Black Money la-13

by Ross Macdonald

  Jamieson groped in a leather box and produced a silver- framed photograph of a young woman. She wasn't especially pretty. There had to be other reasons for her husband's extended mourning. Maybe, I thought, grief was the only feeling he was capable of; or maybe it was just an excuse for drinking. I handed the photograph back to him.

  "How long ago did she die?"

  "Twenty-four years. My poor son killed her in being born. I try not to blame poor Peter, but it's hard sometimes, when I think of all I lost."

  "You still have a son."

  Jamieson's free hand made a small gesture, nervous and irritable. It said a good deal about his feelings for Peter, or his lack of them.

  "Where is Peter, by the way?"

  "He went out to the kitchen for a snack. He was on his way to bed. If you'd like to see him?"

  "Later, perhaps. You said you had some information for me."

  He nodded. "I talked to one of my friends at the bank.

  Martel's hundred thousand-actually it was closer to a hundred and twenty thousand - was deposited in the form of a draft on the Banco de Nueva Granada - the Bank of New Granada."

  "I never heard of it."

  "Neither had I, though I've been to Panama City. The New Granada has its headquarters in Panama City."

  "Did Martel leave his hundred grand in the local bank?"

  "He did not. I was coming to that. He withdrew every cent of it. In cash. The bank offered him a guard but he couldn't be bothered. He packed the money into a briefcase and tossed it into the back of his car."

  "When did this happen?"

  "Today at five minutes to three, just before the bank closed. He'd phoned first thing in the morning to make sure that they'd have the cash on hand."

  "So he was already planning to leave this morning. I wonder where he went."

  "Panama, perhaps. That seems to be the source of his money."

  "I should report to your son. How do I find the kitchen?"

  "It's at the other end of the hallway. You'll see the light. Come back and have another short one with me, won't you, afterwards?"

  "It's getting late."

  "I'll be glad to give you a bed."

  "Thanks, I work better out of a hotel."

  I made my way along the passageway toward the kitchen light. Peter was sitting at a table under a hanging lamp. Most of a roast goose lay on a wooden platter in front of him, and he was eating it.

  I hadn't tried to soften the sound of my footsteps, but he hadn't heard me coming. I stood in the doorway and watched him. He was eating as I had never seen anyone eat.

  With both hands he tore chunks of flesh from the goose's breast and forced them into his mouth, the way you pack meat into a grinder. His face was distorted, his eyes almost invisible.

  He tore off a drumstick and bit into its thick end. I crossed the kitchen toward him. The room was large and white and bleak. It reminded me of a disused handball court.

  Peter looked up and saw me. He dropped the bird's leg guiltily as if it was part of a human body. His face was swollen tight and mottled, like a sausage.

  "I'm hungry." His voice was fogged with grease.

  "Still hungry?"

  He nodded, with his dull eyes on the half-demolished bird. It lay in front of him like the carcass of his hopes.

  I felt like getting out of there and sending him back the balance of his money. But I've always had trouble walking out on bad luck. I pulled up a chair and sat down across the table from him and talked him out of his stupor.

  I don't remember everything I said. Mostly I tried to persuade the boy that he was within the human range. I do remember that my broken monologue was punctuated by a banging noise, which came from the general direction of Marietta Fablon's house.

  The first time I heard the noise, I thought it might be gunfire. I discounted this when it was repeated over and over at irregular intervals. More likely it was a shutter or an outside door banging in the wind.

  Eventually Peter said in a clogged voice: "I apologize."

  "Apologize to yourself."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Apologize to yourself. You're the one you're doing it to."

  His face was like kneaded dough in the harsh light. "I don't know what gets into me."

  "You should take it up with a doctor. It's a disease."

  "You think I need a psychiatrist?"

  "Most people do at one time or another. You're lucky you can afford one."

  "I can't, though. Not really. I won't come into my real money for another year."

  "Use your credit. You can afford a psychiatrist if you can afford me."

