Star Light, Star Bright Page 13

  This, I learned as I fitted myself into the golf cart, was what stuck in Araujo’s throat. He said, “Somebody laughing at us. And she’s a clever woman. For all we know, she’s the one.”

  “Not acting alone. She’d have to be tied in with someone.”

  “Her husband, naturally. Consider the way she gave him his alibi. Do you believe she really spoke to him during the blackout?”

  I said, “Whether she did or not, odds are she’s on the phone with him right now bringing him up to date. So if she was lying, he’ll be all ready to back up the lie. Anyhow, I’ll stop off at Kightlinger’s rooms and see what goes on there.”

  “Without apologies,” said Araujo. “I have to tip my hat to them. You don’t.” He started the cart rolling bumpily over the flagstones. “I’ve had a bellyful of this business. Now with a loaded gun around, God knows where. And this last note to Mr. Daskalos. Why the hell did he give it to me if he didn’t want anything done about it?”

  “That’s a good question. Are you going to see Quist in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  I handed over the note. “Then give him that for his collection. I’m going to the museum with Miss Riley after breakfast. I’ll see you when I get back.”

  “Did you have a chance to tell the boss about the blackout before I called you?”

  “I did.”

  “How did he take it? No”—Araujo made a gesture of dismissal—“never mind. I can imagine.”

  “Whatever you imagine,” I said, “should just about cover it.”

  Interestingly, the security man was no longer at the door when I walked into the main building. I waited for his return a fair time before giving up on it.

  Kightlinger’s sitting room was a fog of tobacco smoke. Kightlinger and Lou Hoffman were at a coffee table littered with papers. Rountree was in an armchair working hard on a pipe. None of them seemed surprised to see me walk in without invitation. All plainly had their armor buckled on and shields in position.

  It was Kightlinger who told me that, yes, Belle had just phoned with word of my visit and the story of the blackout and assault. Terrible. Jesus. This was past being any kind of joke. He spoke. The other two fixed me with fishy eyes and now and then, as if synchronized, nodded agreement.

  I let their spokesman talk himself out. Then I asked him, “Were all of you here during the whole thing? Nobody left at any time?”

  Kightlinger said unctuously, “Well, you know Scottie didn’t get here until after his bridge game.”

  “I know.”

  “And since he did, nobody left here. Not for a minute.”

  “A minute wouldn’t mean much,” I pointed out. “Twenty minutes would be closer to it.”

  “Forget it. Nobody left to go make blackouts or give any poor slob his lumps. But one thing we did, Milano, besides sit here and sweat out a tough writing job. We did some thinking about who the mystery man could be. Want to know who we picked?”

  “Can’t hurt,” I said. “Might help.”

  “All right, then you take a good look at Daskalos himself.”

  I looked, instead, at Rountree, allegedly one of the messiah’s admirers. Pipe clenched in his bulldog jaw, he remained fishy-eyed and imperturbable. I said to Kightlinger, “Why Daskalos?”

  He seemed offended. “Does that surprise you?”

  “No. But if you can come up with a convincing reason for his killing a dog and splitting a man’s skull, I might be surprised.”

  “All right,” said Kightlinger, “he hears voices. God is telling him to do it.”

  The cadaverous Hoffman waggled a forefinger at me. “There’s nothing to smile about, Milano. I was involved with Daskalos for a while. Take it from me he’s authentic. Not rational by materialist standards maybe, but authentic. He believes in what he preaches.”

  I said, “In that case, why his concentration on show business people? Why doesn’t he just carve himself a begging bowl and go out into the world with his message?”

  “Because it isn’t that kind of world anymore. Want to score with a heavy message today? Lay it on people with a heavy image.”

  “Which,” I said, “suggests that he’s right down there with all those nasty materialists, doesn’t it?”

  Rountree picked up the ball. “That’s not quite as clever as it sounds, Milano. Cheap cynicism rarely is.”

