Corpus Delectable

by Talmage Powell

  “Is there a beard with the outfit?” “I can include one, Mr. Rivers.” “Big, bushy, to cover most of my face.”

  “Are you going to a masquerade?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “I’ll see that we come up with a suitable beard.”

  I worked on a beer while I waited. He arrived with a bulky suit box under his arm, a young, neat, dark-skinned man who probably operated the small shop with the part-time assistance of his wife.

  He glanced me over, remarked that the costume should be perfect in size and that I was in luck. I handed over the rental fee and deposit money in exchange for a receipt and the cardboard box.

  “The beard?” I asked as we stood in the apartment doorway.

  “The most luxuriant one in the house,” he said. “Very bushy. Very black. I also included a large black eye patch. Your disguise will be as effective as any at the masquerade.”

  “That’s what I’m after,” I assured him. “Thanks very much.”

  “No trouble, Mr. Rivers. Have fun.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Always.”

  My tone brought a glance. “Buenas noches.”

  Alone in the apartment, I set the box on a table, flipped the tabs, and checked the contents. There were huge, baggy pantaloons of bright red to smother my bottom, and a short, skimpy jerkin to expose most of my lumpy torso to the evening breezes. Black oilcloth boots were designed to cover my shoe tops and strap under the instep. The turban was a brilliant blue, and there was a sash matching it in color. I fingered the eyepatch aside, picked up the beard and shook it out. It was a lulu.

  I stripped to my shorts and climbed into the paraphernalia.

  With all the junk in place, I walked into the bathroom for a final check of the mug in the medicine-cabinet mirror.

  I pulled the imitation silk turban a trifle lower on my forehead. I was satisfied with the effect. Very little of the original Ed Rivers showed through the montage of turban, eyepatch, and wild beard.

  I paused once more, in the bed-sitting room, and tucked the .38 under the waistband of the pantaloons Only the blue sash remained. I wrapped it about my gut to cover the butt of the gun. I didn’t knot the sash to let the ends dangle. I tucked in the ends so I could get rid of the sash in a hurry.

  As I left the apartment, I thought of the purpose and meaning of Gasparilla. Festival. Fun week. And I was on my way at last to a Gasparilla party …

  When I came out of the building, the sky over the Hillsborough River flashed with bursting bombs, falling stars, and sputtering pinwheels of light. No kids were on the street tonight; all were down by the river watching the firewords display.

  I got in the car, which I’d left at the curb, and eased it into traffic. I didn’t fight the tangle. But when I was out to the vicinity where traffic thinned, I pushed the car.

  I watched the boulevard lights swish past, slowed as I neared the turnoff. A few minutes later, the car was picking its way along the driveway, through the jungle greenery of the estate of Señora Isabella. More correctly, the showpiece of a twenty-million-dollar fortune that death had earmarked for one Elena Sigmon.

  I wedged the car behind a snooty little Porsche and got out. The smell of hickory chips smoldering in the barbecue grills put a tang in the air. Beyond the vast lawn, the cozy glow of the paper lanterns beckoned romantically. The sounds of the tireless bongos and endlessly wailing saxophone drifted to me.

  As I walked across the lawn toward the hacienda, I concluded that the party was spreading out. I had to detour a couple who stood holding a long kiss, unaware of any other existence. Salome’s gauzy veils swished about her as she ran teasingly across the lawn, looking over her shoulder at the lanky pirate who pursued her. She conveniently ran out of gas, laughing and gasping as he caught up with her. He scooped her up, and she stopped laughing as she put her lips against his.

  I reached the end of the lawn. Nobody seemed to mind the additional pirate who wandered onto the courtyard.

  I looked around the courtyard for Fred Eppling, Clavery, Natalie, and the Sigmons. I didn’t see them, and decided they must be inside.

  A little blond piratess had spotted me. As I started to move on, she weaved up, thrust a drink in my hand, and made an out-of-focus sound that resembled a hiccup crossed with a giggle.

  “Wups!” She put her fingers over her mouth, looked at me dizzily, and staggered slightly. She got the giggle out by itself this time. “Getting a little drunk out … Look, everybody, Blackbeard himself!”

