Death Under the Moonflower, page 9
“He just got off, Bert.”
“He did? Where’d he been, remember?”
“Uh—let’s see. Fifth floor.”
“Thanks. Well, Peter, be seeing you.”
8
“Fifth floor again then, Jack,” Bert Larrick said to the elevator boy as the door slid shut.
“What’s goin’ on up there, Bert?”
“What’s going on? Why, nothing. Why?”
“I was just wonderin’. Red asked me about that guy the sheriff had over here. He said I said I took him to that floor last night—”
“You did, didn’t you?”
“I guess so. And then Chris Hand has been goin’ up there a lot this evening.”
“Chris Hand? He was on the fifth floor about seven-thirty.”
“He kept goin’ up after that. And he was up there last night before he went to Brownsville. I thought maybe they had a blood donor hid out—”
“How do you know Chris went to Brownsville last night?”
“He told me so. That was about eleven. My bud knows Chris—or knew him before he got the big head—so I asked him if he was checkin’ out of the hotel. He’s been tippin’ a lot since he’s been here. But he said no, he was just goin’ down to Brownsville for the night.”
“Jack, don’t say anything about this, will you not?”
“Sure not, Bert.”
“Not to anyone—even the sheriff.”
“All right, Bert. Watch your step there.”
9
John Belton Lack had intended to build a home, not a house of mystery, Peter Bounty thought as he stood in the summer moonlight and surveyed the mansion on the southern outskirts of Las Palmas.
It was a rambling structure of white-painted brick veneer and clapboard, designed on the lines of the California Colonial with borrowings of graceful iron grillwork from old New Orleans. The shutters, always closed now, were green; the tiles of the roof had weathered to an unusual shade of deep salmon. Wings at the rear were said to embrace a patio, with terrace and sunken garden, swimming pool and tennis court beyond.
During its construction, when it dawned upon Las Palmas that a Croesus had come without fanfare into the community, there had been expectations of a bride to follow and of entertainment upon a princely scale. These seemed justified when simultaneously newspapers announced on their front pages the dedication of the John Belton Lack Hospital and society editors began their columns with word that on Sunday Dr. John Belton Lack would be at home, no invitations issued, in his newly completed residence.
Bounty knew that he had missed quite a circus by going sulkily to a movie that afternoon. No one had stayed away, overawed by magnificence, for by then Dr. Lack had made himself a familiar figure on the streets. He sat on park benches and leaned against drugstore fountains, for all to rub elbows with, and many of the brats who raced through his rooms and over his flower beds that day had eaten ice cream cones with him. Society leaders were in the crush and matrons with marriageable daughters took heart when they were received by a bachelor who, while no Prince Charming, was unaccompanied and in his prime. Their eyes grew keener when they found nothing but masculinity in evidence throughout the mansion and they descended from an inspection of the master bedroom thinking of dinner invitations that had better be extended forthwith. Husbands proved ready allies and began sorting out investment prospecti. Stories went the rounds of the benefactions which Lack had in mind, of his distinguished family connections. He had let it be known at once that he intended to devote himself to research, not general practice; hence, with neither professional ethics nor competition involved, his confreres could welcome him and discourse upon his brilliance.
Then, with the town at his feet as he had seemed to wish, something had happened. Lack went into retirement. Callers were told that he was ill, then that he was receiving no one. A few of these rebuffs and the tide turned against him. People convinced themselves that he was a plutocrat who had sought to curry public favor for reasons of his own, that they had seen through him and that now he was nursing a grudge. He became an eccentric, a libertine, and there were dark speculations as to the true nature of that laboratory which had been the one part of the establishment where his guests hadn’t had access.
