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property. In the legal sense, I mean," he hastened to add when Mary looked at
him.
"Even if Seabright has paid for it?" Thorn asked.
"Absolutely. No question about it. There'd be a devil of a legal and financial
mess to untangle. But the painting would have to be held in trust for Helen,
as per
Delaunay's will. Assuming he's really dead. Wow," added the lawyer, looking at
Thorn. "And the painting was on that plane."
"The matter of the missing plane," said Thorn, "is now perhaps explained."
Miller nodded slowly. "If Helen is still alive, and Seabright somehow found
out about it, he'd then have a good motive to get the painting out of the way.
Maybe sell it secretly; there are collectors who would buy."
Mary for once was not delighted to discuss villainy. She slumped in the
kitchen chair, not looking like her usual self. "Rob, shall we call in the
police and tell them about the call? How are we even going to start looking
for her if we don't do that?"
"Indeed," put in Thorn, "how are we to start looking in any case, whether the
police are notified or not?"
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"Then you advise against calling them?" Miller was fumbling nervously for his
pipe.
"My advice is that we first take thought. What exactly can we tell the
authorities, and what will they believe? All three of us heard someone on the
phone, but which of us can swear convincingly that it was Helen? Certainly not
I, who never heard Miss Seabright's voice."
Miller, having found his pipe, held it in his hand forgotten. "I did a few
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times.
But I couldn't honestly say. Mary?"
Mary had her face down in her hands now. "Maybe& I don't know. Maybe it could
have been someone else. I saw Helen lying on the floor in the Seabright house,
dead. All shot to pieces."
Thorn asked: "You recognized the victim's face?"
"Her mouth was almost gone, her lower jaw. I
never realized till then that guns did things like that. Her hair& it looked
like
Helen's hair. I assumed it was Helen. Everybody did. It never entered my mind
that it might not be her, because I never had any idea that there could have
been another girl in the house. 'Annie.' Whoever it was on the phone just now
said
'Annie'. Did you hear?"
Thorn and Miller both signed agreement. Mary went on: "It's crazy. I don't
know any Annie, and I don't believe there could have been another girl.
Dressed in
Helen's robe?"
Thorn prodded: "But is it not possible? Some runaway, perhaps, being given
shelter? That only Helen and her uncle knew about?"
Mary hesitated. "Delaunay would've told me, if he'd been doing that. Let me
think about it. It's not absolutely impossible, I suppose."
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Miller was now inspecting his pipe as if it were some interesting alien
artifact.
"Assume we went to the authorities with this phone call, and could get them to
halfway believe us. Then ordinarily, you know, a court order could possibly be
obtained, the body in question could be exhumed, a certain identification
made.
Fingerprints, dental records, and so on. But Helen if she was the girl who was
shot was cremated."
"That's right," murmured Mary. "It was the family tradition." Rotating her
head as if to ease weary neck muscles, she looked at the men. She seemed now
to have pulled herself essentially together. "But oh, this is awful the more I
think about it, the more I feel sure that it must have been Helen on the phone
just now:
That dead girl in the house& she could have been someone else, although I
don't know who. But the girl on the phone mentioned something, a thing that
happened to me in Idaho." Mary sighed and looked at Miller as if asking to be
forgiven.
"Something that I know I've never talked about to anyone but Helen."
"But that Helen might have talked about," said Thorn.
"Well& "
Thorn went on: "The girl on the phone said 'he' would try to kill her again if
she came back."
Neither of the others wanted to comment. There was a short pause. Then Miller
said: "She whoever it was said something else that I thought was strange.
About being put into 'real movies', if I heard it right."
"You did," said Thorn. "And mentioned reunion with someone she had thought
'lost forever.' Who had Helen lost forever, Mary?"
Mary did not reply at once. Miller had put away his pipe and was massaging the
back of her neck, her shoulders. She leaned back in the chair, yielding to the
motion. "I don't know," she murmured at last. "She's run off& it'll be a rerun
of last time, I'm afraid."
Thorn asked patiently: "What happened last time?"
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She looked up at him, her head bobbing with the rhythm of the continuing
massage. "Helen ran away and got as far as Chicago. Some jerk there had her
acting in porn movies. She wasn't basically like that at all."
"I see. And do you think that this jerk, as you call him, is the long-lost
lover she has now rejoined?"
"Oh no. Not him, never. She doesn't hate herself that much. But she did talk
to me about some-one else she met on the road, a boy who meant something to
her.
She told me his name was Pat. I don't know if he was involved in the porn
factory thing or not, but she must have known him at about the same time."
"Pat was a runaway too?"
Mary thought. "I got the impression from Helen that he was older, a little
older anyway. Not a runaway any more, an independent adult. No, independent is
not the right word for what adults are like when they've grown up that way, on
the road. I've seen a bunch of them. Lost, usually. Isolated. That's what they
tend to be like when they manage to grow up at all."
Miller said: "Come to think of it, I do seem to remember hearing Helen once
mention someone called Pat. With a kind of wistful look in her eye."
"O'Grandison, that was his last name!" Mary had suddenly come up with it. "Oh,
Rob, that must have been Helen on the phone. Oh, my poor baby. I remember now.
She used to say Pat had talked to her about making good films, wishing he
could help make them, something like that."
And here, unexpected by either man, came tears. Miller, still rubbing Mary's
neck tenderly, tried to react lightly. "Mother Mary," he joked.
"Don't laugh at me."
"I'm not." He squeezed her neck muscles firmly again and looked at Thorn.
"What do you think?"
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"I think," said Thorn, "that in the matter of making vile films in Chicago,
and in the matter of this Mr. O'Grandison, I may be able to learn something. I
repeat that
I am not an official investigator of any kind, but in the course of an active
life one forms connections." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]