Invitation to Murder

by Zenith Brown

  A Rolls Royce of the vintage of Reeves’s yellow poplin suit came sedately into the driveway. Jenny got up quickly. “Oh, I forgot to tell you, Mr. Finlay—”

  The chauffeur, old and almost clerical-looking, had seen them on the porch and came on, stopping where the Customs Agent’s car had been.

  Dodo sat with her head thrown back, gazing up at the ceiling, until she heard the door shut and Reeves’s feet on the scallop shells. Then she brought her head back into normal position, remarkably composed, Fish thought, under the circumstances.

  “Hello, Caxey,” she said. “You’ve always been a bird of evil omen. Except that you come after the fact, not before.” She stirred without getting up. “Sit down, will you, dear. Jenny, I think we could all do with a drink of some kind. Would you ring for Moulton. And you sit down, Fish. Don’t just stand there looking like you’d swallowed a dead octopus.”

  “I’ll get Moulton, and then I have to go, Mother.” Jenny waited for her mother to get through with Fish before she started for the door. “Is that all right? I have to run downtown a minute.”

  “Rats deserting the sinking ship,” Dodo remarked. “Do run along, darling. I’d like to go myself.”

  She turned back to Reeves. “You might as well have it straight, Caxey,” she said calmly. “I bought a ruby necklace for fifty thousand dollars and I didn’t declare it. The man you just saw is a Customs Agent from Boston. Somebody told them.”

  Caxson Reeves had pulled up his narrow trouser legs and sat down, putting his old panama hat on the floor. He looked as sere and yellow a leaf in Newport as he did in New York, lids hooded, as dry and detached as ever.

  “I expected as much when you asked Fish the day you landed if you had any money floating loose and said you’d take a chance,” he remarked. “The amount involved in all that surprises me.”

  “All right, Caxey.” Dodo turned her head as Moulton came in wheeling the bar. “Just leave it, Mr. Finlay’ll pour for us. I’d like a Martini, Fish. And before I forget it, I’m expecting you to dinner tonight.” She smiled at Reeves, not at Fish. “He belongs to us, darling.” There was a touch of malice in her voice, just over or under its matter-of-fact, slightly bitter quality, indicating that she and Caxson Reeves were on a level of discourse that each entirely understood, if Fish did not.

  “I’ll have a small bourbon, Finlay. Water. No ice.”

  “You don’t need ice, darling.”

  Caxson Reeves gave her a wintry smile. “I haven’t said a thing, Dodo. Everything I have to say I said a long time ago.”

  “And I haven’t asked you for anything, have I? It was a gamble. I took it. I lost it. So that’s that. The fifty thousand was my own money. I saved it between husbands . . . for the rainy day when my child’s twenty-two. I bought the rubies as an investment, actually. I got them absurdly cheap. I don’t particularly like them for myself, I’m not the ruby type. I was just going to put them in a vault and keep them. I don’t know why in hell I ever decided to wear them last night. Maybe I ought to be under observation.”

  Her eyes were coals of molten sapphire.

  “And how I got tight enough to shoot off my bloody mouth to Polly Randolph I’ll never know. The little witch. But maybe, if all I had was seventy-five dollars a week, I’d sell my friends down the river too. Thirty-two thousand five hundred is a lot of seventy-five dollar weeks. But it’s my own fault. I’m not asking anybody to weep with me or for me. If I’d tossed my fifty thousand away in the stock market you wouldn’t just sit there saying I told you so, though, Caxey dear. You’d at least be sorry. Or say you were.”

  Reeves sipped his bourbon and put the glass on the table.

  “Are you through now, Dodo?” he inquired. “I don’t wonder you’re angry. But frankly, I don’t believe Polly Randolph informed on you.”

  “It wasn’t Polly,” Fish said quietly. “Someone here put in a long-distance call over the phone in the stable, last night, to the Collector of Customs in Boston.”

  “That’s nonsense, Fish, unless you did it yourself,” Dodo said sharply. “Or unless it was that old devil Vranek, and the maid told him I was wearing them. He’d take a chance to get me in trouble if he could.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Dodo, and you know it,” Caxson Reeves said. “Vranek—”

  “Well, some stinker did it, and you can’t expect me to like it, can you?”

