Narabedla Ltd (5 page)

“He could have been Henry Davidson-Jones’s father.” 

“I don’t think so, Nolly. He was an awfully
ugly
little old man. But,” she said, resigning herself to my dogged skepticism, “you’re right, he could have been anybody at all. There’s only one way to find out.”

That had a sound I didn’t like. I took time to think that over, looking at her. Irene Madigan was worth looking at. About my age, almost my height, wearing white slacks and a silk blouse. I observed that she had C6te d’Azur eyes that were almost the same color as the sea. “Why did you come here, Irene? Why didn’t you just go to see Davidson-Jones in New York?”

“He won’t see me in New York. Last time I tried I was thrown right out of the World Trade Center,” she said grimly, and then lightened. “Listen, I owe you. Can I buy you a drink or something? Maybe lunch? I’d actually rather lunch, if it’s all the same to you, because I’ve been hanging around watching that yacht all day and I haven’t had anything to eat.”

So we found a place on top of that garish American hotel they’ve cut into the rock in front of the Grand Casino, and she told me the story of her life.

Her missing cousin, Tricia, was from the poor side of the family. Still, they’d grown up close. Then Tricia went off to start her own life, the big ambition of which was to be a Dallas Cowgirl and make it with every player on the Rams.

Then she discovered baton-twirling. That looked like the first, best step to her goal. “Only,” Irene said, “she got kind of mixed up with some guy. Then she got into the Hare Krishnas. Then we lost touch for a while.” Meanwhile Irene herself had married young, moved to California, divorced almost as young, and spent five years trying to make it in the movies. I could see that she might come very close. She had; but never a really decent part. And the rich side of the family, I judged, wasn’t all that rich, because she had supported herself with odd jobs in Hollywood. “Checker in a supermarket. Travel agent. I even drove a cab for a while,” she said. “I had my little trust fund, but I didn’t want to touch it until I had to. But now …”

She paused, with a forkful of shrimp halfway to her mouth, looking out at the sea. She finished uncertainly, “Now I feel as if I have to. Do you think I’m a nut?”

I reassured her. “You can’t be a nut, because Marlene doesn’t think you are.”

So then I had to tell her all about Marlene, and my business, and why I was an accountant rather than a lead baritone at the Met, although I didn’t tell her all of that. I couldn’t tell her all of that. She was too pretty and too nice, and maybe a little bit too sad, and I didn’t want to discuss mumps with her. So I jumped ahead to Woody Calderon.

And so we came to Henry Davidson-Jones.

She told me her story. Tricia had come out to Hollywood, too, hoping to convert baton-twirling into at least an occasional walk-on in a bikini. Never got off the ground. Went back to Beaumont to start over; but meanwhile the two cousins had picked up again, and when Irene decided she wasn’t going to get discovered in Hollywood, being then thirty-one while the maximum discovery age was about twenty-two, she went back to Beaumont herself.

Tricia was all excited. She’d had this wonderful offer. She called Irene one evening to tell her about Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones and his promises of half a million tax-free dollars spread over a period of four years, and Irene had wished her well and got down to the serious business of washing her hair.

“And about five o’clock that morning,” Irene told me, “the phone rang again. It was the Port Arthur police. They said Tricia had been in a car accident. She was dead.”

I felt a chill grazing the center of my spine. “And the car went into the water and they never recovered the body,” I guessed.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t that way. They had her body in the morgue, and I identified it.”

She looked like crying for a moment—I mean, not as though she were going to do it, but as though she’d done too much of it lately. “I was her closest living relative,” she said. “So I told them they could use her organs for anybody who needed them. I called up Henry Davidson-Jones’s office in New York to tell them about it. They didn’t send anybody to the funeral, but they did send the biggest damned wreath of flowers you ever saw—I think. There wasn’t any name on it, but the florist said it came from New York.”

She finished eating her shrimp. Then she said, “I wonder whose body it was I had cremated.”

T
he sun was shining bright off the Mediterranean, a tour bus was off-loading summery men and women with cameras, at the table next to us four young German boys were arguing over whether Mutti would be angry if they all had another sweet. It was not an ambience for this kind of discussion.

I nearly choked on the last of my omelette. “But you said—you said you saw her in the morgue!”

“I thought I did. I saw a young woman who looked as much like Tricia as Tricia would, with her head all mashed and her nose pushed up under her left eye, and all the exposed flesh I could see all bruises and gashes. I did make an official identification for the police. She was driving Tricia’s car and wearing Tricia’s clothes and carrying Tricia’s pocketbook. That was six months ago, Nolly. I really did think it was Tricia. Wouldn’t you?”

I was almost as exasperated as upset. “Come on, don’t ask rhetorical questions. You changed your mind, right? Why?”

She said, “I was putting away all her papers. And some papers I saved
about
her. I couldn’t even look at them for months. But I saved everything, and then I decided to bundle it all up and do something with it—maybe bum it; maybe send the whole batch off to some other relative, if I could think of one. And I found myself reading the actual police record of the accident. They gave it to me for the insurance. ” 

“Was there a lot of insurance?”

“There wasn’t any at all, but the police didn’t know that. They were just being nice. The truck broadsided her at a quarter after five. They had the time exactly, confirmed by witnesses. They didn’t call me right away—it took a long time to track me down; they had to check back through my California addresses and everything, because Tricia still had the old address in her pocketbook. But it was a quarter after five when it happened, all right. And when Tricia called me on the phone it was a little after six. I was watching the NBC network news.”

I didn’t say anything right away. I wanted to make sure I was understanding what she was telling me. To help out, I invoked Marlene’s cure-all and ordered coffee from the very English waitress. “American coffee,” I specified, pointing to where it said that in the menu.

