"There's not going to be any lawsuit here, Frank; at least, none revolving around any conversation we have. I'd like to hear what you have to say strictly for my own information. I understand it's only an opinion about something nobody can be sure of."
"The Nately Museum is Victor Rafferty's work," he said drily.
The absolute certainty in his voice took me completely by surprise. "Have you seen Rafferty's sketches?"
"What sketches?" he asked absently.
"Foster's wife told him Rafferty made preliminary drawings of a building like the Nately Museum."
He destroyed a monument, started to build another. "Nobody ever saw Victor Rafferty's sketches, not until after the building was already up. He'd even prepare the major portions of the blueprints himself. He had to; most of the time it was the only way he could make the builders see how the structure was actually going to be put together."
"Then how can you be so damn sure, Frank?"
"I don't need a sketch with Rafferty's name on it to know that the Nately Museum is basically his work." He spoke slowly as he put an oblong blue block on top of a square red one, then stood back to study the" effect. "The building has Rafferty's stylistic fingerprints all over it. The Nately Museum is a Victor Rafferty creation inasmuch as it is a Rafferty concept; it has his signature. There are a thousand details in the building that lead me to that conclusion. If you had a week, I'd go over all of them with you."
"How long did it take to build the museum?"
He thought for a few moments. "About a year and a half." He paused, then added: "Word got around fast that something special was going up. The building has won just about every major architectural award."
"Frank, do you think Rafferty's alive?"
He looked at me as if I was a very slow student who had accidentally stumbled into a graduate course and would have to be gently eased out. "Rafferty's dead, Mongo. Died in … '69, I think." His eyes went out of focus for a moment as he looked at a memory. "Yes. It was August of '69. I attended the funeral."
"Is there any possibility that Patern could be Victor Rafferty?"
"Not the slightest." His tone was emphatic. "I knew Rafferty, and I know Patern. Richard was one of my students." There was a curious note of disapproval, even scorn, in his voice.
"You don't like Patern?"
His silver eyebrows arched. "Now, Mongo, I never said any such thing. Richard is a gifted, brilliant architect. He's also, well… abrasive. He can be grating at times."
"The point is that you don't think Patern could have come up with a building like that on his own, if I'm reading you right."
"Anything's possible," he said evasively. "It's possible that the idea for the Nately Museum originated with Richard. In my opinion, the structure is a Victor Rafferty concept."
"Then Patern must have stolen the idea somehow."
Frank put up his hands as if to ward off an impending attack. "Whoa, my friend. I don't want to slander anyone. I said that Richard was an aggressive, ambitious young man; I didn't say he was a thief. As far as I know, he's completely honest-and proud. He wouldn't have to steal another man's ideas."
"But the fact remains that he's now the shining star of his architectural firm."
"Sure," Frank said easily. "The Nately Museum is a beautiful building."
"With a design that you believe came from a dead man. How can that be unless Patern stole the idea?"
"You're the detective, Mongo." He shrugged. "I'm sorry if what I have to say seems contradictory."
It was getting pretty tedious marching around in verbal circles; I decided to try a new tack. "You've told me something about Patern. What about Rafferty?"
"A man apart," he said slowly, as if choosing each word with great care. "I knew him quite well; and yet I didn't know him; I'm not sure anybody did." He breathed deeply and flashed a broad grin. "I trust that's sufficiently confusing. He was a giant; like many giants, he was inaccessible."
"You must be able to tell me something else about him."
Frank shrugged again and thrust his hands into his pockets. "As an architect he was without peer. As a person, well, that's something else again. He would occasionally come to see me to discuss some professional matters. . " He paused, chuckled. "We'd usually end up here, at this table. We'd play like boys for hours, challenging each other to come up with new designs and concepts. Rafferty was good to be with at those times. But I'm rambling." He took one hand out of his pocket and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Victor had an incredible ability to concentrate, to filter out all distractions. But he could be extremely impatient-even cruel-if he felt his time was being wasted. You see, he simply didn't care about most other aspects of living. I'm sure his health was atrocious even before the accident. Horrible diet; he had an absolute passion for those cheap fast-food-chain hamburgers."
