He then had the cheek to raise his pint. “Cheers!”
Bloody effrontery!
OCEANA
Groton, Connecticut
Two weeks later
53
“Oceana, definitely. Max was right.” In the wintry dark of early evening, Jury swept his arm over the vast expanse of what could have been the grounds of a stately home in England, although the gray-gabled house itself was not that large. “You couldn’t possibly call this place ‘417.’” Jury smiled at her. “Hello, Paula.”
Paula Moffit stood frozen in the doorway, staring at him. “Superintendent Jury! What on earth …?”
“May I come in?”
Saying nothing, she stepped back from the door and Jury entered. They stood in a marble foyer, a grand staircase going far up to another level, where the banister branched off to left and right to encircle the second floor. Pocket doors were open to large rooms, one painted and furnished in blue, one in brown; Jury thought sitting room and library, probably.
“How did you …? Why did you …?”
“I have something to tell you and I didn’t want to do it over the phone. You had to get the dreadful news about David that way and I decided to deliver this news in person. It’s not dreadful. Give me a double whisky, Paula, and I’ll tell you a double story.”
Returning to her ordinary composed self, Paula simply said, “Ice?”
“No. A thimbleful or two of water, depending on how good your whisky is.”
“It won’t want water,” she said, starting toward the blue room and motioning for him to follow.
She had handed him a nearly half-full tumbler of whisky and it was the best he’d ever tasted.
“We can’t make tea, but we can make whisky.” Paula had settled down across from him with her own drink. A basket of yarn she shoved into the corner. Needles were sticking out of one of the balls.
Jury smiled. “You knit? Somehow I can’t picture that.”
“I’m no good at it. How’s your whisky?”
“You’re right: it doesn’t want water.”
“Good. Now, what’s the story?”
“It begins in Reno. The woman was one who’d met David in Atlantic City. She worked in a casino. They had an affair. It’s clear to me that she was obsessed with him—”
“But if this was just before Reno, David was engaged to Rebecca …” Her voice trailed off.
“The affair began before that. When he left New York for your house in Tahoe, he broke it off. Or thought he did. This woman, Marguerite, knew his gambling penchant and knew he liked Reno. So she went there looking for a job in a casino and found one—”
“But didn’t she know David was at this point going to marry Rebecca?”
“Of course. But that didn’t stop her. When he went to the Metropole casino, she started in on him again. Ultimately, they had a row and he did finally get through to her. He was going to be married at Christmas.”
“So she shot him.”
“So she shot him. The shooting itself is, of course, conjecture, since she still won’t admit to that. But the rest of the details she was perfectly willing to talk about, although, according to her, he was the one obsessed. There were no witnesses except for a couple who’d overheard the argument in the casino office. But they saw only David come out—or, rather, Danny Morrissey. He’d used this alias. No one saw her. And he didn’t implicate her. Felt guilty about breaking it off, I expect. Too bad. Too, too bad. You would have read about the owner of the casino if you read the paper.”
She frowned. “I don’t think I did. Anyway, I don’t remember him.”
“Leonard Zane.”
“But he’s the owner of the Artemis Club. What has he to do with this?”
“Nothing, strangely enough. But Marguerite Banado—”
Paula looked alarmed, as if it were not her knitting but a basket of asps that sat on the sofa beside her. “My God! Are you saying this woman shot him again?” She frowned. “But wasn’t it a man who stepped up to the cab and shot them both?”
Jury nodded.
“I don’t understand any of this.”
“You might when I tell you the name of the woman was Maggie Benn. Real name, Marguerite Banado.”
“Isn’t this Maggie Benn employed at the Artemis Club?”
Again Jury nodded. “The woman in Reno, Marguerite Banado—the shooter was her father.”
Disbelievingly, she shook her head. “But why would he—?”
Jury told her what Inspector Buhari had told him. A dreadful row. The threat to do it herself. The manipulation, the guilt.
“A policeman. Yet he didn’t check the bullets?”
“She took out the magazine and handed him one. It was fake.”
Paula slumped back. “But the rest were real.”
