Invitation to Murder

Chapter : 2-1

CHAPTER : 2He saw no reason to revise that opinion Friday afternoon when he came limping up from a culvert with a coffee can full of ditch water to pour into the boiling radiator of his pickup truck stalled on a presumed short cut in the backwoods and rolling green pastures of Virginia. The green Cadillac with a woman and two girls in the back seat, the only mobile unit he’d seen since he left the main road, hadn’t even slowed down when he flagged it to ask the way to Dawn Hill Farm.

“Thought I was a plant hijacker, no doubt.”

He grinned at the New Jersey license plates and the load of freshly dug azaleas in the old truck. They were the reason he was both late and lost. When his sister said she knew a man a couple of miles this side of Charlottesville, a stone’s throw from Dawn Hill Farm, where he could pick them up dirt cheap, he should have known she meant a woman twenty miles the other side, nowhere near Dawn Hill Farm, and the reason they were only a little more expensive than usual was that he’d’d dug and balled them himself. The real folly, of course, had been to let the azalea woman tell him about the short cut.

“Twelve miles from Summerville Court House,” she said. “A green and white mailbox. You can’t miss it.”

He’d give it another mile, Fish Finlay decided. Or if another car came by, he’d stay in the truck so they wouldn’t see him limping. That was the trouble with his leg, he thought, knowing he was being a fool of sorts. Hypersensitivity, they called it. Other people lost worse than a leg in the war, didn’t they? You’re alive, aren’t you? You’ve got a first-rate job, what are you beefing about? You just can’t forget you were an all-Eastern end in your Ivy League days. Nobody gives a damn about your leg . . . it’s your head that counts, old boy. Forget it. And behind the mahogany desk he did forget, and nights and weekends in his place in New Jersey. Only occasionally—at times like this, for instance—did it flash up into his conscious mind.

“Grow up, Psycho. Don’t be a jerk. What’s eating you now?”

Apart from the stalled engine, Caxson Reeves and the azaleas were the answer to that one.

“If you want Jennifer Linton to go to Newport, it’s Anne Linton, not the girl, you’d better see,” Reeves had remarked dryly when Fish reported his diplomatic failure. “And I’d make it as unimpressive and unofficial as possible. Didn’t you tell me you wanted a Friday to go to Virginia and get some bushes?”

He made it sound like a load of stinkweed.

“Azaleas, sir.”

“Then go get them and drop by Dawn Hill casually. Tell Anne Linton we have a serious problem. Keep your mouth shut about Dodo cutting off the stipend.”

“You can stop that, can’t you? It’s a lousy trick. Or is that sort of thing why we call the Trust ‘I. to M.’?”

That came out before Fish knew he was saying it. He flushed under the bleak eyes looking at him. “M. 5401” was the Bank’s listing of the James V. Maloney Trust. “I. to M.” was a top-echelon joke that Fish Finlay never should have heard and having heard never repeated. “I. to M.” stood for “Invitation to Murder.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said.

“It so happens that the term ‘Invitation to Murder’ has nothing to do with the Maloney Trust as you know it, Mr. Finlay,” Caxson Reeves said evenly. “It refers to a document that James Maloney drew up and signed the morning he walked out of here for the last time. It is concerned with the disposition of the Trust in the event of the death of both Dodo Maloney and her daughter Jennifer Linton before Jennifer is twenty-two years old. It also happens to be my business, not yours.”

“I’m sorry,” Fish said again.

“Very well.” Reeves got up and locked the conference room door. “To get back to what is your business. I think it’s time you know more about the Maloney Trust. But first—if Dodo wishes to cut off her daughter’s stipend, there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s the way James V. Maloney wrote the Trust.”

He looked impassively down at the empty chair at the other end of the table.

“He sat right there, and dictated to me.”

He was silent for an instant, his eyes fixed on the chair.

“Jim Maloney was a bitterly unhappy man,” he said deliberately. “It may be he was crazy. I never thought so. He knew he had the Midas touch. He parlayed a small inheritance into a large fortune. He married what you might call a girl of the people so he could have a large and healthy family. It was the only thing he wanted. He thought he didn’t have it because it was God’s way of making him pay for the Midas touch. Then he learned that it was only his wife’s vanity and social ambition, and he learned too that Jennifer was the only grandchild he was going to have. Dodo had been through a blatant divorce and a damned unpleasant custody fight for Jennifer, and was embarked on another equally blatant romance. It was then, when he was sick of everything, that plants came into Maloney’s life to remake it, through these two old gardeners at Enniskerry.”

He nodded at the framed airview photograph of the Maloney estate at Newport that concealed the wall safe behind the chair where James V. Maloney had sat.

“That’s why Dodo has the place there and can’t get rid of it—except to let it go to the city of Newport. He endowed it, so she couldn’t toss those two out of their jobs and their gardens.”

He pulled his half-spectacles down over the bridge of his nose and sat gazing intently at the photograph.

“He was talking about Dodo and her daughter that day. A weed in rich soil takes nourishment from a useful plant. If the plant grows, it flowers quicker to make the best of what life it has. Jim Maloney thought Dodo was a weed. He gave her until Jennifer was twenty-two to prove she wasn’t. His theory was that Jennifer, struggling against her environment, would flower into a useful life. He didn’t put it that way, but that was the gist of it. Jennifer could sink or swim. When she was twenty-two, Dodo Maloney would get back from her precisely the treatment she’d given her. On that basis, it’s been my job to help Dodo cut her own throat any way she likes . . . which she’s done her damndest to do ever since I can remember.”

