Suspicious Circumstances (8 page)

‘Anonymous letters?’ I exclaimed.

‘Came in this morning. Get ‘em all the time, of course. Particularly with celebrities. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s just some crackpot. But you can never be sure, can you?’

Inspector Robinson stood for a moment watching us all with those terrible corny crinkles. Then he brought out of his pocket a particularly elegant shell-pink envelope from which he produced a shell-pink piece of paper. I hurled my hand out and he gave it to me.

The message on the extremely expensive paper was typewritten in capitals. It said:

ANNY ROOD WAS AT NORMA DELANAYS THAT NIGHT. ANNY ROOD MURDERED NORMA DELANAY BECAUSE ANNY ROOD WANTS TO PLAY NINON DE LENCLOS

As both Gino and Uncle Hans read over my elbow, I stared at the message with returning jitters. So somebody knew! Some terrifying, unknown enemy with expensive pink note-paper! Mother’s note-paper was usually pink. Then … then … Delight Schmidt? Was it conceivable that such perfidy…? I forced myself to stop thinking because heaven knew what was happening to my face. I gave the letter back to the Inspector, who glanced through it again before putting it back in his pocket.

‘You know?’ he said. ‘That Ninon de Lenclos bit would have convinced me the whole thing was nuts anyway. Imagine the Great Anny Rood having to bump someone off to get a part in a movie! She must have twenty offers a week!’

He grinned then. He was Hilarity itself. He held out his hand to Uncle Hans.

‘Glad I talked to you, Mr Harben.’ The chummy hand was stretched out to Gino. ‘You too, Mr Morelli.’ He patted me on the back. ‘Goodbye, son. Maybe I’ll see you around at the funeral.’

With a little contented sigh, Uncle Hans settled back to his chess-board. Gino, all flashing teeth, started escorting the Inspector to the door. They were half way there when Tray started somersaulting again. I could have killed him. Inspector Robinson stopped and watched him indulgently.

‘Well, what d’you know? A pooch doing handsprings. That isn’t something you see every day.’

‘No, sir,’ said Gino. ‘Tray’s a real smart mutt. You know? Norma Delanay — she was just crazy about him and his tricks. Couldn’t get enough of them. All the time we would take Tray over just for Miss Delanay to see him go through his routine.’

‘Well,’ said the Inspector. ‘What d’you know?’

They went to the door then. Gino eased the Inspector out and closed the door, looking back at me with an exaggerated Italian grimace of relief. I, of course, was feeling relief, too, but what I was feeling most was a wild admiration and love for Uncle Hans, which swept away all discretion. Grabbing Gino, I dragged him back to Uncle Hans, whom I embraced, almost knocking over his chess-board.

‘Ach, Nickie. Careful. What are you doing? What..?’

‘Uncle,’ I said, ‘you were sensational.’

I glanced from him to Gino. ‘It’s all right. I know you were all at Norma's. Pam told me. Uncle, that fuddy-duddy act! The fake entry in the diary! When did you make it? On the actual night?’

Uncle Hans looked at us shyly. ‘Ach, how embarrassing that you have found me out for the wicked old crook that I am.’ In spite of himself, he couldn’t keep his pride from showing. ‘As a matter of fact, yes, I wrote it on the actual night. When we came home — so much excitement, aye! — and I sat down to write my diary, I thought: Is this suitable for a diary, Hans. In these days with servants you do not know, with all these terrible scandal magazines always ready to pounce on the great and the famous? No, it is not, I said. So instead I invented a more suitable evening.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘It was fortunate, wasn’t it?’

‘Fortunate!’ echoed Gino. ‘It was genius. Good old Uncle Hans — the genius of the family. Boy, did you fix that cop!’

‘Did he?’ I asked, more than prepared to be convinced because being convinced was so much more pleasant than not being convinced.

‘Sure,’ said Gino. ‘Of course he was fooled. Why not? Some cranky anonymous letter? A big star like Anny? Who’s going to believe a cranky anonymous letter about a big star like Anny when Uncle Hans’s got it written down in his book that she was sitting right here at the time?’

I felt a lovely warm glow.

‘Then we can forget it? We don’t even have to tell Mother?’

‘Tell Anny?’ said Gino. ‘You out of your mind? Getting her all het-up for nothing just before the funeral?’

He stopped then, putting a large finger conspiratorially to his lips, for a commotion had broken loose at the head of the stairs and Mother, escorted by Pam and Delight, all in various degrees of chic black, came hurrying down towards us.

