The Amethyst Spectacles, page 3
“Maurice is a very open book,” I argued. “If a thing is to his advantage, he does it, or acquires it, whichever is indicated. If not, he lets it alone. For example, there’s Edwina. Maurice built the house on his ranch in Spanish colonial style and furnished it with antiques he brought from Spain himself and when it was all finished and quite perfect along came Edwina. She looked Spanish, even though an American, so Maurice up and married her. She made the house perfect. Maurice doesn’t have any feelings. Only taste.”
“I take it Edwina is not a young lady who would charge hell with a bucket of water?”
“No,” I said. “She isn’t. But she manages to do all right for herself. Look, I don’t want to talk about people I don’t like. It makes me feel unpleasant inside, darling.”
Patrick asked, “Is Karen the kind that would deliberately let somebody go unpunished for murdering the man she had expected to marry?”
I had had that on my mind. “Well, I’ll tell you, darling. That’s been sort of bothering me. I saw Karen on the plaza the other day with a boy named Kennicott. He’s a rancher up in Sky Valley. They’re in love, I think. Or anyway she is, and she doesn’t try to hide it. She wasn’t being poker-faced with Hugh Kennicott. I mean, if she fell in love with somebody else right away after Ray died, she wouldn’t be apt to say much about Ray, or want anything stirred up, would she?”
“I’m asking you. I don’t happen to know Karen Chandler well.”
“I don’t know her too well myself. She looks like her mother, but I don’t know Mrs. Chandler very well, either. I wonder when Karen met Hugh Kennicott?”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Patrick said. “Beautiful view west from here.”
It was magnificent, with one escarpment after another floating up, many miles apart but, from this high red precipice, looking telescoped into dreamy blue terraces stretching to the mountains on the far horizon.
“I never want to set my eyes on this place again,” I said.
When we returned to the car Patrick got in at the wheel.
Back in town he announced we would have dinner at El Castillo.
Julia Price would probably be in the restaurant, or come in while we were there, and I would ask her when Karen Chandler met Hugh Kennicott.
She was already there. She was sitting at our favorite table gloomily drinking a martini. “What’s the matter?” I asked, several minutes later, after we had sat, and she had inquired after Pat’s condition, and Joe Padilla had fetched us our drinks, with a second martini for Julia.
“Just one of those things,” Julia mourned.
“Nasty customer?” I guessed.
“Right the first time, Jeanie. Dorrie Thayer came in and accused me of cheating her on a ring she bought the other day, and I haven’t been the same since. I offered her money back for the ring, and thereupon she decided maybe it was worth the price after all, and went out, keeping the ring, but leaving me feeling terrible. Which reminds me, Maurice Ames said the other day that the only thing you could do with a triple-plated little bitch like Dorrie—oh, excuse me, Pat.”
“Go right ahead, Julia. Don’t mind me.”
“Well, anyway, Maurice was mad as hell.”
“What did she do to Maurice, Julia?”
“They had a fight. She accused him of entering her house and stealing something.”
“What?”
“She didn’t seem to know what. I wish she’d move back to Hollywood. I think that if it weren’t for her Ray Thayer would be alive today.”
“How do you mean that?” Patrick asked.
“It’s just an idea,” Julia said. “I wish I hadn’t said it, Pat. I wish I were a noble character, or at least could see Dorrie’s side just a little. I wish I hadn’t said that, too,” Julia said. “I wish I would stop talking.”
“How about a dividend?” Patrick asked.
“I think that’s a lovely idea, simply lovely,” Julia said.
Patrick motioned Joe Padilla for the drinks.
“Julia,” I asked presently, “do you happen to know just when Karen Chandler met Hugh Kennicott?”
“Certainly, dear,” Julia said. “They met in the shop. It was last fall, while Ray was out in Hollywood. Karen was up from school for the weekend and Hugh stopped in to buy something to send East and Karen came in. I remember thinking right then they would make a good match. They looked so well together, simply lovely. And Hugh’s got a lot of money—even more than Maurice Ames, I shouldn’t wonder—and that would be lovely for Karen, simply lovely. If it only weren’t for Edwina! There I go again,” Julia said.
