How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Gillian Roberts

  He’d said something about talking with her, but I didn’t remember discussion of a second visit. Maybe he hadn’t had time to tell me, or maybe he’d forgotten, or maybe he truly believed charity should be anonymous. Or maybe he was such an okay sort, he took for granted such acts and didn’t think they required explanation. I told her about the earring. “Did Jesse Reese by any chance wear small pearl buttons on his ears?” I asked. She nearly smiled. I told her about the glitzy and lame widow Reese and her sister-in-botany, Holly, about Georgette and the wig, and about Lala’s cousin Belle and her friends. “There seem to be lots of people now who might have wanted the man gone.”

  “And probably every one of them knew who had that room.” She sounded weary. “Frankie and his big mouth. He was proud of being able to comp me that room, so who knows who else he told? And whoever it was decided to become me by putting on a wig. That’s all it takes. Can I tell you how awful that feels?” She twisted a somewhat spiritless tendril of hair around her index finger. “And I would never wear little pearl button earrings, so I’m doubly insulted.”

  “The witness was fairly senior. His eyes might not be the best for details. But even I, when I saw Georgette with the hair and the cape, for a minute, was sure it was you.”

  “What do you think it is, mass hysteria?” Sasha asked. “The miraculous vision of Sasha that opens locked doors? Can the room become a shrine?”

  “Ah, but I know how the real killers got in.” I explained about my experiment with the chambermaid. It was clever, Sasha agreed, but then her spirits sagged again. None of this answered the only important question, which was: Who was the make-believe Sasha? Until we found that out, the real Sasha remained framed.

  “I didn’t know anybody in the bar, except you and Frankie.” Sasha played with a loose button on her cuff, tapping it with a fingernail until it rolled off onto the table. She put it in her shirt pocket with a satisfied smile, as if she’d completed a difficult job. “Did you frame me?” she asked. “The more I think about it, the more likely it seems. In fact, it’s the only logical explanation. Admit it: you committed the murder. It all makes sense, then, except why you did it, of course.”

  “Thanks, but it works out even more perfectly if you committed the murder, and it saves time, too, since they’ve already fingerprinted you.”

  “Why would I murder somebody like Reese? I couldn’t have gotten sufficiently involved to feel the urge. He was salt of the earth. Solid citizen. Man of the year. Not my type at all.”

  “There’s a good chance he may have been a lying, cheating creep,” I said.

  “But I didn’t know that soon enough. Had I but known he was a rat-bastard, I would of course have fallen for him and have been an actual, logical suspect. Instead, here I am, an actual, illogical suspect, and I didn’t even get to have fun with the man first.”

  “You’ll be out of here in no time.” I hoped I sounded more convinced of that than I felt.

  “Anybody could have done it, you know.” She sounded morose. “A man, even, under the wig and a skirt.”

  “The kind of man you’d probably date,” I said. It almost made her smile.

  Still, by the time I left, not long after, I realized that the only impact my trip to the jailhouse was going to make was to ease Sasha’s incarceration with clean undies and dirty reading material.

  * * *

  From the immediate looks of it, my visit with Mackenzie was going to be as unproductive as the one with Sasha had been.

  When I walked into his room, bearing his suitcase, he already had a visitor. So much for the quiet and private session I’d imagined.

  “This is Pete,” Mackenzie said. “He’s on the force here, but he’s got family in Louisiana an’ he spent lots of time there. We’re comparin’ notes. Have a seat, let us bore you to tears.”

  The tears I shed were produced by yawns I couldn’t prevent while the fellows reminisced about good times with their similarly enormous families on the bayou, and later, on the Atlantic City and Philadelphia forces respectively. Mackenzie’s color was much better than it had been the day before, and his level of animation high. He was happy, having a great time.

  This is who he is, I told myself. Adorable, fun, sexy, smart. But most of all, cop. You give yourself grief about it, dither over it, debate it, but the only thing you can really do about it is take it or leave it.

