Murder with a Past

14

Ollie Hurst trailed Tully and the butler into the foyer of the Colonial mansion. Tully wondered why the lawyer seemed so uncomfortable.

The two men waited in silence.

Mercedes Cabbott appeared, a fresh-scented and girlish vision in skirt and blouse and delicately thonged sandals. Her white hair was exquisitely coifed, as always; her tiny features and lake-blue eyes were set hard.

She looked Oliver Hurst up and down. “How are you, Ollie?” The words sounded as if she had just taken them out of a deep-freeze.

“I’m still here, Mercedes.” To Tully’s surprise, the lawyer’s tone was just as icy.

“And David.” She turned, light-footed. “Shall we go out to the terrace?”

They followed her and the butler out. She indicated two of the white iron chairs. “Would you care for a drink?”

Ollie Hurst said, “No, thank you.”

Tully said, “I’ll pass, too, Mercedes. I’d like to get right to your reason for asking me here. I know it wasn’t social.”

“That’s all, Stellers.” Mercedes waited until the butler went back into the house. “Perhaps that’s best, David. Actually, George has something to say to you, too — he’ll be down as soon as he’s through changing.” Her lips formed a hard line. “What I wanted to talk to you about concerns Andrew. Do you know where he and Sandra Jean are?”

“No,” Tully said. What in hell could George Cabbott want to see him about? “But to the best of my knowledge they’re planning to elope.”

The only sign Mercedes showed was a slight pallor. “So my bluff didn’t work. Well, darling, what am I to do?”

“Do?” Tully said. “I haven’t any idea.” He did not add what he was thinking: And I couldn’t care less.

Very suddenly Andrew Gordon’s mother turned to Oliver Hurst. “Ollie? Would you have a suggestion?”

Hurst shifted cautiously in his chair. “Are you asking for my professional opinion, Mercedes?”

“You may bill me for it.” There was nothing, utterly nothing to be learned from her voice.

“All right,” said the lawyer. “Are they of legal age?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll be happy to give you my opinion gratis: There isn’t anything you can do about it.”

Tully had never heard Oliver Hurst speak in quite that tone. It was composed of notes of bitterness, triumph, regret and barely checked temper; they formed a harsh, uncharacteristic chord. And Mercedes Cabbott’s blue eyes glittered like lake ice in deep winter at the sound of it. Whatever lay between the two obviously went back a long, long way.

“I might have expected you to say that,” Mercedes said.

“You’re licked, Mercedes.”

“My dear,” the young-old woman said softly, “I’m never licked.”

The sun bounced off Hurst’s bald head as he shifted violently back to his original position. But he did not reply, preferring to examine the hills in the distance.

Mercedes Cabbott rose and drifted to the edge of her terrace. She stood there gripping the iron railing, her back to the two men.

“It’s strange how events influence one another,” she said. “One brick falls, and a dozen others tumble after it.” She turned to face them, and again her voice was as savagely cold as her eyes. “If Ruth hadn’t gone away, Sandra Jean wouldn’t have become such a problem. But with Ruth gone, the little slut seizes an opportunity she knows may never recur.”

There’s no point in my putting my two cents in, Tully thought.

They had forgotten he was there. It was strictly a dialogue.

“You asked me for a suggestion, Mercedes,” Oliver Hurst said. The savagery in her voice had, oddly enough, purged him. He sounded almost sympathetic. “I’ll oblige.”

“Well?”

“For once in your life, acknowledge a defeat. Make the best of this, Mercedes. Try to remember that you’re not all-wise and all-powerful, after all.”

“Have I ever made any such claims?”

Ollie uttered a faint, incredulous laugh. He shook his head. “Don’t you know even now what a tyrant you are? And what a helpless parasite you’ve made out of your son? Sandra Jean isn’t the worst fate that could befall Andy. I think it’s even possible she might make a man of him out of the little you’ve left unspoiled.”

She had gone white. Her small hands reached backwards and closed around the railing convulsively.

“You have no right to come into my home and say—!”

