Free Styx & Stone by James W. Ziskin Page B

tragedy, of course, is that Victor did not arrive sooner.”
    “Well, the shepherd returns to his flock,” said Chalmers, arriving before us. Saettano threw me a glance to make sure I’d caught the metaphor. “I was worried when I didn’t see you at the service.”
    “Worried I was dead?” asked the old man.
    The chairman’s face dropped for a moment, his eyes flashing terror: Had he been humiliated? But just as quickly, his iceman face broke into a grin, as if he were suddenly in on the joke. Maybe.
    “Poor Ruggero,” he said, sipping a glass of Moscato.
    “I didn’t know him,” I said. “How is it the radio fell into the bathtub?”
    Chalmers shook his head. “Who knows? It’s such a waste, dying so young and so pointlessly.”
    “Eleonora, here, was wondering,” said Saettano in his strongest voice, “how it was that you were the one who found Ruggero in the tub.”
    Chalmers gulped—and it wasn’t Moscato—then looked at me. He fidgeted, took a sip from his glass, and looked at me again. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said, his eyes avoiding mine. “I often stopped by to see Ruggero. We were close friends as well as colleagues.”
    Chalmers cleared his throat and excused himself. He crossed the room and joined his wife, daughter, and a new arrival: a handsome young man with a mop of sandy hair. He looked vaguely familiar.
    “Who’s that with Chalmers?” I asked Saettano.
    The old professor leaned on his cane, squinted through the smoke, then sat back. “His son, Billy.”
    God, how he’d changed, I thought, watching him from my seat. The last time I’d seen Billy Chalmers, he was in short pants running around Morningside Park ten years earlier. Now, about twenty-two, he had grown into a tall, angular kid, easy in his navy blue blazer, button-down shirt, and loafers. He looked like he belonged in a sculling clubhouse on the Schuylkill or trading chuckles at a fraternity mixer at Harvard. His vacant eyes suggested a lofty sense of superiority or perhaps a profound lack of interest.
    His sister, Ruth, younger by about two years, was seated next to him. She was fair-skinned, with fine, light-brown hair and hazel eyes. Unlike her brother, she would never be mistaken for a prep. She was apparently a sensitive soul, too, as she seemed more upset than I would have expected.
    I noticed Gualtieri Bruchner sitting in a corner by himself, plate balanced daintily on his knees as he broke apart some salmon with his fork. There were no knives. He was drinking water. Roger Purdy approached him in toadying fashion, no doubt to ask him which boot he wanted licked. Bruchner listened patiently, nodding from time to time and posturing as if about to speak, but I don’t believe any words ever left his mouth.
    Hildy Jaspers returned to join Saettano and me, bending from her standing position to speak to the venerable professor. He got a better view down her blouse than I did. A martini glass teetered in her right hand. She seemed oblivious to Bruchner across the room. Those rumors couldn’t be true. Gigi Lucchesi was more her type than the austere professor.
    “May I have a word, Miss Stone?” asked Hildy once she’d finished fawning over Saettano.
    I nodded yes, and she drew me over to the bar. After ordering another martini, she led me out of the lounge and into the graduate offices down the hall.
    “I need to talk to you,” she said, leaning close to me. A ringlet of shiny black hair fell over her right eye, and she almost stumbled into me. “It’s about Bernie. He’s saying dreadful things about me.”
    “Why tell me?”
    She drew back, frowned, then drank some of her gin. “I don’t want you to have the wrong idea about me. And I don’t want your father to know what Bernie’s saying.”
    “He has other worries right now.”
    “Don’t say that. I’m sure he’ll be all right.”
    Chancing an explosion, I lit a cigarette near her eighty-proof breath. “What is it you don’t want him to