by Frances
They had, the investigating detective thought, been thinking of it, but then the letter came from their mother in California. With that proof of her existence, and good health, nobody would give them an order.
Bill said, “Mmmm.” Then he said, “The Ferrises. How do they seem to be fixed? Tycoon types?”
Not that, Stein had gathered; not anywhere near that. Ferris—Walter Ferris—was an office manager; held a good-enough job, but not the sort on which one grew rich. All the same, Stein gathered—although the point had not sharply arisen—that the Ferrises were well-enough heeled.
“Otherwise,” Stein said, “what would they—the family, that is—be doing with this here now fortune in jools?”
“You’ll be coming around the mountain when you come, sergeant,” Bill said. “We don’t really know there is one. Any other thoughts?”
“Only,” Stein said, “that if she’s in California, she’s not your Mrs. Macklin. I suppose that’s what you’re after?”
“I’m damned,” Bill said, “if I know what I am after. The sketch?”
The Ferrises were of two minds about a sketch Dorian had made—in which Dorian had tried to visualize a face as it had been before plastic surgery had relentlessly tightened skin over bone. Walter Ferris had thought it might be his mother’s. His sister—and his wife—had thought not.
“It isn’t too much like the photograph,” Stein said.
“Dorian tried to keep the photograph out of her mind,” Bill said. “There’d have been no use in it otherwise. She may have tried too hard, I suppose. Go ahead.”
“That’s about all, so far,” Stein said. “He asked again about the possibility of another child—Mrs. Ferris’s, I mean. Nope. Just the two. Asked around a little among neighbors, that sort of thing. Got a few of them to agree that Mrs. Ferris might be considered a little eccentric. Nice way of putting it. But—not forthcoming. Don’t like people’s affairs pried into. And—”
He stopped. Bill could hear him, faintly, face obviously turned from the receiver, say, “All right. Let’s have it.” Bill waited. “Something from L.A.,” Stein said. “Hold on.” Bill held on.
“Well,” Stein said, on the telephone again, “looks like our Mrs. Ferris is in L.A., all right. Or was, anyhow, as late as Saturday.”
Bill Weigand, his tone resigned, told Sergeant Stein to go ahead. Then—
Approximately ten days before, a Mrs. Winifred Ferris, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had checked into the Midtown Plaza in Los Angeles. The previous Saturday—“day before yesterday, that is”—she had checked out again. The hotel was large. The Los Angeles police had not, as yet, found anybody who remembered Mrs. Ferris in any detail. A chambermaid had seen her once or twice, and recalled her as middle-aged. The clerk to whom she had paid her bill, and surrendered her key, did not remember her at all. Why should he? People came and went.
“We can wire the photo out,” Stein said. “Probably won’t come to anything. Trouble is, people don’t look at people.”
That, Bill agreed, was a trouble. But a more immediate trouble was: If Mrs. Ferris was checking out of a Los Angeles hotel on Saturday, she could not very well be Mrs. Macklin, who had sailed aboard the Carib Queen from New York on Friday.
“Funny business,” Stein said, but he said it doubtfully.
There was always, Bill agreed, a chance of funny business. Funny business they had always with them. But—why? What would make it worth the trouble?
Sergeant Stein had no answer. Nor had he, for the moment, further information. He left Bill Weigand to his thoughts, which were discouraging. Things seemed constantly to slip through his fingers. It appeared, now, that Mrs. Ferris had slipped, leaving him with Respected Captain Folsom. Folsom was, certainly, a possibility. But Folsom did not “feel” right. The more Bill thought of it, looking at, without seeing, the silent telephone, the more unpleasantly possible seemed the chance that he was on the wrong track altogether. (Not, he thought, with waxing irritation, that he was on any clear track whatever, or had been.) Neither Mrs. Ferris nor Mr. Folsom might have anything to do with the matter. Marsh might have been killed for reasons quite unknown, by persons undreamed of. Miss Springer, the social hostess, for example. Perhaps Mr. Marsh had spurned Miss Springer. Bill Weigand was stern with himself. Undoubtedly, overindulgence in paella was to blame.
