He Huffed and He Puffed

by Barbara Paul

  “We can’t break down the door or pick the lock with all those cameras watching,” Jo said.

  There was a camera at each end of the hall and one opposite each of two doors; it was only behind the doors that life would be camera-free. “I betcha the doors aren’t breakable or the locks pickable anyway,” I said. “Strode is a real security nut, isn’t he? Why don’t we take a little stroll outside? I’d like to get a look at the exterior of this building.”

  “You’re thinking of windows?” Richard asked. “They’d be hooked up to the alarm system.”

  “But surely the window alarms are turned off during the day,” Jo said. “The house staff has to open windows now and then, I’d think. Let’s go outside and take a look.”

  The house had a patio along one side and across the back. The first thing we noticed was that several of the windows were open, thus answering the question about the alarm system. I’d had some image of myself heroically scaling the outside of the building by Strode’s bedroom, but there weren’t any handholds or trellises or anything to climb. It took us a while to get oriented, to figure out where our rooms were and Strode’s locked-up space was. And when we did figure it out, we saw one of his windows standing wide open.

  “My god,” Jo gasped, “you don’t suppose he’s been here all the time?”

  Just then a maid leaned out and closed the window; nope, he hadn’t been here all the time. “Wait,” I told the others and dashed into the house. I reached the bottom of the stairs in Strode’s private wing just as the maid was starting down. She was short and on the plump side and burdened with a wooden tray of cleaning things as well as a dust mop and a carpet sweeper—not a vacuum but one of those things they use for quick pickups.

  “Hey, m’dear, you’ve got too much to carry,” I greeted her. “Allow me to remove some of this impedimenta that weighs so heavily on your fragile young bod. I place my strong right arm at your service—or my left, if you like that one better.”

  Instead of protesting demurely as a well-trained girl-type servant is supposed to do, she said, “If that means you’re offering to carry some of this stuff, grab ahold.”

  I took the tray and the carpet sweeper, leaving her with the dust mop. “You must be new here,” I murmured.

  She grinned. “Howja know?”

  “You’re not invisible yet.” She laughed at that, and we went down the stairs chatting easily. I followed her toward the back of the house, where we ran into an older woman in a navy blue dress—the housekeeper?—who, when she saw me helping put away the cleaning materials in a storage closet next to the kitchen, gave the maid one of the most disapproving looks I’ve ever seen pass from one human being to another.

  “Whoops, I think you’re in trouble,” I whispered to the maid.

  “Whoops, I’m always in trouble,” she whispered back. She took a key ring from her pocket and put it on a hook in a small cabinet on the wall. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I started to say something to the housekeeper but then she turned that disapproving look on me, so I beat the hastiest of hasty retreats. I found Jo and Richard sitting at one of the tables on the patio. “Ah. Consider the problem semisolved,” I told them as I sat down. “I know where the keys to Strode’s rooms are kept.”

  “Where?” they both asked on cue.

  “In a wall-mounted cabinet near the kitchen. The cabinet itself has a lock, but it’s not locked now.”

  “So why didn’t you take the keys?” Jo asked.

  “Two witnesses, one of whom strongly disapproved of my presence in the servants’ domain. We’ll wait a bit.”

  We waited half an hour; and then, because it would have looked funny if I showed up in the kitchen area again so soon, Jo casually wandered back in that direction. I’d told her the last hook on the right in the second row; and when she casually wandered back again, she had the key ring gripped tightly in her hand. Richard went off to distract the security guard (a different one this morning); Jo and I counted to a hundred and hurried off to Strode’s private wing.

  The first door we tried unlocked to reveal Strode’s bedroom. We closed the door quickly and leaned against it, hearts pounding. But no alarms went off, no feet came pounding down the hall, no fists hammered on the door. Okay so far. The bedroom was like everything else in the house, oversized and overpriced. The bed was the biggest I’ve ever seen; it had to have been custom-made. The bedroom contained nothing you’d not expect to find in a bedroom. We looked, but we couldn’t find any concealed maps with bright red arrows pointing to A. J. Strode’s secret hiding place.

