Chapter 6
The sun was shining bright off the Mediterranean, a tour bus was off-loading summery men and women with cameras, at the table next to us four young German boys were arguing over whether Mutti would be angry if they all had another sweet. It was not an ambience for this kind of discussion.
I nearly choked on the last of my omelette. "But you said—you said you saw her in the morgue!"
"I thought I did. I saw a young woman who looked as much like Tricia as Tricia would, with her head all mashed and her nose pushed up under her left eye, and all the exposed flesh I could see all bruises and gashes. I did make an official identification for the police. She was driving Tricia's car and wearing Tricia's clothes and carrying Tricia's pocketbook. That was six months ago, Nolly. I really did think it was Tricia. Wouldn't you?"
I was almost as exasperated as upset. "Come on, don't ask rhetorical questions. You changed your mind, right? Why?"
She said, "I was putting away all her papers. And some papers I saved about her. I couldn't even look at them for months. But I saved everything, and then I decided to bundle it all up and do something with it—maybe burn it; maybe send the whole batch off to some other relative, if I could think of one. And I found myself reading the actual police record of the accident. They gave it to me for the insurance."
"Was there a lot of insurance?"
"There wasn't any at all, but the police didn't know that. They were just being nice. The truck broadsided her at a quarter after five. They had the time exactly, confirmed by witnesses. They didn't call me right away—it took a long time to track me down; they had to check back through my California addresses and everything, because Tricia still had the old address in her pocketbook. But it was a quarter after five when it happened, all right. And when Tricia called me on the phone it was a little after six. I was watching the NBC network news."
I didn't say anything right away. I wanted to make sure I was understanding what she was telling me. To help out, I invoked Marlene's cure-all and ordered coffee from the very English waitress. "American coffee," I specified, pointing to where it said that in the menu.
It wasn't really going to be American coffee, of course, because all French people think that Americans really would put chicory in their coffee if they only knew how, but I was grateful for the distraction so I could think. Irene Madigan left me alone to do it. When the coffee was served, and poured, and tasted, and we had both made a face, I said tentatively, "I suppose you're absolutely sure about the time."
"I thought you'd ask me about that," she said. "I would, too, if I were you. But, yes, I'm sure. The reason I'm sure. . ."She hesitated, then shrugged. "The reason I'm sure is that I had just started my period. I was flowing heavily, and I'd waited for the commercial to go to the bathroom, and Tricia's call caught me on the way to change my Tampax."
"So there's no doubt," I summed up. "She called you around six."
"Right."
"That was three-quarters of an hour after she was supposed to have been in the crash."
"Yes."
"So," I sighed, reluctantly, "it wasn't Tricia who was in the crash. You cremated somebody else."
"You've got it," Irene Madigan said, and began to cry.
Sitting at a restaurant table with a crying woman is not my favorite thing. I avoid it when I can—usually successfully; the last time I'd been in that position was when one of my old girlfriends asked me straight out why I didn't try to make love to her anymore, and I straight out told her what the mumps had done to me. Which was a mistake. Actually, I should have been the one crying. But the reason doesn't matter. People look at you. They make up their own scenarios to account for why she's crying. "He beats her."
"She's pregnant and he won't marry her." Or maybe, in this particular setting, "He lost all their money in the casino and he doesn't even have the decency to kill himself." It makes no difference if you're innocent of all charges. It doesn't even matter if, actually, you've been more of a louse than anyone looking on could possibly guess, and once or twice in the old days I was close enough to that. Whatever. They look at you. And you know damn well that if the crying woman should say exactly the right thing, one of the men in the restaurant would come over and punch your face out. This time I was certifiably as innocent as anyone could get. I looked back at the furtive glances and the hostile stares—girls in bikinis, men in shorts, an elderly couple, she in a sort of lavender miniskirt, he with an ice-cream suit and the worst toupee I've ever seen, fingering his cane dangerously as he glared at me. I tried to project innocence to them all, and wished I could think of a way to stop Irene Madigan crying.
Fortunately, she stopped herself. "Sorry," she sniffled, reaching for a dry Kleenex. I patted her hand. She smiled damply back at me, and a lot of the voltage began to go out of the stares. "The thing is," she said, wiping her nose, "I'm so damn helpless. Who would believe me?"
"I would. I do."
"And who's going to believe you, Nolly?" She returned the hand-pat to show she didn't mean to hurt my feelings. "If you had anything convincing to say you would have been talking to the cops long ago, right?"
"Well, but the two of us together . . ."
She looked levelly at me, waiting for me to figure out the end of the sentence for myself, I did. I shrugged.
She said simply, "Forget that." She rummaged in her handbag again. I thought it was for another Kleenex, but what came out was a couple of sheets of Xerox paper, stapled together and folded several times. She pulled one set of pages off and handed them to me. "Take a look at this, Nolly. I practically had to sleep with a guy from the Wall Street Journal to get it."
I unfolded and glanced at the heading: "Estimated Balance Sheet for Narabedla Ltd. Unofficial."
It was unofficial, all right. It was the Journal staffs best guesses about some very well kept financial secrets. Vic had told me they didn't have to file very many reports. They certainly didn't volunteer any. Almost every line was marked "Estimated" or "Provisional" or "Projected from Earlier Data."
But what it added up to was—remarkable.
I knew the huge empire called Narabedla Ltd. was huge. I hadn't known about the shipbuilding firm in Taiwan, or the Japanese computer company. I had no idea Narabedla held such large interests in a hundred American firms. None of your standard blue chips. Better than the blue chips. The list included most of the biggest money-spinners in the high-tech industries. Gene-splitting. Computers. Industrial chemicals. Pharmaceuticals. Avionics. If a company was going somewhere fast in a growing market, Narabedla owned a piece of it. A big piece. This summary changed my idea of what "big" meant. By these figures, Ford, ITT, any of the companies of Big Oil—Narabedla was right up there with them, and could maybe have bought and sold some of them.
Irene asked, "Did you read the part about the lawyers?"
I had. I hadn't missed its significance. Not one but four of the hottest, winningest firms in the country were on retainer to Narabedla. Which meant to Henry Davidson-Jones. Which meant . . .
I sighed and put the paper in my pocket. "Legal-wise," I said, "they could kill us."
She set her chin. "All the same, the son of a bitch kidnapped my cousin."
I said reasonably, "We don't know that for sure. We certainly don't have a clue about any motive."
"Sex, Nolly!" She pointed to the yacht across the bay. "Sure, that sounds crazy. A man like Henry Davidson-Jones wouldn't have to kidnap good-looking women and lock them up in a harem. God, his big problem ought to be fighting them off! But if he did do that, what better place could there be to do it in than a yacht like that? You could hide half an army. Forty or fifty screaming harem girls would be nothing."
"Irene," I said soothingly, "that wouldn't account for cellists and baritones."
"So maybe he's gay, too. Or maybe he likes music when he makes love." She scowled at me. "I don't know why, I just know that, and if you've got a better theory, tell me what it is."
I didn't have a better theory, of course. I only had a whole lot of doubt and confusion. I said, "It's the craziest thing I ever heard of."
And that was true. But I hadn't then been to the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran.