Invitation to Murder. Leslie Ford

       Invitation to Murder

      Copyright © 1954, renewed 1982, by Zenith Brown.

      All rights reserved.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidepress.com

       Dedication: For: Frieda Lubelle

       CHAPTER : 1

      Fish (James Fisher) Finlay counted eleven.

      Thirty-four minutes by the crystal clock on the crystal mantel he’d been cooling his heels in the terrace window in Malvern Towers, waiting for the Countess de Gradoff (nee Dodo Maloney).

      “—Ten-thirty absolutely sharp, then, Fish, darling—if it’s really important and not too horribly grim,” was what the countess had said.

      His leg was getting tired, standing. He could sit, but he was also tired of looking at James Fisher Finlay reflected ad nauseam in the crystal mirrored walls on three sides of the room. The places to sit were an equal hazard. He glanced from the shell-pink love seat next to a shower of yellow mimosa over to the silver-blue satin job of the same insubstantial elegance with white lilacs beside it. Then he glanced at Finlay, the weather-beaten hide around his hazel eyes wrinkling with sardonic amusement. Six feet two, shaggy-browed, thatched with rusty red iron filings it took a magnetized currycomb to straighten, he was an outsize ox in either shell-pink or silver-blue.

      He gave his short clipped thatch a swipe with the heel of his palm, buttoned his gray flannel suit jacket, and gave up. The patina of the well-groomed New Yorker was not for him. No amount of spit and polish lasted long enough for the next layer to build on. It was hard to see why Caxson Reeves, Vice-President and Trust Officer of the Merchants and Mechanics Bank and Deposit Company, officer in charge of the James V. Maloney Trust, had hired him, when he limped back from three months in Korea, half a leg gone, after a year in the Big War without a scratch . . . with no patina and no connections. And harder to see why he’d sent him up here to the present beneficiary of the James V. Maloney Trust on a job that, if it wasn’t horribly grim, was certainly damned unpleasant.

      Which was probably why Caxson Reeves had waited until Fish Finlay was leaving the office to spring it on him. His rugged face sobered as he sat cautiously down next to the white lilacs, seeing Reeves behind his desk, dry, inscrutable, a sheet of note paper in his hand, hooded lids raised over the rims of his half-spectacles, waiting while Fish limped back to him.

      “A job for you in the morning. Make the appointment before you leave.”

      He handed Fish the sheet of paper.

      “Dear Mr. Reeves,” it said. “I wonder if you will please tell my mother I’m not coming to Newport this summer. I’m going to secretarial school as soon as I graduate this June, so I can work this fall. If my mother doesn’t want to send my allowance, Anne Linton says she can manage to lend me the money. I will stay with her at Dawn Hill Farm and go in to town every morning. It will save a lot of trouble if you can make my mother understand before they go abroad again next week. I tried to do it myself but she doesn’t listen to me, and I really mean it. Sincerely, Jennifer Linton.”

      “Well, well,” Fish Finlay said. He read it again, the lovely peach-blow face and violet-blue eyes of Jennifer Linton’s mother, Dodo Maloney, Countess de Gradoff, coming between him and her daughter’s letter.

      “Did you say a job for me?”

      Reeves nodded his grizzled head once. He wasted nothing, money, words or motion.

      “How do I do it?” Assistant Trust Officer Finlay asked.

      “I’ve no idea.” Reeves took the letter back. “How does anyone tell a very lovely, very spoiled woman her eighteen-year-old daughter prefers potluck with her widowed stepmother on a run-down farm in Virginia to luxury with her mother and her mother’s fourth husband in Newport? I don’t know. My methods have failed for years. Jennifer adores Anne Linton. Under the terms of the Trust she has no money until she gets it all, when she’s twenty-two. But she’s your problem, Finlay. That’s what you’re being trained for. You’ll be the buffer state between the two of them for a long time. You might as well start . . . it’ll be experience.”

      “—Experience I’d rather skip,” Fish Finlay thought, coming back to the crystal room and looking at the clock again. The more he learned about the Maloney Trust and its beneficiaries the more he admired Caxson Reeves’s controlled and apparently inexhaustible patience. He settled back and looked out the terrace windows. They were opened at oblique angles to let in the unexpected warmth of the early April sunshine, and he was aware suddenly of an image of another room in one of them. It looked like a mirage room at first, until he realized it was an image, refracted in the angled window glass, of a sunlit dining-room along the terrace. When he moved his head it disappeared. He moved it back, and it returned. He closed one eye, and the other, playing a game he became so engrossed in he did not hear the door open behind him.

      “Oh, Fish, darling, I do hope I didn’t keep you waiting!”

      The Countess de Gradoff was there, her husband with her. Fish Finlay scrambled to his feet, his awkward leg giving the fragile love seat a jolt that lurched the white lilacs.

      “Oh, don’t get up, darling!” Dodo de Gradoff’s lovely eyes were filled with understanding and sympathy. “It’s so stupid to have pots of things sitting around, anyway.”

      She smiled at him, enclosing him in the warm and pearly aura she diffused about her, as fragrant as a sun-washed rose. Small and peachy-gold, she was as soft and lusciously curved, and as feminine, as a blue-eyed freshly brushed Angora kitten.

      “And you know Nikki, don’t you, darling.”

      “How do you do, sir,” Fish said. He felt more like an ox than ever in contrast to the casual elegance of the handsome man behind her. Nikki de Gradoff had patina. He was as tall as Fish, broad-shouldered, as Nordic as his bride, with clear blue eyes and smooth blond hair with a suspicion of a wave in it, sun-tanned, his English pin-stripe suit without a wrinkle. He had gloves, a stick and a Homburg hat.

      “How ’je do, Finlay?” he said. His English accent was what they call “Oxford,” with only the slightest trace of whatever Indo-European speech—unknown to Fish—had been his native language.

      “Nikki’s not staying, darling.” Dodo took her husband’s arm, her eyes proudly caressing. “I just can’t get him to worry about the Maloney Trust. He thinks money’s stupid.”

      “Not at all.” Nikki de Gradoff smiled at her, and at Fish. “It’s just that I don’t know a damned thing about it, and you fellows do. I never had but one job in my life—and you know what happened to that, my darling.”

      He bent down and kissed her affectionately on the cheek.

      “Don’t worry your pretty head, sweet. That’s what Finlay’s for.”

      She went to the door with him. “Don’t be too long, will you, love?”

      When she came back her eyes were shining, her rounded cheeks flushed a warmer peach. “It’s true, you know, Fish,” she said. “Nikki had a job. In a garage, of all places! He got it in Paris—to support me!” She laughed delightedly. “It was very cute, and very silly. Because you see, we just ran into each other, quite literally, under a lamppost in the rain. I looked like a beggar, because I’d been antiquing with a friend and we didn’t want them to think we were rich Americans. So Nikki didn’t know I had any money at all, when he fell in love with me. It was fate, really. We’d never have looked at each other under normal circumstances. He was as sick of rich women as I was of impoverished nobility. And he got a job so he could ask me to marry him. It was terribly sweet. And when