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

As if on cue, Armand Kent appeared, elegantly mod as ever in brilliant flowered body shirt and immensely wide cuffed slacks, the ensemble held together by a belts of braided leather thongs with silver mountings.
Carol Burdon was with him, apparently as always, equally vivid in a turquoise open throat shirt of raw Shantung silk and chrome yellow hip huggers slung so low that they looked ready to drop from her well formed young body at the soft stomp of a kitten's paw.
Together, together, Chan mused, pondering the open intimacy of the youths and maidens of recent years. If, indeed, any maidens, at least in a technical sense, remained at large. He wondered if they had spent the night together, decided they almost certainly had as he noted the casual intimacy with which Carol caressed Armand's hip as she directed them to seats across the table from Chan. Some of the other, more peripheral, Burdons had appeared and were serving and seating themselves under Willis's aegis. But the detective studied the young people covertly.
Not covertly enough, apparently. Armand Kent suddenly speared him with his glowing, over-intelligent eyes and a sardonic smile twisted the too loose mouth ever so slightly. He said, "Where's Harriet, Inspector?"
Chan knew perfectly well that the question was intended to catch him off guard, to cause him to make some revelatory involuntary gesture of reaction. Not for the first time, he thanked his Chinese ancestry, plus his long experience at self concealment, for his ability to remain phlegmatically impassive under virtually any provocation of the sort.
But the question had caught him off guard. Until that moment, psychologically at any rate, Chan had not fully believed the accounts of Armand Kent's genius rating. From now on, even while he wondered what the young man knew or suspected, he resolved never to repeat the error of underestimating this brilliant and, he suspected, dangerous young man.
He managed a non-committal shrug, said, "Search still continue."
Carol said, pushing back a strand of ink-black hair that had fallen over her left eye, "I'll lay odds, if she isn't dead, she's in hiding."
Ellen Burdon laid down her fork, looking either bewildered or frightened. Chan could not be sure which. She said, "Hiding - from what?"
At that moment, Lenore entered the room and Chan watched her out of the corner of his eye. She looked, he thought, an inexplicable five years younger than the somewhat harried lady playing the hostess role the evening before.
Had sleep done so much in such a few hours? The detective was mystified. And then, as Lenore moved to a place at the foot of the table, she passed behind the two young people directly opposite his own place. For an instant, he saw the look she gave Armand. It was brief, but there was no mistaking her expression.
It was that of a woman not only hopelessly in love but of a woman happily in love, a woman whose every desire has been lavishly fulfilled.
He wondered if Carol had not slept alone that night just past in view of this development - or had Armand sufficient stamina to make two females happy in a single night?
"Oh, to be forty again...!" Chan thought, and not entirely humorously.


VI

THE REST OF the conversation, while Charlie Chan remained at table, was irrelevant as far as he was concerned, but the detective found it, all in all, a disturbing session. More than once he caught Armand's gaze on him, noted its covert mockery. On another occasion, he caught Carol regarding him covertly with amusement in her eyes.
While the talk was of personalities, mostly absent, Chan sensed undercurrents beneath the rather too civilized facade, undercurrents of which he had no knowledge whatsoever. Clearly, the coming clan meeting was to be more than a mere formal investiture of Davis Wilmot with voting rights in the family's corporate decisions. But of what was at stake he had not the slightest idea.
He watched Lenore with interest, but not once did she give herself away again. She was properly attentive to her husband and her guests and relatives, remarked ruefully on the weather outside, whose fury continued to mount.
"It's like living inside a pressure cooker," she told the detective. "Air conditioning notwithstanding."
His meal concluded, Chan rose from the table, and Armand Kent said, "Going to look for Harriet again?"
"As soon as the weather permits." It was not, he realized, exactly an equivocal reply, but it was the best he could manage under the circumstances.
He returned to his room and picked up the house telephone and, after punching Harriet's numbers, let it ring three times, then two after a brief hang-up. He wanted very much to talk to her, to discover, if possible, what the undercurrents he had sensed around the breakfast table were about.
Harriet didn't answer, though he waited a full two minutes. With mounting unease, he hung up and returned downstairs to the living room to discover that the meeting had already been called. Lowell Burdon, Zachariah, Lenore, Ellen and a half dozen of the nameless relatives present had disappeared into the boardroom.
Chan, after wandering about the room, settled in with a group that included Ellen Burdon, Doctor Smith and Davis Wilmot. Chan was surprised to see the last of these still outside the boardroom, and said as much.
Wilmot, sighed and said, "For this occasion, I have to wait to be summoned."
Chan said, "I don't fully understand how it works, Mr. Wilmot. Just what does a voting membership mean?"
"It means just what it sounds like, Inspector. There are never more than seven voting members of the board of Burdon Enterprises - sometimes, like today, less, with poor Lionel gone and Harriet missing. The chairman - in this case Lowell - never casts a vote unless the other members are evenly divided on any issue."
"What about the non-voting members, do they have any say?"
"Each has a proxy," said Wilmot, "but it must be given to a voting member they select, and that member is not bound by a proxy's wishes."
"Isn't that rather autocratic?" said Chan.
Wilmot smiled beneath his mustache. "The Burdon enterprises never pretended to be democratic," he said. "Its founders may have supported the American Republic in theory, but they wanted control of their own affairs. The idea is to avoid stalemates, in the name of efficiency and progress."
"Are there ever campaigns to collect proxies?" the detective inquired.
"Of course there are from time to time. In fact, there's a dandy going on right now. The problem is..." He dropped the subject abruptly as if he had already gone too far.
Chan pushed the point no further and, after a few moments, the candidate for investiture excused himself and wandered away. The detective regarded Dr. Smith, whose expression indicated that he, too, wished he were elsewhere.
Chan said, "Li, why don't you tell me what's bothering you? You act as if there's a flea under your collar every time I come near you."
The family physician said nothing, doing his best to remain inscrutable behind the lenses of his spectacles. But his face reddened as he failed to return Chan's steady regard.
The detective said, "Li, let's stop clowning around. If I were to tell you I have reason to believe Lionel Burdon's suicide might have been arranged - what would your reaction be?"
"My reaction would be that it's out of the question." The physician's voice was firm enough, but his expression grew troubled.
"The coroner's paraffin test?" Chan suggested.
Dr. Smith nodded, said. "There's no getting around it, and you're not going to, Charlie. No way. It's four-ten and out, and that's it."
"Have you forgotten the target range in the basement - plus the deceased's long habit of letting off steam by firing a few rounds?"
Dr. Smith's eyes narrowed behind his spectacles. He said, "I'm a medico, not a trained investigator. If that were so, if Lionel Burdon went down there the afternoon of the day he was killed..." A pause, a slow shake of the head, then, "But no - there's no way of proving it, Charlie. If there was, somebody would have come forward to say so."
"Perhaps," said Chan, "Perhaps not. That's up to me to discover. I wonder why the sheriff's men didn't think of it?"
"Probably," said Dr. Smith, "because they didn't know about it. There was no real reason, on the face of the evidence, to suggest anything but suicide."
"You suspected something, though, Li."
"Only," replied the physician, "because suicide seemed so out of key for the man I knew. What proof have you that it might have been caused by - by something else?"
"Not conclusive yet," said Chan, thinking of Harriet's possible second disappearance. "But interesting."