Chapter 5
Counselor James Joseph O'Brien's reading of the Sal Carini will proved brief, since, by agreement with Lem Weldon, he omitted the body of the testament, which did not deal with the bequest to Phyllis.
" ... and to Phyllis West Barrett, relict of my good and true friend, Samuel Prescott Barrett, I bequeath fifty-one shares of the common stock of Interocean Corporation, which are presently contained in a safety-deposit box in the vault of the Old Colony Surety Bank at 33V2 Boylston Street, Boston, to handle as she sees fit. . . "
That was all.
J. J. O'Brien's watery blue eyes and the brilliant blue eyes of Lem Weldon remained fixed on Phyllis as if waiting for her to faint or, at least, to kick off her shoes and dance a jig on the beefy counselor's huge pickled walnut desk.
Her first reaction was disappointment. Although she had professed disbelief in the existence of any bequest from Sal Carini as absurd, still, below the surface, sugarplum dreams had danced in her head ... dreams of unearned millions falling with magical clink of gold into the coffers of her mind.
Fifty-one shares of common stock in the Hotv'sthatagain Corporation...!
Somebody had to be having a big laugh at her expense. All this brouhaha and maybe a murder over fifty-one lousy shares of common stock in the Neverheardofit Corporation. Fifty-one lousy pieces of over-engraved and decorated paper!
Phyllis West Barrett, heiress and mystery woman, she thought sardonically. Some mystery woman-some mystery ... I
A rare, sudden anger overtook her. She said, "Okay now that the fun and games are over, I'm going to get rid of it, sell it if I can find a buyer, otherwise give it away."
Counselor O'Brien suddenly turned to dry ice. He sat absolutely rigid with shock-Phyllis was later to swear that she saw little curls of carbon dioxide vapor steam up from the top of his collar. She glanced at Lem, saw that his cigarette was in the slow motion process of falling from his lips to his lap.
"Look..." she said desperately, feeling as if she were swimming up a non-existent stream against a strong current. "I don't need whatever they'll bring. ... and I've already been greatly inconvenienced and embarrassed by the whole gruesome business. So why shouldn't I get rid of it? What possible use can a few crummy shares of stock be to me?"
J. J. O'Brien's lips parted and he said something that sounded like, "Ugh!"
Lem Weldon, having retrieved the live cigarette from his lap, fixed Phyllis with a twin-bayonet glare, then said coldly, "Did you never hear of the Interocean Corporation before?"
Then, when she shook her head, "I thought not. Well, for your information, those shares make you the majority stockholder in what may be the wealthiest privately owned holding company in Boston. In a very real sense, this bequest means you are the Interocean Corporation, and..."
His voice trailed off and he said to Counselor O'Brien, "May I?"
Donning horn-rims, Lem perused the will, frowning as he concentrated. Finally, he said, "And you drew this up only last month, Jim?"
"That's right, Lem." For a man of such bulk, J. J. O'Brien's voice was unexpectedly light and high-almost a falsetto. "The old bas-the deceased was ill, of course, but there was no question of his sanity."
"As Mrs. Barrett's attorney, it's hardly within my province to bring that up," said Lem. "On the contrary ... No, my interest stems from another area entirely. Tell me, are these his exact words?" He tapped the document with the back of a hand.
"I'll have the girl bring in the tape and play it for you." The counselor punched a desk button.
"Please!" said Phyllis. "Can somebody tell me if I'm a rich woman or not-and how rich if I am?"
The two men exchanged another glance. Then Counselor O'Brien folded his fat hands across his bulging waistcoat and said, "At a rough, conservative estimate, I'd say each share of Interocean is worth at a minimum-oh, a quarter of a million clams. And that's putting it very low on the totem pole."
Phyllis fainted. When she came to, she was being helped out of the office by J. J. O'Brien's chauffeur, who took her to a basement garage in a private elevator and whisked her back to Lem Weldon's Beacon Hill pied a terre. Lem, she was informed, had further technical matters to discuss with J. J. O'Brien as to execution of the will.
Lying back against the opulent broadloom upholstery of the long limousine, Phyllis pondered her pass out. She had not fainted since, once in her middle teens she had achieved a swoon at a Beatles movie by holding her breath until she felt her lungs were about to burst.
