God Save the Mark

by Donald E. Westlake

  I had meandered this far in my thinking when the doorbell suddenly shrilled and I leaped at once to attention. Could this be them? Could they have found out—perhaps by torturing Gertie—that I was here, and had they returned to get me?

  My initial impulse was to hide in the nearest closet or under the nearest bed, shut my eyes, and wait for them to go away. In fact, I even took a quick tiptoeing step toward the rear of the apartment before I remembered that I wanted to see them, that I’d just been straining my brain to think of a way to find them. If now they had come to me, so much the better.

  At least that’s what I told myself, while glancing in quick panic around the room for some sort of weapon; after all, I was out to capture them, not to let them capture me.

  Atop the television set in one corner of the living room was a lamp of such monumental ugliness as to be magnificently impressive, like Chicago. Its porcelain base represented an endless chain of Cupids, in white and pink and gold, doing things together. It may all have been very obscene, there was no real way to be sure. At any rate, I hurried over and removed this monstrosity’s fringed shade, pulled its cord from the wall plug, and hefted the lamp in my right hand, finding it pleasingly weighty. Holding this weapon of love behind my back I went over and opened the door, ready to start smashing Cupids into every face I saw.

  The gray-haired, full-jowled, black-suited minister on the threshold smiled sweetly upon me and said, in a soft and gentle voice, “Good afternoon to you, my dear sir. Would Miss Gertrude Divine be at home?”

  Was the lamp really out of sight? Flustered, jamming the lamp into the small of my back, I said, “Well, no, she isn’t. She had to, uh, go out for a while. I don’t know exactly when she’ll be back.”

  “Ah, well,” he said, and sighed, and transferred the brown paper package from his right arm to his left. “I’ll try again another time,” he said. “My apologies for having intruded.”

  Anything might have relevance, anything at all, so I said, “Could you tell me what it was about?”

  “Mr. Grierson’s Bible,” he said. “Perhaps I could come back tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I’m not sure she’ll be here,” I said. “What do you mean, Mr. Grierson’s Bible?”

  “The Bible he ordered, the inscribed Bible.”

  So Uncle Matt, the famous boulevardier and con man, had gotten religion toward the end. It was small of me, I know, but I found myself taking a nasty little pleasure in the thought of the supremely confident confidence man losing some of that confidence as he saw the end approaching.

  I think I managed to hide this unworthy pleasure as I said, “I’m Mr. Grierson’s nephew, maybe I could help.”

  “Ah, are you?” His smile of pleasure was tinged with sadness as he said, “I am most happy to meet you, sir, though one could wish it were under happier circumstances. I am the Reverend Willis Marquand.”

  “How do you do? I’m Fredric Fitch. Won’t you, uh, won’t you come in?”

  “If you’re sure I’m not disturbing you?”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  Reverend Marquand noticed the lamp as I was closing the door. I held it up and laughed foolishly and said, “Just putting this up when you rang.” I went over and put it back in its place on the television set, then offered Reverend Marquand a seat.

  When we were both seated, he said, “A real loss, your uncle. A fine man.”

  “You knew him well?”

  “Only telephonically, I’m afraid. We chatted awhile when he phoned the Institute to order the Bible.” He patted the brown paper package, now resting on the sofa beside him.

  “Is that it?”

  “Would you care to see it? It’s our finest model, and really beautiful. We’re all quite proud of it.”

  He removed the wrappings and showed it to me, and it was impressive in much the same way as the lamp, and with the same color scheme. It was bound in white leatherette with an ornate gilt cross on the front and ornate gilt lettering on the spine. The page edges were all gilt, and gold and red ribbons were available to mark one’s place. Inside, intricately illuminated letters were the rule, ornate brightly colored illustrations on heavy glossy paper were scattered throughout, and much of the dialogue was in red. The first page was inscribed in flowing gilt script:

  To Dearest Gertrude,

  with all my love forever

  Whither Thou Goest, I Will Go

  Ruth 1:16

  Matthew Grierson

  Now, this was odd. I could visualize Uncle Matt turning to religion himself in his old age, particularly knowing he was suffering from terminal cancer, but that he or anybody else would consider a gold and white leatherette Bible the right gift for Gertie Divine—despite her name—was hard to believe. There was more here than met the eye.

