What Happened to Lisa?

Chapter V

My eyes came to rest on a small, scarred chest at the end of the faded studio couch. It was locked, and a quick search yielded nothing better than the rod on the shower curtain to break the lock. I unscrewed the rod, inserted it through the hasp. Metal squealed as the padlock ripped loose.

The chest was about half the size of a foot locker and it was my guess that Bladen had picked it up in a second-hand store somewhere for the express purpose to which it had been put. On top was a scrapbook of clippings and press notices, some of them yellow with age. Next came framed black and white gloss pictures of Bladen at a piano, of Bladen fronting a band. During the golden age of jazz, he had been quite a boy. He’d never seriously worried men like Duchin, I supposed, but such men must have known he was in the business.

Beneath the pictures were several tear sheets from newspapers, neatly folded. The first was out of the society section, so old it threatened to tear under its own weight. A three column heading read:

I glanced across the other columns, wondering what had put Bladen on the society page. But he was mentioned nowhere.

Then my gaze went back to the three-column spread, and another name leaped out at me. I read the lead of the story:

I lifted my eyes and stared into space. The account of the wedding of Lisa’s mother and father. Why had Andy Bladen kept it all these years?

I studied the picture of the bride and groom coming from the church. Jones had been his short, robust self even then. The lovely and rich socialite he’d married was small and probably pretty. The picture had been none too good to begin with and was faded now.

I dug deeper into Bladen’s chest, his buried past. Some of the news clips were of Estelle Jones’s gadding about America and the continent. There was a gossip column which had been ripped out of a page, remarking on a certain young matron’s frantic pursuit of pleasure.

The papers grew in a heap beside the chest. Three years after the wedding there had been a birth announcement — a daughter born to Mr. and Mrs. Perry Admin Jones.

Below the papers was another picture, but not of Bladen. A woman this time, elfin-faced, her sandy hair cut short in what must have been one of the first boyish bobs. It was inscribed, “To Andy, your Estelle.”

And below the picture, a pitifully few letters tied into a packet. From Estelle Courtney to Andy Bladen. I read the top ones and the pieces began to fall into place. She’d met him when he’d been playing at a summer resort. A short, torrid romance. Then remorse. She must never see him again. There could never be anything between them.

But there had been something between them.

Just ten short months before Lisa’s birth they’d met again. She was a married woman now, married in a faith that would never permit her divorce and remarriage. Yet the new springing tide of emotion had been greater than ever, and after her return home, she’d written a plaintive letter:

I laid the letters aside. One last picture looked up at me. I picked it up. It showed a- young Estelle and a young Andy Bladen seated together at a table on a hotel terrace.

My heart picked up speed until I felt sick with its pounding. My hands were damp and shaking as I stared at the Bladen of years ago.

Lisa looked nothing like her mother. Even less like Jones. But I was stunned, numbed at her resemblance to the young Bladen who’d squired Estelle Courtney.

The suite was hot and still. I sat there with sweat running down my face trying to soak up the real truth about Lisa. Perhaps even trying with a heavy desperation to deny it. But deny it I couldn’t. It was all there before me. Their lives. Their years, gone now down the mists of time. A wild passion. A mistake. A child coming into the world. But not the child of Perry Admin Jones.

The daughter of Andy Bladen! Forever denied him, forever beyond his reach. Until her mother had returned ill and dying from her last European trip.

So Lisa’s coming to Rogersville might not have been accidental after all. I remembered the well-filled music rack on the piano in the Jones home. I recalled the soft way she’d sung to me a few times when we’d danced years ago. Without revealing his real status, Bladen would have found it easy to go to Clearview, contrive a meeting with her. He could have introduced himself as an old friend, or a classmate of Lisa’s mother. Some of that old feeling for Estelle might have led him to call on her during her last illness.

Carefully I placed Bladen’s lost years back into their Pandora’s box. The picture was pretty well complete in my mind now. I knew the why, and I knew the who. And I knew I was helpless. I couldn’t prove a thing.

Darkness had fallen when I stepped out of the taxi that had carried me from Clearview train station out to the Jones house. I hammered with the knocker. Jones himself opened the door. His face reflected annoyance.

“You again, Holloway. You have little sense of propriety, calling at a time of bereavement.”

“I know who killed the girl,” I said.

His lips thinned; his eyes narrowed. He weighed a decision, swung the door a little wider.

Without speaking, he led the way past the living room where I’d first seen him just a short day and half ago. He paused before a doorway just beyond the living room, and said, “So you have that kind of news, Holloway? I’m extremely anxious to hear it.”

He opened the door, fumbled for a light switch. Indirect lighting flooded a study sumptuous with leather furniture. A door across the room stood open, but Jones seemed careless of being overheard, or sure we wouldn’t be.

