“Can Deirdre make him go away and leave her alone?”
“Of course she can’t. But she can ignore him. She can live her life as if he weren’t there. Antha couldn’t. Stella didn’t want to. But Deirdre’s stronger than Antha, and stronger than Stella too. Deirdre has a lot of Mary Beth in her. That’s what the others often don’t realize-” He appeared to catch himself suddenly in the act of saying more than he had ever intended to say.
He stared at me for a long moment, and then he gathered up his cigarette case and his lighter and slowly rose to his feet.
“Don’t go yet,” I said, imploringly.
“Send me your history. Send it to me and I’ll read it. And then maybe we can talk again. But don’t ever approach my niece again, Mr. Lightner. Understand that I would do anything to protect her from those who mean to exploit her or hurt her. Anything at all!”
He turned to go.
“What about the drink?” I asked, rising. I gestured to the bourbon. “Suppose I call the police and I offer the contaminated drink in evidence?”
“Mr. Lightner. This is New Orleans!” He smiled and winked at me in the most charming fashion. “Now please, go home to your watchtower and your telescope and gaze at us from afar!”
I watched him leave. He walked gracefully with very long, easy steps. He glanced back when he reached the doorway and gave me a quick, agreeable wave of his hand.
I sat down, ignoring the drugged bourbon, and wrote an account of the whole affair in my diary. I then took a small bottle of aspirin out of my pocket, emptied out the tablets, and poured some of the drugged bourbon into it, and capped it and put it away.
I was about to collect my diary and pen and make for the stairs when I looked up and saw the bellhop standing in the lobby just beyond the door. He came forward. “Your bags are ready, Mr. Lightner. Your car is here.” Bright, agreeable face. Nobody had told him he was personally throwing me out of town.
“Is that so?” I said. “Well, and you packed everything?” I surveyed the two bags. My diary I had with me, of course. I went into the lobby. I could see a large old black limousine stopping up the narrow French Quarter street like a giant cork.
“That’s my car?”
“Yes sir, Mr. Cortland said to see you made the ten o’clock flight to New York. Said he’d have someone meet you at the airport with the ticket. You ought to have plenty of time.”
“Isn’t that thoughtful?” I fished into my pocket for a couple of bills, but the boy refused them.
“Mr. Cortland’s taken care of everything, sir. You’d better hurry. You don’t want to miss your plane.”
“That’s true. But I have a superstition about big black cars. Get me a taxi, and do take this for it, please.”
The taxi took me not to the airport but to the train. I managed to get a sleeper for St. Louis, and went on to New York from there. When I spoke to Scott he was adamant. This data required a reevaluation. Don’t do any more research in New York. Come home.
Halfway across the Atlantic, I became ill. By the time I reached London I was running a high fever. An ambulance was waiting to take me to hospital, and Scott was there to ride with me. I was going in and out of consciousness. “Look for poison,” I said.
Those were my last words for eight hours. When I finally came around, I was still feverish and uncomfortable, but much reassured to be alive and to discover Scott and two other good friends in the room.
“You’ve been poisoned all right, but the worst is over. Can you remember your last drink before you boarded the plane?”
“That woman,” I said.
“Tell me.”
“I was in the bar at the New York airport, had a Scotch and soda. She was stumbling alone with an impossible bag, then asked me if I’d fetch the skycap for her. She was coughing as if she were tubercular. Very unhealthy-looking creature. She sat at my table while I went for the skycap. Probably a hireling, off the streets.”
“She slipped you a poison called ricin; its from the castor bean. Very powerful, and extremely common. Same thing Cortland put in your bourbon. You’re out of the woods, but you’re going to be sick for two more days.”
“Good Lord.” My stomach was cramping again.
“They aren’t ever going to talk to us, Aaron,” Scott said. “How could they? They kill people. It’s over. At least for now.”
“They always killed people, Scott,” I said weakly. “But Deirdre Mayfair doesn’t kill people. I want my diary.” The cramps became unbearable. The doctor came in and started to prepare me for an injection. I refused.
“Aaron, he’s the head of toxicology here, impeccable reputation. We’ve checked out the nurses. Our people are here in the room.”
It was the end of the week before I could return to the Motherhouse. I could scarcely bring myself to take any nourishment. I was convinced the entire Motherhouse might soon be poisoned. What was to stop them from hiring people to put commonplace toxins in our food? The food might be poisoned before it even reached our kitchen.
And though no such thing happened, it was a year before such thoughts left me, so shaken was I by what had occurred.
A great deal of shocking news came to us from New Orleans during that year …
During my convalescence I reviewed the entire Mayfair history. I revised some of it, including the testimony of Richard Llewellyn, and a few other persons I’d seen before I went to Texas to see Deirdre.
I concluded that Cortland had done away with Stuart, and probably with Cornell. It all made sense. Yet so many mysteries remained. What was Cortland protecting when he committed these crimes? And why was he engaged in constant battle with Carlotta?
We had in the meantime heard from Carlotta Mayfair-a barrage of threatening legal letters from her law firm to ours in London, demanding that we “cease and desist” with our “invasion” of her privacy, that we make “full disclosure” of any personal information we had obtained about her and her family, “that we restrict ourselves to a safe distance of one hundred yards from any person in her family, and any piece of family property, and that we make no effort whatsoever to contact in any way shape or form, Deirdre Mayfair,” et cetera, and so forth and so on ad nauseam, none of these legal threats or demands having the slightest validity.
Our legal representatives were instructed to make no response.
We discussed the matter with the full council.
Once again, we had tried to make contact and we had been pushed back. We would continue to investigate, and for this purpose I might have a carte blanche, but no one was going near the family in the foreseeable future. “If ever again,” Reynolds added with great emphasis.
I did not argue. I could not drink a glass of milk at the time without wondering if I was going to die from it. And I could not get the memory of Cortland’s artificial smile out of my mind.
I doubled the number of investigators in New Orleans and in Texas. But I also warned these people, personally by phone, that the objects of their surveillance were hostile and potentially very dangerous. I gave each and every one of our investigators full opportunity to refuse the job.
As it turned out, I lost no investigators whatsoever. But several raised their price.
As for Juliette Milton, our socialite undercover gossip, we retired her with an unofficial pension, over her protests. We did everything we could to make her sensible that certain members of this family were capable of violence. Reluctantly, she stopped writing to us, pleading in her letter of December 10, 1958 to understand what she had done wrong. We were to hear from her again several times over the years, however. She is still living as of 1989, in an expensive boarding house for elderly people in Mobile, Alabama.