Invitation to Murder

by Zenith Brown

  Fish Finlay put the phone down and stood with his hand on it for an instant, picked up the phone book then and turned to the yellow pages. The third caterer he called was the one who had served the Randolphs’ party. It was the caterer’s daughter answering.

  “I think I know who you want,” she said at last. “If there’s anything wrong you’d better speak to my father.” She was obviously disturbed.

  “Not a thing,” Fish said. “It’s entirely personal. I just want his name and address.”

  She hesitated. “His name’s François Beyle,” she said. “He lives at a rooming house on Thames Street . . . the Azores. We don’t have a phone for him.”

  “Thanks.”

  He warmed up the coffee Jenny had made for him and cooked some bacon and eggs. He was putting his dishes in the sink when the phone rang again.

  “This is long-distance,” the operator said. “Do you want me to try Hubbard 2-6200 for you again?”

  “Try what?” Fish asked blindly.

  “Is this 6229?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, somebody there called that number last night.”

  Fish sharpened to attention.

  “Whose number is it?”

  “We’re not allowed to give that information.”

  “Look.” He spoke as amiably as he could manage. “I was on a big party last night. Would you mind telling me who I called this time?”

  The operator laughed. “You called the United States Government Collector of Customs, Port of Boston, Mass. Brother, you musta been blind!” She laughed again. “I’ll just cancel it, okay?”

  “Thanks,” Fish said. There was obviously some mistake, but it was too late to tell her so. He glanced ironically at himself in the mirror as he put the phone down. Detective Finlay. He grinned, went out into the kitchen for another cup of coffee and came back into the living-room with it. The tumbled quilt was still where Jenny had pushed it, the imprint of her dark head still on the cushion, the shadowy sense of her presence there weaving a soft web of enchantment around him, until, as he put his cup on the table and reached down to touch the cushion, the alarm clock rang stridently from the table by his bed. He straightened up.

  “Okay. You don’t have to remind me. I haven’t forgotten. I’m still the Maloneys’ hired hand.”

  He picked up the quilt, took it into the bedroom, shut off the alarm and put the quilt on the other bed. He turned on the radio to see if he could get the local news, but a gust of wind slammed the bathroom door so that he didn’t hear the bulletin that was released while he was under the shower.

  CHAPTER : 11

  A shaft of sunlight shooting amethyst and gold across the dark wall of the purple beeches caught Jenny’s new car in a dazzle of chromium and shining blue. She stopped outside the porte-cochere an instant, pride and pleasure chasing away the shadows she’d brought with her from the stable across the courtyard.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  She took a step to see the gleaming side of it, and stopped short, the shine in her eyes fading. The white-walled tire of the right front wheel had bitten a hole in the perfect turf that edged the scallop-shell drive. She caught her breath sharply.

  A childhood fear from her mother’s long-standing quarrel with Mr. Vranek flashed vividly back to her. The chewed-up turf was one of the things they’d battled most bitterly about. She went over and looked at it. It was an accident, but after the spray of butterfly orchids. . . .

  “I should have put it in the stable,” she thought unhappily. But Peter had already been hard to manage and she didn’t want to be alone there in the dark with him then, any more than she wanted now to be responsible for setting off another incident in the long-drawn battle between her mother and the greenhouse. So far her mother hadn’t even mentioned the gardeners.

  “I’d better go explain to him right after breakfast.”

  She picked up the skirt of her robe and wiped off the condensed salty moisture on the door frame, leaning over then to look at the speedometer. It was her first car and last night the figures had a special charm in the special excitement of waiting for the first thousand miles. They read “999.9,” and they wouldn’t be all nines again for nine thousand miles, she’d thought, with Peter turned moody and unattractive, hardly waiting for her to switch off the engine before he was out. She looked at her nines again and her face fell abruptly. The speedometer read “1034.7.”

  She straightened up, flashing her head around to the rut her wheel had chewed in the edge of the turf. “Somebody took my car.” They’d taken it 34.8 miles and cut the turf besides. She slipped across the leather seat and tried the brake. It was jammed on, so tight she could hardly release it. She sat there soberly a moment. “That’s very funny,” she thought. “I bet it was that Peter.” She was angry then. “He has no right to take my car.”