He clung to a bracelet, two necklaces and a ring, presumably of great value. He clung to the probability that Hilda Macklin, in her journey through narrow streets of old Havana, trailed by Pamela North, had sought to dispose of jewelry—perhaps had disposed of jewelry. He did not know that it was the jewelry of which Marsh had carried photographs. He had not seen it; Hilda had described it to Aaron Furstenberg only in general terms. The articles might be different altogether. He thought it probable, if not certain, that Jules Barron had recognized the photographs. It was probable, not certain, that Hilda and Jules Barron were in something together. (They might, of course, merely have struck up a shipboard acquaintance. Hilda might have asked his advice, as she had asked Furstenberg’s. There was nothing to prove that Barron had followed Pam while she was following Hilda, finally among alligators. There was nothing to prove anything.)
Bill Weigand went in search of stimulation. He went to his stateroom, and found Dorian in siesta, and very pretty in it. There is nothing, on a cruise, like a good afternoon nap.…
They met by pre-arrangement, in the smoke room, at a little after seven. They found the big room cool, and almost deserted. They found Captain Peter Cunningham, out of uniform, in a white linen suit, having a gin and tonic. “Ship’s tied up,” Captain Cunningham said, indicating the drink. “Find Havana a bit of a bore?”
They did not, Pam told him, for the others—they most certainly did not. They had merely come aboard to nap. Thereafter they would go into the city and be gay. “Perhaps,” Pam said, “even a night club. Although we almost never do at home.”
They must not miss one of the night clubs, Captain Cunningham agreed. He named several. He was, and this seemed a little to surprise him, going to one himself—club called The Castle. With Mr. and Mrs. Furstenberg—a new club, in the Sans Souci area, said to be very good. Then Captain Cunningham looked at Bill Weigand, and raised his eyebrows.
“A good many things,” Bill said, and told him some of them.
“Beats me how you sort ’em out,” Cunningham said. “Wouldn’t know which way to turn, in your place.”
The Furstenbergs came into the smoke room and looked around it, and Cunningham said, “Probably meet up later,” and went to join them.
“When you’re on to something,” Pam said to Bill Weigand, “you look different. You don’t look different.”
There had been, Bill said, nothing to make him. He told them what Stein had reported.
“It looks to me,” Jerry said, “as if you’re left with Mr. Folsom.”
“It looks to me at the moment,” Bill said, “as if I’m left with everybody.” He turned to Pam. “By this time,” he said reproachfully, “you’ve usually stirred things up.”
“I,” Pam said, “have been thrown about. I have been chased in dark alleys. I—” She stopped suddenly. “I suppose,” she said, “that Mr. Furstenberg really is?”
They waited a moment. Then, cautiously, Jerry said, “Is what, Pam?”
“Why,” she said, “Mr. Furstenberg, of course. All we know is what he says. Or?”
“No,” Bill said, “I haven’t checked. There is a Furstenberg, certainly. Whether this is Furstenberg—why?”
“Impostor,” Pam said. “Marsh really knew him—that is, knew the real Mr. Furstenberg. So this one had to kill him.” She looked at the others. “All I offer is a straw,” Pam said. “All is not gold that glisteneth. Or diamonds either, of course. And—” She stopped; looked at Bill Weigand. “You’ve thought of something,” she said, with accusation. “Instead of listening—”
She continued to look at him.
“The jewelry isn’t really?” s
he said. “But how would that—”
“No,” Bill Weigand said. “I wasn’t thinking of that. But—I thought the diamond sparkle may have got in our eyes.”
They waited. Bill did not continue.
“It is not,” Dorian said, at length, “like you to be cryptic.”
“The sea air,” Bill said.
“More likely,” Dorian said, “all that paella you had for lunch.”
Bill grinned at that. He stood up. He said he would be gone only a minute, and they looked up at him.
“Radiogram I want to send,” Bill told them, and the smile remained widely on his face. He went.
“Exactly,” Pam North said, “like the Cheshire cat.”
11
They went, in time, from the ship and through the pier warehouse and into the soft night. “I wait,” Mike said, standing by his taxicab, patting it with affection. “As you say, I wait.” They had not said anything about Mike’s waiting, but his brown eyes glowed with what was, presumably, devotion.
“Sí,” Jerry said.
“The night is beautiful,” Mike told them, with rather the air of one who has invented darkness. “She is not so hot.”
