Rather Cool for Mayhem, page 7
“Not if it were true.” Dr. Hurley finally put away his nail file. He was obviously uneasy. “Did Dr. Norman make any posthumous accusations, Captain?”
McKay hesitated as he stared at the paper napkin which contained the broken bits of phonograph records. “I don’t know,” he said. “About the only thing I do know for sure at this point is that Dr. Norman certainly invited a lot of guilty consciences to have cocktails at Blindman’s Lake.”
“Just for the record,” I said, “I’d like to take exception to your glittering generalities, Captain. My own conscience is as limpid as spring water.”
“You,” said Captain McKay, “were not invited for cocktails.”
Grace moved her head toward mine and her words caressed my cheek as she whispered: “Are you boasting, Jim? Or have you really developed a conscience after all these years?”
Then bad news walked into the Lakeside Inn Bar.
Henry Pennington was still as well-pressed and self-contained as ever, but as he stalked toward our booth he seemed to have lost a little of the cool politeness of the small-town mortician in favor of the enthusiasm of a U.S. marshal about to post a bankruptcy notice on a factory door.
“Grace dear,” he said, “where in heaven’s name have you been?”
I thought I saw a flicker of annoyance in Grace’s eyes. But it was probably my imagination. Her voice was gay and bantering as she replied: “I was going to give you a written report, Henry. Jim and I were in the woods gathering toadstools.”
“Have you seen Tommy?” Pennington was graver than ever, if that was possible.
“Tommy Stewart?” The banter died in Grace’s eyes.
“Tommy’s missing,” Pennington said. “Joan and Bob Stewart have just come in upstairs. They’re frantic. Tommy was gone when they got home. They’ve looked everywhere.”
Grace rose and brushed past me without a word. Pennington was no longer either mortician or marshal. He was a mother hen. He clucked after her.
The Hurleys expressed concern and joined the exodus, trying hard not to show their eagerness to breathe other air which did not crackle with Captain McKay’s questions.
McKay picked up the paper napkin with its jagged black artifacts. Then he, too, went upstairs.
I was left alone with Karl the barman.
Karl gave me a broad grin. Then he winked knowingly.
Chapter Eight
I could hear the sound of running feet crossing the veranda above my head. I got up, thinking I had better join in the hunt for Tommy.
The bartender’s grin broadened, displaying a curiously complicated bit of glistening bridgework that reminded me of a gold-and-ivory chess piece I had once seen in some European museum. He motioned to me with his head.
“Drink?” he asked.
“I thought the bar was still closed, Karl.”
“This ain’t house liquor. This is my private bottle, which I got a right to serve a social drink for a friend, don’t I?”
“Are we friends, Karl?” I reflected we couldn’t be very old friends, as we had met for the first time only twenty minutes before.
“We’re friends,” the bartender said. “I like the way you talk back to cops. I don’t go for a guy that wets his pants if a cop looks at him twice, but you ain’t afraid of McKay. Little rye?”
“Maybe I’d better help look for the Stewart kid,” I said.
“Tommy? Tommy’s all right. He’ll turn up pretty soon.” Karl poured the rye. I was going to drink it whether I wanted or not.
“How do you know he’ll turn up?” I asked.
“He ain’t lost. He’s upstairs with Alma. Here’s how. First today.”
“How,” I said. The rye wasn’t bad. “Who’s Alma?”
“Alma Frazer. She’s the hash-slinger upstairs.”
“Are you sure Tommy’s with her?”
“Sure,” Karl said. “I seen him getting off the milk truck in front of the inn just as I was coming to work this morning. I seen him go into the kitchen, looking for Alma. He’s okay.”
I thought this sounded strange, and I said so.
“What’s funny about it?” Karl asked. “Tommy’s a great little traveler. He comes down here two-three times a week. He gets the wanderlust up there on the hill behind the white picket fence, and he likes to see what’s going on in the big world outside. So when his folks ain’t watching, he goes out to the road and thumbs himself a ride.”
“I didn’t know he’d run away before,” I said.
