“Terrible minds some of you young men have!” Mr. Budd suddenly became jovial again. “All right, what’s your point?”
“If we could have the results of Moreton’s confidential inquiries, we might have enough information to make any further examination of all these claims unnecessary.”
Mr. Budd stroked his chin. “I see. Yes, not bad, George.” He nodded briskly. “O.K. If the old chap’s alive and in his right mind, see what you can do. The quicker we can get out from under the whole thing, the better.”
“Yes, sir,” said George.
That afternoon he had a call from Mr. Budd’s secretary to say that a check with Mr. Moreton’s former club had disclosed that he was now living in retirement at Montclair, New Jersey. Mr. Budd had written to the old man asking him if he would see George.
Two days later a reply came from Mrs. Moreton. She said that her husband had been bedridden for some months, but that in view of former associations, and providing that Mr. Carey’s visit was brief, Mr. Moreton would be glad to put his memory at Mr. Carey’s disposal. Mr. Moreton slept afternoons. Perhaps Friday morning at eleven o’clock would be convenient to Mr. Carey.
“That must be his second wife,” said Mr. Budd.
On the Friday morning, George put the deed box and all its original contents into the back of his car and drove out to Montclair.
3
The house was a comfortable-looking place surrounded by several acres of well-kept garden, and it occurred to George that the financial fate of Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek had not been quite as disastrous as Mr. Budd had implied. The second Mrs. Moreton proved to be a lean, neat woman in her late forties. She had a straight back, a brisk manner, and a patronizing smile. It seemed probable that she had been Mr. Moreton’s nurse.
“Mr. Carey is it? You won’t tire him, will you? He’s allowed to sit up in the mornings at present, but we have to be careful. Coronary thrombosis.” She led the way through to a glass-enclosed porch at the rear of the house.
Mr. Moreton was big and pink and flabby, like an athlete gone to seed. He had short white hair and very blue eyes, and there was still a trace of boyish good looks visible in the slack, puffy face. He was lying, propped up by cushions and swathed in a blanket, on a day-bed fitted with a book-rest. He greeted George eagerly, thrusting the book-rest aside and struggling into a sitting posture in order to shake hands. He had a soft, pleasant voice and smelled faintly of lavender water.
For a minute or two he asked after the people at George’s office whom he had known, and then about a number of men in Philadelphia of whom George had never even heard. At last he sat back with a smile.
“Don’t ever let anyone persuade you to retire, Mr. Carey,” he said. “You live in the past and become a bore. A dishonest bore, too. I ask you how Harry Budd is. You tell me he’s fine. What I really want to know is whether he’s gone bald.”
“He has,” George said.
“And whether, in spite of all that studied bonhomie, he’s got ulcers yet, or high blood-pressure.”
George laughed.
“Because if he has,” continued Mr. Moreton amiably, “that’s fine. He’s one son of a bitch I don’t have to envy.”
“Now, Bob!” his wife said reproachfully.
He spoke without looking at her. “Mr. Carey and I are going to talk a little business now, Kathy,” he said.
“Very well. Don’t overtire yourself.”
Mr. Moreton did not reply. When she had gone, he smiled. “Drink, my boy?”
“No, thank you, sir. I think Mr. Budd explained why I wanted to see you.”
“Sure. The Schneider Johnson matter. I could have guessed anyway.” He looked sideways at George. “So you found it, did you?”
“Found what, sir?”
“The diary and the photographs and all Hans Schneider’s stuff. You found it, eh?”
“It’s outside in the car, sir, with some of your personal belongings that got put in the box with it.”
Mr. Moreton nodded. “I know. I put them there myself-on top. I figured that, with any luck, a person opening the box would think that it was all just my personal junk.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you, sir.”
“Of course you don’t. I’ll explain. As administrator I was ethically bound to hand over everything, lock, stock, and barrel. Well, that confidential stuff was something I didn’t want to hand over. I wanted to destroy it, but Greener and Cleek wouldn’t let me. They said that if anything came up afterwards and John J. found out, I’d be in trouble.”
George said: “Oh.” He had not really believed in his suggestion that Moreton, Greener and Cleek had concealed important information. It had merely occurred to him as a means of beguiling Mr. Budd. Now he was a trifle shocked.
Mr. Moreton shrugged. “So all I could do was to try and camouflage it. Well, I didn’t succeed.” He stared out gloomily at the garden for a moment, then turned to George briskly as if to dismiss an ugly memory. “I suppose the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s after the loot again, eh?”
“Yes. They want to know if Mr. Sistrom’s going to fight them on it.”
“And Harry Budd, who doesn’t like soiling his dainty fingers with such things, can’t wait to get the thing out of the office, eh? No, you don’t have to answer that, my boy. Let’s get down to business.”
“Would you like me to get the papers out of the car, sir?”
“We won’t need them,” said Mr. Moreton. “I know what’s in that box as well as I know my own name. Did you read that little book Hans Schnieder wrote for his children?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think of it?”
George smiled. “After reading it I made a resolution. If I have children, I’m never going to tell them a thing about my war experiences.”
The old man chuckled. “They’ll get it out of you. The thing you want to watch out for is having a drip of a son like Hans who writes down what you say. That’s dangerous.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you. I was administrator all right, but I went to Germany because my partners sent me. Tail wagging the dog. The case had been in our hair too long and they wanted to have done with it. My instructions were to confirm what we already believed-that there was no legitimate heir to the estate. Well, when I found that Hans was probably a son of Franz Schneider’s first marriage, I had to know about that marriage in order to complete the picture. As you know, I went to Potsdam to see if I could trace him through the regimental archives. To begin with, I failed.”
“But next day you went back for another check through.”
“Yes, but I’d had a night to think. And I’d thought again about what Hans had written. If there was any truth in the thing at all, Sergeant Schneider had become a casualty at the Battle of Eylau and been lost in the retreat. Surely the war diary would record that fact in a casualty list. So that next day, instead of going all over the nominal rolls again, I got the interpreter to translate the regimental account of the battle for me.” He sighed reminiscently. “There are some moments in life, my boy, that always feel good no matter how many times you go over them again in your mind. That was one of them. It was late in the morning and getting very warm. The interpreter was having trouble with that old writing and was stumbling over the translation of it. Then he began on the account of the long march from Eylau to Insterburg. I was only half listening. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about a bad march I’d done in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. And then something the interpreter had said made me jump right out of my skin.”
He paused.
