Chan considered this apparent stumbling block in the path of all suspicion of murder, shelved it as already at least plausibly explicable thanks to the shooting gallery. He said, “I have yet to hear the details surrounding his death. You were there?”
“I was in the living room for the entire two-hour period during which Lionel’s death must have occurred,” said Harriet. “I was watching a television special I’d been looking forward to seeing, a rerun of the movie version of James Michener’s Hawaii. Frankly, it was a disappointing lot of crud. It was just after it finished that I knocked on the study door. When Lionel didn’t answer, I went in and found him lying there.”
“Painful shock for you,” said the detective.
Harriet dismissed his remark with a brusque gesture, saying, “Life is full of painful shocks. At first, I couldn’t believe it. I even thought it might be some sort of practical joke, but I realized Lionel was simply not the practical joking type. And then I leaned over him and saw the other side of his head.”
“Were any of the others with you?”
“When I found the body? No - I was alone. During the movie, I can’t say, I was watching the film. It was right after dinner and Lionel went directly to his study. The others came and went, I suppose. Damn; Charlie, I wish I’d paid closer attention.”
“Hindsight lovely thing,” said Chan. “Trouble is, it come too late.”
“Spare me the aphorisms, Charlie.” Harriet visibly shuddered. She rose, went to the pantry, mixed herself a large glass of milk, sugar, raw egg and rum, a libation Charlie Chan declined.
“I don’t know whether it was the wetting I got or your sick sagacity, but I feel people walking over my grave.”
Charlie Chan said, “What about the award of a voting membership in the family affairs to Davis Wilmot?”
“Oh, Jesus!” said Harriet “Tedious business, but ritual. Do you have any idea how much time and energy a family like ours wastes on tradition?” When Chan shook his head, she grimaced. “Too damned much, to my way of thinking.”
“Why does Zachariah have no vote?” the detective asked.
“Because he bloody well doesn’t want one,” was the reply. Harriet paused to take a healthy swig, then said, “Zach’s a rebel from the word go. He’s also got the second smartest financial brain in the family. He never wanted to be tied to committee decisions. He preferred to make his own. Oh, Lionel and Lowell liked to say he lacked the necessary stability, but that was bushwah. They wanted him, even if they wouldn’t admit it. He’s made more than any of them, and thrown enough bones to the family to keep everybody uncomfortable about it.”
Chan said, “You say he’s the second smartest - then who is smartest? Is it you?”
Harriet put her head back and laughed. The drink had replaced some of the leathery look of her complexion with a healthier underpink. She said, “A generation ago, I might have qualified, Charlie. I’ve got more plain horse sense that any of the others. But horse sense isn’t enough in today’s computer run financial jungle. I’m still back in holding company finance. International exchange rates and rediscount duties need more mathematical brains than I’ve ever had. Lionel was good at that sort of things - so is Lowell, but not that good. He’ll make out, though.”
“Who is the smartest?” the detective asked again.
Harriet regarded him sardonically. “Haven’t you guessed?” she said.
Chan nodded, replied, “The boy - Armand Kent?”
She nodded. “Armand’s a genius. I’ve never met anyone like him. That boy has a brain that belongs in two thousand one A.D. No school could ever keep up with him. He could have graduated from Harvard, summa cum laude, at fourteen, if the college had allowed him to.”
“How about his stability factor?” Chan inquired.
“You put your finger on it again, Charlie,” said Harriet. “He’s always on the ragged edge of a blowup. If he and Carol ever have children, I’d hate to be their baby sitter. I’d never have a chance. Carol doesn’t say much, but she’s got Zach’s brains and then some.”
Chan said, “All right, Harriet, but here’s the big one - who in this family or in the house would have motive to kill Lionel Burdon?”
“Do you think that hasn’t been bothering me ever since he died and I found the suicide idea hard to accept? It’s a real bitch. In some ways, I think it might be better to write it off as suicide and forget it. Frankly, Charlie, I’m afraid of what disproving suicide might stir up.”
