The Glendower Legacy (16 page)

Plopping down on the couch, she warmed her hands on the cup and sighed: “Well, you’re a part of history now, Professor. This, whatever it is we’re stuck in, is history … it comes down to that. An old piece of something, an item in your line, floats to the surface and suddenly people are getting killed—who knows how many years later?”

“Listen,” he said, “history is my thing, not yours. You come riding out of a journalism school, you’re in the business of making snap judgments. Every little detail you people treat as history … hell, they’re not even footnotes. History has dignity, depth, meaning.” Dana Andrews was alone in Laura Hunt’s apartment late at night, the rain coursing down the windowpane, and he was falling in love with her portrait. “What we’ve got here is random violence, not history. Don’t dignify it.” But the inner, thus far undiscovered, logic nagged at him.

She gave him a look of incredulity across the vase of dried flowers: “You seriously call this nightmare random violence? There’s a point to it, Colin, a pattern, and you know it—and whatever it is, it’s linked to that document which you, the famous historian, were supposed to pedigree.”

She was right, of course, so far as that went: he heard all the echoes from his conversation with Brennan.

For the record he was about to continue the argument when Ezzard appeared from the bedroom, stared tiredly at them from the hallway, as if to say that he found abstract arguments carried on with intensity in the middle of the night just a trifle off the mark. He bared his teeth and licked his lips.

“By the way, Colin,” she said, “I didn’t come out of journalism school. It was Wellesley and history was my major.” She stood up and started for the bedroom: “I’m going to get into a robe. Would you drag that pizza out of the oven and hack it up? Pretend it’s me?”

When he brought the pizza and beer back in, cringing at the thought of what was accumulating in his stomach, Gene Tierney wasn’t quite sure if she should throw herself away on Vincent Price or not and Clifton Webb was advising her against it. It was good advice: aside from his other faults, Vincent’s southern accent would have been intolerable to live with. Polly was back on the couch smelling quite exceptionally good. She snatched a wedge of pizza and blew on it.

“Sure,” she picked up her previous thought, “I was going to be an historian. But then I got caught up in reality, as opposed to the fantasy I’d been studying. I found I enjoyed living in the chaos of history rather than studying, observing it after all the life has gone out of it—that decision changed my life. Look at this.” She bounded up and took a small framed object from the wall. “Look at it—it’s a handwritten bill and receipt for a thimble and a cream pot, made and sold and written down by Paul Revere. That piece of paper cost more than two thousand dollars and it’s worth every penny … to me. Paul Revere handled it in the course of his daily life …” She paused to wonder at the thought, then swept her arm around the room. “Just like my Hezekiah Stoddard house. That’s why I’ve never taken a network job. Boston is in my blood, I live in the midst of American history—today’s history is my work, the past all around me.” She looked down at him. “It’s a lovely thing, isn’t it? Knowing that Revere held it in his hand, wrote down the sums … You see, that is the American Revolution to me … That’s what I mean when I say I live in history, you observe it. Washington’s grand strategy and the principles of revolution—they interest me less, somehow, than the evidence, the details …”

“It is a fine piece, anyway,” he said gently. Her enthusiasm moved him in an unexpected way.

She smiled, licking pizza from her lips. She was having so much fun: the thought occurred to him that it was like a college bull session when he’d sat up all night at Hayes Bickford in the Square, drinking endless coffees and wrestling with the first large concepts he’d ever confronted. There was usually a Radcliffe girl with a scarf, a runny nose, and a crumpled handkerchief across the table and the weather outside was always frightful. Twenty-five years later he was watching this clever woman whose mind ran swiftly on its own tracks, who wasn’t afraid to argue and laugh at the same time, and he wondered how much he himself had changed. Had he learned anything in the twenty-five years? Or had the time simply passed, warmly, sheltered, the embrace of Harvard always there to comfort him and give him the safety of certainty?

“Well, I’ll never agree with your theories on an orderly form of history,” she said cheerfully. It was well past midnight and Clifton Webb was waiting in the shadows outside Gene Tierney’s apartment while Dana Andrews left her alone, vulnerable, exquisite.

“I’m convinced it’s all random, I’m afraid,” she said, shaking her head, running slender fingers through the thick mass of her hair. “The men running things have as much grasp on the nobility of man’s fate, the inevitability of his progress, as a regiment of Hubbard squash.”

