Black money (16 page)

"Were you here the night Fablon disappeared?"

"No. I was not. I can't stay on duty twenty-fours hours a day."

He looked at his watch. It was nearly ten o'clock. He was getting ready to terminate the interview.

"I want you to take another look at the picture. Do you recognize the young man in the white jacket?"

He held the picture up to the light. "Vaguely I remember him. I think he only lasted a few weeks."

He sucked in his breath abruptly. "This looks like Martel. Is it?"

"I'm pretty sure it is. What was he doing working for you as a bus-boy?"

His hands made a helpless outward gesture encompassing the past and the present and a fairly dubious future. He sat down. "I have no idea. As I recall he was only part-time help, doing mostly cleanup work. At the height of the season I sometimes use the cleanup boys to serve the cottages."

"Where do you recruit the boys?"

"At the State Employment office. They're unskilled labor, we train them. Some we get from the placement bureau at the state college. I don't remember where we recruited this one."

He looked at the picture again, then fanned himself with it. "I could look it up in the records."

"Please do. It could be the most important thing you do this year."

He locked the door of his cottage and took me through the gate into the pool enclosure. Undisturbed by swimmers, the water lay like a slab of green glass in the sun. We walked around it to Stoll's office. He left me sitting at his desk, and disappeared into the records room.

He emerged in about five minutes with a filing card. "I'm pretty sure this is the one we want, if I can trust my memory. But the name is not Martel."

The name was Feliz Cervantes. He had been recruited through the State College and employed on a part-time basis, afternoons and evenings, at $1.25 an hour. His period of employment had been brief, extending from September 14 to September 30, 1959.

"Was he fired?"

"He quit," Stoll said. "According to the record he left on September 30, without collecting his last two days' pay."

"That's interesting. Roy Fablon disappeared on September 29. Feliz Cervantes quit September go. Ketchel left October r."

"And you connect those three happenings?" he said.

"It's hard not to."

I used Stoll's telephone to make an eleven o'clock appointment with the head of the placement bureau at the college, a man named Martin. I gave him the name Feliz Cervantes to check out.

While I was still at the club I paid a visit to Mrs. Bagshaw. Reluctantly she gave me the address of her friends in Georgetown, the Plimsolls, whom Martel had claimed to know.

I sent the address Airmail Special, along with Martel's picture, to a man named Ralph Christman who ran a detective agency in Washington. I asked Christman to interview the Plimsolls personally, and to phone the results to my answering service in Hollywood. I should get them some time tomorrow, if everything clicked.

19

THE COLLEGE WAS IN What had recently been the country. On the scalped hills around it were a few remnants of the orange groves which had once furred them with green. The trees on the campus itself were mostly palms, and looked as if they had been brought in and planted full-grown. The students gave a similar impression.

One of them, a youth with a beard which made him look like a tall Toulouse-Lautrec, told me how to find Mr. Martin's office. Its entrance was behind a pierced concrete screen at the side of the administration building, which was one of a Stonehenge oval of buildings surrounding the open center of the campus.

I stepped out of the sunlight into the cold glare of fluorescent lights. A young woman came up to the counter and informed me that Mr. Martin was expecting me.

He was bald in shirtsleeves with a salesman's forceful stare. The paneled walls of his office were cool and impersonal, and made him look out of place.

"Nice office," I said when we had shaken hands.

"I can't get used to it. It's a funny thing. I'll be here five years in August, but I'm still nostalgic for the Quonset hut we started in. But you're not interested in past history."

"I am in Feliz Cervantes's past history."

"Right. That's quite a name. Feliz means `happy," you know. Happy Cervantes. Well, let's hope he is. I don't remember him personally he didn't stay with us long- but I had his records pulled."

He opened a manila folder on his desk. "What do you want to know about Happy Cervantes?"

"Everything you have."

"That isn't much, I'm afraid. Just why is Mr. Stoll interested in him?"

"He came back to town a couple of months ago, under an assumed name."