None of them could have noticed the Inspector’s car, for no one made any mention of it and, in a few seconds, Mother was bustling us all off to the Mercedes. Tray made a fuss trying to clamber in with us, but Pam outfoxed him by ordering him to play dead. As we drove away, he was left stretched out like a corpse on the front steps, and all the way to Ronnie’s Mother rehearsed us for the TV cameras.

‘They will be at the church doors, dears, and possibly at the grave. Remember. Always keep your mouths slightly open. Not gaping, of course, but slightly open. And if a columnist or a reporter wants to interview you, which they may, just be simple and natural and speak from the heart.’

Soon we reached Ronnie’s gatehouse and started purring up the drive along which Pam and Tray had run on The Night. The house, infinitely macabre to me, loomed in front of us, the largest French château off the Loire. We all piled out on the drive, where two black funereal limousines with black funereal chauffeurs were parked. A butler opened the door and there we were in the hall by the huge Juan Gris, with the staircase sweeping up ahead of us. I wished I had enough moral courage to face it all unflinchingly, but I hadn’t.

I just stood with my head full of plunges and anonymous letters, and then, when I saw Delight staring at the staircase, obviously thinking the most unmentionable thoughts, I couldn’t face it and looked down at my shoes.

It was the greatest mistake I ever made because I was not only looking at my shoes, I was looking at Ronnie’s floor. And right there, splashed across the Mexican tiles, I saw a succession of faint but quite unmistakable paw-marks.

And they weren’t just paw-marks; they were infinitely worse than that; they were spaced at the most grotesque distances from each other. No ordinary dog could have made them. They could only have been left by an unordinary, monstrous, somersaulting dog.

It didn’t surprise me, knowing California servants, that Tray’s paw-prints should still be there four days later, but, as I looked at them, a dreadful, completely reinterpreted memory of Inspector Robinson’s crinkles came. Hadn’t he stopped and looked at Tray? Hadn’t he said, ‘A pooch doing handsprings? You don’t see that every day?’ At the time, I’d thought he was just being chummy. But — what if he’d noticed the paw-prints on The Night and was putting two and two together? What if all that revolting
Daddy Long Legs
palsy-walsiness had been fake?

The marble foyer seemed to rock and roll around me. Gino was away from the others, standing gazing at the Juan Gris. Gino had an unexpected highbrow thing about modern painting. In a desperate attempt to seem nonchalant, I slid over to him.

‘Gino.’

‘Hi, Nickie,’ he said, still pondering the Juan Gris.

‘Gino, it’s the end. Tray’s paw-prints — they’re all over the hall.’

‘So.’ Gino turned to me with the broadest, whitest grin. ‘I kind of figured they might be.’

‘You figured . . .?’

‘Didn’t you get it? When I saw the cop watching Tray, I suddenly figured, what if there were some prints on Ronnie’s floor? That’s why I gave him that line about Norma being crazy about Tray and us bringing him over here all the time.’

He slung his arm over my shoulder. ‘Get it, Kid? That way I’ve got it all sewed up. If the cop didn’t notice the prints, then okay he didn’t notice them. If he did — what can he do now? He’s maybe got a suspicion that maybe Anny was there after all. But how can he prove it? What’s to stop us from having brought Tray over to do his tricks for Norma the day before or even the day before that or even maybe the morning of the day when she fell? Boy, it’s in the bag.’

The foyer wasn’t rocking and rolling quite as much, but it was still rocking and rolling a bit. My face must have showed it, for Gino took his arm off my shoulder and playfully tapped me on the cheek with his fist.

‘Relax, kid. There’s nothing to get steamed up about. Thanks to the Old Home Team, starring Uncle Hans and Gino, there's…’

At that point he broke off because Ronnie came hurrying down the staircase towards us.

Ever since I was a boy, I’d always thought of Ronnie Light as the suavest, most debonair figure in Hollywood, and I’d been sure that Mother’s description of him as ‘shattered’ had just been Mother. Ronnie, I felt, was the one man who could more than rise above this hideous situation. But, to my surprise, as he came towards us, ‘shattered’ was exactly the word for him. His distinction was still there, of course. Nothing could get rid of that. But it was a sort of ‘shattered’ distinction.

He went to Mother first and kissed her cheek. ‘Anny!’

‘Dear Ronnie!’

He vaguely noticed the rest of us and gave us the weakest of greetings.

