McNally's Chance (8 page)

“What will you have?” he asked as I sat. “This.” pointing at the drink in front of him, ‘is a pint of Guinness stout. When in Rome ..

.”

I wasn’t in Rome so I ordered a frozen daiquiri before playing my first, and only, card. “You know your wife hired me to find you, so I’m obligated to report this meeting to her and tell her you’re staying at The Breakers.”

He smiled his Hollywood smile, exposing his Hollywood pearly whites.

“You stopped at the desk before coming in here and asked them if I was registered.”

I flashed him my jumbo charmer 150-watt smile and assured him that I had. “Zachary Ward and Gillian Wright are also registered, with all of you in separate rooms. How sad for the lovers.”

My drink arrived and the waiter hovered. “Give us a few minutes,”

Silvester told him. Alone once more, he said to me, “You’re very good at your job, Mr. McNally. I see I made a wise choice. And I will probably call Sabrina and tell her we’re here before you do.” He lifted his stein. “Your health, Mr. McNally.”

I drank to that and decided not to tell him he could call me Archy. “So much for my case. Do I still get fed?”

“But of course. Does a ploughman’s lunch interest you?”

“Not in the least, but the shepherd’s pie is the best you’ll get this side of the Atlantic.”

He signaled the waiter and ordered the shepherd’s pie for two. “I’m sure Sabrina filled you in on what we’re all doing here.”

“She did. But she was rather coy on how she got my name.”

Silvester nodded knowingly. Typical Sabrina. Never give anything away on page one that you might need later on. It’s the writer’s instinct.

The less you tell, the more the reader must turn pages to find out what he wants to know. With Sabrina, life imitates art.” He drank his Guinness and managed it without leaving a trace on his upper lip. “When Jill left New York, Sabrina guessed she had come here. You do know why?”

“I do.”

“Sabrina wanted to follow immediately and drag Jill home. I talked her into letting me come down alone, find Jill, and see if I could talk her into coming home. I have been acting as arbitrator between Jill and her mother since Sabrina and I were married.” He seemed to think this over, then said, “Perhaps referee would be a more apt job description.”

As he spoke I filled in the blanks. Fresh out of some Ivy League college with a baccalaureate in English lit, Silvester went to work for a big publishing house with a dream of trees that grow in Brooklyn and valleys full of dolls. He moved rapidly from assistant to associate editor to editor. One day the dream landed on his desk in the form of four hundred laser-printed pages. Robert Silvester had a winner and he showed his appreciation by falling in love with the fictional heroine of Darling Desire.

When he met the author he experienced a classic case of transference.

Sabrina Wright had been places and done things Robert Silvester had only read about in the novels he usually returned with the customary

“Not for us’ rejection letter. If Silvester was bewitched by the fictional Darling Desire he was dazzled by her flesh-and-blood counterpart. This one was not only ‘for us, it was for him.”

Sabrina’s interest in the bartender at Bar Anticipation told me she had a thing for younger men. Robert Silvester was prime and as an added attraction, as if any were necessary, he was the guy who could shape her novel into a bestseller and guide her career. Not wanting to share her editor, she had married him. Both must have thought they were getting the best of all possible worlds and if fame, fortune, and sex were the criteria, they had.

During the early days, Gillian was in Switzerland, learning how to speak French atrociously and ski beautifully. When she finished being finished she returned to a famous mother and a stepfather who resembled the ski instructor in Lausanne, who had introduced her to the arts of sex and the slalom.

“Sabrina is headstrong and adamant when it comes to getting her way,”

Silvester was saying. “She’s always dictated to Jill rather than reason with her and poor Jill was ready to make the break. Sabrina’s disclosure gave the girl just the excuse she was looking for to act on her own. There is nothing like a worthy cause to justify our actions.

Jill’s quest is her own Holy Grail.

“I thought if I could keep mother and daughter apart until I had a chance to talk to Jill it would save a confrontation between the two that would settle nothing. My error was to call Sabrina and tell her I had located Jill and Zack. She insisted on coming down immediately.”

“She didn’t tell me that,” I thought aloud.

Silvester’s shrug said that was a given. “Knowing Sabrina was practically on her way here the minute I said I had located Jill, I checked out of the Chesterfield and into here with Jill and Zack, without telling Sabrina. My purpose was to keep the warring parties from hand-to-hand combat until I had some time alone with Jill. I’d reconciled the two before and hoped I could do it again.”

“And have you?” I asked.

Silvester shook his head. “No. Jill is more determined than ever to find her father.”

Our lunch arrived and Silvester eyed his mound of mashed potatoes suspiciously. “I should have had the tossed green salad.”

Having no such scruples, I asked the waiter to bring me a beer to go with the meal. “Dig in,” I told Silvester. “It’ll put lead in your pencil.”

“My pencil, Mr. McNally, is not wanting.” As if to prove it he went at his shepherd’s pie with gusto.

Tell me, do you know who Gillian’s father is?”

Without skipping a beat he responded, “Cross my heart and hope to die, I don’t. Sabrina will take the secret to her grave.”

“And when did you learn that Sabrina was Gillian’s natural mother?”

Not looking me in the eye, he stated, “At the same time Jill got the news.”

I wanted to know if he had shared in the champagne toast, but the guy was embarrassed enough at the disclosure, and I saw no reason to add insult to injury. I wondered what other secrets Sabrina Wright kept from those she loved and, no doubt, so did they. As far as I was concerned the case, which I didn’t want from the beginning, was closed.

I would bill Ms Wright for twenty-four hours, plus expenses, and leave her and her kin to sort out their differences while running up a tab at The Breakers your average Joe might mistake for a telephone number. But I did want a few answers before I left the clan to their fate.

“Will you tell me how you got my name?” was number one on my list.

Silvester waved his hand as if shooing a pesky fly. “Of course.” He gave me a name that sounded vaguely familiar and went on to say, “We were at college together. He’s from these parts and in our junior year he got himself into a bit of a jam during the Christmas break. A little booze, a little pot, a fast car, and an underage girl in the passenger seat is the way it went, I think. His father hired you to patch things up and he returned to school singing your praises. I never forgot your name or the fact that you owned a collection of silk berets in a variety of pastel shades.”

I recalled my silk-beret period with a nostalgia I’m sure Picasso must have felt for his blue period. This link brought to mind my former client and his son. Good people and it was the boy’s first offense, which is why I agreed to help him. “What did he do after college?”

“Wall Street,” Silvester answered. “I called him to see if you were still in business down here. He contacted his father and that’s how I got your number. I told Sabrina I was going to enlist your help, but as it turned out that wasn’t necessary. Having given her your name I was sure she would contact you when she got here.”

Next query. “She asked me to meet her in a bar of dubious reputation.

Any idea how she knew the place?”

Like a weary martyr he sighed audibly. “My guess is she got one of the Chesterfield’s employees to give her a rundown of the area’s more notorious watering holes and then chose the one most renowned as a meeting place. Even under stress, Sabrina Wright must amaze, amuse, and mystify her gentlemen callers. I take it she treated you to all three, Mr. McNally.”

She had, and with great style. After years of poking around in other people’s dirty laundry, I can say with considerable confidence that the answers to most of life’s mysteries are simplistic and obvious, from the pyramids to Sabrina Wright, as Robert Silvester had just confirmed.

It’s the commonplace that’s more likely to contain surprises behind its familiar facade.

My first thought regarding Lolly’s anonymous caller was that he or she was a clerk at the Chesterfield, who knew Sabrina Wright had registered at the hotel and had heard her ask for Robert Silvester. The informer made a grab for his, or her, fifteen minutes and settled happily for anonymous fame when Lolly printed the item. Simple and obvious. Yet I couldn’t help but ask, “Why did you suggest Sabrina herself might have made that call to Lolly Spindrift?”

Silvester grimaced. “A caprice, nothing more. I’ve been dealing with Sabrina’s impulsive behavior for so long nothing she does surprises me, but, as I’m sure you know, she did not make that call.”

“And neither did Zack Ward?”

“No, Mr. McNally, I’m sure Sabrina painted a picture of Zack replete with twirling mustaches and black cape, but he’s not like that at all.

He is a brash young man, but not a devious one. True, he works for a rag, and he is ambitious, but one has to start someplace. Even Raymond Chandler wrote for the pulps.”

I didn’t tell him that I rather liked the original pulps with their lurid cover art and even had a few stashed away in a box of memorablia I intend to leave to my godson, Darcy. The one touting The Blue Dahlia on its cover must be worth a fortune.

In keeping with Silvester’s white paper on Zack Ward, I stated rather than asked, “And he doesn’t court Gillian because of her famous mother.”

