The Pembroke-centered crime wave had seriously depleted the supply of Lincolns in the Pembroke fleet. Ron and Janet rode in the small car they’d used the other day.
“You’re worried, aren’t you?” Janet asked after a while.
“Worried?”
“About the Professor.”
“Yeah. A little. Because he’s worried about himself. He’s been preaching humility to me for years, but this case is the first time he’s ever actually shown me any. It’s not supposed to be like that. Benedetti is supposed to be able to figure out anything, and lead me to figure it out, too.”
“Take it as a compliment,” Janet suggested.
“That the old man is losing his confidence?”
“No, Ron. That the old man is letting you see that he’s not always as confident as he lets on. That as brilliant as he is, he’s human.”
“He’s got a lot of nerve, turning human all of a sudden. I’ve spent a lot of my life since college depending on him.”
“You’re about to be a father, Ron.”
“Yeah?”
“We’re going to have a child who’ll think you are the biggest, strongest, wisest, smartest being in the universe. You’ll have all the answers, and be able to fix all the problems. And then one day, you won’t, and you’ll have to let the kid in on the secret—that you’re only human, after all.
“Of course,” she went on, “even if a situation never does come up that you can’t handle, you’ll still have to get the message across. A kid has to learn it; can’t grow up otherwise.”
“You mean—”
“I think the Professor’s finally about to give you your diploma, dear.”
“Doesn’t matter much if we don’t break the case.” Ron’s voice was gruff, but Janet could see he was touched. She just hoped she was right.
Flavor Formulas, Inc., was in a low, brick building, about the size and appearance of an elementary school built for baby-boomers in the 1950s. Inside, they were welcomed and shown to a lab. There, they met Cathy Sang, a Chinese-American woman about Janet’s age and half her size. Cathy wore a lab coat over a yellow cowl-neck sweater and a plaid skirt.
“How may I help you?” she asked.
“I’m a private investigator, licensed in New York.” Ron showed her his ID. “I’m working on a case that involves someone encountering a strong grape smell, like artificial grape flavoring. Like in Kool-Aid or soda.”
“When you said you were a private investigator, I thought, Oh, how exciting.”
“Just routine,” Ron said.
He always did that, no matter what he was working on. It was as if he had to say it or lose his license. People wanted a little excitement in their lives, Janet would tell him, but it never did any good.
Cathy Sang smiled. It transformed her face. “So is grape flavoring,” she told him. “As you might guess, grape is one of our most popular products. What would you like to know?”
“Anything you can tell me.”
“Well, we make several kinds, different shades and colors of taste, but they all have the same basic ingredient. Methyl anthranilate.”
“Would you spell that, please?”
Ron wrote it down. Janet was surprised. He hardly ever used a notebook.
“Is there any reason you’d be likely to smell this stuff in the woods?”
“In the woods? No. Unless someone had spilled a soda, I suppose.”
“Mmmm. How about at an airport?”
Cathy Sang brightened. “Oh, yes. You’d be quite likely to smell methyl anthranilate at an airport. Especially lately. Especially at airports by the sea.”
Ron’s eyes widened behind his glasses. “I would?”
The chemist nodded, smiling brightly.
“Because of the birds,” she said.
Eleven
LEAVING THE BUILDING, THEY were both excited, but Ron was positively trembling. He fumbled in his pocket and handed Janet the keys.
“You drive,” he said. “I’d crack us up. Besides, I have to think this out.”
“But this means—”
“I know what it means.” He got in the car. Janet buckled herself in and started the motor.
About three miles down the road, Ron said, “I’m sorry. God knows why I’m snapping at you. It’s just what this all implies is so crazy, I’m not much better than a lunatic.”
“But now we know—”
“All we know,” Ron went on, not realizing he’d cut Janet off again, “is that Chip is almost certainly the one behind the disappearance of the birds. We don’t know why. We sure as hell know he didn’t kill his uncle, and he didn’t booby-trap his own car and kill off his secretary. Even the Professor said there was no reason to do that.”
