Ransom Game (12 page)

If Blackwood thought I was a comedian, she would love Chris Savas. I could picture the two of them romping on the big front yard with the Warren mansion in the background. I tried to think how the latest news from the coroner changed my life. Frankly, I was feeling so terrible, that I couldn't think of anything. I backed out of the office, turned off the overhead light, and slammed the spring lock behind me. It wasn't noon, but I'd had the office up to my eardrums. Home is where the heart is, and that's where I was headed.

FIFTEEN

After a shower and a nap, I got up refreshed, then dressed to present my better self to the gang at the Warren place. I slicked down my hair with both of my military brushes, cleaned my nails and darkened my ankle under the hole in my best black socks with a dab of Warren Shoepolish. My shirt was clean, even if it had never reconciled itself with the shape of my neck. A conservative tie with a fat knot in it hid most of the problem. The face in the mirror was recognizably my own, except for the blotches where I'd scrubbed it a little too enthusiastically. My shoes dulled the shine on my trousers when I rubbed the uppers against my trouser legs, but picked up a little of the afterglow.

Everybody knew the Warren mansion. It hung over the edge of the Escarpment from its highest point. You could see its lights coming over the highway late at night from the Falls. I'd heard that old George Warren used to entertain celebrities up there over the years. The names never got into the papers. Warren wouldn't stand for that, although he would sometimes allow a discreet society note: Mr. and Mrs. George Warren entertained Lord and Lady Whozzis at their Mountain home last weekend …

Knowing the location of the mansion was one thing, getting there was something else again. I cut off the fourlane highway, twirled around a cloverleaf or two and found myself on a straight macadamized road heading for the Mountain, as some of the locals called the Escarpment. When it reached the slope, the road curved to the right and began a series of switchbacks, each mounting higher, until the well-sanded hairpins gave way to a straight razor cut through a forest of young beech and poplars. There was a gatehouse with large stone pillars to the left, and piles of dusty snow on either side of a clean black lane that arced up to the house. The view was interrupted by the box hedges and tall ornamental trees, some of the smaller ones with winter bags over them. The drive was designed to make the mansion look impressive and it did. It would have taken more than a discarded back seat from a '58 Chevy or a rubber tire swing hanging from that silver birch to spoil the effect of that much ivy covering that much wall. Each of the windows, the same number on each side of the big front door, was divided into a dozen panes and each was winking at me differently; telling me that this was the wink of old glass. A
porte cochère
jutted out from the front door. I left the Olds with the keys in it. If they wanted it moved, the help could do it.

It was a serious-faced, attractive young woman with beautiful eyebrows who let me in. I told her my business, and without speaking, she indicated that I follow her, She led the way past a few museum pieces in the front hall. She didn't bother taking my coat, but moved up the curving staircase, which was made of dark wood with slender, turned balusters. Climbing ahead of me, the girl was also slender, with easy movements. The prints on the wall were engravings of classical ruins, massive arches seen through other arches. After the fourth or fifth of these, I became distracted by the gentle rustle of the skirts just in front of me. Then, suddenly it hit me. This was Blackwood, the Mrs. Danvers voice I'd scuffled with on the phone. From the landing at the head of the stairs, she led the way through a long passage to the back of the house and motioned me to stop before a closed door. She knocked and went in, leaving me to stand in my own meltwaters. In a second, she was out again and called me by name. It was Blackwood, all right.

“Mr. Cooperman, come in please.”

“Thank you, Blackwood,” I said, trying not to sound too smug. Her eyebrows came together in a very attractive way, and I walked past her into the next room.

It was a huge studio, with north light, an easel as big as the Ritz, lots of work-in-progress hanging on the tall walls, which went up through where the ceiling ought to have been to a roof about thirty feet above the floor. A table near the easel had been mustered to serve as a palette: a piece of plate glass was nearly covered with blobs of pigment. At one end of the room, a balcony jutted a dozen feet into the room. To reach it, a black wroughtiron spiral staircase beckoned to the sure of foot. A door from the third floor of the house also led to this balcony, which held a large piece of sculpture and a shiny leather couch that I bet didn't open up into anything. In the middle of the studio, Gloria Jarman, the Warren heiress, was sitting on a tall stool in old jeans and a paint-smeared man's shirt. She got up and started walking to me with a paintbrush in her teeth, like a pirate with a dagger. She was tall and slender, a brunette with the white skin that should always go with it. Her eyes were green and friendly.

