The Manx Murders Page 6

  “Tomorrow,” Janet said, and the word in Ron’s ears was full of joy and possibility.

  “Tomorrow, that’s great. I’ve been missing you.”

  Benedetti pointed to himself and reached for the phone. Ron was surprised but said, “Hold on a second. The Professor wants to talk to you.”

  Ron heard his wife’s voice say, “The Professor?” as he handed over the phone.

  Benedetti put the receiver to his ear. “Ah, dear Janet, it is a pleasure, as always, to hear your voice. Am I correct in my impression that you are joining us tomorrow? No, on the contrary, I believe it to be an excellent idea. Your old friend is attempting to seduce your husband, and he is too much a gabbia testa to notice.”

  Eight

  JANET HIGGINS WAS AMAZED at her own peace of mind. She didn’t even mind the cramped airline seat on the short hop between Sparta, New York, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Almost as tall as her husband, she usually spent commercial flights chasing fugitive pains around her various cramped-up joints.

  Of course, Janet was honest enough with herself to admit that the cramped feeling and the pains were probably byproducts of her general dislike of flying. Ron was never troubled with them.

  Janet was always honest with herself—at least as honest as anybody whose constant companion was that master trickster, the human subconscious, could be. She considered it her duty as a psychologist. She knew that it was impossible to insist that you yourself be neurosis-free before you tried to help someone else, but it was incumbent in a trained professional, she felt, at least to be aware of your kinks.

  So she drifted into her habit of being honest with herself. Why was she so happy on this trip, even though the plane had been taking off into a cloudy sky and had a good chance of running into turbulence?

  She wished she hadn’t thought of the turbulence. She signaled for a flight attendant, who materialized like a genie from a lamp. “White wine, please?” A little wine always helped to calm her down.

  Before the flight attendant could turn away, Janet said, “No! I mean, I changed my mind. I’m sorry. Just a club soda, if it’s okay?”

  The club soda was forthcoming. Janet sipped at it daintily. That was silly of me, she thought. No more wine for a while.

  So forget the turbulence. Why so cheery?

  Well, for one thing, she’d been looking forward to this trip since Benedetti decided to go. For another, even more than usual, she was bursting with news for Ron.

  And best of all, the now-glamorous Flo Ackerman had been, according to the Professor, making passes at her husband, and he hadn’t even noticed it. That was good. That was better than good. Janet had spent the early years of her marriage to Ron not exactly not trusting him, just having difficulty believing how a hunk like him could be contented with her. The fact that he professed to be prostrated by her beauty, and the fact that he loved the fact that “she didn’t look like anybody else,” were not calculated to solve the problem. A woman who has felt lonely and isolated since girlhood wants to look like everybody else. She wants to be thought conventionally pretty, even while she knows she’s not.

  Until, of course, she wises up. Janet wasn’t sure she had, yet, not completely. She still didn’t exactly understand Ron’s devotion to her, but she had come to believe it. And since pleasing him made her happy, and he was manifestly pleased with her the way she was, she’d come to accept herself, flat chest, bumpy nose, mousy hair, and all.

  Now she believed it even more. She was astonished to find she wasn’t even very angry with Flo. She was more sorry for her.

  Last night, the Professor had said, “Please, cara arnica, do not get the wrong impression. There is no danger that Ronald will succumb to the importunings.”

  “None, Professor?”

  “The Word of Niccolo Benedetti. That is not the problem.”

  In the background, she could hear Ron: “Maestro, what are you talking about?”

  “What is the problem, Professor?” Janet asked.

  “The problem is the possibility that in not noticing, Ronald will unintentionally encourage the approaches to escalate, until they cannot be cut off without damage to Miss Ackerman’s self-esteem. She is an efficient worker, and not brainless. It will help our task here if she is not upset.”

  Even then, Janet had been more amused than anything else. Poor Flo. Of all the times to come on to Ron, she picked about the worst. And it would be the absolute worst, as soon as Janet got there.

