Murder in Black Letter by Poul William Anderson (classic novels to read txt) 📕

her, if it's urgent," said Kintyre cautiously; for it was in truth none of Moffat's business. "What's the trouble?"

"Burglary."

"What?"

"A neighbor heard noises in her place last night. Stewed about it for several hours, got no answer to the doorbell, finally called us. Our man had to go up the fire escape and in a broken window. The thief's route. It's a mess in there."

"The devil you say!"

"The devil it might be, sir. There were valuables, jewelry and so on, lying in plain sight. They don't seem to've been touched. I suppose the burglar was looking for something else. Have you any idea what it might have been?"

3

Kintyre returned home about noon. Gerald Clayton caught him on the phone with an invitation to lunch. Kintyre accepted readily. He had his share of false pride, but not so much that he wouldn't let a millionaire pick up the tab for a good meal.

The Fairhill Hotel sat in a swank area on the knees of the summer-brown hills walling the Eastbay. Kintyre parked his hand-me-down among mammaried Cadillacs and rump-sprung Plymouths and strolled into the lobby.

Clayton rose from a chair. "Ah, there, Bob, how are you?" He shook hands and moved toward the elevator. "Thought I'd have lunch sent up. But if you'd like a drink beforehand—"

"No, thanks. Maybe a bottle of beer with the meal. Uh, what's the occasion of all this?"

"We've things to talk about. Not too urgent, I guess, but I'm going to be tied up over in the City." Clayton took Kintyre's arm. "Anyhow, I felt like having some company for lunch."

He was fifty, still broad in the chest and erect in the spine, though his custom-made suit worked hard to disguise a beginning paunch. His grizzled auburn hair, brushed straight back, covered a long narrow head; nose and chin jutted out of a creased sinewy face which must once have been rather handsome. His eyes were deeply set, a darting dragonfly blue, without any burden of glasses. Kintyre liked him in a way, and felt sorry for him in a way, and sometimes wondered what the man was really thinking about.

"I heard about young Lombardi," said Clayton in the elevator. "It's a terrible thing."

"The police been after you too?" Kintyre's manner was abrupt; he didn't feel like more emotional scenes.

"I had one interview. They weren't interested in my alibi at all. What a disappointment: I had such a beautiful one. Witnesses to every waking hour. I came to Berkeley about noon Saturday, had a long conference with the manager of a local motorcycle agency, and a theater party which lasted late. Sunday I was at church, then I played golf, in the evening you were over for drinks, and Monday I went back to the City and spent all day in the office."

The elevator stopped and they got out and went down a long corridor. A little puzzled and annoyed, Kintyre said: "You protest too much."

Clayton opened his door. "I'm sorry," he answered. "I was trying to lighten my own mood, and it came out sounding as if I were trying to be funny. Bruce was a good kid."

He called room service. Kintyre's gaze strayed idly around the suite. Actually, Clayton's Bay Area interests centered in San Francisco. For the past several months he had kept an apartment there, while he went through the preliminary maneuvers of establishing a local branch of his import house. But the Eastbay was enough of a market in itself to justify Clayton in frequently staying at the Fairhill for days on end.

Though his latest checking in had been on Thursday, the suite bore little trace of him. His San Francisco rooms were just as impersonal; Kintyre doubted that the New York penthouse or the luxurious flat in Rome had been given more of a soul. There were four pictures, which apparently went wherever Clayton did: a thin blonde woman, with a washed-out kind of prettiness, who had been his first wife; and two young men and a girl, the children she had given him. Otherwise, nothing but business mail and business documents could be seen.

Oh, yes, Clayton smoked expensive cigars, and he had developed enough patter to get by in social circles whose small talk included the opera or Sartre's latest pronunciamento. But he had left no books lying around, only a news magazine; no chess set or cards or half-completed crossword puzzle; no private correspondence—well, if a man wanted to be simply a cash register, it was his privilege.

But Clayton wasn't that either, thought Kintyre. Something of the brash young salesman (where was it he started, Indianapolis? Some such place) and the construction-gang foreman of worsening days and the minor executive in a Midwestern wholesale house—something of what Margery would label "Babbitt," with all of her own class's glibness in labeling—remained in the transoceanic entrepreneur. Yes. But something else must have developed too. Kintyre had never quite discovered what. It was one reason he accepted most of Clayton's invitations.

"Okay, lunch will be on its way. Siddown, Bob."

Kintyre crossed his legs by the window and took out a cigarette. Clayton chose a cigar. "Do the police have a lead on Bruce's murder?" he asked.

"How should I know?"

"You were his best friend." Clayton's eyes locked with Kintyre's and held steady. "The boy wasn't killed for fun. Somehow, he asked for it. If we knew what he was doing in, say, the last week of his life—"

"Hm. You have a point. He was seeing a good deal of you also, wasn't he?"

"Yes. That's the main reason I asked you over today, Bob. Perhaps between us we could reconstruct most of his movements." Clayton chuckled. "Not that I think we'd solve the crime ourselves or any such nonsense, but organized information might help the police."

