Black Money

13

Eric Malkovsky’s studio in the Village was on the direct route to Martel’s house. I stopped to see how he was getting on with his search. He had dust on his hands and fingerprints on his forehead, like a human clue.

“I almost gave up on you,” he said.

“I almost gave up on myself. Did you find any pictures of her?”

“Five. I may have more.”

He took me in to the back of the shop and laid them out on a table like a poker hand. Four of them were pictures of Kitty, in a plain white bathing suit, taken at the Tennis Club pool. She stood and gazed romantically out to sea. She reclined erotically on a chaise longue. She posed dry on the diving board. Kitty had been a beautiful girl, but all four pictures were spoiled by her awkward staginess.

The fifth picture was different. Unposed and fully clothed in a sleeveless summer dress and a wide hat, she sat at a table with a drink at her elbow. A man’s hand with a square-cut diamond on it lay on the table beside her arm. The rest of him was cut off, but Kitty seemed to be smiling in his direction. Behind her I could see the patio wall of one of the Tennis Club cottages overgrown with bougainvillea.

“This is the one she liked.”

Malkovsky showed me the notation on the back:

“She bought six copies, or her husband did. He was in the picture, too, but he made me crop it.”

“Why?”

“I remember he said something about beauty and the beast. He wasn’t that bad looking but he was older, like I told you. And he’d taken some punishment in his time.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember. I suppose I could check it out in the club records.”

“Tonight?”

“If Mrs. Strome lets me. But it’s getting awful late.”

“Don’t forget you’re on double time.”

He scratched at his hairline, and colored slightly, “Could I see a little of the money please?”

I looked at my watch. I had hired him roughly two hours ago. “How about fourteen dollars?”

“Fine. Incidentally,” he said with further scratching of his head, “if you want any of these pictures it’s only fair that you should pay me for them. Five dollars apiece.”

I gave him a twenty-dollar bill. “I’ll take the one she liked. I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could find the rest of it, the part you cropped off?”

“I might be able to find the negative.”

“For that I’ll pay higher.”

“How much higher?”

“It depends on what’s on it. Twenty dollars anyway.”

I left him rooting enthusiastically among the dusty cartons on his shelves, and drove back into the foothills. This was the direction the wind was coming from. It rushed down the canyons like a hot torrent, and roared in the brush around the Bagshaw house. I had to brace myself against it when I got out of the car.

The Bentley was gone from the courtyard. I tried the front door of the house. It was locked.

There was no light in the house, and no response of any kind to my repeated knocking. I went back to the studio in the Village. With a twenty-dollar glint in each eye Malkovsky showed me the negative of the picture of Kitty.

Beside her sat a man in a striped suit, which was wrinkled by his heavy shoulders and heavy thighs. He was almost bald, but compensating curly hair, white in the negative, sprouting up through his open shirt collar. His black smile had a loose, bland empty cheerfulness, which his narrow white eyes annulled.

Behind him near the patio wall, and out of focus, was a mustached young man in a busboy’s jacket, holding a tray in his hands. He looked vaguely familiar: perhaps he was one of the servants I’d seen around the club.

“I should have a name for these people,” Eric said. “Actually; it’s just good luck that I found the negative.”

“We can check them out at the club, as you suggested. Do you remember anything more about the man? Were he and the woman married?”

“They certainly acted that way. She did, that is. He was in poor health, and she fussed over him quite a bit.”

“What was the matter with him?”

“I don’t know. He couldn’t move around much. He spent most of his time in his cottage or in the patio, playing cards.”

“Who did he play with?”

“Various people. Don’t get the idea that I saw much of the guy. The fact is, I avoided him.”

“Why?”

“He was a rough customer, sick or not. I didn’t like the way he talked to me, as if I was some kind of a flunky. I’m a professional man,” he asserted.

I knew how Eric felt. I was a semi-professional man myself. I gave him another twenty dollars, and we drove in separate cars to the club.

Ella opened up the records room behind the manager’s office, and Eric plunged in among the filing cabinets. He had a date to work from: Kitty’s pictures had been paid for on September 27, 1959.

I went back to the pavilion. The music was still going on, but the party had narrowed down to its hard core and shifted its main focus to the bar. It wasn’t late, as parties go, but in my absence most of the people had deteriorated, as if a sudden illness had fallen on them: manic-depressive psychosis, or a mild cerebral hemorrhage.

Only the bartender hadn’t changed at all. He made the drinks and served them and stood back from the party, watching it with his quicksilver eyes. I showed him the picture of Kitty, and the negative.

He held it up to the fluorescent light at the back of the bar. “Yeah, I remember the man and the girl. She came in here with him one night and tried to get tight on B and B – that’s all she knew about drinking – and she had a coughing fit. She had about four or five recruits patting her on the back at once and her husband started pushing them around. Me and Mr. Fablon got him calmed down, though.”

