“You tried?”
“Yes.”
“What was the idea, Travers? Was she testing him?”
“Yes, testing his love for her, if any, and also — mostly, I think — just to get his attention. She’s been in four plays for the Mummers this past year and he hasn’t come to any one of them. I mean, think about that. It became vital for her to let him know she’s alive. Do you understand, Mr. Train?”
“Yes. But why the twenty-thousand limit?”
Travers had quit rubbing his arm and had gotten a cigarette lit and going. He had long supple fingers that liked to keep moving.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I guess it’s because she had no idea of collecting it and simply didn’t want him to lose any more than that. The idea of recovering the stuff was strictly mine, Mr. Train. She knows nothing about it.”
“Maybe,” I said, “she was afraid of overpricing herself. Some husbands I know would pay that much and more to get rid—”
“I know,” said Travers. “I know some too.”
“Would Taylor?”
“I don’t know. It’s almost unthinkable though, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “Not on a day like today. Do you love her, Travers?”
“Yes, I do. But platonically, Mr. Train. She’s very talented. She’s very good.”
“She loves him?”
“Yes. Without limit.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“No, sir. I was trying to help her. What bothers me is her unhappiness.”
He was rubbing his arm again and knocking ashes on my rug. I don’t smoke, but I do have ashtrays and like people to use them. On Thursday, Martha, my cleaning woman, would pounce on that ash like a cat on a baby mouse. Then I’d catch hell. “Get up,” I said. “There’s an ashtray in the kitchen. Also coffee. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be calling her about now?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to tell her?”
“That he delivered the money. That’s all she wants to know. Just that he delivered the money. She’ll think it means he still loves her, and maybe he’ll even come to opening night this Friday.”
I poured two cups of coffee and drank some of mine, looking out the window at Van Ness Avenue two floors below. The sun was still coming down like Apollo throwing knives and my mind boggled at the million dramas going on out there that I would never know about, that wouldn’t open on Friday and close three weeks later, but would go on forever, unnoticed and unreviewed, important only to their audiences of one or two. All she wanted to know was that he still loved her and she’d commit a half dozen felonies to find it out. Wow, Murphy, I thought, go home and sleep it off before you bring it all down around our ears.
“And when you tell her he delivered the money,” I said. “Then what?”
“Then later today, around five, five-thirty, I’ll drop her off on the road near her house — with tape marks on her wrists and a few other touches — and then she’ll stumble into the house and they’ll have this fantastic coming together in the vestibule—” His voice trailed away sardonically.
“You don’t believe that’s what’ll happen?”
He shrugged. “It’s a fairy tale, isn’t it?”
He was probably right, but I didn’t say so, my recall of her clearer now. She was an energetic, eager-eyed, blondish woman of forty or so with not enough to do, a home-grown neurotic in full flower. She probably should have had four or five kids, but Taylor, I knew, couldn’t be bothered. “What was supposed to have happened this morning?” I said. “How was she supposed to have been snatched?”
“The story is, I phoned her to come down to the playhouse at eight o’clock this morning for some special rehearsal, but she was intercepted in the parking lot by the kidnappers — a man and woman she’d never seen before. She was blindfolded and taken somewhere in a rattly old car. Then she was forced to disclose her husband’s unlisted office phone number before being made to take some kind of a sleeping pill. That’s all she’ll remember until she’s dumped out of the same car near her house. And of course she’ll take a couple of her own sleeping pills an hour or so beforehand, so her dopiness will be real. Neat, eh?” He smiled theatrically.
“It has the virtue,” I conceded, “of simplicity. Her car’s at the playhouse parking lot?”
“Yes.”
“You’d better call her,” I said. “The phone’s over there. Tell her you’ll be there in a half hour or so. Don’t tell her I’ll be with you.”
“Mr. Train?”
“What?”
“Would you donate a thousand dollars of that ransom money you’ve got in your pocket to the Marin Mummers for a new curtain? We desperately need a new curtain.” He was good. He was a man of about thirty-five, but his face shone just then like a choirboy’s. I wanted to ask him to make that cruel face for me again, but it didn’t seem fitting.
I smiled. “It’s not mine to give, Travers.”
“Would he even miss it?”
I weighed the question. “Like a tooth,” I said judiciously. “Go call her.”
At first she was frightened at the sight of me, and then pleased when I said quickly, “Henry hired me to find you. I’m Sam Train — remember?”
“Of course,” she said, and flung the flimsy motel door wide. “Henry truly hired you?” She was inordinately pleased.
“Yes. Right after he got the call from your kidnapper here.” I gestured toward Travers, who was beginning to understand this caper was a bit more serious than a drawing-room charade. We’d driven over in my car and I’d lectured him on the facts of life — at least the few I understand.
“He’s got the money too,” Travers said in feigned admiration. “He filched it from the mailman.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Taylor was wide-eyed. “Should you have done that?”
“From your point of view, why not? What’s one more crime on the list?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“As well you might. You’re in the process at this very moment of committing a dozen or so felonies, and I’m in the process of deciding whether to conspire with you in them or have you arrested.”
“You wouldn’t!”
It was a way of getting her full attention and I pressed it a bit further. “You expect me to tell Henry this kidnapping is for real?”
“Of course.”
“You expect me to deliver you and the money back to your husband without another word about it?”
“Of course.”
She meant it. She needed some sign of his love and would start a war to achieve it. I glanced at Travers, who was looking bland, and then at my watch, which said 3:55. Murphy still had several hours of daylight left and whatever plan I made to handle this contretemps would have to be made with care.
“What we might do,” Travers said, “is follow the original plan.”
“No. I want to be there when they meet. I want to deliver her straight into her husband’s arms.”
“You want the credit, is that it?”
“No. I’ve got the credit already. I want to be there to hand him my bill. I don’t trust the mails. What you’ll tell him,” I said, turning to Mrs. Taylor, “is that you woke up in this strange motel room, stumbled outside to a phone booth, and called me because you remembered me from before and didn’t think he’d want the police in on it. Luckily, I happened to be home. O.K.?”
“O.K.,” she said. “That means we both called you.”
“Right.”
“Should I take my Seconals now?”
“Any time.”
“And me?” Travers said.
“You vanish,” I said, and went over and sat down at the rickety motel table and put through a call to the cause of all this.
It was 5:15 when he steered his mole-grey Mercedes SL-480 between the brick gateposts of his drive and tooled up the long curving approach to the house. I’d parked my Dart a quarter of a block away and was waiting because I wanted him there first. Now I followed him in, Bella coming awake in the front seat beside me, looking right for the role of recent kidnappee. Travers had done a makeup job on her, tape marks around the wrists, a discreet rip at the shoulder of the dress, a dirt smear across the forehead, and the Seconals. She was putting her heart in it. She wanted it to work more than anything else in the world, and I was going to see that it did.