The King is Dead (22 page)

‘You're not? Where you going?'

‘To Wrightsville.'

‘Wrightsville!'

‘I made up my mind this afternoon, while you were dunking in the pool. I meandered into the gardens and ran across Judah doing a Ferdinand. He was lying under a royal poinciana waving a peacock flower under his crooked nose and sipping guess-what. We had a long chat, Judah and I. He was unusually voluble.'

‘What's all this got to do with Wrightsville?'

‘Judah says that's where he, King, and Abel were born.'

‘You're kidding!'

‘That's what he told me. And enough more about their boyhood there to make me damned curious.'

‘The big boy was
born
there?'

Ellery shifted in his seat. ‘It gave me a queer lift, Dad. You know how Wrightsville's mixed in my life in recent years. I've become a little superstitious on the subject. I suppose it's inane — after all, the Bendigos are Americans by birth … they had to be born somewhere in the United States … and Abel's twang never came out of anything but a New England nose. Still, learning it was my old Wrightsville jabbed me in the seat of the pants. The moment Judah uttered the magic word — he
is
a magician! — I knew I'd have to run up there for a session with the town. Because the secret's probably buried there, just waiting to be dug up. The way Wrightsville secrets have a way of doing.'

Ellery looked out to the dark sea.

‘What secret?' demanded his father petulantly.

‘The
secret.' Ellery shrugged. ‘The secret of what makes these people tick. Of how this case came to happen, Dad. I'm no longer obsessed with the answer to how Judah pulled that marvellous flimflam. We'll get to that in due course … Up there in Wrightsville something's waiting to be discovered about Kane, Abel, and Judah Bendigo that's going to restore my self-respect. I feel it in my bones and, by God, I'm flying there tomorrow morning!'

13

The last thing Ellery saw was his father on the roof of the observation building waving his hat under a flapping Bendigo flag. The steward pulled and fastened the last black blind, and Bendigo Island disappeared. This time Ellery did not mind. He was thinking of people, not places.

The big trimotor took off.

There were three other passengers — Immanuel Peabody, with the inevitable briefcase; an eagle-nosed man in a wing collar and blue polka-dot foulard tie; and an old woman with a Magyar face and badly stained fingers who was wearing a silly-looking Paris hat. Peabody hurried into a compartment, already unbuckling the straps of his briefcase, and he remained invisible until the plane — its windows free again — circled Gravelly Point for a landing at the National Airport in Washington. The old woman in the hat chain-smoked Turkish cigarettes in a long gold holder and read a magazine throughout the trip. When she set it down to eat her lunch Ellery saw that it was not a copy of
Vogue
but a highly technical scientific journal in the German language, published, he knew, in Lausanne. Immediately the old woman in the silly hat ceased to be an old woman in a silly hat and became — he now recalled those Magyar features — one of the world's most famous research chemists. The man in the wing collar he never did identify. Neither attempted to speak to him, but all through the trip Ellery was afraid one or both of them would. He was relieved when they got off the plane with Peabody at Washington.

The people Ellery was turning over in his mind were the Bendigos, particularly Abel. He had rather neglected Abel, he thought, but he could not quite settle on why this should seem a serious oversight. Abel's attitude throughout the affair had been in the tradition of high politics, a puzzling mixture of the right words and the wrong actions. Like the camouflaged shore batteries of Bendigo Island, Abel effaced himself against his background; like them, he concealed a powerful potential. But a powerful potential for what?

And always Ellery came back to the question he had asked himself from the beginning: Why had Abel brought him into the case at all? It was a question as remarkably lacking in answerability as the riddle of the little gun that could not possibly have fired the shot, and yet had.

Ellery's jaw shifted. There was an answer; all he had to do was find it. And as the plane flew farther north, he had the curious feeling that he was approaching the answer at the exact m.p.h. shown on the pilot's instruments.

It was mid-afternoon when the big black and gold Bendigo ship set Ellery down at Wrightsville Airport. He waved to the pilot and co-pilot and hurried up the steps of the administration building lugging his bag.

Outside, the taxi man was someone he didn't know, a smartly capped youngster with red-apple cheeks. The cab was a new one, bright yellow, with black-and-white-striped trim and a meter.