“I’m here at your invitation, remember? And I didn’t speak until I was spoken to.” The lawyer crossed his legs easily. His aplomb seemed to increase in direct ratio to her anger. “However, if you want politeness instead of honest talk, I apologize.”

Mercedes sniffed with hauteur and came back to her chair. She seemed actually mollified!

Tully was bewildered. What was it between these two? He had never even suspected anything but a most superficial acquaintanceship. But then he thought, What the hell, it has nothing to do with Ruth; and he shrugged.

The rangy shadow of George Cabbott fell across them. His sun-bleached hair curled damply, as if he had just showered. He wore Bermuda shorts and a sports shirt with the tail out.

Cabbott’s eyes, which tended to squint from years of exposure to the sun, widened slightly at the sight of Ollie Hurst. But he merely uttered a pleasant “Hi,” stooped over his wife to kiss her — the incongruous thought crossed David Tully’s mind of Ferdinand the Bull lowering his massive head to smell a wildflower — and went to the bar-cart near the terrace table. “I take it you gentlemen aren’t drinking. Darling?”

“Not just now, George.”

“Mind if I have one?”

“What a stupid question for a smart man,” Mercedes laughed. The sight of her husband had restored her good humor.

George Cabbott dropped an ice cube into a glass, poured some Scotch in, studying its level critically, then added a few splashes of water from a silver carafe. He joined the group, sitting down and crossing one big blond-felled leg over the other.

“Now, sweetheart, where are we?”

“It’s all yours, George.” Mercedes gestured helplessly, smiling. “Believe it or not, I haven’t the foggiest notion of what George wants to talk to you about, David. When this old bear of mine makes up his mind to do things a certain way, Cleopatra herself couldn’t budge him.”

“I was told,” Cabbott remarked, “to tell you directly, Dave.”

“Tell me what?”

Cabbott sipped his Scotch, lowered the glass, agitated it gently. He watched the ice cube slide around. Then he looked up and at Ollie Hurst and said, in a perfectly agreeable voice, “Can you trust this guy, Dave?”

“What?” Tully said, blinking.

“Think nothing of it, Dave,” Hurst said. “Nobody trusts a lawyer. Especially on these premises. And especially this lawyer.”

“Look, George,” Tully said, “I don’t know what this is all about, but Ollie Hurst is my friend and my attorney, and anything you may have to say to me you can say in his hearing.”

“I don’t know,” Mercedes’s husband said in the same pleasant way. “This might be a special case.”

Oliver Hurst gripped the arms of his chair, began to get up. “I think I’d better leave, Dave.”

“You sit down,” Tully said grimly. “No, Ollie, I mean it! Or I’ll leave with you.” Hurst sank back. “What’s this special-case bit, George? Stop talking like a character in TV.”

“If he heard this, Hurst might feel it his professional duty to report it to the police.”

“That’s a damn nasty thing to say, Cabbott,” Ollie Hurst said. He was liver-lipped. “Dave just told you, I’m his attorney. Attorneys don’t run to the police to blab about their clients’ affairs.”

“No offense,” Cabbott said with a small smile. “I was given pretty definite instructions.”

“Instructions about what, for God’s sake?” David Tully cried. “By whom?”

“Ruth.”

His head kept swirling like the ice in George Cabbott’s glass. The groping thought reached him at last that at some point in recent time he had crossed without noticing it the line between hope and despair. Hope that he might hear from Ruth, that she was even alive...

“Alive,” he repeated aloud, turning it over on his tongue as if it were a new taste sensation. His voice rose in a joyous shout. “She’s alive!”

“Wait a minute, Dave,” Ollie Hurst was saying. He had his remarkable eyes fixed on Cabbott.

“Wait for what? George, where is she?” Tully sprang to his feet. “Come on, George, talk, will you?” He grabbed the big man’s shoulders and began to shake him.

Cabbott sat quietly, letting himself be shaken.

“David,” Mercedes Cabbott said. “David.”

“What!”

“You’d better sit down and listen. I have a feeling this isn’t good news.”

Tully sank back in his chair.

“It happened several hours ago, Dave,” George Cabbott said. “I began calling all over town for you, and when Mercedes came back home I got her to do some calling, too.”