  As I started around her, she came up with another giggle and stumbled between me and the house. She caught a tuft of the brown mat on my chest that was exposed by the jerkin. She tugged lightly. “Mister Mans, you’re wired for sound!”

  “Except my woofer is slightly on the blink.”

  The giggle became a shrill, stupid laugh. “That’s barbed, that is.” She jerked a few shreds of chest spinach right out of the garden. “You’re the nearest thing to the real article at this blast. Do I know you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She reached up to give the beard a pull. I caught her wrist. “Naughty,” I said. “That will never do.”

  “I want to know who you are,” she pouted.

  “Honey, I’m old José Gaspar come back from the briny deep to see if you’re doing justice to my dedicated week.”

  “We’re trying, José! We are really trying.” “I can see that.”

  “But who are you when you’re not José Gaspar?”

  I flicked her tip-tilted nose with my fingertip. “Part of the fun, lovely.”

  “I know what …” Her eyes became drunkenly sly. “I’ll find out. I’ll ask Keith who you are.”

  Deliver me, I thought, from the urge to bust such a nice young rump.

  “Good idea,” I said, wrenching a smile through the beard. “But you don’t know where he is.”

  “Yes, I do, too. I do so know where Keith is!” She made a vague gesture toward the left wing of the house. “He’s in there with Natalie Clavery.”

  “How about I find him for you?”

  She brightened. “Okay.”

  “You wait right here.”

  “While I have a li’l ole drink.” She hiccuped. “But you hurry back to Hildy.” “Sure, Hildy.”

  “Don’t keep li’l Hildy waiting.”

  “Don’t worry about a thing, Hildy.”

  I escaped blond little Hildy by fading into the shadows at the ell of the portico. I stopped short as the sound of someone being slapped with an open palm came to me from a few yards away.

  I turned, not seeing them at first. Then I made out the shadowed forms of Van and Natalie Clavery standing under the portico. She was absolutely rigid, except for the hand she was raising slowly to her stinging cheek.

  Clavery’s wiry, intense body swayed under the assault of the emotion ripping through him. A strangled sound formed in his throat. His arms groped imploringly.

  “Natalie …”

  “No, don’t say anything, Van. Don’t make it worse by trying to apologize.”

  “I struck you, Natalie …” “So you did, Van.”

  “I saw you in there with him, Natalie, with Keith Sigmon …”

  “Were you spying, Van?”

  “I wanted to kill him … of all men … Keith Sigmon. Then I saw Elena come in.” Clavery was so filled with feeling he was unable to speak above a thick whisper. “I saw you start out … I waited … And when you stepped onto the portico … Before I knew what was happening, my hand was raising, swinging …”

  “I think I’ll go home, Van.”

  “No, no! Please. I think I know why you were in there.”

  “Do you, Van?”

  “You think Keith and Elena have the old lady’s missing portfolio, the confession I wrote out, the promissory note. Isn’t that it? You thought it was the only way left to get the confession back. Tell me it’s true, Natalie!”

  “Do you believe it’s true?” she asked him.<
br />
  “Yes … With a moment to think, I know it’s true. You couldn’t have any feeling for a man like Keith Sigmon, Natalie.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I have feeling. I despise him.”

  “You’d despise me if I wanted, or even permitted, myself to be saved by that means,” Clavery said. “I’d rather rot in jail.”

  “In any event, Van,” she said with sudden weariness, “you haven’t been saved. Elena came in before I had any chance to put my little last-stage plan in operation.”

  Nineteen

  In the left wing of the solid old mansion the noise of the party was a rising and falling muffled wash of sound.

  From the door through which I’d eased off the portico, I moved slowly along the hallway. At the distant end of this same hall were the same rooms I’d visited previously, rooms where the old señora and Jean Putnam had slept and worked. Much nearer to me, light spilled into the hall from a partially opened door.

  The murmur of voices led me toward the lighted room. As I came closer, my view of the room’s interior widened.

  I heard Keith Sigmon say: “That’s better. Cool off and listen to reason.”

