by Deaver Brown
“Yeah, sure,” said Quinlan. “We’ll keep plugging with Gabler but don’t waste time. Now, you know the Bremers and the Willets have already signed, thanks to Burt and Gerry—”
Ragged handclapping.
“. . . and I think the Davidsons are just about ready.”
“Do we want the Davidsons, Eddie?” somebody asked bluntly.
Eddie Quinlan was firm. “I don’t know what you mean by that, Gus, but yes, we want the Davidsons—and anybody else we can sell. Let’s concentrate on our best bets. How about the Nicollses?”
“She’s hot,” said a salesman, “and thank God, they don’t go to church.”
Devout churchgoers were one of Fiord Haven’s banes. Religion had a way of eating up Sunday morning.
“Okay,” said Quinlan, consulting a list. “Remember, everybody, work on the Nicollses and on the Davidsons. Then those two schoolteachers . . .”
In short, Fiord Haven was mounting the final assault.
This made Everett Gabler’s announcement, when he finally delivered it, all the more stunning. At first he was not able to get a word in edgewise.
Eddie Quinlan was following his own instructions. At the breakfast table the next morning, he concentrated on better bets than Gabler.
“So you see, Sukey, Alan’s right. You’ll save all the money you spend on ski weekends now.”
“You can’t deny it, Sukey,” Alan chimed in. “It’s not investing in property. It’s just spending money we’d spend anyway.”
Sukey glowered from behind her grapefruit.
Quinlan inched away from a controversial area. “And you’ll be able to get in more skiing. You won’t have to wait in long lines for the tow.”
“Ahem,” said Everett.
It was not enough.
Alan was struck with a new line of reasoning.
“Think how good it will be for our health, too, Sukey. We’ll get away from air pollution. Do you realize that we’re breathing poison most of the time?”
If she did, Sukey gave no sign of caring.
“Ahem,” said Everett again.
Both Alan and Quinlan were intent on Sukey.
“You’ll have a place of your own whenever you feel like getting away,” Quinlan said. “No reservations. No traffic jams. No—”
Everett abandoned his egg.
“I,” he stated loudly, “have decided to purchase a lot.”
All animation was suspended. Alan Davidson, marshaling arguments, had not heard him.
Eddie Quinlan had. After one moment of genuine human surprise, the Fiord Haven manner took over.
“Wonderful!” he exclaimed, his hand going to his breast pocket. “You’ll never regret it. And I have here . . .”
While Alan Davidson looked on, contract number fifty-seven was handed to Everett Gabler.
“You see, Sukey,” Alan said accusingly.
Everett, a man who spent much of his life reading every word of contracts, receipts, reports and even ticket stubs, took the document Quinlan proffered. He fixed his glasses firmly. Then, without further ado, he signed his name with a flourish.
He was the only person at the table who remained unmoved.
Eddie Quinlan ran through a small speech of congratulations and welcome, but he sounded almost confused.
“I hope you’re going to be happy here at Fiord Haven,” he said finally.
Everett had his small conceits. One was a fancy for literal truth. “I am sure,” he said, “that this transaction is going to afford me considerable satisfaction.”
But tension remained. And once again, Sukey Davidson responded to it.
She burst into tears.
Three genuinely astounded men, including her husband, gaped at her.
“Look!” she hiccuped helplessly. “Why are they here? Oh, Alan, I want to go home.”
They stared at Sukey, then they turned to stare at the doorway.
There stood Captain Frewen.
Chapter 24
HIS LAST BOUGH
“I SEE your pal, Eddie Quinlan, pleaded guilty and was sentenced last week,” said Charlie Trinkam. “I suppose you were at the trial.”
“Call that a trial!” Henry Morland scoffed, “It was just a formality. As far as I’m concerned, the spice went out of those murders when Quinlan confessed.”
It was two months since the great descent of the Sloan Guaranty Trust on Fiord Haven. Henry and Ruth Morland were spending the Thanksgiving season in New York. At the moment they were in the bar of the Algonquin with John Thatcher and Charlie Trinkam, waiting for the fifth member of their party.
