Puzzle for Fiends (11 page)

“Here, Gordy.”

If I refused it, I would show I didn’t trust them and would lose the slight advantage I’d gained. I took the pill. I took the glass from Mrs. Friend. While they watched, smiling, I swallowed the pill.

They left me then. Dr. Croft was right about the fast action of the drug. Almost immediately I felt thick drowsiness blurring me. The drowsiness made me more conscious than usual of my amnesia. With all the detail fading from my thoughts, there was a great blank left where my name and my memories should be. Gradually a vision of Netti, dim as the image on a myopic’s retina, rose to fill the empty space. I had fooled them into believing they had fooled me. I had won the first round. Now if I could get Netti to smuggle Emma up to my room. Or if I could get Netti to tell me the truth about that old woman!…

They had tried to take everything from me but they hadn’t taken Netti.

Netti’s red-veined gums… Netti’s white cap… Netti’s sour gin breath… Netti’s hip jutting out…

I awoke feeling alert and rested. The travelling clock on the bedside table pointed to one. There was sunlight everywhere.

A warm vigorous breeze blew through the open windows, stirring the heavy drapes. It was a wonderful room, gay, uninhabited, part of the summer outside. For a moment I had a pang of longing for Selena. Selena who was summer, who was all a man could want. Selena with the liquid hair and the warm, generous lips.

But the clock said one. One meant lunch. And lunch meant Netti. I quivered with anticipation at the prospect of Netti.

Exactly at one fifteen the door opened. Selena came in. She was wearing a white swimming suit, a scrap of a swimming suit.

She was carrying a tray.

“Your lunch, baby.”

She brought the tray to me and arranged it on the invalid bed-table. She sat down by my side, her blue eyes laughing, the skin of her bare arm, brushing mine, warm from the sun.

“Sweet, darling Gordy. He just sleeps and eats and sleeps and eats without a care in the world.”

She kissed me, her hair tumbling forward, brushing my cheek.

“Where’s Netti?” I said.

“Netti? Darling, that dreary Netti. What would you want with her?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I just wondered where she was.”

“Then, darling, I’m afraid you’ll never know.” Selena’s smile was sweet as syringa. “No one will ever know, except maybe a couple of sailors who keep telephone numbers.”

I knew then what she was going to say and I almost hated her.

“Really, she was a frightful girl. Always stealing our liquor. And then, bringing you up a jigger of gin. Gordy, darling, with Mr. Moffat coming and everything, you don’t imagine we’d put up with that, do you?”

Selena patted my hand. She rose from the bed and strolled to the window, leaning on the sill and gazing out.

“Mimsey was awfully nice to her. Nicer than she deserved. She gave Netti a whole month’s salary when she fired her.”

After
lunch Jan brought in the wheel chair. Like everything else produced by the Friends, it was the most luxurious of its kind, self-propelling with deep rubber tires and gaily chintzed overstuffed upholstery.

Jan was both proud and proprietary about it. He seemed to think it was his toy and that I was just another prop to make the game more amusing. Tenderly, like a little girl putting her favorite doll in a perambulator, he lifted me from the bed and installed me in the chair. He brought a green silk robe and tucked it around my knees. He fussed over me, tidying and straightening my pajama jacket. He stepped back, surveying me with a huge, white grin. Then he pushed the chair a few feet around the room and burst into a gale of laughter.

I had been entertaining in bed. I was deliriously funny in the wheel chair.

I had thought about asking him if he had taken the lavender-scented handkerchief and, if so, where it was. But the danger, apart from the difficulty of putting the idea across with gestures, discouraged me. He stopped wheeling me around. With my one good arm, I experimented propelling the chair myself. It was easy, but almost immediately Jan called:

“Nein.”

He grabbed the rail at the back with a huge fist and stopped me. His face was dark and sulky.

I had a wheel chair but, apparently, Jan was not going to allow me the potential liberty it offered.

Still smoldering, he pushed me out of the room into a broad sunny corridor. This was my first glimpse of the house that was supposed to be mine. He rolled me into a living-room. It was one of the most spectacular rooms I had ever seen. One entire wall was plate glass, revealing a vast panorama of lonely mountains and a precipitous canyon between.

I had not realized the house was so high up. I had not realized, either, exactly how remote from civilization it was.

We moved through the living-room to a spacious, book-lined library. There was a telephone, I noticed, on a desk in the corner, standing next to a typewriter. The realization of it as a link, however slender, with the outside world was comforting.

French windows opened from the library onto a riotous prospect of flowers. Jan was pushing me towards them when Mrs. Friend emerged from an inner door and came, smiling, to me.

“Darling boy, how nice to see you up. And how do you like your house? Sweet, isn’t it?”

“Kind of cut off from everywhere, isn’t it? Any neighbors?”

Mrs. Friend gave her throaty laugh. “Good heavens no, dear. No one for miles. There used to be an old farmer who had an avocado farm way back in a little canyon behind the house, but your father bought him off. Your father hated neighbors. It was the Napoleon in him, I think. He used to like to get up on high, craggy places and be the monarch of all he surveyed.” She patted my hand. “The others are at the pool. Is Jan going to wheel you down to join the fun?”

“I guess so,” I said.

Mrs. Friend sighed. “Lucky you. Your poor mother never seems to have a moment’s rest. Back to the kitchen I go to order dinner.”

She drifted away. Jan pushed me through the french windows onto a tiled terrace and off it onto a grass path between blossoming hibiscus, oleander, and mimosa. There was no view here, no sense of loneliness, only the bright, almost stifling coziness of the shrubs and flowers. A turn in the path under a wire arch smothered in blue plumbago brought us suddenly and unexpectedly to the edge of a long, wide-rimmed swimming pool.

It was the swimming pool of your dreams. Screened on all four sides by fluttering eucalyptus trees, it was also bounded by a lower hedge of orange trees. The perfume from the creamy white blossoms was almost oppressive and the ripe oranges glowed like fire among the glossy dark leaves. The water of the pool itself was clear and blue as the sky.

Gay mattresses strewed the broad concrete rim. On one of them Selena in her white swimming suit lounged with Dr. Nate Croft. The young doctor, who presumably had no urgent business to attend to, was wearing white trunks. Naked, his body with its soft, dusky skin was as exotic and uncountry-clubbish as his eyes. He lay very near to Selena and his bare arm, I noticed, was lying lightly against hers. Marny was there too. In a brief bra suit of yellow cotton, she sat on the edge of the pool, dangling her long, tanned legs in the water.

The moment they saw me, all three of them came clustering around me, laughing, chattering, commenting on the wheel chair. When Selena had told me that Netti was fired, I had felt at the end of my tether. But the freedom of the wheel chair, restricted as it was, had brought a return of hope. I laughed and kidded back at them with the inward satisfaction that at least my carefreeness was fooling them.

Having delivered me, Jan seemed to feel that his employee duties were fulfilled. Grinning, he stripped off the blue polo shirt and strode to the rim of the pool. He fingered there, lazily flexing the muscles of his chest and arms. His physique was really phenomenal. One glimpse of him and Brunhilde would have walked out on Siegfried. As I watched him I noticed that Marny was watching him too.

Her lids were half closed and the curly lashes concealed her eyes. But there was a strange expression on her young face, intent, almost greedy.

Jan dived into the pool. His face appeared from the blue water. He was laughing and pushing back the long hair, darker now, the color of wet sand.

Marny caught me looking at her. Her face quickly assumed its normal, impudent grin.

“The wages of abstinence, Gordy,” she said. “No drink, no smoke. Let Jan be a lesson to you.”

Jan was playing with a large, red rubber ball now. Tossing it up in the air and catching it, throwing it and diving under it like an exhibitionistic sea-lion. Selena had been standing by me with her hand absently on my shoulder. Suddenly she ran to the pool, dived in and swam to Jan. She was as at home in the water as the big Dutchman. She reached him. She grabbed the ball just before he caught it and squirmed away, laughing a deep, husky laugh. Jan lumbered after her. He caught her leg. The ball slipped from Selena’s wet fingers. It bobbed away, floating, bright scarlet, on the water.

Neither of them seemed to notice it. They went on struggling. Both of them were laughing. We could see their suntanned limbs, entangled as Selena fought, only half earnestly, to escape. Selena was wearing no cap. The beautiful molding of her head showed as the wet hair clung around it. She half broke away from Jan and he leaped for her again. As his arms closed around her, I caught a glimpse of her profile. Her eyes were shining and her red lips were parted in a hot, excited smile.

I felt sharp pain in my shoulder. I looked up. Nate Croft was gripping me so fiercely that the knuckles of his hand were white. I glanced up at his face and I knew that he did not have the faintest idea that he was clutching me. His lips were almost as light as his knuckles, and his eyes, fixed on the struggling brown bodies in the pool, were blazing with fury.

I was learning quite a lot about my captors. But this fact was, perhaps, the most revealing. There was no need to wonder any more why a doctor would risk his entire professional career by becoming party to any conspiracy against me. A man who could react that violently to Selena’s contact with another male would do anything for her—commit murder if necessary.

Murder! The word brought a chill.

That supposedly playful struggle in the pool had done something queer and heightening to the atmosphere. Even I had been infected by it. Without warning, Nate Croft leaped from my side and dived into the pool. Marny shot after him.

They hurled themselves on Selena and Jan, and the spell was broken. All four of them continued to splash and struggle, but the tension was gone. They were just four people having fun with a red rubber ball.

They were still, however, caught up in the aftermath of that odd quadrilateral emotion. They seemed to have forgotten me. Unobtrusively I started to move the chair back away from the pool. Constantly supervised as I was, I could never make plans in advance. I had to seize opportunity whenever it offered itself. I maneuvered back to the arch of feathery blue plumbago. Still none of them were noticing. With my one good hand, I steered through the arch and propelled the chair as quickly as I could up the level grass path, onto the terrace and into the library.

My impulse was to search for the old woman. She must be somewhere in that luxurious, rambling bungalow, which was big enough to house a dozen old women. The door leading from the library to the inner corridor was ajar. I started towards it. The rubber wheels of the chair made no sound against the thick leaf-green carpet. Just as I reached the door, I heard footsteps in the passage beyond it. I peered through the crack between the half-open door and the frame and saw Mrs. Friend moving serenely down the passage away from me.

With her in the house, I knew any attempt to explore would be hopeless. Disconsolately, I spun the chair around, guiding it at random towards the fireplace. Above it, on the ochre-washed walls, hung four photographs in identical frames. One was a photograph of Selena; one was of Marny; one was of Mrs. Friend; and the fourth was of a severe, white-haired man with a bristly, belligerent moustache—presumably Gordon Renton Friend the Second.

I looked at the picture of the man who was supposed to be my father and who had died twenty-nine days before. It was a formidable enough face. I could imagine how utterly different the household must have been with him at the helm.

I felt an odd sympathy with him. Just how much were we tied up together? Mr. Moffat was coming tomorrow. I was to recite Mr. Friend’s
Ode to Aurora.
Did that connect somehow with old Mr. Friend? And how? With his life? Or with his death?

My ominous suspicions, which had been partially smothered by the knowledge that Nate hadn’t attended Mr. Friend at the time of his death, flared up again with renewed violence. Perhaps the Friends
had
murdered the old man and had tricked Dr. Leland into signing a death certificate by some typical Friend ruse which they were afraid might not hold up indefinitely. There was, of course, still no evidence to support that theory except a servant’s chance remark which had been reported to me second hand. But what other possible explanation could there be for the cat-and-mouse game the Friends were playing with me and for their passionate determination to convince me I was Gordy Friend?

And, whatever their plan, where was the real Gordy? Still off on a genuine bat? Or were they hiding him somewhere until I had paid the price for the murder?

The thought of Gordy made me realize what I should have realized immediately. In the group of family photographs above the mantel, there was no picture of Gordon Renton Friend the Third.

That there should be one was clear. They would not have omitted the only son. I looked at the wall closely and detected nail holes on either side of the photographs of Marny and Selena. There were patches too where the ochre was a shade darker. Unquestionably there had been three photographs and the pictures of Marny and Selena had been moved to give a symmetrical effect.

It wasn’t surprising of course, that the Friends had removed Gordy’s photograph. Now that I was mobile in the wheel chair, they could not have risked leaving it on the wall. But with a tingle of excitement, I realized that my pretense of trusting them might have paid dividends. Since they weren’t expecting me to spy, they probably hadn’t destroyed Gordy’s picture. It was possible that they hadn’t even bothered to hide it, but had just pushed it in a drawer.