Mermaid

by Margaret Millar

  She went to the front door and opened it at the first ring of the chime. The overhead light that switched on automatically when the door opened revealed a tall middle aged man with a deeply tanned face and bright, expres­sionless eyes that reminded her of Cleo’s.

  “Mrs. Hilton Jasper?”

  “Yes.”

  “You shouldn’t open the door like that without first ask­ing who is there.”

  “All right, who is here?”

  “Lieutenant Peterson of the Police Department.”

  “This is an inconvenient time to receive you,” she said coolly. “We’re in the middle of dinner.”

  “Really? Funny thing, I was in the middle of dinner my­self when the desk sergeant played me a tape of a message that had just come in from a woman. Sounded like a girl, actually. It seems she’d been listening to the six o’clock news and heard about the death of a man she knew, Roger Lennard. Is that name familiar to you?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Perhaps your husband might find it less vague.”

  Her response was to open the door a little farther to allow him to step inside. When she closed it again the overhead light went off and Lieutenant Peterson’s face was in shadow. It looked

  better that way, more expres­sive, kinder, with the disturbing brightness of his eyes obscured.

  “Let’s not beat around the bush, Lieutenant,” she said. “We’ve called our attorney and until he arrives my hus­band isn’t going to make any statement.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll wait.”

  “I’m not sure when he’s coming. I left a message with his answering service but he may not even get it tonight.”

  “I’ll still wait. I presume you have a spare bedroom.”

  She let out a gasp of surprise.

  “Now, now, don’t get shook. That was just a little joke to lighten up the atmosphere.”

  “It wasn’t very successful.”

  “Many of my jokes aren’t. Win a few, lose a few. I’d like to see Mr. Jasper, all jokes aside.”

  “As I told you, we’re in the middle of dinner. Would you mind waiting for him?”

  “I wouldn’t mind, no. But I’d prefer to come and sit at the table with you. What are you serving, by the way? I hope you don’t mind my asking. You see, I was in the mid­dle of dinner myself.”

  “Avocado and grapefruit salad and seafood Newburg.”

  “Sounds great. Did you make the seafood yourself?”

  “We have a cook.”

  “Congratulations. Good cooks are hard to find these days.”

  “I didn’t say she was a good cook . . . Are you by any chance inviting yourself for dinner?”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  “This is—this is really extraordinary.”

  “I don’t agree. Put a hungry man on the trail of seafood Newburg and what he does is quite ordinary.”

  “I don’t know what Mr. Aragon will say when he gets here if you’re sitting having dinner with us.”

  “Aragon? Now, he’s pretty small potatoes for a big man like your husband. Potatoes. There goes my mind again, back to food.”

  “I’ve never been in a situation like this before in my life.”

  “As a matter of fact, neither have I. But we mustn’t shut ourselves off from new experiences, must we?”

  “Come this way.”

  It wasn’t the most gracious invitation he’d ever received but it was the only one for dinner that night, so he fol­lowed her down the hall.

  Jasper was standing at the head of the dining room table, his left hand in his pocket.

  “Hilton, this is Lieutenant Peterson,” Frieda said. “He has kindly consented to join us for dinner.”

  The lieutenant nodded. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Jasper. I don’t imagine the feeling is mutual.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Ah well, suppose we forget business for a while and act like new friends about to break bread together for the first time.”

  Jasper’s only reply was to pull out a chair and then put his own plate of salad, which he hadn’t touched, in front of the lieutenant. Frieda turned up the heat under the silver chafing dish that contained the seafood.

  She said, “My husband and I aren’t having wine with dinner tonight but I’ll open a bottle for you if you like.”

  “Not while I’m on duty.”

  The lieutenant ate quickly and quietly with only an oc­casional remark about the weather, the food, the state of the nation. Neither of the Jaspers made any attempt to converse. Frieda served the food and Jasper pushed it around on his plate in a pretense of eating.

  Afterward, the lieutenant said, “Excellent, excellent. I truly appreciate having a home-cooked meal now and then. Since my wife died I’ve probably eaten more Big Macs and fries than any man in town.”

  Jasper took a deep breath and held it for a moment be­fore speaking. “Why are you here, Lieutenant?”

  “As I told your wife, the desk sergeant received a phone call about six thirty. He played the tape of it for me. It was the voice of a young woman, a girl probably, who’d been listening to the six o’clock news and heard about Roger Lennard’s death. A man named Abercrombie had spoken rather freely to the press describing someone who’d visited Lennard in the late morning. She claimed the description fitted you.”

  “I see.”

  “A lot of policemen would like people to believe that we go around solving crimes by taking fingerprints and mak­ing plaster casts and ballistics tests. Now these things all look good in a courtroom once the criminal is on trial. But how he’s caught is usually a different story. Somebody squealed, a disgruntled employee or partner, a jealous lover, a cast-off wife. These are the people who solve crimes. If it weren’t for the young woman’s phone call I wouldn’t be here. Tall man in a grey suit and Panama hat—that’s not much to go on. Add a name and address, and the picture changes. Did you go to see Roger Lennard this morning?”

