Thorn

Chapter Three

"Because he's a bloody murderer, and I want the world to know him for what he is. That's why I did it. I waited till they brought the painting out so all the guards would be concentrating on it. I knew he wouldn't press charges against me, he doesn't want any more publicity."

Outrage and enjoyment made a heady mixture in Mary Rogers's voice, and she talked as if she were familiar with their blended taste. At the moment she was seated in an awkward armchair in Mr. Thorn's expensive Phoenix hotel suite, sipping from time to time at a can of beer. Her sturdy legs were crossed in their tight blue jeans.

It was evening again, almost exactly twenty-four hours after Mary's dye-throwing outrage. Over in Scottsdale, just a few miles away, the auction should be getting started just about now, doubtless under a heavily reinforced guard. Mr. Thorn was going to miss the bidding, which was all right with him. He had seen the painting, and he was virtually certain who was going to buy it. And even if by some chance the Magdalen should be bought by someone else, he could easily find out whom. It was not going to get away from him again.

So he felt that he could afford the time to indulge his curiosity regarding Mary and her motives. He had the habit of thinking, whenever anything bizarre happened nearby, that it was somehow meant for him. Quite often he was right.

Lounging near the window now, he glanced out through his new polarizing sunglasses at the last fading tinges of a gory sunset. Clouds were hung theatrically above a distant reach of desert, studded with a few Hollywood mountains. From the twentieth floor, a lot of distant scenery was visible beyond the smoky metropolitan sprawl.

"You can bet I didn't know what she was going to do." This was the voice of Robinson Miller, Mary's young man from the auction room, who had turned out to be her lawyer also. He and Mary, Thorn understood, had encountered each other on some pathway of the legal jungle into which she had been parachuted by her accidental connection with the infamous Seabright murder-kidnapping; and they had been getting better acquainted ever since.

"Completely irrational behavior," Miller added now, drilling Mary with a stern look that she did not seem to feel at all. From what Thorn had seen of her lifestyle so far, it was hard to estimate whether she needed friend or lawyer most.

Last night as Mary was giving the police her name, address, and phone number, Thorn had been nearby, although she had not seen him. Today Thorn had called her up—Miller answering the phone—and had invited her up to his suite for this evening chat, saying there were matters of mutual advantage to be discussed. Yes, certainly, she was welcome to bring a friend along to the hotel lair of the mysterious stranger; and so it was that her legal adviser and probable lover sat beside her now in another chair constructed like hers at disabling angles, sipping a glass of ginger ale and ice and puffing at a large-bowled pipe.

"What I really wanted," Mary announced now, "was to get hold of some blood."

Mr. Thorn, who had been paying only desultory attention, forgot about the scenery and took off his glasses long enough to give her an intense look. It took him a moment to realize what she had meant.

"At first I thought maybe I'd use beef blood. But then I realized that it wouldn't be appropriate to throw anything real on him. Except maybe some real acid." Mary gave a bright giggle. "So it was just that stuff they use in movies, harmless. A friend of mine who works in a studio got hold of some for me."

"The dry cleaner found it interesting," commented Mr. Thorn. "A type of stain with which he had never had to deal before. But it came out of my suit quite easily."

"Your—?" In a second Mary's mood changed to regret and horror. "Oh, I'm sorry! I hadn't realized that any of the glop hit you. Is that why you wanted me to come up here? No, of course not. Look, I really am sorry."

"Your apology is accepted. Think no more of the matter, I was not harmed. And it is fortunate that the painting sustained no damage either."

"Yes, fortunate," concurred the lawyer. Taking his pipe from his mouth, he made fencing motions in the air with the curved stem. "Ah, you mentioned some matters of mutual advantage?"

"I did." Thorn smiled at them both, then addressed himself mainly to Mary. "It is to my advantage to learn more about Mr. Ellison Seabright. It may be to your advantage to help me do so."

"Whom do you represent?" Miller asked quickly, before Mary could respond.

Thorn turned to him. "Only myself. Therefore any information you may give me will go no farther." After a pause he added: "You may be confident also that none of it is likely to be used to Mr. Seabright's advantage."

His visitors exchanged a cautious glance, and slight shrugs. Then Mary asked: "What sort of things do you want to know?"

Mr. Thorn moved a little closer to his guests, taking a seat on a sofa opposite their chairs, his lean hands clasped before him. "To begin with, whom do you accuse Mr. Seabright of having murdered?"

"Mary," Robinson Miller cautioned, shaking his beard at her.

