For one thing, it took me four minutes to convince my own sister to take the chain bolt off the door to my own apartment. For another, I did not get the sort of welcome an amateur detective deserved after a busy and progress-filled day of sleuthing.
“About time you got back,” Sue said. She sounded exhausted.
“I’m going out again,” I said. “Have to take a shower and change.”
“You’re going back to them,” Faith said. Sue had found her a flannel nightgown somewhere that almost fit. She made it sound as if I were going out to eat with James Arness and a bunch of giant ants.
“I’m looking into things. I’m getting to the bottom of it. The more I learn, the more I believe you.”
“You don’t believe they want to kill me. Kill my baby.”
I took a deep breath. “Let me put it this way. From what I’ve learned today, I believe that if they want what you say they want, then what you say they want to do is what they’re going to have to do if they want to get it.”
Sue said, “Huh?”
Faith either got it, or she had something more important on her mind. “I wasn’t thinking,” she moaned. “I should never have talked to you on the phone this afternoon.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not.”
“She’s been like this all day,” Sue said.
Faith deigned to tell me why not. As soon as my phone call was over, Faith had decided my mission had been a bad idea. What good could it do? All I was likely to have accomplished was to warn Them (and the capital was plain in her voice) that Faith had found allies. I had only put myself, and Sue, in danger.
I looked at her. Since I had met Alma, I had to take the danger more seriously. I was kicking myself for not having seen this possibility. I said as much.
“Of course you didn’t see it.” Faith could be magnanimous now that I’d conceded she was right. “I know how hard this is to believe. But I’ve been living with this for months now—it… does something to your mind.”
And there we were, I thought, right back to the entrance to this particular amusement park.
“And it won’t make any difference,” Faith went on. Her voice held gloom worthy of a hard-boiled Los Angeles private eye. “They’ve gone too far now to be scared off. There’s too much at stake for them to quit. They have to kill me, or at least make me have a miscarriage, and all this is going to do is make them more determined and more cautious about how they go about it.”
Sue made the kind of noise in her throat people make when they’re about to say something they think is going to embarrass them.
Faith didn’t let her get it out. “Really,” she insisted. “All I need is a safe place to stay until the baby comes. It should only be a couple of weeks. Once the baby is born, they can’t do anything—if anything happens to the child, the money goes to charity, and they lose it forever. I’ll be safe. Paul’s baby will be safe. It’s all I need, really. Can’t you arrange for some quiet out-of-the-way place for me? Where they won’t find me? I’d just like my baby to be born in peace.”
Still favoring her injured left hand, Faith walked clumsily around my living room looking for the ratty canvas shoulder bag she’d had when she arrived. “I’m not going to freeload on anybody. Where’s my bag? I can pay, you know. I’ll show you.”
“I know you can pay,” I said. After those documents this afternoon, boy, did I know. “Don’t insult our friendship by offering me money. You can stay here. If you don’t think it’s safe here, you can go to Scarsdale and stay with my mother. Or, if you don’t mind getting official about things, I’ll find out where The Grayness stows sources and wangle you into there. I admit, I’m going to have the doorman be extra careful about who comes into this building. And I’ll stay here tonight myself.”
“Oh,” Faith said. “You don’t have to do that. I mean, Lucille is a bitch, but she’s shrewd. Now that she knows I’ve told somebody responsible what’s going on, and that you believe me, she might get the rest of them to listen to reason.”
“Faith,” I said, “a minute ago, nothing I did would make any difference. Which is it?”
Faith looked miserable. I felt like a louse.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You make me feel better sometimes, but I’m afraid to feel better. I’m afraid to hope.”
Sue made the noise again. This time, she got to talk. “Okay,” she said. “Look, Faith. I know you’re worried. If I were pregnant, and I even suspected I might be in a situation like yours, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d probably shoot everybody who looked at me cross-eyed.”
Faith grinned without humor. “Where do I get a gun?”
“Just think about this. If, as I do, I believe you’re right about what’s happening to you, I have to believe your in-laws have committed at least attempted murder, for God’s sake. You’ve been to the police, the police don’t believe you, okay. You were smart to come to Harry. Something like that has got to be checked out. Who knows what they may get up to next? Right, Harry?”
“Huh?” I said. I was goggling at my baby sister. Inspirational speeches from the girl who was upset at the man who shot the Pope because it cut into “As the World Turns.” “Oh,” I said. “Right. Absolutely.”
“But still—”
“No, Faith,” I said. “There are eight million people in New York, any one of them a potential innocent bystander. And if you want to say to hell with the innocent bystanders, I’m not sure I blame you. It’s not that easy to find innocent people standing by. But think of yourself. Won’t you feel better when this is all settled?”
“Oh, God,” she said.