“That may be true,” he said, “but, of course, there are other engines driving history, too. Political realities, spheres of influence, the twentieth-century journey. I can’t help myself. I think there’s a grandness to our story. The direction of mankind is good, because man’s instincts are toward reason, harmony, peace regardless of the detours along the way.”

He felt the warmth of the argument, the debate: it was akin to touching the pulse of life. Argument about issues close to you was something very like an intimate experience, was in fact intensely intimate. She looked him in the eye and he felt the flush. He felt almost as if they’d made love.

“And I say history is a joke on all of us,” she said. She stood up and moved across to him. “But don’t take it too hard, Professor.” She took his hand, stroked it with her thumb. “I like you very much for making the best of it, for making the best of a bad joke … And I hope you’re right. I’d rather have you teaching the young people than me—maybe they are the last best hope. If they swallow what you tell them, and reason asserts itself, yours may be a self-fulfilling prophecy and then, thank God, the joke will be on me—”

She knelt before him for an instant and kissed him, neither perfunctorily or passionately. It was the kind of kiss that comes when the lovemaking is over. That was just how Chandler felt as he watched her go to her bedroom. Curious business …

T
HE NEXT MORNING CHANDLER WOKE
to find Polly was sitting beside him on the couch, tapping the table with a rolled-up newspaper, repeating his name.

“Oh, God,” he moaned. “Be quiet.”

“I couldn’t wait for you to wake up,” she apologized. She looked fine and rested in her robe, hair brushed back, eyes shining. He felt like an old tennis sock. “I thought you might like to see this.” She held up the morning newspaper, open to page three.

HARVARD PROFESSOR MISSING?

SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING IN DOUBLE MURDER INVESTIGATION

From beside the headline his own face peered superciliously out at him, rather fuzzy, cribbed from the faculty section of a Harvard yearbook. She handed him his glasses and he struggled to sit up, pulling his blanket up with him.

“Who the hell is seeking me? Makes me sound like a suspect—the Polly Bishop Effect, I suppose.” But he couldn’t quite hide the grin.

“It’s rather misleading. It’s the reporters who are doing the seeking, not the police—”

“Damned misleading, I’d say.” There was nothing unexpected in the story: speculation, the inability to locate Professor Chandler, a reference to Hugh Brennan. “My God, they even went to Prosser,” he muttered, remembering Brennan’s efforts to get him to call the venerable department head. Prosser had told the reporter: “Professor Chandler is a grown man who may well have gone off for the weekend to avoid precisely this sort of intrusion into his private life. So far as I can tell, Professor Chandler’s involvement in this entire unsavory business is wholly the result of irresponsible media speculation. I heartily endorse his inaccessibility.” It was pure vintage Prosser.

Polly followed him to the bathroom, stood in the doorway talking and watching him as he shaved. Finally he pushed her out and closed the door, preparatory to taking a shower. Damn. She was growing on him.

The voice at the other end of the line was dry, like the rustling of dry autumn leaves, and brittle, like chalk. And businesslike. Percy Davis was a Maine man who got to the point. Chandler identified himself and said that he’d called the previous night returning Davis’s call; what could he do for him?

“I am Bill Davis’s grandfather,” the autumnal voice cracked, painting a quick picture of the old man in Chandler’s eyes. “No need to console me, Professor, none. Bill’s dead and I’m sure you’re sorry about it. What I’m calling about is a parcel that arrived here at the Inn, sent by a man called Underhill. He’s dead now, too. Pretty damned unsatisfactory, I’d call it. I haven’t opened the package but there was a letter with it. I propose to read it to you.”

“Go ahead,” Chandler said. They were getting closer to the secret and his stomach turned uneasily. Polly sat at the kitchen table, staring at him.

“‘I believe that your grandson Bill, a friend of mine and a fine young man,’ Underhill writes, ‘was murdered because he had in his possession a document so curious and valuable that a human life was only a temporary obstacle to those bent on acquiring it. It seems best to me at this point to remove this document from the scene because it is simply too hot to have at hand. Be assured that no one other than I myself knows that I am sending it to you. Inevitably those who want it and are prepared to kill to get it will be confused, perplexed, and increasingly dangerous as they discover their quarry has disappeared. But I am a desperate man and I cannot send it directly to the one party who must see it sooner or later—Professor Colin Chandler at Harvard. I cannot send it directly to this gentleman out of respect for his safety: he is too obviously the logical recipient. His evaluation of the document’s authenticity is essential. I will contact you shortly as to the disposition of the parcel. Please do nothing until you hear from me again. But in case of misfortune befalling me, please take it upon yourself to contact Chandler as discreetly as possible.’” Percy Davis waited a moment: “Odd, ain’t it? Dead man’s words coming like this … it’s like the reading of a will, don’t you see. Well, that’s it. You may consider yourself discreetly contacted, Professor.”