“All right, let’s have your statement. Who killed the girl?”

“You tried.”

He looked at me with frost in his eyes. “I’ve never heard anything more insane. She was my daughter. I was planning on her marrying Gardiner, planning on many things for her future.”

He turned toward the desk. He took two steps toward it before I caught his shoulder, spun him about, and hit him. His nose went flat and he fell back across the desk. I grabbed the front of his shirt, held him pinned, and flung words at him.

“I’ll draw you a picture, Jones. Some of the places I’ll have to fill in. Most of the proof I don’t have. But a cop like Ed Ransom will take care of those details when he knows where to start looking.

“Estelle Jones hated you, spent her life traveling, detesting your presence. Then she got sick and knew she was dying. She knew you loved that. You’d been a social climber who’d married the boss’s daughter for her dough. Now you were finally going to have the top hand.

“She guessed the way you felt and told you the truth she’d kept hidden for years, the truth that Lisa didn’t belong to you. And she must have planned to fix her money so you wouldn’t get it. She must have done that very thing and you managed to keep it hidden until you could get Lisa out of the way. You hated Lisa now. She was the symbol of everything your ego had suffered — and who would suspect you, her own father?

“The accidents in Clearview misfired. She ran — to a friend in Rogersville a person she’d come to know recently whom she felt she could trust. Then you rung in Pickens, and he traced her, burgled her room, stole her ring and watch — and she thought that somebody was still after her. What could she do now? Change her identity. Disappear.

“But Pickens had a plan of his own. If he killed her, he got his pay for that and nothing more. But if Lisa was buried, yet continued to live, he had a grip on you. One word from him and Lisa, the living Lisa, will know the truth about her mother’s money. Ransom will break Pickens into a million pieces to find out the real identity of the nameless little chirpie that Pickens picked up, battered beyond recognition, and planted in the river wearing Lisa’s watch and ring. Pickens wanted only too make sure that you controlled the money long enough for him to take what he wanted as a price for a second, future killing — of the real Lisa.”

Jones crawled from my grasp, oblivious to the blood seeping from his nose. His voice was hoarse. “You expect me to believe she’s still alive?”

“I’ll get Ed Ransom for company and take you to her, Jones. She’s blonde now, bleached. She’s changed the slant of her eyes, the shadows of her cheek-bones, the contour of her lips with makeup, and she calls herself by another name. But I knew her, Jones, and so will you before I’m through!”

Jones dragged himself around the desk, lifted his stark, white face and said, “Is it true, Pickens?”

And Pickens was there, in the open door across the study. He came into the light, yellow-skinned and gaunt, taking slow drags on his cigarette.

“So you know a little before I was ready. We can still make a deal. Holloway’s got no real proof. He was planning to beat or frighten you into admitting something. You’ve let him do just that. But nobody else knows. And I’ll take care of Holloway for you, Jones.”

There was a faint ripple of sound as a drawer slid open, the widening of Pickens’s eyes as he saw Jones’s hand dipping into the desk drawer.

I backed from the desk as if it were a chunk of hell itself. Pickens pulled a gun from a shoulder holster. It cracked, and Jones slumped over the desk.

Pickens sucked hard on his cigarette, brought his yellow eyes up to mine. “This whole thing was a sweet idea until you stepped in, Holloway!”

I had come armed myself. But I doubted that I would be able to use the small .25 automatic in my side pocket. Pickens swung his gun up. But it was Jones with his last ebb of strength who fired.

The slug knocked Pickens against the wall. His cigarette fell from his mouth. He clutched his chest. Jones slid down behind the desk and thumped on the floor. I walked to Pickens, kicked his gun out of the way.

I looked at the wound in his chest. “It won’t cost you a bit more, Pickens. Will you make a statement to the police.”

He considered — or perhaps was listening to the shrill whistling of air in and out of his torn lung. “Okay, Holloway. Like you say, I got nothing more to lose. Got a cigarette? No, I forgot. You don’t smoke...!”

In an apartment in Rogersville a girl sat before her dressing table with a towel wrapped about her head. She was dressed in a red silk bathrobe and her eyes still bore traces of tears! She, Ransom, and I had finished talking and now silence lay over the apartment as she worked with makeup.

Eyebrow pencil. Rouge. Lipstick. Cream. Powder. I watched the blonde singer, Jeanine, die and vanish. I watched the slant of the eyes change, the shadows that seemed to shift the cheek-bones a little, the contour of the mouth.

She was finished. She stood up. She removed the towel and her jet black hair — dyed back to its natural color now — tumbled about her shoulders.

She was Lisa.

She slid into my arms. Her body was firm and warm beneath the robe. Over her shoulder I nodded toward the door and Ransom took the hint. The door closed behind him.

What happened to Lisa from this point on is nobody’s business but hers — and mine.