“He continues to flout logic, my boy. What kind of ‘devastation’ when he stands now at his door yelling, ‘Y’all come?’ ”
“He never invited them. They just came when it began to appear he was dying. Only when illness called a halt to the marrying did he find time to sum them up for what they were. He was not quite so dumb in the end.”
Conversation was a long brooding silence shattered by volcanic observations from Quentin Armitage. They sat by the pool at mid-morning. They drank iced tea. The grounds had been cleaned and tailored, and sunlight shone bright on the white statuary. When Quentin spoke it was haltingly, sometimes laboriously, overloud. Or he would fall into himself and intently watch a tree or send his mind back through the years.
“YOU COME TONIGHT,” he shouted suddenly. “ALL WIVES SWIM NAKED.” Then he lapsed into silent laughter, laughing until his old shoulders shook and his bald head bobbed and saliva ran down his chin.
The laughter made Seal smile. “I’ll look at my engagement calendar.”
“ALL NAKED. YOU TAKE PICK,” Quentin yelled, and laughed silently and then went far away.
In time he pointed at Seal. “You polo?”
“I played some. My Uncle Malcolm had some ponies. I watched you play long ago.”
He nodded vehemently. “I polo. Play with Cecil Smith. You know?”
“Remember him well.”
Armitage meditated. “Ten trainloads whiskey, ten wives, ten polo ponies. Fine biography.” This triggered helpless laughter. He choked his way out of it.
“More interesting than mine,” Seal remarked.
A long silence. A sparrow fluttered water in a birdbath.
“WHOLE WORLD CONCERNED HOW I SPEND MONEY,” Armitage shouted fiercely. “EVERYBODY.”
“Shouldn’t bother you.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Doesn’t. How would you?”
“How would I what?”
“Spend fifty million dollars.”
Seal smiled. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“EXACTLY,” he exploded. “NOBODY KNOWS. But tell me how not.” He pointed to himself. “I know. Good time. Naked girls. Young.”
“Wisest course of all.”
Busy concentrated silence.
“Leave to government, my money?” He shook his head dourly. “No. Vietnam. Politicians, South America. Farm subsidy for not growing. Fifty million gone one day.” He waved his arms. “GOVERNMENT ALL MONEY GONE ONE DAY.”
Seal watched a hummingbird flying backward and observed a discreet silence before he ventured an opinion. “But listen, Quentin, may I say something?”
“YOU TALK GO AHEAD.”
“You can’t let these women and their friends rile you up. It’s bad for you. You can’t drink the way you did the other night. You know what your doctors say.”
Had these words been received anywhere? In the long labored silence Seal wondered.
Finally Armitage spoke, this time quietly. “Bums,” he said. “All bums. Want money. Make fun of me. ‘Anything they can do.’ ” He chuckled. “Write book about me? I slap injunction. Who cares.”
“Just don’t let them stuff you with liquor and cigarettes.”
“All swim naked,” he said, and gave way again, laughing until his tea glass fell and shattered and coughs convulsed his body and Miss Pritchett came running from the house.
“You are such an unrelenting ham, Creighton. Why must you clothe everything in the garb of a mystery story? Come out with it, what’s missing? We have a poor little rich boy who turns to alcohol and searches for love. He fails, destroys himself, becomes a joke figure, a senile little Prometheus cackling and salivating as they dance naked about the pool singing Anything they can do, and darting in for quick strikes at his checkbook. What was that about Cordelia you’ve magpied away? What was this theft that occurred?”
“I like to build suspense carefully,” Seal answered.
“I like, after five months in a ship’s cabin, to unpack my bags.”
“I believe in justice grinding slowly.”
“Two hours is glacial.”
“I am telling it as it was revealed to me.”
“It’s your hobby, not mine.”
Armitage died three weeks later. A boisterous birthday celebration had ripped the house and grounds.
“I think he quit caring,” Miss Pritchett said. “I think he just let them do it — kill him. He said, ‘I’m too tired anyway, and what better way to die than at a party.’ After your first talk with him that morning — two days after — something happened that seemed to change everything.”
It was almost four in the morning. She had telephoned Seal before anyone. They sat in the bedroom where Quentin Armitage lay on the parquetry flooring near the windows to the balcony. Below was the disarray Seal had witnessed once before.
“What did happen?” Seal asked.
“The bright year of his life was with Cordelia Coulter. This was the person he loved. And so I kept from him the truth about her disappearance and death in that accident — that she had walked out with a man and was not coming back, and did not even care enough about him to say goodbye. Clever actress, you know, fooled him thoroughly. She left me a little note — where to send her clothes and things. Not a word in it about Quentin — not a ‘love’ or a ‘goodbye.’ I kept this note for a reason. It went far toward explaining Quentin to people who didn’t understand.”
She regarded the body on the floor.
“Two nights after you came and talked to him those people got into my personal papers and took some things, that Coulter note among them. I assume they planned to use it in that book. Then I don’t know what happened. Whoever it was — Amanda, I suspect — must have had too much to drink and gone off and forgotten them. In the morning when I saw my file open I was frantic. I ran everywhere and almost called you, but then went down into the library and there was Quentin. He had found it — a manila folder; he was reading what was inside. He had read that cold note from Cordelia.
“ ‘I never wanted you to know, Quentin,’ I said.
“He smiled and said, ‘I knew it long ago.’
“But the fact of their having done this — gone prowling through my private papers and sat there in his own house reading them — well, that did it. He never gave them another nickel. But they kept coming, and came in force last night, and here he is.” She looked at Seal questioningly. “You spoke to him, Inspector: Would you think, by any stretch of the imagination, that he was at the last at least partially happy?”
Seal turned from the balcony. “Cheer up, Miss Pritchett. For forty-five years they’ve been hustling him, and it always stung. Rest assured that Quentin Armitage, ill as he was, reduced to spectator sports, was pulling off the biggest hustle of all. You know how laughter convulsed him. Who knows but what he got upstairs here and reviewed the evening and laughed himself — yes, laughed himself to death.”
“Explain ‘hustle,’ ” said Malcolm.
“Simple mathematics. The combined duration of the time spent with him in marriage by those six women comes to less than six months. For that-allotting each wife the million she took him for — he paid six million dollars, or, say, one million a month.
“Since his stroke they’ve been visiting him. for a year, all six of them in a body — or six bodies. For those en masse attentions over a year’s time, according to Pritchett’s bookkeeping — the checks he signed for them, the items they purloined — he doled out a little over one hundred thousand total, or roughly nine thousand a month.