Black Money

3

Laurel Drive ran deep between hedges like an English lane. An immense green barricade of pittosporum hid Mrs. Fablon’s garden from the road. On the far side of the garden a woman who at a distance looked like Ginny’s sister was sitting with a man at an umbrella table, eating lunch.

The man had a long jaw, which hardened when I appeared in the driveway. He stood up wiping his mouth with a napkin. He was tall and erect, and his face was handsome in a bony pugnacious way.

“I’ll be shoving off,” I heard him say under his breath.

“Don’t hurry away, I’m not expecting anyone.”

“Neither was I,” he said shortly.

He flung his napkin down on top of his half-eaten salmon mayonnaise. Without speaking again, or looking at me, he walked to a Mercedes parked under an oak, got in, and drove out the other side of the semi-circular driveway. He acted like a man who was anxious for an excuse to get away.

Mrs. Fablon stayed at the table, looking quite composed. “Who on earth are you?”

“My name is Archer. I’m a private detective.”

“Does Dr. Sylvester know you?”

“If he does, I don’t know him. Why?”

“He rushed off in such a hurry when he saw you.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“You needn’t be. The luncheon was no great success. Don’t tell me Audrey Sylvester is having him followed.”

“Possibly. Not by me. Should she have?”

“Certainly not to my doorstep. George Sylvester has been my family doctor for ten years, and the relationship between us is about as highly seasoned as a tongue-depressor.”

She smiled at her own elaborate wit. “Do you follow people, Mr. Archer?”

I looked at her eyes to see if she was kidding. If she was, they didn’t show it. They were pale blue, with a kind of pastel imperviousness. I was interested in her eyes, because I hadn’t seen her daughter’s.

They were innocent eyes, not youthful but innocent, as if they perceived only pre-selected facts. Such eyes went with the carefully dyed blonde hair whipped like cream on her pretty skull, with the impossibly good figure under her too youthful dress, and with the guileless way she let me look at her. But under her serenity she was tense.

“I must be wanted for something,” she said with a half smile. “Am I wanted for something?”

I didn’t reply. I was trying to think of a tactful way to broach the subject of Ginny and Martel.

“I keep asking you questions,” she said, “and you don’t say anything. Is that the way detectives operate?”

“I have my own ways of working.”

“Mysterious ways your wonders to perform? I was beginning to suspect as much. Now tell me what wonders you’re bent on performing.”

“It has to do with your daughter Ginny.”

“I see.”

But her eyes didn’t change. “Sit down if you like.”

She indicated the metal chair across from her. “Is Virginia in some kind of trouble? She never has been.”

“That’s the question I’m trying to answer.”

“Who put you up to it?” she said rather sharply. “It wasn’t George Sylvester?”

“What makes you think it was?”

“The way he ran off just now.”

She was watching me carefully. “But it wasn’t George, was it? He’s quite infatuated with Virginia – all the men are – but he wouldn’t expose himself–” She paused.

“Expose himself?”

She frowned with her meager out-of-place eyebrows. “You’re drawing me out and making me say things I don’t want to.” She caught her breath. “I know, it must have been Peter. Was it?”

“I can’t go into that.”

“If it was Peter, he’s even more helpless than I supposed. It was Peter, wasn’t it? He’s been threatening to hire detectives for some time. Peter is mad with jealousy, but I had no idea he’d go this far.”

“This isn’t very far. He asked me to look into the background of the man she’s planning to marry. I suppose you know Francis Martel.”

“I’ve met him, naturally. He’s a fascinating person.”

“No doubt. But something happened in the last hour, which makes it seem worthwhile to investigate him. I saw it happen, in the road below his house. A man tried to take a picture of him. Martel scared him off with a gun. He threatened to kill him.”

She nodded calmly. “I don’t blame him at all.”

“Does he make a habit of threatening to murder people?”

“It wouldn’t be a murder, it would be self-protection.”

She sounded as if she was quoting somebody else. “There are reasons for what you saw, I’m sure. He doesn’t want his identity to be known.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“I’m pledged to secrecy.”

She touched her red lips with a finger tipped with the same red.

“Who is he,” I said, “the lost Dauphin of France?”

Without trying, I had succeeded in startling her. She stared at me with her mouth open. Then she remembered that it looked better closed, and closed it.

“I can’t tell you who he is,” she said after a while. “There could be very serious international repercussions if Francis were discovered here.”

Once again she seemed to be reciting. “I’m sure you mean well in what you’re doing – I’m not so sure about Peter – but I’m going to ask you to cease and desist, Mr. Archer.”

She wasn’t kidding me now. Her voice was grave.

“Are you trying to tell me Martel is a political figure?”

“He was. He will be again, when the conditions are ripe. Right now he’s an exile from his native country,” she said dramatically.

“France?”

“He’s a Frenchman, yes, he makes no secret of that.”

“But his name isn’t Francis Martel?”

“He has a right to use it, but it isn’t his actual name.”

“What is his name?”

“I don’t know. But it’s one of the great names of France.”

“Do you have evidence to support all this?”

“Evidence?” She smiled at me as if she had superior knowledge piped in directly from the infinite. “You don’t ask your friends for evidence.”

“I do.”

“Then you probably don’t have many friends. I can see you have a suspicious nature. You and Peter Jamieson make a good pair.”

“Have you known him long?”

I meant Martel, but she misunderstood my question, I think deliberately. “Peter has been underfoot in our house for twenty years.”

She gestured toward the rambling one-story house behind her. “I swear I’ve been wiping his nose for at least that long. When Peter’s mother died, I sort of took him over for a while. He was just a little boy. But little boys grow up, and when he did he fell in love with Ginny, which he had no right to do. She doesn’t care for Peter in that way, doesn’t and didn’t. He simply wore down her resistance because there was nobody else.”

She sounded fond of Peter in spite of herself. I said so.

“Of course, you get fond of anyone if you see him every day for twenty years. Also I detest him, especially at the moment. My daughter has a brilliant chance. She’s a beautiful girl”– she lifted her chin as if Ginny’s beauty belonged to both of them, like a family heirloom –“and she deserves her chance. I don’t want Peter, or you, fouling it up.”

“I don’t intend to foul anything up.”

She sighed. “Can’t I persuade you simply to drop it?”

“Not without some further checking.”

“Will you promise me one thing then? Will you try to handle yourself without spoiling matters for Ginny? The thing she has with Francis Martel is very bright and shining, and very new. Don’t tarnish it.”

“I won’t if it’s real.”

“It’s real, believe me. Francis Martel worships the ground she walks on. And Virginia’s quite mad about him.”

I thought I could hear a self-fulfilling wish in what she said, and I threw her a curve: “Is that why she went away for the weekend with him?”

Her blue eyes, impervious till now, winced away from mine. “You have no right to ask such questions. You’re not a gentleman, are you?”

“But Martel is?”

“I’ve had about enough of you and your innuendoes, Mr. Archer.”

She stood up. It was a dismissal.