Black Money

18

The tennis club didn’t open till ten o’clock, Eric told me. I found Reto Stoll, the manager, in his cottage next door to Mrs. Bagshaw’s. He was wearing a blue blazer with gilt buttons, which went strangely with the heavy somber furniture in his living room. There was nothing personal in the room except the faint stale odor of burnt incense.

Stoll greeted me with anxious courtesy. He made me sit down in the armchair where he had obviously been reading the morning paper. He fidgeted and wrung his hands.

“This is terrible about Mrs. Fablon.”

“It couldn’t be in the paper yet.”

“No. Mrs. Bagshaw told me. The old ladies in Montevista have a grapevine,” he added parenthetically. “This news comes as a terrible shock to all of us. Mrs. Fablon was one of our most delightful members. Who would want to kill such a charming woman?”

No doubt he was sincere, but he didn’t have the knack of sounding that way about women.

“You may be able to help me answer that question, Mr. Stoll.”

I showed him one of the enlargements. “Do you recognize these people?”

He carried the picture to the sliding glass door which opened onto his patio. His gray eyes narrowed. His mouth pursed in distaste.

“They stayed here as guests a number of years ago. Frankly, I didn’t want to admit them. They weren’t our type. But Dr. Sylvester made an issue of it.”

“Why?”

“The man was his patient, apparently a very important patient.”

“Did he tell you anything else about him?”

“He didn’t have to. I recognized the type. It belongs in Palm Springs or Las Vegas, not here.”

He screwed up his face painfully, and slapped his forehead. “I should be able to remember his name.”

“Ketchel.”

“That’s it. Ketchel. I put him and the woman in the cottage next to me”– he gestured towards Mrs. Bagshaw’s cottage –“where I could keep an eye on them.”

“What did you see?”

“They behaved better than I expected. There were no wild drinking parties, nothing like that.”

“I understand they played a lot of cards.”

“Oh?”

“And that Roy Fablon took part.”

Stoll looked past me. He could see the threat of scandal a long way off: “Where did you hear that?”

“From Mrs. Fablon.”

“Then I suppose it must be true. I don’t remember myself.”

“Come off it, Reto. You’re plugged into the Montevista grapevine, you must have heard that Fablon lost a lot of money to Ketchel. Mrs. Fablon blamed him for her husband’s death.”

The threat of scandal darkened on his face. “The Tennis Club is not responsible.”

“Were you here the night Fablon disappeared?”

“No. I was not. I can’t stay on duty twenty-fours hours a day.”

He looked at his watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. He was getting ready to terminate the interview.

“I want you to take another look at the picture. Do you recognize the young man in the white jacket?”

He held the picture up to the light. “Vaguely I remember him. I think he only lasted a few weeks.”

He sucked in his breath abruptly. “This looks like Martel. Is it?”

“I’m pretty sure it is. What was he doing working for you as a busboy?”

His hands made a helpless outward gesture encompassing the past and the present and a fairly dubious future. He sat down. “I have no idea. As I recall he was only part-time help, doing mostly cleanup work. At the height of the season I sometimes use the cleanup boys to serve the cottages.”

“Where do you recruit the boys?”

“At the State Employment office. They’re unskilled labor, we train them. Some we get from the placement bureau at the state college. I don’t remember where we recruited this one.”

He looked at the picture again, then fanned himself with it. “I could look it up in the records.”

“Please do. It could be the most important thing you do this year.”

He locked the door of his cottage and took me through the gate into the pool enclosure. Undisturbed by swimmers, the water lay like a slab of green glass in the sun. We walked around it to Stoll’s office. He left me sitting at his desk, and disappeared into the records room.

He emerged in about five minutes with a filing card. “I’m pretty sure this is the one we want, if I can trust my memory. But the name is not Martel.”

The name was Feliz Cervantes. He had been recruited through the State College and employed on a part-time basis, afternoons and evenings, at $1.25 an hour. His period of employment had been brief, extending from September 14 to September 30, 1959.

“Was he fired?”

“He quit,” Stoll said. “According to the record he left on September 30, without collecting his last two days’ pay.”

“That’s interesting. Roy Fablon disappeared on September 29. Feliz Cervantes quit September 30. Ketchel left October 1.”

“And you connect those three happenings?” he said.

“It’s hard not to.”

I used Stoll’s telephone to make an eleven o’clock appointment with the head of the placement bureau at the college, a man named Martin. I gave him the name Feliz Cervantes to check out.

While I was still at the club I paid a visit to Mrs. Bagshaw. Reluctantly she gave me the address of her friends in Georgetown, the Plimsolls, whom Martel had claimed to know.

I sent the address Airmail Special, along with Martel’s picture, to a man named Ralph Christman who ran a detective agency in Washington. I asked Christman to interview the Plimsolls personally, and to phone the results to my answering service in Hollywood. I should get them some time tomorrow, if everything clicked.