McNally's Caper (24 page)

“That’s best,” I assured her. “I know it’s going to be fine because you’re very creative.”

“Creative? What does that mean?”

“You’re very good at making things up.”

“I guess,” she said and stared at the thick shrubbery surrounding her miniature amphitheater. It occurred to me that she hadn’t yet smiled. “Archy, may I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Can I come and live with you?”

How do you handle something like that?

“Lucy,” I said, “this is your home, right here with your family.”

“I know,” she said, “but I don’t like living here. Besides, I don’t think I’m going to have a family. I heard my mother and father yelling at each other and what I think is that they’re going to get a divorce. I know what that is. A lot of the kids at school, their parents got a divorce.”

“It happens,” I said. “But the kids are still living with their mother or father, aren’t they?”

“Most of them. Except for Emma Bradbury; she’s living with her grandmother. But what if neither my mother or father wants me?”

I swallowed. “I don’t think that’s possible, honey.”

She turned to look at me, eyes brimming. “But what if it
is
? It worries me. That’s why I’d like to come and live with you. Do you have a house?”

“Yes, I live with my parents.”

“Well, couldn’t I come and stay? I’d just need a little room and I promise I wouldn’t cry or get sick or anything like that.”

I had been right: she was the main victim. The adults went their selfish, screwball ways and this child was hurting.

“Tell you what, Lucy,” I said. “If no one wants you, I promise you can come and stay at my home. I don’t think that’s going to happen because even if your parents get a divorce, one of them will want you and the other will want to visit and take you on trips and things like that. Please try not to worry about it. You’re never going to be left alone.”

That seemed to brighten her a bit. She finally gave me a smile, a small, frail thing. Hope is hard to kill in kids.

“You promise, Archy?” she said.

“Positively,” I said with more confidence than I felt. I climbed to my feet. “Now you finish your poem. And don’t forget that you and I are going to have a picnic right here. But you must let me bring the lunch.”

That quickened her; the shy smile turned to a grin. “You know what I’d like?” she said, excited now.

“What?”

“A pizza.”

“Good choice,” I said. “With lots of cheese.”

“And maybe those funny little pieces of meat that look like coins. I like those.”

“Pepperoni,” I said. “You’re so right; they’re good. That’s what we’ll have.”

“Thank you,” she said gratefully. “I love you, Archy.”

It came close to being a mawkish moment but her innocence saved it.

“And I love you, Lucy,” I mumbled and stumbled out of there.

I
HAD TIME FOR
my ocean swim, a melancholy wallow I must admit because I could not sluice away my memory of Lucy’s misery. Adults are supposed to be able to cope with troubles but we want kids’ lives to be a constant joy—and they so rarely are.

No family cocktail hour that evening because my parents were leaving early to have drinks and dinner at the home of septuagenarian friends. It would be followed by a ferocious contest of high-stakes bridge. The victorious couple might win as much as forty cents.

And so I dressed casually, planning to dine in the kitchen with the Olsons. To my delight, Ursi had prepared a rabbit stew made Italian-style with, amongst other goodies, salt pork, garlic, and red wine. Served with small roast potatoes. Also a round of pepper focaccio. Luscious.

I was in the pantry uncorking a bottle of the Chianti Classico we keep on hand in case of an impending nuclear catastrophe when the phone rang and I picked it up in the kitchen. Sgt. Al Rogoff was calling.

“Interrupting your dinner?” he said gruffly.

“Not yet. What’s happening?”

He didn’t answer that. “Can you and I get together tonight?” he asked.

“Easiest thing in the world,” I told him. “My parents are out this evening and I’m going to scarf with Ursi and Jamie in the kitchen. Come join us.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” he said. “We’ll meet later.”

“It’s rabbit stew and roast potatoes.”

“Be right there,” he said and hung up.

“Ursi,” I said, “Sergeant Rogoff will be joining us for dinner. Is that all right?”

“Of course,” she said. “There is plenty.”

Al showed up bearing our dessert: a chocolate cake layered with raspberry mousse, and my diet immediately became a dim remembrance. What a merry feast we had! Good food, good wine, good talk. Like all cops Al had an inexhaustible store of amazing and amusing true tales to relate. My favorite was of a well-known investment banker of Palm Beach who was arrested pedaling his ten-speed bicycle along Worth Avenue at midnight while wearing his wife’s lingerie. How many times must I tell you that madness is engulfing the world?

