The Rich Are Different (61 page)

‘Yes, Steve,’ said Cornelius, looking at me with dutiful grey eyes.

By the time our main course had arrived I was feeling more relaxed. ‘… so you can rely on me to tidy matters up satisfactorily,’ I concluded with relief.

‘Yes.’ He signalled the
maître d
’ who immediately swerved to our table. ‘Ketchup, please.’

Ernest shuddered and withdrew.

When the ketchup arrived Cornelius anointed his hamburger, closed the bun and sank his teeth into it.

‘Right,’ I said affably, carving up my steak. ‘Any other questions?’ ‘Uh, huh,’ said Cornelius. ‘Who’s the guilty partner?’

I put down my knife and fork and reached for the Scotch. My stomach felt as if it had been kicked at close range. ‘Guilty who?’ I said feebly.

‘Partner. Come on, Steve. Let’s quit waltzing around and get down to brass tacks. According to Sylvia, O’Reilly just happened coincidentally to walk into enough money to buy up a large slice of Argentina, but we don’t really believe that, Steve, do we? Expecting us to believe that would be like expecting us to believe in Santa Claus, and anyway if you go right back to the assassination it’s obvious O’Reilly had to use the Willow Alley exit – with help from a partner willing to lend his keys. The problem was not how to get Krasnov into the building, but how to convince Krasnov he had a chance of getting out.’

‘But—’ I opened and closed my mouth twice but nothing came out.

‘Face facts,’ said the kid agreeably, pouring more blood-coloured sauce on to his plate and dipping a chunk of bun in it. ‘Krasnov wasn’t one of these assassins who kill for glory and don’t mind dying in the attempt. He had ten thousand dollars waiting for him in his bank account. He would never have agreed to kill Paul unless they fixed him up with a plausible escape route, and since he couldn’t walk out of the front door, fly out of a window or disappear up the chimney in a puff of smoke, he had to use the back entrance. So they let him in that way to prove he could get out that way. They had to. He wouldn’t have gone near the building without the Willow Alley keys in his pocket. Of course they knew he’d be rubbed out but Krasnov had to believe he’d leave the building alive.’

‘Yeah. Sure.’ I cleared my throat. I wondered what kind of expression was on my face. ‘Well, all right, but O’Reilly could have had copies made of those keys.’

‘How? By picking
a partner’s pocket?’

‘Well, when he was Paul’s personal assistant—’

‘That was just when he didn’t need any duplicates. He had access to Paul’s keys. Anyway why would he have wanted a spare set back then? He knew damned well he wasn’t allowed to use that entrance unless he was with Paul.’

‘I still think—’

‘You can explain the Willow Alley keys away till you’re blue in the face, Steve, but you can’t explain why O’Reilly’s living like a millionaire.’

I tried to float my foreign government fairy-tale. Cornelius sank it in seconds.

‘Oh please, Steve, I really am too old to believe in Santa Claus!’

‘How about the stock market? You believe in that, don’t you?’

‘If O’Reilly had made a big killing on the market your operatives would have heard of it and traced him. I presume you did have operatives looking for him.’

I played my trump card. ‘None of us partners had a motive for killing Paul.’

‘You mean one of us did but we can’t prove yet what it was. I’d guess it was financial.’

‘But we were all rich!’

‘Are you sure?’

We stared at one another. Cornelius’ sharp little face had a white pinched look. Suddenly he shivered. ‘It was an obscene conspiracy,’ he said in a low voice, ‘and it’s still going on. How are you going to end it?’

I hesitated, but knew I had no choice but to take him into my confidence. He knew too much to be fobbed off. ‘I’m going to start by bribing O’Reilly to give us the name,’ I said slowly. ‘Paul always said O’Reilly was the most venal of his protégés.’

‘And then?’

‘Then Sylvia tells him she’ll follow him to Argentina as soon as she’s sold her house and wound up her New York life. O’Reilly goes back to Argentina to lay out the red carpet. I’m expecting our clients, the Argentinian government, to pay us their usual visit next month and when I negotiate with them I’ll make damned sure there’s an unwritten condition on our next loan.’

Cornelius nodded. As far as I could see he was neither shocked nor surprised, merely approving. ‘May I make a suggestion?’ he said politely. ‘When you find out from O’Reilly who this guilty partner is, you should record the entire conversation. Otherwise the partner can always deny it, O’Reilly will be back in Argentina and you won’t be able to prove a damned thing.’

