He Huffed and He Puffed

by Barbara Paul

  “Yeah, I don’t much like that. I thought of booking them all into the same hotel, but I couldn’t be sure they’d come if I did that. They have to think they have a chance of getting at me, don’t you see? I’m the bait.”

  “Well, if you stay with Tracy all the time—”

  “I won’t budge out of her apartment all weekend. Sit down, Castleberry, and stop worrying. Listen, no one of them will know the other two are coming. I’ll send each one an offer to return the incriminating evidence—on condition that the deal is settled here, this weekend. They’ll all come thinking they might get a shot at the big bad wolf in his own lair.” He grinned at his assistant’s expression. “Yeah, I know what they call me behind my back. But those three little pigs will come, Castleberry. They’ll come because they want to get me.”

  “And you won’t see any of them? At any time?”

  “None of them, ever. And you’ll see them only long enough to give them my terms. I think I’ll tape it. That way you won’t have to hang around. We’ll just leave the three of them together and see what happens.”

  “Good lord.” Castleberry took out a handkerchief and blotted the perspiration on his forehead. “I wonder which one of them will win.”

  Strode grunted. “My money’s on Richard Bruce. He makes the other two look like babies.”

  “Maybe,” his assistant said cautiously. “How in the world are they ever going to decide? Mr. Strode, do you know what might happen? Those three people could end up killing one another!”

  Strode smiled his lupine smile. “Now wouldn’t that be a pity,” he said contentedly.

  PART 2

  The Suspects

  4

  JOANNA GILLESPIE, FRIDAY:

  One decent thing about Myron Castleberry—he didn’t gloat. He even managed to sound sympathetic as he explained that A. J. Strode didn’t want to talk just then but would settle accounts with me during the upcoming weekend. At the time I was so dejected it didn’t even occur to me that “settle accounts” might have more than one meaning. Then I understood I was expected to spend the weekend in Strode’s home; I said I’d stay in a hotel. But Castleberry insisted that Mr. Strode wouldn’t hear of it. He was very smooth about it; he managed to make Strode’s command that I come to his home off Park Avenue on Friday afternoon sound like a genuine invitation. I protested I couldn’t go an entire weekend without practicing, and Castleberry told me to bring my violin with me if I wished. That made me laugh. I had no intention of taking something as clean and pure as the Guarnerius into A. J. Strode’s house and risk contaminating it.

  Nevertheless, the so-called invitation surprised me. If Strode was as frightened of my pointing a gun at him as he claimed to be, what was he doing bringing me right into his home? It was almost as if he were inviting me to take a shot at him. And why an entire weekend? How long does it take to sign a set of papers? Strode had something up his sleeve, but I couldn’t begin to guess what. What else could he do to me? He already had me where he wanted me. But if the only way I could get my hands on the affidavit that that fool Ozzie Rogers had signed was to go for the weekend, then I’d go for the weekend.

  I’d seen my lawyer in Boston; the papers Castleberry had forwarded were checked and officially pronounced proper and aboveboard. I didn’t tell my financial manager I was selling; it would be easier simply to present him with a fait accompli. Similarly, I did not at first inform Harvey Rudd where I’d be over the weekend. I left a message on his answering machine that I wanted to get away for a few days and I’d call him Monday morning. Poor Harvey; he’d be tearing his beard out by Saturday night. Then I had second thoughts. Entrust myself to A. J. Strode for two and a half days without letting anyone know where I was? That wasn’t one of my brighter ideas. I called back and left another message telling Harvey exactly where I was going and how to reach me. Then on Friday I’d casually mention to Strode that I was expecting a call from my assistant. A little insurance never hurts.

  What was the man up to? I’d be hard put to name someone in the world I detested more than A. J. Strode. That slimy, grasping man actually thought I’d killed my parents for money. There are times when it’s simply impossible to rise above what other people think of you, as we’re always being told we ought to do, and this was one of them. Ozzie Rogers was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life; I knew two minutes after I met him that a Texas mercenary couldn’t solve my problems for me. And now Ozzie himself was the problem. To tell the truth, I didn’t mind giving up my House of Glass shares all that much; the company meant nothing to me and I could always reinvest the money elsewhere. But I had only Castleberry’s word for it that Strode would keep no copies of Ozzie’s affidavit. Strode was a vengeful man, and I had made the mistake of failing to kowtow when the Great One had made his wishes known. He could easily ruin me just out of spite.

