The Cherry Blossom Corpse (17 page)

“I translated the article for her. Then on the night she died I translated her letter. Otherwise I just served her at table now and then, or in the bar.”

“You weren't more friendly than that? You didn't do her more intimate services?”

When the boy understood what was being asked, he crimsoned, broke into Norwegian, and when he returned to English I understood him to say: “I'm young! I wouldn't think of it.”

He seemed to be an ageist. His denials rang true. Amanda seemed like a mother-figure to him, though a less than comfortable one.

“Nevertheless,” said Stein, turning to the proprietress, “these intimacies occurred with someone.”

She pursed her lips.

“It happens.”

“You have no idea with whom it happened in this case?”

“No. I make it my business not to know about the private affairs of my guests. The Norwegian tourist trade is mostly with older people, but they can on occasion . . . do most extraordinary things. You understand? It is better I not know. My bedroom is separate from the rest—I can get to it through the kitchen. If I am called, I go. Otherwise, it is none of my business.”

“But you have seen her
with
the other guests? . . .”

“Of course. One sees, sometimes, the
beginnings
of things.” (Was it my imagination, or did she look at me as she said that?) “But if one does not see the
end,
how does one know? With Mrs.—is it Mrs.?—Fairchild there
was her
manner.
Very . . . free. Very . . . too friendly, like it was not always meant. How much do you read into that? Not much, very often. So I know nothing.”

Stein sighed.

“Well, I suppose we'll have to leave it there.” We got up. “I wish you could tell us how the Finn gets hold of his drink.”

“He gets hold of it because he brought it with him.”

“But we searched his room, and still he manages—”

“Did you look under the floorboards?”

“No. I never imagined—”

“You have no idea how cunning these drunks are. Not to mention all sorts of people you don't imagine to be drunks at all. If the idea that there had been a murder got through to him, then the idea that someone would want to dry him out—is that what you say?—probably got through to him too.”

“Well, he won't find a private cellar under the floorboards in the new room.”

“No,” said Fru Tønnesen in her tight-lipped way, “that I can guarantee.”

If the interview had done nothing else, it had firmly re-established the guilt of someone or other in the guest-house—somebody British, American, or indeed Norwegian. It did not escape my notice that the boy's insistence that nobody could have got past him to the guest-house also served to reinforce his own claim to have been at the roadside the whole of the relevant time. No doubt the police would check with motorists who passed at the time whether they noticed him. Certainly we couldn't entirely rule out, either, someone who had been hidden in the grounds from earlier in the evening, waiting for the nine-thirty assignation with Amanda, though the provenance of the notepaper made that unlikely. No, it was surely one of the guest-house people,
with the overwhelming probability that it was one of the British or American guests.

“I wonder,” I said, as we climbed the stairs to the lounge.

What I was remembering was the American publisher I had seen at the first day's opening gathering, and discussed with Maryloo Parker—the one, I mean, for whom books were synonymous with bedtime. I rather doubted whether he had slept with quite as many romantic authors as Maryloo Parker had implied—probably she suffered from a tendency to generalize out from her own experience—but still he could be a powerful source of gossip about the American writers, and perhaps even some of the British ones. What the hell was his name? I borrowed the list of delegates from Stein, who had it in his folder, and flicked through it. Marriott Dulac—that was it! Bloody silly name it was too, about as convincing as Lorelei le Neve. Anyway, he was staying at the Scandilux Hotel, which was convenient. I begged the car off Stein again, and explained who I wanted to see.

“You're not expecting to hear about the love-life of Mrs. Zuckerman, I suppose?” asked Svein.

No, I said, I wasn't. I hadn't put any of my eggs in that particular basket. Oddly enough, in the event Lorelei was one of the people I got to hear most about.

