Читать книгу The Removal Company - S. T. Joshi - Страница 8

CHAPTER SIX

By this time Vance and I were almost finished with a meal at Delmonico’s. Evidently his lofty social status was a sufficient cover for my lack of proper evening dress. I’ll admit this was one of the better meals I’ve had lately. Vance didn’t eat much—was too busy talking—but I didn’t follow his example, either in the eating or in the talking.

He was scowling down at his dessert and coffee, as if one or the other contained some blemish that offended his sense of decorum. I saw no problem with what was in front of me. But when Vance continued silent, I felt I had to say something.

“If you want to rest a while and take up your story later….”

“No!” It could have been Bullet Head speaking. “No...just let me think a bit. I want to finish.”

For once I wished one of my clients actually did smoke—it might calm him. Instead, he shot a hand through his hair, swallowed a large mouthful of scalding coffee without apparently tasting it, and went on:

“You can’t imagine what sort of complications this whole business created. First of all, of course, there was the matter of what to do with...with the....”

“The body?” I supplied.

Vance glared at me. “Yes,” he said heavily, turning away from me. “Although I should have known that Sanderson had that all taken care of. When I asked him, all he said was, ‘I will deal with it,’ in that bland, toneless voice of his. I suppose he must have had some means....” The memory of it caused Vance’s face to writhe in pain. “God, I can’t even bear to think of it! Heaven only knows what he did....

“Anyway, that was by no means the end of it. Naturally, we hadn’t told our families what we were doing—and the explanations were... well, shall we say, they weren’t very convincing. It would positively have killed Katharine’s mother if she ever found out—a husband already dead by suicide, and now a daughter.... No, it would have been too much. She herself might have....”

Vance swallowed hard, put the thought out of his mind, and proceeded.

“All I said, when I got back to San Marino, was that Katharine and I had had a big fight and she had left me—gone off on her own. I also had to say that she felt some deep resentment against my family, and that’s why we shouldn’t expect her to write to any of us.... In a way that wasn’t much of a lie: I wouldn’t say she resented my family’s wealth and standing so much as that she was constantly having to face the fact that we still had wealth and standing whereas her own family didn’t. I think it made her feel rather like chattel when she married me.... Well, that’s of no importance now.

“How to explain why she didn’t write to her own mother was the difficulty. She had been very close to her father, and took his death hard, but she also loved her mother deeply; and it wounded Mrs. Hawley terribly that she wasn’t receiving any messages from her daughter. In fact, she spent quite a bit of money hiring some private eye here in New York to look for Katharine, but of course he found nothing—not the faintest trace of a lead.”

“Do you mind my asking,” I said, “how much Sanderson charged for his...services?”

Vance looked blankly at me and said: “One hundred thousand dollars.”

My coughing fit lasted for several minutes.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Vance continued after he was sure I had regained control of myself. “I was a sucker. But he was right about one thing: he really was taking a big risk doing what he was doing...assuming he actually did do it.... I mean, what he did was murder, isn’t it? Helping a person commit suicide is murder, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Legally, anyway.”

“What do you mean by that?” Vance said sharply.

“Nothing.... I only meant that the law regards it as murder, and Sanderson could conceivably be sent to the chair. My own views on the matter aren’t important.”

Vance continued to peer at me, as though he might ferret out some nugget of information from my face, but finally gave it up.

“Anyway, that’s what I gave him. That was the deal. And he made me sign that paper so that I wouldn’t go to the police—because then he could involve me in the matter.” Vance took another swig of coffee. It wasn’t hot any more.

I scratched my head. “Mr. Vance, your story is very peculiar, and very touching also.” I meant that honestly—wasn’t being snide. “But what exactly do you want me to do? You sounded pretty sure, when you saw your wife lying there on that bed in Sanderson’s office, or whatever it was, that she was...well, that she was dead.”

“I know that.” Vance looked around the room, for no apparent reason. “But maybe it was a trick! I’m sure now that it was a trick!”

“Why?”

That brought him up short. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why do you think it was a trick?”—patiently.

“Because of this!” And he brought out his clipping from the Herald-Tribune.

I glanced at it, then looked back at him. “You think this...this Elena Cavalieri...is your wife.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I don’t think so! I mean, I do, but I’m not the only one! Don’t you see?” He was almost enraged with frustration: by the way he was looking at me, I must have been the world’s prize moron. “This was sent to me by my friend, Gene Merriwether. He works on the Herald-Tribune. We go back a long way...our families know each other, and he and I went to Berkeley together...in fact, he must have met Katharine then also, although she was a freshman and we were seniors.... Anyway, he came east to pursue a career in journalism, but so far he’s been stuck doing the society columns. Since he’s California blue-blood, I guess his paper thinks he knows something about the Four Hundred....”

