5
Max held a freshly sharpened No. 2 pencil between his index fingers, but he didn’t write a word. The yellow legal pad lying in solitary splendor on his leather blotter was blank. Nor did he offer refreshments to his prospective client, though he knew good, strong coffee pilfered from Death on Demand steamed in his stainless steel Krups coffee thermos. Max felt neither receptive, sociable, nor agreeable. Max didn’t like Harley Edward Jenkins III.
Harley Edward Jenkins III sat in the red leather chair as if he owned it, Max, and the island. Only the latter was partially true, since he did control forty percent of the stock in Halcyon Development Inc., the real estate investment holding company which had created the luxury homes and condominiums on Broward’s Rock.
“So get on it today.” Jenkins started to rise, which wasn’t especially easy for someone of his bulk. He bulged, despite the deceptive embrace of an artfully tailored navy blue Oxford suit.
Max held up his hand. “Just a minute.”
A frown creased Jenkins’s porcine face, and he pursed his fat lips impatiently.
“I want to be certain I understand you.”
Jenkins jerked his head in acknowledgment and balanced on the edge of the chair. Max thought he resembled a rhino in a hurry to get out on the savannah and gore some fresh meat.
“You’re in a business deal,” Max summed up. “You want to buy some land cheap. The guy who owns it is running around on his wife. You want me to follow him, get some choice pictures, and hand them over to you. Right?”
Jenkins wet his thick lips. “I don’t quite like the way you put that, Darling. Let’s say I merely wish to improve my position in negotiations, gain some lever-age.”
Max slapped the pencil crisply on his desk and leaned forward. “I’ve got some advice for you, Jenkins.”
The businessman’s red-veined face turned a mottled purple.
“Why don’t you go after money the old-fashioned way, Jenkins? Why don’t you earn it?”
He was grinning as the door to his office quivered on its hinges as Jenkins, livid with fury, slammed it shut.
He couldn’t wait to tell Annie about this encounter, even if he did owe a little to Smith Barney for his bon mot. He wished he’d had a camera to capture the shock on that sorry bastard’s face.
Then he sighed. Dammit, he hadn’t had a job for three weeks. Not that it mattered financially, of course. It’s not as if he’d ever have trouble paying the rent. But Annie did like for him to be busy. That girl must have been frightened by a Puritan spirit in her cradle.
Actually, he felt that his office was an artistic creation able to stand on its own merit without any need for utilitarian justification. He looked around in satisfaction. The room was large. An elegant rose-and-cream Persian rug stretched in front of the Italian Renaissance desk. Annie’s tart observation had been that the desk deserved at least a cardinal’s red robe for its owner. Glass-covered bookcases, filled with statute books and annotated treatises, lined one wall, though he made it very clear to clients that he was not practicing law. In fact, clients were usually more than a little puzzled as to his exact role, which suited him fine, since he had decided upon reflection that he didn’t care to be bothered to take either the South Carolina bar or to obtain a private investigator’s license. In his view, it was cruel and unusual punishment to require anyone to take more than one bar exam. He had manfully (if that weren’t sexist) passed the New York bar. As for a private investigator’s license, the sovereign state of South Carolina required either two years of work in an existing licensed agency or two years as a law enforcement officer before one could be obtained. Hence, his office window bore the legend, CONFIDENTIAL COMMISSIONS.
As he had earnestly explained to a skeptical Annie, it was his aim to help his fellow man (or woman), and to that end he was willing to undertake any mission which was both legal and challenging. After all, he didn’t have to be either a lawyer or a private detective to ask questions and solve problems. A discreet but inviting ad ran in the Personals Column of both the Island Herald and the Chastain Courier:
“Troubled, puzzled, curious? Whatever your problem, contact CONFIDENTIAL COMMISSIONS, 321-1321, 11 Seaview, Broward’s Rock.”
At this very moment, however, he was glumly debating why he ever thought this was going to be fun. And the one thing he was absolutely, positively, without question convinced of was that anything in which he engaged be first and foremost fun.
That did not include skulking about with a camera in hopes of obtaining blackmail material. Still, he wished it had been a legitimate case.
He reached out and picked up a silver photograph frame from the corner of his massive desk. He held it up to the light, and Annie smiled at him.
Wonderful, marvelous Annie with her short blonde hair streaked with gold, her serious, steady gray eyes, and her gentle, kissable mouth—the most exasperating, mule-headed, aggravating female he’d ever encountered. By God, didn’t every woman want her wedding to be special? And wasn’t that what he was offering? Hadn’t his mother been at her most charming and least flamboyant when he and Annie visited her in Connecticut at Christmas? And Mother, with three superbly married daughters, had buckets of experience in planning weddings and would be delighted to help.