  “I’d like to hear that tape.”

  “That’s not an answer to my question, Mr. Jasper.”

  “I’ll answer your questions if you let me listen to the tape.”

  “No,” Frieda said. “No, you won’t. You’re not to say anything until Mr. Aragon—”

  “Be quiet, Frieda. What about it, Lieutenant? Do we have a deal?”

  “Sounds fair to me.”

  “I want to hear the tape first.”

  “Now that part isn’t so fair,” the lieutenant said. “Maybe you think you might recognize the voice?”

  “I might.”

  “We’ll have to go out to my car. I brought the tape with me. I intended to play it for you anyway.”

  Frieda made one more attempt to stop him but he pushed her aside. “Let me handle my own affairs,” he said. “I’m a big boy now.”

  “You don’t eat like one. You’re a stupid, pigheaded little boy.”

  “I hate to break up a good old-fashioned family row,” the lieutenant said. “But sometimes I have to. Let’s go, Mr. Jasper. Would you like to come along too, Mrs. Jas­per? It’s the least

  I can do in return for the excellent meal.”

  “I hope you get indigestion,” Frieda said.

  The tape was brief:

  “Police Department, Sergeant Kowalski speaking.”

  “Hello. Is this the right place to phone to tell you some­thing?”

  “Yes ma’am, if you’ve got something to tell.”

  “I heard it on the radio about Roger Lennard being dead. Is it true? I guess it must be true or they wouldn’t say it to everybody like that.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “They said a man quarreled with Roger. I know who it was. He’s mean, he’s a mean old man.”

  “Just a minute and I’ll transfer this—”
r />   “His name is Hilton Jasper and he lives at twelve hundred Via Vista.”

  “Would you give me your name please, ma’am?”

  The tape ended with a click. The voice was Cleo’s.

  The lieutenant said, “Think that might be someone you know, Mr. Jasper?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you’d care to hear it again?”

  “No, thanks,” Jasper said. “I had an idea it might be a secretary I had to fire last week.”

  “Disgruntled employee, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t think a man in your position had much to do with the hiring and firing of secretaries.”

  “There are exceptions.”

  “I’m sure there are. Let’s play it again to make sure it wasn’t your disgruntled employee, shall we?”

  “No. No.”

  “Usually when we’re having somebody try to identify a voice, we play the tape several times.”

  “There’s no need for that. It wasn’t my former secre­tary.”

  “I know that, Mr. Jasper. Who was it?”

  Jasper shook his head.

  “You won’t identify the caller?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t, won’t, same difference as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get an answer . . . It sounded like a girl to me. Would you agree with that?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Perhaps it was one of those girls at the special school where Roger Lennard worked.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Well, you’ve heard the tape. Now I’d like to hear your answers to a few questions. Shall we go back into the house?”

  “I’d prefer to stay here.”

  “Mrs. Jasper?”

  “Mrs. Jasper.”

  “Feisty woman. I like the type but they’re tough to live with. Any kids?”

  “We have a son, Edward. He’ll be a senior at Cal Poly this fall.”

  “No daughters?”

  “No.”

  “Once in a while our crimes are solved for us by dis­gruntled daughters as well as

  employees . . . How long have you known Lennard?”

  “Not long.”

  “What made you decide to call on him this morning?”

  “I prefer not to answer that.”

  “Your prefers and my prefers aren’t going to jibe, are they?”

  “I’ll make a simple statement about my actions this morning without going into motives. I quarreled with Lennard, I hit him twice, he didn’t fall down, I left. Those are the facts. I can’t tell you any more at this time.”

  “You haven’t told me anything I didn’t know.”

  “I confessed to hitting him. That will have to be enough for now.”

  The lieutenant rewound the tape and played it through again. “You’ll notice, Mr. Jasper, that the girl re­fers to Mr. Lennard as Roger.”

  “Yes, I noticed.”

  “She was evidently a friend of his.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you evidently were not a friend either of his or of hers. She called you a mean old man.”

  “So I heard.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “That’s not old,” the lieutenant said. “Is her other claim also exaggerated?”

  “Am I mean? Apparently someone thinks so.”

  “Some secret enemy?”

  “You might say that.”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that at all, Mr. Jasper. I’m con­vinced you know this girl, perhaps very well. Have you been fooling around?”

  “No.”

  “I believe you. She didn’t sound like the kind of person who’d appeal to a man of your social status. She’s definitely lower class, don’t you agree?”

  “I’m not in the habit of judging a person’s social posi­tion by listening to a few sentences on tape,” Jasper said stiffly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll—”

  “Who was the girl, Jasper?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Okay. That’s all for now. You’re free to go back in the house, watch T. V. or go to bed, or finish the argument with your wife, whatever.”

