by David Daniel
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” I said. “Get dressed. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
Ten minutes later, we sat amid ferns and busy waitresses in the hotel restaurant, steaming coffee before us. Neither of us had wanted food, nor small talk. I said, “Somebody tried to kill me last night.”
Her hand came to her mouth. “Oh, no. After…?”
“Before. I didn’t get a minute to tell you.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Save the dramatics. I take the pay, I have to expect to deal with the rough stuff. Only I don’t like it when the people I’m working for hold out on me. That hand-to-God stuff is a bad joke. All of you—Corbin, Ross—I’ve got questions about Ross—and you, sweetheart. You know things you aren’t telling me. It’s time for the truth. If not, I go to the cops.”
“The police? Why?”
“They might be interested in this,” I said. “For starters.” I took the pewter-framed photograph from the side pocket of my jacket and stood it upright on the table.
She drew a sharp breath and grabbed for it. I blocked her hand. She struggled for a moment, then withdrew her hand. She threshed it through her still-damp hair. The look she gave me was stricken. In a very soft voice, she said, “Okay. I was going to see you today, anyway. I decided it yesterday, maybe even the day before, but I wasn’t ready yet.”
“Not ready to talk, anyway.”
She lowered her eyes. “This has been going around in my head, driving me crazy. I swam thirty laps, hard, this morning, hoping it would go away. When we went to that noisy bar the other night, the Silverado—”
“Bras and panties optional,” I said.
There was pain in her expression. “I was interested in that singer, Betty Crown. It wasn’t idle curiosity. There’s something I came to Lowell to find out, because it’s been … haunting me. I spent most of yesterday running around trying to get answers. And now that I think I’ve found some, I don’t have a clue about what to do. So last night, when I came to your apartment…” She exhaled softly, and I saw a tear fall on the place mat. She said, “I’m sorry.”
I was, too, I guess. I put a napkin in her hand. In a gentler voice, I said, “A person likes to think he’s more than just another kind of exercise.”
She nodded.
When she had used the napkin, I said, “Why don’t you tell me about yesterday?”
She turned the framed photograph so we could both see it. “I brought this to Mr. Silver and described it for him. I watched his face. He knew. He said this was Betty Crown.”
“Where did you get the picture?” I asked.
“I’ve had it a long time. That day in your office—you asked me who Isabelle Martin was?”
I remembered. I told her now that I had found the name when I’d snooped in the Jer-Cor check ledger. She didn’t get upset. She said, “This is Isabelle Martin and Betty Crown. She was my mother.”
I didn’t interrupt with questions; not then, nor after, as she told me that a year before, when it was certain that her mother was dying, she told Chelsea that she had once thought about pursuing a career as a singer. Her mother had moved to California, married Ted Nash, and then Chelsea had been born. Her mother gave up the career idea. “Ted was a good father. He was a draftsman at an aircraft plant, steady and hardworking. When I was in high school, he got lung cancer, from the aluminum dust he’d breathed all those years at the plant. He lived long enough to see me graduate.”
Chelsea spent the last year of her mother’s life nursing the dying woman, and it was then that her mother told her about her early singing days. “Betty Crown was just a name she picked. Martin was pretty common here in Lowell, where she was born.”
“And where she knew Jerry Corbin,” I said.
Chelsea nodded. “She didn’t say so. After my divorce, after I left Warner Brothers, she suggested I go see Jerry—said she’d clipped a want ad. I got the job. And when my mother died, even though I’d only known Jerry a short time, he sent a generous donation to a charity in her name. I took it to be the kind of thing he did. Then, recently, he covered $10,000 in expenses for her estate. When I thanked him, he mentioned that he’d come from Lowell, too. In fact, he said, he’d once known my mother.”
“When she was singing at the Canal Club,” I said. “And he was in love with her.”
She looked at the photograph. “I know that now. I suspect that’s how I got the job with Jerry. My mother must have contacted him.”
“This guy in the picture isn’t Jerry, though.”
“I don’t know who it is. There are a lot of questions I don’t have answers to.”
