that they loved me or that I loved them. In a way I think we’re more honest here. All girls get wined, dined, and given gifts by men they don’t really give a damn about; they only tell themselves they do to feel chaste. Some of what men gave me bought clothes and paid the rent, yes, but that isn’t so unusual these days either. I may not have loved any of them, but I never went with a man I didn’t like. I never had to; maybe I was lucky.” She stopped and seemed to be thinking about her luck. It didn’t appear to make her ecstatic.
“Why tell me?” I said. “I was never ordained.”
“All men are ordained on that subject,” she said. “But I’m not apologizing. It’s over now, but I enjoyed the last four years. No regrets. You’re forming theories, and I want you to form the right theories. Walter seems to love me. I don’t love him in the normal sense, but I’ve never needed love. I like him, and I like to be loved. I think I can do him good. I intend to try.”
“Especially now that he’s really rich.”
“That won’t hurt. I like what money can buy, and that’s most of everything. Perhaps that’s what I’ve been telling you. But he asked me to marry him some time ago, and Jonathan liked me.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Were you part of the squeeze?”
“I’d hardly have been worth Paul Baron’s time.”
“You would be worth a lot to Walter. Or maybe Jonathan wouldn’t have liked you if he had known about the last four years.”
She smoothed her skirt over her lap. “I may have been part of Baron’s pressure, yes. But not seriously. Walter knows all about me. So does Mrs. Radford, and so did Jonathan. Even George Ames knows. I told you I had no apologies. I learned that you can’t live with a false front, why should you? I don’t need Walter so much I would hide myself. As it happens, Mrs. Radford seems to admire me for it all, and so did Jonathan. They seemed to feel that I showed initiative and determination.”
I could believe it, from what I had seen of the Radfords. You didn’t get rich a hundred years ago, or today, in a commercial society by being soft or particularly moral. To the old pirates of commerce, morality was relative. It still is.
“You knew Baron before you met Walter?”
“Of course. We were all invited to his parties to make contacts. He didn’t introduce me to Walter, but I did meet Walter at that party. Are you thinking that one of us killed Paul Baron?”
“Who’s us? The girls here, or the Radford clan?”
“Either.”
“I don’t know the girls, but Baron was trouble for the Radfords. I think he killed Jonathan, and that gives the family two first-rate motives.”
“Revenge? Hardly,” she said, “and if one of them was going to kill Paul Baron, why not do it before he got to Jonathan?”
“Maybe Jonathan tried to do it. And then, after Jonathan was dead, Baron tried to go on with the blackmail.”
She gave me a cool frown, but said nothing.
“Tell me about Carla Devine,” I said.
“I can’t tell you much. She’s relatively new here. She was Paul Baron’s latest conquest. He tried us all at one time or another. He dazzled Carla.”
“Did he try you?”
“Naturally. He didn’t dazzle me.”
“Is Carla here?”
“She didn’t come home last night, the girls tell me. She’s done that before, but she was usually with Paul Baron then.”
“Do you know a friend of hers, a boy with an old, gray coupe? Thin, pale, long wild hair.”
“No. No one like that comes here.”
“Do you know where she might have gone?”
She seemed to think. “She talked about her parents at times. They live in a place called City Island. Mr. Gerald Devine; 42 Throggs Lane.”
“All right, Miss Fallon, and thanks.” I stood.
“You might as well make it Deirdre. We seem to be fated to meet often.” She looked at my empty sleeve. Her eyes were foggy tunnels. “Someday you’ll tell me about your arm.”
“No I won’t.”
“The story is reserved for someone special?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “I’ll walk out with you.”
She went into the next room and came back wearing a perky fur hat on her chestnut hair. She carried a fur coat that had to be sable. She handed it to me. It felt like my income for two years, if I had good years. She didn’t touch me as she slipped into the coat. She didn’t have to. Just being that close, I felt her down to my shoes.
We went out and down in the elevator. She looked like a Russian princess-the rosy princess bundled in fur and boots a boy dreams about when he’s fifteen and reading Tolstoy. She made me dream her naked. That was bad. It would have been bad even if I wasn’t investigating a murder. She didn’t fit with five rooms without central heat.
On the street she gave me her hand. “I think you’re a tenacious man, Mr. Fortune. Be careful. I may try to make you tell me the story of your arm someday.”
I smiled. It was all I could think to do. She walked to a small red Fiat. I watched the Fiat drive off. I think I waved.
17
City Island is in the Bronx. It is near Orchard Beach-a strip of brown sand and shallow water where a million people wade on hot summer days like Hindus in the Ganges and feel privileged.
City Island itself is barely an island now, but they still build and berth boats up there. Not long ago it was a true haven from the grime of the city. Today it is just a part of the Bronx: a little less crowded, and with a few more trees.
Gerald Devine’s house was squeezed among shabby wooden-box type houses and a dispirited red brick apartment building. It faced the sullen, scummy water of Long Island Sound. The land in front of the house at the edge of the water was all rock, but there was no grandeur. A sluggish tide lapped like oil at the black rocks. Leafless gray trees looked as alive as laundry poles.
In this bleak landscape where even the snow was gray, Devine’s house shone like a miniature diamond. It was a small, white Cape Cod cottage set in a neat yard that must have been all flowers in summer. The picket fence around the yard was like well-capped teeth. I parked in the swept driveway behind a 1947 Packard Clipper that looked almost new.
The door of the house opened before I reached it. A stocky man with thin, fine gray hair and a pink complexion watched me approach. A crooked smile that had probably been considered roguish when he was young flirted with his thin mouth but didn’t quite take. His blue eyes were small, clear, and questioning.
“Mr. Gerald Devine?” I asked.
“I am,” he said. “Is it Carla you want?”
The lilt of Ireland was unmistakable in his voice. A soft accent, and at another time I might have enjoyed identifying the county. Not now. “I’m not the first, Mr. Devine?”
“Third,” he said. “No one comes after Carla anymore. We see little of her ourselves. Now three come in a morning. It’s trouble, isn’t it?”
“Tell me about the other two,” I said.
He rubbed his upper lip. “I don’t know. You better come in.”
I followed him into a small, clean room cluttered with furniture as old as the Packard and just as well-tended. A woman sat in a reclining chair. She had dark, worried eyes. Her black hair showed no gray at all. She was small,
