Murder on Embassy Row (24 page)

“What book?” Morizio asked.

“About Mexico.”

“Is it here?”

She shook her head, pulled a lace hanky from her purse, and wiped her eyes.

“Where is this book?” Morizio asked.

“Daddy said you would know.”

“Me? Is it in the United States, in Washington?”

“I think so.”

“Had enough, Mr. Chief Inspector? Satisfied?” Ethel Pringle asked as she grabbed her purse from the counter and moved toward the door.

“No.”

She snorted and drew back her upper lip.

“Why?” Morizio asked, slapping the side of his raincoat.

“Why what?” Ethel Pringle said.

“If he told you where the answers were, why didn’t you call me, call somebody, do something, for Christ sake?”

“Why should we have?” Ethel said. “It doesn’t matter why it happened. He chose to throw in his lot with the bad ones and got what usually comes from that. Go to bed with dogs, you get up with fleas.” She slowly turned toward her daughter as she said it, which caused Harriet to gaze at the floor.

“And you didn’t care.” Morizio couldn’t keep the disgust from his voice.

“I care about me, Captain, and about Harriet. Whatever he left in his precious book—he had so many of them—could only hurt us. The boy… you know the story.”

“Of course.”

“The boy was born in disgrace. He…”

“Mother, please,” Harriet said, glancing at the closed door to the back room. She looked at Morizio through red, wet eyes as though to invoke some power within him to make it all disappear.

“You’d best be quiet, Harriet. This is all because of you.”

“You know, Ethel, this is unnecessary,” Morizio said.

“And you shut up. You’re as responsible as they are.”

“They?”

“Paul and her. The three of you wouldn’t listen. There was no need to give birth to a bastard. I screamed at both of them to listen to reason, to be smart for once in their lives, but they’d have none of it.”

Morizio pressed his hand against the tape recorder in his pocket and said to Harriet, “If your father told you anything else that might help me find this book, please try to remember.”

She shook her head.

“Nothing?” he said.

“No. He said you’d know.”

The door to the back room opened and Bryan Worth came into the shop. “Hi, champ,” Morizio said.

“Mummy,” the boy said, pushing against Harriet’s legs and casting a frightened glance at his grandmother.

“He’s a fine looking boy, Harriet,” Morizio said. “Take good care of him. He deserves it.”

Ethel Pringle had already left the shop and was on her way down the stairs. Morizio followed her to the street. “I’m sorry, Ethel, to upset you,” he said, meaning it.

“All the upset in my life has already been done to me, Captain. Paul and her, now you. I won’t let it happen again, and I warn you that whatever you find in Paul’s precious book, it had better not pertain to Harriet and Bryan. Do you hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you, Ethel, but is that why you didn’t follow up on what Paul had told Harriet? It isn’t the worst thing in the world, you know, to have a child out of wedlock.”

She looked right and left before saying, “Have you a daughter, Captain?”

“No.”

“Then be quiet,” she said in a harsh whisper, her face thrust close to his, her lips quivering. An empty taxi came around the corner and she hailed it, climbed into the back, slammed the door behind her, and disappeared from Morizio’s view.

Connie and Morizio enjoyed an elegant dinner in the Savoy Hotel’s River Room—turtle soup with sherry and potted shrimps as appetizers, haddock in cream sauce as their entree, which had been touted in
The Best of London
, and vanilla ice cream for dessert. They were utterly relaxed, and they lingered over cups of rich, dark coffee. They tried to avoid the James and Pringle murders but failed.

Morizio had played the tape of his confrontation with Ethel and Harriet Pringle in their hotel room that afternoon. As usual, it raised more questions than it answered. What book, and where was it? Why was Melanie Callender sending money to the Pringles? Those were the two “biggies”; many smaller questions spun off of them.

“Let’s dance,” Lake said as the Savoy’s jazz-influenced orchestra launched into another set. Morizio hated to dance because he didn’t know how, which made him feel naked and vulnerable on a dance floor.
He reluctantly joined her and she told him he danced better than he thought he did.

“Thanks,” he said, not believing a word. He stopped dancing, stepped back and said, “It must be Piccadilly.”

“In Washington?”

“Yeah, where else would Paul assume I’d know where he put the book?”

“It’s possible,” Connie said, stepping close and attempting to get him to move again.