  Two dressing rooms opened off the bedroom, each with its own bathroom. One of the dressing rooms was empty, stripped bare. “He must be between wives at the moment,” I said. The other dressing room was definitely Strode’s. We went through everything, shamelessly. I was fascinated to find he had an entire chest of drawers that held nothing but silk underwear. Six drawers of drawers.

  “Jack, look here.” Jo was holding open a door in Strode’s dressing room; it led directly into his library.

  The library had four bookcases, a TV, a sofa, a lounge chair, a desk. It may have been Strode’s private library, but it sure as hell didn’t have any of his private papers there. No tax records, no correspondence, not even any household accounts. No file cabinets. He must have handled everything from his office; this place was for relaxing, not working. We did find quarterly reports and similar papers relating to various corporations, probably companies Strode was considering moving in on. Light reading for him. We couldn’t even find any incidental clues, such as a matchbook from an out-of-town restaurant.

  Jo looked at me disconsolately. “Nothing.”

  I put an arm around her. “Hey, Jo, it was a long shot at best. We have to try everything we can think of.”

  “I know, but it’s beginning to look hopeless.”

  I looked for signs that a long, passionate embrace would be welcomed at that point and decided no. Instead I gave her a quick kiss and said lightly, “We still have the better part of two days to come up with something. Right now let’s pray that Richard is still standing so as to block the appropriate monitors or whatever the hell it is he’s doing.” We left the door between the library and the hall unlocked, if for some reason we should want to get back in again. We slipped out into the hall and down the stairway. Safe.

  Jo and I let Richard see us standing outside the security guard’s room. When he came out, Jo passed him the keys and then he was the one to wander casually off in the direction of the kitchen.

  When Richard came back, we all drifted toward the television room, avoiding the living room with its exhibition-hall atmosphere. This time Richard didn’t bother tossing his coat over the I-spy camera. I told him the search was a bust, which he’d already guessed, and we all sat there avoiding one another’s eyes. I couldn’t stand that more than a minute so I jumped up and started inspecting the shelves of videotapes that lined the walls. The cassettes were a fair indicator of their owner’s interests in life, ranging from golden oldies like Debbie Does Dallas to ones I’d never heard of. Snow White and the Seven Hunks? Family porn. The morning was just about shot and we hadn’t accomplished a thing. I couldn’t think of what to do, but I was damned if I was going to be the one to suggest we draw straws to decide who came out of this intact.

  How long do you have to go on paying for a mistake? The sheer neverendingness of it was getting to me. Christ, everything I’d tried had backfired. I’d correct one mistake, but then the correction would turn out to be a worse mistake. So I’d correct the correction, and the result would be a still bigger mistake. It had to end somewhere. Didn’t it? Sure it did. With my neck in a noose.

  If only Sandy and Robin and Chris hadn’t horned in! They’d still be alive today, if they’d just minded their own business. I tried to get them to stay behind, I did everything I could think of to discourage them—but would they listen? T
hey would not. Oh no, Jack, you’re not leaving us behind! and You’re taking Tony Dwyer and not us? and We’re coming, Jack old buddy—no arguments now!

  All I wanted was to get Tony Dwyer up in a helicopter alone; the last thing I needed was an audience. Dwyer was such a jerk. He liked lending people money; it gave him power over them. He liked being able to point his finger and say he owes me and she owes me and they owe me; it was the only way he could make himself important. And oh, how he loved watching me squirm when he threatened to tell Brother Phil how much I owed! But there comes a time when you have to stop the squirming, when you have to stop letting noodniks like Tony Dwyer twist your balls just to amuse themselves. There comes a time when you have to say Enough.

  But godalmighty, I never planned on Sandy and Robin and Chris being up in that helicopter with us! I loved those three; I’d known Sandy and Chris since college and Robin almost as long. Why did they have to pick that day of all days to invite themselves along? And then to make matters even worse, when we got to the Marseilles branch they wouldn’t let me check out the new helicopter alone. Too many innovations, Jack, they said. Lots of new features you don’t know about, they said. Take an experienced pilot with you, Jack. They said.