They drove on for a while in a tense silence. Once, Ron hit the padded dashboard three times, hard, with his fist.
Nearing the entrance to the Pembroke estate, he said, “The Professor told me to listen. Listen to what?”
“He also was telling you to remember what you’ve heard.” Janet shrugged. “Of course, he’s given up that theory.”
“I still want to know what he’s spotted. Maybe it can fit in with this somehow.”
Janet made the turn up the gravel drive, going perhaps a little too fast. She eased up on the accelerator slightly. “Well,” she said, “what has the Professor been listening to?” At least, she tried to say it. The small car bounced so much on the gravel that she had trouble understanding herself.
Ron looked like a man who’d just stepped on a stingray. His eyes opened so wide she could see pink around them.
“Of course!” he yelled. A few seconds later, he said, “Now there’s a reason, dammit.”
A few more seconds after that, he said, “Stop the car.”
“What?”
“Stop the car right now. I’ve got to do something.”
Dutifully, Janet pulled over to the side of the drive and braked gently to a stop.
“Out of the car,” Ron said. He was already clambering out himself. Janet unbuckled her seat belt and came around the car to meet Ron.
He put his arms around her, bent her backward, and kissed her in a way she had never previously been kissed with shoes on.
“What was that about?” she demanded when she’d caught her breath. “Not that I mind, but what was that about?”
“It was about the end of the case. You solved it.”
“I did?”
Janet didn’t know whether to be pleased or angry. Benedetti was always telling her that she had an instinct that took her straight to the key element of an investigation, and that was gratifying. The fact that she herself never recognized when she was doing it was infuriating. Now the same thing was happening with Ron.
“You drive now,” she said. “I want to think.”
Ron drove on. Fast, faster than she’d been going. She asked him to slow down.
He grinned at her. She started to yell, and then she got it.
“The tape,” she said.
Ron slowed down.
When they got to Alpha House, Ron ran upstairs to Benedetti’s room. Janet would have been ahead of him, if it weren’t for her heels. She caught up to him as he was knocking on the door.
“Maestro,” he called, “it’s us. We’ve got something. We’ve got everything.”
“A moment, amico, per favore.”
“He’s putting his shirt on,” Ron murmured. “Just me, he would see in his undershirt.”
Benedetti was adjusting his bow tie as he opened the door. He nodded. “Such excitement on your faces. If I heard you correctly, you have fulfilled the universal desire.”
“I don’t get it, Maestro.”
“He means we’ve got everything,” Janet said. To the old man, she said, “We think so. Your theory was ri—”
“Lentamente. Slowly. You have learned something today, and from this, you conclude you have reasoned out the case.”
“Exactly,” Ron said.
“I a
sk the same privilege. I would like to know what you have learned. Perhaps I can reach the same conclusion.”
It was only fair; Janet was so pleased to be out of the dark at this stage of a case, she’d forgotten that neither she nor Ron would be anywhere near a solution without the old man’s hint.
Ron, of course, had launched into the explanation without a second thought. By the time Janet tuned back in, he had just told Benedetti about the chemist’s remark about airports and birds.
“... come to find out, Maestro,” he was saying, “methyl anthranilate tastes like grape to us—”
Benedetti made a face. “Remotely.”
Ron grinned. “At least it passes for grape. To a human.
“To a bird, though, it’s incredibly nasty stuff. When it hits their skin or eyes or mucous membranes, it burns the way hot pepper burns us.”
“Ah,” Benedetti said. “You smelled grape in the birdless wood.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I chided you. I ascribed it to the presence on the estate of an ice-cream factory.”
“It made sense. You weren’t the one who heard the spiel about ‘all-natural ingredients.’ I was. And I was also the one who was out in the woods when they really were cooking up a flavor, and I didn’t smell anything.”
“Thank you, amico. Your words are some consolation. Nevertheless, I have been a fool. It shall not happen again.”
