The Saberdene Variations

by Thomas Gifford

  “Well, my goodness, good luck to you, Charles. And you’re a braver man than I am, Gunga Din.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Merely that from all I’ve heard Caro Saberdene is something of a handful. But that’s none of my business, is it?”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Don’t be testy. All I hear is mere gossip of the Rialto. And, incidentally, wasn’t she an actress or something?”

  “Oh, dry up, Neal.”

  “No sooner said than done, Charles.”

  Later that night I found myself wondering about her skills as an actress. Later that night I felt a chill that touched my soul.

  THREE

  The judge’s library was cluttered with memorabilia, a museum devoted to himself, everything from an ancient puffy football with the score of a game inscribed in flaking white paint to the model of a World War II B-17 Flying Fortress to photographs featuring the mature Judge Edel with dear friends of his who happened to be mayors of New York, governors, and presidents of the United States. The draperies at the windows hung from bronze spears. Thick-leaved rubber plants and Boston ferns fought for purchases on heavy-legged tables with fringed throws. The wallpaper, where the walls weren’t covered by glass-fronted bookcases, was dark green with a print of tiny rosebuds, twining vines, and nearly black leaves. The room was lit by several table lamps of equally complex design, each with a yellowing shade. The effect was not unlike that of various rooms in crumbling English mansions where old Victoriana had gone to die.

  Judge Edel stood with his back to the window which overlooked Central Park and Fifth Avenue. He was smoking a cigar, the smoke hanging in the gloom of the twelve-foot ceilings. The smell of the room was less of cigar smoke than of a peculiar, faint mustiness, the smell of the past refusing to let go and become only a memory. The judge seemed integral to the past, still in his suit and tie with the heavy jowls obscuring the collar, like Charles Laughton’s in an old movie.

  “Mr. Nichols,” he rumbled, waving his cigar in my direction, and then letting it drift to include the man standing across the room from me, “Mr. Alec Maguire. He’s come all the way down from Boston at my request, Charlie. He has a story and something I want you to see.”

  “How are you, Mr. Nichols?” He came across and shook my hand. He wore a large class ring, gold with an immense red stone. He wore dark-framed glasses and a blue blazer. His receding hair was dark, curly, and lay close to his skull. A long face with a long narrow nose was bracketed by tiny ears, no bigger than a boy’s. “I’m a private investigator working out of Boston. Got my own agency up there.”

  “Boston’s answer to Sam Spade,” I said.

  “Well, think of that! My fame precedes me. Let me say that I’ve read your books with a professional interest, you might say. Fine work.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it,” I said. “But I’m at a loss as to what’s going on here tonight—”

  Judge Edel spoke up through a cloud of smoke. “Alec has done a variety of jobs over the years for Victor Saberdene. The first time was the business of Anna Thorne’s murder. Checking on Varada’s background. Then checking the facts regarding the man who recently confessed to the murder of Anna Thorne. And finally—well, Alec, why don’t you take it from here.”

  “The last job I did for Victor,” Maguire said, “began once I’d verified the man’s confession through my police contacts. It was right on the money which meant there was no doubt about Varada—he was innocent, he’d spent eight years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Victor figured that he might well have revenge on his mind … particularly in light of the kind of sociopath he’d always been. I mean to tell you, Nichols, this Varada’s got a history to curl your hair.” He rubbed his palm across his own kinky hair and grinned. “This guy came direct from the Black Lagoon. He was the guiltiest son of a gun who was ever innocent of a murder charge.

  “So Victor was a little concerned about the mood Varada might be in. He asked me to tail him from the moment he left prison. Which I did. Now, here was a guy who was entirely alone. If he were in one of your books you’d have called him an archetype of the existential antihero. With bells on. He stayed in a rooming house in Boston for a while, got himself a couple of women, worked off a little steam with them but no harm done. Then, darned if the son of a gun didn’t give me the slip. At Fenway Park, a Red Sox game, he was there one minute, gone the next …” Maguire shrugged. “I blew it. But it was a one-man tail at that point and there’s nothing much harder to do than that, if I do say so in my own defense.

