“I did already. I confess you got me curious. There’s nothing that I could find. Sorry.”
“Too bad. What’s going to happen to this girl?” I said. The girl in question returned to the room, still holding the child, and started speaking quickly and in a heated manner to David, who kept shaking his head.
When she hesitated for a moment, I said, “Ask her, will you, when you get a chance, if she knows Will?”
He did, and said, “She says she met Will. He once visited them at their former home. She said her husband was representing Will, and had sold his book for a lot of money last spring. Maybe I’m right about Rowland keeping the money. Anyway, let’s get out of here. There’s only so much of this kind of situation I can stand.”
“You didn’t answer my question about what will happen to her,” I said as we drove away.
“I went to discuss with her the fact that Rowland’s sister in Atlanta wants us to help with the formalities of having his body shipped back to the States. That’s what started that tirade. Parichat wants to go to the States. She says she married an American, her kid is American—the kid’s name is Bent Rowland Junior, poor little tyke—and she thinks she’s entitled to citizenship.”
“And is she?”
“I doubt she’s really married to him,” he said. “Let’s just say that complicates matters. And he is dead now, after all. I’ll see what I can do about the kid. I sure hope she has some of that cash still stashed somewhere.”
“Why?”
“Because he left all his money, everything he has, to his sister,” David said.
“Oh no!” I said.
“Exactly. She’ll be back on the street in no time. Some days I really hate my job,” he added. “So where do you want to go now?”
“I need to go and pick up something,” I said. “Robert Fitzgerald suggested I get it.” That was more or less true, although, granted, the man had barely been conscious when he’d said it.
“You mean you want to go now?” he said.
“Yes,” I replied. “Before others get there.”
“What others?”
“I wish I knew. It’s at his house, whatever it is.”
“Neat place,” he said as he looked around the tree house. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Look at these chess pieces, will you? They’re fabulous. Now, what are we looking for here?”
“I don’t know. Fitzgerald told me they, whoever they are, and I assumed it was the people who bashed him and made such a mess of this place, didn’t get what they wanted. He also said we had to go and see his mother. Maybe you could help me find her. Now, what does this look like to you?” I said, gesturing about the place.
“Other than a mess, you mean? People were looking for something, obviously. I have no idea what, but, come to think about it, these shelves are interesting. One of them has been emptied, the others not even touched. Do we know what was on this one shelf?
“Diaries,” I said.
“Hmm,” he said. “In that case, they were looking for diaries for the years between about 1945 and I960. The others aren’t touched. If that is the case, they didn’t find what they wanted, because they went on to go through all the drawers, check under the bed, searching through the kitchen cupboards, that sort of thing, or maybe it was something else they wanted. This is right off the top of my head, but that’s what it looks like to me.”
“Me, too, and some of those dates are about right,” I said.
“For what?”
“The murder Will Beauchamp was writing about.”
“The fifty-year-old crime again: Helen Ford,” he said. “So you really don’t think Rowland got the money from the publisher? That’s how it works, doesn’t it? The publisher pays the agent who takes his commission and passes the rest of the money along to the author?”
“I think so,” I said.
“There are other options here, you know. Didn’t you say Bent gave Will a couple of thousand dollars as an advance? Maybe Rowland did manage to get Will a small advance, took his cut, and passed the rest along, and the money he’s been depositing is from some other source. I suppose the trouble with that is, why lie about the publisher if there really is one? So, maybe you’re right and he’s dishonest, got a lot of money from some other publisher, and didn’t pay Will. Or he just gave Will a couple of thousand of his own money to give the impression that he had sold the book. Maybe the guy was just an abject loser who was trying to play in the big leagues, or at least give the impression he was.”
“You’re right. It could be any of the above. But it is still possible somebody paid him not to find a publisher, and he was just playing for time with Will.”
“Why wouldn’t he just tell Will he couldn’t find a publisher for it?”
“Because Will would get himself another agent. End of payments for Rowland.”
“Will was bound to find out—did find out, as a matter of fact. This ploy was only a temporary solution.”
“My point exactly.”
“You’re saying that Will is dead, and not just dead, but murdered.”
“I’m coming to believe this is the only possible conclusion.”
“Realistically, who would kill over a book?
“If I had the book, I might know the answer to that question. But it wasn’t in Will’s apartment. I looked. I doubt it will be in Rowland’s office, either. Now let’s keep looking here for whatever I’m supposed to find. Fitzgerald said ‘spirit house.” There was one he was working on in the living room, and another, the one protecting the house, is outside.“
“It didn’t do a very good job, did it?” David said. “Protecting the place, or him, I mean. I’ll go check the spirit houses. This one looks perfectly normal,” he said.
“I’ll go down and check the one outside. I’m hoping not to disturb whoever it is lives in these things.”
“I’m sure they’ll forgive us,” I said.
He returned in a minute or two. “Nothing again, I’m afraid.”
“There has to be something,” I said. I picked up the unfinished spirit house, the one I’d promised to buy for my store, and turned it over carefully. I could see where one piece of its floor was not perfectly fitted together, not up to the standard of the rest of Fitzgerald’s work. I gave it a careful tug, then a harder one, and the floor came away to reveal a hollow in which was stuffed two slim leather diaries. “Got it,” I said.
“Good for you,” he said. “Let’s see? Diaries for 1948 and ‘49- We should turn them over to the police,” he said. “They might be relevant.”
“First, we read them,” I said, taking them out of his hands and slapping them into my bag. “Let’s get out of here.” What I wanted to do, indeed what I would have done if I’d been there by myself, was to sit down and read through them on the spot. I knew, though, that with David there that was impossible.
Difficult as it might be to think that a crime that had taken place fifty years earlier had anything in particular to do with the present time, the inescapable conclusion now seemed to be that Will Beauchamp’s disappearance was definitely connected with the book he was writing on Helen Ford. Anybody who knew anything about the book he was supposed to have written had had something very bad happen to them, from threats to injury to murder. The only course of action it now seemed logical to pursue was to find out more about Helen Ford.
But for a while, I didn’t, distracted as I was by a visit from Chat. “What are you doing in this room?” Chat said that evening when I opened the door to his knock.
“This is the room I was assigned,” I said. “It’s very cozy.”
“But you are supposed to be in the gold room,” Chat said.
“I believe Yutai is now in the gold room,” I said.
“Yutai!” he exclaimed. “On whose authority?”