  I loathe being coerced.

  Perhaps he just wanted to gloat a little; that certainly seemed in character. If a weekend of letting Strode stick needles in me would keep him out of my life from now on, then that was a price I was willing to pay. So I showed up at the big house in Manhattan late Friday afternoon. An armed guard at the gate checked my name on his clipboard and let me in.

  Castleberry met me at the door, his mouth full of apologies about how Mr. Strode had been detained but would see me at dinner. The interior was about what one would expect—large rooms with high ceilings, ostentatious furnishings chosen primarily and perhaps even solely to show off the owner’s wealth. I glanced into the living room, a misnomer if there ever was one; the place looked more like an art gallery than a space to live in. Spotlighted paintings, museum-quality furniture, niches in the walls to show off the modern sculpture. There were even display cases. In a room just off the foyer I could see another guard, seated before a bank of television monitors. One of the screens was a regular TV tuned to a game show with the sound turned down. The other screens showed rooms and hallways; a few were dark.

  I objected. “I can’t be spied on like this—this won’t do at all.”

  Castleberry assured me my privacy would be respected. “Most of the cameras are located on the first floor and outside the house. Upstairs, only the halls and stairways are covered. There are no cameras in any of the bedrooms or bathrooms.”

  “Oh, that’s considerate of you. Is that supposed to make me like it?”

  “Nobody likes it,” he said regretfully, “but Mr. Strode has to have strict security. Every burglar in the city would like to get into this place. Besides, the insurance company insists upon it.”

  So there was nothing to do but put up with it. A maid—actually dressed in black uniform and wearing a frilly white apron, heaven help us!—led me upstairs to a guest room that must have been decorated with an eye to getting coverage in Architectural Digest; the article would have been titled “How To Achieve Perfect Symmetry When Money Is No Object”. Everything in the room focused toward a lovely, wide bay window that led the eye out-of-doors beyond the limitations of the building’s walls, like a central vanishing point in an old perspective painting. I rather doubted that A. J. Strode had overseen the decoration of the room. I wondered who had.

  I told the maid I preferred to do my own unpacking, and when she’d left I moved one chair a couple of feet out of position just to give myself the feeling of having some small control over my environment. We all have our little superstitions. I looked around for a radio but there was none; a television, but no radio. It hadn’t occurred to me I might have to go the entire weekend without music or I could have brought along a transistor. I tried PBS on the TV, but got two kids extolling the virtues of the number seven. Arts & Entertainment? Interview of a mystery writer. Boring.

  Then I opened my suitcase and took out the .380 Walther automatic pistol that had so successfully intimidated A. J. Strode in Pittsburgh. Once I’d gotten over my initial distaste about coming here, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to be without resources simply because we were on Strode’s h
ome territory. The man could be frightened; some opportunity might arise where I could make him back off again—perhaps permanently this time. I didn’t think it likely, but I was ready to grasp any straw that came floating by. The guard evidently had not been instructed to search my suitcase; I’d half expected that. The question now was where to keep the gun. There were plenty of hiding places in that overdecorated guest room, but I needed something quickly accessible. I finally decided on one of the throw pillows on the seat in the bay window; the pillow cover had a zipper, and the automatic slipped inside quite nicely.

  Then I sat down by the pillow and stared out the window. It was probably as well that Strode had been detained. I’d just finished six straight hours of practicing before catching the shuttle to New York, and I hadn’t yet made a complete mental shift from my world to Strode’s. Strode was exactly the sort of big bad wolf my father used to warn me about all the time. I could just hear him saying, See, you know nothing about the world—look at the mess you’ve landed yourself in.