  “Aren’t you going to wait for Aragon?”

  “Why should I?” the lieutenant said. “I’d probably get even less information with him around . . . Thank your wife again for the dinner. And tell her I never get indiges­tion from food, only from people.”

  The lieutenant returned to headquarters. Kowalski, the desk sergeant who’d played him

  the tape on the radio­phone, was still on duty. He was eating a ham sandwich that oozed the bilious yellow of mustard. A young woman in uniform was sitting at a desk with a typewriter in front of her, scratching her head with a pencil. Nothing much seemed to be happening, except possibly inside the young woman’s head.

  “Quiet night,” Kowalski said. “Anything we can do for you, lieutenant?”

  “I’d like to see the city directory.”

  “Sarah will get it for you. Hey, Sarah.”

  The young woman dropped her pencil. “Don’t you hey-Sarah me or I’ll report you to the National Organization for Women.”

  “You reported me twice this month.”

  “Three times and out.”

  “All right, all right. Sarah, honorable policeperson, would you please drag your beautiful butt over to the shelf and get the lieutenant the city directory?”

  “That ‘beautiful butt’ remark could be construed as sex­ual harassment.”

  “Get the directory, kiddo,” the lieutenant said.

  He took the directory back to his office, a small room, hardly more than a cubicle, sparsely furnished with two straight-backed chairs in addition to the swivel chair be­hind his desk. There was also a filing cabinet, and a water cooler used mainly to water the Boston fern on a five-foot stand in the corner, its fronds reaching all the way to the floor. Except for the standard electronic equipment, the desk was almost bare: no heavy paperweight that could be used as a weapon and no papers that could be spied on. On one side there was a small graceful porpoise carved out of ironwood and on the other a photograph of three people in tennis clothes: a fair-haired woman and two teenaged boys.

  The house at 1200 Via Vista was listed in the directory as jointly owned by Frieda and Hilton Jasper, with Ed­ward Jasper, Cleo Jasper, Paolo Trocadero and Valencia Ybarra as residents. Trocadero and Ybarra were probably servants and Jasper had mentioned his son Edward, but claimed to have no daughters. So who was Cleo and why hadn’t her name come up in the conversation?

  He called the record room and asked for any recent in­formation on Hilton or Cleo Jasper. Ten minutes later Sarah appeared with a card bearing the name Hilton Jas­per, the time of his arrival at the police station, the nature of his complaint, a missing person described as his sister, Cleo, a student at Holbrook Hall. Attached to the card was a passport-size picture of an unsmiling pretty girl with long straight hair. The absence of any further information

  indicated that no action had been taken on the case.

  The lieutenant leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. His eyes moved back and forth as if he were watching a computer readout on the ceiling.

  Cleo Jasper. Runaway. Student at Holbrook Hall. Vic­tim of some degree of mental or emotional impairment. Member of a wealthy family. Alive as of six thirty. Still in town, since a nonlocal radio station wouldn’t bother to re­port the death of someone as unimportant as Lennard.

  No indication even of Cleo’s existence had been given by the Jaspers, Mrs. Holbrook, or Aragon. What were they protecting—the girl’s future? Their own pride? The repu­tation of the school?

  The lieutenant yawned, stretched, studied the picture on the card again.

  “Cleo,”
he said aloud. “Where the hell are you?”

  12

  The mail was delivered to Holbrook Hall the following morning at ten o’clock. Rachel Holbrook had been waiting for it, pacing around her office as if she were measuring its precincts, glancing at her wristwatch every few minutes. When she saw the truck coming up the driveway she went to meet the postman at the front door.

  He was a plump, cheerful young man who felt it was part of his job to give his important customers a preview of the day’s haul.

  “Lots of throwaway stuff this morning, Mrs. Holbrook. And bills—I guess you can’t run a place like this without a bunch of bills.”

  “Thank you, Harry, I’ll just take it and—”

  “New issues of Reader’s Digest, Psychology Today, Audiovisual Journal. Letters for the kids, naturally. I always wondered, do they read their own letters or are they read to them?

  “A catalogue of playground equipment. I’d like to bor­row that when you’ve finished, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Holbrook. My kids are getting old enough now to use things like that in the yard.”

  “I’ll save it for you, Harry. Goodbye.”

  The box of mail was so heavy she could hardly carry it back to her office. The job of separating it was usually left to her secretary but this morning she did it herself. She found the letter from Roger Lennard almost immediately. It looked like any other letter, but it was the first she’d ever received from a dead man and it seemed to give off a faintly sour odor.

  She called Aragon at his apartment.

  “Roger’s letter has arrived,” she said. “I think you should be here when I open it.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder if I did the correct thing. Yesterday it seemed so logical and right. Now I don’t know. I’m frightened.”

  He hesitated. Then: “I should be there in about twenty minutes. Take it easy.”