“You’re forgetting two things, I’m afraid,” Chan told her. “One, if you really believed that, you’d never have pulled strings to get me here. You can’t let it lie.”
“True, damn it. What’s the other?”
“Your own survival - or have you forgotten last night already?”
Harriet took a deep breath, finishing her nutritive drink, put down the glass so hard the coaster beneath it jumped. She said, “But, Charlie, why kill me? I don’t know a God damned thing. Hell, I don’t even suspect anybody.”
“You must know something, or whoever did it thinks you know something.”
“Charlie, what should I do?”
At that moment, the house telephone rang.
Chan and Harriet exchanged a look. The detective said, when the ring was repeated, “If you want to stay dead, don’t answer that phone.”
“My thought exactly,” said Harriet. “And you’d better be getting back if you wish to solve this problem.”
Chan glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s six-thirty-three,” he said. “When does the family get up?”
“Anytime - some early, some late. Breakfast is from eighty-thirty on.”
“Thanks,” said the detective. He moved toward the door, turned and said, “If I want to reach you by phone, I’ll give two rings, then hang up and give three. Don’t answer anything else.”
“Two and then three - fair enough.” Harriet got to her feet to see him to the basement door. “Good luck, Charlie, though I’m almost afraid of what you may find out.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” said Harriet, “continued in our next.”
“You must have been awfully interested in the Hawaii rerun not to have heard the shot,” he said.
“I wasn’t, particularly. But I heard nothing. I thought Lionel had probably fallen asleep at his desk. He used to do that quite often. I went in to wake him up when the show ended.”
“And he was beyond waking,” said Chan.
He took off down the steps and somehow made it back to the other house and his bedroom without running into anyone. There, he settled down to await breakfast, studying the album of the house Lenore had given him
After looking at both the photographs and plans of the west elevation, he understood how Harriet had saved herself and ridden out the storm. Below the bedroom floor on which his room was, there was a sort of gallery with a row of Roman arches whose supporting columns were based on a sturdy two and a half foot wall of brick faced concrete - a wall obviously designed to keep some of the ocean out in the stormiest weather.
Chan’s admiration for Harriet and for her seafaring Yankee ancestry rose a further few notches. He wondered if she were resting to recover from what must have been an exhausting experience for anyone of any age. He was willing to lay long odds she was doing no such thing. Harriet was not a woman to give way to any such symptoms of weakness.
Chan spent the rest of the time before breakfast going over the plans of the complex mansion as Lionel Burdon, with an assist from Harriet, had had it reconstructed. He paid special attention to the ground floor and basement plans, since it was on these floors that such action as there was had occurred. Also, he had no wish to get lost in the labyrinth carved out of the solid rock cliff as he almost had while returning from Harriet’s retreat.
BREAKFAST WAS laid out on a long teak sideboard in a smaller room opening off the main dining room. Presided over by the towering, resplendently liveried black Willis, it was in the tra
ditionally English country house style with Yankee and Island overtones - fresh pineapple along with grilled kidneys, hot oatmeal as well as kippers. Accepting a modest serving, Chan sat down at the table, which was occupied by Lowell and Ellen Burdon.
After the expected polite exchange of greetings, Ellen Burdon said, looking worried, “The period of grace is almost over - listen to the wind rising.”
Lowell Burdon looked up from his plate, said, “The second half of one of these storms is always worse than the first. Do you think I should postpone the meeting today, dear?”
“I don’t see how you can,” said Ellen. “We can’t hold the others here after the storm passes, and there’s the Los Angeles project to settle at once. And the Island Air Transport corporate meeting is the day after tomorrow.”
“I know, I know,” Lowell Burdon muttered through a mouthful of eggs and bacon.
That Ellen Burdon should show such close knowledge of the family business affairs mildly surprised Charlie Chan. But then, he reflected, her brilliant son must have inherited some of his alarming intellect from her as well as from his long dead father, and an eye for detail.