I was sceptical. ‘How the hell am I going to do that? Suggest to O’Reilly that we rendezvous in a recording studio?’

‘We can use an ordinary room.’

‘We?’ I said, fearing the worst.

‘You, me and
Sam. Sam’ll fix it. He knows all about that kind of thing.’

‘Now don’t get me wrong,’ I said sweating. ‘I like Sam. He’s a good kid. But—’

‘Look, Steve,’ said Cornelius, ‘you want to crucify this partner, don’t you? Well, if you’re planning a crucifixion for God’s sake make sure you nail the guilty party good and hard to the cross.’

I looked at his tight tough little face. His eyes were arctic grey. Suddenly I laughed. ‘So you’ve got balls after all!’ I said amused, and as he blushed, betraying both his youth and Mildred’s upbringing, I laughed again. ‘All right, sonny,’ I said, crossing the Rubicon at last. ‘We’ll talk it over with Sam as soon as we get back to the office.’

I should have known as I watched the blood oozing out of my perfect steak that I was playing with matches around a box of dynamite.

[1]

‘Terence?’ I said, the phone fit to melt in my hand. ‘Steve Sullivan. Welcome back to town.’

He stood the shock well. ‘Steve? No kidding!’ he said warily after a taut pause. ‘How are you doing? This is a surprise!’

‘I’ve got bigger surprises in store. I’d like to meet you tonight at ten o’clock to discuss them. I’ll leave the Willow Alley door unlocked for you and we can have a nice long private reminiscence in Paul’s office about the summer of ’26.’

He thought about it. I could almost hear that cool competent brain ticking over like some complicated power meter. Finally he said: ‘I don’t like rehashing the past.’

‘Knowing your past,’ I said, ‘that doesn’t surprise me. Be there, Terence, or I spell it out to Sylvia in words of one syllable, exactly how you murdered her husband. Bruce Clayton left one hell of a suicide note.’ And cutting off the appalled silence at the other end of the wire, I hung up.

[2]

At eight o’clock when the other partners had left and only a few clerks were left catching up on the day’s paperwork, I opened the garden doors of the office which now belonged to Charley Blair and crossed the patio to unlock the Willow Alley entrance. The black Cadillac was already parked outside but there was no chauffeur. Cornelius himself was at the wheel. He and Sam Keller were smoking cigarettes in suspenseful silence.

‘All right, boys,’ I said. ‘Bring on the props.’

Cornelius had
told me that Sam, whose hobby was recording amateur jam sessions, had friends at the RCA studios, so I had expected the worst – enough equipment to fill a concert hall, a microphone as big as a melon and enough cable to run all the way down Wall Street to Trinity Church. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that the props consisted of a smart wooden cabinet, an item with dials and knobs mounted on a panel and two small square boxes with a couple of cute little microphones attached. Even the inevitable cable looked as if it might just fade away into the background.

I was impressed. ‘Where did you get this junk?’

‘Jake Reischman lent it to me,’ said Sam. ‘He brought it back last summer from Europe. Apparently there’s a guy in Germany called Stille who’s putting out this invention, the Vox Diktiermaschine, for use in offices. You dictate letters into them or record conferences and telephone conversations. Jake says that the Reischman bank in Hamburg has several of them and they’re real useful. The big advantage is that they go on recording much longer than any other system – even longer than the new system they’ve developed for making “talkies”.’

We toted the stuff inside and I watched fascinated as Sam set up the equipment. In fact I was so interested I almost forgot why we needed the machine.

‘How does it work?’

‘It’s a system of magnetic recording on steel wire,’ said Sam enthusiastically. ‘The sound is recorded on a steel wire passed between a pair of magnetic poles which have coils of wire wound round them to form an electro-magnet, and the electrical impulses which are set up—’

‘How easily does it go wrong?’ I said, getting nervous again.

‘Well, the wire can break and the motor speed can go haywire, but don’t worry, Steve, I’ve thought about this very carefully. Neil and I will be in the coat closet with the cabinet and this control panel – it’ll be a squeeze, but we can make it. Then I can operate not only the recorder but the mixer which balances the level of the speech from the microphones. There’s no problem about the cable because we can run it out of the closet under the folding doors and round the edge of the library under the carpet. The only real risk lies with the microphones. I’ve substituted these RCA condenser mikes for the original Vox mikes because of the superior frequency response, but—’

‘Let’s have it in good plain English, Sam. Where are you putting these microphones?’

