The Rich Are Different (59 page)

The bottom dropped out of the world.

Unable to believe the sentence I read it again. O’Reilly was my age but Greg Da Costa was a contemporary of my brothers who were five years my junior. That meant Bruce had to be referring to O’Reilly, but I had had Bruce watched since Paul’s funeral and I knew for a fact not only that O’Reilly had disappeared but that he and Bruce had never met.

I knew now that where O’Reilly was concerned there were two possibilities. Either he had retreated to some remote corner of the world or else he was dead, and a guy like Terence O’Reilly doesn’t go kicking the bucket when he has a girl like Sylvia to look forward to at last. I was prepared to bet he was alive and scheming in a smartly feathered nest overseas.

I thought of O’Reilly putting his feet up in some alien Eden, apparently untroubled by the need to earn a living.

I thought of the ten thousand dollars in Krasnov’s bank account.

I thought of Paul’s fifty per cent share of the profits being split among his surviving partners.

I thought of the key to the Willow Alley door.

Elizabeth took one look at my face and rang for brandy.

I was in such a state I couldn’t even dig out my hip-flask. I just sat on the couch with the letter in my hands and eventually I remembered I hadn’t finished reading it. I went back to that terrible paragraph but kept getting stuck, just like a phonograph needle trapped in a groove. The butler was placing brandy before me by the time I managed to complete the sentence.

‘… whenever I met the elder of my two fellow-conspirators and saw that he was not only unrepentant but profiting richly from his crime, I knew my guilt would never let me rest. Forgive me, Mother, but …’ There was more, but I couldn’t cope with it. Putting down the letter I swallowed my brandy, wiped the sweat from my forehead and tried to think what I could say.

After a long silence Elizabeth took the letter and locked it away again in the bureau drawer. Her hands were steady now and her eyes were tearless.

‘I never believed the Russian acted alone,’ she said. ‘I always knew Bruce was guilty, but I knew too that he couldn’t have planned such a thing by himself. The murder was so …’ She paused for the right word and found more than one. ‘Calculated. Cold-blooded. Bruce wasn’t like that. I don’t know how long it was before I thought of Terence O’Reilly. During that summer, the summer of ’26 when Dinah Slade was in New York, Sylvia confided so many things to me – poor Sylvia, she was so desperate and I was the only one she could turn to. She told me how O’Reilly had approached her, and later when I remembered her story I knew it was O’Reilly who had planned the assassination … I wanted to talk to you then, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t talk to anyone, even Eliot. All I wanted was to protect Bruce.’

‘I understand.’

We were
silent again. She was sitting opposite me. The empty brandy glass stood on the table between us.

‘I thought there was just one other conspirator besides Bruce,’ she said. ‘I never dreamt there were two. I never imagined that there could be someone here in New York – someone Bruce saw regularly – someone unrepentant and profiting richly from his crime … Steve—’ She stopped.

We looked at one another. I knew she knew but I knew too that I didn’t have to worry. It was very quiet in the room.

‘Eliot’s firm does such a lot of business with Van Zale’s,’ she said. ‘You know how often we entertain the Van Zale partners.’

‘Yes. And Bruce and Grace were so often at your dinner-parties.’ I got up abruptly and went to the window. When I turned at last she was right behind me. ‘Elizabeth, has anyone else seen that letter?’

‘No. Not even Eliot. No one else is ever going to see it. When I feel strong enough I shall burn it.’ Her eyes shone with tears again. ‘Everyone knows I’ve paid a high price for my personal life,’ she said, ‘But I want you to be the only one who knows it’s bankrupted me.’

I took her hand in mine and held it.

After a moment she said unevenly: ‘You’ll … take care of it, won’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Privately?’

‘Of course.’

‘I don’t want anyone calling my son a murderer,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anyone knowing. They wouldn’t understand how he was used – how other people played on his emotions – other people – unrepentant – profiting richly—’

‘I’ll crucify them.’

I left. Outside the sun was shining brightly and the birds were chirping in Gramercy Park.

I walked uptown.

Two hours later in my apartment I tossed an empty bottle of bourbon into the trash-can, lit a cigarette and called my brothers.

[4]

My brothers came bounding up to my apartment and immediately headed for the liquor cabinet. They were twins who just missed being identical, but all three of us were alike enough for people to guess we were brothers.

‘You’re the top copy,’ Paul had said brutally when he had turned down my request that my brothers should work at Van Zale’s, ‘and your brothers are the two blurred carbons.’

It was a cruel description, but although I hated to admit it I knew later that Paul had been right not to accept Luke and Matt as protégés. Those boys would never have made investment bankers. Luke didn’t have the eye for financial detail, Matt didn’t have the brains and neither of them liked to work hard. However, I’d always felt deeply responsible for my brothers. Since my
stepfather had wanted his role to be friendly and not paternal I was really the only father those boys had ever known, and from the moment my father died I’d known they were my responsibility. I’d done my best, but it’s not easy to assume the role of father when you’re only nine years old, and as I’ve already said, I had problems of my own.

Luke was the smart one. He had a presentable wife who had put up with him for ten years, a respectable job as a partner in the flashy little brokerage firm of Tanner, Tate and Sullivan, two cute kids, a Packard and an Oldsmobile and a house he could at last afford in Westchester. It was over a year now since he had asked me to foot his mortgage bills for him. He wore clean-cut well-pressed clothes and conservative neck-ties and read the
New York Times
on the train each morning on the way to work.

Matt, who had been married three times and was now hamming it up with a fifty-year-old actress, was the one who needed looking after. Before I had made him the figurehead president of Van Zale Participations he had been officially peddling bonds but unofficially he had made money by following various pools and selling out before the operator pulled the plug. The art of boosting nondescript stock on the ticker so that fortunes were made for the group which formed a pool was an art which Matt had lyrically compared to a composer penning a symphony score. The stock would rise as the pool bought in, rise again as interest developed in it, drop slightly to reassure the public it was bona fide, continue to rise and fall evenly over a carefully calculated period of time and then rise for the last time. The pool bought and bought, the public lured on by the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, charged in and drove the price up through the roof, the pool sold out, scooping the maximum profit, and the public were left holding the bag as the stock was abandoned to slide down to its genuine value. As Matt himself said: ‘It sure beats poker any day,’ but the pool operators were a sharp crowd and I lived in fear he’d get mixed up in something he couldn’t handle. It was a great relief to me that I’d finally got him settled in a job where I could keep an eye on him.

‘Sit down, boys,’ I said after they had helped themselves to scotches, ‘and see if you can help me for a change. I want some information from Greg Da Costa.’

[5]

I had to be careful what I told them. Having swallowed the public version of the assassination they believed Krasnov had acted alone, and for Elizabeth’s sake I still wanted to keep Bruce’s name out of the story. Naturally I couldn’t mention either the suicide note or its hair-raising implications, yet in order to enlist my brothers’ help I had to let them know that there was a large amount of money knocking around as the result of a conspiracy which only Greg Da Costa could unravel. In the end I fell back on the theory, quashed by my friend in Washington, that Krasnov had been backed by a foreign government.

‘Find out
what the real story is, would you, boys?’ I said casually. ‘I want to know where Greg’s money comes from and what he knows about Paul’s murder.’

They went on looking at me trustfully. I sighed. Sometimes I couldn’t help wishing they were just a little quicker in the uptake.

‘Hell, fellows,’ I said, ‘think of those summers at Newport when you and the Da Costa brothers smoked cigars behind the glasshouse, swigged port on the sly and tried to figure out how to unlace a whalebone corset. If you go out to California on business Greg’s going to weep with nostalgia as soon as you walk through the doors of his hotel.’

‘What business?’ said Matt.

‘Oh, I see!’ said Luke, but he didn’t.

I ploughed on. ‘You’re the president of Van Zale Participations,’ I said to Matt, ‘and Luke, you’re the broker who handles the trust’s investments. Tell Greg you’ve heard he’s hit the jackpot and offer to double his money. Then take him out to dinner, feed him the best hooch in town and – since you’re talking about money – find out just where his wonderful fortune came from.’

They chewed that over. Matt was thrilled by the cloak-and-dagger aura of the mission. Luke was cool.

‘I don’t like Los Angeles,’ he said, ‘and Greg Da Costa’s the kind of guy I’d prefer not to be seen with nowadays.’