“The spice may have gone for you, Henry, but I still want to know the facts,” Ruth complained. “Why did Mr. Quinlan confess, anyway? I only met him during one lunch, but he looked like a last-ditch fighter to me. And he’s a lawyer, too, for heaven’s sake!”
“I think being a lawyer may have been a handicap in this case,” Thatcher observed. “Quinlan realized the magnitude of the evidence we uncovered when Everett Gabler offered to buy that lot at Fiord Haven.”
“You mean we actually accomplished something on that trip, John? I’m glad to hear it.” Charlie’s position was that he had braved serious peril in the cause of duty. “When you’re stuck with Sylvia Hazen as Mrs. C. F. Trinkam at office parties for the rest of your life, will it be any consolation to know you got something for it?”
John Thatcher refused to be alarmed. Over the years, many potential Mrs. Trinkams had appeared on the horizon, only to vanish like mirages at the eleventh hour. Charlie had evaded graver threats to his domestic comfort. And if worse came to worst, Thatcher was prepared to derive pleasure from the spectacle of Miss Corsa offering a senior trust officer’s wife a place to hang her crash helmet.
Now he replied to Trinkam’s question, rather than his accusation.
“As usual, Everett managed to milk the situation of everything it had. First, he obtained a copy of the Fiord Haven prospectus which guaranteed a lake to its customers. Let’s leave that aside for a moment. Far more important, he demonstrated that there’s no nonsense about delay when a prospect has finally agreed to buy a lot.”
“We should have spotted that,” said a disgruntled Henry. “The first night that we saw the salesmen at work, they were all pushing contracts under people’s noses.”
Out of simple generosity, Thatcher did not reply that he, for one, had spotted it. He avoided particulars.
“Quinlan’s story about the sale to Lester was always improbable. After all, the whole goal of Fiord Haven’s frenzied sales effort is to make someone like Alan Davidson lose his head for one chaotic moment. And during that moment, the contract is signed.”
Charlie reasoned otherwise. “Granted, Quinlan’s story sounded implausible. But, what the hell, hundreds of murder suspects have stories like that. As long as no one can prove they’re lying, they get away with it.”
“Which brings us to Everett’s final discovery,” Thatcher riposted neatly. “The contract forms at Fiord Haven are numbered.”
Charlie took the point instantly: Not so Henry Morland.
“Why are they numbered?” he asked, his old curiosity coming to the fore.
“Mostly to keep the salesmen honest. Each morning they’re issued a batch of forms. Each evening they have to account for them. A lot is either sold or unsold. That way, the salesmen don’t succumb to the temptation to hold a lot for a promising prospect and ensure their own commission. And, of course, it simplifies keeping the master plan of the development up to date.”
Charlie was moving effortlessly ahead of the argument. He whistled gently. “Now, don’t tell me. Let me guess. There’s a numbered form missing from the files of Fiord Haven. And there was nothing Quinlan could do about it once anyone got the idea of looking for it.”
“Exactly.”
“All right,” Charlie continued. “That suggests Quinlan sold a lot to Lester and then destroyed the contract. I see that. But, for God’s sake, why?”
&n
bsp; “Because, like a good many other people, Quinlan tried unsuccessfully to compromise with Stephen Lester.” Thatcher turned to Henry. “You remember how magnanimous Quinlan was with the people who had bought lots at Fiord Haven during the murder weekend? He immediately offered to let them off the hook. Obviously, that was a matter of policy with him. If there was anyone who had solid grounds for dissatisfaction about a sale, it was better business to release the malcontent than encourage him to foment trouble. The same policy operated before the murder. When Stephen Lester pointed out a fatal flaw in the Fiord Haven setup, Quinlan theatrically tore up the contract and released Lester from his obligation to buy lot seventy-three. With nine out of ten people, that would have been the end of the matter. But not with Lester.”
“Never mind the character analysis, John,” Charlie directed sternly. “We all know Lester was a pain in the neck. I want to know about this fatal flaw. Can anyone put it into one word?”
This was Henry’s great moment. From Olympian heights, he looked kindly at Trinkam.
