I walked to the window of her Plaza suite. She had drawn the shades to keep out the sun, but the opulent décor still looked as overheated as melting frosting on a birthday cake. For a while I stood motionless, the shade drawn aside as I looked across the park.
“Did you know that Terence was in love with Sylvia?” said Dinah at last.
“Sure. Paul told me. It seemed kind of a joke at the time.”
“A joke?” She looked at me incredulously.
“Yeah—that Sir Galahad had become Sir Lancelot. Terence was never interested in girls.”
She laughed in my face. “He just made his passes more discreetly than you do, that’s all!”
I was amazed. “You mean he made a pass at you?”
“Of course he did! What did you think?”
“Jesus! Did you accept?”
“No, you unspeakable man, I didn’t. Give me some more of that awful whisky, please. … Thanks. I suppose it’s impossible for someone like you to believe that I was absolutely faithful to Paul.”
“Honey, I don’t care whether you lived like a nun or laid every guy in town. I’m just interested in this goddamned Terence O’Reilly. Now let’s go over it all again.”
We went over it all again, the unholy trinity of Clayton, O’Reilly and Da Costa, the innocent letter with its odor of conspiracy, the strong likelihood that O’Reilly had believed Dinah when she told him Paul would never leave his wife.
“Well, that gives Terence a motive,” I agreed, “and Bruce is too nuts to need one, but I can’t see Greg Da Costa, who has to rank as the world’s best sponger, kissing a lush annuity goodbye. That doesn’t add up at all.”
“But with or without Da Costa there must have been a conspiracy.”
That was the last thing I wanted to hear anyone saying out loud. I gave her a quick hard look. I no longer believed she was involved in any plot to kill Paul. Her grief had seemed genuine, and her manner, once she had recovered, had seemed open and honest. But this was a tough girl, and I knew I would never feel completely at ease about her until she had proved to me beyond any shadow of a doubt that she had a strong motive for keeping Paul alive. Whichever way you looked you couldn’t escape the fact that she had been having intellectual jam sessions with Bruce Clayton whenever she hadn’t been getting drunk with Terence O’Reilly.
“You don’t like that word ‘conspiracy,’ do you?” she said, watching me. “And don’t think I can’t guess why. If a high-level employee like O’Reilly organized Paul’s murder the scandal would be very damaging to the bank. If a conspiracy exists you’ll sweep it under the rug and Paul’s murderers will escape scot free.”
“Not while I’m at Willow and Wall.” I sat down beside her. “But you’re right about the rug. I’m going to ask you not to talk to the police.”
“Not to talk to the police!” She was horrified. I had forgotten she was English. No suggestion could have shocked her more.
“Honey …” I groped for the words to bridge our cultures. “This is Jimmy Walker’s New York, not King George’s London. This is where it’s every man for himself and the devil takes those who make one dumb decision. Now here are the facts: Bruce Clayton can buy his way out of trouble. Greg Da Costa has already got himself stashed in Mexico. Terence O’Reilly’s smart enough to outwit what passes for law in this town. The police can’t get these men. All they can do is muddy the bank’s name until we all end up panhandling on the Bowery—and that’ll mean victory for the murderers. If the bank’s ruined they’ll have got what they wanted.”
“But—”
“I’ll get them,” I said. “It’ll take about five years, but I’ll get every damned one of them. Paul was the older brother I never had and he believed in me when everyone else thought I was nothing but a high-class juvenile delinquent. I’ll see his murderers into hell even if I have to tap the big dog on the shoulder to let them in. What was that dog called?” I added, absent-mindedly refilling my tooth mug.
“Cerberus.”
Of course she couldn’t resist the chance to show off her classical education, but when I saw how her reply had disturbed her I realized she had reminded herself of Paul.
She glanced around the room and shuddered violently. “If only I were at home,” she whispered. “If only I were at—” She stopped. She couldn’t have looked more horrified if she’d met old Cerberus face to face.
“For Christ’s sake!” Half the rye in my tooth mug slopped onto the carpet. “What’s the matter?”
