The Valentine Estate

by Stanley Ellin

  ‘Marty McClure’s killing, what else? He found out that over the last few months you borrowed thirty thousand dollars from Marty. He has an idea that when Marty got nasty about getting his money back you might have knocked him off.’

  ‘That’s insane!’

  ‘Not from his angle, Joe. He thinks probably the Boston police aren’t on to you yet, but when they are they’ll find you’re as much a respectable real estate dealer as Marty was a respectable hotel owner. Very moral guy, Greenberger. He’d give his right arm up to here just to hear me say I was on the spot when you threatened to get McClure. Then he could put you on trial down there and clear the whole mess off his books.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ Prendergast said. ‘It would be perjury and you know it.’

  ‘Sure. But I’m a hard case, Joe, and you know it.’

  Prendergast’s prim façade cracked wide open. His eyes gleamed with fury, his teeth showed. He looked like an enraged ferret.

  ‘You’re a fool, Monte,’ he said venomously. ‘If it’s money you want from me, you ought to know I’m mortgaged up to the ears. Do you think I would have gone to a bastard like McClure if I wasn’t? Anyhow, you’re getting fifty thousand for marrying Elizabeth. Isn’t that enough for you?’

  ‘Plenty. But I get it only if nothing happens to her. That’s all I’m here for. No money. Just to make sure nothing does happen to her.’

  ‘Then you’re barking up the wrong tree. I told you she wasn’t here. I don’t know where she is. Why should I know?’

  ‘Because you’re the one who picked her up at my place in Miami and brought her here.’ Chris raised his voice so that it would carry up to that partly open door at the head of the staircase. ‘Ever notice what a nice-looking girl she really is, Joe? I’ll bet you did. The kind of charity case you could enjoy having around for company when no one else is home.’

  Prendergast gaped at him.

  ‘Are you serious?’ he said incredulously. ‘Do you think I’ve been carrying on with her?’

  ‘I’ll go by the evidence. Let’s take a look.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Prendergast.

  His tone, the assurance with which he led the way upstairs, told Chris even before the door of the brightly lit room was flung open that the room would be empty. It was. Massive bedroom furniture, all of good quality but showing the same signs of hard wear as the house itself, a television set with its sound tuned down but its picture showing cowboys and Indians literally at each other’s throats, and that was it. The closets were empty of anything but clothing, too.

  ‘Where’s her room?’ Chris asked.

  ‘I’m not in the business of leading guided tours through people’s bedrooms. Now why don’t you just apologize for breaking in here like this and get the hell out?’

  ‘Listen to that. And I’ll bet you’re a deacon of the church, too, aren’t you, Joe?’ Chris unbuttoned his jacket and drew it open. He thrust his thumbs into his belt, putting the gun on display. ‘Does this tell you I’m not in a mood for fooling around, Joe?’

  ‘You’re not scaring me, Monte,’ Prendergast said, but it wasn’t convincing. His eyes fixed on the gun, and it was plain that he didn’t like the sight of it. ‘You’re not in McClure’s class. You’re a broken-down tennis bum, that’s all. You wouldn’t have the guts to use that thing.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Chris said pleasantly.

  He pulled out the gun and attached the silencer to its muzzle. Carefully, he took dead aim at Prendergast. The click of the hammer as he cocked it was sharp and clear in the dead silence of the room.

  Prendergast flung out a hand as if to fend off an oncoming bullet.

  ‘Upstairs!’ he gasped. ‘It’s upstairs!’

  ‘All right, let’s take a look.’

  The ceiling of Beth’s room on the second floor slanted down steeply under the pitch of the house’s gables. Aside from a loaded bookshelf, the room might have been a convent cell. Dresser, straight-back chair, bedstead, and night table, those were the furnishings. No pictures and no decorations, unless one counted the glass ashtray on the night table as a decoration.

  On the bed lay an open suitcase, its contents in disorder. But she had brought two suitcases into the house on Fifth Street. The other was nowhere in sight here.