  So instead of being alone in a helicopter with Tony Dwyer, there I was with four extra people. I didn’t know what to do; Dwyer was nervous about helicopters and it had taken me forever to talk him into making our little trip along the coast. I finally got him to come by telling him there was a man in St.-Tropez who owed me money. Not enough to pay back the entire amount I was in for—that way he’d still have power over me—but enough to keep him from blabbing to Phil. That’s the way I put it to him: enough to keep you from blabbing to Phil. He bought it.

  So it was kind of then or never; I didn’t know if I’d ever get him up again. But still, I was pretty much resigned to not doing it, because of Sandy and the others. And I wouldn’t have done it, if Dwyer had just had enough sense to keep his mouth shut. But he couldn’t resist the captive audience he unexpectedly found himself with. We were all wearing headsets so we wouldn’t have to shout and Tony Dwyer was having himself a ball, indeed he was, oh yes. He told them how much money I owed and how Phil was going to put me on an allowance like a kid because I was incompetent to handle my own affairs and how Phil might not even give me that if he knew about a few other debts I’d managed to keep hidden from him.

  Chris told him to shut up but he just went on and on. He named names and amounts and even dates; one or two of those debts were over fifteen years old. It was bad enough for my friends to be hearing all that, but the pilot (whom I’d never seen before in my life) was sitting there soaking it all in like a man who couldn’t wait to sell what he knew to the nearest gossip columnist. And still Dwyer kept talking.

  He was giving too much away. It wouldn’t do; it simply wouldn’t do.

  I still get a sick feeling in my stomach when I think about Sandy and Robin and Chris. It was just monumentally bad luck that they happened to be on that helicopter on that day. If they hadn’t crashed my carefully planned party or if Dwyer had kept his mouth shut or if the pilot hadn’t been there … well. But that was just part of a whole string of things that went wrong. The pilot saw what I was doing and got out, alive, and had been squeezing me ever since. I actually had to go to work for Phil to pay him. A. J. Strode found out and had put a different kind of squeeze on me. And what did it all come down to? It came down to this weekend and its carefully orchestrated horrors.

  I examined my two fellow squeezees and wondered what the hell they had done. I’d asked Joanna Gillespie what Strode had on her, but she’d ducked the question by saying it was too ugly to talk about. Somehow I didn’t think it could be much. What dreadful thing could a world-class violinist be caught doing? Pushing plastic chopsticks in China? Smuggling trolls out of Norway? Neither of us, I noticed, had asked Richard Bruce what he had done.

  “His office,” Richard said out of the blue, “that’s where we ought to look next.”

  I stared at him. “Weren’t you the one who said something about an office vault?”

  “The combination has to be recorded somewhere.”

  “So we just waltz in and look for it? Jesus, Richard, even if we could get in that’d be a tremendous job!”

  “Then we’d better get started.”

  “Oh, let’s go give it a try,” Jo interjected. “I want to get out of this house anyway.”

  “Outvoted two to one,” I sighed. “Okay, let’s do it, troops.”

  Let’s do it, troops—hah. Break into A. J. Strode’s office? We couldn’t even get into the building.

  The building was closed on weekends. We could look into the lobby and see two security guards at a bank of monitors much like the one in Strode’s home, only much larger. Richard Bruce tapped on the glass door until one of the guards came to see what we wanted. Richard said we had an appointment to meet Castleberry in A. J. Strode’s office, but the guard said nobody had told him about it and we’d have to wait until Mr. Castleberry got there. He said even if he did let us go up, the guard on Mr. Strode’s floor wouldn’t let us off the elevators. He himself wouldn’t even let us wait in the lobby. It didn’t take us long to decide this was not a profitable avenue to pursue.

  “Any more bright ideas, Richard?” I asked.

  “It had to be tried,” he said patiently.