  “I could have expected you to remember the other times it’s happened. The bolt of lace we paid three thousand five hundred for. At which time—”

  “At which time you said if it happened again I could go to hell, only in more becoming terms.” She smiled at him without warmth, picked up the olive at the bottom of her glass and threw it at a robin perched inquisitively on the verandah rail. “So that’s that, and the hell with it. I’m certainly not going to give you the satisfaction of hearing me implore you to bail me out, or the equal pleasure of refusing . . . or even capitulating, with another lecture on the evil of my ways. I’ve made mistakes that cost me less and made my heart ache a lot more. So that, Caxey darling, finishes the saga of the rubies. The hell with them. Jenny’s promised not to let me starve. And so, much as I love both of you, the very sight of you gives me a terrific pain in a portion of my anatomy you don’t know exists, Caxey darling. I’m getting off it now.”

  She got abruptly to her feet.

  “And going upstairs.” She moved a step toward the door and stopped, looking back toward the beeches. “Please stay if you like, but if you hurry you’ll avoid my husband and his cousins, which I’m definitely doing for the moment. I’ll break the news to Nikki later. He’ll be livid. Goodbye, my dears . . . I’ll see you at eight, Mr. Finlay.”

  She went rapidly into the house. They could hear her heels on the stairs as the sleek black car swerved dramatically in and alongside the ancient Rolls. Caxson Reeves picked up his hat without haste but without visible delay and rose.

  “How do you do, Mrs. Emlyn . . . de Gradoff.” He bowed slightly to each of them. De Gradoff’s eyes were confidently clear, his casual arrogance untouched, a handsome man entirely at ease on his own verandah, being cordial even, in an offhand way. In his shorts and flowered shirt, sun-browned hairy bosom bare, he seemed as symbolic of something, there beside Reeves in his antiquated yellow poplin, as the black car was beside the Rolls and the clerical chauffeur. Symbolic of precisely what, Fish Finlay did not get to in the sudden interest provided him by Mrs. Emlyn’s complete recovery of all her lazy lacquer . . . plus a diamond hard and diamond bright something he couldn’t define and could feel rather than see, lurking deeply behind the dark velvet luster of her eyes as they met his and moved on.

  Tiger! tiger! burning bright, in the forests of the night. . . . It flashed into his mind as she crossed the porch to the bar with the liquid grace of the tiger’s sister, a panther with her young behind her, if that wasn’t ridiculously farfetched for Peter following her with a panther-like ease of his own. He had scarcely more than nodded to Reeves, who had done still less toward him, and his “Hi, Finlay” suggested unsubtle olfactory nuances.

  “We’ll see you this evening, I’m afraid,” Caxson Reeves said, pleasantly, so that it sounded as if he’d said “I expect,” unless they bothered to think about it after he and Fish went down the steps. He stopped at the Rolls. “You needn’t wait, Hanson. Tell my sister Mr. Finlay’s taken for dinner, and that it’s my fault, I didn’t get her message to him in time.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “We’ll go over to your place, Finlay. I’ll have a drink to get the taste of the other one out of my mouth. These people offend me. Not Mrs. Emlyn, she’s quite lovely. The de Gradoffs. I find something intolerably blatant about the public display of too much human flesh, female or male. Except on the beach.”

  Jenny’s blue convertible was gone. Fish had seen her come around, backing her car out so she would not have to pass in front of the porch. There was probably nothing in his belief that the sun was not so bright as
it had been before. He waited for Reeves to pause a moment before starting up the clock tower stairs.

  “What about the rubies?” he asked. “Someone did call the Customs from here.”

  “It could have been Vranek, if he knew about them. He dislikes her enough. As for the rubies, I’ll need information she’s in no mood to give rationally at the moment. The value of the stones is important. I like the way she’s taking it. Reminded me of her father. Especially her saving up the fifty thousand,” he added dryly.

  In the loft room he put his hat on the table. Fish went to get glasses, water, ice and soda. When he came back Reeves was sitting on the sofa gazing absently into the empty fireplace. He looked up.

  “Did Jennifer give you my message?”

  “She forgot. The Customs Agent caught us all flatfooted.”

