Corpus Delectable

Nineteen

In the left wing of the solid old mansion the noise of the party was a rising and falling muffled wash of sound.

From the door through which I’d eased off the portico, I moved slowly along the hallway. At the distant end of this same hall were the same rooms I’d visited previously, rooms where the old señora and Jean Putnam had slept and worked. Much nearer to me, light spilled into the hall from a partially opened door.

The murmur of voices led me toward the lighted room. As I came closer, my view of the room’s interior widened.

I heard Keith Sigmon say: “That’s better. Cool off and listen to reason.”

And Elena’s voice: “Well, I did find you in here alone with Natalie Clavery.”

Sigmon: “She’s twice your age.”

Elena: “You weren’t acting like it.”

My last step had carried me fully into the doorway. The room was a sort of combination den-library. The dark wood-paneled walls were lined with books. There was a fireplace of antique brick. Huge, comfortable couches and chairs graced the room. Tall French windows opened on a side lawn. Left of the windows was a well-stocked, tooled-leather bar.

Keith and Elena were in close contact, standing near an antique table on which a lamp glowed softly. He had one arm about her slender waist, pulling her tightly against him. With the fingertips of his other hand he was tipping her chin up, smiling and looking at her coaxingly.

“You’re very impish when you pout,” he said.

She began to relent. “I ought to claw your eyes out. You know that, don’t you?”

“You’d miss me dreadfully,” he said. “Anyway, it would all be for nothing. The Natalie Clavery bit didn’t mean a thing, I tell you.”

“It had better never repeat itself,” she said.

“It won’t,” Sigmon promised.

He slid his hand to the back of her small head, laced his fingers through the light hair, and pulled the sharp prettiness of the little face forward. “This is the only thing worth repeating,” he said softly. Then he kissed her, and with a soft sound in her throat, she responded.

I felt the tightness pull over my face, as if the skin had shrunk. I thought of the sickening shock a girl of Jean Putnam’s caliber had experienced, chancing to look on a scene similar to this one. And after she’d crept away, face hot with the shame for them, Jean had begun asking herself questions. She’d started to look for answers, to inquire, to investigate. The questions had opened the area to bigger questions. And when the questions became demanding, Jean Putnam had sought a private detective to help her get the answers that would either clear these people or damn them.

Jean Putnam had been killed because she’d refused to let the questions lie unanswered. She’d unwittingly condemned Lura Thackery by writing in a diary the things she had seen and overheard, by putting the questions in Lura’s possession.

It was that simple. The questions had the power to destroy — unless they were first destroyed.

With her dying breath, Jean Putnam had been trying to point to the very heart of the matter, the thing seen by chance that had raised the first question in her mind. She had not been trying to say the word “incense.’ The word she formed in death was far uglier: “incest.”

But the word comprised the question, not the answer. I spoke the answer with a soft hissing of breath: “Ginny... Ginny Jameson!”

Her involuntary response to her own name cleared any remaining doubt from my mind. The girl who’d posed as Elena Sigmon stood half turned in Keith Sigmon’s arms, a sudden frightening knowledge killing the color of the pixie face.

As I moved toward them, Keith Sigmon released her, pushing her slightly to one side. The dissipated handsomeness of his face became old and hard, with a vicious old man’s desire to live at whatever cost.

“Keith Sigmon and a slut of a call girl from Venezuela,” I said. “Ginny Jameson, alias Elena Sigmon.”

“Ed Rivers alias Blackbeard,” Sigmon said thinly. “Check.”

“You... you don’t know what you’re talking about!” the girl said. “I think so.”

“A girl can kiss her daddy!”

“Not like that, honey. Neither does the sheltered granddaughter of a fine old Venezuelan family of aristocrats know how to dance the way you were dancing earlier. Your professional dancing experience was showing all over the place.”

“That’s no proof...”

“Venezuela is lousy with proof,” I said. “All we’ve got to do is air-express a photograph over there and let people who knew you and Elena Sigmon have one look.”

She lifted her arms and hugged herself. It didn’t stop the shiver from crossing her shoulder.

Sigmon seemed incapable of movement, except at the lips. “Just what do you think happened, Rivers?”