“Steve, did Paul sign that new will he was making? “
“Yes, he did. Why?”
“Oh my God,” she said faintly and passed right out.
It turned out she had the best motive in the world for keeping Paul alive. Having owned her beloved Mallingham since 1922, Paul had agreed to convey it to her, and Dinah had been negotiating a fair market price to offer him. Because the conveyance had been imminent they had agreed that all mention of the property should be omitted from the new will.
“So the house goes to Cornelius!” I said. “Well, he’ll sell, won’t he? What’s the big deal?”
But for some reason she seemed to regard Paul’s little great-nephew as a cross between Frankenstein’s monster and Jack the Ripper.
“That little pansy?” I scoffed. “Forget it! He’s just a kid still wet behind the ears. I’ll fix him.”
“Would you?” She looked as though she could pass out again with relief.
“Honey, trust me. I have the Van Zale lawyer in my hip pocket. I’ll find the deed to Mallingham—it’s just the deed conveying the place to Paul, you say? You’ve got all the other stuff? Great—and once I find it you’ll get the transfer of title before you can sing all the verses of ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas.’ However,”—I wasn’t one to let a golden opportunity pass by— “let’s make it a real business deal. You keep your mouth shut about the conspiracy and I’ll see that Cornelius never knows he’s the owner of Mallingham.”
I thought she might be insulted by this display of muscle but she was so worried about Cornelius that she swallowed the deal whole.
“Great,” I said. “We’re in business, honey—I wonder why I keep calling you ‘honey.’ ” I was trying to screw the cap back on my hip flask, which I had just refilled. The cap kept missing the top and sliding down my wrist. I paused to summon all my powers of concentration.
“You’re the sort of man who doesn’t see women as individuals,” she said nastily, knocking back the rye in her tooth mug. “You probably never call a woman by her own name.”
“Wrong,” I said. “I call my wife Cal.” The cap finally made it onto the hip flask. I stood up, fumbled in my pockets and produced a key. “I want you to get out of here and wait in my apartment until it’s time to go down to the ship,” I said. “I don’t want anyone asking you awkward questions. Where are Mary and Alan?”
“They should be arriving any moment. Where’s your apartment?”
“I’ll write down the address. I’d wait to take you all there myself, but I’ve got to get back to the bank.”
I gave her the address. It was dark in the suite’s small hallway and as we were both swaying with liquor I’ll never be sure who brushed who first, but I held her for a long moment and she clung to me. It was quiet. We didn’t kiss.
At last she said in a small voice, “I’m sorry I was always so nasty to you.”
I laughed. “I hardly encouraged you to be nice!”
“You’re not as I thought you were.”
“It’s hard to see people properly,” I said, “when there’s a big shadow blocking the light.”
We were silent. It was a good ten seconds before I opened the door into the corridor.
“Will I ever see you again?” she said in a smaller voice than ever, and I knew that the shock was hitting her again, making her feel frightened and alone.
“Why, sure!” I said, taking the hand she offered me and kissing her on the cheek. “I’ll come riding over the horizon someday
on my white horse to bring back your deed to Mallingham!”
I saw the courage flow back into her as she laughed. I saw the tilt of her chin and the zest in her eyes and the curve of her warm wide mouth. I saw the spark which had set fire to Paul.
“I’ll roll out the red carpet!” she said. “And I’ll open a magnum of champagne!”
“That’s the best deal I’ve heard yet!” I was still holding her hand. I gave it one last squeeze. “Take care of yourself, Dinah. Stay in touch. So long.”
“Goodbye, Steve,” she said as I walked off down the corridor, and as I turned the corner to the elevators she called after me softly, “Thanks for remembering my name.”
Two
I
AVOIDING THE FRONT ENTRANCE of the bank, I talked my way past the cops and opened the Willow Alley door with my set of partners’ keys. The bodies had been removed from Paul’s office. Two maintenance men were busy taking up the ruined carpet, and in the back lobby I had to stop to wipe the sweat from my forehead before I toiled upstairs to the second floor.
