Ed McBain - The House That Jack Built

“When was this, Mr. Abbott?”

“December twenty-first, two days after I went to see Sophie. Remarkable coincidence, what? They must’ve been following me. I come out of this bar on Palmetto and suddenly they’re all over me. Four of them. With baseball bats.”

“Did you recognize any of them?”

“No. Four hired goons is all.”

“Did you report this to the police?”

“Didn’t have to report it. The cops came about the same time the ambulance did.”

“Then the police know what happened to you.”

“If you’re thinking they’ll ever catch those goons, forget it. Elise would’ve known better than to use local talent.”

“Elise?”

“Sure. It had to be Elise who sent those gorillas after me. The old lady doesn’t favor such tactics.”

“Are you saying Elise Brechtmann hired four men to…?”

“Is what I’m saying. I went to see Sophie on the nineteenth. Soon as I left, she must’ve talked to Elise. So Elise got worried, and bingo! On the twenty-first, I’m in the hospital with a fractured skull, a concussion, eight broken ribs, compound fractures of both arms and both legs, a broken nose, a broken collarbone and six missing teeth — all courtesy of little Golden Girl. You say you’ve never met her, eh?”

“Never.”

“A beautiful woman, Elise. All those goddamn Aryan genes, I suppose. Sophie’s a fat old lady now, but back when I was working on the estate, she was a good-looking woman, too. In her fifties at the time, but still taking good care of herself, swam thirty, forty laps a day, looked ten years younger than she was. Her hair was still blond, too, must’ve started going gray all at…”

“This was when?”

“I started driving for them back in ’62. I was twenty-two years old, came here to Florida from California. I had good references. I used to work for some of the stars out there. Mr. Brechtmann hired me right off. Elise was still a little girl then. Ten years old when I started working there. Long blonde hair, green eyes — well, you’ve seen the Golden Girl Beer label, haven’t you? Image of Elise. I haven’t seen her since 1969, when Helen was born — but there was an article about the company in Time magazine last August, showed a picture of her with the blonde hair cut very short, almost like a man’s, but still with those green cat eyes. Helen looks a lot the way her mother looked when she was a girl. Except for the eyes. Helen’s eyes are blue. Well, so are mine. I guess blue is dominant over green, wouldn’t you think? Moves like her mother, too. Same walk. Like a cat. Well, she’s pregnant now, so it’s difficult to tell, pregnant women waddle, don’t they? But normally, she moves with a sort of jungle glide, do you know? Like a big cat on the hunt, stalking. Just like Elise. Something like that’s inherited, I should think.”

“You’re saying that Elise is Helen’s mother.”

“Is what I’m saying.”

“Sophie Brechtmann doesn’t seem to think so.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“That’s what she told me.”

“What a lying old biddy,” Abbott said, and shook his bandaged head in amazement. “She knows damn well what happened. Why else would she have paid me all that money?”

The man behind the curtain groaned.

Abbott glanced at the curtain.

When he spoke again, his voice was almost a whisper.

“Haifa million dollars,” he said.

Matthew looked at him.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Paid me half a million dollars.”

“I thought she’d refused to pay you anything at all. She told me…”

“That’s right, she wouldn’t give me a nickel when I went to see her ’round Christmastime, had her man throw me off the grounds, in fact. I’m talking about then . I’m talking about 1969, when Elise was pregnant and Sophie was frantic.”

“Tell me about it,” Matthew said.

“How can that help me?” Abbott said.

“How can it hurt you?” Matthew said.

Abbott looked at him.

“I’m trying to save a man’s life,” Matthew said.

“This has nothing to do with your client.”

“Maybe it does. Let me hear it, okay?”

Abbott kept looking at him.

“Sure,” he said at last, and shrugged. “Why the hell not?”

January of 1969.

In California, Governor Ronald Reagan asks the state legislature to drive criminal anarchists and latter-day Fascists off the campuses.

In Los Angeles, the trial of Bobby Kennedy’s assassin begins.

In Paris, a Vietcong flag is placed on the steeple of Notre Dame.

And in Calusa, Florida, a girl who will not be seventeen until next month, a sixteen-year-old girl with long blonde hair and pale green eyes comes to the room over the garage on the Brechtmann estate and tells the Brechtmann chauffeur that she is pregnant with his child.

Legalized abortion in the United States is still four years away.

It is a bit past eleven o’clock at night.

Twenty-nine-year-old Charles Abbott is watching the news on television.

He is learning that Lyndon Baines Johnson has just sold the rights to his memoirs for one and a half million dollars.

Immediately he wonders how much the Brechtmanns will be willing to pay for his memoirs, Charles Abbott’s memoirs.

He is willing to tell them — or anyone , for that matter — everything that happened in December of last year. Everything. Oh, such sweet memories.

Sixteen-year-old Elise coming to his room in the middle of the night.

Sixteen-year-old Elise in tears.

Sixteen-year-old Elise in his arms.

Never ask a beautiful young lady why she’s in tears or why she’s suddenly in your arms. He learned that in London. Never ask. Merely kiss away the tears and unbutton the blouse, and let those lovely breasts spill into your hands, and kiss the pink schoolgirl nipples and raise the skirt over pale white thighs and lower the white cotton knickers and let old John Peter find his own stiff way to where it’s oh so warm and wet.

Now, at the end of January, the chicks have come home to roost, mate, the girl is here in tears again to tell you she’s missed her period, the one due around the middle of the month, she is sure she’s pregnant and she doesn’t know what to do about it, she knows her parents will kill her.

“Now, now,” Abbott tells her.

He is thinking of all the ways to spend the money he is going to get from the Brechtmann family.

He is thinking that what he has to sell is worth at least a hundred grand.

At least as much as it would be worth to any enterprising news magazine in the United States.

He can see the headlines now:

What? The Golden Girl pregnant? Franz Brechtmann’s darling little girl pregnant? The girl on the label of the Beautiful Beer? As pregnant as a common tart? The chauffeur the father, no less? Oh my my my my my, quel scandale, quelle médisance! Enough to make people stop drinking beer altogether!

He does not go to the family at once, suspecting the girl — being so young and all — has merely panicked. A single missed period needn’t necessarily indicate pregnancy. He waits. And in February, when Elise tells him she has now missed two periods, they go together to her mother.

Sophie.

Calm, beautiful, sensible, slender Sophie.

“I fear the lass is in a family way,” Abbott tells her.

Or words to that effect.

Sophie’s blue eyes immediately dart to her daughter’s belly; she does not seem to be showing yet.

“Is this true?” Sophie asks.

Elise nods.

“How could you have been so stupid?” her mother says.