"Charlie Chan - 7402 - The SIlent Corpse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chan Charlie)

"How about his health?"
"I checked him every six months for the past eight years, the last time six weeks ago. For a man sixty-one years old, he had the body and mind of a man twenty years younger. His muscle tone was perfect, his reaction timing above normal in quickness, his blood pressure one-twenty over eighty. You and I should have it so good."
"Mental health to match?"
Dr. Smith spread his hands wide, said, "Charlie, you know I'm no psychiatrist, so I'm hardly qualified to give you an answer. But, off the record, he was probably the sanest son of a bitch I ever knew in my life. He never saw a shrink unless it was social."
"Come on, you two," said a sweetly low-pitched feminine voice. "Don't try to spoil the wake with shop talk. You won't succeed."
Dr. Smith murmured something about its being the quietest wake he had ever attended and wandered away. Looking after him briefly, Chan received a definite impression that the physician had seized the opportunity to get away from his questioning. He wondered why, since the evidence of suicide was incontrovertible and the questions had been elemental.
"Inspector Chan," said the low-pitched feminine voice, "aren't you going to say hello to your victim?"
"Pardon, Mrs. Wilmot," Chan said, lapsing into the pidgin English that had once been his trademark. "Most rude." Then, regarding Lenore Burdon Wilmot for the first time, "Victim bloom like beautiful bronze chrysanthemum."
The girl he had rescued from kidnappers nine years before had indeed bloomed into a most attractive woman - nor was the bronze chrysanthemum simile inapt, since the curling cap of her hair bore close resemblance to the flower.
Her wide-set eyes were grey green, her slightly uptilted nose dusted with freckles against the healthy tan of her complexion. Her basic black dress, with its inevitable single strand of perfectly matched pearls, suggested that the coltish teenager whose rescue he had achieved had become a stunningly contoured young matron.
"How perfectly charming," she said. Then, mimicking him gently, "But come as no surprise from captivating detective chief."
Dropping the pidgin, Chan said, "Seriously, Lenore, it's nice to see you thriving - even on such an occasion."
Trouble flickered over the attractive face, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. "That's one thing about us Burdons," she said, "we thrive and thrive and thrive."
The troubled look flickered again. Lenore Burdon Wilmot opened her mouth to speak, but, before she could say whatever was in her mind, an intruder shattered the brief tete a fete.
Red-haired, hound-dog lean and lined of countenance, even in mourning Zachariah Burdon seemed to wear his medals. His light blue eyes lit up the room, the sardonic twist of his oblique mouth suggested verbal devastation to come. The fact that he was sopping wet added to his charisma of drama.
He said, "Hello, Charlie. Glad you made it - though it looks as if you're going to be stuck here for a bit." His voice carried with it a grainy resonance that cut through other conversations like a laser beam.
"Uncle Zach," said Lenore, "you're all wet!"
Zachariah Burdon grimaced, then brushed his condition away with a decisive gesture. "I've been closing the west storm shutters upstairs," he said. "Half of them were wide open. It's lucky we aren't flooded right now."
Lenore Burdon Wilmot said, "But Harriet said she was going to see to that. She stayed home from the services to make the house watertight."
Rudely, Zachariah Burdon said, "I'd like to get my hands on that old bat right now." With his free hand - the other carried a cup of punch - he indicated the soaked condition of his chest and shoulders.
"Uncle Zach!" said his niece. "I didn't know you cared for Harriet that way."
"You're making my flesh creep," said Uncle Zach with a visible shudder. Then, worried, "Where in hell could she have gone?"
"Not far in this weather," said Lenore.
As the wet and disgruntled Zachariah Burdon wandered away, presumably in search of the missing Harriet, Chan became aware of the intensity of the raging tropical storm. A moment of silence had fallen over the assemblage in the living room. Even through the heavily insulated walls of the house, the roar of angry surf and wind, the unbroken lash of driving rain, made themselves felt as well as heard in the snug haven of shelter.
A native Hawaiian, Chan had lived through his share of early autumnal hurricanes. They were a part of the Island way of life. But this was the first time he had been exposed to such a storm on the wide open west coast of Hawaii itself. Even within the stolidly built mansion of concrete and brick, there was a sense of standing stark naked in the teeth of the gale.
"I'd better take you up to your room," Lenore said, "if it isn't under water. I can't imagine why Harriet didn't get the windows closed in time. It's so unlike her."
Moving gracefully, she led Chan back into the majestic hall and up the winding double staircase, which divided itself at a landing midway in its rise to curve north and south into a balcony that squared the circle of the hall itself.
As they proceeded upward, taking the left turn, to a hallway lined with doors, tables and other ancestral portraits, Lenore said over her shoulder, "I'm afraid the family has long since appropriated the rooms on the lee side of the house."
Midway along the corridor, she turned right through a half-open door and stopped dead just inside it with a cry of dismay. Over her shoulder, Chan saw that the opposite side of the large bedroom was indeed partially under water. Evidently, the stout wooden storm windows had been put in place too late to prevent a minor flood. A padded window seat that ran almost the width of the room was sopping, the whole far breadth of the burgundy carpet was dark with a wide water stain and the rim of fine hardwood floor visible between rug and window seat looked as if it had been freshly hosed.