“I never would have done a thing about it, if I hadn’t had grape on the brain. See, they’ve begun spraying the stuff at airports where birds are a problem. It keeps them away, reduces accidents, and does no permanent damage to the birds. It was written up in a trade journal called F&F—stands for ‘flavors and fragrances,’ I think.”
“We must ask about their subscription list. See to it, won’t you, amico? Of course, the thing is quite obvious now. By the time you are done calling, I shall have the details worked out. And perhaps I will think of what to do with our knowledge.”
While Ron went to the other room to call, and the Professor settled in an armchair to think, Janet looked at Benedetti’s latest canvas. It seemed to be finished, but it wasn’t signed.
The shape that had resembled a peace symbol before was still there, in the center of the painting, but dividing each line of red was a shaft of black. Around the rim of the circle, fierce-looking white triangles, like fangs, seemed to close in on it. The whole affair was framed in a bright, blood red. It looked like some nightmare cavern, or the monstrous organ of a perverted fantasy.
Janet, you relentless shrink, cut it out, she told herself.
Ron came back, nodding. “Chip’s Creamery is a subscriber to F&F, and has been since well before the methyl anthranilate article came out.”
“Va bene.” The Professor rose to his feet. “This has been a case, on a small scale, remarkable in its evil,” he said. “And damage is still to be done. My friends, I have been accustomed to calling the tune. As we have arrived at the solution in this instance more or less together, I feel it only fitting that this time we confer about what we are to do.”
“What we are to do?” Janet echoed. “We get Viretsky over here and fill him in on this.” She looked at the frowning faces of her husband and the Professor. “Don’t we?”
“That,” the old man said, “is what we must discuss.” He turned to the canvas and rubbed his chin. “But wait. With your indulgence, there is something I must do first.”
He took off his tweed jacket and draped it over a chair. Then he picked up his palette and a tube of blue acrylic. He squeezed a dab of blue onto the palette, then mixed it with red and white already there until he had a light purple color, not quite pastel. This he swirled across the canvas, like a thin vapor. Then, using the same color, he painted the stylized “B” in the corner.
He put down the palette and put his jacket back on. “There,” he said. “That is finished. Now let us decide how to put an end to this.”
Twelve
MUCH TO CHIP’S SURPRISE, it was Ron Gentry, in the little Dodge, who picked him up at the hospital. It had been a restful two days, but it was time to get on with life.
“It’s good to see you, Ron,” Chip said. “But I was expecting Jackson.”
“He’s with your father.”
“My father? Is something wrong?”
“Well, he’s kind of worn out, but he’s showing the flag for you. There’s a memorial service for Sandy today.”
“Oh, God. Poor Sandy. I should be there.” Chip’s face crumpled.
“They’ll understand.”
“I’m going to make sure Sandy’s mother is taken care of. I swear it.”
“That’s good. Need any help?”
“No, I can make it. I’m okay physically. It’s emotions that keep getting me in here.”
“You’ve had some week.”
There was something strange about Ron’s voice. “Is that supposed to be funny, for God’s sake?” Chip demanded.
“No, I don’t think it’s funny.”
“Good.”
That didn’t come off right, Chip decided. He was much better off with Gentry on his side. “Look, I’m really sorry about that. I know it’s been tough on you, too.”
“I’m used to it.”
“I know you and the Professor have done your best.”
“Maybe.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m taking a scenic route.”
“But that’s Punchy’s!”
“Uh-huh.” Ron pulled into the parking lot and stopped. He waited a few minutes, and drove on to the next stop the tape said Chip had made the night he was driving around with a million dollars in the car.
“Ron, this really isn’t funny.”
“I agree.”
The next stop. And the next.
“Stop the car!”
“When the time comes.”
“Cut it out right now, you sick son of a bitch.”
“Shut up,” Ron said calmly.
Chip tried to jump him, to grab the steering wheel, but Gentry had anticipated the move. He shot out his right arm and caught Chip under the chin with the heel of his hand. The blow stunned Chip. He subsided.
