‘I can cross my heart,’ I said, ‘but you’ll only get full confidentiality if I am employed by a lawyer on your behalf.’
‘I don’t want other people brought into this,’ Belter said firmly. ‘Which is one of the reasons I have come to someone who works on his own.’
‘And out of business hours, so it’s not in your secretary’s diary.’
‘Correct,’ he said, and raised an eyebrow.
I shrugged. ‘A P.I. stands to lose his licence if he tells anyone besides his client what he’s learned on a case. Except reporting criminality to the police. I’ve held my licence a lot of years.’
‘But will you be discreet?’ he said quickly, though I thought I’d already promised as much.
I get tense when a man in a three-piece suit begins to fuss. ‘You wouldn’t like a beer, would you?’
He blinked. ‘A beer would be very welcome,’ he said.
Because he hadn’t loosened his tie, I poured it into glasses.
‘Thank you,’ he said as I gave him his.
We both sat and we both drank.
‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.
He looked at his glass. He said, ‘My wife and I will have been married for twenty-five years in June. The plan was, is, to take a special anniversary trip and spend eight weeks in Europe. Over the years we’ve been to most parts of this country, the places that are interesting for vacationers. Followed the “see America first” maxim. But the idea this time was to do something special. Go to Cab’s graduation – that is our younger son, who finishes at Yale this year. Then, straight on, to Europe. Our first time, ever, abroad.’
‘Sounds very nice,’ I said, thinking of my own daughter finishing college in Austria.
‘We went to get our passports yesterday,’ Belter said.
I waited.
‘And they wouldn’t issue one to my wife.’
‘Why not?’
‘The official said that her birth certificate was not valid.’
My face showed my surprise.
‘There was some irregularity about the impress.’
I frowned. ‘They said it was a forgery?’
‘They didn’t use that word. But that’s what they meant. The man we saw was really quite nice about it. He said almost anyone else would have passed it, but he makes a collection of such things. He even showed us a sample of pre-war impresses. Ours was clearly different.’
‘What’s the history of the certificate?’ I asked.
‘My wife’s mother gave it to her when we got our marriage licence. It’s been sitting in my personal documents file ever since.’
‘Was the certificate the original or a copy?’
‘The original as far as we knew.’
‘And it was a surprise to your wife?’
‘A complete shock and puzzle,’ Belter said with sympathy. ‘She nearly broke down when the official told us. I’ve tried to reassure her that it is bound to have been a clerical mistake, but she’s been in something of a daze since she left the passport office. I would have stayed home from work today, except we have a housekeeper who has been with us for years and is, as they say, one of the family.’
‘And you’ve been tracking down the clerical mistake,’ I said.
‘Yes. I went back to the original records.’
‘And?’
‘Marion County Birth Certificates Office on Ohio Street has no record of my wife being born.’
‘She was born in Marion County?’
‘Supposedly.’
‘When did you go?’
‘Yesterday. After the Passport Office.’
‘Both of you?’
‘No. I sent Paula home. She is rather volatile at the best of times. Something of an artistic temperament.’
‘Did you tell her about your visit to the Birth Certificates Office?’
‘I told her what I knew at the time, last night. That they were making a thorough check, but certainly didn’t have her listed with the details on the certificate we have.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She didn’t know what to say. Except that she wants it unravelled.’
‘Does she know you’ve come to me?’
‘We talked last night in the kitchen while Tamae was making dinner.’
‘Tamae is your housekeeper?’
‘Housekeeper plus. Yes. She has a little television in there and it was on. We saw you on the news. Paula said we better hire you to find out whether she had ever been born or whether she was just a figment of my imagination. So I said I would. I don’t know whether she took me seriously.’
‘Did you take you seriously?’
‘Yes,’ he said gravely. ‘The Birth Certificate people say that no one was born with Paula’s name or to Paula’s mother any time within three years either side of the date we have.’
Belter and I shared a quiet moment, each finishing his drink.
I explained what it would cost to have me go into things and he just nodded. Not exactly the stiff negotiation that has been my experience of bankers.
‘You got the certificate from your wife’s mother?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Is she still alive?’
‘Oh yes.’
I hadn’t expected that answer.
‘Why don’t you just go ask her?’ I held my hands up. ‘Don’t tell me. You did.’
‘Yes. This afternoon.’
I waited for a moment. ‘Mr Belter, come on. Is this going to be the shortest period of employment on record or not? What did she say?’
‘My mother-in-law is eighty-seven and has been in a twenty-four-hours-a-day nursing establishment for six years. She has times when she is completely lucid. In fact, she is quite remarkable for her age. But at other times she is not aware of what is going on around her. For instance, she has a recurrent delusion that people are trying to poison her and when it has a grip, visiting can be quite an ordeal. That’s the way she was today. I didn’t get any useful information at all.’
I thought for a moment.
‘How long do the delusionary episodes generally last?’
‘It’s hit and miss. I don’t want to wait around, doing nothing. She might not be willing to help even if lucid. Given,’ he said slowly, ‘that she is inescapably involved in whatever deception has been perpetrated.’
‘You don’t think it possible that there is some innocent explanation?’