Gone are the Wrightsville owner-driven cabs of yesteryear, the dusty Chevvy and Ford black sedans with the zone maps showing the quarter, half-dollar, and seventy-five-cent trip areas, and drivers like Ed Hotchkiss, who called John F. Wright by his Christian name, and Whitey Pedersen, who had started hacking back in the horse-and-buggy days, when the stone base of the Jezreel Wright monument in the Square (which was round) actually watered the buggy and surrey horses of the farmers-come-to-town instead of being planted with geraniums, as now, by the ladies of the Keep-Wrightsville-Beautiful Committee of the Civic Betterment Club
.

‘Where to?' asked the youngster with a smile.

Wrightsville Airport lies in the valley running north by west between the Twin Hills-Bald Mountain section and the foothills of the great Mahoganies. North Hill Drive is almost due south; it's quite a climb, the road running southeast up the hump past the eastern terminus of ‘The Hill' (Hill Drive) and the western terminus of Twin-Hill-in-the-Beeches. Hill Drive is not to be confused with North Hill Drive, where the ‘new' millionaires have their estates. ‘The Hill' is the residential section of the real thing, the bluestocking families who go all the way back to the 1700s — the Wrights, the Bluefields, the Livingstons, the Granjons, the F. Henry Minikins. Twin-Hill-in-the-Beeches is the town's newest ‘good' development (not the smartest, Skytop Road facing Bald Mountain farther north is the smartest). It's full of fine, bright, sort of modern homes, though, built by well-to-do business people like the MacLeans (‘Dunc MacLean — Fine Liquors', on the Square next door to the Hollis Hotel; Dunc gets all the hotel trade), people who couldn't crash any of the Hill Drive properties for all the cash in Hallam Luck's vaults at the Public Trust Company. And don't think the MacLeans and their crowd don't know it; they don't even try!

‘The Hollis,' said Ellery, leaning back. The mere sound of the name made him feel as if he had come home. Ellery checked in at the Hollis Hotel, and when he checked out sixteen days later he paid a bill for $122.25, $80.00 of which was for rental of his room. Laundry and pressing took up most of the balance. He ate one meal in the main dining-room, but he found it so full of the thunder of organizational ladies and business-group lunchers that he never went back.

High Village hadn't changed much. About the only difference in the Square was that the old Bluefield Store on the north arc, where Upper Dade comes down from North Hill Drive, was gone, replaced by a fluorescent beauty of a shop with a brand-new purple neon sign outside saying
It's Topp's For T-V
. There were a few other changes, more minor than that, but those were chiefly on Wright Street, which had always been a ‘dead spot' for business.

Death had been there in the past year or so — Andy Birobatyan of the florist shop in the Professional Building on Washington Street was among the departed, Ellery sorrowed to learn. The flower business Andy had built up with his one arm (he had left the other in the Argonne Forest in 1918) was being run by his two-armed son Avdo, and not half so well, according to report. Ellery was inclined to salt this rumour, as Avdo was the one who had eloped with Virgie Poffenberger, Dr. Emil Poffenberger's daughter, and made a go of it, too, though it ruined his father-in-law's social standing, caused Dr. Poffenberger's ‘resignation' from the Country Club, and subsequently the sale of his dental practice and his removal to Boston. And Ma Upham of Upham House had died of a stroke and her Revolutionary-type hostel had been sold to a Providence syndicate, causing a D.A.R. boycott and a series of fiery editorials in the
Record
.

Ellery spent his first evening and all of the next day lining up his sights: looking up old friends, greeting acquaintances, strolling along familiar streets, catching up on the gossip, and generally enjoying himself. It was not until he had been in Wrightsville for thirty-six hours that he realized why his enjoyment was so thorough. It was not merely the re-experience of old times in a place he loved; it was that he had just left a place he detested, called Bendigo Island, with its electrified fences and swarming guards and secret police with blank faces and robotized employees and its soft, curiously rotten, air. This, on the other hand, was Wrightsville, U.S.A., where people lived, worked, and died in an atmosphere of independence and decency and a man never had reason to look back over his shoulder. This air, even mill-laden, could be breathed.

It made Ellery all the more inquisitive about the Bendigos.

On the second morning after his arrival he went to work in earnest. His object was to get a biographical picture of King Bendigo and his brothers Abel and Judah from conception, if possible, with the emphasis on King.

