Читать книгу Murder Jambalaya - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 7

CHAPTER THREE

The idea of millionaire Marc DeVarnay hiding out in a fishing village had been startling enough, but it was nothing compared with the thought of him hobnobbing with Old Jake. After that, Old Jake’s body had provided the final, jolting climax, but it was actually just one more surprise in what now seemed like an endless series of surprises. The first had come a week earlier. I had gone to bed that night in Savannah, Georgia, replete—as the poets say—with plans for enjoying a lovely city I had never visited. Years before I had read about its intriguing pattern of squares, its historic waterfront, and its splendid old homes and gardens, and the place had fascinated me ever since. Finally my work had taken me there; unfortunately, it also kept me flitting about the suburbs with nary a glimpse of the central city.

The case involved missing heirloom jewelry, an unlikely assortment of heirs as suspects, a clutter of family feuds, and assorted nasty complications. One of the finest feats of my career was to deftly remove suspicion from a dearly hated daughter-in-law, a sweet girl who intensified the client’s enmity each time they met by having a mind of her own, and pin the crime on a much loved and trusted servant who had been with the client for twenty years.

I then brought off a much more difficult achievement by persuading my boss, Raina Lambert, to give me time off to enjoy Savannah. I planned my sightseeing agenda with more care than General Sherman had used in capturing the place in 1864, and I added several maneuvers the general hadn’t thought of such as discovering which bar served the best mint juleps and comparing dialects of southern fried chicken and candied yams at various restaurants.

I fell asleep thinking of appropriate elaborations such as the substitution of baked ham for the chicken and the extension of my research to pecan pie. When the phone rang, I stirred myself resentfully, picked up the receiver, and groaned, “Go away.”

Raina Lambert’s voice said, “I’ve made reservations for you. You can catch a night plane if you hurry.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I told her. “Just this morning you gave me a week off. Remember?”

“That was then. Now you’re needed somewhere else. A New Orleans businessman has disappeared.”

“Not to worry,” I said. “Everyone disappears in New Orleans, but no one stays missing very long. People get confused by the fact that the bars there never close, and they lose track of time. Have you checked Bourbon Street?”

“The man’s name is Marc DeVarnay. He’s been gone for two weeks, and no one has any idea what could have happened to him.”

“Two weeks is a bit long for a binge,” I conceded.

“He has no vices at all. He even drinks with severe moderation.”

“Then he’s gone to heaven, which is outside our jurisdiction.”

Raina spoke in the firm tone bosses always adopt when they think an argument has gone on long enough. “Here’s the information on your flight reservation. I’ll have Mara Wilks meet you at the St. Louis airport with DeVarnay’s dossier and photographs.”

“St. Louis!” I exclaimed. “I thought you said New Orleans!”

“St. Louis,” she said firmly.

However remarkable the Gateway Arch may be, it is paltry compensation for losing both Savannah and New Orleans in one stroke. Resignedly I wrote down the details.

I made my plane with minutes to spare, but I had ample time during the remainder of the night, on planes and in airports, to mentally review all of the attractions I wasn’t going to see in the fascinating city of Savannah. At eight o’clock the next morning, instead of strolling down Bull Street to admire its historic squares, I was landing at the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, fairly launched on the wildest of wild goose chases, though I didn’t know that yet.

Mara Wilks, a thirty-five-year-old mother of three who could have passed for a high school student with some artful neglect of makeup and dress, was there with a thick envelope of material that had been faxed to her. A selection of photographs had been sent by overnight express.

“I’ll circle past the office and see if they’ve arrived yet,” she said.

While she drove, I occupied myself with reading about Marc DeVarnay. His credentials were the sort that make mothers of marriageable daughters drool—he was single, he was handsome, he was popular, he was successful in a business he loved, he came from a prominent old New Orleans family, and he was sole heir to ten million dollars.

Fate had been almost excessively kind to him. As if wealth, good looks, and popularity weren’t enough, he had founded his own antique store six years earlier, and it was hugely profitable. He was young—just thirty-two—with excellent health. He was intelligent, he was liked by his friends and even by his employees, and he had the respect of his competitors, most of whom were willing to concede, however grudgingly, that he was a very, very good antique dealer. Not only was his family highly respected in New Orleans, but if there had been a French equivalent to the Mayflower, the DeVarnay ancestors would have arrived on it.

Unfortunately, he also was missing. Had he suddenly crapped out after rolling sevens and elevens all his life? No one knew. On a Wednesday night two weeks earlier, he had left for St. Louis to attend an auction. He telephoned his widowed mother to tell her he was about to start for the airport—he always called her at least once a day. Shortly after that, he called a cab. Then he called back and cancelled the cab.