  He never did understand. That man kept me ignorant as sin until I was nearly grown. He had a lot of help from Mother, though; the first sixteen years of my life she kept telling me I wasn’t like other girls and I couldn’t do this and I couldn’t do that and I had to be so careful to take care of myself all the time. Long naps when I wasn’t sleepy, or at least quiet periods of resting. No sports, of course. No public functions of any kind. Brief periods of supervised play, so long as they didn’t get too strenuous. Father backed her up, bringing in tutors instead of letting me go to school, even a private school. I’d reached high school age before I read a magazine article that said diabetics could lead perfectly normal lives just through exercising common sense and a reasonable amount of caution.

  When I confronted them with what I’d learned, they pooh-poohed the whole thing and gave me those looks that meant I was just a sweet, silly, gullible little girl who needed to be led by the hand all the time. I don’t know what I would have done without my Uncle Marcus. That dear man died when I was ten, but four years earlier he’d seen something my parents never saw and gave me a child-sized violin for my birthday. I remember that moment as clearly as if it were this morning; I picked up that tiny instrument—which seemed enormous to me at the time—and I played it. I played a scale first, and then I played a tune I’d heard on the radio that had been haunting me. It wasn’t until several years later that I learned it was the theme of the largo movement of Beethoven’s Seventh; but that one sustained, repeated note sent chills down my back the first time I played it for myself. I knew from the moment I tucked that first baby violin under my chin that there was a rightness to making music that I’d never find anywhere else.

  My mother and father thought it was cute. They both approved of my playing, because it gave me something to do and kept me from crying because I couldn’t go out and play baseball or whatever else might happen to catch my attention. They never stinted on lessons or on replacing the scaled-down violins as I outgrew them, and I’m grateful to them for that. It’s just that they had such a hidebound view of the way a correct life ought to be conducted that the idea of living for music was something of a joke to them. One doesn’t compete with others in the arts, dear … and you aren’t serious about playing for money, are you? Don’t be vulgar, Joanna. You don’t need money.

  Money. A. J. Strode actually thought I killed them for money.

  The light outside had changed; the afternoon was almost gone. I showered and changed and went downstairs to see if Strode was back yet. At the bottom of the stairs I could hear a television blasting away, so I followed the sound to a room down the hall from the main living room. The light was dim; at first all I could see was a huge rear-projection screen showing a tennis player arguing a call. Then I could make out a man stretched out on the sofa watching the TV. “Strode?” I said.

  It wasn’t Strode. The man who got up from the sofa was lean and good-looking and as surprised to see me as I was him. “Hello!” he said in a friendly manner. “I didn’t know anyone else was here—Strode isn’t back yet. My name’s Jack McKinstry, by the way.”

  “I’m Joanna Gillespie. I was supposed to meet Strode here—alone, I thought.”

  “Same here. Did you say Joanna Gillespie? The violinist?”

  “One and the same.”

  “Hey—no stuff! Terrific!” He laughed. “I can’t see you … here, let me turn on a light.” He switched on a table lamp, and I saw clearly for the first time the smiling face of Jack McKinstry. “You sure as hell are Joanna Gillespie—I’d know you anywhere. At the risk of sounding like a gushing fan, I’ve got to tell you I have all your tapes. Well, almost all of them. I’ve just about worn out the Prokofiev! You don’t know what a pleasure this is for me.”

  “Well, thank you, Mr.… I’m sorry, I didn’t get your last name.”

  “McKinstry. But call me Jack—please.”

  He had a smile so infectious that I found myself grinning back. “I’m Jo.” This looked promising, but the timing was all wrong; the getting-to-know-you game would have to wait. “Did I understand you to say you’re here to see Strode too? Well, of course you are or you wouldn’t be in his house, would you? I meant to say Strode and I have some business to wrap up and I expected to see him alone.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll have him to yourself for a while. He’ll probably take care of your business first, before he gets to me. I’ll be here for the whole weekend.”

  I was starting to get a funny feeling. “Isn’t that interesting? I was … invited for the weekend too.”

  His friendly smile started to fade. “You hesitated before you said ‘invited’.”

  “Did I? I didn’t notice.”

  There was an awkward pause. Then he said, “Jo, does your being here have anything to do with House of Glass?”