“I can put it into words,” he offered. “The fatal flaw was the Appalachian Trail.”
“I might have known we’d get back to that, sooner or later,” Charlie grumbled. “What’s so terrible about being next door to the Trail? Is it contagious or something?”
Ruth hastily thrust a bowl of nuts at Henry before he could vocalize his outrage, and Thatcher retrieved control of the conversation.
“Fiord Haven wasn’t next door to the Trail. It straddled the Trail. Henry and I didn’t realize this until we were back on our hiking trip. The original plans for the development called for roads across the Trail, leading to the lake. And a good deal of tow equipment right on the crest.”
With a weather eye on her husband, Ruth asked a neutral question. “But, John, I don’t see how Eddie Quinlan and Ralph Valenti could have gone so far with their plans, without realizing the location of the Trail.”
“I suppose this case could be read as an inducement to employ local professionals,” Thatcher mused. “Of course, if anybody in Gridleigh had been hired, he would have seen the problem instantly. But Quinlan did all the legal work himself, down in Boston. He bought four adjoining farms with a clear title. It never occurred to him that he couldn’t treat the whole acreage as one unit, exploiting the terrain any way he wanted to.”
Charlie Trinkam, as befitted a member of the Sloan, reserved his fire for incompetent performance of duty.
“For God’s sake!” he exploded. “Didn’t Quinlan examine the files at the Registry of Deeds?”
“Of course he did. It just didn’t do him any good. The farms had been in the same families for generations. Examining title was largely a matter of reading wills.”
“I know the sort of thing,” Charlie nodded sagely. “Robert Jones, being of sane mind and sound body, leaves his real estate to his beloved son, Robert Jones, Junior. But, if there was nothing recorded, was there a legal flaw?”
“It would certainly have been an interesting case.” Thatcher’s voice was tinged with muted relish. “For over thirty years, that section of the Trail had been openly and publicly used as a right of way. But as a matter of hard business, Quinlan couldn’t afford to contest the right of way. He and Valenti had invested every penny they had in a development that had to sell quickly—or go under. At the very best, they would have been involved in extended litigation, with public pressure from every conservation group in the country.”
“They were in a tough spot,” Charlie conceded. “With every bird watcher in the country going up in smoke if you relocate a chickadee, I suppose you would have people mounting machine guns to protect this Appalachian Trail.”
Charlie thought he was joking. But Thatcher, watching Henry’s nod of sober approval, realized that Ruth would have had her hands full keeping Henry from the front line.
Ruth, happily unaware of perils averted, had a question of her own. “John, before you rushed off to New York, you said that it was Elvira Tilley who had given you the key to Eddie Quinlan’s motive. What in the world did Elvira have to do with anything?”
“That’s simple enough,” Thatcher explained. “Long before Stephen Lester had appeared on the scene, Quinlan and Valenti learned about the existence and location of the Appalachian Trail. They realized their predicament instantly. They had issued a prospectus promising people a lake, but they didn’t dare rebuild roads to that lake. They had already sold lots on the basis of that prospectus. But they thought they saw a way to salvage the situation. There was nothing in the prospectus that identified the lake. If they came up with a sixteen-acre lake, they would satisfy their legal obligation. They owned a pond to the west, on the other side of the Trail, but it wasn’t doing them any good. There was, however, a perfectly good pond to the east on Mrs. Tilley’s adjoining property. So they bought an option on it. Then they launched a homeric campaign to sell lots, and raise enough money to exercise the option.”
The Appalachian Trail left Charlie Trinkam cold. But talk of options and frenetic attempts to raise money roused his banker’s instincts.
“When,” he asked with narrowed eyes, “did they acquire this option?”
Thatcher beamed. When it came to fundamentals, the men of the Sloan were never far behind.
“That’s the point. When I was in New York, Miss Hazen had heard about the option. She assumed that it had been a shrewd business maneuver. That is, that Quinlan and Valenti had taken an option at the outset of their venture, when local farm prices were low. But when Ruth told me about Mrs. Tilley being a beneficiary of inflated land values, I realized that the option came much later. It could only have been inspired by desperation. No professional real estate operator launches a program which will skyrocket local values—without first acquiring all the land he needs. Then I remembered the very vague talk about their lake used by the Fiord Haven salesmen. No one was taken to see the lake. Whenever they had a feature on water sports, they used photographs of a development already in operation. They were planning to substitute one lake for the other, without any of their customers being the wiser.”