The cynical smile with which Bounty had listened to echoes of all this had never been at the expense of the man at the center of the hurricane. He had observed Lack (as he was well aware the doctor had observed him) without ever trying to shove a way to his side, and he had marked many things to the newcomer’s credit. Oddly enough, from the general viewpoint, lack of ostentation was one of them. Once, in the bank, Dr. Lack had introduced himself, with the headlong manner of a person taking a cold plunge or, less figuratively, of one in the extremity of embarrassment. Perhaps, had the meeting taken place elsewhere, Bounty would not have waited so long to go up this winding walk to an entrance porch where black metal furniture once had stood and to lift the knocker on a white door. But’twas said that John Belton Lack kept that bank on its feet and Bounty had been there taking care of an overdraft occasioned by some of Bert Larrick’s last-of-the month expenditures.
He was about to knock a second time when increased illumination came through the fanlight and, after a significant amount of unlocking and unbolting, the door was opened on well-oiled hinges.
“Good evening, Mr. Bounty. Please come in.” The man in black and white who stepped aside so readily must have been near the age of Bounty and Dr. Lack. His dead-white hair looked like a toupee, perfect but placed by mistake over a plain tanned face. His was the voice whose clear cultured enunciation, coming over the telephone earlier that evening, had made Bounty take it for the physician’s own. “Doctor Lack will be delighted to see you, I am sure. And I hope you will not think it out of the place if I anticipate my master’s welcome by a very warm one of my own. I had begun to think I was never going to have this pleasure.”
Goose flesh sprang out on Bounty once the door shut him in the spacious hall. “Thanks,” he said as he handed over his gray felt hat with its round oily stain on the crown. “Your vote counts as much as anyone else’s. And I don’t mean that literally, Beck. This is Beck, isn’t it?”
“Yes sir. Doctor Lack is in his study upstairs. Will you kindly be seated while I tell him that you are here. I think he will wish me to explain that most of the downstairs is closed.”
“Just a moment, Beck. Maybe I came partly to see you.”
“To see me, sir?” The man’s dark gray eyes would have been rather handsome had they not looked so much like those of a faithful shepherd dog, anxious to understand and please.
“Yes,” Bounty said. “Where’s your room? We might go sit down a few minutes and compare notes on the weather.”
“I have no room, sir.”
“I mean—well, wherever you keep your things.”
“What things, sir?”
“Oh, just things. Everybody has things.”
“I am afraid I don’t, sir.”
Bounty’s smile was slow in coming. And uncertain when it did come, for there was no brazenness in the fellow’s manner. “Is that cold-shouldering me, Beck?” he asked.
“Please, sir, do not misunderstand me. I am altogether at your service. And Doctor Lack is most kind. If you express the wish, he will keep me in the room during your visit.”
Bounty shook his head. He hadn’t intended to make this little speech and he wondered just why he was doing so. “I meant it, Beck, when I said I wanted to talk to you. I don’t know whether you know what about or not. But I’m going to have to poke into your private life, something I don’t like to do with any man. While I’m at it I may bring out some little matters that aren’t of any concern to me but that might be to your employer. Before I see him I’d like to put it to you straight. Would you prefer to come down to my office with me and talk things over with me alone? I’ve got big ears and a lot can go in one and out the other.”
Beck’s eyes were lowered. Bounty wished he could have looked directly into them then, for a great deal must have been mirrored there, judging by the sudden looseness about his mouth which might have been caused by the caving in of dental plates.
“May I ask one question, sir? Is Doctor David Angelo responsible for this visit?”
“Angelo?” Bounty repeated, trying to put two and two together. “No, Beck, he’s not.”
“Thank you, sir.” Immediately the man had his composure back. “I see that your reputation for kindness and fair dealing is deserved. But do not hesitate to ask Doctor Lack what you please about me. There is nothing that he cannot and will not be glad to answer.”
“Beck, when I hear a man say his life’s an open book I want to make a bet with him I can find a page missing. What about it?”
“If it were my place to do so, I should accept that bet. May I leave you a moment now, sir?”
“I think I’ve got an old campaign card about me someplace, if you want to take that. Maybe you’d better not, though. The picture offsets the nice things it says about me.”
“No card is necessary, sir.”
As the man crossed to the wide staircase which rose at the left, Bounty went to a mahogany love seat. Baroque, he thought, was the name for the border design of the mahogany brown floor and of the pale gray and white walls. White doors on either side and at the rear were closed and there was no sound at all in the place.
