Judas Cat

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Won’t you sit down, gentlemen,” Addison said. “A drink, Whiting? You look as though you’ve had some trouble. A motor accident?”

  “No,” Alex said. “No thank you. We’ve run into difficulties in our investigation, and I’d like to talk to you again if you don’t mind, Mr. Addison.”

  “I’m very happy to,” Addison said. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Turnsby and I were on the subject now.”

  Alex looked from one of them to the other. “We have traced the relationship between Addisons, Turnsbys and Mattson,” he said.

  “I see,” Addison said. “Then you can understand why I should prefer to keep them unknown.”

  “Maybe.”

  “If you prefer, I’ll be happy to wait in another room,” Turnsby said.

  Alex wondered why he was there. “I’d like to talk to you, too, Mr. Turnsby.”

  “We might as well go through this all together if we’re going to do it at all,” Addison said. “By the way, Whiting, how is it you’re still at it? I thought you were under a restraining order of the court.”

  “I am,” Alex said. “If you wanted to, you could probably call the sheriff’s office now, and I could be taken into custody.”

  Addison looked at him momentarily. “It’s no affair of mine,” he said. “I only hope you are being discreet enough not to involve me.”

  Alex could not tell whether the remark implied a threat or not, but the casualness with which it was spoken irked him. “I’m afraid our extreme discretion has been the cause of our failure thus far,” he said. “I’m getting to the point where I scarcely know how to be discreet any more. So I’ll ask the questions I came to ask and if they seem impertinent, I’m just going to have to suffer the consequences. I’m not a bad person, Mr. Addison. Neither is Chief Waterman, and yet due to the power you wield in this county we’ve been made to look as though we are. The only chance we’ve got of proving our integrity is clearing up Mattson’s death.”

  “Just a minute, Whiting. I’ll hear you, but just hold on a minute. The power I wield in this county of which you speak is incidental. Neither I, nor my father before me have ever used it to further our interests. That’s a notion every reformer in the county has. And never once has it been proven.”

  “I know,” Alex said. “My father told me that. It’s just that some people like to bow down.”

  “And that’s no concern of mine,” Addison said. “Now let’s hear your troubles. If I can help you, I will. But I warn you, my father was a monument in this state. He helped to build it, and I’ll not tolerate any attempt to vilify him … from anybody.”

  Alex thought the remark was intended to include Walter Turnsby. “Believe me, sir, I want to vilify no one, but I want no one to vilify me either. We think Mattson died because somebody wanted him dead by a specific time. Two coincidences led me to you, and you didn’t help. I asked you about Mattson’s relatives. Nothing. Now I find his son sitting in your house. Now there’s a restraining order against Waterman and me, and I think that’s due to some negotiation between Altman and you, and maybe Joe Hershel.”

  “That is nothing more than an example of the expediency we spoke of before. Altman has given me the impression of being most solicitous of my interests. I have not encouraged it, and I scarcely see where it touches the basic problems here.”

  “Perhaps it doesn’t, Mr. Addison, but for twenty or more years Andy Mattson provided Joe Hershel with model toys, beautiful things … and he received a minimum of compensation—as he wanted it—but he put the provision on Hershel that no patents be taken on these models. You would call that poor business. Maybe I would too, but what I want to ask you straight, have Hershel and Altman approached you on some kind of deal based on patents Hershel intends to file now?”

  “Young man,” Addison said after a moment, “I think that’s information you must obtain from Mr. Hershel.”

  Alex got up from the table. “Then you really don’t intend to help me at all, do you, Mr. Addison?”

  “If you can prove Mattson was murdered and come here with legal authorization to obtain your information, I will be happy to cooperate.”

  “Can’t you see …” Alex started, and then he knew that Addison could not or would not see. “All right, I have another question. Is the man who was your father’s chauffeur still in your employ?”

  “No,” Addison said, “he is not. Why?”