And that was it. I wasn’t sure what I had convinced her of, or if I had wanted to, or if I was even the one who had convinced her. All I knew was, if I had just been hired to be a private eye, I’d better get moving if I expected to get to that restaurant in time to meet the suspect.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE PLACE WAS CALLED Le Cassoulet, a pretty unpretentious name, as names for French restaurants go. It was on Second Avenue in the Fifties, nestled unobtrusively into the ground floor of a five-story walkup. The front was a little shabby, the small window covered with more than a day’s worth of city grime. The menu in the window was starting to yellow with age. The prices seemed a little low. They’d only been changed with ballpoint once during the life of this menu—par for one this old was three times.
I knew why. The restaurant was living on borrowed time, going through the motions until somebody got around to knocking down the walkup and putting up another fifty-story office building. The day is coming when the only building in New York between Fourteenth Street and Central Park under thirty stories tall will be St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
The door made a cowbell ring when I pushed it open. That was probably the only way they could tell if someone had come in, since they appeared to be trying to save on electricity what they lost by not raising the prices. As far as I could tell in the gloom, the place was empty. That was to be expected. In that neighborhood, the pattern is a large crowd between five and seven, with people sneaking drinks before they head home or catching an early dinner before going out, then another wave around ten, when the movies and plays begin to let out.
A dark-haired young woman in the standard New York restaurant-hostess uniform of white blouse and floor-length gray skirt smiled at me and handed me a menu the size of a road map. I told her I was meeting someone. She asked me if I would like to wait at the bar.
By now, my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I could see the place wasn’t deserted. There was a yellowish glow from a blond head, and the ghostly flash of a waved white hand. “Never mind,” I said. “She’s already here.”
The hostess smiled at me again, took the menu back and led me with Helen Keller-like ease through the darkness to the rear corner table Lucille Letron had chosen.
Lucille had a smile and a warm handshake for me, as well as another menu. There was a tiny candle in a re
d glass globe on the table, casting shadows on her face from below. It made her look slightly devilish, which I supposed was appropriate, at least from the point of view of one of Faith’s faction. The red glow of the candle, however, also removed the coolness I had seen in her beauty earlier. I was going to have to watch myself.
“I’m glad you came,” she said. “Have you eaten?”
Neither of us had. I opened the menu and squinted. The handwriting was old and faded. A waiter came by, a young man with curly hair and big soulful eyes. “Would you like anything from the bar?”
Lucille asked for a Campari and soda. I settled for just the soda. The level of health consciousness in New York has at last risen to such a point that you can refrain from alcohol in a restaurant without being looked upon as a carrier of typhus. I might have gone down in the history (soon to be concluded) of Le Cassoulet as a totally run-of-the-mill customer, but I had another request.
“Might we have another candle please?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’d like another candle.”
He pointed. The tip of his index finger became visible in the weak red glow that extended three inches beyond the glass. “What’s wrong with this one?”
“Nothing’s wrong with that one,” I said. “I said I wanted another one, not a different one. I need more light so I can read the menu.”
“I see, sir.” He reached over to the next table, grabbed another candle and plunked it down next to the first one.
“Thanks,” I said. Lucille, who had suppressed gasps all afternoon, was now suppressing giggles. The waiter said he’d go get our drinks now and walked off.
Lucille was now lit from below by two candles. It made her look more devilish than ever. More attractive, too. The giggles hadn’t hurt. She was rapidly becoming human.
“You like to stir people up,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“Not especially,” I said. I squinted again at the menu, then picked up one of the candles and held it between me and the cardboard. “I should have asked for a flashlight. You must have good eyes. How’s the food here? Have you eaten here before?”
“Frequently,” she said. There was a flash in her eyes, as if there were something amusing about that.
The waiter came back with our drinks and took our order. I decided to make it easy and take the restaurant’s word for what they did well, and ordered the cassoulet. Lucille ordered magret de canard, rare.
“I’m glad this isn’t a nouvelle cuisine place,” I said. “I mean, I was willing to meet you any place you liked, but now I won’t have to stop at McDonald’s afterward.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think you’ll want anything else. A person can live on one serving of their cassoulet for days at a time.”
“That’s good. Nouvelle cuisine tastes all right, usually, but I could never really consider three ounces of pheasant, eighteen grains of rice, and two green grapes a meal.”
We talked about French food until our own French food came. The cassoulet was terrific. The beans were big and soft, and the sausages and hunks of lamb and pork were as good as anything I’d had in France. Magret de canard is supposed to be the meat sliced off the breast of a duck grilled like a steak, but from the slab on Lucille’s plate, they had used a swan at least. Maybe a roc. We wished each other good appetite, then dug in.
I ate three days’ worth of cassoulet, and Lucille did honor to her duck, or whatever. She still hadn’t raised the subject she supposedly wanted to talk to me about. I mentioned it.
“Oh,” she said, shrugging it off. “It isn’t so much that I wanted to talk to you. Though I will, off the record.” She looked the question at me; I nodded. “What I really want is to show you something. Possibly. Depending how dinner goes.”
“Good,” I said. “A man needs something to live up to. I thought we were going to discuss Faith.” I could never say that without feeling like a TV evangelist.
“I suppose the subject will come up.”
“Consider it up already. What are you going to do about your mother-in-law?”
Lucille had obviously decided that the attitude for this evening would be “unconcerned.” “She is a problem. Definitely around the bend. Faith would be in real danger, if anyone listened to the old witch.”
“You looked and acted as if you were listening to her.”
“I was listening to the impression she made on you. With dread, believe me. When she tells Robert to instruct the corporation not to pay any taxes this year, because they didn’t do as she asked in a hundred letters (which we never mail) and forbid the importation of foreign cosmetics, we don’t listen. When she tells us to instruct the hotel to clear the floors directly above and below ours so we won’t be disturbed, we don’t listen.”
“Your husband is running the company now, I take it.”
Lucille smiled. “Robert is such a dear.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that Robert makes a wonderful figure as president of Letronique. He’s handsome, and he makes a great speech. But he’ll never be a businessman.”
“The company’s still healthy. Momentum from Paul?”
“Mostly. That and the fact that no one knows how sick Paul is. Robert is smart enough to know that Paul built a top-notch management team, and to take their advice on everything. Still, once Paul dies—did she tell you it’s supposed to be any minute?”
“I heard. You don’t seem especially broken up about it.”
“I was. I had been, until Faith—you see, I told you she’d come up. Until Faith went to her Dr. Frankenstein, and had that little monster implanted in her.”
“There’s nothing wrong with artificial insemination. Especially in a situation like this. Paul wanted a child. This is the only way.”
“Call me superstitious, then.”
“What’s the matter? Don’t you think the baby is going to have a soul?”
“The whole thing just makes me ill. Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure,” I said. I left a mental bookmark at the matter making her ill, though. If she felt strongly enough about soulless monster babies, it might be enough to encourage her to try to do something about it. Especially with the money thrown in as added incentive. “What happens when Paul dies?”
“Excuse me?”
“The last thing you said before we got sidetracked was, ‘Once Paul dies…’”
“Oh. I was talking about the executives at the company. Once it comes out how sick Paul is, people will realize that it’s the management team that’s been running the company for the last few years, and they’ll be hired away. I keep telling Robert the best thing to do is to have them look around for a merger. Then even with Faith’s little experiment, we should be fine.”
“Faith seems to think you’ll have more money in any case than any rational person needs.”
“You’ve met us. You’ve met Alma. What makes you think you’re talking to rational people?”
I didn’t say anything.
“That settles it,” she said. She waved for the check. She wanted to pay, but I was damned if I was going to let a millionairess buy me dinner. A stupid notion, when you come to think of it, but I was stuck with it. I whipped out my American Express card (feeling slightly ashamed it was only a green one—the Letrons undoubtedly carried gold cards at least), and it was snapped up by the waiter before she could protest.
“All right,” she said. “Pretend to be proud. You’ll learn it doesn’t make any difference.”
I didn’t even try to figure out what she meant by that. The credit slip returned. I added and signed and removed carbons. I kept the counterfoil—this could turn into a deductible business expense, yet. The Grayness would laugh in my face if I ever tried to turn in an expense account to them.
“All done?” Lucille said. “Good. Come with me.”
“Sure,” I said. It was still early, and I had asked the doorman and a few of my more friendly neighbors to keep watch over
Faith and Sue, so I wasn’t too worried on that score. And I still wanted to get my money’s worth from Lucille—I’d learned about a good, cheap French restaurant, and I’d learned some stuff about the family business I could have figured out for myself if I’d taken five minutes to think about it. I’d hang around for a while yet.
“Where are we going?”
“Not far,” she said, as we emerged into the cool November air and the relative brightness of sodium vapor lamps on the avenue. “No distance at all, in fact.”
Her voice sounded wistful; I looked at her face, and that was wistful, too. It was about the last sort of mood I’d ever have expected to see her in.
“Think of it,” she said, “as a sort of time travel.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SHE LET ME STAND out on the sidewalk for maybe five seconds before she turned around and walked back to the building.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Forget something inside?”
But she didn’t go back into the restaurant, she walked into the doorway right next to it, the one that led upstairs to the apartments. She looked back over her shoulder at me. “Come on,” she said. “I told you I’ve decided to show you something.”
“Like what? Housebreaking techniques?”
For someone who felt like an outcast at the newspaper I worked for, it was amazing how many real-reporter-type attitudes I had managed to pick up. Journalistic paranoia, for instance. A setup, that’s what this had to be. She’d get me into somebody’s apartment, hit me on the head, leave me, call the cops, get me arrested…
“Are you coming or not?”
Who dares wins, I thought. “Sure.”
There was no ambush waiting in the hallway. Lucille had her keys out. She opened a mailbox that a peeling Dymo label said belonged to “L. Burke.” There was no mail inside, but there was a three-inch stack of those little bookmark-shaped things locksmiths and exterminators in New York spend their idle time slipping through mailbox slots.
Another key opened the inner door. Lucille let me up two flights of stairs through a shabby but clean hallway to third floor front—L. Burke’s apartment. She had keys to that one, too.
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