“Run away? He don’t run away,” Karl said. He poured me some more rye. “Tommy’s got everything down to a system. He knows there’s a milk truck goes by his place every morning about the same time, so he thumbs himself a ride as far as the inn. If he misses the milk truck, he can pick up the bakery wagon or the butcher a little later. Only the milk truck is best because that gives him about twenty-thirty minutes with Alma just when she’s finished with the breakfast trade. Then he can ride home with the brewery truck that comes through from Blue Falls every day to drop off a few kegs here. I guess he musta forgot today is Sunday and the beer truck don’t come by. Otherwise he’d be home by now. He never got caught yet.”
A screwy idea struck me suddenly. Or maybe it wasn’t so screwy.
“Does he always come just to see Alma?” I asked.
“Yep. They’re great pals.”
“What’s the cause of their beautiful friendship?”
“Oh, Alma likes the kid. She always scrapes up something in the pantry for him. Cookies and stuff. So of course he’s got a big crush on Alma.”
“Did Alma ever have any kids of her own?” I asked.
Karl looked at me curiously for a moment before he replied.
“I wouldn’t know. What’s the matter? Don’t you like that rye?”
“Very mild and mellow,” I said, “only I don’t usually get squiffed this early in the morning. How did Tommy and Alma happen to meet?”
“They met right here in this bar,” Karl said. “About a year ago Doc Norman started to taking the kid for walks once in a while, when he came out here weekends. He’d bring the kid here to the bar and buy him a Coke or a gingerale or something, while he knocked off two-three pink gins. Alma is always coming downstairs to pick up drinks for the dining room trade, and one day they got to talking. That’s all.”
“I thought maybe Dr. Norman and Alma might have known each other before,” I suggested.
Karl’s square jaw worked sidewise for several seconds. He gave me a peculiar stare. A little ripple seemed to run through his bushy blond eyebrows, like the seismic reflection of some great subcranial disturbance, an upheaval of doubt and self-questioning.
“If you’re trying to dream up some screwball idea that Alma had anything to do with Doc Norman’s bumpoff,” he said, “I can save you a lot of time and trouble. Alma wasn’t here when the Doc got killed yesterday. She’d been away for two days. Her mother was sick and she was up in Kingston taking care of the old lady. She didn’t get back to Blue Falls till the 4:42 train from Kingston yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “If Tommy likes Alma she must be a swell gal, and I hate to see swell gals get caught in the toils of the law. Why haven’t you told anybody about Tommy and Alma?”
“I tell you, don’t I?” Karl countered.
“I mean, why didn’t you tell Captain McKay just now, when he started out of here to look for Tommy?”
“Why should I tell McKay? He’s paid to find out things for himself, ain’t he? That’s his business. My business is tending bar, not talking to cops.”
“You told McKay about Norman phoning his telegrams from the booth in the corner,” I said.
“That’s different,” Karl insisted. “McKay asked me about that. When a cop asks me questions I always tell him what I know, if it don’t get a pal in trouble. If he don’t ask me, I don’t give out. He don’t ask me about Tommy, so I don’t give. A guy lives longer that way, and he don’t worry so much.”
“Did you worry about Norman?” I asked.
“Norman?” Karl screwed up his lips in a preparatory gesture that seemed to be seeking a cuspidor. Then he grinned his 14-karat grin. “Norman was a customer. I don’t worry about customers, as long as they behave their-selves. Doc Norman never started fights, he always paid his tabs, and he didn’t prowl the stools massaging broads that didn’t want to be massaged. I hear he was a 90-proof heel to people he stepped on, but around here—well, he did favors for people he liked.”
“For you, Karl?”
“For people I know,” the bartender said. “Anyhow, I’m sorry he got it. I hope they catch the bastard that done it. Better finish that rye before the purple hatbands come down here and slap me around.”
I emptied the glass just to make an honest man of Karl. But I enjoyed it more than the hour gave me the right to.
“Maybe I better go up and tell people that Tommy’s all right,” I said.
Karl again gave his lips an anticipatory wind-up. “You ain’t going to do McKay’s work for him, are you?”
