Invitation to Murder. Leslie Ford
got up. “Sorry. I don’t look at things that way. I’ve quit, sir. Unless you’ve already fired me. The bank’s reputation and the Maloney money will be safer in other hands.”
“That’s hardly the way to help Jennifer Linton, is it?”
Reeves spoke on a dead dry level without raising his eyes.
“Don’t be an ass, Finlay. I didn’t get up and walk out when you suggested I may have murdered my oldest and closest friend.”
“I was speaking for Polly Randolph and Dodo Maloney, not myself.”
“I was speaking for the bank,” Reeves said quietly. “Now, if you’ll just sit down, I’ll speak for myself. It’s obvious something must be done.”
Fish sat. Reeves reached for his briefcase.
“I’ve had this for several weeks.” He took out a blue airmail letter. “I don’t know what its significance is, if any, but it disturbs me. It’s a reply to my letter saying the Maloney Trust has no funds to pay de Gradoff’s debts and referring the undisclosed principal to the Countess de Gradoff.” He read the letter carefully before he put it back in the envelope. “The principal is still undisclosed. But he has withdrawn his inquiry. He trusts we will forget that any inquiry was made, and explicitly requests that no mention of the matter be made to any third party . . . particularly the countess.”
“Meaning what?” Fish asked.
“I don’t know. There’s no inference the debt has been paid, or written off. I presume the undisclosed principal still wants his money.”
“How does he plan to get it?”
“I’ve no idea. As he does not appear to be making de Gradoff a free gift of it, he must have a plan of some sort in mind. Another thing. Dodo is a creature of habit. When she changes, it’s always been a sign of trouble. She’s never gone to Newport an hour before she had to under her father’s stipulation about the property. When she got here week before last, she chartered a plane and went directly up there. I want to know why. She was here in time for Jennifer’s graduation, a full-dress occasion she’d normally love. She didn’t go. Again, why? You tell me de Gradoff has been looking up the newspaper files. He has a very legitimate interest in his wife’s father . . . why does he use surreptitious means to satisfy it? He could have come to me. Unless, as you say, Dodo’s suggested to him that I murdered the man.”
“Perhaps he knows there’s the French detective tracking him.”
Reeves glanced at him. “I’d bury that bone, Finlay,” he remarked patiently. “You’ve given me opportunity to gnaw it. I’ve declined. Draw any conclusion you like . . . but silently, will you?”
Fish grinned. “Sorry, sir.”
“To get back to Dodo. I haven’t talked to her since she’s been home. I understand you have.”
“It was the day she got here,” Fish said. “She wanted to know if she had a few thousand bucks lying around anywhere. She didn’t. She then wanted to know if she could draw on her fourth quarter stipend. I said I was just your messenger boy and she’d have to ask you. She said she’d skip it and take a chance. She didn’t say—”
Reeves’s glance had sharpened. “—Take a chance?”
“That’s what she said, sir.”
“The damned fool.”
“I don’t understand—”
“No reason you should.” Reeves was still irritated. He sat looking fixedly at the table. “I’ve had no experience with private detectives,” he said then, abruptly. “I’ve had, however, a great deal of experience with Newport. It’s not what it used to be, but it’s still pretty much of a closed corporation. An outsider would get nowhere. We’d have to have somebody who could move on the inside track.”
He was silent for a moment.
“It’s a serious risk. Are you willing to take it?”
“Me?” Fish Finlay asked.
“You.” Reeves nodded. “Go to Newport, find out what’s going on.”
“I’ll be the rankest kind of outsider.”
“I’ll supply your credentials. An unattached male doesn’t need too many. He must be presentable—which my sister says means he’s in possession of a white dinner coat and doesn’t spit on the floor.”
“And has a normal complement of legs.”
“Forget your leg, Finlay,” Reeves said quietly. “Unless you’re using it to escape the risk I was talking about. Because the bank and the Maloney trustees, as such, have no part in this. If Dodo, or de Gradoff, or your newspaper friend, anyone, finds out what you’re in Newport for, you’re finished here. That’s the risk. You don’t have to take it . . . but leave your leg out of it. If it comes to kicking de Gradoff in the backside, I expect you’ll manage.”
So it was Finlay or nothing. He was conscious of his leg again, sitting there at the end of Nantucket Avenue. Below him where the road turned was a Swiss chalet with two arcs of cabañas extending from it, like a dark prehistoric bird with brilliant multicolored wings stretched out along the glistening sands to catch the sun. The beach was empty now, but beyond the far arc of cabañas were the tennis courts, with half a dozen players out, their long brown legs flashing back and forth over the green composition surface. Pretty soon they’d be dashing down to the white surf feathering the sand. Our kind of fun. . . . The old dream girl with amber eyes crept out beneath the chinks in the shuttered places of his mind. If she’d said plainly, “I don’t love you any more” and let it go at that, would he still be bleating about it? Or was it just the business of being put on the marked-down counter that made him shy away from every other girl who smiled at him, made her look like a sacrificial heifer, or a bargain hunter who didn’t have what it takes to deal in first-class merchandise?
He got out of the car abruptly and went over to the guard rail. There it was back again, the old destructive formula of his lost confidence in himself. Its return had nothing to do with his leg and people playing tennis, and not much to do with his being an outsider getting his first outside view of the closed corporation of Newport society, as symbolized by the cabañas and chauffeur-driven cars down there in front of the beach club. It was his suddenly changed perspective. What if he was wrong about the whole thing? And if he was right, what could he hope to do about it? All he was doing was cutting his own throat . . . which was, no doubt, what Caxson Reeves had been doing his devious damndest to tell him for the last three months, with all the double-talk about the reputation of the bank and the sole duty of the Maloney trustees. If de Gradoff had murdered his first wife. Reeves’s French detective would certainly have found it out. If it was true and he hadn’t been able to prove it, how could Fish Finlay expect to prove future intent to murder in time to stop it?
Reeves was presumably helping him. Fish grinned. Helping him to cut his throat, no doubt, just the way he admitted he’d been helping Dodo to cut hers for years under the stipulated terms of the Maloney Trust. But there was nothing he could do at this point but go on. It was a week before Jennifer Linton would be there. Maybe he could find out he was all wrong and get out before she came.
He went back to his car, too absorbed to see the shiny new blue convertible that came around the curve going toward the chalet, or see the dark-haired girl who was driving it jam on her brakes as she caught sight of his tall figure limping back to the gray sedan with the New Jersey license plate.
CHAPTER : 4
Fish Finlay turned in between the pink marble gateposts. It was curious, driving in through the twilight purple of the beeches on the actual ground level of Enniskerry, when the far sharper image of it in his mind was the black and white aerial photograph over the safe in Caxson Reeves’s conference room, when Reeves had finally given in and started to help him.
“This is