I reached Charley Blair’s office. The door closed as I was yanked inside. The six surviving partners of P. C. Van Zale and Company were at last alone to let their back hair down and have hysterics.
“Jesus Christ,” said Clay Linden, “what a catastrophe.”
Nobody bothered to deny it.
“How did poor Sylvia take the news, Steve?” Charley Blair was visibly upset.
“How do you think?” I collapsed into the nearest chair. “What the hell’s been going on here while I’ve been spreading the bad news uptown?”
“I’ve been talking to the police commissioner,” said Lewis Carson, “and the district attorney. I even talked to the mayor.” Lewis was such a snob that he managed to make Jimmy Walker sound like a creature from another planet.
Eventually I learned that the police were still busy downstairs interrogating employees in the great hall, that the Street’s army of baying press hounds had now been augmented by crowds of sightseeing ghouls, and that the market had declined three points. The leading bankers had all called to express their horror and sympathy.
“What did you tell them?” I said.
“What could I possibly tell them?” said Martin Cookson, who had fielded most of the calls. “I said the assassin was a stray Bolshevist maniac who had been killed immediately afterward.”
We all looked at one another.
“God, is there any coffee?” I said. “My head feels like the inside of an alki-cooker.”
Charley rang the bell for his secretary.
Sagging back in my chair, I gazed vacantly around the room. Charley’s office was large and comfortable, like a room in one of the famous clubs uptown. There were leather armchairs around a wood-burning fireplace, a solid mahogany desk in front of solid mahogany bookshelves, and nineteenth-century English fox-hunting prints on the austerely papered walls. Charley was large and comfortable, like his office, and had silver hair above a round friendly sociable face. He and Lewis were both in their midfifties, but Lewis was everything Charley was not, stuffy, humorless and aloof. Jason Da Costa had been notorious for selecting partners who looked like caricatures of the Eastern Seaboard Yankee aristocracy. Even old Walter Maynard, whom Jay had inherited from Lucius Clyde, had the same blue eyes, the same distinguished features and the same elegant shade of silver hair.
Paul’s men were different. Paul had believed in youth, so we were much younger than Jay’s men, and Paul had also taken a perverse pleasure in picking men who looked as if they never went near a bank except to cash a check. Clay looked like a salesman, the slick expensive California type with gleaming hair and sharp modern clothes and a mind like a cash register. Martin, with his thinning hair and owlish spectacles, looked like a small-town college professor, the kind that would hardly know the difference between a nickel and a medieval groat. And I looked like a Marine fresh from bawling out recruits in boot camp—or so my wife used to tell me in her less complimentary moments.
I was the youngest, but I had the seniority among Paul’s men. I had worked for Paul since the age of eighteen, while Clay and Martin had not entered the firm until after the merger with Clyde, Da Costa. I had also been Paul’s favorite, and as soon as he had made me a junior partner and taken me to Europe with him in 1917 I had known he was grooming me to be his successor. However, no one could have foreseen his dying when his contemporaries Charley and Lewis were still in their prime, and I couldn’t quite see how I was going to muscle past the two of them immediately to grab the senior partner’s chair. I’d have to lie low for a while as I figured out how to shuffle my cards into a winning hand.
The coffee arrived, interrupting my thoughts.
Charley was engaged in an elaborate reconstruction of events, I discovered as I plugged myself into the conversation again.
“… so anyway,” he was saying, “the parade became more violent than poor Bruce intended and he even had to take a gun away from one of his supporters, who was brandishing it at a policeman. At that moment another maniac tossed a brick through the front window and Bruce at once decided to apologize to Paul. Just as he was in the middle of his apology this anarchist Krasnov, who had been hiding in the closed-off half of Paul’s office, burst through the folding doors and started firing. Bruce, who purely by chance had this gun he’d removed earlier from his supporter—”
“You don’t really believe all this, do you, Charley?” said Clay like a salesman sneering at a rival’s inferior product. “We’re New Yorkers, not little old ladies from Dubuque.”