“To hell with McKay. But the Stewarts must be going nuts if they haven’t found the kid. You got anything against the Stewarts?”
“I guess you’re right. Maybe the kid’s folks ought to know he’s all right.”
I hesitated. I found a round-shouldered cigarette in my pocket and took my time about lighting it.
“Karl,” I said, “I used to be a reporter before the President of the United States sent me his greetings and invited me to that war you maybe heard about. If I ever turned in a story without verifying all the facts personally, some editor would beat my ears back. So, while I don’t question your story myself, I wonder if I shouldn’t check on things before passing it on?”
Karl put the bottle away with what seemed to be an unnecessary clatter. He mopped the bar without looking at me. He still didn’t look at me as he said: “Go on, check. It won’t take you long. If the kid ain’t in the pantry, he’ll be in Room 29.”
Karl snapped the bar towel with a crack that was eloquent of his disappointment in all mankind.
“See you on the barricades, Karl,” I said.
Tommy wasn’t in the pantry. I looked in the kitchen, too, but there was nobody there except a Germanic-looking woman with a gray topknot who was engaged in banging saucepans about, and a ratty little girl with an adenoidal expression, who looked up from peeling potatoes.
I could hear excited voices in front of the inn, punctuated by the sound of automobiles coming and going, but I didn’t go out front. I climbed the stairs, looking at numbers on the doors.
Room 29 was at the dead end of a corridor in what was originally an attic, away at the back, where the roof slanted down so I had to stoop a little while I knocked on the door. There was an immediate challenge from within.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice demanded.
“Is Tommy in there?” I asked.
The next quarter-minute was composed of equal parts of silence and assorted sounds of muffled movement, among which I seemed to detect the patter of little feet. Then the door opened to half the width of Alma Frazer.
The tall waitress had removed her starched white diadem of a cap and her hair seemed less frizzled without it. In fact, it seemed pleasantly curly. Her snub nose, too, seemed a little less retroussé than I had thought at break fast, and her blue eyes were downright handsome. She was not at all unattractive, I decided, as she stood there taking me apart visually.
“I’m Jim Lawrence,” I began.
“I saw you at breakfast,” she said. “You came in with the Cossacks.”
There was no hostility in her manner. There was no expression of any kind in her face, as a matter of fact, except a kind of wooden boredom that might have been part of her uniform. I’m sure it was the regulation expression that waitresses learn to put on while waiting for an order from some male customer who feels more virile than hungry and insists on being witty about it.
“Isn’t Tommy here?” I asked.
Before she could reply, Tommy came galloping across the room behind her on all fours, flung himself prone between her feet, got to one knee, raised a potato masher to his shoulder, aimed at my eyes, and exclaimed:
“Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup! This is a Garand rifle. You’re dead.”
I noticed that Tommy had his father’s dark hair and massive forehead. For a moment I thought he had a turned-up nose like Alma Frazer’s, but this was probably a projection of my own thinking. Anyhow, I admit I was not concentrating all my attention on Tommy at that instant. When he raised the potato masher to shoot me dead, he also raised the hem of Alma’s starched green skirt above her knees. I could not help observing that Alma was very neatly proportioned, particularly for a tall girl.
“Who sent you up here?” Alma demanded.
“Karl.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“There’s a rumor going around that Tommy has been kidnaped, and the vigilantes are beginning to scour the countryside,” I said. “Karl and I decided Tommy had better show up before the F.B.I. moves in. Besides, his parents are worried.”
“I see.” Alma pushed her skirt down and stepped backward, moving her feet together so that the young marksman between her knees was deprived of cover. “Tommy, you’d better go now,” she said softly.
“Not now,” Tommy protested. “Not yet. We’re still playing.”
In maneuvering for fresh cover, Tommy pushed the door open a little wider, giving me a fine view of a washbowl and pitcher, the mildewed wallpaper peeling off of one corner of the ceiling, a cheap chromo over the bed, and a threadbare rug of about the size and color scheme of an airmail stamp. I also noted a litter of comic books on the floor, and a tent made of a bed sheet draped over a chair.
“What are you playing, Tommy?” I asked
“Indians,” said Tommy. “I’m Geronimo. Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup.”
