The Villiers Touch

“All right.”

“You want me to interview him, or do you talk to him yourself?”

“I’ll talk to him.” Villiers looked at his watch. “It’s almost four. Get him over here in twenty minutes.”

“That may be a little rough-”

Villiers lifted his eyebrows. Hackman swallowed the rest of his statement, swiveled in his chair, and reached for the phone. He spoke into it briefly and hung up. “He probably won’t come on such short notice.”

“When you get him on the line, I’ll talk.” Villiers sat back and opened the file folder. “Then I’ll want a private office where I can study this before he gets here.”

“I’ll fix something up.” The phone buzzed; Hackman grunted into it, pushed a button, and said, “Wyatt? This is George Hackman of Hackman and Greene-that’s right. Can you hold on one second?”

Hackman cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and nodded. Villiers got up and reached across the desk for the phone.

“Wyatt? My name’s Mason Villiers, possibly you’ve heard of me.”

“Sure. Nice to talk to you.” The voice was young, well modulated, with quick delivery and a slight snappish arrogance.

Villiers said, “There’s a matter I’d like to discuss with you that may be to the advantage of both of us.”

“Me? Are you sure you’ve got the right boy, Mr. Villiers?”

“Quite sure. I’m at Hackman’s office, you know where it is. Be here in twenty minutes.”

“Well,” Wyatt’s voice said, and after a beat added, “it’s kind of rough right now-I’ve got an appointment.”

“Break it.”

“I really can’t-”

Villiers cut him off. “Among the items I want to discuss with you is a woman named Sylvia.”

There was a long silence, at the end of which Steve Wyatt said in a different voice, “I’ll remember this, Villiers.”

“I’ll see that you do. Be here in twenty minutes.” Villiers handed the phone back to Hackman, who hung up, his face twisting up in spasms of soundless laughter.

Hackman said, “He’ll be here, just as sure as there’s a hole in his ass.” It was wasted on Villiers, who had gone back to reading the file. Hackman said less firmly, “Well, then, uh-suppose I leave you here to read that? I’ll be out front.” When Villiers didn’t respond, he left.

At six minutes past four the door opened and Hackman admitted the young man to the office.

Villiers looked up without hurry. The young man stood motionless just inside the door. He was handsome in a te

Villiers did not rise; Steve Wyatt did not offer to shake hands. He slid his cool glance past George Hackman and brought it to rest on Villiers. Villiers’ hard eyes penetrated him, sizing him up. “All right, you’ve had your look. I’m Villiers. Sit down.”

Steve Wyatt settled into a chair beyond the corner of Hackman’s desk. “I’m listening.”

Villiers opened the folder. “You know who I am and what I do. I’m-”

“What’s that?” Wyatt interjected. “The story of your life?”

“Not mine. Yours.”

Wyatt snorted.

George Hackman said, “Think again, boy. We’ve investigated you right down to the price you pay for pants and the brand of gin you drink and the number of women you balled in nineteen-sixty-two.”

Wyatt bridled. “What is this? Some sort of blackmail? You’ve come to the wrong store to make that kind of buy. I’m not rich.”

Villiers shook his head. “George, suppose you go outside.”

“But I-”

“It’ll be better if there are no witnesses to this conversation. Better for me and better for Wyatt.”

“Oh-all right. I get you.” Hackman got out of his swivel chair and went.

When the door closed Steve Wyatt lifted a flat cigarette case from his inside pocket, selected a cigarette, and lit it in the ma

Villiers closed 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-”

“Why tell me what I already know?”

“To 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 te

“All 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.”

“I 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.”

“I tell you I-”

“Sylvia 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.”

“I’m not wired for sound,” Wyatt growled. “Go on-you’re doing the talking.”

“You 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.”

“You 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 and didn’t serve. By this time, of course, you were already living on forgery-you wrote a lot of bad paper against the checking accounts of various people who couldn’t afford to expose you because they couldn’t afford scandals. A bit sordid for a Wyatt, you must admit. I’ve got photocopies of some of the canceled checks here with your forged signatures on them.”