  ‘She came here with you,’ Chris said, ‘then she took one valise, the big one, and headed someplace else. Where?’

  ‘To see her mother.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The woman’s in a private sanatorium,’ Prendergast said wearily. ‘A mental case. She’s been in a bad way for a long time. I arranged to have her taken care of at the best place around.’

  ‘Costs a lot to keep her there, doesn’t it?’

  ‘An arm and a leg. Not that it’s your business, Monte, but that happens to be one big reason I’m in hock.’

  ‘Then why are you doing it?’

  This seemed to rekindle some of the fire in Prendergast.

  ‘Monte, if a simple act of charity –’

  ‘Come on, Joe, don’t try to make noises like a Samaritan. You’re not the type.’

  ‘I’ll admit I’m not. Not ordinarily. But when I saw the misery that girl was going through because she couldn’t provide properly for the one person in the world close to her, I got involved. It was a mistake, but I didn’t know it then. And once the bills started coming in and I saw what I had gotten into, it was too late to back out of it. When I make a promise I keep it.’

  ‘Does that go for Elizabeth, too? What did she promise you in return for this Samaritan deal?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a thing. At least try to get it into your head, Monte, that there is nothing dirty going on between that girl and me.’

  ‘I’m trying. It might be easier if I knew just why you rushed her up here from Miami the way you did. It wasn’t to see her mother, because she didn’t need you for that. What was the reason?’

  ‘The reason was you, Monte. I was supposed to be leaving with the family on a cruise Saturday noon, but just before the boat sailed I got word I had a chance to close a big deal up here. Trouble was, I didn’t know where Elizabeth had filed the papers. When I got in touch with her at your place all she could talk about was the danger she had put you in. She seemed to think some people were out to get her because of that inheritance – maybe that team Warburton told us about – and by moving in with you she found out she had put your neck in the rope too. She said she had decided to stay as far away from you as possible until you were both in London. She insisted I take her with me to Boston, and she could make the London flight from here. There was no talking her out of it. Believe me, I tried.’

  Chris considered this. It was frustrating when the pieces of a puzzle didn’t fit together. It was no better, he discovered, when, as in this case, they seemed to fit together almost too perfectly.

  ‘Your office is right here in the house, isn’t it?’ he said at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s see it.’

  The office was the room beyond the master bedroom on the second floor where through the open door cowboys and Indians could still be seen silently assaulting each other on the television screen. It was an authentic office. Furniture, equipment, banks of filing cabinets – at least, everything looked authentic.

  While Prendergast sat glowering at him from the massive swivel chair behind the desk, Chris drew open a drawer of a filing cabinet, pulled a folder from it at random, and flipped through it. A brochure for a new apartment building, correspondence about the sale of a store, receipts for a house rental. Everything seemingly on the up and up. He picked out another folder. Same story.

  He replaced the folders in the drawer and slammed it shut.

  Prendergast knew when he was a winner.

  ‘If you tell me what you’re trying to find,’ he said with open malice, ‘maybe I can help you find it.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Joe. I’m trying to find what kind of racket you’re really in. But that’s
sort of a secret between you and Elizabeth, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m in real estate, Monte. And that’s no secret.’

  ‘You’re in something else, too, buddy. Something special the cops would like to know about. People who go to Marty McClure for very big money always are.’

  ‘When money is tight –’

  ‘Nice people still don’t go to Marty for it. In fact, they don’t even know Marty was in the business of lending it at fifty per cent interest. And that’s only half of your problem. The other half is convincing me you first got word of Marty’s killing on the radio or TV.’

  ‘I never said I did.’

  ‘Well, you should have, because it’s too late to say it now. You weren’t the least surprised when I told you he was dead, Joe, so you knew about it all right. But you were out of Miami before the cops there even released the story. You really do have an inside track on the news, don’t you? Or maybe you’re just lucky enough to be right on the spot when it happens. Either way, you sure as hell are Marty’s kind of people.’

  Prendergast abruptly reverted to his ferret-like self.

