“Isn’t he well?”
“Well enough. His gout is kicking up worse than usual. It always does when he’s worried.”
“I understand he’s worried about his son. What’s the boy been up to?”
Her curly red mouth straightened. “You’ll have to take that up with Mr. Coulson.”
I followed her pleasantly switching hips along a tile-floored corridor to a downstairs bedroom. Light flooded it from high windows on the left. A square bed stood against the far wall, so huge that it almost dwarfed its occupant. Not quite. He had been known as Big George Coulson when he was an All-American back before the First World War, and age hadn’t withered him. It had thinned and grayed his hair, though, draped rolls of fat around his middle, and stuck a porous whiskey nose on his face. He was sitting up in bed in white piped black silk pyjamas, his swollen red feet stuck out in front of him. There was a collapsible metal wheelchair just inside the door.
The nurse moved forward with the air of a lion tamer approaching a difficult beast. “Mr. Archer is here to see you,” she said with a soothing lilt in her voice.
“I can see that for myself. I’m crippled, not blind.” His voice was a harsh growl.
Trying to sit up straighter, he winced and groaned. She bent over the bed and lifted his inert mass of flesh. She was strong. He leaned his head against her breast for an instant, breathing hard through the mouth. She didn’t pull away until he moved his head to look at me:
“Sit down, Archer. You want something to eat? Alice was just about to bring me my lunch.”
“I’ve already eaten, thanks.”
“You’re smart, boy. Know what she gives me? Cottage cheese and pineapple and a glass of skim milk.” He grimaced.
She touched his corrugated forehead, casually. “You want to get back on your feet as soon as possible.”
“Don’t worry. They can’t keep a good man down.” He winked at me broadly.
Her hand trailed down his cheek and slapped it lightly. “I’ll get your lunch. Dr. Freestone says if you’re good, you can have a lamb chop for dinner, maybe.”
“And a drink?”
“No drink.”
She left the room. I sat down in a leather armchair beside Coulson’s bed.
He leaned towards me confidentially, and said as if it was a personal word: “I haven’t had a drink for sixty hours.”
“Congratulations. Now about your son.”
“Yeah. My son.” He took a deep breath and blew it out through protruding lips. His big-nosed face was a tragicomic mask. “He hasn’t been home for three nights. I haven’t seen him since Saturday. I don’t want to be overprotective about it – I had some wild times myself when I was in college. But frankly it’s got me down.”
“How old is he?”
“Ron’s nineteen. He’s going into his junior year at Stanford. Ron did pretty well in frosh football, and he’s no baby. But I feel an awful sense of responsibility. I promised his mother when she died that I’d see him safely through college. I’ve had to be father and mother both to my boy.” His red-brown eyes became liquid with sentimentality, which seems to grow with the years on aging athletes. “Now that he’s practically grown up, I can’t let him wreck his life.”
“That’s jumping to conclusions, isn’t it? Has he ever taken off like this before?”
Coulson wagged his massive head against the pillows. “Never. Ron’s been in training all summer – plenty of sleep, exercise, no drinking. Until he took up with this woman.”
“So there’s a woman in it.”
“Hell yes, that’s just the point. If he was off on an ordinary binge with the boys, I wouldn’t worry about him. I could laugh it off. Only you know what can happen when an innocent young fellow takes off for a weekend with a woman. First thing he knows he’s drunk, she drags him off to Vegas for a quickie marriage, and there he is, kaput!”
“That’s one way of looking at marriage.”
“The only way, when a boy has a million dollars of his own. Don’t misunderstand me.” He waved a deprecating hand. Swollen and distorted at the knuckles, it resembled a diseased and knotted vegetable. “I’ve got nothing against marriage. I had a good marriage of my own, and I want the same for Ron, when the time comes.”
“Has he mentioned marriage?”
“Not to me. He said something to Alice before he left on Saturday – he talks to her more than he does to me. She thought he was joking, so she didn’t bring it up until yesterday.”
“What did he say?”
“Something about taking unto himself a wife, and wouldn’t she be surprised. She asked him who the lucky girl was, not taking him seriously.”
“But he didn’t tell her?”
“No. It’s what I want you to find out.” He leaned sideways in the bed, his gargoyle face intent. “Find out who she is, and where they are, and whether he married her. If he did, get me the evidence for an annulment. I don’t care how you get it.” His red-blotched hand worked on the sheet, opening and closing.
“How do you know he’s with a woman at all?”
“He showed Alice this corsage he bought. She said it looked like about thirty dollars’ worth of cymbidiums. Ron wanted to know if she thought it was suitable. She asked him suitable for what, and that’s when he made his remark about getting married.”
“You don’t have any idea where they’ve gone?”
“No. That’s your problem.”
“Do you have a picture I can take along?”
“Ask Alice.” He was tiring, his voice had risen querulously. “Tell Ronnie if you see him, his old man’s on his back and worried sick about him. Tell him his old man needs him, eh?”
“Uh-huh.” But I thought as I left the room that the old man was pretty well provided for.
I met Alice in the corridor, carrying a tray. I waited for her to come out of the room. She came out smoothing her hair and wearing the feline smile that almost any kind of a pass can produce in a certain kind of woman.
“Mr. Coulson says you can give me a picture of Ron.”
“Yes, there’s one in the study.”
She led me to a high-raftered room lined on three sides with books. The fourth side was a bay window which overlooked a lily pond choked with green slime. A pair of time-pocked Greek marbles, one an unsexed man and one a woman, looked at each other remotely from opposite ends of the pool.
“Who reads the books? Mr. Coulson?”
The feline smile widened. “George isn’t the bookish type. I guess Mrs. Coulson used to read ’em.”
“She long dead?”
The nurse shrugged. “About fifteen years. She fell off a polo pony and broke her neck.”
“Too bad. Thinking of taking her place?” She didn’t turn a hair, change color or stop smiling. “It could happen. But don’t get any funny ideas in your head. I like the guy. You’re seeing him when he’s down, but he’s got a lot of stuff for a man his age. He’s full of kicks.”
“How about Ron?”
“Him I like, too. They’re nice boys, both of them.” Her cool gaze rested on me. “You’re all right yourself. Drop around some time when I’m Mrs. George Coulson the Second. I’ll pour you a drink.”
“I’m here now.”
“Sure enough you are. Too bad the liquor’s locked up.” She went briskly to a mahogany desk in one corner, and came back to me with a silver-framed photograph in her hand. “Here’s your picture of Ronnie. Nice-looking boy.”
He was. An ordinary good-looking college boy with wide-spaced eyes and a short crewcut and a straight nose. Perhaps the mouth was a little spoiled and feminine, the eyes a little arrogant. The arrogance was tempered by the marks of a worried frown between the eyes, which the retoucher had missed. I wondered if Ronnie was worried about himself.