Ed McBain - The House That Jack Built

“I’m following.”

“Okay, we are now down to Franz Brechtmann marrying Sophie Witte.”

“When was that?”

“1933.”

“And when was Elise born?”

“February of ’52. Sophie was thirty-seven years old.”

“Little late for childbearing.”

“Indeed. But she gave birth to a beautiful little girl nonetheless. So beautiful, in fact, that her proud father promptly named her after his grandmother, and then a few years later brought out a new beer with a label bearing a reasonable facsimile of his then two-year-old darling. Does the name Golden Girl mean anything to you? How about the slogan The Beautiful Beer’? You’ve got it, Matthew. This is the beer that catapulted Brechtmann from number twelve into one of the biggest breweries in America. It’s a shame old Jake wasn’t alive when his granddaughter was born. He’d have been proud of her beer-selling potential.”

“Fill me in on the company,” Matthew said.

According to Warren, the Brechtmann Brewing Company now owned breweries in nine states. The original Brooklyn brewery packaged five million bottles and nine million cans of beer a day. The Calusa brewery — smallest of all the Brechtmann breweries, although it sat on two hundred and fifty acres of land off the Tamiami Trail — itself shipped close to two million barrels a year. In addition, the company brewed non-beer beverages, and it owned yeast plants, malting plants, metal-container plants, and several agricultural facilities where it grew and processed the corn and barley essential to the brewing of beer.

Again according to Warren, the company’s gross sales for the last fiscal year were five and a half billion dollars, a 7.6 percent increase over the year before. Its net income was three hundred and sixty-four million dollars, a gain of forty-two million dollars over the previous year. Over the past eight years, Brechtmann’s earnings per share had grown at an average annual compound rate of more than sixteen percent. The company founded by Jacob Brechtmann in the year 1901 had survived his death in 1945, and his son’s death only five years ago. It continued to flourish under the leadership of Sophie Brechtmann, who at the age of seventy-three was now the company’s single largest stockholder. The company’s CEO was her daughter Elise, thirty-six years old now, whose little-girl face still adorned the label of the beer that had been named after her, the beer that had truly made the Brechtmann family fortune.

“Good work,” Matthew said.

“It’s a start,” Warren said. “I want to do some more digging.”

“For what?”

“Dirt,” Warren said.

Matthew hated hospitals.

He had hated them ever since the death of Susan’s mother. Fifty-six years old when she died. Never smoked a cigarette in her life, but her lungs were riddled with cancer. When the doctors performed the biopsy, they closed her up again at once, said there was nothing they could do for her .

It was Susan’s brother who made the decision not to tell her she was dying.

Matthew had disliked him before then, but that was when he began hating him.

Because, you see… she was a marvelous woman who could have accepted the news, who would in fact have welcomed the opportunity to die with at least some measure of dignity. Instead… ah, Jesus.

He could remember going to the hospital one afternoon. His mother-in-law was propped against the pillows, her head turned to one side, where sunlight was streaming through the Venetian blinds. She had Susan’s features and coloring exactly, the same dark eyes and chestnut hair, the full, pouting mouth showing age wrinkles around its edges now, the good jaw and neck, the skin sagging somewhat — she’d been a beauty in her day, and she looked beautiful still, though ravaged with disease and rapidly dying. She was weeping when Matthew came into the room. He sat beside the bed. He said, “Mom, what’s the matter? What is it?”

She took his hand between hers. She said, “Matthew, please tell them I’m trying.”

“Tell who, Mom?”

“The doctors.”

“What do you mean?”

“They think I’m not trying. I really am, I really do want to get better. I just haven’t got the strength, Matthew.”

“I’ll talk to them,” he said.

He found one of the doctors in the corridor later that day. He asked him what he’d told her. The doctor said it had been the family’s decision—

“ I’m the goddamn family, too,” Matthew said. “What did you tell her?”

“I was merely trying to reassure her, Mr. Hope.”

“About what?”

“I told her she would get well. That if she tried hard enough…”

“That’s a lie.”

“It was the family’s decision…”

“No matter how hard she tries, she’s going to die.”

“Mr. Hope, really, I feel you should discuss this with your brother-in-law. I was trying to help her maintain her spirit, that’s all.”

She died the following week.

She never knew she was dying.

Matthew suspected it came as a total surprise to her when she drew her last breath. He kept thinking of her that way; as dying in surprise. He’d loved her a lot, that woman. He still missed her. Perhaps she was one of the reasons he’d married Susan.

The smells of a hospital.

Cloyingly antiseptic.

The sounds.

Electronic monitors beeping. Address systems paging doctors urgently wanted. Nurses addressing patients in tones better suited for infants.

Charles Abbott was in a semiprivate room on the fourth floor of Calusa Memorial Hospital. The nurse at the desk in the corridor told Matthew that he had been there since the twenty-first day of December last year, a total of fifty-two days so far, which was a long time for anyone except a terminally ill patient to be in a hospital, but—

“He was in coma for almost a month,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “You should’ve seen him when he got here.”

Matthew didn’t think he looked so hot now, either.

He lay in bed with casts on both arms and both legs, his face looking lumpy and discolored, his right eye half-closed. Across the room, the curtain was drawn around the other bed. From behind the curtain, Matthew could hear a man groaning.

Hospitals.

He introduced himself to Abbott and told him why he was there.

“Who?” Abbott said.

Trace of a British accent even in that single word.

“Jonathan Parrish,” Matthew said.

“Never heard of him.”

“Two people you know were watching his house.”

“And what two people is that?”

“Billy Walker and Arthur Hurley.”

“Don’t know them, either,” Abbott said.

“I think you do, sir,” Matthew said. “They’re here in Calusa with your daughter.”

“All right, say I know them. What about it?”

“Why were they watching the Parrish house, can you tell me?”

“I have no idea.”

“What does Jonathan Parrish have to do with Sophie Brechtmann?”

“Did she send you here?” Abbott said at once.

“No. As I told you, I’m representing a man charged with murder. I’m trying to…”

“Then how do you know her name? What do you want here, Mr. Hope?”

“I told you…”

“Or was it Elise who sent you?”

“I’ve never met Elise Brechtmann.”

“But you have met Sophie, eh?”

“I have.”

“Did she tell you how to find me?”

“No, your daughter did.”

“What?”

“Indirectly. She told me you were hospitalized. I simply called every hospital in…”

“Did she tell you how come I’m in hospital?”

“No, sir.”

“Because four men came at me with baseball bats.”