The trouble with Annie—one of the troubles with Annie, he corrected himself sourly—was her stiff-necked pride which confused money with independence. What he needed to do was to make it clear to her that money, when you had it, must never be master. The best way to keep money in line was to treat it as disposable and spend it. This theorem was Darling’s Law of Finance, quite on a par and in happy contrast (at least in intent) to Veblen’s Principle of Conspicuous Consumption. Veblen had no sense of humor. He took money very seriously indeed. As did Annie.
What to do about Annie?
Max folded himself comfortably into his well-padded, high-backed swivel chair, which could be tilted almost horizontal and contained a vibrator and heating element. He flipped two switches and relaxed as the chair lowered and began to purr. Propping his Cordovan loafers on the gleaming desk top, he regarded the portrait. Time for an end-around run. When opposition held the middle ground, the smart general foxed his way to an unprotected flank in the manner of Leonidas Witherall, the erudite sleuth created by Phoebe Atwood Taylor writing as Alice Tilton. He shook himself. There he went again. Obviously, he was beyond help. Annie’s approach to life had infiltrated his mind.
Max thought cheerfully for a moment about unprotected flanks, then concentrated.
If he couldn’t persuade Annie of the merits of a grand wedding, which were undeniable, then he must beguile her. How best to do that?
She could not be bribed, heaven forfend, but perhaps she could be inveigled. What could he do that would persuade Annie that he, Max, was the world’s most wonderful man, and should, of course and as a matter of justice, be deferred to? He spent several delightful seconds imagining Annie in a posture of deference.
She loved surprises.
His eyes narrowed, his face furrowed in thought. Surprises—the shop—Agatha—
Raising the picture high, he let out a whoop. Of course! Why hadn’t it occurred to him sooner? He flipped the chair’s switch. Upright, he plopped the picture next to the phone, yanked up the receiver, and punched a button. “Barbie, dial international information, then get Sotheby’s on the line.”
The object of this deliberation was at that moment braking as she coasted onto the ferry. Hers was the first car aboard. Stumpy Ben Parotti waved to her from the cabin. As the ferry lurched away from the dock, Annie pulled on her cherry-red cable-knit cardigan and got out of her aging blue Volvo to stand next to the railing. The cool April air was perfumed with fish, saltwater, and tar. She breathed deeply. Broward’s Rock was the best place in the world to live, an unspoiled island with civilization’s amenities. Pity those poor deprived millions who called someplace else home. Leaning on the metal railing, she shaded her eyes from the noon sun and looked across the softly green waters of Port Royal Sound at the mainland, then fished a thin book from her pocket. The guidebook, which had been published by the Chastain Historical Preservation Society, contained a succinct but detailed history of Chastain, its most famous houses and people.
She smiled a little at the history’s opening sentence:
Chastain was never the center of commerce and art that was Charleston or even the shipping haven that was Beaufort.
The writer apparently harbored a sense of inferiority. Had no one ever suggested accentuating the positive?
She continued reading:
Nor can Chastain rival Charleston (founded in 1670 at its earliest site) or Beaufort (founded in 1710) in age, but Chastain, first settled in 1730, proudly claims its place in the sun as the favorite coastal hideaway of South Carolina’s lowland plantation owners, who sought its healthful breezes during the deadly fever months of May through October, and in so doing built and maintained some of the loveliest antebellum mansions extant. Chastainians then and now feel themselves blessed above all others in the gentility, beauty, and grace of their city, secure on its bluffs above the Broad River.
Chastain was first settled by Reginald Cantey Chastain, who received a grant from King George the year after the Province was returned to the King by the Lord Proprietors, Carolina’s first rulers. Chastain’s prosperity was great in these early years as she offered a safe port, stable government, and only occasional harassment from the Indians. During the Revolutionary War, when Charleston and the surrounding countryside suffered greatly, Chastain was little touched. What seemed great misfortune when the city fell to the British early in the war turned out to be her greatest fortune, as she was spared fighting and destruction. Indeed, Chastain was apparently favored by Heaven. During the War Between the States, she was early occupied by Federal troops, and therefore escaped the horror of Sherman’s torch, although her loyal sons and daughters found it painful to endure the sequestering of their enemies within their homes. However, this indignity was ultimately to preserve for the glory of the present the grandeur of yesterday. Some of the oldest homes in South Carolina survive in Chastain, including the famed Prichard, Chastain, McIlwain and Benton houses.
The horn alongside the cabin gave three toots, Parotti’s signal that landfall neared.
Slipping behind the wheel, she dropped the guidebook on the seat. Sea gulls moved in a rush of wings from their pilings as the ferry thumped against the buffering rubber tires, and Parotti lowered the ramp. First on was first off, so she quickly put the Volvo in gear and bumped onto the dock, then negotiated the ruts in the lane for a half mile and turned right onto the blacktop. A weathered sign announced: Chastain 13 miles.