“Let’s sit,” he said.

They had more coffee, and the maître d’ bought them an after-dinner drink.

“I ought to go back to Washington,” Morizio said.

“Why don’t you call?” Lake suggested.

“Call Johnny? Yeah, I could do that, but I’m sure he wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. You don’t leave something that valuable in a bartender’s hands.”

“But why worry about it now?” she said. “You said you wanted to try and contact Callender. I think you should, and I’ll go to Copenhagen and see if I can catch up with Inga Lindstrom. We might as well do everything possible while we’re here, Sal. It’s only a few more days before we head back anyway.”

They stayed up late in their room at the May Fair and reviewed what they knew up to that point. Melanie Callender was now a more important figure, and they decided Morizio should be the one to approach her. He could capitalize on his meeting with the Pringles, which would make him more convincing.

Before turning out the light they reviewed what Georgia Watson had dug up on Geoffrey James’s Scottish oil company. Not much, it turned out. It was an oil brokerage operation, buying oil from Scotland and reselling it to other countries. It had functioned, according to Watson, in a legal manner, possessed all the appropriate
licenses and legal documents. Watson was surprised that the company had been folded upon James’s death. It had been impressively profitable and had every expectation of continuing to be, which would have benefitted Marsha James. There had been no effort to sell the firm. It was simply being dissolved by Mrs. James, who’d become chief operating officer and major stockholder under the terms of her husband’s will.

“We already knew all that,” Morizio had said when Lake first told him.

“Yes, but the big question is
why
? If you’re sitting on a rich company you don’t just close the doors. You sell it for a profit.”

“Maybe Marsha James doesn’t have a nose for business. Maybe she hates it.”

“But there are others involved, the Scotsman, Edwin Ferguson, for one. He’s a businessman.”

“She held the big hunk of stock,” Morizio said. “Maybe he didn’t have any choice but to go along.”

They left it at that. Georgia Watson said she’d continue to look into it, and Lake promised to call when they returned from Europe.

The next morning Morizio went through all the Callenders in phone directories for London and environs until reaching Melanie Callender’s parents. Her father answered, a pleasant man who informed Morizio that his daughter was away “on holiday” but would return in two days. Morizio left his name and the number of the May Fair, thanked him, and hung up.

“If we wait around for her we’ll blow the flight to Copenhagen,” he said.

Connie thought about it. “Why don’t I just go as scheduled and you catch up after you’ve talked to her? I’ve got to spend time with my Aunt Eva anyway, and
if you’re really delayed I’ll pop over to Malmö to see my grandmother.”

He went with her to the airport, promised he’d join her as soon as he’d made contact with Callender, kissed her good-bye, and watched her vanish through a doorway leading to her flight.

He killed the day by shopping: a Mackay tartan kilt from the Scotch House and a silk umbrella from James Smith and Sons for Connie; a walking stick that concealed a sword for himself, also from Smith’s; a beautiful cut-glass compote from W.G.T. Burne for his mother; and an assortment of small gifts from Marks and Spencer for nieces and nephews. He returned to the May Fair late in the afternoon and took a nap, had a drink in the hotel bar and Talaparu duckling for dinner in the Beachcomber Restaurant. He felt very alone, and wished Lake were there. He was told at the desk when he retrieved his room key that Miss Lake had called, and would call again. He went to his room and called the d’Angleterre Hotel in Copenhagen. Miss Lake was “out for the evening.” He left a message, turned on TV, got into bed, and promptly fell asleep to a BBC commentary on the state of the British economy which, judging from the announcer’s voice, wasn’t doing very well.

***

Constance Lake sat with her Aunt Eva Nygaard in the d’Angleterre’s Restaurant Reine Pedauque. Aunt Eva, who was in her early sixties and who was a vegetarian, had had a steamed vegetable plate. Lake had feasted on
Kalvefilet Niçoise med friske krydderurter fransk sennep, piskeflode og pommes croquettes
. Veal Niçoise with herbs, mustard, cream, and potato puffs.

“It was wonderful,” Connie said.

