18
In his blue bow tie, carrying his silver tray, at dusk Jack approached a group of formally dressed people on one of the terraces of the main house at Vindemia.
“Would you care for an hors d’oeuvre, sir?”
Turning around suddenly, a man grabbed the silver tray firmly with his left hand and held it steady. “Ah! Liver wrapped in bacon! One of my favorite things!”
Jack said, “D—!”
“You almost dropped the tray, lad!” Fletch said, letting it go. “Want to see us all dressed so pretty at a grand party at Vindemia on our hands and knees eating liver wrapped in bacon off the terrace floor? That would be a pretty sight!”
The two women to whom Fletch had been talking tittered.
Then Fletch thrust his face close to Jack’s and whispered, “Can you spell it?”
His eyes on them, Doctor Chester Radliegh guided his wife across the terrace to Fletch.
“What?”
“Hors d’oeuvre.”
“Sure.”
“Good! Your grandmother never could.”
“My grandmother? The mystery novelist?”
“Your grandmother, the defective novelist,” Fletch said.
“Mister Fletcher!” Radliegh held out his hand to Fletch. “I’m Chester Radliegh.”
“How nice of you to have me on such short notice!” Fletch took Radliegh’s hand.
“I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time,” Radliegh said.
“I’m a great fan of your biography of Edgar Arthur Tharpe Junior.”
Glaring at Jack, Fletch sniffed. “Some like it.”
“My wife,” Radliegh introduced, “Amalie.”
“So pleased to meet you, Doctor Fletcher.”
“No doctor at all,” Fletch said. “Not even a patient. Call me Irwin.”
“Irwin?” Jack muttered. “Since when Irwin?”
“Where are you from originally?” Amalie asked. Her eyes were glazed with complete indifference.
Jack noticed that, unlike her appearance that morning, not one hair on Amalie Radliegh’s head was either out of place or gray. Although still puffy, the skin of her face was smooth and had good color.
“Montana,” Fletch answered.
“Montana!” Jack expostulated behind Fletch’s back. “Since when Montana?”
“Mister Fletcher,” Radliegh said, “I thought I wouldn’t show you the Bierstadt until morning. It’s in the gym. The light will be better in the morning.”
“That’s fine,” Fletch said.
Behind Fletch’s back, Jack whispered, “What’s a Bierstadt?”
“Although I will say hanging a precious painting in a gymnasium strikes me as odd.”
“Oh,” Jack said. “A painting.”
“You haven’t seen the gym.” Radliegh smiled. “The painting is perfectly safe there. Temperature and humidity controlled. Its size and power, vigor seem well suited to the gym.”
Amalie said, “My husband is eccentric.”
Then she said to Fletch: “And tell me: do you speak coyote?”
Each entertaining a separate group around the terrace were Chet, Amy, Downes, Beauville, Nancy Dunbar. Neither Alixis nor Duncan was there.
“I wonder if after dinner you might join me in the study,” Radliegh asked Fletch. “I figure it will be my only chance to have a quiet chat with you about your book, Pinto. Reading your biography sometime ago, I made notes, never thinking I’d have the opportunity to meet you.”
“Of course,” Fletch said. “That will be fine.”
“Ten o’clock then,” Radliegh said.
Fletch said, “See you.”
As the Radlieghs drew off, Fletch turned to Jack. “Get rid of the tray, will you? We need a walk and talk.”
“How did you get here?” Jack asked.
“Radliegh has a painting he wants to sell. I can’t afford it, of course, but he doesn’t know that.”
Jack handed his tray of hors d’oeuvres to Peppy, who already had one. Now he had a tray in each hand.
“Here,” Fletch said to Peppy. “I’ll help you.” He picked an hors d’oeuvre off one of the trays.
“Thanks a lot,” Peppy said. “Sir.”
“Any time.”
Fletch and Jack walked down the terrace steps.
“I’ll show you my digs,” Jack said.
Fletch said, “I suppose I can be late, but I really ought to be back in time for the dinner.” They were walking around the lit pool. A few young from the party idled in the pool area. They glanced at the white-jacketed man in black tie walking into the gardens with a young waiter. “Tell me everything you know.”
Jack said, “That would take forever.”
“I haven’t got forever.”
As they walked the bricked paths through the indirectly lit landscaped gardens, Jack said, “There are more rules for living here than there are in a military academy. Or a monastery. And they are all circumvented, seemingly by everybody.”
“Things are a little oppressive at Vindemia, is that it? The cork is kept on pretty tight?”
“To the point of rebellion,” Jack said. “I’ve heard even the C.E.O., Eric Beauville, say he feels a prisoner here.”
“Talk to me,” Fletch said.
“The rebellion isn’t open,” Jack said. “Everyone just sneaks around spending more energy circumventing the rules than they seem to spend doing anything positive. Like living. Working. So there’s a kind of gridlock.”
Enjoying the flora and fauna of the garden paths, Fletch said, “Gridlock in paradise. Could it be otherwise? I’ve always suspected Adam and Eve sinned out of pure boredom.”
Jack described how the Chief Executive Officer, Eric Beauville, and Radliegh’s private secretary, Nancy Dunbar, hide their smoking cigarettes; everyone from Radliegh’s wife to his stableboy hide their liquor; daughter Alixis her wild sex compulsions; son Duncan his lying, cheating and use of hard drugs.
“Busy little place,” Fletch said, “for all that.”
Jack said, “Radliegh knows his son, Chet, is gay.”
“‘Gay,’” Fletch repeated.
“Chet doesn’t respond to girls at all. Peppy, that kid you just so thoughtfully helped by making one of his trays lighter, is the stableboy and Chet’s lover.”
“But Shana—?”
“Is Doctor Radliegh’s lover.”