“How did Mr. Fablon get into the act?”

“He was with them.”

“They were friends of his?”

“I wouldn’t want to say that, exactly. He was just with them. They drifted in together. Maybe he liked the woman. She was a knockout, I’ll give her that.”

“Was Fablon a woman chaser?”

“You’re putting words into my mouth. He liked women. He didn’t chase ’em. Some of them chased him. But he’d have more sense than mess with that dame. Her husband was bad news.”

“Who is he, Marco?”

He shrugged. “I never saw him before or since, and I haven’t been sitting around waiting to hear from him. He was bad news, a blowtop, a muscle.”

“How did he get in?”

“He was staying here. Some of our members can’t say no when they get asked for a guest card. It would save me a lot of trouble if they could learn to say no.”

He looked around the room with a kind of contemptuous tolerance. “Make you a drink?”

“No thanks.”

Marco leaned toward me across the bar. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but Mrs. Fablon was in here a little while ago.”

“So?”

“She asked the same question you did, whether I thought her husband committed suicide. She knew him and I were friends, like. I told her no, I didn’t think so.”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t have a chance to say anything. Dr. Sylvester came into the bar and took her over. She wasn’t looking too good.”

“What do you mean?”

He moved his head in a quick negative gesture.

A woman came up and asked for a double scotch. She was behind me, and I didn’t recognize her changed voice until she spoke.

“My husband’s been drinking double scotches and I say what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and vice versa.”

“Okay, Mrs. Sylvester, if you say so.”

Marco laid down the photograph and the negative on the bartop and poured her a very meager double scotch. She reached past me with both hands and picked up both the drink and the picture of Kitty. “What’s this? I love to look at pictures.”

“That’s mine,” I said.

Her whisky-stunned eyes didn’t seem to recognize me. “But you don’t mind if I look at it?” she said argumentatively. “That’s Mrs. Ketchel, isn’t it?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Ketchel,” she said.

“A friend of yours?”

“Hardly.”

She drew herself erect. Her bouffant hair was slipping down her forehead like a wig. “Her husband was one of my husband’s patients at one time. A doctor can’t pick and choose his patients, you know.”

“I share the problem.”

“Of course,” she said. “You’re the detective, aren’t you? What are you doing with a picture of Mrs. Ketchel?”

She waved it in my face. For a moment all the people at the bar were looking in our direction. I took the picture out of her hands and put it and the negative back in my pocket.

“You can trust me with your dark secrets,” she said. “I am a doctor’s wife.”

I slid off my stool and drew her away from the bar to an empty table. “Where’s Dr. Sylvester?”

“He drove Henrietta Fablon home. She’s – she was not in a good way. But he’ll be back.”

“What’s the matter with Mrs. Fablon?”

“What isn’t?” she said lightly. “Marietta’s a friend of mine, one of the oldest friends I have in this town, but she’s certainly let herself go to pieces lately, physically and morally. I have no objection to people getting plastered – I’m slightly plastered myself, as a matter of fact, Mr. Arch–”

“Archer.”

She went right on: “But Marietta came here really looped tonight. She walked in, if walking is the word, literally rubber-legged. George had to gather up the pieces and take her home. She’s getting to be more and more of a burden to George.”

“In what respect?”

“Morally and financially. She hasn’t paid her bill, of course, within living memory, and that’s all right, I suppose. She’s a friend, live and let live. But when it comes to scrounging more money from him, that’s too much.”

“Has she been doing that?”

“Has she? Today she invited him for lunch – I happened to be at the hairdresser’s – and made a sudden pitch for five thousand dollars. We don’t have that kind of ready money in the bank, which is the only way I know about it – he tried to get my signature on the loan. But I said nix.”

She paused, and her alcohol-angered face grew suddenly quiet with anxiety. I think her mind was playing back what she had said. “I’ve been telling you my deep dark secrets, haven’t I?”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t all right if you tell George what I said. You won’t tell George what I said?”

She had unloaded her malice but she didn’t want to take the responsibility for it.

“All right,” I said.

“You’re nice.”

She reached for my hand on the tabletop and pressed it rather hard. She was more worried now than she was drunk, trying to think of something to make herself feel better. “Do you like dancing, Mr. Arch?”

“Archer.”

“I love to dance myself.”

Still holding on to my hand she rose and towed me out onto the dance floor. Round and round we went, with her hair slipping down into both our eyes and her breasts bouncing against me like the special organs of her enthusiasm.

“My first name is Audrey,” she confided. “What’s your first name, Mr. Arch?”

“Fallen.”

Her laughter blasted my right ear-drum. When the music stopped I took her back to the table, and went out to the front office. Ella was still at her post, looking rather wan.

“Are you tired?” I asked her.