  "You really think there's something the matter with my head?"

  "Your heart," I said. "You have a hungry heart. You better find something to feed it with besides food."

  "I know. It's why I have to get Ginny back."

  "You need to do more than that. If she ever saw you on an eating binge-" It was a cruel sentence. I didn't finish it.

  "She has," he said. "That's the trouble. As soon as people find out they turn against me. I suppose you'll be quitting too."

  "No. I'd like to see things get straightened out for you."

  "They'll never get straightened out. I'm hopeless."

  He was trying to lean his full moral weight on me. I didn't want any more of it than I had, and I tried to objectify the situation a little.

  "My grandmother who lived in Martinez was a religious woman. She always said it was sinful to despair."

  He shook his head slowly. His eyes seemed to swing with the movement. A minute later he dashed for the kitchen sink and vomited.

  While I was trying to clean it and him up, his father appeared in the doorway. He spoke across Peter as if he was deaf or moronic: "Has my poor boy been eating again?"

  "Lay off, Mr. Jamieson."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  He raised his pale hands as if to show what a gentle father he had been. "I've been both father and mother to my son. I've had to be."

  Peter stood at the sink with his back to his father, unwilling to show his face. After a while his father drifted away again.

  Attached to the great main kitchen, with its tiled counters and sinks and ovens, was a smaller outer kitchen like a glassed-in porch. I became aware of this outer kitchen because there was a noise at the door, a scrabbling and a snuffling which was nearer and more insistent than the banging noise.

  "Do you have a dog out there?"

  Peter shook his head. "It may be a stray. Let it in. We'll give it a piece of goose."

  I turned on the light in the outer kitchen and opened the door. Marietta Fablon crawled in over the threshold. She rose to her knees. Her hands groped up my legs to my waist. There was blood like a dyer's error on her pink quilted breast. Her eyes were as wide and blind as silver coins.

  "Shot me."

  I got down and held her. "Who, Marietta?"

  Her mouth worked. "Lover-boy."

  The residue of her life came out with the words. I could feel it leave her body.

  16

  PETER APPEARED In the kitchen doorway. He didn't come into the outer kitchen. Death took up all the room.

  "What did she say?"

  "She said lover-boy shot her. Who would she mean by that?"

  "Martel."

  It was an automatic response. "Is she dead?"

  I looked down at her. Death had made her small and dim, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

  "I'm afraid she is. You better call the county sheriff's office. Then tell your father."

  "Do I have to tell him? He'll find a way to blame me."

  "I'll tell him if you like."

  "No. I will."

  He crossed the kitchen purposefully.

  I went out into the blowing dark and got the flashlight out of my car. A well-defined path led from the Jamieson garden to the Fablon house. I wondered if Peter's childish feet had worn it.

  There were evidences th
at Marietta had crawled along the path all the way from her house: spots of blood and knee marks in the dirt. Her pink silk cap had fallen off where the path went through a gap in the boundary hedge. I left it.

  Her front door was banging. I went in and found the study. It was dominated by an ornate nineteenth-century desk. I went through the drawers. There was no sign of Audrey Sylvester's love-letter to Fablon, but I found a letter that interested me just as much. It had been written to Mrs. Fablon by Ricardo Rosales, a Vice-President of the Bank of New Granada, Panama City, in March 18 of this year. It said in rather stilted English that the special account from which the Bank had paid her periodic sums of money had been exhausted, and no further instructions had been received concerning it. Under the rules and regulations of the bank it was regrettably not possible for them to name their principal.

  In a bottom drawer I came across a framed photograph of a young Air Force second lieutenant who was almost certainly Roy Fablon. The glass was missing from the frame, and small half-moon-shaped pieces of the photograph had been clumsily punched out. It took me a minute to come to the conclusion that it had been pierced repeatedly by the sharp heel of a woman's shoe. I wondered if Marietta had stamped on her husband's picture recently.

