the bridge over the Chesapeake he came into the rain. The long gray arms of the fog rose, swirling, beckoning him on, concealing a harsher surf-beaten shore and a golden sandal thrown back from the crest of a hungry wave, the infernal Rock and the grave fit only for a monster, as death and a motley crew assembled in Newport, faces yet unknown, and the hands of the gilded clock on the stable tower at Enniskerry moved silently, marking the hours.
CHAPTER : 3
Plenty of time. Three months, practically. The irony of his being that confident was slightly on the bitter side when Fish Finlay thought of it in Newport the last Friday in June.
It was around three o’clock when he got there and found the high serpentine brick wall Caxson Reeves had told him to look for, at Nantucket Avenue and Ocean Drive. He drove along it to the pink marble gateposts. Recessed in a niche in the front of each was a white marble urn of yellow marble flowers, with “Enniskerry” chiseled on the base, as if the place were already a monument, its mortuary elegance heightened by a dense somber screen of purple beeches swallowing up the driveway.
He drove past, needing time to adjust himself. He hadn’t realized how small Newport was, a capsule compression of sharply stratified eras. The Jamestown Ferry lumbering along against the business-like back drop of the Naval Base, the narrow crowded streets of the colonial seaport town, the shabby gentility of the resort shops just before Bellevue Avenue became abruptly the stratum of the elite, with its wide emerald-shaded Victorian dignity and Italianate grandeur . . . and there he was at a dead end of pink brick wall and purple foliage. In front of him where the road turned was a parking place separated by a low stone guard from the jutting rocks, beyond them, stretching restlessly into the misty infinite, the blue Atlantic. He pulled in and sat there, at a dead end of his own, aware with a grim kind of humor that his April confidence had constructed it for him. . . . Finlay bolting back from Virginia confident that the Maloney Trustees had a vital and legitimate interest in the personal welfare of the Maloney heirs.
“We ought to call a first-rate private investigator in on this deal, sir,” he’d said, briskly no doubt, at the end of his report, not noticing that Caxson Reeves’s concentrated attention contained any element but interest. Until Reeves folded his half-spectacles and put them on the table, regarding Fish Finlay with bleak detachment.
“You’ve overlooked the only pertinent fact in the matter,” he said dryly. “As Trust Officers we are not concerned with the safety of the Maloney beneficiaries. We’re concerned solely with the safety of the Maloney money.”
He stopped. Fish Finlay sat there blankly, until it occurred to him that Caxson Reeves had said all he intended to say.
“I guess I made a mistake.”
“You did, indeed,” Reeves said. “Show me where the Maloney money is in danger, and what a private investigator could do to remove the danger, and I’ll be happy to authorize the necessary funds. There are none I can authorize to investigate Dodo Maloney’s current husband . . . suspected by you of murdering his first wife on the slight strength of a morsel of schoolgirl gossip you’ve picked up. If there’s nothing else . . .”
And there wasn’t, except the slow burn under Fish Finlay’s collar as he walked stiffly out of the room, until the end of May, when Caxson Reeves’s secretary stopped him one noon.
“Is anything wrong with the Countess de Gradoff?” she asked, holding out a Maloney Trust expense sheet. “Look at this batch of transatlantic phone calls.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Fish said. He took the sheet. The calls were listed for once and sometimes twice a week. The date of the first was what mattered. It was made the day Reeves had dressed him down for the slight morsel of schoolgirl gossip.
Then there was the local call last week, five days after the de Gradoffs got home from Europe and went directly to Newport. It was from a friend of Fish’s, Joe Henry on the city desk of the Courier Graphic.
“Hey, what’s the revival of interest in old James V. Maloney?”
“Is there one?” Fish asked.
“Two inquiries this week . . . one a photostat deal. Why don’t you come up and catch a drink and dinner and tell me about it?”
“Why don’t I look at the file myself?”
“I’ll have it out for you.”
At six o’clock Fish was skimming through the Maloney file, which was mostly James V. Maloney’s daughter and the custody fight over Jennifer, together with the two old gardeners at Enniskerry, a padded story of the life of a man with an iron resentment against personal publicity. The facts were few. Maloney had left the bank at high noon, a news vendor had found his hat stuffed into a Broadway trash basket, a week later his daughter reported him missing.
“Who got the photostat of this stuff?”
Joe Henry shook his head. “A Western Union boy picked it up. The other inquiry . . . his current son-in-law.”
“De Gradoff?”
Joe Henry nodded. “Smith was the name he gave. Polly Randolph spotted him coming out. She was on the Paris edition when he married Dodo. She’s around, if you’ve got a Maloney expense account to feed her on. Nice gal, red hair and green eyes.”
As Fish watched the sea gulls wheeling, screaming among the rocks in front of him now at the end of Nantucket Avenue in Newport, he could see Caxson Reeves’s parched immovable face at the end of the conference table when he reported the next morning.
“And maybe you’ll think this is another slight morsel,” he said. “But it isn’t from a schoolgirl. It’s from a society reporter named Polly Randolph you’ve probably never heard of.”
“On the contrary,” Reeves said evenly. “I know her very well. Her father jumped out of a window down the street in ‘29. Her uncle owns a good deal of the Courier Graphic.”
“She had dinner with me last night.” Fish was seeing Polly Randolph then, as he described the scene in Tony’s back room.
Polly Randolph regarded him appraisingly across the restaurant table. “But you people know all about Nikki de Gradoff,” she said. “Or did something happen to the little French dick—wasn’t his name Blum?—you had on his trail? At least we all assumed it was the Maloney trustees. Or aren’t you in their confidence either?”
Fish grinned back at her. “I guess not.” Repeating that, he thought he caught a barely perceptible twitch in Reeves’s arid lids.
“Well, I don’t know anybody else who’d be worried about Dodo,” Polly said. “I understand little Blum had been working for the Argentine family until they called him off. However . . .” She shrugged. “Anyway, we gave the wedding the full treatment. Riches disguised in rags meets true love under a lamppost in the pouring rain. A month later, in comes de Gradoff’s concierge with a story to sell. The rigged lamppost meeting, the phony flight from Paris when he found the girl was stinking rich. Nikki had forgot to pay the concierge for helping.”
“Who rigged the lamppost?” Fish asked.
She shook her head. “Somebody who knew Dodo was a pushover for romance, no doubt. Who’d loaned Nikki money and saw that was the way to get it back, I imagine. He’d been going high, wide and handsome for a while after his first