  She glanced up at her mother’s windows, flaming red-gold in the rising sun. In the windows between the bulging turrets where the sun hadn’t struck there were lines of pale cold yellow through the closed slats of the Venetian blinds. Her anger changed to sudden sharp anxiety. She slipped out across the sea-moist leather seat, closing the door softly, and hurried back under the porte-cochere to the porch. Halfway there she remembered that the front door of Enniskerry was locked and chain-bolted, and hurried around the verandah up the back stairs the way she’d come down. She put her hand out to open the iron grille at her windows and stopped. Her mother’s lights were false cold yellow at the front end of the porch, more apparent in the pearly softness of the young day still clinging under the broad overhang of the roof where the searching sun hadn’t yet found it. The windows between, the empty guest room, Nikki’s bedroom, were quiet the way windows of empty rooms and rooms where people are asleep are quiet.

  And her mother hated bright light. Unless. . . . It seemed a long time ago that Polly Randolph had left the table to go persuade Dodo to go upstairs, but it hadn’t been, actually, and maybe her mother wasn’t . . . in any shape to turn the lights off.

  She let the grille go and tiptoed softly along the heavy woven-hemp carpet on the verandah floor. Part of the light came through the windows of Nikki’s dressing-room, through the door there open into her mother’s bedroom. She got to it and stopped short. Her mother was crying. She caught her breath. She’d never heard her mother cry before, and never heard anybody cry that way, the edges flaring up torn off in a sudden frenzy that was almost like the howl of some creature beyond the pitch of nervous endurance. She took a swift step forward and froze stiffly where she was.

  Nikki’s voice came through the window. He was with her, trying tenderly to comfort her. His voice was raised only for her to hear it above the storm of her own.

  “. . . Won’t let them take you, dearest. There’s nothing wrong with your mind. I don’t know why the doctor thinks you need observation.”

  Jenny had started to slip back, her cheeks hot at seeming to spy. She stopped again.

  Observation?

  “He just spoke to me a moment, but I saw him in Randolph’s library talking to Reeves.”

  Mr. Reeves? Jenny hadn’t known he was at the Randolphs’. “Can they all be trying to use Jennifer against you some way, dearest? Is that why this fellow Finlay’s up here? He’s had her over there all night with him in the stable. He can’t be making love to the child. . . . Not unless he’s an unmitigated swine, my darling.”

  Jenny moved quietly away from the window, her jaw tight, her eyes ominous pitch-black.

  And I thought for a minute he was being so sweet to her.

  The tender flypaper poison of his voice seeping through her mother’s nerve-wracked sobbing infuriated her. She slipped back and yanked open her iron grille, pushed the screen in and closed them both, and stood there trembling in her own protected room. What good were locks and bars, she thought passionately. That’s not the way he does it. He hasn’t the guts. He gets crazy women to take the blame. Snaky-sweet, driving her mother crazy, too. . . .
r />   It was a jumble of incoherence, but she knew exactly what she meant. She flashed over to her dressing table, drew her lipstick across her mouth and ran her comb through her hair, and went quickly to the door, pausing to take a deep breath and relax so he wouldn’t see she was angry. She slipped out into the hall, where the sun was sending thick shafts of jeweled light through the Tiffany window around the flattened central turrets, and stopped, her heart in her mouth, as she heard a stealthy whisper of feet in the narrow backstairs passage beyond the door next to her own, standing a little ajar. She turned and pulled it open, startled, but in a different way, at the equally startled and startling figure of Elsa, the maid, her big bony frame wrapped in an old padded-silk dressing gown, her hair tied in a blue net.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, miss. I was going down. . . .” She turned to creep back up again.

  Jenny stepped into the passage and drew the door to. “What’s the matter, Elsa? Don’t you feel well?”