  In the same drawer I found a man's thin wristwatch with four Latin words engraved on the back: Mutuis animis arrant amantur. I didn't know Latin, but `arrant' meant something about love.

  I looked at Fablon's picture again. To my instructed eyes his head was a cruel hollow-looking bronze. He had been dark and dashing, the kind of man a daughter could fall in love with. Though he had been handsome and Martel wasn't, I imagined I could see some resemblance between them, enough perhaps to account for Ginny's infatuation with Martel. I put the picture and the watch back in the drawer.

  A light was burning in the sitting room where I had talked too Marietta, and listened to the grinding of her teeth. The cord of the pink telephone had been ripped out of the wall. There were spots of blood on the worn carpet. This was where her crawl had started.

  I could hear a wailing in the distance now, louder than the wind and drearier. It was the sound of a siren, which nearly always came too late. I went outside leaving the light burning and the door banging behind me.

  The Sheriffs men were in the Jamieson house before I got back to it. I had to explain who I was, and show them my Photostat and get Peter to vouch for me before they would let me into the house. They refused to let me go back into the kitchen.

  Their failure to co-operate suited me reasonably well. I felt justified in holding back some of the results of my own investigation. But I turned them loose on Martel. By two o'clock the officer in charge, Inspector Harold Olsen, came into the drawing room where I was waiting and told me he'd put out an all-points alarm for Martel. He added: "You can go home now, Mr. Archer."

  "I thought I'd stick around and talk to the coroner."

  "I'm the coroner," Olsen said. "I told my deputy, Dr Wills, not to bother coming out here tonight. He needed his rest. Why don't you go and get some rest, Mr. Archer? He moved ponderously towards me, a big slow stubborn Swede who liked his suggestions to be taken as orders. "Relax and take it easy. We won't be getting autopsy results for a couple of days at least."

  "Why not?" I said without getting up from my chair.

  "We never do, that's why."

  He was in charge here, and his slightly bulging eyes were watching me for any questioning of his power. He gave the impression that if he had to choose he would rather own a case than solve it. "There's no hurry. She was shot in the chest; we know that now, probably through the lung. She bled to death internally."

  "I'm interested in how her husband died."

  "He was a suicide. You don't need Dr Wills to tell you that. I handled the case myself."

  Olsen was watching me more closely. He was sensitive to the possibility that I might question his findings, and already quivering in advance with a faint sense of outrage. "It's a closed case."

  "Doesn't this kind of reopen it?"

  "No. It don't."

  He was retreating angrily into bad grammar. "Fablon committed suicide. He told his wife he was gonna, and he did it. There was no evidence of foul play."

  "I thought he was badly bunged up."

  "By sharks, and by the rocks. There's a lot of wave motion off of there, and it rolled him around on the bottom for ten days."

  Olsen made it sound a little like a threat. "But all the damage was done after he drowned. He died of drowning in salt water. Dr Wills will tell you the same thing."

  "Where can I find Wills tomorrow?"

  "He's got an office in the basement of Mercy Hospital. But he can't tell you any more than I can."

  Olsen left the room, wrapped in the brooding pride of a master craftsman, whose handiwork has been criticized by a journeyman. I waited until I couldn't hear his footsteps, then made my way to the library. The door was locked, but there was light under it.

  "Who is it?" the housekeeper Vera said through the door.

  "Archer."

  She let me in. She had on a rayon sunburst kimono. When she sat down on the hassock at Jamieson's feet, I could see the two black braids hanging down her back like severed cables.

  "It's a dreadful thing," he said weakly. "What do you make of it, Archer?"

  "It's too soon to ask me that. Marietta said that lover-boy shot her. Does that have any special meaning to you?"

  "No."

  "Did she have a lover?"

  "Certainly not to my knowledge."

  "If she did have a lover, who would it be?"

