“It’s not just Greg Da Costa’s uncorroborated story. I’ve been in touch with the manager of Greg’s bank in L.A. Every month Greg gets a check drawn on a Swiss bank account and signed by Terence O’Reilly. And there’s Dinah Slade’s evidence too, Sylvia. Before she called you that night she’d just read a letter from Greg implying knowledge of the conspiracy, and the letter was written to O’Reilly. Finally, there are the facts that not even O’Reilly himself disputes. He had infiltrated Bruce’s society, he knew Krasnov—and that means he just had to know what was going on, because I’ve never met anyone smarter at digging up dirt than Terence O’Reilly. Hell, he even exposed Salzedo! Exposing a lunatic like Krasnov would be child’s play in comparison. Anyway, if you add all those facts to the knowledge that he had the strongest possible motive for wishing Paul dead, there’s only one conclusion to be drawn.”
I thought she might shy away from such a verdict, but her reaction was strong and immediate.
“Then that’s that,” she said flatly. “I’ll get him here for you.”
“Sylvia, I sure hate to use you like this.”
“No,” she said more strongly than ever, “don’t apologize. If he had a hand in killing Paul I want him brought to justice.”
“It’ll be a vigilante justice,” I said, watching her. “You realize that.”
“Just do whatever has to be done.” Her face was bleak. Even the shine seemed to have gone from her pretty hair. “I won’t talk about it and I won’t ask any questions.”
We stood up. Her hand was cold as I took it in mine and drew her to me for a kiss. Paul’s eyes watched us from the photograph frame.
“Let me know when the next letter comes from Argentina, Sylvia,” I said, and then leaving the house I traveled rapidly downtown to the bank.
VIII
He never answered her letter. He just packed his bags, jumped on a ship to Florida and caught the train north from Fort Lauderdale. He reached New York on the sixteenth of July, five days before the second anniversary of Paul’s death, and checked into the St. Regis, a stone’s throw from Sylvia’s brownstone.
I was in Philadelphia and had just returned to my hotel after a long business meeting when the phone rang.
“Steve, this is Cornelius.”
I was surprised. I couldn’t think of a single reason why Cornelius should need to phone me. “Yeah?” I said. “Some problem at the office?”
“No, I’m speaking from Sylvia’s house. Terence O’Reilly turned up on her doorstep today. Being upset, she called the bank and when she heard you were out of town she asked for me.” Cornelius prim Midwestern accent was as neutral as a tract of virgin snow.
“Let me talk to her,” I said abruptly.
Cornelius transferred the receiver without a word. Sylvia’s voice said breathlessly, “Steve?”
“Sylvia, how much have you told that kid?”
“But that’s the amazing thing, Steve! He seemed to know it already! As soon as I mentioned Terence’s name—”
“Let’s not go into details on the phone. Are you all right?”
“Yes. No. Well, I mean I was shattered to see him without warning, but fortunately he understood and said he’d give me twenty-four hours to adjust to the idea of his being in town. He said he’d telephone later from the St. Regis.”
“Fine. I’ll come back to New York right away to take care of everything. Now let me speak to Cornelius again, please.”
“Steve?” said Cornelius presently.
“We’d better talk, hadn’t we.”
“I’d appreciate that,” said Cornelius, still chillingly neutral.
“One o’clock tomorrow at the Colony.”
“I’ll be there.”
We hung up. I stared into space for ten empty seconds, and then I unscrewed the cap on my hip flask and poured myself the stiffest scotch in town.
IX
I returned to New York, calmed Sylvia down, snatched a few hours’ sleep, hired private detectives to watch O’Reilly, put in an appearance at two board meetings, interviewed a client who wanted twenty million dollars, glanced over the statistical analysis of a proposed merger between two utility companies, called Matt to check he wasn’t trying to run a bucket shop out of the office of Van Zale Participations, and raced uptown for lunch.
I was ten minutes late and Cornelius was waiting for me. Naturally he would have arrived on time. As I was shown to the table he stood up, for he was always scrupulously deferential to me. In fact no junior partner could have shown more respect for his elders and betters than young Master Cornelius Van Zale of Van Zale’s.