"Well—" Kintyre's memory walked backward into darkness. "Let me think.... We were pretty busy till last week, with term's end and the start of final exams. After that it gets irregular, if you're on a faculty. You might have two exams on one day, and then none for three days. So Bruce had a certain amount of leisure all week. Huh—a week ago last Sunday—didn't he mention something about having gone across the Bay to see you?"

"He did." Clayton looked at a note pad. "He came up to my apartment to ask if I couldn't fix his older brother up with a job."

"So?"

"So I know that type. I'd met him, once before. I said no. Bruce got mad when I wouldn't even interview this Guido character."

Kintyre smiled. "I know what you mean. It's a side of him that not many people saw. He seldom lost his temper, but when it happened, it was awesome. I hope you kept yours."

"It wasn't easy," said Clayton. "Actually, this was not the first time we'd talked about the brother. There was once, some months ago—but I don't recall the details."

"I believe I remember. It came up à propos des bottes in my office, when you and he and I were discussing the Book of Witches, didn't it? He mentioned having this brother who spoke Italian. You doubted Guido would be qualified for any very responsible position. Yes, it comes back to me now, you got almost obnoxiously smug about how you had started from zero and so could anyone else."

"Less than zero in my case," said Clayton. His mouth twitched downward, ever so faintly.

"It riled Bruce," said Kintyre. "But he got over his mad fast enough. He was almost too reasonable for his own good."

"That sounds contradictory. I shouldn't think a really reasonable man would ever get angry."

"I beg to differ. Some things, it's unreasonable not to get furious about. Atrocities, including some governments whose existence is an atrocity. Or getting back to Bruce, there was the Point Perro incident several months ago."

"What was that?"

"Oh, nothing very important, I suppose. Point Perro is about sixty miles south on the coast highway. Uninhabited, though it's on any good map. Just a headland with a beach below, private property, fenced off, but I happen to know the owner and have his permission to use it. As isolated a spot, as primeval, as you'll find outside the High Sierras. Bruce and I took our sleeping bags down there for a weekend of surf casting. It has a deep-dropoff where the fish are apt to congregate at high tide. We found somebody had been dynamiting them, which had not only wasted and slaughtered fish but ruined some of the rock formations. Bruce followed the tire tracks above the cliffs, saw that the dynamiters had headed south, and insisted on following; He was quite ready to beat up on them himself. All we actually accomplished was to roust out the authorities, which spoiled our whole Saturday; but it never occurred to him to do less."

Kintyre sighed. "I suspect that he crusaded himself to his death, in just that manner."

"Let's return to our timetable," suggested Clayton. "Bruce stormed out of my place that Sunday night, but he did agree to come back the next afternoon. I said I'd think it over meanwhile, and he could bring Guido to see me after all."

"What happened?"

"They came together. I saw right off Guido was hopeless. Quite an amusing guy and all that, but once a bum always a bum. However, I made polite noncommittal noises. Hell, maybe I'll open a night club someday, and Guido can sing in it. That would be okay." Clayton drew on his cigar. "I didn't see Bruce again till that little party here Thursday night. Can you fill in the meantime?"

"Mmm—I had it all sorted out in my mind—yes. The Monday you speak of, I introduced Jabez Owens to Bruce. We all talked for about an hour in my office. Otherwise I think he just had a routine day, till he went over to your apartment."

"Tuesday?"

"More routine, except that Owens showed up as agreed and lent him the Borgia letters. Bruce took them home that night to look over."

"Oh, yes, those two were having quite an argument about it at the party. What's the deal, anyway? I didn't quite follow. Talking to Professor Ashwin most of the time, myself."

"Well, you know Owens is a writer, specializing in historical nonfiction on the popular level."

"I've heard the name, is all."

Kintyre drew the long breath of an experienced lecturer.

"Owens was a best seller in the late 1930's," he said. "Since the last official war, though, his sales have slipped. A couple of years back, he recouped with a thing called Magnificent Monster: The Life and Times of Cesare Borgia. Its scholarship is superficial—to put it kindly—but he has a flamboyant style and he dished up the sex and sadism with a liberal hand. All the old libels on Lucrezia are there, and so on. But it was a sensational seller even in hardback; the presses had trouble meeting the demand for pocket editions; and now Hollywood wants to film it as one of their more expensive superepics."

"So?" Clayton looked bored. "Good for him, but what has all this to do with Bruce?"

"Give me time. Prior to writing the book, Owens spent some months in Italy, allegedly doing research. He came back with certain letters he claims to have tracked down in the archives of a noble family—letters to and from Cesare, linking him with a cult of Satanists and all sorts of picturesque orgies and abominations.

"The correspondence stirred up a bit of professional controversy. If forged, it's skillfully done, and the noble family in question has been well bribed and well rehearsed. I suspect that is the case, myself. However, Owens has not unnaturally used the chance, not just to brag himself up as a scholarly detective, as if he'd found another cache of Boswell papers—he makes it pivotal to his whole book."

"Ah, yes. And now my Book of Witches manuscript—"

"Disproves it. The Book of Witches is unquestionably genuine, and certain statements in it pretty well clinch matters. La vecchia religione had been rooted out of the Romagna, even