Mary took another sip of Coors and ignored legal counsel. "He killed his half-brother, Delaunay Seabright. And Helen, his own stepdaughter. You must have heard and read about those killings, they made news all over the country. Oh, I don't mean he did it with his own hands. But you can bet he was involved."

Thorn allowed himself a pained frown, and objected gently: "Were not the police of the opinion that Helen was killed by men trying to abduct Delaunay for ransom? And that Delaunay himself died almost accidentally, though while he was in the unknown kidnappers' hands?"

Mary brushed back her wayward hair. "I bet they weren't unknown to Ellison. I was there that night, when Del and Helen were killed—was I ever there. And I know what I saw. And I know that Ellison's no good."

"Kid," warned Miller, hopelessly.

Thorn nodded to Mary. "When I learned your name, I of course could place you as the escaped hostage of the news stories. But your claim that Ellison was implicated comes as a surprise to me. Have you any evidence that will support it?"

"No, if you mean legal evidence," said Mary, dismissing the idea. "Do you know the family at all?"

"Only through the news accounts."

"Well." Mary looked at her lawyer at last, then back to Thorn. "Excuse me, but just what good is all this going to do you?"

Thorn was not at all sure of that himself, but he was interested. He said: "I find myself in the position of being Mr. Ellison Seabright's rival. Therefore I wish to learn everything of importance that I can learn about him. If, as you say, he is really involved in murder, that is certainly an important fact."

"You're his rival as an art collector?"

"Exactly. Now can you explain to me just what he stood to gain from his brother's death? Or from the girl's?"

"His half-brother," Mary corrected, as if she thought the difference had significance. "What did he gain? The chance to buy up Delaunay's collection, at least the part of it that he really wanted. That's what he's doing over in Scottsdale right this minute. Look, poor old Del hated Ellison. He wouldn't have given him the sweat off . . . so according to Del's will, Helen was to get it all. She was the closest family he had, that he cared anything about. Del's own wife died years ago, and they were childless."

"You say he left all to Helen. His half-brother's stepdaughter."

"Yes. I don't suppose she ever knew about the will. He was always nice to her but I don't think she appreciated him very much. In some ways, I have to admit, Helen could be a snotty little bitch." It was said much more in affection than in anger. Mary gulped beer audibly. "She was still a minor, only seventeen. So everything was to be held in trust. Right, Robby? And if Helen predeceased Del, or died at about the same time, which was the way things turned out, then everything in the collection was to be sold at auction, proceeds going to a charitable foundation Delaunay was setting up. Except—"

Here Mary broke off with a sigh, an unexpected, hopeless sound. Miller was shaking his head again.

"What?" Thorn prompted.

Mary said: "The Verrocchio, that's what. It's really mine."

Miller said quickly: "I think Mary is quite right, I mean I believe what she tells me. But of course legally, again—"

Mary interrupted him. "You see, Mr. Thorn, I lived there in the Seabright house for a couple of months before the night of the killings. And two weeks to the day before he died, Delaunay Seabright stood there with me in the midst of his collection, and told me that Verrocchio was mine. I didn't know what to say, how to react. Then he got sick, and that meant there was a delay in making the gift official, and evidently he never mentioned it to anyone else before he died. Or if he did, no one is going to admit it now."

Thorn made no attempt to hide his doubts. "You say he simply gave you the Verrocchio."

"I know it isn't the easiest thing in the world to believe, that anyone could be so generous. 'This is yours now, Mary, I want you to have it.' Those were his words."

"You told this to the police?"

She glanced at Robinson Miller once more. "Yes. Or I tried. For all good it did me. We've never tried to file any kind of legal claim, since I have nothing to support it."

Thorn could not tell whether she was fantasizing or not. He felt sure she was not simply lying. He asked, in curiosity: "What would you have done with the painting, Mary? If it had actually come to you?"

Her laugh was surprisingly gentle. "Why, hung it over Robby's Salvation Army sofa. No, I'd have sold it, of course. I would have hoped to be able to sell it to some museum, where everybody would be able to see it for a change . . . Del didn't care for museums, you know, he thought they were more arrogant and greedy than anybody else. The people who run them . . . did you get a chance to look at the painting closely? It's really so beautiful."

"I agree."

"I certainly wouldn't have sold it to that creep who's got it now. I'd have made sure he never got his hands on it, and I'm sure he knew I felt that way."

There was a little silence. "May I refresh your drinks?" Thorn offered.

"You see," Mary explained suddenly, "I got to know Del because I helped out his niece when she was a runaway. I met Helen in Chicago, when she was ready to give up being on the road. I was a kind of official social worker then."