‘With a faked birth certificate?’ The grey eyes flashed steely. ‘We only avoided being faced with charges of trying to obtain a passport with false documents because Paula was so patently shocked.’
I said, ‘Wherever your wife was born, there is very probably a record of it. Either she was born outside Marion County or she was born in Marion County but under a different name. In either case, it looks like the thing for me to do is to try to work back through your wife’s family history to try to reconstruct what the circumstances of the birth were. Is your wife’s father alive?’
‘No, He died in the war,’ Belter said. ‘The putative father.’
‘Will your wife help establish dates and places?’
‘Yes,’ he said without uncertainty.
‘All right. Would you ask her to assemble a chronology, as best she can, of where her parents lived, what kind of work they did? Anything that might have left records. And of course I’ll need their name.’
‘Murchison,’ he said.
I turned my notebook to a fresh page. ‘Give me what you know now, off the top. To get me started.’
Before he left, Belter also gave me a retainer.
I could hardly contain myself as he went out the door. They do late banking at the establishment where I conduct my financial transactions. Not a Belter Bank. I drove the five blocks and deposited the day’s second cheque with a nonchalance intended to suggest that it was a routine chore for me. I left deeply disappointed that I hadn’t been observed making the deposits by one of the branch management’s upper echelon. I am known to them.<
br />
Still, at seven-fifteen bank people tend to be at home planning their vacations and talking in front of their housekeepers about whether their wives’ parents are concealing genealogical secrets.
I went to a supermarket outside of which I telephoned to offer to share my boost in fortune with my lady friend, to the tune of a good steak, with a nut cutlet thrown in for her now vegetarian daughter. But she didn’t hear my melody. No one answered the phone.
I bought a TV dinner and went home.
While it was cooking I went to work. I commissioned background research on Lance Whisstock and on the Murchison family.
My contact, Maude Simmons, works on the Sunday Star and supplements her income by searching the Star clipping files, in her spare moments, on behalf of folks like me. She’s also got eyes and ears all around town, an audio-visual Hydra. When I have the money for her service, she does quickly a lot of things I can only do slowly.
I ate my TV dinner in the self-righteous knowledge that I actually was hard at work. It allowed me to savour every mouthful.
Chapter Four
In the morning I went to Biarritz House, a nursing home on Graceland Avenue, north of 38th Street. It was a large white-frame structure in comfortable grounds which looked just like a high-class nursing home should. And nothing but high class would be appropriate for a Belter Mother-In-Law.
I didn’t know much about Ella R. Murchison. Most of the information Belter had given me had been about his wife, Paula, and himself.
Until the previous day, he had ‘known’ that his wife was the Murchisons’ only child, and that they had been longtime residents of Indianapolis. He had met Paula when she was nineteen and had played in a piano recital of the students of Louis Dettlaff, then a prominent instructor of the keyboard arts. Belter’s younger sister had also played. Douglas was introduced at a reception after the performance. It was in May of 1955.
They were married in June of 1957. Belter’s impression was that his wife’s family was hard up before the war, but better off afterwards. Certainly when he met Paula, she and her mother lived comfortably enough, in a small house on 42nd Street, just east of Central. She’d had a good piano at home, and lessons with Dettlaff didn’t come cheap. Paula had attended School 60, at 46th and Central from the fifth grade, and then Shortridge High School. Belter didn’t remember the home address on 42nd, but would be able to recognise the house. He recalled its proximity both to a library branch and to the Uptown Cinema on College.
All he knew about the Murchisons before the war was that they had lived in a different house, and that Earl W. had held a variety of jobs before joining the Army. He had died on the way to Europe in 1942 in some sort of shipboard accident. For whatever reason, Paula had told her husband comparatively little about her early childhood.
I parked in the Biarritz drive and at about a quarter past ten I asked at the central desk for Mrs Murchison.
‘My my,’ said the gently southern accented nurse. ‘What a lucky lady our Ella is.’
I began to preen in the face of unwonted flattery when the nurse made clear what she meant. ‘That makes three visitors for her in two days. Could you go down there and ask for Mrs Howard, please, honey.’
She pointed. I went.
Mrs Howard was not gently accented. She was forward and bustly and warm and left her menu planning to take me to the room.
As we walked along the corridor, I asked easily, ‘How is Mrs Murchison today?’
‘Oh, fine.’
‘I was talking to Doug, Mr Belter, and he said that yesterday she was off about poisoning again.’
‘We’re all Borgias here from time to time,’ Mrs Howard said with a smile.
‘It must be difficult when she’s minded that way,’ I said.
‘We get our fill of “poison tasting”,’ she said. ‘But generally in the end we leave the food on her table and go away. When we come back it’s gone. Now, I can’t testify that she eats it, but she’s not exactly wasting away, our Ella.’
‘Do all the residents eat in their rooms?’
‘No, no. But she fell twice a couple of weeks ago so we’re being a bit careful.’
We stopped in front of a door marked ‘23’. Mrs Howard knocked, paused and went in. ‘Another visitor for you, Ella. A young gentleman. Are you decent?’
Mrs Howard waved me to follow her into the room and pointed to a chair near the bay window which surveyed large landscaped gardens at the back of the house.