As if on cue, Armand Kent appeared, elegantly mod as ever in brilliant flowered body shirt and immensely wide cuffed slacks, the ensemble held together by a belts of braided leather thongs with silver mountings.
Carol Burdon was with him, apparently as always, equally vivid in a turquoise open throat shirt of raw Shantung silk and chrome yellow hip huggers slung so low that they looked ready to drop from her well formed young body at the soft stomp of a kitten’s paw.
Together, together, Chan mused, pondering the open intimacy of the youths and maidens of recent years. If, indeed, any maidens, at least in a technical sense, remained at large. He wondered if they had spent the night together, decided they almost certainly had as he noted the casual intimacy with which Carol caressed Armand’s hip as she directed them to seats across the table from Chan. Some of the other, more peripheral, Burdons had appeared and were serving and seating themselves under Willis’s aegis. But the detective studied the young people covertly.
Not covertly enough, apparently. Armand Kent suddenly speared him with his glowing, over-intelligent eyes and a sardonic smile twisted the too loose mouth ever so slightly. He said, “Where’s Harriet, Inspector?”
Chan knew perfectly well that the question was intended to catch him off guard, to cause him to make some revelatory involuntary gesture of reaction. Not for the first time, he thanked his Chinese ancestry, plus his long experience at self concealment, for his ability to remain phlegmatically impassive under virtually any provocation of the sort.
But the question had caught him off guard. Until that moment, psychologically at any rate, Chan had not fully believed the accounts of Armand Kent’s genius rating. From now on, even while he wondered what the young man knew or suspected, he resolved never to repeat the error of underestimating this brilliant and, he suspected, dangerous young man.
He managed a non-committal shrug, said, “Search still continue.”
Carol said, pushing back a strand of ink-black hair that had fallen over her left eye, “I’ll lay odds, if she isn’t dead, she’s in hiding.”
Ellen Burdon laid down her fork, looking either bewildered or frightened. Chan could not be sure which. She said, “Hiding - from what?”
At that moment, Lenore entered the room and Chan watched her out of the corner of his eye. She looked, he thought, an inexplicable five years younger than the somewhat harried lady playing the hostess role the evening before.
Had sleep done so much in such a few hours? The detective was mystified. And then, as Lenore moved to a place at the foot of the table, she passed behind the two young people directly opposite his own place. For an instant, he saw the look she gave Armand. It was brief, but there was no mistaking her expression.
It was that of a woman not only hopelessly in love but of a woman happily in love, a woman whose every desire has been lavishly fulfilled.
He wondered if Carol had not slept alone that night just past in view of this development - or had Armand sufficient stamina to make two females happy in a single night?
“Oh, to be forty again…!” Chan thought, and not entirely humorously.
VI
THE REST OF the conversation, while Charlie Chan remained at table, was irrelevant as far as he was concerned, but the detective found it, all in all, a disturbing session. More than once he caught Armand’s gaze on him, noted its covert mockery. On another occasion, he caught Carol regarding him covertly with amusement in her eyes.
While the talk was of personalities, mostly absent, Chan sensed undercurrents beneath the rather too civilized facade, undercurrents of which he had no knowledge whatsoever. Clearly, the coming clan meeting was to be more than a mere formal investiture of Davis Wilmot with voting rights in the family’s corporate decisions. But of what was at stake he had not the slightest idea.
He watched Lenore with interest, but not once did she give herself away again. She was properly attentive to her husband and her guests and relatives, remarked ruefully on the weather outside, whose fury continued to mount.
“It’s like living inside a pressure cooker,” she told the detective. “Air conditioning notwithstanding.”
His meal concluded, Chan rose from the table, and Armand Kent said, “Going to look for Harriet again?”
“As soon as the weather permits.” It was not, he realized, exactly an equivocal reply, but it was the best he could manage under the circumstances.
