Читать книгу The Bird Boys - Lisa Sandlin - Страница 12

IV

DELPHA RELIEVED XAVIER Bell of a dripping umbrella, set it in a corner of her office to dry. She showed him into one of the mismatched client chairs. As she turned, she had a strange sense of wind changing against her face. Unlikely, because the air in the office came from a flaky AC unit. She squinted at it.

“Wait a minute.” Phelan stopped her before she got out his door. “Why don’t you bring in a pad and take down the details of this meeting shorthand? Like we do on all cases this important.”

Her gaze examined his. Phelan’s eyes roamed downward. To date, zero case-notes had been recorded in shorthand, a language Miss Wade had learned in Mr. Wally’s business class at Gatesville Women’s Prison. She went into her office, opened and closed desk drawers, and returned with a new steno pad and a ballpoint. Peeking out beneath, Phelan could see a folder that she used to hold their standard contract form. A sheet of carbon paper would be clipped to it. Discreetly, she pushed the second client’s chair away from Mr. Bell, all the way to the side of the room, where she sat and poised the pen.

“This is my secretary, Delpha Wade. She’ll make sure we record every detail of your case accurately.”

“Yes, I spoke to Miss Wade on the phone.” Mr. Bell’s spine stretched a mite before he dipped his head in her direction. “Well, look at you. Miss Wade, would you do me the favor of turning your head to the side?”

Delpha lifted her gaze from the steno pad. She looked directly at the client, and again, for a second, her eyes narrowed. Then she turned her head in the direction of the wall that had most needed repainting.

“I am right. You’ve got the profile of Madeleine Carroll. Not the hair of course, hers was wavy. And blond. But, really, the nose, the chin, a dead ringer for—”

“’Fraid I don’t know who that is.” Delpha returned her attention to the pad.

“You’re too young. She was the star of, no, Robert Donat was the star, of course, but she was the lead actress in ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps.’ Alfred Hitchcock, 1935. You’ve seen it?”

No, at Gatesville, movie-time was Doris Day and Elvis Presley. Delpha placed her chin a fraction higher in the air and a slight smile on her lips, to act out interest.

“I’m a film buff. I realize it’s not everyone’s passion, but for me, well…” The client’s gaze turned to rope in Phelan. “Let me remind you that I’d like my identity to remain confidential.”

The sunglasses had told Phelan that.

The man’s nose—straight-bridged in profile but redveined and lumpy from the front—suggested that he liked the bottle. The gray tinge of its tip, that he was an ardent smoker, and the vertical folds in his cheeks, that he had some decades on him. But he didn’t have an elderly hump or a spindly frame. He was built thick like a wrestler or boxer who gravity had weighed down. And he was turned out—wore a navy blazer over a blue plaid shirt, the snap-brim fedora with neat brown hair around its edges. The hair and the mustache, sort of a briefcase brown, looked less than natural. That he kept his hat on—a man of his age, indoors and in the presence of a woman—said he was hiding what was or wasn’t under it. Vanity? Probably. But sunglasses in the rain, well, that said eye problem, ugly, or disguise.

“Yes, sir. We got that part. I assure you confidentiality is one of our principles. What is it you want us to do for you?”

“I…I’m all by myself now.”

The client halted, lips still open. “Excuse me. It’s startling to say that.” A gust hit the window, and the glass rattled. One of his hands moved to hug the other. “I want you to find my brother. I have reason to believe he’s recently purchased a house in Beaumont. We went our separate ways long ago. One of those family matters.” Bell looked away. “My health…well, I’m not young, as you can see. I’d like to see him once more. Clear the air, as it were.”

“And he’s not in the telephone book?” Phelan’s head angled toward a corner, where they had twenty-seven or eight phone books piled up because sometimes phone books were useful.

“I don’t even know what name he’d be using.”

Phelan’s head inclined. “Why would your brother use an alias?”

“He’s…Rodney’s got this cloak and dagger mania. He’s always had it. As kids, we’d play hide and seek, and Rodney would just run. He’d never come in, even when we called ‘Ally-ally-in-come-free.’ Our mother had to call him. Then he’d come in.” Mr. Bell’s brows squeezed.

“Rodney got your goat.”

Bell looked at Phelan, angled, and threw a glance toward Delpha. “He knew he did. That’s why he did it.” After a moment he took a breath, and his head sank. “Ridiculous, I know. Here we are at the end of our lives, and Rodney is still running.” He drew a tobacco pouch and small packet from his jacket pocket. “Do you mind?”

Phelan pushed over an ashtray, eyebrows lifted. Bell was using Patriotic rolling papers, the C-note pattern.