I ordered ginger ale.
“Scotch?” I offered him as I produced my hip flask.
“Thank you,” said Cornelius, “but I never drink liquor at midday.”
I grabbed the bread basket, pounced on the largest roll and bit it as hard as I could. Cornelius daintily nibbled a bread-stick. As soon as the waiter arrived with my ginger ale I snatched a couple of menus from the maître d’ and said we’d order right away.
“I’ll have the pâté,” I added, “followed by a filet mignon, medium rare, with creamed potatoes and a salad. French dressing.”
“I’ll have a hamburger,” said Cornelius without opening the menu. “Well done. No potatoes.”
Ernest, the maître d’ who ruled over that dimly lighted, high-ceilinged palace of a restaurant like a high priest over a temple, blanched but somehow got the order down. One of the nice things about having fifty million dollars is that you can order a hamburger in a joint like the Colony without being flung out into the street.
I took a long pull at my drink, lit a cigarette and made a great business of shaking out the match. When there was nothing else left to do I said shortly, “All right, let’s have it Talk.”
Cornelius went right on nibbling his breadstick. A minor waiter filled our water glasses. When we were alone again Cornelius said respectfully, “Well, I have to congratulate you, Steve. You did a brilliant job.”
I stared at him. He gazed back. His starry gray eyes were effortlessly innocent.
“You must have bribed every cop in town.”
I shifted uneasily in my chair. “You realized—”
“Why sure. I’m not dumb. I knew from the start that the conspiracy reached beyond Clayton and Krasnov, and I knew exactly why you had to cover it up. Say, it was real smart of you to lure O’Reilly back to town, although I’m sorry you had to use Sylvia. What do you plan to do next?”
I shifted again in my chair and took another long pull at my drink. “What made you suspect O’Reilly?” I said at last. “None of the other partners do, because they figure he had no motive for wanting Paul dead.”
“They should have seen the way he used to look at Sylvia during that first summer I spent at Bar Harbor.”
There was a silence. The kid finished his breadstick and wiped his little paws on his snow-white napkin. My uneasiness increased.
“How come you kept so quiet about all this?” I said.
“I figured the last thing you needed was noise. However, I must admit I did plan on approaching you on the second anniversary of Paul’s death and asking you if I could help fix O’Reilly. Incidentally—just out of interest—did you suggest to Bruce Clayton that he should commit suicide?”
“I did not.” I pulled myself together, struggled out of the trance he’d put me in and prepared to whip him into line. “Now, listen to me, Cornelius …” I began and launched into a speech about the dire consequences for the bank if the conspiracy became public knowledge.
“Yes, Steve,” said Cornelius, looking at me with dutiful gray eyes.
By the time our main course had arrived I was feeling more relaxed. “… So you can rely on me to tidy matters up satisfactorily,” I concluded with relief.
“Yes.” He signaled the maître d’, who immediately swerved to our table. “Ketchup, please.”
Ernest shuddered and withdrew.
When the ketchup arrived
Cornelius anointed his hamburger, closed the bun and sank his teeth into it.
“Right,” I said affably, carving up my steak. “Any other questions?”
“Uh-huh,” said Cornelius. “Who’s the guilty partner?”
I put down my knife and fork and reached for the scotch. My stomach felt as if it had been kicked at close range. “Guilty who?” I said feebly.
“Partner. Come on, Steve. Let’s quit waltzing around and get down to brass tacks. According to Sylvia, O’Reilly just happened coincidentally to walk into enough money to buy up a large slice of Argentina, but we don’t really believe that, Steve, do we? Expecting us to believe that would be like expecting us to believe in Santa Claus, and anyway if you go right back to the assassination it’s obvious O’Reilly had to use the Willow Alley exit—with help from a partner willing to lend his keys. The problem was not how to get Krasnov into the building, but how to convince Krasnov he had a chance of getting out.”
“But …” I opened and closed my mouth twice, but nothing came out.