"How'd he get along with his wife, Frank?"
He made a gesture of distaste. "I don't know anything about Rafferty's personal life, Mongo. I only met his wife once or twice at some official functions. As you know, she's married to Mike Foster now. Seems like a nice woman." His gaze shifted slightly. "I'm not sure any normal woman could have been happy married to Victor; he was married to his work, and totally independent."
"Did he work after his first accident?"
"Not as far as I know. He was too weak from a series of operations. Most of his time was spent recuperating."
"What about Mike Foster?" I asked. "How do you know him?"
"As a matter of fact, he was introduced to me by Rafferty, who considered Mike one of the best contractors around. I use Mike for an annual lecture to first-year design students. Very successfully, I might add. He serves to remind the dreamers that there are men who actually have to build the structures they think up."
I thanked Frank and said I'd find my own way to the door. By the time I reached it he was already absorbed in his acrylic towers in the sandbox.
The obvious thing to do, of course, was to celebrate the imminent end of school. But I'd already done that; three times, beginning in March. Besides, I didn't feel right; the case didn't feel right. I couldn't forget the quiet desperation in Foster's voice. I went home and found a fly struggling in a pool of water in the bottom of the sink. Feeling like an absolute idiot, I gently lifted the fly out of the water and put it on the sink counter to dry. It died anyway. I kept thinking about omens.
That night I slept badly. I finally gave up the struggle with my subconscious and waited for dawn with the latest Ross Macdonald caper; Lew Archer was still tracking lost children-masterfully, propelled by words that shone as bright and hard as diamonds and left a warm glow in the mind.
I finished the book and went down to my favorite diner for a big breakfast. The Times and the crossword took me to nine. I walked to Park and Fifty-ninth, where Patern's architectural firm was headquartered.
Richard Patern's sudden success had earned him a large suite of offices deep in the inner sanctum of Fielding, Fielding and Gross. The blonde with the hard green eyes and Mary Quant makeup who sat at the desk in the walnut-and- chrome outer office was there to protect the young genius from distractions like dwarf private detectives.
She listened to my story about being the representative of an eccentric billionaire who wanted to erect a circus monument. Either too amused or too much of a lady to call me a liar, she penciled me in for a four-o'clock appointment.
It was a nice day, and I kept walking-this time to the Forty-second Street library, where I settled down in the periodical reference room with a smuggled container of coffee. With a person as famous as Rafferty, I figured the logical place to begin was at the end. His obituary, in New York Times small print, was a page and a half long. I paid special attention to the report on his death; it gave the name and address of the watchman who had supposedly seen Rafferty fall into the furnace at the metallurgical lab. According to the report, Rafferty's wife had refused to talk with newsmen. I wondered why. A desire to grieve in privacy? Or fea
r?
I studied the photos of the woman who was now Mike Foster's wife. The difference in the appearance of the woman in the photographs taken before and after Rafferty's death was striking. In the earlier photos she was beautiful, carefree, conscious of the camera and seemingly not at all averse to the attention her husband abhorred.
All that had changed in the later photos. She looked-to use Foster's expression-haunted. There were dark rings under her eyes and a wild, almost desperate, air that had transformed her vibrant beauty into something plastic and hollow. It struck me that there seemed to be far more fear than grief in the stiff mask of her face.
There was an accompanying, detailed report on Rafferty's first "death." The car accident had made headlines; Rafferty's recovery made even bigger ones. It was apparently considered by medical men to be the most amazing medical rally since Lazarus, and most of the credit went to a New York-based neurosurgeon named Arthur Morton.
Morton's picture showed a large, thick-bodied man who might have been a decent athlete fifty pounds before. He was standing in front of a wall papered with framed diplomas, looking extremely pleased with himself.