  “I told her to tell you I was having a conference with the ‘undisclosed principal’ who made the friendly inquiry into the progress of our plans for paying de Gradoff’s debts. I must be very blind. I’m utterly incapable of seeing what it is de Gradoff has that softens the brain of hardheaded people. I understand old Randolph loaned him five thousand dollars last week.”

  Fish handed him his bourbon and water. “How much does he owe Durban?”

  “You know him, do you?”

  “Polly pointed him out to me last night. He was with Mrs. Emlyn at a table across the garden.” He poured soda into his own glass and stirred it. “The police are looking for him,” he added deliberately. “At my suggestion.”

  “What for?”

  “I think he can identify your French detective Blum. I assumed you probably couldn’t.”

  Caxson Reeves’ hooded lids raised abruptly. His colorless eyes rested on Fish for several moments. “I’ve never seen the man in my life,” he remarked quietly.

  “If we could give Lieutenant Bestoso the report Blum made to his client,” Fish said, “plus the information that last night Blum discovered the one thing he needed to finish his case, he could nail de Gradoff down. The bank wouldn’t have to come into it at all. Bestoso’s plenty good.”

  Reeves’s foot switched back and forth like a cat’s tail. “I’ll see what can be done,” he said abruptly. “Young Dr. McNair told me you’d been to see him. What’s the matter with Dodo?”

  “She could be taking Benzedrine, or something of the sort, without knowing it. She’s afraid of cancer. She looks a lot better today. When I saw her yesterday. . . . She doesn’t look good, but after the load she had on last night—”

  “I saw her.” Reeves shook his head. He was silent for a moment. “Durban’s been told she may have cancer,” he said then. “Mrs. Emlyn told him. That’s one of the reasons he hasn’t gone to her. The other is something else Mrs. Emlyn told him. If he insists on going, he may kill the golden goose. If Dodo’s disillusioned, she might react so violently, in her present state, that she’d divorce Nikki and nobody would get anything.”

  “Did you tell him to go and see her by all means?” Fish inquired.

  “A temptation I resisted. I don’t want to force de Gradoff’s hand, if you’re correct. Durban believes he got the dirty end of the stick from the Argentine outfit. That’s why he took over some sixty thousand dollars worth of de Gradoff’s debts—at Mrs. Emlyn’s request. She told him if Nikki could be tided over he could marry a rich American. He was paid twenty-five thousand six weeks ago. Where it came from, I don’t know. He’d like the rest. I understand that. I don’t understand Mrs. Emlyn’s concern. Have you any information?”

  “Only what she told me. Her nephew, period.”

  “The young man?”

  “He must have a rich wife. Obligatory, for some reason.”

  “Jennifer Linton, I presume.”

  A knock at the door cut him off.

  “Jennifer Linton, till this noon, anyway.” Fish went over to the door and opened it.

  “Why, Miss Linton,” he said.

  Her cheeks flushed, defensively hot, as he smiled at her.

  CHAPTER : 17

  “It’s Mr. Reeves I came to see.”

  Caxson Reeves had started to rise, but hearing her and seeing her, and seeing Fish, he sat down, very abruptly for anyone so inured to the human race, including the Maloneys. Well, bless my soul. I knew that he. . . . I’d never dreamed that she. . . . Bless me. He picked up his glass, and put it down again. Then he got up, courteously, as she brushed past Fish Finlay, her cheeks still warm, avoiding his eyes.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr. Reeves,” she said. “But I thought you’d listen to me. Mr. Finlay won’t. I came over last night to tell him, but he just sends me home. . . .”

  “As indeed he should,” said Caxson Reeves. “But sit down, young lady. I’m more than happy to listen. What—”

  She sat down on the edge of the sofa, conscious of the hooded scrutiny leveled on her.

  “It’s ridiculous for Mr. Finlay to pretend I don’t know anything that’s going on,” she said hotly. “I told him last night that I didn’t believe poor Mrs. Winton hurt Polly. And I still don’t believe it. Because I heard Polly talking to Nikki . . . about the woman with the carnations. I told Mr. Finlay she shouldn’t have done it. I told him I knew where she got it all . . . from that portrait in Washington.”