Her aunt, a wrinkled, tanned flower child, smiled and sat back. She wore a beige roughhewn sack dress, a
necklace of handhammered copper dangles, and a copper bracelet. Her hair, brown streaked with gray, was pulled back tight. She wore no makeup and her nail polish was cracked and peeling. Stories in the family about Aunt Eva were legend. She’d been at the forefront of the movement in the early seventies to turn an area of picturesque Christianshavn into the
fristaden
, or free town of Christiania, where hundreds of young bohemians dealt openly in drugs, lived a communal lifestyle, raised large families without benefit of marriage in abandoned army barracks that could only be described as hovels, and who were immune from Danish law. “We finally convinced the Supreme Court that it was better to have them there than roaming around Copenhagen,” Eva explained to Connie during dinner. “That wasn’t really why we wanted Christiania established but it worked.”

Connie enjoyed listening to Eva. Although the older woman espoused avant-garde philosophies and eschewed anything smacking of commercialism and wealth, she lived a rich existence, thanks to the estate of one of her late husbands who’d made a lot of money in real estate. Currently, she was living with a young artist whom she billed as a student, but who Lake was certain was her lover.

“Tell me more about this young man of yours,” Eva said. “He’s not the only one, is he?” She sounded as though an admission of it would be a potent shock.

“Yes, he is,” Connie said, laughing. “One at a time, Aunt Eva. That’s me.”

Eva sighed and sipped her tea. “I suppose you
have
time,” she said into her cup.

The table next to them was occupied by two men, one American, the other Danish. Both were middle-aged and well dressed. Connie had eavesdropped on
their conversation and surmised that they were in the food business. She wanted to talk to them. Eva, noticing that Connie had cocked her head in their direction, leaned across the table and said, “We’ll have them join us.”

It dawned on Connie that Eva assumed she was interested in the men personally. She started to correct her, then realized it didn’t matter how they got to talk. She nodded, and Eva said loudly, “We should join tables. It’s the custom.”

Connie and the Danish gentleman were taken aback at Eva’s loudness, but the American laughed. Connie had been aware throughout the evening that he’d been looking at her. She smiled at him and said, “Your table or ours?”

“Yours, by all means,” he answered. He introduced himself as Mark Rosner, president of Rosner Foods of New York. His Danish dinner companion was Erl Rekstad, a food exporter.

They ordered three brandies; Eva never touched alcohol because it “bloated one.” There was lots of preliminary chitchat, with Rosner asking Connie questions like: “First time in Copenhagen?” “Business or pleasure?” (A hint of a leer). “Husband couldn’t make it?” “Danish? You look Danish.”

Connie answered pleasantly and bided her time until she could ask her own questions. She kept an eye on Eva, who seemed to be enjoying it.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Eva said to Rekstad, referring to Connie.

“Very,” he said. “And you are, too.”

Eva smiled coyly and patted his hand.

“Your wife couldn’t make it?” Lake asked Rosner.

“No, no wife,” he said.

“Oh. Rosner Foods. What sort of foods?”

“Fancy foods, outrageously expensive and sinfully good. Do you like fancy foods?”

“I prefer expensive ones,” said Lake.

“Caviar tastes?”

“Especially caviar. Do you import it?”

“Of course. Do you have a favorite?”

“You mean Iranian or Russian?”

Rosner laughed. “Yes, that too, but I was thinking of beluga, servruga, osetra, pressed, or whole…”

“I love all of it.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Rosner said. He said to Rekstad, “A devoted fan.”

“That’s good,” said the Dane. Eva had now rested her hand on top of his and left it there.

“You must know Berge Nordkild,” Connie said, hoping it wouldn’t prove to be a sore subject.

“Berge? Of course I know him. He just got himself in a lot of trouble.”

“Yes, he did,” Connie said. “I was shocked.”

“You know him well?”

“Quite well.” Let him find out differently later, she thought.

Rosner asked what she did in the United States.

“I’m a… a consultant.”

Rosner raised his eyebrows and finished his brandy. “What do you consult on?” he asked.

“Design. Interior design.”

Connie noticed the puzzled expression on Eva’s face. She smiled at her and raised her eyebrows. Let her think she was reserving some vestige of her anonymity in case the evening progressed.

“I’ve been thinking of having my offices redone,” Rosner said. “Maybe you’d be interested in the commission.”

“Maybe I would,” Lake said. She snapped her fingers
as though a sudden thought had hit her. “Someone else you may know, Inga Lindstrom.”