"Has he done something wrong?"

"He's wanted on suspicion of assault," I said, toning it down. "We're trying to establish his identity."

"I'm glad to co-operate with Mr. Stoll - he uses a lot of our boys - but I may not be too much help. Cervantes could be an assumed name, too."

"But don't your students have to present records, of birth and education and so on, before you let them in?"

"They're supposed to. But Cervantes didn't."

Martin peered down at the contents of the folder. "There's a note here to the effect that he claimed to be a transfer student from L.A. State. We admitted him provisionally on the understanding that his transcripts would reach us by the first of October. By that time he'd already left us, and if the transcripts ever arrived we sent them back."

"Where did he go?"

He shrugged, retracting his bald head tortoise-like between his shoulders. "We don't keep track of our dropouts. Actually he never was our student."

He had no transcript, Martin seemed to be saying, therefore he didn't exist. "You might try his old address here, in case he left a forwarding address. It's care of Mrs. Grantham, on Shore Drive, number 148. She has quite a few apartments which she rents to students."

I made a note of the address. "What courses was Cervantes taking?"

"I don't have a record of that. He didn't stay long enough to have his grades posted, and that's all we're interested in. I suppose you could try the Dean's office, if it's important. He's in this building."

I walked around the outside of the building to the Dean's office. His secretary was a large-busted brunette of uncertain age who handled herself with a kind of stylized precision. She typed Cervantes's name on a piece of paper and took it into a filing room, emerging with the written information that he had registered in French Language and Literature, on the senior level, and upper-division Modern European History.

I vas certain for the first time that Feliz Cervantes and Francis Martel were the same man. I felt a certain humiliation for him. He had taken a big leap and found a toehold. Now he was falling.

"Who taught him French Language and Literature?"

"Professor Tappinger. He's still teaching the course."

"I was hoping it would be Professor Tappinger."

"Oh? Do you know him?"

"Slightly. Is he on campus now?"

"He is, yes, but I'm afraid he's in class."

The woman glanced at the electric clock on the wall. "It's twenty minutes to twelve. He'll finish his lecture at twelve exactly. He always does."

She seemed to take a certain pride in this.

"Do you know where everybody on campus is all the time."

"Just some of them," she said. "Professor Tappinger is one of our institutions."

"He doesn't look much like an institution."

"He is, though. He's one of our most brilliant scholars."

As if she was an institution herself, she added: "We consider ourselves very fortunate to have attracted him and kept him. I was worried he'd leave when he didn't get his promotion."

"Why didn't he?"

"You want the truth?"

"I couldn't live without it."

She leaned toward me and lowered her voice, as if the Dean might have the place bugged. "Professor Tappinger is too dedicated to his work. He can't be bothered with departmental politics. And frankly his wife is no help."

"I thought she was cute."

"I suppose she's cute enough, but she's a flibbertigibbet. If Professor Tappinger had a mature partner " The sentence faded out. For a moment her efficient eyes were fixed on dreamland. It wasn't hard to guess the identity of the mature partner she had in mind for Tappinger.

She directed me in a rather proprietary way to his office in the Arts Building and assured me he always returned there with his lecture notes before he went home for lunch. She wasn't wrong. At one minute after twelve, the professor came marching down the corridor, flushed and bright-eyed, as if he had had a good class.

He did a double take when he saw me. "Why, it's Mr. Archer. I'm always surprised when I see somebody from the real world in these purlieus."

"This isn't real?"

"Not really real. It hasn't been here long enough, for one thing."

"I have."

Tappinger laughed. Away from his wife and family, he seemed to be much more cheerful. "We've both been around long enough to know who we are. But don't let me keep you standing out here."

He unlocked the door of his office and urged me inside. Two walls of shelves were filled with books, many of them unbound French volumes and sets. "I suppose you've come to report the results of the test?"

"Partly. It was a success, from Martel's point of view. He answered every question correctly."

"Even the pineal gland?"

