Death trick

16

"Another thousand?" Blount said, "Well-i suppose you know your business, Mr. Strachey. Of course, I will be needing an itemized statement of expenses at some future point in time. For tax purposes, you understand."

We were seated in our customary places in the Blount salon, the missus sucking daintily on her long white weed, Blount pere eyeing me gravely across his early-American checkbook. I'd thought about asking for twenty-five thousand but concluded that that would be pushing it. He forked over the grand, and I snatched it up.

"May I ask," he said, "where you'll be flying to tomorrow, Mr. Strachey?"

I said, "Caracas."

His eyebrows went up. Hers did not. She said, "We're being taken for a ride."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Stuart, he's playing us for a fool, and you're not stopping him."

I said, "I have the address where your son is staying. I received it from a contact in Los Angeles an hour and twenty minutes ago. I'll be with Billy tomorrow night."

"Billy's not in Argentina!" she snapped. "What do you take us for?"

I said, "Venezuela. Caracas is in Venezuela."

Blount said, "Mr. Strachey, really-how on earth could Billy have-"

"Who is Eddie?" I said.

She gave Blount an I-told-you-so look. He sighed, not so much at my question, I guessed, as at her look.

"Mr. Strachey," Jane Blount said, "have you ever heard it said that gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail?"

"I've heard it said, yes. Henry Stimson is usually credited with the line, or is it Liz Smith?

Anyway, who is Eddie? Billy will tell me when I see him, I expect, so why don't you save me a small expenditure of energy and yourself the financial expense of my remaining an additional ten minutes in-Caracas. Okay?"

"Why must you know about Eddie, Mr. Strachey?" Blount said. "It is, I'm sorry to say, a private family matter."

"Because Eddie is a part of the puzzle. I'll know which part when I know who or what he is. The safety of three or more people could depend on my knowing."

Jane Blount shot smoke in the air. Her husband shifted in his chair and made an impatient face.

"Eddie is a separate matter, Mr. Strachey. Truly, he is. You must believe that. He's got nothing to do with this situation Billy's gotten himself into. You have my personal assurance on that. Can you accept that? Can you?" He looked at me imploringly.

I said, "I might have if it weren't for the fact that Eddie's name has cropped up elsewhere in my travels."

They looked at me. Jane Blount said, "Where?"

"Does the name Frank Zimka mean anything to you?"

He said, "No."

She said, "Lord, no! Zim-ka? It sounds Polish!"

I said, "He's a friend of Billy's. An acquaintance."

"And he knows Eddie?" she said, looking queasy.

I said, "I'm one of the few people left in Albany who knows nothing about Eddie- next to nothing. Now, who the bloody hell is Eddie?"

I startled them.

She said, "He's-he's Billy's favorite uncle."

What shit. I said, "Tell me more."

"Stuart's brother Eddie-Billy and he were so close when Billy was young, it was quite touching, really. And then Eddie went away. He's in shipping, you see." Mistah Kurtz. "Uncle Eddie lived in the Levantine for many years, but recently he returned to this country, and Stuart and I thought he might exert his good influence with Billy so that Billy could finally be straightened out. So to speak. Don't you think there's good sense in that, Mr. Strachey? Some sound counsel from a wise and sophisticated and much-loved uncle?"

Straightened out. I thought about dropping the Sewickley Oaks business on them, but that would have been showing off, and in any case I had my own plans for that particular side of the equation.

"Well, why didn't you just tell me that in the first place? Is Uncle Eddie a leper? a syphilitic? a Pole? What's the big secret?"

Blount was sitting with his head back and his eyes squeezed shut. I'd have felt sorry for him if I hadn't known what a dangerous man he was.

Jane Blount said, "Uncle Eddie is-a socialist."

"In shipping?"

"Yes."

"Well, he's no idealogue."

"No," she said. "At least he's not that."

They were hopeless. I'd find out what I had to from my own sources, including their son, for whom there was evidence of sanity, even good sense. That sometimes happened in families.

I said, "When I see Billy tomorrow, I'm sure he'll be happy to hear about Uncle Eddie's being back. The news should make my job that much easier."

She took on a confused look. Her husband appeared as if, while his wife and I chatted, he'd slipped on his death mask. I waited.

In her embarrassment Jane Blount turned surly. "Just bring Billy back here to Albany, Mr.

Strachey. That's what Stuart's paid you a good deal of money to do. Bring Billy to this house our home and his-and you'll be paid a cash bonus. You haven't asked for that, I know, but I feel confident that you will accept it." She looked at me as if I were the Lindbergh kidnapper.

I got up to leave, and Stuart Blount sprang to life. The missus excused herself, swooped into the foyer, deposited her ashtray in the maid's waiting mitt, and ascended the stairs. Blount walked me to the front door and out onto the stoop. He closed the door behind us.