“Which is why you went over to the university alumni office that first day, isn’t it?” I said. “To talk to Florence Murphy.”
“How did you know that?”
“I didn’t until just now.”
She nodded, relieved maybe. “I knew Mrs. Murphy had known Jerry long ago. They’d stayed in touch with holiday cards. I called her as soon as I got here. She told me she had something to speak to me about, too. We made plans to meet Monday morning. Then she was attacked.”
“Do you know what she wanted to tell you?”
“No.”
Sunlight threw bright shapes on the restaurant carpet. A waitress refilled our cups. “Something began to bother me after you took me to the Silverado,” Chelsea went on. “Yesterday I called Los Angeles County Records. Ted Nash was in the army overseas until after I was born. I was eight months old before he and Mom even met.”
And suddenly I saw it: as I’d seen it without being fully aware last night, when Matty Silver first showed me the photograph. There was a similarity of coloring, something in the shape of her mouth, her height. I wouldn’t have pulled it out of the blue; but with the link made, I could see it. I said, “And now you wonder if the reason your mother split from here was because she was pregnant—and you think Jerry Corbin…”
There were tears in her eyes again, but they didn’t fall. “I thought maybe he’d left her, but now I think it was she who left. Maybe she couldn’t face her family, or she didn’t love Jerry. I don’t think he knew, which is why she never told me. But he must still feel something about her—he paid that unforeseen debt. He had no obligation to. My call yesterday confirmed that Ted Nash adopted me.”
“And now you’re wondering what to do with all this?”
She nodded and tears shook loose and rolled. I took her hand. “What do you feel about it?”
She tried to speak, couldn’t, cleared her throat, and in a small voice said, “Confused. Scared. Afraid Jerry will reject me if I bring it up. But mostly, I feel like I’m … on the verge of solving a mystery of my own, one that might better be left alone.”
She was looking at me, perhaps wanting me to tell her what to do. Her right eye had its own very slight outward tilt, and they were both a glimmering green.
“I’m not sure that’s ever true,” I said.
“Tonight is the show, and I’ve been all mixed up about this. That’s why I was … why last night…” She gave up. A tear fell on my hand.
I drew a slow breath, trying to get my own thoughts clear. I said, “Only you can decide what you need to do. But you don’t have to rush it. One thing at a time. Get through tonight first. Just that.”
She sniffled and dried her eyes. She drank some coffee. When she had composed herself, she said, “What were you going to ask me about Justin?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Nothing you’d know anything about.” I put down money for the check. “You’ve got fish to fry,” I said. “And I’ve got some things to attend to, also.”
“Will I see you later?”
I raised my right hand. “Sure you will.”
At the elevator, she leaned up and planted a quick, only slightly tear-stained kiss on my jaw. I’d have taken it over an honorary doctorate any day.
26
I DROVE OUT Nesmith Street, then up Mansur to Belmont Avenue. There, in the lofty h
eights of old laissez-faire Lowell, I felt the city dwindling to insubstantiality behind me. This was Belvidere. No need for a leaf blower up here; except for occasional ancient beeches, still holding their coppery leaves, all the trees were evergreen. Like the bank accounts. Between the big homes I got glimpses of downtown far below. Washed in late-autumn sunlight, the city had the look of a toy town in a children’s book illustration.
The Devlin ancestral castle was as easy to miss as Camelot, all stone and slate-scaled angles and red-brick chimneys, one of which breathed woodsmoke into the October sky. I parked in the circular cobblestone drive. The front door was fashioned from massive oak planks that all day with a battering ram might get you through. I used the ornate knocker in the form of a standing bear instead.
From the granite stoop I could peer over a privacy fence into an open area in front of a carriage house. There a big guy was buffing a deep blue Mercedes sedan with a chamois the size of a bed sheet. The car gleamed like wet midnight. The guy had the manner and look of a young Boog Powell, an effect enhanced by the plastic batting helmet and satin warm-up jacket he was wearing, both marked with the Orioles logo.
“You must be the cleanup batter,” I called, giving him a winsome smile.
