Тэлмидж Пауэлл: The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

Today, in the shadows of the pro shop, Marley said his most pleasant hello, and Lemuel paused, wiping his creased, weathered face with a huge red bandanna. “How goes the pearl-diving?”

“Greasy,” Marley said, “like always. How about a Coke?”

Lemuel flicked surprise through sun-bleached brows. He and Marley had often spoken pleasantly enough, and they shared the unspoken bonds of menial jobs, but this was the first time Marley had extended such an invitation.

“Why not?” Lemuel said.

They went in, bought their drinks, and retired to the outside bench behind the pro shop, rules forbidding their presence on the veranda that overlooked the front nine.

Marley wasted a brief minute chatting about an inconsequential, the weather. Then he said, stretching the truth a bit: “Had a hairy experience night before last. Old lady in a white nightgown walked right out in front of my car. Happened on the boulevard, at 341.”

“Must have been Atha Vanderling,” Lemuel said, killing half his Coke at a swallow.

“Vanderling? You mean, one of the original Estate tribes?”

“Last Vanderling left. Not a living creature to leave all them millions to.”

Marley shifted on the hardness of the wooden bench. “I guess you know plenty about the Estates and the people.”

“Been here since the day they redid the back nine and put in the long practice tee.” Lemuel winked knowingly. “I could write a book. Sure as hell could.” He sighed. “’Course nobody wants to hear about folks in the Estates the way they used to be.”

“Sounds interesting to me. Say... why don’t we meet here at the pro shop tomorrow a little earlier? We’ll chew over some old times.”

The prospect brought a nod of pleasure. “If the greenskeeper don’t have me chinch-bugging on the front nine,” Lemuel said. “Can’t think of nothing I’d like better. I’m around from sunup to sundown six days a week.”

Cultivating Lemuel as a brain to pick, Marley in the next few days pieced Atha Vanderling into a composite from the old man’s gossip. Awkward and painfully shy when she was young. A very sensitive girl who’d known she was dense and not at all pretty. But the Vanderling money had provided specialists, to tutor her, correct the bucked teeth, design clothing that enhanced the bony figure. She was sent to ballet, riding, diction lessons. She was travelled in Europe. She was provided a debut. Money had worked a small miracle; even so, Atha had emerged into young womanhood as a plain-jane wallflower.

When she was in her barrenly lonely mid-twenties, she met Guthrie Linyard, a social hanger-on who was summer guesting with a neighbor of the Vanderlings. He set about wooing her, and the love-starved young woman’s response had been blindly overwhelming. No one could get through to her. Her belief and faith in Guthrie were fanatical. He truly loved her, not her money, and she loved him.

The couple announced their engagement and were given the usual round of parties. The rapturous young simpleton flew to Paris to buy part of her trousseau.

Came the day of the wedding, and Guthrie vanished, leaving her in white satin, a bridal bouquet in her hands, a spectacle before the eyes of people she’d known all her life in the crowded church.

“Atha’s pappy, as you may have guessed,” Lemuel said, “finally turned the trick with Guthrie Linyard the morning of the wedding. Folks talked about it a long time. Old man Vanderling went into the church ante-room where Guthrie was all set to go in cutaway coat and striped trousers, and made his final offer. If Guthrie showed up at the altar, the old man was drawing a new will, cutting Atha out. Otherwise, there was a side door so’s a man could slip out quietly and here was a package containing fifty thousand dollars cold cash, travelling money.”

“And Atha never married?”

“Atha,” Lemuel said, “was never far from the brink, first place. Atha went stark, staring crazy. Started right there at the altar, her beginning to sob and finally running out in her wedding gown and veil, up and down the streets, looking to see if Guthrie had been hurt in an accident, screaming his name. When she learned what had really happened, she closed in on herself, like an oyster locking its shell. They spent plenty on her, in fancy asylums, and her pappy was never the same afterward. Finally, Vanderling money had done all it could. They were able to bring home what was left of Atha. She never went out, had no friends, although she could talk and act like she had good sense. But she was convinced that some day Guthrie would come back. The best doctors in New York and Vienna couldn’t get that idea out of her head. And while her years melted away, she stayed on in the old home place, after her parents died, lighting a candle in a window every night and waiting for Guthrie to return.”

Marley didn’t as yet know how he would use the information; but his experience and instincts clearly told him that he was on the brink of something big, perhaps the biggest con of his life, the one that would set him up for all his years to come. The toughest part of any con was to locate a mark. The best of con men (the category in which Marley automatically included himself) sometimes went for months without using their talents because the right situation wouldn’t show itself.

The expiration of his parole came and went, its impact shunted aside by the thoughts that suffused Marley of an old crazy woman worth millions.

“I guess,” the bohunk of a parole officer said grudgingly, “you’ll swim out of the greasy dishwater and head for parts unknown.”

“I rather like the Estates,” Marley said.

He continued his digging — through Lemuel, through old newspaper files, the local library, through a mole-like research into names associated with the Vanderlings. His keen imagination popped open kernels he ferreted from old gossip columns, notes on society and business pages. Immersed in his subject, he almost felt that he had once been part of the scene.

Exchanging greasy kitchen steam for the stink of his cheap room each night, he considered the angles.

He would face himself in the scaly mirror over the dresser, knock on an imaginary door, and when the door was opened he would look into Atha Vanderling’s non-present eyes and rehearse.

Role of private investigator: “Miss Vanderling? I’m James C. Lyerly. Here is my card. I have some information about a man named Guthrie Linyard...”

No. It could get too involved, foisting himself into her hire as a private detective. The ideal con was simple, direct.

A long-lost friend: “Atha, you remember me, of course. Jeremy Dekalb... My dear, the years haven’t hurt you a bit...”

Nope. The link must be stronger than one of ancient friendship.

A distant relative: “Atha, I’m Peter Conway, all the way from Switzerland. Aunt Helen told me to be sure to look you up...” More than twenty years ago the local paper had Sunday-featured the removal of the Conway branch of the family to an executive position in a Swiss firm. But the distant relative was too risky. She might have despised Peter.

Marley would brood from his window at the scabby alleyway below. A pigeon isolated in her roost with no one to protect her... no father left to come between her and a Guthrie Linyard, who had once come close to getting it all...

Catching a glimpse of his reflection in the dirty window, Marley felt the sudden creeping of a rather delicious numbness. As if hardly daring to trust his muscles, he turned toward the mirror. His mind unveiled the Guthrie Linyard shown in the society pages a generation ago when the Linyard-Vanderling engagement had promised the most expensive wedding of the season.

Marley lifted his hand, touching his chin. Same size... same coloration... Thirty years ago he’d resembled those old pictures of Guthrie Linyard in a general way. Who could say that Linyard wouldn’t have aged into Marley’s present image?