It was about six when I got back to the Scandilux, and I was disappointed to be told that Marriott Dulac was not in his room. I told the girl on the desk I would check around. The bars yielded up nothing except sipping romance writers, but I found him finally in one of the coffee lounges—inevitably with one of the writers. She was plain but pleasant-looking, and in her thirties. Dulac was playing it pretty cool: with someone more sexually and socially prestigious I could imagine him leaning forward
intensely, transfixing her with a display of his personality and of his interest in her. With this one he sat back, swinging on the back legs of his chair, toying with a piece of oozy chocolate cake on his plate, and making it clear that he would have her if he wanted her, and would be doing her a favour to boot.

He was a big man, with a lot of flesh distributed over big bones. His face was large and fleshy too, with the traditional thick, wet lips and hair that had hardly begun to thin, or else was being unobtrusively boosted. It was the confidence, verging on brashness, with which he presented his body that spoke of the sexual athlete, the punisher of bedsprings. I could see why Maryloo (in spite of her cynicism) had been attracted to him: he looked like Ted Kennedy on a good day.

“Mr. Dulac?” He looked up without irritation. Seduction was all in a day's work, and he was used to being interrupted in the middle of it. “I'm from Scotland Yard, and I'm helping with the investigation into Amanda Fairchild's death. I wonder if—some time—I could have a word with you.”

“Sure. Delighted. Flattered.” He looked it, too. He took the hand of his companion in his two big paws and patted it, in a gesture I had seen sugar-daddies do on the screen but never expected to see outside the cinema. “Say, honey, can we take this up at dinner, maybe? I'll see you then—make a point of it.”

His companion took herself off obediently, and with a tactful lack of fuss. Some men had all the luck. He now added, under his breath, and with a conspiratorial wink at me: “If nothing better offers.”

He insisted on fetching me a coffee from the counter, and as there was nobody at any of the nearby tables I decided that this was as good a place as anywhere to talk to him. Marriott Dulac's voice was unexpectedly musical
and low—a bedroom voice, presumably, but not an unpleasant one.

“As I say, I'm flattered—truly flattered that you want to talk to me, but I'm not quite sure why that is. I've never, to my knowledge, published anything by Amanda Fairchild.”

“No, that's not why. You were pointed out to me, on the first day of the conference, as someone who had a wide experience among romance writers.”

“Right! You're right there!” His face glowed with a smile of self-delight that was almost artless. “An unparalleled acquaintance with the species. But again, not—I regret to say—with Amanda Fairchild. She was less well-known in the States than she was in Europe. That's true of most British writers, I guess. American readers prefer something they can relate to pretty directly. Anyway, I don't recall her having made any American visit, so I didn't have the chance to get . . . acquainted.”

“No—your name certainly hasn't come up in connection with Amanda. I was thinking more of the American writers who are staying at the
Kvalevåg Gjestgiveri.
Maryloo Parker, for instance . . .”

“Now there's a lady!” His face lit up. “Gamesome I'd call her. Ready for anything.”

“Do you know anything about her background?”

“A little. I guess we've talked a fair bit while we've been together. And we have happened to coincide at a fair number of . . . congresses and things. She's a Mid-westerner, good middle-class upbringing. Daddy was a banker or a solicitor—one of these solid professions, anyway—but something went badly wrong in Maryloo's late teens. I suspect a jail term for Daddy, but Maryloo is cagey. Anyway, it meant dropping out of college, doing a lot of grinding jobs—sales rep, beautician, canvassing—that sort of thing. She was married, briefly, to a
teacher, and it was while she was married that she took up romance-writing. When the marriage collapsed she found she had a viable source of income, to supplement the alimony.”

“What about on a personal level?”

“She's a sweet cookie. A clever chick. What more can I say?”

What more indeed? Character analysis in depth didn't seem to be his forte.

“Then there's Patti Drewe . . .”

He screwed up his face.