“Not when he first saw the gun. Buhari was horribly misguided, but he was a cop and no fool. When she first handed him the gun, he took out all of the bullets and saw they were all dummies. ‘See, Papa, it’s just a joke.’ You have no idea how incredibly plausible this woman is. Only then he made the mistake of returning the gun to her. He had to go through airport security that night; he wasn’t about to carry a gun. When he came back—”
“The bullets were real. Oh, my God … but couldn’t he tell?”
“David’s was a head shot. There was no blood. And Rebecca actually moved toward David—when Buhari was getting into the cab. I honestly don’t think he realized he’d killed them until he got back to Kenya and heard about it. And knew she’d tricked him.”
“But then …?”
“Then what? You turn yourself in like a good citizen, you tell the story and no one believes it, and he’d clearly have gotten no help from his daughter.” Jury shrugged. “What would you have done?”
“So it was Marguerite who was really the murderer.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Good Lord, how could it be?”
“It was a conspiracy: Marguerite and Claire Howard.”
When she slowly rose from the sofa, she upset her drink. The heavy glass rolled a bit, but, given its weight, it stopped. The liquid, what was left, snaked over the rosewood. Jury put a handkerchief over it.
All of the color drained from Paula Moffit’s face. Jury feared she might faint. When she said the name, it came out on a whisper of breath. “Claire? She was Rebecca’s mother. Her mother. It’s impossible!”
“The Greeks should have written this one, Paula. I’ve never seen such betrayal. You’re right, it does sound impossible.”
He told her about the show in Nairobi of Masego Abasi’s works, about Claire Howard having been the one to purchase the painting that hung in Rebecca and David’s flat. He took a copy of the picture from his inner pocket and passed it to her. “Marguerite and Claire.”
“They must both … were they insane?” The picture shook in her hand.
Jury shrugged. “They wanted the money.”
She looked at him, puzzled, as if wondering how money got into this.
“David’s, that is your family’s, which would have gone to Rebecca since his death preceded hers. The thought being that Rebecca’s money would go to her next of kin. Claire Howard. She would have to inherit, or it would all be for nothing. They would split the take.”
Paula said nothing. For a good five minutes she just sat and looked into the fire. Then she rose, adjusted the silver-buckled belt at her waist and said, “I’ll see if my cook’s finished whatever he’s making.”
Jury started to get up, but she stiff-armed him. “You don’t think for a moment that after you’ve traveled all the way from London you’ll be eating at the Comfort Inn. Here—” She walked over to a sideboard, picked up a decanter and returned to the coffee table, where she set down the fancy bottle with the horse and jockey on top. “Help yourself. I’ll be right back.”
The dining room was huge, velvet-draped, and elegant. A dozen chairs were pulled up to the oval table on which sa
t a huge bowl of cyclamen and roses, light playing over it from the candlesticks and the chandelier.
“My God,” said Jury, “are we going to sit top and bottom and yell at each other as in one of those BBC programs clearly aimed at Americans?”
“You’re like Max,” she said, her hand on the back of one of the chairs the two were clearly meant to occupy at the end of the table nearest the kitchen. Two places had been set, one at the end, one beside it.
“Like Max?” Jury held up his glass. “One more of these and I’ll be Max.”
“Max could neither ask nor answer a question without embroidering upon it, going, as we used to say over here, all the way around Robin Hood’s barn. You may sit at the head; I’ll sit here.”
He pulled out the chair on which her hand rested and she sat down. He pulled out his own at the head. “This is wonderful. It’s so damned elaborate.”
“Of course it is; it’s Oceana. Would you prefer trays in front of the TV?”
The door between kitchen and dining room swung open and a pretty maid appeared. Or server, he supposed.
“Penny is my maid. But she kindly agreed to put on her other hat and wait at table.”
Penny’s hand went to her hair as if checking on the hat. She giggled. “Oh, madam. Charlie wants to know if you’d like vichyssoisse or fruit à la ménage.”
Jury said, “Vichyssoisse, as it’s only one word.”
“For both of us,” said Paula. “What had Charlie planned for the main course?”
“It’s one of his famous rag-outs.”
Paula smiled. “Rag-oo, Penny.”