“Where is the parcel now?”

“The middle of the kitchen table. I’m looking it right in the eye.”

“Well, I’d better take a look at it, Mr. Davis.”

“You’d better take care, young man. Misfortune damned well befell Nat Underhill. Like he expected it. The way I read it, I reckon you can take this as a warning. Leastways, I would—”

“Yes, I’m well aware of that. I’ve already been, ah, interviewed by the men I believe killed Bill … and possibly Nat Underhill.”

“You don’t say,” Percy Davis remarked laconically. “And you’re alive to tell the story. No moss on you, eh?”

“I’ve gone to ground,” Chandler said, “as they used to say in John Buchan’s day.”

“Well, don’t tell me where you are. This parcel on my table is enough to occupy my mind.” He laughed, rustling the leaves again. It was the kind of laugh that made clear the notion that nothing funny was happening. “I understand your reference to Buchan, by the way.
The Thirty-Nine Steps …
never forget Mr. Memory. Saw an act like that once up north in Nova Scotia, in Halifax, man who remembered everything … well, then, what do you propose?”

“We’ll have to get to Kennebunkport—”

“We?”

“A friend of mine, we’ll be traveling up together.” He looked at Polly. She was nodding, giving him a deep triangle of smile, as if to congratulate a slow student on having finally caught the drift.

“The sooner the better,” Percy Davis remarked laconically. “You don’t want to get yourself killed down there in the city, do you? Seems to me it could happen …”

“We’ll try to get there this evening. As soon as I take care of a few odds and ends—”

The line went dead.

“Well, what, what, what?” Polly leaped up, began pacing a circle around the table, hands on hips.

Chandler told her about Nat’s letter to Percy Davis.

“That’s fabulous!” She grabbed his arm, hugged it. “We’re almost there—my goodness, tonight we’ll know what the damned thing is …” She looked up apprehensively. “Come here,” she said, pulling him toward the living room. “I’ve a bit of bad news, I’m afraid. I was saving it, didn’t want to ruin your breakfast …” She carefully tweezed back the draperies: “I saw them when you were in the shower …”

In the street, toward the top end, was a red Pinto.

He felt a peculiar jellification begin working somewhere beneath his diaphragm: “Look, we can’t get totally paranoid about little red cars—there must be thousands of red Pintos in Boston—”

“But only one with that license plate,” she said.

“You actually checked? You had the presence enough of mind—”

“Whatever I had or didn’t have,” she said impatiently, “take my word, okay? It’s the same number.”

“My God,” he muttered, waving his arms like a man directing traffic or summoning applause, “we’d never even heard of the damnable Pinto until yesterday morning when you went back to the house … That’s it!” he yelped suddenly, “that’s got to be it—”

“What are you talking about?”

“How they found us here, of course! That does strike you as a little amazing, doesn’t it? Finding us so quickly?” By God, he was catching on to this kind of thing, cloak-and-dagger stuff or didn’t they call it that anymore? Anyway, he was learning.

“Why, yes, I suppose it did,” she said. “And do stop twirling about like that—”

“Because they spotted you yesterday morning at my place! It’s your famous face, my darling. They must have seen you go in whether you saw them or not, recognized you—after all, they’ve probably been watching your nightly commentaries on their handiwork …”

“My, my,” she observed, “the penalty of high ratings—what a bore, mobbed wherever I go.”

“I’m serious, you moron,” he said. He went back to the window and took another peek. It was gray outside with patches of blue sky hurrying away as quickly as they broke through the clouds. The street had a quiet air to it, no movement, a sleeping-late morning. It looked cold and fit weather to stay inside by the fire. There was no one in the Pinto, so far as he could tell, but he had a lousy angle: the windshield reflected the plane trees along the curb, the brick housefronts, a bit of gray sky. “Now they know you’re involved, which puts you as deep in the mire as I am. Death by association, if you see my point—I could be telling you where it is, or even giving it to you somehow. You’ve been spotted as my accomplice … Damn, I don’t know whether I’m glad or sorry. You bloody well deserve it for dragging me into it, but—well, I don’t like putting anyone in the way of danger—”