Chapter 5

The next morning, Conrad telephoned the Demarest house and informed one of the servants that he wouldn’t be able to accept Mrs. Demarest’s kind invitation to tea. He asked the woman to tender his regrets to Celeste and had just hung up the instrument when a knock sounded on the door of the suite’s sitting room.

He started to open it himself, but Arturo got there first. As the valet swung the door open, a man’s voice said, “I’m here to see Browning.”

“Mister Browning may or may not be available,” Arturo replied archly. “I shall have to tell him who is calling.”

The man looked over Arturo’s shoulder, pointed, and said, “He’s standing right there, and I can see he’s not doing anything but drinking coffee.”

Arturo waited, his posture indicating he wouldn’t budge though the visitor outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds.

“All right,” the man growled after a moment. “Tell him Jack Mallory is here.”

“Very well.” Arturo turned toward Conrad. “Sir, a Mister Mallory to see you.”

“Send him in.” Conrad tried not to smile.

“Please come in,” Arturo told Mallory as he moved aside and gestured for the visitor to enter.

With an impatient shake of his head, Mallory stepped into the room. He was tall and brawny, with heavy shoulders and long arms. He carried himself like a prizefighter, Conrad thought. His gray suit didn’t fit him very well. Rusty stubble sprouted on a belligerent jaw despite the early hour. His rumpled thatch of hair was the same shade. He carried a hat in one big-knuckled hand.

“I’m Conrad Browning.” Conrad introduced himself and shook hands with Mallory. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Sure. If you want to splash a little cognac in there, I wouldn’t complain.”

Conrad raised an eyebrow in surprise. He would have figured Mallory for more of a straight whiskey drinker.

“I’m afraid we don’t have any cognac.”

Mallory shrugged. “Black will be fine, then.”

Conrad nodded to Arturo, who poured coffee from the pot on the sideboard into a fine china cup. Mallory took it, handling the cup with more deftness than Conrad would have expected from such a big, rough-looking man.

“I’m told you’re the best detective in Boston, Mr. Mallory,” Conrad said. “It’s strange. I used to live here, and I don’t recall ever hearing your name.”

“Not that strange,” Mallory said with a shake of his head. “I’ve only been here about a year. If you’ve been gone longer than that, you never would have heard of me.”

“Where were you before that?”

“Down in Mexico, working for a mining company that was having trouble getting their ore shipments out. Before that I was in Central America, seeing to it that a bunch of guerrillas didn’t keep a railroad from getting built.”

“And before that?”

“Knocking around here and there. I worked for the Pinks, off and on.”

“But you’re not a Pinkerton operative at the moment?”

Mallory shook his head. “I have my own office.”

“You’ve spent time in some rough places. What made you decide to settle in Boston?”

“I never said I was settling here. There are parts of Boston where you can get killed quicker than in any Central American jungle.”

Conrad nodded. “I suppose that’s true.”

Mallory drank some of the hot, strong coffee. “You sent word for me to come here and talk with you for a reason, Mr. Browning. Why don’t you tell me what that reason is, and we’ll see whether or not we can do business.”

“Of course.” Conrad wasn’t comfortable with a lot of small talk, either. He appreciated the detective’s bluntness. “I want to hire you to find a woman.”

Mallory frowned. “Let me guess. You want to be reunited with some long-lost love.”

“Not hardly,” Conrad snapped. “This woman is dead, and if hate wasn’t such a useless emotion, I think I would probably hate her with every fiber of my being.”

Mallory’s bushy red eyebrows rose a little as he tugged at his right earlobe. “That sounds a little more interesting. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

Conrad explained about his history with Pamela Tarleton and the posthumous letter he had received from her a couple weeks earlier. He hated to open up and reveal his pain to the stranger, but if Mallory was going to help him, the detective had to know the background.

The two of them had sat down while Conrad was talking. When he finished the story, Mallory asked, “What is it you want me to do?”