  “Don’t worry, Professor. As I told Ron, I’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Good. I will be glad of your presence for other reasons as well. I have an intuition that the strange things are just beginning here. Now I will give you back to your husband. Travel safely.”

  Ron took the phone. “Janet, really. I haven’t—”

  “I know, dear. Don’t worry about it. Even if she were, and you wanted to, I’ll be there tomorrow, so she wouldn’t get close to you.”

  “No,” Ron muttered, “but I’m going to get close to you.”

  “Mm-hmm. And don’t you forget it.”

  Janet was smiling when she hung up.

  So, the plane was coming in for a landing at—she glanced at her watch—about two-thirty on a Saturday afternoon. Ron would have had his meeting with the brothers and the police about the security on the estate (he’d mentioned that when they were deciding what plane she’d take). He’d take her back to the hotel, she’d tell him the big news, they’d give the Professor some money and send him to the movies (actually, the Professor had a sixth sense for knowing when he wasn’t needed), and she and Ron would disappear for a late matinee.

  No wonder she was enjoying the plane trip.

  The plane stopped. She grabbed her bag and went into the terminal.

  Ron wasn’t waiting at the gate. He wasn’t waiting in the waiting room, either. Okay, traffic or something. Nothing to worry about.

  Janet found a phone, got a coin and a phone number from her purse, and called the inn. Neither Mr. Gentry nor Professor Benedetti was in. Did she care to leave a message?

  “If they check in, just tell them I’ve arrived, and I’m at the airport. They’re probably on their way already.”

  Well, she reflected as she hung up, Ron probably was. The Professor wasn’t a big one for meeting people at airports.

  The place here wasn’t so big that Ron could be wandering around, missing her. The thing to do was to take a seat and wait by her gate until Ron showed up. He’d probably be there any minute.

  She found a bench nearby, sat down, pulled out the new James Herriot, and was swept off to postwar Yorkshire while she waited patiently.

  After a half hour, she was waiting less patiently.

  After an hour, she waited much less patiently.

  After an hour and fifteen minutes, she was torn by mixed feelings. Half the time, she felt she’d been forgotten and was furious, and half the time, she was convinced that Ron’s battered body was lying under a car wreck somewhere between here and Harville.

  She finally decided to hell with the first thing. If she was confident, she had nothing to worry about from other women, and she was, she ought to be confident she wouldn’t be stood up. As for the second, she could do more good in town than she could out here. She picked up her bag and headed for the taxi stand.

  She was so intent on her mission that she almost bumped into Ron without recognizing him.

  “Janet!”

  “Oh!” She dropped her bag, wrapped her arms around him, and gave him a kiss. During Janet’s younger days, there had been a social taboo against PDA—public displays of affection. There had never been a social norm she was more delighted to smash. Affection was its own excuse; people who didn’t want to see people engage in it were just jealous.

  “Hi,” Ron said.

  “Yeah,” Janet said. Her eyes gleamed behind her glasses. “Hi.”

  Ron bent over and picked up her suitcase. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”


  They practically ran across the parking lot to the rented car, a white Ford Taurus. Ron threw the suitcase in the back seat, opened the door for Janet (he remembered that sort of thing even in an emergency; he said his mother had been very insistent about it), then ran around the car and slid in behind the wheel.

  “Ron—” she began.

  “Sorry I was late,” he said. “All hell is breaking loose.”

  “Oh? Something to do with your meeting this morning or something?”

  “Or something,” Ron echoed. “Only in a manner of speaking.” He gave a bitter little chuckle. “It did have to do with security.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Clyde Pembroke’s been kidnapped.”

  “My God.”

  “Yeah. It took practically an act of Congress to make the authorities let me come pick you up.” Ron frowned. “You started to tell me something, didn’t you?”

  Janet gently patted his thigh. “It’ll keep,” she said.

  Nine

  THE MEETING HAD BEEN called for eleven o’clock that morning; Chip Pembroke came by to pick up Ron in another Lincoln, not the same one Clyde had been driving the night before. Ron hopped in the front seat and buckled his seat belt.

  “Isn’t the Professor coming?” Chip asked.

