The Galton Case

Chapter 1

THE LAW OFFICES of Wellesley and Sable were over a savings bank on the main street of Santa Teresa. Their private elevator lifted you from a bare little lobby into an atmosphere of elegant simplicity. It created the impression that after years of struggle you were rising effortlessly to your natural level, one of the chosen.

Facing the elevator, a woman with carefully dyed red hair was toying with the keyboard of an electric typewriter. A bowl full of floating begonias sat on the desk in front of her. Audubon prints picked up the colors and tossed them discreetly around the oak walls. A Harvard chair stood casually in one corner.

I sat down on it, in the interests of self-improvement, and picked up a fresh copy of the Wall Street Journal. Apparently this was the right thing to do. The red-headed secretary stopped typing and condescended to notice me.

“Do you wish to see anyone?”

“I have an appointment with Mr. Sable.”

“Would you be Mr. Archer?”

“Yes.”

She relaxed her formal manner: I wasn’t one of the chosen after all. “I’m Mrs. Haines. Mr. Sable didn’t come into the office today, but he asked me to give you a message when you got here. Would you mind going out to his house?”

“I guess not.” I got up out of the Harvard chair. It was like being expelled.

“I realize it’s a nuisance,” she said sympathetically. “Do you know how to reach his place?”

“Is he still in his beach cottage?”

“No, he gave that up when he got married. They built a house in the country.”

“I didn’t know he was married.”

“Mr. Sable’s been married for nearly two years now. Very much so.”

The feline note in her voice made me wonder if she was married. Though she called herself Mrs. Haines, she had the air of a woman who had lost her husband to death or divorce and was looking for a successor. She leaned toward me in sudden intimacy:

“You’re the detective, aren’t you?”

I acknowledged that I was.

“Is Mr. Sable hiring you personally, on his own hook? I mean, the reason I asked, he didn’t say anything to me about it.”

The reason for that was obvious. “Me, either,” I said. “How do I get to his house?”

“It’s out in Arroyo Park. Maybe I better show you on the map.”

We had a brief session of map-reading. “You turn off the highway just before you get to the wye,” she said, “and then you turn right here at the Arroyo Country Day School. You curve around the lake for about a half a mile, and you’ll see the Sables’ mailbox.”

I found the mailbox twenty minutes later. It stood under an oak tree at the foot of a private road. The road climbed a wooded hill and ended at a house with many windows set under the overhang of a flat green gravel roof.

The front door opened before I got to it. A man with streaked gray hair growing low on his forehead came across the lawn to meet me. He wore the white jacket of domestic service, but even with this protective coloration he didn’t fit into the expensive suburb. He carried his heavy shoulders jauntily, as if he was taking his body for a well-deserved walk.

“Looking for somebody, mister?”

“Mr. Sable sent for me.”

“What for?”

“If he didn’t tell you,” I said, “the chances are that he doesn’t want you to know.”

The houseman came up closer to me and smiled. His smile was wide and raw, like a dog’s grin, and meaningless, except that it meant trouble. His face was seamed with the marks of the trouble-prone. He invited violence, as certain other people invite friendship.

Gordon Sable called from the doorway: “It’s all right, Peter. I’m expecting this chap.” He trotted down the flagstone path and gave me his hand. “Good to see you, Lew. It’s been several years, hasn’t it?”

“Four.”

Sable didn’t look any older. The contrast of his tanned face with his wavy white hair somehow supported an illusion of youth. He had on a Madras shirt cinched in by form-fitting English flannels which called attention to his tennis-player’s waistline.

“I hear you got married,” I said.

“Yes. I took the plunge.” His happy expression seemed a little forced. He turned to the houseman, who was standing there listening: “You’d better see if Mrs. Sable needs anything. And then come out to my study. Mr. Archer’s had a long drive, and he’ll be wanting a drink.”

“Yaas, massuh,” the houseman said broadly.

Sable pretended not to notice. He led me into the house, along a black-and-white terrazzo corridor, across an enclosed court crowded with tropical plants whose massed colors were broken up and reflected by an oval pool in the center. Our destination was a sun-filled room remote from the rest of the house and further insulated by the hundreds of books lining its walls.

Sable offered me a leather chair facing the desk and the windows. He adjusted the drapes to shut off some of the light.

“Peter should be along in a minute. I’m afraid I must apologize for his manners, or lack of them. It’s hard to get the right sort of help these days.”

“I have the same trouble. The squares want security, and the hipsters want a chance to push people around at fifty dollars a day. Neither of which I can give them. So I still do most of my own work.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” Sable sat on the edge of the desk and leaned toward me confidentially: “The matter that I’m thinking of entrusting to you is a rather delicate one. It’s essential, for reasons that will emerge, that there should be no publicity. Anything you find out, if you do find anything out, you report to me. Orally. I don’t want anything in writing. Is that understood?”

“You make it very clear. Is this your personal business, or for a client?”

“For a client, of course. Didn’t I say so on the telephone? She’s saddled me with a rather difficult assignment. Frankly, I see very little chance of satisfying her hopes.”

“What does she hope for?”

Sable lifted his eyes to the bleached beams of the ceiling. “The impossible, I’m afraid. When a man’s dropped out of sight for over twenty years, we have to assume that he’s dead and buried. Or, at the very least, that he doesn’t want to be found.”

“This is a missing-persons case, then?”

“A rather hopeless one, as I’ve tried to tell my client. On the other hand, I can’t refuse to make an attempt to carry out her wishes. She’s old, and ill, and used to having her own way.”

“And rich?”

Sable frowned at my levity. He specialized in estate work, and moved in circles where money was seen but not heard.