She was not; she was a warm, almost a tender night, but she was not hot. They got into Mike’s taxicab and plunged through the warm night of Havana, amid prodigious squawks. They dashed up to, seemed about to carom off, a restaurant, and found it gay and bright and partially filled. It was only a little after eight, and they were early, and had expected to be, and did not mind. They were welcomed; not even their expressed preference for martinis to daiquiris marred the welcome. The waiter only slightly frowned, and instantly recovered himself.
They had steaks and fried green bananas and did not hurry; they had dessert and black Spanish coffee, and did not hurry. They asked Bill to whom, about what, he had sent a radiogram (with the air of one to whom something has just occurred) and were asked to bide their time, and bided it. It was after ten—and the restaurant was by then comfortably filled—when they went again into the night. “I have waited,” Mike told them, in triumph. He waited further, briefly, while Bill Weigand made a telephone call.
“The Castle Club,” Jerry said, and Mike glowed and said, “She is beautiful, the Castle Club.” He bowed them into the cab. They plunged away. Mike turned back, his left hand on the horn button, his smile entrancing. “She is also far,” he said, and, apparently without looking, swerved around a bus. The bus snorted at him; the cab squawked in derision. At the bridge across the Almendares River, where earlier the cab had sickened, the motor coughed momentarily. Mike stamped a foot sternly on the floor boards. The car, chastened, ceased to cough. They darted on a broad avenue through what was, they presumed, Marianao; they swirled past the country club; they darted among the curving streets of the Sans Souci district. Beyond question, she was far.
The Castle Club was at first a glow around a bend. Averting eyes from road, turning to face his passengers, Mike spoke in triumph. “The Castle Club!” he told them, with the simple pride of a man who owns it. He pressed his hand on the horn button for emphasis, and the car squawked obediently. It found, or seemed to find, its own way around the bend. It avoided, as if by instinct, a car approaching from the opposite direction. It went faster.
The glow came from vari-colored floodlights, affixed to palm trees. Soft reds, soft yellows—and a few gay pinks—brightened the frond plumes. It was at once expected, obvious, and beautiful. Above the trees, above the lights, the crystal, seemingly breakable, three-quarters’ moon floated in a dark sky. “My!” Pam North said, paying tribute to the spectacle. “She is beautiful,” Mike said. “Sí?”
The cab swirled in among the palm trees, and the Castle Club seemed to leap, sparkling, from the trees. The builders of the Castle Club, it was instantly apparent, had let themselves go.
The building was low and spreading, and was illuminated by moderate floodlights. It was intensely modern and slightly serpentine in outline. At the entrance, a curved roof of glass defied gravity and the tensile strength of materials. On either side of the entrance, glass walls curved away, into semi-darkness, among the vari-colored palm trees. And, behind the low building—which did a little seem to float—Morro Castle, bathed in pale green light, challenged the dark sky.
“It,” Dorian Weigand said, “is not reticent, is it?”
“Sí,” Mike said. “She is beautiful.”
“What on earth,” Jerry North said, “is Morro Castle doing here?”
“My!” Pam said, having previously committed herself.
“Señors! Señoras!” a man in uniform exclaimed gladly, and flung the cab door open.
“ScrEEch!” the cab door said, in anguish.
“One day,” Mike said, “you will break it off. I will wait.”
“Do that,” Bill said.
They went into the club, and were passed from hand to hand—and, in addition to the trained cordiality of maitre d’s and waiter captains, there was a rather special, somewhat enfolding, warmth in their greeting.
“Of course,” Jerry said for his wife’s ear, “it is off season.”
“Always deflating,” Pam said, in a happy voice, feeling suddenly very gay. “As for me, I feel eighteen.”
“The patio,” the maitre d’ told them, and led them through a spreading foyer. To the right of the foyer was a room in which a croupier chanted his litany, in which dice skidded along a table, bounced from a cushioned baffle and were announced. “Messieurs et mesdames,” the croupier said. “Messieurs et—”
To the left, behind glass doors, there was a spreading room with tables, with a dance floor in the center—and with nobody in it.