"You were a nun," her lawyer interjected.

Mary gave him a glance. "I hadn't taken my final vows. Anyway, I was able to help Helen get her head together somewhat. Delaunay appreciated that, and at his request I wound up living with them here in Phoenix for a couple of months. Helen's parents came along too, at his urging. The old man was grateful to me for helping Helen, that's all there ever was between us."

"I see." Mr. Thorn considered Mary's lush figure, the full veins in her throat. He was unsure whether he ought to envy the young lawyer with whom she was apparently living now, and/or feel regret on behalf of the dead old man who had been only grateful. There wandered into his mind the image, thin and dark, of the other attractive woman who had been at the auction room. Stephanie Seabright, mother and sister-in-law respectively of the two victims. A woman desperately wanting to be young, to start over, perhaps, somehow . . .

Mary had paused for a full breath. "Excuse me, Mr. Thorn, but you're not an American, are you?"

"I am not. Though I have made my home in America for the past year. I like your—"

"You see, we have in this country a very serious and tragic problem, of teenagers, some kids even younger, who find their homes, if you can call some of them homes, just completely unendurable. So the kids take off, hitchhiking or what have you, and quite a number of them, more than you'd think, wind up as murder victims. Nobody's done a really good study yet to demonstrate how many." Mary smiled eagerly, giving the impression she enjoyed either the lack of that crucial study or the prospect of reading what it would someday reveal. "The others, the relatively lucky ones, are sexually abused, robbed, molested. They wind up in jail, on dope, in prostitution." Mary continued to smile. No doubt it was unconscious.

Mr. Thorn said: "I see the problem. It is not a new one." Several floors below his suite, a radio was softly playing a lament that concerned, if his old ears were to be trusted, the fate of a limestone cowboy. Very little surprised him any more.

"There are official means of attempting to deal with the problem, of course. Courts, agencies, juvenile homes. They all can do some good but it's not enough. I intended to sell that painting and use the money to show what can be done. I intended to set up a halfway house for runaways."

"Ah." Mr. Thorn appeared to be giving the suggestion his most thoughtful consideration. Then he nodded. "That sounds like a most worthy plan."

Mary, who had perhaps not expected such quick and unqualified agreement, blinked at him and slowed down. "I really can't think of anything that's needed more."

"Amen," said Robinson Miller.

Thorn asked: "This plan of yours, I hope, has not been abandoned?"

"No. Not at all. We've had to postpone things, of course, but—"

"Then you would be willing to accept a contribution?"

The sudden, innocent joy in Mary's eyes realized some of the potential beauty that her habitual fierce smiling tended to obscure. She looked at Miller. "We could at least start an account, Robby . . . I'm very grateful, Mr. Thorn."

Only grateful. "I was wondering," asked Mr. Thorn, meanwhile slowly drawing out a checkbook, "if you intended to return to the Seabright house for any reason? I assume you have moved out."

"I haven't been back since that night. Except once for a police re-enactment. But I do still have a few things there, if Ellison hasn't had them burned. They'll have to be picked up sooner or later, I suppose."

"Might I come with you when you do that?"

"Why?" asked Miller bluntly.

Thorn opened the checkbook on his bony knee and drew a pen from his breast pocket. "I have been trying to arrange a meeting with Mr. Seabright, in his late brother's house. I have phoned several times and have been told that he will see no one. He has not returned my calls. I hope to arrange, somehow, a simple invitation to cross the threshold of that dwelling. No more than that."

Miller opened his mouth, glanced at Mary, closed it again. His eyes came back to the open checkbook on Thorn's knee, the pen poised over the blank check. At last he repeated Mary's earlier question. "You're his rival in the sense of—collecting?"

"Yes. Precisely. I should like very much to get a look at his collection."

"He's not very likely to give any friend of mine the grand tour, you know," said Mary doubtfully. "In fact I don't think he'd let either of us in the house. More likely he'd just have my things thrown out the front gate, and us with them."

"I ask only that you do what you can to help me cross the threshold. After that I shall manage for myself. Agreed?"

"Agreed." She was still doubtful.

"As for your projected charitable home—" Thorn wrote, tore out a check with a crisp noise, handed it across. "Something on account, shall we say? I hope to be able to continue my support of the project once it has begun."

Mary's eyes widened, looking at the small piece of paper. "Thank you! Jeez, what can I say? Oh, Rob, this is a start, a real start."

Miller looked, made as if to whistle, then raised puzzled eyes to Thorn. "I'll say. Thanks. You must have a real affinity for lost causes."