Chapter 3
The restaraunt and bar of El Castillo—we always called it the Castillo—had not changed in appearance while I had been away. But the patrons were different. For one thing there were fewer pseudo and more real cowboys, now that there was a good price for cows and Santa Maria County had gone in for ranching in a big way. Only a few people that we knew came in during dinner. But the place itself looked the same. The restaurant and bar were two long low-ceilinged rooms connected near the front by a wide archway. This presumedly gave a sort of privacy to the bar. Cowhands are very modest and they don’t like to drink in a bar in the presence of what they consider ladies, and since the bar did a lively business in the late afternoon, females were expected to take their cocktails in the restaurant. Both rooms had cream-colored adobe walls and golden-varnished vigas—beams—which supported the adobe ceilings. Paintings by the local artists adorned the walls. The price of each painting was delicately penciled on a sticker somewhere on its frame and, in case you overlooked that, a sign in the archway said that the prices could be had at the cash desk.
We had a good dinner. I kept watching Patrick for signs of wear and tear from an afternoon which had left me dog-tired, but he didn’t seem weary at all.
We were having our coffee when Maurice Ames came into the bar. Our table looked directly through the archway and we saw him some time before he discovered us. The first thing that always popped into my head when I set eyes on Maurice Ames was a crack Julia Price made once. She had remarked that he even had his jeans tailored for him by his tailor in New York. Maybe he did at that. For one thing he couldn’t be a stock size. His shoulders were too wide and his torso too long and his legs too short for his height. He couldn’t have been more than one or two inches above five feet tall, maybe not that, but he had the shoulders, long arms, and large head that belonged on a man over six feet. He had coffee-colored eyes, swarthy skin, thick wavy iron-gray hair, a big fleshy nose, and a narrow but thick-lipped mouth which smiled into a tight V. Yet he was somehow attractive.
“That’s his vitality,” I was observing to Patrick, when Maurice spied us through the archway and came over.
“I say!” he said. We said hello and shook hands. Patrick stood up. Maurice declined to sit down. “It’s jolly you’re back in circulation,” he said, looking at Pat. Maurice had been born and raised in New York but he preferred to talk like the British. “We’ve got to throw you a party, Lieutenant. We don’t see a hero every day. Ha, ha.” He had a queer shadowy laugh, as if he always had a slight cold in the head. “How about tomorrow night? Dinner.” That was impossible, but Patrick promptly said fine. “We dine at seven. Black tie,” Maurice said then. Black tie! Just as though there wasn’t a war on. Maybe he forgot for the moment that Patrick, dressed in corduroys and a windbreaker, was still in the Marines. “A black tie would look very funny with your blues or your greens, my darling,” I thought.
Standing beside the table they made an odd pair. Maurice was so short and wide and so bristling with vitality. Patrick was so tall and lean and so diffident. Maurice was dressed like a cowman, as befitted a rancher in our valley. Under his arm was tucked a very clean, very wide-brimmed, cream-colored hat. “I’ll do you a New Mexican dinner!” he was saying, with vigor, his coffee-colored eyes rolling from Patrick to me, and back to Patrick. “I’ve got some new recipes, jolly good ones, you know, if I do say it myself.”
“He’s got a jolly good cook,” I said to Patrick, when Maurice had bustled away. “The food will be swell. Do you like him, Pat?”
“I don’t know that I don’t. How did he make his money?”
“In advertising, to start with. I guess he’s got his finger in a lot of pies. He doesn’t make any mistakes. May I remind you that you don’t care much for Mexican food?”
“He said New Mexican,” Patrick said.
“I stand corrected, darling. Maurice is nuts on his New Mexican recipes, by the way. He’s traveled all over the state collecting them.” I stopped and thought. “We’ve got a lot of peculiar people in Santa Maria.”
I was the one, for a change, who got tucked into bed that night.
I went straight to sleep.
I was awakened by Pancho. He was standing on his hind legs and rooting aggressively at the mattress. I reached down and touched his head. It felt soft and satiny but he pulled it away and made small whimpering noises, barely audible, and very urgent.
Oh, Lord, I thought, why does anybody keep a dog!
I got up and tiptoed to the living-room door, thinking he wanted to go out.
