The contingent of gendarmes had left by the time I returned to the Payton house. Tamara looked pale and in a state of semi-shock. “I don’t imagine they found anything useful?” I asked. She shook her head. “Same here,” I said. “The Frenchmen on that boat say they never met your mother, except maybe in a nightclub.”
“Then what was she doing on that boat?” she said desperately. “Do you believe them?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “They obviously pretty well off, and rich people normally don’t kidnap other rich people. On the other hand, these are the kind of characters who could have gotten rich by kidnapping people. I’m afraid I’m not being very helpful to you.”
She didn’t contradict me. “Will you tell the police about them?”
“What is there to tell?”
She looked at me bleakly, then lowered her eyes. “I talked to my father again. I had to yell and scream at him, but he finally admitted that he got a ransom note about a week ago. He threw it away.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Did he tell you anything about it, like how did he get it, what language was it in, what did it say about the ransom, was there a picture of your mother?”
She sighed despairingly. “It all seems so hopeless. I don’t think I’ll ever see my mother again. How—”
“Easy,” I said softly. “What did your father say about the note?”
“I don’t…well, I think he said it was mailed in Los Angeles—”
“Los Angeles?”
“I don’t think that means much. A lot of people here go out to the airport and ask people to mail things for them in L.A. Or they give it to the airline crew to carry up.”
“Hrmph. What else?”
“Well, he said there was a picture of…he called it ‘some silly picture of your bitch of mother making faces at me.…’”
“He’s all heart, your old man. Anything else?”
“Nothing. Except he knows it’s a hoax and he’s going to ignore it. He…he got very worked up and began to scream about my mother. He…called her crazy and a bitch and.…” She buried her face in her arms. I sat down beside her on the couch and slipped an arm around her shoulders. She let herself collapse against me and we sat there silently. I had a lot of things to say, but none of them were of any use. I stared up at the neat rows of pandanus roofing and thought dark thoughts.
After a while the phone rang, startling us both. I handed the receiver to Tamara. She listened to what was being said, nodding or shaking her head occasionally, but saying nothing. She hung up abruptly.
I lifted my eyebrows.
“That was…Claude somebody-or-other. He’s a newspaper guy I know vaguely. He says the paper just got a call saying my mother had been kidnapped. He wants to know if it’s true.”
“Who made the call?”
“I don’t know. I…just hung up without asking.”
“Hrmph. Let’s—”
The phone rang again and this time I answered, expecting the police or the gendarmes. They’d have recorded the conversation on their tap in town. But it wasn’t. It was an American who identified himself as the local stringer for the Associated Press. He’d received information about a kidnapping.
“From where?” I said.
“Sorry, that’s confidential.”
“So is any information about…what did you say it was?”
“A kid—Oh. You want to trade.”
“Maybe. You first. Where’s your information from?”
“I dunno. A phone call a couple of minutes ago, some guy speaking French with a real thick Tahitian accent. A real dolt.”
“Just an anonymous call, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” I said mock-sympathetically, “you must know what those are worth. I’ll tell the Paytons about it, they’ll get a real laugh.” I hung up and dialed Commissaire Tama’s office. He cursed colorfully in three languages when I told him about Tamara’s conversation with her father and the two calls from the journalists.
“If it’s really the kidnappers,” he growled at last, “this could be their way of putting pressure on Payton to pay. Once the public knows about it, no politician running for office could continue to ignore it.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Unless it’s a leak from your—”
“I know, I know,” he said wearily. “I’ll question those newspapermen myself. And tell them to kill the story.”
“Then they’ll know there’s been a kidnapping.”
The Commissaire snorted impatiently. “If they have a line into the police, then they know it already. Or if it really was the kidnappers calling to get publicity, they’ll keep at it until the whole world knows. I can’t see that it makes much difference either way.”
“My brain’s gone to sleep,” I apologized.
* * * *
There was nothing to do except wait. Tamara called her father again, this time with the news that the story was about to go public. Maybe Tama could stifle a local paper but not the AP telex machine. The word had probably already reached the States. “Tell him the publicity will be worth 50,000 votes, easy,” I said. I wondered what Charles Wentworth Payton, Republican candidate for the United States Senate from the great and sovereign state of New Mexico, would do now. Maintain that it was a hoax till the time his wife’s chopped-off fingers began landing on the desk of the editor of The New York Times?
