Invitation to Murder. Leslie Ford
around, if you’ve got a Maloney expense account to feed her on. Nice gal, red hair and green eyes.”
As Fish watched the sea gulls wheeling, screaming among the rocks in front of him now at the end of Nantucket Avenue in Newport, he could see Caxson Reeves’s parched immovable face at the end of the conference table when he reported the next morning.
“And maybe you’ll think this is another slight morsel,” he said. “But it isn’t from a schoolgirl. It’s from a society reporter named Polly Randolph you’ve probably never heard of.”
“On the contrary,” Reeves said evenly. “I know her very well. Her father jumped out of a window down the street in ‘29. Her uncle owns a good deal of the Courier Graphic.”
“She had dinner with me last night.” Fish was seeing Polly Randolph then, as he described the scene in Tony’s back room.
Polly Randolph regarded him appraisingly across the restaurant table. “But you people know all about Nikki de Gradoff,” she said. “Or did something happen to the little French dick—wasn’t his name Blum?—you had on his trail? At least we all assumed it was the Maloney trustees. Or aren’t you in their confidence either?”
Fish grinned back at her. “I guess not.” Repeating that, he thought he caught a barely perceptible twitch in Reeves’s arid lids.
“Well, I don’t know anybody else who’d be worried about Dodo,” Polly said. “I understand little Blum had been working for the Argentine family until they called him off. However . . .” She shrugged. “Anyway, we gave the wedding the full treatment. Riches disguised in rags meets true love under a lamppost in the pouring rain. A month later, in comes de Gradoff’s concierge with a story to sell. The rigged lamppost meeting, the phony flight from Paris when he found the girl was stinking rich. Nikki had forgot to pay the concierge for helping.”
“Who rigged the lamppost?” Fish asked.
She shook her head. “Somebody who knew Dodo was a pushover for romance, no doubt. Who’d loaned Nikki money and saw that was the way to get it back, I imagine. He’d been going high, wide and handsome for a while after his first wife died. He was really down and out when Dodo ran into him . . . or vice versa.”
“Did you know the first wife?”
Fish asked it casually. She went on eating for so long without answering that he’d begun to wonder if she’d heard him.
“You mean, can I prove he killed her?” she asked then, calmly. “The answer is No, Mr. Finlay. The same as I told the French dick when he was beating about the bush also. She took an overdose of sleeping pills and died. She was in Paris. Nikki was in a hotel near Dijon. He had a lady with him to prove it, also the hotel manager and staff. Being French, the police assumed an affair of gallantry. When Nikki admitted he’d wanted a divorce, they took the rest of it for granted, till her family stepped in. The body was exhumed, and showed nothing. And that was that. Or was it?”
She hesitated an instant, turned her head, looking Tony’s back room over carefully before she turned back and leaned toward him.
“I’ve never told anybody this. It was the damndest thing that ever happened to me. I’m still not over it.”
She glanced around again. The tables near them were empty.
“I was sent out to interview him right after the funeral. There was a rumor that the rake had reformed and was going to seal up the house with himself in it . . . something bizarre. I went out to the faubourg. He let me in and got me a drink. The servants were all busy, he said. We were in her little writing-room. We settled down for a heart to heart chat about life and love and the folly of it all. And I still don’t know what happened.”
She shivered a little and took another drink from her glass.
“He was talking: Could any pure woman ever love him again? How had he ever dreamed of divorcing an angel of light? I was a woman . . . did I think he was a monster?—All that crap, and I was ready with a touching reply of the same, when all of a sudden I heard myself telling him the truth. I was saying I’d always thought he was one of the most scheming, coldest, most utterly ruthless . . . I stopped before I said ‘swine’. . . .”
Polly Randolph closed her eyes, a shudder running through her.
“It was just as if somebody else—or some thing else—was using my tongue, saying things I’d never even thought. I hardly knew the man. It was the atmosphere of the place . . . something. He had all her letters and stuff out, burning things in the fireplace. And just when I stopped, I saw all the dust on the table and I knew I was there alone in the house with him. There weren’t any servants and hadn’t been for days, because I remembered just then I’d noticed the hall was dusty. And he was looking at me looking at the dust, and I . . . I swear I thought he was going to kill me. I was petrified. I tried to get up, but he said ‘Sit down,’ and I sat. Then he started. Why did I say what I’d said? Why scheming? What did I mean, ruthless? Who had I been talking to? It was just like a silk stocking around my neck.”
She shuddered again, her face pale.
“I don’t know how I got out of there. I’ll never forget that trek down the hall with him behind me. I truly never thought I’d make it. I knew he’d killed his wife, and he knew I knew it. I don’t know how I did, but I did. And I knew that was why the servants weren’t there. It was just as if some finger I couldn’t see was writing it in the dust in her room. And if I’d turned up in the Seine with a suicide note in my pocket in the next couple of weeks, it wouldn’t have surprised me. I was sick as a dog when I got home and I had cold sweat all over me when I saw him coming out of the office the other day. And what’s he so interested in the Maloney deal for? Dodo must have told him all about her father. Three martinis and she sounds off on the dirty deal he gave her. I’ve even heard her say poor old Caxey Reeves murdered him.”
“What kind of a dirty deal does she think she got?” Fish asked.
“She never specifies. She just gets a cagey look in her eye and says she’s got everything she needs to break the Trust. Maybe Nikki’s trying to help her. I suppose if Mr. Reeves murdered the old man you could establish undue influence, or something?”
Caxson Reeves had listened to that without a ripple of expression, waiting impassively for Fish to go on.
Polly Randolph shrugged her shoulders. “All I know is you won’t catch me in Newport this summer. I’ve asked for Washington, heat or no heat. And you know, of course, I’m an overwhelming minority of one. Except for the first wife’s family, and they won’t talk. I tried to corner one of them in Madrid on my way back and he’d never heard of anyone named de Gradoff. Everybody else including Dodo thinks he’s divine and that the family took him to the cleaners when he was helpless in the throes of chivalrous remorse.” She shrugged again. “But I know if I were the Maloney trustees and I got even a whiff of that romance curdling, I’d see Dodo didn’t have any sleeping pills within reach.”
“Dodo does not take sleeping pills,” Caxson Reeves said evenly.
“I’m just telling you what Polly Randolph said,” Fish replied. “I still think an investigator could sound out the first wife’s family.”
“Who’d be happy to convict themselves as accessories after the fact for the benefit of the Maloney estate, no doubt.” Reeves looked at him over his spectacles. “It is not my business as Trust Officer of this bank to accuse a client’s husband of murder, Finlay. Dodo is trying to break the Trust. Just how long do you think it would take her to find out the Maloney Trust was paying someone to pry into de Gradoff’s past, and to bring suit for damages? You’re concerned with her safety and with Jennifer Linton’s. I’m concerned with the Maloney Trust and the reputation of the bank. I—”
“You told me.” Fish pushed his chair back to absorb the sudden resurgence of angry resentment. “As long as the bank and the Maloney dough are safe, that’s all that matters. I guess that’s the point of your ‘Invitation to Murder’ gag. You said