He quit buffing and turned a hard stare on me. “I’m the driver. Writing a book?”
Gone were the grand and glorious days of livery.
As I was about to give the knocker another go, the door opened. A short man with thinning gold hair and wearing a black suit peered past a sharp nose at me. “Yes, sir?” His was the same voice I’d gotten on the phone, with the kind of accent ski instructors affected.
“Mr. Devlin is expecting me,” I said.
He nodded me in and asked me to wait. I didn’t mind. I hadn’t been in a museum in years. The room was baronial: ornate wood and plaster, geometric parquet, and oriental rugs as thick as lawn turf. In the corners trees grew from Chinese urns. At the far end was a wide, winding staircase, equipped with an escalator chair. The old paintings on the walls were depictions of fantastic mountains and wild landscapes.
“Would you come with me, sir,” the man with the accent said. “Mr. Devlin will join you in the solarium.”
We walked through the house quietly, which is the only way you can walk through a house like that. The solarium was in the southwest corner, filled with potted marigolds and geraniums, which spiced the air with a bitter, bracing smell. Three of the walls were leaded glass, in the center of each of which was a panel depicting the same bear-rampant figure as on the door knocker. Judy Bishop would probably know the heraldic meanings.
“Ah, Mr. Rasmussen,” said someone behind me. “A pleasure.”
I turned. I took the hand which Basil Devlin lifted off a cane. It was dry and liver spotted, but firm, which it would need to be to move around the cane: it looked like ebony. “A pleasure to meet you, sir,” I said.
He still had the sensitive, fine-boned face I used to see often in the social and business pages of the newspapers, but he looked as though sickness had laid a dread hand on him. The ruddy look of lunches in the grillroom of the Vesper Country Club had faded. His mouth, the bags under his eyes, even his small white mustache looked tired. Everything but his eyes. His eyes were sharp and bright as an eagle’s. I pegged him at eighty or very near. But never mind that, he was a presence in the city. The way his neighbor, former senator Paul Tsongas, was and would be for years to come. It’s what Corbin meant by “juice.”
Basil Devlin scowled up through one of the glass walls of the solarium. “I had hoped we could enjoy the sunshine as we chatted, but clouds are coming in. It’ll be cold. Heinz, we’ll use the sitting room.”
I was ready to take off my jacket, but he was the host. I tagged along behind him and Heinz and climbed as Devlin rode the escalator chair to the second floor. “The weather’s changing,” he said. “We’ve mucked it up permanently.” I thought about sharing with him the Old Farmer’s forecast for later tonight and appearing oracular, but I figured he didn’t need it. We reached the sitting room within the hour.
The walls were hung with more paintings, portraits of men in suits whose style went back through a century and more. All were posed with their hands on a book and looked important. “The family gallery,” Devlin said with a wave. His was an old Anglo-Irish bloodline of farmers and bankers, a useful mix in the days when the Yankees were grudgingly letting go their stranglehold on local power. He nodded at a pair of chairs. No fear of sinking into these: they were fashioned of oak and leather and looked as if they had been upholstered by a taxidermist. We settled in before a limestone hearth, where a wood fire danced. When Heinz had gotten the old man settled, with the inevitable plaid lap blanket, he left us. Basil Devlin said, “I’m delighted you phoned, and that I can finally put a face to a name. I’ve heard about you around town.”
“Nothing good, I hope.”
The dewlaps creased in a small grin. “The man who accused you … Councilman Cavanaugh. A particularly loathsome species of fungus, I think. They seem to sprout at will in some of those shadowy corner offices of City Hall that seldom get swept. Of course, Devlins once occupied their share of said offices. But in those days there was no notion of careerism. What you had was a spirit of public service, of noblesse oblige.”
“Which made a nice flip side to laissez-faire, if we’re speaking French,” I said. My bloodlines flowed from the working floor of the mills.
Devlin smiled. “Touché. I suppose that that spirit is one few can afford today. Still, I don’t hold anything against any person who has a code that he tries to live by. You have one, haven’t you, Mr. Rasmussen? A credo you operate under?”
