Heart of Stone (27 page)

“I beg your pardon?” asked Pierce.

“I'm going to have to ask you nicely to stay on until I finish my investigation. I can't force you, of course. But how would it look if you disappointed me?”

“But why?”

“There are just a few loose ends I need to tie up before I put this case to bed. It's just a couple of days.”

Something about Chief Terwilliger's request to stay put changed Gayle Morton's attitude toward me. Her father, too, suddenly embraced our short acquaintance and treated me as a friend and confidante. Since I was “friendly” with the police chief, they seemed to think that I could help them out of their jam or at least provide answers to their questions. I convinced them to rejoin Fadge and me for breakfast.

By the time we returned to the restaurant, Fadge was studying the menu again, smacking his lips, his face betraying a lingering hunger that the Adirondack Special had not appeased. Once we'd all sat down and ordered (English muffin for Owen Pierce, half a grapefruit for Gayle, and cornflakes for me), Fadge asked the waitress if the steak and eggs were any good.

“What can that revolting man possibly want?” asked Gayle once the waitress had pushed off. Fadge looked up, ears pricked and eyes bulging.

I motioned for him to take it easy and mouthed the name Terwilliger. His alarm subsided.

“I never even saw Charles here in Prospector Lake, I swear,” she continued, unaware that she'd nearly offended Fadge.

“I'm sure he doesn't suspect you,” I said, confident that my questions had sparked the doubt in Terwilliger's mind. “He said it was just for another day or two. Until he can discuss the details and review the photographs with the state police.”

“I wish you'd never met Charles,” said Pierce to his daughter. “A leopard can't change his spots.”

“If I may ask again, was Charles leaving you?” I asked, opting for his
Christian
name. I was trying to win her over.

Her father didn't like the question, but Gayle answered straightaway. “That's not true,” she said. “Charles and I had our troubles like any other marriage. But he wasn't leaving me.”

“What kind of troubles?” asked Fadge, surprising us all.

Gayle looked at him in horror. She must have been wondering who this giant man was and why he was asking her personal questions.

“Charles was . . . in demand,” she said. “For the past year, people have been seeking him out, hoping he could do something for them.”

“Because of the Bible picture?” Fadge had joined the hunt. “Or was it the Natalie Wood movie?”

“Both,” she said, appearing bemused. “People sent him scripts to read, begged for meetings, made offers for new projects.”

“And there must have been women,” added Fadge. “Starlets, ingénues, stage mothers?”

“Yes,” she answered wearily. “All of the above. If it wasn't a crackpot or a schemer, it was a nineteen-year-old girl from Iowa or a Spanish whore from the islands trying to ride my husband to a studio contract.”

“Gayle,” spouted her father. “Some decorum, please.”

“Must have been hard,” said Fadge.

“Like I said. We had our troubles.”

The two of them sounded like an episode of
Dragnet
.

“So what was he doing here?” asked Fadge, continuing his direct examination. “No Hollywood deals going on here, were there?”

“No. I doubt it.”

“The two of you arrived on different days, and you weren't staying in the same motel.”

Owen Pierce huffed his disapproval.

“Cool your heels,” said Fadge. “I'll get to you next.”

“We had a quarrel,” explained Gayle. “Charles wanted to get away. He had fond memories of this place and his old friends. So he decided to visit them. I came to tell him I was sorry.”

“Bunch of Communists,” said Pierce. “A damn yeshiva full of Communists.”

“I don't understand why you flew across the country to follow him if it was just a quarrel,” said Fadge, probing deeper. “It couldn't wait till he got back?”

Gayle mulled it over for a long moment before finally saying that she wanted to turn over a new leaf in their marriage. She wanted to embrace his past and his friends.

“Then why do you still call him Charles?” asked Fadge.

She didn't answer. Her father piped up to tell Fadge to leave her alone.

“Why don't you pick on someone your own size?” he said.

“All right,” said Fadge. “I'll ask
you
a question.” (I didn't think Owen Pierce qualified as Fadge's size, but I kept quiet.) “If it was a simple quarrel, why did
you
fly across the country with your daughter? Frankly, the whole thing seems like a bigger deal to me.”

Good question, I thought. But it was time to let silence go to work. I like to use silence as a carrot when I'm interviewing a subject. Or perhaps it's more of a stick. Nervous people hate gaps in the conversation. They would use a shovel to fill them if shovels shoveled words.

I gave Fadge the subtlest of blinks, and he acknowledged me. We waited. Gayle started to fidget. Her father toyed with his spoon. We watched them.

“I thought he was coming here to meet his old flame,” Gayle blurted out finally. “We'd had a fight, and he said he didn't love me anymore. He packed a bag and stormed out of the house that night. When he didn't come back the next morning, I was worried. I phoned our travel agent and found out Charles had booked a flight to Albany. I knew what that meant.”

“An old flame,” I said. “Who was that?”

Gayle looked me in the eye. “It was someone named Miriam. One of his old friends from that Arcadia place.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Philby's Bait and Tackle and Photo Supplies opened at 5:00 a.m. I figured they sold more worms than film at that hour, but I wasn't going fishing. And I didn't land up there until after eleven anyway. I took all my film—the black-and-white rolls I'd shot of Baxter's Cove the day before and the color slides from that morning—and for a five-dollar bill, the lady at the counter agreed to rush everything. She said they'd be ready by three.

