Villiers Touch by Brian Garfield

the file and set, it down beside his chair. “You’re twenty-eight years old, not married, no close surviving family except your mother, Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt. You—”
    â€œWhy tell me what I already know?”
    â€œTo convince you I’m not bluffing. You went to the right schools as a child, the right summer camps, the right birthday parties and dancing classes and tennis lessons and ski resorts. You marched with the Knickerbocker Greys; you graduated with gentlemanly marks from Hotchkiss and Yale, where you made Skull and Bones, and in nineteen-sixty-four you made a good showing in the Bermuda Cup Race sailing a boat that belonged to a second cousin of your mother’s. You’re a fair shot with a skeet gun, a good horseman and beagler, and a fair if casual hand with a tennis racket. You’re a good swimmer. You can hold up your end of a conversation, whether it’s opera, pop art, stock market, or who’s who. It’s only natural, because you come from a family that represents the luster of aged vintage money, if not the money itself. You’re poor, and your mother is poor. You’ve always been a hanger-on, living off relatives. When—”
    â€œAll right, all right. You said you wanted to talk to me about someone named Sylvia. I don’t know any Sylvia.”
    Villiers shook his head with a mild grimace. “That won’t do, and you know it.”
    â€œI tell you, the only Sylvia I ever heard of was Sylvia Ashton Warner, and I never met her. Sylvia Sidney, maybe? I never met her either.” Wyatt had a glittering smile and a quick glib-ness. His accent was the kind of maloccluded patois spoken by some of the upper crust who had obviously been taught as children to speak with pencils clenched in their teeth.
    Villiers said, “If the name meant nothing to you, you wouldn’t have hurried over here. Forget it, you’ll only waste both our time by stalling.”
    â€œI tell you I—”
    â€œSylvia Hunter, now deceased, was the alcoholic wife of a real-estate financier named Farris P. Hunter. Her life was a textbook history of notoriety and divorces punctuated by psychoanalysis, tranquilizers, and a parade of gigolos, of whom you were the last.”
    Wyatt’s eyes were bright with venom. He spoke without bothering to pry his lips apart, “You fucking bastard.”
    The phrase was, in a sense, a literal description of Mason Villiers. He didn’t respond to it. What he said was, “I’ll finish this, and then you can get the wisecracks off your chest. When you graduated from Yale you spent two years drifting the international watering places, worming your way into jet-set cliques as a professional guest, bed partner, and mascot with your brassy line of patter and your well-developed seductive talents. You cut a swath with eight or nine society wives and too many unmarried girls to count—I have a sampling of names and dates here if you want them, but it’s not necessary right now—incidentally, if you’ve got a microphone on you, you’ll find this conversation has been jammed to jibberish.”
    â€œI’m not wired for sound,” Wyatt growled. “Go on—you’re doing the talking.”
    â€œYou met Sylvia Hunter in nineteen-sixty-four, in Biarritz. You ripened the acquaintance in sixty-five, when you made it your business to appear in Palm Beach at a time when Mrs. Hunter and her daughter were there but Farris Hunter was wintering in New York to take care of his business affairs. The daughter was seventeen, the product of one of Sylvia Hunter’s earlier marriages. Mrs. Hunter was forty-two at that time, plenty attractive from these photographs, in spite of the punishment she gave herself.”
    â€œYou had the draft board on your tail at the time, but Mrs. Hunter introduced you to a doctor who told you what drugs to take before your draft physical, so you were classified 4-F