Michael Collins - The brass rainbow

“I’d like to talk about Monday, Mrs. Radford? About your brother-in-law?”

“You’re the detective George and Deirdre mentioned,” she said. “I don’t understand what you want. The police assure us that the man will be caught soon. He must be put away.”

“They’ll throw away the key.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Mr. Fortune,” she snapped, and frowned. “We are at coffee. You’ll join us for a cup.”

It was a command. I followed her into a dining hall of ornate sideboards, high-backed chairs, and a center table as long as six pool tables. Portraits of grim men from the past hung on the walls, all of them having a vague resemblance to the late Jonathan Radford and to George Ames. There were some fifteen people in the room. One of them was George Ames. They were all drinking coffee.

“How do you like it prepared, Mr. Fortune?” Gertrude Radford said.

The question would have been a surprise except that I was looking at the sideboards. There were percolators of every type; drip pots; filter-paper pots; silex types; espresso pots; one large urn; pots for boiling; and some ways of making coffee I couldn’t even name.

“We each brew our own, Mr. Fortune, in our own way,” Mrs. Radford said. “A family tradition going back over a hundred years. Coffee was the original Radford-Ames business. I myself favor a simple percolator.”

“Percolator is fine,” I said.

She led me into a corner. For a time we sat and drank. Coffee was sacred. It was good coffee. I watched the whole crew mothering their pots and cups, and all at once it gave me a chill. It was like a blood ritual with the celebrants drinking the blood of their ancestors at the high altar of family. A tribal rite designed, as all rites are designed, to keep the members inside and everyone else outside.

Mrs. Radford brought me out of my visions. “You’re suggesting, Mr. Fortune, that there is doubt about what happened to Jonathan?”

“I don’t know what happened to Jonathan,” I said.

“The police seem sure this Weiss…”

“Sure isn’t the same as knowing,” I said.

A man’s voice answered me: “That is a cynical statement, Mr. Fortune, and stubborn. You’re more competent than you look.”

George Ames stood over me. He wore evening clothes now-white tie and tails. He looked good.

“The police talked to me,” I said. “They’ll let me hang myself. Maybe we could talk about Jonathan’s enemies now?”

“Influence didn’t get rid of you, perhaps answers will,” Ames said. He took a black cigarette case from his inner pocket and selected an elegant cigarette with gold trim. “Every man makes enemies in sixty years, but there was no one recent or special. Murder is drastic, Fortune. It takes a powerful reason, don’t you think? There was no enemy of that magnitude.”

“Business?”

Ames smoked, smiled. “Jonathan was chairman of Radford Industries. It’s actually a financial holding company: impersonal, collective, almost anonymous. Jonathan’s death will change nothing for anyone.”

“Who gets the business now? Who gets his money?”

Mrs. Radford answered that. “Jonathan’s personal money goes all over the family. He made no secret of that. He was a bachelor, and at least fifty people will share in his will.”

“His real wealth,” Ames added, “was his holdings in Radford Industries. Everyone in the family has some shares. I have a few thousand myself, but Jonathan held fifteen percent. That chunk gives control of the company; he would never break it up. I assume it will go intact to Walter as the only young Radford.”

“It will,” Mrs. Radford said, “together with the five percent my husband had and Jonathan controlled since my husband died.”

“So Walter gets the business?” I said.

Ames laughed. It was a loud laugh. Almost too loud. “The stock doesn’t mean the power if I knew Jonathan. He’d just about given up on Walter as a businessman.”

“Don’t be insulting, George,” Mrs. Radford said coldly.

“Come now, Gertrude,” Ames said. “Walter hates the idea of running the company, and you know it. Jonathan knew it, too, and he’ll certainly have arranged it so that management will run the company at least for now. I hope so, anyway. I have a stake.”

“Walter will prove he can run the company,” Mrs. Radford said. “He’ll take hold now. Deirdre will help once they are married.”

“Perhaps she will at that,” Ames said.

I said, “Miss Fallon and Walter are being married soon?”

“The announcement will be made after the funeral.”

When I had first talked to George Ames, he had called Deirdre Fallon a “lady friend.” Ames was a man I would have expected to be formal, and a fiancee is not a lady friend.

“A sudden decision?” I asked.

“No,” Mrs. Radford said, “it was actually to be announced yesterday. That was what Deirdre discussed with Jonathan at lunch on Monday. Walter and Deirdre think we should wait longer, but I see no useful reason. We must balance death with life.”

It was a nice speech that proved nothing. Had the late Jonathan maybe really opposed the marriage? It was a thought, but I wasn’t going to find out here.

“Did Jonathan have a personal, private problem?” I asked.

“Good gracious no,” Gertrude Radford said.

“Damn it, Fortune,” George Ames said, “this Weiss came to collect money, Jonathan refused, and Weiss killed him. Those are the plain facts. You can’t evade them.”

“Why go to Jonathan?” I said. “Why not go to Walter?”

“Because Walter couldn’t pay,” Ames said testily. “Jonathan had control of his brother’s estate until Walter was thirty.”

Mrs. Radford said, “My husband did not believe that a woman could, or should, handle money. Except for a small income of my own, Jonathan controlled our money.”

“What are you trying to find out, Fortune?” Ames said. “No one in the family was near the apartment at the time, except Gertrude, and she couldn’t get in. She has no key. Jonathan was already dead then.”

“Maybe,” I said, “or maybe someone was with him keeping him quiet. Maybe he wasn’t dead at two o’clock after all.”

They didn’t look startled, or guilty, they just stared at me with nothing to say to that.

I said, “Do any of you know a man named Paul Baron?”

“No.”-“Of course not.” They said together. Their ignorance sounded genuine. I dropped it.

“Where could I find Walter now?”

“He went out with Deirdre. She’s staying in one of the cottages until the wedding,” Mrs. Radford said. “We don’t mean to be unhelpful, or callous, Mr. Fortune, but we can’t help you. At the moment I am only concerned with binding our wounds.”

“We all like to bind wounds,” I said. “Thanks for seeing me.”

None of the others drinking their ritual coffee had even glanced at me, and they didn’t now as I walked out. I was an alien animal, some foreign species. They were behind their walls, and outside there were only strange breeds of no interest to them.

The butler ushered me out. The hour was almost up, so I stood in the biting night cold and waited for the taxi to return. I was thinking about Paul Baron and a world a lot different from the world of the Radfords, when I heard the light steps in the snow.

A thin shadow watched me from the trees at the corner of the house. The shadow hissed at me, said:

“Are you the detective?”

“Yes.”

“Hurry,” she said.

A female shadow that turned and walked away around the house. I followed.

The path led toward two cottages behind the house. Only one showed light. The tall woman led me toward the lighted one.