Fast Start, Fast Finish Read online

  “Then neither you or Mrs. McCarthy carried a bag.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, I think that’s all,” he said, closing his pad.

  It was a strange and rather startling sensation to find yourself drunk in broad daylight—to emerge from a dark, underground bar and to find yourself on a street full of busy, hurrying, sober people, with the sun blazing down. Being drunk—being this drunk, at least—was something that Charlie had always associated with nighttime and streetlights and neon. And here, in this glare, which took so long for his eyes to adjust to, he had the feeling that time had gone topsy-turvy on him or had elided somehow while he had been drinking. A great cog in time had slipped for him, and he found himself in a place where everyone else was adjusted to a different rhythm. Then, after a moment standing in the street, wondering which way to go, which group of sober walkers to join, he remembered what he had decided to do. He saw what he wanted at the end of the block, a telephone booth, and having to say “Excuse me” to a fellow pedestrian only once, he made his way to it and pressed himself inside the folding glass doors. After a little difficulty finding the number, and then a coin, he dialed the number he wanted.

  “Why, how very strange to hear from you, Mr. Lord,” Myra Mirisch said when she came on the line. “It’s almost uncanny.”

  “Look, Miss Mirisch,” he said, “can I come up and see you? I’ve really got a hell of a problem.”

  “But how very strange,” she said again. “Your wife called me earlier in the day, looking for you.”

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “She did, did she? Oh, my God.”

  “Yes. I gather you play little tricks on your wife, Mr. Lord.”

  “Oh, my God …”

  “But don’t worry. I covered for you. I told her that you were expected, and I’d have you call her. But you see, it’s rather lucky that you called me, because I had no idea how to reach you.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

  “Anyway, do call her right away. She sounded upset.”

  “Sure,” he said, and then again, “But Miss Mirisch, do you think I could come up and see you? Just for a few minutes? There’s something I’ve got to talk to you about.…” There was a pause on the other end of the line, and Charlie said, “Miss Mirisch?”

  “Mr. Lord,” she said, “I’d be glad to talk to you. But don’t you think it would be better if we talked when you’re sober?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

  After hanging up the phone, he stood, or rather, leaned, for a minute or two in the warm glass box with the sun blazing in on all sides, a prisoner in the bright glass box, trapped and adrift in a sea of busy, hurrying, sober faces. All he wanted was a little success. He had had a taste of it once. What had happened to it? He wanted it again. Not a big success. Just a little normal, American, middle-class success—that was all. Other people had it. Why not he? It was all he wanted. Was it such an enormous order?

  Nancy was a little surprised and a little hurt by Genny McCarthy’s reaction to the episode of the automobile accident, and of Blanchette afterward. “Look, sweetie, I heard the crash and I watched the whole hullabaloo from my bedroom window. I didn’t come down because I didn’t want to get involved in it. After all, sweetie, it’s a matter between you and Black Bitch. Don’t drag me in on it! I call her Black Bitch,” she said.

  “Well,” Nancy said a little lamely, “on top of everything else, I completely forgot a doctor’s appointment I had this afternoon, and I just got the curse.”

  “Some days you just can’t win, can you?” Genny said. “But I will say, sweetie, that it was kind of dumb of you to give Black Bitch all that money. She’s not going to miss any days’ work, for God’s sake. Hell, her husband’s got a car, and half the time he drives her to work. And half the time she comes to me she takes the bus.”

  “Why couldn’t she have taken the bus today?”

  “I’m afraid old Black Bitch has screwed you, sweetie.”

  “I don’t suppose you could mention any of this to her, Genny,” Nancy said.

  “Don’t drag me in on it! It’s between you and B.B. But of course you’ve got to pay her now, since you agreed.”

  “Of course,” Nancy said.

  “The real thing Black Bitch is mad at is that she wasn’t sitting in her car when it happened. Then she could have sued you for personal injuries. Black Bitch’s dream of utter heaven is to be involved in an automobile accident and get roughed up just enough so she can claim she’s suffered a whiplash in her back.”

