The Manx Murders Page 4

  “Tomorrow afternoon will be fine,” the Professor assured him.

  “I may not be here. I like to go to the factory a couple of times each week. I don’t think Henry’s been there five times since he got married.” He sighed. Ron pegged him as a man who liked to think he bore his crosses patiently—outside of working hours, at least.

  “Thank you again, Mr. Pembroke. We will go see your brother now.”

  “Just follow the gravel road to the left. When you come to the fork in the road, go right. That’ll bring you right up to the front of Omega House.”

  “Actually, I mean for us to walk. I wish to see the area from which the birds have vanished.”

  There was a well-marked path through the woods toward the other house. In some places, it was even covered with white gravel, but mostly it was mud. The sky was overcast, and the sun was going down. It wasn’t raining, but there was enough mist in the air to turn the trees a dripping leathery black in the fading light.

  “If I’d known we were going to do this tonight, Maestro,” Ron said, “I would have worn tougher shoes.”

  “Have I not managed to teach you that investigation is an often disagreeable chore, my friend? You will note Miss Ackerman is not complaining.”

  “Miss Ackerman is being polite,” Ron suggested.

  “Miss Ackerman,” retorted Miss Ackerman, “is used to walking around toxic waste dumps on short notice. This is almost a pleasure.”

  But Ron was tired, hungry, and in a teasing mood. “Nero Wolfe would never start tramping through the woods in twilight.”

  “No,” Benedetti conceded. “He would remain home in comfort reading a book while his assistant went tramping through the woods at twilight. At least you have me here to complain to. Besides, Nero Wolfe is a character in a book. Now sta’ zitto, I am trying to think.”

  Ron kept quiet. He wanted to think, too. This was not the kind of case the Professor usually interested himself in. Usually, there were some atrocious murders, and all Benedetti had to do was catch the killer. This was different. There were no deaths; nobody had even been hurt. The question here was what the hell was it exactly that was going on?—and it was mildly unnerving.

  Ron decided he was in no shape to worry about anything now. In addition to fatigue and hunger (and he’d have to make a point about dinner to Benedetti very soon now—the Professor, it seemed, could live off the vibrations of his own genius when he felt like it), Ron felt a very real resentment at not having been able to take a day or two off before plunging into this thing. About not having had a chance to see Janet.

  They slogged along in silence. The only sounds were the crunch of shoes on gravel, the squish of shoes on mud, and the occasional cry of a bird.

  Then there were no cries of birds.

  “We are here,” Benedetti said. “Listen.”

  Ron listened. He listened until he could hear himself breathing. He could hear Benedetti and Flo breathing. There was the occasional drip of water from a wet bough.

  Ron smelled something. “My God,” he whispered. “I am going nuts.”

  “What is it, amico?” Benedetti demanded.

  “Grape,” Ron said. “I smell grape again.”

  Five

  BENEDETTI FROWNED AT HIM. “Are you all right, amico?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t you smell it?”

  “Yes, I smell it.”

  “Really?”

  “Ronald, I do not humor people, as you should well know.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Flo Ackerman said, “I smell it, too.”

  “Good.”

  “But why are you so upset, amico? Surely one might expect to smell a sweet flavoring in the near vicinity of an ice-cream factory, no?”

  “Ice-cream factory,” Ron muttered. “Of course. Well, I certainly feel like an idiot. Sorry, Flo. Sorry, Professor. I guess I’m just out of it today.”

  “We will soon be done for the day,” the Professor said.

  “Your mouth to God’s ears,” Ron said.

  Flo Ackerman laughed. “My mother says that all the time. Are you Jewish, by any chance?”

  “No such luck,” he said.

  The Professor was back concentrating on the matter at hand. “It is no exaggeration. The birds are gone, from this area at least.”

  “They’ve just moved,” Ron said. “That’s probably why there are so many around the cattery now, according to Clyde Pembroke, at least.”

  “Obviously. The question is why did they go, eh?”

  “I can’t answer that one, Maestro.”

  “Neither can I. Yet. Let us press on.”

  A couple of hundred feet down the trail, Flo Ackerman gave a little scream and fell down.

