Black money by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

maternal tone was quite different from the one she had used on her husband and me. "You're staying right here. It's nearly dinnertime."

    "I'm starved," Peter said to me.

    The boy asked his mother why they didn't have a television set.

    "Two reasons. We've been into them before. One, your father doesn't approve of television. Two, we can't afford it."

    "You're always buying books and records," the boy said. "Television is better than books and records."

    "Is it?"

    "Much better. When I have my own house I'm going to have color television in every room. And you can come and watch it," he concluded grandly.

    "Maybe I will at that."

    The door to the garage study opened, ending the interchange. Professor Tappinger came into the living room waving a sheet of paper in each hand.

    "The questions and the answers," he said. "I've devised five questions which a well-educated Frenchman should be able to answer. I don't think anyone else could, except possibly a graduate student of French. The answers are simple enough so that you can check them without having to know too much French."

    "That's good. Let's hear them, Professor."

    He read aloud from his sheets: "One. Who wrote the original Les Liaisons dangereuses and who made the modernized film version?

    Choderlos de Laclos wrote the original, and Roger Vadim made the movie.

    "Two. Complete the phrase: `Hypocrite lecteur. . .'

    Answer: Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere- from the opening poem of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal.

    "Three. Name a great French painter who believed Dreyfus was guilty.
    Answer: Degas.

    "Four. What gland did Descartes designate as the residence of the human soul? Answer: the pineal gland.

    "Five. Who was mainly responsible for getting Jean Genet released from prison? Answer: Jean-Paul Sartre. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?"

    "Yes, but the emphasis seems to be a little one-sided. Shouldn't there be something about politics or history?"

    "I disagree. If this man is an impostor passing himself off as a political refugee, the first thing he'd bone up on would be history and politics. My questions are subtler; and they cover a range that it would take years to bone up on."

    His eye brightened. "I wish I could put them to him myself."

    "I wish you could, too. But it might be dangerous."

    "Really?"

    "Martel pulled a gun on another man today. I think you'd better let me go up against him."

    "And me," Peter said. "I insist on going along."

    Tappinger followed us out to our cars, as if to make up for his earlier impatience. I thought of offering him money for his work, five or ten dollars, but decided not to risk it. It might only remind him that he needed money and make him angry again.

    8

    I FOLLOWED PETER'S CORVETTE Inland into the foothills. Their masses had been half-absorbed by the blue darkness of the mountains. A few lights, bright as evening stars, were scattered up their slopes. One of them shone from Martel's house.

    Peter stopped just short of the mailbox. The name stenciled on it stood out black in his headlights: Major General Hiram Bagshaw, U.S.A. (ret.) He cut the lights and started to get out.

    The quiet of the evening shivered like a crystal. A high thin quavering cry came down from the direction of the house. It might have been a peacock, or a girl screaming.

    Peter ran toward me. "It's Ginny! Did you hear her?"

    "I heard something."

    I tried to persuade him to wait in his car. But he insisted on riding up to the house with me.

    It was a massive stone-and-glass building set on a pad, which had been excavated above the floor of the canyon. A floodlight above the door illuminated the flagstone courtyard where the Bentley was parked. The door itself was standing open.

    Peter started in. I held him back. "Take it easy. You'll get yourself shot."

    "She's my girl," he said, in the teeth off all the evidence so far.

    The girl appeared in the doorway. She had on a gray suit, the kind women use for traveling.