Ella Murchison sat in another chair facing the window. She was crocheting, and glanced towards me and Mrs Howard brightly. A substantial woman, she looked fifteen years younger than her advertised age.
‘This is Mr Samson,’ Mrs Howard said. ‘He knows your Douglas and your Paula too, I shouldn’t wonder. I’ll be back a little later on.’
Mrs Howard left.
Ella Murchison did not return to her work. She watched me carefully as I sat down.
‘Hello,’ I said cheerfully.
‘I don’t know you,’ she said.
She was not in doubt.
‘No,’ I said.
‘You’re not that young. Are you a gentleman?’
‘I try to say my please and thank yous.’
‘Mrs Howard says that you know Douglas and Paula. Do you know my grandsons too?’
‘I’ve heard a little about them. And I haven’t met Paula yet.’
She picked up her crochet work and began hooking the yarn dexterously.
‘It’s very pretty,’ I said. ‘What is it going to be?’
She didn’t answer at first. Then she put the work down, faced me again and said, ‘What do you want, Mr Samson?’
All notions of possible indirections departed. ‘Your son-in-law has hired me,’ I said.
‘To keep me company?’ she said without laughing. ‘What a kind and thoughtful boy he is.’
‘Not to keep you company,’ I said.
She plumped up her hair with her two hands. ‘If I’m going to have company, I should get myself ready.’
‘He’s worried about your daughter.’
‘You may not think me much to look at now,’ Mrs Murchison said, ‘but in my day I had looks. Oh yes. Not bad in my day.’
I stopped talking.
She said, ‘There’s one or two old codgers in this place who don’t think I’m so bad even now, you know. You look surprised.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Well, be surprised as you like. It’s true.’ She looked at me sharply. ‘You haven’t brought me any chocolates, have you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Fancy that. Visiting a lady without bringing her anything. Some of my old gentlemen buy me chocolates every week, out of their pocket money. But I don’t touch them.’ She bent forward and narrowed her eyes. ‘They put things in those chocolates. They do. You can scoff. You can mock. But I’m on to their little game. So, no sooner do the boxes come in than they go out. Straight in the basket. They can’t fool me that way. Not me.’
She stopped talking and picked up her crochet work again.
I sat quietly with her for a long couple of minutes.
Finally, I tried again. ‘Paula is upset,’ I said.
Mrs Murchison didn’t take her eyes off her work. ‘So, don’t you try to get into my good books by bringing me candy another time. I’m too smart for that. Too smart.’
I rose and went to the door. I opened it, and then closed it without going out.
Immediately the old woman lowered her hands and turned with a sigh. When she saw me still standing in the room her reaction was fierce. ‘What are you trying to trick me like that for? You think it’s goddamn funny to play pranks on old women? You get out of here.’
I nodded, and left.
Mrs Howard was in the foyer talking to the nurse at reception. She turned to me as I approached. ‘Has she sent you to get something?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m on my way.’
‘That wasn’t much of a visit,�
�� Mrs Howard said, with a practised tone of faint criticism.
‘It seemed to be as much as she wanted,’ I said.
The southern nurse said, ‘She had two visitors yesterday, Connie.’
Mrs Howard said, ‘Really?’
‘Yes, honey. That Chinese housekeeper of her daughter’s, and then her son-in-law. I’d think she was just about visited out.’
Mrs Howard said to me, ‘I was off yesterday.’
‘She got on to poisons,’ I said.
Both women laughed briefly. Then Mrs Howard shrugged. ‘She ate breakfast this morning without a word.’
‘I didn’t feel it was a delusion,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ Mrs Howard asked. ‘That someone is poisoning her?’
‘I felt she turned it on, so as not to talk to me. She seemed very alert. Much younger than her years.’
Both women nodded in agreement. I asked, ‘Does she get a lot of visitors?’
‘Oh, the family’s quite good. Daughter, grandchildren, pretty regularly,’ Mrs Howard said.
‘And the Chinese housekeeper,’ the nurse said.
‘I think she’s Japanese, Barbara.’
‘Oh my!’ the nurse said. ‘Anyway, she comes too.’
‘Three or four times a month, I’d say. Oh, they’re not bad. They bring her things. Books and magazines, yarn, tapes of concerts sometimes. They’re musical, you know. Definitely among our good relatives.’ She looked at the nurse. ‘What percentile would you say?’
After a moment’s thought the nurse said, ‘Nothing like the Grosses or the Fallowfields, of course. But . . . top twenty?’
Mrs Howard nodded. Then to me she said, ‘Maybe if you come back in a couple of days she’ll be more receptive. Unless visiting again would be too inconvenient for you.’
The burden of retaining the Belter top-twenty rating was squarely on my shoulders.
I was on the road again by eleven. By pre-arrangement I was to call Maude Simmons between eleven and half past. Where better to make a telephone call than from a pay phone at the Indiana Bell office on North Meridian?
Maude sounded tired. ‘I’ve only had time for the information off the surface. The one-cut skim. You understand that?’
‘Yes.’
‘O.K. Just checking.’
‘A girl’s got to keep things straight,’ I said.
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