Leaving the shop, I bumped into a tall man who was just on his way in. The collision nearly knocked me to the ground, but he caught me in his arms. I apologized, as did he. And that was when I noticed his face; it was familiar, but I couldn't place it straightaway.

“Why, hello, Ellie,” he said, grinning at me from behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “Don't you remember me?”

Oh, God. It was the wife-swapper, Nelson Blanchard. I wondered if our collision was accidental after all.

“Mr. Blanchard,” I said, smoothing my skirt. “How could I forget?”

“Nelson, please.” He bared all his teeth at me. “And it's Dr. Blanchard, actually.”

Right. I'd forgotten. This was the pervert whose job it was to examine women's private parts. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. He must have taken an aptitude test in high school and scored “degenerate.”

“Terrible news about Karl,” he said, and I stopped.

“You knew him?”

“Of course. Karl and I go way back. Before he was Charles Morton.”

“How well did you know him?”

“Very well from the old days here on the lake,” he said. “I've had a cottage here since forty-seven. And I saw him from time to time in Los Angeles. I have a home in the Hollywood Hills. He was in Bel Air. The movie biz, you understand.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Perhaps you'd like to visit me sometime in California. If you're more the traditional type, you might prefer a time when Lucia is away . . .”

Or when pigs flew.

“Had you seen Karl recently?” I asked. “Since you go way back, I thought perhaps he'd contacted you.”

Blanchard shook his head. “Strange, isn't it? But, no, he didn't contact me. And we'd been corresponding about my pet project. Karl was very interested in coproducing
The Scarlett Lady
.” He paused. “That's my film.” He blushed. “
The Scarlett Lady
. Brigitte Bardot wants in. But it's Lucia's role, of course.”

“Bardot? Really?”

He nodded. “Not right for the part.”

“Maybe if there's a role for a schoolmarm,” I said.

“Going fishing?” he asked, ignoring my contribution.

“Something like that.”

“Lucia and I would like to invite you to dinner one night before you leave,” he said.

I assumed my best expression of disappointment. “I'm leaving Sunday, you know. I don't think I'll have a free night before then.”

He looked crushed but took it like a man. He managed a weak smile. “Oh, well. Perhaps next summer.”

“Who was that guy you were talking to?” asked Fadge when I climbed into the car.

“An oddball I met at a party here. He and his wife want to have me for dinner.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“No, I mean they want to
have
me for dinner. They're wife-swappers.”

Fadge shook his head. “What's wrong with people?”

I started the car and pulled away from the curb.

“What's the wife look like?” he asked.

“Put it this way,” I said. “Her husband wants to cast her over Brigitte Bardot in his sexy movie.”

“You know, Ellie, we don't have any plans for dinner.”

I slugged him on the arm and drove on.

From Philby's, Fadge and I headed south on Lake Road out of the village. A half mile later, I pulled over to the side of Route 15 and parked twenty yards shy of the Camp Orpheus entrance. Fadge asked why we couldn't drive in.

“I'm not welcome here,” I said, switching off the ignition. “We'll have to wait for lunch to be served before we can go in. The camp director will throw me out if he sees me.”

Fadge sighed. He didn't like walking farther than from the sofa to the refrigerator. “This is the worst vacation ever.”

“What vacation?” I asked. “You're supposed to be working. Who's minding the store anyway?”

Fadge shrugged sheepishly. “Nobody. I put a sign on the door that I went fishing.”

I shook my head. No wonder he couldn't make ends meet. He was a financial disaster. Who else would close an ice cream parlor in August?

As the day before, campers and counselors and directors all convened inside the cafeteria at noon and tied on their feedbags. Fadge and I climbed out of the car, made our way onto the campgrounds, and crossed the compound to the Bear Lodge. Herbie was lying on his bunk in the same position I'd left him the day before.

“Who's he?” asked the boy, indicating Fadge with a bob of his head.

“A friend,” I said. “Do you have anything for me?”

“Do you have my payment?” he asked.

I walked over to his bunk and fished my billfold out of my purse. “Two dollars, wasn't it?”

“We said beer and a date.”

“You said beer and a date. I said two dollars, and you agreed.”

“Fine,” he huffed, sitting up and holding out his hand. “But you're getting the better end of the deal.”

Herbie told me that he'd asked around and found some interesting dirt on Jerry Kaufman. But first he told me there was no talk of Jerry knowing Karl Merkleson.

“Okay,” I said. “Then what's the interesting dirt?”

“Jerry had a little girlfriend in the village,” he announced as if dropping a bomb. “One of those annoying Christians trying to convert the world. They have that big camp not too far from here.”

“I already knew that,” I said. “The minister's daughter. I even know her name.”

Herbie smiled smugly.

“So I gave you two dollars to tell me what I already knew?”

“Hold on,” he said. “Did you know he had a crush on an older woman before he met the girl?”

“No,” I said, still unimpressed. “Did she push him off the cliff by any chance?”