Jack and Susan in 1913 (21 page)

“I can begin to imagine,” said Jack ruefully.

“‘Unquenchable ire at an unforgiveable betrayal,' is a phrase that springs to mind,” said Mr. Garden.

Jack uncrossed his legs and discovered that one of them had gone to sleep, and now was heavy as lead and tingling with pins and needles. He ignored the discomfort and crossed his leg the other way. “There's more,” Jack said. “I feel quite sure there's more.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Garden. “To put it bluntly, as you requested, you are relieved of your position with Beaumont, Beaumont, and Beaumont.”

None of those three Beaumonts was Jack himself, but referred to his uncle, his late father, and his much later grandfather. Jack had always looked forward to the day a fourth Beaumont would be added. That day was suddenly receding into the distance.

“My uncle is going to sack me?” said Jack. He was calm—in the way a ship's captain is calm when a torpedo has blown a hole in the hull, lightning has struck the mainmast, and general mutiny has just been declared among the crew.

“No,” said Mr. Garden, ever precise. “He already has. I do not betray a confidence, I think, when I also tell you that he has struck you from his will.”

“He's done all this because I didn't go to Havana?”

“Because you didn't go to Havana, because you lied to him, because you have lowered yourself to the position of an impoverished tinkerer, and consorted with actors and”—Mr. Garden's voice lowered dramatically—“moving-picture people. Mr. Beaumont, your uncle considers that you have brought eternal and irreparable shame on the house of Beaumont, Beaumont, and Beaumont.”

“Not exactly,” Jack pointed out, “if my uncle is the only one who knows about all this.”

“He is not, in point of fact. Notice of your brave and daring rescue of the night watchman at the Cosmic Film Company appeared in the
Sun
and the
Times
. It escaped our notice at the time, for we thought naturally that you were in Havana, and the article referred to some other John A. Beaumont, Esq.”

“‘Brave and daring…'” Jack repeated thoughtfully.

“Bravery and daring have their place,” said Mr. Garden sententiously, “on the high seas, on the battlefield, in the jungles of Africa. But bravery and daring have no place in a company devoted to financial investments. In fact, so far as your uncle is concerned, bravery and daring are substantial disqualifications for the position which you so lately occupied.”

Jack stretched out in his chair and inadvertently banged his head against the wall; it seemed appropriate. “Mr. Garden, is this all? I really was advised by my doctors to get some rest.”

“Not quite all,” said Mr. Garden. “I've saved the good news for last.”

“There's good news?”

“Yes. No cloud is without its silver lining, after all. No longer attached to the house of Beaumont, Beaumont, and Beaumont, you are now perfectly free to marry Miss Bright. Your uncle hopes you will be very happy together—in some other part of the country.”

“Mr. Garden?”

“Yes, Mr. Beaumont?”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you look like a beet in a snowstorm?”

J
ACK KNEW WHY his uncle was doing this to him—any excuse for a disinheritance. Jack's uncle had remarried recently, a lady from the South—that region of the country that breeds ladies who are the most mercenary creatures on earth. Especially the widowed variety, with offspring from the previous marriage. And this particular widow had three sons, each more dissolute than the last, and her plan was to siphon off the Beaumont inheritance into their rapacious hands. Jack, like his father before him, had never gotten along with his uncle. It had been a great nuisance that by the terms of the will of Jack's grandfather, the firm's assets had gone entirely to Jack's uncle. Now it appeared to Jack that he was to be cut out entirely.

Soon after the wordless departure of Mr. Garden, Jack lay down on his bed and thought about all this, but soon fell asleep and dreamed of Susan in Hosmer Collamore's arms. It was a nightmare.

He awoke in a sweat and was immediately overcome by an obsession: to find out where Susan and Hosmer had gone. The matter of his stolen inheritance could wait for a while. After all, his uncle wasn't dead yet.

His current financial situation, however, was a concern, especially if it proved necessary to go chasing Susan and Hosmer far. He had not received any salary since he'd left Beaumont, Beaumont, and Beaumont on his “trip to Cuba,” but had lived off a small supply of cash he'd brought with him from Twenty-third Street, and that supply was almost gone. In fact, he had less than ten dollars. His checking account contained nearly two hundred dollars, but that would be eaten up by the hospital bill.

Therefore, he concluded, all the money he had in the world was the five hundred dollars given to him by Susan Bright (through the agency of Hosmer Collamore) for the rights to the patent on the motion picture camera.

He wondered if it would make a difference to Susan to know that he was now exactly what he had represented himself to be—an impecunious inventor, whose sole resource was the money he'd got from her anonymous generosity. She probably wouldn't believe him if he told her, and, he reflected ruefully, he couldn't blame her for that.

Jack began to pack his belongings, then realized there was no point in maintaining the imposture of a threadbare wardrobe any longer. Though he was in no financial condition to buy anything, he had much better clothing in his apartment on Twenty-third Street. He stopped packing, looked around the room, and his mind again returned to Topic A: How to find Susan?

To find her, he must also find Hosmer, which would probably be easier. The first step would be to find out what happened to the Cosmic Film Company. The company seemed to have vanished from its former burnt-out premises, and the operator at Telephone Central only knew that the phones had been removed, and there was no new number for Cosmic. Still, it seemed unlikely that such a large and prospering enterprise would go out of business overnight and simply disappear without a trace, so he allowed himself some hope that he would be able to find it in a day or so.

