Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

dining room filled. Roman matrons sat facing each other, bouffant head to perfect bouffant head, the straight cashmere backs rippled with corseting. The businessmen, American, German, Italian, drank and discussed slipped disks and smoking and hotels they had stayed in at Frankfurt. Johnson said, “People with good taste don’t change overnight.”
    “You think not?” I said. I thought of Maurice and all his awestruck encomium of Johnson and his cosmopolitan living. I said prosaically, “Then why should Charles suddenly want to marry me?”
    I waited for him to flunk it, or bish it, or paper it over. Instead he thought, and then said, “To protect you?”
    I stared at him. They were serving us with brochettes of lamb, slipped off the charcuterie wire, with a tossed salad glistening beside them. A flagon of Antinori, Chianti classico 1966, had arrived instead of champagne. It was all quite different from what I had expected. I said, “It was you who said there was no need to go to the police. We’ve done nothing wrong, except hide the fact that we were in the zoo. We didn’t see the man die.”
    “But,” said Johnson, “you know two things the police haven’t discovered. You know who was with the dead man. And you know why he died. You know what was in Lord Digham’s camera.”
    “So do you,” I said. “So do Jacko and Innes and Diana and the couture house and Maurice, for all I know, as well as poor Charles himself. If I need protection, then so do we all; How shall we pair off?” I added.
    “Morally, genetically or aesthetically?” Johnson inquired. The sweet-trolley stood to one side awaiting us: I could see fresh strawberries and a deep bowl of cream; gooseberry tart, pears in brandy and gâteau. The waiter replenished my wine. Johnson said, “Who do you imagine killed that man in the loo? Mila Schon or Carlo Palazzi in person? The pirating of a season’s fashions can make the fortune of a wholesale house and bankrupt a couturier. Where big money is involved, big operators are hired. The two men you saw together in the Villa Borghese might even have been rivals. There was a struggle for the film in the toletta, and the first man had his head blown off.” He broke off. “I’m sure he had an obituary.”
    He had several. I recited the most recent one, rapidly.
    “
Just as you were, you will always be
    Treasured forever in memory
    Death came and gently kissed your brow
    God has another angel now
.”
    “Mr. Johnson —”
    “Johnson,” he corrected me. “It’s confusing, I know, but my Christian name and surname are the same.”
    “All right,” I said. “I’m Ruth. And it would be nice if you didn’t keep calling Charles Lord Digham. But if they were rivals, and not meeting each other, why did the first man have to go into the loo. I mean —”
    “There is a time for everything, and that wasn’t it,” said Johnson. “Yes. Well, my guess is that he knew someone else had his eye on the camera, and he was looking for a quiet place to wind up and take out the film. He could hardly do that while you were spraying him with hoses in the rhinoceros compound or whatever. Then if he was attacked, all he stood to lose was the empty camera.” He finished partitioning his brochettes through the lower half of his bifocals and inspected me through the upper. “You still don’t want to go to the police?”
    “No,” I said.
    “No,” he agreed. “They might ask how your camera and Charles’s got mixed up in the first place.”
    I went on spearing cucumber because I prefer not to show when I have been shocked. I said, “Charles is around the Dome all the time. He was there the afternoon before his Villa Borghese session. I suppose he picked up the wrong camera.”
    “The police,” said Johnson prosaically, “might think you gave him the wrong camera. It certainly left his lying where anyone could get at it.”
    “Yes…” I said slowly. “But that would argue that
three
people were after