It wasn’t really going to be American coffee, of course, because all French people think that Americans really would put chicory in their coffee if they only knew how, but I was grateful for the distraction so I could think. Irene Madigan left me alone to do it. When the coffee was served, and poured, and tasted, and we had both made a face, I said tentatively, “I suppose you’re absolutely sure about the time.”

“I thought you’d ask me about that,” she said. “I would, too, if I were you. But, yes, I’m sure. The reason I’m sure …” She hesitated, then shrugged. “The reason I’m sure is that I had just started my period. I was flowing heavily, and I’d waited for the commercial to go to the bathroom, and Tricia’s call caught me on the way to change my Tampax.”

“So there’s no doubt,” I summed up. “She called you around six.”

“Right.”

“That was three-quarters of an hour after she was supposed to have been in the crash.”

“Yes.”

“So,” I sighed, reluctantly, “it wasn’t Tricia who was in the crash. You cremated somebody else.”

“You’ve got it,” Irene Madigan said, and began to cry. Sitting at a restaurant table with a crying woman is not my favorite thing. I avoid it when I can—usually successfully; the last time I’d been in that position was when one of my old girlfriends asked me straight out why I didn’t try to make love to her anymore, and I straight out told her what the mumps had done to me. Which was a mistake. Actually, I should have been the one crying. But the reason doesn’t matter. People look at you. They make up their own scenarios to account for why she’s crying. “He beats her.” 

“She’s pregnant and he won’t marry her.” Or maybe, in this particular setting, “He lost all their money in the casino and he doesn’t even have the decency to kill himself.” It makes no difference if you’re innocent of all charges. It doesn’t even matter if, actually, you’ve been more of a louse than anyone looking on could possibly guess, and once or twice in the old days I was close enough to that. Whatever. They look at you. And you know damn well that if the crying woman should say exactly the right thing, one of the men in the restaurant would come over and punch your face out.

This time I was certifiably as innocent as anyone could get. I looked back at the furtive glances and the hostile stares—girls in bikinis, men in shorts, an elderly couple, she in a sort of lavender miniskirt, he with an ice-cream suit and the worst toupee I’ve ever seen, fingering his cane dangerously as he glared at me. I tried to project innocence to them all, and wished I could think of a way to stop Irene Madigan crying.

Fortunately, she stopped herself.

“Sorry,” she sniffled, reaching for a dry Kleenex. I patted her hand. She smiled damply back at me, and a lot of the voltage began to go out of the stares. “The thing is,” she said, wiping her nose, “I’m so damn
helpless.
Who would believe me?”

“I would. I do.”

“And who’s going to believe you, Nolly?” She returned the hand-pat to show she didn’t mean to hurt my feelings. “If you had anything convincing to say you would have been talking to the cops long ago, right?”

“Well, but the two of us together …”

She looked levelly at me, waiting for me to figure out the end of the sentence for myself. I did. I shrugged.

She said simply, “Forget that.” She rummaged in her handbag again. I thought it was for another Kleenex, but what came out was a couple of sheets of Xerox paper, stapled together and folded several times. She pulled one set of pages off and handed them to me. “Take a look at this, Nolly. I practically had to sleep with a guy from the
Wall Street Journal
to get it.”

I unfolded and glanced at the heading: “Estimated Balance Sheet for Narabedla Ltd. Unofficial.”

It was unofficial, all right. It was the
Journal
staff’s best guesses about some very well kept financial secrets. Vic had told me they didn’t have to file very many reports. They certainly didn’t volunteer any. Almost every line was marked “Estimated” or “Provisional” or “Projected from Earlier Data.”

But what it added up to was—remarkable.

I knew the huge empire called Narabedla Ltd. was huge. I hadn’t known about the shipbuilding firm in Taiwan, or the Japanese computer company. I had no idea Narabedla held such large interests in a hundred American firms. None of your standard blue chips.
Better
than the blue chips. The list included most of the biggest money-spinners in the high-tech industries. Gene-splitting. Computers. Industrial chemicals. Pharmaceuticals. Avionics. If a company was going somewhere fast in a growing market, Narabedla owned a piece of it. A
big
piece. This summary changed my idea of what “big” meant. By these figures, Ford, ITT, any of the companies of Big Oil—Narabedla was right up there with them, and could maybe have bought and sold some of them.

Irene asked, “Did you read the part about the lawyers?” I had. I hadn’t missed its significance. Not one but four of the hottest, winningest firms in the country were on retainer to Narabedla. Which meant to Henry Davidson-Jones. Which meant …

I sighed and put the paper in my pocket. “Legal-wise,” I said, “they could kill us.”

She set her chin. “All the same, the son of a bitch kidnapped my cousin.”

I said reasonably, “We don’t know that for sure. We certainly don’t have a clue about any motive.”

“Sex, Nolly!” She pointed to the yacht across the bay. “Sure, that sounds crazy. A man like Henry Davidson-Jones wouldn’t have to kidnap good-looking women and lock them up in a harem. God, his big problem ought to be fighting them off! But if he
did
do that, what better place could there be to do it in than a yacht like that? You could hide half an army. Forty or fifty screaming harem girls would be nothing.”

“Irene,” I said soothingly, “that wouldn’t account for cellists and baritones.”

“So maybe he’s gay, too. Or maybe he likes music when he makes love.” She scowled at-me. “I don’t know
why,
I just know
that,
and if you’ve got a better theory, tell me what it is.”

I didn’t have a better theory, of course. I only had a whole lot of doubt and confusion. I said, “It’s the craziest thing I ever heard of.”

And that was true. But I hadn’t then been to the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran.