Invitation to Murder. Leslie Ford
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of course. I haven’t explained it very well. No. I’ve got to go. There’s nothing else to do. That’s all there is to it.”
If Fish Finlay couldn’t see it, he couldn’t help hear it in the sudden passionate sincerity of her voice.
They were passing a service station, coming into the small town. She flashed up in the seat. “Oh, heavens, we’re here already! What’ll I do? What’ll I tell them?”
He smiled a little in spite of himself. Suspected murder she could take. This was different.
“Oh, I know!” She flashed around toward him. “Oh . . . would you? Would you sell me a couple of your azaleas? The house proctor has a green thumb. I could tell her I went after them for her. Just one lie would cover it. I don’t want them to call up Anne!”
“Sure,” he said.
“Except that I haven’t any money till next month. Or you could send the bill to the Bank. Mr. Reeves might—”
“Pay me later,” Fish said. “I’ll be back.”
“Oh, wonderful! The brick gate right there. . . .”
He turned the truck in.
“We go left to the service yard.”
Fish shook his head. “You hop out here. I’ll take the trees, and find the old man to plant them.”
He smiled at her and stopped the truck. She was out and around before he was. They met in front of the battered fender. Her eyes were shining as she put her hand out.
“I don’t know how to thank you! Really, thanks ever so much!”
She turned and ran up the lawn toward the quiet mansion on the hill, and stopped, looking back, her eyes like breathless stars, their light transformed instantly to a new and lovelier compassion as she saw him limping back around to the other side.
“Oh . . .” she whispered. “That’s why he’s banished dreams.”
She turned and ran on until she heard the truck rattle to a start. Then she turned and waved. He said he’d be back.
Fish Finlay had forgotten his leg, then and when he found the service yard and helped the old man unload the azaleas, all of them . . . all he had to give for a momentary dream he was sealing up in a heart where dreams were banished. Jennifer Linton was his job.
“She’s not going to Newport.” He said it out loud as he stopped the truck a moment at the end of the service lane. Suspicion was enough, whether the Argentine girl’s story was true or false. The fact that there was that story settled it.
But he couldn’t turn back and go to Dawn Hill Farm now and tell Anne Linton. Not with the passionate conviction of her protest still in his ears. There was plenty of time. Three months, practically. The de Gradoffs wouldn’t be back home until the middle of June. He switched his lights on and turned the truck northward home.
Crossing the bridge over the Chesapeake he came into the rain. The long gray arms of the fog rose, swirling, beckoning him on, concealing a harsher surf-beaten shore and a golden sandal thrown back from the crest of a hungry wave, the infernal Rock and the grave fit only for a monster, as death and a motley crew assembled in Newport, faces yet unknown, and the hands of the gilded clock on the stable tower at Enniskerry moved silently, marking the hours.
CHAPTER : 3
Plenty of time. Three months, practically. The irony of his being that confident was slightly on the bitter side when Fish Finlay thought of it in Newport the last Friday in June.
It was around three o’clock when he got there and found the high serpentine brick wall Caxson Reeves had told him to look for, at Nantucket Avenue and Ocean Drive. He drove along it to the pink marble gateposts. Recessed in a niche in the front of each was a white marble urn of yellow marble flowers, with “Enniskerry” chiseled on the base, as if the place were already a monument, its mortuary elegance heightened by a dense somber screen of purple beeches swallowing up the driveway.
He drove past, needing time to adjust himself. He hadn’t realized how small Newport was, a capsule compression of sharply stratified eras. The Jamestown Ferry lumbering along against the business-like back drop of the Naval Base, the narrow crowded streets of the colonial seaport town, the shabby gentility of the resort shops just before Bellevue Avenue became abruptly the stratum of the elite, with its wide emerald-shaded Victorian dignity and Italianate grandeur . . . and there he was at a dead end of pink brick wall and purple foliage. In front of him where the road turned was a parking place separated by a low stone guard from the jutting rocks, beyond them, stretching restlessly into the misty infinite, the blue Atlantic. He pulled in and sat there, at a dead end of his own, aware with a grim kind of humor that his April confidence had constructed it for him. . . . Finlay bolting back from Virginia confident that the Maloney Trustees had a vital and legitimate interest in the personal welfare of the Maloney heirs.
“We ought to call a first-rate private investigator in on this deal, sir,” he’d said, briskly no doubt, at the end of his report, not noticing that Caxson Reeves’s concentrated attention contained any element but interest. Until Reeves folded his half-spectacles and put them on the table, regarding Fish Finlay with bleak detachment.
“You’ve overlooked the only pertinent fact in the matter,” he said dryly. “As Trust Officers we are not concerned with the safety of the Maloney beneficiaries. We’re concerned solely with the safety of the Maloney money.”
He stopped. Fish Finlay sat there blankly, until it occurred to him that Caxson Reeves had said all he intended to say.
“I guess I made a mistake.”
“You did, indeed,” Reeves said. “Show me where the Maloney money is in danger, and what a private investigator could do to remove the danger, and I’ll be happy to authorize the necessary funds. There are none I can authorize to investigate Dodo Maloney’s current husband . . . suspected by you of murdering his first wife on the slight strength of a morsel of schoolgirl gossip you’ve picked up. If there’s nothing else . . .”
And there wasn’t, except the slow burn under Fish Finlay’s collar as he walked stiffly out of the room, until the end of May, when Caxson Reeves’s secretary stopped him one noon.
“Is anything wrong with the Countess de Gradoff?” she asked, holding out a Maloney Trust expense sheet. “Look at this batch of transatlantic phone calls.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Fish said. He took the sheet. The calls were listed for once and sometimes twice a week. The date of the first was what mattered. It was made the day Reeves had dressed him down for the slight morsel of schoolgirl gossip.
Then there was the local call last week, five days after the de Gradoffs got home from Europe and went directly to Newport. It was from a friend of Fish’s, Joe Henry on the city desk of the Courier Graphic.
“Hey, what’s the revival of interest in old James V. Maloney?”
“Is there one?” Fish asked.
“Two inquiries this week . . . one a photostat deal. Why don’t you come up and catch a drink and dinner and tell me about it?”
“Why don’t I look at the file myself?”
“I’ll have it out for you.”
At six o’clock Fish was skimming through the Maloney file, which was mostly James V. Maloney’s daughter and the custody fight over Jennifer, together with the two old gardeners at Enniskerry, a padded story of the life of a man with an iron resentment against personal publicity. The facts were few. Maloney had left the bank at high noon, a news vendor had found his hat stuffed into a Broadway trash basket, a week later his daughter reported him missing.
“Who got the photostat of this stuff?”
Joe Henry shook his head. “A Western Union boy picked it up. The other inquiry