Silvester shook his head. “Did Sabrina tell you Jill met Zack in a writers’ workshop?” When I acknowledged this with a nod, he asked,

“Did she tell you that Jill was enrolled in that workshop under an alias?”

He didn’t wait for a response because we both knew she hadn’t. As I had noted when I met her, Sabrina Wright is a package. Now I knew she never allowed anyone, including her husband, to get under the wrapping.

Silvester explained, “Jill joined the workshop more as a diversion than with any serious intent to penning a novel. She also dabbled in acting classes, art classes, and yoga, all with a ‘no comment’ from her mother. It’s not easy being the daughter of a successful woman and less easy when the woman is Sabrina Wright. “Jill had learned early on that when people discovered her relationship to Sabrina they treated her with either indifference or scorn. In her early days as an actress, a noted producer offered her a big part in his next play if her mother would finance it. After that, she ventured out into the real world under an assumed name. As far as I know she and Zack saw each other for a few weeks before he knew who she really was.” “Then why,” I quizzed, ‘is Sabrina certain Zack Ward is more interested in a Sabrina Wright expose than in her daughter?” He wrestled with that one before capitualating, but not without reluctance. “Zack is young and rather attractive. He didn’t make a fuss over Sabrina, if you know what I mean. To compensate, she had to find a plausible excuse to make herself, and not Jill, the reason for Zack’s presence in our lives.

Enough said?” The thought had crossed my mind but I had given motherhood and prudence the benefit of the doubt -and come up skunked, yet again. In my formative years I had dated both Polly and Anna.

Together, they had made a lasting impression. If the writer and her editor were in a give-and-take relationship, poor Rob was coming away empty-handed.

Even if what he was telling me was true, it didn’t mean that Zack Ward wasn’t the instigator behind Gillain’s search for her father, and I said as much to Silvester.

“I honestly don’t know if he did or didn’t talk Jill into coming down here,” Silvester said. “But if it was Jill’s brainstorm, Zack is with her all the way. The two are in love, Mr. McNally. Make no mistake about that.”

I wasn’t about to make any mistakes because I was no longer involved in the rather sordid affair, but as Silvester’s lunch guest I felt I had to feign interest. Okay, I’m not kvetching. Who’s above getting the inside scoop on the antics of the rich and famous? Not Archy.

However, I couldn’t help but giving ol’ Rob a little nudge in the ribs.

And if Gillian did happen to find her papa, Zack would pull the plug on his laptop?”

Silvester signaled our waiter for the check. T’ll tell you what, Mr.

NcNally. Why don’t you ask Zack that question?”

I stood in the sitting room of Robert Silvester’s suite at The Breakers, staring at Gillian Wright and Zachary Ward. A line from the intro of an old song echoed in my brain: “Here I stand with deep regret, an innocent victim of etiquette.” That I was, and you could drop the innocent without doing bodily harm to the rhyme’s message.

When Silvester invited me up to meet the couple I refused with the lame excuse of having an appointment with my tons or He insisted it wouldn’t take long and said so while signing the check. Not wishing to bite the hand that feeds, I acquiesced. “But just for a minute,” I said, running a hand through my hair. Leaving the restaurant he admitted, “I told them I was lunching with you here and they’re anxious to meet you.” I didn’t need a crystal ball to know that Gillian Wright wanted to dub me her knight-errant in charge of her crusade to unearth Daddy Warbucks. Sorry, kid, but I misplaced my DNA-testing kit. Why me? Because they were the new kids on the block and believed I was the only game in town. Having crossed another bridge I didn’t want to leave in flames, I agreed to the meeting for the chance to politely refuse my investiture in person. Silvester called from the desk and told them we were coming up. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr.

McNally,” Sabrina’s daughter welcomed me. Gillian Wright could be called plain only in contrast to her showy mom. On her own, the young lady was rather pleasing to the eye and this eye is a connoisseur of the species. She had her mother’s dark eyes and a mop of curly light-brown hair. As a child she must have been a true blonde. She sported a healthy tan and wore a pair of indi-chic bell-bottom slacks and a man’s dress shirt with the tails hanging out. Rather than emulate or compete with her high-fashion mother, Gillian chose to dress down in a more subtle, yet edgy style in an attempt to appear as if she had better things to occupy her mind than the current length of madam’s hem line. Unfortunately it didn’t work.