Corpus Delectable

by Talmage Powell

  I walked over. Eppling’s suite of offices was on the second floor, quietly sumptuous, a layout of satin-sheened walnut paneling, leather furniture, draperies of raw silk, and diffused indirect lighting.

  His neat, smallish, sandy presence was clad in a three-hundred-dollar suit as if it was his work clothes — which it was.

  His slightly sallow face had a few lines of strain. He smiled vaguely. “Seems we have another thing in common, Rivers — both working on a Gasparilla play-day.”

  “The costumed señoritas in Ybor City will just have to get along without us.”

  He glanced at his wrist watch. “I’m due at police headquarters at eleven o’clock to go over some details relating to Señora Isabella’s estate.”

  “Anything to do with Jean Putnam’s death?”

  “Who can say? Frightening … If a girl like Jean is subject to murder, none of us is safe.”

  “I get the same sentiment on every hand,” I said. “But the least likely victim is nevertheless stone-cold dead in the morgue.”

  He nodded, almost casually. He was making no display. Neither does a man who feels a thing deep down, where it will stay with him a long time …

  “Any men in her life?” I suggested.

  “Jean’s? Wrong street, Rivers. Several young men, all of good character. But no deep entanglements. No wild-eyed rejected suitor who’d hire a professional killer.”

  “You never know what goes on behind a man’s eyes.”

  The corner of Eppling’s mouth quirked. He made a gesture encompassing the office. “It wasn’t always like this, Rivers. I worked my way through law school and started from scratch in criminal law. I took any cases I could get, working and driving for opportunity. I haven’t always been the sheltered corporation lawyer. I know what the human brain can harbor.”

  “Then we come back to Señora Isabella,” I said. “An old woman dies of natural causes, nothing shady, nothing haywire. But a girl apparently as noble as Joan of Arc is subsequently marked for murder. Something Jean did for the old Señora?”

  “Impossible! Jean’s duties were wholly innocent. She screened the continual charity seekers, oversaw household expenditures, made out checks for the old lady’s personal charge accounts, handled personal correspondence, kept the señora’s social appointment book straight. That sort of thing.”

  His voice shaded off. He was in a funk for a second. “Those were pleasant days for Jean Putnam, Rivers. Gracious living, genteel environment. The old lady was really fond of her.”

  “Maybe Jean Putnam filled a gap left by a dead daughter.”

  “No,” Eppling said slowly. “It wasn’t that, at least not bascially. The señora was tough, the way a queen could be tough when monarchies were for real. She was hard to get close to. She talked little of the past. She had plenty of emotional control. She was kind and patient, but she didn’t go in for deep friendships. And she permitted herself to despise only two things in life — Venezuelan terrorists and her rotten son-in-law.”

  Nine

  With a conscious effort, Eppling snapped the morbid train of thought. An attitude of briskness returned to his body. “I had several reasons for wanting to see you,” he said. “Shall we get started on them?” “Fine.”

  “The first has to do with Señora Isabella’s will,” Eppling said. “To lead up to Jean Putnam, I suppose I should acquaint you with the old lady’s wishes in general terms.

  “She had two heirs apparent, her granddaughter Elena and the despised son-in-law, Keith Sigmon. Frankly, the old woman was happy with neither prospect. But she was dead set against Keith Sigmon ever coming into control of the estate.

  “Cutting through the legalistic language and complicated technicalities, the old lady earmarked the bulk of the estate to Elena, thence eventually upon Elena’s demise to several charities and foundations.

  “Now in an estate of such awesome proportions, a few thousand here and there is chicken feed. This is where Jean Putnam fits in. The old señora left little bequests to everyone around her, including the grocery delivery man. The largest went to Jean Putnam, ten thousand dollars in cash. She didn’t live to spend a penny of it. Somewhere, Jean must have a blood relation, if simply a distant cousin. This person, or persons, is now her heir. I want your assistance in finding him, her, or them.”

  “I’ll have to file it for future attention,” I said.

