Search the Shadows, page 17
Carl handed over the car keys without argument when I pointed out I had had fewer beers than he. “I could use a cup of coffee,” he said.
“If that’s a hint, consider it taken. There won’t be any problem, will there—if you come in for a while?”
“There damn well better not be. I don’t mind a certain amount of fatherly advice, but I won’t sell my soul for any job, even this one.”
There it was again—a word that held meanings he had not intended. Or had he? Did he know something I didn’t? Dave had been Carl’s adviser, and they were obviously on friendly terms.
“You’d better turn left here,” Carl said. “It’s a oneway street.”
I flipped my turn signal back from right to left and determined to concentrate on my driving. I had to stop reading hidden meanings into harmless statements. The situation was confused enough without that.
It was the first time I had been out at night, and as we left the Outer Drive and headed for Prairie Avenue, I realized why people kept warning me to stay put after dark. The bars and all-night eateries were doing a brisk business despite a faint mist that smeared greasily on the windshield, but the so-called Historic District, bounded by Eighteenth and Cullerton and by the weedy slopes of the railroad embankment, was as dark as a tomb except for the uncanny reflected glow from the Nazarian estate. It lit the trees like a cold fire.
Before he opened the gates, the guard looked inside the car and turned his flashlight into the back seat. George was on duty at the garage that night; he greeted me with a small contortion of the lips that might have been meant as a smile, and I handed him my keys.
“They could put a few lights in this part of the grounds,” I said, stumbling over a stone as Carl and I approached the cottages.
He took my arm. “There’s no way anyone could get over the walls. Don’t get in a tizzy if you hear the alarm; it’s always being set off by squirrels and birds and such.”
Since the maid had been in the cottage when we left, I expected to find the door unlocked. However, it was not, and I fumbled to find my key and insert it in the lock. Carl made no comment. I reached for the light switch inside the door and turned it on.
Carl headed for the easy chair and was about to drop into it when I said sharply, “Wait a minute.”
“What? What?” His derriere only inches from the seat of the chair, he sprang back into a standing position and stared wildly at the space he had been about to sit on. “What’s the matter?”
“Someone has been here while we were gone.”
Carl collapsed into the chair. “I thought I was just about to sit on a tack or a bat or something. Of course someone has been here. Maria.”
“Besides Maria. She wouldn’t leave marks like that.”
The marks of dusty footprints across the floor were clear, to my eyes at least. Carl’s male vision was less critical; his eyes followed my pointing finger and then returned to me with open disbelief. “I can’t see anything.”
I followed the marks to the corner where I had put my suitcases. Closet space was limited; I had had to leave them stacked against the wall. The one on top was empty. I laid it aside.
“The lock has been forced,” I said, examining the other suitcase.
That got Carl out of the chair. Squatting beside me, he peered at the lock. “You lock your suitcase too? What do you keep in there, the family jewels?”
“Just papers. Family papers.” I lifted the lid. When I saw the contents, I knew I had been right. The large manila envelope had not been sealed, but I had tucked the flap inside. It was outside now, and the corner of a paper protruded.
“Is anything missing?”
I pulled the papers out far enough to check them but not so far that he could see what they were. There weren’t many—my birth certificate, some of my mother’s letters, and the lab report giving the results of my blood tests.
“No,” I said, closing the envelope. The only other thing in the suitcase was the old photo album with Mother’s snapshots. I took it out.
Carl jiggled the protruding metal tongue of the lock. It moved readily under his touch. “These locks are as flimsy as paper,” he said. “Any casual kick or blow could snap them. Maybe she hit the suitcase when she was vacuuming.”
“Maybe.”
He could tell I didn’t believe it. “Are you going to report this?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“It would just get the kid in hot water. People are always ready to suspect ‘the servants.’ She’d probably lose her job.”
I wondered why he was so concerned about the maid. Could be he was only being kind and fairminded. But she was a very pretty girl, and obviously admired him…. “You mean nice, kind Mrs. Dunlap would fire the girl without even trying to find out whether she was guilty?”
“You don’t understand people like these,” Carl said. We had both risen to our feet; his face was flushed with emotion. “Mrs. Dunlap wouldn’t even know about it. The butler and the housekeeper handle minor domestic matters, and girls like Maria are a dime a dozen, they’re so desperate for work. It would be easier for them to fire her than investigate.” He saw I was weakening, and pressed harder. “I can’t believe she deliberately broke the lock. Probably it was weak and snapped when she moved the suitcase, and she couldn’t resist the temptation to see what was inside. But she wouldn’t take anything. She wouldn’t risk her job.”
“I don’t have anything worth stealing.”
“Then why not give her a break?”
I knew Maria hadn’t looked through those papers, and I liked Carl for being so vehement in her defense.
“Okay,” I said.
“Thanks, Haskell.”
“For what? I should thank you, for keeping me from doing something stupid and unfair. Sit down, I’ll make coffee.”
He did as I asked. When I went to the kitchen I realized I was holding the photo album close against my breast. I laid it on the counter and put the kettle on.