“I know what happened,” I said. “When she got the news that her grandmother had died in the States, your daughter, the real Elena, went up to the mountain cottage. To give you the news, Sigmon. She found the two of you there, and I imagine it was pretty sickening. It hit her hard, coming on top of news of her grandmother’s death. No girl has probably ever felt more alone. She’d lost her grandfather and her mother to a terrorist’s bomb. Her grandmother was lying dead in a distant land. And you, her father, were in the midst of an orgy with a slut.

“Demoralized by all that emotional dynamite, she started down the mountain road recklessly. She never reached the final mile of the road. Her reactions failed at a curve. The car went over, caught fire.

“I imagine you were following her down, Sigmon. If you didn’t see the actual crash, you saw the flames. In either event, you couldn’t save her. How about it? Am I substantially correct? When the heat of the wreckage drove you back, I suppose even a louse like you had a moment of grief. Was the next part your idea or Ginny’s?”

“It wasn’t mine,” Sigmon said in a suppressed voice.

Ginny’s vixen face sharpened. “It didn’t take much to talk you into it!”

“Of course not,” I said. “Grief and remorse wouldn’t bring Elena back. Her accidental death was an unalterable fact, a thing of the past. But it had a vital effect on the future. At stake was a twenty-million-dollar estate. When Elena died, the old señora’s vast assets would go in trust to charities and foundations.

“So why permit Elena to die? It seemed so simple at the time, didn’t it, Sigmon? All you had to do was toss a few items belonging to the real Ginny into the burning wreckage, go to the police and report the death of Ginny Jameson — not the death of Elena Sigmon, heiress to a fabulous estate. You knew the investigation would be routine and brief. The Venezuelan authorities were glad enough to get Ginny Jameson off their hands. Later you picked up Ginny, boarded the plane with her as your daughter. Being an American by birth, you had no passport problem. With your type of friends in Caracas, I’m sure you had no trouble in obtaining any necessary changes and bits of forgeries in whatever papers Elena would need.

“It seemed quite clever, Sigmon. With Ginny waiting under cover, probably at a hotel, you posed as the lone witness of the auto accident. Your word, uncontradicted, that it was Ginny Jameson who’d left the mountain cottage and crashed to her death.

“But a man can be too clever. I talked with Caracas. Not one time was Elena mentioned as being present during the investigation. You had to do it solo, giving them the impression you’d come down the mountain alone. You couldn’t produce an Elena Sigmon to corroborate your story because there wasn’t one still in the land of the living. This was an additional point, Sigmon, that steered me toward the truth.”

He made a noise like a snuffling dog as he tried to get some moisture in his mouth. “All right,” he said. “So you send a picture back to Caracas...”

“Keith!” Ginny said sharply.

He motioned her not to come nearer to him. “So I left my daughter in a desecrated grave,” he said, the oldness growing in him. “I took a seat in a game for one of the world’s fabulous fortunes.” He laughed softly, briefly, bitterly. “Twenty million dollars... it still isn’t worth dying for.”

“Two young girls, Jean Putnam and Lura Thackery, paid a damned heavy price, Sigmon.”

“But I didn’t kill them. Neither did Ginny. Whatever happens, I intend to live. In jail. In the gutter. Anything beats dying — and you can’t pin murder on me, Rivers.”

“I know,” I said. “I—”

The back of my head exploded. The carpet hit me in the face. The thick, plush nap ceased to exist for a few seconds, then returned to reality like stiff, stinging little barbs against my cheek.

Distantly, I heard Sigmon say, “You can’t... I won’t be a party to...”

“You’ve no choice now, darling,” Ginny said with renewed brightness. “Let Rivers feed the fish in the bay and no one else will ever connect it up.”

An expensive shoe pinned my knuckles against the carpet, and a third voice, male, said: “You were coming after me next, weren’t you, Rivers?”

“Yes, Eppling. From here to you. I knew it all, once I got the final details in place.”

“I thought so, when dear little Hildy started asking everyone who the big, black-bearded pirate stranger was,” Fred Eppling said. “She really let the cat out for you, Rivers, when she said you were looking for Sigmon and had come in here. I decided it was time I came in quietly myself.”

“Bless little Hildy,” I said, “who surely deserves a twice-busted rump.”