Jane (I exclaimed when I was able)! You are a smasher, a stunner, et cetera! How could these photographs possibly do otherwise than delight you as they delight me, as they must be the delight of any family member, friend, enemy, business associate or competitor whose eyes are privileged to rest upon them? As they must delight God himself, whom I suspect of snapping that full-color overhead? Blackmail indeed! Have them enlarged and framed on your office walls, reproduced in the brochures of all Mack Enterprises, direct-mailed to preferred stockholders and to every senior citizens’ organization in the republic!
She thought me not serious, but was heartened enough to scold me, mildly, for reexamining the photographs, which reluctantly I gave back to her. Admiring her vanity along with the rest, I granted that their circulation could be an embarrassment and inconvenience, if not to her affiancement at least to her business and private life. And I seconded her opinion that police and private-detective files were not to be trusted with them: I knew from experience how that brotherhood relishes a good photograph; in any case (so to speak) they were not Sherlock Holmeses or Hercule Poirots, just cops and ex-cops of one sort or another, more or less competent routine investigators.
That was why she’d brought them to me. What should she do? I asked her kindly, Had they really been taken without her knowledge? The lighting and camera angles were so good, and in 1949, especially, the gadgetry of snooping was less exquisite than it had become since. What she’d acknowledged, moreover, about Lord Jeff’s eccentricities…
Okay, it came out then, with more blushes and a couple more Kleenexes: he’d been a camera buff, had set up a tripod and lights and automatic timer himself in their room at the Connaught back in ’49. But there’d been nobody on the ceiling last January! And it was still to be explained how naughty Jeff’s photo (which she’d never even thought of since, or seen a print of till now) came into someone else’s hands 20 years later. And whose? Would I please, as one of her oldest friends and the most trusted, try discreetly to find out who had sent her that note (from Niagara Falls, N.Y., 14302, on St. Patrick’s Day, the envelope revealed, with a 6-cent Cherokee Strip commemorative), so that she could protect herself and “Lord Baltimore” from further invasion of their privacy and proceed to contest Harrison’s will if she saw fit?
Well. I wondered aloud how she thought to protect herself even if the culprit could be located, since any legal prosecution would necessitate her placing the photographs in evidence; no doubt the blackmailer would publish them anyhow if he or she felt threatened. All business and no tissues now, fair Jane reminded me coolly that as president of a multimillion-dollar corporation and potential contestant of two million dollars’ worth of testamentary articles, she was not naive about industrial spying and counterspying, however innocent she might have been about lewd invasions of personal privacy. She had a fair idea of what sufficient money could hire done. If I would help her find the guilty party, the rest could be left to her.
Quite taken aback, as they say, I asked her what she meant to do if the letter’s author turned out to be Drew or Jeannine? For while I couldn’t quite imagine Drew’s highly principled illegalities extending so far, two million was a lot of bread for the Revolution, and it seemed not unimaginable that his hand might be forced by some less scrupulous comrade. As for Jeannine, I had no notion whatever of what moral lines she drew, if any, but I couldn’t imagine her standing up to, say, Reg Prinz’s silent suasion. In any event, both could surely be said to have the motive for blackmail, if not the means or, on the face of it, the disposition. So too could her cousin A. B. Cook VI, a much likelier candidate now that I thought about it. Germaine Pitt, on the other hand, would seem to have readier means, at least for having somehow come across the earlier photograph among her late husband’s memorabilia; but she had truly cared for Harrison, and I couldn’t fancy her suing for a larger bequest, much less resorting to vulgar blackmail. For that matter, as representative of the major loser in a successful action on Jane’s part, I myself ought properly to be among the prime suspects, ought I not?
Death to all of you, Jane said affably. I was in her element now — sizing up the competition — and she had of course reviewed the lot of us plus other direct and indirect beneficiaries of the will as possible authors of that letter. That she’d then come to me spoke for itself, she declared. She suspected Prinz, whose scruples were dubious but whose photographic expertise was not, or some unknown colleague of Drew’s, certainly not Yvonne. In either case, Jeannine and Drew might well know nothing of it, and need never. Would I help her?