  ‘And what kind of people is a blackmailing, fortune-hunting son of a bitch like you, Monte?’

  ‘That’s a good question, Joe. Where is this sanatorium Elizabeth is visiting at two o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘Across the river in Watertown near the country club there. And she isn’t visiting it at this time of night. She’s put up after visiting hours by this family who lives near there. Dr Francis Degan. He’s in charge of the place. Why? Are you going out there now to put that gun on her because she tried to keep you out of danger?’

  ‘No. Let’s say I’m going out there because I have her interests at heart exactly as much as she has mine at heart. What’s the address?’

  Prendergast took his time digging it out of a notebook. With it, he ungraciously provided travel directions.

  His parting words at the front door went straight to the point.

  ‘Understand this, Monte. You and I have had it with each other. Elizabeth is always welcome here. That doesn’t go for you.’

  ‘It looks like I’m the lucky one,’ said Chris.

  4

  When he left the house he found that the mist had dissolved into a fine rain which drifted down weightlessly. He put up his jacket collar against it and trotted down the block to where he had left the car.

  Prendergast’s directions had been explicit. Cross the Charles by the Boston University Bridge and head west on Route 3 to the suburbs. And all he had gotten out of Prendergast besides these directions was that the man had been investing a lot of money in Beth, some of it McClure’s highly dangerous money. But why, if he wasn’t getting any return on-it in bed? That, Chris thought, was the one Mrs Monte was going to be faced with very soon.

  He saw he was approaching a vast sweep of grounds and some institutional-looking buildings. Boston University it must be. Beth’s Alma Mater for one short year. She and Hilary Talbot – no, it would have been Hilary Prendergast then, a campus queen if ever there was one – used to drive home along this avenue in Hilary’s car every day after school. He might even have passed them in Frenchy’s Cadillac on his way back to the hotel after a match at Longwood, Frenchy, as always, at the wheel. Frenchy didn’t like him to drive, Frenchy didn’t like him to look at girls, Frenchy didn’t like him to do anything but concentrate on the business of tennis. He had been elected to relive Frenchy’s own glorious youth for him, that was the trouble. But maybe he had passed the two girls on their way home from college and looked them over. What were the odds he had ever noticed the tall gawky brunette seated beside the blonde doll? And now, God help him, he was married to her.

  What was he doing out here anyhow, chasing after her in this rainy middle of nowhere at three o’clock in the morning? She had told him where to meet her in London. If all he was interested in was his fifty thousand, he only had to be there at the right time, and that took care of it. Yet here he was, crossing Boston University Bridge and tearing along deserted Route 3, fifteen hundred miles from Miami and three thousand miles from London, because he was getting hooked on this wife of his. He was afraid for her. Even more amazingly, he wanted to be with her, see her, hear her, have her merrily sprawling all over him in bed, biting hard into his naked shoulder and telling him that he tasted underdone but delicious.

  He reflectively rubbed his shoulder. Her teeth had been sharp, the shoulder still hurt a little.

  Next thing comes the patter of little feet.

  ‘Now, son, remember to follow through on the forehand. Just watch how Daddy did it at Wimbledon –’

  ‘Madonna mia,’ Chris silently asked the empty, rainy world beyond the windshield, ‘is this peculiar girl I married already making me as kooky as she is?’

  Route 3 became Mount Auburn Street then Belmont Street, and there were the grounds of what had to be a country club. The Degan address was a few blocks beyond the club, a night light over the door showed the number plainly. A large, handsome house, pseudo-colonial.

  The card in the doorplate said Dr Francis Degan in a neat handwriting. Chris pressed the bell and waited. Finally pressed it again. However tenderly these people felt about Beth, they weren’t going to be happy at being rousted from bed on her account at this hour, but that couldn’t be helped.