“The lady’s husband left her excellently provided for.” He added, to put me in my place: “You’ll be well paid for your work, no matter how it turns out.”

The houseman came in behind me. I knew he was there by the change in the lighting. He wore old yachting sneakers, and moved without sound.

“You took your time,” Sable said.

“Martinis take time to mix.”

“I didn’t order Martinis.”

“The Mrs. did.”

“You shouldn’t be serving her Martinis before lunch, or any other time.”

“Tell her that.”

“I intend to. At the moment I’m telling you.”

“Yaas, massuh.”

Sable reddened under his tan. “That dialect bit isn’t funny, you know.”

The houseman made no reply. His green eyes were bold and restless. He looked down at me, as if for applause.

“Quite a servant problem you have,” I said, by way of supporting Sable.

“Oh, Peter means well, don’t you, old boy?” As if to foreclose an answer, he looked at me with a grin pasted on over his embarrassment. “What will you drink, Lew? I’m going to have a tonic.”

“That will do for me.”

The houseman retreated.

“What about this disappearance?” I said.

“Perhaps disappearance isn’t exactly the right word. My client’s son walked out on his family deliberately. They made no attempt to follow him up or bring him back, at least not for many years.”

“Why not?”

“I gather they were just as dissatisfied with him as he was with them. They disapproved of the girl he’d married. ‘Disapproved’ is putting it mildly, and there were other bones of contention. You can see how serious the rift was from the fact that he sacrificed his right to inherit a large estate.”

“Does he have a name, or do we call him Mr. X?”

Sable looked pained. It hurt him physically to divulge information. “The family’s name is Galton. The son’s name is, or was, Anthony Galton. He dropped out of sight in 1936. He was twenty-two at the time, just out of Stanford.”

“That’s a long time ago.” From where I sat, it was like a previous century.

“I told you this thing was very nearly hopeless. However, Mrs. Galton wants her son looked for. She’s going to die any day herself, and she feels the need for some sort of reconciliation with the past.”

“Who says she’s going to die?”

“Her doctor. Dr. Howell says it could happen at any time.”

The houseman loped into the room with a clinking tray. He made a show of serviceability as he passed us our gin-and-tonics. I noticed the blue anchor tattoo on the back of his hand, and wondered if he was a sailor. Nobody would mistake him for a trained servant. A half-moon of old lipstick clung to the rim of the glass he handed me. When he went away again, I said:

“Young Galton got married before he left?”

“Indeed he did. His wife was the immediate cause of the trouble in the family. She was going to have a child.”

“And all three of them dropped out of sight?”

“As if the earth had opened and swallowed them,” Sable said dramatically.

“Were there any indications of foul play?”

“Not so far as I know. I wasn’t associated with the Galton family at the time. I’m going to ask Mrs. Galton herself to tell you about the circumstances of her son’s departure. I don’t know exactly how much of it she wants aired.”

“Is there more to it?”

“I believe so. Well, cheers,” he said cheerlessly. He gulped his drink standing. “Before I take you to see her, I’d like some assurance that you can give us your full time for as long as necessary.”

“I have no commitments. How much of an effort does she want?”

“The best you can give, naturally.”

“You might do better with one of the big organizations.”

“I think not. I know you, and I trust you to handle this affair with some degree of urbanity. I can’t have Mrs. Galton’s last days darkened by scandal. My overriding concern in this affair is the protection of the family name.”

Sable’s voice throbbed with emotion, but I doubted that it was related to any deep feeling he had for the Galton family. He kept looking past me or through me, anxiously, as if his real concerns lay somewhere else.

I got some hint of what they were when we were on our way out. A pretty blond woman about half his age emerged from behind a banana tree in the court. She was wearing jeans and an open-necked white shirt. She moved with a kind of clumsy stealth, like somebody stepping out of ambush.

“Hello, Gordon,” she said in a brittle voice. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“I live here, don’t I?”

“That was supposed to be the theory.”

Sable spoke carefully to her, as if he was editing his sentences in his head: “Alice, this is no time to go into all of it again. Why do you think I stayed home this morning?”

“A lot of good it did me. Where do you think you’re going now?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“You have no right to cross-examine me, you know.”

“Oh yes I have a right.”

She stood squarely in front of him in a deliberately ugly posture, one hip out, her breasts thrust forward under the white shirt, at the same time sharp and tender. She didn’t seem to be drunk, but there was a hot moist glitter in her eyes. Her eyes were large and violet, and should have been beautiful. With dark circles under them, and heavy eyeshadow on the upper lids, they were like two spreading bruises.

“Where are you taking my husband?” she said to me.

“Mr. Sable is doing the taking. It’s a business matter.”

“What sort of business, eh? Whose business?”

“Certainly not yours, dear.” Sable put his arm around her. “Come to your room now. Mr. Archer is a private detective working on a case for me – nothing to do with you.”

“I bet not.” She jerked away from him, and swung back to me. “What do you want from me? There’s nothing to find out. I sit in this morgue of a house, with nobody to talk to, nothing to do. I wish I was back in Chicago. People in Chicago like me.”

“People here like you, too.” Sable was watching her patiently, waiting for her bout of emotion to wear itself out.

“People here hate me. I can’t even order drinks in my own house.”

“Not in the morning, and this is why.”

“You don’t love me at all.” Her anger was dissolving into self-pity. A shift of internal pressure forced tears from her eyes. “You don’t care a thing about me.”

“I care very much. Which is why I hate to see you fling yourself around the landscape. Come on, dear, let’s go in.”

He touched her waist, and this time she didn’t resist. With one arm holding her, he escorted her around the pool to a door which opened on the court. When he closed the door behind them, she was leaning heavily on him. I found my own way out.