  Then I understood. This was a message of some kind, a clue that Gertie would understand. A clue to what?

  Well, maybe three hundred thousand dollars wasn’t all there was to it. After all, Brazil was where Uncle Matt made his money, and Brazil is a great new raw nation, its wealth hardly tapped. Maybe there was more, much more, and the three hundred thousand was only the visible part of the iceberg, and the clue to the rest of it was somehow here in this Bible.

  Of course! Why else give the three hundred thousand to a perfect stranger, even if he is technically a relative? Because it’s chicken feed, because the really big money is tied up somewhere else.

  That’s why Uncle Matt sent Gertie to me. He was leaving it up to her whether she would tell me about the rest of it or not. The three hundred thousand was a kind of test, to see if I was worthy of all of it. And Gertie had been kidnapped by people intent on forcing the information out of her.

  I said, “You’re delivering this, is that it?”

  “Well—” He smiled in some embarrassment. “There is the question of payment. Your uncle was to have sent us a check, but unfortunately he passed on before—”

  “Well, how much is it?”

  “Thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents.”

  “I’ll write you a check,” I said. I’d brought along my checkbook when I’d first left home, not knowing how long I’d be gone, but this was the first time I’d had to use it so far.

  Reverend Marquand loaned me a pen and said, “Just make it out to Dear Hearts Institute.”

  I wrote out the check and gave it to him, and he seemed ready to settle down, minister-like, and discuss my own religious affiliations with me at some length. I begged off, saying I did have some work to get done, and he was very good about it, leaving at once and letting me get to the job of studying the Bible.

  I spent nearly an hour at it, and got nowhere. How was this Bible different from all other Bibles? I couldn’t figure it out. But of course Gertie was the one the message was for, and I had no doubt it would be meaningful to her in one glance.

  Finally I had to give it up. I hid the Bible in the oven, put it completely out of my mind, and went back to the train of thought I’d been on when the Reverend Marquand had arrived, which had been the decision that the only fact of which I could be at all sure was the murder of Uncle Matt. Starting from there, and with the luck of a Daily Double winner, maybe I could eventually find some other facts about which to be sure.

  Very well. I left a note for Gertie, telling her I’d phone in from time to time just in case she should escape from her captors, and went out to look up the murder reports in the newspapers at the library.

  The Lone Researcher was on the trail.

  15

  THE Daily News found my Uncle Matt dull, but didn’t like to say so. He was, after all, a semi-mysterious old demi-millionaire with an oddball will and a weird history and a photogenic ex-stripper nurse, and as if that weren’t enough, he’d also been murdered in his luxury penthouse apartment on Central Park South and the murderer was still at large. It was clear the News felt it should have a field day with Uncle Matt, and yet somehow it just couldn’t seem to get a good grip on him. Every item that started
out to be a story about Uncle Matt’s murder ultimately wound up being a story about something else instead, usually the Collier brothers, with whom my uncle, so far as I could tell, had shared no characteristics at all, other than being dead, having money and belonging to the white race.

  Still, the Daily News was the only game in town. The Times had given the story one bare useless item the day after the murder, and the other papers had been almost as bad. Only the News had persisted in follow-up stories, I suppose out of a sense of noblesse oblige.

  Ah, well. Intermixed with the references to Jack London and Peaches Browning (don’t ask me how they did it) I did find the facts of the case, such as they were, and copied them laboriously into the notebook I’d just bought for the purpose.

