“I’ll have to file it for future attention,” I said.
“I know,” he nodded, “but there is the chance you’ll run across the information in your present investigation. If not, get to it as quickly as you can. I naturally want the will probated and the estate settled as soon as possible.”
He glanced past me suddenly in a way that caused me to swivel my head. The office door had opened silently on oiled hinges. Van Clavery stood in the doorway, his eyes baleful in his lean, anxiety-ridden face.
Eppling touched my arm briefly. “My second reason for calling you, Rivers.” He took a few steps across the office. “Come in, Van,” he said quietly, “and close the door.”
Clavery obeyed, his movements jerky with irritation or something deeper. He wore a dark business suit, but I still got that impression of uncertainty of Clavery’s reactions, that sense of danger that he’d somehow conveyed in the pirate costume when I’d first met him.
Clavery and the lawyer exchanged a brief message with their eyes. The silence of the office became noticeable.
“I’m glad you came, Van,” Eppling said quietly. Clavery’s lips thinned. “I hope I’m not making a mistake.”
“I gave you the best advice I could, Van.”
“Or put a rope around my neck!”
“I don’t think so,” Eppling said. “I know Rivers by reputation. He’ll dredge up every detail, if he lives so long. It won’t look good if he finds it out for himself. As I told you on the phone, it’s better to give it to him, straight out, now.”
Clavery looked at me with eyes that for a fractured second hated me unreasonably, hated me as a symbol of something he’d like to smash.
Eppling said, “Van has a few words of a personal nature he’d like to say, Rivers. Will you offer your professional confidence?”
“Tentatively,” I said.
“Then to hell with it!” Clavery said, as if he were at a breaking point.
Eppling put his hand on Clavery’s shoulder. “Now wait a minute, Van. Rivers is in a touchy position himself. If what you have to say was against Rivers’ interests, we wouldn’t consider it, wouldn’t be here. If it isn’t against his interests, I’m sure he will treat it with confidence.”
“I’m not known as a talebearer,” I said.
Clavery moved a few steps, aimlessly, just for the sake of moving.
“Well, Van?” Eppling prompted.
Clavery fingered his lips as if trying to bring feeling back to them. “Several months ago... I spotted a stock deal that looked sure-fire. I... borrowed money to make the play.”
“From the señora’s timber-import enterprise?” I asked.
“Yes...” His voice was the rattle of paper. His admission had killed the anger in him, taken a part of the life out of him. “The deal fell through. I was caught short.”
“How much?”
“Forty thousand dollars,” he said. A short, irrational laugh ripped from him. “Didn’t seem like much at the time, stacked against the prospects... but it’s all the money in the world if you haven’t got it.”
He looked at me as if he had to focus his eyes all over again. “Recently... when I knew an accounting was bound to reveal the shortage... I went to Señora Isabella, told her what had happened, and asked for a little time.”
“You couldn’t raise the money?”
“I’d raised every dime I could, to go with the forty thousand. Even my home... isn’t worth the paper against it.” Clavery stumbled to a chair and dropped. He sat grasping the chair arms, a quivering in his hunched body.
“I was counting on my past record, the old lady’s gentility and common sense,” he said. “Throwing me in jail wouldn’t get her money back.”
“She went along?”
Clavery looked at me bleakly. “She was deeply hurt. I hated myself for doing that to her. She thought it over for a few days. Then she called me, the week before she died. I hurried to see her...”
He shook his head against the overpowering clutch of his personal ghosts. “The old lady was looking better, feeling better, able to sit near her bedroom window. The last upsurge before death, I guess it was. She greeted me normally, as if it was a routine business discussion. Said she’d decided how the matter should be handled. She wanted my personal note in amount of forty thousand dollars, payable in five equal annual installments. She also wanted a brief statement in my own handwriting as to the indebtedness covered by the note. Naturally I gave her both.”
“Naturally.”
“She clipped the note and statement together and put them in a large old leather portfolio,” Clavery said. “She assured me the matter would forever remain between the two of us.”
I glanced at Eppling. “When did you learn about this?”
“At the start. Señora Isabella asked my advice before making a decision. I saw no profit in destroying Van for a single mistake.”
“A couple days after the old lady died,” Clavery said, “Fred and I went to the hacienda. He’d agreed to separate my...” his face twisted, “my confession and the five-year note. The statement was to go here in the office safe.”
Eppling regarded me coolly. “The indebtedness had to be included in the assets of the estate,” he said. “But Van’s personal statement had no business going to a probate judge, as I saw it. He and Señora Isabella had settled the matter between them. I was handling it as she would have wished. The handwritten statement, which Van terms a confession, was to be returned to him when he had repaid the forty thousand.”
Clavery worked his hands together, popping the knuckles like brittle sticks. “Jean Putnam went to get the portfolio for Fred—”
“And discovered it was missing,” I said.
They both drilled me with their attention.
“Where’d you learn that?” Clavery said.
“You don’t expect me to answer that, do you?” I countered. “I suppose you searched for the brief case.”
“Thoroughly,” Fred Eppling said.
Clavery began to gasp. “I intend to repay the money, even if the confession is never found... but that statement... in my own handwriting... made public, it would brand me, shatter my reputation, ruin my life...”
A sudden seizure stiffened Clavery’s wiry body. His tongue curled in a wad toward his throat. His eyes rolled upward until the whites showed. He grabbed his chest.
“Get some water,” I told Eppling.
I slid Clavery from the chair and stretched his rigid body on the plush carpet. I heard Eppling rattling glassware in the next office.
By the time I’d loosened Clavery’s collar and straightened his arms at his sides, Eppling had returned with the glass in his hand.
“Brandy,” Eppling. “Better than water.”
Clavery’s body was relaxing in a series of shudders. I slipped my hand behind his head, lifted slightly, and put the brandy to his lips. The amber liquid rolled into his mouth, a few drops at a time. I sensed strength returning to his muscles.
My face became distinct in his burning-eyed gaze. He pushed at me weakly, slowly sat up. “Fred...”
“Yes?” Eppling said from across the room.
“What are you doing?”
“Phoning for a doctor.” Eppling, I saw, was standing with a phone in his hand.
“Never mind,” Clavery said. “I’m all right now.”
“But, Van...”
“For God’s sake, don’t weary me!” Clavery shouted weakly. “Do as I say and put the phone down!”
“It may be your heart, Van.”
“No such luck,” Clavery said through twisted lips. He struggled into the chair with my help. “I’ve had all that checked. A nervous syndrome. The medics have a name for it, but it’s plain damned stinking nerves...”
His eyes filled with self-hatred and a wild frustration. “This.” He pummeled his thighs, belly, and chest. “This isn’t me, this wad of corruption, this mass of flesh and blood and bone. The part that thinks and feels... that’s me. That’s the personality, the entity known as Van Clavery! But it — the me — is imprisoned in this faulty vessel, this morass, this barbed-wire, inescapable jail of lousy nerves.”