  “Because for two days he’s scarcely let me out of his sight, and today he and two other thugs tried to corner me in an old building here in town.”

  For the first time Addison’s impassiveness seemed to have left him. He contemplated the ends of his fingers for a few seconds as though he were trying to fit something together. “That’s interesting,” he said. “Very interesting. Excuse me a moment.”

  He went to a pull cord by the fireplace, and Alex sat down again.

  “How did you happen to know it was my father’s chauffeur, Whiting?”

  “One of our Sentinel people recognized him.”

  The maid came in then. “Ellen, has my secretary left the grounds yet?”

  “Yes, he has, Mr. Addison.”

  “Please send Phillip in then.”

  While he waited he drew the drapes apart that hung over the long French doors, and looked out while he waited. From where he was Alex could see the terrace, and beyond that the glisten of water from the garden sprinklers.

  “You’re learning things about your father, aren’t you, Walter? Had you any idea he was a toymaker?”

  “Not the faintest,” Turnsby said. “There were many things I did not know about him. But I should have expected that patent business.”

  “Yes, of course,” Addison said. “Apparently he was a rather brilliant man. With his quirks, naturally. All of us have them, I suppose. Father used to say that in all his years he had never met a brain more subtle, more astute, or a man with less to say, or to put it more accurately, a man who could speak volumes in a sentence. …”

  Alex got the impression that Addison was talking now to fill the time before Phillip came, edging away from the mention of patents, and he was conciliatory again.

  “… We are scarcely the men our fathers were, are we, Walter?”

  “No,” the man who called himself Turnsby said, “but we have our inheritance.”

  The words had come from him quietly, and, Alex thought, spoke the volumes accredited to his father’s sentences. He knew the reference was not to money.

  “Yes, of course,” Addison said again. A tall man wearing a white serving coat came in. “Phillip is my butler, gentlemen. Phillip, you remember when Bracken left our service?”

  “Yes sir. About two weeks after the old Mr. Addison’s death.”

  “Do you recall if we have had any calls for reference on him since?”

  “I think not, sir. We were talking of it at breakfast the other morning. Cook had seen him in town, and Mr. Faulkes said it was queer he hadn’t had any inquiries on him, seeing how long he’d worked for the old Mr. Addison.”

  “Faulkes is my secretary,” Addison explained. “Phillip, in the time Bracken was around after he received his notice, did he seem disgruntled about it?”

  “He was a bit put out, sir. He felt there ought to be a place for him here. Felt that you should give him some sort of work.”

  “I see. But he was not what we might call vindictive about it?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that, Mr. Addison.”

  “All right. Thank you very much, Phillip.”

  After the butler left Addison returned to his chair. “That doesn’t tell us very much, does it?”

  Alex wondered. It would seem proper that Addison should give his father’s chauffeur a job. He still felt that he had, that all this was rehearsed.

  “Whiting, did you ever see this man Bracken in the company of your mayor or Mr. Hershel?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve decided to tell you the story of that deal which actually is no deal, and n
ow it won’t be until this business is cleared up. Altman has been at us for years to open a plant in Hillside. I saw no advantage to it with the main plants here in Riverdale. Then one day in early summer this year he and Hershel came up and suggested that we extend our line of building equipment and household goods to include miniatures, the plans for which he already had. He pointed out where our prestige and his facilities if extended to the proper size would pay off immediately. I presumed the plans to be his, and there was absolutely no mention of Mattson. I agreed to give him an answer by September first. Naturally I’d have my lawyers in on it if we agreed to go ahead. We have not yet arrived at that status.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I seem skeptical, Mr. Addison,” Alex said. “But on my last visit you were no help. I’ve traced that Pissarro painting myself. I found out Mattson purchased all of them in the Addison collection when he was in France. I should think you’d have known that. And I can’t help but wonder if your father didn’t know what Andy did for a living, and if it wouldn’t be natural for him to have mentioned it to you.”