“I’ll have the rag-out.” Jury smiled at her.
Penny giggled again. “Oh, sir.” She whisked herself off.
“My cook is Hungarian and he loves surprise guests because then he can wail that we have ‘not any decent food in the house, madame.’
“‘You mean no foie gras, no truffles, no pheasant? Escargots?’ I say to him.
“He says, ‘I don’t mean I can’t throw something together, of course.’”
“Well,” said Jury, “he sure as hell threw together something great. What is it?”
“It’s a stew. He has many versions.”
As good as at Ardry End. The wine he would have liked to run by Harry Johnson. It was poured by Penny.
“I thought you said your staff had gone home.”
“The cook’s always here. Penny had her coat and scarf on and was nearly out the door when she happened to see you. Coat off, scarf unwound. Do you always have that effect on women?”
Jury laughed. “Not that I’m aware of.”
They ate in silence for a few moments, and then Jury said, “David’s alleged gambling system, that fascinates me. The incompleteness theorem, or one of them. That some truths are impossible to prove. No, that’s not right. It’s more that some truths are not universally provable, meaning they’re true sometimes, but not at others.”
“That makes no sense.”
“I’m not putting it right. And we’re talking about mathematics, so a context is hard to demonstrate. But say I make the statement, ‘All is illusion.’ You can neither prove nor disprove that, since illusion is part of the all—so illusion would be illusory.”
“It sounds like a house of mirrors.”
“In some crude way, it is. What I don’t get is how this could evolve into a system for playing twenty-one. Unless …” Jury looked at her and smiled. “Unless he wasn’t playing cards, he was playing people.”
Paula frowned, and then she laughed. She actually clapped her hands. “I’m slightly drunk. So are you. Let’s get drunker. Let’s have brandy. Penny!”
Penny came running.
They drank tiny cups of espresso and bigger snifters of brandy out on the enclosed patio at the back of the house, where the water’s dash against rock was closer.
Jury looked at the night sky, squinting. “Is that a gibbous moon, Paula?”
“Yes, I believe it is.”
Silence as they sipped their coffee.
“Where’s your suitcase?” asked Paula, looking around as if it had been left out here.
“At the motel. The Moonrise.”
Paula gagged. “That shambles. Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll send Charlie to get it.”
“I’m staying here?”
She sighed. “Of course you are. I’ll have Penny get a room ready.”
“Too much trouble.”
“It is not.”
“Oh, yes, it is, for the room I want.” Jury looked across the silvery grass to a huge oak tree and up to its top where light reflected off glass.
Paula laughed. “You can’t—it’s too cold. There’s electricity, but—really, you can’t!”
“Oh, yes, I can.” He was already off the patio.
She called after him. “Turn on the heater!”
It was an easier climb now than it had been for David as a child. A wood stair circled the big tree to the platform near the top.
The first thing he did was switch on an old electric fire; he watched the fake flames flare up. An old turntable stood on a washstand, a collection of vinyl records in their faded sleeves beside it. Willie Nelson. Good grief, Willie—all the girls you and Julio ever loved before, Carole-anne’s favorite. He put a record on and Willie blared out: This land is your land …
My God, thought Jury, divesting himself of his jacket, which he tossed over a rumpled chair, I could be back in my own flat in Islington.
Then, gazing at the ceiling, he thought, no I couldn’t.
… from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters … Yes, there were stars over London, and a moon and maybe the lapping of the Thames against the bank, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen the light splinter and spill over London as it did over this glass-ceilinged tree house.
He had toed off his shoes and flopped down on the bed. He wondered if David had lain here thinking similar thoughts to the sound of Willie’s guitar.
Jury felt a jolt so hard he thought the tree must have moved. But it wasn’t the tree; it was more like his heart: Godammit, David, why did you have to come to effing London? Why couldn’t you just have stayed in the good old USA?
This land was made for you and me.
Jury thought about those moments in Covent Garden with the telescope, looking at Uranus and the night sky. He muttered, “’Night, David,” as a light faded and he looked for the gibbous moon. But it had slipped out of sight, behind a cloud, as all moons do, eventually.
The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mysteries) Page 34