The man nimbly fashioned a cigarette, saying, “Things happened in our family. Like any family. I told myself the sky was still blue without Rodney. But now I’ve changed my mind. I want to see my brother.”

“Whatever family things happened—they didn’t bother Rodney?”

“Ohhhh.” Pondering. “They did. But we have to be realistic. Neither of us can take it back.”

“Take what back?”

“My word! The past, of course.” He leaned back, homemade clamped between his lips, drew a small coin from the breast pocket of his blazer. Phelan took it: gold, worn out of round, foreign words bracketing the head etched in the middle. Which, as near as Phelan could tell, was two Siamese twins with fat lips, joined together at the back of the skull.

He glanced over at Bell.

“Roman. The god Janus, who faces both the past and the future. Nice to look at, isn’t it? To remind yourself that the past is gone.” Bell plucked back the coin and stowed it again in the blazer’s pocket, gave it a pat. “Or that, in the future, something can be done to make up for it.”

“OK, you want to talk to your brother, maybe make up. You’re retired, Mr. Bell?”

“Yes. I’m retired. And I want to see Rodney again, just one more time.”

Phelan damned the sunglasses. He’d have liked to have studied the old fellow’s eyes.

“Then I’ll go home. Go to the movies, tavern, gymnasium, attend Classical Club meetings until, well, until I can’t do those things anymore. You have a great many years before you’ll know what I mean, Mr. Phelan.” He bent his head toward Phelan in what maybe was meant to be a fatherly nod, but his bottom lip bowed upward.

“Classical Club?”

An expression of pleasure lifted the man’s heavy face. “A group of professors. I taught an occasional night class at Loyola, just an elective, a history of early film. Paid practically nothing. But the credential allowed me discounted entry to some events. My favorite is The International Film Festival in Houston, I always drive over. Maybe you’ve gone?” Bell threw a glance at Phelan and turned inquiringly to Delpha.

“I missed that,” Phelan said, so that Delpha didn’t have to find a reply. What Phelan did not miss, some years back, was movie night at a base camp in Kon Tum province—“The Alamo” projected onto an outdoor screen with holes in it. Him and Jyp Casey still wired from the night before, hauling a guy around downed and blasted trees, Zion Washington striding beside, both hands on his M-16.

“Too bad. Film’s my passion, but my livelihood…it was drearier. I took over my father’s business. While my brother Rodney was off gallivanting here and there, I was selling coins, like the Roman one I showed you. Sabres and pistols, assorted antiques. I added movie memorabilia, autographs to our stock. I kept the shop going. Cooped up inside the same four walls every day. Same noisy little streets, my god, the racket tourists make, the local fools. Yowlin’ like cats.”

“Where was that?”

Coy smile. “Confidentiality, remember? Let’s just say, a city.”

Having connected Loyola, the client’s accent, noisy little streets and yowling tourists to New Orleans, Phelan was annoyed by the lack of verification. He injected the atmosphere with a friendly smile. “Born and bred in New Orleans, Mr. Bell? Sell a lotta sabres down there?”

With the nicotine-stained fingers of his right hand, Bell doffed the black glasses and set them on Phelan’s desk. His eyes were darkest brown and hooded, the lax skin of his upper lids balanced on pale lashes. “I suppose it’s not that difficult to guess. Born and bred. Yes, we sold sabres. Daggers, dirks, fancy pistols. Weapons, you know, of war.”

“Was your brother Rodney a part of your business?”

“A long time ago. He kept the books. When he moved away, he simply got an allowance for doing nothing.”

“And that chapped you.”

“Oh, not really. They thought…they thought that was better for everyone.”

“They?”

“Our parents.”

Had his bottom lip quivered? His voice sounded hollow. His clean-shaven jaw had slipped sideways. Bell had, for a moment, become unhinged.

“Happy family?”

“Like any other.”

“Uh huh. Do you have more siblings?”

Xavier Bell took a last deep draw, spit-extinguished the homemade, and dropped the butt into the ashtray. Exhaled the smoke. “No.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventy-five.”

“And Rodney?”

“Seventy-three.”

“Is he married?”

“Not that I know of. He never seemed inclined toward marriage.” Bell’s face was bland.

As was Phelan’s, while he batted around questions he decided could wait. “OK, got it. We find your brother, you spend some time, say goodbye and godspeed. Correct?”

“That’s close enough.”

“You mentioned an alias. Is Rodney your brother’s real name?”

“No. He uses different names.”

“Really,” Phelan said, adjusting to this information. “How do you know that?”