Beck’s soft-soled shoes made no sound as he went to the rear of the upper hall or as he returned and came down the stairs. “Doctor Lack is most anxious to see you, sir.”
Bounty found the waxed floor hard going. “Beck,” he said as he gained the stairs, “I think I’ve heard Christopher Hand speak of you.”
“Christopher Hand, sir? That was kind of Mr. Hand.”
“I forget what he said the rest of your monicker was.”
“I doubt that Mr. Hand knows it, sir. It is John.”
“Middle name? I collect’em.”
“Allton, sir.
“John Allton Beck,” Bounty repeated in a smothered voice and reached for his handkerchief. “Been with Doctor Lack long?”
“All my life, sir,” the man answered as they went down a hall which had two white double-cross doors on the left and one on the right.
Bounty gasped and loosed a succession of violent sneezes. “’Scuse me,” he murmured then, stuffing the handkerchief into his pocket. “Lead on, Beck.”
The latter opened the door at the end of the hall and gave a quick discreet glance across the room before he lowered his eyes and announced distinctly: “Mr. Bounty, sir.”
The room imposed itself first upon the visitor: a long book-lined study, the bar of a T, of which the hall was the upright. The severity of its gray and deep green and mahogany was tempered by touches of that same salmon shade. In front of a flat-topped mahogany desk facing the door, against a background of pale gray curtains and white and salmon drapes, posed salmon-haired John Belton Lack.
The red hair which was the butt of so many jokes about town wasn’t red. Salmon described it with only fair exactitude. It was peculiar, arresting hair, fluffy-looking as if it had just been shampooed, but after your first stare at it you found it exceptionally handsome.
Dr. Lack’s hands were clasped behind a sack coat of black or midnight blue whose natural shoulders and uncompromising straight lines did nothing to fill out his fine-drawn body. This was a pose, undoubtedly, and an effective one. John Belton Lack was master of that room and by demonstrating his mastery he projected John Belton Lack and became master in that room.
A man who went to all that trouble was vulnerable. Bounty strode across the thick-napped rug, extended his hand and said bluffly: “Good evening, Doctor! Glad to see you again.”
Lack reacted as a poised and punctilious gentleman might react to the prick of a pin at his rear. He came forward with a little lurch and gave Bounty a cold, firm-fleshed hand, but before he spoke his eyes went over the blue serge shoulder to the door. His were pale gray-blue eyes clouded now by a milky look which made it difficult to interpret that quick glance.
“I am very glad to see you again, Mr. Bounty,” he said in a low and precise but nervous voice, then came out with an incisive “Beck!” that made Bounty turn to see what misconduct the other was guilty of. To his surprise, when the man stepped dutifully forward Dr. Lack laid a hand on his back and said: “Mr. Bounty, I wish you would shake hands with Mr. Beck as you have done with me.”
“Bet your life, Doctor. We should have done this at the door, Mr. Beck.”
Bounty wasn’t sure that Lack didn’t deserve a kick for this move. Fleeting as was the alteration in Beck’s countenance, the sheriff caught it and stored its image in his memory. The man had flinched involuntarily, as if Lack had borne down upon a spot which in a literal sense was unbearably sore, and a tightness at the corners of his mouth had given the lower part of his tanned face a distinct resemblance to the physician’s. He presented Bounty with a strong hand which suffered by comparison with Lack’s fine one but he inclined his head as he did so, and when he spoke he kept his eyes lowered.
“My master’s kindness in giving me this privilege makes me wish I could serve him better, Mr. Bounty. Perhaps I can by putting myself at your service.”
Lack’s hand had fallen. His pale sensitive face grew paler, revealing all his bleached-looking salmon freckles, and his lower lip was held between his teeth while he stared for an instant at the floor. “Let’s sit down, Mr. Bounty,” he said suddenly, obviously acquiescing in Beck’s definition of his own status by excluding him from the invitation.