  A light went on behind the door. The door opened an inch against its chain.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Dr Degan?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘My name is Christopher Monte. I’m sorry to bother you this time of night, but if there’s an Elizabeth Jones –’

  ‘Jones?’ The chain rattled, the door swung open. The man standing there, sketchily clothed, what with that grizzled hair, the immense, heavy-shouldered, pot-bellied bulk of him, the battered nose, might have been a college full-back twenty years before. ‘Don’t you mean Monte?’ he said good-naturedly. ‘You’re her husband, aren’t you?’

  ‘She told you about that?’

  Degan shrugged apologetically.

  ‘I guess she told us almost everything there is to tell about you two. You can blame that on me. She looked so rotten when she walked in here that, as a psychiatrist, I insisted she come out with the whole story. But I’m sure she never expected you to turn up like this. To tell the truth, Monte, I’m glad you did. It’ll do her good to see you’re still in one piece.’

  ‘It’s good to know she’s got people like you keeping an eye on her,’ said Chris.

  ‘What the hell, she’s that kind of girl.’ Degan motioned down the hallway leading to the back of the house. ‘Come along. I’ll show you the way and leave you to make your own introductions.’

  The way led past an open door at the far end of the hall – a cellar door, Chris realized when he was abreast of it and felt the cool damp draught coming through it – and the next instant realized as well that there was something shadowy and menacing, something poised for the kill, on the landing of the cellar steps.

  The blow was aimed at his head. At the last instant he tried to pull away from it, but too late. His move saved him from having his skull split open, but the weight struck the side of his head with stunning impact and glanced bruisingly off his shoulder. He buckled at the knees, and then Degan had both arms around him in a grizzly-bear hug and heaved him unceremoniously down the cellar steps. He seemed to hit every one of them on the way down in a rolling, bouncing, dizzying fall, every part of him being battered by the impact and the bad knee getting the worst of it.

  He landed on his back half-dazed, trying not to pass out completely. The cellar light went on, and he blurrily saw the figure standing at the head of the stairs, weapon still upraised for the unnecessary second blow. Someone who resembled Degan, same features, same heft, but this man wore a raincoat.

  Chris closed his eyes as the man trotted heavily down the steps. This was a time to play possum. Prendergast had given this team the job of getting rid of him permanently, so he wa
s lucky to be still alive. Now the trick was to stay alive until he could get into motion again, get the gun out of his belt. Useless as it was, it might still make a convincing threat.

  It was as if Degan read his mind.

  ‘Watch it, Larry,’ he warned from the top of the stairway, ‘he’s got a gun on him.’

  A shoe prodded hard into Chris’s ribs.

  ‘No sweat,’ Larry said. ‘He’s out cold.’

  ‘Get the gun anyhow.’

  Hands went over Chris. The gun was dragged from beneath his shirt.

  ‘And Joe said it had a silencer on it,’ Degan said. ‘It must be in his pocket. Get me his car keys too.’

  The hands went through pockets retrieving silencer and car keys.

  ‘Listen,’ said Larry, ‘I can finish him off a lot neater with this cannon than with a hunk of pipe. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be a car crash, and it’ll look like a hell of a car crash if they pull him out of it with a bullet in him. You’ll do it Joe’s way. Now throw me those keys. I’ll bring the car around to the side of the house here, so we can load him into it away from the street. You can finish him off before I’m back.’

  ‘Chicken bastard.’

  ‘That’s what I am. What the hell, I’m the one driving him twenty miles out into the country, and that’s enough for a night’s work. Just throw me those keys and take care of your end of it.’

  Chris cautiously opened an eye. He saw the keys flicker in the light as they landed in Degan’s outstretched palm, saw Degan pull open the door to the driveway outside. He measured the distance between his hand and Larry’s ankle. With Degan gone it would be one against one. What made his bowels churn was the certainty that if he grabbed at that ankle and didn’t bring Larry down, it was all over on the spot.

  ‘Larry!’

  It was Degan yelling. Then he was inside the door again, trying to slam it shut, but it swung back into his face. He scrambled down the cellar steps, his hand fumbling in a hip pocket for what must be a gun caught in the pocket. A man appeared on the landing at the head of the stairs. Another came through the door close behind him. Both were armed.