‘One can go in the fireplace behind the grille of the firescreen,’ said Sam. ‘There’s no problem about that because the screen will conceal both the mike and the preamplifier – that’s the little box – and the cord can run under the rug as soon as it leaves the grate. But the other mike’ll just have to go on the desk.’

‘Wonderful!’ I said sarcastically. ‘And what do I tell O’Reilly when he marvels at my new paperweight?’

‘Well, this is the way I figure it, Steve. The little preamplifier can be
concealed in a drawer of the desk. We’ll have to drill a hole in the side of the desk next to the wall so that the cord can run out, but it won’t take me a minute to fix that. Now the mike itself can stand right by the lamp at the edge of the desk so that the cord will fall directly between the desk and wall to the carpet. The odds are that O’Reilly won’t notice the cord and if he does he’ll assume it’s the cord from the lamp. Then we can cover the mike with a loosely arranged handkerchief. I know it’ll look shady to us, but I’m gambling on the fact that a handkerchief is so ordinary that O’Reilly won’t look at it twice.’

‘And don’t forget, Steve,’ added Cornelius, with his trick of cutting through the details to the heart of the matter, ‘it’ll never have occurred to O’Reilly that we might try and record the conversation.’

‘I almost wish it hadn’t occurred to you. Are you sure it’s really necessary to have two mikes, Sam?’

‘I’m playing safe, Steve. One might do the trick, but I couldn’t guarantee it. With two we’ve got less chance of failure.’

I resigned myself to the inevitable. ‘All right, go ahead,’ I said, and turning to the bar concealed in the book-case I added: ‘Drink, kids?’

Cornelius said he never drank after dinner. Sam said he’d wait until he had everything arranged.

‘If you’re not drinking,’ I said to Cornelius as I added a sling of the poison that passed for vermouth to my glass of gin, ‘you can go and hide that Cadillac. It’s about as unnoticeable out there as an acre of jungle in the Sahara.’

Cornelius got rid of the Cadillac. Sam connected the microphones. I downed my martini. After that we had to see if we could make the machine work so Cornelius and I struggled to maintain a conversation while Sam crouched in the closet and twiddled the dials.

‘Keep going!’ called Sam as Cornelius and I ran out of small-talk for the fifth time.

‘“At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,”’ recited Cornelius and paused to say to me: ‘Tennyson. “The Revenge”. One of Paul’s favourite poems.’ He continued the recital. It was one hell of a long poem but at least it saved us the trouble of talking to one another. ‘“…: ‘Sink me the ship, Master Gunner – sink her, split her in twain! Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!’”’

‘Great!’ yelled Sam. ‘I’ve got it! All right, guys, you can relax.’

It was nine-thirty. I fixed myself another martini. ‘We won’t close the double doors into the other half of the room,’ I said, prowling around with my glass in my hand, ‘or O’Reilly’s going to get nervous wondering what’s behind them. I only hope to God he doesn’t demand to search the premises.’

‘It’s up to you to put him at his ease, isn’t it?’ said Cornelius nastily.

‘Can I have that drink now, please?’ said Sam. ‘Thanks. Gee, I’m nervous! Steve, I wouldn’t be in your shoes for all the oil in Texas! Supposing he tries to kill you?’

‘Thanks for reminding me, sonny,’ I said and produced a gun from my
briefcase. The little kids boggled at it as if it were a naked lady. Flicking off the safety catch I laid the gun down carefully in the middle of the desk. ‘That’s just to stop O’Reilly getting ideas,’ I explained, ‘but he’s not going to do anything stupid until he’s heard what I have to say.’

‘Is it yours?’ asked Sam in awe.

‘No. My brother Matt took it off a drunk in a speak a month ago when the drunk tried to pistol-whip him for winking at his wife.’

We sat in silence looking at the gun. Finally I told them to take up their positions.

‘Steve,’ said Cornelius in a small voice, ‘is there any gin left?’

I reopened the bar, poured him a double, showed it the vermouth bottle and handed him the glass.

He downed the drink in two minutes and disappeared after Sam into the coat closet in the other half of the room.

Putting away the glasses I hid all but one of the dirty ash-trays and fidgeted with the communicating doors.

‘I’m going to turn on a small light in here,’ I said moving into the drawing-room. ‘I think it’ll give O’Reilly extra reassurance that nothing’s hidden in this half of the room.’