Black Money

1

I’d been hearing about the Tennis Club for years, but I’d never been inside of it. Its courts and bungalows, its swimming pool and cabanas and pavilions, were disposed around a cove of the Pacific a few miles south of the Los Angeles County border. Just parking my Ford in the asphalt lot beside the tennis courts made me feel like less of a dropout from the affluent society.

The carefully groomed woman at the front desk of the main building told me that Peter Jamieson was probably in the snack bar. I walked around the end of the fifty-meter pool, which was enclosed on three sides by cabanas. On the fourth side the sea gleamed through a ten-foot wire fence like a blue fish alive in a net. A few dry bathers were lying around as if the yellow eye of the sun had hypnotized them.

When I saw my prospective client, in the sunny courtyard outside the snack bar, I recognized him instinctively. He looked like money about three generations removed from its source. Though he couldn’t have been out of his early twenties, his face was puffy and apologetic, the face of a middle-aged boy. Under his carefully tailored Ivy League suit he wore a layer of fat like easily penetrable armor. He had the kind of soft brown eyes, which are very often short-sighted.

When I approached his table he got up quickly, almost knocking over his double malter. “You must be Mr. Archer.”

I acknowledged that I was.

“I’m glad to see you.”

He let me feel his large amorphous hand. “Let me get you something. The Monday hot lunch is New England boiled dinner.”

“Thanks, I had lunch before I left Los Angeles. A cup of coffee, maybe.”

He went and got it for me. In the creeping fig that covered one wall of the court, a pair of house finches were discussing family matters. The male, which had a splash of red on its front, took off on an errand. My eye followed him across the framed blue sky, then out of the frame.

“It’s a beautiful day,” I said to Peter Jamieson. “Also this coffee is good.”

“Yes, they make good coffee.”

He sipped dolefully at his malted, then said abruptly: “Can you get her back for me?”

“I can’t make your girl come back if she doesn’t want to. I told you that on the phone.”

“I know. I put it wrong. Even assuming she doesn’t come back to me, we can still save her from ruining her life.”

He rested his arms on the table and leaned towards me, trying to imbue me with crusading fervor. “We can’t let her marry this man. And I’m not talking out of jealousy. Even if I can’t have her, I want to protect her.”

“From the other man.”

“I’m serious, Mr. Archer. This man is apparently wanted by the police. He claims to be a Frenchman, a French aristocrat no less, but nobody really knows who he is or where he comes from. He may not even be Caucasian.”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“He’s so dark. And Ginny is so fair. It nauseates me to see her with him.”

“But it doesn’t nauseate her.”

“No. Of course she doesn’t know what I know about him. He’s a wanted man, probably some kind of a criminal.”

“How did you find that out?”

“From a detective. He caught me– I mean, I was watching the house last night, waiting to see if Ginny came home with him.”

“Do you make a practice of watching Martel’s house?”

“Just this last weekend. I didn’t know if they were coming back from the weekend.”

“She went away for the weekend with him?”

He nodded dismally. “Before she left she gave me back my engagement ring. She said she had no further use for it. Or me.”

He fumbled in his watch pocket and produced the ring, as if it was evidence. In a way it was. The diamonds that encrusted the platinum band must have been worth several thousand dollars. Its return meant that Ginny was serious about Martel.

“What did the man say?”

Peter didn’t seem to hear me. He was absorbed in the ring. He turned it slowly so that the diamonds caught and refracted the light from the sky. He winced, as if their cold fire had burned his fingers.

“What did the detective say about Martel?”

“He didn’t actually say anything outright. He asked me what I was doing there sitting in my car, and I told him I was waiting for Martel. He wanted to know where Martel came from, how long he’d been in Montevista, where he got his money–”

“Martel has money?”

“He seems to have. He certainly flings it around. But as I told the man, I don’t know where it came from or where he came from. Then he tried to ask me some questions about Ginny – he must have seen her with Martel. I refused to discuss her, and he let me go.”

“Was he a local detective?”

“I don’t know. He showed me some kind of badge, but I couldn’t see it in the dark. He got in the car beside me all of a sudden and started talking. He was a very fast talker.”

“Describe him. Young or old?”

“In between, around thirty-five or so. He had on some kind of a tweed jacket, and a light gray hat pulled down over his eyes. He was about my size, I think – I’m five-foot-ten – but not so heavy. I really can’t describe his face, but I didn’t like the sound of him. I thought at first he was some kind of crook trying to hold me up.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“If he had, I didn’t see it. When he finished asking me questions, he told me to be on my way. That was when I decided to buy a detective of my own.”

There was a touch of arrogance in the phrase, reminding me that he was in the habit of buying things and people. But the boy was a little different from some other rich people I’d known. He heard himself, and apologized: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“It’s all right, as long as you realize that all you can do is rent me. What kind of a girl is Ginny?”

The question silenced him for a minute. The ring was still on the table, and his brown eyes focused on it until they crossed. I could hear the clatter of pans and conversation from the snack bar, interspersed with the sweeter notes of the finches.

“She’s a beautiful girl,” he said with a dreamy cross-eyed expression, “and really quite innocent. Undeveloped for her age, in spite of her brains. She can’t possibly realize what she’s getting into. I tried to show her the pitfalls, marrying a man with no real information about his background. But she wouldn’t listen. She said she intended to marry him no matter what I said.”

“Did she say why?”

“He reminds her of her father, that was one thing.”

“Is Martel an older man?”

“I don’t know how old he is. He must be thirty at least, maybe older than that.”

“Is money one of the attractions?”

“It can’t be. She could have married me, in fact we were due to be married next month. And I’m not poor.”

He added, with the caution of old money: “We’re not the Rockefellers, but we’re not poor.”

“Good. I charge a hundred dollars a day and expenses.”

“Isn’t that quite a lot?”

“I don’t think so. Actually it’s just enough to get by on. I don’t work all the time, and I have to maintain an office.”

“I see.”

“I’ll take three hundred dollars advance from you.”

I knew from experience that very rich people were the hardest to collect from after the event.

He shied at the amount, but he didn’t object. “I’ll write you a check,” he said, reaching into his inside breast pocket.

“First, tell me just what you expect in return for your money.”

“I want you to find out who Martel is and where he came from and where his money came from. And why he came here to Montevista in the first place. Once I know something about him, I’m sure I can make Ginny see reason.”

“And marry you?”

“And not marry him. That’s all I hope to accomplish. I don’t suppose she’ll ever marry me.”

But he carefully put the engagement ring away in the watch pocket of his trousers. Then he wrote me a check for three hundred dollars drawn on the Pacific Point National Bank.

I got out my little black book. “What’s Ginny’s full name?”

“Virginia Fablon. She lives with her mother, Marietta. Mrs. Roy Fablon. Their house is next door to ours on Laurel Drive.”

He gave me both addresses.

“Would Mrs. Fablon be willing to talk to me?”

“I don’t know why not. She’s Ginny’s mother, she’s interested in her welfare.”

“How does Mrs. Fablon feel about Martel?”

“I haven’t discussed him with her. I think she’s taken in, like everyone else.”

“What about Ginny’s father?”

“He isn’t around any more.”

“What does that mean, Peter?”

The question bothered him. He fidgeted and said without meeting my eyes: “Mr. Fablon died.”

“Recently?”

“Six or seven years ago. Ginny still hasn’t got over it. She was crazy about her father.”

“You knew her then?”

“All my life. I’ve been in love with her since I was eleven.”

“How long is that?”

“Thirteen years. I realize it’s an unlucky number,” he added, as if he was collecting signs of bad luck.

“How old is Ginny?”

“Twenty-four. We’re the same age. But she looks younger and I look older.”

I asked him some questions about the other man. Francis Martel had driven his own black Bentley into Montevista about two months ago, on a rainy day in March, and moved into the Bagshaw house, which he leased furnished from General Bagshaw’s widow. Old Mrs. Bagshaw had apparently got him into the Tennis Club. Martel seldom appeared there and when he did appear he hid himself in his second-floor cabana. The hell of it was that Ginny had taken to hiding there with him, too.

“She even dropped out of school,” Peter said, “so she could be with him all the time.”

“What school was she going to?”

“Montevista State. She was majoring in French. Virginia has always been crazy about French language and literature. But she dropped it, just like that.”

He tried to snap his fingers: they made a sad squeaking sound.

“Maybe she wanted more of the real thing.”

“You mean because he claims to be a Frenchman?”

“How do you know he isn’t?”

“I know a phony when I see one,” Peter said.

“But Ginny doesn’t?”

“He has her hypnotized. It isn’t a normal healthy relationship. It’s all mixed up with her father and the fact that he was part French. She flung herself into this whole French business the same year that he died, and now its coming to a head.”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“I know, I don’t express myself too well. But I’m worried sick about her. I’ve been eating so much I’ve given up weighing myself. I must weigh over two hundred.”

He palpated his stomach, cautiously.

“Roadwork would help.”

He looked at me in a puzzled way. “I beg your pardon?”

“Get out on the beach and run.”

“I couldn’t, I’m much too depressed.”

He sucked up the last of his malted, making a noise like a death-rattle. “You’ll get to work on this right away, won’t you, Mr. Archer?”