  And Elena’s voice: “Well, I did find you in here alone with Natalie Clavery.”

  Sigmon: “She’s twice your age.”

  Elena: “You weren’t acting like it.”

  My last step had carried me fully into the doorway. The room was a sort of combination den-library. The dark wood-paneled walls were lined with books. There was a fireplace of antique brick. Huge, comfortable couches and chairs graced the room. Tall French windows opened on a side lawn. Left of the windows was a well-stocked, tooled-leather bar.

  Keith and Elena were in close contact, standing near an antique table on which a lamp glowed softly. He had one arm about her slender waist, pulling her tightly against him. With the fingertips of his other hand he was tipping her chin up, smiling and looking at her coaxingly.

  “You’re very impish when you pout,” he said.

  She began to relent. “I ought to claw your eyes out. You know that, don’t you?”

  “You’d miss me dreadfully,” he said. “Anyway, it would all be for nothing. The Natalie Clavery bit didn’t mean a thing, I tell you.”

  “It had better never repeat itself,” she said.

  “It won’t,” Sigmon promised.

  He slid his hand to the back of her small head, laced his fingers through the light hair, and pulled the sharp prettiness of the little face forward. “This is the only thing worth repeating,” he said softly. Then he kissed her, and with a soft sound in her throat, she responded.

  I felt the tightness pull over my face, as if the skin had shrunk. I thought of the sickening shock a girl of Jean Putnam’s caliber had experienced, chancing to look on a scene similar to this one. And after she’d crept away, face hot with the shame for them, Jean had begun asking herself questions. She’d started to look for answers, to inquire, to investigate. The questions had opened the area to bigger questions. And when the questions became demanding, Jean Putnam had sought a private detective to help her get the answers that would either clear these people or damn them.

  Jean Putnam had been killed because she’d refused to let the questions lie unanswered. She’d unwittingly condemned Lura Thackery by writing in a diary the things she had seen and overheard, by putting the questions in Lura’s possession.

  It was that simple. The questions had the power to destroy — unless they were first destroyed.

  With her dying breath, Jean Putnam had been trying to point to the very heart of the matter, the thing seen by chance that had raised the first question in her mind. She had not been trying to say the word “incense.’ The word she formed in death was far uglier: “incest.”

  But the word comprised the question, not the answer. I spoke the answer with a soft hissing of breath: “Ginny … Ginny Jameson!”

  Her involuntary response to her own name cleared any remaining doubt from my mind. The girl who’d posed as Elena Sigmon stood half turned in Keith Sigmon’s arms, a sudden frightening knowledge killing the color of the pixie face.

  As I moved toward them, Keith Sigmon released her, pushing her slightly to one side. The dissipated handsomeness of his face became old and hard, with a vicious old man’s desire to live at whatever cost.

  “Keith Sigmon and a slut of a call girl from Venezuela,” I said. “Ginny Jameson, alias Elena Sigmon.” “Ed Rivers alias Blackbeard,” Sigmon said thinly. “Check.”

  “You … you don’t know what you’re talking about!” the girl said. “I think so.”

  “A girl can kiss her daddy!”

  “Not like that, honey. Neither does the sheltered granddaughter of a fine old Venezuelan family of aristocrats know how to dance the way you were dancing earlier. Your professional dancing experience was showing all over the place.”

  “That’s no proof …”

  “Venezuela is lousy with proof,” I said. “All we’ve got to do is air-express a photograph over there and let people who knew you and Elena Sigmon have one look.”

  She lifted her arms and hugged herself. It didn’t stop the shiver from crossing her shoulder.

  Sigmon seemed incapable of movement, except at the lips. “Just what do you think happened, Rivers?”

  “I know what happened,” I said. “When she got the news that her grandmother had died in the States, your daughter, the real Elena, went up to the mountain cottage. To give you the news, Sigmon. She found the two of you there, and I imagine it was pretty sickening. It hit her hard, coming on top of news of her grandmother’s death. No girl has probably ever felt more alone. She’d lost her grandfather and her mother to a terrorist’s bomb. Her grandmother was lying dead in a distant land. And you, her father, were in the midst of an orgy with a slut.