“Face facts,” said the kid agreeably, pouring some more blood-colored sauce onto his plate and dipping a chunk of bun in it. “Krasnov wasn’t one of these assassins who kill for glory and don’t mind dying in the attempt. He had ten thousand dollars waiting for him in his bank account. He would never have agreed to kill Paul unless they fixed him up with a plausible escape route, and since he couldn’t walk out of the front door, fly out of a window or disappear up the chimney in a puff of smoke, he had to use the back entrance. So they let him in that way to prove he could get out that way. They had to. He wouldn’t have gone near the building without the Willow Alley keys in his pocket. Of course they knew he’d be rubbed out, but Krasnov had to believe he’d leave the building alive.”
“Yeah. Sure.” I cleared my throat. I wondered what kind of expression was on my face. “Well, all right, but O’Reilly could have had copies made of those keys.”
“How? By picking a partner’s pocket?”
“Well, when he was “Paul’s personal assistant—”
“That was just when he didn’t need any duplicates. He had access to Paul’s keys. Anyway, why would he have wanted a spare set back then? He knew damned well he wasn’t allowed to use that entrance unless he was with Paul.”
“I still think—”
“You can explain the Willow Alley keys away till you’re blue in the face, Steve, but you can’t explain why O’Reilly’s living like a millionaire.”
I tried to float my foreign-government fairy tale. Cornelius sank it in seconds.
“Oh please, Steve, I really am too old to believe in Santa Claus!”
“How about the stock market? You believe in that, don’t you?”
“If O’Reilly had made a big killing on the market your operatives would have heard of it and traced him. I presume you did have operatives looking for him.”
I played my trump card. “None of us partners had a motive for killing Paul.”
“You mean one of us did but we can’t prove yet what it was. I’d guess it was financial.”
“But we were all rich!”
“Are you sure?”
We stared at each other. Cornelius’ sharp little face had a white pinched look. Suddenly he shivered. “It was an obscene conspiracy,” he said in a low voice, “and it’s still going on. How are you going to end it?”
I hesitated but knew I had no choice but to take him into my confidence. He knew too much to be fobbed off. “I’m going to start by bribing O’Reilly to give us the name,” I said slowly. “Paul always said O’Reilly was the most venal of his protégés.”
“And then?”
“Then Sylvia tells him she’ll follow him to Argentina as soon as she’s sold her house and wound up her New York life. O’Reilly goes back to Argentina to lay out the red carpet. I’m expecting our clients the Argentinian government to pay us their usual visit next month, and when I negotiate with them I’ll make damned sure there’s an unwritten condition on our next loan.”
Cornelius nodded. As far as I could see he was neither shocked nor surprised, merely approving. “May I make a suggestion?” he said politely. “When you find out from O’Reilly who this guilty partner is, you should record the entire conversation. Otherwise the partner can always deny it, O’Reilly will be back in Argentina and you won’t be able to prove a damned thing.”
I was skeptical. “How the hell am I going to do that? Suggest to O’Reilly that we rendezvous in a recording studio?”
“We can use an ordinary room.”
“We?” I said, fearing the worst.
“You, me and Sam. Sam’ll fix it. He knows all about that kind of thing.”
“Now, don’t get me wrong,” I said sweating. “I like Sam. He’s a good kid. But—”
“Look, Steve,” said Cornelius, “you want to crucify this partner, don’t you? Well, if you’re planning a crucifixion, for God’s sake make sure you nail the guilty party good and hard to the cross.”
I looked at his tight tough little face. His eyes were arctic gray. Suddenly I laughed. “So you’ve got balls after all!” I said amused, and as he blushed, betraying both his youth and Mildred’s upbringing, I laughed again. “All right, sonny,” I said, crossing the Rubicon at last. “We’ll talk it over with Sam as soon as we get back to the office.”
I should have known as I watched the blood oozing out of my perfect steak that I was playing with matches around a box of dynamite.
Four
I
“TERENCE?” I SAID, THE phone fit to melt in my hand. “Steve Sullivan. Welcome back to town.”
He stood the shock well. “Steve? No kidding!” he said warily after a taut pause. “How are you doing? This is a surprise!”
