The Road To Ruin

61

SATURDAY WAS A VERY busy day for Kelp, but not a happy one. The aftershocks of the Monroe Hall kidnapping just kept coining. Friday he’d been plagued by those two plainclothes cops, who knew they were suspicious of something but couldn’t figure out exactly what. But then Saturday came along, and the cops became the least of his problems.

The day started before eight o’clock, when he was rousted from sleep in his room in the little green house by Stan, who said, “The boss’s wife is on the phone. She wants you to talk to her and me to drive her somewhere.”

He found his way to a phone—there were none in the bedrooms—took a few seconds to remember his name in this context, and then said into the receiver, “Morning, Mrs. Hall, Fred Blanchard here.”

“Oh, Fred, they’ve found Mr. Hall.”

“Well, that’s great,” he said, thinking, good, the heist is back on track.

“I’m going to the hospital to see him,” she said.

“Hospital? What, is he wounded?”

“I don’t think so. I think it’s just observation. I’ll need you in the office to take care of things, and I’ll phone you later.”

It wasn’t until after he’d hung up and was brushing his teeth that it occurred to him she hadn’t mentioned the butler. Was Dortmunder in the hospital, too?

•

No. It was a little after nine when she phoned again, Kelp cooling his heels in the office most of that time, wondering if they were going to get their original plan back on track or not. Tonight, was the concept. Tonight the cars go to Speedshop. Then the phone rang, and it was Mrs. Hall, and she said, “Fred, two people from my law firm are on their way. I know you’ll give them all the help you can.”

“Mrs. Hall? Is Mr. Hall all right?”

“Well… It’s complicated. Would you also speak to Mrs. Parsons?”

Not willingly. “Sure,” Kelp said.

“Tell her, please, to pack my summer things, and her own.”

“Pack?”

“Tell her we’ll be going home,” she said. “She’ll know what I mean: Maryland.”

What the hell is going on here? Kelp thought. What he said was, “You’re going away for a while?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Call security, please, tell them to bring the Pierce-Arrow up to the house, put the luggage in it that Mrs. Parsons packs.”

“Will do.”

“The two people from the law firm,” she said, “are named Julie Cavanaugh and Robert Wills.”

“That’s a funny name for a lawyer, Wills.”

“Is it? Please tell the gate to let them in.”

“Sure,” he said. Having written the two lawyer names down, he looked at them and still thought Wills was a funny name for a lawyer. Cavanaugh wasn’t, though. “Mrs. Hall.” he said.

“Yes?”

“How’s, uh…” Could not remember the name. “How’s the butler?”

“Rumsey?”

“Rumsey. John Rumsey. Is he in the hospital, too?”

“No one knows where Rumsey is, Fred. Monroe was found wandering around in the woods, but he was alone, and he doesn’t know where the kidnappers held him, and Rumsey hasn’t appeared anywhere.”

This is worse than I thought, he told himself. There’s more to this story, and none of it is good. “I’ll take care of everything,” he promised, and did.

•

The lawyers were young bird dogs, skinny and focused. They looked like brother and sister, both tall and thin with very sharp features and thick black hair swept straight back as though they used a wind tunnel for haircare. They were announced from the gate, so Kelp went to the front door to watch the black BMW drive up the road and stop where the horse transporter had stopped, just yesterday. A lot had happened since.

“I’m Blanchard,” he told them when they marched together up to the door, the boy lawyer in black suit, white shirt, dark blue tie, the girl lawyer in knee-length black skirt, high-neck white blouse, open black jacket with discreet shoulder pads.

“Cavanaugh.”

“Wills.”

Nobody offered to shake hands. I am, after all, Kelp reminded himself, a servant. He said, “The office is this way.”

Entering the office, Cavanaugh said, “Oh, good, a partners desk. Robert? Do you have a preference?”

“I like daylight to my right.”

So they seated themselves facing each other at the partners desk, as though this had been their office for a hundred years, and Cavanaugh said to Kelp, “We’ll need the list of staff at the compound. And I understand some actually live here?”

“Including me,” Kelp said.

“I’ll need a separate list of indwellers,” she told him. “We have a lot of notifications to give out.”

“Notifications?”

Wills took over the story. “Mrs. Hall is closing the compound, in prospect of marketing the property and its contents.”

“Marketing? You mean, put all this up for sale?”

“Yes, of course.”

Kelp said, “But if Hall is back, so there’s no ransom to pay or anything like that, what’s going on?”