The servant moved with alacrity to a club chair of dark green leather, shifted it a fraction of an inch and stood behind it while Bounty sank self-consciously into its depths. He was behind a companion chair in time to see his master flip up his coattails before his seat touched leather. “I beg your pardon, sir.” He spoke at Dr. Lack’s elbow. “I am afraid the temperature of the room is too low for Mr. Bounty’s comfort.”
“It is? Then regulate it. At once.” That edged, nagging voice, with its little rasp of sibilance, was one which would soon chafe the nerves of a listener, since it was itself the product of nervousness as much as of the vexation which the doctor plainly felt either at his servant or at himself.
“Don’t bother.” Bounty was careful to delay his protest until Beck was already on his way to a gadget in a corner by one of the pair of doors that flanked the desk. “I’m not exactly a hothouse plant, Doctor.”
“Neither do I want you to look for snow in the air of my home, as no doubt you did.”
“I’d be the last person to do that,” Bounty assured him, the while he worked out an idea about voices. “I never saw snow.”
Beck was at his post again, his eyes fixed on the freckle-blotched back of one of Dr. Lack’s hands. “Will there be anything else, sir?”
No, Bounty thought, that wasn’t Beck’s own voice at all. It was Lack’s, at a moment when the doctor was calm and grave but emotionless in his dominance over a patient. Easy to believe that the servant had made a recording at such a time, that he had applied himself to its study until he had mastered it in everything it had of individuality and that now he was no more than a tuning fork to remind that voice’s owner how far off pitch he was….
“Yes, Beck.” Whether or not the voice in his ear was responsible, the physician’s voice had lost some of its insistent stinging quality and he was leaning back in his chair with more signs of relaxation than he had yet shown. “See if you can’t find an ash tray for Mr. Bounty. And, Beck, we have some whisky for this occasion.”
“I am sorry to say, sir, that we do not.”
“Thanks just the same,” Bounty spoke up. “But I don’t smoke or drink.”
He doubted that Lack knew what he said, so intent was the doctor on Beck’s face. “Surely, Beck, we have. I had you get a bottle, you remember, with Mr. Bounty in mind.”
“That was some time ago, sir. Doctor Angelo took that bottle away with him.”
“Oh.” Lack’s eyes fell. “Quite all right. That will be all, Beck.”
Bounty stared after a back which, save for that white cap of hair, might have been that of John Belton Lack with some much-needed meat on his bones. He stared for a moment at the closed door, then, realizing that he had had a match in his mouth and had spat a sliver of wood to the floor, he turned his head and spoke hastily, to cover up his lapse: “John Allton Beck. Not unlike John Belton Lack, Doctor.”
“It is a rearrangement of the letters of my name, yes. Please do not form a false impression from that matter of the whisky, Mr. Bounty. Doctor Angelo will have needed it for a patient. He is an abstainer. As I am myself. I am glad to find the three of us in accord on this.”
Bounty, having seen Angelo with hangovers, could only look owlish. “I’m probably not in accord with you,” he said. “Alcohol and nicotine are all right. I like’em. But they dull my other appetites. And I’d rather indulge those. When I can’t—”
“Yes, yes,” Lack said hastily. “That isn’t the case with me. With me it’s not a matter of principle, however, but of digestion. Digestion,” he repeated, as if he hoped Bounty would carry on the conversation from there.
Bounty studied his face, a face which acquired no softness from the subdued glow of a lamp whose shade was of some frosty-looking material banded with salmon. Remove John Belton Lack from all this stage setting, divest him of the halo that wealth, birth and scientific achievement gave him, and what had you? Superficially, a man who thirty or more years ago was a freckled redhead like that Sutherland bellhop. Regard him more closely, however, and every feature of him became distinguished, refined by the fervor of a fire deep within him and peculiar to him. Those freckles, for instance. They made his skin look rather like a speckled eggshell, but you wouldn’t notice them and think how they enhanced his appearance if there weren’t illumination behind to throw them into relief. Yet, for the man’s own sake and for that of others, Bounty thought that some good yellow yolk inside that shell would be safer, even if it did make for opaqueness. Yon Cassius had a lean and hungry look.