He got up. “What contribution her fourth husband is going to make, I don’t know. What Dodo told you this morning she’s told me. I don’t believe any part of it. As you know, I first heard about this marriage from a gossip columnist calling up to find out how much money she’d settled on de Gradoff. I’m skeptical of chance romantic meetings.” A wintry gleam came into his eyes for an instant. “In my book, anyone pretending he has no interest in money is either a fool or a knave. And rather particularly, in the present case . . . in view of an item that came in the mail this morning, while Dodo was telling you her happy story.”

He went to the end of the table and took the photograph of Enniskerry off the wall. He put it on the table, opened the safe, brought out a pale-blue airmail envelope and took a sheet of typed paper out of it.

“This is either in good faith, or it’s a clumsy attempt to find out the provisions of the Maloney Trust. Not even my secretary knows them. I promised that to Jim Maloney. Dodo knows them, but it’s to her interest to keep quiet. Jennifer was told them on her sixteenth birthday. You know them. I’m getting older, and I don’t think I’ve misjudged you.”

He pushed his spectacles up in place and looked down at the paper.

“This is from our Paris correspondent. He says it is a ‘friendly exploratory inquiry,’ on behalf of an undisclosed principal, and in no sense a demand for money. The undisclosed principal wishes to know what progress we are making with our program for paying the outstanding obligations of the Countess de Gradoff’s husband, Count Nicolai Hippolyte de Gradoff.”

“He wishes to know what?”

“When we are going to pay de Gradoff’s debts.” Reeves’s voice was as dry as the crackle of the paper as he put it back in the envelope. “I made a transatlantic call. Off the record, I was told that de Gradoff was heavily involved when his first wife died.”

“Killed herself.”

“I’m purposely restricting myself to what has been reported to me as fact,” Reeves said quietly. “—To clear himself, de Gradoff borrowed a considerable sum on his interest in the first wife’s estate. It is that sum this so-called ‘friendly inquiry’ is about. The undisclosed principal was given to understand that he was marrying a rich American lady . . . at which time the debt would be paid.”

He put the letter in the safe, closed it and hung the picture of the many-towered mansion back on the wall. There was no ripple of expression in the dusty aridity of his face or in his voice when he spoke again. “Perhaps that is why de Gradoff appeared anxious to hear what you might have to say to Dodo this morning.”

Fish looked at him soberly. “Do we have any program—”

“None. I have no authority to pay such debts. If Dodo wishes to do it out of income, that’s her business. I advised the ‘undisclosed principal’ to take the matter up with her.”

As Reeves gathered up his papers, Fish got to his feet. “One other point, sir—if I may stick my neck out again.”

“Why not?”

“This French detective that Dodo—”

“You told me.” He looked at his watch. “It would seem to indicate that there’s a second ‘undisclosed principal’ making inquiries. But I have a meeting.”

He went out leaving Fish Finlay standing there much the way he was sitting now in the stalled truck, the problem that seemed simple on the face of it complicated by a feeling of uneasiness he could not define. He looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to five . . . late to drop in on anybody in the mint julep belt in the rig he was in. He was aware suddenly that he was in honest fact procrastinating and had been all day. He could have got half as many azaleas and had plenty of time to get to Dawn Hill Farm earlier, if he’d wanted to.

“You don’t want to let Dodo down . . . but you don’t want to force the kid to go to Newport. Make up your mind, Finlay.”

It was ten to one he’d passed the green and white mailbox without seeing it for the simple reason he didn’t want to see it. He started the truck. He’d give the rolling landscape one more roll and the empty road two more curves, and then backtrack. It was around the second curve that he saw the boy perched on the white culvert down in the hollow. He rattled down, braked the truck, leaned over to ask the way to Dawn Hill Farm, and saw it was not a boy. It was a girl in a white shirt and green jodhpurs, her green jacket and black velvet cap in a dusty heap on the road at her feet, and it was about as miserable and dejected a little figure as Fish Finlay had ever seen.

He grinned, looking across the road up to the open field.

“Lost a horse, sis?”

Then he braked the truck sharply. He couldn’t see the kid’s face, just the top of her dark tousled head, but her shirt was badly torn and her fists clenched tight.

“You’re not hurt?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t have a horse.” Her voice was strained, as tight as her fists. She raised her head then and Fish saw her face.

A feather of gold dropped from the wing of an angel there in the dusk. His hand stopped motionless on the door.

She wasn’t a kid. She was a girl, or maybe not a girl but a dream half-dreamed, only seeming real there in the golden dusk . . . the heart-shaped face, moon pale, the wide-set stricken eyes, dark gray-green under thick glossy brows and long black curling lashes, full lips with no lipstick to hide their pallor, nothing to hide the intense unhappiness that shot like a poignant arrow through the futile armor of Fish Finlay’s own unhappy heart.

She got up from the culvert and he saw her slim lovely body, high young breasts, girl and lost dream melted into one, as she stood looking at him for a moment of relief as poignant as her distress, and then picked up her jacket and cap and came over to the truck.