It was not that she was money, hungry, either-she had never had any real worries about money in her life. But, coming as it had on top of everything else, the announcement that she had inherited something like thirteen million dollars at a minimum put her down for the count.
Lem's last words to her had been, "Please don't leave the apartment until I get back. After all, I'm giving you the keys to my own little kingdom."
She inserted key in lock and turned it-to find the door still locked. Annoyed, she reversed the key and it opened. Lem, she decided, must have failed to lock it when they left. But that failed to mesh with her impression of the man. Lem Weldon was a man of such obvious iron self-discipline that he never made the simplest of moves without plotting every step well in advance.
Suddenly, as the lock clicked shut behind her, Phyllis felt something very close to panic ... for she was not alone in the apartment. From bathroom or bedroom-she could not be certain which-came the sound of movement.
It was not a loud sound. To her, it seemed like a slight complaint of some article of furniture, a mere murmur of motion-or rather of reaction to motion. She stood still, straining to hear its repetition so that she could pinpoint its source.
Again she heard it, a rustle of fabric rather than a true complaint such as a chair creaking under the weight of a burden imposed upon it. Unmistakably, it came from the bedroom beyond the wasp waist of the apartment that contained kitchen and bath diagonally opposite in the hallway connecting the two main portions of the pied a terre.
With horrifying vividness, Phyllis saw in her mind's eye the murdered body of Gerry Mann as it fell slowly out of the Volkswagen minitruck to splash her with blood during its downward passage to the graveled driveway. She recalled the unidentifiable driver of the big black car that had missed hers by inches in a desperate effort to get clear of the murder scene in time to avert discovery.
All she could think of was that this man, this murderer, had somehow managed to trail Lem Weldon and herself to his hideaway apartment, had broken in and was looking for something-or, worse, someone-on the premises ... that she was alone with a killer.
Why she didn't simply turn and flee before her entry was discovered, Phyllis was never afterward able to rationalize, save as a vagary of her panic. But she didn't-perhaps some ancestral streak of stubbornness proclaimed deep within her that she had taken all the pushing around she was going to take during the past thirty-six hours.
Instead, she looked around the room and darted to the fireplace and plucked the wrought-iron, brass-handled, gaffed poker from its rack at one end of the hearth. She hefted it, found its weight well balanced-though she felt faint disappointment that it was not the far heavier sand wedge from her golf bag back in Kitteridge.
She heard the odd sound from the bedroom again as she moved silently over the Axminster carpet that covered most of the living room and slid silently along the brief hall toward the half-open bedroom door. And there she stopped, paralyzed by what she saw.
Or, rather, what was reflected in the big mirror atop the fine old cherry bureau against the opposite side of the room. There was a man lying on his back atop the blue-and-white candlewick spread. He was stark naked on the bath towel laid out carefully beneath him. He was also masturbating...
Phyllis had never seen a man masturbate before. Pres was not given to such diversion, nor had he needed its supplementary sex during the hyperactive two-and-a-half years of their life together. She had supposed, prompted by occasional photographs and drawings of men engaged in this form of indulgence, that a man simply ran a hand up and down his phallus until ejaculation was attained.
But this stranger's technique was utterly different. He lay with his thighs slightly parted. His testicles had in some way been pushed upward into his groin, and he was pressing downward upon his phallus with the finger pads of both hands, running it up and down against the insides of his thighs, employing them as a substitute female genital.
As she watched, he lifted his left hand to his mouth, there licked its fingers with his tongue and then returned them to his phallus, anointing it with saliva to ease the repeated passage of its downthrusts between his thighs. He shifted his body, turning slightly away from her on his right side-and again the bed beneath him uttered the sort of sigh that had first caught her attention.
The utter unexpectedness of such a spectacle at such a time completely unnerved her. Nor did the contrast between her fears and the reality she saw in the mirror, abet her in any quick decision. She could only stand there, poker in hand, and watch as the stranger on the bed brought his act to its inevitable climax.
His pelvis made a series of thrusting motions and then his whole body went rigid and remained completely still while he had his orgasm. Since he now lay on his right side with his back toward her, she could see the pink tip of his phallus protruding from the rear of his well-muscled thighs, and the swift-dwindling little stream of white fluid that followed from it.
He lifted his hands then and reached behind him to towel himself off, shifting again as he did so. Phyllis, no longer held rapt by his genital action, lifted her gaze to the mirror-and discovered that a pair of light blue eyes was regarding her with lively interest in the glass.