I made a split-second decision. We all obviously suspected a conspiracy. We were all, equally obviously, scared silly by our suspicions. Therefore the partner who took the lead in unraveling the conspiracy, neutralizing it and sweeping it under the rug was going to come out on top. I had information from Sylvia and Dinah which no one else had. To share that information, I now saw clearly, would be to throw away the aces from my winning hand.
“Don’t be dumb, Clay,” I said. “So long as there’s some kind of yarn for the police to swallow, what does it matter what we believe? The six of us know Bruce was nuts enough to have set this up, but once you start talking about a conspiracy instead of a stray anarchist we’re in trouble.”
“Steve’s right,” said Charley. “As far as this bank’s concerned, ‘conspiracy’ has to be the most obscene word in the English language.”
“Most distasteful,” said Lewis grandly.
“Quite unthinkable,” muttered old Walter into his moustaches.
The old guard had spoken, but the new guard were beginning to unscramble their brains.
“That’s all very well,” said Martin, “but—”
“You’re all nuts,” said Clay. “If anyone’s going to believe this myth that the Russian acted alone, we’ve got to explain how he got into the building. So what the hell are we going to say? That he coasted across the sky on a brace of reindeer and let himself down the chimney?”
“And anyhow,” said Martin, polishing his spectacles furiously and looking more like an academic than ever, “just how did this guy get in? Even if we admit between ourselves that he was in league with Bruce, there’s no way Bruce could have slipped Krasnov into the building. There has to be another person involved. There has to be a conspiracy.”
The dam broke. Everyone roared with rage and fright. I was just wondering furiously if I dared keep the information about O’Reilly to myself any longer when there was a knock at the door.
“Yes?” called Charley, scarlet-faced and perspiring heavily.
The door opened. We all stared.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said Terence O’Reilly, “but I’ve come to confess.”
II
My first reaction was that he was crazy as a coon dog. My second, when I realized he hadn’t come to confess at all, was that he was clever as a cobra—and just about as harmless. I should have realized as soon as I saw the way the plot was shaping up that the consp
irators, who were as anxious as we were to transform Krasnov into a lone assassin, would have to provide an explanation for his undeniable presence in the building.
“I was responsible for a breach of security which has ended in tragedy,” said O’Reilly, “and I wish to tender my resignation.”
We watched him in silence. Even Clay had locked up his California manners in the presence of an outsider and presented a conventional Connecticut Yankee front. Martin replaced his spectacles. Old Walter looked shocked. Lewis wore his stuffiest expression. I was still boggling. It was left to Charley to say mildly as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with a sodden handkerchief, “There’s no need to be so melodramatic, O’Reilly. We’ve had enough melodrama for today. Come in and close the door. Is it my imagination, fellows,” he added to his partners, “or is it really about a hundred and ten in the shade?”
That defused O’Reilly nicely. We sat around in our leather armchairs discussing the weather like a bunch of pseudo-English gentlemen while O’Reilly was left standing by the door. At last when we had finally made it clear to O’Reilly that he was a first-generation Irish-American in the presence of a bunch of Yankee aristocrats, Charley said with all the nice-guy charm for which he was famous, “I’m sorry, O’Reilly. Bring up a chair and sit down. You look exhausted. Now what’s all this about a breach of security?”
O’Reilly was the one who was sweating now, but he kept both his dignity and his nerve.
“Thank you, Mr. Blair, but I’d prefer to stand,” he said. “I wanted to explain that I knew this man Krasnov. Every weekend this summer Bruce and Grace Clayton have held open house for various intellectuals and political extremists, and since I was a friend of the Claytons, Mr. Van Zale suggested it might be wise if I stayed in close touch with them to keep an eye on what was going on. I reported to Mr. Van Zale on the society Citizens for Militant Socialism. Krasnov was a member. I thought he was unstable, but Bruce so abhorred violence that I decided the C.M.S. presented no serious threat to Mr. Van Zale’s safety.”
The Rich Are Different Page 42