  I said, “I’ll keep that in mind,” and took the three of them in, one by one. “Now, what you folks have to keep in mind is that if Mr. Daskalos is our poltergeist, he couldn’t have stirred up all this commotion by himself. So there must be somebody lending him a hand. Any idea who that is?”

  One by one, each of them gave me a shake of the head.

  “Well,” I said, “the room number is twenty-eight. When your team hits on an answer just pick up the phone and pass it along.”

  I offered them a genial good night in departing. I didn’t get any in return, genial or otherwise.

  I removed Sharon’s letters from my jacket, hung up the jacket, kicked off my shoes, and stretched out on the bed to do my reading there. I knew at once that this was no way to do it. It had been an eighteen-hour day, and every one of those hours had a grip on my eyelids and was dragging them down. Close them, and that would be it until the wake-up call.

  My body protesting this cruel treatment, I hauled it off the bed and across the room to the dresser, where reposed the balloon glass with its still-ample supply of Quist’s private stock. Airing fine cognac, I found, in no way diminished its impact, at least not if you took a proper dose. Standing there, I opened the Watrous Associates’ envelope postmarked July—easily done, because it was already unsealed—and opened the envelope within it, which was barely sealed with a lick.

  Instantly, a familiar, tantalizing, traumatic scent rose to my nostrils.

  Fleurs de Rocaille.

  I didn’t remember the letter being scented this way when it was delivered to me by Shirley Glass in my office, but I could have been wrong about that. If I weren’t—if it had been doctored for maximum effect—that was indeed dirty pool. The dirtiest. Because the effect now may not have been maximum, but it was certainly undeniable.

  Six sheets of embossed paper, both sides of each sheet covered with a childish scrawl. Johnny dear, it started, and then in page after page of rambling prose it set forth the case for our reunion. Do you remember what it was like that time? popped up frequently. That time when we walked to the village … That time when we talked about … That time when we put the mattress in front of the fire and we …

  I did remember. I also remembered what she could have only seen in a rearview mirror: gravel from under her Jaguar’s tires stinging my rainsoaked, uncomprehending face.

  At one point, midway in all that scramble of reminiscence and explanation of her present woeful plight, she came perilously close to undoing a lot of the damage that gravel had done. Close to poetry, in fact. You made me feel real, Johnny. I never felt real before. I don’t now. But you made me feel real.

  My grip on the situation was suddenly becoming slippery. I reinforced it with a huge belt of cognac. And by hard contemplation of my correspondent’s dazzling ego.

  Apparently, it had never entered her mind that Johnny might now himself be committed to some other female of his choice. Not much of a tribute to me in that. Much less, in truth, than that paid me by Maggie Riley in her wary circling away from me.

  Anyhow, since Mrs. Quist and I had pretty well hashed over the subject of the letter during the past day and a half, there were no real surprises in its first ten pages. Then came page eleven.

  She wanted to have a baby. Not Andrew’s baby, because that would only make everything worse than it already was. My baby.

  I startled myself by saying out loud in exasperation, “Oh, for chrissake, Sharon!”

  My baby. Why fight it?

  She would come to New York and move in and we would have a baby. Sundays, if I weren’t out negotiating with fences like my friend Henni
g, we would take turns pushing it around Central Park. Of course, once a week she’d phone Andrew to make sure he was getting his rest and not overdoing the Jacuzzi.

  As she had put it in that earlier passage, she didn’t feel real. I was beginning to feel unreal myself.

  The other letter, dated December, at least had one foot on the ground. A mere four pages long, it opened with a restrained blast at me for having returned the previous message unread. Then came The Plan. She was at the bottom, I was the only one who could help her, and she had to see me right away. Christmas week there would be a big party on the estate, a lot of people would be around all week, and if I just showed up as her guest, we’d be able to get together in private now and then. With all those people around. So please don’t write or call or anything, just come. And when I get to the gate just ask for her.

  Signed, in case I didn’t get the nature of the invitation, Your Sharon.

