Tricks and Treats, page 5
The room was a mess. The three of them, Paul Eastmont, his wife, Laura, and his brother, Cuthbert, were sitting rigidly and morosely. They were waiting for Louis Bratten.
“But just who is this Bratten?” Laura Eastmont asked in a shaking voice. She was a very beautiful woman, on the edge of middle age.
Cuthbert, recently of several large eastern universities, said, “A drunken, insolent sot.”
“And he’s a genius,” Paul Eastmont added, “in his own peculiar way. More importantly, he’s my friend.” He placed a hand on his wife’s wrist. “Bratten is the most discreet man I know.”
Laura shivered. “I hope so, Paul.”
Cuthbert rolled his king-size cigarette between thumb and forefinger, an annoyed look on his young, aquiline face. “I don’t see why you put such stock in the man, Paul. He’s run the gamut of alcoholic degeneration. From chief of homicide to—what? If I remember correctly, you told me some time ago that they’d taken away his private investigator’s license.”
He saw that he was upsetting his sister-in-law even more and shrugged his thin shoulders. “My point is that he’s hardly the sort of man to be confided in concerning this.” He looked thoughtful. “On the other hand, half of what he says is known to be untrue anyway.”
The butler knocked lightly, pushed one of the den’s double doors open, and Louie Bratten entered. He was a blocky, paunchy little man of about forty, with a perpetual squint in one eye. His coarse, dark hair was mussed, his suit was rumpled, and his unclasped tie hung crookedly outside one lapel. He looked as if he’d just stepped out of a hurricane.
“Bratten!” Paul Eastmont said in warm greeting. “You don’t know how glad I am to have you in on this!”
Cuthbert nodded coldly. “Mr. Bratten.”
Laura stared intently at her hands, which were folded in her lap.
“Give me a drink,” Bratten said.
Paul crossed to the portable bar and poured him a straight scotch, no ice.
Bratten sipped the scotch, smacked his lips in satisfaction, and then slouched in the most comfortable leather armchair in the den.
“Now, what’s bugging you, Paul?” he asked.
Cuthbert stood and leaned on the mantel. “It’s hardly a matter to be taken lightly,” he said coldly.
“How in the hell can I take it lightly,” Bratten asked, “when I don’t even know what the matter is?”
Paul raised a hand for silence. “Let me explain briefly. Several years ago, before Laura and I had met, a picture was taken of her in a very—uncompromising pose. This photo fell into the hands of a blackmailer named Hays, who has been milking us for two hundred dollars a month for the past four years. Recently Hays needed some cash badly. He offered to give me the photo for five thousand dollars.”
Paul Eastmont glanced protectively at his embarrassed wife. “Naturally I agreed, and the deal was made. The negative, incidentally, was destroyed long ago, and I happen to know that the photo wasn’t reproduced at any time since by taking a picture of it That was part of the original blackmail arrangement. It’s the only picture in existence, an eight-by-ten glossy.”
“Interesting,” Bratten said.
“But Hays turned out to be a stubborn sort,” Paul went on. “He gave me the photograph yesterday, and like a fool I didn’t destroy it. He saw me put it in my wall safe. Last night he broke in here and tried to steal it back.”
“And did he?”
“We don’t know. Clark, the butler, sleeps in that part of the house, and he heard Hays tinkering about. He surprised him as he ran in here.”
“Terrific scotch,” Bratten said. “Did he have the photo?”
“Yes. It wasn’t in the wall safe. As you can see, he hurriedly rummaged about in this room, lifting cushions, knocking over the lamp, we think looking for a place to hide the photo. Then he leaped out the window.’’
“Caught?”
“Hurt himself when he landed and couldn’t run fast enough. Shot dead by the police just outside the gate. And he didn’t have the photo on his body, nor was it on the grounds.”
“Hays was a smart blackmailer,” Bratten said. He squinted at Paul. “You left the room as it was?”
Paul nodded. “I know your peculiar way of working. But the photo must be in this room. We looked everywhere, but we didn’t disturb anything, put everything back exactly the way we found it.”
“Ah, that’s good,” Bratten said, either of the scotch or of the Eastmonts’ actions. “Another drink, if you please.” He handed the empty glass up to Cuthbert, who was the only one standing.
“Really,” Cuthbert said, grabbing the glass. “If I had my way, we wouldn’t have confided this to you.”
“We never did hit it off, did we?” Bratten laughed. “That’s probably because you have too much education. Ruins a man sometimes. Restricts his thinking.’’
Cuthbert reluctantly gave Bratten his fresh drink. “You should be an expert on ruination.’’
“Touch. That means touché in English.” Bratten leaned back and ran his tongue over his lips. “This puts me in mind of another case. One about ten years ago. There was this locked-room-type murder—”
“What on earth does a locked room murder have to do with this case?” Cuthbert interrupted in agitation.
“Everything, you idiot.’’
Paul motioned for Cuthbert to be silent, and Bratten continued. “Like they say,” Bratten said, “there’s a parallel here.’’ He took a sip of scotch and nonchalantly hung one leg over an arm of his chair. “There were these four brothers, rich, well-bred-like Cuthbert here, only with savvy. They’d made their pile on some cheap real estate development out West. The point is, the business was set up so one of the brothers controlled most of the money, and they didn’t get along too well to start off with.”
