Deadly Nightshade (11 page)

George Bartram suddenly grinned. “Unless you want to except Ormiston,” he said, with a glance at Loring. Carroll Bartram frowned.

“He can't exactly love you, though, can he, old boy? Not if he ever looks in the glass,” persisted George.

“Nonsense.” His brother looked annoyed.

“You might let us in on the joke,” suggested Mitchell.

“What do you say, Carroll? Shall I?”

“You'll have to, now, you ass.” Carroll Bartram turned away with a disgusted look, and sat down again on the davenport.

“I talk too much; always did; you mustn't make too much of the story,” said George Bartram, uneasily. “Ormiston may have forgotten all about it.”

“Don't be too sure of that.” Loring also had a faint smile on his lips.

“You go ahead and tell it, Bob. You know more about it than I do. I was only a kid.” The younger Bartram grinned again, unsubdued.

“Well…” Loring glanced at his patient, who sat lighting a cigarette and looking bored. “It all happened years ago, when the four of us were at school. Dear old Prep, you know; Newcome's. It's a great favorite with Bostonians, the kind that like to keep their precious boys near home. I wasn't in the charmed circle, of course, being merely the son of a poor Oakport G.P.; but I played with the young Bartrams every summer, and old Mr. Bartram was fond of my father. He made it possible for me to go to that excellent, if rather old-fashioned, school; and I am still grateful.”

“Cut that.” Carroll Bartram moved impatiently.

“Although,” continued Loring, with a smile at Gamadge, “I have never yet been allowed fully to express my gratitude. Well; Ormiston was in our class, Carroll's and mine; and a precocious, gifted, conceited, generally objectionable young pup he was. Not at all in the Newcome tradition. I can see now what he must have gone through; but then I simply joined with the other young barbarians in boycotting him. He retaliated—amply retaliated—by making the most diabolical caricatures of us all. Really diabolical. I don't believe anybody who ever saw a caricature of himself by Ormiston, even at that early period of his genius, felt quite as cocky about himself as he had felt before.”

“I can well believe it,” said Gamadge.

“You've seen his later things; just try to imagine them inspired by personal rage and resentment! Well, Carroll didn't like his; so he sought out the lumbering Ormiston, who was twice his size but permanently out of training, and broke his nose.”

“Really broke it?” Gamadge was politely interested.

“Really and truly broke it—in fair fight, of course. Just one of those things. He smashed it flat, and flat it has remained ever since. I may say that there was a most horrible row. The parents came down, goodness knows what all. We tried to explain what the awful provocation was, but nobody would take us seriously; and Carroll was in disgrace for some time.”

Bartram said, smiling a little, “Father told them I ought to be expelled. I wasn't, for some reason.”

“Of course you weren't; old Newcome wasn't quite a fool. He knew that accidents will happen. Old Mr. Bartram begged old Ormiston to let him have Bert sent somewhere for plastic surgery, but Bert flatly refused. He went through the rest of the term—our last—as an interesting mutilé; enjoying it, I have no doubt, tremendously.”

George Bartram said, “I was a lower-form boy, but even kids like me knew what a crazy idiot Ormiston was. He had all kinds of notions. Why, he was a vegetarian!” George Bartram's tone expressed a kind of horror. “At his age!”

“He's a Social Perfectionist, now,” said Gamadge.

“No!” Loring was delighted. “Is he really? I haven't seen him for years; don't know how he's turned out, personally. Old Mr. Bartram, with his usual kindness, kept in touch with him. The Ormistons were always hard up; Mr. Bartram persuaded Bert to accept the money for his session at the Beaux Arts, saw him from time to time afterwards, and I dare say lent him plenty of cash.”

“Have you seen much of him since those days, Mr. Bartram?” asked Mitchell, upon whom the story of the broken nose seemed to have made an impression.

“Almost nothing. We used to run into each other in Boston, sometimes, but he's in New York now. I never see him up here.”

“You wouldn't say he still had a definite grudge?”

“Goodness knows; I hope not. It can't be a serious one.”