  "I have no idea. Frankly, I haven't had too much to do with the Fablons since Roy died, even before that. It's true we were close friends in college, and for a few years after, but our lives took different turnings. About Marietta's private life I'm completely ignorant. It does occur to me, though, that she may have meant somebody else's lover-boy."

  "Martel, you mean?"

  "It's the obvious thought, isn't it?"

  "It's so obvious I'm afraid of it. But I did come across a peculiar connection between him and Marietta. She's been drawing some kind of an income from the Bank of New Granada."

  "Marietta has?"

  "That's right. It was cut off within the last couple of months."

  "Who was the source of the income?"

  "That isn't clear. It may have been Martel, and if it was it suggests a wild possibility. Marietta may have sold her daughter to him."

  "She wouldn't do that!"

  Jamieson was as shocked as his anaesthetized condition would permit.

  "Plenty of other mothers do. They don't call it selling, but that's what it boils down to. A debutante ball is the closest thing we have to the Sudanese slave markets."

  Vera let out a ribald mirthless laugh. Her employer frowned severely at her, and said as if in rebuke: "But Marietta is - was devoted to Ginny."

  "She also knows how important money is. She told me so herself."

  "Really? She used to throw her money around as if her resources were inexhaustible. I've had to bail her-" Vera glanced up sharply, and Jamieson decided not to finish the sentence. I said: "Maybe her daughter was the only resource she had left."

  I was trying out the idea, and Jamieson sensed my purpose. "Possibly you could be right. Marietta's hardened in these last few years, since Roy died. But even assuming that you are right, why would she marry Virginia off to a dubious foreigner? She had my poor son Peter ready and willing."

  "I don't know. The marriage may have been Ginny's idea after all. And the fact that Marietta and Martel got money from the same Panama bank may be pure coincidence."

  "You don't believe it is, though?"

  "No. I've lost my faith in pure coincidence. Everything in life tends to hang together in a pattern. Of course the clearest pattern so far in this case is death repeating itself. The fact that Mrs. Fablon was murdered brings up the question of her husband's death again."

  "But wasn't it est
ablished that Roy killed himself" Vera frowned, as if he had said something obscene. Unobtrusively she crossed herself.

  "That's the official story, anyway," I said. "It's open to question now. Everything is. I understand you identified his body."

  "I was one of those who did."

  "Are you certain it was Roy Fablon?"

  He hesitated, and stirred in his chair uncomfortably. "I was certain at the time. That means I have to be certain now, doesn't it? It's not a memory I care to dwell on, frankly. His face was swollen, and terribly cut up."

  Jamieson closed his eyes tight. Vera reached for his hand and held it.

  "So you couldn't be certain it was him?"

  "Not just by looking at him. He'd gone through quite a sea-change. But I had no reason to doubt it was Roy, either. The doctor at the inquest, Dr Wills, said he had irrefus-" He stumbled over the word - "irrefutable evidence that it was Roy."

  "Do you recall what it was?"

  "It had to do with X rays of the old fractures in his legs."

  "That ought to take care of that, then."

  "Of what?" he said rather irritably.

  "The possibility that it was a faked suicide and that somebody else wore Fablon's overcoat into the ocean. It's a possibility worth considering when a man is deep in debt. But what you've just told me rules it out."

  "I should think so."

  "A minute ago," I said, "you started to tell me about bailing out Mrs. Fablon."

  "That was in the distant past. I helped out both of them on occasion. In a way I felt responsible for Roy."

  Vera stirred angrily. "You gave her the house."

  "What house?"

  Jamieson answered me: "The one she's living in - was living in. I didn't exactly give it to her. She had the use of it. After all she was kind to my poor son. And so was Roy in his time."

  "Did he hit you for much?"

  "A few thousand. It would have been more, but most of my capital was tied up in trust funds. Roy was desperate for money in his last days. He was gambling, with money that he didn't have."

  "Gambling with a man named Ketchel?"

  "Yes, that was his name."

  "Did you know Ketchel?"