She glanced at herself in the wall mirror facing her desk. “Not so very. It’s the music. It gets on my nerves when I’m not allowed to dance to it.”

She passed her hand over her forehead. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold this job.”

“How long have you been at it?”

“In the last hour or so.”

“You’re a good witness. How would you like to join my staff permanently?”

“It would depend on what I had to witness.”

We smiled at each other, warily. We had both had unsuccessful marriages.

I retreated into the records room. Malkovsky was bent over the pulled-out drawer of a cabinet, riffling through file cards.

“I’m making some progress. I hope. As far as I can see there were seven outside guests, individuals and couples, in September of 1959. I’ve ruled out four of them – people I remember personally, mostly repeaters. That leaves three: the Sandersons, and the de Houvenels, and the Berglunds. But none of the names rings a bell.”

“Try Ketchel.”

“Ketchel!”

He blinked and smiled. “I believe that’s the name. I couldn’t find it among the guest cards, though.”

“It could have been taken out.”

“Or lost,” he said. “These older files are in a pretty poor shape. But I’m morally certain Ketchel is the name. Where did you pick it up from?”

“From one of the members.”

I got out the negative. “Can you make me some copies of this?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“How long would it take you?”

“I guess I could have some by tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow morning at eight?”

After a moment’s hesitation, he said: “I can try.”

I gave him the negative, with a lecture about not losing it, and said goodnight to him at the front door. When he was out of hearing, Ella said dryly: “I hope you’re paying him decently. All he makes out of his photography is a bare living. And he has a wife and children.”

“I’m paying him decently. There’s no record in the files of the Ketchels being guests here.”

“Mrs. Sylvester could have given you the wrong name.”

“I doubt it. Eric recognized it. More likely someone took the record out of the files. Are they easily accessible?”

“I’m afraid they are. People are in and out of the office, and the records room is open a good deal of the time. Is it very important?”

“It may be. I want to know who sponsored the Ketchels as guests.”

“Mr. Stoll might remember. But he’s gone off for the night.”

She directed me to the manager’s cottage. It was closed and dark. The wind whimpered like a lost dog in the shrubbery.

I went back to the main entrance of the club. Dr. Sylvester still hadn’t returned. I looked in at the bar, saw Mrs. Sylvester slouched over a drink, and retreated before she saw me.

Ella told me more about her second marriage. Her husband Strome was an attorney in the city, an older man, a widower when she married him. She had been his secretary originally, but being his wife was much more demanding, in subtle ways. Her first husband had been too young; her second was too old. An older man was deeply set in his habits, including sexual habits.

I let the conversation go on. Such desultory continuing conversations were one of my best sources of information. Besides I liked the woman, and I was interested in her marriage.

The story of it blended with the long rough night we were having. She’d stayed with Strome for six years but in the end she couldn’t stick it out. She hadn’t even asked for alimony.

Some people left the party, and Ella said goodnight to them by name. Others were staying on. Our conversation, or Ella’s monologue, was punctuated by gusts of music, laughter, wind.

Dr. Sylvester’s arrival brought it to a full stop. He pushed through the door with angry force.

“Is my wife still here?” he asked Ella.

“I think so, doctor.”

“What kind of shape is she in?”

“She’s still upright,” I said.

He turned a stony eye on me. “Nobody asked you.”

He started off toward the bar, hesitated, and turned back to Ella: “Would you get her for me, Mrs. Strome? I don’t feel like facing that mob again tonight.”

“I’ll be glad to. How is Mrs. Fablon?”

“She’ll be all right. I got her calmed down. She’s upset about her daughter, and it was complicated by barbiturates.”

“She didn’t try to take too many?”

“Nothing like that. She took regular sleeping pills and then decided to come down here to see her friends. Add one drink and the result was predictable.”

He paused, and dropped his professional tone: “Go and get Audrey, will you?”

“Ella hurried away down the lighted corridor. I leaned on the reception desk and watched Dr. Sylvester in the mirror. He lit a cigarette and pretended to forget me, but my presence seemed to make him uncomfortable. He coughed smoke and said: “Look here, what gives you the right to stand there watching me? Are you the new doorman or something?”

“I’m bucking for the job. The wages are poor but think of the fringe benefits, like getting to know all the best people.”

“You’re bucking to get thrown out on your ear.”

His jaw had converted itself into a blunt instrument. His hands were shaking.

He was big enough to hit, and unpleasant enough, but everything else about the occasion was wrong. Besides, he was in transit from one troubled woman to another, and it gave him a certain license.

“Take it easy, doctor. We’re on the same side.”

“Are we?”

He looked at me over his cigarette, smoke crawling on his face. Then, as if its burning tip had touched off his outburst, he threw it down on the marble floor and scotched it under his heel. “I don’t even know what the game is,” he said in a friendlier tone.