‘Hello, everybody. I’m …’

His voice choked off in what could have been grief but which seemed to me much more like an uncontrollable attack of the jitters.

Mother was squinting down at a tiny diamond watch pinned to her breast.

‘Heavens, it’s late. We must leave. This very minute.’

She was half way towards the door when Ronnie managed to croak, ‘Anny, I’m afraid we can’t leave just yet. I’m afraid … That is, I’ve just had a call …’

And then, while Mother was poised on the threshold, halted by his words, another lovely black-draped figure came hurrying in from outside. She saw Mother and stretched out both arms to her, her teeth flashing shark-white under her little flying veil.

‘Deah,
deah
Anny,’ she cried in that rich, unspeakably cultured voice which Pam, who was the ‘real thing’ in England and knew what she was talking about, maintained had been fabricated in the slums of Birmingham for Export Only. ‘Deah,
deah
Anny — deah,
deah
Ronnie. I do hope I’m not
tar
somely late.’

There it was — there was no doubt about it — there was Sylvia La Mann, a rather plump but quite unmistakable Sylvia La Mann.

While Mother stood rooted to the spot like a beautiful pillar of salt, Sylvia La Mann wafted over to Ronnie, touching his hands with the tips of long black-gloved fingers and gave him a thirty-eightish version of her 'Queen of the Rosebud Garden of Girls’ look which, in the old days before the Industry and the Public and the oil tycoons had all got hep to it, had always been winning her Oscars and contracts and husbands.

‘Deah Ronnie, I put off the Colmans.
They understood
. Of
course
they do. The moment I told them you’d called
especially
and needed me to be family, they understood in a
trice
.’

I turned to Ronnie, as did everyone else, waiting for him to strike her, which was the least, I felt, that he could do.

But instead, incredibly, he was smiling a craven smile. He even let her kiss him, although, around her gorgeous orange curls, I saw him dart Mother a look of hare-like apprehension.

‘Deah Ronnie.’

‘Dear Sylvia. How sweet of you to change your plans for me. And now, I think, we should all of us be going…’

Soon we were all out milling on the front steps. Both of the funereal black chauffeurs had sprung from their funereal black limousines and were standing by the open rear doors. Sylvia La Mann had looped her hand through Ronnie’s arm and was drawing him possessively towards the leading car. Mother, who had lost the advantage, splendidly regained it. She merely looped her hand even more firmly through Ronnie’s other arm, dazzled the chauffeur with a smile and then, turning the smile on to Sylvia’s rather too voluptuous hips, said, ‘Ronnie, dear, let’s take Sylvia with us. She’ll make such a squeeze for them in the other car.’

Having given the impression that Sylvia took up as much space as Elsa Maxwell, she stepped first into the car. Ronnie got in next followed rather clumsily by Sylvia La Mann. We, the forgotten ones, the nobodies, the little people, all crammed into the second limousine.

The funeral service was to take place at the very grand Episcopal Church in Westwood Village where, improbably, Ronnie was churchwarden. As we drove sedately behind the other limousine, they were all seething with indignation and curiosity.

‘Why did he let her get away with it?’ said Pam. ‘He must be out of his mind.’

‘I think it’s divine,’ said Delight Schmidt, who was sitting next to me, a fact of which I was uncomfortably conscious. ‘Bereaved husband arrives at wife’s funeral with ex-paramour and would-be second wife.’ She glanced sideways under her lashes at me the way she was always doing, the way I wished she would stop doing. ‘Nicholas, do you think one of them will plunge into the grave like Pola Negri and Rudolph Valentino?’

‘It wasn’t Pola Negri,’ I snapped, moving my knee away from hers.

Delight Schmidt sighed and brought her knees back together. ‘Oh, Nicholas, why are you so surly with me when I feel it my duty to your Mother to become the ray of sunshine in your life?’

For quite a while we went on driving past very expensive bits of Southern California, while I was torn between dark, dark thoughts and the consciousness of Delight’s knee.

Suddenly Delight said, ‘Nicholas, have you ever played Tot? It’s a lovely game. Every time you see a child in a passing car you scream ‘Tot’, and if you scream it first you win a point. There are special Tots, of course, which count more. A one-armed Tot, for example, or a two-headed Tot or maybe an ex-Tot. I mean, if, for example, you were to see Deanna Durbin …’

Normally, I’m sure, Pam would have found the game as revolting as I did, but she must suddenly have remembered that Delight Schmidt was still potential dynamite, because she nudged me in the ribs.