“What do you think, Doctor Loring? Would a fellow like that—a neurotic, perhaps—would he let a thing like that smolder along till it finally flared up? Of course I know he'd have to be definitely crazy to do anything like this, with one of his own children involved—”

“I'm no psychologist; can't tell you. Never see the fellow. Shouldn't think it likely—he has an outlet in his work, and plenty of adulation. He's quite the fashion, just now.”

“He behaved pretty cool about that boy of his; Sheriff couldn't get over it.”

“Oh, he's a tremendous poseur, you know; it's hard to say what such people are really feeling. He may have been putting up a front. Ormiston's reactions to anything wouldn't be ordinary; he'd see to that.”

“His wife seems like a nice lady; but very calm and placid.”

“She'd have to be placid to stand living with him. I have met her; wrapped up in her children.”

Mitchell looked thoughtful, but said nothing. It was Gamadge who remarked: “Mitchell said she stayed with the older ones when the little boy was lost, while the rest of the family—except Ormiston, I believe—rushed about searching. I don't quite know why, but that struck me as odd.”

“Well,” said Loring, “of course it's very lonely up there, with all the other places empty; and Ormiston wouldn't be any good as a guardian; he might forget all about the children. I suppose she simply didn't dare leave them.”

“She's a calm sort of lady,” reiterated Mitchell, in a dogged kind of way. “Took the whole business very quietly. Well, you never know. We'll have to pay them a call. You can't help us then, Mr. Bartram? No mystery, nothing at all in your family history that might throw any light on this?”

“We're probably the stodgiest family on record.”

“And the only mystery there is,” said George Bartram, “doesn't interest anybody but Carroll and myself. You can say what you like, old man; but it is a mystery, and I always thought so.”

Carroll Bartram had not spoken, but he had made a wry face, and looked at Loring with a weary half-smile. “Still worrying about that, are you, George?” he asked.

“No, I'm not worrying about it; but it would come in mighty handy now; I can tell you that!”

“What would, if you don't mind me asking?” inquired Mitchell.

“Family business; I talk too much.” George Bartram grinned. “You don't want to hear about it.”

“If it's a mystery, I certainly do.”

“Well, it's just that we never could make out where Father's money went to. His cash, I mean. The cash we thought he must have had when he died.”

“Cash?”

“I mean securities. The business was in good shape, and there was enough to buy Mother a comfortable annuity; but we thought there would be more.”

“How much more, Mr. Bartram?”

“Well, at least four hundred thousand dollars.”

Four Hundred Thousand Dollars

“F
OUR HUNDRED THOUSAND!”
Mitchell sat up in his chair.

“About that. It can't have been much less.”

Carroll Bartram rose from his corner of the davenport, and walked off to the bay window at the other end of the room. “I don't believe I can sit through it,” he said. “You'll excuse me, George; but I thought we stopped crying about that mythical nest egg ten years ago.”

“Yes, but Carroll, it wasn't mythical,” protested his brother. “Father had the securities—he'd been investing for ages. They were in his box, and nobody else had a key. He must have sold out—must have; we even traced some of the sales back to him.”

“I know.” Carroll Bartram turned wearily from his contemplation of the green world beyond the window, and sat down at a radio placed on the left of the bay. He turned it on; a chatter of war news burst upon the air, but was quickly subdued to a murmur. George Bartram, his thoughts suddenly wrenched back to the present, looked wistfully at the radio, one ear cocked to listen.

“Isn't it the damnedest thing?” he complained. “I almost wish now that I'd stuck it out. I don't believe it'll spread to the neutrals. My job wasn't the kind you can drop and pick up again. That Dutchman Bloomveldt has been waiting for it for five years. Fine for Bloomveldt—stepped right into my shoes; try and get that job or any other job away from him!”

“I guess you're better off in your own country, now, George,” said Loring, not unsympathetically.

“That's what they all said. I don't know.”

“That four hundred thousand, Mr. Bartram,” insisted Mitchell.