  So there we were, stranded on Forty-seventh Street following our second straight failure to breach A. J. Strode’s defenses, what a sterling day this was turning out to be. Joanna Gillespie announced she had to eat something. We found a bar and slid into the first empty booth we came to, Jo and I on one side and Richard on the other. The menu listed nine different sandwiches; we told the waitress to bring one of each. What with our drinks and the food and the ashtray and the salt and pepper shakers and a stand-up card pushing some “specialty” the bar’s kitchen was trying to get rid of, there wasn’t room to put your elbows on the table. The club sandwich was closest to me and I started off with that; but everything kept slipping out from between those little triangles of toast so I switched to the Reuben.

  There’d been a little eye contact going on between Jo and Richard that I didn’t much care for, so to break that up, I asked Jo, “Were you a child prodigy?”

  “No, thank god.” She was slumped down in the booth, halfheartedly picking a piece of cheese out of one of the sandwiches. “Prodigies usually burn out by their early twenties. I intend to play for another fifty years at least.”

  I don’t know what I was thinking of, I must not have been thinking at all, my brain was on vacation dammit, but it just slipped out: “You figure you’re going to be the one to sell to Strode?”

  Jo looked startled, but it was the way Richard Bruce was looking at me that made my skin crawl. Nothing to do but bluff it out. “C’mon, you’ve both been thinking of it, you know you have. Fess up.”

  “Well, it’s clear you have,” Jo said indignantly. “Whatever happened to our agreement not to accept Strode’s rules?”

  “I’m sticking to it,” I said as earnestly as I knew how and blotted my hands on my trousers. “But I can’t help but wonder whether you guys are having second thoughts. Are you?”

  They were both silent a moment. Then Richard said, “It’s a little early to give up yet. We still have some time left.”

  “That says it for me,” Jo added.

  I allowed myself to look relieved, and it wasn’t entirely show. “Okay, sorry I doubted. It’s just that I’ve got so much riding on this weekend … it’s not just me that might get hurt, it’s the whole family business that could go down the toilet.”

  “McKinstry Helicopters,” Richard said, not asking.

  So he knew my company—and was working hard at not looking impressed. “That’s it. I’m one of those McKinstrys. Unless they all disown me after this weekend.”

  “Do you think so?” Jo asked, not really interested.

  “They might. My br
other’s always ready to believe the worst.” I told Richard the same story I’d earlier told Jo, that Strode had manufactured evidence to implicate me in a helicopter crash that had taken place in France four years earlier. “People died in that crash,” I pointed out. “That means I could be charged with murder if Strode convinces the French police I’m responsible.”

  “But only if they think you caused it deliberately,” Jo objected. “The charge might be criminal negligence or something like that, but not murder.”

  “Oh, that’s the cute part,” I said. “You see, I was in that helicopter when it crashed, and only one other guy and I got out alive. The other guy was the pilot, and Strode has bribed him to say I wrecked that bird on purpose.”

  “Why?” Wouldn’t you know, Richard just had to ask that.

  “Why am I supposed to have wrecked it? Strode’s version is that I owed money to one of the passengers and killed them all to get rid of him. Good god! For one thing, I’m not in the habit of taking my creditors with me on little jaunts along the southern coast of France. For another, those four other people in the helicopter were my friends, I’d known them all for years … I could no more kill them than I could kill myself. And I’m supposed to have risked my own life just to get out of paying a debt? It’s absurd.”

  “Can you get to the pilot?”

  I shook my head. “Strode’s got him hidden away somewhere.”

  Jo evidently saw something in Richard Bruce’s face. “That’s what he did to you too, Richard, didn’t he? He got somebody to sign something and then hid the person away.”

  “That’s exactly what he did.” Without any prologue he went into some song and dance about a ship called the Burly Girl that sank with a full crew and an insurance check that came when it was needed most. Then he turned to me. “You’re in danger of being charged with killing … what, four people, Jack? Strode has accused me of killing thirty-seven.”

  Jesus, a mass murderer sitting right across the table from me! I couldn’t think of a damned thing to say. Thirty-seven people!