He breathed deeply and said, "Eddie is an old school friend of Billy's. From the Elwell School.

They were quite close." I guessed what that meant. "The boys have been out of touch for a number of years, and now Eddie is back in the area and Jane and I thought Billy might be more eager to come back to us if he knew we would reunite him with Eddie. Call it blackmail if you like, Mr. Strachey, but remember that we're doing it for our only son, whom we love very much.

Is it all right now? Have I reassured you?

"You have," I said. "I'd like to meet Eddie. Could you arrange it? He might be able to clear some things up for me in connection with the killing."

He put his arm on my shoulder and spoke in a fatherly way. "Mr. Strachey, I appreciate the special interest you've taken in this matter, I sincerely do. But, truth to tell, don't you feel that that end of the situation would best be left to our police department? There are detectives who are paid good salaries to carry out the work that you seem to have taken on- at my expense!" He shook with mirth and waited for me to join him.

"I've been in touch with one of those highly paid detectives," I said, "and although the man does, I suppose, have his virtues-dedication, cleanliness, perhaps thrift-he definitely is on the wrong track on this case. My sorting through this Eddie business just might point us all in the right direction, the police included. And I can't put it to you too strongly, Mr. Blount, that a speedy resolution to all this lethal craziness could just possibly save people's lives. That has to be a part of what we're about here."

He gazed off into the park. I followed his eyes and saw a jogger stop and talk to a young man standing beside his bicycle.

Blount looked back at me and said, "No. I'm sorry, but I'll have to give you a firm no on that. It's Eddie's parents, you see. They've become friends of Jane's and mine, and I've given them my word. They are looking after Eddie's best interests, and I can certainly appreciate that. The boy has just moved back to this area and is working hard to establish himself, and his parents are quite insistent that Eddie not be brought into this extremely anxiety-provoking situation of Billy's. It is a separate matter, as I've pointed out, Mr. Strachey, and, I have to insist, an entirely private one. I'm sorry. The answer to your request is no."

The jogger and the bicyclist walked off together.

I said, "Eddie just moved back to this area recently? How recently?" I was confused again.

Blount said, "I simply am not at liberty to discuss Eddie's situation. I'm so sorry."

"All right, then," I said. "I'll do what I can with what I've got. I'll do it the hard way. I'll be in touch, Mr. Blount."

I left him standing there and walked up State Street.

I picked up the Rabbit on Central and drove down to the Dunn Bridge, across the river, and east on Route 20 toward Massachusetts.

The erratic weather had failed to bring out the colors of the foliage that year, and as I approached the Berkshires, the hills were drab even under the bright sky. When I reached Lenox after an hour's drive, a low cloud cover had slid in, and the place had a desolate November feeling to it, with Thanksgiving still more than a month away.

I got directions at a colonial-style Amoco station and found the Elwell School down the road from Tanglewood, which was shut down for the season, a chain across the gate with the big lions on posts. Like Tanglewood, the Elwell School was a disused turn-of-the-century estate, its monumental-frilly Beaux Arts main building looking like a miniature Grand Central Station. Most of the Berkshire prep schools had gone under in recent years-Cranwell, Foxhollow, the Lenox School-and Elwell had the look of a place clinging to life. A fancy sconce beside the main door rested on the gravel driveway, smashed, and had been replaced on the stone wall above it with a vertical fluorescent tube of the type found beside motel bathroom mirrors. An oval window had been filled in with plywood.

In the headmaster's office, I showed my ID to a pleasant woman in a cardigan sweater and said I was trying to trace the whereabouts of a dear old friend of my client. She led me down a high-ceilinged corridor and unlocked a door which led into a small, windowless room the size of a storage closet. This, she said, was the alumni office. I wouldn't be allowed access to the alumni files, but I was welcome to look through the yearbooks and newsletters. And if I found the man I was looking for, the woman said, the school would forward mail, provided it had a current address on file. She switched on the ceiling light and left me there.

I went through the 1971 yearbook, making a list of all the Edwins and Edwards. There were seven, as well as one Eduardo. Billy Blount was neither pictured nor mentioned as a graduating senior or as an underclassman.

Blount did show up in the 1970 volume, grinning sleepily and a bit warily at the camera-not, however, among the graduating class photos, but on a separate page at the back of the book for seniors who had not completed the school year. There were two other boys as well who had dropped out. One was a Clarence Henchman, of Westfield, New Jersey, who looked as if he were coming down with mononucleosis. The other nongraduating senior was Edwin Storrs, of Loudonville, New York. There was a hurt, frightened look in his' eyes, and his blandly handsome teenage male model's face was that of a relatively fresh and unsullied Frank Zimka.