More Tales of the Black Widowers (28 page)

Geoffrey Avalon drifted over, with the second drink at the halfway mark. “You don't have to look through the whole house, Rog. You didn't paste them over the molding or inside the drainpipe, did you? Where do you usually keep them?”

“In a little box I've got in the drawer. I looked there first. They weren't there.”

His voice had risen past its usual quiet pitch and Emmanuel Rubin called out from the other side of the banquet table, “You left them in your shirt the last time you wore them and they got sent to the laundry and you'll never see them again.”

“That's not so,” said Halsted, clenching his left hand into a fist and waving it. “This is the only darned shirt I've got with French cuffs and I haven't worn it in three months and I saw the cuff links in the box just the other night when I was looking for something else.”

“Then look for something else again,” said Rubin, “and they'll turn up.”

“Ha-ha,” said Halsted grimly, and finished his drink. Mario Gonzalo said, “Is that shirt you're wearing the one with the French cuffs, Rog?” “Yes, it is.”

“Well then, if that's the only shirt you've got with French cuffs, and you couldn't find your only pair of cuff links, what are you using to hold the cuffs together?”

“Thread,” said Halsted bitterly, shooting his cuffs for inspection. “I had Alice tie them with white thread.”

Gonzalo, himself an example of faultless sartorial splendor, with a predominant bluish touch in shirt and jacket, shading into the darker tints of his tie, winced. “Why didn't you put on a different shirt?”

“My blood was up,” said Halsted, “and I wasn't going to be forced into changing the shirt.”

Drake said, “Well, if you'll cool down a bit, Rog, I'll introduce my guest. Jason Leominster, this is Roger Halsted, and coming up the stairs for a scotch and soda is the final member, Thomas Trumbull.”

Leominster smiled dutifully. He was not quite as tall as Avalon's six feet two, but he was thinner. He was clearly in his forties though he looked younger, and under his tan jacket he wore a black turtleneck sweater which managed to seem not out of place. He had high and pronounced cheekbones over a narrow and pointed chin.

He said, “I'm afraid you're not getting much sympathy, Mr. Halsted, but you may have mine for what it's worth. When it comes to not finding things, my heart bleeds.”

Before Halsted could express what gratitude he felt for that, Henry signaled the beginning of dinner, the Black Widowers took their seats, and Trumbull loudly and rapidly, proclaimed the ritualistic toast to Old King Cole.

Rubin, staring hard at what was before him, lifted his straggly beard skyward in an access of indignation and said to Henry, “This thing looks like an egg roll. What is it, Henry?”

“It's an egg roll, sir.”

“What's it doing here?

Henry said, The chef has put together a Chinese meal for the club this month.”

“In an Italian restaurant?”

“I believe he considers it a challenge, sir.”

Trumbull said, “Shut up and eat, Manny, will you? It's good.”

Rubin bit into it, then reached for the mustard. “It's all right,” he said discontentedly, “for an egg roll.”

Even Rubin melted with the birds' nest soup, and when the first of the seven platters proved to be Peking duck, he grew positively mellow.

“Actually,” he said, “it's not that you lose things. You forget them. It's that way with me. It's that way with everyone. You're holding something, and put it down with your mind on something else. Two minutes later you can't for the life of you tell where that something you put down is. Even if, by sheer accident, you find it, you still can't remember putting it down there. Roger hasn't lost his cuff links. He put them somewhere and he doesn't remember where.”

Gonzalo, who was daintily picking out a black mushroom in order to experience its unaccompanied savor, said, “Much as it pains me to agree with Manny—”

“Much as it pains you to be right for one rare occasion, you mean.”

“—I've got to admit there's something to what he has just said. By accident, I'm sure. The worst thing anyone can do is to put something away where he knows it will be safe from a burglar's hand. The burglar will find it right away, but the owner will never see it again. I once put a bankbook away and didn't find it for five years.”

“You hid it under the soap,” said Rubin.

“Does that work with you?” asked Gonzalo sweetly. “It doesn't with me.”

“Where was it after you found it, Mario?” asked Avalon.

“I've forgotten again,” said Gonzalo.

“Of course,” interposed Leominster agreeably, “it is possible to put something in one place, shift it to another for still safer keeping, then remember only the first place— where it isn't.”

“Has that happened to you, Mr. Leominster?” asked Trumbull.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Leominster, “but I don't really know if it happened at all.”

Henry arrived with the platter of fortune cookies and said in a low voice to Halsted, “Mrs. Halsted has just called, sir. She wants me to tell you that the cuff links were found.”

Halsted turned sharply. “Found? Did she say where?”

“Under the bed, sir. She says they had presumably fallen there.”

“I looked under the bed.”

“Mrs. Halsted says they were near one of the feet of the bed. Quite invisible, sir. She had to feel around. She said to tell you that it has happened before.”

“Open your fortune cookie, Rog,” said Avalon indulgently. “It will tell you that you are about to find something of great importance.”

Halsted did so, and said, “It says, 'Let a smile be your umbrella,'“ and chafed visibly.

Rubin said, “I'm not sure that it's proper for a Black Widower to be receiving a message from a woman while a stag meeting is actually in session.”

Gonzalo said, “Electric impulses have no sex, though I don't suspect you would know that* Manny, any more than you know anything else about the subject.”

But Henry was bringing the brandy and Drake headed off the inevitable furious (and possibly improper) response by tapping a rapid tattoo on his water glass.

Drake said, “Let me introduce Jason Leominster, a somewhat distant neighbor of mine. He's a genealogist and I don't think there's a single member of the Black Widowers —always
 
excepting Henry—with
 
a genealogy
 
that would bear looking into, so let's be cautious.”

Leominster said, “Not really. No one has ever been disappointed in a genealogy. The number of ancestors increases geometrically with each generation, minus the effect of intermarriage. If we explore the siblings, the parents and their siblings, the grandparents and their siblings; all the attachments by marriage and their siblings; and the parents and grandparents that enter in with the cases of remarriage, we have hundreds of individuals to play with when we go back only a single century.

“By emphasizing the flattering connections and ignoring the others, we can't lose. To the professional genealogist, of course, there can be items of historic value uncovered, often minor, and sometimes surprisingly important. I discovered, for instance, a collateral descendant of Martha Washington who—”

Trumbull, having raised his hand uselessly in the course of these remarks, now said, “Please, Mr. Leominster— Look, Jim, this is out of order. It's got to be question-and-answer. Will you indicate a griller?”

Drake stubbed out his cigarette and said, “It sounded interesting to me as it was. But go ahead. You be the griller.”

Trumbull scowled. “I just want everything in order, Mr. Leominster, I apologize for interrupting you. It was interesting, but we must proceed according to tradition. My first question would have been that of asking you to justify your existence, but your remarks have already indicated how your answer would be framed. Let me, therefore, go on to the next question. Mr. Leominster, you said in the course of the dinner that a person might hide something in one place, switch it to another, then remember only the first. You also said that it happened to you only in a manner of speaking and may never have happened at all. Could you elaborate on this? I am curious to know what was in your mind.”

“Nothing, really. My aunt died last month,” and here Leominster raised his hand, “but spare me the formalities of regrets. She was eighty-five and bedridden. The point is that she left me her house and its contents, which had been her brother's till he died ten years ago, and Mr. Halsted's affair with the cuff links reminded me of what went on when my aunt inherited the house.”

“Good,” said Trumbull, “what went on then?”

“Why, she was convinced something was hidden in the house; something of value. It was never found and that's all there is to it.”

Trumbull said, “Then whatever it is is still there, isn't it?”

“If it was ever there in the first place, then I suppose so.”

“And it's yours now?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you intend to do about it?”

“I don't see that I can do anything. We didn't find it when we looked for it, and I probably won't find it now. Still—”

“Yes?”

“Well, I intend in time to put the house up for sale and auction off its contents. I have no use for them as things and a reasonable use for the cash equivalents. It would be, however, annoying to auction off something for a hundred dollars and find that it contains an item worth, let us say, twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Trumbull sat back and said, “With the host's permission, Mr. Leominster, I'm going to ask you to tell the story in some reasonable order. What is the thing that is lost? How did it come to be lost? And so on.”

“Hear, hear!” said Gonzalo approvingly. He had finished his sketch, making Leominster's face a triangle, point-down, without in the least losing its perfect recognizability.

Leominster looked at the sketch stoically and nodded, sipping at his brandy, while Henry noiselessly cleared the table.

Leominster said, “I am from what is called an old New England family. The family made its money two centuries ago in textile mills and, I believe, in some of the less cheerful aspects of trade in those days—slaves and rum. The family has kept its money since, investing it conservatively and so on. We're not tycoons, but we're all well off—those of us who are left: myself and a cousin. I am divorced, by the way, and have no children.

“The family history is what makes me interested in genealogy, and the family finances make it possible for me to humor myself in this respect. It is not exactly a remunerative pursuit—at least, not in the fashion in which I pursue it— but I can afford it, you see.

“My Uncle Bryce—my father's older brother—retired fairly early in life after the death of his wife. He built a rather fussy house in Connecticut and involved himself in collecting things. I myself don't see the pleasure in accumulation, but I imagine it gave rise in him to the same pleasures that are given me by genealogical research.”

“What did he collect?” asked Avalon.

“Several types of items, but nothing unusual. He was a rather plodding sort of fellow, without much imagination. He collected old books to begin with, then old coins, and finally stamps. The fever never got to him so badly that he would invest really large sums, so that his collections are not what you might call first class. They're the kind that appraisers smile condescendingly over. Still, it gave him pleasure, and his thousand-book library isn't entirely worthless. Nor is the rest. And of course even a minor collector may sometimes get his hands on a good item.”

“And your uncle had done so?” asked Trumbull.

“My Aunt Hester—she was the third child, two years younger than my Uncle Bryce and five years older than my father, who died fourteen years ago— My Aunt Hester said that my uncle had a valuable item.”

“How did she know?”

“My Aunt Hester was always close to my uncle. She lived in Florida, but after my uncle was widowed she took to spending .some of the summer months with him in Connecticut each year. She had never married and they grew closer with age, since there was almost no one else. My uncle had a son but he has been in South America for a quarter century. He has married a Brazilian girl and has three children. He and his father were not on good terms at all, and neither seemed to exist as far as the other was concerned. There was myself, of course, and they entertained me often out of a sense of duty and distant liking; and I was rather fond of them.

“Aunt Hester was a prim old lady, terribly self-conscious about the family position; to a ridiculous and outmoded extent, of course. She was precise and stiff in her speech, and was convinced that she was living in a hostile world of thieves and Socialists. She never wore her jewelry, for instance. She kept it in a safe-deposit box at all times.

“It was natural, then, that my uncle would leave the house to my aunt, and that she would in turn leave it to me. I'm genealogical enough, however, to remember that my Uncle Bryce has a son who is the direct heir and more deserving, by ties of blood, to have the house. I've written to my cousin asking him if he is satisfied with the will, and I received a letter from him three days ago telling me I was welcome to the house and contents. Actually, he said, rather bitterly, that as far as he was concerned I could burn the house and contents.”