  I left it, but only for a moment. I’m not proud of how I decided to improve the shining hour, but the truth is, I went to the nurse’s station. “Could I see Mr. Mackenzie’s medical record?” I asked.

  “I’m not permitted to do that.”

  “I only want…”

  She looked stern and intractable.

  “Not the medical part.”

  “Yes?” She was not one of the more sensitive nurses on the floor. I hoped she specialized in comatose patients.

  “His name. Could you just tell me what his name is on the chart?”

  She looked at me as if perhaps she should wrap me tight in a white, sleeveless jacket.

  “What harm could it do?” I asked in my sweetest, most subservient voice. That produced absolutely no response. “Then only his first name? Please?”

  Her brow furrowed. “I don’t think so.” She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Well…” She grudgingly pulled the file. “C,” she hissed. “Plain C.” She smiled meanly, triumphantly. “Now are you satisfied?”

  When Mackenzie was well enough to face charges, I would have him hauled in for failure to provide the hospital with full information about his name. Surely it was illegal, an insurance fraud or something.

  Pete finally left, with promises to be back soon, and after the most cursory questions about health, comfort, plan of treatment, and the like, I continued the crime-oriented conversational theme, to keep up Mackenzie’s level of enthusiasm.

  We had catching up to do, all the way back to the flashy widow and her sister, then through the earring, the wig, the angry old folk, and, just because I was so proud of having figured it out, a reprise of the killer’s method of entry into the hotel room.

  Had even Scheherazade done a better job of producing engaging adventure stories? Mackenzie not only looked enchanted, he seemed impressed. For once, he didn’t belittle my findings. “Interestin’,” he kept murmuring. “All fits together.”

  I hated to end, but I had nothing left to pull out of my bag of clues. “That’s about it so far,” I said. “Except for a peculiar sense that the people here are too satisfied with the status quo and they aren’t going to do a thing about changing it. I mean, are they searching for Dunstan, for example?”

  He sighed, which I interpreted as a negative answer—nobody was overly interested in expending energy in a direction considered extraneous.

  “How easy is it to get hold of a wig on a Monday night?” I asked.

  “If, say, seized by a sudden inspiration to impersonate somebody else?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Precisely. Is there a neighborhood Wigs Я Us? Would there be purchase records?”

  Mackenzie was quiet for a while. “Lots of questions and directions,” he finally said. “I will talk to Pete about them. Also was wonderin’ where the man’s car is. Thought maybe there’d be something in the trunk or the glove compartment that would shed light. It’s an outside chance, but all the same—where is it? Pete says his car keys weren’t on him and they haven’t found a vehicle yet. Not at his house, either. Didn’t seem the kind for a bus, and the train schedule was wrong for his timin’.” Mackenzie shrugged. “Pete’s a good guy, but I get the distinct sense they consider this thing solved and feel in need of no more than tidyin’ up. So they maybe need help pointin’ the way.”

  “Well, if you’re going to be the helper, I hope you literally mean nothing more strenuous than pointing.”

  “That’s precisely what I meant. But you’re still mobile. Nobody took a potshot at you.”

  I pointed at my chest. Moi?
He was suggesting that I sleuth? The one he called the overage Nancy Drew?

  “There’s a certain urgency in these things.” He looked uncomfortable with the situation he had created. “Have to move quickly or ever’thin’ goes cold. Think we could be a team?”

  I nodded dumbly. A team. Following in the footsteps of Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe, Sherlock and the doc, Nick and Nora.

  “I’ll do the thinkin’ here and you’ll—”

  “Yes?” I snapped. Maybe I even shrieked it. It was definitely not a hospital-smooth sound. “What is it you think I’ll do as my part of the teamwork?”

  “What do you think you’ll do? What do you think I’d think you’d do? You’ll have to be out there thinkin’ an’ walkin’.” He grinned.

  I wasn’t sure if that’s what he’d meant all along, or whether he’d reversed direction and bamboozled me.

  “Down to business now,” he said. “I think maybe we should know a little more about those investment plans and how they work.”

  “That’s out of my league, you know. Anything that has to do with money.”