A young man and young woman, looking intensely mod despite the suitable somberness of their attire, were engaged in attempting to soak up the worst of the water with an apparently endless supply of costly looking bath towels. While Chan and Lenore stood watching them, the girl looked up at them and grimaced.
"I'd like to wring Harriet's neck," she said.
Beneath a vast amount of long, almost coal black hair, an arrestingly piquant young face, from which blazed light beryl blue eyes, gazed up at them. As she tossed a hopelessly wet towel onto a pile of a ready discarded towels in a corner, bracelets and neck chains jingled rather like the wind chimes that dangled from Chan's own porch roof back on Oahu.
"Carol!" said Lenore. "Where are the servants?"
The young man rose and replied, "Those that aren't busy downstairs are doing the rest of the west bedrooms. What a mess!"
He was a lithe leopard of a youth clad in charcoal flare trousers and a frilled white shirt with black trim. His face, framed by neatly styled middle-brown hair and sideburns, was not handsome but attractive. His eyes, which were darkly topaz in hue, gazed from Lenore to Chan with an intensity that was just short of a hypnotic glare.
Lenore introduced them. "Charlie, this is my cousin Carol and this is Armand Kent."
"A hell of a way to greet a guest," said the youth, "especially such a distinguished one as Inspector Chan. Why couldn't we move him across the hall?"
While the other three discussed and discarded the possibilities of a transfer - the house was simply too full for any such move to be practicable - Chan turned his thoughts toward the missing Harriet. Though he had met that unique member of the Burdon clan but once, her impact had been unforgettable.
It had occurred when Chan restored Lenore to her parents, Lowell and Ellen Burdon, following his successful rescue of the girl from her kidnappers. Actually, Chan had been considerably embarrassed at the time by the fact that the Burdon family made, or tried to make, more of a hero of him than he felt his actions merited.
Since deep collusion had been involved between "victim" and her supposed "kidnapper" - something far more frequent in such crimes than is generally believed - the Chief of Detectives had always felt that his main achievement had been to keep the story out of the press. A very young and very headstrong Lenore Burdon had fallen head over heels in love with a handsome Kanaka filling station attendant, who had cooked up the scheme of getting their non-marriage off to a prosperous start by milking Lenore's family via the fake kidnap route.
That the boy had died when his car smashed while he was fleeing the scene was, Chan supposed, regrettable, though he was not even sure of that.
It was then that the Burdon clan, and Lionel Burdon in particular, had won Charlie Chan's undying respect. Instead of fostering the bewildered girl's resentments by punishing her, they had rewarded Lenore with increased family responsibilities.
But it was Harriet Burdon MacLean who stood most sharply etched in Chan's memory. When he brought the stunned and grief stricken girl home to a fine old mansion on a palm covered hilltop overlooking the city of Honolulu, Harriet had opened the door before he could pull the bell.
Looking like the archetype of all traditional New England spinster schoolmarm types, rugged and rawboned and cutting sharp of eye and jaw, she had taken the girl from the circle of the detective's supporting arm and said to her, "I suppose I ought to whale the daylights out of you, but I'm too damned glad to see you for that."
Just the right mixture of iron reproof and love for her wayward niece. Lenore had dissolved in a flood of tears in Harriet's arms and Harriet, looking at Chan over her niece's shoulder, her own eyes suspiciously wet, had said, "I suppose I ought to thank you, Lieutenant, for merely doing your job. Few enough people do that nowadays."
Chan had been a detective lieutenant at the time. Although it was a good many years since, he and Harriet still faithfully exchanged Christmas cards with brief handwritten notes. Here and there, in that time, he had picked up bits of lore about Harriet Burdon MacLean, of which there was a good deal.
Although she was a sister of Lionel, Lowell and Zachariah Burdon, none of their offspring ever called her Aunt Harriet. To do so was to invite crisp and crushing retort. To any who dared call her Aunt Hattie, punishment was more severe, usually involving a deduction from her sizable Christmas checks for those in the family, and permanent coventry for non-relatives with the ill judgment or ill luck to call her by this detested nickname.
Her brothers might be the active heads of the clan, with Lionel chairman of the holding committee that made the conglomerate's decisions - but Harriet had both voice and vote when polling time came, and her voice was listened to and her vote counted. She had a knack of smelling out impending economic setbacks in ample time for preventive action and her cynicism protected all around her from falling for promotional figures and figureheads alike.
It was Harriet who ran the large and complex domestic side of the establishment and who ran it superbly as well. In more ways than one, she was the Burdon family conscience, usually wrapped in a flowered print dress as befitted her age and station in her own estimation. Harriet's failure to insulate the Burdon Point main house fully against the hurricane was the first failure Chan had ever heard attributed to her.
Somewhere, deep inside the detective, a little alarm light went on, a silent but insistent buzzer sounded. He looked at the youth called Armand Kent and said, "Were the windows open when you came in?"