  “Well, I still haven’t told the other reason why I called you,” Nancy said. And she told Genny McCarthy about her visit from the police officer.

  “Gadzooks!” Genny said when she had finished.

  “I just thought I ought to warn you,” Nancy said. “Because obviously he’ll be paying a call on you too.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Genny said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, frankly, sweetie, I think the real reason why they’re suspicious of you is that you’re new here. People just don’t know the two of you as well as they know some of the rest of us.”

  “Oh,” Nancy said. And then, “But he did say he was going to interview everybody who was there that evening.”

  “Well, maybe,” Genny said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  “And I must say, Genny, that I think it’s rather horrid of Jane Willey—if she knew that this was part of the routine—not to have called me or warned me that I was going to be grilled this way! I mean, Jane Willey might at least have mentioned this to me. This was the first I’d heard of any diamond watches!”

  “I agree it would have been nice if she had.”

  “Nice! If it had been me, it would have been automatic!”

  “Yeah. Well, don’t forget, sweetie, the Willeys are a little teed off at you.”

  Nancy gasped. “Why?”

  “I understand Charlie’s been a little funny about fixing up the road.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Nancy said. “He hasn’t been being funny. It’s just that fifteen hundred dollars is—well, it’s not a tiny sum of money, and we’ve got so many other expenses right now. But all Charlie asked Edgar was for a little time to think about it.”

  “Well, I hear that both Jane and Edgar are pretty teed off.”

  “Genny,” she said, “do you think that’s why she’s behaving this way—sending policemen to my house accusing me of stealing watches?”

  “Could be. Jane’s a funny dame,” Genny said.

  “Well, then, I’m certainly going to telephone that woman right now and straighten out a few things with her. You won’t mind, of course, if I tell her that you and I have had this little conversation.”

  “Good God, don’t get me involved in it!” Genny said. “After all, I’ve got to live with these people.”

  “Well, I’m certainly going to call her, anyway.”

  There was a noise on the other end of the line that sounded like Genny McCarthy licking her lips. “Look, sweetie,” she said, “before you do—I’m not for-certain sure that’s their reason. So why don’t you let me do a little sleuthing first? Strictly sub rosa. Let me see if I can find out, strictly on the q.t., if they really are teed off at you—and if they are teed off, how teed off they are? And how we can patch things up? Okay?”

  “Well, all right,” Nancy said.

  “This I can easily do.”

  “Thank you, Genny.”

  “Oh, don’t mention it,” Genny said cheerfully. “It’s part of the McCarthy Service, sweetie! Meanwhile, let’s have another little lunch at the club. I want to introduce you to some more of the members. I loved our last one, didn’t you?”

  5

  The Willeys had flown off for a few golfing days in Bermuda, and so it wasn’t until the following week that Genny McCarthy was able to pay a little call on Jane. “Oh, am I glad to see you!” Jane Willey cried when Genny arrived. “You know, ever since my par
ty I’ve been brooding about that remark you made—that it was all her money. How did you find that out so fast? Quick, sit down and tell me how you did it. Did she tell you that she had the money?”

  Genny smiled and shook her head. She sat down and said, “How was Bermuda, sweetie?”

  “Oh, Genny, don’t tease! Bermuda was fine. Now, tell me how you did it. I’ve just got to know.”

  “I just asked her one simple little question,” Genny said. “Her answer told me all I needed to know.”

  “Well, what was it?”

  “Oh, some preliminary groundwork was needed as well,” Genny said.

  “What sort of groundwork?”

  “Well,” Genny began, tapping out a cigarette from her pack and lighting it carefully, “naturally, when I heard that somebody had bought the house and that we were going to have new neighbors on the Lane, I was curious as to who these people were.”

  “Naturally.”

  “All I knew was that their names were Charles and Nancy Lord and that they were moving from Southern California.”

  “That’s all any of us knew.”