An expensive leather suitcase, a gift from his mother, was missing from his home, as were his toilet articles and some clothing. Obviously he had packed for the trip and left home with his suitcase. A quick check in St. Louis revealed that he arrived there, claimed his reserved hotel room, and attended the auction. He made a purchase at the auction and had it shipped to his store in New Orleans. All of that was as expected.

The one significant irregularity was that he failed to telephone his mother on Thursday or at any time after that. This had never happened before except when he was in Europe. She hadn’t heard from him since the call he made Wednesday night just before he left for the airport. He checked out of his St. Louis hotel on schedule early the next morning, Friday, but he missed his return flight to New Orleans, and neither he nor his suitcase had been seen since.

Jolitte DeVarnay, DeVarnay’s mother, was severely critical of the way the police had handled the case, but most missing men eventually show up again, screaming for help when they sober up or run out of money. DeVarnay hadn’t.

As far as anyone could discover, he had no enemies, no business or personal crisis to run away from, no secret life about to come unraveled. He was as open and above-board as the heir to ten million dollars could be. Even so, the police figured he had his own good and sufficient reasons for dropping out of sight for a week or two, and eventually he would be heard from.

His mother informed anyone who would listen that the police were idiots. Marc was a good son, he was close to his mother, and he wouldn’t have gone off of his own volition without saying anything to her about it.

Jolitte DeVarnay was not only a wealthy pillar of New Orleans society and politics, but she had long since promoted herself to duchess. She took her case to a series of higher courts—first the police commissioner, then the mayor, and finally the governor. It went without saying that she was on a first name basis with all three. Each in turn gave the police a prod or two but refused to call out the National Guard or ask the president to declare New Orleans a disaster area. By that time DeVarnay had been missing for two weeks, no one seemed to be giving his disappearance the serious attention his mother thought it deserved, and she was desperate.

On the recommendation of several wealthy friends, she made one more telephone call—to Lambert and Associates. Probably the fact that we call ourselves “Investigative Consultants” influenced her decision. She sounded like the kind of person who would feel humiliated if she had to engage a detective. Once she agreed to a retainer that would make even her bank account wince and indicated a willingness to accept a final bill in accordance with her status as millionaire and duchess, Raina Lambert took her complaint very seriously indeed and gave it the highest priority.

Meaning that she telephoned me in Savannah and dumped it into my lap.

“What do you make of it?” I asked Mara.

“It’s an either-or case,” she said.

“Explain yourself.”

“Either something drastic has happened to him, or there are secrets in his life no one knows anything about.”

“Or both,” I suggested. “The place to begin looking for a missing New Orleans businessman should have been New Orleans, not St. Louis.”

The photos had arrived when we reached her office, and both of us took time to study them. Marc DeVarnay certainly was a fine-appearing man. He was clean-shaven, his thick, dark hair had just the right stylish suggestion of a wave, and—as the fact sheet indicated—he appeared to be in robust good health. He also appeared to be the intense type of person who takes himself and life much too seriously, but a shy smile in one of the photos made me wonder whether he might be concealing a sense of humor. He looked much too open and forthright to be a successful businessman, but that could have been an asset for him.

We started at his hotel. Since there already had been inquiries by the St. Louis police at the request of the New Orleans police, our visit surprised no one. The attitude was a resigned, “Here we go again.” His photo was duly studied and identified; his registration card, a copy of which we already had in his dossier, was displayed. The signature matched as well as signatures usually match. He had stayed there several times before but at long enough intervals so that no one remembered him. The hotel staff couldn’t say whether he had behaved normally, but it found him a pleasant guest who caused no problems and tipped generously. He had checked in late that Wednesday night, he was out all day on Thursday as far as anyone knew, and he checked out and left early Friday morning.

DeVarnay had taken a cab to the airport, and the St. Louis police had located the driver and talked with him. He recognized DeVarnay’s photo and also the description of the leather suitcase. The one thing he remembered vividly was that when they reached the airport, DeVarnay had given the skycaps the brush-off and entered the terminal building carrying the leather suitcase himself—which surprised the cab driver. DeVarnay obviously was capable of carrying a suitcase, if he wanted to, or even two or three of them, but he had seemed like an affluent type who would disdain such drudgery.

Our next stop was the auction house. The Forsythe Galleries were a trendy art merchandising establishment. I disliked them the moment I walked through the door, and I disliked Jeremy Forsythe, its owner/manager, even more. He was the prissy kind of businessman—small mustache; small smile; small, evasive eyes. His galleries seemed to be hugely successful, but I wouldn’t have bought anything at all with confidence there, not even a da Vinci cosigned by Michelangelo with an attestation of authenticity from Rembrandt.