No, it had not been Maria who had searched my things. In a way I was glad the incident had occurred. It was the first evidence I had had that someone in the house was curious about my background and suspicious of my motives.
I was still waiting for the water to boil when the phone rang. The voice was one I didn’t recognize.
“This is Elise, miss, at the main house. I was to tell you that you received a telephone call while you were out. The gentleman left a number at which he can be reached and requested that you return his call tonight or tomorrow morning. Have you a pencil?”
I found one eventually. After writing down the number, I thanked her and hung up.
She had not given an area code, so it must be a local number. Jon? He was the only “gentleman” of my acquaintance who might be in Chicago. Dave would have left his name. I wondered why Jon—if it was Jon—had not.
Carl broke the silence. “Go ahead and call if it’s important. Don’t mind me.”
“It’s not important. Just a friend. I think.”
“Want me to leave?”
“No. They sure keep close tabs on us, don’t they? We haven’t been back five minutes.”
“That’s one of the disadvantages of this cozy deal,” Carl admitted. “All calls come through the central switchboard; after midnight, when the poor damned house servants are finally let off duty, the telephone is switched over to the guard at the gate. It does arouse certain delusions of persecution.”
“I thought you looked guilty,” I said maliciously.
Carl pretended to wipe a perspiring brow. “I was afraid it was Mrs. Dunlap, telling me we had forgotten to leave the door open. Where’s that coffee? I need a fix.”
He got a charge out of the old pictures, especially those of Dave. “Have you shown these to him?”
“Not yet.”
“He may or may not appreciate them,” Carl said, grinning. “Especially these. They must have been high on something.”
The series he referred to had been taken at another of the parties, and again they were all wearing costumes. Dave had certainly been the life of that party; tastefully attired in a loincloth and a paper crown, he had been caught in a number of undignified, not to say indecent, poses. The one that amused Carl most showed Dave holding a flustered Margaret Maxwell in a lascivious embrace. The bed sheet in which she had draped her body was wildly askew, baring her long thin legs to mid-thigh, and Dave’s hands were not where a gentleman’s should be.
“Drugs?” I said.
“More likely beer. Dope wasn’t as easy to get in those days, was it? Look at that old goat.”
Someone other than Mother had taken the picture; she was prominently featured, again with Dave. His features were contorted into a satyr’s goatish leer and his lips were pursed exaggeratedly. Mother had one hand spread over his forehead; her thumb was in his left eye and her face was alight with laughter.
“That’s her?” Carl asked. “Your mother?”
“Yes.”
“She was beautiful.”
I studied the picture again. “No,” I said thoughtfully. “She wasn’t really beautiful. But she had something—a kind of spark. Maybe it was just simple happiness.”
“She was certainly the belle of the ball,” Carl said. He was looking at another photograph, where Mother sat between two of the men. Both had their arms around her and both were looking, not at the camera, but at her. She was laughing. In those pictures she was always laughing. One of the men was Dave. The other…
“That’s him,” I said, careless of grammar. “Stephen Nazarian.”
“Good-looking guy, isn’t he? Not much family resemblance to his sister or his father.”
“No.”
“Not that I’d know,” Carl said. “I never met the old man until he was over eighty and petrified. They say he was quite a devil with the ladies in his time. To judge from the leer on Stephen’s face—”
“That’s not a leer.”
“No, it’s more like he was getting ready to bite her neck. Dave looks a little bloodthirsty, too. I wonder if he…” He didn’t finish the sentence.
I said, “I wondered myself. He’s not married—”
“He was.”
“I didn’t know about that. I guess his heart wasn’t broken then.”
“Who knows? He’s been divorced for years. The marriage didn’t last long; maybe he was on the rebound, at that.” Carl pursed his lips and pondered. “Yeah, it’s possible. He was married in 1967—”
“Two years is pretty long for a classic case of rebound,” I said, amused at his solemnity.
“He was only eighteen. Couldn’t have taken the fatal step much before that, could he? Especially on an academic stipend. Not,” Carl added, with a meaningful look at me, “that two starving students can’t starve together a lot more pleasantly than they can starve apart…. By all accounts, she preferred not to go hungry. Wanted him to quit school and go into something ‘practical.’”
“Is there any dirt about these people you don’t know?” I demanded.
“Not much,” Carl said coolly. “When someone has as much power over you as a professor has over a student, you fasten on any tidbit that reduces him or her to human terms. You are not even averse to a spot of blackmail, should the opportunity arise.”
“If you’re going to threaten Dave with these pictures, I’ll be sorry I let you see them,” I said—knowing full well that the pressure I had put on Dave was hardly more defensible.
“I couldn’t blackmail Dave with these; he’d just laugh. But I know a couple of Mad Meg’s students who would love to get their hands on them.”
“You mean Professor Maxwell?”
“Uh-huh. She’s a little loony, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Oh, nothing certifiable, more’s the pity. She has absolutely no sense of humor and—what’s the current jargon?—a very low self-image. She never forgives an insult, real or fancied, and she can fancy quite a bit. One guy I know had to transfer to Brown to get his doctorate; she’d taken a dislike to him for some unknown reason. Some people said it was because he wouldn’t—”
“Never mind.” I knew what he was about to say; I had heard stories about repressed spinster professors and male graduate students before. Malicious, sexist, unfounded stories—in most cases.