  “No,” Ron said. “The Professor is painting.”

  “Oh, yes, he does that. I’ve read about that in Parade magazine. What is he painting now?”

  “He is painting a picture of a mating pair of cardinal grosbeaks eating grapes. It’s a very interesting painting, since, he tells me, it’s hard to deal with red and purple together without making the picture garish. He’s doing fine. It will probably be an extremely realistic painting—we’re at that stage of things. It could go in a nature book, assuming cardinals eat grapes, which I don’t know.”

  “Cardinal grosbeak? What’s that?”

  “That’s the full name of the bird. You should know that, being the son of a devoted bird-watcher the way you are.”

  Chip grinned sheepishly. “That’s Dad’s hobby. He tried to get me interested in it, but it didn’t work. You must know a lot about it.”

  “Not really. It just stuck in my mind because it sounded so perfect: Clarence Cardinal Grosbeak, Archbishop of Altoona.”

  Chip laughed. “I don’t think there is an Archbishop of Altoona, but I get what you mean. Why didn’t the Professor want to come along?”

  “Because what we’ll be doing today isn’t philosophy; it’s just nuts-and-bolts work. The kind of thing I do ninety percent of the time. He has no patience with it whatsoever. And, as he frequently says, no talent for it, either.”

  “That’s a shame,” Chip said. “Chief Viretsky was looking forward to meeting him.”

  “Gee, I suppose the chief’ll just have to settle for a couple of multimillionaires.”

  “He sees them so often he’s sick of them. You don’t know what it means to be a Pembroke in this town.”

  “How could I?” Ron said. “My father sold insurance.”

  “Listen, Gentry,” Chip said, suddenly serious. “Don’t envy me, okay?”

  “I don’t, especially. I was just saying I couldn’t know what it means to grow up the way you did.”

  Chip laughed. “Well, there’s your first lesson. It makes you paranoid. It’s also extremely isolating. I mean, it must be weird enough to grow up rich in New York, or even Pittsburgh, where there’s ‘society,’ with dancing schools and that other crap for people at your income level. It’s nauseating to think of—I’ve met plenty of dancing-class society in college and since—but at least it’s somebody your parents don’t have to warn you about.

  “And, you know, my mother was worse than my father? She’d had all this wealth dumped on her like a Christmas present, and suddenly she was suspicious of the whole world, in case they would try to take it away from her.”

  They stopped for a red light. Chip drummed nervously on the steering wheel. “It was worse for me than it was for my dad and Uncle Clyde, you know. They were twins; they had each other. I didn’t have anybody.”

  “You seem to have weathered it all pretty well,” Ron commented. “You’ve got a successful business of your own.”

  Chip nodded and his face lit up a little. “All my own. I borrowed the money to start up Chip’s Creamery Ice Cream from a bank. My dad was furious. You know, before I started this business, I made it through almost forty years of life and never had a job. I just sort of noodled along. Then, one day, I decided to take the thing I loved best in the world and just do it the best I could.”

  “And that was ice cream.”

  “Well, no, actually, that was playing shortstop in the major leagues, but I was already too old for that, so I thought I’d go to the ice cream next.”

  “I hear it’s good stuff,” Ron said.

  “Thank you. I’m very proud of it. It’s doing well, too. Of course, I’m never going to make Pembroke kind of money with it, but it keeps me off the streets. I’m about at the point where I can start using some profits to do some good. Like those two hippies up in Vermont. Brilliant publicity, and it doesn’t cost them all that much. I think World Peace is pretty well played out as a cause, though. I think I’ll go for the environment.”

  Ron said, “Ah.”

  “What’s the matter?” Chip wanted to know.

  “Don’t do that until the Professor finds out what happened to the birds, okay?”

  “Are you saying I could have chased the birds away with ice cream?”

  “Of course not. I’m saying you can bet if there’s something around to embarrass you, the press will latch onto it. I’m not talking about the local paper here—”

  “Oh, naturally.”

  “I’m talking about the national media and the tabloid TV shows. Those guys will kill you if they get the chance. Did you see the one they did on the Professor?”

