The Weird World of Wes Beattie

by John Norman Harris

  “Yes?” Sidney said.

  “One is to forget all about your discoveries and go ahead with the insanity defense. The other is to investigate Gadwell, find out what his motive was and see if he can somehow be tied in with the murder. For instance, if there were some way of showing that Edgar had persisted in his desire to meet Gadwell, and that Gadwell had agreed to a meeting on that Friday night, one might create a reasonable doubt. But in any case, either your investigation should be buried and forgotten, or it should be pursued to the end.”

  “Which do you favor, sir?” Sidney asked.

  “You probably know me well enough not to ask,” Ogilvy said. “Look—this blasted family of Beattie’s retained me to defend him, but they’ve done just a shade more coaching than I am willing to accept. Paget, in his God-given wisdom, is deciding what I should be told and what I shouldn’t. Grant, I am going to withdraw from the case. My position is too embarrassing. Now then, Wes is over twenty-one, and he has not been declared incompetent. If he were, then his nearest relative is the sister—also over twenty-one. Is she capable of being discreet?”

  “Yes sir,” Sidney said. “She’s a bit of a mad hoyden, but essentially she is a responsible person.”

  Ogilvy looked at him closely. “Careful, Grant!” he said. “Now I am going to write to Paget, who seems to act for the family, and explain to him that I am withdrawing. I shall also call the sister—have you got her number? And I will privately recommend to her that she should persuade her brother to retain you. Grant, I feel that you have already proved your competence to handle the matter.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Sidney said, with some confusion.

  “And on Monday, when Wes comes up for remand, I will go into the magistrate’s court and make a statement about my withdrawal just to keep the record straight. Now you understand, Grant, that I have a duty to defend this man, and I would not withdraw if I did not feel that under the circumstances you can defend him better than I could.”

  Sidney suddenly felt a queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach. Taking over a murder case from the great Baldwin Ogilvy was a fairly hefty responsibility.

  “By the way,” Ogilvy said, “you will want to talk to Heber. Heber claims that Wes’s alibi for the evening of the murder is patently phony. He had Wes make a tape recording under sedation, and he says the discrepancies in the story stick out like a sore thumb.”

  “That’s nice,” Sidney said. “I’ll go and see him—if and when I am retained to defend Wes.”

  “You will be, Grant,” Ogilvy said. “I want to see you do it. All right, you’re young, but you’ve got a brain. When I think of all the stupid lawyers I know with white hair, I’m not at all concerned about a bright young fellow having a crack at something.”

  Sidney went back to his office with spasms of elation alternating with qualms of uneasiness in his emotional make-up.

  ***

  But there was no time to sit around and think. The case was due to come before the assizes in two weeks, and it was absolutely necessary to find out just why Howard Gadwell and Mrs. Wicklow had wished to frame Wes Beattie.

  Sidney Grant had a profound conviction that money would be the motive if it were ever discovered, but it was impossible to see how Gadwell could profit from the downfall of Wes Beattie.

  Unless—and a dark suspicion was already beginning to crystallize—unless Gadwell had been acting for someone else.

  The position of Ralph Paget was going to require a certain scrutiny. Someone who knew Wes’s nature had organized the plot against him. Someone who knew that, in May, he was desperately short of funds. Someone who knew his tendency to lie. Paget had known these things.

  Paget, too, had been primarily responsible for railroading the case through the magistrate’s court and sending Wes to jail. Paget had known that Edgar was looking for Mrs. Leduc—and had kept his mouth shut about it. Could Paget have engineered the telephone call to Edgar, trying to persuade him to lay off? Edgar, according to Paget, had accepted the story told by his anonymous caller. Had Edgar suspected his brother-in-law and pretended to believe the story in order to lull Paget’s fears?

  Paget had briefed Baldwin Ogilvy, had encouraged the insanity defense and had withheld vital information from Ogilvy. Any connection that might be established between Paget and Gadwell would put the lid on it. After all, Mrs. Paget stood to gain by the murder of Edgar Beattie before the will was changed—but only if Wes were convicted of it.