  Ron ran to help her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Flo said. “I twisted my ankle.”

  “Perhaps, amico, I should stay with Miss Ackerman while you get help,” Benedetti suggested.

  “Oh, no, Professor,” Flo protested.

  Ron peered closely at the ankle. “It doesn’t look too bad. Want to try it?”

  “Sure,” she said. She held out her hand and Ron helped her to her feet. She tried to walk, wobbled a little, gave them a brave smile. “I can make it, if we don’t go too fast. And if you give me a hand.” She took Ron’s arm, and they marched on.

  It was only minutes later that the forest parted in front of them, and they were walking toward the front door of Omega House. When they were about twenty feet along the flagstone walk that led to the door, a figure loomed up out of the shrubbery to their left. It was tall and lean, and hard to make out in the last of the dusk. In its right hand, it held a small sickle that gleamed even in the gathering darkness.

  Flo screamed, jumped back into Ron, and held on. Ron was trying to shed her, to have his arms free to deal with the apparition. He was about to throw her to the ground, not gently, when he heard Benedetti bark, “Amico, no!”

  The noise seemed to quiet Flo down. She let go of Ron and peered.

  “Mr. Jackson,” she said. “You startled me. Especially with that thing in your hand.”

  Jackson’s voice was soft and rich. “Sorry,” he said. He put the tool behind his back, as if somehow ashamed of it, then walked forward.

  As he came closer, Ron could see that Jackson was about the same age as the Professor. His brown face was heavily lined, and the lines emphasized whatever emotion his face was expressing at the moment. Right now, they were expressing cautious amusement. Despite his age, the wedge of hair that stood up from his head was a shiny black.

  The Professor stepped forward, hand extended. “Good evening. I am Niccolo Benedetti. This is my associate, Ronald Gentry, and I believe you know Miss Ackerman.”

  “Yes, I do.” Jackson spoke to her. “I’m Jackson, estate manager here. The gardeners always seem to be slovenly with the grass between the flagstones. The only way to do it is to get down there with a sickle, you know. So I was bringing the work up to par.” Now he spoke to all of them. “I’m sorry if I startled you. We’re all mighty glad you’re here. The atmosphere is going to be a whole lot better if you can figure out how to get the birds back.”

  “We shall do our best, Mr. Jackson,” the Professor reassured him.

  Just then, the light came on over the front door. The door itself opened a second later, and a young, pleasant-faced man popped his balding head out and said, “I thought I heard something out here. Everything all right, Mr. Jackson?”

  “Just fine,” Jackson said. “Our visitors are here. If you don’t mind showing them in, I’ll go clean things up in the shed.”

  The young man, who had to be Chip Pembroke, told him sure, and emerged to usher his visitors to the door.

  Once inside, he took jackets (the servant-master relationships in these parts were very informal, Ron reflected) and hung them up on a device that looked like an octopus making love to a Russian samovar.

  “Hi, Flo,” Chip said. “Uncle Clyde said yo
u’d be around. You must be Professor Benedetti and Gentry.”

  Ron admitted it.

  “Well, I’m awfully glad you’re here. I’m Chip,” he said, offering handshakes. He looked like his Uncle Clyde (and therefore, presumably, his father) only from the cheekbones up. His eyes had Clyde’s shrewd look to them, and the strange greenish glint behind the brown. From there down, he was someone else entirely, undoubtedly Sophie. He had the kind of looks that can be perky and pretty on a woman but tend to look unfinished and callow in a man. His handshake was firm and dry, though, and there was a quiet confidence in his voice.

  “Actually,” he went on, “Humbert Pembroke the second, if you can stand it. The best thing my mother ever did for me was to call me ‘Chip.’ ”

  “Nice to meet you,” Ron said. “Listen, Flo twisted her ankle out in the woods—”

  “You came through the woods? In the dark?”

  “It wasn’t dark when we started. We wanted to check if this bird business was real.”

  Chip offered a strained smile. “And you found out, didn’t you? Spooky, no?”

  “Very.”