“Ah, ha! Doing double duty as Chet’s fiancée to keep up the image necessary for Chet’s impending national political career.”
“You know a few things yourself.”
“Thanks to Andy Cyst. I thought you said there’s no story here.”
Jack said, “Not one to tell.”
“No,” Fletch said. “Not one to tell.”
“Come in.” Jack opened the door to his half of the cottage.
“There’s no lock on your door,” Fletch said.
“I guess when you’ve got a chain-link fence around the whole estate, only one gate, guards at it, not every door within the estate needs to be locked.”
“We’re protected from everything but our protectors,” Jack said. “We even have passports we have to show to enter the estate.”
“Passports?”
“Even have to show them at the company store to buy food. Mine’s pink.”
Fletch glanced around the small living-dining room, kitchenette. “Do you suppose this place is bugged?”
“Do I care?”
“Ah,” Fletch said. “Doesn’t take you long to get rebellious. I must remember that next time you visit and I ask you to take a shower.”
Jack said, “There was a murder here. I think that much is pretty clear. In a laboratory which was not supposed to have lethal gas in it, Doctor Jim Wilson was killed by lethal gas. He wasn’t supposed to be in the laboratory at that moment. Radliegh was.”
“Is the death being investigated?”
“It must be. Unnatural death, all that. But I’ve seen no sign of it.”
“Radliegh can’t keep the police out.”
“I haven’t seen any police around—other than his own rent-a-cops.”
Wandering around the room, Jack then talked generally of almost everything he had seen, heard, thought, felt since arriving at Vindemia.
“Okay, Jack. You’ve been here a while.” Fletch relaxed in the two-seater couch. “Who’s making all these attempts on Chester Radliegh’s life?”
“Process of elimination?” Jack asked. “Motive? Opportunity?”
“Any method at your command.”
“Well, his mother-in-law isn’t. She’s a strong old dear, and the only one around here who seems genuinely appreciative, respectful of Doctor Radliegh. She seems to think he really is perfect.”
“Pretty old, is she? All her illicit compulsions behind her?”
“I doubt Mrs. Radliegh could organize these attempts. You just met her. Amalie.”
“Do you suppose she really thinks coyote is a language? Or was she trying to tell me she’s nuts?”
“Her brain is filled with little pills bumping into each other in a pool of liquor.”
Fletch said, “She could have fixed the coffeepot to electrocute her husband.”
“Yes, she could have,” Jack agreed. “That wouldn’t have taken much doing. It was in his personal dressing room. But the cabin explosion, the broken front axle on the Jeep—”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Fletch said. “Sounds to me like the work of two different people, working at cross-purposes. Radliegh didn’t get blown up in the cabin because the Jeep axle broke first. Also possibly true in what happened in the laboratory. One person filled it with poison gas; another arranged a bomb in the building. You were right. Too much time went by between Wilson’s being poisoned by gas and the explosion.”
“Daughter Amy is the only one who seems to have her father where she wants him. She’s told him if she doesn’t get what she wants, she’ll falsely accuse him of sexually abusing her as a child.”
“Nice.”
“It seems to be working. So she has no motive for knocking off her father. She has seven children she keeps here, and, has gotten Papa to pay off three husbands.”
“What some women will do to protect themselves from controlling men. In olden times, some became witches, for the same reason. Later, others bought bikes and got jobs.”
“He’s got more reason to kill her, than she him, to my mind. And Peppy says anybody could have poisoned the horse—if the horse was poisoned.”
“Poison is easy to get, especially on a farm. Any kind of poison could have been used, from a stimulant to a depressant.”
“Well, Mrs. Radliegh uses depressants. And stimulants, I guess. I emptied her rubbish this morning. But I don’t see her tiptoeing around a stable before dawn.”
“Lethal gas is something else. I would think that could be traced. It had to come from somewhere.”
“So,” Jack said. “It looks to me more than one person is making attempts on Radliegh’s life.”
“Me, too.” Fletch stood up. “You’ve eliminated very few people, if any. And that leaves a lot of suspects. Rather too many.” He patted his cumberbund. “A few days with your mother has made me uncommonly hungry.”
“She has that effect,” Jack said. “Did you enjoy your time with her at all?”
“Definitely I did. Your mother’s wise and witty,” Fletch said. “Always has been. I suppose at some point during the last twenty years I could have looked her up. Should have.”
“Do you feel badly about not having done so?”
Fletch looked at his son in the lamplight of the small room. “I do now.”
“You had no real reason to,” Jack said. “You didn’t know about me. She didn’t tell you. In fact, she was sort of hiding from you.”
“That’s not nice to think about.”
“And, people do drop from sight.”
“The question now is,” Fletch said, “what are we going to do about Radliegh? You called me here—”
“Thanks for coming, by the way.”
“I want to see that Bierstadt anyway. There appear to have been a number of attempts on his life; one succeeded in killing an innocent bystander. The methods of trying to kill him have been distinctly different, even maybe contradictory.”
“Lots of attempts,” Jack said. “Lots of suspects.”
“Different methods, from poisons to bombs. And one successful murderer. And, I don’t see that Chester Radliegh deserves being murdered in particular, do you?”
“He sat with me in a patch of woods this afternoon,” Jack said, “and talked to me. You sort of feel like you’re sitting next to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, or something, but other than that, he’s a nice guy.”
“I mean, he hasn’t committed mass murder, raped his daughter, drugged his wife and son, ground the faces of the poor …”
“If anything, to the contrary.”
“Well.” Fletch glanced at his watch. “I’m meeting with Radliegh at ten o’clock.”
Jack said, “Maybe it’s that no one talks to him. I mean, really talks to him. It seemed to me this afternoon that, for him, people are a long reach, if you know what I mean.”
“You know, Jack,” Fletch said at the door. “Even King George the Third got the point, after a while.”