For want of anything better to do, I began to search the house. Maybe Colonel Schneider and his boys had overlooked a Clue. But the only thing of interest I found in the first hour was a voice-activated tape-recorder and high-power transmitter hooked up to the telephone in Danielle Payton’s bedroom. That much the gendarmes had accomplished.
There was a bookcase against one wall of the bedroom, with perhaps a hundred books in it, mainly American paperbacks, romances and mysteries of the Mary Stewart variety. I doubted if French cops would have spent much time with it, so I began to go through it book by book, riffling through the pages of each and holding it up by the spine for a brisk shake. The only things that fell out were parts of dead cockroaches. But halfway through the middle shelf, nestled between a Victoria Holt and a Helen MacInnes, was an imitation leather notebook. I opened it, and it was all that I could have hoped for.
It was Danielle Payton’s diary. The entries were handwritten in an almost unintelligible scrawl, using various kinds of felt-tip and ballpoint pens. The trouble was, it didn’t contain very much. The first two months of the year were blank. On March 3rd was the first entry: Arrived from States. House filthy.
The next one wasn’t until March 22nd. Met J-F, had dinner. Spent the night. OK, not v. imaginative.
It jumped to April 4th. Two days with H. What a brute!
The rest of it was the same, perhaps one entry a week, and then generally relating to what seemed to be her love affairs. The comments were short and pithy, but never explicit, and no names were mentioned, just initials. It didn’t seem to be the breakthrough I’d hoped for, but I continued to flip the pages doggedly.
For most of June and July there was nothing, and I assumed that she had returned to the States. It resumed in early August with: New roof on main house. 4 nights in hotel.
On August 9th she spent some time with H., and on August 17th she mentioned an evening with H. at M-F’s. J. en plein forme. So J. had been in fine fettle, had he? I assumed this referred to a soirée with her Tahitian pal Hiro at the home of Jackie the swinging doctor and his wife Marie-France, the apprentice witch.
But it was the entry for August 29th that made the hair prickle on the backs of my arms. Manana Club with R. Met 3 v. sexy Frenchmen. V. virile looking. Went home with R., who was jealous. Maybe arrange party with all three? Bring can of 3-in-1 oil?
Sept. 5: Tried one of the paras. V. good. But says they don’t do it together. Too bad. Maybe can change minds.
Sept. 9: Tried another. Indefatigable but too hairy. Ugh.
Sept. 14: Thought we were set for 4-way, but tiresome people wanted to talk money. Left early.
Sept. 23: Saw Y-L. He apologized. Asked me to come by boat.
Sept. 27: Went by yesterday afternoon. No one there.
Sept. 29: More apologies. Then same tiresome conversation as before. J-P very insistent. V. angry and left. Told them not to bother me again.
The rest of the diary was blank. I drummed the cover with my fingers for a moment, then got up from where I’d been sitting on the floor and went over to the desk in the far corner. There were several envelopes of canceled checks. To a non-expert eye the handwriting on the checks appeared identical to that in the diary.
I found Tamara stretched out on her bed, staring at the ceiling. She leafed slowly through the diary, her lips compressing from time to time.
“I better show this to Tama.” She nodded, and rushed for the bathroom. The door slammed behind her.
“Did you inform Colonel Schneider about this?” asked the Commissaire after I’d given him the diary and told him what I knew about the three Frenchmen.
“Should I have?” I asked innocently. “These guys are on a yacht, the yacht’s in town, the Police Judiciaire handles the town. I figured you could call him if you needed him.”
He stared at me with perfect understanding. “Exactly,” he rumbled from somewhere deep inside his three or four hundred pounds of bodyworks. “I think you may safely leave these three robust ex-paras to me. If by some chance I should subsequently need a roadblock erected on the other side of the island or a house searched on the island of Huahine, I shall certainly ask the worthy Colonel to do the honors.”
We exchanged thin smiles.
Divide and conquer.