  Chip Pembroke took Flo’s arm from Ron and led her to an orange leather divan. At least Ron thought it was a divan. Nothing in this room was exactly the shape or exactly the color you’d feel comfortable with. Right in front of the divan, for instance, was what Ron supposed was a coffee table consisting of three cones of chromium holding up a liver-colored plastic tabletop in the shape of an artist’s palette, complete with thumbhole. Ron guessed it was a sobriety test. When you put your drink down on the hole, it was time to stop for the night.

  The whole thing was very fifties. Not like anything anybody actually had in their homes in the fifties; the kind of stuff you found in style magazines, where some designer had to carry things to their extremes. The whole place was filled with chrome and leather and plastic, pastels and Day-Glo colors, shiny surfaces and geometric textures.

  Ron suspected that Sophie had done to the entire house what some women did with their clothes and hair and makeup. Lucille Ball became well known in the 1940s, and her appearance was stuck in the forties for the rest of her life. Ron’s mother came of age in the early sixties, and she wore long, straight hair to this very day. To the late Sophie Havelka, from the wrong side of the tracks, this house had been the height of style during the period of her greatest triumph, and she froze it in time.

  It was, Ron thought, more alien and uncomfortable than the jumble of Victorian monstrosities in Alpha House could ever be.

  The room they were in was a huge space. Obviously, one or more of Sophie’s decorators had earned a piece of his retirement money by knocking out a few of the walls. Now, you could shoot a 1950s science fiction movie in the place.

  As she lay on the divan, Flo wondered what the hell she thought she was doing. She’d twisted her ankle, all right, but it was nothing, the pain over in a minute. Why was she acting like an invalid, for God’s sake? she asked herself. But she knew why. She was doing it, or at least had done it, because she wanted to get hold of Ron Gentry’s body. She’d settled for his arm. Even through her jacket and his, he’d radiated a warm sensation.

  She told herself she was being a fool; the man had shown no interest in her at all past a friendly concern, and he was married to one of the best friends she’d ever had. She’d just have to stop this foolishness right now.

  But as she sat up and wiggled out of her jacket, she wondered if Ron Gentry was watching.

  Chip Pembroke looked to Ron to be about eighteen years old, marked up from sixteen only because of the thinning brown hair he wore slicked over a growing bald spot. Chip wasn’t fat exactly, but seemed as if he were headed in that direction. He had an incipient double chin and looked soft to the touch. Ron supposed that was tolerable in an ice cream magnate.

  His clothes—button-down shirt with a tiny red check, white chinos, gray wool socks, and penny loafers (no pennies)—and his gee-whiz attitude toward the Professor and Ron himself added to the illusion of youth. In fact, Chip was past forty, some years older than Ron himself.

  After getting repeated assurances that Flo was fine, didn’t need a doctor, didn’t want an aspirin, was, in fact, about to get up off the divan and tap-dance, Chip turned to his other guests.

  “Greetings! Welcome to Omega House. Sounds like a fraternity, doesn’t it? I suppose you want to see Dad. I’ll go get him in a second. Please, sit down. Want anything to drink?”

  The Professor and Flo declined with thanks. Ron said, “You wouldn’t happen to have a grape soda, would you?”

  Chip looked at him with something close to horror.

  Ron grinned in spite of himself. “Just trying a long shot. I’ve had the urge all day.”

  “No, I ... I’m afraid we don’t. We’ve got Coke, and Seven-Up, and tonic and seltzer. And liquor, of course.”

  “Seven-Up will be fine.”

  “Okay, just a sec.” A few moments later, Chip returned with a glass. “Actually, it’s Sprite.”

  “That’s fine,” Ron said. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll go get Dad. Take good care of Flo. She and I have been trying to bring those two old coots together, and I’m glad to see reinforcements.”

  “We will do what we can,” the Professor said.

  “Not that I want you to be too hard on my father, either.”

  The Professor repeated, “We will do what we can,” this time with a gentle smile.

  So much, Ron thought, for not humoring anybody.