“I’ve got bigger surprises in store. I’d like to meet you tonight at ten o’clock to discuss them. I’ll leave the Willow Alley door unlocked for you and we can have a nice long private reminiscence in Paul’s office about the summer of ’26.”
He thought about it. I could almost hear that cool competent brain ticking over like some complicated power meter. Finally he said, “I don’t like rehashing the past.”
“Knowing your past,” I said, “that doesn’t surprise me. Be there, Terence, or I spell out to Sylvia in words of one syllable exactly how you murdered her husband. Bruce Clayton left one hell of a suicide note.” And cutting off the appalled silence at the other end of the wire, I hung up.
II
At eight o’clock, when the other partners had left and only a few clerks were left catching up on the day’s paperwork, I opened the garden doors of the office which now belonged to Charley Blair and crossed the patio to unlock the Willow Alley entrance. The black Cadillac was already parked outside, but there was no chauffeur. Cornelius himself was at the wheel. He and Sam Keller were smoking cigarettes in suspenseful silence.
“All right, boys,” I said. “Bring on the props.” Cornelius had told me that Sam, whose hobby was recording amateur jam sessions, had friends at the RCA studios, so I had expected the worst—enough equipment to fill a concert hall, a microphone as big as a melon and enough cable to run all the way down Wall Street to Trinity Church. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that the props consisted of a smart wooden cabinet, an item with dials and knobs mounted on a panel and two small square boxes with a couple of cute little microphones attached. Even the inevitable cable looked as if it might just fade away into the background.
I was impressed. “Where did you get this junk?”
“Jake Reischman lent it to me,” said Sam. “He brought it back last summer from Europe. Apparently there’s a guy in Germany called Stale who’s putting out this invention, the Vox Diktiermaschine, for use in offices. You dictate letters into them or record conferences and telephone conversations. Jake. says that the Reischman bank in Hamburg has several of them and they’re real useful. The big advantage is that they go on recording much longer than any other system—even longer than the new sy
stem they’ve developed for making ‘talkies.’”
We toted the stuff inside and I watched fascinated as Sam set up the equipment. In fact, I was so interested I almost forgot why we needed the machine.
“How does it work?”
“It’s a system of magnetic recording on steel wire,” said Sam enthusiastically. “The sound is recorded on a steel wire passed between a pair of magnetic poles which have coils of wire wound round them to form an electromagnet, and the electrical impulses which are set up—”
“How easily does it go wrong?” I said, getting nervous again.
“Well, the wire can break and the motor speed can go haywire, but don’t worry, Steve, I’ve thought about this very carefully. Neil and I will be in the coat closet with the cabinet and this control panel—it’ll be a squeeze, but we can make it Then I can operate not only the recorder but the mixer which balances the level of the speech from the microphones. There’s no problem about the cable, because we can run it out of the closet under the folding doors and around the edge of the library under the carpet. The only real risk lies with the microphones. I’ve substituted these RCA condenser mikes for the original Vox mikes because of the superior frequency response, but—”
“Let’s have it in good plain English, Sam. Where are you putting these microphones?”
“One can go in the fireplace behind the grill of the firescreen,” said Sam. “There’s no problem about that, because the screen will conceal both the mike and the preamplifier—that’s the little box—and the cord can run under the rug as soon as it leaves the grate. But the other mike’ll just have to go on the desk.”
“Wonderful!” I said sarcastically. “And what do I tell O’Reilly when he marvels at my new paperweight?”
“Well, this is the way I figure it, Steve. The little preamplifier can be concealed in a drawer of the desk. We’ll have to drill a hole in the side of the desk next to the wall so that the cord can run out, but it won’t take me a minute to fix that. Now, the mike itself can stand right by the lamp at the edge of the desk so that the cord will fall directly between the desk and the wall to the carpet. The odds are that O’Reilly won’t notice the cord and if he does he’ll assume it’s the cord from the lamp. Then we can cover the mike with a loosely arranged handkerchief. I know it’ll look shady to us, but I’m gambling on the fact that a handkerchief is so ordinary that O’Reilly won’t look at it twice.”
The Rich Are Different Page 48