He stuffed his ten dollars into his pocket and had his hand on the knob of the door when there came a knock.

Jack opened the door and found himself staring into the faces of two persons he had never seen before—a large man and a not much smaller woman of middle age, dressed in what appeared to be their Sunday best.

With an explosive sigh, the woman dropped to her knees in the doorway, grabbed Jack's hand, and covered it with kisses. Before astonished Jack could protest, the man had grabbed his other hand and began pumping it so vigorously that Jack feared a wellspring would gush from the top of his head.

“Madam, please…”

Ignoring Jack's protest, the woman on her knees rubbed her cheek over the back of Jack's hand and then kissed it some more. Hosmer's old apartment across the hall already had a new tenant, an old man with arthritic shaking hands, who now opened his door and peered out disapprovingly.

“Thank you, sir,” said the man who was still heartily shaking Jack's hand. “Thank you. I thank you, my wife here thanks you on her knees, our children at home—there's five of 'em—they'd be here to thank you too except two of 'em has the mumps and the other three was looking peaked, and Mary here thought it best they not come with us, though they was a-achin' to.”

“Do you have the right apartment?” asked Jack. “Maybe you want Mrs. Jadd upstairs.”

“John Beaumont,” said the visitor, still pumping, “John Beaumont, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I bless the day your mother first laid eyes on your father's brow.”

“I blesses the bed that cradled your infant form,” said the woman, staring up at Jack with tears in her eyes.

“Who are you?” asked Jack.

“The Cosmic watchman,” said the man solemnly.

Suddenly it all made sense.

“Where is the young lady?” cried the wife. “We wants to thank her too.”

“Please come in and sit down,” said Jack abruptly. “I need your help.”

Husband and wife glanced uneasily at one another. To them, help meant money.

“Don't worry,” said Jack, who immediately understood those looks, having learned a few things living life as a straitened mechanic, “it has nothing to do with money.”

Husband and wife came into the room. Jack asked their names, and found that they were Mr. and Mrs. Kosdercka—but everyone called them Mr. and Mrs. K.

“No more about saving your life, Mr. K., please,” said Jack, “because if you can help me, you'll have paid me back more than fully. I just need the answer to one question: Where is the Cosmic Film Company?”

Mr. and Mrs. Kosdercka looked at each other. Mr. K. looked down at the floor and said, “I don't know.”

“You do know,” said Mrs. K. “Tell the young man. I'd be weeping over your grave right now if it wasn't for this gentleman and his young lady friend.”

Mr. Kosdercka still hesitated. “Not supposed to tell. Not even supposed to know.”

“It's because of the young lady who helped to save your life that I'm asking. She was abducted,” said Jack, not even blushing at the lie, “by a man employed by Cosmic, and I was hoping that, by speaking to Mr. Fane or someone, I could find the villain who made off with her.”

Mrs. K.'s eyes widened at the romance and intrigue of the thing.

Mr. K. considered the business. “You know Mr. Fane, do you?”

“We had business dealings,” said Jack, truthfully. “And now I need to find him, that's all.”

“They all took off.”

“That's obvious. But where did they go?”

“Didn't want nobody to know,” said Mrs. K.

“The Trust,” whispered Mr. K. leaning forward conspiratorially, as if representatives of that organization might be eavesdropping from an adjoining room.

“That's why they decamped? To avoid the Trust?”

Both Mr. and Mrs. K. nodded.

“Where did they go?” asked Jack. “Brooklyn?”

Mr. K. shook his head. “Across the Hudson.”

“New Jersey?”

“California,” said Mrs. K. and slapped at her husband's hand for his deception.

“California? The whole company?”

“Some place where they grow oranges. Can't recall the name.”

“Hollywood,” Mrs. K. supplied.

Jack could not believe that Susan had run off with Hosmer Collamore with the intention of marrying the man. Logic dictated that Susan Bright had simply gone to ground. Perhaps she had moved to another part of Manhattan; or was residing above some laundry in Brooklyn; or had gone home to Connecticut to nurse her wounds. That's where he should be searching for her—in rooms above laundries, and in small rustic hotels in rural Connecticut.

But there are times when inspiration supersedes logic. This was one of them. Jack knew that he wouldn't find Susan in those places but in a place called Hollywood in California.

The town was so small it didn't even appear in his pocket atlas. So despite logic and deduction and probability to the contrary, Jack withdrew his five hundred dollars from the bank and purchased a train ticket for Los Angeles.

He packed two small valises of his better clothes from the Twenty-third Street apartment. Then he went back up to the Fenwick with a briefcase and dumped all his papers and plans and drawings into it.

Then he discovered that the final drawings he'd executed for the patent application on his camera improvement were missing. Evidently during his tenure in the hospital they'd been stolen from his room. He then understood why the door of the room had been wide open on his return. The thief hadn't even bothered to close it again.

Anyone with those drawings could patent the camera, and reap all the monetary benefits that accrued from any use of the device.

“Damn,” cried Jack, plugging his hat on his head and flying out the door. His train left in half an hour.