"Even that."

"I'm amazed, frankly amazed."

"It may be a sort of compliment to you. Martel seems to be a former student of yours. You had him for a week or two, anyway, seven years ago."

He gave me a startled look. "How can that be?"

"I don't know. But it can't be pure coincidence."

I got out Martel's picture and handed it to him. He nodded his head over it. "I remember the boy. He was a brilliant student, one of the most brilliant I've ever had. Unaccountably he dropped out, without a word to me."

His cheerfulness had evaporated. Now he was shaking his head from side to side. "What happened to him?"

"I don't know. Except that he turned up here seven years later with a wad of money and a new identity. Do you recall the name he used in your class?"

"You don't forget a student like that. He called himself Feliz Cervantes."

He looked down at the picture again. "Who are these other people?"

"Guests at the Tennis Club. Cervantes held a job there for a couple of weeks in September of '59. He was a part-time cleanup help."

Tappinger made a clucking sound. "I remember he seemed to be in need of money. The one time I entertained him in my house, he ate up virtually everything in sight. But you say he has money now?"

"At least a hundred thousand dollars. In cash."

He whistled. "That's just about ten years salary for me. Where did he get it?"

"He says it's family money, but I'm pretty sure he's lying."

He studied the picture some more, as if he was still a little confused by Martel's double identity. "I'm sure he had no family background to speak of."

"Do you have any idea where he came from?"

"I assumed he was a Spanish-American, probably a first generation Mexican. He spoke with quite an accent. As a matter of fact, his French was better than his English."

"Perhaps he is a Frenchman after all."

"With a name like Feliz Cervantes?"

"We don't know that that's his real name, either."

"His transcripts would show his real name," Tappinger said.

"But they're not on file here. He was supposed to have gone to L.A. State College before he came here. Maybe they can help us."

"I'll query L.A. State. A former student of mine is teaching in the French department there."

"I can get in touch with him. What's his name?"

"Allan Bosch."

He spelled the surname for me. "But I think it would be better if I made the contact. We university teachers have certain ah - inhibitions about talking about our students."

"When can I check back with you?"

"Tomorrow morning, I should think. Right at the moment I'm on a very tight schedule. My wife is expecting me for lunch and I have to get back here in time to look over my notes for a two o'clock class."

I must have showed my disappointment because he added, "Look here, old chap, come home with me for lunch."

"I can't do that."

"But I insist. Bess would insist, too. She took quite a liking to you. Besides, she may recall something about Cervantes that I don't. I remember she was impressed with him when he came to our party. And people, frankly, are not my metier."

I said I would meet him at his house. On the way there I bought a bottle of pink champagne. My case was starting to break.

Bess Tappinger had on a good-looking blue dress, fresh lipstick, and too much perfume. I didn't like the purposeful look in her eye, and I began to regret the pink champagne. She took it from my hands, as if she planned to break it over the prow of an affair.

She had covered the dinette table with a fresh linen cloth cross-hatched with fold marks. "I hope you like ham, Mr. Archer. All I have is cold ham and potato salad."

She turned to her husband. "Daddy, what do the wine books say about ham and pink champagne?"

"I'm sure they go together very well," he said remotely.

Tappinger had lost his effervescence. A glass of champagne failed to restore it. He chewed fitfully at a ham sandwich and asked me questions about Cervantes-Martel. I had to admit his former student was wanted on suspicion of murder. Tappinger shook his head over the young man's broken promise.

Bess Tappinger was excited by the champagne. She wanted our attention. "Who are we talking about?"

"Feliz Cervantes. You remember him, Bess."

"Am I supposed to?"

"I'm sure you remember him - the Spanish young man. He came to our Cercle Francais icebreaker seven years ago. Show her the picture of him, will you, Archer?"

I put it down on the linen cloth beside her plate. She recognized the busboy right away. "Of course I remember him."

"I thought you would," her husband said meaningfully. "You talked about him afterwards."