  “You’ll never guess where I found him. Heck, I was just playing a hunch. Never did find out if he’d spotted me. Anyway, I played the only card I had—gave myself twenty-four hours, then I’d have let Victor know and he could have hired somebody in New York to bodyguard Mrs. Saberdene at that end. That was Victor’s concern, of course, thinking of how her testimony had sunk Varada. But I did find him … back in Earl’s Bridge!

  “Darned if he didn’t, eight years later, return to the scene of the crime. I’d lucked out. He was staying in a run-down motel about ten miles away, he’d rented this beat-up old car, and I just saw him on the street in Earl’s Bridge. So help me, never been so lucky on a case. Anyway, he went back to the same theater. Bright sunny day. He walked down that same path where Mrs. Saberdene had seen him go with Anna … it was so weird! Because he hadn’t killed her. Sort of the wrong man returning to the scene of somebody else’s crime. Weird!

  “Then he took a long walk through town, right past Thorne’s house, then, honest to God, he walked all the way out to the cemetery … I kid you not … he took a little buck-and-a-half bunch of daisies and put them on Anna’s grave!”

  Maguire stopped to take a sip from the brandy the judge had poured for us and I said: “I’m at a loss. I just don’t get it. This is not the Varada I’ve come to know and love. The man you’re describing sounds too much like a human being—”

  The judge rumbled again and a lock of gray hair drooped across his seamed forehead. “Prepare yourself, Mr. Nichols. In the vernacular, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” His chest and belly shook as he leaned back in the deep old morris chair. He folded his hands across his vest with its gold chain. “Now, back to the cemetery at Earl’s Bridge …”

  “Well, sir,” Maguire said in his deliberate, precise manner, “I was standing under a tree near the iron fence watching him, so darned hot I thought I’d drop in my tracks, and then he finally left the cemetery. Walked right past me, wearing this Panama hat, a safari jacket, didn’t even seem to notice me. Next day he left the car where he’d rented it and caught a bus to New York City. I followed the bus but one of the hoses went out on me, my car overheated and seized up, and naturally I lost him. So I called Victor and he told me to come down to New York and keep an eye on Mrs. Saberdene just in case Varada decided the time had come to bother her.

  “So I watched her without her knowing it for ten days. Victor didn’t want to worry her, told me she was—what was his word?” He snapped his fingers, the red stone in the class ring flashing. “Delicate. Said she was delicate and he didn’t want to frighten her. Well, nothing for ten days and he’d just about decided to call it off with a sigh of relief when I followed her to the Market Diner at Forty-fourth and Eleventh Avenue. Over by the big Greyhound package station—not the sort of place she usually went. She went in, sat at a booth by the window. I had a perfect view … and pretty soon—”

  Judge Edel interrupted. “Now, this is the meat of it, Nichols. This is what Victor brought to me about a week before you entered the picture. Go on, Alec.”

  Nichols. The old stalking horse. I saw the notation as if it were still in front of me. Good old Charlie. Oh, Victor, Victor, you bastard …”

  Before Maguire could get under way the judge took a large manila envelope from the table beside his chair and with his huge meaty hands slid out a stack of photographic enlargements. “These are the pictures Alec
took. Have a look at them.”

  I took one look at the top picture, then the second, and the third, then I came out of my chair like the champ at the bell for round one.

  “This flat fucking cannot be! What the hell do you guys think you’re doing? You listen to me, you, you … Caro Saberdene is scared to death of this man. Whatever these pictures mean … if they’re, they’re doctored to make things, uh, well, look bad … I mean, this is complete nonsense, you’ve gotta see that …” I blustered myself out and Maguire bent down and picked up the stack of pictures, squaring the corners in the awkward silence that followed.

  “Stop sounding like Jimmy Stewart getting all het up.” The judge’s hand fell like a sash weight on my shoulder, casually pushing me back into my chair. “Those pictures are the real goods. Might as well accept them for what they are.”

  He spread them out on a long low table, moving a couple of potted ferns and some National Geographics.