“So,” Charlie summarized, “until Lester came along, they were hoping to pull the whole thing off. They’d sell enough lots, buy Mrs. Tilley’s place, and develop the second lake. Then, when Fiord Haven was a success, they could sell the original lake, on the other side of the mountains, at a nice fat price. Were they hoping to keep all this to themselves?”
Thatcher nodded vigorously. “They certainly were. I thought it was very significant that Elvira Tilley did not recognize Eddie Quinlan. She was punctiliously greeting everybody she knew in the Gridleigh Inn, but Quinlan was a stranger to her.”
“You mean she didn’t know she’d sold to Fiord Haven?”
Ruth bristled in defense of her friend. “How could she? The development was always called Fiord Haven locally. She was approached by something called Northern Land Development for an option. She never realized they were the same.”
Henry had local loyalties too. “Maybe John and I wouldn’t have been so fast on the draw ourselves, except that we were just back from Boston. Down there, the offices were labeled Northern Land.”
“I expect, Charlie,” Thatcher said, “that after they took out the option, Valenti and Quinlan were careful to keep their corporate name in the background up in New Hampshire.”
As they paused to order more drinks, Ruth sighed gently. “Of course, all this information about real estate companies is very interesting,” she lied politely, “but it doesn’t really explain anything about Amanda, does it? I still don’t understand why she acted the way she did.”
Thatcher was old-fashioned enough to appreciate women who were more interested in people than in business firms. Or, exposure to Sylvia Hazen was rapidly making him so.
“The way Amanda acted is a good indication of the way Stephen Lester acted,” he said. “We may never know for certain, but the police theory is quite clear. Stephen Lester bought a lot in good faith aft
er lunch on Saturday. Then, as he was setting out for a walk, he told Eunice about the purchase. He almost surely expected to tell Amanda at the first opportunity. But during his walk, he came across the Appalachian Trail and he began to have suspicions about Fiord Haven’s topography. By the time he returned from his walk, he was angry. Angry enough to snap at Amanda when she tried to question him about where he had gone and what he was planning to do. He had no intention of telling her that he had been gulled into buying land by a shady operation. What he wanted was more information. So he started off on a circuit of the critical area and ended up at Alec Prohack’s trailer. There, you recall, he insisted on examining plans of the whole site and expressed interest, not in the buildings that were going to be erected, but in the development of the land—roads, trails, tows. By the time he finished with Prohack, his worst fears had been realized. So he waited until everybody had left the site. Except Quinlan, whom he immediately taxed with his discoveries.”
“From what we’ve heard about Lester, I can almost feel worry for Quinlan,” Henry growled. “You remember the attitude he took with Finley?”
“He was never as dangerous a threat to Finley as he was to Quinlan,” Thatcher pointed out. “With Finley, Lester would have had to go to strangers, namely the Architectural Society, to create real trouble. But when Quinlan tore up the sales contract, Lester told him that wasn’t enough. It was criminal for any businessman to sabotage one of the country’s great wilderness trails. And he, Lester, would stop it. He trotted out his qualifications for the job. Remember, Lester had been a member of the conservation committee of the Sierra Club. He was on a committee of the Appalachian Mountain Club. He could organize enough pressure to ensure Fiord Haven’s bankruptcy. And, on top of that, he was unbearably righteous about the whole thing.”
Ruth contemplatively speared an olive. “Really, Sukey was quite right, wasn’t she? For one terrible moment, it would be like being married to Stephen Lester.”
Thatcher smiled wryly. “Even in his jail cell, Eddie Quinlan isn’t likely to phrase a confession along those lines. He doesn’t pretend any remorse about Lester’s death. As he sees it, the man was threatening his existence. He saw red and picked up a hammer. What bothers him is Valenti’s death.”