Pancho stationed himself by the window open on the lane. He grunted ominously.
Patrick was lying perfectly quiet. I didn’t want Pancho’s whim to wake him. Tiptoeing back, I picked the dog up and chucked him in the bathroom and shut the door.
“That’ll learn him!” Patrick said, as I slipped back in bed.
“Darling! I thought you were asleep.”
Patrick put out an arm and pulled me against his shoulder.
“Dirty trick you pulled on that dog, Jeanie. It’s discouraging. Generations of breeding have gone into making him a good servant to his mistress and then she double-crosses him—won’t let him do his stuff.”
“Stop drooling and say what you mean, Pat.”
“We had a lurker.”
I shivered and moved closer, and felt safer.
“Maybe it was just some Mexican celebrating something,” I said.
“Huh-uh. I was awake. Pancho knew that and came to me before lie woke you. The so-and-so lurked all over the place. Probably intends to steal your emeralds.”
“Good,” I said. We couldn’t afford the emeralds, which Patrick had blown himself beyond his means to give me for a wedding present. “I mean, they’re insured. We could pay up the insurance and the storage bills and buy some bonds …”
“Don’t dream, Jeanie.” Patrick lit a cigarette with his free arm. “I’ve been dying for a smoke, but I wanted to see what the guy was up to. I got interested in the dog, too. He’s a good little beast, Jeanie. First he came to me, knowing I was awake….”
“How would he know that?”
“People smell different awake than asleep. At least, to a dog. As you know, dachshunds have very fine noses.” Patrick kissed my nose and said, “Of course, you have too. Pity you didn’t wake sooner. Between you and Pancho we might have had some real detective work. Maybe a man intending to break in and steal a ham sandwich smells different from a man who means to steal emeralds, or with intent to murder.”
I yawned.
“What lovely ideas you have in the night, darling.”
“Well, he’s gone away.”
“There wasn’t anybody, really?”
“There was.”
Pancho scratched on the bathroom door. Patrick got up and let him out.
The dog did two or three delighted swishes around the room and then leaped into his basket, where he snuggled in with delighted nuzzling noises and cheerful sighs.
“The lurker doesn’t seem to weigh on his mind, darling. I don’t believe there was any. I think you made it up.”
“The lurker departed while you were putting Pancho in the dink. That’s civilization for you! Society breeds a fine dog and trains him to bark at the right time and when the time comes society forbids the dog to bark.”
I yawhed again. “If you don’t mind, society will go back to sleep, darling.”
The next evening, when we were driving along the Santa Fe road on our way to the party, Patrick asked how long Ames had lived in our valley. I said maybe ten years. “What brought him here?” Patrick asked.
“He came first on a trip. He liked the country and moved out. Maurice is feudal, Pat. I imagine the special attraction of Santa Maria was because he could live out here sort of like à Spanish grandee. Darling, be sure to notice the tiles in the risers of the main staircase. They are copies of the ones in El Greco’s house in Toledo—Toledo, Spain.…”
“Thanks,” Patrick said.
“Now, don’t be stuffy—there are lots of Toledos. You’ve been in Toledo, Spain. You probably remember El Greco’s house. The whole main staircase in the Ames house is supposed to be an exact reproduction of El Greco’s. It would be fun if you remembered, and would know if Maurice is telling the truth.”
“If he’s faking, want me to tell him so?”
“Darling! Now, listen. Maurice Ames is full of little tricks. It would be a lot of fun if you discovered that his staircase is a bluff, I mean, not a copy of El Greco’s at all. We’d keep it to ourselves, of course. I wouldn’t run around telling people that Maurice lied about his staircase.”
Patrick’s glance was impudent.
“I did go to Toledo,” he said. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you, because I didn’t see El Greco’s house. I didn’t even know there was one.”
“What a pity! Well, anyhow, Maurice gives beautiful dinners. It’s fun to dress up.”
Patrick groaned. He was wearing his forest-green uniform and his service and medal ribbons with their star looked very gorgeous. I felt so proud. But he complained that the uniform felt stuffy and uncomfortable. His muscles, he said, were slack, and he had put on weight. I laughed at that. He was lean as a grasshopper. I was wearing a green lace dinner dress, an old one but new to Santa Maria, and it was precisely the green for my emeralds, my emerald engagement ring and my bracelet and the synthetic emerald loops I wore in my ears which everybody said looked like real emeralds. I loved to dress up. I liked Maurice’s making his parties occasions.