  “So,” Genny said, “the first thing I did was get out the locater for the Social Register to see whether there were any Charles and Nancy Lords. The Register doesn’t publish an edition for Los Angeles, but still a lot of the better people there list themselves in the New York or San Francisco books. But anyway, I got nowhere. They’re not in it.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think they would be,” said Jane, who was not in it either.

  “So obviously, I was stymied unless I could find out her maiden name.”

  “Now, how did you find that out? Did you have the postman let you look over their mail before he delivered it?” Jane Willey giggled. “I did that once. They’ll gladly do it for a little tip. It was when those horrible Petersons were talking about putting up a grape-stake fence around their yard that would have ruined the looks of the Lane. They’d promised not to do it, but Edgar and I didn’t trust them. So we checked their mail for a few weeks afterwards to make sure they weren’t getting any bids from fencing contractors.”

  Genny McCarthy raised her eyebrows. “Well, my method was much more simple,” she said.

  “What was it?”

  “I figured that when they bought the Petersons’ house her full name would probably be on the bill of sale, so I simply called Caroline Peterson.”

  “You mean you were still speaking to those awful people, Genny—after all they tried to do to us?”

  Genny laughed. “Oh, you know me,” she said. “I’m a live-and-let-live gal. I always say, forgive and forget.”

  “Well, I always try to be that way too,” Jane said. “But go on. Did you just out-and-out ask Caroline what the maiden name was? Wouldn’t she have thought you were being a little nosy?”

  Genny smiled again. “No, I merely said, ‘Caroline, I saw the couple you’ve sold your house to from a distance the other day, and she looks exactly like a girl I grew up with in Rhinebeck—a girl named Nancy Sanders’—I just made up that name—‘could this possibly be the same girl? I haven’t seen her for years.’ And Caroline said no, she guessed it wasn’t because this woman’s maiden name was Aylesbury, and from something she said she’d gathered that this woman had come originally from Detroit.”

  “Genny, you are clever!”

  “So, it was back to the old Social Register again—checking on Aylesbury in Detroit. Luckily it wasn’t a name like Smith or Jones. Well, it seems that there’s quite a gaggle of Aylesbury in and around Detroit. But there was one in particular that caught my eye—a William R. Aylesbury, whose wife’s name was Nancy Harper. He was Yale twenty-two, about the right age to be this girl’s father, and with a wife named Nancy—it was just possible that the daughter was named after the mother. It was just a hunch, but I figured maybe I was hitting pay dirt.”

  “Yes, go on.”

  “Well, next thing I did was to go to some of the old copies of Who’s Who that Daddy had. Who’s Who lists the children. Well damned if I didn’t find two William R. Aylesburys in Who’s Who in Detroit, both with daughters named Nancy. Stumped again, I thought. One was a university professor—not much money there, I figured—and the other was a big-type executive. But which was the father of our particular Nancy?” She stubbed out her cigarette and reached for another. “Then I had a lucky break,” she said, frowning over the match as she lighted it, then waving the match out.

  “Go on!”

  “Well, I was leafing through all the different volumes of Who’s Who that Daddy had—he was in it, of course, from the Year One—and I suddenly discovered that the college professor Aylesbury died in nineteen-fifty-nine.”

  “But you still didn’t know whether that was her father or not.”

  “No. I told you I had to ask her one simple question. When I was talking to her at your house the other night, I mentioned Daddy and how I missed him, and I asked her if her father was still living, and she said yes, he was. So I had my answer.”

  “Genny, you are a genius!”

  “Her father has a paragraph yea long in Who’s Who. He’s on the board of twenty companies, chairman of the Detroit Mercantile Bank, head of the Civic Light Opera Association. He lives in Grosse Pointe, raises prize black Angus at his farm on the northern peninsula, and has race horses in Ireland.”

  “And she can’t pay fifteen hundred dollars to fix up our lane! Oh, Genny, my blood is boiling!”