  Well, smarter people have made dumber plans. I could have been introduced for what I was, an old acquaintance who had once helped solve a professional problem for her. In that mob of yuletide freeloaders—eighty of them, Araujo had said—I could have maintained a low profile. On the estate, there would have been no hired guards hovering over the lady’s shoulder, one point of contention with her husband where she had been winner. As for the promised privacy, there might have been a French farce quality about the hunt for it, but you can’t have everything, can you?

  I burned both letters in the fireplace, reduced them to powdered ash, and floated into bed on a tide of cognac.

  And dreamed a whole series of dreams which all started at different points and all wound up at the same one. Maggie Riley was watermelon-bellied pregnant with my child and was sore as hell about it.

  In the bright light of morning, however, when I met Maggie in front of the building where her car would be delivered, she turned out to be—allowing for a subtle and pleasing female roundness of belly just below the waistband of her slacks—gratifyingly flat where it counted. And in a mood for talk. She had just sat in on the briefing session where Araujo described to Quist what had gone on during cottage inspection. What happened after I left Araujo? Did I get to see Sid and Scottie and Lou?

  I said I had.

  “And?”

  “And they all fingered Daskalos.”

  “They did?” Maggie said. “You know, Virgilio’s beginning to wonder about it himself. About whether Kalos hasn’t somehow rigged up all this and gotten the others to go along with it. Wild as that sounds.”

  “Wild events make for wild theories. Could Araujo offer a reason for any such rig-up?”

  “No, but there’s this new message Kalos seems to have pulled out of his hat.” She frowned. “About that message. Do you think it was written the same time as the others?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Anyhow, there’s the way Kalos came up with that message. And there’s Holly Lee’s visiting him during the blackout—”

  “There’s no hard evidence she did.”

  “Virgilio thinks she did. You don’t?”

  I shrugged. “Listening to Wynken, Blynken, and Kightlinger, I got the impression that while they were all pointing at Daskalos what they really had on their minds was Calderon.”

  “Mike?”

  “Mike. He’s got good reason for wanting to lay out Daskalos. And he was flagrantly close to the scene of the crime last night. If he turns out to be the bad guy, Kightlinger sees his movie package go up in smoke. So he lines everybody up to make a case against Daskalos.”

  Maggie made no comment on this as the car was brought up and she got behind the wheel. We were down the road some distance before she broke her silence. “Virgilio said you had a bad time with Kalos yourself while you were at it. What was that about?”

  “Oh, that. The messiah started to open up about me and Sharon, and there was Araujo listening with his ears fanned out. No sweat. I managed to shut up Daskalos before any damage was done.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Anyhow, if I’m asked what woman I was trying to lure from the path of righteousness, I’ll just say it was you.”

  “Thanks a lot. But what about the blackout? Why would anybody want to pull it off? Whoever it was.”

  “Using cop’s logic, whoever it was wanted to get hold of a loaded gun. Of course, logic could be the most misleading thing to use in this case.”

  “That’s a big help,” said Maggie.

  The mansion housing the Quist Collection was not as big as I had anticipated but big enough, a three-story stucco roofed with Spanish tile. Inside, the guards on view were obviously first-string men, rugged, trimly uniformed, and capable looking. Quist’s tax lawyer was waiting there in the anteroom. Maggie introduced me as a friend of the family, and then departed with him up a flight of stairs, leaving me to do my own exploration of the collection.

  As it turned out, I had plenty of time to do it in, from Courbet to Gauguin. It was a collection frozen in time, the second half of the nineteenth century, about three dozen oils and two Degas ballerina bronzes, but it was superb in every way, not a clinker there. And, of course, there was the pleasure of discovering masterworks I’d never seen before even in reproduction. Maggie’s pets, for instance, the two Van Goghs. One was a self-portrait which must have been painted not long after the ear-slicing episode, the scarf which served as bandage concealing the severed ear, the eyes looking calmly into the observer’s. For all anyone knew, the subject could be thinking of the way he had atoned for the sins of Jack the Ripper.