The mountains were putting on their famous red plush act as we angled off into the Silver River road. This road was made of crushed white rock as far as the Ames place. We began to climb a little as soon as we left the highway. Ahead on the right were the houses of the three friends. The first was quite near the road. That was Scott Davies’. It was a pure-white adobe in the modern manner. There were no windows on the flat white façade toward the road. Spruces and tamarisks planted in close thickets shut away all of the house except that blank wall from passersby, who got no inkling of the colorful, ingenious, lively house and terrace and garden beyond. Scott had perched his house on the edge of the cliff along the Silver River flood plain. Stairs went steeply from his flagstone terrace down to his gardens and orchard below. There was a path, too, which led along under the cliff, made by Mexicans and burros who had tilled the Silver River plain for generations.
The Thayer place was a half mile along from Scott Davies’. It had never been interesting. Now it looked rundown and dirty. Adobe needs constant care to look fresh.
The bright-blue Cadillac stood in the drive, seeming to have stopped at the wrong place.
The road veered left away from the flood plain, circled widely, and climbed more steeply. Now we had the Ames ranch on both sides. We had traveled through typical upland desert country all the way from Santa Maria, that is, yellowish earth sprinkled with grayish cactus and sage, freshened by spring but not verdant. Now we had grass. It was a “short close-growing grass and looked at this season from a distance fine and vivid as a putting green. Dark plump evergreen juniper trees grew casually all over the landscape, and the Ames’ cattle browsed on the grass. The ranch was fenced. We rattled over cattle-guards.
There was lane a quarter-mile long leading from the road to Maurice’s house, which also stood on the bluff above the Silver River, but well away, so that a proper lawn surrounded the big two-storey white house. The house was built solidly of stucco simulating adobe, but solider and sounder if less artistic than adobe. It had large double verandas.
A pretty dark-skinned maid in a Spanish peasant costume let us in and took our wraps. We could hear Maurice talking back to the people in the drawing room as he bustled out to welcome us. His eyes were shining in their queer brown opaque fashion. He loved giving parties, and he projected his excitement. You enjoyed coming here even when you thought you might not.
He shook hands vigorously.
Patrick saw the staircase and delayed our entrance into the drawing room by going over to gaze at it. “You like it, eh?” Maurice asked. His mouth shaped its tight V. He rubbed his dry short-fingered hands.
“I like it very much,” Patrick said. “I seem to have seen it before some place.”
Maurice beamed like a light. “It’s a copy of …”
Patrick lifted a hand. “I’ve got it. I saw it in—in El Greco’s house, in Toledo.”
“I say, old boy!” Maurice said. He was hushed. He gazed on Patrick with profound admiration. “That’s amazing, you know. Really. You’re the first! A lot of blokes that call themselves experts have missed that. I say-y! Really!”
When I got Patrick’s eye I gave him a knifelike stare of utter disapproval. He looked innocent. But had he guessed what his astonishing memory of a staircase he had never seen was about to get him into, he wouldn’t have been enjoying teasing me so much.
Chapter 4
Maurice was dressed like a Spanish don, in black broadcloth, with an embroidered jacket and a white satin shirt.
The outfit suited him, enhanced his bizarre appearance, and it made him belong with the house.
As he linked his arms with ours and guided us into the drawing room I was conscious of his dry short-fingered clasp on my bare wrist, and I wondered why it is that so many people who aren’t physically attractive like to touch you. I had such mixed feelings about Maurice Ames. He had always made a fuss over me, called me his yellow-eyed gal, and such, and I had always disliked it, but I had come to take it lightly because it was well-meant. He simply wasn’t sensitive to people. He assumed, I think, that because he was pleased with himself for acquiring power and money and the beautiful things he craved and could now possess, that others were pleased for him, too. He was a generous, enthusiastic host. He lavished everything on Edwina and would have done the same, I had always thought, for Bee and Karen, if they had let him. You couldn’t give things to Bee and Karen.