She drove with the window down, enjoying the clear, fresh air with its underlying sourness of marsh and bay water leavened by fragrant Carolina jessamine and pine resin. The greening marsh grass announced the coming of spring. Pale green duckweed scummed the roadside waters, and fiddler crabs swarmed over the mudbanks. Tall sea pines crowded the shoulders of the road. Pine pollen coated the road and the shoulders and everything else in the lowlands with a fine lemony dusting from the yellow-purple spring flowers. As she neared Chastain, a stand of enormous live oaks screened a plantation home from view. Only glimpses of tall red-brick chimneys revealed its presence. Delicate swaths of Spanish moss hung from the low, spreading limbs.
Her first view of Chastain was unprepossessing, a fast-food hamburger joint, three derelict wooden houses, a jumble of trailer homes. She judged these with a jaundiced West Texas eye—one good wind would level them flatter than squashed pop cans. By the second Kentucky Fried Chicken, she spotted a plaque announcing the Chastain Historical Area, with an arrow to the right. Stuck behind a smoke-belching chicken truck, she chafed at the slowness of the traffic and kept a wary eye peeled for the eccentric driving common to small towns (mid-block stops, unheralded turns, and blithe disregard for stop signs).
She turned on Mead Drive, followed it to Montgomery, found another plaque and finally reached Ephraim Street, which ran along the high bluff. A half dozen lovely old homes sat on large lots to her left. The river, sparkling like beaten Mexican silver, slipped seaward to her right.
She drove to the end of Ephraim Street and parked in a neat graveled lot on the point, appropriately named Lookout Point. She locked the car, being sure to scoop up the guidebook with its map of the historic homes, her camera, and an extra roll of film. She paused to admire a flock of stately brown pelicans diving toward the river and a luncheon snack of mullet, then turned to survey the street. Just opposite rose a squat, buff-colored, square building which housed the Chastain Historical Preservation Society. From her guidebook, Annie knew the building was originally a tabby fort built in 1790 when the country raged to join with the French against England and other European powers as the French battled to protect their Revolution. However, Jacobism languished when the French Revolution banished Lafayette. She imagined for a moment the bustle and effort that had resulted in the fort, the grounds churned by wagon wheels, and the smell of lime and crushed, burned oyster shell hanging in the air. Now a smooth carpet of grass lapped against flowing banks of brilliantly red and yellow azaleas. A brick wall separated the Society grounds from Swamp Fox Inn, which boasted that Lafayette had slept there during his triumphal tour of the South in 1825, an old man remembering the glories of his youth, still tall, lame in one foot, but with electric, crackling black eyes and a gentleman’s charm of manner. The three-story frame Inn was an amalgamation of additions. Its center had been built in 1789.
She studied it with interest. Mrs. Webster had explained that the Inn was providing a room for the mystery expert in return for promotional mention in the House and Garden Week brochures. Annie had called that morning to reserve an adjoining room for Max, her helper, as she explained to the innkeeper. She sighed as she noted the paint peeling from the second and third story pillars, the untrimmed live oak trees, which threatened to poke holes in the weathered exterior, and the unkempt stretch of lawn visible through the sagging wooden fence.
Although nice surprises certainly could arrive in plain packages, it was her experience that poorly maintained motels, hotels, and inns featured hard beds, lousy food, and were either too hot or too cold. And she knew how fastidious Max could be. He was every bit as particular as Koko, the kingly Siamese in The Cat Who Could Read Backwards. Her heart sank. Oh well, it would be good for Max to traffic with hoi polloi. She pictured him arising from a lumpy bed and stepping into a lukewarm shower. Grinning, she crossed the street, her goal the famous Prichard House which would be the site of the Murder Nights entertainment. She was ready to survey the setting and figure out the practical elements. Where should the corpse be found? Where would the suspects be placed? And the Investigation Center? What clues should she strew at the Scene of the Crime?
Fortunately for her sanity and the logistics of the week, the three featured homes were all here on Ephraim Street, right in a row. As she understood it, ticket holders would first tour the ground floor rooms in the three featured houses, then gather on the lawn of the Prichard House for a buffet dinner to be followed by the coup de grace, the Mystery Program.
She stopped in front of the wrought iron fence to look at the Benton House. A two-story frame built in 1798, it glistened with recently applied white paint and looked as crisp as Tom Wolfe in a fresh white suit. Double porticoes flanked three sides, supported by simple Ionic columns. Black shutters framed the windows. Stubby palmetto palms were spaced every ten feet along the fence, but the magnificence here was in the grounds. Annie’s eyes widened. SOUTHERN LIVING should see this garden. Lady Banksia, yellow jessamine, honeysuckle, pittisporum, a long shimmering arc of wisteria across the back of the deep lot, dogwood so brilliantly, pristinely white that it glittered in the sunlight, and azaleas—single blossoms, double blossoms, hose-in-hose blooms, in vivid splashes of color that included salmon, pink, orange-red, yellow, purple, and white.