  “It’s nothing, miss.” She stopped, clutching at the neck of her robe. “It’s . . . just sometimes I can’t stand it . . . just not every night. All the noise comes up through the fireplace. I asked him to let me move my room back with the other servants, but he said she’d be all right pretty soon. He’s so considerate, miss. He won’t let anybody stay up with her. He says it just makes her worse. But he just never gets any rest himself. But he can sleep late in the morning. He just doesn’t know that I never get any rest.”

  She kneaded her big hands desperately. “He says it makes her worse if anybody comes in when she’s like this. And I know it does, because she gets terribly angry. She threw a book at me one night. He’s the only one that can quiet her when she . . . she’s like this. I . . . I just don’t know what to do. I wanted to leave, but he asked me not to, on his account. He needs somebody he can trust not to talk about it.”

  She took another backward step. “I was just going down to get a cup of tea.”

  “All right, go on,” Jenny said quietly. “You go and make me some coffee, would you, while you’re down? You can just put it on my table. And you move into one of the back rooms right now and go to sleep. I’ll tell Moulton, and I’ll speak to Mr. de Gradoff. I’m sure he just doesn’t understand, and now I’m here I can help with my mother. I could always run up and get you, if we needed you.”

  “Oh yes, miss!”

  The torn edge of the woman’s voice reminded her sharply of her mother.

  “Well, that’s the way we’ll do it, and I’ll have my coffee black,” Jenny said. “And maybe we could have some toast, do you think? You just bring your tea upstairs and drink it in your new room.”

  “Oh, thank you, miss.” She smiled back, pathetically grateful, picked up her robe and started down the stairs.

  Jenny watched her a second, and looked up the crooked flight of stairs going to the third floor. “Of course, she believes it. She can’t see the lights, upstairs,” she thought quickly. “And she’s really honest. That’s very good . . . for him.”

  She went out into the hall and glanced up again at the beamed walnut ceiling. The stairway to the third floor was back in the corner turret, winding elegantly around the inner service stairs she’d just come away from. Of course, nobody’d see the lights, unless they were outside, or outside her own room on the porch. Not even Mrs. Emlyn or Peter in the guest rooms just to the right on this floor. The bulging turret between her mother’s big dressing-room and her bath would cut them off. Nor could anyone hear. The doors of Enniskerry were solid walnut. Not much came through them. Their windows would be open, but the roar of the sea would swallow the sound from her mother’s room, except up the fireplace flue to Elsa’s room.

  She went quickly round the spindled balcony rail and stopped at her mother’s door an instant before she knocked, straightenening up and relaxing, arranging her face into an inquiring blank for whatever appeared. She was aware instantly of a sharply different quality of sound or silence through the polished door as she knocked again.

  “Oh, gosh, Nikki, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here. I just saw Mother’s light.”

  He was there abruptly, not pleased, opening the door sharply, prepared to rebuke an interloper, Elsa probably, and Jenny there in her blue wool robe and pajamas was clearly not who he expected to see. It took an instant for his arrogant disapprobation to dissolve and reassort itself in the face of Jenny’s apparent surprise and apology. He had on a heavy black silk knee-length dressing gown, his silk pajama legs only a little rumpled. The glaring lights in the room behind him were gone.

  “What is it, Jennifer?”

  He opened the door a little wider, not arrogant, merely a man whose privacy had been disturbed by an intrusive stepdaughter old enough to know better.

  It was so genuine that Jenny drew back, unsure.

  “I’m terribly sorry. I . . . I saw my mother’s light. I wanted to—”

  “I’m afraid she’s trying to get some rest, my dear. Later, if—”

  “No. Let her come in, Nikki.”

  Jenny heard her mother’s voice suddenly sharp. The old childhood pattern was before her. “What-does-she-want-now?” it demanded, with an overtone of “You-let-me-talk-to-her, I’ll-see-that-she-does-as-she’s-told.” It was there so clearly, and with it the rest of the pattern, that the old agonizing fear of her mother’s anger dredged blindly up out of the past, the way the rut in the turf had dredged up the fear of another row with the gardeners. For a moment it held her in its irrational grip, erasing all the years in between, until she caught herself shrinking under de Gradoff’s intent blue eyes. He stepped back and opened the door, confident again in some odd way she could instantly sense, aware he’d seen she was diminished and that her mother was antagonistic to her again. She swallowed and slipped past him into the soft peach-shaded light of the room, that didn’t need light, now the day was all around them.