Her panic returned-just because she had caught him masturbating in Lem Weldon's bed did not mean he was not the killer ... Abruptly, stifling a sound that was half-moan, half-cry of alarm, she turned and stumbled back through the short passage toward the living room and the front door. Not daring to look back, she wrenched it open in order to flee ... and found Lem Weldon standing there, his hand half lifted to grip the brass doorknob from the other side.
He caught her before she bumped into him, said, "Why, Phyllis, what's the matter?"
She babbled and stammered in her urgency, finally managing to convey the message that there was a strange man in the apartment. He seemed neither surprised nor perturbed, led her back inside, kicked the door shut behind them, removed the poker from her unnerved fingers, replaced it in its rack on the hearth with the matching tongs and shovel.
As he did so, he called out, "Is that you, Tim?"
A cheerful male voice called from the bedroom, "Who were you expecting? Martin Bohrman?"
Phyllis sank into an armchair, on the verge of collapse from the aftermath of terror. She thought, Oh, no-you don't faint twice in one morning, Phyllis West Barrett!
Aloud, she managed to croak, "Who is that?"
Lem Weldon permitted himself a faint, fond half smile. He said, "Tim Buckley. You've probably never heard of him."
Phyllis shook her head to show she hadn't.
"He happened to call me from Denver last night after our conference at Beth Davis's. I suggested he might be of help to us. Fortunately, he had just finished wrapping up a job there. He agreed to come on and meet us here."
"Who is he?" Phyllis asked. "How can he help? And why?"
"He just happens to have a certain interest in underworld affairs," Lem told her. "Unlike you, my dear, he has long been aware of Interocean and some of its implications."
"But I don't-" Phyllis began, beginning to feel pushed around again.
"We're going to need help." Lem Weldon said firmly. "I'm more than ever convinced of it from my talk with Jim O'Brien. Needless to say, I didn't tell him about Tim. After all, he's been on Sal Carini's payroll for years."
"But-" Phyllis tried again, again was cut off by the attorney.
"My dear," he said, "you must realize that your inheritance is as big a surprise for Old Sal's family as it is to you-and a much more unwelcome one. Surely, you know that the word family, in Carini's circles, has connotations beyond the domestic meaning of the word.
"Now, when they recover from their surprise, it seems quite unlikely that they will let you enjoy the fruits of Old Sal's labors without making at least some effort to get it back in their own clutches. That's one reason why you and I are going to need help."
"One reason?" she asked.
He nodded, seemed about to say something further, then hesitated, said, "It's altogether too problematical right now-but we've got to find out why those fifty-one shares were left to you. Until we do, we shan't come close to achieving any kind of resolution of your affairs."
Phyllis was tempted to say, "But I haven't had an affair since I married Pres-unless you count the weekly insult with Freddy the Freeloader." She decided it was not a time to be silly-although she felt silly, had felt silly ever since getting over her shock at finding the stranger-Tim Buckley, was it?-masturbating on Lem Weldon's candlewick spread.
The sudden seriousness of her situation was too big, too fast, for immediate comprehension. Better to take refuge in the ridiculous, with which her dilemma as well laced. Was she taking, or at least seeking, refuge from Gerry's murder, from her inheritance and the ugly implications Lem Weldon had just hinted at-or was she seeking to hide her reaction to the sight of a well-muscled male body engaged in a sexual act-even though its object, like its subject, was itself?
"Hello, Lem-and this, I suppose, is Phyllis Barrett?".
There he stood in the inner door, the man she had just seen masturbating on their host's bed. He was short and looked heavyset-although the body she had watched was without a trace of fat. Although his features bore a scrambled ugliness, with his light blue eyes like twin jewels in his well-tanned face, he was strikingly attractive. His teeth flashed, white, even, well tended, as Lem Weldon performed the introduction.
To Phyllis, the most remarkable thing about Tim Buckley was his poise. There was neither embarrassment nor a hint of hoped-for collusion between them at having caught him performing what most of American society still considers a shameful act. He was open, at ease, outwardly amiable. She decided then and there that she disliked him if only for his imperturbable self-assurance.