  “That partner of his. Ex-partner. He’d have an opinion on the man, don’t you think? Could you free-lance another article? Or pretend to investigate on your parents’ behalf? Whatever works.”

  “I was going there anyway,” I said. “He was on my list before I even got here.”

  Mackenzie rolled his eyes. “I don’t remember Nora telling Nick that she had the idea first. An’ surely not snarlin’ it.”

  I didn’t say I was sorry, but I did smile.

  “Ah hereby deputize you,” Mackenzie said.

  It felt more like being knighted.

  We were off and running, or at least one of us was.

  Sixteen

  RAY PALFORD’S OFFICES WERE in a converted house in Margate. I climbed three broad wooden steps edged by blue-purple hydrangea bushes onto a wide white-painted porch filled with wicker furniture. For the first time, I felt at the shore. The real shore, as it should be.

  Inside, the office was much closer to my fantasies of how a citadel of money should look than Jesse Reese’s had been. Every furnishing had started out in the best circles and had since mellowed into understatement. Attractively aged Persian carpets, an inlaid wood coffee table, and buttery leather couches softened the reception area.

  I wouldn’t know from personal experience, but I assume that the harsh realities of profit and loss sound a lot better in this muted environment.

  His receptionist was considerably younger than Miss Evans. A new generation, which was, perhaps, why I never once heard her echo the older woman’s “I’m sorry.” This time, when asked my business, I said something that was almost the truth. “I’m collecting information about the late Mr. Reese. Mr. Palford’s former partner. My name is… Harriet. Harriet Vane.” Well, part of it was the truth. Almost.

  She nodded, rather curtly. Good thing so few people read these days, although I had heard that mysteries were enjoying a renaissance. Not Dorothy Sayers, perhaps? In any case, the general illiteracy makes it easier for the basically unimaginative to come up with an alias.

  The receptionist checked her watch and double-checked his appointment book, then pressed a button on her phone and explained. I heard squawks and clipped questions. “Yes, Mr. Palford, I remember.” She replaced the receiver and flashed me a wide, insincere smile. “He can see you for a few minutes. Then he has to leave for his scheduled meeting.”

  I thanked her and was ushered into larger, still more upholstered and waxed quarters. Surely investment counseling involved computer programs, numbers and guesstimates and projections on a little screen, but there was no hint of electronics. The office would have felt homey and familiar to Mary, Queen of Scots.

  Computations were being made offstage, possibly in a galley belowstairs, filled with chained and half-naked economist slaves punching keypads.

  Ray Palford stood behind a massive expanse of polished mahogany and slipped papers into a briefcase that looked made of glove leather. He himself appeared stitched of the same material. Tall, fit, smooth-skinned, younger than his dead ex-partner. “What is it this time?” he asked by way of greeting.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Brooke said you were investigating Jesse Reese, not me, so if you’re here, there must be yet another snafu. I was afraid of this.” He stopped filling his briefcase and gave me a stern look. “And I assume you have notified my lawyer that you were questioning me directly. Well,” he said, “out with it. What now?”

  “Listen, Mr. Palford, you’ve got me confused with somebody else. I don’t have an ‘it’ to bring out. I just want to know about your former partner.”

  “What’s happened with the suit?”

  “You’ve mixed me up with your tailor?”

  He settled into an amused relief. “Have a seat, have a seat.” He waved me into a wing chair with a petit point design of the hunt. “Who are you, then? What’s this about?”

  “Grandmother Vane—she’s housebound, but she’s adamant about this, hysterical almost, and it does horrible things to her blood pressure and her heart—but she wants to call the police because she thinks Jesse Reese took her money. I’m not sure she’s exactly…all there, you know? And now, of course, to make things worse, he’s dead, poor man. I mean I don’t think the police would be interested in a half-crazed old woman’s… Anyway, I told her I’d consult another expert, and since you were once his partner, I thought maybe you could help explain things to her. We’d pay, of course, but I’m really at a loss. If we could make an appointment for you to talk with her, would you? I just had to find out—I promised her I’d find out today. She’s panicking because of the news, you see.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry for your grandmother,” he said. “If her suspicious are grounded in reality, of course. But as you may have inferred from my erroneous greeting to you, I am already embroiled in a lawsuit with the late Mr. Reese, and I feel that it would be improper for me to…well, I’m not exactly an impartial judge of Mr. Reese’s fiduciary ethics.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I tried talking to his assistant, but she—”