  “That’s her old man.”

  “Genny, you are amazing—the way you find things out. Wait till I tell Edgar about this!”

  “Look, that was simple,” Genny said. “I’ve found out much harder things than that. Though I admit I can’t find out where your little watch has gone, sweetie.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s just such a nuisance—the rigamarole we have to go through to collect the insurance. I’ve seen two others—one at Van Cleef and one at Tiffany—both of which I like much better than the old one. It’s just a question of waiting for the insurance company to pay the claim. They say they’ll have to interview everyone who was here that evening. I suppose that means they’ll be coming to see you and Bob, Genny.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s stupid, and I apologize. But they say they must do it that way—it’s a rule.”

  “I understand. Of course you know who I think took it, sweetie.”

  “Oh, I know! And you’re probably right! But if she did take it, I just don’t want to know about it. And I hope she’s gotten rid of it so they don’t find it on her. She’s been such a treasure for so long, I couldn’t bear to have to give her up. And as I said to Edgar, ‘This is what we have insurance for.’”

  “You gals are too soft-hearted. If Black Bitch or any of the girls I’ve had ever took anything from me they wouldn’t stay in my house two minutes.”

  “Oh, but Mary is—I just don’t want to think about it if it was her. I said to her the other day, ‘Mary, a policeman is coming to talk to you about my watch—it’s just a routine they have to do. You just keep saying you don’t know anything about it. Because you don’t.’ It was my way of warning her, just in case she still had it, to get rid of it.”

  “Look,” Genny said, “don’t you or Edgar ever let on to the Lords that it was I who told you. I don’t want to get involved in it.”

  “Oh, of course not!”

  “Swear?”

  Jane Willey raised her hand and crossed her fingers in the Girl Scout’s honor sign. “Scout’s honor!” she said. And then, “It’s just that now we know who to concentrate on about the road. Her, not him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Incidentally, what did you find out about him?”

  “Nothing. He’s not listed in anything. He’s nobody,” Genny said.

  On Saturday mornings Charlie and Nancy both liked to sleep late, and on Sunday mornings also, for that matter. But this had been a Saturday, a particularly beautiful morning in late May, and t
he air outside their open bedroom windows was warm and filled with the sound of singing birds. Nancy had drowsily noticed that the bedside clock said eight and had gratefully remembered that it was Saturday and that she could stay in her soft warm bed next to her warm, sleeping husband for as long as she wished. When the telephone rang she reached for it and picked it up, and said, through a yawn, “Hello.”

  “McCarthy Service reporting!” said a bright, familiar voice.

  “Oh, hello,” Nancy said.

  Next to her Charlie muttered, “Who the hell is it? Tell them we’re still asleep.”

  “Well, my news today is mixed,” Genny said as Nancy settled herself back against the pillows and cradled the receiver against her ear. “Some good, some bad. But first I want to apologize for not getting back to you sooner, but the Double-yous were in Bermuda last week, and I couldn’t get to Jane till yesterday.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Nancy said.

  “Well, I’ll give you the good news first. You were right. You weren’t being singled out by that policeman. He’s been talking to everybody. He wants to talk to me, and I suppose to Bob—though old Bob was so plastered that night I don’t think he knew where he was. So I thought you’d be relieved by that,” Genny said.

  “Yes, I am,” Nancy said, turning slightly on her side.

  “Who is it?” Charlie whispered in her other ear. Nancy shook her head. With his hand, he drew patterns down her back, and with an elbow she nudged his hand away.

  “Anyway,” Genny was saying, “now for the bad. The Double-yous aren’t just teed off at you, sweetie. They’re boiled off—and for a reason that I thought would really interest you.”

  With both hands now he was massaging her back and shoulder, the soft parts of her upper arm. His hand slid beneath the thin strap of her nightgown to her breast. “Yes, what is it?” she said into the telephone and then covered the receiver with her hand and glared at him. “Stop that!” she whispered to him and edged herself away from him across the bed.