“Oh yeah, yeah. I don't know that I remember much . . . Sure we did—you know—but . . . Wait: she's got an invalid husband. You know, writing's a real last resort for folk in distress, financial, emotional, whatever. What would disgraced politicians do if they couldn't go away and write thrillers? Half my writers have problems getting their alimony, invalid husbands or by-blow children they want to put through college.” (Rather rich that last point, I thought, coming from him.) “I seem to remember that Patti is a pretty good writer. Naturally I don't read many romances except those from our stable, but I think she's very competent. That's my impression of her: coping very nicely for herself and hers.”

“You say you don't read many romance writers, other than your own,” I said, rather disappointed with what I'd got from him so far. “Do you read Lorelei le Neve?”

He perked up immediately.

“Oh my, yes. Of course, everybody reads Lorelei. You've got to read her, analyse her appeal, if you're going to give any advice worth having to the aspirant writer. She just covers the spectrum—has an unerring instinct for the market, for people's weak spots, you might say. Added to which, we'd all like to be grooming a successor for Lorelei. Rumour has it about the publishing houses that she's a doomed woman.”

“You don't actually know her?”

“Not personally.”

“So you can't say anything about her as a human being?”

“You're using the phrase in its loosest sense, I hope. Well, no, though publishers do sometimes get together and gossip, you know. One hears things. And funnily enough, a sort of connection of mine did know her—or had dealings with her—long ago, before the war.”

“A connection?”

“Actually a relative of my wife's.”

“You have a wife?”

“Somewhere. This relative was manager of a factory that started up in Virginia, just before the war. It was government-aided, and the idea was that it could switch to war-production if necessary, which is what happened. Lorelei was personnel director. She was still quite young, but there can't be any mistake: that name is quite unique. It was at the end of the Depression, there were people who had been out of work the whole decade. Lorelei was responsible for hiring and firing. This uncle of my wife's said it was obscene, the joy she took in choosing who she hired and who she fired. He said he'd never known anyone do it with such relish.”

“No,” I said. “I don't think there's been a mistake. That degree of relish for power is rare. Does he know anything about her subsequent career?”

“Not much. When war did come, she was a bit of an embarrassment: daughter of a fairly recent German immigrant family. As war production started up full employment returned, and the job lost its appeal. She was a trained singer, and she got herself hired by an opera company, for the chorus. This was Chicago, so far as I remember. She was a disruptive influence, always muscling in on any small parts going, and after a year or two she got the boot. At the end of the war she joined up. She hadn't been allowed to while hostilities lasted,
but after '45 they found plenty of uses for German speakers. My impression is that she was in the armed services for quite a while.”

“Anything more?”

“Not from him. As I say, one hears things in publishing circles . . . Apparently there was an English husband—one she chewed the bones of slowly, and then spat out. It was a process of slow breaking—I forgot whether he ended up as a suicide or a mental patient, or just flew the nest. As with Maryloo Parker, it was during the marriage that she started writing romances, I don't know whether it added savour to the breaking process, or perhaps it was part of it. Quite soon she began to earn well from it, moved back to New York, and since then it's been onwards and upwards.”

“Nothing much to report about those years?”

“Some horrendous stories about how she treats fans. Not to mention how she treats editors. Of course, some of the fans ask for it, and not every editor is worth weeping for. On the business side at her publishers they're terrified of her, of course, and she makes the most ferocious bargains, or pushes her agent into making them. He's her puppet, and nothing but a dogsbody.”

“I suppose her publishers are terrified of losing her?”

“Right. However much they squeak, eventually they cave in to the agent's demands. Actually she's had several agents, and split from them with acrimonious publicity. It's one hell of a life for whichever unlucky person it is at the moment.”

“Know anything about this girl Felicity Maxwell?”

Marriott Dulac shrugged.

“Just a companion, I think. Wrote a couple of romances that were just about competent. Seems to be less bullied than you might expect, but from all accounts Lorelei is near death, so she may fear being left on her
own. Though as far as the dying is concerned, it wouldn't surprise me if
that
was merely put around—by her, to get people pleasantly anticipating it, so she could get a bitter laugh out of disappointing them.”