Corpus Delectable

Eight

“What’s going on?” Keith Sigmon said. He came across the room with plunging, angry strides. Emotion had pulled the dissipated edges of his face tight, restoring briefly his chiseled, classic good looks, in a cold, inhuman casting.

“This amateur psychiatrist,” Elena said, “is trying to analyze me.” She was pale. She looked at him with the laughter dying in her throat.

He gave her a quick but careful examination with his cutting gaze. Then he turned to me. “Rivers, do I have to put you under a peace bond to keep you away from here?”

“Nope.”

“Don’t you realize the police have upset us more than enough in the death of Jean Putnam?”

“Yep.”

“Then what in hell are you after?”

“The continued existence of one Ed Rivers,” I said, “for some years to come in a whole skin.”

“Well...” he said. He thrust his hand in the pockets of his silk dressing gown. “I have no objection to your continued existence.”

“Thanks.”

“So long as you don’t try to tear us to pieces in the process.”

“He’s trying,” Elena said. Her tone was irritating, egging Keith Sigmon. “He’s torn his way back to Ginny Jameson.”

Sigmon’s lips thinned until they just about disappeared. “Go ahead and dig on that score, Rivers. The girl’s death was an accident.”

“Death?” I said. “I didn’t know Ginny Jameson was dead.”

I couldn’t tell how my words reacted inside of Sigmon. This guy had lived by his wits and looks so many years it had become second nature. He shrugged. “Ginny and I had been partying a day or two in the cottage near Caracas. Elena came there with news of her grandmother Isabella’s death in Tampa. Ginny decided the party was over, that father and daughter needs be alone at such a moment.”

He motioned for Elena to get him a drink. “Ginny had been drinking. I tried to talk her out of driving back to Caracas alone. But... well, she and Elena had had words, rather bitter ones. And to be honest, I felt it time for Ginny to leave. Anyhow, she missed a turn on the mountain road. Elena and I spotted the wreckage when we left the cottage shortly afterward that night. I reported the accident to the authorities. The next day Elena and I came on to Tampa. That’s all there was to it.”

Nothing to him, I thought. Like a missing button on an old suit he’s ready to cast off.

But it seemed likely that Elena didn’t share his attitude and lack of feeling. I could imagine the scene in the mountain cottage when Elena had arrived that night. The news of her grandmother’s death must have had her already in an emotional turmoil. To top it, to blow the lid off, she’d found herself crashing her father’s liquor and sex party.

Later, recalling the things she’d said to her father and Ginny Jameson, perhaps Elena had felt responsible for sending the girl out to her accidental death.

Death on every hand for Elena Sigmon, little snake writhing on hot stone... Death by terrorist’s bomb, death by age and decay in faraway Tampa, death by auto for a half-drunken girl on a mountain road at night.

For Elena, a more pleasant death lay in the bottle. Or so it appeared to me, right now, in this instant. How it would appear an hour from now, a day from now, I didn’t know, because I didn’t know what an hour from now might bring.

Sigmon accepted the drink his daughter offered. “Now that you’ve drawn me out on the subject of Ginny Jameson,” he said, “I’m sure you’ll excuse me. It’s still Gasparilla time, you know. I have to dress for a cocktail party.”

“It wasn’t Ginny Jameson that brought me here,” I said.

“Then what?”

“The old lady’s brief case.”

“Come again?” he said.

“Your mother-in-law, Señora Isabella Sorolla y Batione, deceased, owned an old leather portfolio. Jean Putnam reported it missing after the old lady died.”

“So what?”

“Have you recovered it?”

“I don’t think it’s any of your business, Rivers.”

“I do,” I said. “It may be the right tag end.”

“You’re losing me on the curve again,” he said.

“And I think it would be pretty hard to lose you on any curve, any crooked twist. But I’ll explain, Mr. Sigmon, Mr. Lord High Big Cheese of this palatial estate. Jean Putnam remained here for a few days after the old lady died to clear up tag ends. Somewhere in those tag ends was the one that caused Jean Putnam to want the services of a private detective. A tag end that got her killed.”

“Ridiculous!”

“Want to tell me about that portfolio?”

“There’s nothing to tell! It was simply an old catchall for an old woman’s mementoes.” He killed most of his drink at a gulp. “Try another tree, Rivers. You’re barking up the wrong one here.”