  “I know,” he nodded, “but there is the chance you’ll run across the information in your present investigation. If not, get to it as quickly as you can. I naturally want the will probated and the estate settled as soon as possible.”

  He glanced past me suddenly in a way that caused me to swivel my head. The office door had opened silently on oiled hinges. Van Clavery stood in the doorway, his eyes baleful in his lean, anxiety-ridden face.

  Eppling touched my arm briefly. “My second reason for calling you, Rivers.” He took a few steps across the office. “Come in, Van,” he said quietly, “and close the door.”

  Clavery obeyed, his movements jerky with irritation or something deeper. He wore a dark business suit, but I still got that impression of uncertainty of Clavery’s reactions, that sense of danger that he’d somehow conveyed in the pirate costume when I’d first met him.

  Clavery and the lawyer exchanged a brief message with their eyes. The silence of the office became noticeable.

  “I’m glad you came, Van,” Eppling said quietly. Clavery’s lips thinned. “I hope I’m not making a mistake.”

  “I gave you the best advice I could, Van.”

  “Or put a rope around my neck!”

  “I don’t think so,” Eppling said. “I know Rivers by reputation. He’ll dredge up every detail, if he lives so long. It won’t look good if he finds it out for himself. As I told you on the phone, it’s better to give it to him, straight out, now.”

  Clavery looked at me with eyes that for a fractured second hated me unreasonably, hated me as a symbol of something he’d like to smash.

  Eppling said, “Van has a few words of a personal nature he’d like to say, Rivers. Will you offer your professional confidence?”

  “Tentatively,” I said.

  “Then to hell with it!” Clavery said, as if he were at a breaking point.

  Eppling put his hand on Clavery’s shoulder. “Now wait a minute, Van. Rivers is in a touchy position himself. If what you have to say was against Rivers’ interests, we wouldn’t consider it, wouldn’t be here. If it isn’t against his interests, I’m sure he will treat it with confidence.”

  “I’m not known as a talebearer,” I said.

  Clavery moved a few steps, aimlessly, just for the sake of moving.

  “Well, Van?” Eppling prompted.

  Clavery fingered his lips as if trying to bring feeling back to them. “Several months ago … I spotted a stock deal that looked sure-fire. I … borrowed money to make the play.”

  “From the señora’s timber-import enterprise?” I asked.

  “Yes …” His voice was the rattle of paper. His admission had killed the anger in him, taken a part of the life out of him. “The deal fell through. I was caught short.”

  “How much?”

  “Forty thousand dollars,” he said. A short, irrational laugh ripped from him. “Didn’t seem like much at the time, stacked against the prospects … but it’s all the money in the world if you haven’t got it.”

  He looked at me as if he had to focus his eyes all over again. “Recently … when I knew an accounting was bound to reveal the shortage … I went to Señora Isabella, told her what had happened, and asked for a little time.”

  “You couldn’t raise the money?”

  “I’d raised every dime I could, to go with the forty thousand. Even my home … isn’t worth the paper against it.” Clavery stumbled to a chair and dropped. He sat grasping the chair arms, a quivering in his hunched body.

  “I was counting on my past record, the old lady’s gentility and common sense,” he said. “Th
rowing me in jail wouldn’t get her money back.”

  “She went along?”

  Clavery looked at me bleakly. “She was deeply hurt.

  I hated myself for doing that to her. She thought it over for a few days. Then she called me, the week before she died. I hurried to see her …”

  He shook his head against the overpowering clutch of his personal ghosts. “The old lady was looking better, feeling better, able to sit near her bedroom window. The last upsurge before death, I guess it was. She greeted me normally, as if it was a routine business discussion. Said she’d decided how the matter should be handled. She wanted my personal note in amount of forty thousand dollars, payable in five equal annual installments. She also wanted a brief statement in my own handwriting as to the indebtedness covered by the note. Naturally I gave her both.”

  “Naturally.”

  “She clipped the note and statement together and put them in a large old leather portfolio,” Clavery said. “She assured me the matter would forever remain between the two of us.”

