6
Life Begins in darkness and ends in darkness and in between is a nightmare.
A man in a bar in Algiers told me that. It was in my mind when I woke up to the gray cold of another day.
All you can do, that man said, is stay out of it. He may be right, but life is short. If you stay out you’ll never know if you could have done something to make it less a nightmare. Like doing something about men who push other men under trains.
I was angry, and lay in bed enjoying the anger that had replaced the shaking of last night. I also thought about our ability to forget once an immediate threat has passed. It’s our strength, I suppose, but also our weakness, and in the safe light of day I was sure no one could kill me. Stupid, of course, but without that belief, who could go ahead being a detective or anything else?
After a big breakfast to prove how good my nerves were, I spent the morning looking for Weiss again. I walked with one eye looking behind. I was brave, but not crazy. I didn’t find a smell of Weiss, but I found that Paul Baron was still looking.
In the afternoon I checked out Deirdre Fallon. She was a regular at the Charles XII, she was well known, and she had been there with Radford. Her hairdresser backed her up, too. George Ames also checked out, but not as definitely. He had arrived at his club around noon all right, and had left around 5:00 P.M., but it was a big club with many doors, and Ames had not been with someone all the time.
I took the late afternoon train for North Chester. When I got off, there was a clean tang to the cold air: country air. The suburban town had a rural feel, with tree-lined streets, and a single old black limousine at the taxi stand. When we were out of the town and in the country, I asked the driver if he had seen Walter Radford get off the train on Monday.
“Come in on the one-fourteen. That’s the twelve-ten out of the city. He took my cab. Old lady Radford come in on the three-two; the two-eight out of the city. Cops already asked me that. You a cop?”
“Private,” I said.
“You don’t say?”
The driver glanced at my empty sleeve and looked like he would like to talk some more, but I wasn’t in the mood to tell any of my stories about losing the arm. We finally turned through a high iron gate and went along a curving drive through thick woods deep in snow to a house set in a large, snow-covered lawn.
It was a big house, but austere. The simple three-story brick center section was over a hundred and fifty years old. Two white frame wings had been added later, but no later than 1850. My driver had another train to meet, but he’d come back in an hour unless I called earlier. I knocked and waited in the brittle cold and impossible silence of a country twilight.
A short, dark man in a butler’s outfit answered the door. Walter Radford was not at home. I gave my name and asked if I could talk to Mrs. Radford. The butler bowed me into an elegant entry hall and vanished through sliding doors to the left. A fine Federal Period staircase curved upward at the rear of the entry hall. A thin woman came through the sliding doors.
“Mr. Fortune? I’m Gertrude Radford.”
She had the neat white hair, veined hands, and loose skin of her years, but there was a youthfulness about her. It was her eyes: wide, blue, almost innocent eyes. They were the eyes of someone who had faced few hard knocks, and who had never had to doubt anything. She wore a long black silk dress. Her pale face and nervous hands were the only signs that she might be disturbed by what had happened.
“I’d like to talk about Monday, Mrs. Radford? About your brother-in-law?”
“You’re the detective George and Deirdre mentioned,” she said. “I don’t understand what you want. The police assure us that the man will be caught soon. He must be put away.”
“They’ll throw away the key.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Mr. Fortune,” she snapped, and frowned. “We are at coffee. You’ll join us for a cup.”
It was a command. I followed her into a dining hall of ornate sideboards, high-backed chairs, and a center table as long as six pool tables. Portraits of grim men from the past hung on the walls, all of them having a vague resemblance to the late Jonathan Radford and to George Ames. There were some fifteen people in the room. One of them was George Ames. They were all drinking coffee.
“How do you like it prepared, Mr. Fortune?” Gertrude Radford said.
The question would have been a surprise except that I was looking at the sideboards. There were percolators of every type; drip pots; filter-paper pots; silex types; espresso pots; one large urn; pots for boiling; and some ways of making coffee I couldn’t even name.
“We each brew our own, Mr. Fortune, in our own way,” Mrs. Radford said. “A family tradition going back over a hundred years. Coffee was the original Radford-Ames business. I myself favor a simple percolator.”
“Percolator is fine,” I said.
She led me into a corner. For a time we sat and drank. Coffee was sacred. It was good coffee. I watched the whole crew mothering their pots and cups, and all at once it gave me a chill. It was like a blood ritual with the celebrants drinking the blood of their ancestors at the high altar of family. A tribal rite designed, as all rites are designed, to keep the members inside and everyone else outside.
Mrs. Radford brought me out of my visions. “You’re suggesting, Mr. Fortune, that there is doubt about what happened to Jonathan?”
“I don’t know what happened to Jonathan,” I said.
“The police seem sure this Weiss…”
“Sure isn’t the same as knowing,” I said.
A man’s voice answered me: “That is a cynical statement, Mr. Fortune, and stubborn. You’re more competent than you look.”
George Ames stood over me. He wore evening clothes now-white tie and tails. He looked good.
“The police talked to me,” I said. “They’ll let me hang myself. Maybe we could talk about Jonathan’s enemies now?”
“Influence didn’t get rid of you, perhaps answers will,” Ames said. He took a black cigarette case from his inner pocket and selected an elegant cigarette with gold trim. “Every man makes enemies in sixty years, but there was no one recent or special. Murder is drastic, Fortune. It takes a powerful reason, don’t you think? There was no enemy of that magnitude.”
“Business?”
Ames smoked, smiled. “Jonathan was chairman of Radford Industries. It’s actually a financial holding company: impersonal, collective, almost anonymous. Jonathan’s death will change nothing for anyone.”
“Who gets the business now? Who gets his money?”
Mrs. Radford answered that. “Jonathan’s personal money goes all over the family. He made no secret of that. He was a bachelor, and at least fifty people will share in his will.”
“His real wealth,” Ames added, “was his holdings in Radford Industries. Everyone in the family has some shares. I have a few thousand myself, but Jonathan held fifteen percent. That chunk gives control of the company; he would never break it up. I assume it will go intact to Walter as the only young Radford.”
“It will,” Mrs. Radford said, “together with the five percent my husband had and Jonathan controlled since my husband died.”
“So Walter gets the business?” I said.
Ames laughed. It was a loud laugh. Almost too loud. “The stock doesn’t mean the power if I knew Jonathan. He’d just about given up on Walter as a businessman.”
“Don’t be insulting, George,” Mrs. Radford said coldly.
“Come now, Gertrude,” Ames said. “Walter hates the idea of running the company, and you know it. Jonathan knew it, too, and he’ll certainly have arranged it so that management will run the company at least for now. I hope so, anyway. I have a stake.”
“Walter will prove he can run the company,” Mrs. Radford said. “He’ll take hold now. Deirdre will help once