  Uncle Matt had been murdered the night of Monday, May 8, seventeen days ago. Gertie had gone out to a movie that evening with a friend identified as one Gus Ricovic and hadn’t returned to the apartment until one-thirty in the morning, at which time she discovered the body and phoned the police. The actual murder was assumed to have taken place somewhere between ten and eleven. Death had resulted from a single blow to the back of the head made by some blunt instrument, not found on the premises nor turned up in the subsequent investigation. There was no sign of forcible entry into the apartment, nor was there any indication of a fight or any other struggle. So far as Gertie knew (or at least so far as she had told the police and reporters), Uncle Matt hadn’t expected any visitors that evening.

  The Daily News was so taken with the notion of someone murdering a man who’s expected to die momentarily from cancer anyway that they even interviewed Uncle Matt’s doctor, one Lucius Osbertson, who from his manner in the interview I took to be both rotund and orotund; in the spaces between the lines Dr. Osbertson could faintly be heard lamenting the loss of a steady source of fees.

  The follow-up stories added little. The police appeared to be wandering dispiritedly in an ever-diminishing spiral, like a band of defeatist Indians who’ve lost their warpath. Gertie came in for a lot of attention, with photos and interviews and her show-biz biography. Gus Ricovic was never mentioned at all after the initial story. Here and there references were made to the strange will Uncle Matt was supposed to have left behind, but of course its details had not as yet been made public, so there were no references to me, and by the time I would have been available for the spotlight the story was as dead as Uncle Matt. By the sixth day after the murder, in fact, even the Daily News had nothing left to say about it any more.

  When I left the newspaper library, my new notebook bristling with the facts in the case, it was five o’clock, the height of that daily self-torture known as the rush hour. I was on 43rd Street west of Tenth Avenue and decided it would be saner to walk than to try to find a cab or squeeze myself aboard a Ninth Avenue bus, so walk is what I did. It was probably also quicker; I made it, walking at a leisurely pace, in twenty-five minutes, and so far as I could tell I wasn’t shot at once.

  I had thought at first, while in the library, of going back to Gertie’s place, of maybe using that as my base of operations, but then it seemed to me that Gertie might be forced into admitting that I’d been there, and in that case her kidnappers would naturally stake the place out on the assumption that I’d be back. After that I’d considered staying at a hotel, but the idea of signing a false name to a hotel register while a desk clerk stood directly in front of me and looked at me was far too nerve-racking to consider. As to staying with some friend, my friends were too few and precious for me to want to involve any of them in kidnappings and murder attempts, not to mention the fact that God alone knew if I could trust any of them.

  When all was said and done, there was only one place I could go and that place was home. My own apartment. Surely no one would expect to find me in my own apartment, so it was unlikely that anyone would be looking for me there, and that meant I could expect to be at least as safe there as anywhere else in the world. And a good deal more comfortable; I could change my suit, I could sleep in my own bed, I could begin to lead again at least some small remnant of my former life.

  Thus went my thinking, and I could find no flaws in it. Still and all, as I approached my own block my feet did begin to drag a little, my shoulders to hunch, and the small of my back just slightly to itch. I found myself peering into every parked car, and flinching away from every moving one. I alternately stared into the faces of pedestrians coming the other way or ducked my own face behind my hand, neither tactic being particularly brilliant since I left in my wake a long line of immobile pedestrians standing flat-footed on the sidewalk and staring after me. As a result, my return was not entirely as unobtrusive as I had hoped it might be.

  Nevertheless, I came to my own building without incident, and entered, and found my mailbox filled to overflowing. Actually overflowing; letters were sticking out of the slot above the door like darts out of a dartboard. When I unlocked the little door it sprang open with a sound like phong!, only faster, and a whole wad of mail burst out and scattered all over the floor.

  I filled my jacket pockets with letters, held another stack in my left hand, and went on upstairs. As I reached the second-floor landing, the door there opened, Wilkins appeared, and the two of us faced each other for the first time since Gertie had thrown him—and his suitcase—out of my apartment. Wilkins raised his ink-stained hand, pointed a rigid ink-stained finger at me, and said, icily, “Just you wait.” Then he snapped the door shut again.