“Because in the early days, I’d call, but then I stopped being able to find him. During this last decade of our…estrangement, I happened on the name he was using. Rodney Harris. I followed up. But then he moved again.” Xavier Bell resettled his shoulders in the blazer.

Phelan noted again that they were not frail or humped shoulders. “That how you found Rodney was here in Beaumont? Somebody happen to tip you?”

“Within this last year, financial conditions changed. Some aged relatives passed away. A portion of the estate was deposited into a bank here.”

“I see,” Phelan said. “Large estate?”

“That’s hardly relevant. Or your business, Phelan. But I will say that the apple of our mother’s eye was real estate, and she never sold a property. The sweet old miser.”

That description rang for a beat.

“How long ago was it you found your brother? And where, sir?” Delpha’s tone had taken on heavy-cream, she managed to pump the question full of courtesy and concern.

Bell angled toward her. “He was around Jacksonville, Florida. About four years ago. 1969, that would make it.”

“Four years ago. That’s the last time you saw him,” Phelan said. “You saw him in person then?”

“Briefly.”

Delpha offered a sympathetic smile. “Y’all couldn’t fix things up?”

The old man’s hands opened and stretched. “I’m afraid not. My brother is a coarse man…coarser than he once was. We took different paths in life, I suppose. I told him I forgave him—”

“For what, Mr. Bell?”

“Everything! Forgiveness…is an attribute of the strong, they say. But I fixed nothing. As much as I tried to.”

“What was it that you hoped would happen?” Now Delpha’s softened voice was a balm directed to Mr. Bell’s ear alone, and Bell oriented his whole body toward her.

Phelan’s forehead wrinkled. How was she doing this?

“Just…just…just to be his big brother again, for a little while. When he was small, he thought I hung the moon. To feel how that felt again, well, that…that was worth a great deal, and I’m a man who knows what things are worth.”

After some seconds of silence, Bell glanced at Delpha and then passed his hand over his eyes. “I’ve embarrassed myself again, haven’t I?”

Phelan changed the subject, asked, in a matter-of-fact tone, for Rodney’s description, a picture of him if there was one, list of habits or pastimes Bell knew about. Like, was Rodney a bowler? Or a Baptist, so they’d know where to look for him.

Bell drew from the navy blazer a yellowed black and white photo. “That’s Rodney and me.”

Phelan studied the photo: two men of different heights standing on a street corner, a broad door behind them. Part of a street sign above their heads read “Orle.” Their faces were alike: same black brows, straight nose, and slightly upturned lips. The men wore identical clothes: lightish suits, double-breasted unlike the blazer Bell wore today, but tacked in at the waist, two-toned shoes buffed to a sheen. Straw boaters. The taller man had an arm extended to the shorter one’s shoulder, the hand blurred as though he’d reached out at the last minute. These two could have been any youngish, well-enough-off white men in the United States in, say, 1930, ‘32,’34—sometime in there. Which told Phelan about the brothers’ conditions, being as how a fair number of Americans in the 1930s could not have produced a shiny pair of cap-toed, two-toned shoes without the aid of a fairy godmother.

“Which is you?”

Bell touched the photo. The taller one.

“And this is the most recent you have? How old were you?”

“Thirty.”

Great, a forty-five-year-old picture. Phelan mentally rolled his eyes.

“As for habits. We were Catholics, but I don’t know that my brother has kept up attendance. Rodney likes birds. Always did. Birds. Nature.” That was why he’d been in Jacksonville because that’s where a lot of birds nested or flew over or some such. And now Beaumont. There were wetlands all around the area.

“Birds. All right. That’s helpful.”

“That’s really all I have to give you. Oh, then there’s this.” Xavier Bell reached into his inside jacket-pocket, pinched bills from a wallet, and counted out a dozen real hundreds onto the metal desk. “Your fee for three weeks. I’m willing to pay a bonus if you find him by, say, September 30. Five hundred dollars. If you find him in a week, I’ll expect an immediate per diem refund. And of course I want a receipt.”

Phelan kept his voice even. “Thank you, sir. Miss Wade will need your signature on our contract. That will also serve as a receipt for your retainer.”

As soon as Delpha had added the financial details, she rose from the client chair. Contract and ballpoint appeared on Phelan’s desk, squared into place by her hands, for the client. “Please add your telephone number, sir. Below your name there.”

“Certainly. But…I’m quite often at a film. I might call you,” he said, gaze darting to her. “Progress reports.”

“That’d be fine. And, ‘scuse me,” she said gently, “but…”

“Yes?”

“Is Rodney dangerous?”

The client pulled back. “I didn’t—I never said the first word about dangerous. Why would you ask that?”