  I sat down on the nearest chair, plop, and waved an arm at the television. “Could you turn that off?” He did. “Look, Jack, I don’t want to be rude, but why I’m here is my business. Just tell me one thing. Did you think you were going to be the only guest this weekend?”

  He nodded. “You?”

  “The same.”

  He grinned crookedly. “And I don’t think A. J. Strode just wants to bring two fascinating people together, right? He got us both here without telling either the other was coming. He has to have a reason for that—he never does anything without a reason. Any ideas?”

  I shook my head. “Not a one. Damn that man!”

  “Amen,” Jack said, looking surprised. “Why, heaven protect us, I do believe the lady is not an admirer of Iron Man Strode. Can this be true? Does this mean I am not the only one in this show-offy house who is not a member of the A. J. Strode fan club?”

  “That’s what it means,” I muttered. “I don’t want to be here at all. I want to be in Boston practicing Mozart.”

  Jack pulled over a chair next to mine and sat down. “Joanna Gillespie, I think you and I ought to talk to each other. We might turn out to be allies, you know. Frankly, I could use an ally. I don’t want to be here either, and it looks to me as if our not-so-genial host is planning a little surprise that involves both of us. I don’t know about you, but I hate surprises. Especially when A. J. Strode is behind them. So what do you say—shall we pool our resources, whatever they might turn out to be?”

  I was thinking it over when Myron Castleberry came into the room. “Oh, there you are! I see you’ve met—good, good. I’m afraid—”

  “What’s going on, Castleberry?” Jack interrupted him. “You didn’t say a word to me about Jo’s being here, and you didn’t tell her about me. What’s this all about?”

  “I didn’t mention it?” Castleberry said smoothly. “An oversight on my part, I’m afraid. I’ve come to tell you Mr. Strode was delayed in Atlanta—bad weather of some sort. But his plane has just taken off and he’ll be here in a few hours. We’re not to wait dinner for him. The cook says half an hour, if that’s satisfactory?”

 
; “And if it isn’t?” Jack asked innocently.

  Castleberry pretended not to hear. “You know where the dining room is? Good. If you’d like a cocktail before dinner, just call the kitchen on that telephone over there.” He left before either of us could say anything.

  “That’s the only decent suggestion I’ve heard all day,” Jack said and headed for the house phone. “Martinis okay?”

  I said yes. “Do you believe that?” I asked when he’d finished at the phone. “That he just forgot to mention there’d be two of us here?”

  “Not for one minute. I doubt if Castleberry ever forgets anything, perfect little toady that he is. I don’t like this, Jo. I smell a fish.”

  “We could leave.”

  He was quiet a moment. “Maybe you can leave, but I can’t. I have to get some business settled with Strode, and it has to be settled this weekend. Has to be. I don’t have any choice.”

  That was a familiar phrase. Should I tell him?

  Just then another black-frocked and frilly-aproned maid appeared, this one carrying a tray with two glasses and a shaker of martinis on it. “Bless you, my dear,” Jack said, taking the tray, “and our undying gratitude to you for your lifesaving errand of mercy. Doesn’t it give you a warm glow to know you’ve just rescued two desperate souls from a terrible and thirsty death?”

  She looked at him uncertainly; evidently such extravagant language wasn’t usual in A. J. Strode’s house. But she smiled politely and left without saying anything.

  Jack poured a martini and handed it to me. “We don’t have a whole lot of time. I’ll go first, if it’ll help.” He poured his own martini and lifted the glass. “To better days.” We both drank and he said, “Strode is working an extortion game on me. He wants my shares in a company called House of Glass. Does that mean anything to you?”

  I finished my martini and held out my glass for more. “It does.”

  He refilled our glasses and said, “Strode has manufactured some evidence that implicates me in a helicopter crash that took place in France four years ago. The evidence is garbage, but it can still make trouble for me. I can’t afford even the appearance of guilt right now. If he can get the police investigation reopened … well, I’ll just say our family business is the manufacture of helicopters. See? You can imagine the damage all that adverse publicity would do—not just to me but to the rest of the family as well.”