.
“No, bagels taste better at home, especially made on a lopsided toaster.” She sipped her coffee. “Jim! Colombian?”
“It’s one of those mornings, Millie. I love you.”
“Well, I know that. I love you back.”
He wetted his lips, hesitated, then plunged in. “I had a serious talk to Davina yesterday.”
At mention of the name she stiffened, lifting clouded eyes to his face. “Since when is she a fount of knowledge?”
“About some things, she’s the only fount of knowledge,” he countered. “Don’t get your dander up, Millie, hear what we talked about first. I know your first time of meeting her properly wasn’t happy — John dying and all that, but I’ve known her for a long time, and in some matters I trust her opinions.”
“I looked at her and saw Medusa.”
He took her hands, chafed their backs with his thumbs. “I accept your feelings, Millie, but try to get past them this once!
A Helical God
is going to turn our world upside down, and none of the C.U.P. people is in touch with reality the way Davina is. Like us, they’re academics. Something Davina knows very well, which is why she decided to stick her oar in. Believe me, Millie, she apologized all the time she gave me her
thoughts, and after a few hours thinking about what she said, I think she’s right.”
His earnestness was unmistakable; knowing her dislike of the woman was as illogical as instinctual, she tried to do as he asked, be detached at least. “Very well, Jim, you talked.”
“We have to change our lifestyle, she says. If the book’s a big success and the general public discovers that Chubb’s brightest biochemistry star lives in a semi-slum on State Street, it will harm both Chubb’s image and our own. It would look as if I, a black man, was being exploited, under-paid, and the truth is that I’m not. My fault entirely that I plough the money back into my work, but Davina says the adverse publicity could rebound on the book.” The full mouth tightened, the eyes hardened. “We have to be living better well before Publication Day, April second.”
“And where do we get the money?” Millie asked, voice harsh.