He returned to his room and picked up the house telephone and, after punching Harriet’s numbers, let it ring three times, then two after a brief hang-up. He wanted very much to talk to her, to discover, if possible, what the undercurrents he had sensed around the breakfast table were about.
Harriet didn’t answer, though he waited a full two minutes. With mounting unease, he hung up and returned downstairs to the living room to discover that the meeting had already been called. Lowell Burdon, Zachariah, Lenore, Ellen and a half dozen of the nameless relatives present had disappeared into the boardroom.
Chan, after wandering about the room, settled in with a group that included Ellen Burdon, Doctor Smith and Davis Wilmot. Chan was surprised to see the last of these still outside the boardroom, and said as much.
Wilmot, sighed and said, “For this occasion, I have to wait to be summoned.”
Chan said, “I don’t fully understand how it works, Mr. Wilmot. Just what does a voting membership mean?”
“It means just what it sounds like, Inspector. There are never more than seven voting members of the board of Burdon Enterprises - sometimes, like today, less, with poor Lionel gone and Harriet missing. The chairman - in this case Lowell - never casts a vote unless the other members are evenly divided on any issue.”
“What about the non-voting members, do they have any say?”
“Each has a proxy,” said Wilmot, “but it must be given to a voting member they select, and that member is not bound by a proxy’s wishes.”
“Isn’t that rather autocratic?” said Chan.
Wilmot smiled beneath his mustache. “The Burdon enterprises never pretended to be democratic,” he said. “Its founders may have supported the American Republic in theory, but they wanted control of their own affairs. The idea is to avoid stalemates, in the name of efficiency and progress.”
“Are there ever campaigns to collect proxies?” the detective inquired.
“Of course there are from time to time. In fact, there’s a dandy going on right now. The problem is…” He dropped the subject abruptly as if he had already gone too far.
Chan pushed the point no further and, after a few moments, the candidate for investiture excused himself and wandered away. The detective regarded Dr. Smith, whose expression indicated that he, too, wished he were elsewhere.
Chan said, “Li, why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you? You act as if there’s a flea under your collar ever
y time I come near you.”
The family physician said nothing, doing his best to remain inscrutable behind the lenses of his spectacles. But his face reddened as he failed to return Chan’s steady regard.
The detective said, “Li, let’s stop clowning around. If I were to tell you I have reason to believe Lionel Burdon’s suicide might have been arranged - what would your reaction be?”
“My reaction would be that it’s out of the question.” The physician’s voice was firm enough, but his expression grew troubled.
“The coroner’s paraffin test?” Chan suggested.
Dr. Smith nodded, said. “There’s no getting around it, and you’re not going to, Charlie. No way. It’s four-ten and out, and that’s it.”
“Have you forgotten the target range in the basement - plus the deceased’s long habit of letting off steam by firing a few rounds?”
Dr. Smith’s eyes narrowed behind his spectacles. He said, “I’m a medico, not a trained investigator. If that were so, if Lionel Burdon went down there the afternoon of the day he was killed…” A pause, a slow shake of the head, then, “But no - there’s no way of proving it, Charlie. If there was, somebody would have come forward to say so.”
“Perhaps,” said Chan, “Perhaps not. That’s up to me to discover. I wonder why the sheriff’s men didn’t think of it?”
“Probably,” said Dr. Smith, “because they didn’t know about it. There was no real reason, on the face of the evidence, to suggest anything but suicide.”
“You suspected something, though, Li.”
“Only,” replied the physician, “because suicide seemed so out of key for the man I knew. What proof have you that it might have been caused by - by something else?”
“Not conclusive yet,” said Chan, thinking of Harriet’s possible second disappearance. “But interesting.”
“God damn it!” said Smith softly, “I’d give a lot to know. The target range… Charlie, you’ve given me something to think about. I wonder…”
He rose and, forgetting his manners in this new absorption, left Chan sitting there without a by-your-leave.
Charlie Chan The Silent Corpse Page 5