  The first glossy black-and-white showed Caro sitting at the table in the window at the Market Diner. Across from her stirring a spoon in his coffee cup was Carl Varada. His Panama hat lay on the table obscuring his left hand. Caro was looking directly into his face. He was, droopy-eyed, looking down at his coffee.

  Through the next dozen pictures Caro was sipping coffee, looking impassively at Varada while he talked, Caro speaking, her face solemn, Caro wiping at her eyes as if she were on the verge of crying. There was no way to tell what might have been said. There was no real emotion in the pictures. Just my own shock at seeing them for the first time.

  “Now, a second set,” Maguire said. “I shot them at a place called Peter’s Bar and Grill up on Columbus. I followed her in and Varada was already sitting at the bar. Middle of the afternoon, pretty empty. I sat at the end of the bar and stuck my head in the Daily News and snapped off another roll of pictures.”

  Varada taking hard-boiled eggs from a rack in front of him, breaking them on a napkin, peeling the shells away, munching on them while he talked to Caro. Once again she sat passively, either looking across the bar into the mirror or staring at Varada. She seemed never to speak, in an almost catatonic state. Then Varada’s face became more animated, the eyes almost flashed below those high, arched, arrogant brows. Then he looked disgusted, frowning, lips curling in a mocking smile that was in fact a frown. Taking his straw hat from the bar, putting it on, then ambling away from her toward the sunny glow coming from the doorway. Caro still sitting frozen, her thumbnail on her lower lip.

  “I took these shots down to Victor at his office,” Maguire said. “As you might imagine he was shocked at first, then he was confused. Not angry. Just confused. Like what he was saying was, What do they mean? I can’t give an explanation, either, and I told him so. Mrs. Saberdene seems just to be listening to Varada. She doesn’t seem to want to be there but on the other hand she could just have gotten up and left at any time. Varada never seemed more than irritated. He wasn’t threatening, he wasn’t angry.” Maguire shook his head, perplexed. “But what they might have been saying—well, didn’t use a mike. Who knows what they were talking about?” He shrugged. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  “And what might that be?” I was holding my temper, ignoring the gremlins drilling at my psyche.

  Maguire shrugged. “Ask her,” he said softly.

  “Now,” Judge Edel rumbled, “here’s where I came in. Victor brought the pictures to me as an old friend. He was naturally distracted by them, he asked me for my interpretation. Well, hell’s bells, what could I say? Caro met him at least twice, why remains a mystery. I have no intention of asking Caro. Was Varada threatening her? He certainly seemed to be threatening her later on—shortly after these meetings took place the phone calls began.” He took forever lighting another cigar. “Caro said nothing to Victor about the meetings, not even after the harassment began.”

  I said: “Did Victor ever confront her with them?”

  “No. He told me he would not even consider such a course. He felt that she was under enormous pressure, that she was too near the edge—psychologically speaking—and he didn’t want to run the risk of having her slip off. He said he thought that Varada was trying to get at him through her, maybe blackmail, money, you name it. When she didn’t want to play that game Varada decided to step up the attack.”

  Maguire said: “I told Victor that I had a prior commitment in Boston. I told him I felt that Varada had played his hand and come up empty. I told him I thought Varada would fold and clear out because Caro hadn’t cracked like one of those eggshells. It turned out that I was wrong.”

  “Victor told me about the telephone calls,” Judge Edel said. “Then, my God, he told me about Potter and Claverly and Abe Braverman. As far as I was concerned Victor was the one who’d gone over the edge. I didn’t know if he needed a keeper or a psychiatrist and I told him so. I told him he had to go to the police and if he got caught in some fallout he’d have to face up to it. But Victor told me I wasn’t getting the point, he was going to do it his way. Now, Nichols, since I knew you’d been caught up in this thing, sort of an innocent, I thought maybe you should be told about these remarkably puzzling pictures. Of course, Varada hasn’t been seen or heard from since the death of Victor … Well, Charlie—do you mind if I call you Charlie?—I’ve probably complicated things for you. But I think Victor had a great deal of faith in you. I think he’d have wanted you to know about these pictures. I don’t know what they mean but they worry me. I guess there are only two people on earth who know. And apparently they aren’t talking.”

  “What is it that worries you so much?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know but it was one of the questions God wants you to ask.