He stormed to the front door and held it open for me.

I flicked the door knocker with my finger. “Keep it polished.”

“If you come back, you’d better have a good reason.”

“I will,” I said.

It was growing dark by the time I reached my apartment. I let the plumbing gargle, running the huge, old-fashioned tub almost to the brim. I stripped and soaked some of the mush out of my muscles in cool water.

I went out to dinner and got back about eight. I called police headquarters while I sipped a beer. Zero. Blank. The city-wide had failed as yet to net Ben McJunkin. I stood at the window while I finished the beer and thought of Ben McJunkin and the twists and turns his life had taken. It was hard to think of a scarred old panther like him as ever having been a chubby baby in a loving mother’s arms.

Returning to the phone, I tried one or two numbers. Nobody was home. Everybody was out having a Gasparilla gas.

I watched my secondhand TV set for a while, one of the rare occasions when it was turned on, and there was snow in the picture.

The day had been endless. The previous night, with the varied experiences running the gamut from murderous McJunkin to merrymaking Myrtle, had taken a lot out of me. But my fatigue was due to something more than the physical. The apartment felt empty, as if no one at all lived here. A yawning emptiness seemed to be at my feet.

I made sure the windows and doors were locked. I turned in early. I slept with the .38 near my right hand.

When I reached my office the next morning, the telephone-answering service reported a call from Fred Eppling, the attorney. He’d left a number for me to call back. I called, and he answered the phone himself. He said he wanted to see me and gave me an address in a staid bank building a few blocks away.

I walked over. Eppling’s suite of offices was on the second floor, quietly sumptuous, a layout of satin-sheened walnut paneling, leather furniture, draperies of raw silk, and diffused indirect lighting.

His neat, smallish, sandy presence was clad in a three-hundred-dollar suit as if it was his work clothes — which it was.

His slightly sallow face had a few lines of strain. He smiled vaguely. “Seems we have another thing in common, Rivers — both working on a Gasparilla play-day.”

“The costumed señoritas in Ybor City will just have to get along without us.”

He glanced at his wrist watch. “I’m due at police headquarters at eleven o’clock to go over some details relating to Señora Isabella’s estate.”

“Anything to do with Jean Putnam’s death?”

“Who can say? Frightening... If a girl like Jean is subject to murder, none of us is safe.”

“I get the same sentiment on every hand,” I said. “But the least likely victim is nevertheless stone-cold dead in the morgue.”

He nodded, almost casually. He was making no display. Neither does a man who feels a thing deep down, where it will stay with him a long time...

“Any men in her life?” I suggested.

“Jean’s? Wrong street, Rivers. Several young men, all of good character. But no deep entanglements. No wild-eyed rejected suitor who’d hire a professional killer.”

“You never know what goes on behind a man’s eyes.”

The corner of Eppling’s mouth quirked. He made a gesture encompassing the office. “It wasn’t always like this, Rivers. I worked my way through law school and started from scratch in criminal law. I took any cases I could get, working and driving for opportunity. I haven’t always been the sheltered corporation lawyer. I know what the human brain can harbor.”

“Then we come back to Señora Isabella,” I said. “An old woman dies of natural causes, nothing shady, nothing haywire. But a girl apparently as noble as Joan of Arc is subsequently marked for murder. Something Jean did for the old Señora?”

“Impossible! Jean’s duties were wholly innocent. She screened the continual charity seekers, oversaw household expenditures, made out checks for the old lady’s personal charge accounts, handled personal correspondence, kept the señora’s social appointment book straight. That sort of thing.”

His voice shaded off. He was in a funk for a second. “Those were pleasant days for Jean Putnam, Rivers. Gracious living, genteel environment. The old lady was really fond of her.”

“Maybe Jean Putnam filled a gap left by a dead daughter.”

“No,” Eppling said slowly. “It wasn’t that, at least not bascially. The señora was tough, the way a queen could be tough when monarchies were for real. She was hard to get close to. She talked little of the past. She had plenty of emotional control. She was kind and patient, but she didn’t go in for deep friendships. And she permitted herself to despise only two things in life — Venezuelan terrorists and her rotten son-in-law.”