  I hesitated there on the landing, wanting to knock on that slammed door and see if I could make it up to Wilkins somehow, because after all I did truly owe him an apology. The very worst that could be said of the man was that he was deluded, and if I had come perilously close to entering his delusion that was my fault, not his. And I did have more money now than I could possibly use, so why not put some of it into the publication of his novel, regardless of whether or not it was any good?

  But there was no time for all that now, so making a mental note to talk to Wilkins when the rest of this was all over, I went on past his door and up the stairs to the third floor and walked into my apartment.

  Where a woman with impossibly red hair, sequined tortoise shell glasses and a mostly-yellow plaid suit leaped up from my reading chair, flung her arms out, and came rushing toward me on spike-heel shoes, beaming and crying, “Darling! I’m here and the answer is yes!”

  16

  I DIDN’T even know what the question was. Quickly I side-stepped the embrace, ran around the sofa, and with a little distance between us said, “What now? What’s all this?”

  She had turned, like the bull still after the cape, and paused on tippy-heel, arms still outflung as she cried, “Darling, don’t you recognize me? Have I changed so much?”

  Was there really something familiar about her, or was it merely the old suggestibility at work again? Taking no chances, I said, “Madam, I have never seen you before in my life. Explain yourself. What are you doing here?”

  “Darling, I’m Sharlene!”

  “Sharlene?” I squinted, trying to get the picture. There had been a Sharlene back in high school, a shy little girl I’d managed to go steady with for a while, a wistful ephemeral little thing who’d had it in her head she wanted to be a poetess. Most of the kids in school had called her Emily Dickinson, which she had taken as a compliment.

  “Sharlene Kester!” yelled this garden-club monstrosity, giving in truth the full name of that frail girl-child.

  “You?” In my bafflement I actually pointed at her. “You’re Emily Dickinson?”

  “You remembered!” The thought so enraptured her that she charged me again, arms outstretched as though she were doing her impression of a Flying Fortress, and it was only the nimblest of footwork that enabled me to keep the sofa between us.

  I shouted, “Wait a minute, wait a minute!” I held up my hand like a traffic cop.

  Amazingly enough, she stopped. Tilted somewhat forward, seemingly ready to leap into action again at any
instant, she inquired, “Darling, what is it? I’m here, I’m yours, the answer is yes! Why don’t you take me?”

  “Answer?” I asked. “Answer to what?”

  “Your letter!” she cried. “That beautiful beautiful letter!”

  “What letter? I didn’t write you any letter.”

  “The letter from camp. I know how long it’s been, believe me I know, but you told me to take my time, to answer only when I was sure, and now I’m sure. The answer is yes!”

  My mind was empty. I said, in bafflement, “Camp?”

  “Boy Scout camp!” Then, abruptly, the manic look on her face switched to something much sterner, and in a quick cold voice she said, “You aren’t going to say you didn’t write that letter.”

  Then I remembered. The summer I was fifteen I had spent two weeks in a Boy Scout camp, two of the most disastrous weeks of my life; of all the gear I’d taken to camp with me, I’d returned with nothing but my left sneaker, and it without its laces. That was also the year I’d been going steady with Sharlene Kester, and in a fit of depression while at camp I had written her a letter; yes, I had. But what the letter had said I could no longer remember at all.

  Nor could I understand why, sixteen years later, Sharlene—could this gaily daubed hippo really be Sharlene?— why she should out of a clear blue sky decide to answer that letter.

  Unless she’d heard about the inheritance. Eh? Eh?

  While I was wasting time thinking, Sharlene was still talking. She was saying, “Just let me tell you something, Fred Fitch. You remember my Uncle Mortimer, who used to be assistant district attorney back home? Well, he’s a judge now, and I showed him your letter, and he says it’s a clear proposal of marriage, and it’ll stand up in any court in the United States. And he told me, if you’ve gone big-city and think you’re going to trifle with me, he told me he’ll handle the whole thing himself, and you’ll be slapped with a breach of promise suit just faster than you can think, so you’d better be careful what you say to me. Now. Do you remember that letter or don’t you?”