“You’re going to suffer for this,” he hissed, after another mile.
“Try it again,” Ron invited.
“No, thanks. I’m saving you for later.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m taking care of you right now.”
He turned off the road, and began bouncing up the drive past the old main gate.
“Talk to me,” Gentry said, his voice juddering from the bouncing of the car.
“Go to hell,” Chip juddered back.
“More! Call me a bastard!”
“I’ll call you every name in the book! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Gentry ignored the question. “There’s the old gatehouse. We should have known it was you when nobody went for the million. You didn’t give a damn about a measly million. You were playing for the whole thing.”
“You’re crazy!”
Gentry stopped the car just beyond the stake-and-ribbon outlines of the Lincoln Town Car and the Samurai.
“Now you get out. Don’t try to run, the woods are staked out. Don’t try to jump me, or I swear I’ll cripple you.”
Chip worked his sore jaw. After a moment, he got out of the car.
“I assume you had a gun on your uncle. Either that, or you’d tied him up already. Friday night. The night you kidnapped him.”
“Rave on.”
“Yeah. Inside the barn.”
Chip stepped inside. There, by the light of a kerosene lantern, he saw a man in a chair in the middle of the barn with his head thrown back, and a small cat perched on top.
For a second, Chip froze. Then he took another look.
“Of all the cheap, tasteless—You can get off that chair, Professor Benedetti.”
“With pleasure,” the Professor said. He gently removed the cat from his head—it was th
e same cat, Chip suspected—and cradled it in his arm.
“What is going on here?” Chip demanded.
“We are fulfilling our commission,” the old man told him. “Your father engaged us to find the killer of his brother, no matter what the consequences, and we have done so. How sad for Miss Jovanka we failed to do so sooner.”
Chip spat on the dirt floor.
“You will oblige us by answering a few questions,” Benedetti said. “Take a seat.”
He gestured to the chair. They looked so grim, the jerks. Chip wasn’t worried. He sat.
“Did you have to screw her?” Ron said.
Chip Pembroke looked up at him. The slightest suggestion of a grin played at the corners of his lips. “We were in love,” he replied.
“Yeah, love. I realize, by your standards, you had to kill her. But you could have set that bomb trick up anywhere—at the office, outside the restaurant—and sent her out for the stuff. She’d be just as dead, and you’d look just as innocent. Why did you have to use her like that first?”
“You’re incredibly insulting, you know that?”
“Maybe God will give me a pimple on my tongue. I am glad to inform you that she got you, anyway, Chip. It was that invoice she wanted to talk about that Saturday morning, the one she didn’t understand. I’ve checked it out. It was from a flavoring company, one you did a lot of business with. That part was no big deal.
“But the invoice was for artificial grape flavoring. And Sandy knew you never used anything artificial. She must have wondered if the whole thing was a mistake. Especially in such quantities—yeah, I’ve been on the phone to the supplier, too.”
“And they told you my business practices? Shame on them.”
“Shame on me, I told them a lie.”
Ron turned his back on Chip. It was a dare.
But Chip sat tight. Still with his back turned, Ron went on. “There was no mistake. You were filling the forest with methyl anthranilate.”
Benedetti chuckled. “That made him flinch.”
“You were driving the birds from the forest, Chip. You were playing mind games with your father and your uncle.”
“Indeed,” Benedetti said. “I am looking forward to my hour alone with you—after you have been arrested and locked safely away, of course. It will be interesting to explore the reasons for your terror campaign. Was it simple malice? Or were the missing birds and the dead cat—and how many stray cats did you kill before your uncle stumbled upon one, I wonder?—steps in a malignant campaign to convince the twins, as it ultimately did, that someone was persecuting them? That would certainly lend credence to the idea you so carefully planted and nurtured—that a gang of implacable kidnappers was out to hurt the Pembrokes in every way possible. This was a gang so confident they sent ransom notes before the kidnapping; so shadowy, we never got a glimpse of them.
The Manx Murders Page 18