  “I’ll tell you, Charlie.” The judge turned his back on us, opened the heavy draperies, and looked out at the glowing night sky above Central Park. “The thing I don’t understand is … I look at these pictures and, God damn it, it looks to me like they know each other. That just sticks in this old craw.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  ONE

  CARO WAS IN BED BY the time I had gone for a walk to mull over the judge and Maguire and those damned photographs, then made my way back home—or to the Saberdene brownstone, which I’d come to think of as home. At least I’d thought of it as home until I’d seen the photos and the judge had finished with me.

  I began feeling like a world-class sap: Victor had used me for a stalking horse and Caro had somehow played me for a fool … and she had, indeed, been giving a performance. A brilliant performance, convincing me of what I wanted to believe. Or had she? Was she completely innocent of the implications the photographs made so starkly? It was all impenetrable because there was no answer to the only question that mattered anymore. Why?

  In my experience, such as it is, confusion and frustration and depression are the three primary components of cosmic drunks, which is what I proceeded to accomplish over the next three hours. I drank my way through a virgin bottle of Bell’s scotch while I sat in Victor’s study and had a replay of a Mets game on Sports Channel racketing along before me and who the hell cared how the game turned out. I woke up at four o’clock on the floor, halfway between the big leather chair where I’d been sitting and the liquor cabinet. I can only assume that God intervened and dropped me in my tracks before I could get to another bottle. He probably wanted to keep me around for more punishment because I hear He is at times a vengeful God.

  I’ve also heard that some hangovers can kill. It is a view to which I now subscribe.

  Things didn’t look a damn bit better in the morning sunshine. Worse, if anything. I kept seeing those photographs. They almost came to life in my mind, like movies, but they had no sound track. It was the sound track I needed, the only hope I had of explaining what Caro might have been doing during her secret meetings with the villain of the piece. No sound track. No explanation. Of course not.

  I was tiptoeing along my own worst doubts about her and I got the last thing in the world I
expected when I finished negotiating the stairway. Absolutely the last thing, which had become just about par for the course.

  She was more beautiful, more radiant, than I had ever seen her. I saw her in the garden, in a sundress, her tawny hair shining in the light filtering through the trees. She saw me, her smile lit up the face which had so often been a solemn mask since I’d known her, and she came toward me grinning broadly, laughing softly.

  “You,” she said, “look like Judge Edel took advantage of your virginity after he got you drunk. He’s tried often enough with me.” She took my arm and led me to the table. “You need intravenous coffee. Did you have a nice time?”

  I groaned, wished I hadn’t told her I was going visiting at all. When I’d slumped in the wrought-iron chair, she leaned down, tilted my chin up, and kissed me softly but firmly. There was a sparkle in her eye, new to me. Why now, of all mornings?

  She poured coffee and buttered a toasted bagel and put it before me. There was a clean fresh breeze. There was still hope that the heat wouldn’t get out of control. Faint, like all my hopes that morning, but still a hope.

  I’d laboriously gnawed my way through most of the bagel when she came and knelt beside my chair, put her hand on my knee, and took my hand.

  “Charlie, I know how awful everything has been. It seems like forever, these past few weeks. But I woke up this morning and everything seemed to have changed …”

  “I know exactly what you mean, Caro. I felt the same way last night—”

  “Oh, I’m so glad! I’m so very glad, Charlie.” A tear escaped and she wiped it away, never taking her eyes from me. “The world is getting back to normal now. I can feel it. In my heart.”

  I might have blurted out my questions about the photographs right then. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring her down, couldn’t inflict the hurt. She was so happy. She was coming out of the woods. And I understood what Andy Thorne had meant. I didn’t want her to be hurt. I didn’t want her to withdraw into her own quietness, I didn’t want her to leave me, to cut me adrift. Somehow, I really wasn’t sure how it had happened and maybe no one ever quite does, but she’d become that important to me. And with the perversity of human nature, she was even more important now that I’d seen the photographs and my faith in her was crumbling all around me. I looked at her face, felt her squeeze my hand. She could feel that the world was getting back to normal and it showed in her face.