  I glanced at Eppling. “When did you learn about this?”

  “At the start. Señora Isabella asked my advice before making a decision. I saw no profit in destroying Van for a single mistake.”

  “A couple days after the old lady died,” Clavery said, “Fred and I went to the hacienda. He’d agreed to separate my …” his face twisted, “my confession and the five-year note. The statement was to go here in the office safe.”

  Eppling regarded me coolly. “The indebtedness had to be included in the assets of the estate,” he said. “But Van’s personal statement had no business going to a probate judge, as I saw it. He and Señora Isabella had settled the matter between them. I was handling it as she would have wished. The handwritten statement, which Van terms a confession, was to be returned to him when he had repaid the forty thousand.”

  Clavery worked his hands together, popping the knuckles like brittle sticks. “Jean Putnam went to get the portfolio for Fred — “

  “And discovered it was missing,” I said.

  They both drilled me with their attention.

  “Where’d you learn that?” Clavery said.

  “You don’t expect me to answer that, do you?” I countered. “I suppose you searched for the brief case.”

  “Thoroughly,” Fred Eppling said.

  Clavery began to gasp. “I intend to repay the money, even if the confession is never found … but that statement … in my own handwriting … made public, it would brand me, shatter my reputation, ruin my life …”

  A sudden seizure stiffened Clavery’s wiry body. His tongue curled in a wad toward his throat. His eyes rolled upward until the whites showed. He grabbed his chest.

  “Get some water,” I told Eppling.

  I slid Clavery from the chair and stretched his rigid body on the plush carpet. I heard Eppling rattling glassware in the next office.

  By the time I’d loosened Clavery’s collar and straightened his arms at his sides, Eppling had returned with the glass in his hand.

  “Brandy,” Eppling. “Better than water.”

  Clavery’s body was relaxing in a series of shudders. I slipped my hand behind his head, lifted slightly, and put the brandy to his lips. The amber liquid rolled into his mouth, a few drops at a time. I sensed strength returning to his muscles.

  My face became distinct in his burning-eyed gaze. He pushed at me weakly, slowly sat up. “Fred …”

  “Yes?” Eppling said from across the room.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Phoning for a doctor.” Eppling, I saw, was standing with a phone in his hand.

  “Never mind,” Clavery said. “I’m all right now.” “But, Van …”

  “For God’s sake, don’t weary me!” Clavery shouted weakly. “Do as I say and put the phone down!” “It may be your heart, Van.”

  “No such luck,” Clavery said through twisted lips. He struggled into the chair with my help. “I’ve had all that checked. A nervous syndrome. The medics have a name for it, but it’s plain damned stinking nerves …”

  His eyes filled with self-hatred and a wild frustration. “This.” He pummeled his thighs, belly, and chest. “This isn’t me, this wad of corruption, this mass of flesh and blood and bone. The part that thinks and feels … that’s me. That’s the personality, the entity known as Van Clavery! But it — the me — is imprisoned in this faulty vessel, this morass, this barbed-wire, inescapable jail of lousy nerves.”

  His breath was thinning again. I wondered if he was on the verge of another spasm.

  He peered at me with eyes that had redness in their rims. His nostrils flared. “Damn you,” he said bitterly. “Big, solid man … no quakes … no shivers … you don’t know. You can’t understand. So don’t stand there and pity me! I — the me — can’t stand your stupid pity.”

  Clavery dropped his haggard face in his hands. A thin, mewling sound came from him. It was a sob, deep and bitter inside of him and unable to find its way clearly out of him.

  Over Clavery’s head, my gaze met that of Eppling. We stared at each other a moment, slightly shamed and fearful with the reminder between us of the capacities and incapacities inherent in all men.

  Eppling’s eyes fell away. He studied the top of his friend’s head for a moment, standing behind the chair.

  “Rivers … if you get a lead on the portfolio, will you call me? It will be worth one thousand dollars if you call me.”