  “Portrait?” Reeves was puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

  She pushed her hair back impatiently. Fish Finlay reached in his pocket for a cigarette, watching her intently.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I told Mr. Finlay when he was in Virginia—I think I must have known without knowing it who he was, because I’d never told anybody before—about the Argentine girl at school. Nikki’s first wife was a cousin of theirs. It’s a big family and terribly important, and Nikki’s wife was sort of a black sheep for marrying him. And this girl . . . she’s a very good friend of mine, and her parents told her a few more things so she could tell me. The portrait was one of them.”

  “What portrait, Jennifer?” Reeves asked patiently.

  “It was a portrait the first wife was having painted for Nikki as a surprise, for his birthday. The first thing anybody knew about it was when the artist had a show in Washington, and there was a picture called ‘La Dame aux Oeillets.’ But a friend of theirs recognized it and told them, and they got hold of the artist right away, and he told them. He told them she was terribly pleased with it, and just had one more sitting the next day, so he couldn’t believe it when he heard next morning she’d killed herself.”

  Reeves listened impassively.

  “The portrait’s gone now, Jenny,” Fish said. “Did you know—”

  “Of course,” she said impatiently. “They bought it. They didn’t want it just hanging there like that. And the reason it was was that the artist wrote Nikki and told him he was painting it and how much it would cost and Nikki said he’d better scrape the paint off and use the canvas for something else. So the artist finished it and just called it ‘The Lady with the Carnations.’ You see, Nikki didn’t know—”

  She broke off and looked at Fish. “The Argentine family weren’t just being callous. They had her body exhumed, and there was nothing there. But they had a letter she’d written just before she went to bed that night, that her maid had posted, saying how happy she was and how divine Nikki was, and to prove it how he’d given her the de Gradoff rubies. When they came to look over her things, there weren’t any rubies. But there was a canceled check for $60,000, in francs, and on the stub she’d written ‘to redeem de Gradoff rubies.’ Nikki brought the rubies out then, and they took one look at them and said he could have them. They knew right away there was something wrong with them. They didn’t understand how he’d given them to her if she’d paid that much to ‘redeem’ them, though if they were in pawn you could say he’d given them to her, because they were worth an awful lot more. And they told Nikki he could have them and the letter she wrote the night she died if he’d give up any claim to the rest of her estate.”

  She stoppe
d a moment, frowning, and looked back at Fish Finlay.

  “That’s what I thought Polly was talking about last night. When she was describing the woman with the carnations I knew she’d seen the portrait. She’d told me she’d been in Washington. And when she said she’d seen the woman looking at my mother’s rubies, the way Nikki looked at Polly scared me. I was sure he thought she knew about the rubies some way. And this morning, when mother said Polly was so excited about them, I could see him just waiting, standing there all tense, to see if Polly had told her anything about them. I think now he was scared Polly might have told her she’d bought the rubies that had belonged to his first wife. But I didn’t know then what was wrong with them.”

  “Do you know now?” Caxson Reeves asked patiently.

  She nodded. “That’s what I just went downtown for. And what gave me the idea was the way the Customs Agent looked at my mother when she said she’d paid fifty thousand dollars for them. He didn’t believe her. It was like the Argentines not believing it about the sixty thousand dollars.”

  “It seems like a lot of money to me,” Reeves said.

  “Especially when they didn’t look like much, until you saw them lying out there in the sun. Then they were fabulous . . . and that’s just the point. I went down Bellevue Avenue to see the man at Chenier Frères—mother’s a customer of theirs in Paris. And he just laughed at me. He said there’s no such thing as a necklace of star rubies. It would be a ‘criminal waste,’ because they’re dull unless the light strikes down on them to show the star. And they’re too valuable to waste, he said. One star ruby as big as I described would bring fifty thousand dollars. He thought I was being funny.”

  She managed a smile herself. “And there’s another thing. This morning, when Nikki realized Polly hadn’t told mother about the rubies, he caught himself and said it was surprising Polly’d be excited about jewels she wouldn’t look well in. But she was almost the same coloring as the woman in the portrait. So I asked the man at Chenier’s what type of woman would wear rubies, and he said, ‘Why, Miss Linton, you have the perfect type at Enniskerry. Your mother’s friend, the lovely Mrs. Emlyn.’ ”