Vance seemed irritated, reflecting again on the world’s varied injustices to blue-bloods, then went on: “He was doing some background work on an article on the Greenways, and he came upon this six-month-old clipping in the paper’s ‘morgue.’ It was he who sent it to me. He himself said it was Katharine!”

I looked at Vance skeptically. “Merriwether said this was your wife?”

Vance backed off. “Well, not in so many words.... But he sent it to me because he felt there was a striking resemblance!”

“Okay, let’s say for the sake of argument that this Elena woman does look like your wife. What of it? What are you saying or suggesting?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Vance said, now a bit tentative. “But there’s something funny going on—something very funny indeed....”

“Vance, I’ll go even farther. Let’s say this actually is your wife. What do you think happened?—that Sanderson brought her back from the dead, and that he then gave her some entirely new personality? Look at the clipping, Vance: Elena Cavalieri, of Cattolica, Italy. Whoever wrote this article—I presume it wasn’t Merriwether himself—must have been supplied this information. What reason do you have, aside from some supposed resemblance to your wife, that this woman isn’t who it says she is?”

Vance said nothing.

“How about this?” I suggested. “You say this Gene Merriwether knew your wife, although apparently not well.” I looked up at him to confirm this assumption; when Vance made no remark, I felt I was on safe ground. “Then how well does he know Elena Cavalieri? Did he cover this wedding?”

“No,” Vance said in a small voice.

“Has he ever seen or met Miss Cavalieri—now Mrs. Greenway?”

“I don’t think so.”—even smaller.

“So,” I concluded, with a sigh of impatience, “on the basis of a photograph in a newspaper clipping that someone who doesn’t know your wife very well thinks looks like her, even though she supposedly died a year and a half ago, you’ve come to me to investigate this matter.” It was again a statement, not a question.

Vance was looking down at his plate, with its untouched dessert. “Yes.”

“I think you’re wasting your time and your money.”

He glanced up quickly, simultaneously alarmed and crestfallen. “Does that mean...that you won’t do anything?”

Suddenly I felt an overwhelming pity for the fellow. He really was in a bad way. “Mr. Vance, I think you’ve gone through a horrible experience; I think you’re tormented with guilt at what happened, even though I for one don’t think you’re in any way to blame in all this. And now you’re grabbing at straws. Maybe you should just accept the fact that your wife is dead, and get on with your life.”

Vance sat quiet for a few moments—then exploded with rage. “Who are you to tell me what to do, Scintilla? Don’t you dare preach at me! Whose side are you on, anyway?” He had turned bright red and was breathing heavily and irregularly.

“I’m not on anybody’s side,” I said with all the calmness I could muster. “I don’t know that there are any sides to be on. My feeling is that the matter doesn’t warrant investigation. There’s too little to go on. There are a variety of ways to look into it, and there’s a lot I could do in terms of checking the backgrounds of all these people, but I very much doubt that the end result will be anything you want or hope for.”

“But what about this Removal Company? Don’t you think it’s a fishy operation? And it’s right here in your own back yard....” Vance now seemed more desperate than angry.

“I’m not the police. Even if I find this Sanderson fellow, I can’t make any arrests. Anyway, if I did go to the police, that would get you into a bit of trouble, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” Vance rubbed his chin. “But please: could you just look around a bit? Do whatever you can—don’t go to the police, but just report back to me if you come up with anything...peculiar. I just want to set my mind at ease.” Vance leaned back heavily in his chair and closed his eyes.

I put my napkin down on the table and called for the check. “All right, Vance. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not likely to use a fraction of that ten thousand dollars you plumped down on my desk. So I’ll get to work, and take whatever fee I think appropriate for my time and expenses, and give back what’s left. And I suspect a lot will be left. Okay?”

“Okay.” Vance paid the check without looking at it.

“I may need your help a bit more,” I said. “In fact, we may have to work in tandem at some points. I don’t do that very often, but this is a special case. Are you prepared for that?” I wasn’t so sure about this, but I felt I had to give Vance some encouragement.

“Yes!” he shot back eagerly—perhaps as eagerly his wife did when she had herself knocked off.