  “Poor, pathetic Norma? You won’t get anything except adoration from her. She’d faint if you suggested foul play. When they finally release Jesse’s body, she’ll probably commit suttee—immolate herself on his funeral pyre. She was Jesse’s ideal woman, completely acquiescent. When I read the newspaper account of the manner of his death, about that big woman who killed him, I was surprised, in fact, that Jesse had taken up with a strong creature long enough for her to belt him. A fatal experiment, a very wrong change of pace for him. He likes people he can dominate, intimidate. Of course, even little flowers turn into man-eating plants. Look at his widow, an example in point. She was once Miss Sweetness and Light.”

  “Off-the-record,” I said. “I really need some help. This is out of my league completely.”

  “What’s off-the-record? What are we talking about?”

  “Anything you say. Is it possible that Grandma’s not crazy? That the man did worse than make bad investment judgments?”

  Ray Palford raised his eyebrows and almost nodded. He looked at his watch, a wafer of gold, and scowled. “Let us say that Jesse Reese’s and my philosophies of business—in fact our philosophies of life—were incompatible. I choose to believe that in both arenas, my preferences are the civilized ones. Mr. Reese, of course, would have and indeed did consider them timid or unimaginative. Had we both lived to be centenarians, we would have come no closer to agreement.”

  I picked my way through his weedy sentences. Was he angry? Enough to have killed Reese? I pictured him in a wild brown wig. It wasn’t much of a stretch. A dab of lipstick. He had an androgynous face, fine-featured and smooth-skinned. “I’ve been told he was a gambler,” I said. “Which is worrisome. Is that what you meant when you said he thought you were too timid?”

  “Not necessarily or exclusively. We defin
itely don’t—didn’t—agree about ethics: business, professional, personal. We didn’t even like the same music. Which is not to say that gambling wasn’t a dangerous component of our incompatibility. Markers, like pipers, must be paid. But Jesse wasn’t one to agonize over the future or contingencies. Agonizing over anything was one job Jesse had no trouble delegating.”

  I wondered if he could speak this way—full and flowery sentences and no hesitations—on any subject, or whether Jesse Reese in all his permutations had been discussed until the subject was as polished as the man’s carved desk. I pondered this while looking at the photo on the console behind Ray Palford’s desk. No pageant contestants here. His was a silver-framed portrait of three polished children, a woman straight out of Town and Country, and a man who looked like him, except for the mustache. He noticed what I was looking at. “A lovely family,” I murmured.

  “Thank you. It is a great comfort to have managed one partnership that worked out.” He fingered his smooth upper lip. “I still feel naked. My dog didn’t recognize me.” He chuckled. “Now, where were we again?”

  I looked at his smooth face. The better to impersonate a woman, my dear? “So, ah, given your differences,” I said, “can I ask how the two of you ever became partners?”

  “Much in the same way people who later divorce get married. We noticed the things that turned out not to matter and failed to notice the things that did matter. I thought the sum would be better than its parts. I have the analytic skills and I’m good at following things through, paying attention to details. Jesse had an excellent intuitive mind plus a quick wit and an easy way with people. An appealing combination, in theory.”

  “But the things you failed to notice?”

  He stood up. I was afraid my time was up, but he instead paced the rug. “The greed, the gambling, the womanizing—oh, especially the choice of Miss Bloodsucker as his wife, which escalated and intensified all of the above but still, I thought, belonged to his personal life and was no business of mine, but I was woefully innocent and therefore incorrect about that. The man’s only ethical doctrine is to always pay his debts, a definite virtue, to be sure, but less so if and when accounts have to be churned in order to do so, or values compromised in order to make the money to pay the debts.”