  “Because he lives in your house? That one? Where it made it look like some kind of commune or something?”

  “That’s the one. I happen to own a twelve-room house—an old hunting lodge the city grew up around—and the Professor lives in three rooms on the top floor. To see that show, you’d think the three of us lived in a waterbed.”

  Chip shrugged. “See, there’s something I wouldn’t know about. Being famous, I mean. The Pembrokes have always managed to keep out of the public eye.”

  “Yeah, well, be prepared. When it gets out that Benedetti is down here, the press will be out in force, wondering where the serial murderer is.”

  They came to the entrance to the estate. The Lincoln rode a lot more smoothly on the pitted gravel road than Flo Ackerman’s car had. Flo had been invited to today’s meeting, but she’d declined. It wasn’t her field, she said. She was going to hop a plane back to D.C. for the weekend and catch up on reports.

  Ron was just as glad. He didn’t look forward to another jouncing in that Mixmaster she called a car.

  Their path through the estate took them past Omega House, into the woods and out back, into terra incognita for Ron. In about ten minutes, they reached an unassuming one-story cinder-block building, well hidden in the woods. From it, a paved road led out through the woods.

  “Goes out to the highway,” Chip explained when Ron asked about it. “Access for the milk trucks.”

  And, Ron thought, for such of Chip’s employees who couldn’t afford Lincolns. There were about ten cars in a small parking lot alongside the building.

  “You’ve got people working on Saturday?”

  “All the time,” Chip said. “It’s cheaper to keep the machines running.”

  Chip opened the door for Ron. The receptionist smiled, gave them a hello, and said, “Your father’s here, Mr. Pembroke; he’s waiting in the conference room. Chief Viretsky called—he’ll be a little late.”

  “And Uncle Clyde should be along any time, now. Great.

  We’ll be waiting, Sandy. Send everybody right in as soon as they arrive.” />
  Henry Pembroke looked tired and old this morning, more worn out than he’d looked fresh from the exercise machine the evening before. He kept rubbing the purple spot on his wrist.

  Nevertheless, he struggled to his feet and shook hands with Ron. He nodded at his son, his face expressionless.

  “Where’s your car, Dad?”

  Henry Pembroke shrugged. “The Mercedes is in the shop, and I just wasn’t up to driving the Samurai. The thing will go anywhere, but on this terrain, the ride’s too rough for an old man like me. I didn’t want to go all the way out to the highway to come up the smooth road, either—I’d just get homogenized on the way out instead of the way in.”

  Unexpectedly, he grinned at Ron. “That’s why my son had to pave the road, Gentry. If the milk trucks had to come in the regular way, he’d have to make butter instead of ice cream.”

  “What did you do, Dad, walk?”

  “Yes, I did. Loved it. I should do it more often. There are still birds around here. I saw a cardinal on the way over.”

  “Was it eating grapes?” Ron asked.

  “What?” Henry blinked. “No. Cardinals don’t eat grapes. They’re seed-eaters.”

  “Just wondering,” Ron said.

  He sniffed. The air was filled with a sweet smell, but it was much weaker than yesterday’s, and it wasn’t grapes. He sniffed some more.

  “Butter pecan,” he said.

  “Close,” said Chip. “Butter almond. With real butter and real almonds, as always. Real everything.” He looked at his watch. “I wonder what’s keeping Viretsky.”

  Henry Pembroke smiled, coughed, smiled again. “I know what’s keeping him. Cussedness. He just wants to make the Pembroke brothers wait to show us we don’t intimidate him.”

  “Do you?” Ron asked.

  “Intimidate Viretsky? No. And we never have. When he was a kid in this town, he was wild. Not bad, you know, just rambunctious, as my father used to say. Dropped out of school and came to work at the mill.

  “One day, he got into an argument with a foreman over the best way to set up a grinding job. Called the foreman an idiot and worse, which he was, but you can’t have that kind of insubordination on the shop floor. So Clyde called him into the office, and we told him we’d have to let him go.”