“If she’s that difficult, why do people choose her as an adviser?”
“Boy, are you naive,” Carl exclaimed. “Little girl, you don’t pick an adviser because of her pretty face or his charm. You are supposed to work with the specialist in your field—archaeology, linguistics, history, whatever. The faculty makes damned good and sure that everybody shares the load.”
I had hoped to learn something from Carl about the two other men in the group, but he didn’t recognize their names. His only comment was “Must have left the field.”
It was almost midnight before he glanced at his watch and announced he had better go. “It is a common delusion of the middle-aged, though unsupported by statistics, that sexual hanky-panky only occurs between the hours of twelve midnight and six A.M. I don’t want to endanger my reputation.”
“You have your nerve accusing other people of being paranoid,” I scoffed. “Do you really think Mrs. Dunlap’s spies are taking notes on your comings and goings?”
“One can never be too careful,” Carl said. “Are you attending the tea party tomorrow?”
“Yes. Is that what it is, a tea party?”
“Various beverages, spiritous and otherwise, will be consumed. She holds these little get-togethers, as she calls them, every few weeks. Carrying on the tradition—the old man used to do it twice a month.”
My mother must have been one of the guests. Hadn’t he said they could not refuse his invitations?
Carl ambled to the door. “See you tomorrow, then.”
“Okay.” I added, “Thanks. I enjoyed it.”
“Me too. Next time I’ll introduce you to the breathless excitement of Brookfield Zoo. Or how about a murder tour? The garage where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place, the alley on North Lincoln where Dillinger was gunned down, and, of course, the site of the 1968 Democratic Convention.”
“I can hardly wait.”
I left my door open so that the light spilling out would help him find his way home. After I had closed and locked it, I took the manila envelope out of my suitcase and went carefully through the papers. They were all there, but I had no doubt that someone else had done the same thing earlier that evening. Someone I could visualize only as a faceless shadow—sitting in the easy chair, whose cushions had held the imprint of a human body. I wondered why “they” had waited until today to carry out the search. I had been absent from the cottage every day. However, I had not been far away, and a trespasser would not be able to count on being uninterrupted, if I decided to return for lunch or for something I had forgotten. Today was the first occasion on which I had spent the entire day away from the estate.
Was it only a coincidence that Carl had suggested the excursion and made sure I was absent until late in the evening?
In the cold light of day—a gray, gloomy, chilly light—I decided my suspicions of Carl had been groundless. He was the one person who had no connection with my mother; he couldn’t have been more than five or six years old when she died. The intruder had to be one of a small number of people, though. A stranger couldn’t enter the grounds; a stranger would not have a key to the cottage. Possibly the searcher was one of the guards, checking on my bona fides at his boss’s request. If that was the case, Nazarian now knew that I was who I claimed to be. The theory didn’t make sense, however. If the old man had doubted my identity, he had only to ask for proof.
The weather felt more like March than mid-June. I found a laundromat that was open on Sunday. It had the grimy, used look of most such establishments, and as I put my clothes into one of the chipped machines I reflected bemusedly on the paradoxes of my situation. I was living on the grounds of one of the most vulgarly ostentatious mansions I had ever seen—doubly vulgar because of its location in the midst of poverty and despair—with daily maid service and armed guards to protect me, but I was eating out of tins and doing my own laundry. Which was, of course, no more than I deserved.
The contrast was not limited to my own position; there were other peculiar exceptions to the luxurious life style of the Nazarians—the neglect of the cottages, for example. The gardens were not as well tended as I would have expected in such an establishment either. I was willing to bet there would not have been weedy flower beds or unpruned shrubbery when the old man was up and about. Obviously Mrs. Dunlap and her husband were not as fussy. No reason why they should care, if the house and grounds had been left to the Foundation. In fact, they were probably looking forward to the day when they could leave Prairie Avenue forever. That day could not be long distant.
Aside from the necessity of doing my laundry, I had left the house that morning because I wanted to return Jon’s call from a pay phone. The phone in the laundromat was out of order. Since a conspicuous sign warned patrons that the management bore no responsibility for clothes left unattended, I had to wait till mine were done; I couldn’t take the chance of losing them, since practically every stitch I had with me was in the machine. I sat twiddling my thumbs and watching the other customers—tired housewives with their hair in curlers; girls who looked like junior-high students carrying babies who should have been, but probably weren’t, their younger siblings; a ragged man sleeping on a bench and surrounded by a palpable fog of alcoholic fumes. When the dryer finally stopped, I gathered up my clothes and went in search of a telephone. I finally found one that worked, in a drugstore, and placed the call.
Jon wasn’t staying at a hotel. The voice that answered was that of a young woman. When I asked for Jon there was a perceptible pause before she said, “Just a minute.” She continued to hold the telephone when she called him. “Jon! Jon, darling, it’s for you!”