Rogoff and I retired to my father’s study after dinner. I broke out a bottle of the pater’s Remy Martin and poured us ponies of cognac. We sat in facing club chairs and simultaneously sighed with content.

“Great dinner,” Al said.

“Great dessert,” I said. “No-cal, of course.”

“Of course. Would your old man object if I smoked a cigar? He’ll smell it.”

“Go ahead,” I urged. “I’ll tell him we had a conference on the Forsythe investigation.”

“That’s the truth.” He lighted up one of his Louisville Sluggers and I had an English Oval, wondering how many I had had that day. Two, three, four or more—I couldn’t recall. And I was in such a replete mood I didn’t much care.

“How are you coming along on the Forsythe homicide?” I asked lazily, for to tell you the truth I really didn’t want to think about it. That raspberry mousse cake was stupendous! And guess who had two slices.

“I’m not coming along,” the sergeant said grumpily. “No hits, no runs, just errors. I can’t get this thing off the ground. That’s why I’m here. You got anything? Anything at all?”

I hesitated half a mo. I had a lot I could tell him but it was all suspicions, conjectures, presumptions. Still, I reckoned it was time to reveal
some
of it. At least I could give him a few bones to gnaw, and he had the resources and official heft to find answers to the questions troubling me.

“As I recall,” I said, “you told me Sylvia Forsythe and Anthony Bledsoe were not at home when the murder occurred. Did you check out their alibis?”

He nodded. “She’s clean. She was having a pedicure and a massage at the time Forsythe was offed, just like she claimed. Bledsoe is a little more iffy. He drove the Forsythes’ Rolls in for a wash and wax, as he said, but he didn’t hang around while the work was being done. Says he just wandered around window-shopping and then had a hamburger. Maybe. We haven’t pinned it down.”

I took a deep breath. “Al,” I said, “Tony Bledsoe is the illegitimate son of the recently deceased Griswold Forsythe the Second.”

He looked at me, blasted. Suddenly he chomped down on his cigar and bit off the tip. He made a grimace of disgust and deposited the severed smoke in a nearby ashtray.

“Is that for real?” he demanded.

“It is,” I said. “Reported to me as gossip and then confirmed by an unimpeachable source.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before this?” he said harshly.

“Because I only learned of it a few days ago and I thought it of little significance. A footnote, so to speak. But then I heard that Bledsoe has a propensity for violence, especially after he’s had a few drinks.”

“Propensity for violence,” the sergeant repeated. “Love the way you talk. Couldn’t you just say the guy’s a hothead?”

“All right,” I said. “Anthony Bledsoe is reputed to be a hothead.”

“And you have a propensity for prolixity,” said Al who, as you may have guessed, is no fool. He looks as if he was hacked from a side of beef by a careless butcher but he is an extremely astute and conscientious detective. He also happens to be a closet balletomane—but that’s neither here nor there.

“Okay,” he said, “so Tony is the dead man’s bastard. What does that get us?”

“Motive?” I suggested. “Resentment and anger. He was a servant in his father’s home. That couldn’t have been easy to endure.”

“Who’s his mother?”

“Mrs. Nora Bledsoe, the Forsythes’ housekeeper.”

Rogoff shook his meaty head in wonderment. “That place is a zoo,” he said.

“You’re the second person who’s said that.”

“Who was the first?”

“Timothy Cussack.”

“Oh-ho. And have you any secrets about that bum you’d care to reveal?”

“I’m leery about him,” I admitted, not answering his question directly. “But I can’t imagine what his motive might be for strangling Mr. Forsythe. Surely not for the few hundred dollars in his wallet.”

The sergeant hunched forward. “But you figure he’s a possible?”

I nodded.

“And Bledsoe is another?”

“Or the two of them in cahoots. Al, they’re close friends, drinking buddies. They may have cooked up the whole thing together. Bledsoe gets a nice bequest after his father dies. The two of them, Bledsoe and Cussack, want to open a saloon or nightclub or whatever. Maybe they got impatient and decided the old man was worth more dead than alive.”

That wasn’t
quite
the way I saw it, but I knew the suggestion would be sufficient to start Al digging deeper into the whereabouts of the two suspects at the time of the murder.