Lem Weldon did so. As she listened, it became evident to Phyllis that both men knew a great deal more than she had supposed about the late Sal Carini and his family and the underworld, especially the Boston underworld. There were gaps in the briefing that left her wanting to ask questions, gaps that seemed taken for granted both by the speaker and the listener, taken for granted because they obviously needed no spelling out.
When it was over, there was silence. Then Tim Buckley got up and walked to the mantel, resting an elbow on it as he looked from Lem Weldon to Phyllis and back again. He said, "I presume you have some plan of operations, Lem?"
The attorney nodded. He said, "I want you to stay with Phyllis while I do a bit of scouting around. I don't expect any immediate action, naturally-they're much too well disciplined to go off half cocked-but you never can be sure somebody might not get out of hand."
A pause, then "Obviously, you can't go back to Kitteridge with her. Your presence there would complicate things needlessly."
"I agree," said Tim Buckley. "So how do we work it?"
"You stay here with her. This apartment has everything you'll need for a number of days-not that I intend you to remain here that long. Just lie doggo until I call you or come back. It will only be a matter of hours."
It was not only incredible but impossible, Phyllis decided. Here was Lem Weldon, a man she had been told to trust implicitly, handing her over quite casually to a stranger she not only didn't know but to whom she had taken an instant dislike amounting to loathing. The fact that she had caught him in the act of masturbating, and that he knew she had witnessed it, made the situation all the more unbearable.
She heard herself say, "I can't do it. Lem, I want to go home."
The light, bright blue eyes of the attorney were cold as they turned to her. He said, a hint of icicles in his beautifully modulated voice, "Have you considered what your presence in Kitteridge would do at this time-especially with Tim on hand. You'd be besieged by everybody-not just Kitteridge folk but the press, the police, perhaps even."
He let it hang. Phyllis felt her face grow hot. She said, to her amazement, "Screw everybody-I want to go home. The Kitteridge police force is quite competent to protect me, I'm sure."
The look the two men exchanged was that of a pair of adults forced to deal with an ignorant and obstreperous brat. Again it was Lem Weldon who did the talking. He said, "My dear, our local constabulary is perfectly competent-to deal with such matters as lie within its frame of reference. Unfortunately, what we may have to deal with in your case lies entirely outside of that sphere."
Tim Buckley, his face as open as an angelic imp of Satan's, said, "Miss Barrett-Phyllis-please don't be afraid of me. It is not my intention to harm you in any way. Quite the reverse-I came here at Lem's request to protect you."
She knew she was blushing and hated herself. This stranger could have been reading both her thoughts and her feelings. At any rate, he had scored a bull's-eye. She barely heard what Lem Weldon said to back Tim Buckley up. All she knew was that she was going to have to go along with them, whether she liked or trusted Tim Buckley or not.
Before he departed, the attorney said, "I'll see that you have something to wear. What would you like to have me pack for you?"
She was tempted to silliness again as she almost suggested he send along her birth-control pills. Instead, she said, "Oh, the usual-toothbrush, comb and brush, some-well, if you don't feel up to it, get Hilma or Beth Davis. That old snoop has been trying to go through my things for years."
Lem Weldon smiled, then said, "I feel reasonably sure I can manage. And you can get anything else you need delivered here by telephone." He rummaged in a jacket pocket, went through some cards, placed one on the mantel, added, "Here's the number."
Then he was gone...
Phyllis did her best not to look at Tim Buckley, but it was no use when you were alone with a man in a vacuum. When at last she turned her eyes to his, it was to meet his blue regard. They stared at each other for a long moment. Then his lips twitched and his eyelids crinkled and all of a sudden they were both laughing like a couple of maniacs.
Finally, he gasped, "Mrs. Barrett, do you think you could put together a Scotch and soda?"
"I can but try." She rose, weakly, from the armchair, made her way to the kitchen.
When she returned with the drinks in hand, he was no longer in the living room. She frowned, heard sounds from the bedroom again-mercifully not the same sounds that she had heard before. She hesitated but could not long resist their mixed appeal.
This time, he was fully clothed, of course-nor was he on the bed. His suitcase offered a poor substitute for the well-muscled body. He was in the act of taking something out of the bag and turning away, but again the wall mirror revealed what he was doing. He was jamming a clip into the chamber of a large and ugly-looking automatic pistol.
This time, she retreated before his blue eyes had time to find her in the glass. Her hand was shaking as she put the highballs down on the brass-railed coffee table.