“I think it’s quite likely Pamela gave birth to the children at some private hospital or sanitarium in this area. If she did, it’s possible she might have shared some of the details of her plan with someone there, a doctor or a nurse, maybe. I want you to find out if that’s true.” Conrad leaned forward in the comfortable armchair and clasped his hands together. “But that’s not all. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Mallory, I don’t believe Pamela Tarleton was quite sane. She blamed me not only for ending our engagement but also for her father’s death.”

“It’s none of my business, but did you have anything to do with that?”

Conrad shook his head. “Clark Tarleton was killed by an assassin hired by one of his crooked business partners. Pamela never really accepted that. I suppose it was easier for her to blame me.”

“So she was loco, as they say down in Mexico,” Mallory replied. “What’s your point?”

“I’ve been going on the assumption that what Pamela said in the letter about the twins is true, although I’m not fully convinced she’s hidden them somewhere on the frontier. It seems to me it would have been much easier for her to conceal them somewhere here in the East, where she’s more accustomed to things. However … everything Pamela said has to be doubted on some level.”

Mallory tugged at his earlobe again and slowly nodded in understanding. “You don’t know for sure there really are any twins.”

“That’s right.” Conrad stood up, put his hands behind his back, and began to pace. “It’s possible the entire thing is nothing but a vicious hoax, intended to cause me more pain.”

“That would do it, all right,” the detective mused. “Tell a man he has children he doesn’t know about, send him on a wild goose chase looking for them, and then he’s crushed when he finally finds out they don’t exist.”

Conrad stopped his pacing and jerked his head in a nod. “Exactly. That’s just the sort of warped cruelty that might have occurred to Pamela.”

“So you want me to find out where she had the kids not just to help you locate them, but to prove that they actually exist.”

“Yes. Will you do it? Your fee and expenses will be no object.”

Mallory got to his feet and held out his hand. “I won’t soak you.” He gripped Conrad’s hand. “You strike me as a decent sort of gent, Browning. I’ll do what I can to help you.”

“Thank you. I’ll have my secretary write you a bank draft before you leave. Just tell Arturo how much you need.”

“What’ll you do in the meantime?” Mallory wanted to know. “You don’t seem to me like a man who sits back and waits for somebody else to do all his work for him.”

Conrad smiled. “I have my own avenues of investigation to explore. Consider it a race if you like, Mr. Mallory … a race for the truth.”

One of those avenues of investigation opened up that afternoon. A messenger arrived at the hotel with a note for Conrad. When he broke the seal on it and unfolded it, the scent of expensive perfume rose from the paper.

Arturo had taken the note from the messenger and handed it to Conrad. He cocked a quizzical eyebrow but didn’t come right out and ask what it was about.

Conrad told him anyway. “This is an invitation to dinner tonight, Arturo. At Mrs. Beatrice Garrison’s house. She apologizes for the lateness of the invitation but says she only heard today that I’m back in Boston.”

“I’m afraid the name means nothing to me, sir, although it clearly does to you.”

“The late Mr. Wilbur Garrison owned textile mills, a shipping line, and everything else he could get his fat, greedy hands on. When his heart gave out in his mistress’s bed, his wife inherited everything and became one of the wealthiest women in the Northeast. She’s a prominent figure in Boston society.”

“Ah, then I take it no one else knows about the amorous activitives that cost her late husband his life.”

“On the contrary.” Conrad smiled. “Practically everyone knows about them. But members of high society never allow the truth to interfere with their illusions. I know what I’m talking about, because for a long time I was the same way.”

“Having seen you in action, sir, I find that difficult to believe.”

“Believe it. There was a time when I was the most pompous, priggish stuffed shirt you could ever hope to see. My mother, rest her soul, tried to help me grow up, but it took a couple of other people to finally accomplish that.”

A couple people named Frank Morgan and Rebel Callahan.

Conrad put away the thoughts of his father and his late wife and went on. “It’s short notice to get a tuxedo fitted and altered in time for dinner this evening, so we’d better get busy. The jacket is going to be especially tricky.”

“Why is that, sir?”

“It’ll have to be cut so you can’t see the guns.”