Although an occasional car had passed as she made her way slowly from the Lookout Point bench past the Society Building and the Inn to this first historic home, Annie soon realized this part of Chastain didn’t exactly teem with activity. The Benton House reflected back the early afternoon sunlight. The Venetian blinds were closed, and the many windows offered no hint of its interior. Just then a middle-aged man came briskly around the corner of the house, pushing a wheelbarrow. He looked like a competent, no-nonsense gardener. If he were in charge of this garden, he deserved kudos indeed.
She propped her purse and the guidebook against the base of the fence. Removing her camera from its case, she held it up and took a series of shots. Returning the camera to its case, she picked up her belongings and continued down the sidewalk to the entrance to the grounds of Prichard House.
Each house along Ephraim Street sat far back on a large lot. This provided a great deal of space for the gardens and, the guidebook informed, accounted for the plantation-like appearance of many of the older homes.
When Annie saw the Prichard House, she realized it fitted Mrs. Webster perfectly. There was nothing casual, downhome, or unpretentious about the Prichard House. It was a two-story, brick, Greek Revival mansion, with six immense octagonal columns supporting the double porticos. Pale pink plaster coated the exterior walls. A five-foot-high decorated parapet topped the second portico and four massive octagonal chimneys thrust up from the roof. Shining marble steps led up to the main entrance. Enormous and ancient live oak trees, festooned with long, silky strands of Spanish moss, dominated the front lawn. Most of the action would take place here. There could be few lovelier homes in all the South. Prichard House was, as Mrs. Webster had advised and Annie had nodded gravely, the jewel in Chastain’s architectural crown.
The Prichard House garden featured a natural woodland with live oaks, mimosa, and magnolias interspersed with wildflowers and colorful banks of azaleas and yellow jessamine. Far to the back of the property, a tall stand of cane guarded a pond, providing only a tantalizing glimpse of dark water.
It was so imposing that she felt a twinge of hesitation in poking her camera through the wrought iron fence to take photographs. Thanks heavens, with the lovely speed of a .35 mm., it only took a few seconds.
The third historic home rivaled the Prichard House in beauty. McIlwain House was a lovely Georgian mansion, two stories, again on a high foundation, with a delicate extended front portico with slender columns supporting the second story partial verandah. Formal gardens ruled here, beds of roses flanked by dogwood, crepe myrtle, and azaleas.
Once again, she shot a series of pictures, then, returning to her vantage point in front of the Prichard fence, she made a rough sketch of the Historic Area.
Dropping the drawing into her purse, Annie pushed through a gate to the oyster-shell path that led to the grand entrance of Prichard House. She walked slowly, appreciating the soft crackle of the shells beneath her feet, the mixture of scents, jessamine, honeysuckle, and wisteria, and the silky freshness of the afternoon air. There was going to be plenty of room. She could order tents put up, three of them in a row, on the wide expanse of lawn embraced by the circular drive. What she needed now was to determine The Scene of the Crime, but she could only accomplish that by nosing around the gardens, and she had no intention of trespassing in these sacred precincts without permission. She wondered if Mrs. Webster would be surprised at her prompt appearance. Hired in the morning, at work by afternoon. Well, it should only endear her to the Board president.
It was a long walk to the shining marble steps. She was midway up when a car churned up the oyster-shell drive, spewing a plume of gray dust. Annie glanced toward the sound and glimpsed the face of a pale girl whose pretty face was contorted by fury. Then the gray Continental and its driver were beyond the house and only the cloud of oyster-shell dust hung in the air.
Annie’s insatiable curiosity was piqued. Obviously, the girl must belong in this magnificent house. Only an inhabitant would have the effrontery to drive like that on grounds such as these. Who was she and why was she so angry? And on such a beautiful day.
Mounting the steps, she rang the front door bell and, faintly, deep within the house, heard a somber peal.
The gleaming white double doors rose nine feet tall. They opened in a moment, and a middle-aged woman in a maid’s uniform nodded politely at her.
“I’m Annie Laurance, and I’m helping Mrs. Webster with plans for the—”
A reverberating crash sounded from the back of the shining hall.
Startled, the maid swung around.
The driver of the car burst into the main hall. She was tall and willowy, with strikingly lovely auburn hair which she wore in an old-fashioned chignon. Her face was delicately boned and slender; her pale blue eyes were enormous. She would qualify as a beauty except that her face was white and pinched, the lips quivering in distress.
She ignored Annie. Perhaps, in her anger, she didn’t even see her. She spoke to the maid, her voice shaking with fury.
“Where is Corinne?”