He raised his glass and made a mock bow to Cuthbert. “In language you’d understand, it was a classic sibling rivalry intensified by economic inequality. What it all meant was that if this one brother was dead, the other three would profit a hell of a lot. And lo and behold, this one brother did somehow get dead. That’s when I was called into the case by a friend of mine, a local sheriff in Illinois.”
“Seems one of the brothers had bought a big old house up in a remote wooded area, and six months later the four of them met up there for a business conference or something. The three surviving brothers’ story was simply that their brother had gone into this room, locked the door, and never came out. Naturally not, lying in the middle of the floor with a knife in his chest.”
“I fail to see any parallel whatever so far,” Cuthbert said.
“The thing of it was, this room was locked from the inside with a sliding bolt and a key still in the keyhole. The one window that opened was locked and there wasn’t a mark on the sill. It was summer, and the ground was hard, but I don’t think we would have found anything outside anyway.”
“Secret panel, no doubt,” Cuthbert said.
“Nope. It did happen to be a paneled room, though. We went over that room from wall to wall, ceiling to floor. There was no way out but the door or the window. And to make the thing really confusing, the knife was wiped clean of prints, and there was nothing nearby the dying man could have used to do that, even if he’d been crazy enough to want to for some reason. There was no sign of a struggle, or of any blood other than what had soaked into the rug around the body.
“Without question the corpse was lying where it fell. On the seat of a chair was an open book, and on an end table was a half-empty cup of coffee with the dead man’s prints on it. But there was one other thing in the room that caught my attention.”
“Well, get it over with and get to the business at hand,” Cuthbert said, trying to conceal his interest. “Who was it and how was it done?”
“Another drink,” Bratten said, handing up his glass. “Now here was the situation: dead man in a locked room, three suspects with good motives who were in the same house at the time of the murder, and a knife without prints. The coroner’s inquest could come to no conclusion but suicide unless the way the murderer left the room was explained. Without that explanation, no jury could convict.”
Bratten paused to take a long pull of scotch. “The authorities thought they were licked, and my sheriff friend and I were walking around the outside of the house, talking about how hopeless things were, when I found it.”
“The solution?” Cuthbert asked.
“No. A nail. And a shiny one.”
“Good Lord,” Cuthbert said.
“Doesn’t that suggest something to you?”
“It suggests that somebody dropped a nail,” Cuthbert said furiously.
“Well, I tied that in with what had caught my attention inside the room,” Bratten said, “and like they say, everything fell into place. We contacted the former owners of the house, who were in Europe, snooped around a bit, and that was that. We got a confession right away.”
Cuthbert was incredulous. “Because of a nail?”
“Not entirely,” Bratten said. “How about another drink, while you’re up?”
Cuthbert turned to Paul. “How do you expect this sot to help us if he’s dead drunk?”
“Give him another,” Paul said, “and let him finish.”
His face livid, Cuthbert poured Bratten another glass of scotch. “What was it you saw in the room that you connected with the nail you found?”
“A picture,” Bratten said. “It was hanging crooked, though everything else in the room was in order. It’s things like that that bring first daylight to a case.” He looked at Cuthbert as if he were observing some kind of odd animal life. “You still don’t get it?”
“No,” Cuthbert said, controlling himself. “And as I first suspected, there is no parallel whatsoever with our problem.”
Bratten shrugged. “What the brothers did was this: through their business, they gathered the materials secretly over a period of time and got things ready. When the time was right, they got their victim to go out there with them and stabbed him on the spot, then wiped the knife handle clean. They had the concrete block foundation, the floor, the roof, and all but one of the walls up. They built in an L of the big house so there were only two walls to bother with. They even had the rug and furniture down and ready.”
“After the victim was dead, they quickly put up the last wall, already paneled like the rest on the inside and shingled with matching shingles on the outside, and called the police. In short, the locked room was prefabricated and built around the body.”
Cuthbert’s mouth was open. “Unbelievable!”
“Not really,” Bratten said. “No one would think to check and see how many rooms the house had, and they did a real good job on the one they built. Of course, on close examination you could tell. The heating duct was a dummy, and the half of the molding that fitted against the last wall had dummy nail heads in it.”
“But from the outside, the room was perfect. The shingles matched, and the metal corner flashing was a worn piece taken from another part of the house. The trouble was they didn’t think to use old nails, and they didn’t want to leave the inside of that last wall bare when they fit it in place.’’
“An amusing story, I admit,” Cuthbert said. “True or not. Now if you’ll be so kind as to point out this damned parallel you keep talking about…”
Bratten looked surprised. “Why, the picture, you imbecile! The crooked picture on the last wall!” He pointed to a cheap oil painting that hung on the Eastmonts’ wall.
“But that picture is straight!” Cuthbert yelled in frustration. “It is immaculately straight!”
“Exactly, you learned jackass. It’s the only thing in this fouled-up room besides my drink that is immaculately straight. And I suspect if you look between the painting and the cardboard backing, you’ll find your photograph.’’
They did.
Night Piece for Julia
Jessamyn West
CHARACTER STUDY
I have read this story at least a dozen times, yet its ultimate revelations raise the hairs on the back of my neck every time. It ineluctably reminds me that a great many murders have little to do with literal dying—a fact which makes them only the more horrible. The resounding success of such novels as The Friendly Persuasion has done a disservice to this clear-eyed and clear-minded writer; far too many readers connect the name Jessamyn West with gentle Quaker folks thee-ing and thou-ing amid the bright eternal springtime years of this nation’s infancy. But “Night Piece for Julia,” which probes the depths of contemporary human experience, shows the true scope of this remarkable writer’s talent. - J.G.
To be alone in the night, to be cold, to be homeless, fleeing, perhaps: Julia had always feared these things.
Where was she? She couldn’t be sure at first. Just outside Bentonville, perhaps. It was there she tried walking with her shoes off. Her pumps had cut into her heels until they were bleeding. But the icy gravel of the unpaved road hurt her feet more than the shoes. She stood still for a while without courage either to take another step forward or to force her cut feet back into her shoes. I always heard coldness numbed, she thought, but it doesn’t; it hurts, too, and it makes the other hurt more. She could have walked in the half-frozen slush at the side of the road, but she still had a concern for her appearance that would not let her splash, stocking-footed, through the mud. Suddenly, almost spasmodically, she shoved her feet down into the shoes. The pain twisted her face. “I will think of them as outside myself,” she said, “as if they were two animals, pets of mine that suffer.” She laughed a little hysterically. My dogs, she thought. Why, other people have played this game. That’s what soldiers say, and policemen, when they think they can’t take another step. They say, “My dogs hurt,” and walk right on. She looked down at her narrow feet in the rain-soaked, round-toed suede pumps, her ankles and insteps red through the gauzy stockings. “Poor dogs, hundschen,” she said, “it is almost night. We’ll rest soon.”
She managed a few short stiff steps, then, with teeth grating, she swung into an approximation of her usual stride. The rain was turning to sleet, but the wind had veered so it was no longer in her face. She was so cold she could not tell whether the clothes under her coat were wet or not. She got her hand out of her glove and put it inside her coat, but it was so numb she couldn’t tell wet from dry. Well, she thought, if I can’t tell whether I’m wet or dry, what difference does it make?
It had been so dark all afternoon that the added darkness of nightfall was scarcely noticed. It only seemed to her that she could see less clearly than she had, as if her sight were tiring, too. She rubbed the back of her wet glove across her wet face, but still the sodden corn shocks that lined the road were gray and indistinct. In her effort to concentrate on something outside herself, she saw a bird perched on the snake fence beside the road. She was almost as surprised as if it had been a child. “What are you doing out in weather like this?” she said.
She thought she’d been through the town before, but always quickly, in an auto. Two or three sentences would be said, and then, while their dust still lingered in the single block of stores that made up the town, they would have passed beyond it, onto the road between the cornfields. But walking, limping, whipped (words she had no knowledge of before now had meaning so intense she thought their look alone would always in the future hurt her) by the wind-driven sleet, she measured out the short distance by a scale that added infinity to them. She limped from sign to sign, from gas station to gas station. Without these means of marking her progress she could never have gone on. “I will just walk to the next station,” she would say, and when she had reached it, she would hobble on to one more. The road was empty of cars, the service stations tight shut, their glass opaque with condensed moisture. Their swinging signs rattled in the wind with a sound of chains.
By the time she reached the town it was full night. Lights were on in most of the stores and houses. She skirted the main highway, taking a back street that paralleled it through town. She passed three or four shops, all closed; a dry-cleaning plant, a plumber’s, a secondhand furniture store. The furniture store had one window set up as a bedroom, with a bird’s-eye maple dresser, dressing table, and bed of a kind fashionable in the early nineteen hundreds. She leaned against the window, where she was somewhat protected from the sleet, and looked at the bed. It had a cheap factory-made patchwork quilt on it and two pillows in lavender slips. It looked like heaven to Julia, a bed, something she had taken for granted every night of her life before.
I’ll have to ask someplace, she thought. I can’t go on in this cold. I’ll have to risk it. I’ll die if I don’t. She held her hands against the glass. The yellow light behind it made it look warm, but to her icy hands it was only an extension of ice.
She saw herself in the mirror of the dressing table and instinctively tried to tidy herself. Her face looked as hard and white as a stone, like something already frozen. In the mirror her gray eyes were black, her wet yellow hair gray. Her fingers were almost too numb to push the fallen strands of her hair back under her dark cap. She got her lipstick out of her pocket and tried to put lips onto the blue scar the cold had made of her mouth, but her fingers were too stiff for that precise work. She thought she looked sick and water-soaked, but still neat. Now that she was ready to go on, she became aware again of her heels, throbbing with a pulse of pain that seemed to beat even in her eyes.
I’ll stop at the first place, she thought. Everyone has to sleep. No one would refuse me on a night like this. She walked on painfully, unable to joke any longer about her feet. The sleet bit into her face like fire.