  “Demoralized by all that emotional dynamite, she started down the mountain road recklessly. She never reached the final mile of the road. Her reactions failed at a curve. The car went over, caught fire.

  “I imagine you were following her down, Sigmon. If you didn’t see the actual crash, you saw the flames. In either event, you couldn’t save her. How about it? Am I substantially correct? When the heat of the wreckage drove you back, I suppose even a louse like you had a moment of grief. Was the next part your idea or Ginny’s?”

  “It wasn’t mine,” Sigmon said in a suppressed voice.

  Ginny’s vixen face sharpened. “It didn’t take much to talk you into it!”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Grief and remorse wouldn’t bring Elena back. Her accidental death was an unalterable fact, a thing of the past. But it had a vital effect on the future. At stake was a twenty-million-dollar estate. When Elena died, the old señora’s vast assets would go in trust to charities and foundations.

  “So why permit Elena to die? It seemed so simple at the time, didn’t it, Sigmon? All you had to do was toss a few items belonging to the real Ginny into the burning wreckage, go to the police and report the death of Ginny Jameson — not the death of Elena Sigmon, heiress to a fabulous estate. You knew the investigation would be routine and brief. The Venezuelan authorities were glad enough to get Ginny Jameson off their hands. Later you picked up Ginny, boarded the plane with her as your daughter. Being an American by birth, you had no passport problem. With your type of friends in Caracas, I’m sure you had no trouble in obtaining any necessary changes and bits of forgeries in whatever papers Elena would need.

  “It seemed quite clever, Sigmon. With Ginny waiting under cover, probably at a hotel, you posed as the lone witness of the auto accident. Your word, uncontradicted, that it was Ginny Jameson who’d left the mountain cottage and crashed to her death.

  “But a man can be too clever. I talked with Caracas. Not one time was Elena mentioned as being present during the investigation. You had to do it solo, giving them the impression you’d come down the mountain alone. You couldn’t produce an Elena Sigmon to corroborate your story because there wasn’t one st
ill in the land of the living. This was an additional point, Sigmon, that steered me toward the truth.”

  He made a noise like a snuffling dog as he tried to get some moisture in his mouth. “All right,” he said. “So you send a picture back to Caracas …”

  “Keith!” Ginny said sharply.

  He motioned her not to come nearer to him. “So I left my daughter in a desecrated grave,” he said, the oldness growing in him. “I took a seat in a game for one of the world’s fabulous fortunes.” He laughed softly, briefly, bitterly. “Twenty million dollars … it still isn’t worth dying for.”

  “Two young girls, Jean Putnam and Lura Thackery, paid a damned heavy price, Sigmon.”

  “But I didn’t kill them. Neither did Ginny. Whatever happens, I intend to live. In jail. In the gutter. Anything beats dying — and you can’t pin murder on me, Rivers.”

  “I know,” I said. “I — ”

  The back of my head exploded. The carpet hit me in the face. The thick, plush nap ceased to exist for a few seconds, then returned to reality like stiff, stinging little barbs against my cheek.

  Distantly, I heard Sigmon say, “You can’t … I won’t be a party to …”

  “You’ve no choice now, darling,” Ginny said with renewed brightness. “Let Rivers feed the fish in the bay and no one else will ever connect it up.”

  An expensive shoe pinned my knuckles against the carpet, and a third voice, male, said: “You were coming after me next, weren’t you, Rivers?”

  “Yes, Eppling. From here to you. I knew it all, once I got the final details in place.”

  “I thought so, when dear little Hildy started asking everyone who the big, black-bearded pirate stranger was,” Fred Eppling said. “She really let the cat out for you, Rivers, when she said you were looking for Sigmon and had come in here. I decided it was time I came in quietly myself.”

  “Bless little Hildy,” I said, “who surely deserves a twice-busted rump.”

  Twenty

  The pressure of the shoe eased from my fingers. I turned slowly, sat up halfway, supporting myself with my palm against the carpet while my head endured a fresh blast of pain.