I told her I was afraid to say no. Was she truly capable of “putting out a contract” on the person responsible? That was not what she’d said, she said: there were surely more ways than one to neutralize a threat, once the threatener was identified. Photographic negatives could be located and destroyed; effective counterthreats or other checkmates could be devised. Where was my imagination? Meanwhile, she assumed I had other appointments that afternoon, as she did, and there was no particular hurry about this inquiry, since no payment was being demanded or deadline set. Why didn’t I think about it for a while? And would I agree at least not to rush the will into orphan’s court until I had so thought, and we’d talked again about it?
When Jane is being Madam President, her briskness is a little false, at least professional, as it surely wasn’t back there with the photos and the Kleenex. She was so pleased to have had our chat; we didn’t see nearly enough of each other since Harrison’s death; we must get together socially, and soon. I tried the most obvious double entendre: Indeed it had been a joy to see her again, so little changed since old times…
Well, she declared: we’ll certainly get together. Soon. Toodle-oo now.
Ta-ta.
I wanted to believe her so unrufflable that, perfectly aware of my irony, she declined to acknowledge it because she found it vulgar, at least inappropriate. Similarly, that she quite remembered her past visits to my office, and to my room, and simply saw no reason to acknowledge the memory. But my whole sense of her told me she was oblivious to both.
Now I’m less certain. (It’s Saturday sunrise. I fell asleep over the chart table. I’m sore in every joint. We 69-year-olds can’t do the Dear-Diary thing all night like a teenager after a big date.) Of anything. Except that, as best we wretched Andrewses can love, Todd Andrews loves Jane Mack; has never ceased loving her since 1932; has never loved anyone else. How stupid my life has been, old man: empty, insignificant, unmentionable! How full hers, however “oblivious.” And who am I to speak of her obliviousness, who scarcely realized until last night that I’ve been in love with that astonishing woman for 37 years?
As Jane suggested, we got together. Not exactly “soon”: seven Fridays later, yesterday. I’d thought about those photographs in the meanwhile; had seen a bit of Lady Amherst and Ambrose Mensch (who seem to be a couple these days; lots of horny gossip; more power to them) out at the college, where things have been popping. Watched Drew and Reg Prinz in action out there too, and reinforced a few tentative conclusions. Germaine’s a stable, decent woman in an unstable situation: I see in her neither cupidity nor vindictiveness. If she’s involved in anything like blackmail, it’s against her will, so to speak. Mensch is an enigma to me: erratic, improvisatory. I can imagine him, as Lady A.’s younger lover, obliging her to do something uncharacteristic — but I daresay they’re more likely candidates for prurient photography than purveyors of it. And what would they gain? Drew is, as ever, more principled than effectual. His surviving black colleagues haven’t been in evidence in the Marshyhope riots: either they have other fish to fry or he’s still on the outs with them since the bridge business. And he’s too aboveboard about his probate challenge-in-the-works to be feasibly underhanded. Prinz is a cipher, “Bea Golden” a blank — who, however, commutes between here and that quack sanatorium of hers up in Canada, not far from Niagara Falls. Of Cook I’ve seen and heard nothing except that he has declined without explanation an honorary degree from Marshyhope this spring, one which he’d previously either been pressing for or been being pressed for by John Schott. A minor mystery, from whose rough coincidence with the blackmail business I can make no plausible inferences. That Niagara Falls postmark had led me to consider also, fruitlessly, certain recipients of and rejected applicants for Tidewater Foundation grants up in that neck of the woods: no dice, except that at least one of the latter strikes me as a certifiable madman. Then there was Jane’s “Lord Baltimore,” who dwells somewhere in those latitudes: I even considered the possibility that the threat was bogus, some bizarre test of Yours Truly, administered — but what in the world for, unless to try whether his famous old heart is breakable at last? — by the Widow Mack herself.