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

Harriet dismissed his remark with a brusque gesture, saying, "Life is full of painful shocks. At first, I couldn't believe it. I even thought it might be some sort of practical joke, but I realized Lionel was simply not the practical joking type. And then I leaned over him and saw the other side of his head."
"Were any of the others with you?"
"When I found the body? No - I was alone. During the movie, I can't say, I was watching the film. It was right after dinner and Lionel went directly to his study. The others came and went, I suppose. Damn; Charlie, I wish I'd paid closer attention."
"Hindsight lovely thing," said Chan. "Trouble is, it come too late."
"Spare me the aphorisms, Charlie." Harriet visibly shuddered. She rose, went to the pantry, mixed herself a large glass of milk, sugar, raw egg and rum, a libation Charlie Chan declined.
"I don't know whether it was the wetting I got or your sick sagacity, but I feel people walking over my grave."
Charlie Chan said, "What about the award of a voting membership in the family affairs to Davis Wilmot?"
"Oh, Jesus!" said Harriet "Tedious business, but ritual. Do you have any idea how much time and energy a family like ours wastes on tradition?" When Chan shook his head, she grimaced. "Too damned much, to my way of thinking."
"Why does Zachariah have no vote?" the detective asked.
"Because he bloody well doesn't want one," was the reply. Harriet paused to take a healthy swig, then said, "Zach's a rebel from the word go. He's also got the second smartest financial brain in the family. He never wanted to be tied to committee decisions. He preferred to make his own. Oh, Lionel and Lowell liked to say he lacked the necessary stability, but that was bushwah. They wanted him, even if they wouldn't admit it. He's made more than any of them, and thrown enough bones to the family to keep everybody uncomfortable about it."
Chan said, "You say he's the second smartest - then who is smartest? Is it you?"
Harriet put her head back and laughed. The drink had replaced some of the leathery look of her complexion with a healthier underpink. She said, "A generation ago, I might have qualified, Charlie. I've got more plain horse sense that any of the others. But horse sense isn't enough in today's computer run financial jungle. I'm still back in holding company finance. International exchange rates and rediscount duties need more mathematical brains than I've ever had. Lionel was good at that sort of things - so is Lowell, but not that good. He'll make out, though."
"Who is the smartest?" the detective asked again.
Harriet regarded him sardonically. "Haven't you guessed?" she said.
Chan nodded, replied, "The boy - Armand Kent?"
She nodded. "Armand's a genius. I've never met anyone like him. That boy has a brain that belongs in two thousand one A.D. No school could ever keep up with him. He could have graduated from Harvard, summa cum laude, at fourteen, if the college had allowed him to."
"How about his stability factor?" Chan inquired.
"You put your finger on it again, Charlie," said Harriet. "He's always on the ragged edge of a blowup. If he and Carol ever have children, I'd hate to be their baby sitter. I'd never have a chance. Carol doesn't say much, but she's got Zach's brains and then some."
Chan said, "All right, Harriet, but here's the big one - who in this family or in the house would have motive to kill Lionel Burdon?"
"Do you think that hasn't been bothering me ever since he died and I found the suicide idea hard to accept? It's a real bitch. In some ways, I think it might be better to write it off as suicide and forget it. Frankly, Charlie, I'm afraid of what disproving suicide might stir up."
"You're forgetting two things, I'm afraid," Chan told her. "One, if you really believed that, you'd never have pulled strings to get me here. You can't let it lie."
"True, damn it. What's the other?"
"Your own survival - or have you forgotten last night already?"
Harriet took a deep breath, finishing her nutritive drink, put down the glass so hard the coaster beneath it jumped. She said, "But, Charlie, why kill me? I don't know a God damned thing. Hell, I don't even suspect anybody."
"You must know something, or whoever did it thinks you know something."
"Charlie, what should I do?"
At that moment, the house telephone rang.
Chan and Harriet exchanged a look. The detective said, when the ring was repeated, "If you want to stay dead, don't answer that phone."
"My thought exactly," said Harriet. "And you'd better be getting back if you wish to solve this problem."
Chan glanced at his wristwatch. "It's six-thirty-three," he said. "When does the family get up?"
"Anytime - some early, some late. Breakfast is from eighty-thirty on."
"Thanks," said the detective. He moved toward the door, turned and said, "If I want to reach you by phone, I'll give two rings, then hang up and give three. Don't answer anything else."
"Two and then three - fair enough." Harriet got to her feet to see him to the basement door. "Good luck, Charlie, though I'm almost afraid of what you may find out."
"What does that mean?"
"It means," said Harriet, "continued in our next."
"You must have been awfully interested in the Hawaii rerun not to have heard the shot," he said.
"I wasn't, particularly. But I heard nothing. I thought Lionel had probably fallen asleep at his desk. He used to do that quite often. I went in to wake him up when the show ended."
"And he was beyond waking," said Chan.
He took off down the steps and somehow made it back to the other house and his bedroom without running into anyone. There, he settled down to await breakfast, studying the album of the house Lenore had given him
After looking at both the photographs and plans of the west elevation, he understood how Harriet had saved herself and ridden out the storm. Below the bedroom floor on which his room was, there was a sort of gallery with a row of Roman arches whose supporting columns were based on a sturdy two and a half foot wall of brick faced concrete - a wall obviously designed to keep some of the ocean out in the stormiest weather.
Chan's admiration for Harriet and for her seafaring Yankee ancestry rose a further few notches. He wondered if she were resting to recover from what must have been an exhausting experience for anyone of any age. He was willing to lay long odds she was doing no such thing. Harriet was not a woman to give way to any such symptoms of weakness.
Chan spent the rest of the time before breakfast going over the plans of the complex mansion as Lionel Burdon, with an assist from Harriet, had had it reconstructed. He paid special attention to the ground floor and basement plans, since it was on these floors that such action as there was had occurred. Also, he had no wish to get lost in the labyrinth carved out of the solid rock cliff as he almost had while returning from Harriet's retreat.


BREAKFAST WAS laid out on a long teak sideboard in a smaller room opening off the main dining room. Presided over by the towering, resplendently liveried black Willis, it was in the traditionally English country house style with Yankee and Island overtones - fresh pineapple along with grilled kidneys, hot oatmeal as well as kippers. Accepting a modest serving, Chan sat down at the table, which was occupied by Lowell and Ellen Burdon.
After the expected polite exchange of greetings, Ellen Burdon said, looking worried, "The period of grace is almost over - listen to the wind rising."
Lowell Burdon looked up from his plate, said, "The second half of one of these storms is always worse than the first. Do you think I should postpone the meeting today, dear?"
"I don't see how you can," said Ellen. "We can't hold the others here after the storm passes, and there's the Los Angeles project to settle at once. And the Island Air Transport corporate meeting is the day after tomorrow."
"I know, I know," Lowell Burdon muttered through a mouthful of eggs and bacon.
That Ellen Burdon should show such close knowledge of the family business affairs mildly surprised Charlie Chan. But then, he reflected, her brilliant son must have inherited some of his alarming intellect from her as well as from his long dead father, and an eye for detail.