As if teasing, Delpha said, “No special reason, Mr. Bell.” Her uneasy expression transformed into a smile of mild sweetness. Phelan noticed that the smile stopped short of her eyes but didn’t think Bell would.

Bell still stared at her, but when her smile broadened, he relaxed again in his chair.

Phelan shut down his own amusement—see, having her in here was a primo idea—lit a cigarette, and sat back in his swivel chair. “Routine question.” He gestured vaguely. “Miss Wade is being thorough. In this business, we have to know what we’re getting into. What’s the answer, Mr. Bell?”

The dark eyes gazed at the left side of Phelan’s desk, skimmed across it and fixed on the right side. “Rodney…caused dangerous things to happen.”

“How did he do that?”

“He…” Bell’s pinkish nose reddened. “Was not a loyal brother. Took what wasn’t his.”

“Say Rodney’s a thief?”

“Oh yes.”

“What did he steal?”

The client, apparently conducting some inward dialogue, did not reply.

Finally, Phelan cut off the silence with, “All right, then, your retainer will buy you around, as you said, three weeks from Phelan Investigations. Full weeks but spread out over whatever time period is required, including nights and weekends if we’re obliged to work then.”

Bell seemed to stuff his preoccupations back into himself and attend to the office around him. “Surely that’s long enough?”

“Can’t say. Depends on how deep your brother’s buried himself. But you should know that we do work several cases at a time.” Phelan spread his palms. “Busy schedule. Now. Yours is a heavy research case. Any reason you’re in a hurry?”

Bell stroked his mustache with a knuckle. “Not really, I suppose. Having someone working for me already helps.” He nodded, almost bashful. “It’s, well, it’s been such a long time since I’ve had…allies.”

“Got allies now, sir. Phelan Investigations will do our best.”

The flash in Xavier Bell’s dark eyes was that of a yearning six-year-old who knows better than to ask for anything, but dogs you anyway. It passed. But the tremulous smile combined with the mossy old nose activated Phelan’s sympathy gland.

Phelan scooped up the hundreds and set them in his desk drawer on top of a bank deposit booklet. He came out from behind the metal desk and walked their client to the door, making a detour for the client’s still-wet umbrella.

Behind them, he heard Delpha say quietly, “Mr. Bell.”

Xavier Bell did not turn toward her. Instead, he offered his hand to Phelan and a speech that he seemed to be cranking out from memory. “I will be relying on you—”

“Mr. Bell.” Delpha, a shade louder this time.

Phelan glanced back at his secretary, saw the client’s sunglasses dangling from her hand, returned to Bell, who, reciting confidential discretion results, either didn’t hear her or didn’t want to lose his place in the speech.

“…and I do appreciate your best effort. Thank you.” The old fellow exhaled.

With a flip of his hand, Phelan directed his attention to Delpha. Bell twisted himself back toward her and exclaimed, “My word, I just walked right off without those!”

Delpha presented the glasses to him as if they were General Eisenhower’s binoculars, smiled.

Her smile imprinted on his face. He fit on the sunglasses and wagged his finger at her. “Madeleine Carroll.” They heard him descend the stairs carefully.

Phelan went back and nabbed his camera from his desk. He was thinking that Bell was a nice enough old guy. A mixed bag. Delpha could melt him with sweet talk, but Phelan had the feeling he wasn’t always meltable. A tiny bit of unstandard about Xavier Bell.

Hearing the outside door shut, Phelan trotted down to the dentist’s office on the first floor. Jogged across the waiting room with a nod to the receptionist, who trailed a hand at him. He dodged into a room where a girl reclined on a chair with her mouth gaping and her eyelids squeezed shut, the dentist bent toward her with a silver hook.

“Beg your pardon, Milton, this’ll just take a second.” Phelan leaned toward the window and took hurried photos of Xavier Bell. The rain had let up some, but the man had unfurled his umbrella, looked left, right, then crossed the street.

Here was something different: a brisk gait, unlike the deliberate steps on the stairs. Old age was afflicting Bell, but it had not yet unsteadied his legs. On the corner he paused, leaning out from the umbrella—perfect profile snap—to speak to a guy with a hat sitting in a dark car. For a second, he turned full face and looked toward Phelan’s eyes. Phelan snapped the button and pulled back.

“Tom, I’m gonna charge you rent for my window. It’s not sanitary.”

Phelan straightened. “Borrowing your window is helping me make your rent, Dr. Building Owner. Very sorry for the intrusion, Miss.”

Phelan exited the treatment room, raised a hand to salute the receptionist behind the desk, and was rewarded by a paper airplane to the jaw.