“Oh yes. Well, it was this way: Father died in 1927, and he left the mills to Carroll and myself, and everything else to Mother. Just what we expected; but we thought she'd be well fixed—better than that; rich woman, from some peoples' point of view. We got the surprise of our lives. During the last two years of his life, the old man had sold out four hundred thousand dollars' worth of bonds, and there wasn't a thing to show for it. Mind you, his lawyers and his business associates and everybody else who could get their noses into it started right out to check up on it; and I may say they didn't leave many stones unturned. There was enough to buy that annuity for mother, which kept her going the way she always had gone—the old house in Boston, her old servants, and her old limousine; but she couldn't have done it without the annuity.”

“Darned nice of you two to buy it,” said Mitchell.

“Only thing we could do; we didn't hesitate. Besides, things were different then; we didn't either of us think we were going to need her money. I sold out to Carroll—always meant to—and went into this partnership—Treves Incorporated. Carroll ran the old business. Then the crash came, and were we glad we'd bought that annuity just in time! But it didn't leave us any margin. I took the European end of the business—gave me a better income. Never got the time to come back—not till now.

“Well, nobody could ever find out what Father bought with that money, or what he did with it. Mother didn't know, and she wouldn't discuss it; she thought he was perfect—said that if he spent it, he must have spent it wisely.” George Bartram smacked his hand down hard on the arm of his chair. “Gad! I wonder whether she'd have been so cool about it if there hadn't been enough left to keep her comfortable!”

“Gently, gently,” suggested Loring.

“All right; but I get wild when I think of it.”

Loring, with his half-closed eyes wrinkling at the corners, turned to Mitchell. “You must understand,” he said, “that the usual explanations won't work in Mr. Bartram's case. They really won't; I mean it. I'm healthily agnostic where the perfectibility of human nature is concerned, but you can take it from me that old Mr. Bartram wasn't leading a double life—not in any sense at all. The executors wanted Mrs. Bartram to get her money, and they didn't take anything for granted, or handle the situation with gloves, I can tell you.”

“Father and Mother went to Europe every summer,” said George Bartram. “We got to the point where we wondered if he'd been playing the races, or taking fliers at Monte Carlo.”

“I didn't get to that point,” murmured Carroll, without turning.

“Mother swore there wasn't anything of the sort; they were always together, you know. I don't believe they were separated for more than seven hours at a time since they were married—and that means business hours.”

Mitchell said: “You'll excuse the question; did anybody think of blackmail?”

“Everybody thought of blackmail, except the family, and persons like myself, who knew old Mr. Bartram,” replied Loring. “But that led nowhere.”

Gamadge inquired, with mild interest, “Did he collect anything?”

“What kind of thing?” asked George Bartram, puzzled.

“Any kind of thing. People will pay a good deal for a book, a manuscript, a letter; I know that from my own experience. They will pay an extraordinary sum for a Chinese pot, a coin, a watch, a fan—if they're collectors, of course.”

“I never heard that he collected anything. Last time he was in Paris, in 1927, he bought a lot of pictures; job lot. He said they were a bargain. He didn't pay much for 'em.”

“Did he understand pictures?” Gamadge looked up at the landscape over the mantelshelf. “That's a nice Kensett.”

“Oh, that's always been there; he didn't buy that. No, I don't think he cared for pictures at all. These were some that a Frenchman wanted to sell—one of those aristocrats you hear about, trying to get rid of family stuff. Ormiston introduced them.”

“Mr. Ormiston introduced your father to this Frenchman?”

“Yes. Ormiston and his wife were living in Paris then. Father always looked them up when he went to France.”

“And Ormiston engineered this deal?”

“So I understood.”

“What became of these pictures?”

“I don't know. They were in our attic in Boston. I understood Father bought them out of charity. What became of those pictures Father bought in Paris, Carroll?”

Carroll Bartram answered without turning his head: “Mother let Ormiston have them for what they cost Dad. She said she had his receipted bills for them.”

“She didn't have them appraised, I suppose?” asked Gamadge.

“No, the customs people appraised them when Dad paid the duty.”

“Why did Ormiston want them?”

“He said he'd clean them up, scrape about six coats of old varnish off some of 'em, and make a couple of hundred on the turnover; that's what he told Mother, anyway. I suppose he knew how to market such things.”