The lawyers looked at each other. Cavanaugh shrugged, looked at Kelp, and said, “This will be common knowledge soon enough. Mr. Hall has amnesia. His memory is gone.”

Kelp said, “Like the soap operas?”

Wills said, “It was the result of blunt trauma to the head, or multiples thereof. The doctors believe it’s irreversible.”

So that’s what Mrs. Hall had meant when she’d said her husband’s condition was “complicated.” And she’d described him as having been found wandering in the woods. But, in that case, what had happened to John?

Cavanaugh was going on: “Those resident here will be given until Monday to find housing elsewhere. All staff will be given two weeks’ salary, to be mailed to their home address or whatever address they leave with us.”

“Only security stays on,” Wills said.

“So,” Cavanaugh said, “we’ll need to interview staff, one at a time. Would you arrange that?”

“Except for security,” Kelp said.

“And Mrs. Parsons,” Cavanaugh said.

Kelp turned away, to go over to his own desk and start making the calls, but then he turned back to say, “I have to tell you, I still don’t get it. Why all of a sudden sell this place?”

Again the lawyers looked at each other, and this time Wills was the one who shrugged, then turned to say to Kelp, “This is speculation on our part, and we would prefer you not to pass it on.”

“We’ll tell you our speculation,” Cavanaugh explained, “because you are being impacted by what’s happening here.”

“Mr. Hall’s assets are controlled by the courts,” Wills said, “and yet, he lived here beyond what means he should have had. There is a theory he had additional assets in offshore accounts.”

Cavanaugh said, “No one knows that for sure.”

“But,” Wills said, “if those accounts exist, Monroe Hall would be the only one who could access them. Who would know the numbers, the passwords.”

“Oh,” Kelp said, “and he’s lost his memory.”

•

Kelp sat at his desk across the room from the lawyers and fielded phone calls and arranged for staff to come in for their farewell interviews, which several of them took badly, pointing out years of faithful service, sacrifices made, the decision to stay on with Hall even after the world had turned against him, but what was anybody to do? This party was over. Those few human beings in the world not yet shafted by Monroe Hall were now getting their turn.

Including, Kelp realized, the wife. It was Hall’s bone-deep selfishness that would have kept him from protecting Mrs. Hall, providing for her, writing down those secret account numbers and passwords and leaving them somewhere for her to find. But what would he care what happened, if he wasn’t around? In Kelp’s mind’s eye, a whole lot of hundred-dollar bills with wings attached flew across a blue sky and disappeared over a black mountain in the distance. No, thousand-dollar bills. Gone. Forever.

•

It was eleven-thirty, and the lawyers were just finishing the last of the staff interviews when the phone rang and Kelp answered, as usual, “Hall residence.”

“Robert Wills, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

“Frank Simmons of Automotive Heritage Museum.”

What? What can this mean? Nothing good. Bland as ever, Kelp turned in his chair and said to Wills across the room, “For you. Frank Simmons of Automotive Heritage Museum.”

“Yes, got it, thank you.”

It was very hard for Kelp to hang up, not listen to this conversation, but he managed. Wills spoke briefly, then hung up and said to Kelp, “Blanchard, call the gate, will you? There’ll be some flatbed trucks arriving, in about half an hour.”

Worse and worse. Reaching for the phone, Kelp said, “Sure. Uh, what are they for?”

“The antique cars,” Wills said. “You know about the antique cars stored on the property here?”

“I’ve heard of them,” Kelp acknowledged.

“Technically, since the bankruptcy proceedings,” Wills said, “they’ve belonged to the Automotive Heritage Museum. With the changed situation here, the museum wants to move them to their own property, for safekeeping.”

“Their own property.”

“Yes, in Florida. I understand it’s a beautiful place, glass-walled buildings, views of the Gulf, all completely climate-controlled.”

“They’ve been wanting to get their hands on these cars for years,” Cavanaugh said. “Hall always managed to fend them off, but that’s over now.”

“I guess it is,” Kelp agreed.

“It’s a better place for them, really,” Cavanaugh said. “They have thousands of visitors a year. Here, no one ever got to see the cars.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Kelp said, and turned away to call the gate, while the lawyers finished their final interview, with a raspy-voiced housemaid who now announced this firing was the best thing ever happened to her, she was going to her own climate-controlled glass-walled building in Florida and live on her sister for a while.

Who did this? Kelp silently demanded of the world, as he made the call to the gate. What clown had to go and kidnap Monroe Hall and louse up what was going to be a very beautiful piece of work? May he suffer, the louse.