  Her mother was sitting bolt upright against the peach faille bedrest, her eyes almost glittering bright through the reddened lids and hollow circles under them, her mouth hard, her cheekbones splotched with anger.

  She believes him. She believes I’m against her. Jenny could see it instantly. She braced herself and went over to the side of the bed. It was littered with picture and fashion magazines. A couple of novels, the pages crumpled, were caught under the peach velvet comforter kicked down to the blanket rail at the foot of the four-poster bed.

  “Mother, I’ve been over at the stable,” she said simply, and saw her mother’s taut fingers jerk the rumpled edge of the peach linen sheet. “Nikki’s told you about Polly, hasn’t he?”

  The freezing awareness of her mistake clutched her even before she felt the small vivid mushroom of silence that exploded in the room around her. Nikki’s voice was the flash of light coming instantly with it. “Polly? Do you mean Polly Randolph? What about her? What should I know about her?”

  She steadied herself against the side of the bed. A light flashed too in the recesses of her own dark conviction. He knows. But her mother didn’t. She was waiting, taut, but not because of Polly.

  “She’s dead, Mother. She was drowned, tonight. Mrs. . . . Mrs. Winton pushed her off the fishing platform at the Randolphs’.”

  “Oh, no!” Her mother’s lips framed it without sound. The angry splotches on her cheekbones vanished, leaving them bloodless white. “Not Helen Winton . . .” she whispered. “Oh, Jenny . . . she wouldn’t!”

  “Mr. Finlay saw her, Mother. We were taking some food down to eat on the steps. He saw her from up the bank, and she told us both she did it. I . . . I thought Nikki knew.”

  She forced herself to stop and turn and look at him, standing there, watching her so intently that his eyes did not react to her turning for an instant. Then he was frowning, not understanding why she thought he knew.

  “Because one of the men who took her up was talking to you when you were waiting at the gate for your car. That’s why I thought you knew. I saw you all from the nursery window. They’ve taken
her to Shepherd’s Vale, Mother.”

  “Oh, how awful.” Dodo covered her face with her hands and bent her head forward. “Poor, poor creatures,” she whispered.

  “And I went over to Mr. Finlay’s. I thought he was back. I thought he’d know whether they’d . . . found her. But he wasn’t home, and I thought I’d wait, he wouldn’t be awfully long, and he’d want some coffee. So I made him some, but he didn’t come and I went to sleep on his sofa. He didn’t get there until just a few minutes ago. And I didn’t stop to think how it would . . . upset him, to find me there. . . . when he was already dreadfully upset, about Polly. But you’ll explain to him for me, Mother, won’t you? Because it’s sort of . . . embarrassing.”

  “Silly, darling,” her mother said gently. “Forget it. Fish isn’t the kind of person that—”

  She broke off, a faint flush seeping into her drawn white face.

  “He’ll understand perfectly,” de Gradoff said. Dodo flashed him a grateful glance that Jenny saw wiped out everything he’d said about Fish Finlay himself.

  “He’s hardly likely to take advantage of a thing of the sort,” de Gradoff added. His manner implied that he easily might, and Jenny felt her cheeks tingle.

  “It’s just if anybody else saw me, is what I mean, Mother,” she said quietly. “They haven’t found Polly yet.”

  She blinked back the tears that had sprung into her eyes.

  “I just feel so awful about it,” she said unsteadily. “What . . . what’ll they do with—”

  “With Skunky’s mother?”

  It was curious for her own mother to put it that way, and somehow it erased all the dregs of the old pattern from her mind.

  “They’ll keep her at Shepherd’s Vale, Jenny. Under . . . observation.”

  Jenny felt her voice tighten as she said it and saw the color seep out of her lips, leaving a white line around them as her eyes moved, drawn in a sudden panic past Jenny to her husband, her fingers twitching the hem of the sheet.

  “You mustn’t let it upset you, Dodo, dearest.”