Invitation to Murder. Leslie Ford
I can arrange for you to have.”
The purple beeches were a sable rim in the photograph. Reeves’s finger moved up to where the rollers broke with foam-filled crests on the rugged cliff and rested on a jagged black spot bisected with a thin white line.
“Here’s the Devil’s Chasm. A break in the cliff. The Rock, the Maloneys call it. But there’s no use loading your mind with old tragedies. Those were the bathtub-gin days. People tried to get Maloney to put a rail around it. He did board up the clock tower, but that was only to protect the shingle work.”
The scalloped-shell road dyed mauve from the reflected light of the beeches hadn’t shown in the picture. Bordered with purple-leaved begonias, curving gently back on itself to hide the house and inner grounds, it opened suddenly into a magnificent sun-flooded arc of sky and sea and lawn. The courtyard was a great emerald medallion of perfectly shaved, sharply edged turf, the drive a gleaming ivory frame around it. Directly across from Fish as he entered it was a low spindled balustrade set with marble urns of pink geraniums, concealing the terraced rose gardens down to the cliff. The stable was on his right. The hexagonal clock tower was centered in the high-gabled side facing the house, its shingles as intricately and delicately patterned as a bird’s feathers, its molded cupola set like a feathered helmet wide at the brim to shield the gilded clockface under it.
The house across the medallion, shingled as intricately as the clock tower, had a curious air of summer stillness, no sound of human occupation and no sign of it except a long low foreign car standing under the porte-cochere. Fish’s engine and the scrunch of his tires in the drive were like a tocsin sounding in a courtyard of enchanted sleep, making him more acutely conscious than ever of the embarrassment of his own position there. If the arrangements for the stable apartment hadn’t already been made, he would have driven right on around and out again. He stopped in front of the porte-cochere and got out, his footsteps grating unevenly as he passed in front of de Gradoff’s car. It was custom made, the draft he’d signed to pay for it exactly the amount of his own year’s salary before taxes. It still didn’t mean the man was a murderer, he thought ironically. He rounded the gleaming hood to the verandah steps, started up and stopped. “—Oh, I’m sorry.”
Three people were facing him there, de Gradoff, a younger dark-haired man and a lovely black-haired woman with skin startlingly white in contrast to the sun tan of the two men, barefooted in shorts and sleeveless sport shirts. He’d obviously interrupted a first-class row. The arrogant flush on de Gradoff’s face was mirrored in the sullen mouth and glowering brow of the younger man and by contrast in the woman’s lacquered indifference. She wore a black linen dress and scarlet sandals, a black bag and scarlet parasol dropped casually under the bamboo chaise she was stretched lazily out on. Her dark eyes were leveled on Fish Finlay with total lack of interest. He might have been a harmless toad that had hopped up on the steps and would hop away in a moment.
Apparently de Gradoff did not recognize him.
“I’m Fisher Finlay, Mr. de Gradoff,” he said. “Is—”
“I know,” de Gradoff said, without moving. He was slumped down in a wicker chair, his bare legs over the arm. “The stable’s over there.” He motioned toward it. “My wife’s not at home. The servants are busy.”
One of them appeared, a thin sallow man wheeling a portable bar.
“I can take Mr. Finlay over, sir,” he said. “If you’ll serve yourselves, sir. Madam said—”
“He’ll manage, I’m sure. What are you having, Alla?”
“G and T,” the dark lady murmured.
“Scotch,” the young man said. “On the rocks.”
The servant stood there, his hand on the bar.
“Mrs. Emlyn said gin and tonic, Moulton.” De Gradoff repeated it without emphasis. “Mr. Peter takes Scotch. Gin and soda for me. Just a touch of lime.”
“Yes, sir.” The man’s eyes met Fish’s for an unhappy instant.
“Thank you,” Fish said. He turned and stepped back into the drive.
“That was stupid, Nikki, dear.”
He heard Mrs. Emlyn’s lazy voice before he was off the bottom step. But she spoke in French, which Fish, being an American, obviously could not be expected to understand.
“I shouldn’t worry about that fellow Reeves’s hired hand,” de Gradoff said easily, also in French. “He won’t be with us long . . . unless his hide’s thicker than I think.”
He added something Fish could not hear. He heard the burst of laughter that followed it as he got into the car.
“You’d be surprised how thick my hide is, friends,” he thought pleasantly as he started around the ivory drive toward the stable. Their anxiety to get rid of him was all he needed to bring the situation sharply back into focus. They weren’t being that insulting just for fun. He glanced in his side-view mirror. The lovely Mrs. Emlyn had bestirred herself to come to the verandah rail and was looking after him. He wondered. Mr. Peter was obviously the cousin aged twenty-three that Jennifer Linton had been summoned to entertain. Who was Alla Emlyn? And what was her interest in the Maloney Trust? De Gradoff’s reply had pointed it up just as it pointed up his own concern. The hired hand routine was what Fish had given Dodo over the phone the day she landed in New York and had wanted to know if she had a few thousand dollars loose. Unless she’d passed it along, which was unlikely, it meant that Nikki listened in on phone calls as well as at keyholes.
He stopped in front of the hexagonal tower and got out to open the trunk and get his gear. It was all to the good . . . unless, he thought abruptly, they’d been at work on Dodo. But they hadn’t. He heard the gay toot of her horn as she came in the beech tree drive. She saw him and swerved toward the stable.
“Darling! What fun!” She threw the car door open and rushed to him, arms out. “It’s divine to see you!” She kissed him warmly on both cheeks. “But where’s Moulton? He’s supposed to settle you in.”
“He’s busy.”
“Nonsense.” Her eyes shot over to the porch. “Can’t they even pour their own poison, the lazy devils?”
In the brief incendiary flash, her laughter suddenly gone, Fish saw her face. Good God, what’s happened to her?
“But never mind, I’ll take you up.”
She was gay again, too gay, trying to conceal the taut lines under the heavy layer of her peachblow makeup. She was much thinner. The pearly lusciousness that was what he remembered about her was completely gone.
He picked up a couple of bags and followed her into the hexagonal two-story hall at the base of the clock tower. Central stairs led to a railed balcony level with the windows on the three front sides of the tower. There were doors at each end of the balcony and one in the center.
“Nikki’s furious. He wanted Alla here.” She stopped on the stairs. “She’s another cousin. Husband hunting.” She wrinkled her nose. “Marry a central European and you get the whole family. And they’re certainly realistic about life and love. Alla married an Air Force major in Austria, he got her out, got her naturalized and whoosh, off she went to Reno.” She laughed. “Couldn’t stand being chatelaine of Emlyn Appliances Inc, in Frisbie, Wyoming. But she didn’t stick him for alimony. Just a lump sum, plus her own jewelry he’d got in duty free as household effects. Smart girl, Alla.”
She went on up the stairs. “I knew her long before I met Nikki. Peter’s her nephew.”
“Wife hunting?”
“Don’t be funny, darling. Unless, of course, something very glamour and very, very rich turned up. He might condescend.”
She laughed again. “If it’s Jennifer Linton you’ve got in mind, relax, darling. She’s not his type. And she’s not rich, my sweet. Not when I get through smashing up your old Maloney Trust.”
She