He was candid enough with us. “I know all about it—the police were asking,” he said. “Certainly DeVarnay was here. I remember him only too well. Since he was going to disappear anyway, I wish he’d done it earlier—before he screwed up my auction.”

We asked him what he meant by that.

“DeVarnay has a reputation,” he said. “He’s rich, he’s built a very nice business in a short time, and he’s maybe the country’s foremost Mallard collector. Supposedly he’s also an important authority on Mallard. I’d never met him before, but I’d heard all about him.”

Both Mara and I wanted to know who or what Mallard was.

“Prudent Mallard was a famous nineteenth-century New Orleans furniture maker,” Forsythe said condescendingly. “We don’t see much of his work this far north, but he’s very popular with New Orleans collectors. I’d managed to pick up five exceptional items, all in excellent condition, along with a few minor things, so I put them in a private auction with other pieces I’d been holding back. It was a special sale for serious Midwest collectors—admission by invitation only—and I invited DeVarnay and a few other out-of-state dealers and collectors I knew were interested in the type of things I was offering. The Mallard items were so good I thought DeVarnay would bid up the prices, in which case our local collectors, seeing how interested a big wheel like him was, would try to buy them themselves. Instead, he did very little bidding—he made a few cursory passes at the main Mallard pieces and then dropped out. That was his privilege. Unfortunately, I’d made the mistake of puffing him in advance, and because the out-of-town expert obviously wasn’t interested, the local people thought there must be something wrong with the items, and they wouldn’t bid, either. It was almost a disaster. Just to add insult to injury, DeVarnay suddenly came to life almost at the end and bought a small nightstand, a throwaway item, for more than it was worth.”

“You say you’d never met DeVarnay?”

“No, and I hope I never meet him again. The police showed me his photo,” he added when Mara pulled one out of her envelope. “That’s him. He was here, but I can’t imagine why he came. He thoroughly screwed up my auction by an almost total lack of interest even though he did buy one item.”

“How did he pay for it?” I asked.

“In cash, and he arranged to have it shipped to his store in New Orleans. Then he left. Where he went from here was no concern of mine and still isn’t.”

Back in the car, Mara paused before starting the motor. “He could have been preoccupied by something—the question of whether he was going to disappear, for example. Or where he was going to disappear to. That would account for the inexplicable behavior.”

“Perhaps so. But in that case, why bother to attend the auction at all?”

“Because he was expected to. Or because he hadn’t made up his mind.”

“There’s another explanation. Forsythe had DeVarnay set up to make a sucker of him. DeVarnay was supposed to function as a shill and bid the prices up, and if he wanted something himself, he would have to pay through his nose. DeVarnay saw what was going on and refused to play. Buying a nondescript nightstand at the end was his way of thumbing his nose at Forsythe. That’s one possibility. It’s also possible that DeVarnay really is an expert, and those fine items weren’t nearly as good as Forsythe represented them to be.”

“What would that have to do with his disappearance?”

“Perhaps nothing. Up to the point Friday morning when he entered the airport terminal carrying his own suitcase, he hadn’t disappeared. He was right where he was supposed to be. His disappearance happened after that.”

“I suppose he could have rented a car or met someone—”

“Or taken a different plane from the one he was supposed to take. This is where we go to work.”

How much of a problem you have finding traces of a person who passed through a place two weeks earlier depends on the place. With a village on the edge of an outback, which sees on the average one strange face a month, you probably won’t have much difficulty. With an airport serving a metropolis, with thousands of people passing through it daily if not hourly, you’ll have a job on your hands.

No one we talked with remembered Marc DeVarnay. Eventually the airlines’ computers saved us, but it took time. It was early afternoon before we established that he had left St. Louis on a MidAmerican flight to Denver, traveling under his own name, shortly before he was supposed to depart for New Orleans. He bought his ticket with cash.

At that point I needed instructions. I telephoned Raina Lambert at her work number in Minneapolis and dictated a report to her answering machine. It wasn’t a long report, but I had to call her back twice in order to get it finished between the beeps. Then Mara and I went back to her office to wait for Raina to telephone.

When she did, she greeted me with a question. “If DeVarnay went on to Denver, why are you still in St. Louis?”

“There are odds and ends that need cleaning up here,” I objected. “Did something happen that sent DeVarnay winging into the blue? Did he meet someone? It would be a great help to know why he’s on the run.”

