“I wanted to see you, Mr. Gross,” I said. Looking everywhere at once, like Artie when he first sees you again, the way he did last night when I showed up at his party. And now doing the same thing myself, because Mr. Gross was as painful to the eye as a wrong piano chord is to the ear. Did I say he was bald? With a head that looked as though if you squeezed it, it would stay squeezed.
He held up Tim’s gun in a tubby white hand. “With this?” What an idiotic voice. “You wanted to see me with this?”
“For protection,” I explained.
“I have little time,” he said. “I am dummy this hand. We have three tables tonight, all close personal friends. You are an embarrassment to me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“If you want to see me—”
“Her-bert!” A shout from downstairs.
His face twitched. Indecision, and then the mind made up. “Keep watch,” he told the Three Stooges. To me he said, “I will return. When next I am dummy.”
He went away, and the Three Stooges settled down to watch me. I told them, “I’m not going to try and get away. I want to talk to Mr. Gross.”
But I don’t think they believed me.
While they stood grouped near the shut door, I went back over to the window. Nothing had changed down below. I stood gazing, and all at once a shadow flitted, out at the end of the driveway, by the edge. I blinked, but it was gone.
Behind me, the Three Stooges were talking together, deciding to send one of their number for a deck of cards. Larry, the butler, was the one to go.
I watched and watched. Was that motion along the hedge, in the darkness? I couldn’t be sure.
Moe, the chauffeur, said, “You.”
He had to mean me. I turned and pointed at myself.
He said, “You play bridge?”
“A little,” I said. “I’m not very good.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “We need a fourth.”
“All right.”
But Larry hadn’t yet returned with the cards. I turned and looked out the window again, and now I did see her, following my route exactly — Chloe, pussyfooting across the lawn toward the house.
“You,” Moe said. “Come on, we got the cards.”
Chapter 15
It just so happened we were both dummy at the same time. When Mr. Gross came in I was sitting at the table with my arms folded, watching my partner, the cook — whose name was not Curly but Luke — take a perfectly sensible contract of five hearts and grind it beneath his heel. I had always thought I was one of the world’s worst bridge players, but now I knew three worse.
Mr. Gross came in then, and I got to my feet. He said, “If you want to see me, why not merely ring the front doorbell?
It struck me he’d picked up our conversation exactly where it had been interrupted last time. And this time, would it be interrupted the same way, or would the interruption be screams and crashings as Chloe was discovered? It had been ten minutes since I’d seen her out the window, and so far not a sound.
Just as I had been forcing myself to concentrate on the cards, now I forced myself to concentrate on what I had to say to Mr. Gross. “I was afraid you wouldn’t talk to me. It’s a matter of life or death.”
“Life or death?” His mouth twitched; a fastidious distaste for melodrama. But how on earth could such a face convey fastidiousness about anything? And that wedding band on his left hand — what sort of female horror did it imply downstairs?
He said, in that voice again, “Whose life or death? Mine?”
“No. Mine.”
“Yours? But you came here with a gun.”
“To defend myself.”
“Rather than that,” he said, with twitching lips, “explain yourself.” The lips made a smile, in appreciation of the joke. His teeth looked soft, like bread.
“My name is Poole,” I told him. “Charles Robert Poole. Two men came—”
But he already knew the name. He took a step backward, his eyes widened, and if his face hadn’t already been as white as the belly of a fish, I think he would have blanched. “You killed the Farmer!”
“No! No! I didn’t, Mr. Gross. I want to explain—”
“And you came here to kill me!”
“Mr. Gross—”
“Damn!” said Luke. Our contract had just sunk without a trace, only a bit of oil skim on the water.
Mr. Gross said, “What possible point can there be in these murders? Do you think you can kill the whole organization?”
“Mr. Gross, I didn’t kill anybody. I swear I didn’t.”
“Her-bert!” Again from downstairs.
But this time he ignored it. “Of course it was you,” he said. “Who else would kill the Farmer? Who else would dare? Who else would want to?”
“I didn’t want to. Why would I kill him? I didn’t even know him.”
At the table, Luke was shuffling with unnecessary noise. The three of them sitting there were watching me with ill-concealed impatience. In any game, the worst players are always the ones most in a hurry to get at the next hand.
Mr. Gross was saying, “You found out he was the one who had sent Trask and Slade to kill you. Foolishly, you thought you could save your own life by ending his.”
“No, no. I just wanted to talk to him. I know better than that, Mr. Gross. I know it wouldn’t do any good to kill Mr. Agricola. Or those two men, either.”
“Trask and Slade.”
“Yes, sir, Trask and Slade. There would just be somebody else come after me, somebody else to send them, I know that.”
Gross frowned, making creases in his cheeks that looked as though they’d never pop out again. He agreed with what I was saying, but if that was what I already believed, then something had to be wrong somewhere. He said, “And if you were to kill me? Do you think then you would be safe?”
“No, sir. Even less safe. The whole organization would be out looking for the man who killed you.”
This was heady flattery indeed. He preened before me. “That is very—”
“Herbert!” Shouted this time from the doorway.
We both turned to look, and the woman there was undoubtedly six foot three in her bare feet, but at the moment she was wearing four-inch heels. She looked to be in her late twenties, a statuesque blonde, leggy and magnificent, with the body of a somewhat slimmer Anita Ekberg: a Copacabana chorine if there ever strutted one. Facially she had a cold Scandinavian beauty; ice-blue eyes and hollow cheeks and wide mouth and smooth complexion. Just as Gross’s ugliness was embarrassing, making you turn away in spite of yourself, this woman’s beauty had the same effect. It was too much beauty, larger than life, overpowering. It would take a man with absolute confidence in himself to climb into bed with her.
Or a fistful of money? Because this was surely the woman heralded by that wedding band.
Gross himself seemed impressed by her. He waved flaccid hands helplessly, saying, “Something’s come up, my dear.”
“I doubt that,” she said, with utter scorn.
Had Gross had blood in his veins, I’m sure he would have blushed. As it was, his face turned just slightly green. Formaldehyde? He said, “You must carry on without me, this cannot wait.”
“Bridge,” she told him, “is played with four players.”
He looked around helplessly, and saw Luke and the other two sitting at the table in silent agreement of the lady’s observation. “Joseph,” he said. “Go down and take my place for the moment. I will return as soon as possible.”
Joseph was the butler, whom I had initially thought of as Larry. And the chauffeur was not Moe but Harvey.
The quick look I now caught between Joseph and the lady of the house led me to believe this was not the first time, nor the first circumstance, in which Joseph had taken Mr. Gross’s place for the moment. In fact, it seemed to me I saw a similar exchange of glances between the lady and Harvey. Luke, I noticed, resolutely watched his hands shuffle the cards.