‘You’ve got to go, Luke,’ I said, and as our glances met I saw he knew why. I didn’t trust Matt to handle the job alone.

Luke looked glum. He was the smart twin, the respectable twin, but when I held up the hoop he knew he had no choice but to jump through it. ‘All right, Steve,’ he said grudgingly, falling into line, and two days later he and Matt left for L.A.

[6]

The call came when I had just returned to my office after a partners’ meeting.

‘Steve?’ said Luke. ‘It’s us. Jesus Christ, you won’t believe the beans that have been spilled.’

I felt so sick I could hardly speak. ‘No names on the phone, please. Where are you calling from?’

‘Chicago. No problems, Steve. Greg was stewed as week-old prunes and won’t remember a damn thing but I thought we ought to get out of L.A. and head east on the first available train.’

‘Swell. I’ll meet you at the station. What time do you hit town?’

He told me. I was there. I stuffed them into a cab, whipped them up to the apartment, slammed the door and reached for the Scotch.

‘All right, boys, let’s have it.’

‘Paul was knocked off by Bruce Clayton and Terence O’Reilly!’ they chorused.

I just stood there holding the bottle of Scotch. ‘And?’ I said blankly.

‘Christ, Steve,’ said Luke, ‘isn’t
that enough? Listen, this is the way it was—’

‘Greg came to New York in the summer of ’26 after Stew got killed,’ interrupted Matt, bursting to hog the limelight, ‘and Bruce Clayton – if you can believe it – asked him for a loan.’

‘That just proves there’s nothing so dumb as a high-flown intellectual,’ said Luke dryly, ‘but Greg was living well in Mexico at the time and apparently Bruce thought he was making a mint ranching. Bruce said he knew some crazy Russian who would knock off Paul for ten thousand bucks and was Greg interested in putting up the money and paying back Jay’s suicide with interest.’

‘Of course as we all know,’ said Matt, ‘if Greg had to choose between avenging his father and a steady income he’d choose the income, but he suddenly had this bright idea about how he could have his cake and eat it—’

‘He said he couldn’t spare the cash,’ said Luke, ‘but he cheered them on from the sidelines. Then after Paul was dead he turned around and blackmailed the hell out of both Bruce and Terence.’

‘Say, Steve,’ said Matt, ‘are you going to go on nursing that bottle or do we have any hope of getting a drink?’

I fixed the drinks. I was still feeling weak at the knees. ‘How did Greg know where to find O’Reilly?’

‘O’Reilly kept in touch. You can bet
he
didn’t trust Greg to keep his mouth shut. O’Reilly’s no dumb intellectual. Of course if he planned to disappear for good it wouldn’t matter how much Greg talked, but apparently he plans to come back to New York for a while. Greg thought there was some broad involved though he didn’t know who it was.’

‘But where the hell is O’Reilly, for God’s sake?’

‘Argentina,’ said Matt placidly. ‘He’s bought a huge ranch and he’s acting like he’s king of the pampas.’

‘You were right about the money, Steve,’ added Luke. ‘There’s one hell of a lot of it floating around. That’s some bill the Russians are footing for Paul’s murder! Quite apart from O’Reilly Greg’s living so high on the hog that he even has two chauffeurs. It was true that the broad he married did have money of her own but Greg soon showed her how to spend it. Wherever his money’s coming from now it doesn’t come from her.’

I said very carefully in my best casual voice: ‘Did Greg tell you in words of one syllable just where all this fairytale loot was coming from?’

‘Sure. Terence O’Reilly. He gets a cheque every month.’

‘O’Reilly must be in direct contact with the Russians,’ said Luke. ‘Cigarette, Steve?’

I smoked a cigarette to the butt while the boys marvelled at their discoveries. When the cigarette was finished I congratulated them on their detective work, confessed I didn’t know what I would have done without them and told them that if they breathed one word about the existence of a conspiracy I’d toss them out of Van Zale Participations and never speak to either of them again.

They swore
earnestly that there was no need for me to worry. ‘Because we know what it would do to the bank, Steve,’ said Luke, ‘if word got around that a high-grade employee like O’Reilly had been involved.’

It was nice to know at least one of the boys wasn’t always slow on the uptake. I patted him on the back and gave him another drink. Eventually they wanted to know what I was going to do next.