“Mr. Cooperman, I'm so glad you could come. Sorry to welcome you in such a mess, but I'm preparing for an exhibition in the spring and I've got at least forty more pictures to do. I hate working in the winter, don't you? You have to steal the light. I've ended up putting in artificial. Otherwise I'd be here till July with nothing to show for it. Come over here, I'll show you what I've been doing.” Without taking a new breath or looking back, she raised her voice, calling: “Blackwood, we'll have some tea in here, I think. You'd enjoy a cup of tea, wouldn't you, Mr. Cooperman? I know I would.” She picked up a rag and began rubbing her hands, as though she wanted to shake hands with me, but the timing was wrong. She gave it up after a nervous minute.

The canvas on the big easel was a painting of a broken doll. The head had been split open. The painting was precise to the point of pedantry: every blotch on the face, every tear of the clothing was rendered faithfully, perhaps too faithfully. The pattern of the doll clothes, the texture of the composition head, the glassy stare of the eyes all announced that Gloria Jarman, or Warren (I didn't know then that she exhibited under another name entirely), was a very accomplished artist.

“I've been working in acrylic for the past year,” she said, looking at one of the pictures with her head tilted to one side and pulling at a loose strand of hair.

Wherever you turned in the studio, pictures of dolls looked out at you with a gaze that was strange and frightening. Blown up on the canvases to twice the normal size or bigger, they made me want to avoid eye-contact. They weren't all battered like the one on the easel; some sat with dignity, some stood. All were Victorian with cream complexions and long dresses. It was as if each of the figures were expressing some half-stifled emotion that had been under control for a hundred years. Each was so slyly drawn that it was impossible for me at least to tell how the painter had shown the greed or anger, fear or pettiness on their unmarked faces. Otherwise, all looked exactly like the dolls in the basket of old dolls lying in a heap near the outside wall.

She led the way to another leather couch at one end of the room. Here the light came from behind me, and the view of the studio could be seen without blinking. She didn't quiz me about her pictures, but she'd watched my face carefully as I'd examined them. There was a large slab of marble in front of the couch with heavy art books on it. Gloria Jarman took a seat opposite me and looked at me intently, like she was trying to decide if I could hold a pose in the nude for twenty minutes at room temperature.

“You're not very big, are you?” she asked smiling and giving a toss to her head to suggest that she was talking in italics.

“No, but I'm wiry,” I told her. Funny, I didn't mind her staring at me. It gave me a democratic chance to stare back at her with equal frankness. Her dark hair was a mess, pulled back from a high, calming forehead with a polka-dot red bandana. Her cheekbones were covered with the glow of the work she'd interrupted, her mouth was generous with full lips, and her chin came to a point which tended to make her face a little top-heavy. Her hands were large, hanging at the end of nicely turned arms under the paint smears. Her shirt hung free at the waist and covered the designer label on the well-cut jeans. Her shoes were brown and English. The top three buttons of her shirt were undone, and that ended up, as usual, the math focus of my attention. As I looked at her, I felt suddenly sorry for George Warren. It would be easy to recognize fortune hunters buzzing around a plain daughter, but when the heiress was a great beauty, how could he sort out the drones?

“I'm sorry,” she said, “I was staring. Very rude.”

“So was I. We're both rude, but even.” Now she tried out her let's-get-down-to-business smile. It was my cue. “You asked me to come up here, Mrs. Jarman, so I braved the hairpin turns, and here I am. Do you have a problem? I could use the business.”

“You put it so appealingly, Mr. Cooperman. How could I resist?” She tried another smile and shifted in her leather chair, glad the meeting was under way. “Let's get down to cases. I had a phone call this morning. I think it was Johnny Rosa.” She looked at me trying to see the effect of her words. I tried to show as little surprise as I could get away with. After all, she'd told me that she'd call only if he tried to reach her.