  On Friday evening Sidney Grant invited June Beattie out for a quiet dinner at La Chaumière, a French restaurant where it was possible to get a quiet corner and talk.

  ***

  “What I want from you, Miss Beattie,” Sidney said, when they had loaded their plates with hors d’oeuvres, “is a rundown on the family relationships. I want to know where everyone fits in.”

  “Do you want the full story,” she said, “or the abridged version, which only takes a couple of days?”

  “The abridged abridged version,” he said.

  “All right then. We start with Gran. You’ve met her. Reared in opulence in Rosedale, educated in Toronto, England, Switzerland, France and Germany. All the accomplishments of a lady. Rich. Inherited money. Disappointed in love, I suspect, and married young Charley Beattie, an up-and-coming, as a man who could manage her inheritance. Charley did very well because he brought in the money faster than Gran could spend it. Gran despises money and gets rid of it as fast as it comes into her possession. Charley and Gran had issue as follows.

  “One: Edgar. A low-lifer. Charley liked horses, fights, and so on, in secret, but Edgar loved them openly. A disappointment to Gran. He was persuaded to stand still at the altar of a fashionable church for long enough to get married to a gal of Gran’s choosing—also a friend of Marcia’s. It didn’t take. No offspring. Divorce. Since then, Edgar has lived as a reconstructed bachelor. At least, up to the time he ceased living.

  “Two: Claudia. Went to school in England and never recovered. Flat feet, horse face, decent stick generally. As a Red Cross girl she was exposed to the entire Canadian Army during World War II, but failed to achieve even a flaming affair.

  “Three: Marcia. Married Ralph Paget, English bank clerk bent on improving his social status. Marcia is hotly tipped as next chapter regent of the Imperial Order, Daughters of the Empire. She is still trying to extirpate faint traces of her husband’s lower-middle-class origins—like calling Gran ‘Mother B.’ They have two grown-up kids—a girl married to a doctor in Montreal, a boy who is some sort of economist in the Department of Trade and Commerce at Ottawa.

  “Which brings us to Number Four: Gran’s pet, Rupert, a poet and philosopher in whom she found her highest hopes realized. Unhappily, Rupert, when a sophomore at Trinity, went to a stag banquet, where the main entertainment was a girl called Darleen, a smashing creature dressed in a small square of black velvet. She played the piano-accordion and tap danced. The boys whistled and howled, and Darleen—a genuine beauty queen at sixteen—loved it. Just for the hell of it, the boys pushed poor Rupert into dating Darleen. Rupert, who had never met any girls except the suitable ones—you know, the ones destined to be given in marriage at the fashionable churches—fell head over heels. The girl tortured him, I’m told. He tried to orient to her milieu. She, on the other hand, was aware of the Beattie opulence.

  “There came a black day when Mr. Maggs, Darleen’s father, called at the old family home. Mr. Maggs was a well-known conductor. Street car, not symphony. He had grievous news. There was a family crisis. Money was to be handed over. But Rupert, the impractical romantic, stole away and married the girl. Five months later their union was blessed with a sweet little baby girl. Me.”

  “A charming story,” Sidney said.

  “Ah, but there’s more! Gran was inconsolable. She insisted that Rupert be hurled forth into outer darkness. He had made his bed, let him lie in it. He and Darleen got an apartment just off Dupont Street. Rupert sold encyclopedias. There was a depression o
n. His father secretly subsidized him—so did his sister Claudia. But Darleen was one of the great spenders and had a weakness for gin. When World War II broke out, Rupert rushed happily from his wife’s arms to the King’s. He went overseas and was naturally commissioned, being a former Trinity man. After he had left, Wes was born. He never saw his father. I can just remember poor, suffering Rupert.

  “Us kids were picked up every Sunday by the chauffeur and taken to see Gran, a traumatic experience for any Dupont Street kiddy. Gran bought us proper clothes and heaped expensive presents on us. Darleen converted many of the clothes and presents into cash for the purchase of gin.