The sergeant sat back, finished his brandy, and began to juice up a fresh cigar. “You know,” he remarked, “the only reason I put up with you is that you’re one of the beach people. They’ll talk to you and tell you things they’d never tell me because I’m just a lousy cop.”

“You know,” I said, “the only reason I put up with you is that you can flash your potsy and get the street people to tell you things they’d never tell me because I’m just a lousy civilian.”

We glowered at each other, then burst out laughing.

“Not a bad team,” Rogoff said.

“Not bad at all,” I agreed.

He rose to depart without lighting up his new cigar, for which I was thankful. I walked him out to his pickup truck. It was a splendid night, cool and clear.

“Thanks for the feed,” Al said. “And for the leads. I’ll take a closer look at Bledsoe.”

“And Cussack,” I said. “Don’t forget him.”

“I won’t,” he promised. “And if you learn anything new don’t be bashful. Support your local police.”

“Don’t I always?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “After a delay. But better late than never.”

“What a brilliant expression,” I told him. “I wish I’d said that.”

“Go to hell,” he said cheerfully and drove away.

I went back inside and cleaned up father’s study, taking brandy snifters and ashtray into the kitchen to rinse. I asked Ursi to give me a wakeup call on Friday morning. Eight o’clock, no later.

“Make sure I’m out of the hay,” I urged.

“I’ll make sure, Mr. Archy,” she said, smiling. “If necessary I’ll have Jamie play his concertina in your bedroom.”

“That’ll do it,” I acknowledged and climbed the stairs to
my
Secret Place. I undressed and pulled on a Japanese kimono imprinted with a scene of a samurai battling dragons. Fitting?

I worked on my journal awhile and then surrendered. I treated myself to a marc, lighted a cigarette, and put on a tape of Tony Bennett singing cabaret songs. What a balladeer he is! Did you ever catch his “Night and Day”? Magic.

While I sipped, smoked, and listened I reflected on my conversation with Sgt. Al Rogoff. I was satisfied with the way it had gone, confident I had spurred him to do the donkeywork needed to add flesh to the bones of my theory of what had happened. I was not absolutely sure of it, you understand, but there is little I am totally certain of—except that a stock will rise in price the day after I sell it.

I finished my drink, cigarette, and Tony Bennett’s tape. His last song was “I’ll Be Seeing You.” It was beautifully done but had no relation to the discreet inquiry that concerned me. A more apt selection might have been “The Lady Is a Tramp.”

Ursi was true to her word and pounded on my door at eight
A.M.
Friday morning and continued pounding until she heard my strangled shout, “I’m up, I’m up!” I cannot claim I bounced out of bed at that ungodly hour full of p & v. But I did manage to drag myself through the morning’s ablutions, shaving, dressing, and arriving downstairs in time to breakfast with my parents in the dining room.

It was not a festive repast. As usual, father kept his nose buried in
The Wall Street Journal
, checking the current status of his Treasury bonds, and I was in no mood for brilliant chatter, aching for at least another hour of slumber. Poor mother had to provide what conversation there was, relating a droll tale of a woman in her garden club whose springer spaniel apparently had an insatiable appetite for her impatiens.

After breakfast we all separated. Father drove his Lexus to the office, mother retired to the greenhouse to wake her begonias, and I set out in the Miata on my morning program, planning to visit the Trojan Stables. Horse people, whether engaged in the activities of farm or racetrack, are notoriously early risers, sometimes (ugh!) before dawn. So I expected Mrs. Constance Forsythe would be present when I arrived.

And so she was, supervising a morning exercise of all the horses entrusted to her keeping. The riders were mostly her stable boys, plus a few owners, plus Timothy Cussack atop a handsome chestnut mare. I was glad to see him so occupied; I had no desire to have an immediate encounter with that scalawag.

Mrs. Constance was all beams. “Hiya, Archy,” she said genially. “You awake so early?”

“Barely,” I said.

She was looking a bit puffy about the gills that morning, as if on the previous night she had enjoyed a pajama party with a regiment of dragoons. I had noted her ruddy and ravaged face on our first meeting, and wondered if she might be a heavy drinker. Now I was convinced of it. The outdoor life was not the cause; hers was an 80-proof complexion.