Under a Gilded Moon(94)

Grant shook his head. “I will say only this: to see a player like Cabot here leap with the grace of a gazelle over piles of fallen men, that was a thing of beauty. Although I’d forgotten—how clumsy of me.” He turned to the others. “Cabot prefers we not discuss that particular Harvard-Yale game. Issues, as I recall, of the extraordinary brutality of several players.”

Lilli Barthélemy waved this away. “Nothing that the introduction of the forward pass shouldn’t address.”

In the stunned silence that followed, she held a hand to her chest, delicately. “That is, I believe I read as much. Obviously, I’ve not followed the sport myself.”

Mrs. Smythe appeared sputtering at the entrance to Biltmore’s bowling alley. “Mr. Leblanc to see you again, sir.” She lowered her voice, the sophistication chipped off her accent when she was under stress and the Liverpool showing through. “I told the meff he’d not been invited, I did. But he pushed himself in, that one. As if!”

Kerry braced herself against the cold stone of the alley’s wall as Leblanc’s form hulked past Mrs. Smythe. He wasted no time with preamble.

“Against my own better judgment, I followed a lead out of town, a trail that went a whole hell of a lot of nowhere.” He leveled a glower at Emily Sloane. “Now I’m more convinced than ever there’s damn well got to be a connection between a killer escaping justice in New Orleans and what happened here—Catalfamo as the common factor. So, since the local police are incompetent rubes, who here wants to give me the official Biltmore version of the train station murder?”

Kerry kept her eyes focused directly ahead on the opposite wall. To her right, though, she sensed Lilli Barthélemy drawing herself up. Stiff. Defensive.

Vanderbilt began by meeting Leblanc’s eyes coolly. Then handed him a glass of port from Kerry’s tray. “Let’s agree, Leblanc, that this will be the last time you barge into my home uninvited, shall we?”

Leblanc’s upper lip lifted in the beginning of a sneer. But his gaze darted around the bowling alley and, as if suddenly reminded of Biltmore’s sheer size—and its owner’s influence—his mouth flattened. “Agreed.”

Briefly, George Vanderbilt recounted what happened.

When he finished, Madison Grant sauntered forward. “Mr. Leblanc, you have a point about the Italian.”

“My God,” Cabot muttered. “Here we go again.”

Grant’s hand brushed the lines of the square bulge in his coat pocket again. Perspiration dotting his forehead, he’d not shed his jacket like the other gentlemen, who were bowling in shirtsleeves. “The man slipped away out of sight, as I understand it, moments before the attack occurred.”

Cabot stepped to the right lane. “If that’s the criterion, they’d better suspect me, as well.”

Emily Sloane clutched a ball close to her chest but did not approach a lane. “No one, Mr. Cabot, suspects you.”

Cabot’s gaze shifted toward Kerry as she stepped to refill Vanderbilt’s port.

Grant sent a ball down the right lane—so badly aimed that Moncrief had to jump to keep his legs from being knocked out from under him. “I assume,” he said, turning, “we all see what the actual suspects have in common, yes?”

The thunder and crash of the balls and pins stilled. Even Moncrief quit moving.

“I’ll spell it out, then,” said Grant, “if no one else will.”

Emily Sloane drummed her heels on the wood floor. “Not this again, surely.”

“Let us be honest: we all know the tendency of certain races toward criminality.”

Vanderbilt reached for another port but only swirled it. “Do we all know that?”

“Our top universities, all the best minds in eugenics agree. And America is currently leading the efforts to encourage superior genetic strains.”

Cabot lifted a ball, and for a moment, Kerry thought he would hurl it at Grant. Instead, he thrust it at him. “I confess I must amend my earlier assessment of you. You’re not just a silly, self-important, ignorant man. You’re a lethally ignorant one.”

Leblanc stomped several paces. “Look, I got a case here to solve.”

As if he’d not heard, Grant took the ball. “We don’t allow religion or false sentimentality to cloud our findings on race and social progress.”

“Such as,” Cabot suggested bitingly, “caring for the hungry, the outcast, the stranger in the land?”

Grant’s shoulders hunched. Brittleness, Kerry thought, behind the smooth finish. Like mountain clay that, without a kiln, would hold no more than shadows. “I would refer you, Cabot, to our colleagues in Germany, assisting in our cutting-edge work.”

“Frankly,” Leblanc cut in, “I don’t give a damn about any of this. I got me a killer to catch.”

Grant straightened, stroking the square lines of something inside his coat pocket again.

“I still wonder . . .” Kerry heard her own words before she realized she’d said them.

All eyes turned to her as if one of the bowling pins had begun to speak.

“If Miss MacGregor,” Cabot put in, “has something to say . . .”

“Sure.” Leblanc snorted. “Why the hell not waste more of my time? Let the damn maid blather now.”