  “And little June became very smart at parrying Gran’s questions about where that nice reefer coat had gone. She also knew enough not to talk about all the nice men who came to the apartment—army, navy, air force, Yanks, Australians, Norwegians. It was a ball, it really was.

  “And then Rupert was killed in an armored car in Italy, and Gran was stricken with remorse. She offered to take us kids and raise us. Darleen accepted, at a price. We were whisked away, with Mummy weeping ginnily. She wasn’t a bad sort. It was just the circumstances that were so utterly bloody.

  “I adjusted with no trouble at all. I simply commenced a twelve-year battle with Gran and Marcia, who wanted to make a lady of me after the Marcia fashion. They never got to first base. But little Wes missed his Mummy, and cried. They bought him Teddy bears and kiddy cars and bribed him in various other ways, but Mummy hung on. He got to know that it was slightly naughty talking about Mummy, but he clung to me a good deal, as I was the one thing from the old environment.

  “Gran wanted to change his name. ‘Wesley’ had the most frightful Methodist connotations—although Darleen named him after a cowboy singing star, not after that renegade Anglican priest. She named me after her favorite female film star. But Wes was Wes, and he wouldn’t have any other name.

  “He won his point, but apart from that Gran dominated him as only she can. She was utterly unscrupulous. Tears, ridicule, bribes—any weapon that came to hand was used. She was a goddess to Wes, a goddess who had to be appeased. On the face of it he was Gran’s pet, but I think he knew even then that there was no real love in it. He was a bit delicate, and she kept him around home a lot instead of letting him go out and get his hair mussed. But she also—the unscrupulous old woman—destroyed his confidence in his ability to do anything. Anything she didn’t want him to do, that is.

  “Well, Grampa, old Charley, was my pet. He was my secret lover. He made life bearable for me. He was a bit strict with Wes, but quite fair on the whole. However, Wes’s great hero was Uncle Edgar, who took a shine to the boy, or felt sorry for him. So if you think Wes ever had a chance, you’re wrong. I think that basically he was artistic, but Gran and Marcia would give art a bad name with anyone who had artistic leanings. They are literally vultures for culture. I mean they like dead art.

  “They dress up and go to art gallery openings and condescend to the artists. They dress up and go to symphonies and applaud just the right amount. They like everything that is correct and approved by the top aesthetic authorities, but they never love anything madly. Wild enthusiasm ain’t in ’em. It’s this godawful pallor that is so frightful. Beethoven doesn’t need to be dead, but they make him dead, and they make the French Impressionists dead, and the Old Masters and Shakespeare and everything they touch with their clawlike hands.

  “There is the tragedy of Wes—that he was never able to develop his real enthusiasms. And me, I’ve never had anything but enthusiasms, pro or con.

  “So that’s the historical background. Coming to modern times, Grampa got sick a year ago last fall. He had a stroke, but he recovered, and Gran took him off to Arizona to convalesce. But the minute they got back, he had another stroke and he was laid up over Christmas, and then he had a worse one and was paralyzed right down one side and speechless. Well, it dragged on till February, when he died.

  “Well, Marcia, bless her charitable soul, she said it was just too much for Gran with only Claudia and Betty and the cook, so what did she do but sell her house and move back to the old home to help with the nursing. That was just before Christmas. Mind you, Marcia had practically haunted the place before that anyway, but there she was, back and trying to run the joint. I had moved out to my own apartment as soon as I was twenty-one, so it didn’t affect me, but Claudia was highly incensed at Gran for letting her get away with it.

  “This was all very cozy for Marcia, if not Ralph. They had always been up to their ears, what with Marcia’s clothes and entertaining, and this move got rid of their mortgage and all that, and they made a nice profit on the house, so all of a sudden they were in the chips.

  “Naturally they were on Wes’s neck. He was supposed to pay board, but he was always months behind and always biting Gran’s ear for something, and she would nag and complain but give it to him. Marcia and Ralph started this bit about the boy needing discipline to straighten him up, and he got pretty fed up.