  There was a trace of a smile about Turnsby’s lips. The color rose to Addison’s face. “That’s enough of your impertinence, young man. If you have so many doubts as to my integrity, I suggest you make your charges and see where they land you.”

  “I am quite aware of where they will land me,” Alex said. “And I know how much more you can afford to do than I can. I know there’s something as rotten as hell in this some place. And it goes back further than Hershel and his ideas of expansion. It involves patents, and I’m pretty sure it involves patents already in the possession of Addison Industries. I think it also involves your father’s will, or some sort of codicil to that will. Now you know how far along we are on this investigation and what we expect to come of it.”

  “My father’s will is no concern of yours whatever, young man,” Addison said angrily. “It was in the hands of reputable lawyers from the day he made it until it was filed in probate court. There seems to be some idea here that half the world was responsible for his success and for his fortune. There is not a court in the land would allow it, and not a court would allow claims on the estate not provided in that will.”

  He delivered the last words directly at Turnsby.

  “Don’t take out your wrath on young Whiting and me, George. We’re bystanders.”

  Addison got up again and went to the window.

  “You see, Whiting,” Turnsby said, “this ill-starred, ill-crossed clan of Addison, Turnsby and Mattson is a peculiar mixture of the ideal and the practical. They have been in and out of love with one another for sixty years. And every once in a while one or another of them has taken upon himself to save the Addison soul, sometimes, unfortunately, at the expense of the Addison dollar. That was my father’s chief fight with him … Mattson, that is. And it was also the fight of my foster father, Michael Turnsby. In his case he got the fanatic’s reward. There were some of us who didn’t think it was quite his due. But that’s a long time past, isn’t it, George?”

  Addison did not turn from the window, and Turnsby continued quietly without looking at Alex.

  “But Henry Addison, who was never outside the law, as George reminds us, seems to have mellowed a bit in his maturity, and the Turnsby clan grew small and narrow, as the women of them were all that were left. I wonder if your father didn’t leave a codicil to his will, George? The will to please his son, the codicil to please his conscience.”

  Addison came back from the window, his heavy footsteps loud in the stillness of the room until he reached the velvet quiet of the rug. “I think you had better leave now, both of you,” he said. “There is no codicil to my father’s will. An attempt to prove one exists is a deliberate attempt to discredit me and him. I will see its perpetrators prosecuted to the letter of the law.”

  Alex stood up and waited a long minute while Turnsby arose, his eyes searching Addison’s face. “It must be a wonderful thing, George,” Turnsby said, “to have such confidence in the law.”

  Chapter 43

  OUTSIDE THERE WAS ONLY Alex’s car in the white gravel driveway. He offered Turnsby a ride into Riverdale. Neither of them spoke until they had passed the stone gates of the Addison estate.

  “Have you any idea what the codicil contains, Mr. Turnsby?” Alex asked.

  “I don’t even know that one exists. For me it was a figure of speech. Unless you have proof of one, Whiting, I am inclined to believe George. The Addisons were always sure of where they were going before they started.”

  “Do you mind my asking why you came here, Mr. Turnsby?”

  “To claim and dispose of my inheritance,” he said. “With my father’s death I came into twenty-five thousand dollars from the Addison estate.”

  “I know,” Alex said. “We’ve considered that as a possible motive for your father’s death. Obviously he did not intend to leave it to you.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Addison said the old man wrote him to give it to a displaced persons’ fund. Mattson’s death before the will was probated took that out of his hands.”

  “George is very free with some information,” Turnsby said. “But just in case you are still confused by me as a suspect, I’ll tell you I wouldn’t touch Addison money with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Why?”

  “There are a lot of reasons, Whiting. Most of them belong in the grave with my father … and my mother.”