I was surprised to learn that the Apache chief still rode in this age of comic books, even though he now fought General Miles and the pale-faces with automatic weapons.
“Jump on your horse, Geronimo,” I said. “We’re joining the tribe. They’re having a big pow-wow.”
“Better leave the guns here in camp,” Alma said, reaching for the potato masher. She looked hard at me as she added: “Are we telling anybody where the camp is?”
“Nuh-uh. It’s a secret camp,” said Tommy.
“No torture can wring the secret from our bosoms,” I said, returning Alma’s stare. I intended to come back to that garret cubicle, and I wanted to be welcome. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find out when I did come, but I had a hunch that Alma was sitting on something that might hatch into a cute little surprise. And I was always a hunch player.
Tommy and I tiptoed down the stairs. Tommy understood perfectly that we had to avoid being ambushed and he needed no coaching. We scouted the empty dining room, crossed the veranda and negotiated the back stairs without being discovered. Then we sauntered through the parking lot and reached the front of the inn via the driveway. The assembled pale-faces greeted the return of Geronimo with war whoops.
“Tommy!” screeched Joan Stewart, as she scooped up the truant into her relieved embrace.
“Tommy!” said Bob Stewart sternly. “Why do you worry us like this? Where have you been?”
“Playing,” said Tommy truthfully.
“How did you get down here?” With the removal of the threat of danger, I could see Bob Stewart seriously contemplating corporal punishment.
“I wondered why you didn’t come back,” Tommy replied truthfully, if evasively. “So I came down to look for you.”
“Look for us, darling?” Joan’s eyes weren’t moist, but there were tears in her voice. “But where, darling?”
Tommy made a gesture that embraced the lake, the hills, and all points in between.
“Around here,” he said.
Tommy was skilfully avoiding falsehood. It was up to me to grab the hot potato and keep him honest.
“We were admiring the wonders of nature,” I said. “Rocks and rills. Flora and fauna. Alma mater. Birds and bees.”
“Tommy, have you been stealing birds’ nests again?” Joan demanded.
“Nuh-uh,” said Tommy. “It’s too early to get any good ones. There’s still too many leaves on the trees. You can’t see ’em.”
“Come along, young man.” Bob Stewart gave Tommy a gruffly affectionate slap on the behind. “We’re taking you home.”
“Just a moment, Mr. Stewart.” Captain McKay emerged from the spectators’ sidelines to join the game. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to give up the keys of your car, too, just like the rest of our happy little band.”
“But we have to go home, Captain,” Joan Stewart protested. “I’ve got a pot of beans in the oven. I can’t leave the oven going like this indefinitely. You don’t want to burn our house down, do you?”
“In that case,” McKay said, “I’ll give you an escort. Pinky, will you ride home with the Stewarts while Mrs. Stewart looks after her beanpot? I’ll want you to bring them back here pretty soon.”
Chapter Nine
The gasoline-scented dust from the Stewart car had scarcely settled before two auto loads of officious young men from the District Attorney’s office arrived at the inn. They were ill-humored from loss of sleep or golf or religion, or whatever normally occupies bright young deputy district attorneys and saturnine, red-necked County investigators on a Sunday morning. They formed a sullen ring around Captain McKay who briefed them like a coach talking to an overconfident football team between halves.
The huddle broke up very quickly. Small ambulant caucuses of three or four men each moved from tree to incandescent tree, smoking pensively and looking importantly solemn, walking up and down the driveway with slow, juridical steps, and talking in ominous undertones.
Henry Pennington offered his counsel to one caucus after the other. He was obviously on much better terms with the County investigators than with the State Police. The D.A.’s young men were dependent upon the next election for their tenure of office, and they evidently regarded Pennington as a corner in State politics. They didn’t engage in any public osculation, but they were at least polite and even smiled at him from time to time as he set them straight as to the strategy they should pursue to solve the murder of Dr. Norman H. Norman. At least, I assume that is what he was doing, although I overheard nothing. Pennington adopted the official sotto voce as he dispensed his expert testimony.