“Tonight the patio,” the maitre d’ repeated, and they went down broad stairs and into the night—the gayest, brightest of nights. Slender dark girls, wearing nothing in particular with incredible grace, swayed and bucked, in the company of dark young men who wore straw hats, white trousers and what appeared to be abbreviated white nightshirts. Heads tossed and feet stamped, and the girls, from whom feather trains depended, whisked their feathered tails. Feverishly, from beyond the dancers, under a curved glass canopy, an orchestra in bright shirts and slashed trousers played what must surely be the fastest mamba in the world.
Around the dancers there were tables, not all of them occupied. The maitre d’ skirted the dancers, stopped proudly at a table for four on the edge of the dance floor and spread his hands in triumph. “Ringside!” he announced and pulled out chairs. They arranged themselves. “By the way,” Bill Weigand said, “I’m expecting a message.”
The maitre d’ eyebrows rose. “A message, señor?” he said, “But of course, a message.” He looked with doubt at Pamela, at Dorian; then, with even greater doubt, at Bill Weigand. “A—ah—a message, señor? From another—ah—that is to say—”
“No,” Bill said. “Not from a lady. From the police.” He looked at the maitre’s face. “There will,” Bill told him, gravely, “be no disturbance.” Then Bill gave his name.
The maitre’s face brightened. He nodded and nodded again. A clever one, the maitre’s face said. I understand, señor. The señor is discreet. The señor may rely oil the discretion of the Castle Club. (The maitre had a talkative face.)
The floor show subsided into the wings, and the band played on. The crystal moon floated high in the dark sky, and was accompanied by stars. And, to one side of the patio, Morro Castle continued to loom darkly. But now it was understandable, being a replica—a sturdy replica, mounting fifty feet into the night air, but by no means so massive as Havana’s harbor-guarding emblem. It was not even, in its massiveness—its pale green massiveness—particularly inappropriate to the modernity from which it jutted. About the whole idea there was a certain engaging impertinence.
While the show was on, the table area had been in semi-darkness. Now, with spotlights diminished on the dance floor, it was easier for them to look around. The patio, if occupied to the dusky tables at the perimeter, would hold
, perhaps, a hundred and fifty. It was about half filled, and largely—which was pleasant—by undoubted Habaneros. But fellow tourists from the Carib Queen were numerous. Most were no more than dimly familiar faces. But the Buckleys were there, at a table for two, looking somewhat round-eyed. (The girls who had danced had really worn very little—far less than is commonly worn in Kansas.) And, part way around the dance floor, Captain Peter Cunningham, RNR, sat at a table with Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Furstenberg. There was a bottle of scotch in the center of the table.
The orchestra put out cigarettes. The orchestra embarked on a rumba—a very fast rumba.
“Come on,” Pam said to Jerry, who looked at her in horror. “One two three pause,” Pam said, “or anything that comes to mind.” She looked at him. “No,” she said, “it’s not too fast. Come.” He went. It was much too fast; it was impossible to remember one two three pause. It, nevertheless, got into the feet, which did something—although certainly not what was prescribed—on their own. Jerry was told he was doing beautifully, and almost believed it.
After a pause, and a second dance, they went back, and were a little breathless. Dorian and Bill were not at the table. In the center of the table, there was a bottle of Vat 69. On the table was a bowl of ice, and bottles of club soda, and four glasses. “Scotch?” Pam said, in doubt, and then looked around at other tables. Most of the tables, and all those occupied by passengers of the Carib Queen, were similarly supplied. Dorian and Bill returned, from the vicinity of the dance floor. Pam North pointed at the bottle.
“The custom,” Bill said. “We buy a bottle of whisky. We stay as long as we like.”
“We will never,” Dorian said, “drink half of it.”
“That,” Bill said, “is probably part of the idea. Takes the place of a cover charge. It—”
He stopped. They looked in the direction he was looking. The maitre d’ was bringing further guests—bringing Respected Captain J. R. Folsom and Mrs. Macklin. The captain had entered into the spirit of things. He wore one of the short white nightshirts. They were, perhaps, more appropriate to slenderer men. Mrs. Macklin, who seemed—at any rate from a distance—to be entirely sober, wore a white dress and her improbably red hair was meekly in order. There was, however, nothing meek about her manner, as she preceded Captain Folsom to a table, a little way back from the dance floor.