An intriguing aside near the end of the article mentioned Morton's death. I checked the appropriate cross-index and came up with his obituary.
I skipped the Grosse Pointe and Harvard Medical School background. There were two things about the account of his death that immediately caught my attention. The report said that Morton had been murdered in his Park Avenue office by an intruder-at approximately three-thirty in the morning, a decidedly unlikely hour for a Park Avenue physician to be in his office. I also found it curious that Arthur Morton had been killed less than two weeks before Victor Rafferty's final, presumably fatal, accident.
The fact that the two men who had been paired to produce one of history's greatest medical miracles had died violent deaths a few days apart seemed like an interesting coincidence.
Scanning through succeeding issues, I couldn't find any mention of the murderer's being caught, but I noted down some of the details in my pocket notebook. Next I started checking through all the issues of the Times published in the six months between Rafferty's car accident and his death-a laborious task made easier by the library's microfilm records. I had no idea what I was looking for, but the added fact of Arthur Morton's murder made me curious enough to make the effort.
Aside from the series of follow-up reports on Rafferty's recovery, there wasn't much about him up until the time of the final accident-except for one item that I almost missed and that then seemed to leap out from the page.
It was a photograph, and the only caption was a large question mark. A short paragraph below noted that the picture had been taken outside Victor Rafferty's home, but that reporters had been kept behind police lines and forbidden to question any of the men present.
When I magnified the photo under the viewer, I could make out two men lying on a flagstone walk leading up to a large Tudor house. One of the men was trying to rise, a hand to his head, and seemed to be in pain. The other lay in the kind of final, splay-limbed position I'd come to associate with death.
Rafferty's wife was standing just outside the house, almost hidden in the shadows of the huge willows that dotted the lawn. Her hand was clamped over her mouth, and in the silence of the library I imagined I could almost hear her screaming.
There were four men standing around the two who had fallen. Three of the four had the burly, no-nonsense look of plainclothes detectives or government agents. The fourth man was of a different breed. The picture had been taken with a telephoto lens and was slightly blurred under magnification, but I could see that the man's head was completely bald. He seemed to be in charge of whatever was going on, because his face was pointed toward the camera and he was gesturing angrily in the direction of the photographer.
The heavyset men were dressed in light, sweat-stained summer suits; Mrs. Rafferty wore a sleeveless frock; the bald-headed man was wearing what appeared to be a heavy winter overcoat, complete with fur collar. I frowned and rechecked the dateline in the newspaper; it read Friday, August 15: two days before the accident in the metallurgy lab. I photocopied the picture and left the library.
I still had some time to kill before my appointment with Patern, so on a hunch I went back uptown to my university office. There was an envelope from Mike Foster that had been delivered by messenger. Inside was a check for an unexpected five hundred dollars that brought visions of sunny Acapulco beaches to my mind. The accompanying head-and-shoulders shot of Victor Rafferty, taken after the accident, brought the temperature back down; it showed, in good detail, that the right side of his skull had been shaved, as if for an operation. A thin, furry matting of hair was just beginning to grow in over an ugly, puckered mass of scar tissue; a network of scars ran like rivers of ugliness down the right side of his face, over the area of his temple, through his eyebrow, and down his right cheek. The unscarred flesh on his high forehead looked almost transparent, like cheap tissue paper. His thin lips seemed locked in a painful grimace. The black, sensitive eyes were very bright, almost feverish. There was a brooding quality about the face; the torment in those smoldering eyes seemed fueled by more than just physical pain.
I let the photograph slip from my fingers onto the top of my desk, as though the fire in those eyes might burn me. Then I hurried back out into the day.
3
It was time for my meeting with Richard Patern, and I wasn't looking forward to it; I'd lied to get the appointment, and I was hard-pressed to think of a reason why Patern should want to talk to me once he discovered my real interests. I made it a point to be on time.
