“Then how did you know?”
He smiled and turned away like he didn’t want me to see it. We were already past the golf course, and the trees and fields of the greenbelt were giving up the ghost (an Indian ghost, I suppose) to suburban houses. When he looked back at me he said, “You seem an intelligent young woman. Surely you can guess by now?”
“How could I possibly? I don’t have the facts.”
“You mean you lack an exhaustive list of my acquaintances. If you had one it would do you no good, only confuse you. If you can’t guess without that sort of information, you couldn’t possibly guess if you were burdened with it.”
I’m good at a lot of things, but there’s one I’m not worth a damn at, and that’s turning on the feminine charm to get what I want out of a man. I tried it then, leaning over and catching hold of his arm and making my eyes go all misty while I said, “Please? Because I helped you?”
He just about laughed in my face. “Believe me, that’s not the way. You should have said, ‘Because I need your help.’ Or at least you should have if you really required the information. You’ve been watching television. It turns people into idiots about human relations.”
“I don’t watch
“Much better. Why?”
“Because Elaine—because my mother and father feel very, very strongly about this Uncle Bert thing, and if it gets out they’ll think I was the one who told. I have to know who did tell, so I can point the finger.”
“Me.”
“You’ve already told other people?”
He was smiling again. “Not really. But I might. I doubt, though, that your parents will think of you. They probably don’t even know you know.”
“Yes, they do. My father told me. Now please tell me who told you.”
“You really do feel you have to find out, don’t you? All right, I’ll answer your question. But a professional man has to turn a profit. So in exchange for my information, I want you to give me frank and honest answers to two questions of my own, and grant me a favor.”
“What’s the favor? Who are you, anyway?”
“That’s two more questions, which makes it three to three. The favor is that you let me go to the bus with you, and ride out to Dawn and up to Garden Meadow with you. Until you helped me into this train, I hadn’t realized how much I’ve missed the company of pretty women. As to who I am, here’s my card.”
He took it from his shirt pocket, but it still looked new—not a fancy engraved one like my father’s but not a cheapie either. It read:
ALADDIN BLUE
with a Barton post-office box and a South Barton (I could tell by the exchange) phone number. I stuck it in my shirt pocket. “Is that your real name?”
“No more questions from you. I’ve answered two of yours already, including telling you what the favor I want is. Is it a deal?”
I nodded.
“Then answer one of mine. What do you know about your Uncle Herbert?”
“Everything?”
“Yes. Everything.”
“All right. Uncle Bert—he’s really Herbert Hollander the Third—is Father’s big brother. He’s about six or seven years older, I think. He’s crazy. You know that, too; if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be in Garden Meadow, which is a sort of hospital for crazy people.”
“Rich crazy people,” Aladdin Blue put in.
“Right. It costs a couple of thousand a month just to keep him there. One time I heard my father say it was like sending a kid to college, only worse; and it never stops. He doesn’t talk much about things that happened when he was a kid, and I think the reason is that Uncle Bert would be in all the stories. They must’ve been pretty close, and maybe he joined the army when he was young because Uncle Bert was in it already. Uncle Bert was a captain.”
“But now your father is rich, and your uncle is poor.”
It wasn’t a question, just a statement thrown out for me to let pass if I wanted to, but I could tell from the way he said it that he knew something already—maybe more than I did. “Not exactly,” I said. “My grandfather—he was Herbert Hollander, Junior—was kind of a nut, in one way anyhow.”
“He founded the Hollander Safe and Lock Company and made a fortune.”
“Right, but he was kind of a nut just the same. He had a partner when he started, and there was a lot of trouble between them.”
“I didn’t know that,” Blue said.
“He bought this partner out pretty early, while the company was still small, but I guess he always remembered those fights and felt that they could have done a lot better if he’d been the only boss.”