“And wouldn’t say a word about why.” She leaned over and squeezed her husband’s hand.

“I was at Police Headquarters,” Tully said. He wet his lips. “George, for God’s sake.”

“She telephoned me,” Cabbott said. “She wouldn’t say from where—”

“Did you ask her?” Ollie Hurst asked curtly.

“Of course. She simply refused to say.”

“Are you sure it was Ruth?” the lawyer persisted.

“Her voice.” Cabbott shrugged. “Unmistakably.”

“Could it have been faked?”

“If it was, it was a perfect imitation.”

Tully said hoarsely, “Hold it, Ollie. George, if she wanted to get in touch with me, why didn’t she do it directly? Why through you?”

“I asked her the same thing, naturally. She said the police might have your line tapped. Also, she didn’t want to chance your talking her out of going away.”

“Going... away?”

“That’s what Ruth said.”

“The idiot, the little idiot,” Mercedes Cabbott said. “Acting noble at a time like this!”

“You mean,” David Tully said bleakly, “she’s leaving me?”

“I can only tell you what she said, Dave,” Cabbott replied in a patient voice. “She said she was sorry for keeping you in the dark so long about her dropping out of sight. She said she was all right physically. She said you wouldn’t be hearing from her again until she was safe, perhaps not even then. ‘Safe’ was her own word, Dave.”

“Safe,” Tully said. “And she didn’t tell you where she was planning to go?”

“No.” George Cabbott suddenly drained his glass. “I may as well give you the whole thing, Dave. She said for you to pick up the pieces of your life, and... well, she started to cry and said something like, ‘Tell Dave he’ll always be my sugar-pill,’ and then she hung up.”

“Her what?”

“Sugar-pill. I take it that’s one of her wife-words of endearment? When Mercedes is being especially nice she calls me her hay-bailer.”

Ollie Hurst asked, “Was that a special word between you and Ruth, Dave?”

“Yes.” There was the oddest look on Tully’s face. “No imitator would have known about it.”

“Then it was Ruth.” The lawyer abruptly got up. “I think, Cabbott, I’ll take one of your drinks after all.”

“Help yourself.”

“Will you have one, Dave?”

“No. Ollie...” Tully got to his feet, too. “I’d like to go now. Make it a quick one, eh?” He crossed the terrace to the doorway, hesitated, turned around. “George.”

“Yes, Dave.”

“Ruth said nothing at all about Cox? The motel? Anything like that?”

George Cabbott squinted at his empty glass as if it pained him. “That was the last thing I asked her — whether she had shot Cox. That’s when she hung up on me. Without answering.”

“Thanks, George.” Tully walked into the house.

“I’ll see you out, David.” Mercedes Cabbott rose and hurried after him. Oliver Hurst gulped his drink and followed. Cabbott remained alone on the terrace, staring into his empty glass.

Mercedes and Hurst caught up with Tully on the front steps.

“David, David, I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Tully said. Her hand in both of his was trembling and cold. He felt very little himself.

“Sorry for a lot of things,” Mercedes Cabbott said; and with some surprise Tully noticed that she was glancing Oliver Hurst’s way when she said it. But then she said in the old assured way, “I won’t keep you. God bless, David,” and she went back into her palace.

The two men walked slowly to Tully’s car and got in. “She was talking to you, too, Ollie.”

“You noticed that?” And the lawyer was silent. He did not speak again until Tully turned out of the estate into the public road. “I knew her daughter. Kathleen Lavery.”

“Oh?”

“Kathleen was a beauty. I was a college kid, and I went head over heels for her. She... reciprocated enough to scare Mercedes. I was a nothing, a nobody, without a dime. Mercedes took Kathleen abroad and she was drowned in a boating accident.”

“I’m sorry, Ollie.”

Hurst shrugged. “It was a long time ago.” But Tully noted the gray pallor that had settled over his friend’s face.

So now Ollie Hurst had his law practice and his Norma, and Mercedes Cabbott had her Colonial palace to rattle around in and her enigmatic George and her dead — and dying — motherhood.

And I? Tully thought. What do I have?