“Tell Mara to give it another day and then report directly to me. I have something else for you. DeVarnay was carrying traveler’s checks, and he’s cashed some of them. Four that we know about. He always carried a small reserve of money in traveler’s checks when he traveled, five hundred dollars in fifty-dollar checks. They’re issued by a New Orleans bank, and four of them have been returned to the bank in the usual way.”

She dictated the names and addresses of the four firms that had cashed them and the dates they were cashed. When I finished writing, I looked at the list and whistled. Three of the checks had been cashed the day he disappeared: One in Denver, one in Reno, and a third in San Francisco. One was cashed in Seattle on the following day.

“Do you still want me to go to Denver?” I asked. “Obviously Seattle is the last place he surfaced—as far as we know—but that was two weeks ago. Today he may be cashing checks in Nome or Beijing.”

“I have someone trying to pick up his trail in Seattle. See what you can find out along the way.”

By then it was late afternoon, and the people DeVarnay had encountered in his travels would no longer be on duty. I stayed overnight in St. Louis, working with Mara in a vain attempt at finding out how DeVarnay spent his one free evening there.

The next morning, taking the same flight DeVarnay had, I was off on the next lap of the great DeVarnay goose chase. In Denver, no one at the gift shop that had cashed his traveler’s check remembered him. I asked about the shop’s procedure with traveler’s checks. The check had to be no larger than fifty dollars, and DeVarnay had to purchase something, show his driver’s license, and sign the check in the clerk’s presence.

He had parted company with MidAmerican Airlines when his plane landed, and no employee remembered him. After more recourse to airlines computers, I placed him on a Sierra Western flight bound for Reno. Again he paid for the ticket with cash.

He had taken an afternoon flight to Reno, and so did I. I spent the flight pondering his unnatural preference for small airlines. In Reno, he had cashed another traveler’s check—this time in a downtown casino where gamblers cash checks of all kinds as fast as they run out of money. He had shown his driver’s license and endorsed the check in the presence of the cashier. No one remembered him. I hoped he had taken time off from his frantic dash west to play a few slot machines. Otherwise, he wasn’t getting any more fun out of this trek than I was.

He had taken a Sierra Western night flight to San Francisco, and so did I. He had checked in at the Golden Sunset Motel near the airport, paying for one night with a traveler’s check plus some cash. I stayed at the same motel.

Early the next morning, which was a Saturday for me, I caught a Pacific Northern Airlines flight to Seattle, the same one DeVarnay had taken on Sunday two weeks earlier. The last traveler’s check we knew about had been cashed at an airport gift shop in the Seattle terminal.

Mort Morris, the Seattle agent for Lambert and Associates, met me at the airport. He was a big, bristly man with a disarming smile, and it was said he could talk his way through a brick wall. He had already done the obvious.

Marc DeVarnay had not booked any flight under his own name, nor had he rented a car or stayed at any hotel or motel near the airport or in downtown Seattle. We set about systematically eliminating everything that was left. That done, we started over again, and the next step was harder. Instead of merely asking about a name, one of us had to call personally and see if anyone recognized DeVarnay’s photo.

We had an almost nibble from a bus driver on the Los Angeles run. At first he thought he’d had DeVarnay as a passenger. Then he changed his mind.

And that was all. When we finished, Marc DeVarnay was just as thoroughly missing as he had been in the beginning. All we had established was that he now was missing from a different place.

On Wednesday night, precisely one week after she had cancelled my Savannah vacation, Raina Lambert telephoned. She listened to my report without comment. Very little can be said about a long, extremely thorough list of negatives.

“What do you think?” she asked finally.

“Is there any insanity in the DeVarnay family?”

“Not that I know of. What does that have to do with it?”

“There is now. No one but an insane person behaves this way.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“I still think this search should have begun in New Orleans. DeVarnay very neatly led us all the way to Seattle and left us here. Then he went wherever he intended to go all along, using an assumed name.”

“So why look in New Orleans when he was last seen in Seattle?”

“Because the reason he disappeared is in New Orleans, not here.”

“Maybe so,” she mused. “All right. Come to New Orleans.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to look for him in New Orleans. I’d rather go to Savannah. If DeVarnay wants to disappear that badly, let him.”

“Catch a night flight if there is one,” she said firmly. “Call me back and give me your flight information.”

She was still the boss. I hung up and dialed an airline.

So I arrived in New Orleans and was immediately launched on a second wild goose chase. During the three hours I spent sitting on Old Jake’s porch, guarding his corpse and communing with undiluted nature, I had ample time to ask myself why I didn’t find a job that occasionally made sense.