  “I’ve grown to have a great respect for Andy Mattson,” Alex said when the big man beside him seemed reluctant to continue. “I’ve learned that he cared nothing for money, and a great deal for people in general, although he made himself the most solitary man in the world. I’d like to know why. I know that he considered war a curse—and greed the cause of war. I couldn’t prove it, but I have the feeling he loved your mother a great deal. Maybe I’m making that up because I want to believe it—or because I know he went out of seclusion when she died in 1933. But for the life of me, and you’ll excuse me if you’re attached to the family, I can’t figure out why she’d leave him for a Turnsby, from what I know of them.”

  “She was afraid of him,” Turnsby said. “It’s that simple: she was afraid of him. Have you any notion what it’s like to be afraid of someone you love? … Or on the other hand, have you any notion what it’s like to know that someone you love is afraid of you?”

  “I don’t suppose I have,” Alex said, but he remembered the fear the children had of Andy.

  “That was the way between them. And all his life after that I think, my father was afraid of frightening people. I must have absorbed some of my mother’s fear very early, and mine was a physical fear of him. I would lie in bed at night, the door to my room open, the lights on in the other room, and I would watch his shadow on the wall, gigantic and distorted and the fear of him nearly suffocating me. It made me cringe from him. I was forever lost in my mother’s petticoats. And then one night she woke me and dressed me, and took me out past him where he sat in the living room like a man with his eyes open in his sleep. Turnsby was waiting for her with a horse and buggy, and we drove a long time through the night. After that I only saw him three times in all these years … The Addisons disowned my mother when she ran away with Turnsby, even though they were married some years later.”

  They had reached the outskirts of Riverdale. “Where do you want me to take you, Mr. Turnsby?” Alex asked.

  “You’re going to Hillside?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you’d be so kind as to stop somewhere that I could make a phone call I’d like to ride with you as far as Three Corners.”

  “Barnards’?”

  Turnsby nodded. “She’s my half sister, you know.”

  “I know,” Alex said. “I asked her about you.”

  “And she told you nothing, right?”

  “Quite right.”

  “You see, Whiting, we’re back to fear again. She’s a good many years younger than I am. She was always a little m
ite, and afraid of me. In the way of youngsters—who are sadists—I enjoyed that. I suppose it was compensation in some ways for my own early experiences.”

  Alex parked the car in front of a drug store.

  “No,” Turnsby continued before he got out, “I don’t think Norah is going to be happy to see me today. But I shall see her, nevertheless. It’s only a kindness however, to call her first. I presume her nerves are rather bad over this?”

  “Hers and her husband’s,” Alex said.

  Turnsby nodded and got out of the car without further comment. Alex watched him draw himself up as he walked into the drug store. He was an extraordinarily tall man. There were too many pieces to this story now. From nothing they had suddenly come to everything. He was reminded of the time on the farm when he had discovered a whole school of baby mice in a feed bin. He had brought the cat from the barn and thrown her in among them, and she had fled as though from a flock of wolves. He glanced into the mirror as had become his habit now. But so far he had not again picked up the black sedan.

  Turnsby returned. “I’m not going to be the most welcome guest at the Barnards’ this afternoon,” he said. “But at least she didn’t tell me not to come.”

  Alex wanted to ask him why he was going there, but he thought better of it. “I’ve learned the story of the building of Addison Industries,” he said, easing the car out of the parking space. “And I know Mattson was out of it early. But through that painting I know he was connected with them again around 1906 or so, and this time in Europe.”

  “I think I can complete the picture for you,” he said. “After the Spanish-American War, Mattson went to the Philippines. He did a great job in sanitation there. Meanwhile Addison had built several plants in Europe. When Mattson returned from the Philippines, Addison got hold of him and convinced him there was a job to be done in Europe, in his plants, naturally. Mattson called no place home then and he went to Europe. He was successful there, too. But about 1912 Addison converted many of the plants to their war potential, as they would say now. Mattson worked for two years trying to break up the project. He went before every government he could get to, but you see, they all seemed to want the war potential developed. He was invited to leave Europe.