The meeting was scheduled to take place in one of the tall narrow Victorian houses on Nob Hill in San Francisco. There was a view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the front yard, ghostly in the fog on the morning Sanguineus and Fredrico Rolgo arrived.
The client, Liam Pierce Arden, greeted them on the porch. He was middle aged, balding, overweight, always smiling in a nervous manner, and spoke as much with his hands as with his mouth.
He wore a green cardigan sweater over a tee shirt, baggy grey trousers with open-toed sandals. On both wrists was a Rolex watch, one to tell the time and the other to give barometer readings and phases of the moon. He was forever glancing at his watches, whether talking or listening. He was very rich, a self-made man, but he gave the impression of one who suffers an inferiority complex. This was due, Sanguineus believed, to the fact that Liam was not born an Arden.
He was an adopted member of the Arden family. His biological parents were a prostitute and a sailor who had known each other for about thirty minutes, and never met again. He lived in an orphanage until age 13, when Ross Arden's mother, Helen, sensed something valuable about him. She adopted him for all the wrong reasons and raised him as though he were an indentured servant.
At 18 Liam Pierce Arden enrolled in a small private college in Sacramento. Two years later he started a business in partnership with his philosophy teacher, Lucy, and married her when they had made their first million.
Their business was peculiar. They had a contract with the National Security Agency concerning a remarkably accurate method of analysis. It was a patented computer program aligned with a unique propositional calculus that no one except Liam and Lucy could figure. It was as highly secret as their NSA security clearance.
Liam brought Sanguineus and Rolgo into the drawing room where they were introduced to Lucy. She looked nothing like a philosopher. She looked more like a kitchen maid. She kept her hands in her apron pockets when not in need of them. She sat in a chintz armchair with her legs crossed under a flower-print skirt, not the least self-conscious about her varicose veins. She had no beauty to speak of. Sanguineus felt that Liam had attached himself to her for the same reason Helen Arden had adopted him: a valuable asset.
The conversation was centered on Helen's two nieces, Penny and Nellie Arden, age 22 and 23, respectively. Like Liam, their father was an adopted member of the Arden family. It was his exceptional artistic talent that got Helen thinking that adoption was the surest way of enriching the family. So when she had determined that her son Ross was anything but exceptional, she scoured orphanages around the state until she discovered a very bright child: Liam Pierce.
Ten days earlier Rolgo had asked Sanguineus to play the part of a golf course designer, a role he had played twice before. The reason was another peculiar thing in a string of oddities surrounding the Arden family. Rolgo had negotiated a contract with Liam. The NSA wanted an Arden family member killed. They believed that one of the two sisters, Penny or Nellie, was involved in a terrorism plot that was aimed at the Professional Golf Association tour, a plot that was only seemingly political. The motive was blackmail, a means of funding what was intended to be an international secret sorority. It was to be a "good life" organization, a hedonistic lifestyle with psychopathic overtones.
One of the Arden sisters had got the ball rolling with a vivacious redhead nicknamed "Eleanor Carnivore." She was suspected by the NSA of being the widow of a wealthy Wall Street financier who had died in a contrived auto accident. She then underwent a change of identity. But this was pure speculation based on similarities and rank coincidence. All the NSA really knew was that a beautiful redhaired woman calling herself Eleanor Carnivore was planning a series of deadly mishaps at PGA tournaments, she and one of the two Arden sisters. Had it not been for Liam and Lucy's sophisticated analysis of very soft and porous information there would not have been any "evidence" whatsoever, just a paranoid suspicion.
During the contractual process Rolgo was told by Liam that the Arden family lawyer had poisoned Eleanor's mind against "Penelope," the NSA code name for the unknown sister, so that Eleanor would think that the girl was intending to rat her out. It was expected that Eleanor would respond by killing... Who? Penny? Or Nellie?
Sanguineus went to the party at the invitation of Ross Arden. The invitation had been suggested by Liam, who had talked Ross into putting in a nine-hole golf course on the family estate, recommending the Atlanta golf architect, Ricklen Cruor. The idea was that Sanguineus would be able to determine the victim should Eleanor act on her intention during the party. If this should be the case, he was to bump off Eleanor. But nothing out of the ordinary happened at the party.
It was three days later, a week before the meeting at the Nob Hill mansion, that Penny and Nellie disappeared after announcing that they were "going off together." The next day Ross Arden had the name "Penelope" carved on a vacant crypt in the Arden mausoleum, along with the current year, 2015.
"And there lies one of the difficulties," Liam said when everyone had their drink in hand and was seated in the plush, shadowy room. "How is it that Ross knows the code name for his two cousins? We think he might have learned it through the family lawyer, Mr Huffins. My NSA manager is the one who recruited Mr Huffins when Lucy and I discovered that his girlfriend was the mysterious redhead. But my manager denies having revealed the code name."
"It's possible," said Rolgo, "that Eleanor knows the code name through the simple fact that she is on the NSA payroll. They don't want us to know this."
Lucy spoke up. "Liam and I thought of that, but our analysis rules it out."
Rolgo and Sanguineus exchanged wry glances that Liam, chuckling, accepted good naturedly. "Suffice to say that Eleanor Carnivore is not aware of the NSA's suspicions," he said, "but has some worries about the FBI. She had the help of a former FBI agent in changing her identity. We are quite sure she killed him, but it would be natural for her to worry that perhaps she didn't kill him soon enough."
Sanguineus asked if he might smoke. Upon receiving enthusiastic permission he went to an open window, lit a Sultan, and turned to the room saying, "It isn't so much a question of how Ross knows the code name as it is the question why he had a crypt carved with that name. We're assuming that Eleanor killed the guilty sister and that Ross had the body interred in the Arden mausoleum. And before we wonder why he didn't put the victim's real name on the crypt we need to figure out why there are no records or witnesses regarding the girl's death and burial. Officially she and her sister are 'off together.' Mr Huffins is missing, and so is Eleanor. Apparently the NSA has washed its hands of the whole affair now that the secret sorority idea is kaput."
"The reason 'Penelope' is on the crypt," said Liam, "is that Ross does not know which of his cousins is the victim. The bodily remains would presumably reveal which one, through dental records or DNA, but he doesn't wish to know. So the question is, why doesn't he wish to know? Our analysis concludes that he is in thick with Eleanor, and that he is very likely involved in Mr Huffins' disappearance."
"That means that Ross DOES know which cousin is in the crypt," Sanguineus said. "It means he was at least partly responsible for the girl's death and saw to it that no one was in a position to note the fact. But why he had 'Penelope' carved on the crypt must have something to do with the NSA, with his belief that this agency wanted the guilty party dead. So he puts the code name on the crypt as a means of letting the Agency know that yes, the guilty party has been eliminated."
Lucy laughed as a way of expressing her irritation. "Oh, we had thought of that," she said.
Rolgo leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "If Ross Arden were to find out that his golf course designer is snooping around in the mausoleum, it would be a safe bet that he, and whoever he is in league with, would investigate. My idea is to see that Ross Arden does find this out, and to have our operative waiting for him in the mausoleum. The contract stipulates that the killer of 'Penelope,' and the killer's associates, are to be liquidated. What better place for this than a mausoleum?"
Now Sanguineus stood and walked down the passage to the mausoleum door. Standing under the ceiling light he looked at his digital watch. It was eleven-fifty.
He opened the door a few inches and gazed out at the expanse of moonlit statuary. He was remembering his unusual encounter with Penny and Nellie at the estate the other night, luxuriating in the dregs of the party's aftermath.
His smile was cold and hard.
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