After a swift, whining ride in a Muzak-filled elevator, I found myself in familiar territory at the main reception desk of Fielding, Fielding and Gross. I was somewhat surprised when the receptionist waved me on into the interior network of corridors, and even more surprised to find a man I assumed was the resident genius waiting for me outside his office in his shirt sleeves. He grinned when he saw his secretary staring at me as if I had no clothes on.
Richard Patern was a man in his early thirties who projected the image of an athlete-scholar. He'd kept in shape, and was obviously proud of his body; he had broad shoulders, a trim waist, and the tight, somewhat awkward gait of a former football player or wrestler. His deep tan nicely complemented bright, intelligent hazel eyes. To round off the image, he wore a twenty-five-dollar razor haircut and a two-hundred-fifty-dollar Brooks Brothers suit. He looked good and he knew it.
Patern stepped forward and extended a tapered, sinewy hand. "Mongo the Magnificent,' he intoned like an announcer. I shook his hand. Gripping me firmly by the elbow, he presented me to his secretary, who was still staring at me wide-eyed. "This is one of the greatest circus performers of all time. Incredible gymnast and tumbler; absolutely able to defy gravity."
"So you told me," the woman said breathily. Her green eyes blinked like traffic lights. "Hello again, Dr. Frederickson."
Patern ushered me into an office decorated in browns and golds, with vast areas of tinted glass that afforded a dizzying view of Manhattan. Outside, a helicopter flapped silently toward its aerie somewhere along the East River.
The walls of the office that weren't glass were decorated exclusively with antique, lacquered circus posters which looked very old and valuable. Frank Manning, preoccupied with his sandbox, had neglected to mention the fact that Patern was a circus buff. It could make things difficult.
"Would you like some coffee, Dr. Frederickson?"
I nodded. Patern buzzed his secretary, who appeared within seconds with cups and a pot of coffee on a tray.
"Let's see," Patern said, stirring his coffee. His gaze slowly rose to the ceiling, then snapped back to my face as his memory circuits revved up. "You were a headliner with the Statler Brothers Circus. Genius I.Q.; used your time and money to study for a Ph.D. in criminology. You retired from the circus, and you work uptown at the university." He paused, apparently inv
iting me to respond. I declined with a smile. He asked, "Do you know Frank Manning?"
"I do," I said a little stiffly. "Frank" Manning sounded a little strained and familiar coming from Patern. I indicated his office with a sweep of my hand, tried to keep my voice neutral. "You've come a long way in a short time, Mr. Patern."
He didn't seem to hear me. "Let's see," he said distantly, "I think I saw a piece on you in Newsweek… something about you also being a private detective. Is that right?"
I nodded, beginning to feel uncomfortable.
"Well, I'm really delighted to meet you," he said with apparent sincerity. "My secretary tells me you want to talk to me about a building."
"A particular building, Mr. Patern. I'd like to ask you some questions about the Nately Museum."
His smile remained, but the hazel eyes above it grew hard and cold. "That sounds like detective talk, not client talk."
"It is detective talk." With my personal dossier in Patern's head, there didn't seem much point in trying to maintain the potential-client masquerade. "I'd appreciate your giving me some information."
He gave it some thought, then said, "I don't mean to be rude, but I just can't see why the Nately Museum should concern a private detective."
"Why don't you let me be the judge of that? You may be doing yourself a favor in the long run. There are some people who don't believe the idea for the museum was yours."
"What people?" he snapped.
"I'm told there's a similarity between the Nately Museum and some of Victor Rafferty's work. The people who mention it definitely don't mean it as a compliment to you."
A look of genuine surprise and concern swept over his face. "What's this Rafferty business?" he said impatiently. "Rafferty's been dead four, five years."
Something in the architect's voice suggested that I hadn't been the first to make the comparison to his face. I asked him about it, and he made a quick, nervous gesture with his hands.
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