  Henry Pembroke returned without his son. Clyde’s twin brother walked down the main stairs. They were in the same place here as they were in Alpha House, but the magnificent marble had been replaced by a construction of steel struts and white wood. It didn’t look strong enough to hold a Slinky, let alone a man, but Chip had ascended, and Henry came down, without so much as a wobble.

  Henry Pembroke wore royal-blue sweatpants and sweatshirt, and had a fluffy white towel wrapped around his neck. He was sweating profusely, and he wiped his face from time to time. He was considerably thinner than his twin, and that made him seem a little taller, but he probably wasn’t. Still, they were enough alike that if it weren’t for the forceps mark on Clyde’s forehead, it would be impossible to tell them apart if you didn’t have them side by side.

  Henry’s purple mark was on his left forearm, above the wrist. Ron noticed it when Henry raised the towel to wipe his face. Not too useful as identification. It would be easy to keep that covered up.

  Pembroke smiled and gave a slight nod of his head. “Miss Ackerman. Professor Benedetti. Mr. Gentry.” His voice was softer than his brother’s, with a slight rasp to it. “Please forgive me for the way I look; I was working out. I didn’t know when you’d be here.”

  “It’s quite all right, Mr. Pembroke,” the Professor told him. “Neither did we. But I did want to get to you today, if only to reassure you of my commitment to the case.”

  Henry pulled a metal-and-plastic chair around and sat on it. “I understand it was the birds that made you decide to help here. Wait till you see.”

  “I have seen. We came here from Alpha House through the woods.”

  “Unnerving, isn’t it? Worse than unnerving. People forget how important nature is, even in the background of our lives. To stand in that part of the woods is ... bizarre.” He wiped himself with the towel again and shook his head in a quick shivering motion. “It’s almost supernatural, as if there’s been a curse put on the place.”

  “Do you believe that to be the case?”

  Benedetti’s voice was soft as he asked the question. Ron knew the Professor loved it when people started ascribing the phenomena he looked into to supernatural causes.

  There’d be no joy on that score this time, though.

  “Oh, of course not,” Henry Pembroke said firmly. “Guess where my broker is now?”

  The Professor was unfazed by the seeming non sequitur. “I couldn’t begin to.”

  “He’s in F
rance. Mont St.-Denis. He likes to beat the rush for skiing, you know. He wrote to me last week, when I mentioned we’d asked you to come here, that the place is still buzzing about how you unmasked the ‘werewolf.’ ”

  Henry Pembroke sat back in the chair. “No, I don’t really think anything supernatural is going on. Still,” he murmured, “it would be nice to know how he’s doing it.”

  “By ‘he’ you mean your brother, I suppose.”

  “Who else? That’s why I’m so glad you’re here, Professor. It will take a genius to trap him. We’re supposed to be identical twins, but there is a major difference. Two major differences.

  “The first one is that Clyde is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. There is a strain of high intelligence in our family. Our father had it; Clyde has it. People laugh at me when I say this, but my son Chip has it—it’s just hidden under his inherent good nature. But, somehow, I don’t have it.

  “But in Clyde, the intelligence goes along with a fierce competitiveness. I won something he wanted only once, and he has hated me ever since.”

  Ron was sure they were going to get the Sophie story again, this time from the other side, but the Professor double-crossed him.

  Benedetti said, “You said there were two differences.”

  “Yes, I did. The other difference is this: I have a conscience; Clyde has none, none at all.”

  There was a sudden pounding on the great front door, someone literally smashing something against the oak. They could make out a man’s voice, screaming, on the verge of hysteria.

  “Let me in, or, by God, Henry, I’ll burn this place down with you in it! You goddam evil bastard! Open this goddam door!”

  Chip came running down the stairs. He looked a question at his father, who sighed. Chip ran on and opened the front door. He said, “Uncle Clyde—,” then got steamrollered out of the way.

  Clyde Pembroke came stomping into the room, ignoring all the clashing colors and rampant modernity. He was carrying a cardboard box. He thumped it down on a table, then, shaking with rage, he walked over to Henry, shaking a fist in his face and bellowing, “I’ve put up with a lot of shit from you because of who you are, but this time you’ve gone too far. If anything like this ever happens again, little brother, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me? I’ll kill you!”