The heat of the fire was making my face stiff. “I never put a name to it,” I said.
“You have a reputation for reliable work.”
“If I do a job so people are satisfied they got their money’s worth, I get to keep on working. When I don’t and they don’t, it’ll be time to close up shop and take a postal exam.”
“Exactly the logic I used in recommending you to Jeremiah Corbin. He and I go way back, as he may have told you.”
“He said his family worked for yours.”
“For many years. A gentleman in his employ came, oh, two weeks ago, with a letter of introduction. Nice-looking man. Jewish, I believe.”
“Justin Ross?”
“Ross, yes. He told me about Jeremiah’s plans to visit the city. They were looking for someone to oversee security—someone unconnected with the police, he said. To minimize notoriety, I should think. People in the public eye must attract unwanted attention at times. Why, years ago—” Devlin sat back abruptly. “Forgive me. You’re on a tight schedule. It’s a big day for the city. And I’m just a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, whiling away the empty hours with talk.”
“Somehow I don’t think that’s ever described you, sir.”
“Thank you. What can I do for you?”
He was right. Time was in limited supply. “I know that you went to Harvard,” I said. “I’m looking for a little help. Were you familiar with the clubs there?”
His eyes brightened. “I was Pork,” he said. My face must have shown my confusion. “Porcellian,” he explained. “It’s one of the oldest and most respected.”
I nodded. “Did you ever hear of an unofficial club whose members swore an oath to uphold the traditions of the school and itself?”
Devlin touched his mustache. “Hmm—most of them have oaths of one sort or another.”
“This would’ve been to do anything necessary, including take revenge.”
For a moment he made no response. Flames muttered in the hearth. Then he said, “You know of this club?”
“Hearsay only, sir. Does such a club exist?”
His gaze seemed to turn inward. One hand fumbled at the plaid blanket and drew it higher. The other gripped the chair arm. Except for his eyes, the gnarled hands appeared to be the only part of him that was vital. “Did exist,”
he said. “In rumor, at least. It was strictly … beyond the pale. The story was that there was a club which had its origins among the grandsons of men who had come to this continent in prison ships.”
“As criminals?” I asked.
“It was common practice in the colonies. And, as history suggests, our good fortune. It’s often the qualities of cunning, daring, resourcefulness—a willingness to stretch the limits?—that have led men to achieve and society to benefit.” It was a variation on his free-market riff, but I was patient. After a moment’s ramble, he found the original topic again. “Over time, the heirs of some of those convicts managed to find themselves matriculating at Harvard College. There, to defend their names against the inevitable calumny if their ancestry were learned, several purportedly banded together. This would have been in the early eighteenth century. Of course, this is sketchy history.”
He paused, his breathing having become harder. I glanced toward the oxygen tank. He saw my glance and shook his head. He went on. “The story was that clubmen were handpicked. And each was sworn to a code such as you describe—to avenge wrong done to any other member. Recall, these men would have had some criminal blood in their veins, so the notion was that vengeance could be cruel.” His faint smile said he was playing along. “It makes a good story. I doubt college records would substantiate it. In fact, I’m sure Harvard would pointedly deny the club’s existence.”
He started to cough. Heinz came in and got the oxygen mask ready, but Devlin ignored it. After a moment the coughing subsided, but I didn’t want to push it. I rose. “Would you happen to know the name of the club, sir?”
For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me, or didn’t understand the question. Then, absently, his hand rose again to finger his small mustache. He said, “The club, yes. It was called Crossbones.”
I thanked Devlin for his hospitality. He stayed seated as we shook hands.
“Give my good wishes to Jeremiah,” he said. “He invited me to attend tonight’s event. Unfortunately, my social life between now and next April will be reserved for Palm Beach. We’ll be leaving tomorrow. I don’t do well with the cold.” He managed a smile. “When you get to my age, you realize there are people dying who never died before, and you take care.” He lifted a grizzled hand. “Have a good winter, Mr. Rasmussen.”