“It’s a new kind of game.”

I didn’t have the negative of Kitty and Ketchel, so I described it to him. “The man in the picture, the one with the diamond ring, do you know who he’d be?”

It was an honesty test, but I didn’t know whose honesty was being tested, his or his wife’s.

He hedged: “It’s difficult to tell from a verbal description. Does he have a name?”

“It may be Ketchel. I heard he was your patient.”

“Ketchel.”

He stroked his jaw as if to massage it back into human shape. “I believe I did have a patient of that name once.”

“In 1959?”

“It might have been. It might well have been.”

“Did he stay here?”

“I believe he did.”

I showed him Kitty’s picture.

He nodded. “That’s Mrs. Ketchel. I couldn’t be mistaken about her. She came to my office once, before they left, to get instructions about a salt-free diet. I treated her husband for hypertension. His blood pressure was way up, but I managed to bring it down within the normal range.”

“Who is he?”

Sylvester’s face went through the motions of remembering. “A retired man from New York. He told me he got in at the start of the bull market, lucky stiff. He owned a cattle spread somewhere in the Southwest.”

“In California?”

“I don’t remember, at this late date.”

“Nevada?”

“I doubt it. I’m hardly famous enough to attract out-of-state patients.”

The remark seemed forced.

“Would Ketchel’s address be in the clinic records?”

“It might, at that. But why are you so interested in Mr. Ketchel?”

“I don’t know yet. I just am.”

I threw him a question from far left field. “Wasn’t it just about then that Roy Fablon committed suicide?”

The question took him by surprise. For a moment his face was trying on attitudes. It settled on a kind of false boredom just behind which his intelligence sat and watched me.

“Just about when?”

“The picture of the Ketchels was taken in September 1959. When did Fablon die?”

“I’m afraid I don’t remember exactly.”

“Wasn’t he your patient?”

“I have a number of patients and, frankly, my chronological memory isn’t so good. I suppose it was around about that time but if you’re suggesting any connection–”

“I’m asking, not suggesting.”

“Just what are you asking, again?”

“Did Ketchel have anything to do with Fablon’s suicide?”

“I have no reason to think so. Anyway, how would I know?”

“They were both friends of yours. In a sense you may have been the connection between them.”

“I was?”

But he didn’t argue the point. He didn’t want to go into it at all.

“I’ve heard it suggested that Fablon didn’t commit suicide. His widow raised the question again tonight. Did she raise it with you?”

“She did not,” he said, without looking at me. “You mean he was drowned by accident?”

“Or murdered.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear. This place is a hotbed of rumors. People don’t have enough to do, so they make up rumors about their friends and neighbors.”

“This wasn’t exactly a rumor, Dr. Sylvester. It was an opinion. A friend of Fablon’s told me he wasn’t the sort of man to commit suicide. What’s your opinion?”

“I have none.”

“That’s strange.”

“I don’t think so. Any man is capable of suicide, given sufficient pressure of circumstances.”

“What were the special circumstances of Fablon’s suicide?”

“He was at the end of his rope.”

“Financially, you mean?”

“And every other way.”

He didn’t have to explain what he meant. Towed by Ella, his wife hove into view. She had slipped another mental disc and was in a further stage of drunkenness. Her mouth was set in grooves of dull belligerence. Her eyes were fixed.

“I know where you’ve been. You’ve been in bed with her, haven’t you?”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

He fended her off with his hands. “There’s nothing between me and Marietta. There never has been, Aud–”

“Except five thousand dollars worth of something.”

“It was supposed to be a loan. I still don’t know why you wouldn’t co-operate.”

“Because we’d never get it back, any more than the other money you’ve thrown away. It’s my money just as much as yours remember. I worked for seven years so that you could get your degree. And what did I ever get out of it? The money comes in and the money goes out but I never see any of it.”

“You get your share.”

“Marietta gets more than her share.”

“That’s nonsense. Do you want her to go under?”

He looked from me to Ella. Throughout the interchange with his wife, he had been talking to all three of us. Now that his wife was thoroughly discredited, he said: “Don’t you think you better come home? You’ve made enough of a spectacle of yourself for one night.”

He reached for her arm. She backed away from him grimacing, trying to recover the feel of her anger. But she was entering a fourth, lugubrious stage.

Still backing away, she bumped into the mirror. She turned around and looked at herself in it. From where I stood I could see her reflected face, swollen with drink and malice, surmounted by a loosened sheaf of hair, with a little trickle of terror in the eyes.

“I’m getting old and heavy,” she said. “I can’t even afford to take a week in residence at the health farm. But you can afford to gamble our money away.”

“I haven’t gambled in seven years, and you know it.”

Roughly he put his arm around her, and walked her out. She was tangle-footed, like a heavyweight fighter at the end of a bad round.