  “I told him the only thing to do was get out on his own, and he said he would, but Gran talked him out of it. I don’t know why. Well, Grampa died, and he left Wes and me some money. Five thousand dollars each. Wes’s money was tied up till he was twenty-five, because Grampa knew he’d just squander it. I got my share in April and immediately proceeded to squander it on this trip to all the places I ever wanted to see. And then Wes got arrested, and you know all the rest.”

  Dinner was far advanced by the time she had finished her recital.

  “Why,” Sidney asked, “would Marcia want to come home?”

  “Heirlooms and such,” she said. “Protecting her interests. She figured that if she got well established there, Gran would get feebler and feebler and gradually Marcia could take over and maybe push Claudia out. She likes all that antique furniture and the old family mansion bit.”

  “Tell me exactly what Baldwin Ogilvy said to you,” Sidney said, changing the subject.

  “He said he was calling me as Wes’s nearest relation. He said he felt that he had been put in an impossible position and had to withdraw from the case. He understood that I had retained a Mr. Grant to work on other aspects of Wes’s criminal career, and he said he wanted to offer a friendly suggestion which I could do what I liked about. The suggestion was that I get into the Psychiatric and talk to Wes and perhaps persuade him to retain you. And that was it. Oh, he delicately suggested that I didn’t need to discuss his call with any other relatives.”

  “And you’re going to see Wes tomorrow?”

  “Though Hell should bar the way. Oh, by the way, how come you spilled the name Gadwell to our little friend Black? I thought you wanted to keep Gadwell in the dark. Won’t Black tell him about you?”

  “Maybe he will. I wanted to get Black’s reaction to the name. What I wanted to know is just how much Black did know about the frame-up. If Black calls him, he won’t have my name. I signed in as George Leduc. He might have taken the Duffys’ license number, which would give him their name. We’d better warn them that they might get a phone call. I have no objection to Gadwell being made a bit uneasy—provided he doesn’t know too much too soon.”

  They bought a bottle of Marsala, and drank it slowly by candlelight, and the conversation drifted away to other matters. If Miss Semple could have observed them leaning over the table and talking cozily, she might have clicked her tongue disapprovingly. But Miss Semple was with the girls at her Friday-night bridge club.

  Eight

  DURING HIS DISCREET RESEARCH into the character and habits of High Grade Howie Gadwell, Sidney Grant had tried several times to get in touch with Sharon Willison, a TV songstress of some renown, who had once been Gadwell’s wife. But Miss Willison traveled a lot. Sometimes she was in New York, holding a can of toilet-bowl cleanser in front of a videotape camera, sometimes she was in Hollywood, singing a number in a show, and once she had been at Las Vegas in a night club performance.

  The information which Sidney had ga
thered on the subject of Gadwell was nebulous. He owned pieces of things, he promoted things, he skated on thin ice. But he managed to protect the image of a great spender. He did all the fashionable things, like going to the big fights, the World Series and the Kentucky Derby. He went to Palm Beach and Nassau. Head waiters called him by name and showered him with attention.

  Financially, it didn’t quite add up.

  On the Saturday morning following his dinner with June, Sidney Grant once again dialed the number of Miss Willison’s apartment on Jarvis Street (at the north, or more respectable, end) and was delighted to get an answer. It was necessary to bear down in his investigations in the few remaining days before he would be publicly proclaimed as Wes Beattie’s counsel.

  Miss Willison was not too happy about being disturbed, but she graciously consented to an interview at eleven, and she had all her charm turned on as, wearing a stunning housecoat, she welcomed Sidney to the apartment.

  “Are you bringing your own photographer?” she asked. “Or do you want us to supply some shots?”

  Miss Willison showed an understandable irritation when she learned that by “interview” Sidney had not meant an interview for a magazine article, but, to do her credit, she remained polite. She had arranged a splendid pose, curled up on the end of a sofa, with a coffee tray beside her on a low table, and it was all wasted. Nevertheless, she poured Sidney a cup of coffee and looked at him inquiringly.

  “Miss Willison,” he said, “I wanted to ask you a few questions about one Howard Gadwell.”