  “What was in the brief case?” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” Eppling said. “I never examined it. The señora used it as a depository for personal odds and ends. I imagine it was junk, except for the personal meaning it had for her. And, of course, excepting Van’s five-year note and handwritten statement.”

  “The statement might give someone wrong ideas,” I suggested. “Has there been any contact, any hint at blackmail?”

  “Not that I know of,” Eppling said. “Has there, Van?”

  Clavery didn’t immediately answer. Eppling touched his shoulder. “Did you understand me, Van?”

  “Yes,” Clavery said, jerking away. “I understand. I’ve got nerves, but I’m not a frigging mental case!”

  He lunged out of the chair, burning up his reserves. He strode to the window and stood looking out. When he turned, he was calmer.

  “Sorry, Fred.”

  “Forget it. You’re under one hell of a strain.” Clavery nodded absently, as if for the moment he was beyond caring. “Fat chance anybody would have of blackmailing me, Rivers. I halfway wish something like that would happen. It would at least break the uncertainty, the blank. It would give me a chance to get that confession back — even if I had to kill the bastard who took it.”

  “If anybody makes contact,” I said, “you contact me.”

  “Maybe I don’t — ”

  “You contact me,” I repeated. “My neck is involved, and the disappearance of the old lady’s portfolio is the only break I’ve got so far. You follow?”

  Clavery looked at me in morbid silence, but I knew he got the message.

  Ten

  Back in my office, I put an overseas phone call to Caracas, Venezuela, on the agency bill. The member of the Caracas policía who put me on his switchboard spoke badly fractured English. My Spanish was little better. He got the drift of what I was after finally and connected me with a higher-up who spoke better English than I did.

  Carrying an honorary membership card in the Florida Sheriff’s Association and being on the rolls of the Tampa auxiliary police force, I stretched a point and told the capitán in Caracas that I was a Tampa cop.

  “What may we do for you, Señor Rivers?”

  “We are investigating a murder,” I said. “The victim was one Jean Putnam, formerly employed by the Señora Isabella Sorolla y Batione.”

  “Ah, yes. A fine old lady. We were sorry to hear of her death.”

  “We are interested in her son-in-law, Keith Sigmon,” I said.

  �
��I’m acquainted with the name only through the investigation of the bombing that took the life of his wife and father-in-law.”

  “Was he clean on that score?”

  “Señor! You suspect … but no! The bombing was most definitely the work of terrorists. Keith Sigmon has a vile reputation, but he has taken care not to fall into our official records.”

  “He was not in Caracas when word was received there of the old señora’s death,” I said. “He was at a mountain cottage with a girl named Ginny Jameson. The girl was killed while driving from the cottage toward Caracas.”

  “One moment, please. I will have to consult the record.”

  The phone company rang up a little more profit while the capitán barked orders in Spanish and apologized to me for the brief delay.

  I heard him murmur, “Gracias, Luis,” heard the rustle of paper. Then: “I have it, Señor Rivers. The matter was mainly handled by the constabulary of the mountain village of Eminencia. We entered the investigation at Keith Sigmon’s request.”

  “His request?”

  “He was anxious to make his departure for Tampa, in view of the death of his mother-in-law. The accident, while unfortunate, had no suspicious aspects. The girl, Ginny Jameson, was a known prostitute. She came to Caracas from the United States with a company of entertainers. When the others returned, Ginny Jameson remained. As a dancer she had little talent, but she found other employment pleasurable and reasonably profitable. Had she lived, I’m sure we would have eventually deported her.”

  “But she saved you the trouble,” I said.

  “Well … since you put it that way.”

  “Keith Sigmon says she left the mountain cottage alone,” I said.

  “We are certain of it. No one could have been in the car with her and escaped serious injury. The vehicle overturned on her, pinning her inside, and caught fire. That stretch of road is desolate, Señor Rivers. Had it not been for the flames, she might have lain undiscovered in the ravine for days. As it was, Sigmon saw the wreckage and reported it immediately … not the action of a man who is hiding anything, I might reflect. He might have conveniently had a lapse of memory and boarded his plane the next day.”