  I made the rounds of the main gallery a few times before I tried the door at its far end and found myself in a small reading room. Shelves of leatherbound books, and on the one exposed wall a picture that had nothing to do with any other here: a John Singer Sargent portrait, life-sized, of a handsome young woman in shirtwaist and floor-length skirt. I already guessed before I looked at the inscription on the brass plate that this had something to do with family, and so it proved. Mary Henrietta Lucas Quist. Quist’s mother, probably.

  When Maggie finally showed up she confirmed that Mary Henrietta was indeed Quist’s revered mother and a lot of old-time Boston money, but she was plainly not interested in anything by slickster Sargent. So it was back to her Vincent and a lecture on him which, when my feet started to ache, I broke into by asking her how her business with the lawyer had gone.

  She shook her head. “Not good. He had a list a mile long of the requirements we’d have to fulfill to get tax exemption. Including opening the doors to the public on a limited basis.”

  “And Quist won’t go for that?”

  “Not at all. Nohow. Now and then a certified scholar, okay. Not the public and buttered popcorn.”

  I said sympathetically, “And here you are, right in the middle of the brouhaha.”

  “Nice word,” Maggie said. “You don’t hear it often in these parts. But I’m completely with Andrew in this. Going public means going into show business. A new loan exhibition to set up every month. Finger-painting lessons for the kiddies. Lectures with slides for people who don’t give a damn about art but want to talk about it at cocktail parties. That’s what a curator’s come to mean nowadays. It is not my line of country.”

  “Maybe not. But you sure can deliver a powerful lecture when so moved.”

  Her face reddened. “Well, I’m not lumping you with the general public. You’re here, aren’t you? Come to think of it, you said one reason you wanted to come along was to ask me a question about my book. What question?”

  I thought fast. “What led you to a Van Gogh–Jack the Ripper connection? Where did it start?”

  She looked reproachful. “You’re faking it, Milano. That is strictly a nothing question.”

  “Caught in the act. But now that it did come up I’m curious about the answer. What is it?”

  “A Woman’s lib get-together. About seven or eight years ago. They had a speaker—well, I’ll admit she was a little far
out—on the inherent sadism of the male when dealing with the female. She used the Ripper murders as the classic example. When she mentioned the dates it suddenly struck me how they fit Vincent’s crisis. That was it.”

  I said, “Out of compost do marvelous flowers spring.”

  “Very poetic. Sticking to prose, how about recommending an agency in Paris that’ll do my investigating for me and won’t break the bank?”

  “How about an early lunch somewhere around here? If I make the recommendations then, it’s a business lunch. Tax deductible.”

  “No.”

  “Quist told you to cooperate with me, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, but he didn’t—”

  “Never mind the fancy footwork. Just cooperate. You pick the place.”

  Which turned out to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken emporium.

  With separate checks, of course.

  At the garage, Maggie took the golf cart shuttle to the main building, and I took a walk upstairs to Security headquarters. Araujo, hollow-eyed and in a bilious mood, was alone there, consoling himself with a foot-long sandwich and a bottle of beer. I reported on my interview with Kightlinger and company; Araujo, through hunks of sandwich, described the search for the missing gun. The service building and garage area had already been combed. There was now a platoon beating the bushes along all pathways. Oh yes, and when Mr. Calderon had come driving in at dawn he had—not very graciously—submitted his person as well as his car to a thorough search. So far, no gun.

  I said that this was no surprise. What was surprising was the way our movie people were now lining up against Daskalos. Indeed, the chief of Security himself had mentioned to Miss Riley his growing suspicions of the gent. How about that?

  Araujo said irritably, “I know. You were the first one to come up with the idea. Well, now it really begins to make sense.” He leaned far back to empty the beer bottle down his throat, then thumped it down on the desk. “What the hell, look at the way they alibi each other. The way they have us running around in circles. Playing games with us. And Daskalos has to be the one pulling those strings.”