Two Names for Death (Black Gat Books Book 25) by E. P. Fenwick

Author:E. P. Fenwick [Fenwick, E. P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9781951473013
Publisher: Stark House Press
Published: 2020-04-02T11:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The next morning found Eggart in New York with Cooney’s blessing, but not altogether at ease with himself. Ostensibly his purpose was to follow Francis Bellane’s affairs behind the curtain of bland information which Bellane himself had drawn over them; and behind that curtain, Eggart knew, Cooney hoped to find a strong enough motive to bring Bellane down. Eggart had left his superior happily spreading out nets to catch the car or plane Bellane had used on his furtive return trip to Boston, late Sunday night; that there was such a car or plane Cooney no more doubted than he doubted Eggart’s existence.

The lieutenant wished him well, and envied him his cheerful certainty. He himself meant to carry out Cooney’s orders implicitly, and to examine every aspect of Francis Bellane’s past and present; but he was afraid that the information he got would be a beginning, more than an end, and that Lenore Bellane’s affairs were more complicated than even she had known—until the last minute, perhaps.

It was Edith who intrigued him most. Everywhere he turned in this case, he ran up against the girl. In herself she seemed harmless enough and even pathetic, but she was the only clear trail Lenore Bellane had left behind her, the only apparent link with the queer, indifferent people who had been Lenore Bellane’s family and friends. His first exasperation with the girl’s ubiquity had begun to turn into interest. With no definite end in view but a general clearing up of the situation, he had spent the previous evening in making a list of all the motives the daughter gave for her mother’s death.

Bellane he left in abeyance. That link was not yet clear, although he believed that it existed. But between Theodore Schafft and his wandering wife, the only connection Eggart could see was Edith.

He had had Schafft’s history turned up, and found it a quiet one. He was the son of a fairly successful doctor, and had been a kind of prodigy in his youth. Before Schafft was twenty he had appeared as soloist with several of the smaller symphony orchestras, and had even played a Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra that he had composed. After his father’s death, when Schafft was twenty-one, he had begun giving music lessons to help out at home; the doctor’s estate had been a small one, and most of it was needed to keep up the house. From here on, there was almost no trace of the young musician. Whether his early talent had petered out, or been smothered in financial cares, or whether it had never been strong enough to compete in such a narrow, overcrowded field, there was no one to say. He gave an occasional recital over local radio stations, sometimes playing his own work; the Fantasy had one more performance, by someone else, out of town. That was about all.

As a piano teacher he had an excellent reputation for “bringing out” talented children, but when the children began to think of the piano as a career, or a serious accomplishment, they went on to study elsewhere.

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