“I see,” I said. I let her have that much and a serious frown. “Tell me about it.”

“It was about eight o'clock, or a little before. I honestly didn't check the time. I thought about it later. I thought that it might be important. It was around then, around eight.”

“Keep talking,” I said.

“He asked for me. Blackwood wasn't here. I was still in bed. I thought it might be Bob, phoning on the kitchen extension to tell me something before heading off to work, but it was this different voice. I don't know how to describe it. It was full of menace, I guess. It sent shivers, anyway.”

“What did the voice say?”

“It asked if I was Mrs. Jarman. I said yes. Then there was a pause, as if he hadn't expected to get me so quickly, and then he said something like, ‘You were the one. It had to be you. You've got to see me. I'll wait for you at the hole.' I think that's what he said. ‘All I want is what I earned. Come alone at noon tomorrow.'”

“I said I didn't know what he was talking about but then he hung up. Some of his words may have been different, but that's the gist of it. Do you think it was Johnny Rosa? I can't think of anyone else it might have been.”

“Do you know what ‘the hole' might be?”

“No, it doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe I didn't hear him correctly. Why do you think he telephoned me, Mr. Cooperman? If it is Johnny Rosa, why is he still pursuing me? Why doesn't he stop or find someone new? I'm sick to death of Johnny Rosa and the lot of them. Do you understand?” She looked as though her hair was going to come loose; it had been thrown about as she added expression to her recounting of the conversation. I tried to think like a detective for a change and pulled my gaze away from Gloria.

“Well,” I said, pulling a Player's from the nearly empty pack in my overcoat pocket. I found a light more easily than the next thing to say. I lit the cigarette elaborately, watching Gloria's eyes follow the whole process. I felt like a magician who knew there was no rabbit up his sleeve. “Well,” I repeated, “if that was Johnny Rosa, then my former client went to a lot of trouble trying to make it appear like he'd been killed. That's pretty funny.”

“I don't understand.” She lifted a chin that in this position didn't look so much pointed as aristocratic. I guess she led with her chin quite a lot. I liked it.

“She hired me to find Johnny. Now it sounds likely that she knew he wasn't really missing. Maybe she was trying to impress a friend, or a couple of friends.”

“Why the mystery? Ask her.”

“Can't. She was murdered last night.”

“Oh dear. I mean, that's awful.”

“For her, yeah. She paid me to find somebody that wasn't lost, and somebody drowned her for doing it. Anyway, she didn't get what she paid for, so, in a way, I still feel like I'm on the case. For another couple of days at least.”

“And then?”

“Then I'll be working for you. Frankly, you need me. I'll try not to be so careless this time.” She smiled, but her paint-smeared hand went involuntarily to her throat just the same. At this juncture, Blackwood came in wheeling a tray with a large silver teapot and a few very small pieces of bread and butter.

SIXTEEN

After the last of the crumbs had been cleared away on the tea trolley, with Blackwood following in its wake, I was settling into the prospect of further talk about business, but Gloria had caught me watching Blackwood's retreating backside from the room. As backsides go, it was one of the nicest I'd seen, and it was all the nicer because it didn't appear that she took much notice of it.

“She's a treasure,” Gloria said.

“What?”

“Blackwood, she's wonderful. I don't know what I'd do without her.”

“Where'd you learn to talk like that? Do you normally call people ‘a treasure' and say you don't know what you'd do without them?”

“I see what you mean. It makes me sound older. Sounds like my mother talking through me. I'll try to watch it. I find myself imitating people I respect. I have to watch that in my painting. But I should really draw the line at Mother.” She'd ignored a rasp of class envy in my voice. Breeding had to be worth that at least. She went on about her mother.

“She became one of those despicable rich women who haunt the casinos in the south of France. I think I keep seeing her in the movies. I haven't heard from her in years. She didn't even send a card when Daddy died, although, of course, we heard from her lawyer.”