He consulted town records, he hunted up Wrightsvillians strange to him, he spent long hours in the morgue of the Wrightsville
Record
and the reference room of the Carnegie Library on State Street. He hired a Driv-Ur-Self car at Homer Findlay's garage down at Plum Street in Low Village and he made numerous trips — Slocum Township, Fyfield, Connhaven, even to little Fidelity, in whose dilapidated cemetery he had an old grave marker to hunt up. Once he flew to Maine.

Especially helpful was Francis ‘Spec' O'Bannon, who was still in Wrightsville running Malvina Prentiss's
Record
(Malvina, the eternal Rosalind Russell, retired from newspaper publishing when she married O'Bannon but retained her maiden name!); O'Bannon kept the
Record
morgue copiously supplied with bourbon while Ellery was dug in there. And, of course, there was Chief of Police Dakin, who was beginning to look more like Abe Lincoln's mummy than Abe Lincoln; and Hermione Wright, who had never looked more radiant; and Emmeline DuPré, the Town Crier, who practically bayed for an entire afternoon; and many others.

Ellery had two whole weeks of it, digging up the pieces, jig-sawing them; crosschecking the testimony, establishing the facts, integrating them with world events, and finally arranging them in roughly chronological order. At the end he had a picture of ‘the oldest Bendigo boy' and his brothers which, kaleidoscopic as it was, delineated them with photographic brutality.

Excerpts from E. Q.'s Notes

Dr. PIERCE MINIKIN

(Dr. Pierce Minikin is 86, retired from practice. Semi-invalid, cared for by Miz Baker, old Phinny's widow, since Phinny died and the
Record
lost the best pressman it ever will have. Dr. Pierce is great-uncle to F. Henry Minikin, but two branches not on speaking terms for over a generation. Dr. Minikin has very small income from some Low Village property. Still lives in Colonial Minikin house on Minikin Rd between Lincoln and Slocum Sts. In bad shape, needs painting, etc. Dated 1743, squeezed between Volunteer Fire Dept and Slocum Garage, backyard overlooks Van Horn Lumber Yard. Old fellow a tartar with frosty twinkle and sharp tongue. Physically feeble, mentally very alert. We had several wonderful visits.)

‘King' Bendigo? My dear young fellow, I knew that great man when he was mud in his father's eye. Brought all three Bendigo boys into the world. From what I've heard, I owe the world an apology …

His father? Well, I don't suppose anybody remembers Bill Bendigo in Wrightsville except a few old hasbeens like me. I liked Bill fine. Of course he wasn't respectable — didn't come from a high-toned family, didn't go to church, was a regular heller — but that didn't cut any ice with me, I liked my men hard and my women patients to bear down, haha! Bill was hard. Hard drinker, hard feeder, hard boss — he was a building contractor, built that block of flats over on Congress Street near the Marshes they're just getting round to tearing down — and a hard lover? Boys at the Hollis bar used to call him Wild Bill. There's many a story I could tell you about …

Well, no, can't say I do. No, not Italian, that's on their mother's side. Don't know how they got the name Bendigo, except that Wild Bill's people were Anglo-Saxon. Came over from England around 1850 …

Big man, six foot three, a yard wide, and a pair of hands on him could bend a crowbar. Champion wrestler of the Green. The Green? That's before it was named Memorial Park. Boys used to grapple there Saturday afternoons. Nobody ever pinned Bill Bendigo. They used to come from all over the County to try. Handsome devil, too, Bill was — blue-eyed, with dark curly hair and lots of it on his chest. If you didn't know about the English, you'd have said Black Irish …

The lover part. Well, now, I didn't know
all
Bill's secrets! But when he fell in real love it was all the way. Worshipped the ground Dusolina walked on. Little Low Village girl from an Italian family. Can't remember her maiden name to save my life. Yes, I do. Cantini, that's what it was. Her father'd been a track walker for the railroad, killed by an express train in '91. No, '92. Left a big brood, and his wife was a religious fanatic. Dusolina — Bill called her Lena — fell just as hard in love as Bill, and they had to elope because Mrs. Cantini threatened to kill her if she married a Protestant. Dusolina did, anyway; they were married by Orrin Lloyd, he was Town Clerk before Amos Bluefield. Orrin Lloyd was the brother of Israel Lloyd, who owned the lumber yard then — grandfather of Frank Lloyd who owned the
Record
up to a few years ago … Where was I?