“You’re Peter Chantry. I understand a girl named Rose Breen looked after you for a while when you were a small boy. You may not remember her.”
“I do, though. I remember her very well. Rose treated me very well. She used to do a lot of clowning around. She taught me to swim in the pool. She even got me started reading, mirabile dictu.” The memory softened his eyes. They needed softening. He almost smiled.
“Mirabile what?”
“Mirabile dictu. It’s a Latin phrase. Rose and I had a wonderful time together – the best time that I ever had in my life. I’ve been thinking about her a lot these last couple of days. I sat up most of last night thinking about her.” He added confidentially: “I do my best thinking at night.”
He appeared to be about twenty, but he acted younger. Still I had the impression that he was playing a role – assistant gardener, village idiot, family fool – behind which his intelligence lay in ambush. I’d run into similar fronts in other young people who felt displaced at home.
“Maybe I better come back around midnight or something. We’ll synchronize our watches.”
“Mine is already synchronized,” he said, deadpan. “What’s your name?”
“Lew Archer. I’m a private detective. Is that clear?”
He looked at me in boyish confusion. Then he decided to laugh. Or un-laugh. “I’m sorry, but I don’t like to be mistaken for Leverett’s son.”
“Where did you pick up the is-that-clear bit? Television?”
“Leverett. He used to say it all the time. I started saying it back to needle him. It must have crept up on me. Things do.”
“Tell me more about Rose. Sit in the car if you like.”
“No thanks.” But he leaned his arm on the door. “Why is everybody suddenly so interested in Rose? A man was here the other day – it’s what got me started thinking about her. I’d hate to think of that Barr person catching up with Rose. He isn’t really her uncle, is he?”
“He’s not her uncle. I don’t know who he is.”
“What does he want with her?”
“She’s the one to ask. Do you have any idea where she is, Peter?”
“How would I know?” His face had gone blank and stupid. “She may be dead, for all I know.”
“But you don’t think she is.”
“I don’t want to think she is.”
“How did the idea come up?”
“Everybody I care about dies or goes away.” He kicked the earth, spraying the car-door with gravel.
“When did you last see her?”
“I was about five. She took off without even saying goodbye. I felt very badly about it. I cried. That was about the last time I ever cried. You see, she treated me like a mother. My own mother never did. Rose took me to her place and we used to pretend that I was her little boy.” His voice cracked with self-pity.
“Didn’t she live in?”
“She did at first. After Father came home from the war she moved into her own place, down the road. I suppose there wasn’t room for her in the house. But you’d think there would be, wouldn’t you?” He looked at the house. “It’s a big house, and there was – there were only Mother and I for a long time after that.”
“What about your father?”
He turned on me. “What about him?”
“You said that he was home from the war.”
“He didn’t stay,” the boy said. “He went away again around the same time Rose did. Maybe it was the same time. I don’t remember exactly.” He winced, as if the razor edge of memory was hurting him.
“He went back to the war?”
“The war was over, I know that much. It was over long before he ever came home in the first place.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t he tell you? Or didn’t your mother tell you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.” His sneaker toe was digging a hole in the gravel. “I wish you wouldn’t ask questions about my father. It’s painful to me. I hardly remember him. Besides, his run-out has nothing to do with Rose Breen.”
I wondered. Maybe he was wondering too. He raised his eyes from his little excavation. They were bleak and blind in the sunlight. They winced away from mine like an animal’s.
The sound of a heavy car was approaching in the road.
“That’s Leverett now,” he said. “You’d better move your car. Leverett doesn’t like people to get in his way.”
I started to move the car to the side of the driveway. A mass of chrome and color hove up in my rearview mirror and honked at me. I got out, leaving the motor running. So did the other driver.
He was a middle-aged man in a dark gray suit that matched his dark gray hair. Either he had a good tailor, or he was very fit under his clothes. His face was brown with suntan that hadn’t come out of a bottle, and not bad-looking, except for a prissy little mouth under a prissy moustache. His eyes were keen and glacial.
“Don’t block the driveway, please,” he said precisely.
“I was just unblocking it. There’s room for you to get by.”
The Count of Montevista
Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).
I went through my mail in search of hopeful omens. One interesting-looking envelope came from Spain and had pictures of General Franco and the Santa Maria on the stamps. It was addressed to Señor Lew Archer at my Sunset Boulevard address. Inside it said: “Cordiales Saludos: This comes to you from faroff Spain to call your attention to our new Fiesta line of custom furniture with its authentically Spanish motif…”
There was a bill from The Bottle Shelf.
Its size astonished me. Combined with the weekend I had just put in, at Palm Springs, it made me determined to quit drinking almost any day now. I was planning my anti-drinking campaign, with emphasis on how to spend all the money I would save on liquor, when the telephone on my desk rang.
It was Eric Griffin of the Beverly Hills law firm Griffin and Shelhovbian. I had done a little work for him in the past. He wanted to know if I was free to undertake a small job. I was.
“I have a young man with me in my office now. He’s the son of an old acquaintance of mine, and he seems to feel that he needs the services of a detective.” Griffin sounded as if he had his doubts about the need. “Apparently his girl has thrown him over in favor of some sort of foreigner. He seems to think that the man may be crooked or even dangerous.”
Behind Griffin’s voice I heard a younger man say: “He is dangerous.”
“I’ll let him talk to you himself,” Eric said.
“Not on the phone. Shall I come over there?”
“No, I’ll send him over to you. His name is Peter Jamieson Three,” he said with a faintly sardonic intonation. “Treat him gently.”
“Is he fragile?”
“Not exactly. I knew his father at Princeton.” His voice was full of unspoken information. “The family lives in Montevista. Peter will handle the financial arrangements himself, since he’s not really my client.”
The young man arrived in about twenty-five minutes. He was puffing from the climb to my second-floor office. He couldn’t have been out of his early twenties but his face was fattish and rather apologetic, the face of a middle-aging boy. His body was encased in a layer of fat like football padding which made his Ivy League suit too tight for him. He looked like money about three generations removed from its source.
“I’m Peter Jamieson.” He let me feel his large amorphous hand.
“Yes. Sit down. Mr. Griffin told me you were coming.”
“I heard him. Mr. Griffin thinks I’m making a fuss about nothing. I’m not, though.” He peered around at the mug shots on the walls. He had the kind of soft brown eyes which are very often shortsighted.